Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  That would have been better, in everyone’s estimation, if Raymond had been a wiser man, or less ambitious. His wings had been severely and properly clipped by the last emperor of Byzantium, who had actually taken Antioch in its prince’s absence. Raymond had been compelled to pay homage to the emperor as to an overlord: an act that had galled him in the doing and forever after.

  But now that emperor was dead. Antioch was safe from his claim of suzerainty – though the new emperor would no doubt make his own claim. But not yet. Raymond breathed free at last, looked about him, and set to the delightful task of expanding his territories and claiming back those that the Byzantines had taken from him. He was also, and with relish, quarreling with Joscelin of Edessa over numerous insults and injuries, not least of them Joscelin’s distaste at having been forced to accept the Prince of Antioch as his liege lord.

  It was all very tangled, very complicated, and very ill for the strength of the Franks against the infidel. When Franks quarreled, people said, infidels rejoiced – and infidel joy was expressed most keenly in war.

  In the autumn of that year, the year after Baldwin was crowned king beside Melisende his mother, the knots and tangles of alliances in the north began rapidly to unravel. Antioch and Edessa were at odds if not yet at war. Edessa had failed to keep its half of a bargain with Antioch, that would have added greatly to the lands of both. Joscelin had chosen instead to swear truce with infidel Aleppo, in hopes of bettering his fortunes in that direction rather than in servitude to a haughty overlord – those being the words of his that came in rumor even to Mount Ghazal. His overlord the Prince of Antioch was greatly displeased, perhaps to the point of sending an army against Edessa.

  While the Franks quarreled, the infidels struck. Zengi the Turk, who wielded power in Mosul, was not content to rule a single city. He would be lord of all Syria if he could, of all the world if Allah favored him. He mounted an attack against one of the infidel allies of Joscelin. Joscelin, bound by oath to aid his ally, marched out of Edessa – and Zengi, who had laid the trap with such cunning skill, marched in behind him and laid siege to the city.

  Joscelin was intermittently and sometimes belatedly prudent. There were many indeed who called him a coward. He did not turn back in furious haste to break the siege and win back his city. He retreated to Turbessel with an army that, to be sure, was not remarkably large or strong, and was probably no match for Zengi’s horde of Turks and Kurds and Turcomans.

  The queen, with the High Court in hastily summoned council, gathered an army and set her Constable in command of it, and sent it to the aid of Edessa. It was a great army, splendid as it marched out of Jerusalem. But not great enough. It needed Antioch.

  And Antioch would not stir. Joscelin had betrayed his vassalage, had made alliances with infidels, had paid for his perfidy in the loss of his city. “Let him learn his lesson,” Raymond said before he stopped receiving messengers from the queen or her commanders. “He never had much sense when it came to people, or fighting, either. Now he pays for it – and far be it from me to ride to his rescue, unless he begs me himself, on bended knee.”

  But Joscelin would not do that, would not grovel as he said that Raymond had done before the late emperor of the Byzantines. And so the quarrel went on: silly, petty, and dangerous.

  The price of warring pride was Edessa. Zengi took it after a month of siege. On the very eve of Christmas his tribesmen broke down the wall and ran wild in the city. Every Frankish male was put to death, and every Frankish woman and child sold as a slave. The Latin churches were broken down and their sacred things taken or trampled in the dust. Everything that had been built or wrought or begun under the Franks was shattered. Edessa was again, as it had been before the Crusade, a city of infidels and of eastern Christians.

  * * *

  Edessa was fallen. The infidel crouched at the northern gate of Outremer. The queen’s armies had failed to withstand him. Antioch had refused, and still refused, for its prince’s blind ambition. Nor had Joscelin grown wiser in adversity. First he had failed to do what he could, while he could, to weaken Zengi’s siege of Edessa; he had chosen instead to wait for the queen’s army, loitering in Turbessel while his city fought alone. Now from Turbessel he defied the authority of Antioch, repudiated his oath of fealty, and declared that he would stand alone until the whole of his realm was restored to him.

