Sixteen
JAFFA
Edythe knew where Rouquin kept his horses, in a
long stable against the city wall, and as soon as she came into
Jaffa she went there and found him hitching his roan stallion to a
ring in one corner.
“ I have heard you are going to Jerusalem,” she
said. “ Take me with you.”
Rouquin hung the bridle on the wall. “What are you
doing down here? You’re all supposed to be in Acre. What are you
talking about?”
“Ayberk brought me. I told Johanna that Besac
needed me at the hospital.” She shrugged that off. “ I’ ll dress
like a man. A squire, I’ve seen enough of them. I can get the
clothes. I’ll work. I’ll keep up.” She watched his eyes. “ I’ve
done a lot for you, and for Richard. He won’t let me, but he
doesn’t have to know. I realize it will be hard. I was in the camp
at Acre. Can it be worse than that?” She said, carefully, “ I’ll do
anything you want.”
The gray eyes narrowed. In the spiky red beard his
wide mouth twisted into a crooked smile. “Anything I want, huh?
He’s got me riding rear guard. All right. I’ ll take you. If you
mean it. Come with me, right now, and prove it.”
She swallowed, unnerved. Her legs quivered. She had
not meant this to happen so suddenly, but she had promised. She
followed him around the end of the stable and out to the
yard.
It was broad, paved in old bricks, with an orange
tree growing in one corner, and a fountain. On three sides were the
low stone houses where his men were quartered. He said, “ I’m
surprised Johanna let you go.” It was the heat of the day and
except for three boys brushing down horses, and Mercadier lounging
under the orange tree, no one was there.
She did not say, Johanna has another plot. She
wants me out of the way. She said, “She knows how important the
hospital is. Richard must think I’m still in Acre, though.” Another
boy rolled a barrow full of horseshit and straw out of the stable
and around a corner. Rouquin took her into the middle
building.
They went through a long hall, dark, smelling of
dirty clothes and stale chamber pots, littered with blankets, to
the south end, where there was a door, which opened on a narrow
closet. This was his room, she saw, his helmet on the crossbar, his
mail, his shield against the wall.
“Sit.” He put a stool down in the middle of the
room.
She had no idea what was going to happen. She
swallowed, and rubbed her palms on her skirt, and sat. He pulled
off her coif, and her hair came down over her shoulders and
back.
She saw then he had the shears in his hand, and she
cried out, but before she could defend her hair he took the whole
long swag, rolled it over his hand, and in one chop cut it
off.
She gasped. She put her hands to her head, the
short hair bristling, scratching her neck; she had never cut her
hair. He pushed her hands aside and began to crop away even the
rest, as close as he could, down to her scalp, like his.
Mercadier had come into the open doorway and was
leaning his shoulder on the jamb, his eyes quizzical. He made a
gesture with his hands.
Rouquin said, “She’s going with us. Keep it
tight.”
“ With us.” The Brabanter’s round face creased in a
smile. “A pretty knight she’ll make. In a dress?”
“She’ll need a jerkin. Our colors. Shirt, hose,
boots, small clothes.”
She said, “ I have my own . . . ,” and blushed,
clamping her lips shut.
“She can wear her own small clothes.” Rouquin ran
his hand over her cropped head. Her scalp felt cold. She was bald.
She looked up at him, and he smiled at her, pleased with
himself.
“You still don’t look like a boy.”
“ I’ ll grow a moustache,” she said, and Mercadier
laughed.
She had expected a different demand of him. He had
felt her hand tremble in his grasp. When she had gone, he stood
under the orange tree in the dusk, thinking about that. He could
have had her, right there. She would have let him.
It would have been the price she paid for going
with him. An obligation, a trade. He wanted something else. He
wanted her free, willing, eager, coming to him joyously. He
remembered kissing her, how she had lifted her face to him, her
eyes closed, trusting in his arms. She would give herself utterly
to him, freely, for his own sake, when it happened. He could wait.
There would be no chances on the march, but maybe in
Jerusalem.
