To Be Queen

by Christy English

  “My lady, I have not forgotten the vow I made you in your father’s keep.”

  He did not speak of his oath of fealty, but of the promise he had made me while we stood alone in the dark, in the shadow of my father’s curved staircase. I had been fourteen when he swore that there would come a night when he would not let me go. Years had passed since then; I had borne a child and married a man I did not love since those words were spoken. But still, I remembered.

  “My lady, I always keep my word.”

  Rancon faded into the shadows. I inhaled deeply of the night air, for my breath had turned shallow at his nearness. I pressed one hand against the cold stone of the castle rampart. Amaria took that hand then, and drew it into her own.

  “We must go in, my lady. You must sleep. The road ahead is long.”

  Her steady blue eyes met mine without judgment or rancor. I let Amaria lead me back into the keep. Bardonne followed us in silence. Amaria put me to bed with no more words between us, but as I lay down, she pressed a kiss to my forehead, almost as my mother might have done, had she been there. She took a liberty, but I did not rebuke her. For years she had been my friend as well as my lady-in-waiting. Amaria knew me and loved me for myself, as few others ever would.

  I lay back on my bolster, but I did not sleep. The light from the braziers crept up the hangings of the bed, and raised shadows on the tapestries that lined the walls. I watched the shadows dance. At dawn, we would take to the road again, this time with Conrad and his Germans beside us. Baron Rancon would carry my husband’s standard. I would treat him as a stranger, as I had done for years already, as in the sight of my husband, I always must.

  The good weather did not last as we traveled deeper into Germany. The rains began outside Metz and stalked our path as we rode on horseback from one principality to the next. We were five months on the road from St.-Denis to Constantinople, and as we moved, the company of our troops grew until our ranks swelled to more than twenty-five thousand fighting men, their ladies, and their servants.

  Most of the baggage was sent ahead by river at the city of Regensburg, so that our army, as large as it had become, might move faster. Conrad continued to host us at each castle he controlled, but most of the horde of crusaders remained in their own tents. I was relieved when we left Germany, and my women and I had our own tent raised along the roadside. As charming a host as Conrad was, I was happy to be queen in my own hall, even if my hall was made of waterproofed leather trimmed in silk.

  Late in the month of September, we were well away from Conrad’s territories and had entered the outskirts of the empire of Byzantium. The banner of Aquitaine flew above the tent I slept in, as it flew with the fleur-de-lys of France over the large tent that passed for Louis’ great hall. Though many Parisians had traveled with us, Louis’ hall became my own, for I had my own barons and ladies from Poitou and Aquitaine traveling with me.

  On the first night we camped outside the city of Sofia in Bulgaria, I spoke with my troubadours before the feast. We had experienced no hardship or warfare along the path of our Crusade thus far, so there was much to celebrate. Like all Poitevins, I was always willing to celebrate being alive, so I called my troubadours to me, and instructed them to sing that night old songs my father and grandfather had written, as well as one of my own.

  As the fruit was being served, one troubadour after another stood to sing. Louis glowered at this break in Parisian formality, but we were not in Paris now. This was a new country. We might carry the Court of Love into the East, and with it all the music that I had known in my childhood.

  My barons cheered after every song, for they knew each of them well, as I did. Even some of the Parisians who traveled with us listened with attention, as they never would have done if Abbot Suger or Bernard of Clairvaux had been there, watching them.

  Brother Francis frowned as if he would bring down thunder and lightning on all our heads. Brother Matthew and Father Gilbert, two more priests that Louis had brought to pray for him in Jerusalem, listened to the music of my homeland in stunned silence, as if they had never heard songs of love before. They sat together at a lower table, blinking like bovines that had just been struck between the eyes.

  The German emperor Conrad applauded my troubadours as loudly as my own people did, and offered them sacks of silver discreetly in payment for their talent. I had paid them all beforehand, but I smiled as Bertrand and his lute player took the German’s money, scraping before Conrad as if he were their lord.

