The Young Lion

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  The Duke said to Guillaume, ‘Go to the stables and get another horse. Another two. All the grooms are inside the tavern trying to keep warm.’

  ‘My brother, who appears so calm and elegant, is the best horse thief north of wherever you come from,’ Henry said to Xena.

  ‘I had a cousin who stole horses,’ she replied. ‘He, too, was quiet and polite.’

  Why does that make her eyes fill with tears, he wondered.

  Guillaume returned a few minutes later. He and Henry carried the wooden box down from their room.

  ‘Have a piss and empty your bowels if you can,’ Henry told Xena, ‘because we’re not stopping. You’ll ride the mare.’

  On the outskirts of the city they pulled up for a few minutes. Guillaume opened the wooden box and tossed his father and Henry their swords. They had light armour for their chests and leather helmets. They each clipped an axe to their belts. Guillaume threw the box under a tree, turned the pack-horse around to face Paris, and gave it a whack on the rump. The rain had stopped.

  Xena had no idea of the direction in which they rode. It was almost full moon but mostly they had to depend on the horses’ vision in the dark and they rarely rode faster than a trot, their own shadows and those of trees falling across their path. After an hour they were deep in a forest where leaves were so thick on the earth the horses’ hooves made a swishing noise. Several times Xena felt some other presence and saw black fans rush silently across the pale-moon sky. A tiny metallic scream followed as the owl snatched a mouse. She drew alongside Henry, ‘Are there wolves in this forest, sir?’

  ‘Wolves. Bears. On the open land there were lions, centuries ago, but they were slaughtered in the Roman circuses. The lovely thing about this forest, Xena, is that there are no Frenchmen in it.’

  Ten French knights with ten extra horses had just left Paris. They carried torches and after an hour had covered almost twice the distance their quarry had in the same period.

  Geoffrey, Henry and Guillaume signalled to Xena it was time to change mounts. The men worked in silence, expertly unsaddling and re-saddling the horses. Henry and Guillaume knelt and laid their ears against the ground. They nodded to each other.

  ‘Can you stay on a horse if it gallops?’ Henry asked Xena.

  ‘As a child I could.’

  ‘You’ll remember,’ he said. In Catalan he asked Guillaume, ‘How many of them, do you think?’

  ‘Eight or ten, plus extra horses.’

  ‘I figure they’re five leagues behind us.’

  ‘They haven’t seen us yet, or they’d be riding faster.’

  ‘That,’ said Henry, ‘is our one chance. Don’t tell the girl.’

  Xena thought she saw pairs of green eyes in the dark. She was relieved they remounted so quickly. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  ‘Soon we’ll cross the border and we’ll be in our country,’ Henry said. ‘Keep up with me. You must keep up!’

  He spurred his horse and broke into a canter. The Duke and Guillaume began riding faster too, because now there was the slightest lightening of the sky and they could just discern a path through the forest.

  ‘Gallop!’ Henry shouted. ‘Release the mare.’ He snatched the bridle lead from Xena’s hand and slashed it with his dagger. The three men cut the leads on their spare horses. All eight animals began to run as a herd. The men wore spurs; Xena did not. But she could stand for a gallop and her mount, feeling her weight lift from his back, stretched himself. The Arabian surged alongside him, then rushed in front of the herd. ‘I hope she knows where we’re going,’ Henry called to Guillaume. They had about a league of treeless, open ground to cross.

  Xena could feel the stallion fade beneath her. He was sweated up and foam blew from his mouth onto her face. ‘Not long, not long,’ she urged him. It was light, although not yet dawn.

  The Duke and Guillaume, riding ahead, slowed to a canter.

  ‘Around that bend, behind those trees, we’re at the border!’ Henry called. ‘Don’t look back.’

  They slowed to a trot as they entered the stand of trees. Some of them were ancient, their bare limbs so high Xena had to crane her neck to see their tops. A huge elm stood at the centre of the grove and close to it, nibbling at what little greenery she could find, was the Queen’s Arabian mare. ‘Keep moving,’ Henry said. Guillaume whistled to the mare who raised her head and trotted after them. A few yards beyond the ancient tree the men pulled up. ‘That tree marks the border,’ Henry said. ‘For centuries the Kings of France and the men of Normandy have parleyed there.’

