Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  “Islam can muster more,” Melisende said levelly. “Many, many more. Its wellsprings are in this place, rooted in it. Ours are far away in France and Germany and the Low Countries. When one of ours dies, none rises up to take his place. When one of them falls, half a hundred spring up out of the earth. This is their country, my lord. They have advantage of numbers always, and more in reserve, never waning or failing.”

  “That is counsel of despair,” Conrad said: and well he would know it, Richildis thought, after the march from Constantinople. “If we have so little hope, why make the effort at all?”

  “Because,” she said, “God wills it.”

  That raised a cheer, with laughter in it, but no agreement. Damascus or Aleppo, Aleppo or Damascus. The barons of the High Court inclined toward Aleppo, except the king, who these days would do whatever his mother did not wish to do. He, with the lords of the West, spoke for Damascus. Its wealth, its ancient name, its position between the two halves of Islam, and certainly the prospect of revenge for the defeat that Jerusalem had suffered in its last campaign against the city, all seemed more easily comprehensible than distant and lesser-known Aleppo.

  “After Damascus,” Baldwin said, “we can take Aleppo. But if we pass Damascus and march on Aleppo, who’s to say that Damascus won’t fall on us from behind and betray the alliance of which we are being so careful?”

  That swayed a few of those who had stood against him. He pressed harder. “Orchards and vineyards,” he said, “and riches from a hundred caravans. Roses, apples of Damascus; fine steel, silks, spices. All ours, all laid in our hands to wield against the infidel.”

  Sanity and policy showed dull as ash beside the glitter of worldly greed. One by one they fell to it, the barons of Jerusalem. Those who professed to be higher-minded were persuaded, they said, by the prospect of winning Damascus, securing it behind them, then advancing in safety to take Aleppo.

  It was very reasonable, perhaps. Still Richildis did not like it. It was ill done to break alliance twice, and with the strongest of the Turks waiting for just such a chance to move on the city that he coveted. Nur al-Din could be no less tempted than the Franks by the beauties of Damascus.

  Her voice was faint and thin, and few rose to bolster it. They were all gone over to Baldwin’s camp. Even Melisende had fallen silent. Eleanor sat tight-lipped, too proud to protest. Whatever she said would only prove the whispers of her infidelity with the Prince of Antioch. Why else, after all, would she insist on opposing her husband’s vote in the council?

  * * *

  It was decided. They were going to take Damascus. Arslan knew again the dizzy anticipation of war: half excitement, half terror.

  The women never looked happy when their men went to war – even when it was they who did the sending. And this time it was not. Queen Melisende was much against this course of action, Queen Eleanor too, and Lady Richildis for good measure.

  The queens he could elude – one was oblivious to him, the other preoccupied with her son’s rebellion. Lady Richildis and Arslan’s own mother, however…

  “Do you believe this is wise?” Richildis demanded of her brother as they dined together in Helena’s house. Tomorrow the council would disperse, for a while: the Westerners to Jerusalem where they would look on the Holy Sepulcher and invoke God’s blessing on the Crusade; the rest to their own demesnes to gather their levies. They would all meet again at Tiberias beside the Lake of Galilee.

  Richildis would go to Mount Ghazal. She would not lead her levies – that she left to Kutub, and to her brother who would lend them his more suitably Christian name and face. It would be rather splendid in Arslan’s estimation, to be together again with the men from Mount Ghazal.

  Clearly Richildis did not think so. “Do you want to loot Damascus, too? Are you as blind with avarice as the rest of them?”

  Bertrand sighed. “What is either wisdom or avarice, when the council of a whole Crusade determines on a thing that it will do?”

  “You never said a word,” she said.

  “And did you?”

  She opened her mouth, shut it again.

  He grinned, if wearily. “You can see the tide running, too. If they’re going to do the worst thing, the ignorant thing, they’ll do it. No voice of reason is going to stop them.”

  “Were we such fools,” she asked him, “when we were nobles in Anjou?”

