Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  The green wood of the palisade would hardly go up in flames, but the well-worn fabric and leather of the tents, the wood of the wagons, the tent-poles, the stocks of arrows and spears and spare lances – those could burn, and would, if the enemy broke through the wall or flung fire over it.

  No one had time to think. They scrambled together in marching order, the freshest and the least wounded of the fighting men in front and rear, the baggage and the women in the center, and hurled all their force into breaking through the line of the enemy. Miraculous: it gave way, broke and scattered as they thundered past.

  They ran eastward, following no one knew whom; but that someone led, they could hardly doubt. Eastward the gardens shrank and faded, and the city’s walls looked out on desert. Any who might have turned back found himself face to face with an army of infidels. Both raiders and forces from the city had massed behind them.

  The sun’s sinking found them cut off from the green country, and no wells that they could find, nor running stream: only rock and sand and thorn. They had no choice but to camp there, well back from the walls. People crowded the ramparts; jeering perhaps, though it was hard to hear.

  Arslan knew what they would be saying – how could they not? Of all places to go round the walls of that great city, this would be the worst. Here was no water, no shade, no respite. Here the walls were strong and high, and no gate to weaken them. They had been herded like cattle, no wiser than sheep – straight to the worst of all places in which they could have come to rest.

  It was done. There was no undoing it. No going back, no going forward in the black and arrow-ridden night. They camped where they were for lack of better place to go, and those who were wise husbanded their water, but those who were foolish had drunk it all and went thirsty to sleep; or lay awake cursing the treachery – for so it must be – of those who had led them here.

  Sixty-One

  No one ever confessed to guiding the army of Crusade to the east wall of Damascus. No one remembered or would admit to remembering who had done it. The French and the Germans insisted that it must have been a baron or barons of Jerusalem – one or more who valued the Damascene alliance above the Cross itself. The barons of Jerusalem objected strongly to such an accusation.

  Baldwin succeeded in preventing a war by the rather simple expedient of rising in the council, kicking over the table at which the highest ones sat, and saying in the shocked silence, “Yes, go on. Kill each other. Spare the infidels the trouble.”

  And having said that, he walked out of the council – out of his own tent and the open ground in front of it, into the firelit dark.

  Arslan made haste to follow. Behind them the council erupted; but Baldwin did not pause or turn back.

  Nor did he go far. They were always careful in camp to pitch tents in the same places, so that men could find their own lords and companions, and messengers knew where to go. The men of Beausoleil and those of Mount Ghazal camped to the east of the king’s men, which here was on a little rise of land, just high enough to see the camp spread out below with its flicker of fires. They had no water here, but brush they had, enough to offer comfort in the cool of the desert night.

  Baldwin paused in front of the largest tent, that in the flickering dimness showed merely dark. In daylight it was crimson. The guard recognized the king’s face, bowed and did not try to stop him as he scratched at the flap. “My lord? Lord Bertrand?”

  No answer came. He was abroad in the camp, surely; Arslan had not seen him in council, nor looked for him with any urgency. Bertrand was wise enough, and high enough, to escape gatherings that would come to nothing useful.

  Baldwin raised the flap. A shaft of light dazzled Arslan’s eyes. It went dark as Baldwin barred it. Before the flap could fall, Arslan had ducked beneath, close on Baldwin’s heels.

  * * *

  Bertrand was there. He was lying on the cot, and a turbaned villain bent over him: Kutub the Turk, scowling horribly and saying in the language of his own tribe, “Thrice-idiot son of a Christian dog! How long have you been hiding it?”

  “I am the son of a Christian dog,” Bertrand said, laughing perhaps, but too faint to be certain. His breath caught as Kutub bent lower and prodded. “Ai! Easy, man! You’re killing me.”

  “You hardly need the help,” Kutub snarled. “When did you take that spear in your hide? Yesterday? The day before?”

  “Today,” Bertrand said thinly, through another gasp of pain.

  “Liar,” said Kutub. “Yesterday morning at latest. Iblis rot your hide, if your own idiocy doesn’t.”

