Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  With each word she spoke, Bertrand stood a little straighter. His face hardened. His eyes began to burn. When she had done, he raised clenched fists and slashed them down, so sudden and so fierce that she flinched. “They lied to her!”

  “And did you not prove it to her,” said Richildis, “beyond any hope of doubt? You fled from her. You swore that this would be no child of yours.”

  “Not because she bore him! Because she hid him from me.”

  Richildis shook her head. “It makes no difference to her. Abandoned is abandoned; and she has a child without a father.”

  “How can I accept him now? After what I did and said?”

  “Easily enough,” Richildis shot back. “Swallow your pride, if you can. Go back to her. Beg her pardon. Take up your son and acknowledge him.”

  “No,” said Bertrand.

  Richildis sighed. “So,” she said. “They didn’t lie to her. They told her the exact truth.”

  Bertrand opened his mouth, but he did not speak. Servants had come with platters and bowls and jars, bearing a minor feast. The Byzantine followed them. He saw to it that they set a table on its trestles and spread it with a cloth, and laid upon it places and victuals for all three.

  Richildis should not have been hungry, not in the middle of a quarrel, but it was long hours since she broke fast with Lady Elfleda. She was glad of fine white bread and good cheese, the haunch of a gazelle, fruits sweetened with honey, sweetmeats in the eastern fashion – more varied than she had often had in the palace in Jerusalem, and of better quality, too.

  “My lord has an excellent cook,” the Greek said as they sat to eat – Richildis hungrily, Bertrand with reluctance, the Greek with relish. “He came in fact with an excellent recommendation: he had been in the service of the Lady Helena.”

  Bertrand snarled at the name. “Eat,” Richildis commanded him with iron will.

  He bared his teeth, but he obeyed her.

  She raised a brow at the Greek. “And you?” she inquired. “Are you also excellently recommended?”

  He shrugged: wry, amused, a little embarrassed. “My name is Michael Bryennius,” he said, “of the one and most excellent City, the heart of the Roman Empire, Constantinopolis. You, lady, I know by the name that your brother called you.”

  “Richildis,” she said, nodding, “of La Forêt Sauvage in the County of Anjou.”

  They bowed to each other over the plates and bowls, with Bertrand between them glowering impartially at them both.

  “You came here alone,” her brother said to her, “without even a servant to attend you. Have you taken leave of your senses?”

  “Rather less than you have,” she said tartly. “I rode with a caravan from Jerusalem. Hospitallers guarded it. An English lady kept me company. It was all quite proper.”

  “Even that?” He jabbed his chin at the bow and quiver that she had laid on a bench by the wall.

  She flushed slightly, but she kept her head up. “There was a raid. Circumstances compelled—”

  “That you become an Amazon?” His lip curled. “Oh, I’m sure. What do I know of women, after all? What do I know of anything?”

  “Oh, do stop that,” Richildis said in impatience that she regretted as soon as it was done. But she could not undo it. He was wallowing as he had been wont to do when he was younger, indulging in great fits of thwarted temper.

  And since he had eaten all that she thought he was going to, she beckoned to the servants who hovered just beyond the table’s edge. “Now, sleep. I’ll send someone with wine in a little while, with something in it that should help you forget your troubles.”

  “Nothing can do that,” he said, as inevitable as summer’s heat in Outremer.

  “It can try,” she said grimly. “Are you going? Or should I pursue you and strip you and trip you into bed?”

  “I will go,” he said. He did not say it kindly, but he said it.

  * * *

  When he was gone, escorted by servants, the hall seemed suddenly and vastly quiet.

  There were people in it, curious faces, folk of the castle coming and going with evident if sometimes transparent purpose. But in the corner in which the table had been set, there were only the two of them, Richildis and Michael Bryennius. The Greek was still eating, partaking calmly of a bowl of something white and milkily sweet. He held it out to her. “Will you take a little? It’s quite pleasant.”

  She moved to decline, shrugged, accepted a spoonful. It was indeed lovely, delicately flavored with almonds and honey and a hint of rosewater.

  Over the spoon she met the bright dark eyes. “Is it a custom of your country,” she asked, quite without thinking, “to stare at a woman who is a stranger?”

  His eyes lowered with gratifying abruptness. Did he flush? It was difficult to tell. His cheeks were dark and his beard grew high on them.

  She had never liked a heavily bearded man. She wondered always what it was he needed to hide: weak chin, ill-shaped mouth, bad teeth. Somehow with this man she did not think such things. Those lines of his face that she could see were well and cleanly drawn. His lips she had seen, and they were not ill shaped; his teeth were excellent. She could discern a firm chin under the black curls. He was a handsome man, but he did not carry himself as handsome men too often did, with too keen an awareness of their own beauty.

  She liked him altogether too well for a stranger and a foreigner, a man whom she had never seen before this hour. She was not given to swift judgments or to sudden likings. It was almost alarming. As if, she thought, he had cast a spell on her.

  Only fools contended that all Byzantines were sorcerers. If this man worked any magic on her, it was the simple one of fine dark eyes and charming manners. And, beyond that, something else. Something she could not put a name to, a sense of ease with him, comfort that had nothing to do with reason.

