by Jean Gill
A breeze flicked Dragonetz’ cheeks. ‘Fresh air,’ he thought and that unbiddable heart soared at the thought of night camps and exercises. He’d told Sicres one truth; he was going to give his men hell. And they were all desperate for it like menagerie animals turned out in the forest. The sort of hell that turned muscles to rock, bread to a banquet and sleep-deprived bodies to simple satisfactions.
Hours later, the cookfires doused, the cicadas trilling their subdued night song, the stars promising another dry cloudless day to follow, Dragonetz eased his legs and stretched out on the grass for time with his aides before Arnaut took first watch. They had waited, patient and trusting, for the full story, and they had earned it. But first things first.
‘How did two Guards get killed?’ he asked softly.
Raoulf spat out a grass blade he’d been chewing to a froth. ‘Don’t blame the men. Some animals in anonymous armour were sneaking a sword thrust here, a dagger blade there.’
‘It was one of them caught Bausas across the back of his head and with no helmet on, he had no chance,’ Danton chipped in. Dragonetz grunted. He had of course ascertained earlier in the day which of his men had died and made it clear that the honour and recompense to his family in Aquitaine would be no less than if he had died fighting the Infidel, which, in a sense he had. It always depended on how you defined ‘Infidel’ but that was not an insight that Dragonetz shared with his officers, never mind with a troop of farm hands turned soldiers. ‘We dealt with him but his mates managed their little tricks under cover of our grand show and dispatched two Guards before they ran off.’
‘Dealt with him,’ Dragonetz repeated and his tone warned them.
It was Raoulf who drew the fire. ‘Be reasonable, man! You were there! He watched Bausas dropping to his knees and he dealt with the murdering scum before another of ours was lost. I know you’d have liked it well if we’d brought you the piece of shit to answer a question or two but there are limits to a man’s self-control!’
‘No,’ said Dragonetz, ‘there are no limits to a man’s self-control only to his belief in it. The ‘he’ being?’ Mutinous silence from all three men was the sole response. Dragonetz sighed.
‘The hell with it.’ Once more it was Raoulf who braved his leader’s icy scorn. ‘It was me.’
Dragonetz lay back on the grass, his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, for which his men were only briefly grateful. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And when I point out that you weren’t even in the same street, it will turn out - amazingly - that it was Arnaut or Danton.’ His switch to sitting position had the grace of perfectly toned muscles in a young body and his eyes snapped open to accuse them all. ‘Gentlemen, we have wasted enough time. You have enjoyed your demonstration of esprit de corps, let us skip the denials and torture, assume just for one instant that I am a competent Commander and in fact your Commander. You will share with me all the information you possess and I will tell you what really happened today. Now get on with it. Raoulf?’
Reluctantly Raoulf gave the name, ‘You know I’m all for disciplining the men but this wasn’t pitched battle for God’s sake and the lad reacted in good faith to the situation. If he suffers for it, Dragonetz, I swear...’ then he trailed off under a contemptuous gaze.
‘I’m sure you do,’ was the cold reply, ‘but I have no intention of sharing my plans for him with you. A little reminder, Raoulf.’ Then his tone switched. ‘I apologise that the message was so curt but every second counted and you were magnificent today. Truly. No other unit could have responded as you did.’
‘But you want us to be better.’ Raoulf’s tone was flat, still stinging from the previous exchange.
‘I want us to be better,’ Dragonetz agreed and his inclusion of himself in that went a long way to soothe ruffled pride. They all knew him as a perfectionist. ‘And when you don’t have the whole picture, you don’t know what damage can be done by one man lacking self-control. I ordered that no Guard be killed. I know it was difficult. Two guards were killed, their deaths put down to us. There’s bound to be a reckoning for that.’
‘And you’re angry with Bausas’ friend for killing his murderer? He probably saved the life of another Guard! Or one of ours!’ Raoulf was completely lost at the reasoning.
‘I know,’ said Dragonetz. ‘As it turned out, I wish I’d ordered you to capture or kill a bunch of thugs in armour and let none escape. But I didn’t know that at the time and those weren’t my orders.’
