Five
ACRE
Berengaria and her women now spent most of their
time with the priest, who kept church in a separate tent, so
Johanna and her women had more room in theirs. They brought in new
reed mats for the floor and kept the door flaps folded back, to let
in the air and light. The dust from the camp drifted everywhere. In
the evening, while Lilia and Edythe shook out the Queen’s linen and
made her bed ready, Lilia said, under her breath, “You will never
guess who loves me now.”
Edythe glanced at her. “Who?”
The girl had shed her gloom about Gracia. She
smiled; she had dimples at either corner of her mouth. Her dark
eyes flashed. “You will never guess.” She flipped her hips back and
forth and put a finger to her lips.
Edythe shut her mouth tight, ashamed of even
caring. Lilia would get nothing for this but a few baubles, maybe
worse. But the girl was happy, glowing. Someone loved her. Edythe
felt a low roil of envy, herself old and juiceless.
She bent over the pallet bed, tucking down the
corner. “Then I won’t try. We should bring her some bread and wine;
it’s getting late.”
“The King is coming,” Lilia said.
“Well, then definitely we should get some
wine.”
Johanna came in, a train of pages after her,
carrying a table, and some ewers. Right behind them another page
appeared, stood to one side, and piped out, “The King!” Johanna
fussed over the placement of the table, and Richard sauntered in,
trailing Rouquin and King Guy and Guy’s brother Hugh and the
Templar Grand Master. They crowded the place. Edythe drew back
almost to the bedside, the sharp smell of sweat in her nostrils.
Johanna called Lilia to light the candles.
Richard came up to his sister. “Not getting on so
well with my dear bride?” He kissed her cheek. “God, what a shrew.”
He left the ambiguities of this hanging in the air. Edythe,
watching, was startled at how pale he looked, his face gray beneath
the brown of the sun. While Johanna bustled around she stood
quietly watching them all.
Guy was saying, “Everybody is lining up to take the
four bezants. Even the Germans.” He drank from a cup and handed it
off to a page. Rouquin, a few feet away, kept his back to him;
watching from the back of the tent, Edythe had seen before that
Rouquin hated Guy.
“Nonetheless,” said Guy’s brother Hugh. “One month.
That’s close.”
Humphrey de Toron walked in among them, trailing
three of his pages. He made his bow to Guy, his overlord, and Guy
spoke and shook his hand, smiling. Guy played a perfect King;
Edythe wondered, briefly, why that wasn’t good enough for a
nonexistent kingdom. Her gaze lay on Humphrey, whose puzzling
elegant manners fascinated her. If she had such a grace, she
thought, she would have more than one to love her. Humphrey’s page
brought him a cup of the wine. He said nothing, but Edythe saw his
attention slide across the room, as if against his will, toward
Richard. The look on his face reminded her suddenly of Lilia.
“What about the fleet?” Richard said. He was at the
center of the flaming lamps, under the peak of the tent. When he
spoke, all the rest of them fell silent and faced him, a ring of
moons. The Templar stepped forward. He wore the silver medal of his
order on a chain around his neck. The red cross was like a
bloodstain on his snowy white surcoat.
“A lot of the shipmasters who brought us here want
to go back to Sicily, but there’s a Genoese captain who came with
the King of France who can take charge of that. Simon Doro.”
“No,” Richard said. “No Genoese. They’re all French
under the skin.”
The Grand Master’s voice was measured. “We have to
seal off the city completely, that’s the key to it. For that we
need a fleet.”
Richard put his hand to his head. Maybe he had a
headache. His voice was mild. The Grand Master might have no
overlord but the Pope, but he only advised, and Richard disposed.
“The Pisans will do it. The fleet that came with me. If we offer
them enough. Rouq’, did you scout Saladin’s camp?” The Templar
backed off, frowning.
“Mercadier and I did, this afternoon,” said his
cousin. “It’s a clever setup, several rings deep; it would be hard
to storm. Still, from all the signs, they used to have a lot more
people, so they’re losing men. I think we outnumber them two to
one, maybe. Mercadier has heard they send swimmers back and forth
across the bay with messages, so we should have the fleet on the
watch.”
