Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  He was a fool, perhaps, but he trusted her not to make it the talk of the taverns. She had her honor, did Nahar. She could not love one man alone, nor had the birth or wealth to indulge herself as she pleased. She did as well as she could in the world that God had made for her.

  One afternoon as they conversed of something aimless and yet interesting, she stopped all at once and said, “It’s time, I think.”

  Arslan blinked at her, baffled. “What? For me to leave? Surely it’s not that late – I just came here.”

  “No,” she said. They had been sitting on the bed, decorous enough, one at each end. She swooped across the space between. Before he could move or speak, she had captured him. Her arms were strong, her lips insistent.

  He did not know at all what to do. Girls giggled at him, blushed when he looked at them, but never seized him and kissed him, least of all like this. It was like being swallowed whole.

  When he dreamed of this, he had not dared dream so far: strong brown limbs, heavy ropes of black hair, eyes that a boy – or a man – could drown in. She was not particularly fair-skinned nor large-breasted nor rich of body – she was not what the squires talked of when they yearned after women. When he looked at her he thought less of roses than of thorns, of fierce dry hills and desert places.

  But even in the desert there are havens, oases of green, with water and rest. Nahar led him there and guided him through all their delights. He had never known there were so many.

  Maybe for most men there were not. This was a master of the art, no doubt of it; even he could tell. She seemed to take pleasure in it. She not feigning that, he thought, or hoped. She smiled at him through curtains of her hair, showing him yet another thing that he could do, that perhaps would pleasure her as much as it pleasured him.

  We are sinning, he thought somewhere in the midst of it. I’ll have to do penance.

  It did not matter. Not then, not after, when they lay in a tangle and he felt the onslaught of sleep, but there was enough of him awake to hear her murmur, “Sweet child.”

  He roused at that, with a prick of temper. “Is that all I am to you?”

  “You are what you are,” she said. She kissed him, not dizzyingly as she had before, but softly, lips and cheeks and brow. “Sleep a little. I’ll wake you before too long.”

  He was not strong enough to resist her, or foolish enough to doubt her word. She drew him back out of the warm dark, urged him up and helped him dress and ushered him out, all before he could bring his wits to bear. He was in the street and the sun going down before the essential thing came to him. He had not paid her. He had to pay her.

  The door was shut to him, and would not open for any of his calling. He went away in despair, reeking of sin, too much the sinner to go in search of his confessor.

  * * *

  This was the end, of course. Nahar had had what she wanted of every man; as with every man, she would not want to trouble herself with him again, not in friendship. If he went to her, it would be to buy pleasure as any man did.

  He was too proud to do that, and too ashamed. He would not go begging to her, nor do penance for having failed to resist her.

  And there was no one he could talk to. No one who would understand. Baldwin who was his friend, perhaps the only friend he had, would never see why Arslan had to do what he had to do. Baldwin was a king, accustomed to taking what he wanted. He had never known what it was to want but not to have.

  Not that Arslan knew what he wanted. Nahar as a friend? She was older than he, an infidel, a whore who had told him outright that she would never belong to any single man. He had no wealth to give her, no house and lands and properties as that long-ago patron had done for his mother, to make her a woman of means and to give her choices. He had not even paid Nahar for the afternoon’s pleasure she had given him – and had been locked out, he was sure, because of it.

  He went back in the end because of that: to pay her, and for no other reason. Or so he told himself.

  Rather to his surprise, he was let in. He allowed himself to be set in the anteroom where he had been before. But as soon as the doorkeeper left, he slipped out. He knew the ways well by now, the passage and the stair and the one door of many. He met no one. It was quiet today, only one or two stirs or murmurings behind the curtains. The noisy one as he liked to think of her, the woman whom he had never seen but had often heard whooping and sobbing like some demented beast, was silent.

  He hesitated at Nahar’s door-curtain. There was no sound within. It struck him belatedly and with a shock of shame, that she did not spend all her life in that one cell of a room. She must be out, in the house perhaps, in the city, who knew? She was not there. He would leave his bit of silver on her bed, nor care if she knew who had brought it.

  He raised his hand, but stopped. Someone was inside. The sounds were soft, but he had heard them often enough in that place and, for that matter, in corners of the stable.

  Why his belly should clench so, he did not know. He knew what she was. She had a living to earn.

  He wanted to leave the silver in front of the curtain, turn, bolt. But he could not do it. He moved away, set his back against a wall, slid down it. He should go back to the anteroom and wait to be called. He could not do that, either.

  After a moment or an hour, the curtain stirred. Arslan did not know the man who came out. He was a man, that was all, a Frank, neither well nor badly dressed. He could have been a tradesman, a pilgrim, a man-at-arms, even a poor knight. Arslan could not hate him. There was nothing there, really, to hate.

  The man left as men did here, a little furtive, a little proud of himself. Some crept and clung to shadows. Some walked as if they had won the world. This one did neither. He might have been coming from a business engagement, one in which he had done reasonably well.

  Arslan stayed where he was. The curtain lifted again. Nahar stood holding it up, looking straight at him. The man had not seen him, huddled against the wall in a pool of shadow, but she saw. She said, “Come here.”

