Johanna said, “The Saracens did it, not him.”
“Now that Richard is here, everything is going to change.”
“Oh, you think so. Well, let’s pray for that.”
Henry was leading them into the camp by a back way. The porters came groaning after, and they climbed a long flat rise, well inland of the city. The path wound through mounds of rotted garbage, bits of gnawed bone, shredded cloth, piles of shit. The rain had pounded everything into a stinking mush. The smell of urine made the air sick. Lilia crossed herself, tears sliding down her face. Johanna’s shoulders were hunched again, and now Henry did not try to jolly her out of it. Every few yards they passed an abandoned cesspit. Up on the top of the ridge was the first line of the camp, a row of wretched little hovels, dug halfway into the ground and cobbled together of scraps of wood and stones and cloth. Gritty wood smoke hung over everything.
They passed through these clots of huts, fire rings, and heaps of garbage toward the long ridge of the hill. There on the only flat high ground, a dozen tents had been pitched in a circle. Henry said, “This is the royal compound,” as if it were a palace. They carried Gracia into one of the smaller tents, and the other women followed, praying and moaning.
Edythe drew back, unwilling to go inside. A vague horror tingled on the back of her neck. She stopped outside the door and turned toward the city. From this height she could see what lay before them. She went out past the next tent, to the top of the slope.
The smoke from the nearby fires drifted in the air, but she could see all the way to the far wall of the enormous city, larger than any city she had ever seen before, Troyes or Rome or Messina. Curved around the top of the bay, the headland itself was low and flat, but on every inch of it was a house or a wall or a street, many piled on other houses and walls, all made of yellow stone, or maybe the smoke made it yellow.
Much of it lay in ruins. The whole city seemed knocked to earth, to rubble. The great walls along the water stood untouched. On the narrow neck of land where the headland connected to the coast there had once been a wall, but now it was a crumbled mass of rock, the tower blasted, the gate broken down.
The whole sweeping view was quiet now. At first she saw no people there at all. In the litter of rock, bits of wood stuck up, scaffolds, wheels. Down toward the beach some giant siege engine stood half-burned, its base whole but the uprights only charred and broken stubs, like grotesque fingers. Closer to her, she saw signs of a great fire, which had blackened even the stone.
Not a green thing grew on this place, not a stem or a leaf. Here and there a bent figure crept hunched among the rocks, feeling around the ground and picking things up. A haze of smoke and yellow dust hung over everything.
As she watched, Richard’s grand entry was passing the far side of this ruin from her, along the crumpled wall. On the barricades behind the rubble, a few defenders appeared, but they made no sound and skulked along like wolves from cover to cover. Outside, the Christians had gathered all along the way to whoop and cheer. The wind tore their voices away, inhuman howls that swelled and fell to a mutter.
The serpentine parade of armed men would be gone in a moment. The Christians would come back to the hovels and shanties cluttering the slope before her like the dens of animals. The sprawling wretched wreckage of the city, the stench from the pits behind her, and Gracia’s death all weighed down on her. She struggled to see the hand of God in this. To fit that image over this truth like a magic shield that would ward away all the evil. She could not master it and she went on into the tent, grateful for once for its closeness and dark.
Four
ACRE
Berengaria said, “I tell you stay in Cyprus.”
Johanna said, briskly, “Oh, I think this is much better.”
Edythe and the other waiting women led in the porters, and Lilia pointed out where they should put the trunks and chests. After the cramped deck of the galley the tent seemed huge, and Edythe felt like leaping and dancing in and out of the poles that braced up the canvas. The last sunlight streamed in through the cloth, veiled, mysterious. The wind puffed up the fabric in a constant ruffling. The floors were covered with thick woven stuff, rapidly becoming filthy under the trampling feet. Another train of men hauled in more trunks.
Outside, the raucous crowd still shouted; Richard had issued them all huge rations of wine and they were roaring around bonfires and yelling fight songs and Te Deums and pledges to die for God. Inside the tent, Berengaria, flanked by her women, went to one side and plunked down on a stool. Her sunburned face was thin with fatigue, her long gown dirty. She crossed herself, which she did a dozen times an hour. Johanna glared at her. The air between them crackled with dislike. Berengaria turned her face away.