Richard had chosen his army carefully: the
remainder of his Poitevins, Rouquin and his men, several local
barons and their companies, who knew the ground well. The Templars
and Hospitallers, Guy and his men, Henry of Champagne, and the last
of the French. They had brought a supply train of six wagons.
Leaving Jaffa, Edythe rode on one of the wagons, dressed in a dark
jerkin and hose and old shoes too big for her, a long cap. Under
the shirt she wore a band of cloth bound tight across her breasts,
to hold her flat. Richard led the army; the wagons traveled well
behind him, and Rouquin behind them. The army stretched out along
miles of the road.
The first day went along easily enough. The sky was
bright blue, a single bird floating in high circles overhead. It
was dull sitting on the jouncing wagon seat; the driver snored. She
noticed the other pages and squires of Rouquin’s company picking up
wood as they went and stowing it in the wagons, and she got down
and ran around gathering with them. It was easier moving in the
jerkin than in a long dress. The wood was sparse, thorny, low to
the ground. She came into camp at sundown worn to exhaustion. She
slept on the ground by the fire, Rouquin on one side of her,
Mercadier on the other.
The next night as they made camp, she watched
Mercadier chop kindling so fast she couldn’t see precisely what he
was doing. The others moved around her, bringing wood, dumping
their saddles and other gear on the ground around the fire to mark
their spaces. When they met, they banged their hands together and
said, “Jerusalem.”
She helped the cook spit mutton. The chatter around
her was full of laughter. Richard rode by and they all cheered him.
She stacked wood, hauled water, part of this. She felt suddenly
warmer. Someone began to sing a marching song, and the others
picked it up. The tuneless growl of voices spread from campfire to
campfire. She turned the meat and greased it and the fire crackled;
she backed quickly away. She began to pick up the words of the
refrain. Settling by the fire to keep the spit turning, she began
to sing along. She was one of them, going to Jerusalem. Nobody
cared about anything else.
The next day, as they moved up into the first low
hills, suddenly a shower of arrows came pelting down from the slope
beside the road.
Edythe was out looking for wood; she heard someone
yell, and turned back to see the front wagon abruptly stop, its
lead team slumping down in the harness. The wagons coming along the
road after ran up on one another, the drivers cursing and ducking
the arrows, crawling under their seats and jumping to the ground.
Another horse was down, kicking. Another reared in the harness and
fell sideways. She started toward them and a second shower of
arrows pelted into the wagons, each arrow carrying a little cuff of
fire.
She stopped. A yell went up from the rear guard.
The pounding hooves warned her, and she flung herself under the
wagon; all she could see was a wall of horses’ forelegs driving
toward her. They divided smoothly around the wagon and crossed the
road on either side. She crawled out and stood up.
The mass of horsemen was charging up the hill
toward the unseen bowmen, and from the vanguard another stream of
horses came galloping after them. She lowered her hand. Now she saw
that the wagon she had just hid under was burning.
That was their food, those barrels and bales. She
scrambled up the wheel to the driver’s seat; two other squires were
climbing on, and another ran to the horses. The two boys on the
wagon were crawling across the covered top toward the burning
arrows.
She shouted, “ Be careful—” The whole load of the
wagon was covered with this sheet of canvas, and so far only that
was burning. She cried, “Help me get this off.” She pulled her belt
knife and slashed the cords holding the canvas down.
The boys bounded around and together they threw off
the burning cover. The third squire had freed the living horses
trapped with the dead ones, and they pulled the wagon out of line.
Behind them the next wagon burned, past saving. Three squires were
trying to loose the pitching, screaming team.
She ran to help. They saved the horses, but the
whole wagon was on fire. They dragged the rest out of the way,
hauling them close together, in case there was another
attack.
Abruptly the knights were galloping back around
them, arrows in their mail and shields, roaring. They howled at
each other and made their horses rear and prance. Their faces
blazed. They had fought the Saracens in some blind draw and crushed
them. A little rain began to fall, and with the other squires she
crept in under the wagons, watching the knights whoop over their
victory.
