Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  When he opened them, Arslan had set the basin carefully aside for himself and the rest of the servants. Baldwin noticed: a brow went up briefly. He said, “That’s the one you told me of. Yes?”

  “I think so,” Arslan said.

  “You think? You don’t know?”

  Arslan shrugged, uncomfortable. “It must be Mursalah. But—”

  “But?” Baldwin asked when he did not go on.

  He did not like to say it, did not particularly want to, but there was no simple way to avoid it. “We didn’t need to do anything. The people we had ready to cry a miracle, to urge the army on – none of them had to say a word. Everyone followed him. What if – I find myself thinking… what if it’s somebody else? Somebody from…”

  “An angel of God?”

  “That’s what his name means, you know. Mursalah: Emissary. What if it’s not a blessed lie? What if God made it the truth?”

  “God can do that,” Baldwin said calmly. “Does it matter? He led us here. We’re safe for the night. Come morning, we’ll do whatever we have to do, to leave this place alive.”

  That was wisdom. Arslan wanted to ignore it, to worry away at the skin of his doubt, but Baldwin had risen and donned his mantle and gone to walk among his troops. Arslan had to scramble to follow.

  * * *

  In the morning when they broke camp, as the sun hovered on the horizon, the glittering figure rode out of it. Again he led them; again he chose ways both easy and short, found water for them, and at evening brought them to a place that again they might defend from the hordes of their enemies.

  His powers seemed somewhat limited. He could not keep off the enemy or protect them from storms of dust or the terrible heat. Those they must fight for themselves. Yet they reckoned him an angel of God, nor looked for him to lead them astray.

  On the second night Arslan left Baldwin to make his rounds of the camp with another of the squires, and sought the campfire round which sat the men from Mount Ghazal. They greeted him gladly enough, passed him a round of bread fresh from the coals. He took it with thanks. He had had a little to eat at the king’s fire, but this bread was fresher.

  While he ate he searched the faces in firelight. They were all eastern faces, but no Turks; no fierce scarred cheeks, no threefold plaits. “So where are they?” he asked at last.

  No one asked him whom he meant. One of the young men answered with a tilt of the chin. “Out there. Distracting the tribesmen, or so we can hope.”

  “Treachery?” Arslan asked.

  “Not against us,” the easterner said. He shrugged. “It’s all the tribe, the clan, the kin. One fights for God – for Allah. But if the jihad, the holy war, comes between self and kin… one decides as one best may. That may be to give up a pursuit that after all is useless, and go back home to one’s own kin and one’s women.”

  “It’s not all or even most of the ones who come after us,” said Arslan.

  “Well,” said the easterner. “It’s some of them. Isn’t that better than none?”

  And there was Mursalah, who guided them through this country, shortened their path and made it less brutally difficult. Arslan granted that it was considerably better than nothing.

  * * *

  Mursalah led them home: out of the desert and to the Sea of Galilee. Before Tiberias he left them, slipping away into the glare of the setting sun. None saw him vanish. One moment he was there, and the city beyond him, and the gleam of the lake; the next, city and lake remained, but of him there was no sign.

  All who were alive gave thanks to God in the city of Tiberias. Of their queen’s war they had nothing, only the ranks of the dead, the wounded, the broken and battered. Altuntash was gone. Word came that he had gone to Damascus, and there fallen afoul of the law, not for treachery but for an old perfidy to a brother. He had blinded his own kin; and that kin demanded recompense. So his eyes were put out, but he was let alive, nor condemned as a traitor.

  * * *

  Strange were the ways of the east. Bertrand, though he had lived here so long, still was a Frank at heart. He would go in time to Beausoleil; but first he paused in Jerusalem. He went with his son to visit Helena, the two of them coming not as victors but as weary travelers.

  Her house was a place of rest as it had always been, cool and quiet. They had indulged in an orgy of water and coolness in Tiberias, but here was comfort of the spirit as well.

