Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  “What is the kingdom without its king?” they asked him.

  “My mother rules as queen in Jerusalem,” he said. “My brother sits at her side, as biddable in his youth as I ever was. Our kingdom has no lack of royalty to rule it.”

  “Sire,” said one of those who had urged him to flee, “royalty we may have in plenty, but of you there is only the one.”

  Baldwin paused. Perhaps he had not known before how they loved him, or not understood what it meant. Or perhaps he was simply tired, and needed to grope for the words. “I will not leave you,” he said. “We live together or we die together. I will not ride away and abandon you to the infidel.”

  “Maybe God will give us a miracle,” Arslan said out of nowhere that he could discern; and well out of place, too, a squire in a council of lords and princes. He was rather mercifully ignored.

  * * *

  Those who spoke in favor of storming the city were shouted down, though they were loud enough and numerous enough to make it a battle royal. To attack would be certain death, if the messenger told the truth – and there were those who doubted him, too. But the king chose the counsel of retreat, a slower death and a less certain one, and honorable enough in the circumstances. Arslan saw what it cost him to make that choice, how his lips drew thin and his face went tight, and he looked wan and strangely old. He had done what his mother commanded; through no fault of his own he had failed.

  * * *

  In the grey light of dawn they broke camp. Already the enemy were gathering, streaming out of the city, boiling up from the earth. The air itself seemed turned against them: hot already, searing as the sun climbed over the horizon. None dared count the leagues to Jerusalem. Step by step, pace by hard-fought pace, they would win their way home, or die in the trying.

  No one spoke unless he must. No one sang, not even the priests who might have raised up a hymn to hearten them. They marched in grim silence broken by the shrilling of infidels and the clashing of swords.

  By sundown they were out of sight of Bosra, even as slowly as they had advanced. The enemy granted them a respite in the hour of prayer; they pressed on through it, and camped as it ended, ringed with guards and surrounded by Saracens. Those who could sleep did. Most lay awake, clad in their armor. The dead slept in the wagons – Baldwin had forbidden that they be left behind. “We leave nothing,” he had said, “for any infidel.”

  He walked among them far into the night, perhaps to reassure himself; but in the doing he lightened their hearts, sitting by this campfire or that, sharing a bit of hard bread, a sip of water, a tale or two of other and happier marches. Arslan followed as his guard and shadow, no more able to sleep than he.

  Dawn came suddenly, caught them by surprise. Baldwin was almost preternaturally awake. He bade the priests sing mass. “Make a joyful sound,” he said, “unto the Lord. Let the enemy make of it what he will.”

  It was a doleful enough sound in the event, crying out to God for help, beseeching Him to look with compassion on His children. And when the mass was all said, those shriven who wished to be, and all consecrated to God, they set themselves again on the long road back to Jerusalem.

  Forty-Three

  When Arslan died, he was not going to mind if he was sent to hell. He had lived in it – for eternity it seemed, though it could hardly be a month since he had ridden out of Jerusalem. He had not slept in longer than he could recall. Nights were a hell of fighting and standing still, days a hell of fighting and pressing onward. He sank into a kind of trance as he went on, a dream in which he never let go his sword, never took off his armor.

  The king was commanding that even the wounded and the broken carry drawn blades, to make their numbers seem greater. If the dead could have obeyed, no doubt he would have commanded them, too. They at least could feel no hunger nor thirst, no heat, no weight of mail bearing them down.

  Each day the heat grew worse. Men went mad with it. Arslan kept finding them in the line of the march, fallen or dismounted from their slat-ribbed and staggering horses, struggling to get out of their armor. “It burns,” they cried. “It burns!”

  Arslan helped to bind one of them to his saddle, lashing him with his own spare saddlestraps, while he fought to get down again, to escape from the stifling prison of leather and steel, to run away God knew where. He was beyond reason. They all were – those who persisted in going on quite as much as those who fell down raving.

  As he walked beside Messire Roger’s horse, leading his own, a clamor of shouting at last came clear. “Fire! Fire!”