  He did not want to, but he did as she bade. He had his purse in his hand. “I came to pay you,” he said.

  “You owe me nothing,” she said.

  His step faltered. Her eyes held him. They drew him in with her, past the curtain into the familiar room. It seemed smaller than he remembered, small and mean.

  She made him sit on the bed where he had sat so often before. She sat in her own place, at a careful distance, with her feet tucked up. Then for a while she let the silence stretch, till he was ready to burst out in words, any words, simply to break it.

  “You owe me nothing,” she repeated. “If you come to me and ask, yes, you pay. But what we did… I wanted it. That was for me.”

  “And not for me?”

  “Should it have been?”

  “I don’t understand you,” Arslan said.

  “I am very understandable,” said Nahar. “If I were a man, I would be perfectly simple.”

  “But you aren’t a man.”

  “No,” said Nahar.

  Arslan shook his head to clear it. “You’re too confusing. You make me dizzy.”

  “But you came back,” she said. “You sit here. You don’t say what must be in your mind, that after all I am a base and blatant harlot.”

  “I don’t think words like that,” he said. “I don’t know what to think. I was shut out, you see. The last time. When I tried to come back and pay.”

  “Because there was no payment owing,” she said. “If you insist, you may buy me something that I would like.”

  “But I don’t know what you would like,” Arslan said.

  “Surprise me,” said Nahar.

  * * *

  They had not touched or kissed, they had said nothing tender at all, but when Arslan went away again, his heart persisted in singing. He had no idea in the world what he would buy for her, except that it would be something extraordinary. Something different. Fripperies were not to her taste, gauds or ribbons or bits of silk. A dag
ger she might like. Or…

  Illumination was wonderful. Alarming, too. Worrisome. It was different indeed. But it seemed, the more he thought about it, to be exactly right.

  * * *

  It was several days before Arslan could go back to Nahar. There were duties, obligations, a festival in the court – a conspiracy as it seemed to keep Arslan from doing what he intended to do. But at last he was set free for an afternoon. He retrieved his gift and shut it in its basket, not without relief, and all but ran into the city.

  This time he did not go up till he was summoned. He was not asked to wait long, which pleased him.

  Nahar must have been out in the city: she was dressed as he had never yet seen her, in a Frankish gown of modest color and cut, with a veil and a fillet. She looked odd and rather out of place.

  She seemed glad to see him, greeted him with a smile and another new thing: the offer of a cup of wine. He took it but did not sip it at once. His basket weighed heavy beside him. She was determinedly uncurious, drinking her wine and chattering of he knew not what.

  While Arslan hesitated, waiting for his moment, the basket made its own decision. With only the slightest of warning scrabblings, the lid erupted, and with it his gift.

  Nahar sat on the bed in her modest grey gown, face to face with a ruffled and tail-twitching kitten. Its eyes were perfectly round and still infant blue, fixed on her in an expression of pure indignation.

  She committed an unpardonable sin in the world of cats. She laughed.

  The kitten, affronted, launched itself straight up and forward. She gasped as its claws found purchase in her shoulder. With great care she pried them loose, but did not fling the kitten away. It clung less painfully, worked its way up and inward, burrowed into her hair and began to purr.

  Arslan was holding his breath. A lover of true finesse would have given his lady a hawk or a hound or a fine palfrey. But he lacked the wherewithal for those, nor did he think that Nahar would have any use for them. A cat, however, could bear her company, hunt the mice and rats that scrabbled in the walls, and keep her warm on nights when she had no man to do it for her.

  Not that he would say such a thing. He knew better than to insult her.

  Maybe he should have given her a gaud after all, a ring or a bit of silk.

  Then she smiled. It was a smile such as he had never seen in her, broad and delighted. “I’ve always wanted a cat,” she said. “But none ever came to me, and no one ever gave me one.”

  “You do like it?” Arslan asked, almost choking on it. He was trying too hard to be calm. “Would you rather have had a necklace? A pair of gloves?”

  She stroked the kitten’s grey-striped head. Her expression was almost fierce. “No! Any fool can give me gloves or a necklace. Nobody ever thought to give me a cat.”

  Arslan drew a breath. “So I did the right thing?”

  She bent toward him, kitten and all, and set a kiss on his forehead. “You did exactly right. Aren’t I clever, for knowing you would?”

  Arslan smiled a bit uncertainly. This matter of men and women, he was coming to see, was both simple and endlessly complicated. He did not know if he would ever master it.

  But today he had done well. She was pleased with his gift. So pleased that she took him to bed again, and pleased yet again by his surprise that she should do such a thing. “You are a marvel and a rarity,” she said to him, so that he blushed furiously and lost his stride and had to fumble till he found it again. She waited till they were done before she went on. “Don’t change, not even a little. No other man is like you, and certainly no boy. There’s only one of you in the world.”

  “If you ask my mother,” muttered Arslan, “one of me is more than enough.”

  “Your mother adores you,” Nahar said. “Come here, stop chattering, let me show you something else that a man can do if he is both wise and agile.”