  She gazed up at it; it was so old and sacred it seemed to touch the sky. ‘Perhaps heaven reaches down through the tree, to replenish earth,’ she said.

  ‘Your speech is poetic,’ Henry remarked. His voice had an inflection of curiosity. ‘God and man once more conjoined? By a tree?’

  She nodded, unheeding, awe-struck by the elm tree.

  ‘You can look round now,’ Henry said.

  Xena gasped. Halfway across the open stretch of land French cavalry galloped towards them.

  Henry, Guillaume and Geoffrey dismounted and ripped off their leather helmets, shaking out their hair. Xena put her hand to her head to adjust her veil, but it was gone. Her mass of black ringlets fell past her shoulders to the centre of her back. She gasped and tried to cover her hair with her hands.

  Guillaume said, ‘Henry, she’s lost her veil. Don’t stare at her. What can we give her?’

  ‘A leather helmet?’

  Studying the ground as he walked, Guillaume handed her Geoffrey’s helmet. She was able to hide much of her hair inside it. ‘I must look stupid,’ she said.

  ‘You do,’ Henry replied cheerfully.

  ‘You’re an arsehole,’ Guillaume said in Catalan.

  The French knights slowed, then stopped. A troop of more than a hundred mounted men were advancing from the other side of the elm forest.

  ‘Our Vexin garrison,’ Henry said. ‘It has a watch tower.’

  The French yelled insults and shook their swords in the air. One had Xena’s veil on the point of his lance. His companions slashed it to shreds, before they turned and set off, back the way they had come.

  ‘They would’ve caught us if you couldn’t gallop,’ Henry said. Does he mean he would have stopped for me? Xena wondered. We would have both been killed.

  ‘We can eat soon,’ he was saying. ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a whole litter of piglets.’ He turned to her. ‘But I’ll give you one.’

  ‘I don’t like animal flesh,’ she said.

  He grunted. ‘How about a fish?’

  ‘Fish would be good. And milk. I like goats’ milk. Do you have that in your country?’

  ‘We’ve got everything,’ Henry said. ‘It’s a land of milk and honey.’

  He’d lost interest in the topic of food. His mount ambled beside hers. He leaned towards her ear. ‘How is it,’ he asked, ‘that you can write backwards and forwards?’

  Her face flushed.

  ‘Everyone where I was born, in Antioch, can write backwards and forwards,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, girl,’ he said. ‘It’s ungrateful. Are you a spy for the Empress of Byzantium? Is that why she gave you to the Queen?’

  ‘No! I am not!’

  Henry ignored her answer and changed the subject again. ‘That elm tree that marks the border – Charlemagne slept beneath it.’ He raised an eyebrow, questioning if the name meant anything to her.

  Xena thought, What does it matter now? I’m his prisoner.

  ‘Was that before or after he defeated the Moors?’ she asked.

  Henry chuckled. ‘What a clever Greek girl you are. Writes backwards and forwards. Knows history … You’re full of surprises, Xena.’

  He spurred ahead to join his father and brother who were already embracing the men from their garrison.

  On the eighth of January the King decreed a month of mourning for the death of Abbot Suger. Marital intercourse was not permitted during
the mourning period. Thank God I don’t have to oblige him for a few weeks, the Queen thought. Late that same night she heard that Geoffrey and Xena had escaped. She went to the royal chapel to give thanks.

  Louis was already there, surrounded by monks, so she knelt at a distance from him. In the clouds of incense, amid the chanting, he did not notice her presence. But as he left the chapel he saw her and came over.

  ‘I pray for a child,’ Eleanor said.

  His melancholy eyes rested on her. ‘We’ll have a pure and holy child,’ he said.

  By the time the mourning period ended the Queen knew she was pregnant. Some days later when news reached Normandy, the Duke rode out with Henry and Guillaume for the best day’s hunting anyone could remember for this time of year. ‘Where’s your courage?’ Geoffrey shouted at his sons as he rushed on foot at a bear flushed from its winter den.

