He should have been more satisfied that he sat here on Barak’s back, with the sun climbing higher and his father looking at him with recognition at last – knowing who and what he was. It was not an ill feeling, but not a greatly joyous one, either. It made things very complicated.
“I have to think,” Bertrand said. “Do you understand that?”
Arslan nodded.
Bertrand looked hard at him, as if to search out the truth. Since the truth was all he had, he could offer nothing more than silence.
Bertrand gathered the reins abruptly. “Come,” he said. “Come back to the hunt with me.”
Arslan’s heart swelled till surely it would burst. Such simple words but they meant so much.
He kept his face as calm as he could, loosed rein on Barak, let him follow Bertrand’s grey. Following his father. Riding with him to rejoin the hunt.
Twenty-Nine
The hunt was in full cry when Arslan and Bertrand returned to it. They had come to a broad open valley – one that was, Arslan saw with some surprise, not far at all from the place where the ladies had camped. They had ridden in a great circle.
As neatly as partners in a dance, hunters who had wandered afield now came back. There was much laughter and jesting, much brandishing of quarry. The king and the queen were the center of it, she boasting a pair of fine gazelle, he a string of wild geese that he had shot one by one out of the sky. “And who wins the wager?” someone shouted.
“Why,” said the queen, “all of us!”
The king laughed and bowed in her direction. “Now there is grace,” he said, “and victory for everyone.”
“And a falcon for me and a pearl for you,” she said, “and for the rest – a feast!”
They all cheered. The young and the bold spurred to a gallop. The sedate kept their mounts to a canter. Melisende grinned a rare and wild grin, and clapped heels to her mare’s sides.
It was the sun that made her so, and the cool air, and the exuberance of the hunt. Fulk, catching fire from her youth, loosed rein on his stallion. The beast leaped as it were into flight.
Arslan was close behind, Bertrand beside him. He saw Lady Richildis beyond, keeping pace with the queen; and Baldwin riding ahead, reckless in his speed, laughing over his shoulder. That was perilous, Arslan would remember thinking. He should not—
It was blurringly swift and yet very slow, as some men said battle could be. The king at the full gallop. The queen a horselength ahead. A flash of brown on the brown earth, long ears, white tail – a hare started from cover, leaping full into the headlong hoofs of the king’s stallion. The horse staggered. Its legs tangled. Slowly, slowly, yet swift as thought, it careened end over end.
The king fell free. Arslan, still caught in that slow crawl of time, saw him roll, saw him flail the earth, wide-eyed, battling shock, as the great wheeling weight of the horse crashed down on him. Arslan saw the high saddle, how it fell with monstrous inevitability, merciless as an executioner’s axe.
The stillness was entirely of the mind. People were reeling, shouting, screaming. Horses were hurtling hither and yon. People were hauling at the king’s horse, the horse was struggling, flailing with hoofs, and the king – Arslan could not see the king at all.
The horse rolled away, scrambling to its feet, staggering lame. Its leg was broken. No one seemed to see. Arslan got down off Barak, not even noticing whether his own horse stood still or reared in terror. The king’s stallion stood trembling, its poor leg dangling. Arslan had no weapon swift to hand, only the knife at his belt. It would do: he knew where to strike. Straight in the great vein of the neck, steady and deep, and the horse barely protesting, staring at him with its big dark eye, afraid and in pain yet trusting him – a man, a lord of creation – to take away the fear and the pain.
The horse sank down in a gush of bright red blood. Arslan stepped back out of reach of it, turned, let mind and eye know again what it had refused.
The king was not still, not mercifully dead. He jerked and convulsed over and over against the arms that restrained him. His skull – dear God, his skull was crushed and yet he lived, and his face—
Arslan swallowed bile. It was the queen who held the king down, the queen whose wailing seemed to fill the world: Melisende the cold, the perpetually calm, the queen to her fingers’ ends, keening for the husband whom she had not, by any reckoning, loved as dearly as he loved her.
