“Stories,” Richildis said.
It had slipped out of her, without her thinking. And they were staring at her, waiting for her to go on. “She comes from Aquitaine,” Richildis said. “In that country, the nobles are most fanciful. They sing – her grandfather was a troubadour. They tell stories. They live for their lovely lies.”
“They sound like courtiers,” Constantine said.
“But do think,” said Michael Bryennius. “A nation that trades in stories. What could we tell them, all of us? Have we any dreams to sell?”
“That’s base trade,” Demetrios said.
“And we only do that through our mercantile gentlemen,” said Nikos with little evidence of dismay. “Pity we couldn’t pack them off on a caravan for a thousand nights and a night – the emperor would love us perpetually.”
“They’ll be off to Outremer soon enough,” said Michael Bryennius. “Then they’ll be a plague on that country instead of ours.”
“We hold title to a portion of Outremer,” Richildis reminded him.
Her voice sounded small and cold in her own ears. It seemed that it did in his as well; he glanced at her in surprise. “Yes,” he said. “So we do. It’s safe, surely. Those we left to look after it—”
“Have you seen what the Germans have done at Philopatium?” Richildis demanded of him.
She was no less startled by her vehemence than he was. It had come flooding, no warning at all: memory of Mount Ghazal and the hard labor that she had done there to make of it a place both prosperous and pleasant. Grief touched her still at the thought of it, but lightly. The hard blow that had struck her down, that had sent her in flight half across Asia, was faded and all but gone.
Michael was watching her steadily. His brothers chattered of something else, out of tact perhaps, or lack of interest or understanding. “Do you want to go back?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said. Simply, and without hesitation.
“This very moment?”
“No,” said Richildis. And that too she was sure of. “We needn’t leap on a ship within the hour. We needn’t even look for the next one that sails, or a caravan or a riding of pilgrims.”
“Or a Crusade?”
She shuddered a little. “I don’t want to travel with the Germans.”
“Nor I,” he said with evident relief. “Maybe when the French come? They’ll be here inside of a month – sooner, if they’re as close as people say.”
“I’ll think about it,” Richildis said.
And she would. Instinct tore her in two, between yearning to see her own countrymen again, to hear the langue d’oc and the langue d’oeil spoken by tongues that had been bred in Provence and in Anjou; and wanting to run away even farther than she had run before, clear into the east of Ch’in. Outremer was home, more so than any caravan, yet she dreaded the thought of it. Kin, friends, memories of pain as well as joy…
She drew herself up. She was strong again, had been for a long while. She could endure the homecoming. To be home: that was a dream she had had for a while, and not of La Forêt either, but of her castle in the hills outside Jerusalem.
She was healed, maybe, or nearly so. Outremer would complete the healing or undo it utterly. She could not know which until she went there, until she knew again the heat of that sun, breathed in the scents of dust and dung, felt in her bones the thrum of holiness that underlay every living and unliving thing in that of all lands in the world. Nowhere else, not even Rome, dwelt so strong in the heart, or called so clearly once one had let oneself hear.
Forty-Six
Emperor Manuel had set the Germans well on their way and scoured the palace at Philopatium inside and out before the French were let in. Their advance guard had been notoriously revolted by the savage Germans, had shunned them and professed great relief when they were sent away into Asia. It was distressing for the French, Richildis had heard, to be forever in the wake of such pillage and plunder, to be guarded like prisoners lest they do the same, and forced to pay vast prices for provisions because the Germans had taken most of what was to be had.
“And to think,” Richildis said to her husband, “that three hundred years ago they were all one empire, East Franks and West Franks – but the East Franks gave way to the wild Saxons, and there’s all the trouble in a word.”
“And you are a West Frank?” he asked from amid the cushions of the bed. He was nigh buried in them, in an orgy of comfort.
She sat crosslegged in a corner, too wide awake to sink down into the warmth of him. “I am an Angevin,” she said, “and that is a Frank, yes. There’s no Saxon in me. I’m a barbarian of an older blood.”
“A charming barbarian,” he said, “and distractingly beautiful. Your French are almost civilized, then – and not at all happy to be reckoned together with the bloody Germans.”
“Would you be? If you were a Frank?”
“Not in the least,” he said. “They wrought dreadful havoc by all accounts, no better in their manners than wild beasts, and no more grateful to be netted and hauled away. And to think: the empress is one of them. She’s mortified, I hear, and has let her kinsman the German king know it.”
“I could almost wish I had been there to hear her.”
He peered from amid the cushions, bright dark eyes and lifted brow. “Do I hear a suggestion of wistfulness? Are you wanting to be presented at court?”
“Could I be?”
“You haven’t asked.”
“So I could,” she said. She was a little angry, though for no good or proper reason. She had not even been in the City for a fortnight, and she had shunned courts and kings through all her wanderings through the east. He could hardly be faulted for expecting that she would be the same here. Indeed she should. But…
“One hears such things,” she said. “The birds that sing, and the lions roaring, and the throne that rises and falls as the emperor ordains.”
