Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  And she could have chosen a caravan; have traveled in comfort, with nights in caravanserais, and attacks only from the occasional pack of bandits. Instead in her folly she had elected to come home with the Crusade. Grand high heroic thought, that, but grim enough in the doing of it. She could die here. Death was a real and present thing, almost an ally; had it not flown on her arrows as they sought targets amid the rocks and scree?

  She was greatly surprised, late one day, to come over yet another pass, down yet another slope, and see no mountain waiting ahead. The land was ugly enough, stony and barren, but it was astonishingly level after the mountains that had held them for so long. Far ahead was a brightness, a suggestion of shimmer that might be the sea. If truly that was so, then they had crossed this wilderness of Anatolia, and come almost to the infidels’ country, the land that the Turks called Rûm.

  Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was only a trick of the light as the day faded.

  The queen and her train had come somehow to the van, away from their wonted place in the center. The knights about them were Poitevins, allies and vassals of the queen, who was also Duchess of Aquitaine and Poitou. She had been quarreling with the king again, and more acrimoniously as weather and terrain grew worse; she fled him, perhaps, while he dawdled in the rear, and pressed ahead.

  Dawdling was his great sin; half the camp knew it, from the words she had flung at him day after day. She was too prudent to leave him, but she would ride well in front of him.

  Orders had come down to the van that they would camp on the high and barren level on which they found themselves. But it was a bleak place, open to wind and arrow-flight, unappealing even after the mountain tracks. Eleanor halted there, looked about, curled her lip. She said nothing. Her servants began somewhat diffidently to make camp.

  One of the commanders of the van was a vassal of hers. He was not a friend or a familiar, he was too much in love with her for that. Richildis, riding up with the last of the ladies, saw him bow to the queen and summon his men and ride off across the windy plain. A mildly alarming number of knights and soldiers followed.

  Eleanor’s servants looked to her. She frowned at the departing force; the more so for that the king’s standard, which had been set where the camp should go, had gone with them. After a long moment she shrugged. “Follow them,” she said.

  “But, lady,” someone ventured to protest, “the king—”

  “Geoffrey says,” said the queen, “that his scouts have found a better camping place farther on, but still close enough to come to before dark. It’s a valley, they say, green and pleasant, with water, and shelter from this miserable wind.”

  “But the king is still so far behind,” the bold one said. “What if the Turks see us separated, and decide to do something about it?”

  “If the king is fool enough to let himself be left behind,” she said with little effort to conceal her impatience, “then let him pay the price for it.”

  Some of those near her drew in a breath at that, but none, even Richildis, was brave enough to cross her further. Richildis berated herself for a coward even as she kept silent. Michael Bryennius was with the king. The last she saw, he had been disputing happily with a handful of prelates, one of his endless Byzantine theological niggles. He had been so evidently content that she had refrained from calling him to ride with her, had let the queen draw her away farther and farther till they were in the van and he was well behind, still toiling up the road to the pass.

  Eleanor was not to be moved by any invocation of the king’s name. Nor was prudence a word she cared to hear. And there was the lure of water, food, rest in a place untormented by the ceaseless, gibbering wind.

  Richildis crossed herself and said a prayer to the saints who protected hapless travelers and leaden-footed kings, and let her horse follow the rest of the queen’s train. The plain lay empty behind, the king’s banner gone from it. As she looked back, the wind stirred the dust of their passing, swirled it into a cloud, concealed altogether the way that they had come.

  * * *

  Michael Bryennius had had a long and thoroughly satisfying argument with his prelates, and fine men they were, too, if given to stopping abruptly when the slope grew excessively steep. At length, as the sun began to sink, even he lost his enthusiasm for the finer points of theology, on a road that was notably worse than what had come before.

  Louis, whose inclination to tarry had incited such ire in his queen, had wit enough at least to realize how late it was growing and how far they still were, by the scouts’ account, from the place where he had ordered the van to make camp. He roused himself to a fair semblance of kingly vigor, ordered the column to make what speed it could, even set his own royal shoulder to a baggage-wagon that, having negotiated tracks so steep as to be all but impossible, seemed to have decided that this last and grueling slope was more than it could endure.

  Its axles held, praise God, and its wheels turned with much protest but forbore to break. It lurched, creaked, groaned its way up the crest; wobbled at the summit; teetered precariously; crashed to a brief halt on a bit of merciful level. Mules and carters both paused to breathe, to nerve themselves for the even more exhausting task of getting themselves and their burden down a road as steep as the way up.

  Louis could afford to pause longer while his squire brought his horse; but he waved the boy away. He had raised his eyes as they all must have done, looking toward the place where the camp should be. And as those ahead of him had done, he stared unbelieving.

  There was no camp. The broad flat tableland was there as the scouts had described, wide enough to house the army, and high enough to give the enemy pause. But the king’s banner did not fly there, nor did a city of tents await him, the privies dug, the horselines pitched, all the camp that he had ordered to be made.

  The army ahead of him had been driven on by barons and sergeants, urged from behind by others coming over the pass and eager as they had been to take refuge in the promised camp. Others behind the king did the same, rank on rank of them, struggling, sweating, stumbling and cursing, winning their way to the end of this appalling road. All of them saw the thing that no one had expected, the camp that was not, the empty place.

