Edythe said, “Maybe. . .”
Johanna gave her a sly look. “You have some thought in mind?” Her voice was bland.
“No, my lady,” she said, humbly.
“Good,” said Johanna. “ Leave this to me. Now help me with this table.”
Edythe wondered why it mattered to her that Johanna had this plot afoot, and that Acre was suspended on her whim. Guy de Lusignan had gone back to Acre after the Crusade fell apart. Now Johanna was giving a safe conduct into his city to his worst enemy. Let him sink or rise, most likely sink, from what Edythe had seen of him. Richard would suffer, but ho heigh. They had no loyalty to her, and so she had none for them. It was all one to her, and one was nothing.
But it was not nothing. She tried to grind away the pebble beneath the blanket, but still it rubbed her. She longed to see Rouquin again, who would never leave Richard. Richard had kept his own kind of faith with her, protecting her secret. She hated him less now that he had failed. With the rage against him in the streets, she could not rage against him in her heart. And they had fought so hard for Acre. And she thought of the old beggar by the fountain there, and Berengaria’s garden.
Johanna had a safe conduct drawn up, allowing the bearer and an escort into Acre, and covered with seals and stamps and colored ink and a big ribbon. She concealed this in a letter to Isabella. She did not hide it especially well, but she knew it did not really need to escape notice, up there.
She wrote also to Guy of Lusignan, who was back to ruling Acre now, that he should be ready to arrest anyone who used it.
This seemed the perfect trap to her, which Conrad himself had devised, and Conrad himself would set off. She kept it out of Edythe’s sight. She knew Edythe was Richard’s creature, and Johanna wanted to punish Conrad herself, by her own guile. Then she would let him know, the lying snake, that she had done it. Edythe might even admire this. Richard certainly would. Pleased, she sent her letters off.
“They have come back from Jerusalem,” Berengaria said.
She was sewing on an altar cloth. She had excellent skill at this, and in the light of the candles the angel’s wing she was composing in gold thread looked as smooth as honey. Her own sleeve was worn, and soiled at the edge; her ladies took poor care of her.
“They never reached Jerusalem,” Edythe told her. She was holding the cloth on her knees, to steady it for the Queen’s needle. They were sitting in her chamber, where around them the other women went on chattering in their own tongue. Berengaria alone of all the Navarrese had bothered to learn French. “The Crusade failed.”
“Well, then,” Berengaria said, watching her fingers with the needle and thread. “ Will we then go back to Acre?”
Edythe said, “ I don’t know, my lady.”
Berengaria gave her a quick look. “You want Acre too?” She stopped sewing and faced Edythe.
“ I want what you want, of course.”
Still watching Edythe, the little Queen smoothed the gold thread with her thumb. She said, “ I want to go back to Acre.”
Edythe was thinking they might never be able to go back to Acre. Conrad, whatever he was, was far too clever for Guy, and if he seized the great city in the north he would not let the Crusaders in again, as he had not let them into Tyre. She considered what Berengaria had just said.
“You could write the King and ask him.”
“ I could send a messenger,” Berengaria said. “ I cannot read or write, my lady, alas. You know this.” She made no move to do anything, but stared at Edythe, as if she could put her thoughts into Edythe’s mind.
Edythe said, “ I could write it for you.”
Berengaria smiled at her. She had said the right thing. Berengaria said, “You write him. You tell him better.” She nodded. “Help me, I help you.”
“My Lady, I—”
Berengaria shuffled her hands in front of her. “Just do. Bring paper and pens.” And Edythe wrote exactly what the Queen wished to say to her husband, and beneath it, wrote, Go to Acre, quickly.
A letter came back, a few lines of script: He would let them go back to Acre in the spring. Ricardus R. No news, nothing personal. Nothing to Edythe. Berengaria said, “ Will I ever be truly Queen of the English?”
“My lady, only God could tell you that. It has been a strange marriage, that I can say. But, you know, I have seen few marriages that are not strange.” She was thinking of Eleanor and Henry. “You could make a garden here.”