  The night ended early, for we had a few days’ march still to the city of Adrianople, the last city that would rise in our path before we would come to Constantinople. All the barons and their ladies, save for a few of the Parisians and Louis’ favorite confessor, Brother Francis, left my husband’s tents with smiles on their faces. For the first time since I had been made Queen of France, my husband’s people had embraced the Court of Love, as I had always longed for them to do. That first taste of cultural victory left me hungry for more.

  I had thought to try to tempt Louis to my bed, but as I looked upon his sour, pinched expression, I simply kissed his cheek and bade him a good night. I would sleep with the sound of my grandfather’s music still in my ears. I would savor the joy that came with biding among my own barons and among the Germans, who seemed to love music as much as we did.

  From that evening outside the town of Sofia, my troubadours sang, and our lords and ladies listened. The songs of my family were carried deep into the East, right up to the gates of Adrianople, and to Constantinople itself. It seemed to me that my grandfather lived again whenever his music was played.

  As we rode closer and closer to the gates of the capital of Byzantium, the land rose gently beneath Melusina’s hooves, as if the country offered a greeting to me and mine. The windswept plains outside Constantinople had not changed in a thousand years. I almost expected to see the wild men of Herodotus riding down upon us as we came closer and closer to the great city’s gates. Our fighting men surrounded us and became ever more vigilant. At any moment, the Turks might attack us, even in Byzantium itself, and strike to cut us down. Those Turks, with whom we were at war, were the heirs of the ancient tribesmen who had terrorized that land centuries before.

  The danger in the air around us, the spiced heat that rose from the ground even in the autumn, filled my heart with joy. The hills were green and brown with the ash and myrtle trees that grew along the Lycus River leading into Constantinople.

  I rode Melusina among my own barons, as each vied with the others for precedence beside me. Louis rode far behind me, and I savored the first taste of freedom I had known since my father’s death. The first sip of that nectar was sweet.

  Each step on the road to Byzantium left me wanting more.

  Chapter 18

  City of Constantinople

  Empire of Byzantium

  October 1147

  THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE ROSE ON THE HORIZON LIKE A great curved beast. Even from a distance of five miles, the buildings and domes, the towers, and the great walls could be seen as we approached on horseback. Melusina seemed to step more lively, and the Parisians fell silent. Even in Germany, we had not seen a city as great as this. The walls and ramparts towered above us as we approached, blocking out the sun. The city’s huge wooden gates bound in worked iron opened before us, and we stepped into another world.

  The scent of spices was the first thing that struck me as Melusina carried me into the city, with Louis beside me. The smell of cinnamon and nutmeg rode on the air, and the scent of pepper and salt. The Byzantine emperor Manuel’s people cast flowers at our horses’ feet, blooms of such strange and vivid colors, orange, purple, and mauve.

  Constantinople spanned the great water of the strait of Bosporus as a corridor might bridge the gap between a woman’s solar and her bedroom. The city was as dirty as Paris, but I forgot the dirt at once as I craned my neck to look upon the heights of those buildings. Constantinople’s towers and domes gleamed gold and white agai
nst the landscape, a jewel of gold and pearl set against a backdrop of ochre.

  My ladies fell silent behind me as Louis and I entered the city. None of us had ever seen a place so large, or so grand. Rome itself could not possibly rival it. Constantinople was a city apart.

  The towers shone like jewels in the late-morning sun. The great dome of Hagia Sophia beckoned to me, cupped like a woman’s hand over a flame. Its elegant, graceful lines spoke of a distant past, when the Empress Theodora had ruled at the side of her Justinian.

  The buildings of Constantinople were all made of stone. Different-colored marbles caught the light as we rode past, framing the wide cobbled street. Refuse flowed in neat rivers into drains along the edge of the road. In Paris, dirty water flowed into channels carved in the center of the streets, so that people and horses alike were forced to walk through the filth. I breathed deep, and though the scent of camel dung mixed with the scent of flowers and cinnamon, I did not catch the stink of human refuse as I had throughout Europe.