  “You, never. I…” He took them all in with a sweep of the hand. “Remember how I came here.”

  “Headlong,” she said. “Headstrong. Reckless and endlessly righteous. Knowing nothing of the world here, of its complexities. When did we become easterners, Bertrand?”

  Maybe she did not expect an answer. He gave her one nonetheless. “Too long ago to remember,” he said. “We can’t go back, you know.”

  “Some do,” she said.

  “But not we.”

  She bent her head. She was a little pale, maybe. A little too quiet of a sudden.

  “I wish,” she said after a while, “that I could ride to war. War is so much simpler than this.”

  “You can, you know,” he said. “You can ride with us. Queen Eleanor is going. You can—”

  “No,” said Richildis.

  Bertrand opened his mouth to speak. Helena silenced him with a word. “Bertrand my love, you are a knight of renown and a lord of men, but when it comes to women you re the blindest fool yet born. Can’t you see she’s going to have a baby?”

  Bertrand’s expression was beautifully shocked. Arslan supposed he could have missed it, if he was blind and deaf and never looked at his sister at all – and to be sure he said, “So that’s why you’ve been wearing those Byzantine robes instead of decent Frankish gowns. I thought you were trying to set a fashion.”

  “I was trying,” said Richildis, “to be circumspect. It’s enough to come back after so long, without coming back to cooing and fluttering and too-frequent inquiries as to my health. I know how old I am. I know what I’ve been doing that’s hardly advisable for a woman in my condition. I’m going to stop doing it. I’m going back to Mount Ghazal, to have my child in peace.”

  “Not Jerusalem?” Bertrand had recovered his wits with admirable speed. “But surely the royal physicians—”

  “I’ll have all the care I need in my own place, among my own people.” She sounded very sure of it. She looked beautiful, too: amazing in a woman as old as she was. Arslan sighed a little. If he had not been in love with Queen Eleanor – if Lady Richildis had not been his near kin, and halfway his mother besides…

  She was smiling at her brother the more brightly, the more darkly he frowned. “I’ll be well. I promise you. Only promise me the same.”

  “I’m always well,” Bertrand said, half growling it.

  “Promise,” she said.

  He growled a little louder, glared, but she would not let him go as easily as that. “I promise,” he said at last.

  Fifty-Seven

  “Will you promise me the same?” Helena asked Bertrand as they lay together in the cool of the night, with the fan whispering over them, plied by a small imp of a servant who could do his duty even in his sleep.

  Bertrand was not in the least amused. Women, he thought, were damnably persistent creatures. “I’ve gone to war a hundred times before, and you’ve never made me promise anything. Why now?”

  She shrugged. Her shoulders were white in the nightlamp’s glimmer. She had aged well, had Helena. She was more beautiful now than she had been as a girl: her skin finer, her hair richer, her eyes more wonderfully wide and dark. She had grown in wisdom as in beauty, and that in its turn made her all the more beautiful.

  It did not make her any less baffling. “Why are you fretting for me?” he asked. “Are you afraid I’ve grown too old to fend for myself?”

  “Of course not,” she said; and she said it firmly, with no quiver of doubt.

  “What is it, then? Omen? Foreseeing? Premonition?”

  Again she shrugged. “I don’t know. I j
ust want to be sure.”

  That clearly was all she would say. He surrendered; he laid his hands in hers and said, “I promise. I’ll do my best to come back unscathed, as God wills it.”

  She seemed content with that. She lay down and closed her eyes and to all appearances went to sleep. So too, after a while, did Bertrand.

  * * *

  But when he woke, when he had broken his fast and bidden Helena good day – for he would linger in the city for a day or two after the kings had left, since Beausoleil was ready and waiting for the war that he had known would come – he had conceived a thought. He saw the kings ride out, the banners and the trumpets, the bright armor glittering, the men-at-arms in their ranks, the queens each on her fine horse in her fine gown and silken veil that surely she would stop to change out of as soon as she had left the city well behind. They were full of their splendor, their strength and their holy cause. No doubt vexed them, no hesitation now that the choices were all made.

