They did it as Baldwin had commanded, in careful order: tents pitched, horselines set up, men set to work digging pits for the privies. It was all as if they were in friendly country, unbeset by infidels. Those who would have flung themselves down where they halted, were beaten or shamed into obedience. “Show those devils a bold face,” Arslan heard a sergeant snarl. “Front to or backside up, I don’t care. You heard his majesty. Do it!” And they did, for the king and for the preservation of their own sun-parched hides.
The sun sank. Night brought little relief from the heat. The stars were dim, veiled in dust.
One by one and in pairs and small companies, the lords gathered to the king’s tent. Baldwin had not summoned them, had had no need. He sat under the canopy with the sides rolled up to admit what breeze there was, with his armor off – raging folly, some muttered, but most were rather comforted by the sight of their king in a tunic that was almost clean, with the dust wiped from his face, and his fair hair combed and glistening in the light of a lamp. He had had his servants broach a cask of wine, the next to last, and share it out. It was heady with no water to weaken it, but it was wet; bliss enough, though there seemed too precious little of it.
Even as they gathered they were arguing. Whether to go on or to turn back; whether to stand and fight or to retreat in such order as the enemy allowed. “It can only be worse ahead,” someone said in Arslan’s hearing. “This is madness, this whole misery of a war.”
Arslan did not think that Baldwin would beg to differ. But he was in the middle of it, where his mother had set him, and he showed no sign of shrinking from it.
Quite the contrary. Altuntash the apostate had ridden with them, worse than useless as a guide, nor loved at all for this country that he had brought them to. Baldwin was courteous to him, a gritted-teeth courtesy. “Sir,” the king said now. “Tell us truth. Is there water in this country? Can we go on?”
“Better to ask,” someone muttered, “if we can survive till morning.”
He was ignored. Altuntash bowed as he always had, a little too low, a little too elaborate. “Majesty,” he said in Frankish though the interpreter hovered, “there is water in deep wells. My guides know how and where to find it.”
“Indeed?” asked Manasses the Constable with a lift of brows. “Then we go thirsty now for nothing?”
“No,” said Altuntash, “sir. This is the barren country. We come soon into Trachonitis, which we call the country of the caves. It seems bleak, bleaker even than this, yet men live in it, burrowing deep in the earth. Wells sustain them, and gardens in the rock.”
“And will they share their water with us?” Manasses inquired.
“Sir,” Altuntash said, “we will take it, whether they give it or no.”
“‘We,’ sirrah?”
Baldwin spoke before Altuntash could reply, quelling his kinsman with a word. “Then you believe that we can go on.”
“Majesty,” Altuntash said, “I believe that we must.”
“And I, that we must not!” cried one of the barons. “Sire! Will you listen to this man? Traitor, twice and thrice traitor – he’ll betray us into the enemy’s hands.”
“That is possible,” Baldwin said while Altuntash stood unmoving. His face, wiped clean of its obsequiousness, was harsh for all its full floridity, tight-lipped, cold-eyed. It was the face, perhaps, of a traitor.
“But,” said Baldwin, “if we retreat now, we fall into dishonor. And we disobey the queen.”
“Who is the queen?” someone shouted from the back of the gathering. “Is she here? Why isn’t she leading us into this debacle?”
A growl went round at that. “Yes, she sits in her perfumed comfort, with water whenever she wants it, and fountains pouring out wine. Whereas we—”
“Sirs,” Baldwin said, not raising his voice, yet it carried far and firm. “We are not here to question the rights or wrongs of a royal decision. It is made. We must accept the consequences. It is my will that we go on, if and as we can.”
The king’s will carried the council. The lords and barons went away still muttering among themselves, but none made move to defy him.
Manasses was the last to go, except for Baldwin’s squires and his servants. The Constable did not smile; this was not a night for smiling. But he nodded. “You’ll do,” he said.
* * *
“From him,” said Baldwin, “that’s high praise.”
It was not quiet in the tent with the sides rolled down, but there was an illusion at least of being set apart from the clamor of the camp. The infidels were drawing in, whooping and shouting. Some of the Franks were baying back. Somewhere, a pair of stallions were fighting.
But within these thin walls, there were only a pair of servants, and Arslan to do squire-service. The others were gone about this errand or that.
Baldwin let himself be readied for sleep. Many in the camp would sleep in armor tonight, but Baldwin settled for his sword as a bedmate and his armor nearby. Arslan would sleep next to it, ready to leap up and get him into it if the enemy attacked in force.
“Not that I think they will,” said Baldwin, sitting on the bed, too restless to sleep. In council he had looked a man, if a young one, tall and firm and strong. In the tent, in lamplight, and stripped for sleep, he showed himself for the boy that he was, too tall for his bones, awkward and gangling. But the voice was still the king’s, the mind running on, galloping on paths of its own.
Arslan had not seen it quite so clear before. This war had grown Baldwin up. The sulky boy who had left Jerusalem was a man now, a commander of armies. It could not have happened all at once – it had to have come on slowly as they fought their way through the Hauran – but Arslan was just now coming to see it.
