Four Sisters, All Queens

by Jones, Sherry

  Nothing can dissuade Beatrice from speaking, however. “Isn’t this an exciting start for our campaign,” she drawls. Marguerite turns away from her sister’s knowing eyes to watch knights pull silk-wearing Saracens into the boats, then smash their oars against the heads and hands of the rest who cling and claw at the dinghies. Blood sprays. Eyes roll. The knights laugh. Marguerite bends over the rail to heave bile from her empty stomach into the death-dark sea.

  Beatrice lays a hand on her back; Marguerite flinches away, spitting and wiping her mouth with her handkerchief.

  “I hope you are seasick, and not heartsick, O Queen,” Beatrice says. “We came to conquer these people, not to befriend them.”

  The Frenchmen climb ladders from the dinghies to the deck, prodding their prisoners before them. Marguerite moves closer for a better view of the heathens and savages, half-expecting horns or forked tongues, but they look only like frightened men in dripping garments. Charles and Robert bind their hands with rope, then shove them below deck. One of the men shouts in the melodic Saracen tongue. A sailor replies in the same language. Marguerite asks him to translate.

  “He says his boats came to greet us, and not to fight,” the sailor says.

  “They do not appear armed.”

  “Trickery, my lady. They conceal scimitars and daggers under their robes,” he says. “Or they may have released them in the sea, to keep from drowning. They only wanted to find out why we’d come, he says. Ha ha! I guess they know now.”

  Robert passes, his mouth a rictus of cruelty. Marguerite touches his arm. He turns to her, his eyes out of focus.

  “What will you do with them?” she says.

  Robert blinks as if she, too, spoke Saracen. “Louis wants to question them, that is all,” he says. “Then we’ll chain them up below. If they talk, they will be left in peace there.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “The sting of a barbed whip will make any man talk,” Charles says as he walks by.

  “Charles,” Beatrice says, “did you see that the fourth Saracen ship escaped our fire? They’ll return to Damietta.”

  “Good! Let them tell their neighbors that the mighty French have arrived.”

  As the Saracens pass, some lift hate-filled eyes to leer at her breasts and body. She stumbles backward, her hands on her chest. Beatrice strides forth and slaps a man’s face.

  “Show respect for our queen,” she says. The man laughs and spits on her shoe.

  “Damned heathens—pardon me, my ladies,” the sailor says. “The Muslims have no love for women except what’s between the legs. Be careful when we get to land. Take a man with you everywhere you go. It’s no sin in the Saracens’ religion to rape a Christian woman.”

  Shrieks rise from the hold, following Marguerite to her cabin, where she lies on the bed with her pillow over her head. They are heathens, she reminds herself, but wasn’t the same said of the Cathars whom she knew as kind and gentle folk? O Lord, why have you sent me here to witness these atrocities? But it was not God who placed her on this ship. For that, she can thank Blanche.

  She had thought herself so clever to send Blanche running from the palace with her threats. How blissful were those years at the court without her mother-in-law’s gargoyle of a face ever turned her way, and without her sneering remarks. The result, however, wasn’t quite what she had hoped. Instead of welcoming her to rule with him, Louis began holding court at Blanche’s castle, excluding Marguerite altogether. But her children, at least, were safe from their grandmother’s sick influence.

  How naïve of Marguerite to think she might prevail over her mother-in-law. Blanche was not gone, but only biding her time. As Louis prepared for his Outremer campaign, Marguerite prepared to rule France in his stead—only to find, mere weeks before his departure, that Blanche had a different idea.

  “Why not take your wives along, and encourage your knights to do the same?” she said to Louis and Charles. “Your men may not be so eager, then, to return home before the task is finished.” Now, after eight months away, Marguerite is the one yearning for home.

  Sleep is her only escape from the terrible screams of tortured men. And yet it is silence that awakens her and brings her to the deck again. Louis, Robert, Charles and the pope’s legate emerge from the hold, their faces grim—except for Robert, who grins as if he had just enjoyed the finest entertainments.