Night had fallen. Edythe drifted to the door of the tent, her hand over her face; the stench of the camp made her nose burn. A man passed her, hunched over under a sack half full of bits of wood, cloth, metal, his gaze on the ground, picking up anything he saw. In the big tent just down the slope, a number of men were cheering and shouting. They were having another of their endless councils. She turned back into the tent, where they had laid Gracia’s body beside the wall.
Johanna was kneeling there, her head bent, praying and crying. Berengaria had withdrawn with her two women into a corner. Edythe circled the place lighting the candles. Slowly their light swelled up into the room. Outside, the shouting and cheering suddenly doubled, but it was far away. The Queen rose, crossing herself again.
“Where is Lilia?”
“I haven’t seen her, my lady.”
“Oh, she’s got a new flirt.”
Edythe thought briefly of Rouquin, her old flirt. She wondered why that mattered to her. She could hear voices yelling, in the biggest tent across the way, where soldiers were gathered also outside the canvas walls, listening, passing the word around of the Kings’ deliberations. Suddenly Johanna came up beside her.
“You must go with me,” she said to Edythe. “I have a task to do.” She favored Edythe with a candid look. “None other would I trust than you in this.”
“My lady,” Edythe said, warned by the edge in Johanna’s voice. She went to fetch her cloak.
Rouquin drifted to the back of the council, toward the tent flap, where he could see out to the city. The council did not interest him much. All the great lords had come in to shout and complain and threaten and ultimately to hear what their leaders decided. Those leaders were in the center of the tent, on a quick-made wooden floor. Richard had finally caught up with Philip Augustus, the French King, small, one shoulder lower than the other, as if his crooked mind had warped his body. A German duke had come up to sit beside them.
The other men crowding around them were the lesser lords who had answered the Crusading call a lot sooner than either King: local men, some Germans, a lot of northern French, Burgundians, Lorrainers. A cup went around among them, and a squire took it to fill it again.
Rouquin turned his back on this, his eyes aimed out the tent flap toward Acre. The late sun shone on its honey-colored walls and made even the rubble look beautiful: a golden city. That was what mattered: the prize.
He had looked over the ground when they came in. Since then, talking to a couple of people, he had formed a picture of it in his head—Saladin’s camp was just to the east of this hill, and numbered less than the Crusaders, with Richard’s army come.
They were not equal man to man, either, he guessed, the Saracens mostly mounted archers, lightly armed and armored. They couldn’t stand against mailed knights. Even Guy de Lusignan had had some early victory over them, before, typically, he had thrown it back. But with a shrewd general who knew how to pick the right fights, the Saracens camped just inland would attack the Christian camp whenever the Crusaders attacked the city, so that the Christians had to fall back to defend themselves, and Acre could recover. By all accounts the Sultan Saladin was such a general.
This strategy would work for the Saracens as long as they could keep the
defenders of Acre supplied. The Crusaders had never been able to block the city completely from the sea; that was why sinking the big galley when they arrived was such a triumph. As for the land side, Richard’s war machines, catapults, a belfry forty feet high, could roll right up to what was left of the wall and drop a bridge onto the top of it.
Then, he thought, with the numbers they had now, they could throw a lot of force against the gate while part of the army waited, ready to meet Saladin’s counterattack, and drive the gate and hold the city in a week. It wouldn’t matter what Saladin did after that.
Rouquin turned toward the council again, where a gaunt man in a dirty surcoat had come up through the general yells and snarls to stand in front of Richard.
