Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  “I don’t know, lady,” Arslan said.

  “I think I might not,” said Eleanor. “Will you betray me before I can do it?”

  “If you thought I would, would you have told me?”

  She shrugged. “I might.”

  “I might, too,” Arslan said, “or I might not.”

  “If you do, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “If I don’t, my king and your king may never forgive me.”

  She smiled. It was almost laughter, but not quite. “I’ll gamble,” she said.

  He could go then, but he lingered. “You could die,” he said.

  “So could you.”

  He nodded.

  She looked at him. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “All the time,” said Arslan.

  “Odd,” she said as if to herself. “Men don’t usually admit to such things.”

  “Why, if it’s true?”

  “Is it your eastern blood?” she asked. “Is that why you’re different?”

  “Easterners say it’s mostly because I’m a Frank.” He paused. “My mother’s like me, and she’s half of each. We can’t seem to talk like other people.”

  “Don’t be like anyone else,” Eleanor said. “Promise.”

  “That could be perilous,” said Arslan.

  “Are you afraid?”

  She was challenging him. She was not, at that moment, any older or saner than he was. She should have been a man, he thought, to be so free of her mind and self – freer than any woman he had ever seen, even Melisende.

  “How strange people must be,” Arslan said, “in your country.”

  “Someday you will see.” She sighed. “Ah, my sweet France! So beautiful, and most of all in May, when the birds are singing and the blood goes wild…”

  Arslan squirmed with embarrassment. He could hardly say what he was thinking, that it did not need to be either May or France for the blood to rise and sing. July in Damascus, in the humid heat of afternoon, drunken with the scent of orange blossoms, was more than enough for the purpose.

  “Do they have orange trees in France?” Arslan asked.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “And apples, and plums and pears, and lemon trees in the far south where the winters are soft and almost sweet.”

  “Softer than here?”

  She tossed her head with a snort of disgust. “Winters are brutal here. Summers, too. Spring – that’s beautiful, for the whole three days it lasts.”

  “Sometimes it lasts a month,” Arslan said.

  “Not that I noticed.” She yawned, but her eyes were bright, wide awake. “Will you promise?”

  “What?” he asked stupidly.

  “Will you promise never to become ordinary?”

  “How can anyone promise that?”

  “Do it,” she said.

  “Are you commanding me, majesty?”

  She seemed a little disconcerted – and why she should be, he could not see. “Is that all I am to you? A crown and a throne?”

  “You’re giving it up,” he said, not at all wisely.

  “I hate it,” she said with sudden passion. And, a little less fiercely: “Not being queen. Being his queen. I’ll find me another king. Someone younger, fairer. Someone whose sole pleasure in this world is not to dream of the next.”

  “I wish you well of your ambition, lady,” Arslan said – and bowed and fled while she was still caught between temper and astonishment; before she could compel him to promise a thing that he could not agree to at all.

  And was he so different? Baldwin did not seem to think so. He was not hated or scorned, though he was the king’s foster-brother. He had been careful to avoid envy. His mother had taught him that, and Lady Richildis; and his father, too. It was a useful art for a bastard to know.

  Yet the Queen of France, who herself was well out of the ordinary, thought him odd.

  To her surely all of Outremer was strange. It was nothing like France or Aquitaine or Anjou. It was the land beyond the sea: beyond anything that the West had known.

  He would see France. Someday. And Aquitaine. And Anjou. All of them. And if he was stranger than any… then so he was. He might after all be utterly ordinary.

  Sixty

  When they left their quick-built fortress, Eleanor and her Amazons rode with them. No one had the fortitude to stop them, nor did King Louis seem inclined to try. They stayed well back at least, let themselves be warded in the center – and if the men who warded them objected to a duty that should not have been necessary, none went so far as to say so.

  Arslan was in the van, close behind his father. Baldwin was somewhat behind, Louis in the rear. The French king was not, for all his monkish pretensions, a poor fighter. He was rather brave in fact, and not too ill with a sword.