  Beatrice hastens to Charles’s side while Louis speaks to the ship’s captain, who sends a boy scampering up the mainsail to the crow’s nest. At the blast of his trumpet the surrounding ships crowd in, nobles and knights filling their decks. Marguerite stands outside her cabin door, staring at her husband’s blood-spattered tunic.

  “Friends and followers,” Louis shouts, “we are unconquerable if we are undivided. The divine will has brought us here. Let us show our thanks by waiting to land after Pentecost, be the enemy’s forces what they may.”

  Cheers and whistles mingle with mutterings. “Pentecost?” Beatrice says. “That’s more than a week away. While we linger here, the Saracens will be preparing to fight.”

  For the love of God! Can she do nothing but criticize? Marguerite feels compelled to defend Louis. “We cannot hope to inspire others to our faith if we don’t even keep our holy days.”

  “I thought we came to kill Muslims, not to convert them,” her sister says. She tells Marguerite the secrets spilled by their prisoners: convinced that the French would land at Alexandria, the sultan of Egypt sent his army there, leaving Damietta virtually unguarded. “Charles says we should take the city now, and press on to Grand Cairo before the Saracens return.”

  “It is not I who am the King of France,” Louis cries. “Nor am I the Holy Church. It is you yourselves, united, who are Church and King.” As cheers gather and rise, he finishes. “In us shall Christ triumph, giving glory, honor, and blessing not to us, but to his own holy name.”

  PENTECOST HAS COME and gone, the Holy Spirit descending this year as a devastating wind that blew more than one thousand of their ships away from the harborless Damietta coast, scattering them to places unknown. Only a fourth of their army will land. There is talk of retreat, but this is the day for which Louis has dreamt, planned, and awaited for many years. “The Lord will lead us and protect us,” he keeps saying, as if to convince himself.

  Marguerite watches the landing from the ship’s deck, her breath a ragged cloth snagged on a branch. Before her spreads an expanse of sea as blue as tears, and beyond that, the rock-jumbled shore of Egypt, where the knights of France have just begun to tumble from their boats and stomp their feet, adjusting to the firmness of solid ground for the first time in weeks. They have not yet seen the flashes of light, the clouds of dust, the horses and men in golden armor pouring forth from the gates of the walled city and racing toward them.

  Jean, look up! Shouting would be pointless. He could not hear her from this distance. Yet she can hear the strange-sounding horns and kettledrums and shrill cries spurring the Saracens to action. The Frenchmen wedge their shields into the sand and thrust their lances into the ground, sharp points facing outward, then stand behind their barricade with their swords lifted high overhead. The Saracens thunder on as if the French weapons were made of dreams, easily trampled.

  “Charles!” Beatrice, standing beside her, starts to scream for her husband, whose boat has not yet reached the shore. “Come back, Charles! You will be killed!”

  “They are sailing to their deaths,” she says to Marguerite. “And it is all your crazy husband’s fault.” Marguerite says nothing, for she cannot argue. If there are too few men on shore to withstand the Saracen attack, Louis will be at least in part to blame. The galley carrying Charles, Louis, their brother Robert, and the others from their ship is far from the shore, having been delayed by the fall of the old knight Plonquet into the sea and by Louis’s insistence on halting to pray for his soul.

  But Marguerite isn’t going to malign her husband, especially to Beatrice, who is so quick to
judge others and find them wanting. Besides, she is still trying to discern Joinville among the men on shore bracing themselves for the enemy’s approach.

  Sweet Mother, spare his life.

  The attackers press forward, their cries audible even from this distance. Marguerite hears, also, the pounding of their horses’ hooves—but no, that is her own pulse. The Saracens are gaining ground, and quickly, covering the beach in an attack that the French cannot flee, there being only the sea and enormous jagged rocks behind them. Every muscle tenses as if her body would armor itself. She searches for Joinville, but he is lost in the huddle of men standing en garde with only a barrier of shields and lance points between them and death.

  “What a disaster,” Beatrice says. “This mission has been flawed from the beginning. First Louis shames his barons into joining him instead of recruiting men who want to fight. Then we set sail at Aigues-Mortes, when Marseille is so much closer, and tarried eight months on Cyprus, spoiling our chances of a surprise attack, to await more troops that never came. Why he does not heed Charles’s advice, I do not know.”

