She groomed Richard’s beard and hair, stretching the long curls across the pillow; glinting clumps of hair clogged the comb, and she pulled them off into a little ball. She would have to burn that, lest someone plotting against him find it. Rouquin sat on his heels, watching, his hands together. He looked tired; she knew he had spent most of the day fighting.
She got a basin and a ewer of water, poured the water into the basin, and cast around for some cloth. There was nothing obvious to hand and she stood up, pulled up her skirt, and ripped off the front of her underskirt. She wrung this big sheet of cloth out in the basin of water and began to wash Richard’s face.
The King sighed, although he did not waken, and turned his face into the cool cloth. She washed his throat and behind his ears. She folded the blanket down to bathe his chest, and he murmured again at the touch. She said, “Will you roll him over?”
Rouquin got up and moved closer; he slipped his arms under Richard and effortlessly turned him. “The fever’s gone down,” he said, and sat back on his heels again.
“I think so. A little.” She would have to go look at the stars. Maybe the planets had shifted. She was very bad at the whole matter of stars. She began to wash Richard’s back. She glanced at the big man, sitting there beside him on his heels. Rouquin was watching Richard, his face slack; he looked a little lost.
The King had a lot of cousins, even some others here in Acre. Only Rouquin was so faithful, so useful. She wanted to reach across the space between them, somehow, and honor him for this. She said, “You grew up with them, didn’t you?”
His head bobbed. “In Poitiers. Winchester.” His head swayed, as if he were avoiding some memory, his gaze turning elsewhere. “Eleanor took me, when my mother died. I got there just after they lost William, their first. Henry was only a baby, so she paid a lot of attention to me for a while. But then she started setting them like a clutch.”
He shut his mouth tight, as if he had said too much. She said, “How old were you then?” She knew his mother had been Eleanor’s sister, and he looked much like her.
“Three, I think.”
Under her hands the King’s muscles were kinked and cramped, and as she came upon each knot she rubbed it with her fingers until it went away. His right arm was a great stack of muscle, his left arm much thinner. The groove down his back was two fingers deep, straight and clean.
She said, “Her children came late to her, and she loves them all.” She wanted to keep this bridge of words open between them. Also she was grateful that Eleanor’s passion for her children had spread somehow to her, Edythe.
He said, “She is a fierce, noble woman, my aunt. It’s for good reason they call her the Eagle.”
“God bless her. God be with her.”
He said nothing. She worked her way from Richard’s shoulders to the small of his back. Her arms began to ache, and she could hardly keep her eyes open. She pulled the blanket up over him and tucked it around him, and the effort left her exhausted.
“Go to sleep,” Rouquin told her. “I’ll keep watch.”
“There’s nowhere,” she said, but she sank down beside the pallet and put her head on it, down by Richard’s feet, and was asleep at once.
Rouquin rubbed his hands together. He felt weak and stupid, unable to do anything, while Richard whom he loved lay suffering before him. Richard whimpered in his sleep, and Rouquin jumped as if at a shout. He drew the blanket higher to the King’s chin. At that, the woman at the foot of the bed stirred and turned her head and was asleep again.
She knew what to do; he had watched her hands tending the sick King, her actions swift without haste, precise, assured. Like a man fighting. Except she could not see the enemy, nor slay it with a sword, so what she did was harder. Her touch alone seemed to heal.
She had thrown off her coif at some point, her dark hair loose across the bed. She had an interesting face: big eyes with heavy prominent lids, a wide mouth, a long thin nose. Not pretty. He liked how she looked. He remembered how she had pulled up her skirt right in front of him, heedless how much long leg she showed him, to get a useful piece of cloth. This somehow stirred him more than an intentional flirt.
What he had told her came back to his mind, and that led him into the thickets around it, the wilderness of his childhood. Older cousin of the princes. The splendid courts, the great feast days. Always, he sat below them, he went last, the mere cousin.
