Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  Guards stood along the wall, figures in armor who were – he started – not men at all, but women. Of course he knew of the queen’s Amazons; he had seen them often enough, and heard them too, on the march from Jerusalem. But these were not ladies of rank. Each was as tall as a man, robust and broad of shoulder, and looked as if she could wield the weapons that she wore.

  Amazons indeed, and splendidly scornful of his astonishment. “I have,” he said to them, “a message for the queen’s majesty from the King of Jerusalem.”

  They did not answer him. One turned however and slipped through a gap in the wall, too quickly for him to see anything within. He swallowed a sigh.

  It was some while before the guard returned. She looked slightly damp about the edges. “Her majesty will speak with you,” the woman said. “Wait, and she will come.”

  Arslan bowed slightly. “I thank you,” he said.

  Perhaps he imagined her sniff of scorn. She returned to her post, and to her task of ignoring him.

  There was shade at least in the pavilion, and water in a jar, cool and sweet, which no one prevented him from sipping. It might be a deadly thing to do, to taste water left so signally unattended; and if that was so, then so be it. He would die for his beloved. She would come at last and find him lying there, and maybe she would spare a moment to mourn him: so young, so fair, so nobly dead on her behalf.

  He snorted. Oh, indeed; and she would return his love, too, and abandon her husband and her queenship to run away with him. A man could dream awake, and dream folly. Better he see the truth: that he was nothing to this queen among women but a pleasant face and a few moments’ distraction.

  * * *

  When at last she emerged from behind the wall of silk, he was greatly disappointed. She had on a gown such as any lady of rank might wear in the heat of summer, light fabric of Mosul draped loose and cool. Her hair under the drift of veil was damp, to be sure, and curling wonderfully, barely restrained by a golden fillet. She was decorous in spite of it, pausing as he knelt to her, offering her hand to kiss.

  She had not done that when he came to her before. Maybe she did not see him well in the shade of the pavilion after the bright glare of sunlight – perhaps she took him for someone else.

  He kissed her hand as she expected him to do, and hoped that she did not mark how he trembled. Her perfume was dizzying, her skin wonderfully soft and milky fair. She freckled, he could not help but notice. She must conceal it with paint and artifice when she was not come fresh from the waters of the lake.

  It was charming, as a blemish will be when it belongs to one’s beloved. He let go her hand and drew back with his head still bowed.

  As he drew breath to begin Baldwin’s message, her voice said above his head, “Lion. Arslan.”

  He choked, gasped, swallowed. His face was on fire. He did not dare lift it. “Lady,” he said with what voice he could manage.

  He had not known that one could hear a smile. “Are you always so shy, young lion?”

  “No, lady,” he said.

  “Ah,” said Eleanor. There was a world of understanding in the sound.

  If the earth had opened then and swallowed him, Arslan would have been content. “Lady,” he said as best he could, “his majesty the King of Jerusalem bids you attend him at dinner in his camp.”

  “And does he bid the King of France as well?”

  “All the high ones, lady,” Arslan said.

  “Ah,” said Eleanor again, this time as if in boredom. “Then I must go. One must be politic, after all.”

  Arslan held his tongue.

  She sighed audibly. “It’s such a nuisance, this having to be politic. I’ll be glad to see the end of it.”

  And her marriage to the king, too, no doubt. Everyone had heard the scandal.

  “Arslan!” she cried suddenly.

  He looked up startled, into her laughing face. “There, see?” she said. “You can look at me. Am I hideous? Is that why you keep your eyes so demurely lowered? Are your boots so much more engrossing than a mere queen?”

  “Lady,” Arslan demanded with a flash of temper that perhaps took her aback, “is your life so dull that you must enliven it by making sport of kings’ messengers? Your pardon, I pray you, but much as I would like to be your plaything, I have a king to serve, and he is waiting for me.”

