Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Richildis did not think that Helena fared as ill in pregnancy as Melisende did. But her skin had a certain transparency, and her mood was brittle, like the smile she directed at Richildis. “And now I’ve betrayed myself. You’ll tell him, I suppose, and let him dispose of me.”

  “No,” Richildis said. She kept anger out of it.

  Helena was surprised: her eyes had gone wide.

  “It is never my place,” Richildis said, “to tell another woman’s secrets. I do believe that he should know, and soonest is best; if he discovers it too late, he’ll be far more angry that you kept it from him than that it’s happened at all. But if you refuse—”

  “I can’t tell him,” said Helena. “Not… till I have no other choice.”

  “What will you do, then? Let him think you’ve turned cool to him? Invent a new lover? Go away on pilgrimage?”

  “I don’t know,” Helena said. She sounded ready to weep, though more from exhaustion than self-pity. “I’ve held it in so long. I haven’t thought – I haven’t been able to think—”

  “That happens,” Richildis said a little dryly.

  Melisende would have rounded on her in anger. Helena smiled a crooked smile. “My Turks are set to sweep me away into the wilds of Asia, where, I suppose, I can live on mares’ milk and the flesh of camels, and raise my child among the horses.”

  Richildis tried to imagine Helena as a wild tribesman. She nearly laughed. Helena in her fine gowns, with her perfumes and her eyepaints, was perfectly a creature of eastern cities. Richildis could not even see her in a Frankish castle, let alone in a tent among the tribes.

  Helena sighed. “I honestly don’t know what to do. I suppose I’ll hide it from him for as long as I can, then find an excuse to go traveling for a while. I have kin in Damascus – distant, I fear, and not overly kindly disposed toward me, but willing enough to take me in if I have need. The Prophet, after all, enjoins charity upon every true believer.”

  “You have kin among the infidels?”

  “That surprises you? I’d think you’d be sure of it – it’s of a piece with the rest of me.”

  Richildis shook her head. She did not know what she was thinking – what to think. Except that she liked this woman very much; and more, every time they met. It was not proper at all. It might not be particularly Christian. Although the Lord Christ had kept company with harlots, a woman of good family should be more circumspect.

  Suddenly she was very tired of circumspection, of propriety, of the sheer niggling weight of being a respectable woman in a country much too holy and much too ancient to be respectable itself. She shook herself hard, faced Helena squarely, and said, “You must do what you judge best to do. Whatever it is, I’ll help you as I can. But I think – I really do think – you should tell my brother now.”

  “No,” said Helena. “No, I can’t.”

  Richildis bit her tongue. When it had stopped stinging she said, “Very well. Do you have any friends? Is there a woman who can come in and assist you, who can guide you when it’s time, either to a convent or, if you insist, to Damascus?”

  “I have my Turks,” Helena said. “No women, no. Only you. Women of decent family,” she said with the faintest hint of bitterness, “do not befriend a courtesan. Women of… indecent family have their own trades to ply, and seldom suffer a rival.”

  Of course. Richildis should have known that. She swallowed a sigh. “You do need someone you can trust, to help you – who won’t be urging you to turn yourself into a Turkish tribeswoman.”

  “A khatun,” Helena said. “They would make me a princess of the tribes. I’d ride and shoot like a man, and travel in a wagon when I was tired, which of course I’d never be. And when my baby was born, I’d wash it in mares’ milk and set it on the back of a new-broken colt and turn it into a perfect little Turk.”

  “All that Frankish blood,” Richildis said, “would betray the poor creature. It would wither and fade – and so would you, away from cities.”

  “It’s Damascus for me, then,” said Helena, “and soon. My cousins will need fair warning.”

  “No,” said Richildis. “No, stop it. We’ll think of something else. Or you’ll tell Bertrand. He’ll cherish you.”

  Helena shook her head. She was unreasonable as women in her condition could be. She would not hear of telling Bertrand.

  Foolish. If she kept that of all secrets, she would do herself far more harm than good.