  She was the same as ever, sufficient in herself. She had a new thing, a carpet from Tabriz, like a weaving of jewels. She had hung it in the dining-room, where it glowed behind her as they ate.

  In the way of young things, Arslan slipped direct from bright, almost fierce wakefulness to nodding where he sat. His mother had him taken away to a bed in the house, against which he protested, but feebly.

  When he was gone, the two who remained sat in sudden quiet, sipping the last of the wine. Neither was minded at once to speak. At length Helena asked, “Was it as terrible as they say?”

  “Worse,” Bertrand said. He left his chair to sit on the carpet at her feet, rested his head on her knee and sighed as she tangled her fingers in his hair.

  “You are thin,” she said, “as if the sun has eaten you. And limping – what was it? Arrow? Sword?”

  “Not a thing,” he said, “but old Time and too many days a-horseback. I’m not the boy I was – or that he is.”

  Arslan, he meant; and she understood. He heard the smile in her voice. “Isn’t he splendid? He looks just as you were when first I saw you. A golden youth, beautiful and shy.”

  “I wouldn’t call Olivier-Arslan shy.”

  “Wouldn’t you? But there; you’re not a woman.”

  “Nor to him are you, who are his mother.”

  She laughed and tugged on his hair, not quite hard enough for pain. “I see well enough, O my lord. All men are shy in front of women.”

  “I yield to your wisdom,” he said. He drew in the scent of her. Sleep was close, but not yet upon him. He said, “The queen chose ill in her alliances. Now Damascus is against us, and the truce is broken.”

  “And the king?”

  “The king, who is wise in his youth, says nothing.”

  “And the people see, and hear of what he did in that failure of a war, and love him for that silence.”

  “Exactly,” Bertrand said.

  “Clever, clever boy,” said Helena.

  Bertrand raised his head. She was only half smiling.

  “That will come to a crux, you know,” she said. “He’s a man now, old enough to rule a kingdom. His mother will have to let go; let him wield as well as wear his crown.”

  “He’s young still,” Bertrand said, not comfortably. Even to Helena he was not pleased to voice the thoughts that had been vexing him for years now, since Baldwin came of age and his mother failed to acknowledge the fact. “She’ll wait, I think, till he’s old enough to be knighted – then she’ll have to set aside the regency.”

  “Except,” said Helena, “that it’s not a regency. She’s queen to his king, ruler beside ruler. But in everything she takes precedence. I understand her, I think. So often a woman is far more capable than any man, yet the world compels her to hide behind a man’s name. Her majesty would have done well to raise that child differently, made him weaker, more dependent on her; less his own man and far more his mother’s.”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Bertrand said sharply. “That’s not in her. She despises the weak. She’s proud of her strong son.”

  “Yet she refuses to grant him the reward of his strength: to let him be king without her.”

  “Ah well,” Bertrand said, half growling it. “When they’re both ready, we’ll know.”

  “Pray the lesson isn’t taught in war,” said Helena.

  “What, such a lesson as we just learned, in rampant ill-luck and folly?”

  “Just so,” she said. She bent to kiss him on the forehead and then on the lips, lingering over it. Her mouth tasted of herbs, cool and sweet.

/>   He could never cling to temper when she kissed him so. He sighed and let himself ease against her. “I dreamed of you,” he said. “You brought me cool water to drink. You touched me, and weariness went away; I forgot pain and fear, and remembered only you.”

  “I dreamed,” she said, “that I brought cool water, and that you drank your fill, and were healed of a wound.”

  “I wasn’t hurt,” he said, “except in the soul.”

  “And do you blame the queen who sent you?”

  He snapped taut. “No!”

  Yet as she sat silent, offering no apology, repenting nothing that she had said, something made him say, “I don’t blame her. But I do think that she chose ill, and cost lives and blood and the honor of the kingdom. Worse for her: people will remember that the king obeyed her against his will and to his great pain and suffering, while she sat at ease in Jerusalem. That will be reckoned against her.”

