What it would be tonight…
She shivered a little, though the room was warm with braziers and lamps and the heat of human bodies. The thing that made a marriage a marriage was the one thing she had forborne to think of. They had not even kissed, the two of them. They had touched hands. That was all.
Maybe he would be content to live as brother and sister, to share a household in Christian chastity.
Ah: but would he? And would she?
She was almost sorry when the last of the wine had gone round, when the plates and platters and bowls were carried away. As little as she had partaken of them, as silent as she had been while the revelry went on around her, it was a shield of sorts. When it was gone, there would be nothing left but the two of them. And then…
* * *
And then. They were delivered to Michael Bryennius’ house – their house – with rather too much shouting and laughter, wine and torches and ribald singing. She did not recall that there had been so many at her first wedding, or that so many had been young men, knights and squires armed with torches. Someone had mustered an army. She would lay the blame on Bertrand, but he seemed as taken aback as she. She had to glimpse Baldwin’s face in a flare of torchlight, to see the expression of wicked glee – and Arslan looking as if he had been the master of the plot.
She would kill them. Later.
They sang and roistered and drained wine from skins outside in the sleet, while the more proper guests saw bride and groom put to bed. Melisende and Helena oversaw Richildis’ bath in a brazier-heated room, clothed her in a shift of fine white linen and a gown of sea-blue wool lined with soft grey vair, combed out her hair and scented her with oil of roses. She had trembled herself into stillness.
* * *
The chamber was golden with lamplight, the bed freshly made and strewn with herbs and rose-petals. Richildis could only think, looking at them, of bare skin and rough dried leaves and the discomforts of luxury.
She dared not burst into giggles: if she did, she would not be able to stop. She let them, her queenly servants, arrange her in the bed, spread her hair about her shoulders, draw the coverlet up just so far and no farther. All of it would come off, of course, but he would expect to find her so. Every new husband did. Did he not?
Who knew what a Byzantine would expect?
They bowed and smiled – even the queen, enjoying herself immensely, Richildis could see – and withdrew. Leaving her alone with her overscented bed and her overwarmed chamber and her overarching edifice of fears. She had not been so afraid last night; no, not even in the wedding, when she spoke the vows that bound her to this stranger.
Stranger, foreigner, man whom she had known for a month and then not seen for ten years and more. And when he had come back, he had demanded that she marry him. And she, like a fool, had agreed.
Her heart had done all the choosing. Her head ruled now, when her heart should be strongest. Fool of a creature, to be so contradictory.
The outer door opened slowly. The charivari outside the window drowned out any footstep, yet Richildis felt his coming. She could not move. She lay like a scared child, a maiden bride arrayed for her beast of a husband.
Michael Bryennius’ voice sounded without, calm but very firm. “No, I do not require an escort. No, you will not put me to bed. Now go.”
Then the door was shut and barred and he was inside of it, looking much less calm than he had sounded. He was as damply clean as she, his cheeks flushed, his eyes a little too bright. The door bulged behind him as some ox of a knight flung shoulder at it. But the bolt held. It was a sturdy thing, new-forged from the look of it, and with this night in mind, Richildis had no doubt.
He took a step away from the door, then two, then three. And stopped. “You look,” he said, “like—”
“Like a frightened fool.” Richildis flung back coverlets and mantle, rose on legs that wobbled but held, and approached him as if he were a Saracen and she had a mind to conquer him. He did not recoil, which spoke well for his courage.
She did not know precisely what one did. Thierry had expected her to be lying in bed, as flat as she could manage, and had grunted and heaved on top of her till he was satisfied. That was not the way she had heard people speak of it elsewhere. They began, it was said, with a kiss.
Her arms fit well about his neck. His scent was of musk and spices, light and clean yet somehow strong enough to dizzy her. One kissed… so. He was not the innocent that she was. He knew the art that she had only heard of. She was clumsy, but he was a willing teacher, patient and not too conspicuously amused.
His patience would have won her heart if nothing else had. It won her head, too, which was more to be marveled at. Fear lingered, that he would seize her after all and throw her down, but he never did.
It was she who grew impatient at last, who wearied of touching lip to lip and tongue to tongue, with the rest of the body burning, and not so slowly, either. If this was a sin, then sin could be sacred.
Blasphemy.
She did not care. This was like battle, like riding wild in the hunt: a white exhilaration. To let go, to free oneself of fear and doubt and shame of the body – to make a sacrament of the flesh as the Church had made them of the spirit…
“No wonder they won’t allow folk to marry inside the church door,” Richildis said in a pause, “if it leads to this.”
He did not answer, not in words. He lifted her in his arms and swept her up, only to lay her down again rather quickly. She was spare enough, but her bones were solid. She laughed breathlessly, sinking down and down in the featherbed, and the deeper she sank, the more beautifully startled he looked.
Before she vanished utterly, she reached up and caught hold of him and pulled him in with her. She felt him try not to fall on top of her. That only made her laugh the harder. In a tangle of legs and arms, elbows and knees and garments that needed undue amounts of time to be rid of, they found at last the meeting of body and body.
She gasped. He tried to pull away, but she held him till he yielded. “I hurt you,” he said. He sounded as if he would weep.