  Eleanor’s laughter had died, but it gleamed still in her eyes. “Yes, do go wait on your king. Who is not, I think, as interesting a young man as you.”

  “I am crashingly dull,” Arslan said. “He is a king.”

  “Why then,” said Eleanor, “so is my husband a king, and he bores me to tears. Kings are so seldom witty. Is it the weight of the crown, do you think, that crushes the intelligence out of them?”

  “Lady, you have worn a crown; I never have.”

  She laughed aloud. “Oh, you are wonderful! How can I let you go, unless you come back again? Will you come back? Shall I command your king to give you to me for at least a little while?”

  “I think,” said Arslan, “that you lack sufficient employment for your mind. Lady.” He bowed low as was fitting for a squire to a queen, and left her standing there. She was still laughing. He did not look back to see if the laughter turned to rage, or if it went on undismayed.

  Fifty-Nine

  Arslan was not sorry that he had said what he had said, but he quaked a little after, for fear of consequences. At dinner he waited on his king, he could not avoid it, but he stayed well out of the French queen’s way. She, for her part, seemed as oblivious to him as she had ever been: not even ignoring him, simply unaware of his existence. That must be an art of queens, to fail to see what one did not wish to see.

  No punishment descended on him. No messenger came to Baldwin to demand satisfaction for his squire’s insolence. Eleanor had had her sport. Arslan was as nothing to her again.

  He was not bitter about it. She was a queen, and born a duchess; and even if she forsook all that, she would still be Eleanor. He did rather pity poor King Louis. That monkish man, no more than middling blessed with intelligence, must be sorely baffled by his splendid terror of a wife.

  * * *

  “Can you imagine being married to her?” Arslan asked Baldwin as he got the king ready for bed. Baldwin had been kept up late even after the King of France and the German emperor had gone wearily off to their tents, by the queen’s tireless exuberance. One more cup of wine, one more dance, one more song – Eleanor was in extraordinary spirits. At length Baldwin had had to take his own leave, abandoning her to night roisterers and her own guards and hangers-on, for dawn came early, and with the dawn they would call the muster; and if all were present and accounted for, by midday they would begin the march to Damascus.

  Baldwin shuddered slightly at Arslan’s question. “She’s splendid. Too splendid for the likes of us. She’d eat a man alive.”

  “She doesn’t seem to have eaten Louis,” Arslan said.

  “What’s there to eat?” Baldwin pointed out. “Dry bones and holy relics, no savor in him at all. And isn’t she trying to escape that marriage?”

  “Louis won’t let her go.”

  “Won’t he? I’ll wager she wears him out, too, even in his shelter of priests and prayer. Just think of her with sons – she’d be like the serpent, devouring her own young.”

  “You don’t like her at all,” Arslan said in surprise. “I thought you found her enchanting.”

  “So did my mother,” Baldwin said with a flash of teeth. “And didn’t it make her livid? There’s a she-wolf of her own kind and inclination, too utterly like her for words. No wonder they detest each other.”

  “You don’t hate your mother,” Arslan said.

  “No,” Baldwin said a little too quickly. “No, of course I don’t. I don’t hate the French queen either. But I don’t like or trust her.”

  “Who does trust a queen?”

  “Or a king?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “No,” Baldwin
said, “but you were thinking it.” He shook his head. “Why did we begin this? Don’t tell me you really are imagining being married to her.”

  “God’s feet, no,” said Arslan, and truthfully too. “I’m not a king or a king’s heir; and she’ll never take less.”

  “She won’t take me,” Baldwin said.

  “Not even for a plaything?”

  “Not even then.” Baldwin’s mood was light still, but in that, for a moment, he sounded like a king. “I shall find me a lady of this country, one both noble and rich, who knows the land and the people, and who understands that the infidel can be ally as well as enemy.”

  “I don’t think anyone new from the West understands that,” Arslan said. It puzzled him, it always had; but the West was far away. It could not know what they knew who lived and fought here.