  But she was not to be moved just now, and Richildis knew it. She would have to be subtle – a Frank outdoing an easterner in subtlety; now there was irony.

  “We’ll think of something,” she said again. “Somehow. If God is with us.”

  “God,” said Helena, “has been known to be kind to a courtesan.”

  “Let us hope He’ll remember,” Richildis said.

  Twelve

  Helena would not relent. She would not tell Bertrand. He could not escape the fact that his lover and his sister had become friends – it was a mild scandal in certain quarters of the court. Not however with Melisende, who was too deeply absorbed in her own troubles to care what Richildis did, nor with Bertrand himself. He could have disapproved; after all a man could have a mistress without encouraging his lady sister to befriend her. But he was not ashamed of the woman whom he so dearly loved, nor did he fear that she would corrupt his sister.

  Richildis began to understand the dilemma of the priest who must keep the silence of the confessional. She had promised Helena that she would say nothing to Bertrand. No matter how great a folly she might reckon it, she had given her word. She would not break it.

  And they said that women had no honor. Richildis wished it had been so. She would have been happier, and less constrained with guilt.

  The quarrel with her brother, the distance that had risen in Acre, served them rather too well now. That she could be Helena’s friend but not return to amity with Bertrand… he could only reckon it incomprehensible, a vagary of the female mind. And that too served them well.

  She confessed the whole sin of deceit. Her confessor, the same elderly priest who performed the office for Melisende, set her a penance that made her wonder if he had even listened: a handful of prayers and a day of bread and water. She did as he bade her, but she did not feel absolved. The deception went on, nor could she see any end to it. Not at least until the baby was born.

  Between the two women, princess and courtesan, she was beset with bearing and birthing. There was no escape but from one to the other. And the winter wore on, colder than she would have imagined possible, and after it a startling, brief, and breathtakingly beautiful spring.

  Then as Lent trod slowly toward Easter and the sun grew warm again, Helena left Jerusalem with Richildis’ knowledge if not her full consent. They had between them found a place for her to go, a house of holy women near Bethlehem. Helena would not be expected to cloister herself, nor would they compel her to live as they lived. They were content to accept her as guest and sometime penitent, to house her and the servants whom she brought with her – even to the Turks who would have appalled any house of holy women in France. But this was Outremer. Turks tamed and clearly loyal to a Christian lady were, if not ordinary, then certainly not incomprehensible.

  Richildis could not visit her often. Melisende had more need of those she trusted, the closer she came to bearing her own child. At best Richildis could send and receive a messenger, the Turk Kutub more often than not. He seemed able to come and go as he pleased, slipping in in morning or evening, slipping out as softly as he came. He brought the same word always, that his mistress was well; that she occupied herself in reading and in contemplation; that she would, if Richildis were kind, be pleased to have word of Bertrand.

  Richildis sent back such word as she could. She tried not to rebuke Helena for enforcing silence. Bertrand only knew that Helena had taken it into her head to retreat for a time.

  * * *

  “It’s because of me, isn’t it?” he said to Richild
is.

  The inevitable had happened. He had stalked her to the ladies’ chapel and found her there alone. She gone to pray, and not least for Helena, who must be near her time.

  When Bertrand spoke behind her, she barely jumped. She had been expecting such a thing for so long that it came as no surprise at all.

  She finished the prayer that she had begun, though she could feel him seething at her back, like hot iron held close to the skin. She crossed herself, rose, turned.

  “You know where she is,” Bertrand said. “And why. She’s gone to be away from me.”

  Since that was manifestly true, Richildis could not deny it. She said, “She loves you very much. She needs peace, that’s all, and a little holy quiet.”

  He was not listening. “I’ve hardly seen her all winter, hardly spoken to her, let alone—” He broke off. He was pale enough still from winter to show the flush that rose to his cheeks. “I know how these things go. A woman finds another man, a courtesan another patron. I suppose I’m being let off gently. But who – God’s bones! Who else can there be?”

  “No one,” Richildis said.

