“All the Bryennioi of that branch are… unusual,” the empress said. It was difficult to tell whether she approved or disapproved. She approved, Richildis rather thought, but it would be less than imperial to betray it.
Her stolidity stood in great contrast to the French queen’s liveliness. It was not the hieratic stillness that Byzantine royalty were said to cultivate in their cradles, but a stony German immobility. It served well enough; it presided over this banquet with monumental graciousness. It even preserved Richildis from an excess of Queen Eleanor’s attention, diverting the French queen to this lady or that, or calling on her to pass judgment on yet another delicacy from the imperial kitchens.
Richildis was glad to be left to herself. The gossip that ebbed and flowed about her was little that concerned her, either of France or of this court and palace. She missed her husband, his warm presence, the amusement that she did not doubt would touch him at the posturings of the various ladies. But women did not dine with men in this empire. In old Rome they had done it, but in the newer Rome they followed an ancient custom of the Greeks. Richildis much preferred the lesser feasts of the Franks, in which she might sit beside her sweet friend, touch hands beneath the table, laugh together over a particularly delicious scandal.
And maybe he was missing her, or maybe he was not. This was his own country, his own custom. He would find nothing strange in it. It must have been far stranger for him to share a table with ladies as well as lords, and his lady at his side in what, in Byzantium, would be great impropriety.
She was almost glad to be reft out of her thoughts just then by the French queen with another question, another eager seeking after legends – for such was her vision of Outremer. She did not want to hear of ordinary things. She wanted the exotic, the strange: lepers on the dungheaps as well as princes in their palaces. Richildis sighed and gave her something of what she asked. And why not, after all? Soon enough she would see the truth of it.
Forty-Seven
Queen Eleanor and her ladies had a conceit, a grand fancy. It had carried them through the wilds of Europe and to the edge of Asia. They meant to carry it even into Outremer.
“Amazons!” cried Eleanor as Richildis presented herself at the palace of Philopatium. It had taken some doing to find the queen: she was not in any of the places in which one might expect to come on a royal lady. But in the field behind the palace, beyond the ranks of tents in which resided the armies of the French, a company rode in armor bright-burnished in the sun.
They were all women. They bore helms at saddlebows but rode here bareheaded but for silver fillets, hair plaited down their backs or streaming free. They all carried bows and wore swords forged to woman’s measure. They were a very pretty company; and Richildis saw at last how Eleanor had come by the scarlet that dyed her cheeks.
“We revive the Amazons of old,” the queen said after she had brought her white mare to a rearing halt in front of Richildis and dismounted in a flurry of skirts. She was armored to the waist, clad in woman’s fashion below, but Richildis had caught a glimpse of braies and very sensible boots; and the skirts were divided for riding. It would be very comfortable, if more than mildly scandalous.
That thought made her say before she thought about it, “What, no bared breasts?”
Eleanor laughed. She had a laugh as hearty as a man’s, yet with a lilt in it that was unmistakably a woman’s. “Can you imagine what my husband would say to that? Poor milk-and-water boy, he’d die of the shock.”
“Yes, and isn’t he the one to come to bed in a robe like a monk’s. He crosses himself as he begins, and says a Paternoster for each thrust. And when he’s done – and that’s not long at all, please God – he runs to his confessor to confess the sin.” The lady who had spoken seemed no more brazen than the others, nor did the queen frown at her, even when she tossed back her head and laughed.
“Poor boy,” said Eleanor. “The priests got at him early. By now there’s no hope for him.”
“Indeed,” said another of her ladies, “if you can’t cure him, who in the world can?”
“Ah well,” Eleanor said. “What’s to do? He’s the monks’ child, and there’s no curing him of it. But they left him enough sense to spare me the worst of his piety.”
“Aye: and he knows better than to forbid this pagan pastime.” The Amazon who had spoken whooped and spun her mount about and galloped off down the field, with the others in hot pursuit.
But Eleanor remained with Richildis, with a guard or two for company, and a lady of quieter mien than the rest. “I’ll have you fitted for armor,” the queen said. “You will ride with us, yes? I’m told you know how to bend a bow.”
“I learned it when I was a child,” Richildis said somewhat reluctantly, “but I never learned to wear armor.”
“Why, no more than we,” said Eleanor. “It’s not so hard. It galls abominably at first, of course, but after a while you grow used to it.”
“I don’t think—” Richildis began.
“I do think,” said Eleanor. “Come, we’ll talk to the armorer. There’s a coat or two already made, that might fit you.”
As always with queens, one did well to do as one was told; to let oneself be swept up and carried off to whatever fate her majesty decreed.
Richildis could hardly fault herself. She had wanted to return to Jerusalem, and had thought to attach herself to the French. But not quite so firmly, nor ever so close to the counsels of its princes. Folly, of course: how could she not be singled out, with such names and titles as she brought with her?
So she paid for her own failure to be ordinary. Armor, yet, and a flight of fancy, as if a company of ladies from France could claim to be descended from the Amazons. They all rode well. Some could even shoot a bow and find the vicinity of the target. What earthly use they would be in a battle, she could not imagine.