But they were always together, and as he was the oldest, when they were boys he beat them at everything. As they grew up he kept it that way. He could ride wilder horses, pull stronger bows, jump onto the table in full mail when Henry and Richard were still struggling to stand upright under the weight. So when they were young, he was their king. He defended Richard and Geoffrey from Henry, and Henry from Richard and Geoffrey. He picked on all of them, save John, who was much younger and in a monastery half the time anyway.
The other boys matched themselves against him. “I’m as good as Rouq’ at that.” As they grew it seemed natural for them to take sides, Rouquin and Richard against Henry and Geoffrey, in wrestling and swimming and running and horse racing, playing the lute, hawking and tilting and hunting. Rouquin was the first one knighted, by the King’s own hand. Unlike the others, he would not go to tournaments; there was real fighting doing the King’s work. Anyway, he had no money.
But the old King, in all their view, constrained them. He got along with none of his sons, still less with Rouquin. There was the bad Becket incident, young Henry’s debts, old Henry taking Richard’s betrothed to bed, a lot of threatening, cajoling, spiteful talk. Eleanor, who had come to hate the old man, talked the boys into rising against him, a sputtering, grievous rebellion that ended in failure and humiliation for them all and in Eleanor’s imprisonment.
The Eagle. “Mine to make,” she had told him once, just before she was captured, “mine to break.” He had known then that Henry’s ambitions were small compared to hers.
Even from a dismal tower the great Queen had her reach; when after a nasty screaming match the old King exiled Rouquin to wander, she arranged to have him wander to Johanna in Palermo.
A year later the old King let him come home and forgave him with a kiss. But in the family there was no peace. Eleanor was still locked up. The King let none of them anywhere near her. John had wheedled his way into the old man’s favor and demanded land of his own, although old Henry had already parceled it all out to the others. So John wanted a little of everybody else’s. Then young Henry died, the young King, the eldest, the crowned heir, and suddenly also Geoffrey, in a tilting accident in Paris. Then the old man himself was dead, and Richard was King, and master of everything.
Rouquin had nothing. A place at the table, the King’s favor, nothing of his own.
He had made a company of mercenaries, because Henry and then Richard always needed soldiers and the pay was very good. He liked to fight anyway. Richard promised him a castle someday, an heiress, a title, but there was always another call to arms. This time, the Crusade.
“We have to do this,” Richard had said. “Don’t you see? We have to do this, or we aren’t men.”
Now he sat in a tent outside Acre, always hungry, always nervy, and Richard was trembling again. Rouquin laid one hand on him, but he could do nothing. He said, “Edythe.”
She turned her head but did not waken. He liked saying her name, this old-fashioned, Saxon name, not fitting her somehow. He reached out and touched her. “Edythe.”
Now she did wake up, with a start, and her gaze went at once to Richard. She crept up beside him, put her hands on him, and then suddenly pulled back the blankets and laid the whole side of her head to his chest. Rouquin muttered an oath. After a moment she sat up and folded the cover around Richard again.
She looked straight at Rouquin for the first time. “Has this kind of thing happened before?”
Rouquin said, “He was sick for a while in Italy. He threw up then, and shivered.”
She made an unf
eminine grunt in her chest. She got up, raked her fingers through her hair and coiled it up in a knot at the nape of her neck, and went off out of the tent. In a few moments she was back, and she lay down on the floor by the bed and slept there. More than anything else that reassured him, that she went back to sleep. He settled down to wait out the night.
In the morning, swarms of men had gathered outside the tent to attend on the King. Rumors swept through the camp: He was dead, he was raving, devils had issued from his throat. Johanna went out several times and ordered the crowd away, but they would not go. She was constantly on the edge of crying, but she dared not leak a single drop. Everybody was watching her. Whenever they saw her, men shouted questions at her.
The King was well enough, she said, but sleeping. Now they should all go. They did not leave. Guy de Lusignan pushed through the crowd—or his men came first, pushing, to make way for him—and she had to let him in. Her page pulled the tent flap firmly closed on the gawkers outside.
