Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Eleanor sighed, shrugged. “Louis has dreams. He sees visions. This is the Holy Land – how can its defenders be anything but saints?”

  Raymond halted in his pacing, so abruptly that the silk of his robe swirled for yet a moment longer, a billow of gold and crimson. “God’s feet! This country’s crawling with saints and holy fools. But it needs men of the world to defend it – men of action; men of war. Alack for us, some of those are fools, too, and some – like Joscelin – are bloody idiots.”

  “He’s that bad, is he?”

  Raymond dropped down at Eleanor’s feet. She smiled at him and smoothed a wayward curl of his hair. He smiled back, but absently. “Worse,” he said. “He lost Edessa through his own fecklessness, then lost it again when he could easily have won it back. Now he’s squatting in Turbessel, snarling at the infidel and leaving my borders wide open. An army from the west, suitably rested and refreshed, with such weapons and strength as it can bring to bear…”

  “Yes,” said Eleanor. “You’ve said.” She made it sound more sweet than impatient.

  “So I have,” he said, unruffled. “His majesty has no desire to hear it. Jerusalem, he says. Jerusalem calls him. To what? To prayer? This Crusade began because of Joscelin – because he let Edessa fall. The sooner he is dealt with, the better.”

  “The better for whom?” she asked. “For the Crusade? Or for you?”

  “If I am Antioch,” he said, “that is nearest to Edessa, and next to fall if the infidel comes so far – yes, for me. Jerusalem is far away. I am here, and the enemy breathes down my neck.”

  “Jerusalem is all my husband dreams of,” Eleanor said.

  “Let him dream of it,” said Raymond, “but let him lead his army to the aid of Antioch.”

  “Jerusalem has troubles of its own,” Eleanor said after a pause. “It may have other uses for the Crusade.”

  “What other uses can there be? Edessa is fallen. We must win it back. The first step, the essential step, is to destroy the strength of the infidels. And who is strongest among them now? Who but the one who calls himself Nur al-Din. He lairs for the moment in Aleppo. If we can lure him out – if we can take him now, before he grows stronger—”

  She petted him as if he had been one of his hounds. “There. There now. It matters so much to you who live in the middle of it. But we come from far away. We see differently. What’s so obvious to you… to us it’s all confusion. Crusade is more than a war over borders, or even the fall of a city.”

  “You parrot your husband well,” he said.

  “You sound like a sulky boy,” she said. “Come, kinsman. Smile at me. Forget your troubles for yet a while. It’s spring; it’s glorious. Come ride in the meadows with me.”

  He let her draw him up, laugh him out of his sulks, carry him away amid the lilies of the field.

  * * *

  The lilies of the field neither toiled nor spun, but play they did, laughing like children. Louis in his dour devotions might well have failed to see, but others of his army were not so oblivious. They spoke aloud what everyone was whispering: that Prince Raymond and the queen were rather more familiar with one another than close kin might be expected to be.

  Louis would not hear it. Quarrel though he might, and bitterly, with a queen whose whole life was the world and everything in it, and who cared little for the life of the soul; but he would hear no ill word of her. “He is her uncle,” he said. “These southerners – their blood is hot. It craves a familiarity that in us cold northerners would be excessive. But in them it’s mere affection.”

  “Such affection,” his counsellors muttered: “lying in a bed of flowers, wrapped in one another’s arms.”

  Louis would not listen. He saw what they let him see: a southern warmth to be sure, but never more than propriety would allow.

  * * *

  Princess Constance, rather to Richildis’ amazement, was equally unwilling to give credence to the rumor. She was as besotted with her husband as Louis appeared to be with his wife. She would hear no ill of him, nor do aught but excuse him, even when he slighted her in the company of the lords of Antioch. He set the Queen of France on his right hand and relegated his princess, the rightful ruler of the princedom, farther down at table or in hall. He conducted himself as if she were nothing to him, although without her he would have held little rank and less precedence.

  Richildis, married young to a man for whom she cared little, had some understanding of these noble necessities, but she had long since lost the custom of it. From the blessed sanctuary of a second marriage, a marriage made chiefly for herself, she saw in this nothing of beauty, and much that was to be pitied.