  “Of course there’s someone! There always is. Couldn’t she have told me first? Couldn’t she have let me know that I’m no longer pleasing to her?”

  Richildis shook her head. She did not know what to say. Had she been anything but Helena’s friend, she would have been glad that Bertrand misunderstood so badly; that he would so simply if never easily break off his long round of sinning with a woman whom he could never marry.

  But she was Helena’s friend and unwilling ally. She could not betray a secret. She set her lips together and locked her fingers till they ached, and let him snarl himself into silence.

  He took a long time about it. It was as monotonous as a monk at prayer. He cursed Helena, blessed her, castigated himself and her and the rest of the world. He never once bethought himself of the truth.

  At length he seemed to remember that Richildis was there. He rounded on her. “You must know who he is. Women talk to one another. Gossip’s the whole world to them. Tell me who has taken Helena away from me!”

  “No one,” Richildis said again, for what good it would do.

  “It can’t be possible you don’t know,” Bertrand said. He was pacing as he said it, from wall to wall in front of the altar, halting, spinning on his heel, stalking back. He halted in front of her. “You’re lying for her.”

  Richildis bit her tongue, tasted blood.

  But he was blind to her. “Or she didn’t tell you. No, she wouldn’t, would she? She knows you’d tell me. A sister can’t keep secrets from a brother. I’ll have to ask – who would know—”

  “No one,” Richildis said with all the force that she could summon, “has taken Helena from you. She has gone to a convent to contemplate her sins and to cultivate a little peace. That is all she has done. You insult her by the very thought that she would abandon you for any other man.”

  “She is a courtesan,” said Bertrand. “That is what courtesans do.”

  Richildis’ expression must have been terrible: he actually flinched. “You,” she said in white cold anger, “do not deserve any woman of either sense or probity – and Helena is both. Whatever she is, in whatever state of body and soul she may have been when she came to you, she has given herself to none but you since she accepted you into her bed. She has taken no other lover, admitted no other patron. Only you.”

  “Then,” he said with the air of a man who snatches at any advantage, “how has she lived? I’ve never made her rich.”

  “Her patron who was before you,” Richildis said out of her still and freezing center, “happened to die before she met you. He left her well provided. She’s a wealthy woman, Bertrand. Don’t tell me you never knew.”

  He blushed, he truly blushed. But he was a man. He was too proud for decent sense. “She lives well because her patrons pay her well.”

  Richildis brought her fists down on his shoulders. He wore mail under his tunic: he was as hard as chain-woven steel. “Oh, you purblind fool! First you go half mad because she must have taken another lover, then you tell me she’s been living all along on the spoils of her lovers.”

  “No!” he half-shouted back. “You are the fool. She’s always had lovers, a courtesan does. But she never turned me away. Never – till this winter and spring. Someone else stands closer to her heart, or to the cashbox where her heart should be.”

  “Have you ever,” Richildis demanded of him, “paid her one copper penny for the use of her body?”

  “She is not a whore!”

  “Then you’ve given her nothing, paid her nothing, and still she never refused you her door.”

  “I gave her gifts,” he said thickly. “She must have—”

  Richildis spun away from him in perfect disgust. “Oh, go. Go! I’m ashamed to be your kin.”

  She thought that he might linger, might try to defend himself, but he did not. He left her headlong, blind and hopelessly deceived.

  “Helena,” Richildis said to the air. “Oh, Helena. We’ll all pay high for this.”

  Thirteen

  Bertrand was cursed. He had been driven out of France for his folly with a woman, sundered from his father and his kin, compelled by the heat of a quarrel to seek the heat and dust and holiness of Outremer. Now, when he had thought it all done and gone, the curse struck again. He had quarreled with his sister, and for a woman whom he had thought he loved.

  He left Richildis in anger, speechless with it. What he did for the rest of that day and somewhat of the next, he barely remembered. He must have sat through a session of the High Court, for that was why he had come to Jerusalem. He engaged in an hour’s vigorous sword-practice with some of the other young men of the court, and had bruises to show for it. When he came to himself he was in the king’s stables, readying to ride with a handful of knights and squires who had taken it into their heads to go hunting gazelle in the hills beyond Olivet.