  At the sight of the marbled buildings and the murmuring fountains, the Parisians drew close together, muttering and anxious. Brother Francis brought his mule as close as he could to Louis’ mount, as if the presence of his king might protect him from the exotic landscape, an elegance so different from anything Paris had to offer. Even as Louis’ people shrank from all they saw, I felt my spirit open like a flower under the sun after a winter of snow and ice.

  Though I loved the Aquitaine all my life, with its deep green forests and its rolling hills, I loved the East as much from the first moment the towers of Constantinople rose around me. Here at last was evidence of the achievement mankind was capable of, the beauty of the mind of man that my father had always spoken of when he taught me of the Romans and the Greeks. Here was a city that housed the remnants of the ancient world. I took in the sight of that beauty, and it fed my soul.

  I looked to Louis, whose horse walked close beside mine, and I saw that he knew nothing of what I felt. His eyes were cast forward. He looked neither right nor left, but followed his own standard deeper into the most beautiful city on earth. No thoughts of ancient Rome or Athens entered his mind; I could see that from the look on his face. I turned away from Louis then, and cast my own eyes back to the wonders around me. We did not plan to stay more than two weeks in this place, so I would drink in all the beauty that I could.

  Constantinople’s buildings were close together, built one on top of the other, as the buildings were in Paris. But this city was much larger than Paris could ever be, hemmed in as it was on its small island in the middle of the Seine. As we moved deeper into Constantinople on horseback, my husband’s troops of twenty-five thousand men and all my ladies with our baggage train were dwarfed by the countless people and the endless streets that fanned out around us in a great arc off the wide road we traveled on.

  We came to the Lycus River at the center of the city. The river was surrounded on all sides by buildings six stories tall. My ladies and I were brought down from our horses by imperial slaves. These slaves, dressed in thin silk robes over linen trousers, lifted us down from our mounts.

  I blinked, shocked to be handled by a servant without permission, but the man in his fine jeweled silk touched me without meeting my eyes. His hands were indifferent on my waist, as if I were a vase that his lord had asked him to set on a table. My ladies tittered together, for these slaves were clearly chosen for their beauty as well as for their strength.

  Later that evening, I was told that these were not men at all but eunuchs, gelded half men who had been trained to guard the empress with their lives. My own men-at-arms were separated from me and my ladies by these towering hulks, but there was no time to question this arrangement, for we were handed at once into flowered litters made of fragrant cedar wood stained dark brown. These litters were carved with flying beasts, dragons with sapphires and rubies inlaid for their gleaming eyes.

  We followed the path of the river to the Bosporus, the strait that separated one section of the vast city from the other. This water divided Europe from Asia, and the imperial palace from the rest of Constantinople itself. Once we reached the edge of the Bosporus, we were handed by more slaves into wooden barges with canopies of silk to block the sun. These canopies were covered with fragrant, jewel-toned flowers of vermilion, lapis, and saffron. The peasants of Constantinople lined the quayside and waved to us and cheered as we set off across the water to the imperial palace. My women were silent until we were on solid ground again, clutching one another’s hands, for none of them could swim.

  Nor could I, but I was thrilled by the new world that had sprung up around me; it never entered my mind to be afraid.

  My ladies and I had been separated from Louis and his Parisians as well as my own lords from Poitou and Aquitaine. But as our barges reached the palace on the other side of the strait, I saw that the men had crossed the Bosporus in barges of their own. My ladies climbed onto dry land one by one. When I rose to step out of the barge, the Baron Rancon was there beside me, offering his hand. He helped me onto the marble quay within the inner walls of the palace.

  “My lady queen.”

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  I addressed him formally, keeping my tone light. All around us my ladies stood staring. Never before had he singled me out for attention in public.

