Oh, but there was a way. A very simple way. Two people together, alone in a room, with the sun to warm them. A kiss here, a touch of the hand there, and in a little while…
Her breath came thin and fast. She was going to faint. She rose abruptly, thrust her book aside, fled.
* * *
Richildis did the proper thing, the correct thing. She left Beausoleil and returned to the safety of Jerusalem. Messire Amaury sent her with a company of men-at-arms led by a middle-aged, deeply scarred, and thoroughly sensible sergeant. He also sent, for propriety’s sake, the maids Leila and Yasmin. “Keep them, lady,” he said. “Your brother would wish it, and their father is delighted. He has a houseful of daughters and insufficient men of means to marry them to.”
“There will be no Muslim men of means in Jerusalem,” Richildis pointed out.
Messire Amaury shrugged. “If there is a way, those ladies will find it. Go, take them. They’ll serve you well. If when you come to the city you have no further need of them, send them back with Giraut and his company.”
Richildis could hardly in courtesy refuse. She bowed to his will, which was also and patently the will of the two women.
They were delighted beyond belief, if never beyond words, to be given into her service; and better yet, to be sent to Jerusalem. They were adventurous spirits, though they had been born in the bodies of women of Islam.
“The imams would be shocked,” Yasmin said, “but I’m glad we were born under the heel of the Frank. That way we get to look after you. You go places. You do things. You have adventures. No one has adventures in the harem, unless she has one with one of the master’s friends – and he can be killed for it, and she can have her nose cut off.”
“Or her head,” Leila said with a shudder. “You who walk the world without a veil – you can’t imagine how deadly dull it is within those walls.”
“I grew up in a convent,” Richildis said. “I can imagine.”
* * *
All the way to Jerusalem, she wavered between taking the veil and turning her horse’s head and galloping back and flinging herself into Michael Bryennius’ arms.
Of course she did neither. In company with armed and mounted men, and with her brother and his allies hunting Bedouin far away from the road on which she traveled, she met no raiders. The road was quiet except for the stream of pilgrims and the occasional caravan. She traveled in safety, undelayed and unmolested, until she passed again within the walls of Jerusalem, bowed before her lady and returned to the life that had been made for her.
There in the city of peace she found what peace a woman could find who had believed herself free of the temptations of the body. Was she not a widow? Had she not welcomed the day that freed her from her wifely duties?
And yet in the nights, while she slept in her third of the bed with Dame Agnes snoring next to her, she remembered the glint of sun on blue-black hair, and the line of a hand as it turned the pages of a volume of Aristotle. But it was only memory. She prayed till it went away. However long that took. However difficult it might be.
Nineteen
While Richildis dallied in Beausoleil, grief had come to the palace in Jerusalem.
It had begun in the winter while Melisende waited in growing impatience for her son to be born. Her sister Alys, who had never been kind to Melisende for that she was wedded to a man past his youth and ungifted with beauty, had become a widow all untimely. Her princely husband was as ambitious as he was beautiful – and he had taken it into his head to take back all the lands that his great Crusading father had ever won. Richildis had heard him vaunting at Melisende’s wedding – and had heard older men, Fulk among them, observe with palpable irony that youth would, will they or nill they, have its say.
That winter Bohemond had decided to act on his ambitions. One of the Cilician princes was dead, and his heir with him, leaving a realm that had been conquered by the first Bohemond. This second Bohemond set out to seize the principality. Young as he was and full of himself, he took with him no great army; he thought to conquer by sheer force of princely presence.
But the old prince’s brother had taken the throne, and though a Christian had made alliance with the infidels. These allies, Turks of one of the great tribes, fell on Bohemond’s little army and destroyed it utterly. His head they took to their lord; and he in his turn sent it to the Caliph as a gift of honor.
The kingdom had mourned the young Prince of Antioch – even Melisende, who had no reason to love the thought of him. After all, as she said, he was male and he was good to look at, and he had not made too ill a prince. There had been rumblings of revenge, young hotheads set to gallop off and destroy the Turkish armies singlehanded.
But the king was too practical a man to indulge himself in fancies. As winter wore into spring, he kept the more passionate of his knights at bay, held them off with a promise of battle when battle was wisest – which, he let them think, would be soon.
Soon after Melisende delivered herself of her son, while Richildis rode to Beausoleil, news came that caused the king to call the council of his trusted advisors and to closet himself with them for the greater part of a day.
There was no grown heir to Antioch. Princess Alys had presented her husband with a single child, a daughter, whose name was Constance. When word of her husband’s death came to her, Alys had taken the regency without troubling to consult the king.
Melisende, on hearing of it, had shaken her head. “Father won’t like that,” she said.
But the king had chosen to bide his time. He had no vassal great enough or strong enough to hold Antioch, let alone to master the princess who held the throne and the city. Fulk would have done admirably; but Fulk was hardly likely to give up the prospect of kingship in order to become a mere prince – even if the Church would have allowed him to put aside his wife in favor of her sister.
