Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Such a sight they must have been to the weary warriors who straggled in in the full light of morning: all at their ease, the singer singing, no cloud to mar their pleasure. They had taken no wound, suffered no pain of battle. While their husbands and lovers fought for their lives, they had slept at ease in warm and scented beds.

  Richildis saw no hatred in those grey and battered faces, only a kind of resignation. Until they looked on the queen. Then they hated. Then indeed they found release for all their anger.

  Eleanor could not but know it. But being Eleanor, she would never let them see. Even the eunuch felt the force of rage against his mistress. His voice faltered, his fingers slipped upon the strings of his lute. She beckoned sharply. “No! No, don’t stop. Play on. Play on!”

  It was bravado, but the army would see it as heedlessness. Eleanor could hardly retract it once she had said it. She sat back in her cushioned chair, warmed by the sun, and made great show of listening to the eunuch’s song.

  Richildis barely heard it. Eleanor’s tent was so placed that most of the army had to pass by it as they came in. Richildis searched the faces, bearded and shaven, swollen with wounds or blessedly unscathed. But no lean dark Byzantine face. No rich black beard. No Michael Bryennius.

  At first she expected little. As many as they had lost, there were still many more alive, and they took time to march past. But as more and more went by, and none was her husband, she sank slowly into despair. He was dead. He must be dead. If he lived, he would be here, in front of her, calming all her fears.

  After despair came anger, the same anger that in the others had turned itself against the queen. How dared he not be there? Before God, how dared he be dead?

  And as her anger swelled till it consumed the whole of her, a shadow appeared before her, a ghost, an apparition: the shape of a man standing in the sun. He was not maimed or badly wounded. His armor was clean. His beard was dusty, but bore the marks of careful combing. He looked much as he always had, a little paler than usual perhaps, and a great deal more tired.

  He did not say anything. Her wrath must have pulsed from her, strong as heat from a fire. “You’re alive,” she said. She made it sound like an accusation.

  He nodded. He swayed a little. Dear God: he was wounded after all, and deadly pale. She rose in terror, braced to catch him as he fell. He was a solid weight, too solid. She sank down with him.

  Servants were there, squires, a knight or two. Among them they carried him off, but not, as they would have wished, toward the surgeons’ tent. “Those butchers,” she said. “I have more art in healing than they.”

  Since Michael Bryennius, even half-unconscious, agreed with her, they carried him where she bade them. Her own tent was set near the queen’s, open to the air as Eleanor’s own was, and with servants ready to fetch whatever she had need of. She sent them for water, cloths, herbs and simples from the queen’s stores. Michael Bryennius she saw laid in the bed and relieved of his armor; then she sent his rescuers away, with careful thanks lest they believe her ungrateful. That, she was not. But he was hurt, and how badly she did not yet know. She had no time for aught else.

  Someone had cleaned and bound his wounds – several of them, though the one in the arm was worst. It had been stitched, not too badly. She did what she could for that and for the rest while he lay in a stupor. He had pressed himself to come so far, she supposed; but now that he was here, he had let himself go.

  She covered him at length, and said to one of the servants who seemed unable to let him out of sight, “Stay with him.”

  The man raised his brows but did not object. Richildis rather wished that he had. Her heart wanted to stay, but common sense told her that others of the wounded would need such care as deft hands and a packet of herbs could give. There were not so many in this camp who had spent time in converse with both Greek and infidel physicians, and learned a little in doing it.

  She came back late, worn down by the numbers of the wounded, and too many who died now that they were safe among their countrymen. Pain broke down their guard; they said things that otherwise they might have kept silent. They blamed the queen. It was as much the fault of the commanders of the van, Lord Geoffrey most of all, who had given the order to move the camp. But Eleanor had had the power to forbid, and she had not. She had allowed the army to be separated. Some were even calling it treason.

  They were angry; they had suffered a bitter defeat. Time would soften their condemnation, but Richildis did not think that it would vanish. There was so much that royalty could do, so far that it could go before the people lost faith in it. Yet a small thing could shift the balance inescapably. A word not said, an act undone; a camp shifted while the Turks waited in ambush.

  The mood in the camp was bitter. They were not broken as the Germans had been in Ephesus, far from it, but neither were they the proud warriors who had sung their way through Asia. The sun had forsaken them. They dwelt under a grey and lowering sky, shape and image of their spirits.

  Michael Bryennius was awake when she came back to the tent. She had half expected him to be up and gone, but she had caught him before he could rise. He greeted her with a lift of the brows.

  “I thought you had died,” she said to him.

  “Obviously,” he said, “you were so afraid for me that you tended me and left me.”

  “Others needed me more,” she said.

  It was not like him to be petulant. Maybe the Devil had taken up residence here, and sent his imps to vex even the wounded in their tents.

  And then he asked, “Are you angry with me?” That was such a question as her Michael Bryennius would ask, in such a tone as he would use, honest curiosity, and nothing plaintive in it.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am angry with you. If you had died, what in the world would have been left for me?”

  “It was not,” he said, “as if I planned to be caught in an ambush.”

  “Do you blame the queen, too?”