“ Here, there, everywhere,” Berengaria said, in a sharp voice. This was so unlike her that Edythe gawked at her. The little Queen threw down the letter. “ I could as well have heard from my father. I am tired of waiting.” She waved at Edythe to go. “ I think I will have a headache later. If you would bring me a drink.”
“My lady,” Edythe said.
Some time went by. They heard nothing from Ascalon, nothing from Acre. Edythe made the women potions containing mostly honey and wine and spice. She put the tincture of artemisia in ajar with a firm stopper. One day when she went up to the palace, she came on Johanna in a flying rage, storming up and down the hall.
“Have you heard this? Tell her! Tell her!”
By the throne Rouquin stood, taking a cup from a page. He said, “Not likely.” He wore a long loose shirt and hose, no armor, but his sword on his belt, his gloves thrust under the buckle. He gave Edythe a brief, hot look. She remembered the last time she had seen him, and her heart jumped. She tore her gaze away from him.
Johanna’s face was magnificent with anger. She spun toward Edythe, her arms flying out. Her coif had come loose, and she pulled at it, and released a tumble of her curly red-gold hair across the yellow silk shoulders of her gown.
“They have offered me up to the Saracens.”
“ What?” Edythe said.
Johanna stalked across the room. Along the divans the other women murmured and bowed as she walked anywhere near them and giggled when she had passed. A table fell over. A cup rolled. As she neared Edythe, she cried, “They have offered me to marry one of the Saracens!”
“Safadin is not so bad,” Rouquin said, smiling. He drank the wine.
“No, when he has a scimitar and you have a sword.” She stamped her foot. “ I will not marry an unbelieving pagan hound.”
Edythe drew back with the other women, trying not to smile. Rouquin was clearly not conveying this as a serious offer; she thought Richard himself would have to come before her to make this even a matter of question. Johanna in full fury was like a small storm, gusting up and down the hall, things flying in her wake. Probably enjoying herself.
Now she blew past Rouquin and flung herself down on the throne, where she was wont to sit when Richard was not there. She glared at her cousin. “My brother is being amusing. He cannot mean this.”
Rouquin shrugged. “ I don’t know if Safadin is any more inclined to it than you are.” His eyes moved, and Edythe caught his glance, but then he turned back to Johanna. He said, “The King wants you to swear you will not deal anymore with Isabella.”
“Oh,” Johanna said. She looked suddenly smaller, the air gone out of her. “ Is that why you were in Acre?” She waved a hand at him. “ Tell me everything that’s going on there. And Berengaria will want to know about her garden.”
“Guy still rules,” Rouquin said. “ I don’t know about the garden. Let me go, Jo, I have to leave soon.”
“Go,” she said. “ Tell Richard I will have a Christian husband, or none.”
Edythe went out onto the terrace, into the dark; she thought, He would marry his sister to a Saracen, but I am not fit to be allowed into Jerusalem.
She knew Richard did not mean the marriage offer seriously. It was his way, she thought, of punishing Johanna for meddling with Isabella. He seemed to have fallen into a playful way of dealing with Saladin when they weren’t fighting, these mock negotiations, like boys dueling with sticks. The moon was rising, a little less than full, clouds drifting over its face like islands in the air.
&nbs
p; Someone was coming, and she turned. Rouquin walked up beside her and leaned on the rail.
“The King has a message for you, as well.”
“Oh,” she said. “ What, is he marrying me off, too?” And put her hand over her mouth, before she said too much.
He laughed. “No. He said, ‘ Tell her she’s a good little monster.’”
She lowered her hand and looked out to sea. “He thinks I’m his familiar, like a toad.”
“They call you the King’s witch. You saved Acre,” he said. “Guy could not have kept Conrad out. He wasn’t even ready when the safe conduct came, much less when he saw how many men Conrad had brought, and ships, too. If I and my company had not been there, Conrad would have Acre now.”
She said, “ I’m glad he doesn’t.” Berengaria would have lost her garden, then, she thought. She turned to him, wanting to hold him there, to keep his attention. “How can he do that? Attack Christians on Crusade, when he thinks he’s King of Jerusalem?”
“ I think his Jerusalem is different from ours,” Rouquin said.