While Baldwin delayed and temporized and kept his knights in hand, Alys strengthened her rule in Antioch. She meant, it was said, to seize throne and coronet for herself; to shut her daughter in a convent or wed her to a man too lowly or too craven to claim the title that accompanied his bride. If that was true, then in her way she was as ambitious as her late and lamented husband.
The king, hearing this, set out at last for Antioch. When Richildis came to Jerusalem she heard the worst of it. Alys in her ambition, or in her folly as many reckoned it, had done a thing that no Frank, no child of Crusade, should ever have done. She had sent a rich gift to the Turk who ruled in Aleppo, to the greatest of the infidels that she or anyone knew of, and begged him to make her strong against the armies of her own father.
“That blazing idiot,” Melisende was saying even as Richildis returned to her old place by the princess’ side. Melisende was in her solar as usual with her women, returned to her old strong self again, and holding the reins of city and kingdom while her father contended with the most wayward of his daughters. She had risen as the messenger delivered his message, and sat down again with an effort that Richildis could easily see.
“That fool,” she said with banked heat. “What in the world does she imagine the Turk will do, once he’s been invited into Antioch? He’ll seize it and her, and set at naught everything her so-beloved husband fought for.”
“And, not incidentally, deprive this kingdom of one of its greatest demesnes.” Richildis had not meant to speak, but she had got into the habit in Beausoleil of speaking her mind when and as she chose.
Melisende did not bid her be silent, though some of the other women lowered their brows and looked disapproving. “Clearly my dear sister never thought of that,” Melisende said. “She never did think before she did whatever came into her head. She and her late husband were well matched.”
Richildis could not disagree. And in time word came back to the city. Alys had shut the gates of Antioch against her father. He, having captured and hanged her envoy to the Turk, was in no very forgiving mood. Nor, it seemed, were some of her own servants. They opened their
city’s gates to Baldwin’s commanders – to Fulk and to Joscelin of Edessa. Alys locked herself in a tower, in fear of her life. Only the promise that she would live, and her father’s solemn oath thereon, persuaded her to come out.
He forgave her. What else could he do? She was his daughter, the child of his body. And, as Melisende observed, she was a pretty creature, with a talent for melting a man’s heart. She could not have the princedom; she had lost all chance of that when she turned to the Turk against her king and father. But she had her life, and exile to her dower lands. Her daughter she gave up to the care of Count Joscelin, who would rule as regent until a husband could be found for her. Since the little princess was all of two years old, no one was in great haste to see to it.
Shame as much as grief accompanied every word that came down from Antioch. And when the king came back, he was – not a broken man, no. But not the hale and robust man that he had been. He who had always been so strong, who had seemed firmly established in the prime of his life, was suddenly grown old.
He had been no child when Pope Urban preached the first Crusade, and that was five-and-thirty years ago. Now all his youth was gone, both the truth and the semblance of it.
The three of his daughters who were untainted with exile gave him what solace they could. Melisende was never one for tender displays, but she could and did bear him company more often as summer faded into the hot and dusty autumn and thence into a grey winter. Baldwin, as greyly wintry as the sky that dripped cold rain without ceasing, fell ill of an ague such as beset many in court and city that winter. They recovered fully. He never entirely did.
It was as if a life of war and struggle and kingship had fallen on his head all at once, bowed and bent him till he was nigh to breaking. He was weary, perhaps weary unto death.
* * *
It was a long winter and a grey spring in the High Court of Jerusalem. Bertrand, having returned direct to Beausoleil after the settling of Antioch, appeared at last for Christmas Court, but went away again without visiting either Helena or his son.
Richildis made no move to compel him. Helena had left the convent in the summer and returned to her house, which after all was her own. She was living there quietly, her gates shut to the men who came courting – for rumor ran as rife as it ever did, and had her long and truly parted from her knightly lover. Of her son people were saying remarkably little. She would not suffer it; and Helena, when sufficiently determined, could stem even the tide of gossip in the court.
One rumor she could not suppress, or perhaps did not trouble to: that Bertrand had rejected the child because it was not his own. That, to anyone who had seen him, was patent nonsense. He was growing up big and fair, and his eyes as he grew out of infancy were the grey of winter rain. He spoke his first word early, with the same stubborn set of jaw as Richildis had seen often in Bertrand himself: “No,” he said. He said it, for a while, in response to everything.
He did not say it to Richildis as often he did to everyone else. She was no lover of children, had never doted on babies as other women did. But this one she looked on with a fierce tenderness that surprised her, even frightened her a little. He was hers – her kin, her blood. No matter his bastardy; no matter that his father would not even look at him.
The name that his mother had given him was Olivier, but the Turks called him Arslan, Lion – a favorite name of theirs, Richildis gathered, for a strong manchild. Saints knew, enough of their chieftains bore some form of it.
This lion-cub answered to it more easily than to his given name. Arslan he was, then, and a strong young lion he was growing into.