  * * *

  “Idiots!” Melisende, unlike Joscelin, thrived on adversity; but it was as much as she could do to wait patiently in Jerusalem while men made such a shambles of both war and alliance. “If even one of them could see past his own nose, it would be a sacred miracle.”

  “Shall we pray for it?”

  Richildis had come to Jerusalem in the new year, after she judged herself recovered from the delivery of a miracle of her own: twins, Gisela the firstborn and Alexios her brother. She had wondered, late in her pregnancy, if there were two to make her so vast and unwieldy, but she had never believed it till Gisela was born and the pains went on, and her brother sprang yelling into the world. Two at once, as if to make up for all the barren years.

  She had come this morning to pay her respects to the queen, and Melisende had asked that she stay. The twins went home with their father and their nurses. Richildis returned, if briefly, to the familiar round of the queen’s service. She stood with the other ladies through the rest of the morning audience, then adjourned with them to the solar, where a new and talented singer was matching his voice to the wailing of a flute. He was young enough to be beardless, but Richildis wondered if he was one of the Greek eunuchs. No one else had a voice of such power and purity.

  There a messenger had brought word of yet another calamity in the fall of Edessa, another refusal on the part of either Raymond or Joscelin to be even faintly reasonable.

  “There will have to be a Crusade,” Melisende said. “I see no other hope for us. With Antioch stalking the edge of treason, Edessa fallen, Edessa’s lord intent on his feud with the lord of Antioch, and the infidel laughing as he takes the spoils… we need more than we have, to win back what’s been lost. We need the knights of the West.”

  “But will the pope preach a Crusade?” one of the ladies asked. “There has been none willing in fifty years, since Urban preached our fathers and grandfathers into taking Jerusalem.”

  “Then it’s time one was willing, yes?” said Melisende. “I’ll offer Antioch one chance to redeem itself: I’ll consult with its council on the sending of an embassy to Rome. Raymond is a bloody fool, but his vassals may have better sense.”

  * * *

  As it happened, they did; and an embassy set sail for the west, but not in as much haste as might have been expected. That was a strange year, this second year of Melisende’s reign with Baldwin, beset with urgency yet vexed with delays. No one seemed able to act, except Raymond of Antioch, who ran to the emperor of Byzantium to beg for aid. Raymond gained nothing, not even, at first, an audience with the emperor. His humiliation was the talk of Jerusalem. People did love to see a proud man fall on his face.

  Arslan was not greatly sorry, either. His dislike for Princess Constance had not abated in the least as he grew older. Her husband was as insufferable as she was: the same overbearing manner, the same haughty disregard for anyone he regarded as beneath him. And that, Arslan certainly was. Even if his father had formally acknowledged him, which Bertrand had never quite taken time to do, he was still a bastard.

  It did not hurt as much as it used to. Over the spring and summer, Baldwin got his growth at last, and his voice changed, too; suddenly he was a great growling lion-cub of a creature, neither boy nor man. After he knocked down the sergeant who had been teaching him swordplay since he was small, wrested the sword from him and beat him with the flat of it, the queen determined that her son was getting out of hand. She gave him a new tutor, one who would not, she opined, be as easy to overmatch as Reynaud had been.

  “There isn’t anybody,” Baldwin said that night before he went t
o sleep. “I’m better than all the sergeants.”

  “She’ll put a knight in charge of you,” Arslan said. “You’ll see.”

  Baldwin lifted a shoulder in a shrug. He was going to be big, like his grandfather before him; his fears of ending as small as his father were long since proved groundless. Arslan would always be bigger, but not by so very much.

  At the moment they were much of a size, but Baldwin was all elbows and knees. Arslan was a little more grown into himself.

  “The younger knights are all weaklings,” Baldwin said. “None of them has the least idea what to do with us.”

  “I have always tried to be an obedient student,” Arslan said with an air of injury. “So did you before you shot up like a weed. Now you’re as tall as a man, do you think you’re as strong as one? You’re just a clumsy pup. You’ve years of growing in you.”