She had not seen him since the night before they marched on the Holy City. She said, “How close did you get, last month?”
One of his shoulders lifted and fell. “A few days’ hard riding. But they would not continue. The other lords. They were threatening to leave on their own—Hugh of Burgundy and the French, the Flemings, all the local men, even Guy—just ride away from Richard, run back here to the coast where it’s safe.”
She said, “Oh, God.”
“It was harder every step. The Saracens burned all the villages in the way, all the fields; there was no forage, hardly any graze for the horses. They shot down horses from ambush. We were running out of food. They had poisoned the wells. We’d have to fight all the way back, too, and we had nothing to eat but dying horses. Saladin’s army may be gone, but they hate us out there.”
She said nothing. Her lips tasted salt; the wind sang off the edge of the roof behind her.
“ I don’t blame them,” he said. “They’re great fighters and Jerusalem is theirs, as much as ours. If I were one of them I’d be fighting us too.”
She gave him a startled look. “That must be heresy. Are you going to confess that?”
“Oh, come,” he said, scornful. “ I was born halfway out the church door. Angevins don’t confess, it would take too long.”
She laughed. “ What does Richard say?”
“ Richard wants that city. But I’m beginning to think even he . . . There’s this marriage offer.”
She said, “He can’t mean that. As you said. He is just having a little joke with Saladin.” Still, she thought, he is looking for other ways out of this. Her heart clenched; she thought of what the beggar had said, and Yeshua ben Yafo.
“Anyway,” Rouquin said, “I came back.”
She remembered what she had told him, before they left, and leaned toward him, and he bent and their mouths met.
“ I have to go soon,” he said, a while later, his arms around her. “ When my men are all loaded on the ships. We have to get back to Ascalon; we’re building a fortress, and trying to take another place, down the coast toward Egypt.” He kissed her cheek and her nose and her mouth again.
“How will you know when the ship is ready?”
“They’ll ring the church bell.”
“ Why can’t we come down to Ascalon? Jaffa is boring.”
“ It’s just a pile of rocks, right now. We have some hovels raised. Johanna won’t endure that. You stay here.” He kissed her again.
She leaned her head on his shoulder. Better he leave. Better they keep this to a few kisses. But even as she thought that, she was lifting her head and he was turning his. He licked her lips and she parted them and he slid his tongue over hers. She shut her eyes. He was groping through her gown; he had too knowing a way with women’s clothing. She laid her hand on his chest. She wanted to touch his body, to feel his skin against hers, to taste him, mouth him, to study him and know him. The church bell began to ring.
He drew his hand out. “Next time,” he said, and kissed her mouth again and went away. She shrank back to the wall, thinking this could go nowhere good. But she would not turn back; she wanted where it went, whatever happened afterward.
Saladin had gone to Damascus. Humphrey said the Sultan was having family trouble, maybe an uprising, that the Muslim priests were preaching against him and the Caliph himself had rebuked him for losing Acre and Jaffa to the Christians. Humphrey had told Richard about the hashishiyyun, the sect that practiced political murder, and now came a report that Saladin had wakened one morning to find two of their knives by his bed.
In the countryside around Ascalon were men who had not stopped fighting just because the Sultan was gone, who fought, simply as a matter of course, whoever tried to rule them. Richard was hammering these, attacking their villages and running them down piecemeal, driving them to submit or leave. Every day he rode out with enough men to move fast and punch hard and went looking for enemies.
He said, “ We found nobody today, not even any sign.”
He sounded gloomy about that. Rouquin thought the local small game was no solace for Jerusalem. They were in the hall in Ascalon, small and grim and cold in spite of the smoky braziers. “My sister is well?” the King said, abruptly, turning toward Rouquin.
“Like an ox. She has Edythe make her all kinds of potions and elixirs and infusions.”
“Can she make her an infusion that will keep her out of trouble?” Richard slumped in his chair, his feet thrust forward.
Rouquin laughed. He said, “ What we need is to plan another attack on Jerusalem.”
Richard’s head went back, his eyes shut. “There is no army anymore. Who would go? You and I and Mercadier?”