Raoulf was thinking. ‘So you’ll go easy on him because he reacted to what was actually happening and dealt with it as seemed best.’
‘Yes, you bloody old fool, I’ll go easy on him! But only because I can make better use of him that way. You know we can’t afford to care about one casualty. Men have to be expendable and their friends have to obey orders. Now do you want to know what happened or not?’
‘I got your message while supervising kit inspections and routine exercises,’ Danton chipped in. ‘The boy said to get the horses prepared for leaving the city as soon as possible and to take all the men on foot to the Jewish Quarter, provoke and attack the City Guard but kill no-one. So I gave orders at the stables, rallied the men and you know the rest.’
‘Much the same message reached me,’ agreed Raoulf.
‘And me. Why was the Guard there? And why did we have to fight them?’
Dragonetz measured his words. ‘Officially, and no man here but ourselves must think any different, officially we were ordered by Aliénor to test our men against Ermengarda’s élite to sharpen them up.’
‘And unofficially?’
‘I had a message from Raavad. A brawl between Jews and Christians started presumably by some trivial dispute. Likely to erupt into civil war. He sent to Ermengarda too.’
‘So you sent for the Guard.’ The beauty of it dawned on Arnaut first. ‘Not to keep the peace but to cover the civil brawl with our pitched and very loud battle.’
‘Some anonymous citizen informed the Guard that there was a disturbance in the Jewish Quarter.’ Dragonetz couldn’t keep a straight face any longer. ‘And then they were the disturbance. How,’ he enquired with interest, ‘did you provoke them to fight?’
‘Traditional methods.’ Danton grinned.
‘Called their mothers and sisters whores, then prodded them a bit. Always works.’ Raoulf grinned.
‘Not always.’ Dragonetz reflected on the prodding he himself had received. ‘But often,’ he conceded.
‘And you’d have to be damned unlucky to get your sword through chain mail when you’re trying to avoid killing, so that should have been easy.’ Raoulf made a bitter concession to Dragonetz’ earlier anger. ‘A bit of sport all round and no harm done.’
‘That’s how it would have been,’ Dragonetz agreed. ‘A few citizens accidentally and tragically killed in a military exercise, no racial hatred, no blaming the Jews. Except that the initial dispute wasn’t accidental, there was a band of mercenaries out to start civil war in Narbonne, and thought that killing a soldier or two was all to the good from their viewpoint.’ He kept to himself the more targeted attempt on his own life. ‘So the question is, who stands to gain from the destruction of Narbonne? From bringing down Ermengarda?’
‘Toulouse. Or the Les Baux, splitting the alliance against their attempt on Provence.
‘Indeed,’ said Dragonetz. ‘Same old favourites. I suggest we get some sleep. Surprise attack at dawn will be sounded and we’ll see how the men react. By the way, the retreat was excellent.’
‘Pleased Sicres, I don’t doubt!’
‘Pleased me too, which is more to the point. Perhaps we’ll organise a tourney when we go back to Narbonne between Sicres’ best and ours, blunt some lances - lose a few men on both sides for sport and cheer up the remainder.’ No-one was stupid enough to speak. ‘Arnaut?’
‘Sire,’ Arnaut confirmed and took his position on First Watch while his comrades matched their bodies to tussocks and found unconscious communion with the e
arth.
With determination, Estela braided her hair in thick defiant loops and coiled them round her head in a glossy black crown, the announcement to the world that she was a married woman. Was that all there was to it? Pushing, shoving and forcing with a blunt instrument? Her mouth twisted as she mouthed the sweet lies of the songs she had learned by heart, the lines of desire and regret, of passion and parting, and compared the reality.
She tried the demure coif once more for good measure but gave up trying to arrange her thick plaits underneath it and threw the white headpiece back in the chest. Instead, she pulled out a swathe of red silk, wrapped it round as a head rail and knotted it to one side, leaving the ends trailing. Maybe there were advantages to living in the barbarian manner of Oltra mar, long robes hiding all but her eyes from the stinging glances that she was about to face. Further arming herself with a scarlet mantel, fastened with the Pathfinder Rune brooch, and a maroon cotte over her white under-shift, she smoothed her skirts and trod the route to break her fast and face the Queen’s Ladies.