  Helena nodded. “A woman can only fail, you know. Either she is weak and proves that weakness, or she is too strong and is excoriated for it. There’s no mercy given a woman who errs – not if that error brings grief to a kingdom.”

  “Men err, too,” Bertrand said, “and are punished for it.”

  “But not as a woman is – perpetually.” She slipped from her chair into his lap, a rare unbending, and one that took him slightly aback. But he was glad of her in his arms, folding them about her, losing himself in the scent of her hair. She said nothing more for a long while, nor on reflection did he. It was safest so.

  Forty-Five

  From the roof of a house high up over the Golden Horn, Richildis looked down on the teem and seethe of the City and the harbor. There below her, near enough almost to touch, were ships from every nation in the world, and markets full of strange and wonderful things, and streets crowded with people such as she had never dreamed could be. Great tall black men from Africa, sleek golden people from the silk countries, Indians with their great eyes and their slender grace, huge ice-fair bearded men from the Rus – Turks, too, and Saracens, and Franks looking both rough and familiar, and always, in multitudes, the Byzantines themselves.

  There was a houseful of them below her, most of this branch of the Bryennioi, with the matriarch ruling them all with a terrible gentleness. The Lady Irene had called a council of her sons, to which the sons’ wives were not invited. They had responded in their various ways: some with equanimity, some in flight to friends or market, and Richildis to the roof from which she could perceive the world like one of the old gods, high and remote and yet irresistibly present.

  She stroked the amber silk of her gown, loving the feel of it. It was not Byzantine silk, though of that she had a quantity, but the rarer, costlier weaving of the farthest east. She had found it in a bazaar in Tashkent, at the easternmost stretch of her journey. The caravan had gone on, all the way to Ch’in, but she had turned back with Michael Bryennius, summoned to this council in which none not of the blood was welcome.

  She forbore to resent the exclusion. Lady Irene was feeling her mortality, had taken it into her head to surround herself with her sons for, as she maintained, one last time before they scattered again to the ends of the earth. One of them had come farther even than Michael: Constantine had come in late the night before, burned almost black by the sun of Africa, with gifts of ivory and gold and amber for all the ladies. He had been to places that, he swore, had never seen a man of his nation or complexion, nor imagined that he could exist.

  They were an adventurous lot, these Bryennioi: nothing like the run of Byzantines, and yet one of their cousins had been an emperor. Michael in exile in Outremer had been a poor shadow of Constantine in Africa, Nikos in the Rus, Demetrios on the silk roads with a caravan of cutthroats and merchant princes. None stained himself with trade, yet trade fed the lands that gave the Bryennioi their nobility. It was a subtle dance, as Byzantine as one could imagine.

  Richildis folded her arms on the parapet that rimmed the roof, laid chin on them, watched a fleet sail in from somewhere far and strange. Its sails were purple, faded with salt and sun to the color of watered wine.

  She sighed, and felt herself smiling. She had smiled a great deal in the past year or two, on caravan with Michael Bryennius. There had been quarrels – how not? But laughter most often, even when the road was hard, or bandits beset them, or a way taken proved less short or less easy than guides had promised. Snow in the mountain passes, sun in the desert – his hand reaching to clasp hers, and his smile as their eyes met, as if they were not wife and husband at all, but friend and sweet friend out of Provence or Aquitaine.

  A step sounded behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. It was not Michael Bryennius as she had expected, but his brother Constantine.

  All the brothers were much alike: tallish dark-eyed bearded men with warm deep voices. Constantine was the tallest and, at the moment, the thinnest, though from the depth of his chest and the width of his shoulders, Richildis suspected that he could be a big and burly man. The sun that had deep-dyed his skin had faded his hair to bronze. His face was clean-carved, his brows level above eyes that had seen stranger things than she could perhaps imagine.

  He was a handsome man, handsomer than his brother; and she looked at him and felt never a quiver. Warmth, yes, for the smile that he shared with his brother, and for the likeness, and because, from the moment that she met him, she had liked him.