Guy went toward the bed, where Richard lay, his eyes closed and his mouth open. Rouquin was gone and Edythe was sleeping in Johanna’s bed; Lilia sat by the King’s shoulder. Guy crossed himself.
“Is it the fever?”
Johanna pressed her palms together. She had a confused feeling this was her fault, that talking to the King of France behind Richard’s back had sickened her brother, like the hole in the thatch that let in devils. “His doctor believes he will be well soon.” This was not exactly what Edythe had said. Guy, she remembered, had seen his wife and children die of a camp fever.
“He will be well,” she said, again. Her voice rang harsh in her own ears. “He is getting well.”
“This is not a good time for him to be sick.” Guy faced her. “Conrad is coming.”
“The other King,” Johanna said, and wished she had put it more gracefully. She half-turned away from him. She did not want to heed anything outside this tent, but she had to. “Aren’t the Crusaders supposed to hold a council? To determine the true King of Jerusalem?”
“The Leper King put that in his will, when he felt himself dying. He knew his only male heir probably would not live long. He decreed that the Kings of England and France and the Emperor of the Germans should meet to choose the rightful King of Jerusalem.” Guy said this as if he had said it often before. Clearly it was large in his mind. In this game his only counter was Richard. His gaze went to Richard again. “Will he live?”
Her gorge rose. Her brother’s life, reduced to a pawn in this man’s little scheme to win a meaningless crown. Richard favored him, and she knew why: because he was Poitevin, and Conrad was from Montferrat. That seemed tenuous to her. But she knew her place in this, and she acted it. She put her hand on his arm.
“We shall support you,” she said, quietly. “You need not fear for that.”
The taut, handsome face before her altered slightly, easier. The damned man thought of nothing but himself. “When will he—get well?”
“Soon, I hope.”
“Does it still hold—the oath to take Acre by the next full moon?”
“While Richard lives, his word lives,” she said. “And Richard surely lives.”
Another page had appeared at the tent flap; Johanna’s hand still lay on Guy’s arm, and she nudged him that way. “Keep faith, my lord.” She drew her hand back and crossed herself.
The coming of King Conrad was only another problem in the sea of problems. She saw King Guy out and let Humphrey de Toron in.
He came with his usual flock of attendants, whom with a look she drove away to the far corner of the tent, among some boxes. Their lord went at once to Richard’s bedside and stood there and said some Latin under his breath and crossed himself. Johanna waited for him under the peak of the tent. He came back to her, his hands out.
“My dear lady Johanna, God keep him. God keep us all, these days. I am so sorry.”
“He will be well soon,” Johanna said. She took his long, ringed hands. “God willing.”
“God heed our cause and his.” He glanced back toward Richard, then faced her again, his smile fading. “The King’s sickness is unfortunately the news everywhere, including the Saracen camp. The truce is thrown down; there will be no council with Saladin, at least until he is well.” He squeezed her hands. “He’s strong. God is with him.”
“He has a good doctor,” she said. “We are all praying for him. I was told Conrad is coming.”
“Yes, likely tomorrow.” His eyes were half-closed, no longer guileless. He let her hands go. “Guy told you? Yes, of course. He needs Richard.”
She nodded. “Do many of those here favor Conrad over Guy?”
“Well, they wouldn’t be here, if . . .” He tilted his face slightly, watching her sideways. “Guy has his enemies. He has a . . . way of making enemies. In the end, you know, it all depends on Richard. And the shape of the moon.”
Once again, her brother’s oath to take Acre in a single month made everything harder. She said, her hands cold, “He will be better soon.”
He smiled at her, abruptly looking young and guileless. “I am Your Highness’s servant.” He bowed. His gaze turned toward Richard and she saw the smooth mask slip a little and some fear wrinkle his face, some other longing, and then he was leaving.
So Philip Augustus was sick also. Johanna flexed her fingers together, feeling better. It could not then be her fault, if both of the Kings were sick. She did not bother to plumb the depths of this reasoning, and she did not think much about what else Humphrey had said. She went to sit by her brother and let Lilia go for a while.