  To Marguerite’s ear, these laments are as the sound of the wind rattling the sails: unremarkable, having been heard so many times before. Beatrice arrived for this journey with a scowl, one which she has nurtured ever since. “I would not have come except for you,” she told Marguerite. “Since you are accompanying the king, now every man wants his wife along.” As if Marguerite had a choice, as if she desired to leave her home and her babies with Blanche and live among heathens in the desert. Joinville’s joining the expedition has made it more agreeable—but now, watching what is sure to be the slaughter of their men, she would give anything, her life, if he had remained at home.

  She grips the rail: now is the moment. The Arabs halt. Their horses, confused by the wall of shields and points, wheel and rear, tossing riders to the sand. French knights run forward, on the attack, and the fallen men leap to their feet. Marguerite presses her hand to her mouth as the next wave of Saracens crosses the bridge over the Nile and crashes onto the scene, cutting down the fighting Frenchmen, until a shower of arrows from behind the barrier sends the Saracens falling to the ground.

  “Our men should not land. Why doesn’t Louis turn the boat around?” Beatrice says. “His refusal to listen to Charles is going to make martyrs of them all.”

  “Be quiet, or I will arrest you for treason,” Marguerite snaps. “Do you think Louis intended for this to happen?”

  He envisioned a quick victory, the Saracens falling to their knees at the sight of the great French force, the innumerable ships. They embarked last August with a giddiness that dissipated when Alphonse failed to appear at Cyprus with the army he had promised. The debate over how to proceed turned nasty, as happens when anyone disagrees with Charles.

  “If we go now, we can swoop on the Saracens like hawks,” he insisted. “If we winter here, we give them months to prepare. They will never even allow us to land.”

  Robert, however, had the barons on his side—men who, as Beatrice points out again and again, Louis tricked with his gift of cloaks last Christmas. He laid the garments over their shoulders, then pointed out the red crosses embroidered in their folds. He grinned in childish glee at the sight of their stunned faces. They were now obliged to join his fight for the Holy Land. Why wouldn’t they choose to tarry at Cyprus for as long as Louis would allow?

  “The added troops will make France an unstoppable force,” Robert argued. “If the Saracens are not surprised by our arrival, they will be stunned by our numbers.”

  But of what advantage is the greatest army in the world if the winds are against you? They lost so many ships, and men—of three thousand knights, only seven hundred remain, fewer than half of those on the shore now. Marguerite thinks of King David, how he slew the mighty Goliath with only a stone and a slingshot, and prays now for a similar miracle. The Lord is their only hope.

  Again her prayers are answered. The battle dissolves. The Saracens ride away, save for the few on the ground fighting hand-to-hand, who will certainly be killed or captured. The galley carrying the Oriflamme, the red flag of St. Denis, lands ashore. Cries of “Vive la France!” sound across the water, along with shouts and cheers as two men plant the flag in the rocky sand. Its flame-like points flicker in the wind, announcing that France has arrived. The victorious knights yank off their helmets and embrace one another, while the foot soldiers gather the bodies of those killed in the skirmish. Marguerite squints into the sun, looking for blue-and-white stripes with a gold border—the coat of arms of Champagne. Please, O Lord, let him be unharmed.

  Then shouts of a different sort arise from the royal galley, still some distance from the shore. Odo of Châteauroux, the pope’s legate, leans over the rail on the top deck and waves his arms, crying out, as Louis clambers down the port side ladder in full armor, his shield around his neck, his head helmeted.

  “What is the lunatic doing now?” Beatrice says as Louis leaps from the ladder into the sea. Marguerite cries out, unbelieving. He cannot swim. Worse: the water terrifies him.

  And yet the chest-high sea barely slows him as he sloshes to shore, holding his lance and shield high overhead. Robert follows close behind, with several of his knights, and then Charles and the rest are scrambling down ladders and wading after him, for the king must not land alone and unprotected.

  “How disappointing for Louis,” Beatrice says. “First he misses the fighting. And now he finds himself walking in the waves, not on them.”