  The walls of Damascus loomed closer, gleaming white in the morning. Men like ants swarmed beneath: Conrad and his Germans, intent already on the attack. Turkish arrows rained down from the walls. Frankish arrows arced upward.

  Arslan was perfectly, unshakably calm. Anticipation of battle could rattle his bones where he sat; but battle in front of him – that he could face with a clear eye. He had all the time in the world to make certain that his armor was on properly, his lance well sharpened, his sword loose in its scabbard. He did not wear the great helm that the knights wore, but a smaller helmet in the Norman fashion.

  He was glad of that, knowing how narrow the world became in the hollow confinement of the helm, how difficult it was then to see what came at one from behind. That was the squire’s task, to see what the knight could not – and it seemed that he would play squire to his father; there was no other close enough, and Baldwin was farther back and well attended.

  He leaned across to help his father with the helm, lifting the great heavy thing and lowering it onto armored shoulders. The familiar face vanished in blind metal. But for the shield and surcoat with the sun’s disk thereon, and the grey charger, this could have been any knight at all, any nameless fighting man in an army full of them.

  The trumpets called them to order along the line of the walls. They left their horses behind with a picked company of soldiers and squires, to find again when the gates were breached. On foot in a long mailed line, with scaling ladders, with rams, with the engines that Conrad had brought up with him the day before, they stormed the walls.

  And the walls fought back: arrows, spears, oil and sand heated to burning. Arslan braced his shield over his head, locked with his father’s on the left hand, another man’s on the right – making a roof against the fire from the sky.

  A shrill cry of trumpets, a hammering of drums, a clatter of nakers, clear even above the roar of battle, brought Arslan’s eyes to the gate that defied a whole company of Germans. He was not far from them, struggling to raise a ladder against a trebled horde of infidels.

  The gate sprang open. He had thought the walls well manned; yet they were nigh deserted beside the army that poured out of the city upon the startled Franks. Hundreds, thousands of them, shrilling their battle cry: Allah-il-allah! Allahu akbar!

  “God’s balls,” Bertrand said beside him, echoing in the helm. “There shouldn’t be this many men in the whole of Damascus.”

  And they kept coming. Rank after rank of them, tribes and clans and nations. Turks – whole steppesful of Turks.

  Those never came from Damascus, nor could have been there longer than it took to cross from the northern gate to the gates of the south. Aleppo had had the alarm, after all, and moved with preternatural swiftness. It had sent its armies, all of them perhaps, to the succor of its sister and rival.

  The Franks gave up their assault on the walls, turned at bay against an enemy more numerous than they had ever dreaded to meet. What had seemed a brief siege, a quick conquest, turned swiftly into rout.

  “The camp!” someone roared from behind. “They’re headed for the camp!”

  The baggage, the horses, the provisions – and, except for the queen and her Amazons, the women and s
ervants. They fought with redoubled ferocity, no thought now of taking the city, only of gaining back what was theirs.

  When the trumpets rang the retreat, they were already well away from the walls. They continued in good order, within a wall of shields and spears: drawing back for prudence’s sake, and taking their engines with them.

  * * *

  Unur the emir had indeed brought in the armies of Aleppo. “They must have known,” someone said that night in the council of the kings. “They had to have known.”

  “Not necessarily,” Baldwin said. He did not seem unduly cast down, though it was difficult to contemplate a battle turned so suddenly against him. “They would have expected us to aim for Aleppo, and stood the troops to arms there. Once we were sighted here, Unur could summon the armies and expect them to come at once. Surely you aren’t all taken by surprise? It had to happen.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen so soon.” Louis of France was not wont to speak in council, but this night, perhaps the fire of battle lingered in him still. He had fought well by all accounts, and might have broken through into the city if the enemy had not broken out before him. “We should have been in the citadel and strongly guarded before the rest of the Saracens came against us.”