“I am Baldwin of Alsace,” he said. His voice cut through the noise, and everybody hushed. He went on, “I have come here to ask you one question. I have been here over a year. In that time I have drunk mud and eaten wormy dog meat, and gone days without eating anything. My men and I have burned in the summer sun and slogged around barefoot in the winter in the pouring rain looking for dry wood; we have battled the assaults of the Saracens and dug tunnels and burrowed into the walls of the city only to meet Saracens burrowing toward us. And we have died. We have died by the one and the two, and by the dozen. We have died of Saracen arrows and rock barrages from the city and tunnels collapsing, of hunger and of plague. Now”—he folded his arms—“tell me why we should pay any heed to you at all.”
Rouquin knew Baldwin somewhat, Count of somewhere, who held important lands north of Normandy and France. He was in fact a close counselor of the King of France, which was probably what was going on here: a challenge to Richard. Everybody in the place was watching, intent.
“Have I asked you to bow down to me?” Richard said. “We own the same liege lord.” His head moved a little, toward Philip Augustus, as much acknowledgment as he would ever give the little French King.
Baldwin said, “Yet you dare come in among us with banners and trumpets and a grand display, as if Acre is yours now, and we should step aside.”
Rouquin saw a smile tilt the French King’s mouth. This, then, was going his way. Richard got up from his stool and came forward to face Baldwin.
“My lord Baldwin, as a Crusader, I should bow down to no one but Christ, and I expect that you would agree; this is not the matter. I am not here to disparage any man, but to take this city. You have been here two years, true, some of you”—he looked around for Guy de Lusignan, who had begun the siege, and tilted his head slightly toward Philip Augustus, who had arrived only weeks before—“but you are still on the outside.”
The crowd let out a howl of wrath. Rouquin grinned; he stepped back into the open tent door, where the air was better.
Baldwin cried, “We have suffered—”
Richard thrust his hand up, pointing, as if he could see the sky through the canvas. “You can suffer, or you can win. Which is it? Listen to me. In twelve days the moon is full. Mark that. I want forty days. In forty days, that moon will be full again, and I will have this city. Are you going to be with me or not?”
A roar went up from them all. The scraggly Baldwin, who did look as if he had been sick, flung a glance from side to side. “Who made you lord here?”
Richard had stopped talking to him. He lifted his gaze and took them all in, and under his gaze the whole place gradually fell still. Richard spoke to them all. “I am not lord. Christ is lord. I serve Christ. Do you?” He looked from side to side, meeting all their eyes, one at a time. “I need every man with me. I promise you Acre, but you must follow me, and give me everything you have.”
The crowd’s mutter rose steadily, for and against. Somebody yelled, “We don’t need him—” Someone else called, “Lead us, Lionheart!” On his stool Philip Augustus was hunched over in a coil of bad temper.
Richard’s voice rang out over all the others. “And to every man who follows me I will pay four bezants a month as long as the war goes on.”
For an instant the tent was utterly still, as if the whole crowd had lost its breath. Then they bellowed, full-throated, beating each other on the shoulders. Suddenly they all agreed. The wordless yell became a score of voices screaming Richard’s name. Two men dashed out the tent flap with the news, and outside the cheering began also.
Philip Augustus stood. Rouquin could just see him through the weaving bodies between them. The King of France was talking, his voice lost in the yelling, but the meaning was written on his face: Richard had done it again, Richard had undercut him again. He got up and rushed out of the tent by a back way. Rouquin laughed. The German was still sitting there as if somebody soon would tell him what had just happened. Richard stood in the middle, looking nowhere, silent in the uproar. He looked tired suddenly. Rouquin turned back to the city of Acre, which he would begin to attack in the morning.
Edythe thought: This is why she promised me a husband.
They had not come far, she and Johanna, only two doors along the hilltop ring of tents that housed the great men of the Crusade, to the one where the French King’s banner hung. Johanna had sent a page ahead, so they got in with no fuss. Now Edythe kept to the shadows at the back of the tent, stacked with crates and gear; up in the lighted part, Johanna walked restlessly around. The floor was spread with a carpet, but there wasn’t much space and she walked two steps one way and two back.
Through the cloth walls of the tent, the sounds came from the nearby council: an uproar, a cry, a sudden cheer. Edythe, in the shadows, shivered even in the warm summer night. Her stomach hurt.