  Bertrand stood in the jostle of the crowd for a long while after the armies were gone. He hardly noticed the shift and swirl of people about him, though he was aware, in a dim fashion, that he was standing like a rock in a millrace. He simply braced his feet and made himself huge and stood fast, and the crowd parted to stream past him.

  When they were all gone, he went where he had decided to go. His business was brief in the circumstances; but when it was done he had a writ in his purse, copy of the one that resided with a judge of the city. Another would go in its time to the king’s chancery.

  It was not relief he felt. Calm, rather. At peace, one might say; but he was hardly on his deathbed, nor meant to be for long years yet. He had done something that he should have done long ago. That was all.

  * * *

  Richildis came home to Mount Ghazal, she thought, quietly. But as she rode toward the village with Michael Bryennius and the escort that had built itself somehow on the way from Acre, she saw banners hung from the balconies, garlands of flowers woven round them, and people running to line her path. The men and boys were shouting, the women singing: the sweet eerie song with which they welcomed one of their own returned from a long journey.

  Her eyes pricked with tears. Pregnancy made her foolish, but even so, she was moved. Her people – her own people – were glad that she had come back.

  The singing followed her up the way to the castle, the men and boys running, the women walking and singing. And in the castle was great welcome also, all the guards and servants, the clerks – and yes, her two maids whom she had left behind, Yasmin and Leila as swollen with child as she was. They were all gathered in the gate and the court, laughing and crying, sweeping her into a round of embraces that would have been presumptuous if these had not been who they were. Her people. The people of Mount Ghazal.

  Everything was in beautiful order. Town and castle gleamed with cleanliness. The crack in the north wall was gone. The east tower was all finished, built high and beautiful. As she rode past it her banner went up from its turret: the white gazelle recumbent in a field of lilies, against the blue sky of Outremer.

  Better than the women’s song, better than the feast that waited, better even than the bedchamber aired and garnished and strewn with rose-petals, was the excellence of the stewardship that she had left behind her. The demesne had prospered. The accounts were minutely, meticulously kept. Whatever had gone ill, it was past, forgotten.

  Of course she would examine all of it later, at her leisure. But it was a gift her people had given her, not only their welcome but their good service; and she had abandoned them, run away with barely a thought, and seldom sent word.

  They had done extraordinarily well without her. She could be jealous, perhaps. Or worried – what if the world ran so well without lords or baronesses, that in the end it decided to dispense with them?

  Foolishness. She had come home, and home had welcomed her with open arms. Yasmin and Leila squealed with delight to find her pregnant, leaped on her and took her by storm and carried her away to be bathed, pampered, chattered at till her head spun.

  Yasmin had married a man of the town, the eldest of the nine brothers of Suraya the valiant. He had grown from a stalwart youth into a man of worth and substance, likely to be chosen rais when old Hamid grew weary of the office. This was their second child – the first, a son, was brought out for Richildis’ inspection; and a fine strapping black-eyed child he was.

  Leila, not to be outdone, had snared a Frank, a very infidel as her people would reckon it, the sergeant-at-arms of the garrison. He was a stranger to Richildis, new to Outremer this past pair of years, a big fair man remarkably like that Arnulf who still stood guard over Michael Bryennius’ life and body. He was not a Norman however but an Angevin. He had been, he said, a soldier under the Count himself, but had been encouraged to go on pilgrimage after an unfortunate incident in a tavern. Richildis forbore to ask precisely what that incident entailed. A knife, another man-at-arms, a woman perhaps – it was a familiar tale, well worn with repetition.

  He seemed a stolid enough creature, restful beside his vivid magpie of a wife. She chattered for both of them, would tell the whole tale of Mount Ghazal from the moment that Richildis had left it, if Richildis but gave her time.