  One did what one must. That was wisdom as old as Antioch, as young as the princess who sat alone and forsaken while her prince paid court to the Queen of France.

  Fifty-Five

  Spring was brief in Outremer, and summer unrelentingly long. On the threshold of it, a messenger came up from Jerusalem under the royal banner. Queen Melisende summoned the King and Queen of France to a gathering of the High Court in Acre.

  She had honored them greatly in her choice of messenger. It was no less than the Patriarch of Jerusalem himself, bringing word of more than the council. Conrad of the Germans had come to Outremer at last, healed of his sickness and bringing great gifts and goodwill from the Emperor of the Byzantines.

  Louis sat bolt upright at that, startling those who were familiar with his languor in council and at the time of audience. “Conrad? Conrad is in Jerusalem? How could he be? He’s far behind me.”

  “You tarried,” Eleanor said a little too sweetly. “All the army is here at last. You could have been in Jerusalem a week and more ago.”

  For once he did not seize the invitation to quarrel. “I shall come there as soon as I may,” he said.

  “But first, majesty,” said the Patriarch of Jerusalem, “if you will, see fit to attend the queen’s council in Acre. Much will be decided there with regard to the Crusade.”

  Louis nodded, less crisply than before, but still as one who listens to what is said to him. “I shall go,” he said. “If Jerusalem calls, who am I to refuse?”

  * * *

  “You may go,” Eleanor said after the feast was over and the Patriarch had been escorted to his rest. She had retired to the solar behind the hall, to sip wine with those who were not minded yet to sleep. Louis might not have accompanied her, but she had asked and he had not seen fit to decline.

  Raymond was there, too, and Princess Constance with her ladies. It was a pleasant gathering of kin, the ladies with their needlework, the men setting the board for chess but pausing for conversation, and a singer and a luteplayer and a player on the Greek pipes making sweet music beneath the sound of their voices.

  Eleanor however was in no greatly pleasant mood. “You may go,” she said to her husband as the singer sang of love lost and never to be found again. “I shall remain here.”

  Louis looked up from the chessboard with its squares of ebony and silver. He had a silver king in his hand, accoutered like a Saracen sultan. “You can’t stay,” he said. “The summons was sent to both of us. Queen Melisende will be wanting to meet her sister queen.”

  “I’ll meet her in my own time,” Eleanor said, “and in my own person.”

  “Your person is that of the Queen of France,” Louis said stiffly. It was meant to be dignity, perhaps. It only sounded petulant.

  Eleanor looked long at him. The force of her glance laid him bare to anyone else who felt it. He had no kingly beauty, no stately grace. He was not even clean. His hair hung lank on his narrow skull. His beard was ragged. Neither his robe nor his body had been washed in time out of mind.

  He was a saintly man and an anointed king. But beside her bathed and scented elegance he seemed no more lovely than a beggar on a dungheap.

  Richildis caught herself wondering what it must be like for Eleanor to suffer this man’s embraces. Rank scent, vermin most certainly, and no art or delicacy – she shud
dered.

  Eleanor lidded her terrible eyes. “If to be Queen of France is to be your wife,” she said, “then I have no desire to continue in that office.”

  The silence was absolute. Even Raymond seemed stunned, or he feigned it well. Louis blinked slowly. “You don’t want to be queen?”

  “I don’t want to be your wife,” she said.

  “But God has joined us,” he said. “We can’t be divided.”

  She showed a delicate gleam of teeth. “Can’t we? You remember Bernard, that horrible man, so full of God’s righteousness that he has no room for mere charity. Didn’t he condemn our marriage? Didn’t he thunder at the pope to dissolve it on grounds of our too-close kinship? The pope will listen if we remind him. How can he not?”

  “We are not,” said Louis, “as closely related as that.”

  “What!” she cried in mock horror. “You gainsay the great Bernard, the mighty saint of Clairvaux?”

  Louis shook his head. He had never been a match for her in temper, still less in wit, and too well he must know it. “Lady,” he said as if with great patience, “the Queen of France cannot refuse to be married to its king. It isn’t done.”