  A hunt would do him good. A fast ride, the wind in his face, the hot sweet scent of blood. Short of a good bruising fight, there was nothing better for such a mood as his.

  But as the groom brought out his best hunting mount, the strong swift grey that he had bred of a Frankish dam and an Arab sire, something caught his eye. Amid all the coming and going of the stable at the height of Easter Court, still one movement struck him with both its strangeness and its familiarity. Out in the hills near Beausoleil, that skulk, that flick of robe, would mark the passing of an infidel. Here it was strikingly out of place.

  He thought he recognized the shape of the skulk. Leaving the groom to look after grey Malik for yet a while longer, Bertrand slipped through the crowd of men and horses. Almost he was too late – but the skulker had been hindered by a quarrel among hunting hounds and was just eluding them as Bertrand came in sight of him.

  Bertrand opened his mouth to call out the man’s name. Kutub – Helena’s man, the Turk Kutub.

  But he held his tongue. Inspiration struck, strong as the hand of God. He slipped back toward the groom and the horse, moving as swift as he knew how; snatched rein, flung thanks over his shoulder, sprang into the saddle without pausing to set foot in stirrup.

  Malik had been in a stall for a hand of days. He was eager to be out and running. Bertrand let him go at his own speed, darting through the court, ignoring the hunting companions who called his name. He had other quarry now, and better sport.

  It was a great folly to imagine that a Frank could outstalk a Turk from the steppes of Asia. But this Turk did not appear to be looking for pursuit. He rode openly once he had left the palace, sitting his ugly-headed little Turkish pony, passing through David’s Gate to the southward road.

  Fortune and the season favored Bertrand’s hunt. The roads were heavily traveled, thronged with pilgrims. He had no little fear of losing a single man in the press, but there were few enough in turbans, and none with the point of a helmet thrusting through the snow-white wrappings.


  Kutub rode at ease in his high sheepskin-cushioned saddle. Pilgrims crossed themselves as he passed, or muttered imprecations against his infidel presence. He took no notice. A Muslim who had lived his life among Christians, learned not to hear what Christians said of him.

  Some distance outside of Jerusalem, when the city had shrunk to a shape of walls and towers and one blinding golden dome, the Turk seemed to wake as if from a drowse. Bertrand, who had been nearly asleep himself, kept awake only by the need to keep that turbaned helmet in sight, nearly lost him then; but God was looking after his wayward knight. Bertrand saw the turban shift, the rider slant across the line of travelers on foot and on muleback and in carts. The road’s verge was kept clear by and for the swift passage of men on horseback: messengers, errand-riders of this lord or that.

  As soon as Kutub’s pony reached the road’s edge, the Turk set heels to rough-coated sides. The pony sprang willingly into a gallop.

  Bertrand cursed and wrestled his own horse through clots of pilgrims. They were too intent on piety to give way, even before a Frankish knight on a tall horse. Some might have ridden them down. Bertrand, alack, was soft when it came to such things. He pushed through as best he could, stopped short in the midst of a huddle of black-robed monks, crossed himself rather furiously and escaped, God be thanked, into nearly empty space. Malik snorted and lashed his tail and, even before Bertrand could bring spurs to bear, leaped in pursuit of the Turk on his pony.

  No sane horseman, alone and ungifted with remounts, kept his horse at a gallop for long. Bertrand knew some long moments’ fear that he had erred; that Kutub had indeed supplied himself with a change of horses, and would not slow till he reached posthouse or caravanserai. But after that first, heart-stopping gallop, he settled to the pace of the horseman who must travel swift but spare his horse: gallop to walk to canter to walk and back again. The tough little steppe pony did not need rest and water and forage as some might, but Kutub pampered him: stopped at intervals to let him breathe, graze if there was forage to be had, drink from well or cistern.