  She did not believe in such things. No more could she escape it, or hope to deny it.

  There was nowhere now that she could go. Her brother was sent to his bed by her own command, with the Byzantine’s assistance. She did not know this castle or any of the people in it. As far as she had seen, it was entirely a house of men, as rigid in it as a monastery.

  And that was strange, from all that she had heard of Outremer: how few the men were, how many the women. To be sure, most of those she saw seemed to be native to this country, but there were Franks enough, sergeants and men-at-arms, and one tall gaunt knight of middle years who appeared as she was wondering what to do, bowed and said, “My lady, a place will be prepared for you if you wish it.”

  She inclined her head in return. “I do wish it,” she said, “and I thank you. Sir…?”

  “Amaury, my lady,” he said. “I come from near Cluny in France.”

  “I know Cluny,” Richildis said. “The monks there are wonderfully severe.”

  The gaunt knight betrayed the faintest sword-edge of a smile. “So they are, my lady.”

  And perhaps, she thought, he had reason to know it. She did not ask. One did not, in Outremer.

  Another knight came in behind him. Younger, this one, and plainly born in this country: his fine olive features and his dark eyes would not have looked ill beneath the turban of a Saracen emir. He bowed lower than Messire Amaury had, with a notable store of grace. “Ah, lady! They spoke truth who said you were fair. May I wait on you? May I worship at your feet?”

  Messire Amaury drew breath to remonstrate. “Daniel—” he began.

  “Amaury,” said the younger knight, but his mockery was gentle. “Yes, yes, I know. I’m too forward. My lord will be ashamed of me. But so fair a lady – how can I help myself?”

  “Easily,” said Amaury, “if you had any strength of will.”

  “But how can I?” Messire Daniel asked, “if I was never raised in Cluny?”

  Richildis intervened before they could begin to quarrel. “Messires! Messires, if you will, I’m weary and I’ve traveled far. A bath would be welcome, and a bed, and time to rest.” />
  That diverted them handily. Daniel was all limpid apologies, Amaury nigh rigid with embarrassment. “At once, lady,” Amaury said; and Daniel cried in his sweet eastern-accented voice, “Lady! No sooner need you speak than it is done.”

  And all the while they vied to serve her, she was aware, subtly, in her bones, of Michael Bryennius’ manifest amusement.

  Seventeen

  There were women in Beausoleil after all. The two who waited on her in the bath appeared to be Saracens, someone’s sisters perhaps, or his wives: plump young creatures with doves’ voices and intensely curious eyes. They spoke little Frankish. She spoke only a word or two of Arabic.

  Somehow they managed. Their names were Leila and Yasmin. They waited on her very well, with the deft hands and keen perceptions of well-trained servants. She had not been so well looked after, for a fact, since she left her maids behind in La Forêt.

  The place in which they bathed her must have been built before the Franks became lords of Outremer. It was like one of the old baths in Jerusalem, an eastern hammam, luxury above luxury in a stronghold two days’ journey by caravan from Nablus. It was tiled in blue and green, water-colors, and it had a cistern that was kept filled, and a hearth and a cauldron for the heating of water, with an ingenious arrangement of pipes that directed water both hot and cool to the little tiled pool in which the bather could sit or lie. There was only the one room, to be sure, and not the several of a hammam, but even one was a wonder in such a place as this; and the water could be as hot or as cold as one liked.

  Richildis had long since been seduced by the allure of the eastern bath. She basked in it for so long that she nearly fell asleep. Then Yasmin and Leila lifted her gently out and laid her on a soft couch and worked sweet oils into her skin.

  Under their hands she did indeed slip into sleep. If she dreamed she did not remember. When she woke, the room that met her eyes was strange.

  She was not disconcerted. Memory had followed her into sleep. She knew that she was in Beausoleil. She lay in a high carved bed fit for a princess in France, swathed in delicate netting as was the custom here, to keep out the stinging flies. The coverlets were silk, and the cushions mounded about her. The sheets were fine white fabric of Mosul.

  She struggled out of them. The room in which the bed was set was not excessively large but very bright and airy for a room in a castle. It had a window which bore out her guess: that she was in a tower. She looked down from on high to the clustered houses of the village and the patchwork green of fields and orchards, and thence across bare brown hills to the flicker of brightness that must mark the banners of another castle.

  So it was in Outremer: castles strung like jewels in a necklace, each in sight of the other, all the length and breadth of that beleaguered kingdom. In Jerusalem one was not so much aware of it: the city itself was so great, so very much the center of things, that one forgot that there was anything else in the kingdom.

  Out here one could hardly avoid the truth. This was a land at war, shaped by war.

  She was not dismayed. She was exhilarated. As she had been in the raid on the caravan, she felt intensely, keenly alive. She was like a lady’s lapcat, kept in the bower, petted and fed and shut out from the world: one day she had slipped past some unwary pair of feet and escaped, and discovered that she was a wild creature, a hunter, a conqueror of the great world.

  “Silliness,” she said as she leaned on the windowframe, with a soft warm wind brushing her cheeks. It was not much past sunrise, when it was still almost cool. The light on the hills was mellow gold.

