Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Even their kings seemed hard put to comprehend the need for retreat. They had agreed to it under duress, suffered it unwillingly, vexed Baldwin and the lords of Jerusalem beyond reason with their unshakable simplicity. In their world, a man was good or bad, Christian or infidel, friend or enemy. There were no shades between.

  They could only win or lose a war. They did not understand how one could win a battle but lose the long fight, or how a defeat on one day might feed a victory the next. They did not think so far or comprehend so much.

  Such simple people, one could think. Saracens often did, and paid in blood: for simplicity could be strong, and headlong bravery overcome the subtle maneuverings of eastern courts.

  There was much bravery on that march, and much grim endurance. In camp at night, some still held out hope for the war, spoke of gathering again at Tiberias, restoring their strength, marching once more – against Aleppo as they should have done before, or against another and surer target; Edessa perhaps, or one of the smaller cities within reach of the Frankish borders.

  But too many men were dead, too many hearts grown weak and cold. Such could happen in a war. The spirit could resist even the strongest defeat, rise up and overcome. Or it could sink and fail, and lose all hope of victory.

  The armies of the West had stood in the muster for nigh two years. They had traveled far and fought a bitter fight to reach this place. And when they had come to it, they had found an enemy stronger than they had looked for, met a city that they could not take. Four days of humiliation, four days to discover that all their years of war mattered nothing. They were the laughingstock of Islam, the mock of the Saracens.

  They were weary to the bone. They thought longingly of home: green and misty country, rain in the summer, water wherever they looked for it. They looked on the lords and fighting men of Outremer, and saw strangers, foreigners, men from beyond the sea. Men who, they were convinced, had betrayed them in the taking of Damascus.

  Conrad of Germany, never the most sanguine of men, marched straight for Acre and away. He could not bring himself to linger in this country that had so shamed him. He sailed for Byzantium to the comfort of his imperial friend and kinsman, and thence again into the West.

  But Louis of France was in no such haste to escape. As unfortunate as his Crusade had been, his return to France could only be worse. By now everyone knew what his queen insisted on: that their marriage be sundered, that she be set free to find another, less conspicuously godly husband. They no longer even pretended to travel together. She kept with her train to the army’s center, he to the rear, while Baldwin and the knights of Jerusalem rode in the van.

  She had wanted, it was said, to turn aside, to visit her kinsman in Antioch. But Louis had forbidden her. She was still his wife; he was still her liege lord. Even then she might have disobeyed, but her knights had a little sense. They persuaded her that it would do great harm to her cause in Rome if she were thought to be committing adultery with the Prince of Antioch. The pope might reckon then that setting her free would only encourage her in sin; that she should instead remain in the care and under the authority of her notably pious husband.

  Eleanor had no talent for circumspection, and little for prudence, either. But she was never a fool. She could set aside her whims for a while – a very long while, perhaps – to show a proper restraint, if in the end it won her the freedom she desired.

  * * *

  Arslan had never fallen out of love with her. He should have. He saw her too clearly. He knew too much of her sins, her infelicities, her foibles.

  It did not matter. His mother had never failed to see his father as he was: haughty, headstrong, never willing and seldom able to admit to error. She loved him nonetheless, lifelong and heart-deep. She would look at no other man, nor think of it – and men still courted her in Acre and in Jerusalem, for she remained a beautiful woman.

  One could know what one loved, without falling out of love with it. Arslan had no expectation of requital, nor wanted it. It was enough that it was.

  Or so he told himself on the long retreat from Damascus, as one by one the lords and knights scattered to their own places. The army dwindled day by day. Far fewer went home than had gone out. Women would weep and priests would sing the mass of the dead, over and over, through the length and breadth of Outremer.

  It did not seem that they would sing that mass for Bertrand, lord of Beausoleil. He did not recover, but neither did he worsen or die. They carried him to Jerusalem – against his will, rather, for he would more happily have returned to his own castle. But Baldwin himself overruled him, speaking as king and not only as his friend and pupil. “You’ll be tended where the best tending is,” he said.