* * *
For three days Fulk lingered, racked with convulsions, dying yet refusing to die. They had carried him back to Acre with deathmarch slowness, laid him in his bed in the citadel, surrounded him with priests and physicians. And not one of them – not a single one – could do more than pray for his soul.
Melisende who had been so calm when her father died, who had borne her mother’s death, it was said, with Christian fortitude, whose strength was so commonplace a thing that no one remarked on it – Melisende had broken when her husband fell. She had not loved him. She had barely esteemed him. Perhaps it was regret, and perhaps it was love waking late – no one knew.
After the first extravagance of grief she had gone quiet. She stayed by Fulk’s side, would leave it for nothing, not to eat, not to sleep. She held his hand. It was slack, all bones and blue-white skin, a dead man’s hand. It gave back nothing. The life lingered in him: he breathed, he shuddered at intervals, he shaped words with his broken mouth. They all strained to hear, but he said nothing that mattered, nothing that they could make sense of.
Baldwin’s calm was deeper than his mother’s, his shock if anything more profound. He had to eat and sleep and go about duties and lessons – his mother insisted, and he lacked will or desire to defy her. He sat with his father when he could. When he went to his bed, he lay as if asleep, but Arslan next to him felt the stiffness in his body, the stillness that was too deep for sleep.
He would not talk about it. Arslan, never given to pressing for words where words were too much or not enough, let him be.
When he was ready, he said what had been festering in him for nigh three days – since he turned in his headlong gallop and saw his father fallen, his head all broken by the saddle, and his mother keening like an eastern woman. He was lying in bed. Outside it was deep night, the hour between matins and prime. A cold rain had crept in, rattling against the shutters, sending drafts of chill dampness through the room.
Beside Arslan, Baldwin stirred slightly. “He’s going to die.”
Arslan nodded. Baldwin’s eyes were dark in the nightlamp’s glimmer. They did not see Arslan’s face, though they might seem to be resting on it. Arslan doubted that they saw anything at all.
“He’s going to die,” Baldwin said again, “and I will be king.”
Arslan stayed silent. He had not had a father till three days ago, not one who knew who he was, and he had never had an inheritance to think of. Nor therefore had he had to think of what it meant to be a lord or a king – of the truth that some people thought too little of, and some too much. That in order to be king, a prince must lose his father. The king must die, that the king might live.
“I’m not supposed to be king this soon,” Baldwin said. “I’m supposed to be much older. Much closer to a man.”
“Then there will be a regency,” Arslan said, since that much he did know.
“Like Aunt Alys and Cousin Constance in Antioch?”
Irony was not a frequent thing in Baldwin, but it was not unheard of, either. Arslan gave it the raise of brows that it deserved. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Your mother wouldn’t sell you to the highest bidder, to rule instead of you.”
“Wouldn’t she?” Baldwin lay on his stomach, propped on his elbows, frowning at the wall. “They say her mother – my grandmother – was a warm and loving woman. She loved her husband. She took an interest in her daughters. But they grew up different.”
“They grew up to rule,” Arslan said. “Princess Yveta is like her mother, mostly – or like her mother as people tell of her. I like Prince
ss Yveta.”
“Aunt Yveta should have children,” Baldwin said. “So of course she’ll never marry. She’ll be a holy abbess and spoil the novices instead.”
“I don’t think,” said Arslan, “that your mother will do anything too terrible to you. You’re too old, for one thing. For another, you’re much more sensible than Princess Constance.”
“Cousin Constance is a horrible child,” said Baldwin, who was in fact a year younger than the lady in question. “No wonder Aunt Alys despises her, if she was like that as a baby. Can you imagine? She must have screamed for everything she wanted, and kept on screaming till she got it.”