  “War never goes as we would expect,” Baldwin said with the surety of one who had led armies since he was a child. “So then. We’re driven back to this camp. Raiders are running through the gardens again. We can’t defend ourselves here, storm the walls, fight the new army, and keep the raiders at bay, not all at once.”

  “Can we not?” asked a baron from somewhere in France: a southerner perhaps with his black curls, lank now from a hard day’s fighting.

  “We are outnumbered,” Manasses the Constable said with remarkable patience in the circumstances. All the knights of Outremer were weary of the westerners’ persistent failure to understand this half of the world. “This is the greatest army that has ever marched under the True Cross, and yet we are but a tithe of a tithe of the hordes that Islam can raise against us. They are in their own country; we are far from our own. When one of us dies, none comes to take his place. When one of them falls, a hundred crowd in behind him, pouring like a river from all the lands that pay homage to Allah. We have no such fortune. We must husband our resources. We cannot spend ourselves without heed for the cost.”

  “Then what do we do? Run home with our tails between our legs?”

  “Not yet,” Baldwin said with conspicuous equanimity. “But we should consider that instead of a city lightly defended and easily taken, we face an army larger than our own, that came through a gate we could not either reach or hold.”

  “Should we try?” someone asked.

  Baldwin spread his hands. “Should we? We’re pressed to hold what we have, this southern edge of the gardens. We can’t surround the city; we’re too few.”

  “An army at every gate?” said one of the German barons.

  “Then what will we have left to take this side of the city?” a baron of Jerusalem shot back. “It’s as his majesty said. We can’t do all that we should do. We have to choose.”

  “I should think the choice would be made for us,” King Louis said with a touch of diffidence. “We’re here, yes? We’ve begun the attack from this southern side. We have to continue.”

  “We may not be able to.” That was a man near the back of the gathering, an accent more of Outremer than of France. “They expect us here, and will concentrate their forces in this place. If we go elsewhere – where they don’t expect us—”

  “But they expect us to keep attacking,” Louis said, “unless we retreat. Should we pretend to run away, then? And draw them after us?”

  No one scoffed. He was a king, after all, and a fair fighter, though he had little mind for the greater complexities of war.

  Baldwin, a king likewise but more notably gifted in the art, said rather gently, “They could raise the whole country against us, fall on us and destroy us before we could come back to the borders of our own country. No, brother: we have to stay here, if we have any hope of taking the city.”

  “But if we withdrew,” said the man in the back, “and chose a place that they would not expect – perhaps the eastern wall—”

  “That would be ill done,” someone else said, “if you know this city at all. It’s desert there. Water is—”

  “We’ll carry what we can,” the baron said, if baron he was; he was far back and veiled in shadow. “If we succeed, we gain much.”

  “If we fail, we lose it all.”

  “Messires,” Baldwin said in a clear, quelling voice, “I think we’re short of so hard a choice. If tomorrow we fail to break through the walls – then we do what we must do.”

  That was wise counsel, though it resolved little. They settled on it and went to what rest was granted them: little enough with infidels prowling among the trees, shattering the night with shrieks and howls and arrows out of the dark. In the deep night they fell on the horselines, cut tethers and slashed hobbles, reckless of dancing hoofs. Franks drove them off, but not before they had sent a good score of destriers lumbering into the night.

  Mules, palfreys, remounts they could have spared far more easily than those great heavy beasts from the West. There were so few left, so many dead of famine and heat and sickness; yet those that remained were weapons as deadly as any sword, great battering hoofs and tearing teeth and sheer force of weight against the infidel on his swift light horse of the desert.

  It was not a crippling loss, but they did feel it. The knights relegated to remounts were so much the less able to storm the walls, so much the more disheartened by the blow to their pride and their purses.

  Again as before they rode out of the camp toward the city. This time no women rode with them. Queen Eleanor, out of prudence or even fear, elected to remain behind, and her ladies with her.

