Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  But it seemed that God had other intentions. She suppressed a sigh and rose, and went to make herself ready for guests.

  * * *

  They were as she had expected, nobles of the High Court going home from court and coronation. Their curiosity was palpable. She had made no secret of her marriage, but neither had she made a great public outcry.

  That might not have been wise after all. In the absence of truth, rumor will fly – and she had not only married a man from the Byzantine embassy, she had vanished from Jerusalem fairly promptly thereafter. These were the outriders of an army, perhaps, come to see for themselves what she had done.

  She had no shame to offer them. Such order as she could manage, she kept, and she received them into it with all the grace that blood and training had given her. When Michael Bryennius came in from wherever he had been – inspecting the sugar-mill, he told her much later – the hall was full of strangers.

  He took it in in a glance, and her with it, seated on the dais with the two barons of lesser holdings and the heiress of one as great as the others put together. In a lull in their high and pointless chatter she rose, stretching out her hands. “My lord!”

  “Lady,” he said, advancing with the same impulse that had come over her, taking her hands, kissing them one by one. His eyes laughed up at her. She bit her lips to keep from grinning back. When she had mastered herself, she turned with her hand in his and said, “My lords, my lady: my husband.”

  They were forced to be courteous, not an easy thing when their eyes were so wide and their minds spinning so furiously. She wondered what monstrous bridegroom rumor had given her, that they should actually seem disappointed by her elegant Byzantine. Had they been telling one another that she had married an infidel? Her notorious Turkish guard, perhaps?

  And she had married a Christian, if a schismatic, and one who spoke Frankish besides. Rumor would never love that as it had loved the wilder speculations.

  She enjoyed herself rather more than she had expected to, sitting next to her husband in her own hall, playing host to the first guests that she had received as lady of Mount Ghazal. And only a month ago, she had had no thought at all of gaining such a thing, still less through marriage to a man whom she had not seen in so long.

  “Strange are the ways of God,” she said to herself, unheard amid the murmur of conversation. Not even her husband heard her. He was engaging in lively debate with the lords and their squires, over the best way to dress a deer in the field.

  She should make conversation with Lady Gisela, and not suffer her mind to wander even farther afield than the men’s poor slaughtered deer. The lady had been chattering on for quite some time, as far as Richildis could tell. It was mindless chatter, court chatter, comfortably simple to fit oneself into. One had only to nod, smile, murmur a word at suitable intervals.

  Such was the lot of a lady in hall. She found that it suited her, even as tedious as it could sometimes be. Yes; it suited her very well indeed.

  Thirty-Five

  Kutub had gone out not long after Epiphany to find men-at-arms for Mount Ghazal. On the threshold of summer, around the feast of the Ascension, he came back with an armed company. They were all Turks, and all young, and all nearly as villainous to look at as he was himself. There seemed to be several dozen, but the count of them, on the rare occasions when they could be persuaded to stand still, was ten.

  “These are my cousins,” Kutub said, marking the half-dozen who stood together. “And these,” he said of the other four, “are my nephews. There would have been more, but the city-sultans have been paying well this year, and the rest of my kin had promised themselves already to this one or that.”

  “That’s well enough,” said Richildis. “We have a dozen here, learning to fight in the Byzantine style since we lacked an arms-master of the Turks.”

  “Well,” said Kutub, “and now you have him. Show me these dozen of yours.”

  It was hardly appropriate for a servant to command his baroness; but this was Kutub. Richildis acceded to his wishes, nor sent someone either, but went herself, out to the field where Michael Bryennius had mustered his soldiery. They all had bows, each in his fashion, and were shooting at targets.

  Michael Bryennius did not believe in interrupting such proceedings unless there was great need. In that it seemed he was like Kutub. The Turk went to stand beside him, greeting him with an inclination of the head. He followed the example that Kutub set, indulging in no effusions of welcome, watching in silence as the young men from the village nocked arrows, aimed, and shot, over and over.

  “You waste their time,” Kutub said at length, in a tone of careful consideration. Michael Bryennius raised a brow.

  “The shooting in a fight,” Kutub said, “is most often from the back of a horse.”

  “These won’t be horse-archers,” Michael Bryennius said. “The Franks don’t use them as the Turks do.”

  “Perhaps they should.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Michael Bryennius said. “But the fee we owe the queen is a fee in men-at-arms in the Frankish fashion. We can but oblige.”

  “My kin will never fight like Franks.”

  Michael Bryennius looked past him to the uneasy huddle of his young relations. They were wild creatures, the dust of the steppe still in their long plaited hair, and hardly enough beard on the lot of them to befur the face of a single Byzantine. He grinned at them. They glowered back. “My dear young things,” he said in Arabic, “you will cut a remarkable swath among the soldiers of Jerusalem.”

  “They will fight for the lady,” Kutub said, “and for the queen she serves. No one else.”

  “That will do for the purpose,” said Michael Bryennius.

  * * *

  Richildis could only be relieved that there would be no war. Kutub would hardly contemplate harm to his lady’s husband, but his kin might have no such compunctions about their rivals from the village. Villager and wild tribesman had been at war since the world was born – but while the men who commanded them were at amity, they could not break the truce.