  Bertrand, too weak to rise, could still snarl at him; but there was no opposing the will of a king. He had perforce to go where he was taken.

  Arslan had never perfectly understood why westerners acted so strangely when they came to Jerusalem. It was the most holy of cities, to be sure. There were beautiful things in it: the Dome of the Rock all shining gold, the Father Mosque all silver like the moon, churches great and small, palaces, houses of princes. The Lord Christ had walked here, and David and Solomon, and the holy ones of Israel.

  Yet it was, in the end, only a city. He had grown up in it, knew it as he knew his own body. He did not see why one should fall down weeping at sight of it, or drift about it in a fog of sanctimonious bliss. King Louis had been there already; but he had to visit every shrine again, walk every step of the Way of Calvary, spend whole days in prayer before the Holy Sepulcher.

  The rest of them lived as they must live. Queen Eleanor, who more properly should have been Melisende’s guest, was given a house in the city, and servants, and guards as she required them, and aught else that she cared to ask for. One thing only she was not given: her freedom to depart for France. Louis had forbidden it. They would return together or not at all.

  She bore her misery well enough. Some would have said she was giddily happy, she with her court of adoring young men, her hunts and fêtes, her grand expeditions into the markets, where she strewed gold as if her husband’s coffers were inexhaustible. She never seemed to care for the yowling of his clerks, nor to count the cost of any dainty that her whim fell on.

  * * *

  What Arslan saw of that, he saw from a distance, when he was not looking after his father. Bertrand had been taken to his own house, with Yusuf the physician still in attendance. There they found Helena waiting. She shed no tears, betrayed no shock at the pale shadow of a man who was brought to her in a litter. She took him in charge, saw him carried within, laid him in his own bed with his own servants to wait on him, and fought Yusuf to a standstill when he would have cast her out. Helena was a match for any man living, even a physician from Baghdad.

  She in turn would have sent Arslan back to his king, but Arslan was in a mood to be stubborn. Baldwin had no particular need of him. Nor maybe did Bertrand, but Arslan wanted to be certain that he did not die after all and leave Arslan with an inheritance that he had never asked for.

  Helena knew about it. There was little that Helena did not know. She spoke about it only once, a day or two after they came back. Arslan had been watching nightlong, had wandered out at dawn to discover if the cook would surrender a loaf of the bread that smelled so heavenly in the baking. Helena was there ahead of him with a new loaf and a well-aged cheese and a bowl of dates. Cook was nowhere in evidence. “Out at market,” Helena said before Arslan could ask.

  Arslan sat at the great scarred table with loaf and cheese and a cup of ale from the jar. They ate for a while in companionable silence. Helena was as sweetly contained as ever, no effusions of joy at her son’s return, no outburst of grief over her lover’s wound.

  “Are you staying,” she asked him after a while, “to make sure your father gets well, or to be sure he dies?”

  Arslan came just short of choking on a date. “Do you need to ask me that?”

  She shrugged. And was
silent, which he should have let be, finished his breakfast and made his escape. But he could not help but say, “I don’t want him to die.”

  “Why? Don’t you want to be a Baron of the High Court of the Kingdom of Jerusalem?”

  Arslan struck his fist on the table: a rare enough outburst that his mother blinked and looked briefly startled. “Of course I want to be a great lord of the world! But I wasn’t raised to it. I’ve never even seen Beausoleil. He’s never invited me there.”

  “You could have gone uninvited,” Helena said.

  “No,” said Arslan.

  She nodded slightly.

  “The price is too high,” Arslan said. “I don’t want to pay it.”

  “Every noble heir pays it,” said Helena.

  “Not so late,” Arslan said fiercely. “Not so ill. He could never call me his son in front of anyone who mattered – but he would make me his heir after he is dead. What joy is there ever in that?”