  And, as if at the Devil’s own pleasure, the swarms of Turks that erupted from every crack and hollow in the riven earth. They had seen – they must – how the van rode far ahead, how the rear let itself fall back out of sight. They had done as Turks must wisely do. They had gathered to attack.

  Already as Michael Bryennius surmounted the pass behind the king, the front line of the march was beset. He did not pause to think, still less to be afraid. He drew his sword. No time to hunt for the spears that were bound to the pack of a sumpter mule – for all he knew, the beast was a league ahead, wherever the queen and the van had gone; and Richildis with them, please God unscathed, unharried by this wasp’s nest of Turks.

  That was all the prayer he made time to say, all the fear he let himself give way to. Louis, layabout on the march though he might be, was a fair man in a fight. He had mounted his waiting horse, taken the lance that his squire had kept for him, suffered himself to be weighted with the vast unwieldy helm. So warded, formidable in his shell of steel, he set spur to his horse’s side and thundered down from the crest.

  Michael Bryennius, less heavily armored, followed in his wake, swept up in a tide of knights, squires, and yelling men-at-arms. Exhausted they might be, desperate to eat and rest, but battle warmed them like wine.

  It was a grim and desperate fight with the mountain at their backs, against enemies who knew the land, who had all the advantage of its hiding-places. They could only do as Franks had done in Outremer since the first Crusade: go forward, wielding the weight of their armor and horses, overwhelming the enemy by sheer force of steelclad resistance.

  Here they could not press forward far. The enemy were too many. Shrieking, flailing Turks drove them apart, scattered them, hurled men and beasts and wagons over the precipice. There was no
order in it, no finesse, no fine array of battle such as kings would play upon a field.

  Michael Bryennius found himself in a little gaggle of men and boys: knights and squires and a man-at-arms or two, and among them the king. Louis would never affect any splendor; he was too pious. He wore a pilgrim’s robe over his mail, and had lost or discarded his helm somewhere. The nondescript bearded face in the mail-coif could have belonged to anyone. No crown adorned its brow, no mark of rank.

  And that, perhaps, saved him. He was no more beset than any other man, if no less.

  A flurry of Turks had driven them down the slope against a gnarled stump of tree. Someone – not Michael Bryennius – urged the king to abandon his horse and take refuge in the branches. Louis resisted, but the others were too many and too strong for him. They treed him like a hunted leopard, set backs to the trunk themselves, and battled Turks in the fading light.

  Michael Bryennius paused at last, leaning against the tree. His horse was dead, had been cut from beneath him as he defended the man above him.

  He would die here. He knew it as one knows that the sun has risen of a morning: as fact beyond disputing, inevitable and inescapable. Man by man, company by company, the Turks would destroy the army of the French, till no man was left standing. Then would be an end of this arm of the Crusade.

  The sun, that had seemed suspended in the sky, sank with breathtaking suddenness. Michael Bryennius might not have noticed, except that one moment it was in his eyes; the next, it was gone. He was nearly face to face with a grinning, yelling Turk. He drew his sword calmly, sighted along the blade. The Turk’s own blade darted out. He clove the hand that held it, and followed the great stroke round, biting deep into the body.

  The man was not, God be thanked, clad in mail but in a coat of boiled leather. It slowed his sword but neither broke nor notched it. It also, and somewhat to his dismay, was not eager to let go the blade once it had sunk in flesh. The Turk was curled about it, writhing and howling. If any other happened on him, he had no weapon but the meat-knife at his belt; no bow, no spear, nothing.

  But no new enemy leaped on him. It was dark already, almost too dark to see. All the shadows near him wore the shapes of Franks in armor.

  With a back-tearing wrench, he won back his sword. The Turk convulsed and voided and died. The stink of his entrails was ripe, more immediate than the reek of death that had ridden all about him.

  A torch flared. Michael Bryennius bit back a curse – what madman made a target of them all?

  But no arrow flew through the dark. No Turk leaped yelling from a crest. As other torches kindled, stringing beads of light across the wrack of the battle, Michael Bryennius saw what they all must see, that the only Turks in that place were dead. The enemy had withdrawn, driven back by the dark.

  King Louis clambered down awkwardly from his perch. There was blood on his sword: even up so high, he had found Turks to kill. He was unwounded, to the audible relief of his men; they cheered him wearily as he stood among them. He raised a hand, humble as he always was, diffident, without grace; but because he was their king, they forbore to fault him for it.

  * * *

  The fight was ended. There was only the grim labor of aftermath: making such camp as they could, reckoning the count of dead and wounded, and feeding themselves as they might.

  The long struggle to get the baggage through the passes proved itself wise then. The tents were most of them with the van, but there were enough for a beginning; and bedding, too, and food, and wine that was more welcome than any of it, both warmth and sustenance. They made a better camp than they might have expected, though there was no hope of reaching the high level; they had to stay where they were, between the pass and the plain, and pray that the Turks had gone indeed and not pulled back to trick them into complacency.