  Baron Estienne de Selors said to Augustin, ‘If the royal babe, my friend, has one strand of yellow hair, I vow to strangle it before its second dawn.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In Paris, by the end of February every sign of winter snow had vanished and delicate new leaves uncurled throughout the forests that surrounded the city. Spring was further advanced in Burgundy, where the Seneschal stayed on one of his estates. A robin sang outside his window. He could look out on his greening fields where speckled cows, released from their winter pens, were enjoying the soft sunshine. But the Baron felt something was wrong. He knew the King’s moods as intimately as he knew his own, and understood them better. He knew that Louis had lost his appetite for the campaign against Normandy.

  The King had been hungry for attack before the Christmas Court. By now garrisons near the Vexin were mobilised, ships were sailing up the Seine and infantrymen were on the march from the Île de France. A handsome troop of knights was prepared to leave on the morrow. But something was wrong with the King.

  It’s the sorceress, Estienne thought. She tells him she’s with child just days before he’s to ride to war. She’s put him in a soft mood.

  To the Baroness he said, ‘Going to battle, a man must think of nothing but killing his enemy.’

  ‘I know, dear.’

  ‘He can’t be thinking of babies.’

  The Seneschal stamped up and down. It was not just the pregnancy. It was that Louis had lost his nerve. In his heart, the Baron believed, Louis knew the Anjevin scum had cuckolded him.

  ‘Those Anjevins have Lucifer as their advisor,’ he said to his wife.

  ‘I met Geoffrey Foulques at court several years ago and I thought he was charming. He complimented me on my eyes.’

  Her husband was astonished. ‘What did he say about them?’

  ‘That they sparkle like emeralds.’

  The Seneschal was too shocked to respond. He had been married to the Baroness for thirty years. She was cheerful and competent, and during his absence for most of the year, she and his reeves ran their estates as well as any in Europe. She had brought him a lavish dowry, given him six healthy children (three of each), and did not ask about his concubines. But she was fifty, and fat, and her face was permanently flushed, and he had no idea what colour her eyes were, although he supposed a long time ago he had known.

  ‘He invited me to visit him in Normandy.’

  The gnashing of her husband’s teeth was audible to the two young pages waiting by a door.

  ‘I went there as a child on the Feast of St John,’ she added. ‘We stayed in a white castle by the sea, Caen I think, and went swimming, day after day. The Lion came swimming with us. He dived under the waves and grabbed our legs. He and our Old Louis were friends in those days.’

  ‘So why haven’t you accepted the Duke’s invitation to visit again?’ her husband shouted.

  ‘Estienne, don’t be silly. I know you’ve wanted to kill him ever since he took Normandy from England and the Vexin from us. Next week you’ll tell some mercenary to chop off his head. You’ll say it happened in the heat of battle and you didn’t realise who was being beheaded.’

  Her answer mollified him. At length he confided, ‘The son is much more dangerous to France. He has vast ambitions. The father is satisfied with whoring and hawking. It’s the son’s head I want.’

  She raised an eyebrow. It alarmed the Baroness that, without Suger’s restraining hand, Estienne was becoming reckless.

  Louis, she knew, would insist no physical harm be done if either of the Dukes were captured. The King would demand ransom, land, castles, the return of the Vexin and all Normandy if his victory were great enough. But when Louis had that, he would release them. They were, after all, his vassals, part of the tapestry of tightly woven rights and duties that animated their world, gave it meaning, beauty, purpose and value.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘we’re not Turks. We’re honourable Christian people.’

  ‘I’m going to see the cows,’ the Baron announced.

  The beasts ambled to the rail, their wet, grey, oblong noses pushed towards him in greeting. A cow was an amiable, soothing creature who enjoyed being spoken to affectionately. He crooned, ‘Bonjour, ma belle, bonjour ma jolie,’ and made kissing noises. His temper cooled under their gentle influence and he was able mentally to rehearse the plan of attack. It was scheduled for two in the morning on the fifth of March, initially with a siege of the castle of Rouen. Once the siege was established, they would confiscate gold from Rouen’s thousands of Jews, then burn the city. The Rouen Jews had proved themselves infuriatingly loyal to the Anjevins. France had only one man on its payroll among them. He had reported that, despite good harvests and an easy winter, the Young Duke still visited a moneylender’s house: that meant he was still in debt, or still in need of money. ‘He’s short of gold to hire mercenaries, ma cherie,’ the Seneschal told a cow. He gave her a good scratching between the horns and allowed a rough lick of his cheek from her charcoal-coloured tongue.