“Just like her mother,” Arslan said, not charitably; but he did not like either Princess Alys or her daughter. Princess Alys was a haughty creature, given to sneering at anyone less lofty than herself. Princess Constance…
He schooled himself not to growl. Children were never kind, least of all to a bastard, but in the court he had fought his way to a position of respect. None of the pages could take him in a fight, nor could a good number of the squires. Nobody called him Olivier the Bastard to his face, or behind his back either – except Princess Constance when she visited her kin.
Lady Richildis said she liked him. That was why she curled her lip at him, found frequent occasion to slight him, called him ill names and galloped headlong over any defense that he could utter. He had stopped defending himself long ago, since that only fed her malice. If such was liking, then he did well to shun it.
“You are nothing like your aunt and her daughter,” he said with vehemence that made Baldwin start. “Nor is your mother.”
“She’ll want a regency,” Baldwin said after a pause. “She’ll take it, too. I’m not ready to be king. Oh, God. I wish…”
Arslan waited, but he never actually said what he wished. Instead he shifted abruptly as he could do, shook himself, said, “I have to see my father.”
* * *
By the time they had dressed and made themselves presentable – though who would care, Arslan could not imagine – it was nearly dawn. The king’s chamber was guarded as always, the guards stiff and somber. Within, nothing was different. Still the same priests, the same physicians, the same stink of blood and sickness and something ripe and rotten-sweet that made Arslan think of death. They had been burning incense to cover it, and to invoke God, too; and there had been something noisome burned not long before, some nostrum of the ancients, most likely.
Queen Melisende sat by her husband’s bed as she had sat for the past nights and days. Her face in the lamplight seemed a lifeless thing, a carving in pale stone. She glanced up as the two pages came in: swift, blinding, like lightning in the dark. This was not a woman gone mindless with grief – not any longer. She was thinking. Planning. Letting the long dark hours, the ruined face, the people coming and going, all the confusion of this sudden and yet drawn-out dying become for her a place of quiet.
Quiet like a storm before it breaks. Baldwin bowed to her, homage that she barely acknowledged, and knelt beside his father. There was nothing alive there, nothing aware, only the rattle of breath, the twitching of a body that had lost volition long since. The soul had gone out of it.
Baldwin did not weep. He simply knelt, head bent, eyes closed – praying, perhaps. Arslan started a little guiltily at that, thought that he should pray, too. A few words at least, begging the Blessed Virgin to be kind to this poor broken thing – to let it die soon, and not linger any longer.
She answered him – and that he had not expected. It was a long while before he understood the meaning of the silence.
There were sounds still: the rustle of cloth in a priest’s robe, a cough, a soughing that might be wind. But something was missing. Everyone who breathed, breathed softly. No rattle and catch of tortured breath. No bubbling of blood in the broken throat.
The king was dead.
Baldwin’s head came up as if he too had heard what was no longer there to hear. His face was stark white. “Father?” he said. “Father!”
Arslan caught at him before he could rise, before he could violate the dead with shaking. He fought, but Arslan was braced for it. Arslan held him and withstood him and waited till he went quiet again. Then, when it seemed safe, he let go.
Baldwin stood straight. He could not have cried himself out – but he had remembered what he was; what this moment made him.
So had Melisende. Arslan, lifting his eyes over Baldwin’s tousled fair head, looked full into her face.
He hoped that he would never see such a face again. It was even whiter than Baldwin’s, and even starker. Its eyes were burning. Grief, yes, and pain, and guilt – whatever that was for. And a kind of white, fierce triumph. As if she had won something. As if…
“The king is dead,” she said. “The king is a child. Baldwin!”
He snapped about, sharp as if her voice had been a lash.
“Baldwin,” she said more gently but with no less intensity, “you do understand? What I must do?”
“If I didn’t,” he said, “would it make any difference?”
“It might have been easier,” she said. She sounded almost regretful. “When your time comes, you will be king – you will be fit to be king. Until then, you will accept my right to command you.”