* * *
Michael Bryennius heard her tale with ill-bridled amusement. “And to think: I was bored half to tears, listening to his pious majesty rehearse a whole spate of sermons. You had the more interesting part by far.”
“Too interesting for my blood,” Richildis said darkly. “What is that story you told me, of Alexander and the Amazons?”
“Which, the true or the false?”
“The true,” she snapped, “and well you know it.”
“There,” he said, though he knew better than to stroke her. “There now. You are in a taking. What, do you mean the young ladies whom Alexander met on one of his marches, who rode out in grand array, even to the bared breast, and delighted his soldiers immeasurably? But they were only young maidens of that country, no better with weapons than young maidens are wont to be, got up in pretty armor and with gilded bows, to pique the conqueror’s fancy.”
“Exactly,” said Richildis, only a little mollified. “And what did he do with them? You can wager he didn’t take them on as soldiers of his army.”
“No, it’s said he gave them pretty presents and sent them home again, and was gracious to their kinsmen who had conceived the game.”
“I don’t think,” Richildis said, “that the Saracen will be as charitable. So many fair-haired ladies would fetch a grand price in the slave-market of Damascus.”
“I suspect they’re not such fools as that,” her husband said. “From what I hear, Eleanor is far more intelligent than his majesty the king. She sees some advantage in this revel of hers, or I’ll wager she’d not do it.”
“Of course she sees an advantage. She sees how shocked everyone is. She loves to be shocking. I think it’s in the blood. All that line are given to excess.”
“You sound as sour as King Louis,” Michael Bryennius said, which was not wise at all. She pitched him out of bed and swept up the bedclothes and stalked off to the couch in the antechamber.
* * *
She was sure that he would follow her. Yet he did not. It was cold in the outer room, and lonely, and the couch was hard. She tossed on it, cursing her own temper and his refus
al to see what idiots these Frenchwomen were. Playing at war, as if war were a game and not grim bloodstained truth.
Pride would not let her crawl back into bed with him, though she tossed and cursed the night away. He must have laughed himself to sleep. None of her moods and frets had ever shaken him in the least.
“Damn him,” she muttered in the dark.
* * *
He was awake when she came back, his arms warm, welcoming her with all her prickly temper. “I don’t deserve you,” she said.
“No one deserves such a fate,” he agreed.
She kicked his shins.
He yelped. “Ai! Your feet are cold.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Yours,” he said. He kissed her from brow to chin, warm and warming kisses.
But she was not ready to be kissed into submission. “I do not want to wear armor,” she said. “I’ll feel a perfect idiot.”
“You’ll look a perfect delight,” he said. “And consider: it’s practical. It will protect you well on the march, and ward you from arrows.”
“That can’t be what she’s thinking of,” Richildis said.
“Why not? She’s more sensible than she looks, I think. She loves the grand gesture – but she makes certain that it serves her purpose. Why do you think she insists on good Frankish mail and not the rather less… complete warding of the old Amazons?”
“I don’t think they wore much of anything,” muttered Richildis. She considered kicking him again, but her feet were warm now, nigh as warm as the rest of her. “Why do you have to be so damnably sensible?”
“One of us should be,” he said. “Usually it’s you. It’s rather pleasant, for once, that it’s not.”
“If you tell me I’m beautiful when I’m angry, it won’t be your shin I kick.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said in all apparent sincerity.
* * *
Richildis suffered the armor because it was practical. Certainly it was not comfortable, and getting into and out of it was an exercise in sweaty frustration. She did not think that she looked grand in it, though some of the ladies preened themselves as if they had worn the finest silks. They ornamented their mail with ribbons, fastened plumes to their helmets, wound garlands about their horses’ necks.
One thing Richildis did that set a fashion. She had made a surcoat such as knights wore in Outremer, marked on the shoulder with the red cross of Crusade. The white silk was thin yet strong, and kept off the worst of the sun. It looked well enough, too, and discouraged excesses of ornament.
While the ladies fretted over fashion, the emperor was preoccupied with ridding himself both swiftly and cleanly of his guests. The Germans had been a monstrous inconvenience. The French, hard on their heels, were better behaved but in the end no more welcome. They were armed, they were many, they were ready for war. Byzantium had no desire to loose that war on itself.
Manuel himself escorted the French king and his queen and all their following across the Golden Horn and into Chalcedon, and thence on the road into Asia. His well-wishings seemed honest enough. He was a great lover of the West, was the Emperor Manuel. But not so close; not in his own city, pillaging his people.
* * *
Richildis rode with the queen, and her husband with the king. They had bidden farewell to House Bryennius, but it was the adieu of the Franks and not the forever farewell of the Romans. They would return. It was expected. Nor was Richildis altogether dismayed by the expectation.
Most of the family had remained in the house as they rode away, but Constantine had followed them to the harbor and the ferry. The French were on the other side, had crossed the head of the Golden Horn the day before and camped for the night in Asia. Richildis and her husband would meet them on the road past Galata.
They had a little while before the ferry was ready to cross. They spent it in speaking of small things, the doings of this cousin or that, and whether Michael had remembered to pack the court robe that his mother had insisted on. He would not go before kings, she had said, in his usual drab old rags.