  Arslan had moved up where he could see. He made no sound, did not gasp; could not move.

  How in the world the man had not only gone on as if nothing were wrong, but ridden, fought, commanded men in battle and in camp, Arslan would never know. The wound was deep, and it was ugly. Spear, most likely, or broad-bladed sword. Bloodied bandages lay beside it.

  “How did you find it?” Arslan asked Kutub.

  “I came in with a message,” the Turk answered, “and found him flat on his back, having tried and failed to change the wrappings. Idiot.”

  “Indeed,” said Arslan. He rounded on his father. “Why?”

  Bertrand shrugged. It must have hurt, but his face did not change. “I was preoccupied. The surgeons were busy. It was nothing.”

  “It will kill you,” Kutub said, flat and hard. “It was nothing then, no: a blade in the side, no vitals pierced, blood enough but what’s that to a fullblooded man? It bled you no whiter than the surgeons would. But now…” He looked as if he would have spat, but thought better of it. “There’s cautery, there’s this potion or that, there’s a poultice if I had the herbs – but it’s in Allah’s hands.”

  “God’s,” said Bertrand.

  “Do what you can,” Baldwin said from behind them all. “I’ll send my own physician.”

  “What, a Frankish butcher?” Kutub looked appalled at the thought.

  “He comes from Baghdad,” Baldwin said. “A Christian, of course, but trained as the infidels are. You’d trust him, surely.”

  Kutub growled but held his peace.

  Baldwin smiled. “I’ll fetch him.”

  Arslan opened his mouth to object to the king’s running his own errands, but who else was there? Kutub was washing out the wound with a mingling of water and wine and pungent herbs. Arslan did not want to leave his father, nor could he have done it: Bertrand had caught his hand and held it in a grip so fierce it bruised.

  “Arslan,” Bertrand said. “Olivier-Arslan.”

  Arslan knelt by the cot, bent perforce over his father. He caught there a scent that wrinkled his nose: not only the odor of unwashed body, sweat and dust and blood, but another, sweeter, darker. The scent of a wound that had festered.

  Of course it had festered. The fool had wrapped it and for all purposes forgotten it, though the pain must have made him dizzy. If Arslan had done such a thing, he would have had a tongue-lashing now and a beating later, if he lived.

  “Arslan,” Bertrand said again. “Listen to me. If I don’t come home alive—”

  “You will,” Arslan said.

  Bertrand glared. Dear God, he was pale, as if he were dying already. “Don’t you be an idiot, too. Be quiet and listen. If I die of this – and yes, I deserve exactly that – go to my man in Jerusalem, whose name your mother knows. He has writs sealed under my seal. They give you my name and countenance. They name you my heir.”

  Arslan did not hear, not just then. Not such words as those. “You can’t die,” he said.

  “Every man can die,” said Bertrand, “and every man does. Stop that. Listen. You are my heir, Arslan. Whatever I have, I give to you.”

  “No,” said Arslan. He was not denying what he heard, but that he heard it at all. “You can’t be—”

  Bertrand let go his hand and struck him. It was a hard blow, too hard – God in heaven, much too hard for a dying man. Arslan reeled under it.

  “Sometimes I think,
” Bertrand said, “that that was the beginning of the accolade: the father beating sense into his son. Though what sense there is in war or in weapons, God knows.”

  “I can’t be your heir,” Arslan said. It was all he could think of to say.

  “Why not? You’re the only son I have, that I know of. Certainly the only one in Outremer. You have the king’s countenance and his favor. The queen had the raising of you. The Queen of the French is known to admire you. Worse sons have inherited their fathers’ domains, and done worse with them than you will.”

  “But I was never—” Arslan began.

  “My fault,” said Bertrand. “My fault, my most grievous fault. I should have done all this long ago. I knew that I would do it; I wanted it. But I moved too slowly. I thought, you see, that I would never die.”

  “You won’t die now,” Arslan said fiercely. “Yusuf will see to it. Yusuf was physician to the Caliph himself, before he went in search of a Christian lord.”