“No,” she said. “No, no, no. You would never hurt me. Not you, not ever.”
“But—”
“Be quiet,” she said. “Love me.”
It was she who had vowed to obey him. But he was a wise husband. He chose to obey her.
Thirty-Four
Mount Ghazal was not as dreadful as the queen had led Richildis to expect. It was in some disrepair, to be sure. Its knight was long gone, and she would have to find another, or equal him with twenty men-at-arms. Its steward was old and not well, nor had he a wife to rule in his name. There was however a young clerk in his workroom, a weedy boy with the squint of the nearsighted, who appeared to know where everything was, if not always what to do with or about it.
Richildis appointed him steward, to his manifest dismay, and set him to work. For the men-at-arms – knight, she could not find quickly, nor truly wanted to – she turned to Kutub. She had only to raise a brow. “I saw,” he said, “some strapping young men in the village. I can make fighters of them, I think.”
“You think?”
“They aren’t Turks,” he said. “If they were…”
“Can you find any?”
His brows went up. “You would take a whole score of wild tribesmen? If I could find them?”
“I’ll take what I can get,” she said.
“Then if you’ll trust me,” he said, “I’ll see that you’re well served.”
She inclined her head. He bowed and went away. Truly away – out of Mount Ghazal. God – or Allah – knew where.
She had little enough time to fret over him. There was the castle to set in order, the rais of the village to receive in proper dignity, the affairs of the holding to see to, each in its turn.
And Michael Bryennius coming up from Jerusalem on the morrow, after he had settled affairs of his own. She would like to see the castle clean at least, and a chamber readied for hi
m, and food to feed him that was not cold roast mutton and days-old bread.
She kilted up her skirts and mustered her forces and set herself to work.
* * *
Michael Bryennius found a clean hall and a horde of busy servants and, ankle-deep in the mud of the stableyard, his wife. She was looking over a fine colt while a dark-eyed boy held the halter of its dam. “He was bred here?” she was asking in quite decent Arabic. “His sire?”
“Lady,” said the boy who held the mare, “he didn’t exactly have a sire. We tethered her out, you see, where the Banu Yusuf like to water their flocks. They have a good stallion. If it happened that he covered her… well…”
“And if it happened that some knight on a hulk of a destrier had ridden past first?”
The boy lowered the lids over his big beautiful eyes. “Oh, lady,” he said demurely, “there were no knights in the region that day; no, not one.”
“I hope you didn’t lure one over a cliff,” Richildis said, “or into a lion’s den.”
“Oh, no, lady!” the boy said fervently. “Of course not. We’re horsebreeders, not murderers. One did come, but my cousin Suraya was filling a jar at the spring. Suraya is very pretty.”
“Worse and worse,” sighed Richildis. “Did he – take advantage of her?”
“Of course not, lady,” said the boy. “He thought of it, of course, but Suraya’s nine brothers happened to come by on a boar-hunt, with their spears and their bows and all. They persuaded him to take his hulk of a destrier and find his pleasure elsewhere. He was remarkably willing to oblige,” the boy said, remembering with evident fondness. “He was standing in the saddle, and moaning every time his horse took a rough stride.”
“They flayed him?” Richildis asked in morbid fascination.
“No, lady,” the boy said. “Suraya has a dangerous knee. Most dangerous, lady. My cousins have some doubt that the knight will sire children after this – even weakling daughters.”
“Is that so?” Richildis said. “I should like to meet those cousins – and their sister Suraya.”
“And do you like the colt?” the boy asked with an air of innocent persistence.
“The colt is splendid,” Richildis said. “I do wonder what the destrier was doing while Suraya was disposing of his master.”
“Covering the mare, I would guess,” Michael Bryennius said.
Richildis whirled. The light in her face was enough to stop a man’s heart. It was always there when he came to her, reflection of that in his own face – nor did time seem likely to lessen it.
She restrained herself from embracing him in front of strangers, greeted him demurely as a wife should greet her husband. “You do think the colt is a halfbred?”
“I think the destrier must have been a very fine horse indeed,” Michael Bryennius said. “You don’t see such bone or such size in the desert stock – even the best of it.”
The colt, which had been standing quietly on the lead, decided just then to rebel. As it went up, Richildis brought it firmly down again. She rebuked it as if it had been a wayward child, and in God’s truth it lowered its head and looked ashamed.
* * *
“Even infant stallions give way to you,” Michael Bryennius said to her much later in the chamber with its fresh rushes and still faintly damp bed-linens. Everything looked as new as this morning, except the carven monstrosity of the bed, which some long-gone lord must have hauled with him all the way from Germany. Richildis had thought of having it taken away and burned, but it was too useful. Perhaps its ghastliness would grow less as she grew accustomed to it.
She was letting her mind wander. Her husband let her do it, smiling at her in the lamplight, doting shamelessly.
“I think I’d like to stake the mare out again in the spring,” she said, “and see who else rides by on his destrier.”
He grinned like a boy. “I have a better plan. Invite a guest or two – and choose each for the quality of his horses.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “that I want to submit a guest to the knee of the lovely Suraya – or the gentle ministrations of her nine brothers.”