  Baldwin surged across the bed. “I am not a clumsy pup! You take that back!”

  Arslan was ready for him – and stronger, too. It was more of a struggle than it would have been two seasons ago, but he won as always, wrestled Baldwin down and sat on him. “Do think,” he said from that vantage. “Your mother had her grim face on, the one that means she’s going to do something nobody else will like but she will enjoy immensely. With your luck, she’ll hand you over to your Uncle Manasses, and make him make a man of you.”

  “Uncle Manasses would be too soft on me,” Baldwin said – all the admission Arslan would get that Arslan had been right. “He’s too lofty, too. Unless she means to foster me out – but she can’t do that. I’m the king. I have to stay in the court.”

  King indeed, Arslan thought, letting himself fall backwards onto the bed. “We’ll know in the morning,” he said, “who’s to break you to bit and saddle.”

  Baldwin made a horrible face at him, but was too lazy or too prudent to try another attack.

  * * *

  In the morning they knew indeed. They were roused as always by the king’s body-servant, but at an hour so unwontedly early that Baldwin yowled a protest. “Her majesty commands,” Radulf said with a hint – a merest hint – of satisfaction.

  Dressed, combed, and lightly fed, they went out to face the fate that Queen Melisende had ordained for them.

  A knight. Indeed. A baron of the High Court, no less, and big enough to give even Baldwin pause. Lord Bertrand inspected his charges with an eye that found little to approve of – though it did glint a little, perhaps, on Arslan.

  Arslan could have excused himself. He was under no obligation to be taught as Baldwin was. No one had commanded him. He had no orders from the queen, nor had the king said a word.

  The king did not need to. His eyes said everything that needed saying. If Arslan loved his friend and liege lord, he would stay. They would suffer together as they always had.

  Arslan swallowed a sigh. No hope that his father would spare him for kinship’s sake. Quite the opposite, if he knew Bertrand. He would lead as always, break ground for his lord the king, and take the blows meant for the king, too, if he must.

  “You will take your own blows,” Bertrand was saying as if he had been listening to Arslan’s thoughts, “and pay your own prices for them. No hiding behind friends or servants. The king enjoys great privilege, but it comes at a great price. Whatever he does, for harm or good, he bears the burden of it.”

  “There are always people who will bear it for me,” Baldwin said with a lift of the chin that told Arslan much: that he was afraid, that he was angry at himself, that he would strike however he could, and wound as deep as he might.

  Bertrand was oblivious, or perhaps impervious. “While I am your tutor, no one but you will do penance for your sins.”

  “So you say,” Baldwin said, still in that tone of studied insolence.

  Arslan did not see exactly what Bertrand did. It was too fast to catch the whole of. One moment he was standing at ease, listening to Baldwin. The next, Baldwin was flat in the dust of the practice-yard and Bertrand was standing over him, holding out a hand to help him up.

  Baldwin grasped the hand, made as if to rise, tugged with sudden ferocity.

  Bertrand braced his feet. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all. Now, up. There’s work to do.”

  Thirty-Seven

  Work indeed. Earlier tutors had driven them hard, or so they thought. But none of those was Bertrand. He drove them from before dawn till long after dusk – and not only with weapons, either. They were to read and write in Latin and Frankish and as much Greek as they had wit for, and they would speak Arabic well enough to be sure that their interpreters were honest. And when they were not doing all of that, they were learning the arts of courtiers: everything from dancing and the lute to the intricacies of state councils.

  Once in a great while they were permitted to stop for a moment and breathe. Such moments were never given them when they expected any. Bertrand would fail to appear on the practice field, perhaps, or a page would be standing in the schoolroom, ready to rattle off a message: “Lord Bertrand says go away, do something frivolous, don’t come back till evening.” There was never any pattern in it, whether they behaved well or ill before the gift was granted them. It had nothing to do with feastdays or saints’ days, when they worked harder if anything, since, as Bertrand informed them, a king’s duties never paused, not even when he slept.