  But the nagging feeling that something was wrong would not depart.

  When he returned to the chateau he summoned a military rider and handed him a note. ‘I need a reply by the morning of the fourth of March, at the latest,’ he said.

  Henry told Xena she would be staying with Guillaume’s mother, Isabella, and her daughters. Isabella’s house was on the outskirts of Rouen, made of stone, and the largest in the city. Fields for the family’s horses, sheep and cows surrounded it, as well as an orchard, vegetable and flower gardens, and an apiary. It had a well for drinking water and was only a few minutes’ walk to a small tributary of the Seine, where the animals drank. Inside, the house had a dining hall, five sleeping chambers, an apartment for Guillaume where he stored his musical instruments and a larger, more luxurious one for his mother, equipped with its own bathing tub. It was in this apartment that Isabella received her ‘husband’, Geoffrey. There was a bath house next to the kitchen, both in separate buildings. At the back of the residence were servants’ quarters and, at an appropriate distance from them, the latrines.

  From her front door Isabella could see the castle of Rouen, the ducal palace, built on top of a hill to overlook the town, the river, the orchards and forests.

  When Henry and Guillaume had arrived at her door with a dark-skinned stranger, Isabella had taken her son aside and asked him in Catalan, ‘Who is she?’

  Geoffrey’s concubine was handsome rather than beautiful: tall, slender, grey-eyed and worldly, a woman whose bearing commanded respect.

  ‘Henry stole her,’ Guillaume said. ‘We’re to keep her hidden.’

  ‘Is she with child to him?’

  ‘He hasn’t lain with her.’

  ‘This is ridiculous! From whom did he steal her?’

  ‘A vicious and powerful Frenchman. Mother, please don’t ask questions.’

  She raised a long wing-shaped eyebrow. ‘If she’s not with child to Henry why did he steal her?’

  Her son looked guilty and miserable. He shook his head.

  There’s much more to this, Isabella thought. ‘She’s a
Greek, you said? She is charming and has beautiful manners, as if she’s accustomed to refined living.’

  Guillaume nodded vigorously. ‘Born in Outremer. A knight brought her back from the second crusade.’

  ‘Henry stole her from the knight?’

  Guillaume nodded.

  A lie, his mother thought.

  Xena saw little of Henry, Guillaume or Geoffrey in the weeks after her arrival at Rouen. The men appeared fleetingly, Guillaume and his father staying to eat and enjoy a few hours of family life; Henry only to greet Xena and drop off some gift: a length of cloth, a jar of olive oil, a sack of pulses. If she wanted to go riding to the forest she had to be accompanied by two male servants from the estate, and two of Guillaume’s sisters. She had to wear a hooded cloak, Henry said. It was easier to stay at home and exercise the horses in the paddock.

  ‘Most of the time the men are not even at the castle, or in Rouen,’ Isabella told her.

  ‘There’s going to be a war, isn’t there?’ Xena said.

  Isabella nodded.

  At first, Isabella’s strong, serious demeanour had intimidated the girl. She possessed the same grave courtesy as Guillaume. But the longer Xena stayed under her roof, the more she appreciated Isabella’s temperament. At random moments a fire of creativity – music, singing – could burst from her. Her son had the same quality. And he did sing like an angel. When he and his father stayed for supper, Guillaume sang, Geoffrey played the citern and sometimes the tambourine. Isabella and her daughters danced, clicking their fingers, twirling and stamping to the beat. At these times Xena missed her own family so painfully she could have wept. In Antioch they hadn’t played a lute, or danced, but they sang together before and after meals. The bread laughed when we broke it, she remembered. The wine sang to us. One evening, during supper, Guillaume kissed her on the forehead. ‘Your heart aches so much I can barely breathe,’ he murmured.

  After Xena had settled in properly, Isabella demanded Guillaume tell her the truth.

  ‘Mother, she’s in great danger. She’ll be tortured and murdered if the Frenchman gets hold of her again.’