  This plain was waste, but waste that in another season had been green: thickets of thistles and brambles, dry thorny things that caught in horses’ tails, crept through the rings of mail, pierced leather as if it were fine silk. The enemy had set it all afire.

  Had he thought it hell before? That had been mere purgatory. This was the Devil’s own kingdom. Sun beating down, fire roaring up, smoke parching the throat and catching in the lungs till men died of it – died coughing blood and black bile.

  * * *

  “God has no mercy.” The voice was a croak, the face a blackened devil’s, the eyes clear grey in it, too clear for sanity. Arslan stared blankly at his father. Bertrand stared as blankly back. Behind him rose a wall of flame, the fire of which the smoke had been the outrider, rearing up as if to crash down on the army beneath it.

  “God,” said Bertrand, louder. “What happened to God?”

  One of the smoke-dimmed, soot-stained creatures marching near them was an archbishop. Arslan knew that not because he was any different from any other armored man, but because he clung to the bridle of a mule that in happier times had been white, whose pack showed still a glimmer of gilding. The Archbishop of Nazareth was given in charge the great treasure of the kingdom, the True Cross itself. Even here he would not forsake it.

  He raised his head at the sound of Bertrand’s voice. His eyes were as mad as anyone else’s, but they had lit with a clarity of purpose. Still stumbling beside the stumbling mule, he began to tug at the wrappings of its burden.

  No one tried to stop him. No one helped him, either, nor could Arslan turn aside from where he walked, half leaning on, half dragging his horse.

  The Archbishop freed the True Cross from its swathings. It shone unbearably bright in the smoky air, gold and jewels brilliant, untarnished, like a vision of heaven from the depths of the Pit.

  He raised it up, and his voice with it, preternaturally clear: chanting in Latin a hymn to the Cross.

  And in the moment, the very moment, that it rose erect, just as he began the verse of the Vexilla Regis, the wind shifted. It turned, veered, blew back the way it had come – swept the smoke away from the Franks and into the faces of the infidels.

  A cry went up, a long deep roar of wonder and awe. “A miracle! God loves us. A miracle!”

  “See?” Baldwin said to Bertrand. “God is here. He is with us.”

  Bertrand said nothing. Nor did the Archbishop pause in his chanting. That too was a miracle: that clear voice unroughened by smoke or thirst, rising up to heaven.

  All that day he bore the Cross before them, and no infidel came near him, though they had barely paused in harrying the army. God had not seen fit to drive the enemy away, only the fire that the enemy had set. The war was theirs, He seemed to say. Let them go on fighting it.

  Arslan would never understand God.

  * * *

  They fought on, pace by pace, league by league, back as best they could to the Sea of Galilee. One miracle had sustained them for a while, but it had not deterred the enemy to any great degree. At night and in the mornings when they prayed together, they sang a litany that had been born in the dark years before Charlemagne raised the Frankish kingdom to an empire: From the terror of the infidel, O Lord, deliver us.

  When they had half of the way to go, when it seemed that the whole distance and that much again must lie before them, and only death between, they made camp as they could while the enemy paused to
pray. The evening prayer of Islam had been their salvation before, and would be again, God willing.

  It ended too quickly as always, with the full fall of dark. Many no longer pitched tents, lacked the strength to begin, but Baldwin’s tent went up as always, because the king must be the strongest of them all. They set the Cross before it though it might be a beacon to the enemy, to hearten the army.

  Smoke had not stained it, dust barely dimmed it. It gleamed in the last of the sunset, and glimmered in torchlight thereafter. Men prayed near it, briefly most of them, as if they had wandered past and seen it and yielded to the urge.

  Arslan had no prayers to say. The farther they traveled, the grimmer the fight, the more devout most of the army became. They had had one miracle in the wind that blew the fire away. They stormed heaven incessantly for another, till surely God wearied of the sight and sound of them. Baldwin himself was with the priests at every halt, except when he was walking through the army, comforting the wounded or the weary, spending himself without heed for the cost.