  My husband came to stand beside us then, and Baron Rancon dropped my hand. Louis stood close but did not touch me, his eyes trained on the high stone walls around us. The water gate closed behind us, a heavy wooden barrier edged and enforced with bands of iron.

  For the first time since entering Constantinople, I felt a chill as those great gates were sealed shut. Our fighting men and most of our baggage were left outside. I later discovered that our people were given lodgings in the city and that our baggage was brought into the palace by a separate gate. But in that moment, behind those gates of iron and wood, I wondered if we would as easily find our way back out again.

  I pushed this thought from my mind almost as soon as I had it. Louis met my eyes, and smiled. “I have been told that the gentlemen are housed separately. I am off to greet the Emperor Manuel, but I will see you at this night’s feast.” Louis kissed my cheek as a brother might, before the Emperor Manuel’s attendants led him and our men away. Only Baron Rancon lingered, his eyes on me. My safety was his personal trust. He did not like to leave it to another.

  I had heard on the road to Byzantium that in the palace at Constantinople men and women lived separate lives, save for their daily meetings in the great hall, and for love play. There would be little of the latter with Louis, and while I would rather have gone to see the Emperor Manuel for myself, I soon relaxed in the presence of my own ladies. The Empress Eirene did not come to greet me, but sent her head woman, Esmeralda, to see to my comfort. My ladies and I were led through a different entrance from the one the men had taken into the depths of the palace.

  The interior walls rose around us, but light still shone through the latticework that covered the windows. The outer walls were strong for defense, but were set far back from the living quarters of the palace. Sunlight came into the rooms through windows that stretched from floor to ceiling. The painted white latticework kept out the direct heat of the sun, so that even in that climate, the rooms were never too warm.

  My ladies and I were taken into the women’s quarters. In the East, women not only led separate lives from men but were cut off completely in their own section of the palace. I did not care for this arrangement. But this city was only one stop on our road to Jerusalem. We would leave in two weeks’ time, and take the long journey to Antioch to meet my uncle Raymond. Until then, I would enjoy the beauties that surrounded me, and overlook the flaws of Byzantium.

  The rooms that the Empress Eirene had set aside for my use were the most elaborate I had ever seen. It was a day for firsts, for I had never before seen entire rooms laid out in marble: floors, walls, and ceilings. The beams of the high ceilings were inlaid cypre
ss wood carved in swirls, images that brought to mind the waves of the ocean. Marble columns rose throughout the sunlit rooms, each in different shades of rose and cream, each column gilded at the top in Corinthian splendor. Low divans lay against the walls, and were scattered throughout the room, that one might sit in comfort the moment one thought to rest. These were carved from rich mahogany and covered with cushions of silk and damask in shades of rose, mauve, cream, and gold.

  The effect these rooms had on the body and the spirit was immediately soothing. I felt the tension leave my shoulders for the first time since coming down off my horse in the hands of that palace eunuch. As Amaria and I led Priscilla and the rest of my ladies into these rooms, palace women scurried like mice to get out of our way, their faces veiled like Saracens. One of the Parisians crossed herself when she saw them. Amaria met my eyes. She would send word to Bardonne to find a quick and secret way out of this palace. I would not rest easy under the roof of a man who kept his women always veiled.

  I still did not see the empress, but her veiled women were everywhere, offering me sweetmeats, hazelnuts braised in honey, and candied dates and figs. I took one of each for politeness’ sake, and sent the rest among my women. After I had eaten and taken a glass of watered wine from Cyprus, the empress’ ladies brought me into the baths.

  The four deep pools lay in the shape of flower petals, large teardrops curving off from the center of the room. These bathing pools were sunk into the marble floor, as a pond or a lake might be at home. But this was no forest pool of brackish water. The empress’ baths were man-made lakes lined with pink and cream marble. Beneath the floor of each, furnaces were stoked day and night, so that the water in those pools would stay heated, that the women of the palace might bathe any time they desired.