Queen of Swords
Page 68
Eighty
It was all done, and well begun. Horses, baggage, men, were gathered and laden on the ship that flew the flag of the Papal Curia above the lions of St. Mark. The harbor of Acre was its frenetic self, humming with trade and with pilgrims, wide-open gate of Outremer.
Arslan had said all but one of his farewells. Baldwin was gathering his army, preparing to take a great prize: the mighty fortress and city of Ascalon, that was in the hands of the infidels of Egypt. If he won it, he would win back all the honor that he had lost in the Crusade.
Arslan would not be there to see it, whether Baldwin won or lost. He would be in France, learning to be lord of La Forêt. In the purse that he carried close to his side lay a letter from Baldwin to his brother Geoffrey of Anjou, bidding that nobleman welcome Baldwin’s dear friend and foster-brother, and grant him lordship over his father’s domain. That was a generous thing, and kingly, as Arslan would have expected of Baldwin.
Arslan had turned his back on regret for wars unfought and companionship forsaken. Here on the quay of Acre, there was only his mother still to face. His father had bidden a final farewell at the gates of Jerusalem, as he rode away with Baldwin to the taking of Ascalon. Richildis was gone away to Byzantium, and Zenobia with her. The mother had been calm enough, but the daughter had wept her heartbreak, clung to Arslan and screamed when her nurses pried her away. He had felt it like the drawing of a knife from a wound. When he saw her again, if he saw her again, she would be a woman grown; she would have forgotten him.
Bertrand and Richildis and Zenobia were gone. But Helena had come to Acre with her son because, she said, she had business there. Arslan knew perfectly well what that business was: to see him off. He had no power to stop her, nor was greatly minded to try.
It was rather comforting to stand beside her while the last of his baggage was carried onto the ship. His horse, his gift from Baldwin, was safe below with one of the younger Turks as a groom. The rest of Arslan’s escort waited by the rail, looking fierce and foreign among the men of Italy and Germany and France. For them it was a grand adventure, better even – they professed – than riding to the king’s war.
“Messire!” a sailor shouted from the rigging. “Messire, the tide’s a-running. Are you going or will you stay?”
That was pure courtly courtesy from a man of the sea. Arslan bowed to it, turned to his mother, could think of no word to say that he had not said a dozen times over.
She relieved him of the necessity. She kissed him on both cheeks and, lightly, on the lips. “Go with God,” she said.
So simple, that; so brief to say. “Stay with God,” said Arslan, and began to turn away. But he whirled back, caught her to him, held her for a long and wordless moment. How small she was, he thought; such a little woman after all, to have such strength of will.
And were they not all as she was, every blessed one of them?
He was smiling as he left her, laughing through tears; running lightly up the plank just before they drew it in without him. The tide was running indeed, and the wind was in the sails.
“A swift tide and a fair wind for France,” said one of his fellow-travelers, a man in the garb of a Templar with a face less dour than was the wont among those soldier-monks. “May God grant us a smooth journey.”
Men nodded, crossing themselves, murmuring approval of the sentiment. Arslan walked a little part from them to a slip of vacant space along the rail, between Kutub and a young man from Mount Ghazal. Neither of them spoke, no more than Arslan. They stood there silent as the ship slipped its mooring and made for harbor’s mouth. So too did Helena stand on the shore, a straight still figure in silk that shimmered in the sun.
When he could no longer see her face, when he could barely distinguish her among the myriad other crowding figures on the quay of Acre, Arslan turned his back on the city and the kingdom, and his face to the blue gleam of the sea. But he was not seeing the dance of waves with their flecks of foam. In his mind’s eye like a painting on a parchment he saw a far green country, a broad roll of river, a black loom of forest; fields and vineyards and a castle on a hill. The castle was tiny, the fields and orchards minuscule to eyes that had seen the splendors of Krak and Banias, the beauties of Antioch, the gardens of Damascus. Yet they were beautiful. They were glorious. They were, God and the voyage willing, his own.
Author’s Note
The story of Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem, is yet another of those wonderfully dramatic historical episodes so beloved of the novelist in quest of a subject. Though not as well known as that of, say, Eleanor of Aquitaine, nonetheless it is quite as remarkable.
I have chosen to invent the characters of Richildis and her family, along with their holdings of La Forêt, Beausoleil, and Mount Ghazal. The rest of the dramatis personae, the settings and incidents, are much as I have written them. Queen Eleanor did indeed ride on Crusade in armor at the head of her troop of “Amazons” – for the whole of her story, see Amy Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Cambridge, Mass., 1978); the book, though not entirely reliable on details of the Crusade, paints a striking picture of the lady and her age.
Queen Melisende and her sisters were quite as boldly independent as I have written them, and their men, in the historical record, are cast rather more in the heroic mold than not. There certainly was a congenital objection on the part of the women of that family to surrendering power once they had taken it; an objection that led in the cases of Alys and Melisende, to the actual display of force on the part of their disgruntled menfolk.
Alys, after she had been defeated for the second time, seems to have yielded to the inevitable. In Melisende’s case however, Helena would have won her wager: within a year of her surrender to Baldwin and her retirement to Nablus, she was again appearing in royal documents as Queen of Jerusalem. Mother and son appear to have had no further conflict, nor did Baldwin challenge her control over the Church in the kingdom. She died in September 1161, leaving her power over the Church to another of her strong-willed female kin, her stepdaughter, Fulk’s daughter Sibylla of Flanders.
Baldwin himself became, in the opinion of most scholars, one of the greatest of the Kings of Jerusalem. He was an excellent general and commander of armies, and a competent administrator. His first campaign as sole king, the long war and siege that ended in the taking of Ascalon on 19 August 1153, was a splendid triumph. No later war or accomplishment quite equaled it.
At the end of 1158 Baldwin married the thirteen-year-old and very lovely Princess Theodora of Byzantium, niece of the Emperor Manuel. Baldwin appears to have loved her and to have been faithful to her, but she bore him no heir of either sex.
Three years later, on 10 February 1162 – only five months after the death of his mother and rival – Baldwin died of a fever. He was thirty-two years old. His queen went on to become a famous scandal, one that needs a book of its own. His brother Amaury, meanwhile, inherited both crown and kingdom. An excellent summary of their history can be found in Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades (Cambridge, England, 1988), volume II: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100–1187.
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First published in the USA in 1997 by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Copyright © Judith Tarr, 1997
The moral right of Judith Tarr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,
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ISBN 9781788636193
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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