  He blinked. “As well blame the king for not moving fast enough, or Lord Geoffrey for moving too fast altogether.”

  “You are much too reasonable for a mortal man,” she said. She sighed. “Sweet saints, I’m tired.”

  He held out his arms. “Come to bed, then.”

  She shook her head. “No. No, I have to wait on the queen. I only came to—”

  “To be angry at me.”

  She glared. “No. To be sure that you were well. Promise me you’ll sleep. I’d give you a draught, but if you give me your word…”

  “I should be up,” he said. “Seeing what I can do.”

  “There are others more able to do that,” she said. “Lie back. Go to sleep. I’ll wake you for the daymeal.”

  It was a measure of his weariness that he protested only a little, and not for long. She paused as he lay down, stabbed with fear. What if he was wounded worse than she had thought?

  No. She had examined him thoroughly. There were only those that she had found, none severe enough to be deadly, unless it festered. And for that, she had done what she could, as best she knew how.

  * * *

  The queen and the king were not quarreling. They were not speaking to one another at all. Eleanor wore an air of defiance that would better have suited a scapegrace child. She had walked the camp as a queen should, given comfort to those who were not greatly inclined to welcome it. That done, she took her ease among the high lords and the king’s council – if it could be called ease, to hear them fight the battle over and over. Recriminations there were none – not for that. Until they looked at her and went quiet.

  She sipped wine, the last of the good vintage from Byzantium, and maintained an expression of mild interest. In a lull in the retelling of tales many times told, she said, “We will of course break camp tomorrow and go on. This time,” she said, “in one army, unsundered. Can the rear undertake to accomplish this?”

  “Can the van swear solemnly to allow it?” the king asked in a cold voice.

  “The van
would thank the rear to keep a good pace and not dawdle,” she said.

  “The rear would thank the van,” he shot back, “to obey the orders it is given.”

  More than one of those caught in the fire drew in a sharp breath, but although Eleanor’s eyes glittered dangerously, her lips smiled. “The vanguard will follow every royal order to the letter,” she said, “by my own command.”

  Louis, cheated of a battle, looked shrunken and faintly lost. “Well,” he said. “That’s all right, then.”

  Eleanor’s smile brightened a noticeable degree. She bowed her head regally, acknowledging not only his surrender but her own victory. Such as it was, and as little good as it could do with an army turned against her.

  But Eleanor was nothing if not resolute. She would win the army back: Richildis could see how she determined on it, lifting her chin, setting her shoulders back, bracing like a soldier going into battle.

  Fifty-Two

  God or the Devil, whichever had taken charge of the French army’s fate, seemed to have wearied for a while of tormenting them. The road thereafter was less ghastly difficult, winding out of the mountains and into a broad and winter-barren plain. The Turks did not follow them there. They marched unmolested, foraging where they could, eking out the provisions that the Byzantines had allowed them.

  Indeed they wearied after a while of condemning the queen for her ill judgment and turned back on an older grievance: the Emperor of the Romans and his haughty and often recalcitrant servants. Michael Bryennius till now had been little noticed and seldom condemned for his race and nation, but after the battle on the mountain they seemed to remember who and what he was. They began to shun him, to walk wide of him in camp and to ride away when he approached them on the march.

  He suffered it with wry humor. “Better a cold shoulder than cold steel in the belly,” he said.

  “That could follow,” said Richildis. “Be wise now. Don’t wander off. Stay close to the queen.”

  “What,” he said, “so that the two most hated personages in the army can both be found in the same place? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to divide and conquer?”

  “Divide and be conquered,” she said, refusing to be drawn into his antic fit. “Promise me.”

  “I promise,” he said easily – too easily, maybe. But he was a man of his word. She had to trust him.

  He did stay close, by his lights. He rode with the queen’s company or not far behind it, mostly. Sometimes she saw him farther back with the king’s suite. His old companions in disputation were most of them impervious to the mutterings of common soldiers. If they mistrusted him, they reckoned themselves safe enough; nor, unless he was even more devious than the run of Byzantines, could he foment treachery while he debated the mystery of the Trinity.

  In Richildis’ mind, the opposite too applied: no one would threaten him with stone or steel while he rode with the king’s councillors. Words were only wind, even the most bitter of them – and there were many, as the march stretched down to the sea.

  They came at last over mountain and plain to the city of Attalia, stone-walled sea-city full of hated Byzantines. It was a poor city, ill-provisioned; the land about it had been swept bare by marauding Turks.

  As if to add insult, the emperor’s governor there was a westerner, a man from Italy with a barbarian name: Landolf. He wore the garments of the east, grew his greying fair beard long and affected eastern manners, which only sharpened the Franks’ resentment. Nor could he give them the provisions that they needed, though he did his poor best.

  If he had been a heavenly angel with a face of light, the French would have detested him for that he was the emperor’s servant. This aging ineffectual man with his imperial orders and his squalid little town and his empty storehouses was wonderfully easy to despise. And despise him they did, no more reasonable in their hunger than thwarted children.

  It did, it least, divert them from Michael Bryennius. He liked this Landolf no better than they did. “Such a man,” he said, “well deserves to be given a barren charge and a poor protectorate.”