  Where he went, Arslan went, armed and watchful – as he had since they were children together, and as he would do until God sent him another purpose. When Baldwin consented at last to rest, Arslan lay near him, tumbling into a sleep nigh as deep as death.

  He swam out of it, gasping as if he had been drowning. A shape of darkness loomed over him. He surged without thought, battling air and unyielding iron.

  It caught his hands, held him till he stopped struggling. He looked into a face that he knew too well for recognition, that he had not seen in longer than his dimmed brain could remember. “Kutub!”

  “Hush,” said the Turk who, the last Arslan knew, had been safe in Mount Ghazal, looking after it with Lady Richildis’ steward while she wandered through the east. He was wrapped in a dark cloak, a hood over the turban that would have betrayed him as an infidel.

  Arslan lowered his voice, at least somewhat. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hush,” Kutub said again. “Come.”

  Arslan might have argued, but he had been trained from infancy to that singular tone and expression, to shut his mouth and quell his curiosity and follow.

  Kutub led him straight out of the camp, past guards oblivious to two shadows passing in shadow-quiet, to a hollow that opened suddenly and nearly pitched Arslan into it. There were people in it, Turks younger than Kutub but all like enough to him to be kin, and a handful of strapping young men who must be the levy of Mount Ghazal. The last he saw of those, they had been safe in the army, or as safe as anything Frankish could be in this outland of hell.

  They all greeted him with inclinations of the head, wary eyes and a frown here and there but no open protest. Kutub wasted no time: once Arslan was in the midst of them he said, “You levies are here on sufferance – because my cousins refused to do anything without you. You, my young lord, are here because we need your voice in front of the king. Some of those out there are my people, my own tribe and kin, but they will not spare this army because of it, nor will I betray my lady’s people to them or to any other. You should know this, because your death is waiting on this plain. The armies of Islam are sworn to destroy every man of you.”

  “Aren’t they always?” Arslan asked.

  “Not,” said Kutub, “as a rule, with such determination. They’re herding you, you know. Driving you away from water. Slowing your march till you die of thirst.”

  “We’ve found water,” Arslan said. “Sometimes.”

  “You should be finding it at every camp,” Kutub said swiftly. “I see none here – yet I know of a spring not a league distant. Have you guides? For if you do, I’ll wager they’ve betrayed you.”

  Arslan could hardly doubt it. “Is that what you came to do, then? Guide us?”

  “Not I,” said Kutub. “This isn’t my country. I never hunted it in my youth or wandered through it in the madness of my young manhood. But this one may be of use.” He pointed with his chin.

  It was one of the Turks, taller than the rest and fairer of skin, but otherwise as like Kutub as a brother. He grinned at Arslan, baring very good teeth, and said in his own dialect, “Ho, young lion. You look like an imp from the Pit.”

  Arslan had no doubt that he did, what with dust and soot and grim exhaustion. He bared his teeth in return. “Then we are brothers, you and I,” he said.

  The young Turk laughed. “My name is Mursalah,” he said, “and a Frank had somewhat to do with the making of me.”

  Arslan peered at him. “That’s not terribly easy to see.”

  “Oh,” he said, setting hand to breast, “but my heart knows it. Will you hear what yonder so-wise man has in mind?”

  “I doubt I’ll be given a choice,” Arslan said rather dryly. He paused. “Mursalah… Are you an angel or an emissary, then?”

  “Now that,” said Mursalah, “is why I bid you listen to my cousin Kutub. He has a plan, you see. He thinks that he can bring your army home.”

  Arslan would not let hope leap too high in him – not yet, not after so long in hell. Hell, after all, was both absence of God and absence of hope – and any hope offered would inevitably be snatched away.

  “Listen to me,” said Kutub, “and forbear to laugh until I’m done.”

  Arslan listened. In the event he did not laugh, except in wonder, and somewhat in admiration. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s mad, but it would work.”