“And no,” he said before Constantine could ask, “I did not pack the parade armor, too. That would need a whole pack-mule to itself. The plain mail will have to do, and Father’s drab old sword.”
Since Father’s drab old sword had been forged in India and was as fine a blade as anyone knew of, they grinned at that. Michael slapped the hilt, which was plain enough, to be sure. Just then the ferryman bellowed the call to board. He left unsaid whatever new sally had occurred to him; pulled his brother into an embrace instead, and his brother drew Richildis with them in a threefold farewell.
“God go with you,” Constantine said to her, “and protect you from harm.”
“God keep you,” she said, “until we meet again.”
“Let that be soon,” he said.
“Come to Mount Ghazal,” said Richildis, “when the Crusade is over. We’ll hold a festival in your name.”
“If God wills,” he said, “I’ll come to you.”
Michael Bryennius touched her arm. The ferry was slipping from the quay. All their baggage was on it, their horses, their sumpter mules. She gasped and ran, with a last glance back at her husband’s brother. As she would expect of him, he was laughing.
That was a fine thing to take away with her: the mirth of a Bryennius. And another Bryennius at her side, breathless with running, holding her up as she held him, as the boat made its ponderous way across the Golden Horn.
Forty-Eight
Manuel had hoped that once the French were across the Horn, they would go swiftly on their way. But Louis could be indolent at inconvenient moments, as Eleanor herself attested. The camp that he had made at Chalcedon showed signs of remaining indefinitely.
That was not at all to the emperor’s liking – nor Richildis’ either, and certainly not Michael Bryennius’. There was little that a pair of mere nobles could do. An emperor however could wield the power of his position. A pilgrim from Flanders provided him with a pretext: in rage over some slight difference in price between the bread that he had bought and the bread that his friend had found in another baker’s stall, he gathered a mob and nigh tore the camp apart.
The king hanged him out of hand, but the emperor had closed down the markets, stopped the ships and the caravans that supplied the army, and made clear through his messengers that he had no intention of indulging these barbarians further.
An army could not march on an empty stomach. In that much Manuel perhaps had outsmarted himself; but he played a greater game than the simple one of dislodging unwelcome guests. King Louis called a council before it could call itself. The emperor’s messenger attended; and another in worn and dusty traveling clothes, who carried himself with care, as one who is in pain.
They were no more or less unruly than any other council Richildis could remember. In a rare unity of opinion, they condemned the fool who by inciting a riot had attracted the emperor’s attention.
“And we are most sorry for it,” the king said, not seeming to reflect that apology was hardly a kingly thing. “Such amends as we can make—”
“Yes,” the Byzantine envoy said, “there will be amends. His most serene majesty will consent to feed your army in return for a small concession.”
“And that is?” the king inquired, again not as wisely as he might have done.
“That you and your lords agree to restore certain lands that were taken from us, and to pay homage to the Emperor of the Romans for such of those lands as you intend to dwell in.”
A snarl rose from among the barons. It was as wild a sound as the howl of a wolf, and purely dangerous.
And the king said, “If we do that, he will feed us again?”
“If you will also agree to depart within the week, and make your way toward Nicaea.”
“We did mean to do that,” said the king.
The snarl had gone on while they spoke. In the moment of silence before the envoy’s reply, if reply
there was to be, it burst into a roar.
Louis could no more stop it than if it had been a wave of the sea. Never at all would the lords and barons of France grovel before the emperor of the Byzantines – no, not though they starved.
When the worst of it had run its course, a clear cold voice cut through it. “Do please think, my lords – if you can.”
Eleanor had neither risen nor raised her voice, and yet they both saw and heard her. The exuberance of the Queen of the Amazons was gone. Here was royalty bare, too lofty for contempt.
“My lords,” she said. “We may starve, and proudly, but we are sworn to Crusade. Jerusalem awaits us. Must we perish here for our folly and for the Greek emperor’s pride?”
“He humiliates us!” they cried.
“One may pay homage,” she said, “without giving one’s soul.”
“But—” they said: milder now, baffled, beginning to think like men and not like beasts.
“You are sworn to the King of France,” she said, “and to the Crusade that was preached by the Pope of Rome and by the great Bernard. Such oaths would supersede any that you swear here. I think you should swear them, asking God’s forgiveness; for without them there is no Crusade.”
“There is a German Crusade,” someone said.
“Possibly not,” said Eleanor. She inclined her head to the man who hitherto had sat silent, slumped in weariness or in the weakness of a wound. He drew himself up with a visible effort of will.
“My lords,” he said. His accent was that of Lorraine, with a hint of German heaviness. “Majesties. I come from Dorylaeum, where once was a great victory for another Crusade. But for this one…” He sighed. He seemed too exhausted for tears, or even for despair. “Disaster, messires. Defeat. The whole army of the Turks came on us there as we were nigh to dead from the rigors of the march. They slaughtered us, my lords. Our army is gone. The remnants were to make their way as they could, back to Nicaea. I was sent as they began, to bring word to you. For all that I know of them since, the Turks destroyed them all.”
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