She was sitting in the tent of the King of France, where she should not be. Johanna should not be here. The Queen of Jerusalem should not have been where she had been, last night at Tyre. What Johanna had promised on the ship—the husband, the dowry—that had been a bribe, not a reward, for just such a moment as this, to keep her quiet. She wondered what she ought to do. She wondered how she could be sitting in the tent of the King of France and not bay like a wolf in rage.
She had had the dream again. It was almost every night now. Not all night, just toward morning, and nothing but a voice. Awake, it said. Awake, awake.
After a while, Johanna thought, This is folly, now, I should go, and just then, in a burst of noise, several men came through the tent door.
The first, so angry his lopsided face shone, came three steps inside and saw her and stopped cold. His face softened like warm wax. At once he waved at the others. “Go. Leave me.” His eyes never left her, and Johanna smiled, seeing she had the same grip on him as ever. She bent her knee to him, a sovereign lord, and bowed her head a little.
“Johanna,” he said, and came toward her, his hands out.
“My lord Philip.” She took his hands, held them away from her, and pressed her cheek to his. “I am glad to see you.”
“I am overjoyed to see you,” said the King of France. He sat down on the nearest stool. He had a pointed chin under a sparse beard, a wide forehead, pale deepset eyes; the left half of his face was smaller than the right, so he seemed always tilted. “Johanna, your brother is a devil.”
She sat, too, inclined toward him, earnest. “Philip, it isn’t Richard, it’s the Crusade. It’s evil. I’m convinced of it. You must unsnare yourself.”
His gaze traveled over her face, from eyes to lips to eyes again, and he said, “I would make you my Queen, if he would let me.” He shook his fists, his face twisting. “Who does he think he is—he is my vassal! Mine! I have had his hands between mine—but he won’t marry my sister and he won’t let me marry his!” His face had turned the color of a holly berry.
She murmured, consoling. For years everybody had known that Richard would never marry Philip’s scandalous older sister, in spite of their long betrothal, and now of course he had married Berengaria. Johanna certainly had no wish to marry Philip. The French King rubbed his hand over his face. He looked worn, unsteady. He was younger than Richard and had always been sickly, reptilian, given to bursts of
rage. But he was wily also, with a fearsome grasp of his kingdom’s interests, a better King than his father had ever been. Suddenly he glared at her.
“I am his liege lord. Yet he comes in here and overstands me as if I were a peasant.”
“My lord,” she said, “it is the Crusade that poisons minds. You must go back where you belong. I plead with you, as a woman, as a Queen, as one who—loves you.”
His eyes blazed. “Love,” he said. Then he settled back, blinking. “What can love mean to a Plantagenet?”
Johanna glared at him, affronted. A furious response came to her, but angering him countered her purpose. This was the moment to leave, anyway. She rose to her feet. “Yet consider what I’ve said. I am glad to see you, sir; I have often thought on those days in Sicily, in the garden.”
“Johanna,” he said. “I didn’t mean what I said. Stay.”
She went to the door; Edythe came quietly up and followed her out. In the darkness outside, Edythe gave her a single sharp look. But she would keep faith, Johanna thought. Edythe was her mother’s woman, and Eleanor abhorred the war, too.
Johanna did not know what else she could do to destroy the Crusade, except to prize out the French King and send him home. Losing the French army, which was much smaller than Richard’s, would not stop the war; if Philip went back to France, Richard would have the whole command in his hands, with no rival. But back in France, Philip would certainly be tempted to meddle in Richard’s lands, left defenseless without their lord, and plenty of people would help him. At the right moment she would remind Richard how likely that was to happen, and he would go home.
Then she could marry whom she wanted. Her mother had promised that. She would have more babies. Her life would go again as it should. In the door of her own tent, across the way, she saw Lilia watching for her, and she led Edythe back to their own candles.
Edythe lay rigid on the pallet, listening to the other women breathe and snore around her. It was hot in the tent, too hot to sleep, and her mind too unquiet.
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