  Or so she could hope. Infidel honor was an odd and fragile thing. It resided in a man’s right arm and the weapons it bore, in the bodies of his women, in the name and prowess of his tribe. If he decided that loyalty to his commander stained his honor, then he would go where his honor bade him.

  She would have to hope that both Kutub and Michael were deft enough to keep the balance. Perhaps she should find a Frankish sergeant to command the lot of them, setting Kutub free to be captain of guards, and Michael Bryennius to be her consort.

  Another thing to set in the annals of her memory. She had made a whole edifice of them, a house of rooms that grew more numerous each day. The exercise, that she had had from a nun of great learning, suited her well; she felt the honing of her mind upon it, the keenness that she had thought lost when she was taken out of the convent. Solitary study had not been enough; nor had she found anyone with whom to talk of what she read, except in her letters to Michael Bryennius.

  She would have to learn to talk to him as she had written, without constraint. She was still too new to this, her days too full, the nights more often spent in deep and exhausted sleep than in either lovemaking or conversation. There was always someone listening, someone standing by, someone needing something that must be seen to just then.

  Perhaps she should have done what he had hoped she would do: linger in Jerusalem, be a new bride, let her barony wait till she was ready to devote herself to it. But she had been too restless for that; too determined to do what she judged to be her duty. And, she admitted in the quiet of the nights, she had to force this choice of hers on her husband, to see what he would do – to lose him if she must, and quickly, before her heart bound itself any more tightly to him.

  It had been too late for that, she thought, before he left Beausoleil, years ago. And he seemed at ease here at Mount Ghazal, as he had been in Jerusalem, as he had been at Beausoleil. Surely he was at ease in Byzantium, too,
and wherever else God and his fate had led him.

  An enviable gift, that. Perhaps she could persuade him to teach her the way of it.

  * * *

  Her house of memory grew, and rooms were opened and closed, altered and divided, as time and necessity demanded. Outside of it, in the world of the body, winter passed into spring, and spring into summer. She returned to Jerusalem for the great feasts, for High Court, for attendance on the queen who was still her liege lady.

  The first time she came back from Mount Ghazal, for Easter Court, Melisende allowed her to perform proper obeisance as a baroness to the queen, but lifted her after and looked long into her face. Rather than lower her eyes or admit to embarrassment, Richildis returned the scrutiny. There was nothing new to see. No encroachments of age. No marks of strain or sorrow. Queenship suited Melisende. She prospered in it.

  “You,” said Melisende, “look… young. Is that the fountain of the ancients in your courtyard, then? Have you found your youth again?”

  “Not my youth,” said Richildis, “which I rather misspent. Joy. That’s what I’ve found. Joy.”

  And so she had. In the summer she knew what she had suspected when she returned from Easter Court. It so startled her that she could not speak of it even to her husband. With Thierry there had been nothing – and he had sired bastards enough. She had reckoned herself barren.

  Now, with increasing clarity, she saw that she was not. She knew what misfortune had followed Helena’s refusal to tell her beloved that he would be a father. Yet she could not say the words. Could not stand in front of her husband and say, “I’m going to have a baby.”

  * * *

  He said it for her, one night in the fullest heat of summer. The well in the castle flowed with cool water, a blessing indeed in a country and in a season in which water was precious rare. They had granted themselves a vast indulgence: a bath together. They were still damp, still scented with the herbs that had made the water sweet.

  She was slender still – spare as she had always been, without much meat on her bones. But her breasts were fuller, she had noticed that.

  So, it appeared, had he. He kissed the tip of one. She shivered in pleasure. “Beloved,” he said, soft as a cat’s purr. “When will the baby be born? Somewhere about Epiphany, yes?”

  Richildis’ mind went briefly dark: a moment’s swoon of pure relief.

  But if he was angry—

  He did not seem to be. He was smiling, looking into her eyes.

  “Epiphany,” she said, “or a little after.”

  “It will spare the most ribald of the jests,” he observed.

  He must be angry. He had shown no joy, none of the deep delight that she had expected. She reached for him, not knowing what she would say, not certain that she could cry his pardon.

  When the words came, they came of themselves. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think – I knew I was barren.”

  “God knew better,” he said.

  Her hands found him, locked behind him. She buried her face in his breast. “I’m afraid,” she said.

  “All women fear the curse of Eve,” he said.

  She struck his back with her clenched fists. He gasped: she had not tried to be gentle. “Don’t be obtuse,” she said. “I’m afraid of the pain of childbearing – who wouldn’t be? But that’s not what terrifies me. It’s… that this child may not live. That I may not be able to—”

  “Hush,” he said. “God will do as God wills. Pray that He wills that the birth be easy, the child strong, well fit to grow into man or woman.”

  “Man or woman? You don’t care which?”

  “Either or both,” he said.

  “You are not the usual run of man,” said Richildis.

  “I should hope not,” he said with some indignation. “How dull that would be. How painful: for then you would never have looked at me.”

  “You’re easy to look at.”

  “But if I weren’t myself, would I look like myself?”