  Louis kept insisting that Michael Bryennius had saved his life. Michael Bryennius did not see what one stray Turk had to do with the king’s safety or lack of it; but Louis said over and over, “He was coming for me, and you leaped, and killed him even as he struck at me. It was a splendid stroke, just splendid!”

  Michael Bryennius could hardly point out that the Turk had been aiming at him. After all, Louis might have the right of it. The pilgrim’s garb was disguise of sorts, but an enemy could have seen that the pilgrim was extraordinarily well guarded – might even know the French king’s affectation of simplicity.

  He held his tongue therefore and let himself be dragged into the tent that they had set up for the king and plied with cups of wine that he barely touched. He had a wound or two, scratches, no more, but the one on his arm had bled exuberantly – now, how had he got that? The king’s own physicians fluttered and hovered. He could hardly be so ungracious as to snarl at them, but they tried his patience sorely.

  The attention of kings was never a comfortable thing. Their gratitude was frankly excruciating. It won him a warm dinner, however, and a bed out of the wind, though he came to it late and weary to the bone. Even as he slept he heard the king conferring with his councillors, going on as if no weariness could touch them, droning all night long of battle and disobedience, war and treachery. They were blaming the queen. The angry, the wounded, the exhausted, needed a target; and Eleanor had been in the van. The van had disobeyed orders, had not pitched camp where it was told. Only she could have permitted such a thing, or even – some insisted – commanded it.

  Michael Bryennius was already half-conscious between weariness and loss of blood, or he might have roused and injected a little sense. Certainly Louis was doing nothing of the sort. He was letting them go on, letting them curse the queen.

  Hardly Christian charity, Michael Bryennius thought with his last waking wits. Hardly wise, if the king would keep this army together and eager for its Crusade. But there was no forcing wisdom on a king determined to have none of it. Michael Bryennius knew. He knew kings.

  Fifty-One

  When the king and the body of the army did not appear in camp by sundown, the commanders sent scouts to find them. Eleanor was scornful. “How like him,” she said. “How utterly like him.”

  Others were less swift to dismiss him. They were beginning to regret this choice, though it had set them in a green and peaceful place, with water, and best of all, no wind. And so close, too, to the king’s chosen place, that had been so bleak and forbidding.

  Yet he should have reached the plain before the sun set, and his scouts should have found them soon after and led the army to its rest. No scout had come, no messenger, no word at all.

  No one slept well. The queen herself lay awake, staring at the roof of her tent. Richildis saw no regret there, no repentance, certainly no fear. But whatever she might think of her husband, she could not but pray that the army had escaped attack; that he had dawdled till nightfall and camped short of his goal. It would not be the first time, or the tenth.

  Somehow this was different. Before when Louis had dragged his feet, the van had stayed with him. They had not let themselves be separated. Nor, before, had the enemy hounded them so close, or the land been so tumbled that neither half of the army could see the other. And when the Germans had been so parted from the French, there had been battle, and destruction.

  It was all ill done. Richildis feared for the king and his lords and men-at-arms, for the baggage and the rest; but most of all she feared for her husband. If there had been a battle, if he was wounded or killed, she did not know what she would do. Storm heaven at the very least; raise a cry at the gates of hell.

  She was a little startled that she should feel so strongly. It was a sin, probably. One should not love a man so. Such passion should be reserved for one’s God.

  And if she had loved God as she loved this man, she would have been a nun in Anjou, and never come across the sea at all.

  * * *

  The dark before dawn brought the word that they had been dreading. There had been a battle indeed; many wounded, too many dead. Men, roused hastily, went back to aid in guarding the
hasty camp. When the sun rose, they would bring the king and his battered army to this place.

  Of Michael Bryennius there was no word, nor had he sent any message. Richildis caught herself gnawing her knuckles. She locked her hands together under her mantle, forced composure. It did him no good if she shrieked or wailed. Not if he lived, not if he had died.

  Her heart wanted to ride back with the rescue-party. Her head bade her be sensible. A woman would only discommode them; and there was little that she could do, even with her bow and her quiver of arrows. Best that she remain here, that she stand close to the queen. Already the mutterings had begun: that it was Eleanor’s doing, that without her the army would not have broken in two, the van would not have gone too far ahead, the Turks would not have seized opportunity to attack. Was it not her vassal who had chosen to disobey the king’s orders as to the place of the camp? Had she not acquiesced? Worse, had she not done so in open scorn of the king?

  Guilt would strike wherever it could. And they were all guilty, every one of them, of abetting this folly that had proved so deadly. The anger had begun, the recriminations. And there was Eleanor in the pale cold morning, dressed defiantly in crimson and gold, refusing to weep for the poor battered army.

  Her defiance waxed as the sun rose. She insisted on breaking her fast with her ladies in her painted pavilion, with the sides rolled up, for it was remarkably, almost unnaturally warm for that time of year. They remained there when they had eaten their fill, taking the soft air and listening to the luteplayer whom Eleanor had found in Ephesus. He was a eunuch, young enough to look still as if he would grow from youth into man, and he could sing as well as play. His voice was achingly sweet, lingering on a love-song that, he professed, was all the rage in Damascus.