  “And young?” Arslan asked, panting with the effort.

  She laughed much longer and more freely than his feeble wit might be judged to warrant – laughter that was like a release, shaking the bed, sweeping him up with it till they lay giggling helplessly in one another’s arms. The cat, its patience exhausted, uttered a sound of pure disgust. It stalked across them to the bed’s edge and thence to the floor, and went hunting either mice or quiet in the darkness under the bed.

  Thirty-Nine

  The twins were ill. They had been ill before, had recovered with prayer and tending, but they had not thrived thereafter.

  Richildis knew as every mother did in this age of the world, that children were fragile. They died. She had lost one in the autumn, hardly after she had known she carried it – too young even to know whether it was son or daughter.

  She was not well herself, from that. And as the twins grew thinner and paler, she lost will and strength. She was not aware that she was fading; rather that the world was fading about her. It did not trouble her greatly. She would have said, if anyone had asked, that for all her troubles she was still happy. She had a husband whom she loved, a demesne that she had made prosperous, a house in Jerusalem, a place in the High Court, friends and kin, a whole world in which she belonged. God would preserve her children. Would He not?

  Except that He would not. She saw it before anyone else would admit to it. Her husband could not see, or would not. He was oblivious as men could be, visiting his children, finding them much as ever, going on about his business in castle or city, wherever they were.

  They were in Jerusalem that winter and spring, before word came from the West that Crusade had been preached and would come when it came. That could be within the year, or it could be years, while the infidel settled deeper into Edessa, and the Court persisted in doing nothing to dislodge him.

  Richildis had always drawn strength from the Holy City, but this year she had none to draw. On Good Friday her children slipped away, so softly and so quietly that one might barely have noticed. They had been ill of a rheum that week, no worse than anything that had taken them before, till it flared up in fever and consumed them.

  Gisela died in her arms, one gasp among many, and then nothing. Alexios lived not an hour longer. She sat in their nursery, cradling them both. They did not grow cold as she had expected. It was an early summer, the heat already fierce. Even within the walls of the house the air was warm.

  Michael Bryennius had been out somewhere – in the market, she supposed, or visiting the Byzantine embassy. He came in like a storm breaking, burst through the door, stopped at sight of her. His face in the black beard was white. Not as white, she noticed, as the faces in her arms. There was life in his features, and strength even in their absence of color.

  She could not say anything. What was there to say? When he broke down weeping, raw choking sobs, she could not move. Her arms were full, her heart all empty. Nothing in the world could fill it. Not even the sight of him at her feet, prostrate with grief.

  The stillness went on and on. People came and took the children away. Other people came and coaxed their father to retreat. They would have done the same to her, but she made herself a rock, a stone, immovable. She would not move though the world shifted beneath her.

  Her tormentors muttered to one another. “Mad,” they said. “Grief has driven her mad.”

  That was not true at all, but she lacked inclination to say so. She simply did not wish to speak, nor to stir, nor to do anything at all but sit in this darkened room with its smell of death.

  She must have been there for a long while. Days, perhaps. There was water in the jar, which she drank. Sometimes there was food. She ate a little bread, a bit of cheese. It was not death she wanted, not to slay herself with hunger and thirst. She simply wanted quiet.

  The quiet shattered in a blast of light and sound. The room was full of people, great loud-voiced men in dusty armor.

  It was only Bertrand, and Arslan behind him, and the whole half-dozen of Helena’s Turks. They looked as if they had come riding headlong to battle.

 
Richildis regarded them with neither fear nor surprise. They all stared back. She was mildly startled to see that the Turks were not boys any longer, nor particularly young men. There was grey in Ayyub’s beard, now that he had finally grown one. Some of them had married, she had heard, one even to a Frankish woman who had buried a husband and gone looking for another.

  How swiftly time flew.

  Then she was flying herself: swept up in Bertrand’s arms and carried out into the hurtful, hateful light. She flinched away from it; felt him flinch in return, and heard the mutter of his curse. It seemed the house was in disorder and its master gone from it. She had not known that Michael Bryennius was away. Perhaps he had gone back to Byzantium to escape his sorrows.

  Bertrand carried her to the baths and set her in the hands of the servants. They were looking flustered, as well they might. They might have been weeping.

  With hot water and vigorous scrubbing, some of her wits began to come back. She fought that. She did not want to feel again, to care what happened to her. Better to be not-there, to be buried in quiet. Then was no pain, no sorrow. Only emptiness.

  But her kin were not so merciful. Bertrand had come, it seemed, straight from some campaign or other, and Arslan with him; and they had fetched Helena, and she was putting the house in order. Richildis was not at all astonished to find the king himself in the hall in which she entertained guests, helping Arslan and a handful of the servants to prepare the hall for dinner. Of the dead she saw no sign, nor of her husband.

  She went looking for them, came on Helena instead, imposing a reign of gentle terror on the kitchen servants. Helena broke off her dressing down of the sullen and scowling cook, to turn to Richildis with such an expression that Richildis wanted to recoil. Instead she said, “I can’t find my husband. Is he dead?”