The King's Witch (7 page)

Packs of armed men surrounded it, and now more men, shouting, streamed out of the tent, arms shaking in the air and feet stamping. The council was over. Moving through the crowd felt like being in the midst of a great jumble of moving rocks, the men stirring around them in their mail and shouting in their ears. The page went ahead, his voice unheard, and the women had to sidle and creep and edge their way forward to the tent door.

There the page went in before them, but Johanna followed before she was announced, with Edythe on her heels.

The tent was all but empty. Heaps of gear stood around in it, saddles and lances, lumpy sacks and barrels and the treasure chest, a bed back by the far wall, the middle ground trampled to dust, one lamp burning. Richard stood in the light. Johanna flew through the room toward him.

“What are you doing? Is it true? Are you going to attack Tyre? This is folly, Richard—you must see—”

He said, “We are not attacking Tyre. We are going to Acre in the morning.”

That took some of the wind out of Johanna, but she pushed ahead, her voice swelling. “You must call off the Crusade. This is evil—what is happening is evil—”

“Call it off,” he said, with a laugh. “We just started.” He turned to Edythe. “You can go.”

She bowed and went back, as Johanna turned and watched her with a pleading look on her face. There was no way to refuse the King, and Edythe slipped out the tent door. Behind her, Johanna’s voice rose again, less certain.

Edythe lingered outside the doorway. She had expected Johanna to tell her brother about the sudden appearance of the Queen of Jerusalem, and it bothered her that she had not. The crowd was thinning, the men, still shouting, still angry, going off by twos and threes toward their camps. She looked toward Johanna’s tent; she should go back to Gracia. But the idea revolted her: the close, dirty, sweltering space, the moaning women, the helplessness. Her mind seethed, too full, and every thought a question. She wiped her hand over her face. She could not help Gracia; she needed to calm down. The long rolling of the surf drew her, and she went down toward the shore, drawn toward the sea, away from the other people, searching for some dark and quiet place where she could think.

Rouquin walked down along the shore, past the curved prows of the galleys beached there, his back to the city on its rock. His gut was churning. The unruly council screaming to attack had heated his blood. He longed to storm the city that refused him. Richard had cut this idea off from the beginning. They were going to Acre. They were going to Acre in the morning. The other men roared and screeched about honor and respect and the small garrison at Tyre, and Richard stood there utterly unmoved.

Rouquin had said nothing. On his own he would have seized Tyre, but he was Richard’s man and so he had to swallow the King’s decision. This tore at him and he walked past the high sterns of the galleys, along the white slop of the surf. The moon hung in the west like a sleepy old eye. The night air was cool on his face and his temper ebbed a little. Taking Tyre might not be so easy, anyway; the Saracens had failed.

In the shadow of one of the ships, something moved.

He wheeled, his hand on his sword hilt. “Who’s there?”

The dark prow rose up over him; in the distance, they were shouting again. Someone was standing in the shadow under the prow. He went in closer, drawing his sword. “Come out! Let me see you!”

“My lord.” Johanna’s woman came forward, the doctor, her hands at her sides. The moonlight washed over her. “It’s only me.”

He relaxed, pushing the sword back into its sheath. “What are you doing here?” He remembered from Cyprus how she went around by herself, and he was minded to show her why that was a risk. He felt a stir of excitement in his gut. Richard did not allow whores with the army, and in Cyprus he had been fighting all the time.

She did not seem frightened; she stood straight and high headed, her eyes direct. She said, “I wanted to think. It’s so loud. What happened in the council?”

He said, “Nothing much.” The bad feeling it had given him came back to him and his temper seethed up, crowding out his other interest. “I don’t see how we can turn meekly away from this. This is an insult to everybody, to the whole Crusade.”

She said, “Do you know that the Queen of Jerusalem came to see Johanna?”

That jarred him. “Really. Isabella? Alone? What did she want?”

“I didn’t hear.” The wind blew wisps of her hair loose round the edge of her coif.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because it bothers me.” She gave him a startled look. “If they won’t let us in, how could she get out? Could this be a trick?” She frowned a little. “Why should it be a secret? I have to go back; Johanna will miss me.”

He grunted at her. She was quick, he thought, and probably right, or at least right to be suspicious. He felt the churning around them of cross purposes. He longed to get to Acre at last, where there would be honest fighting, where he would know who the enemy was, no more of all this boiling undercurrent. “Go back,” he said. “Probably it’s nothing. They’re women, they like to cluck together. She could know a lot of ways to get around Conrad.”