He was not entirely sure he liked it. The Baldwin he had known, the bright-eyed and rather ordinary boy, had transmuted into something that he was not sure he recognized. That something, maybe, was a king.
It was still Baldwin sitting on the bed, frowning at the air. “We can try to hold our ground here, or we can make a break for it. God will have to help us – He knows we can’t do it ourselves. May He damn that Altuntash to perpetual torment! He did nothing to prepare us for this country, or for the hordes of infidels who infest it.”
“We could have expected the latter,” Arslan said dryly, “and found guides to tell us the former.”
“We were told,” Baldwin said sharply. “We just weren’t told. It’s one thing to say, ‘Oh, yes, sire, it’s deep desert, dreadful country, the Devil’s own,’ and quite another to be in it.”
“Yet we are in it,” Arslan said, “and there’s no end to it, they say, till we come to Bosra.”
“Do you think we should turn back?”
Arslan looked hard at Baldwin. It seemed an honest question, and from the Baldwin he knew it would have been; but this Baldwin, this king, he did not know.
After a while Arslan decided to answer it honestly, whether it were honest or no. “I think it would probably be prudent, but prudence has little to do with the winning of wars.”
“I think that, too,” said Baldwin. “Do you look at it, Arslan, and see not just a mess of blood and dust and struggle, but a kind of overarching whole? Can you feel where this wing should go, and where that one should be, and how it should come together?”
Arslan had never thought about it. “I suppose so,” he said. “Is it like looking down from a height and knowing where everything is?”
“Just like that,” Baldwin said.
“Then yes,” said Arslan. “But I see the blood and the sweat, too, and hear the wounded crying.”
“So do I,” said Baldwin, “but when I’m in the high place, it matters less. I have to be king then, you see. I have to do what a king should do.”
“I’m glad I’m not a king,” Arslan said.
“I think I’m glad I am,” said Baldwin. “Even here. Or is that arrogant?”
Arslan shrugged. “God set you where He wanted you to be. He could have mad
e you a woman, after all. Or a commoner.”
“Yes,” Baldwin said. He paused. Arslan thought he might let himself fall over then and try to sleep, but he remained fiercely awake. “I’m glad she’s not here,” he said.
There was no need to ask whom he meant. “So that you can be a man?” Arslan asked.
“So that I can be a king.” Baldwin did lie down then, flung himself flat, arm over his eyes. “She got us into this. If we get out of it, I’ll have to go back and be a child again, do as she tells me, submit to her regency.”
“Do you hate her?”
Baldwin stiffened a little, but spoke calmly enough. “No. I don’t hate her. I wish she would be a natural mother, and give me what is mine.”
“Why don’t you ask for it?”
Baldwin laughed, a sound like a grunt of pain. “Are you fool enough to believe I could? Or she would grant it?”
“How can you know for certain till you try?”
“I know,” Baldwin said. “And so should you.”
Arslan did, rather, but he was feeling contrary tonight. He was hot, he was thirsty, he itched. There were untold thousands of infidels swarming without. He was somewhat past fear. It made him say, “You’re afraid of her.”
“And shouldn’t I be?” Baldwin asked without evidence of anger.
“Not if you’re the man you want to be.”
“Then I’m not a man yet,” said Baldwin. “Only a king.” He sighed heavily. “In the morning we break out of this trap. And trust in God that He brings us safe to Bosra.”
Forty-Two
It was madness, what Baldwin wanted to do – purer folly than his mother had committed in forcing this war upon them all. Not to retreat but to force their way forward. Step by step, every inch bought in blood, they hacked their way through the hordes of infidels, striving grimly toward Bosra.
Arslan fought at the king’s side, clinging to it through every wave and surge of battle that sought to sweep him away. Baldwin was defended, warded in ring upon ring of knights and men-at-arms, but even they were not enough to hold back the shrilling demons who vied with one another for the glory of killing the king of the Franks.
For Arslan it was a nightmare of shouting, shrieking, the clash of metal on metal, the hot sweet stink of blood, the gagging reek of cloven entrails and bowels loosed in death. And heat, heat like the forge of God, sharpening thirst to burning pain, searing through heavy leather and padded gambeson as if they had not been there, as if the sunstruck mail were laid directly on his skin.
But of all the pains and terrors that beset him, one small thing vexed him out of measure: the gall of the saddle through mail and leather and padded cotton against his sweat-raw privates. He had heard that saints could turn such pain into virtue, make of it a sacrifice to God. He could only dream of cool baths and soft silks and a houri or two to soothe his hurts.
It was a lovely dream, too lovely for this hell of a battle. His body fought without him: stand and charge, stand and charge. His lance was long lost. His sword was notched – it had caught on the spike of a helmet. When it broke he would resort to a mace, but that weapon he disliked; it was heavy and lacked subtlety.
As if there were anything subtle about mortal combat. Kill or be killed, that was the only law. Defend one’s king, gain what ground one could, keep oneself and one’s horse alive. For God, for Holy Sepulcher. For raw burning thirst-ridden life, and for a queen who sat in her cool bower and played armies like pawns on a chessboard.
* * *
They won through. Staggering, bloodied, dying for lack of water, but alive and moving. Their dead they carried with them, by Baldwin’s order. The field was full of bodies, but they were all infidels, the living enemy drawn back in awe of Frankish hardihood.