The boy next to her said, “They are hot, look at
them.” His voice was wistful. “ I’ll be such a knight as
that.”
She made some indefinite sound. He was one of the
squires to Rouquin’s company; his name was Walter. He seemed
familiar and she knew she had seen him before, probably often, but
only now she paid attention. Now that they shared the Crusade. She
turned to watch one knight rear his horse up and make it leap four
great bounds on its hind legs along the road, and the others
cheered.
They stayed where they were, built camps around the
wagons, in the rain. The fire sputtered and the meat was raw and
turning bad. Sometime just before sundown, when she was halfway
dozing, she looked up and saw Richard dismounting from his horse on
the other side of the camp.
She crouched back among the other squires. Richard
came into the middle of the camp, on the other side of the fire,
his eyes steadily on the squires. He wore no helmet, no sign of
rank, only a dirty white surcoat over his mail. His blue eyes
blazed. He said, “Your masters say you saved these wagons. By God’s
spurs you are worthy, and I love you for it, I shall dub each one
of you by my own hand, when this is done.”
The boys all cheered, and some stood up, and said
their names and bowed; Walter leaped to his feet and bowed and
bowed, grinning all over his face. She stayed sitting, hidden among
them, but what he had said swelled in her mind. He had meant her,
too. He had praised her, too. She would have done anything for him.
She deserved Jerusalem.
They slogged on. The wagons that had burned had
held most of the fodder for their horses. Besides the constant
search for dry wood, now they were looking also for grass, for hay,
anything in this desert country that the horses would eat. She
thought the army was growing smaller. She saw little of Rouquin,
who was in the saddle before she woke up until after she was
asleep. She asked Walter if there were fewer men, and he
shrugged.
“ Probably they’re leaving. They did last time.” He
had an armful of grass; she had found a narrow meadow in a draw
just off the road, along a creek rapidly filling in the rain, and
they were cutting all they could before the rising waters drove
them out. The wet grass was soaking her jerkin. He said, “You’re a
girl, aren’t you.”
She mumbled a denial. He said, “ It’s all right.
There’ve been other girls. There were girls the first time. At
least I’ve heard. Like that song.” He began to sing an old ballad,
about a woman who followed her husband to the Holy Land.
She thought probably he had seen her before, too,
back at Jaffa, at Acre, but he had not recognized her, not paid
attention, until they shared this. They went back up to the camp
and fed the snorting horses; the roan tried to bite her. She went
to help the cook. Walter sat by the fire, yawning. That night again
she never saw Rouquin come into camp, and he was gone when she woke
up.
Plodding on through the mud, she grew hungrier. In
the higher hills, they took another assault of arrows, and again
the knights drove the Saracens away. The wagons were empty anyway,
except for lances and shields.
Walter said, “ I’ ll keep going. Won’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”
“Yes, but then you have—” He nodded toward
Mercadier. With a start she realized that he saw her lie down each
night beside Mercadier, and so he thought her the Brabanter’s
woman. She said nothing.
They trudged on. There was nothing to eat. The
horses neighed with hunger. The sun could not break through the low
clouds; it would rain again soon. She thought she should pray. She
plodded along beside Walter, her head down, afraid she would give
up. A drop of rain hit her nose. Another, and another.
Then the foreguard was yelling, and the rear guard
dashed by to help them. She caught a glimpse of the great roan
bolting past, its long ugly head stretched forward, the mailed
rider drawing out his sword.
The shouting up front became clamorous. Ahead the
road topped a saddle ridge, and they labored, panting the last few
hundred yards, and from the summit looked down into a long, wide
valley. As the wagons rolled onto the down slope, they could see
the valley floor, where the knights had surrounded a collection of
laden animals: donkeys, and many camels and some horses, and a
flock of sheep and goats. Walter thumped her back.
“A caravan! We’re saved!”
She let out a yell. They had found food. The rain
even lessened awhile. The knights let the handful of Saracens
driving the caravan leak through their circle. They unpacked the
camels and let them go and slaughtered the sheep and goats, built
fires, put meat over them, and they began eating; they were eating
well past sundown, when Rouquin finally came in.