He did not bow his head, though perhaps he should have. He said steadily, “I understand you.”
“Good,” said Melisende. “We’ll do well, then. You will,” she said, “be a good king. When your time comes.”
“If it comes,” Baldwin said: but too low perhaps for her to hear.
Thirty
Melisende had studied the example of Antioch. She had been careful to win the people to her side, to be charming to the lowly as well as to their princes, to be a queen whom they loved and whom they judged worthy of respect. They were ready to hear that she would be regent in her son’s minority.
One more thing she had learned from her sister. She did not attempt to set aside the child who should rightfully rule. When she stood in front of the council of the kingdom, two days after the king’s death when all who could come to Acre had done so, she stood with Baldwin at her side. The likeness between them was inescapable, and she had fostered it by ordering him dressed as she was in white and gold, the colors of the kingdom.
She laid her arm about his shoulders, there in the great hall of the palace of Acre, and said to the assembled lords and barons, “Here is your king. Because he is young, he requests that I rule with him. I who was born the heir to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, who was raised to be queen and to rule at a king’s side: I have accepted the trust that he places in me. Do you also accept it? Will you permit not regency only, but queen regnant beside youthful king?”
She was not asking, not really. Arslan could tell that much. The barons could, too, most of them. He was watching his father: Lord Bertrand less shocked than some of them were to be here, approving a new reign, where but a week before had been a king of unblemished vitality. But he had been there at the hunt. He had seen the king fall. He had known what it meant, nor denied it as so many did.
People did not grieve for Fulk as they had for the old King Baldwin. They had not loved him so much. They were already rising out of grief, looking to the queen and her son, seeing what they were given to see. They were happy – a kind of delirious happiness in some of them, the laughter that comes after powerful shock. They rose, right there in the hall, rose and lifted a shout, ragged at first but then more nearly together. “Baldwin! Melisende! Melisende! Baldwin! Melisende! Melisende! Melisende!”
* * *
Melisende’s grief for Fulk was real. There were many who doubted it, but Richildis who knew her – Richildis saw the truth of it. Much of it was regret, and guilt too: that she had not known what he was to her until he was lost beyond recalling. “I never told him,” she said in the night after Fulk was buried in Jerusalem near the Holy Sepulcher, not far from Melisende’s own father. “He never knew that – after all—”
>
Richildis had no words of comfort to offer. The easy, the gentle, the not quite false but not quite perfectly true things that most women could utter as easily as they breathed, had never come to her when she needed them. She could only say, “It’s said the dead know all.”
Melisende laughed, no mirth in it, only pain. “Then he knows everything – every slip and folly, every moment that I resented him, every time I looked at him and wished that he had been anyone else – almost anyone at all.”
“And the end, too,” Richildis said, “when you repented of it.”
“But did I?” Melisende had been sitting while Richildis brushed out her hair. She rose and began to prowl. “I never loved him. Even now I don’t love him. He did love me – I think he did. He said he did. He told people—” She broke off. “Ah, God. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t taken it into my head to go hunting – if we hadn’t—”
“Stop that,” Richildis said briskly.
Melisende’s eyes glittered, but she stopped ripping at herself with words. “I don’t love him. What I feel – I could have esteemed him more. He was a good man, an affable man, and not too ill a king. Not a great one, no. He never had the gift. But he did well enough.”
That was tribute, in its fashion. It was as much as Melisende would give him.
* * *
And when he was laid in his tomb, when mourning had turned as it inevitably must, to the joy of a new reign, Melisende at last was in her element. Melisende the princess had waited in taut-strung patience to be queen; then when she was queen she had fought to rule beside her husband. Now that husband, that man who had been required by law and precedence to give her the rank and title to which she was born, was dead.
She had still to rest her right on the head of a male, a boy who must wear the crown and sit as king beside her. But a boy, a child both young and small for his age, would not constrain her to accept his will or his precedence. She could rule now in truth, rule as queen.
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