  “And did the Caliph survive the learned Yusuf’s ministrations?” Bertrand inquired.

  Arslan hissed. “You are babbling. Is that delirium? God’s feet, you’re fevered. If you die – God be my witness, if you die, I’ll repudiate everything you ever tried to give me.”

  “You can’t,” Bertrand said. “I wrote it down. It is yours, inescapably. Only a child of your body may inherit.”

  “And if I have none?”

  “Your mother may dispose of it. But only if you die without issue.”

  Arslan’s teeth clicked together. Bertrand was clever, as he should have expected. Too clever by half. And too clearly determined to let this wound kill him, as if he had no care for those who loved him.

  “Why?” Arslan demanded as he had before, but more strongly now, with fiercer intensity. “Are you tired of life? How can you be? You’re not even old!”

  “I’m old enough,” said Bertrand. “Yes, I’m tired. I’ll take the cowl, I think, after this war is over.”

  “You can’t do that, either,” Arslan said. “You’d go mad inside of a month.”

  “Maybe,” Bertrand said. “Maybe I’d be glad of the quiet.”

  He was not smiling, not jesting. He meant it.

  Such could happen to a man when he grew older. Arslan had seen it before. Men who had fought lifelong in their own and their lieges’ wars, who had been born and bred to rule over men, in time grew weary; longed to lie down, to rest, to be free of the burdens that had weighed on them for so long.

  “And Mother?” Arslan demanded. “What of her? Will you give her up, too? Can you do such a thing to her?”

  “We’ve spoken of it,” Bertrand said. “She thinks that a year’s retreat, or a decade’s, is not of necessity an ill thing.”

  “Without her? Without any comfort of the body?”

  “That is not,” Bertrand said with perceptible patience, “as great a preoccupation for us of greater age than for you young things. The blood cools. The need – no, it never goes away, but the urgency fades. It’s warmth, then, in place of the old consuming fire.”

  “That is perfect nonsense,” Kutub said, startling them both. They had forgotten that he was there. “Here, that’s the king’s physician coming, unless my ears deceive me. Mind you let him do his work. You may be succumbing to some strange brain-rotting disease of the Franks, but we want you alive.”

  Indeed it was Baldwin’s Christian Arab in his yellow turban, with his eunuch apprentice and his box of medicines and an expression of great ennui that changed not in the slightest when he saw the wound that to Arslan looked so horrible.

  * * *

  Baldwin himself had not come back with Yusuf. Arslan told himself that he only did his duty in going to find his king. He was not a coward, no. He was not running away from his father, from death and pain, from the things that he had heard and must perforce believe.

  That his father had acknowledged him. Not in front of the barons, not to give him name and parentage before the High Court and the people of Jerusalem. No. His father had named him heir. Had granted him a kind of legitimacy – after Bertrand himself was dead.

  One could, Arslan discovered, feel several different kinds of pain all at once. Grief, too. Fear. A man who let go, who no longer cared to live – in war, he could be almost certain that he would die.

  And now it seemed that the army was much as Bertrand was: weakened, disheartened, torn with contention. No one slept. Few even rested. If they had been so inclined, the enemy would have prevented. All night long they suffered attacks from the city, over and over, hordes of Saracens, yelling, with torches.

  And in the king’s tent the council went on. They were arguing hotly – but not over standing fast or running retreat. Nothing so sensible. They were contesting the division of the spoils once Damascus was taken. Any who pointed out that Damascus was as good as lost, that they were vastly outnumbered, that they sat in a waterless camp in unprotected desert, was shouted down.

  Those indeed were mostly men of Outremer. They who had been as greedy for spoil as any, woke late to clear sight and certain knowledge. They could see what the French and the Germans were unwilling or unable to see. The war was lost. They could not take Damascus from this place or with this army. The city was too strong and its defenders too numerous.

  By the time the council dissolved in confusion, Arslan had long since left it. There was fighting to be done, a camp to defend. Better that than fruitless babble and more than fruitless reflection – and far better than remembering what his father had said, what Bertrand’s death would make him.