  “And tomorrow,” Baldwin said, “we go to destroy an ally.”

  Arslan raised a brow. “Second thoughts?”

  “Too late for that,” said Baldwin. He stopped pacing and lay down at last. “Go to sleep, brother. Tomorrow we do what we have to do to get this monster of an army on the road to Damascus.”

  * * *

  They did, indeed, what they had to do. It was the greatest army that had ever gathered in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the greatest that had ever ridden out of the West against the House of Islam. It would have been unwieldy under but one king; under three kings and a queen and a myriad of princes and barons and knights and sergeants, it bade farewell to the blue waters, the cool airs and the green places, and marched with good speed away from the lake and into the desert.

  They had mustered in the day, but such was the size of the army and the slowness of its gathering that the vanguard set foot on the road as the shadows stretched long toward evening. The rear began its march well after sunset, in the cool of evening that slid into the chill of the desert night.

  It was well done. Even the hardy men of Outremer welcomed the escape from the day’s heat, to travel by night and rest by day as all wise armies did in this fierce country. The men of the West lived the longer for it, and stayed the stronger.

  God was with them, it seemed, and none of the infidels. That the enemy knew of their marching was inevitable; but it might be, it just might be, that no man of Islam knew that they had settled on Damascus. They had put out through scouts and spies that they would move on Aleppo, or perhaps on Edessa.

  No raiders awaited them on the road to Damascus. No armies met them. They advanced in the dark and cool, camped in the fiery heat, sought what rest they could. The ways that they took, they had learned on their last campaign against Damascus, when God’s messenger, the nameless and faceless knight whom Arslan had known as the Turk Mursalah, had guided them safely home. Now they traveled in safety to the ancient city, past Bosra that had defeated them before, unmenaced, unmolested, untormented by thirst or hunger, though the heat was as terrible as it could ever be in this country in the summer.

  And of a morning that was as hot already as iron in the forge, they saw before them the green shimmer and, far away, a white gleam of walls. The name of it ran down the column, borne on the dust of its passing: Damascus. At last, Damascus.

  * * *

  Arslan had kin in this place, cousins of his mother, and yet he had never seen it. He had heard of its riches till he was nigh sick of them; but no one had told him how beautiful it was, its gardens and its orchards, its streams and rivers, its walls, its towers and minarets agleam in the morning.

  They camped there on the desert’s edge, in the shade of trees that bore young green apples and hard knots of stranger fruits, and some even the fragrance of blossoms: oranges, lemons, citron. There was water, cold and sweet, flowing among the trees, and sweetness of grass and flowers.

  Such beauty only made the stronger the will of Crusade to take this for itself. Water in this country was more precious than gold, and fruits of the earth more beautiful than jewels from the mine. Yet there were gold and gems in the city, spices and silks, things wonderful and rare.

  They dreamed of them in their tents that day, while the city woke to find itself faced with an army. In the night they advanced again, seeking deeper wells and greater comfort.

  Here they met at last the flicker of Saracen swords – but weak, startled, and few in number, driven back swiftly into Damascus. They could rest again unmolested, with a victory, however small, to grant them ease. It was an omen, they said to one another. A promise. Damascus would fall to them as easily as its vanguard had done.

  So said the French and the Germans. But Baldwin’s men, his knights and soldiers of Jerusalem, were warier. “Not all of the infidels’ wars are fought on the open plain,” Constable Manasses said in council. “Here in the gardens and among the trees, they’ll send their raiders to cut us down one by one.”

  “My army will go,” said Baldwin, “to hunt infidels – the serpents in the gardens.”

  * * *

  It was a kind of fighting that Arslan had done before, but nearly always in desert places: more hunt than march, with men for quarry. He found himself in a small hunting-party, with his father for commander. It was a comfortable company, one that he had been in before: men of Beausoleil and Mount Ghazal, skilled hunters and trackers, keen to catch the spoor of an enemy.