Johanna walked up to her brother and put her hand
on his arm. “If you must talk of war, get out of here. I want this
for a place of peace, a woman’s place, so if you want to stay, talk
more gently.”
Richard said, “Go, then. Humphrey—my lord de Toron,
stay.” He sat down on a stool in the middle of the tent and asked
for some wine. Humphrey de Toron lingered, waiting to be called on.
Richard turned to Johanna, who was bustling around him, directing
Lilia with the wine; Edythe came up quietly and put another stool
beside the King’s.
Johanna’s brother said, “So where is the lady
Berengaria?”
“At church,” Johanna said, and gave an imperious
sniff. “Or what passes for a church here.”
“What’s wrong between you? I thought you women
clung together like brambles and sheep.”
Johanna sat down on the stool. “She prefers the
company of God. No, believe me, I am much happier without her. It’s
men who are the brambles and the sheep; men can’t endure life
without another man around to be better than, or in liege to.”
Nearby, Humphrey de Toron smiled.
Richard took the cup of wine. This, Edythe knew,
was an old game with them. She frowned; his eyes seemed unnaturally
bright, and his face shone with sweat. “Women,” he said. “You’re
just like Mother. You love circles, everything’s got to web
together for you, which is why you can’t decide anything.”
Johanna began a sharp reply. Richard swayed, as if
his head were suddenly heavy; the cup slipped out of his hands, and
he pitched forward onto the floor.
Lilia screamed. Humphrey de Toron started toward
him, and Edythe leaped up from her place by the bed. With a cry,
Johanna had dropped to her knees beside her brother. She swung
toward Humphrey.
“Please go, sir.” Her eyes came pleading to Edythe.
“Help me.”
Humphrey left, with his pages. Edythe sank down
beside the King. He was alive, still, she saw at once with a
ridiculous gratitude, and struggling a little, as if to get up. Or
just twitching. His eyes were only half-open. She laid her hands on
him. He was shivering in long furious spasms, his muscles knotting
under her touch.
“What is it?” Johanna said. She wrung her hands
together, leaning over him. “Is it poison?”
Edythe said, “I don’t know.” She looked around
them. “My lady—we must cover him. We could put him in your
bed.”
“Yes,” Johanna said. “I’ll bring Rouquin.”
Edythe knelt by the King, struggling to understand
this. He was breathing well enough. Now his eyes opened; he put one
hand on the mat beneath him and tried to get up, but he was too
weak even to lift his head off the ground, and he lay flat again.
Sweat trickled down his cheek. Rouquin came in, swearing under his
breath, and lifted Richard in his arms. Edythe, standing back,
remembered how strong he was; he lifted his tall cousin like a
child in his arms and took him to the Queen’s pallet.
Johanna said, “Let no one in.” She turned to
Edythe. “You must help him. You must save him, Edythe.”
A plea. Or a command. Edythe licked her lips,
trying to think what to do. She had lost Gracia. Help me,
she thought. Please help me. But she could not think to whom
she prayed.
Edythe got Lilia to heating wine, the last of the
zingiber potion and a good dose of oxymel, and with Johanna she
wrapped the King in the bedclothes; before they were done, he
thrashed and retched and his knees jerked up and he spewed vomit.
Johanna began to weep, her hands to her face, sobbing helplessly.
Edythe mopped up the mess, pulling the dirty blankets into a heap
on the floor. She unwrapped her coif and wiped his face with it and
tossed the soiled cloth after the blankets. He was still shivering
and he was unconscious. His clothes were filthy and she began to
undress him; she pulled his belt out from under his body and cut
the lacings of his shirt with a knife. Johanna brought more
blankets and helped her peel his shirt off. They covered his chest
with fresh blankets and pulled off his boots and hose. He had
fouled himself. Johanna turned her eyes from his nakedness, put her
hand on Edythe’s shoulder, and stared steadily away while Edythe
cleaned him up and then covered him.
Edythe’s heart was pounding. She had never touched
a naked man before. Of course she had seen them, and drawings and
descriptions, but this was different. His efflorescence amazed her.
He was beautiful; she could not let him die.