No-one pointed at her, no-one whispered audibly ‘You know what we said about Estela, well...’ no-one even smirked knowingly and finally, crewel needle in hand as she worked on yet more finery for the Queen, Estela accepted that she was last week’s news. Nervous as she had been of everyone reading on her face what she had done, she was disappointed when no-one did. She had wanted everything to change, she had shattered her world and nothing had changed, no-one had noticed. She pricked her finger and blobbed a blood-flower among those planned on the fine weave in front of her. She sighed. That too was ahead of her. She was expecting her own blood-flowers in a few days and she was enough of a country girl to know what it meant if they didn’t start. That would certainly show somebody something! But what exactly, she didn’t know.
Gradually, her head bent over her sewing, she took in the chat going on round her, sifting gossip from news, trivia from potentially useful. It was a relief to Estela, mixed with something else that she chose to ignore, to hear that Dragonetz had taken his troops out of the city on some training exercise. More confusing was the mixture of reports on a scuffle in the streets between Aliénor’s men and Ermengarda’s. Word was that Sicres, the Commander of the City Guard, had beaten Dragonetz in a duel, disarming him and forcing him to withdraw his men from the city for an unspecified period.
Contradictory word was that Dragonetz had been following Aliénor’s orders throughout and had not tried to fight Sicres. Speculation on what those orders might have been varied from the result of a drunken bet between Aliénor and Ermengarda as to whose army was better, to the notion that Dragonetz was continuing his crusading work in the streets of Narbonne. It had after all been the Jewish Quarter where the fighting took place and everyone knew that the Jews had fought side by side with the Moors in the Holy Land. And of course Ermengarda would order her men to protect the citizens of Narbonne. It was public knowledge that the two rulers did not see eye to eye regarding the Crusades, Aliénor’s passion to redeem the Holy Land falling flat on the trader Viscomtesse.
However, the main distraction for the Ladies from the game of Estela-baiting seemed to be the return of Alis from Carcassonne, pale and thin, red-eyed from weeping her uncle’s death. The Ladies leeched on others’ emotion and grew fat with it, expanding in false sympathy at whatever minor horrors came their way and gasping with pleasure at anything worse. Alis was treated to much clucking of ‘You poor dear,’ as she related the unpleasant practicalities of a funeral in mid-summer heat, the rancid smells and flies, but the chamber positively reeked of anticipation when Alis started to detail her father’s need to establish his new authority with some public spectacles. Estela drifted off into her own thoughts at the third description of a severed body part, this time a hand, moving of its own accord and pointing in accusation at the executioner before crumpling to its unnatural end.
Estela was mid-way through stabbing an imaginary gang of cutpurses when she realised someone was not merely speaking but speaking to her.
‘Estela, what are you doing to that?’ Vaguely, Estela followed Sancha’s gaze and saw the pattern her needle had stabbed on the cloth. She sighed.
‘Here, give it to me.’ Sancha bit off the thread and with her own needle started carefully unpicking the trail of destruction masquerading as laid-work. While her head was bent, Sacha added conversationally, ‘New headgear?’
So someone had noticed. ‘I thought it fitting.’ At last Estela was able to give the haughty reply she had planned. Wasn’t that what it had all been for?
The other woman hid her smile in the needlework. ‘It is fitting,’ she said gently, ‘and it suits you. You don’t need to prove yourself, Estela.’
Tears pricked in response and Estela stifled a sudden urge to confess what she’d done, to receive absolution. Instead she sniffed and blurted out ‘You’d be a good mother.’ Even before the colour washed from Sancha’s face, Estela reached out to touch her and murmured, ‘I’m sorry. I forgot.’