  “Much,” said Helena, “once the anger and the grief are past. Wealth, power, duties that can weigh heavy – but pleasure, too, and in great quantity, if so it pleases you.”

  “But I want that now,” Arslan said. “While he’s still alive. Why won’t he give me that?”

  “You should ask him,” Helena said.

  Arslan growled in his throat. He was not hungry, not any longer. He made what courtesy he could, rose and left her.

  * * *

  Of course he could not ask his father to acknowledge him in public, in the High Court itself, as his son and heir. He was too proud. Bertrand must do it himself or not at all.

  And of course Bertrand would never do such a thing. For all the love he kept for Helena, for all the pride he seemed to take in his son, the old anger festered still. He would never forgive, not entirely, nor forget.

  No more would Arslan, if this went on. He was innocent of any wrongdoing. If it was an ill thing to be born, then every living creature was as evil as the Manichees believed – and theirs was no heresy at all. The world belonged to the Devil, nor had God any part in it.

  He crossed himself as the thought swelled and festered and burst. He was no heretic, whatever else he was. Only a nobleman’s bastard, no more or less at fault for it than many another.

  Maybe he should run away. Maybe, when the French went back at last to their own country, he should go with them. Queen Eleanor would take him into her service. He was decorative enough for that, and for whatever reason, she found him interesting. It was not as if he had nowhere to go, no place to take but that which his father grudgingly bestowed on him. He was not even indebted to Bertrand for his existence in Jerusalem. He was King Baldwin’s man, friend and foster-brother and loyal companion. He needed nothing that Bertrand had to bestow.

  Need was one thing. Wanting…

  He fled the house that day, ran errands that to be sure needed doing, came back late and windblown and more tired than simple exertion might account for, and set himself to keep silent attendance on his father. Bertrand was asleep, a rarity in that he had taken no draught for it; Yusuf had denied him that comfort, bade him hunt down and capture sleep by himself, unaided. It was a restless, muttering sleep, edged visibly with pain, but he did not rouse from it as Arslan sat beside his bed.

  Arslan was glad. If Bertrand had been awake, they would have quarreled. He did not want that. He kept his vigil, drowsing himself, but alert to any shift in breathing or movement from the man in the bed.

  Yusuf would not say that Bertrand would recover. “He might go on like this for the rest of a reasonably long life,” he had said when Arslan asked, somewhere north of Banias. “He might mortify and die tomorrow. There’s no telling.”

  “But,” Arslan had said then, “the longer he goes on, the more likely he is to recover, yes?”

  “No,” Yusuf said. “He should get better. If not, and soon, he never will.”

  That was weeks ago now. Bertrand was a little less weak, perhaps. A little clearer-headed when he was awake. But not enough. Perhaps not ever enough.

  It came to Arslan as he sat there, that if this went on, he would not be able to bear it. Not for months, even years. No knight and fighting man should be so crippled, so grievously diminished.

  If Bertrand was not better in a month, Arslan would go back to Baldwin. Or perhaps, if that taxed his strength too greatly, he would go to Mount Ghazal. Lady Richildis would be having her baby soon. All word from her was good, or at least not ill. She was in good health, her letters said, letters she wrote to Helena and meant for the others as well. She grew enormous rather early in her time. Maybe, she said, she was bearing a giant, another Bohemond. But the midwife was in no anxiety, and she was vigorous enough, though careful as a woman of her age should be, who hoped to bear a child alive and to emerge alive herself.

  Maybe Arslan would go to Mount Ghazal to visit his aunt, to learn from Kutub the Turkish arts of war, to sit in the evenings with Michael Bryennius and hear tales from everywhere in the world, and thereby practice his Greek. He was not bound here in Jerusalem, not unless his king commanded him; and Baldwin had set him free for as long as he had need. He could go wherever he pleased.