When he was clean and covered snugly, she got the
potion from Lilia and pointed to the heap of filthy clothes and
blankets on the floor.
“Take that. Have it burned. See to it yourself.”
The cup in her hand, she turned to Johanna. “Help me.”
They could not budge Richard, lying cramped on his
side with his knees drawn to his chest, shivering and sweating at
the same time. Berengaria came back, saw her lord husband bundled
on the bed, and fled away again to the makeshift church. Johanna
sent again for Rouquin.
The big man came in. Edythe had thought him always
a little angry, but there was no anger in him now. He went down on
one knee beside the low pallet and put his hand on Richard’s
cheek.
Johanna said, “We need to get him to drink. He has
to be up—” She looked at Edythe.
“He must sit up,” Edythe said.
Rouquin went behind the pallet, squatted down, and
laid his arm under the King’s shoulders. His voice sank almost to a
whisper.
“Sit up, Richard. Sit up, boy.”
The King’s head moved, and his lips parted. Johanna
gave a long sigh. Rouquin raised him effortlessly against his
chest, supporting his head, and Edythe held the full cup to his
lips. She stroked his throat, to make him swallow. Rouquin said,
“Come on, sonny, drink it, drink,” in that same crooning, tender
voice.
Richard’s eyes fluttered. His lips touched the
wine, and he lifted his hands unsteadily, but he had no strength
even for that. Under Edythe’s fingers his throat worked in a
swallow, and then another.
His eyes closed. His head rolled back against
Rouquin’s shoulder; the big man looked at Edythe.
“Let him down,” she said. “Let him sleep.” She
could tell they had used all the strength Richard had left. The
moon was old and weak, which was in his favor. She would have to
see where Mars was. She hoped the potion warmed him; she could
think of nothing else to do.
Rouquin stayed in the tent, near the door; Lilia
came back, carrying a bundle of fresh blankets, and made another
bed on the far side. At the prie-dieu in the back, Johanna was
crying and praying.
Rouquin said, “Is it poison?”
Edythe sat on the side of the pallet, one hand on
the King’s chest over the blankets. “I don’t think so.” She would
look in her herbal, where there was a section on poisons and their
effects. She slid her hand under the blankets, to the King’s bare
chest, to feel his heart’s pulse.
Against her palm the pounding of his heart was
another sign that his humors were swelling out of balance. Sweat
covered his skin, his knotted muscles shivered; she imagined the
black bile seething in his gut, the yellow pooling in his belly.
She wondered if they were right about the poison, or if it could be
magic, an evil spell.
By midnight Richard was scorching with fever. Maybe
she had given him too much zingiber. Nonetheless, the fever proved
that it was not a poison. She boiled some lemons with their cooling
properties in a lot of wine and water, let this potion stand
awhile, and then called Rouquin to help her; Johanna and Lilia were
asleep, spooned together, on the pallet across the tent. Berengaria
was still in the church.
Rouquin gathered the King in his arms, whispering
to him, and sip by sip she fed Richard the new drink. As she did
she looked him over for swelling, lumps, or bruises that would show
where the rioting humors were collecting in dangerous masses. Foul
stuff matted his hair and beard.
Rouquin said, “Will he die?”
“No,” she said, without thinking about it much. She
would not let him die. He had drunk nearly all the potion, and she
nodded that Rouquin could lay him down again on his back. She went
and found a comb among Johanna’s things and came back and began to
comb out Richard’s hair. Rouquin stayed where he was, hunkered down
behind the pallet.
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 unfeminine 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 of 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.
“Johanna said also Humphrey de Toron was here,” she
said.
“Humphrey,” he said. He lay back down on the bed,
his head turned to watch her. By the way he spoke the name she knew
how it was with him. He must have seen it in her face, because he
said, “You think I am a monster.”
“My lord,” she said, surprised. He was hers, now,
whatever his sins; she loved him. “Do you want more?”
“Yes.”
She went for the rest of the broth. What men did
together, making women of each other, that was sinful, cursed, and
apparently very common, to judge from jokes and stories. Those who
said it was evil agreed also that she was evil. That set their
righteousness at nothing. What Richard did was Richard’s humor. She
sat down beside him and helped him drink again. His color was
better. His head still wobbled.