“Hah, you like that, hah?” He sat beside her. She
saw Walter’s eyes widen, and the squire slide away. She gave the
dripping haunch in her hands to Rouquin.
“ Eat. There’s plenty. It’s delicious.” There was
blood running down her chin.
“Yes. Nothing like a fast for seasoning.”
The singing began again, but this time they were
singing Christian hymns, and she only listened. They were going to
Jerusalem, all together, that was what mattered. She lay down, and
he lay next to her.
The rain began again. She hunched down under her
cloak, and then he spread his cloak over them both and drew her
close to him. He slept in his mail and he was cold and damp against
her, but he kept the rain off. She pressed her face into the
shelter of his body. Surely the caravan was a sign. God favored
them. This time they would come into the Holy City.
They moved on through driving rain. They had
abandoned most of the wagons and she rode one of those horses now,
first by herself, then with Walter up behind. They rode bareback,
the harness reins chopped short. She had never ridden astride
before, and it surprised her how different it was. Eleanor, she
remembered, had ridden astride.
Behind her, Walter crept closer on the horse’s
back, put his arms around her waist as if to hold on, and began to
move his fingers toward her breasts. She looped the reins into one
hand and gouged the nails of the other across his wrist.
“Ow,” he said.
“Oh, did I hurt you?” she asked, looking to see who
noticed. Nobody paid them heed.
“Slut,” he said, under his breath, but he withdrew
his hands, and just held to the back of her belt. In the afternoon,
they dodged another spray of arrows. Several of the knights lost
their horses, and one took their horse, so they were walking
again.
Rouquin whispered, “Are you sorry you came?”
“No,” she said, amazed that he asked. “No.”
But there was no food anymore. All night the hungry
horses neighed and her stomach hurt and she dreamed of eating. In
the bleak wintry hills nothing grew but thorns and scrub. On the up
and down road, she saw Richard riding ahead of them and realized
how many had deserted, how small the army was becoming.
She saw him again when they came to a river, and he
pulled off to the side to watch them all cross. She caught only a
glimpse of his face, but that was enough. His eyes were hollow, his
skin a bad color. She knew, with a knot in her stomach, that he was
getting sick again.
She thought, In Jerusalem, he will get
better. She thought of the tincture, back in Jaffa; she should
have brought it. Maybe she could find some in Jerusalem. She should
have brought it.
Then he would have known. But she should have
brought it.
The next morning, in the driving rain, she was
helping break the camp when the chief men began to move up toward
the front of the army. She saw they were having a council. Walter
said, “This is what they did when they turned back the last time.”
Her stomach rolled. They must be close, she thought. It must be
only over the next hill, beyond the next bend in the road. But the
men were gathering, up there, and she could hear them
shouting.
“Sire, we cannot go farther. There’s nothing to
eat. God knows what lies ahead of us. Saladin and all his
troops—”
“And us so weakened, Sire—”
Richard stood with the cloak pulled tight around
him, shaking. The corruption of his body was more to him than the
arguing around him. De Sablé came at him again. “ How can we even
mount a charge if we are attacked? We have lost half the
horses.”
He thought, That hardly matters, since we’ve
lost half the men. Gerald of Nablus, the Hospitaller, rose up
before him, adamant here as he never was against the
Saracens.
“Sire, we must turn back. There’s still the long
way to the coast and we have no food.”
They had food. Not much. It was the horses he
pitied. He felt cold all the way to his bones, as if each stroke of
rain pierced him like a lance. He wanted to lie down, but they were
miles from any bed.
Rouquin was there, his face streaming in the rain,
his eyes hard, accusing. “ In the great Crusade, they never turned
back. They took Jerusalem.”
Guy said, “My lord, I am low minded saying this,
but the Grand Masters are right. We must go back.”