“Well then,” he said, struggling out of his cushions. “You shall have your moment in the court. It will take a while to arrange. If you would rather go home…”
“I’ll stay,” she said a little sharply. “But wait, let all the French come here, the king and his queen, and not only the Lorrainers and the vanguard. I’d like to see their faces when they stand in front of the emperor.”
“You never ask for the easy things,” he said, but he did not sound unduly cast down. “I’ll do it if I can. If not – will you accept a more ordinary day in court?”
“If you can’t give me the stars and the planets,” she said with sudden lightness, “I’ll accept the moon instead.”
“Generous lady,” said Michael Bryennius. “Practical, too. I’m glad I married you. Another man might not have appreciated you properly. Such virtues as you have… they’re not in the common way.”
“No; they’re often reckoned vices.”
He grinned. “Come here,” he said.
She did not always obey him, vows or no vows; but at the moment she was inclined to be indulgent. She let herself fall into his arms, laughing as cushions billowed around them. Laughter was his gift to her as always, and love that followed fast upon it, in a cloud of feathers from a burst cushion.
* * *
The French king and the queen and their great lords marched in from the west on a splendid day of autumn. They were not admitted at once to the city, not after the Germans’ depredations; rather they were diverted and stopped at Philopatium, where amid the cleared rubble of their predecessors’ camp they set up their own tents. The high ones of course had the palace, a roof over their heads and elegant pavements for their feet, with servants to wait on them as they desired.
If the vanguard had been closely guarded, the army itself was nigh held prisoner, and not to its liking, either. Byzantium did not trust any Westerner in arms. But the king and his lords were let into the city, conducted to the palace and presented to the emperor.
The emperor had decided that it was neither safe nor particularly politic to r
eceive the King of France in his golden hall of audience with its magical and mechanical splendors. Instead he received them in a great open court under the vault of heaven.
Richildis was there: Michael Bryennius had kept his promise as best he could. She was choosing not to mourn the birds that sang, or the golden lions. She had a place among the ladies who were permitted to attend, in a court robe that had seen a dozen reigns at least and was grimly determined to see a dozen more. She could see very well, since she was taller than the women in front of her. The emperor came late and last, but while she waited there was ample to see. All of the court who had been invited were there, processionals of princes coming each to his place with his retinue, lords and ladies protecting their fragile skin under silken canopies, chamberlains massing and fluttering and herding flocks of courtiers this way and that.
She had seen gold in plenty – had she not seen the Dome of the Rock, and Hagia Sophia with its great dome and its lesser domes and its mosaics like none other in the world? But gold here was as plentiful as sand, as if it might be strewn underfoot and trampled on, and no one would notice. Every robe was silk, every neck and ear and brow seemed adorned with pearls, lucent in the sunlight. She in her antique court robe from the chests of House Bryennius, the pearl drops in her ears and the pendant about her neck and the coronet atop her crown of braids, was distinct from the rest in her height and fairness, but there were a few other tall fair ladies and lords, Macedonians perhaps, or even French or Germans. She did not think she was stared at for that, but because she was a stranger, in robes that the ladies about her must recognize.
It seemed that here one did not converse as one did in court in France or in Outremer. One maintained a hieratic silence, in boredom that over time might become monstrous, or be transformed into a sacrament.
She saw her husband across the broad space, standing among the lords as she stood among the ladies. He looked as bland as the others, one dark bearded face among many. He did not glance at her. One did not do that, either, she supposed.
To her vast relief, just before she was ready to erupt in a fit like a small and thwarted child, a ripple ran through the assembly. The court was filled as far as she could see with silken-gowned and coroneted nobility. At the far end the gate had begun to open, the great gate that, she had been told, admitted noble embassies and petitioners to the emperor. So high was it and so wide that for a moment she did not see the people dwarfed within it.
Then she saw the chamberlains in their silks, with their beardless eunuch faces. She saw the French in their finery, such as it was to eyes accustomed to eastern splendors: little silk, much wool and fur and cloth of gold. She remembered vividly the discomfort of such garb in this hotter, fiercer part of the world. She could not tell if they were as miserable as she had been when she arrived in Acre: from this distance she saw little but a blur of sunburnt faces. Even the queen had fallen victim to the sun, an unlovely scarlet that clashed with the crimson of her robe. Her hair however was a ripple of gold, flowing down her back and nigh to her heels.
That of course Richildis could not see at first; it came clear as the procession advanced. They were not required to perform the nine prostrations that were expected in the hall of the throne – reason enough for Manuel to have chosen this greeting instead, without its burden of ritual. They could approach in dignity, upright and without groveling, as would well suit them in the pride of their position.
As they advanced, the emperor came out at last. He walked on his own feet in the crimson boots of his rank. Guards surrounded him: great tall Varangians with their famous axes. They were taller than he, but he was no small man, and no dark one either: fair hair beneath the crown with its pendant pearls, fair beard grown as full as it might be, which to be sure was not very. The Frankish custom of shaving the beard might have served him well. He managed nonetheless to look both regal and handsome, not at all as Richildis had imagined an emperor of the Byzantines.