  Arslan knew of it too late, or he would have found a way to go to her, to call her a dozen kinds of fool. The camp was beleaguered; there were raiders all about it. They could spare too few to guard it. All who could must ride and march against the city. They must take it. They could not guard the camp, too, even with the queen inside it.

  Or maybe she thought that she could do some good, that she could fight to defend the camp. That would be like her. It should have sent Arslan riding headlong back, but he had gone too far. He was almost at the walls. The way behind was thick with infidels: shadows amid the gardens, shapes flitting through the trees.

  The walls were black with men, the parapets so crowded that man must interfere with man, and no archer draw bow without colliding with his neighbor. More yet waited below. If the Franks hoped to raise the scaling ladders today, they would have to do it through the ranks of the enemy, against a bristle of spears.

  They paused as they saw what faced them, but they were no cowards, they of the Cross. They flung themselves forward, rank on rank of them, mounted and afoot.

  Arslan felt the sheer hammering force of the charge, as if he were a weapon himself, lifted in a strong hand and hurled against the enemy. He was a spear, a sword. He mowed down the hordes of the enemy.

  But he could not come near the wall. None of them could. The enemy were too many. Over and over again they charged. Again and again they fell back. Each time there were fewer to renew the assault, more dead or wounded to stumble over or to drag back behind the line of battle.

  There comes a time in a fight when those in the midst of it know in their bones that they have won or lost – that they should press harder or would be wiser to retreat. Arslan knew it on the sixth or perhaps the seventh charge, as he sat his heaving horse and looked about him and took count of those who were left. Baldwin was still ahorse, and Bertrand just beyond him. Louis of France – there, under the banner of lilies, battered and stained as if its bearer had fallen or been dragged in the dust. Conrad of the Germans had pressed ahead without them, a small and reckless charge amid the general confusion.

  There in the lull,
the high ones of Jerusalem had drawn together about their king. The word among them, contested but without excessive heat, was clear. Retreat. We must retreat.

  Baldwin’s hand swept up suddenly, beckoning his trumpeter. The man was ready and waiting. He raised his trumpet to his lips, a signal caught by other trumpeters down along the line. The clear call rang out over them, the call to withdraw.

  The Germans seemed deaf to it, caught up in their knot of battle. The French surged backward nigh as eagerly as they had charged before. The army of Jerusalem went more slowly, on guard against treachery or attacks from the walls. As the space widened between them and the city, the Germans lowered their swords and began to draw back.

  Arslan was one of the last to retreat. It was not that he was reluctant; but Baldwin hung back, and Arslan stayed beside him with drawn sword. Bertrand sat his grey horse on the other side, silent and faceless in his great helm. Grey Malik was wounded: there was blood on his neck and flank, bright scarlet against silver. It seemed not to distress him; he stood quietly, chewing on his bit as he was wont to do when he had perforce to stand still.

  As the last of the men of Jerusalem stirred into motion, Baldwin wheeled his mount and sent it dancing after. Arslan and Bertrand followed more sedately. The Germans were coming behind, pace by pace, with pauses to loose volleys of arrows or to jeer and taunt the enemy, who shrilled contemptuously back.

  Retreat it might be, but it was hard fought. The raiders in the gardens had drawn together into an army and set themselves to trap the Franks between the gardens and the walls. But there were too few, and for whatever reason the men in and about the city were not minded to aid them. The Franks broke through and forged toward the camp, harried on the flanks by remnants of the raiders.

  They found the camp beset. Here at last perhaps the men from the West understood what it was to fight in this country, to be so few against so many, and more always in back of them.

  They broke through to the camp, found tents struck within the palisade and wagons loaded, ready to go wherever they must. No one asked those in the camp how they had known, or what they would have done had not the army come back just then. Even as the last of them passed within, a horde of yelling Saracens fell on the camp from without. Their arrows streamed fire; they brandished torches in the hot bright daylight.