Richard held his jaw fast, to keep his teeth from
chattering. Around him were men who owed him their swords, their
power, even their lives: Guy whom he maintained as King, Henry of
Champagne who was his cousin, Guy’s brother Hugh whom he had made
lord of Ascalon, the orders whose coffers he filled regularly, and
they were curling their tails up between their legs and getting
ready to run.
But he needed them. Without them, he himself could
not go forward.
He bent his head. “Go tell the rest, then. We will
go back.” His muscles hurt, every part of his body throbbing.
Rouquin surged up in front of him. His gray eyes
were wide with fury; Richard thought suddenly of his father, raging
like this. Rouquin’s voice spat at him.
“You can’t do this. You swore to lead us.” He
wheeled toward the men already hurrying off to retreat. “ I will go
on; who will go to Jerusalem with me?”
Mercadier stood there, but Rouquin’s voice
stretched to reach the others, already gone into the haze of the
rain, their backs to him. Nor did they heed him. No one turned to
join him, but all rushed away.
Richard clutched the cloak around him. He had to
get somewhere warm and safe. With his doctor, and her gentle hands
and her potions against the pain. He looked at Rouquin and said, “I
order you to retreat.”
She was sheltering under a wagon when Rouquin came
back, and from his face she saw what had happened. She turned her
gaze down. His voice was bitter, the words chopped, broken in her
ears. The Crusade was over. They would not see Jerusalem. The old
beggar was right: Nobody won.
She had known this. She had known this, she
thought, since the massacre at Acre.
He said, “Now are you sorry you came?”
She lifted her face to him. “No.” She put her head
forward, her forehead against his mailed chest. At least now she
had a measure of the task. “No.” She pressed closer into his
warmth, his arms around her.
All the way back to Jaffa she ate only a piece of
bread, an old apple, a bone she gnawed down almost to nothing. The
army fell steadily apart, men going off in all directions. Rouquin
and his company and the few Poitevins left reached Jaffa with
Richard almost falling out of the saddle. Edythe went into the
palace and watched over him for the next three days while he
thrashed and shivered and burned with the fever.
She hardly slept. She put aside Jerusalem and set
herself entirely to tend the sick King. She ate what she could and
put on fresh, dry clothes, which did much to restore her, but
Richard had tumbled away into the dark and she could barely keep
her hands on him, much less bring him back.
She gave him the tincture, but he vomited it up.
All his muscles cramped. She stayed by him, talked to him, rubbed
the knots in his back and arms and washed him, brewed potions by
the bed and fed them to him drop by drop, cleaned him up and kept
him warm.
Once, he lay on the bed and laughed. He said, “ I
see it, there, there, the peaks—all shining, they shine like
gold.”
She sat beside him, uneasy, remembering the old
wives’ whisper that dying people saw heaven. He sang to himself, or
maybe he was just breathing loudly. Then he said, again, “This city
in the clouds, there—there’s no way to it. I can’t fly.”
She put her hand on his wrist; the pulse there was
stronger than before. He was not dying. He was somewhere else, but
he would come back. He started under her touch and turned his face
toward her.
His eyes stared, wide and full, seeing something
entirely other. “What is there? What do I have to do?”
“Ah,” she said, wondering what she was talking to,
“ I hope you will be well, my lord King.”
His eyes stared at her, unblinking, still huge.
“They say the Jew knows the answer,” he said. He turned his head
again and shut his eyes.
She gave him the tincture again, this time with a
sour water the apothecary said would soothe his stomach. He kept it
down, and from then on he seemed to get better.
She slept a little. But she dared not leave
him.
Day by day he grew stronger. The dark handsome
Saracen, Safadin, came with a letter. Richard had them move him out
to the hall to meet him. He needed help even sitting down on the
throne, but when the crown was on his head, his back straightened,
and his shoulders squared, he shook them off and sat alone.
The place was full of braziers, too hot for
comfort. All along the walls stood the people of the court. Edythe
stayed in the corner; the Saracen had looked at her once and she
had seen hatred in his eyes. She searched among the crowd along the
wall, but she did not see Rouquin. He had not forgiven Richard,
then. Walter was there, and Henry of Champagne. Humphrey de Toron
passed the words back and forth between Richard and the
Saracen.