Richard’s fever raged all day, and then fell; in the late afternoon they managed to feed him a little bread. He was never fully conscious. Sometimes he spoke gibberish or reached for things no one saw but him. Johanna prayed and got Lilia to pray, and Edythe kept him covered and gave him wine when she could. Please, she thought. Please. She was afraid to think he was getting better. People came and went with news. King Philip was very sick, plucked bald and spitting teeth, but unlikely to die. There was some general evil in the camp, which had carried off many people in the first day, among them Baldwin of Alsace, the Count of Flanders. Even some of the Germans, who avoided all of the others, were burning with fever.
Still, after its first killing assault, it was losing its power. Everybody had some notion about this: the influence of Saturn, corrupt air, a Saracen curse. Fevers had swept regularly through the camp for two years and nobody had ever had any answer, except that they all passed by.
During the long, grim day Johanna heard everyone and did what she could, which was not much. Edythe admired her calm. Everywhere things looked bad. There was no bread left. The wine was almost gone. The meat was spoiled. At noon on the third day they heard that Rouquin was fighting by the wall, trying to raise the belfry against it; at midafternoon, that he and his men had swarmed over, but no one could get to their support before the defenders closed. Rouquin barely escaped, last of the Crusaders to reach safe ground.
They ate the meager supper of beans and onions, and Johanna and Lilia went to sleep again on the far side of the tent. Edythe sat by the King’s pallet; she dozed as she had before, her head on the foot of it.
The trembling of the pallet woke her. He was shaking all over, his knees drawn up, his teeth clattering together. His eyes were open. She put her hand on his head and his eyes turned toward her, lucid and full of pain. She wrapped him with the blankets, tucking them in tight around him, looped a corner over his head, and rubbed him through the blankets to warm him. Her arms began to ache, but after a while his shuddering lessened under her hands. She rubbed his muscles flat and smooth, all up and down his back, until he was quiet and the spasm passed.
Suddenly he said, “I have to piss.”
She went for a pot and brought it to the side of the bed; he was trying to push himself up, but his arms buckled. She put one arm around his waist and heaved his upper half against her. He swung his legs off the bed, one on either side o
f the pot, and leaning on her, he reached down and sent his stream into the pot. He sighed at the release.
He said, “It’s a bad thing . . . when a man can’t even stand up to piss.” It took all his breath to say it.
She laughed; she thought it was true, and also that the act of will to say it was a good sign. When he was done, she dabbed at the end of his penis with a cloth she then tossed aside. He was falling out of her grip, lying down again, his arms under his head. She swung his legs up onto the bed and wrapped him in the blankets.
She took the pot to the front flap of the tent, where there was light from a torch outside. She sniffed at the urine and looked at it in the light; it was very dark but there was a lot of it, and it smelled clean and sharp. She tossed it out the door, startling the two guards drowsing on either side.
She closed the flap and went back to the pallet. The King was awake. He lay on his stomach, his head turned to one side, and his eyes gleamed at her. When she sat down on the edge of the pallet, he said, in a whispery voice, “Where’s Rouquin?”
“I hope he’s sleeping. King Conrad is coming.”
“Ooh, is he. Well, things were too simple.” His body was cool, almost without fever. She began to rub his arms and shoulders, to get his humors moving. His skin was scaly.
“Could you keep down some broth?”
He dragged in a deep breath. “I could keep down half a cow. Who’s been here?” His voice was stronger.
“Johanna has never left.” She gestured toward the far side of the tent, where the other women slept on. “She told me that King Guy came, while I was asleep.” She hoped Berengaria was at least praying for him.
“Good for Guy. He’s not a coward, at least.”
She got up and went across the tent to the brazier, where a pot of bones had been cooking all night; she drew off some of the juice into a cup. The cup was hot, and she wrapped a corner of her skirt around her hand to hold it. When she came back, he tried to sit up. She helped him and, gasping at the heat, he gulped down the broth, which seemed to make him stronger.
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