The colour flooded back as Sancha bent lower over the faulty stitching. ‘I take that as a compliment,’ she replied, her voice as ragged as Estela’s sewing. ‘Now, let me tell you the news from Provence.’ Too absorbed in her own private life, Estela had forgotten that Sancha was newly returned from the provinces and she was soon absorbed in discussion of the increasingly fragile balance between Raimon Berenguer, Comte de Barcelone, and les Baux, Dukes of Provence. Sancha was convinced that it would not be long before there was open battle over Provence, with Narbonne caught in the middle, both as Barcelone’s ally and as the next treasure coveted by les Baux’ greedy eyes.
‘So that puts one of the Ladies from Provence into the frame as a go-between, our spy against Aliénor and Dragonetz.’
‘Possibly,’ conceded Sancha. ‘But I have dug into the backgrounds and connections of all the possible suspects and they would have to be master spies to have hidden all the traces. There are many Provençals like me who have no desire to see les Baux gain further power, nor blood shed yet again for the sake of a name with more hectares attached. It just doesn’t fit.’
‘And it doesn’t really tie up with some connection being made at Douzens. That argues someone from the Corbières.’
‘Like you,’ Sancha pointed out drily, eliciting a smile.
‘Touché. Unfortunately, I don’t have your contacts or status to collect the gossip in the Corbières that you can in Provence. Besides, the connection at Douzens could have been made by Templar links, or Church links - they are all traders and travellers who might have made our insider’s acquaintance in Aquitaine and met up again at Douzens.’
‘Possibly,’ Sancha replied again, persisting, ‘But you can fit more of the Corbières pieces together now. Isn’t your father a Toulouse man?’
‘Carcassonne and Toulouse,’ Estela agreed. ‘But I know nothing of him and his affairs.’
‘Nor want to know. I understand. But perhaps it’s time we listened to a tale of a witch hanged till her feet danced and the miraculous prophesies that came from her dead mouth.’
‘Or the blind child who touched the new ruler of Carcassonne and after his miraculous cure shouted that he could see a heavenly aura round Raimon. I think I get your meaning,’ was Estela’s dry response.
‘We can interpose some pertinent questions, I think, particularly if her father or even Alis herself paid their loyal visit to their old liege lord to reassure him now there is a new one.’
‘Toulouse,’ breathed Estela as both women moved their stools to join the circle round Alis, who was relating the marvellous omens of late twin births among the sheep and wells springing from dry land that had greeted Raimon Trencavel as Viscomte de Carcassonne.
In between being suitably impressed by miracles, malformations and the merely bizarre, Sancha and Estela managed to elicit the information that Toulouse had indeed required a duty visit from not only the new Comte de Carcassonne but several of his vassals and that the fealty owed by Trenc
avel to Barcelone, in his new role, had not yet been officially given. As far as Estela could determine, this left Raimon Trencavel on the fence with his feet dangling well into Toulouse’s playground. Carcassonne had ceased to be Narbonne’s ally and it wasn’t clear what Raimon would do if push came to shove over Provence. Sit on that fence as long as possible, probably, Particularly as Toulouse also had his eyes on Provence for dessert with Narbonne as his main dish.
Alis herself was little help here as, in answer to a disingenuous question from Sancha, she expressed disappointment that she had not seen the famous pink walls of Toulouse on this occasion and had only second-hand gossip of that city. She had heard that the young Comte was hoping to stamp out corruption and its heretic carriers. According to Alis, which meant according to her father, Raymond de Toulouse put religion above everything. Above, Alis murmured hesitantly, above normal human relations. At this point Alis paled, as she had not during her account of traditional flaying and quartering of a convicted traitor. Pressed by curious Ladies as to what she meant, Alis declared her knowledge merely second-hand gossip and started yet one more gruesome tale of righteous punishment.
Estela was chewing all this over, when her thoughts were once more interrupted, this time by a voice grave but still girlish. She hadn’t noticed Bèatriz joining the Ladies, presumably having left Ermengarda and Aliénor with duties elsewhere. The girl pulled up a stool the other side of Estela from Sancha and she stroked her own silky brunette hair, hanging loose over her shoulders, as her gaze took in Estela’s coiled braids. ‘What’s it like, being married?’ she asked, round-eyed and serious.