“That would be a start. A smaller army. Better supplies. If we could stash supplies on the way, then getting back wouldn’t be such a problem. We know better how to fight them now, too.”
Richard lay sprawled on the throne. “I think this is, as usual, more complicated than you make it. Although if I had eight thousand soldiers like you, I could take heaven. That was good work, in Acre.”
Rouquin would not let him turn off the subject of Jerusalem. “The winter is ending. We could try an early campaign. I could do some scouting. Start planning the supplies.”
Richard’s fingers tapped on the arm of the throne. “ It’s tempting. I just came back and I’m already itching to get into the saddle again.”
Rouquin said, “Then scout with me.” This was how it felt to lose; you wanted to go win again as soon as you could, to erase the humiliation. The loss rode you like a bear on a stag until you got it down under you and ate its heart. Richard would come around. Jerusalem was still out there; they could still reach it. He went down to the half-ruined city, where his men were quartered in an old mosque.
Rouquin would not stop talking about Jerusalem, and Richard began considering a new attack. But first he sent for Humphrey de Toron, who had come down from Acre with Rouquin. He would not stay long, rude and harsh as the place was; Richard thought it would take years to rebuild Ascalon, and the harbor had a problem with sand. Yet the oldest parts of the city were beautiful, even broken and ruined: a dense pattern of tiled arches and courtyards, fountains, grillwork, balconies, part Arab, part Greek, part something else indefinable. He and Humphrey talked of this for a while, the young man standing before him several moments before Richard remembered to tell him to sit.
He liked talking to Humphrey, who was clever and observant. When this was over, finally over, he wanted to do a lot more to Humphrey. In the meantime, there were these conversations. “You were in Acre,” he said. “ For this plot of Conrad’s.”
“Yes. Your cousin is a master of these things; he put a lot of men in the right places, and Conrad abruptly changed his mind.”
“Rouq’ is good on the ground. What he cannot see, sometimes . . .” Richard sat forward, his arms on his knees. “Jerusalem is much
farther than it seems. There is more between us and it than mere country. More trouble.”
The young man said, “Yes, my lord. I believe that.”
“ It’s so far from the coast. The supply problem is the backbreaker.” Richard rubbed his hands together. “The old Kings held it for a hundred years. Baldwin, my great-grandfather Fulk, Amalric, the Leper. Yet now I cannot see how they did it.”
Humphrey said, “They never did hold it all. What they did control were the right places—where you must be master, to keep Jerusalem. Nablus, Kerak, Ramleh, the fords of the Jordan. They had a truce with Egypt. And they weren’t up against Saladin.”
Richard sat staring at the floor. He was remembering that campfire two months ago, halfway to Jerusalem, and Guy telling him,“ We can’t go on.” Even Guy, who owed him everything, telling him, “ I will start back with the others in the morning.”
He said, stubbornly, “These lords now are a pack of greyhounds, who are happiest watching the game from far off.” Humphrey, of course, the prettiest of them.
Humphrey said, “ What they wanted, you have given them—Acre, the coast, Jaffa. Cyprus.”
Richard said, “ What I want—”
He stopped. The taste of turning back still sour. Even the great victory at Arsuf was a rock in his gut now. He had to take Jerusalem to get this over with, but he could not shake the suspicion that he had let his reach go past his grasp. He stood up.
“ What I want is the Holy City. What I came for.”
“My lord, you can take it, perhaps, and even hold it while you are there.” The young man rose with him. “But you will go back to the west, and then we will lose it all again. Because none of us is like you.” In Humphrey’s slim young face, his dark eyes widened, solemn. “As Safadin said, you are the Alexander of the Franks.” Then suddenly Humphrey leaned toward him and kissed him.
Richard caught hold of his wrist. But he took the kiss, held it deep and hard, all the pent-up desire in him like a scorching brand. In his hand the slender wrist turned, and Richard let go, and Humphrey wound his arms around his neck, his lips greedy, their bodies pressed together. Richard thrust himself against him. The creak of a door warned him that someone was coming. He drew back, and Humphrey stepped away, his face red.
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