“Them, you would do well to take on as men-at-arms,” he said.
“Even the sister?”
“Her above all,” he said, flinging himself backwards onto the bed, spreading his arms for her to fall into.
When they had sorted themselves out with the laughter that had become an inextricable part of what they did together, Richildis rested her head on his shoulder and let him cradle her with the whole of him. “I don’t suppose you’ll like it much here,” she said. “It can’t be like anything you’d choose to do.”
His voice was a rumble in his chest, thrumming against her ear. “What makes you think that?”
She held him a little more tightly, as if to stave off anger. “You come from your City, yes? This is an outland castle in poor repair, and a holding in sore need of good management. So much of it must seem unnecessary to you. Unnecessary and excessively countrified.”
“Are you regretting marrying me?”
She lifted her head from his shoulder, raised herself against his grip. It tightened, then dropped away. She stared into his face. It was very white, his eyes very dark. “I could never regret marrying you,” she said.
“Then why,” he demanded, “are you perpetrating such utter nonsense? Yes, I was born in Constantine’s City. Yes, I’ve spent much of my life there. But not all my family’s holdings are in cities. There is an estate in Illyria, a lone tamed island in a black sea of mountain and forest, where the hunting is astonishing. Someday I hope you’ll see it. Then tell me in all truth that I would find this place impossibly rustic.”
Richildis bit her lip. “I… didn’t mean to make you angry.”
No? And had she not?
She silenced the mocking voice in her mind and said, “We know each other so well, and yet so little. A month, nigh a dozen years ago. Letters at intervals since. A few days in Jerusalem, and now here.”
“That’s more than most new-wed folk are given,” he said. “Some never meet till the day they’re married.”
“They don’t marry for our reasons, either,” Richildis said. “They are practical.”
“And we are not?”
“If we were,” she said, “I would have married a Frankish baron years ago, and you would be mated to a suitable young woman of your City.”
“And we would both be miserably unhappy,” said Michael Bryennius. “I don’t think I believe in being practical.”
“You may have to learn, if you’re to find any kind of contentment here.”
“I’ll surprise you,” he said. “Watch and see.”
She much preferred to kiss him long and deep; and then, because it was late and the day began early, to curl up in his arms and go to sleep.
* * *
Michael Bryennius made a very capable consort to the baroness of a holding in the hills of Jerusalem. He could keep accounts, which spared the young seneschal for efforts elsewhere. He knew horsebreeding and, also excellently to the point, the breeding and keeping of goats and sheep. He could fight when it pleased him, and train men to fight, which resulted in the appearance in the courtyard every morning of a dozen stalwart young men from the village with blunted spears and wooden swords, and the setting up of butts for archery in the field beyond the castle’s wall.
A loud splash one morning, and a yelp immediately thereafter, told Richildis that one of the would-be men-at-arms had lost the usual wager: victory in this contest or that, or an involuntary swim in the cistern. Michael Bryennius insisted that such silliness kept them keen. The cistern had been built in some ancient time for who knew what purpose; Richildis meant to have it drained and cleaned and over time refilled, to bolster the newer well in the castle’s heart. Meanwhile it was a reasonably vile example of its kind, green and scummy, with things swimming below the surface that no one liked to think too much on. Richildis hoped that none of the daily vanquishe
d took sick from the foul water.
So far none had, and they took noisy delight in the game. Their clamor interrupted her going over of lists with Charles the steward, but rather more pleasantly than not. It was a good sound, like the clucking of fowl in their coops by the kitchen, the sound of hammering and hewing as workmen repaired a crumbling corner of the east tower, the squeal of a mare in the stable. They were all living sounds, lively sounds, sounds of a castle setting itself in order.
She was sitting there smiling, alarming poor Charles, who had stammered into silence. “Go on,” she said to him. “I’m listening.”
He stammered as he obeyed, but steadied as he went on. She had hopes of him. His shyness was crippling, but he had a good mind and a fine eye for detail. He needed someone to assist him, she thought: someone to speak for him when his stammer overwhelmed his wits. She would find a suitable person, a clerk from Jerusalem, or someone more local perhaps, someone from the village, if any there could read and write Latin and the dialects of Frankish as well as Arabic. One of the Frankish settlers, perhaps. She set the task in her memory, to do when there was time.
She had no proper page yet – another task: to find a noble family with a son to spare, for her to foster – but there were always young things about the castle, offspring of servants or workmen or, perhaps more often than that, people in the town who were curious about their new lady. One of these appeared breathless at her side, and said in Arabic too rapid almost for her to follow, “Lady-there’s-a-riding-coming!”
She deciphered that with little enough difficulty. “People? Franks?”
“Franks!” said the child. “With banners.” It sighed as if in rapture. She would think it male, but dressed as it was in a grubby white shirt and a blue bead on a string, it could as easily be female. “Many many Franks, lady. Four, five handfuls.”
Richildis could not allow herself to become alarmed. This was the lot of any who held a castle in a world of war: any noble traveler could come as he pleased, with all his retinue, and expect guest-right for however long he wished to stay. She had dared to hope that no one would come until the castle was ready.
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