  They advanced with dizzying swiftness, as if God Himself were guiding them. And perhaps after all He was. Was this not His Crusade?

  All that morning, their second morning outside Damascus, they hunted its hunters. Three times they killed: turbaned infidels armed with knives and bows. Once a Turkish arrow found target, brought down a young man-at-arms of Beausoleil who had been so unwise as to pause to pluck a blossom. He paid high for that one wild rose: an arrow in the throat, and his life reft from him as he drew in the sweetness of the scent.

  As if his death had paid their passage, they found no other hunter, nor met another arrow. They drew in their net toward the place where the army had meant to camp: where, as they scoured the orchards, men less fortunate in duty had been felling trees and raising a wall against any enemy who might come.

  It was a fair stronghold even as Arslan came back to it, a wall nigh completed and a gate set in it, with guards, and sentries pacing, and all the image and likeness of a castle built of stone.

  Those within, he discovered, were French and men of Outremer. The Germans had gone on. Emperor Conrad, weary of the name of coward that he had borne since he returned from Ephesus to Constantinople, had taken his destrier and his knights and men-at-arms and gone to storm the city. Messengers, returning, had him at the river Barada, in a village called Rabwa under the loom of the city’s walls. “Tomorrow,” Conrad said through them, “we take Damascus.”

  Only a fool would reckon a war won before the city was taken, yet that night they kept festival in the camp. They had come farther and swifter than even the most sanguine had hoped. Damascus was taken by surprise. Aleppo, surely, could send no reinforcements so quickly, nor act to save its sister city before the banner of the Cross was raised above the citadel.

  “And from within,” they said, “we can hold against the world.”

  They were already counting out the gold that they would win, reckoning the jewels, dreaming of the women they would capture and subdue. That they themselves could die, that this lesser paradise should be their tomb, none of them paused to think. They were full of God and gold. Death would never touch them.

  * * *

  Queen Eleanor had been wiser than to insist that she and her ladies take part in the fighting. They had suffered themselves to be protected in the army’s heart, guided through the orchards and shut up within the raw new wall. Arslan had not meant to show himself where they were, but he had an errand from Baldwin to the French king, and must pass by their tents both coming and going. As he returned to Baldwin’s own tent, Eleanor appeared outside her pavilion, sitting under a tree adorned half with flowers and half with hard green fruit. She had taken off her armor and put on a silken go
wn; she had bathed too, it seemed, in water from one of the wells, and made herself both fresh and beautiful.

  Soldiers, passing by, looked at her and sighed. She meant that, perhaps: to be a vision of beauty in the midst of war. Or maybe she only wanted to take the air and drink in the scent of orange-blossoms. That she sat in an armed camp within a barely finished wall, that a city full of infidels lay just beyond the trees, seemed to perturb her not at all. She had great courage for a woman – for any human creature. Her maids were white and silent, and one or two looked to have been weeping, but she was as lively as ever.

  “Young lion!” she called as he tried to slink past.

  Briefly he considered failing to hear, but her voice was penetrating. Others beyond him had heard, too: heads raised, eyes turned toward him. With as cheerful a face as he could manage, he paused and bowed. “Majesty?”

  “Come here,” she said.

  He hesitated, but there was no simple escape. He approached her slowly, bowed again, knelt as a squire should in front of a queen.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Are we moving on tomorrow?”

  That might not have been what she had intended to say, but it was certainly harmless. “Some of us are,” he answered. “Some will stay here to hold against escapes from the city.”

  “But you will go on.”

  “I go with my king,” Arslan said, “majesty.”

  “And I no doubt will stay here.” She sighed. “Sometimes, young lion, I purely hate to be a woman.”

  “God willed it,” Arslan said, for lack of anything better to say.

  “God wills everything,” said Eleanor. “What do you think would happen if I took my ladies and rode with the army? Would I be seized and clapped in chains and dragged back to this place?”