  “You think so?” Kutub honestly seemed to care that Arslan approved: remarkable in that most insouciant of Turks.

  “I think,” said Arslan, “that we Franks are ripe for a miracle. If miracle you can offer, then let us have it. We’re dead else.”

  “Go, then,” said Kutub, “and let these mooncalves from Mount Ghazal go back too and keep their tongues between their teeth until it’s time to cry the miracle. Then let them be as loud as they please.”

  They all nodded eagerly, as apt for this blessed wickedness as the Turks were. Arslan knew a pang: he was sinning, he could feel it. But if it brought the army back safe to Jerusalem, what matter a stain or two on a soul already black?

  He would have sung if he could, if it would not have betrayed him to the guards. Not for joy, not exactly. For hope; for relief. For the pain, too, of being alive again, of seeing the world clear, of feeling the dry kiss of the wind in his face. It had the faintest whisper of coolness, a wan hint of dawn.

  He looked back once as he left the hollow. It was empty already, or seemed to be, all its shadows gone, no sign of any presence, man or horse. He might have wondered if he dreamed it, if he had not held in his hand the pledge that Kutub had sent: a little Turkish dagger with a verse of the Koran carved on the blade. It was far too dark to read, but he knew the verse from long ago.

  By the winds, the messengers, sent each in its turn,

  By the winds of wrath,

  By those which bring back life to the earth and its fruits,

  By the Winnowers,

  By the Reminders—

  Surely what thou hast been promised shall be brought to pass.

  Surely, he thought as he made himself a shadow to slip through the guarded edges of the camp. Surely man would make a miracle, if God would not.

  Forty-Four

  In the morning as the army broke camp, they looked upon an unwonted thing: a plain empty of enemies. They did not credit it, not even as a miracle. They set themselves in battle order and marched out as they had each morning, armed and ready, even the wounded with their swords beside them.

  As they marched away from the sun with their shadows long before them, in heat as merciless as it had been since they abandoned Bosra, a shadow seemed to grow out of their shadows. The riders in the van saw it first, Templar knights who rode always ahead, to be the first in battle, the first to fight and the first to die.

  Hands leaped to swordhilts. A lance or two lowered. But it was only one man. They could see far enough beyond him, and no one followed. No one lurked in ambush. He rode alone. As he came closer, ridin
g easily, they saw that he wore mail washed with bright silver, and a surcoat of white unmarred. He carried a banner the color of blood, and on it no device.

  He must be a Frank: his armor was Frankish. His horse was as white as foam on the sea, tall as Frankish horses were, but with a look about him of the eastern breed. He shone almost too bright to bear, a dazzle of pure brightness.

  Just before he entered the line of the Templars, he halted. He had no face to see, only the blank and silvered steel of the helm. Yet it seemed that he scanned them all, took in the whole of them. He raised his banner. It swept up, forward.

  They followed him. Any who might have doubted him was silenced by his own silence. He spoke no word. He rode before them, never beside them. He approached no one of them, not even the king.

  For all most of them knew, he could have been leading them to destruction. But the light on him, the gleam of his armor, his horse’s white coat, seemed too splendid to be mortal.

  He led them on ways that they had not gone before, ways that might perhaps be easier; that were, if not empty of enemies, then less desperate than they had been heretofore. That, O miracle, led from water to water, from oasis to oasis; and the Turks who followed seemed powerless to prevent them from drinking their fill.

  In the evening he brought them to a place that was well made for a camp: set up above the plain yet with a well that brought up clear water and plentiful. They could defend this camp from the enemy that circled below, rest high under the stars and be as much at peace as they had been on all this grim retreat.

  When they looked for the guide, to see where he pitched his tent, or what tent he had, they found no sign of him. He had vanished with the evening light.

  * * *

  Arslan waited on the king as always, brought him water – enough even to wash his face and hands, luxury unbounded in this hell of dust and stone. Baldwin had taken a little while to be by himself in quiet, before he went among the army. He accepted the water, drank and bathed himself, sighed and closed his eyes.