  Lord of Beausoleil. Heir, then, of La Forêt in Anjou that he had never seen. But Lady Richildis had spoken of it so often, in words so vivid, that he felt sometimes as if he had not only been there but had grown up there.

  What bliss that cool green place would be if he could go there now. How much more pleasant than this clamorous dark, the thirst that he could not ease save with miserly sips from his waterskin, the pain of defeat and the knowledge of his father’s sickness of spirit as of body. It was all more than he could bear, than he could wish to bear.

  It was almost with relief that he heard, from the midst of a lull in the enemy’s forays against the camp, that the kings had come at last to their senses, or been beaten into them. At dawn they would march. They would give up the siege. They would retreat from Damascus.

  Sixty-Two

  Lord Bertrand was still alive in the dawn, laid in a wagon with others of the noble wounded. Baldwin’s physician went with him, looking as bored as ever but showing no inclination to leave his side. Arslan took a little hope from that. Yusuf would not trouble with a dying man, unless that man was the king.

  There was little enough hope to be had else. The Crusade that had begun so splendidly, in such high hope and grand expectation, had crumbled into a disorderly mob. The nations held together because they must, because the enemy would not refrain from harrying them. Men of the West looked with distrust, even with hatred, on men of Outremer, and muttered of betrayal.

  “Oh, God’s sooth,” Arslan heard a man from Banias sneer at a half-dozen strutting bravos from Normandy, “and we paid the emir so well that he’s kind enough to send his armies to hunt us, even now we’ve broken off the siege against his city.”

  “The paynim are always treacherous,” a Norman said.

  “And so are their cousins the dancing-girls of Jerusalem,” said one so like him that it must have been a brother.

  Arslan bumbled in before a battle could start, took no care to keep his horse from trampling ill-protected toes and shouldering bristling men apart. He offered no apology. These were commoners, plain men-at-arms. They expected little good of a nobleman.

  It did distract them, as he had intended. He rode on down the line, wielding clumsiness again to herd in a troop of stragglers. They gave him no thanks, even as a company of Turkish horsemen thundered past, yelling and loosing arrows into the Frankish army.

  Arslan had suffered retreats before. But
none like this. None so bleak of spirit, so close to despair. They were harried without mercy, men and horses shot, cut down, left to lie, for they could not stop, could no longer carry the swelling numbers of the dead. The bleak plain throbbed with the buzzing of flies, stank with the sick-sweet smell of death.

  But Bertrand was alive in spite of himself, tended by the physician from Baghdad. He lay in a drugged sleep – “Better for the pain,” Yusuf said – rocking and swaying in the wagon as it crawled southward from Damascus.

  Perhaps he was aware of the retreat. Perhaps he was spared it. Great numbers of the wounded had died; new wounded came to the wagons, recovered or died. He lay oblivious, unchanging as far as Arslan could see. Yusuf had cut once that he knew of, paring away dead flesh, binding the renewed wound with poultices that smelled both strong and strange.

  Yusuf seemed to regard Bertrand’s condition as a personal affront. He was too lofty to trouble with the lesser wounded, though he would condescend more often than not to do what could be done for the rest of those in the wagon.

  Arslan found himself lending a hand, sometimes, when he had wearied of fighting, or when they had paused for the night. They were harried far out on the plain, forced into waterless and fireless camps, driven without mercy back toward Jerusalem. He seemed to hold Dame Fortune’s favor: for all the fighting he did, all the arrows that flew over and past him, all the swords and spears that he met and beat aside, none touched him. He gained not even bruises, nor shed a drop of blood. God wanted him to live, it seemed, though whether he would live as heir of Beausoleil – that, he did not know.

  * * *

  In all that time he saw nothing of Queen Eleanor except from afar. The kings he saw often: he could hardly escape it as he performed his duties in Baldwin’s tent and at his side. The French queen was keeping to herself, offering no outrageousness, wearing her armor but only for prudence’s sake. Her knights and her favorites had the same whipped look as all the rest of them, the same angry incomprehension. They would never understand why they had had to run away, as they put it, from Damascus.