  A month, first. A month at his father’s side, if he could will healing on a man who had lost the heart for it. Even Helena’s presence seemed not to be enough. Maybe Arslan’s would be, if Arslan refused to be Bertrand’s heir if he died before he had acknowledged his son.

  Arslan could endure it for a month. He would count the hours, but he would suffer through them. He was a Christian, was he not? He had learned from the cradle that suffering was a virtue. He would practice it now, for his father’s sake.

  Sixty-Three

  Bertrand’s days had blurred into the nights, a long grey fog of pain. He knew that he had traveled the length of the kingdom, that he had come to Jerusalem – and yes, beyond doubt that he was in his own house, but Helena was living in it, and Arslan. Helena he would have been startled not to see. Arslan…

  The boy could not forgive him for what he had done. That was as clear as if Arslan had shouted it. He was making his presence a mute reproach. Taking revenge, Bertrand thought, for an injury that he in his youth must reckon unforgivable.

  Bertrand in his age could hardly disagree. It was ill done, and yet what else could he do?

  “Acknowledge him,” Helena said crisply. He had not spoken aloud, but she always knew what he was thinking. A lesser man, or one more superstitious, might have reckoned her a witch. She was perceptive, that was all, and she knew him well.

  She had no patience with what she called his nonsense: his moping and glooming, his indulgence in pain. Even Yusuf was gentler about it than she.

  “You want to die,” she said, “because your pride won’t let you give your son his birthright while you’re alive to see it. Haven’t you wallowed in your revenge for long enough? Haven’t you had enough of punishing him in order to punish me?”

  “How is he punished?” Bertrand demanded. “He’s a king’s man. He’s risen higher by himself than I could ever have raised him. He’s the king’s own foster-brother. God knows, he could even marry a queen, if he goes on as he’s begun.”

  “Not Eleanor,” Helena said in a tone so fierce that Bertrand stared at her.

  “Of course not Eleanor,” he said. “She’s a queen already, and Louis is in no hurry to join himself with the God he professes to love so well.”

  “She’ll divorce him,” said Helena, “or he her. That’s a certainty. But she won’t sink her claws in my son.”

  “No; she’ll find herself a boy who’s heir to a kingdom already. My little pair of baronies are nothing that she would trouble to notice.”

  “Little baronies,” she said, “but rich enough, and great power to be had from them, if their lord is ambitious.”

  “Do you think our son is?”

  Helena paused before she answered. “I think that he will do whatever he judges best, for himself and his honor and his liege lord. He’ll not refuse
a gift given freely and openly. But,” she said, “he wants a thing that you are unwilling to give. He’ll give up wealth and lordship for it, if he must.”

  “He’s a fool,” Bertrand said.

  “He is your son,” said Helena.

  Bertrand opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. He who had refused La Forêt, who had sworn never again to set foot in Anjou – he could hardly condemn the son of his own body for doing much the same, and for spite at his father, too.

  Wisdom was never less than painful. Worse at the moment than his wound, which caught at his side and made him draw breath shallowly.

  Helena left him to ponder his sins and his son. Whom he loved almost to despair, whom he looked on with both pride and grief. Pride for all that the boy was. Grief that he had not known of it till the boy was nearly a man. And now…

  He closed his eyes. The dark was no more comforting than the light of day. He had never in his life swallowed his pride. He could not begin now. No, not though he died before morning.

  That grace he would not be given. Yusuf was one of those few physicians who believed that a patient should know the truth. And Bertrand’s truth was that he was not dying. He might live long years as he was. He might recover, though by how much, Yusuf would not foretell. Bertrand suspected that the former was more nearly true than the latter.

  To live so; bedridden, weakened, slave to the heavy knot of pain that Yusuf’s potions could not loosen or banish…

  He was, by a miracle, alone. No servant lurked in a shadow. Helena had gone, he knew not where. Arslan was asleep, surely, or resting till evening, when he would keep vigil again in accusing silence.