He read out loud the letter from the Sultan, and
Richard said, “My lord Saladin hears I am sick, and offers me his
own physician. Very generous of him.”
Safadin spoke.
“The Sultan’s physician is a very famous and
learned Jew from Cairo. He has magic herbs and amulets unknown to
you in the West.”
Richard laughed. He said, “ Tell him I have my own
physician. As it happens, I have meant to write my lord the Sultan,
and if my lord Safadin will wait, I shall have this done.”
Safadin bowed; Richard bowed. He sent for a scribe,
and Edythe went out of the hall.
She walked down the stairs, to the courtyard. Since
they had come back she had not gone to the hospital, for fear of
leaving Richard in his extremity. She could not go now, either. He
was holding together for Safadin’s sake, but she knew he would not
stay upright very long. The discord still raged in his body. Yeshua
had said to give him the tincture as soon as she knew he was sick.
She had done it too late. For her own selfish purpose she had
failed him.
She went around to the kitchen, meaning to find
something to eat, and came upon Rouquin there. Her heart quickened
when she saw him.
He said, “How does the King?”
“ Well enough,” she said. “ He thinks too
much.”
He got her hand, and she followed him into the
shadow between the kitchen wall and the vine-covered back of the
palace. The air smelled sweet of flowers. Spring was coming. She
felt his arms around her and lifted her face, and they
kissed.
His hand got swiftly into her clothes. “ I want
you. Now. This time.”
She said, “ We can’t—not here—” She coiled her arms
around his neck. “Yes. Take me someplace.” She shut her eyes.
He had her lip between his teeth. He had pulled off
her coif and his hand stroked over her cropped hair. Then he stood
back.
“Go make sure he has someone with him, and come
back. I know where.”
She went out, quickly wrapping the cloth around her
head again, which was much easier, with her hair only an inch long.
She went up the hall, empty except for a guard at the door. A table
stood by the throne, an inky goose quill lying on it.
At the end of the hall was the King’s chamber,
where she found Richard back in his bed, asleep. A half-full cup of
wine stood on the floor beside him. A page dozed at the foot of the
bed. Her heart was pounding. She tried not to think what Rouquin
was doing. She listened to the King’s back and felt the pulses of
his liver and of his brain; he murmured at her touch but did not
waken. She went out and back down the steps to the courtyard.
He took her to a shed behind the kitchen, where on
the dirt floor there were some rugs in a heap, a lamp, and a
cup.
The room was dark and smelled moldy. He said,
“Light the lamp.” While she fumbled with a tinderbox, he threw off
his shirt and boots and hose. She got the lamp lit in spite of her
trembling hands. Before she turned back to face him, he was
unlacing her kirtle.
She took off her coif, her eyes on his nakedness,
and her woman’s part clenched. His part was already swollen hard.
She lifted her gaze to the heavy muscles of his chest, but her eyes
wandered down, over the slab of his belly, to the club thrusting
straight out, its tip like a helmet.
“Your hair’s coming back darker.” He fingered the
short curl beside her ear and pulled off the kirtle. “I have wanted
this—so long.” He stroked his hands down her sides, up to undo the
clasp at the back of her neck.
She stood before him, her arms out, so that he
could pull her gown down around her waist. “Yes,” she said,
although her voice shook. Her breasts tingled, only her thin shift
covering them, the nipples poking out the fine cloth. Her blood
hammered in her ears. She did not know what she wanted, but she
knew what was happening.
“No bells this time. Nothing about honorable.” He
slid her clothes down over her hips to the floor.
“Yes.” She stepped out of the heap of cloth.
He knelt and drew her down onto him, so she faced
him, straddling his great horseman’s thighs. Lifting her thin
underdress, he took it off over her head. She shut her eyes, as if
then she would not be so naked.
“Do you want me?”
“Yes. Yes.”
She put her arms around his neck, and he slid his
hand between her legs. The touch made her shiver. His fingers
parted the folds of her body and the round head of his club poked
up into the opening.