  There must be a chapel in this castle. She should find it, discover if a priest said morning mass in it. But she was too lazy to leave the window, even when, by the magical art of servants, the two maids appeared to wait on her.

  They had brought breakfast: a sop of bread in wine in the Frankish fashion, but sugared almonds too, and an orange. It was a delightful welcome to the morning. And when she had eaten every bit, there were clothes for her, not her own that had been so sadly soiled, but robes in the eastern fashion, and slippers, and a silken veil.

  She thought briefly that these must have been castoffs of Helena’s; but they were made for Frankish height and breadth. Perhaps they had been a man’s: there was little enough distinction in eastern dress between a man and a woman, the same loose trousers and long shirt and silken overrobe. These were white, all but the robe, which was a quite beautiful shade of crimson.

  So dressed, Richildis ventured with Leila and Yasmin for guides, out of the tower and into the hall of the castle.

  Bertrand was not there, nor was either of his knights. There was a squire mending a shield, a curly-headed, wicked-eyed eastern-looking boy who ducked his head and applied himself conspicuously to his work. And there was the Byzantine, Michael Bryennius.

  Morning light suited him well, even falling high and faint through the louvers of the hall. He had been breaking his fast, from the evidence in front of him. He read from a book as he sipped from a silver cup, murmuring too softly for her to understand. His brows were drawn together in concentration. He seemed oblivious even to the sudden rampant excitement as a pack of hounds burst baying through the hall.

  They had escaped, it seemed, from the kennel and come in search of their master. It took a handful of servants and the squire and a pair of harried dog-boys to capture them and wrestle them all out again.

  Richildis had seen one brindled bitch escape and bolt up the stair at the back of the hall. But if no one else had noticed, she did not see that she should draw attention to it. Her sympathies were rather more with the dog than with the men who bayed after her kennelmates. If the dog found Bertrand… well then. Bertrand had always been excessively lazy of a morning.

  It was wonderfully quiet after the dogs’ removal. Richildis advanced boldly to sit across the table from Michael Bryennius.

  He greeted her with a smile, held out the winejar, lifted a brow in inquiry. She declined with a tilt of the head. She was listening intently, but no sound came from the realms above. No barking; no roar of human outrage. She was disappointed.

  “She’ll have climbed into bed with him and gone to sleep,” Michael Bryennius said. He sighed a little himself. “Pity. It would have been wonderful to hear how he would like to be licked awake by a loving hound.”

  “You have no sense of propriety,” she said.

  “No more do you,” said Michael Bryennius.

  If anyone else had said such a thing – even, especially Bertrand – she would have bridled. But this man seemed able to say anything that he pleased, and she could only laugh.

  “I’ve never met anyone like you before,” she said – and that too she would not have said to anyone else.

  He raised his brows. “Oh? You’ve never met a man of the City?”

  “Several,” she said. “None of them was like you. They were all…” She paused. She should not say it; but she could not stop herself. “They… slithered.”

  “Ah,” he said without perceptible offense. “The subtle serpents of Byzantium.”

  She flushed. “They do earn their reputation.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “Are you insulted?”

  He seemed to ponder that. “I think I should be. But from a Frank, such would hardly be flattery.”

  “You are probably as subtle as any other of your people,” she said. “It is only…”

  “Only?” he asked when she did not go on.

  She raised both fists and struck them on the table. “Oh! You are mocking me.”

  “I could,” he said after a careful moment, “understand that. If I tried desperately hard. If I were given the wisdom that God gives a woman.”

  She laughed. It hurt. She was hot and cold at once, blushing and going stark pale. “It is only that my whole heart persists in trusting you, and none of your race, in every tale that’s ever told of them, is to be trusted.”

  Having said that, she waited for him to go all cold and s
erpent-soft, or else to burst out in sudden rage.

  He did neither. He said slowly and rather wryly, “How odd. Because it’s said of your race that you speak your mind invariably – but what that mind is, is as variable as the moon, and rather less predictable. If it serves the moment’s purpose, your whole heart and soul is in it, and every grain of your belief. But a moment later it’s all changed, and all your will is turned about. You swear great oaths, it’s said, and break them with terrible ease. You have no faith; no heart-deep honor.”

  “I am not like that,” she said, soft and still.

  “No,” he said. “You are not like that. You would keep your word, I think. Even to a courtesan; even against your own kin.”

  “It is true,” said Richildis, “that to some an oath sworn to an infidel or to a sinner has no force to bind the soul. Unfortunately for me, I am not one of them.”

  “That is difficult,” he said.

  “As difficult as being an unsubtle Byzantine?”

  He flinched a little, perhaps. Perhaps not. “I did,” he said, “say somewhat that I should not. Once. More than once. Often enough to be invited to amuse myself in another country.”

  “And I,” said Richildis, “swore that if my brother was alive, I would bring him back to his lands in Anjou, nor return except with him beside me.”

  “And he of course is not about to go back.”

  “You can hope for a change of emperor,” Richildis said. “I have to hope for a change of heart – and that is not likely to happen soon.”