  “I’m doing it,” Eleanor said. “You go, play court to the queen who keeps her grown son on a leash like a faithful dog. I’ll stay here. The petition can go to Rome with the next packet of letters for his holiness. A few months, a season – it’s done. The marriage is annulled. I’m free to go where I will.”

  “And what will you do,” Louis asked her, “while you linger here? Will milord prince ask to dissolve his marriage, too?”

  That was a shrewd blow, shrewder than anyone might have expected of that unworldly king. Eleanor barely blanched at it, nor turned her glance on Raymond, who sat still, watching, saying nothing. “My uncle has kindly offered me his patronage,” Eleanor said.

  “And his bed? Lady, has he offered you that?”

  No one dared gasp. Eleanor laughed, sweet and cruel. “Oh! A sin, a palpable sin: a lustful thought. Quickly, confess it, or it stains your soul forever.”

  “The sin is not mine,” he said, too low almost to hear.

  “Oh, no!” she cried. “No, never yours. And no son to show for it, either.”

  “I did my duty,” he said stiffly.

  “Yes, once a year, on a day grudgingly approved by your priests, with prayers before and prayers during and penance after, and such a holy loathing in the doing of it that I’m amazed you managed it at all.” Eleanor tossed her head, reckless as a highbred mare, and galloping on like one, too. “I am a woman, sir. A creature of flesh and blood. I am not a vile thing to be approached with shrinking and disgust, nor a pure spirit to be worshipped from afar. I am body and soul, flesh and spirit, and I am sick unto death of being married to a canting monk.”

  She stopped for breath, drawing it in sharply as if it were edged with pain. Such words, such vehemence, had the force of years behind them, pent up till it must escape or shatter the one who spoke them. Even those who, like Richildis, had known how little affection Eleanor had for her husband, were shocked to hear her speak so.

  “Lady,” Louis said, somewhat breathless himself. “Lady, you are distraught. The rigors of Crusade, the temptations of this city, the lure of eastern luxury—”

  Eleanor smote her hands together with such force that he jumped. “Stop that!” she cried to him. “Just stop that! I am not distraught. I am full to the brim with your cursed piety. Go find yourself a nun, a saint, someone as cold to the things of this world as you are yourself. Set me free. Give me back the sun and the warmth and the sweet air of my own country.”

  “What, not the sweet air of Antioch?” Louis did not believe her, Richildis thought. He reckoned that her southern blood ran hotter even than usual; that she was gone wild with it, incited perhaps by her rake of an uncle, but that in the end he could persuade her to see reason. “Lady, I cannot set you free, as you put it. We are joined together by God and by the vows that we swore before the Church and the people of France.”

  “Rome can dissolve any such vow,” said Eleanor. “It’s as simple as a pair of accusations: that we are kin within the forbidden degree, and that I’ve borne you no son.”

  Louis’ eyes glittered. “Accusations? Accusations, you say? Why don’t you go even further? Why not ask me to condemn you for adultery?”

  “Aha!” said Eleanor in open glee. “So you aren’t as calm about this as you pretend. Of course you won’t divorce me as an adulteress. You have no proof. You’ll find none. And if you try… why, here’s a prince of the Holy Land himself, lord and master of Antioch, willing to swear that I am as pure as a nun in the cloister.”

  “Some cloisters,” muttered Louis, “are in sore need of discipline.”

  “Not mine,” said Eleanor. “Nor shall I remain yours. I’ll be free of you, my lord – if not sooner, then later. You’ll never prevail against me.”

  He set his brows together. He looked remarkably stubborn, and hardly weedy at all. One remembered then that he was the heir of strong kings, descended from Hugh Capet himself. “I will not divorce you,” he said, “nor see this marriage annulled. You will come with me to Acre, and thereafter to Jerusalem. We will present a face of amity to the High Court and the queen and the young king.”

  “No,” said Eleanor.

  Louis rose. Oh, indeed: his temper was up. He had forgotten perhaps that he was by nature and inclination a mild, saintly man. “Guards,” he said.