  When autumn had slipped into winter again, the year Edessa fell, the page came on them just as they readied to go to the field, with the same message as always, in the same maddening treble. This was not the usual page however: it was Prince Amaury, and he must have studied that shrill tone to have it down so perfectly, since his ordinary manner of speaking was no more unpleasant than anybody else’s. As soon as the message was out, he added in his own voice, “I’m coming with you.”

  “You are not,” Baldwin said at once. “You’re waiting on Lord Bertrand today.”

  “Lord Bertrand has gone to visit his sister in Mount Ghazal,” Amaury said. “He’s not coming back for a hand of days at least.”

  Arslan’s throat hurt suddenly. “He never told us,” he said.

  “He didn’t want you to think you could get away with anything,” Amaury said. “Tomorrow someone’s going to take his place till he comes back, but today you have for yourself. He said to enjoy it, it won’t come again soon. And I’m going with you.”

  “Not,” said Baldwin, “if I have to tie you up and stuff you down the garderobe. Go find someone else to pester.”

  Amaury folded his arms and set his jaw and looked immovably stubborn. Baldwin picked him up, tipped him through a doorway, and bolted. When they were out of David’s Tower and well lost among the throngs of Jerusalem, Baldwin stopped to get his breath. Arslan was glad of the opportunity. “You,” he said between gulps of air, “dumped that poor child into—”

  “I said I’d stuff him down the garderobe,” Baldwin said. “I’m a man of my word.”

  “We’ll get a flogging when milord finds out.”

  “But not until then,” Baldwin said. He looked about keenly, with a clear purpose in mind. “And it will be worth it. Are you with me?”

  “That depends on what I’m getting into,” Arslan said.

  “Come and see,” said Baldwin.

  Arslan was a fool, maybe. He held his tongue and followed.

  * * *

  They went to a part of the city that they had not often been in before. Baldwin seemed to know where he was going, though Arslan thought he heard him counting turnings under his breath.

  The streets were narrow and seemed as crowded as ever. Most of the people who thronged here were shabby in one way or another: pilgrims much worn with travel, ragged squires and threadbare knights, men-at-arms in worn leather, passersby of less determinate provenance and purpose. Sellers of sausages and pasties did a desultory business – and no wonder, from the pie Arslan unwisely bought: it was mostly onion, and the meat in it was probably dog, unless it was rat. He grimaced and gave the remains of it to
a beggar.

  Baldwin had not wanted a pasty, had barely paused to let Arslan buy or begin to eat it. Arslan had to thrust through a knot of pilgrims to catch his friend. Mary Mother, if people knew that the King of Jerusalem ran loose and ill escorted in the back alleys of his own city, there would be an outcry to rival anything Arslan had ever heard.

  That was not a thought he usually let trouble him. But this was not their usual run, either. Mostly they went to the bazaars with a crowd of squires, or went hunting, or found something to do in or about the Tower of David.

  Baldwin halted so abruptly that Arslan ran into him, and turned equally abruptly. The door he turned to had nothing to distinguish it, not even a mark cut into it. It was simply a door.

  But what was behind it…

  * * *

  Arslan had heard about houses of pleasure. All the squires talked about them. Some had even been in them, though for how long and to what effect, he sometimes doubted they told truly. The priests said that even thinking about them was a mortal sin. Going to one, and doing what people did in it, must be direct damnation.

  This was a house of pleasure. There was nothing else it could be, unless by some freak of luck they had stumbled into an infidel’s harem. It reeked of perfume and of flowers and of other, earthier things. Its walls were hung with gauzes that fluttered in the breeze of people’s passing. There were rooms, stairs, crannies full of whispering and laughter. The light was dim, deliberately so, and tinged as if with blood.

  Arslan wanted out. But Baldwin had a grip on his wrist, and it was too strong to break.

  They stood in what must be one of the anterooms, unmet and unattended, but there were eyes in the walls. Arslan could feel them, could almost see them glinting, laughing at a pair of boys huddled together as if in terror.