France’s anointed king, having completed his procession through the court, stood in front of the Emperor of the Romans. Louis was another of the fair Franks, almost white-fair, with eyes so blue that even from amid the court Richildis had caught the brightness of them. He was tall, slender, fair of face – everything, one might think, that a king should be.
And yet there was something lacking in him. He was a little too fair, a little too pale – a milk-and-water creature, graceful without honest strength. His voice in speech was light, musical, without particular depth. He spoke words through the interpreter, bland and politic words that meant little and offended no one.
He was very pious, Richildis had heard, and certainly he showed it; alone among the princes of France, he wore no finery, no handsome robe nor golden adornments, but the plain worn robe of a pilgrim. He looked all the more unprepossessing beside the golden splendor of his queen. Her face under the crown was lively rather than beautiful, long and rather narrow, with wide eyes of a color indeterminate at Richildis’ distance: grey perhaps, or green. Where the sun had not burned her unbecomingly she had a very fair skin, whiter than the king’s. Her figure was tall, graceful, strong as a steelblade: a strength that the king so signally lacked.
The king and the emperor were guided by chamberlains to two tall chairs under a canopy of purple and gold. There they sat with the interpreters and, as far as Richildis knew, continued their blankly amiable converse.
The queen meanwhile had been brought face to face with the empress. Irene, she called herself now; but in Germany in her childhood she had been named Bertha. For all the elegance of her dress and manners, she was still a big, florid, broad-beamed German woman – bigger and broader than the slender Eleanor, with strength but no grace. They did not, Richildis thought, like each other on sight. Rather the opposite in fact.
But queens were queens, and where they must be politic, so they would be. Empress Irene bore Queen Eleanor to her own palace within the walls of this great palace of the Boukoleon, to a colonnaded hall in sight of the sea, where she had laid a feast for the French queen and all their respective ladies.
Richildis was one of them by her husband’s contriving, through the right of House Bryennius to set a wife – even a Frankish wife married in distant Jerusalem and brought here on a whim – in the empress’ august presence. She hoped that her manners were adequate to the task. She did not expect that she would be noticed particularly, or given any greater favor than that she be present and share in the banquet.
She was startled therefore as she made to seat herself near the foot of the table, to be approached by a soft-voiced eunuch and bidden in very decent Frankish to follow him. He led her to the table’s head, to a place within reach of queen and empress. She hoped that she did not look as foolishly disconcerted as she felt. For the empress smiled at her and said as if they ever had been introduced at all, “Ah! Lady Richildis.” And to the Queen of France: “Lady Richildis is the wife of one of our nobles, a lady of Anjou in your own country, and a Baroness of the High Court of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Yes, if you will believe it: baroness in her own right and by grant of the Queen of Jerusalem, without recourse to her husband or to any man.”
In the full light of Queen Eleanor’s attention, one forgot the long face, the long nose, the severe lines of the mouth. One saw only the eyes, wide, grey-green, and perfectly focused. They made her beautiful.
“How wonderful,” she said to Richildis. “That you should rule as you please – and your husband never objects?”
“My husband finds it rather amusing,” Richildis said, “majesty.” She took the chair that was offered, with a faint sigh and an inner shrug. It was not as if she was a stranger to royalty.
These were queens as Melisende was, secure in their strength. But in Eleanor there was an edge, an almost frenetic gaiety, as if something in her was stretched too tight. She seized on Richildis like a child on a new toy. And such a toy: a baroness of Jerusalem, a bulwark of the Crusade, a warrior against the Saracen.
&nb
sp; She said it just so in her musical accent, so that Richildis remembered that her father’s father had been a troubadour. It was in the blood.
“In truth,” Richildis told her, “we live much as we would in France. We have our castles, our holdings, our duties to king and court.”
“And yet,” said Eleanor, “you live, it’s said, in luxury that we can hardly dream of, eating off golden plates, clothing yourselves in silk. The wealth of the East is yours, and you make joyously free of it.”
“You do dream well, majesty,” Richildis said.
“One becomes accustomed,” Eleanor said. “France would seem squalid to you now.”
“France would be beautiful,” Richildis said as composedly as she could. She did not want Eleanor’s words to be the truth, though she had heard them before; though she had seen how her eyes had changed, how the noble pilgrims from France seemed drab and ill-washed. Even these in their Byzantine finery: she saw how they scratched, if discreetly, and marked a certain sharpness under the perfumes of the East.
She could not be so lost to her own country as that. She had not changed so much.
Queen Eleanor had gone on as if oblivious to the quality of Richildis’ silence. “You must come with us, of course. We have guides, and of course the emperor is generous” – this with a glance at the empress – “but a lady of our own nation, wedded to a Byzantine, in service to the Queen of Jerusalem: how perfect that is! We can hardly let you go.”
“I had,” Richildis said, “intended to go home in a little while.”
“Then you shall go with us,” Eleanor said. She clapped her hands. “Oh, that will be splendid! You can teach us the songs of Outremer, and speak to us in Arabic. You do speak Arabic?”
“A little,” said Richildis.
“There, you see?” said Eleanor, turning to the empress with an air of great delight. “She is wonderful – just as you said. Is her husband as great a marvel, too?”
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