  The men who stood along the walls and kept watch on the door, the unvarying shadows of every kingly gathering, advanced at the king’s word. Eleanor regarded them without fear, perhaps without comprehension. “I will not go with you,” she said to the king.

  “Messires,” Louis said to his guards, “take her majesty into your care. See that she goes nowhere, does nothing but by my leave. In the morning we depart for Acre.”

  “But—” someone ventured to protest. “How can we – the whole army – we can’t leave so soon!”

  “We can,” Louis said, “and we will. And her majesty comes with us. Madam, you may ride under your own power or you may be carried like a prisoner. You have but to choose.”

  Eleanor folded her arms and made herself immovable. “I am staying in Antioch.”

  Louis nodded to the guards. They looked a little startled, but willing enough. Quietly, firmly, and quite irresistibly, they lifted her up and carried her away to her chamber.

  * * *

  Raymond had sat by in silence while king and queen conducted their quarrel. But after she was gone, when the echoes of her guards’ booted feet had died away, he rose. He who had been so affable, so kindly, so unstinting in his generosity, said to his royal guest, “Get out.”

  Louis regarded him in puzzlement. “Sir? I beg your pardon; she is your kinswoman, after all. But I am her husband.”

  Raymond’s lips curved. It was not a smile. His teeth were bared. “Get out of my city.”

  “In the morning,” Louis said, “we certainly shall. Until then, my lord—”

  “Now,” said Raymond. And when Louis did not stir, in a great bull-bellow: “Now!”

  Louis scrambled up, backing away in haste and confusion. Raymond pursued him. The amiable face, the charming smile, was gone. He was crimson, suffused with rage – and Louis perhaps remembered too late that prince’s reputation: affable, yes, but terrible in wrath.

  Louis was feckless and given to dallying when he should move in haste, but he was not a perfect fool. He chose the wiser part. He turned tail and ran.

  * * *

  What war, famine, even the vows of Crusade had failed to do, Eleanor had done with her shocking display of intransigence, and Raymond in his rage had completed. Louis the gentle, Louis the monk, Louis the endless ditherer, had roused at last to a kingly resolve. He forsook his lassitude; he flung his army into motion. He swept them all out of the enveloping comforts of Antioch and set them on the road to Acre. He did it that very night, under the moo
n’s white and startled face – impelled by fear and by the half-bared steel of Prince Raymond’s guards. Raymond himself stood at their head, as if he had been the angel of Paradise with flaming sword.

  Louis was driven out by steel-edged force. He was not, for all of that, too blind a coward to take care for the wife whom God and the Church had given him. He doubled and trebled the guard about her lest her uncle venture a rescue, a guard that held to its duty long after they were gone down the long road from Antioch. She could do nothing without their presence, not the slightest intimate thing.

  Not even her ladies could pass that wall of guards. She had not been permitted to bid farewell to her uncle, nor allowed to pause as she was half-led, half-carried out past the swords and spears of his guards. Raymond would not go to Acre, would not answer the queen’s summons. He would guard his own country against both Christian and Saracen, Joscelin and the emperor of the Byzantines and the hordes of Islam. He had cast out the French, driven forth their king. All alliances were broken, all friendships ended.

  It was ill done; nor would it end, Richildis thought, with this swift and headlong retreat. They would all pay for this that they had done tonight.

  The French army marched in surprisingly good order considering the lateness of the hour and the haste with which they had gathered themselves and their belongings and taken to the road. Louis was not such a precipitous fool as he might have seemed. His men had been ready to depart for some days before he roused them from their beds. If they were shocked by the summons, if they regretted the comforts that they had left behind, they were too eager for those of Acre to mourn overmuch. “And then,” they said to one another in a long sigh of wonder, “Jerusalem.”

  Eleanor, locked in living walls by day, still needed womanly attendance at night. Louis permitted only two to wait on her: a servant of mature years and massive probity, and, rather oddly, Richildis. She might have thought that her Byzantine husband would remove her from any such consideration, but Louis did not think in such a fashion. “You are married to a schismatic,” he said to her, “but your virtue is never questioned, nor is any ill word spoken of you. I pray that you may teach her by example.”