Or perhaps they had seen the country into which the march would take the Franks, and had determined to let it do their killing for them. It was a black country, fields of ash like the pits of hell. If the lands they had passed through before were barren, this was desert among deserts.
And yet people lived here. They dwelt in caves beneath the earth, burrowed like beasts in the ground.
Where there were people, there was water. There was heat like fire, there was dust, there was nothing green on the blasted earth – but water there was, their guides assured them of it.
And when they found the deep wells, sent down their waterskins on the long ropes that they had knotted together of every rope and line and cord that they could muster, knives far below cleft the ropes or slit the skins. They brought up nothing, no water, no relief from the heat and the thirst.
Arslan had still one flask of wine. All the water that he or anyone had was doled out in pitiful sips to the horses. The wine he drank in drops, barely enough to moisten the center of his tongue. Even that little was enough to dizzy him.
He had lost count of time, caught in an eternity of thirst and exhaustion, but those who could still keep count reckoned four days in that black and burning desert. Four days; and then at last they came in sight of heaven.
It was only Bosra. Crowded dusty infidel city – but there were green things growing in it. And outside it a miracle: pure water from the rock. Springs bubbling from the ground, miraculous in this hideous country.
The army fell on them in a delirium of joy. Lords and sergeants fought as hard as they had in all their battles, to keep order among the troops, to keep the springs clear and unmuddied and the horses watered without gorging. The wise knew to fill their waterskins and sip slowly. Yet the temptation to wallow, to drink till the stomach revolted, and drink and drink again, was nigh irresistible; for some, impossible.
The king would not drink till his men were satisfied. It was a sacrifice, and noble. When he had had his share however, and his council had gathered in something like comfort, he contemplated the frown of the walls and the barred gates, and said, “God will give us this city.”
“Will He?” That weary voice was the Archbishop of Nazareth. His faith was strong enough by all accounts, but he was as weary as the rest of them. Wearier perhaps, for his was the greatest charge: to carry the jeweled splendor of the True Cross, and to uphold it as a banner in battle.
“He must,” Baldwin answered him. “Have we not suffered terrible trials to come here? What were they for, if not to earn us this victory?”
“Perhaps to warn us that there can be no victory.” The Archbishop lowered his face into his hands. “No, don’t listen to me. I shake your faith – such faith as we all need now, or we die.”
“God defends us,” Baldwin said. “We have to hope in Him. What else is there to hope for?”
No one had an answer to that.
* * *
The council disbanded to find what rest they might, for in the morning they would begin the attack on the city. Baldwin slept, or feigned to. Arslan sat on his own pallet across the flap of the tent, knees drawn up, exhausted beyond sleep. He had drunk his fill, enough to send him twice to the privies. As he thought again of venturing into the dark and the hordes of stinging flies, a flurry without brought him to his feet.
He had no premonition, no stab of fear. Nothing but a kind of exhausted curiosity and a dim thought: that if this was a messenger, he should wake the king.
The king was awake, sitting up, no sleep in his eyes. The messenger was let in by the grim-faced guard: a man in eastern dress, much stained and soiled, as if he had fought his way with difficulty from a heavily guarded place.
The word he brought was ill, as ill as it was possible to be. “Betrayal,” he said. “The wife of Altuntash has surrendered the city to Unur of Damascus. All its Christians are driven out. The towers, the citadel – they teem with Turks. All the armies that beset you in the black desert are as nothing beside what waits for you within yonder walls. The House of Islam is raised up against you. Nur al-Din himself, the terrible lion of Islam, has come to destroy you. There is no hope for you, King of the Franks, or for the army that you have brought here.”
Baldwin heard him in white-faced silence. When he had finished, when he had bowed to the carpets, the king said in a soft, still voice, “See that he is fed and given water as he pleases. And call my council.”
* * *
They came straggling through the night. Some were in bits and oddments of clothes, some in full armor, others somewhere between. Not many had been sleeping, from the look of them.
The messenger, fed and somewhat refreshed, conveyed his message to them as he had to the king. Then he was suffered to go, to rest as he might; but they were given no such gift.
They would be at it till dawn, Arslan thought. Shouting one another down. Crying out in protest. Yelling for attack, retreat, both, neither, all at once and all in a clamor of shock and betrayal.
The loudest voices, those which held forth the longest, cried a counsel of greatest folly. “We are lost,” they said. “Only let the king take the swiftest horse that can be had, and the True Cross in his hand, and ride away. God will keep him safe till he comes to Jerusalem.”
“And the rest of you?” Baldwin demanded. “What will you do?”
“Die,” they said.
Baldwin reared up, eyes glittering. “If you are fortunate – yes, you will die. If not, then you live as slaves.”
“God wills it,” they said.
“God does not will it!” Baldwin cried. “This whole war is a monster of folly. I fought it because I was compelled. God has proved what my heart knew: that we should never have begun.
“But I will not lose you. I will not cast aside the whole army of Jerusalem to run like a coward back to my lady mother. We will go back together, or we will die. I will not leave you.”
Queen of Swords Page 37