  Marguerite is not listening, however, not any more. For, as Louis nears the shore, she sees at last what—whom—she has been seeking. Jean, his helmet removed and his hair lifting in the breeze, has climbed atop the rocks and extends his hand to help the dripping Louis up and out of the water.

  Beatrice

  Real Sisters

  Damietta, 1249

  Eighteen years old

  SHE ANSWERS THE cabin door with held breath, dreading bad news—but the captain is smiling. “Good tidings from the king, my lady. We have taken Damietta.” A boat has arrived for her and Marguerite. They are to sail at once, before the afternoon winds blow.

  And then she waits to board with her ladies and her belongings, watching Sir Jean de Joinville fold his long body to kiss Marguerite’s ring. He lingers just a breath longer than he should; his eyes smile into hers. Marguerite pinkens, and who can blame her? Joinville is a handsome man, and most entertaining, with a quick wit and ready laugh. Louis, on the other hand, is a bore.

  “We conquered Damietta in just two days?” she asks Sir Jean as he helps her aboard the galley. “I am astonished.”

  “Why, my lady?” His voice teases. “Do you expect our mission to fail?”

  “Three-quarters of our army is blown off course and our second contingent has yet to arrive. If we succeed, I will consider it a miracle.”

  “Then we are fortunate to have the Maker of Miracles on our side, non?”

  She cannot tell whether he is jesting. Marguerite’s rapt expression offers no clues—not to Joinville’s state of mind, at least. “But the Arabs worship our God, don’t they?” she presses. “How do you know he isn’t on their side?”

  “They don’t believe in the resurrection,” Marguerite says. “They’re like the Jews.”

  “Except the Jews crucified Christ,” Joinville says.

  Beatrice rolls her eyes. She would remind Joinville that Pontius Pilate, a Roman, ordered Jesus crucified, but Marguerite is saying, “Is that more heinous than occupying Jerusalem? I hear the Muslims have barred Christians from Abraham’s tomb,” as they walk away from her. What use is arguing, anyway? The French are cruel and unforgiving—as she has learned from Charles.

  In this way, he could not be more different from Beatrice. She learned beauty and compassion at her father’s knee. Charles swept into Provence like a violent storm. Upon becoming count, he ordered the tongues cut out of the mouths of dissenters, be they poets, merchants, or common vassals. The s
lightest whiff of revolt incites his crushing response. He destroyed an entire village because six of their men plotted against him. He killed a youth in the market at Aix for hitting him with a stone. He imprisoned Marseille’s wealthiest merchants for refusing to pay homage to him, and hangs one of them every year in an effort to subdue the stubborn city.

  “Weakness begets failure,” he said when Beatrice protested his cruelty. “You want to become an empress, don’t you?”

  The galley comes to rest a short distance from the beach, where a dozen knights stand ready to retrieve them. Joinville lifts Marguerite into his arms and slowly—quite slowly—carries her across, taking care to bind up her skirts so they do not drag in the waist-high water.

  Beatrice bounces in place. Outremer, Charles has said, will be a part of their empire. She cannot wait to begin helping him.

  “Your brother the king treats me well,” she said to him the night before he sailed to shore. “Let me try to influence him on your behalf.” All those years by her father’s side haven’t gone to waste: Beatrice knows men, and how to coax them. Louis, for all his pious austerity, listens when she speaks—while his gaze flits to her bosom. She’ll soon have his ear, which she’ll turn away from the shortsighted Robert of Artois’s advice and toward the astute suggestions of Charles (who ought to be King of France; his own mother has told him so). Together they will make this campaign the most successful of all, exceeding the pope’s wildest expectations. Perhaps he will reward Charles with lands and castles—with Jerusalem, perhaps, the holy city! Or with Gascony, whose turmoil England seems unable to control.

  “The cat loves fish, but hates to get its feet wet,” she taunts the men still standing on shore. “Who will reach me first? Who will be my champion?” They rush into the water, their eyes on her, the beautiful countess, the wife of the king’s brother, one of the famous sisters of Savoy, the prize.