  Richildis would have time. It was early yet, but she could feel herself growing slow, sinking into the torpor of late pregnancy. She wanted to be here, home, safe; to bear her child in this place that above all was hers.

  Yes, even more than La Forêt. That was so long ago now, so far away. She could remember it if she tried. Sometimes she dreamed of it: the wet green smell of its woodlands, the sun’s warmth on the hills where the grapes were ripening, the hush of snow on a winter’s night. Yet when she woke, she saw the world that had chosen her, the harsh dry land, the sudden greenery, the neverending rumor of war; and it was hers, her world, no more to be denied than the life that stirred beneath her girdle.

  Lady Agnes wrote her still, and she wrote in return, bare words on parchment doing duty for living presence. They never mentioned Richildis’ return, not any longer. It was all of other things, things that they had in common, the ruling of a demesne, the raising of foals and hound-pups and fosterlings, the training of maids and soldiers. Lady Agnes never spoke of herself, of the ailments to which a woman of her age must be subject, nor pressed for relief from her twenty years’ burden. She had grown into it, Richildis thought. It had become her essence.

  Just so had Richildis become a part of Mount Ghazal. In going away from it, in allowing herself to forget it, she had only heightened the joy of her return.

  For Michael Bryennius it was not the same. It could not be. Yet he seemed content. He had his place here, into which he fit as smoothly as a tile in one of his people’s mosaics.

  Had there been no Crusade gathering to march on Damascus, Richildis would have been happy indeed. The levies had all gone, and Kutub with them, her old friend whose absence from her side had meant more to her on her journey than Mount Ghazal itself. There were fewer men in the village, and the guardroom had but half its complement. The women and the men left behind went on as they always had when the fighting men had gone off to war. Prayers were said in chapel for them and for the Crusade. Messengers who came were welcomed with wide eyes and anxious faces.

  But from day to day they lived in quiet, moving slow in the summer’s heat. Richildis’ refuge was the bower that she had built, that opened on the garden: cool even at midday, soothed by the fall of water from the fountain. Such breezes as blew, blew through it in the sweetness of roses and jasmine. She would sit or lie there, holding court as her husband put it, with the reins of the barony in her hands, and a great sense of rightness in it all.

  She could only pray that the Crusade would go as well. That they would take Damascus, perhaps even Aleppo; that they would all come home safe and victorious under the banner of the True Cross.

  * * *

  Queen Eleanor in Jerusalem shone like a bird of paradise in a flock of
finches. She was larger, brighter, more vivacious than any lady in the High Court; and she seemed to have determined to take the city by storm. While her husband played pilgrim, lying for long hours on his face before the Holy Sepulcher, traversing the way of the Cross on bare and bleeding knees, drowning himself in this wellspring of holiness, she found leisure for lighter pursuits.

  Her pilgrimage was genuine enough, Arslan suspected. She visited all the shrines from the Tower of David to the Garden of Gethsemane, and prayed there with evident devotion; but not for hours and days as her husband did. She played, too, held court, led hunts into the hills, danced far into the night after banquets of exceptional splendor.

  Baldwin was not in love with her as Arslan was, but he did find her intriguing. She seemed to share his fascination – and Arslan, whom love had not made blind, wondered how much of that was Baldwin’s youth and beauty and his charming manners, and how much was his rank and his lack of a wife.

  Everyone knew what she had said to King Louis in Antioch, how she asked that the marriage be dissolved. It was a fair scandal, one that she made no effort to conceal, much to the dismay of her husband’s counsellors. It looked ill that the two who led the Crusade should be so at odds as to dissolve the marriage that God and the lords of France had made. It was, some said, a poor omen for the Crusade.

  Arslan did not know what to think of it – no more than he knew what to say as he saw Baldwin so much in Queen Eleanor’s company. “Charming boy,” she called him. “My beautiful young knight.” Baldwin would blush at that and remind her that he was not yet knighted, and she would cry, “What! What inequity is this? Of course you must be a knight. How can you lead a Crusade without the accolade?”