  She returned smile with smile. “I never grow tired of this,” she said, sweeping city and harbor with a hand, pausing at the clustered domes of Hagia Sophia. “Or do time and custom make it all seem ordinary?”

  “I think,” said Constantine, “that one would have to be a connoisseur of boredom to be bored by our City.”

  “Is that why you travel so far? To keep it fresh?”

  His eyes widened. He laughed – incredulous, perhaps. Or delighted. “Do you know, no one’s ever understood that before.”

  “I understand your brother,” she said. “You’re very like him.”

  “Branches of the same tree,” Constantine said. “Our father was a dull stick, but one wise thing he did in his life. He married our mother. She was reckoned beneath him, a tradesman’s daughter from Ephesus – but she brought a handsome dowry and a certain beauty of her own, and a way about her that fed the family’s fortunes till they grew richly fat.”

  “And she bred sons who were nothing like the run of their kind.” Richildis half-turned from him to look on the city again, but her mind was on him still. “Sons who could, when they pleased, take thoroughly unsuitable wives.”

  “Ah,” said Constantine, “but Frankish wives are all the rage. The emperor himself has fallen to the fashion, wed himself one of those big fair German princesses about whom one always wonders… can she lift a whole ox?”

  Richildis laughed. “I’m a feeble thing, then. I can barely lift a lamb.”

  “I hear that you can bend a Turkish horseman’s bow.”

  “And where did you hear that?”

  “Round about,” he said. “I half expected to see you in armor, with a dagger plaited in your hair.”

  “Do I disappoint you?”

  “A little,” he said. He was grinning, as wicked as ever his brother could be. “You’re not a savage at all. You look reasonably civilized.”

  “I cry your pardon,” said Richildis.

  “Do forgive her,” Michael Bryennius said behind her. “Whatever she did, I’m sure she did it with perfect intent.”

  She turned to greet him. Constantine, stranger though he was, was a comfortable companion; but Michael Bryennius was like a part of herself come home to rest. He took her hand and kissed it and sat beside her.

  * * *

  In a little while they were all there, all the brothers, a little wild in their gaiety, like pupils escaped from a stern master. Richildis’ presence constrained them remarkably little.

  “Free at last,” Nikos said. He was the youngest and usually the most sober, but for once he was showing h
is relative youth. He sat on the parapet with a fine disregard for either propriety or safety, and turned his face to the sky. It was clear today, vivid and hurting blue, but never as blue as the sky of Outremer. “Am I the only one,” he asked, “who believes that our mother grows more formidable with age?”

  “You’ll never hear me doubt it,” Michael Bryennius said. “She’s as frail as a flower of steel – and will outlive us all.”

  “Amen,” the others said.

  “So,” said Constantine when they had paid due tribute of silence. “Is it true what I’ve heard? Franks are coming, and bringing a Crusade?”

  “Franks are here,” Nikos said. “The emperor’s kinsman, the German king, emperor, whatever he calls himself – he’s pillaging everything he can get at, around Philopatium. It’s driving our emperor to distraction. And there’s an army of West Franks behind the Germans, and English too for all any of us knows. The emperor wants them gone as quickly as they came. They’re a frightful lot, no manners at all.”

  Richildis caught Constantine’s eye and bit back laughter. Nikos, oblivious, swung a leg over the edge of the parapet and said, “I hear the French queen is a remarkable creature.”

  Richildis found that they were all staring at her. She spread her hands. “Sirs, sirs! I left Anjou nigh twenty years ago. She would have been a child then, barely out of leading-strings.”

  “Pity,” said Demetrios. He was the coldest of them, and she thought perhaps the most intelligent. “It’s said she loves luxury. She might make certain persons very rich, if they were both clever and resourceful.”

  “Are you suggesting that we bilk the Queen of the Franks?” Nikos whooped and nigh fell off the parapet; saw the dropped jaws and sudden pallor, and only laughed the harder. “What shall we instruct our mercantile gentlemen to sell her? Silks? Pearls? Swine?”