She was too small. She clutched him, gritting her
teeth. He drove himself up into the middle of her, tearing in,
tight and burning. She laid her head on his shoulder and
sobbed.
He pulled her around, up and down, whispering to
her. Her arms around his neck, she clung to him, trying to move the
way he wanted, her chest against his, rocking together with him.
The pain became an aching need for more. He moved faster, sucked on
her shoulder and with his arms under her knees curled her legs up
between them. He gasped and groaned and held her fast, a deep pulse
in the middle of her. Breathing hard, he was still.
She shivered. She straightened herself slowly; she
felt as if she had never noticed her body before. As if she had
never been naked before. Something else was supposed to happen.
Something needed to happen. He was still inside her, and she moved
against him. He laid them both down on the rags, his weight against
her, kissed her, tipping her head back.
“My dear one. My dearling.” His tongue flickered
into her ear. He pulled her leg up over his hip. She moaned, her
arms sliding down his hips, her hands running over his backside.
She was climbing, climbing. Then for an instant everything was
perfect, warm, and sweet.
He put his head down next to hers, face-to-face,
and they were both silent awhile.
“ I want to marry you.”
She wept. She rubbed her face against his. “Don’t
say that.”
“You were a virgin. Look at all this blood. We
should marry.”
“No, we can never marry.”
He looked at her, puzzled, but did not ask her why.
He stroked her belly, the inside of her thigh, streaked with blood
and seed. She lay against him, tired. She would think about all
this later. For now this was enough, to have him in her arms. But
nothing lasted.
“ I need to go back to Richard.”
“Yes, I know.”
“ I love you.” That seemed so extraordinary. She
had not known what that meant before. She felt as if a door she had
never seen before had opened, as if she had been locked all this
while in a little room, and the walls had suddenly fallen away, and
now the world lay open to her. She never wanted to leave him. She
would take whatever she could of this wonderful thing. Maybe that
was what Yeshua had meant, about being the woman she was, not
wanting more, just that.
“ I love you.” He played with the curl by her ear;
he kissed her. “ I don’t need to marry. I’m a bastard.”
She held him, her hands on his hair, and he bent
and kissed her collarbone and set his teeth against her skin. She
had to tell him. He trusted her; that was why he did not ask for
reasons. He didn’t want to know, either. She arched her back so
that he could reach her nipple with his tongue. His hand slid down
between her legs again. This was delicious; her whole body
throbbed. When he found out, everything would be over. Better a dog
than a Jew. He would never touch her again. So she would never tell
him. But it could not go on forever.
Richard was getting steadily better. He exchanged
some more bantering letters with Saladin, who was staying in
Jerusalem, and sent the Sultan a gift of Byzantine silk. Promptly
there came back some very fine horses. The King showed them off for
the rest of his court; one of the squires who trotted them up and
down the courtyard was Walter.
His face was bruised, and he ran with a limp. She
wondered what had happened to him. He saw her, and smiled, and then
led the gray mare away. Behind her, somebody said, “That’s Walter.
As much as he gets beaten up, he won’t hear a word against
Richard.”
A few days later, as she waited by the kitchen door
for Richard’s meat, the Templar de Sablé came up to her, casual, as
if he himself were there for his dinner.
“ I would have some words with you, Lady.” He said
this out of the side of his mouth.
She shivered. It had come to her now. Almost she
said, Then why not send me a reed? Instead, she said,
“No.”
He could not linger; someone would remark on it.
But he gave her a foul look and went off. Rouquin was gone again on
a raid; she was alone.
With Richard better she went to the hospital in the
afternoons. Coming back one evening she thought someone followed
her, and turned into a lane, and went by crooked ways back to the
palace. But she knew who it was.
So she was relieved when Johanna wrote from Acre,
demanding she come; the Queen could not sleep, and Berengaria got
headaches. Rouquin would come there soon anyway. Richard sent to
his sister that he was going up there sometime in the spring, for
yet another of his councils, and in the meantime, now that he was
well, he would send Edythe.