He pushed away the cup, then lay down again, and
his gaze poked at her. “Who are you?”
She sat back away from him in a little jerk of
warning. She had loved him too soon. She folded her hands in her
lap, her back straight. “Edythe. I’m one of—”
He rolled onto his side toward her, one arm bent
under his head; the light from the front of the tent shone on his
face. He said, “I mean, who are you really?”
“My lord, I don’t understand. I will fetch some
wine.” She started up.
He grabbed her skirt. “No, stay. My mother sent
you?”
She sat down. Her hands knotted together in her
lap. She had let him start this, and now she had to go where he
hunted. “Yes, my lord.”
“And Mother got you somehow from an English
nunnery.”
“I—yes.” She looked off toward the door, in case
someone was listening.
“You’re lying. You don’t sound English, you don’t
even sound Poitevin. You’re from France, somewhere.”
“I—”
“Tell me.” He was trying to prop himself up on one
elbow, his head unsteady, the blanket down around his waist.
“I was born in Troyes. But I swear—”
“Troyes. That’s not a Troyenne accent. No.”
Abruptly, as if he had caught a fresher scent, he went off on a new
track. “Your father was a physician, wasn’t he? That’s how you know
all this, from Papa’s knee.”
She jumped, cornered. She said nothing; against her
will she saw in her mind the gaunt bearded face above the dark
clothes, a book in his hand, pointing to places on her doll and
explaining humors. A brief pang struck her like a tooth in the
heart.
“My mother is broad-minded,” he said. “She loves
clever, accomplished people, no matter who they are. She knew a
famous physician in Troyes. He sent her herbs and recipes, gossip
and stories, and gave her much wise counsel. She might have saved
him from the French King’s purge, what was it, ten, twelve years
ago, if she had been free, and still in Poitiers.”
She watched him like a rabbit seeing a snake coil
steadily closer through the bending grass. He said, “But she did
save you, didn’t she?”
“My lord,” she said, her voice thin. “I don’t know
what you’re talking about.”
“Not a Troyenne accent,” he said, “because in
Troyes you didn’t speak French. You spoke that other
thing—Zephais—Zephardic. You’re a Jew.”
“No,” she said. She licked her lips. Unwillingly
she thought of the evils his coronation had brought upon the Jews
of London—when the crowds rioted through the Jewry and killed many.
He had stopped it but for money. “No,” she said again. “Not
anymore—I’m a Christian.” She remembered to cross herself.
“Were you ever baptized? You shouldn’t be on the
Crusade.”
“Oh, please—” She flung out her hands to him.
Eleanor had decided against the baptism, in itself a dangerous
admission. “I want to go to Jerusalem. I have come all this way,
and we’re so close, I can’t go back now.”
He said, “You must serve God. Be a true Christian.
When we take Jerusalem, we will bring the Kingdom of Jesus, and
when He comes again, He will know you, and you will be
saved.”
“I serve God,” she said. She settled back, her
hands on her knees. She understood what this meant: To serve God
was to serve Richard. “I promise.”
He smiled at her. “I believe you.” He hitched
himself up on his elbows; he was tired. “I think you’re one of us,
anyway, damned thing and outcast. If I take Jerusalem, we’re all
saved, you with me.”
“Yes,” she said. She wondered what he meant.
“Good. Bring me something to drink.”
She brought him the jar. At the first swallow he
made a face. “This tastes awful.” But he drank it all and had her
bring him more.
When that was gone, he lay back on the pallet,
drowsy. “How long have I been sick?”
“Just three days. You fell late two days before
yesterday.”
“Good. Now send for my brother,” he said.
“Who?” she said, surprised.
“My cousin. Rouquin.”
He was falling asleep. She went to pull the blanket
up. He said, his eyes closed, “Get him.”
“Yes, my lord.”
He settled himself into the bed. He whispered,
“It’s all well if I do this well.” At once he was asleep. She
thought awhile about forgetting the order and letting him rest, but
in the end she sent a page for Rouquin.