* * *
On a fine afternoon in the octave of Easter, not long after Arslan had entered his second year, Richildis sat with Helena in the garden of Helena’s house. The almond tree was in bloom, and the lemon tree was dizzy with fragrance. Arslan played with a pair of Helena’s Turks. One was his mount, a fierce war-pony. The other was his ferociously snarling prey. They were hunting lions, it seemed, with much noise and exuberance.
“They grow so fast,” Helena said. “I used to hear the women saying so, gossiping in the market, and I thought them impossibly foolish. But they told the truth. Babies become children become men in an eyeblink.”
“So I had noticed,” said Richildis. She had not meant to broach the subject so soon, but her heart bade her say then, “He’ll be a child for yet a while – a long while, one would think. And yet, as swift as time flies… have you given any thought to what will become of him?”
Helena did not glance at Richildis, but kept her eyes on her son as he completed the triumphant slaying of yet another turbaned and villainous-looking lion. “I think of it constantly,” she said. “He’ll never make a Turk, though they insist that he would cut a splendid figure among the tribes: he’s too big and fair. Yet what kind of Frank can he be? He has no father to speak for him.”
“He has,” said Richildis, “an aunt.” And as Helena’s eyes flicked toward her: “Mere female I may be, but I flatter myself that I have some little influence in the court of Jerusalem. Would you consider sending him into fosterage?”
Helena’s breath hissed. Her face had gone still, a mask that betrayed itself by the fact of her putting it on. “I do consider it. My heart flinches. Give up my baby? Surrender him into the hands of strangers? And yet,” she said, “he’s not a daughter, to raise as I was raised, perhaps in that generation to snare a prince. A son becomes a boy and then a man. And this one will want what Frankish men have: war and feats of arms, and a knighthood if he can get it.”
“Or an emirate.”
Helena raised her brows. “What, send him to my cousins who are infidels? You would allow that?”
“No,” said Richildis, “but you might.”
“No,” Helena said. “If he were less his father’s child – if he had more of the eastern look and spirit… I might. But not this one. Though he answers to a Turkish name, he’s as fine a young Frank as ever came swaggering out of Anjou.”
“So he is,” said Richildis. She looked at him and sighed a little. “I have been thinking,” she said, “that there is a prince of the same age and much the same heart and breeding, who has neither milkbrother nor close companion. Would you be willing to let him go for an hour or two every day, to keep Prince Baldwin company?”
Helena’s eyes widened. Richildis knew better than to think that she had not pondered just such a thing – but still, to have it offered to her who was a courtesan, whose child had no father who would accept the name… that affected her to a visible degree.
Richildis held her tongue. Helena was not one to be compelled to anything, even the furthering of her son’s fortunes.
After a while Helena mused, “His father will see him. Will perhaps forbid—”
“Not likely,” said Richildis, “until it’s far too late. The knights never come to the nursery, nor are welcome there; nor care what goes on within. When the two of them come out together from among the women, when both are much older than they are now, no knight, though he be a baron of the High Court, will have either the power or the influence to divide the royal heir from his friend.”
“You plot as cleverly as a Byzantine,” Helena said.
Richildis did not know why she blushed. “I have a care for my kin,” she said, “whether acknowledged or no.”
“Your brother may not forgive you for this.”
“He has so much to forgive me for,” Richildis said with lightness that was not entirely feigned. “What’s one thing more?”
Helena smiled herself, if somewhat faintly. “You can do this?”
Richildis nodded without speaking. She should, she thought, have spoken with Melisende first. If the princess did not agree…
* * *
The princess was not, that week, in the best of moods. Her husband had been vexing her again as she put it, pressing her to begin another child – this despite the fact that young Baldwin had yet to be ill for so much as a day, or to complain
of anything but the pangs of teething. He was in all ways a robust child, sunny of disposition, with his mother’s looks and his father’s affability. He was growing up well and strong, but Fulk was a prudent man. The succession, in his mind, was best assured with more than a single heir.
Melisende had been simmering for some time. As had been her custom since well before Richildis knew her, she did the greater part of it in solitude, praying in her chapel or in one of the churches in the city. When prayer failed her however she turned to other consolations.
Richildis had become one of them. On days when duties and pleasures allowed, she would find her lady in this church or that, and walk with her back to the palace, often by circuitous routes. There were always guards. Sometimes they were mounted, sometimes afoot.
That day Richildis came back from Helena’s in company with Kutub the Turk, whose presence deterred anyone from interfering with a woman of apparent means and rank walking alone. She had known that Melisende would be praying in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher today – proof enough of how far her husband had taxed her patience, that she stormed heaven from the very navel of the world.
Melisende was coming out as Richildis came in, with small escort and in little state. At sight of Richildis she dismissed her maids and all but a pair of guards. They did not approve, but neither did they dare to protest.
As they departed slowly down the Street of the Sepulcher, Melisende turned in another direction, toward the east of the city. The two guards and the Turk, who knew each other from other such expeditions, exchanged warily respectful nods and fell in, Kutub ahead, the Franks behind.
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