  “Yet now we are in it,” Eleanor said as they gathered after a banquet of smoked fish and too well aged cheese. The king was there, playing one of his perpetual games of chess, as if he could lose himself in fancied battles and thus escape this endless wearying war.

  They had thought him oblivious, but he looked up from embroiling his queen in a fight that she could not win, to say, “I’ve had enough of marching. It’s forty days to Antioch, they say, and most of it through mountains worse than those we just came over. This is a port; there are ships. I’ll order Landolf to transport us by sea.”

  Eleanor regarded him with incredulous scorn. “In this season? From this godforsaken place? That weakling will never muster enough ships to carry us all.”

  “He’ll find them,” Louis said. “God will make sure of it.”

  Eleanor rolled her eyes. Louis did not see. He was engrossed in the game again, making it more difficult than ever for his opponent to lose.

  * * *

  Louis did as he had said. He summoned Landolf to him and laid down his command. Landolf gasped and sputtered and failed to say anything of use; but he agreed, in return for a price that made the king’s chancellor blanch, to do as the king desired. Louis went away well pleased. Eleanor shook her head and meticulously said nothing.

  Ships, as Landolf said, could not be conjured up in a night. They waited, hungry and cold and buffeted by storms off the sea. And, inevitably, a horde of Turks that swept down on them where they camped outside the walls.

  No Byzantine force came to their aid. The city, seeing the assault, slammed shut its gates. They fought alone, were wounded and died alone, with the city’s walls blank and heedless at their backs.

  “We are not alone,” Louis declared. “God is with us.” But few of them had his faith. They would much have preferred a company of archers.

  That battle they won, or at least failed to lose. The queen and her ladies were never touched at all; lay safe within the camp, with those who had weapons keeping them close to hand. But the army held off the enemy, drove them back from the edges and from the horselines and the baggage-wagons. A wagon or two went to the torch, but they lost little. Only blood and lives, and any trust they might have had in their Byzantine allies.

  * * *

  Michael Bryennius had nothing to say. He had fought among the rest, nor seen any incongruity, since these enemies were Turks; but once the Turks were driven back, the French scowled and drew away when he passed by. It was as if his aid was an ill thing, because there was only one of him and not an army’s worth.

  He came back to the tent that night unwounded but very tired, and with bloody hands. That was not like him. Richildis had water heated and brought in, and bathed him as she could, as he would allow. He did not resist, but neither did he help her. The spirit seemed to have gone out of him.

  When he was clean, dried as much as he might be in the brazier’s warmth, she took his face in her hands and made him lift it. His eyes were tired. There was no death in them, nothing broken.

  She had not known she was holding her breath till it rushed out of her. She said not what she had meant to say but, “Do you want to leave? Shall we find our own way home?”

  “I don’t think there’s any better way than this,” he said.

  “God help us, then,” said Richildis.

  The corner of his mouth twitched faintly. “Here we are in God’s army, fighting God’s war. How much more help can we expect?”

  “A caravan would be convenient,” she said, as wry as he.

  “Not in this season.” He sighed, yawned, shook himself. “We all pay for our sins. Mine was pride – and surety that a French army was more likely to come quickly to Jerusalem than a Greek caravan.”

  “We didn’t know this king,” said Richildis. “God forgive me, but the man is an idiot.”

  “Not really,” he said, rather surprising her. “Pious, weak-willed,
maladroit with the ladies – all of those, yes. And no great example of a king. But he’s not feeble-witted.”

  “Does it matter if he’s a master of philosophy, if he can’t command his own army?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  She let her knees give way till she sat at his feet, head on his knee, arms about his middle. The warmth of him was sweet, sweeter than the brazier. “You can blame me,” she said. “I thought of this. I got us into it – I attracted the queen’s curiosity.”

  “I agreed to it,” he said. “I’m as much at fault as you.”

  “Then what do we do?” she asked. “If you die – how will I live?”

  “As you always have,” he said. “We’ll come alive to Jerusalem. God will see to it.”

  She pulled away in sudden temper. “You’re as much an idiot as the king.”

  “But I am,” he said, “a better player at chess.”

  “A child could lay claim to that,” said Richildis; but her temper had faded. She sighed, eased, let herself sink back against him. This time his arms went about her. Warm within them, then at last she rested.

  Fifty-Three

  “But there are too few.”

  King Louis contemplated the fleet of ships that lay in the harbor of Attalia. They were a motley lot, of every size from fishing-boat to lumbering barge to a handful of horse-transports wallowing in the swell. There were not enough, not by half, to carry the whole of the army; and it was not a simple ferry-run but a sea-voyage that Louis had in mind, all the way to Antioch.

  Landolf the imperial governor spread his hands at the king’s words, sighed and said, “Majesty, these are all I could find. I scraped every port and harbor and village in all this coast of Caramania. These are as many as will sail in the season of storms; as many as can sail. There are no more.”

  “Surely you can find more?” Eleanor asked coldly.

  The governor bowed low, lower than was strictly necessary; but he had learned to fear the queen far more than her gentle half-monk of a king. “Lady, majesty, there are none to be found.”