  “You make my head ache,” she said, but not to complain of it. She did something small and very wicked, that made him yelp and nigh cast her out of bed.

  As she lay grinning with her hair spilling on the floor, he mustered his breath and his dignity. “You are treacherous,” he said.

  “You begged for it,” said Richildis.

  “I did not.”

  “You did,” she said. And stopped; and gasped. Her hand flew to her middle.

  He leaped, all foolishness forgotten. The sheer white terror in his face made her want to laugh, but she dared not. “No,” she said, fending him off. “No, please. Stop panicking. It was only – it moved.” She paused as the words made themselves real in her awareness. “It’s alive, my love. It moved!”

  She was laughing, crying, she hardly knew which. And so early yet. So fragile a thing, that flutter within; so long a road to travel before it could live and breathe in the world outside the womb.

  It would not flutter again for its father – contrary child; she would speak to it sternly if it persisted. He professed not to care. “You felt it,” he said. “You know. Your word is all I need.”

  “Such trust,” she said. “Your family will disown you.”

  “My family may try,” he said. “It won’t get far. I’m master of its affairs, after all – even here.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She searched his face as it hung over her. “You said,” she said, “that you had left them in others’ care. That—”

  “Others look after them,” he said. “I remain master of them. I haven’t given them up, my lady. Not even to gratify the indignation of my mother.”

  “You’ll go back someday. Won’t you?”

  “I and you and the whole flock of our children,” he said, “in a grand caravan. Yes, we will go back – to visit, to see the glories of the empire, to make the acquaintance of my kin who are now yours. Did you think I’d exiled myself here forever?”

  “That’s what it is to you, isn’t it? Exile.”

  He shook his head sharply. “No. No, damn it. You’re all raw edges tonight, looking for hurt where there is none. Do you forget so easily the vows we took? Whither thou goest, I will go. I live here of my free choice and because you choose to live here. When we’re older, when our children are grown enough to travel, why shouldn’t we think of traveling to the City? Is there some oath that binds you here?”

  Richildis opened her mouth to reply that yes, there was; but the words would not come when she called them. She was bound not to go back to La Forêt while Bertrand refused to take the lordship of it – old oath grown worn with use, but no less strong for that. But where she went else, that mattered little. She could see the wonders of East Rome, the splendors of Byzantium, perhaps even the fabled palace of the emperors. Was not her husband one of the royal kin?

  “You see,” he said as if she had answered his question. “You’re not sworn to stay in or near Jerusalem till life forsakes you. Someday we’ll sail to Byzantium, you and I and our children.”

  “One child,” Richildis said, “and the life of that one is in God’s hands.”

  He bowed his head and crossed himself as the Greeks did, backward. Something in the gesture melted her heart. Perhaps he never fully understood why she sprang on him just then, overset him, nigh overwhelmed him with the ferocity of her embrace.

  Thirty-Six

  While Richildis made Mount Ghazal a place fit for a child to be born in, the world had gone its round as relentlessly as ever. In the autumn the peace that had for the most part prevailed in the kingdom since King Fulk died, shattered suddenly and with terrible force.

  The balance of kings and emperors in this part of the world had always been delicate. Now there was a new king on the throne of Jerusalem, an emperor hardly less new on the throne of Byzantium, the father of each dead the year before. In Damascus the infidels were watching, always watching, alert to capture what they could from weak or unready princes.

  Not only in Damascus, either, or am
ong Saracens. Both Antioch and Edessa had grown restive under Fulk’s rule. Under what they reckoned to be the feebler rule of a woman and a half-grown boy, Joscelin of Edessa and Raymond of Antioch broke out in open rivalry.

  Raymond of Poitiers had been chosen for Constance, heiress of Antioch, as Fulk had been chosen for Melisende – and in much the same fashion, for he was in England when the messengers found him, as Fulk had been seven years before that. Fulk had been seeing his son married to the heiress of England. Raymond was in attendance on the heiress’ father. He had been amply willing to forsake that liege lord in favor of a young and beautiful princess. That she was also headstrong, arrogant, and notably free of her tongue, did not appear to dismay him. Nor was he perturbed that she was, at the time of their marriage, all of nine years old. “She will grow,” he was heard to observe, “and she has beauty in her bones.”

  The princess’ mother Alys had been led to believe that this handsome man of seven-and-thirty had come to take her as his bride. Only so could he come to Antioch unmurdered, and only so could he claim it as the king’s vassal, too quick and too subtle for her to prevent him.

  Something broke in Alys when the truth was laid before her. Where Melisende would only have grown stronger, more determined to win back what was hers, Alys proved herself of lesser mettle. She retired to her dower lands, nor would she come out for any summoning, even that of her sister the queen. She was said to spend her days in alternation between the chapel and the winejar.

  All the steel that had been in Alys seemed to have passed on to her daughter. Constance grew up as beautiful as Raymond had professed to expect, the image of her father Bohemond, white-fair hair and sea-blue eyes and a face like that of a marble saint. For all that anyone knew, she doted on her tall handsome husband, heeding him as she heeded no one else.