She muttered something. Turning, she crossed the beach toward the Queens’ tent. As she went she poked the stray hairs back under her coif. He watched her go until she was out of sight among the tents, wondering what was going on.

In the morning Gracia could scarcely open her eyes, and when she coughed, the green stuff that came up was streaked with red. Edythe gave Berengaria more of the zingiber root in a lot of wine. They got back onto a galley and joined the fleet moving south along the coast. Richard as usual was on another ship, and the Queens’ galley went along well behind the leaders. Edythe took Gracia up onto the foredeck, away from Berengaria under the awning, and sat helplessly beside her.

Johanna and her other maid, Lilia, joined them. The Queen had at last realized what was happening to her dear old woman, and sat there holding Gracia’s hand and moistening her lips with a cloth dipped in wine. Lilia prayed. Edythe thought either one as useful as anything she could think of.

“Here,” she said, after a while, “we have to turn her over. Help me.”

When they turned Gracia onto her side, she threw up. That at least kept them busy for a while. The sun was rising into the bleached white arch of the sky; Johanna ordered a shade rigged for them, and two of the oarsmen off duty suspended a cloak from the mast stay. Edythe looked out at the long low coast they followed: brown, featureless except for some palm trees, here and there a cluster of little square huts and some boats. In the distance blue hillsides rose, the tallest capped with snow.

She thought,
This is the land where Jesus walked
. If she were a true Christian, that would move her. She helped Johanna slide a cushion under Gracia’s head; the Queen was weeping. Johanna looked up once and said, “Why did we come? Why did we do this mad thing?”

Beneath them, Gracia stirred. Edythe put her hand on her, amazed at this; she had thought the woman in a death sleep. She did not open her eyes. She whispered, “Here. Die here.” Her lips moved, but nothing came out. Her cheeks were sunken. She whispered, “Go to heaven.”

“Oh, Gracia—” Johanna bent over her, sobbing, and daubed her lips with the wine-soaked cloth. Edythe turned away, heart-stricken. That was the faith she did not have, the fulfillment where she was empty. Lilia crossed herself, and she did also, but it gave her nothing.

In Jerusalem, maybe she would know.

Somewhere ahead, a trumpet sounded, faint in the wind. Sunk in her grief, she paid no heed at first, but then from the front of the fleet more horns blared, and a great shout went up.

She lifted her head. “Did you hear that?”

Johanna, overcome with weeping, lay down beside Gracia with her arms around her, their heads side by side. Edythe went up into the V of the prow.

Ahead of her dozens of ships, their great sails furled up on the tilted yards, rowed through the flat blue sea. The horn sounded again, far down there. She squinted, shaded her eyes with her hand, trying to make out what was going on.

A confusion of wooden castles, masts, and oars. Out there ahead of them a galley bigger than any of theirs was moving broadside to their course. Their passage lay athwart the wind, but the strange galley plowed forward under a great round-bellied mass of canvas. Edythe looked toward the coast, curving out ahead of them into a jutting headland.

On this headland, yellow walls rose above the sea, and behind them, buildings, roofs, the narrow spikes of towers. The fleet cruised steadily past, a league of sea between, but the big galley was going toward the headland city. In the front of the fleet, where Richard’s ships met the strange galley, they were shouting, and down in the stern of the women’s ship, somebody was calling orders.

She stood back, tired of looking. By her feet anyway lay the greater mystery. She went back to sit down next to the dying woman and took her hand.

Gracia’s fingers tightened a little around hers. Edythe felt her living strength, the response of her touch. In the distance the shrieks and horns grew louder, but the air around her seemed to grow still. Slowly the fingers in her grasp slackened, and as much as she held tight they lay loose, and then she knew Gracia’s soul was gone.

Richard said, under his breath, “French. Not likely.”

His eyes were on the big galley sailing across their path; the strange ship had just suddenly unspooled a long blue banner from its mast, its tail slit into three spikes and a white cross on its belly. Rouquin gave a snort. “If it is, they don’t know their own flags.”

“Just so.” Richard swung toward him. “We’re going to take her. Get some archers up in that castle.” He reached out and grabbed the page with the horn. “Sound the alert.”

Rouquin strode back amidships, where Mercadier was already coming toward him. The Brabanter cried, “Should we put on mail?”

“There’s a chance we’ll wind up in the water,” Rouquin said, and went by him without pausing, toward the sterncastle where the weapons were. “I’d rather not do that wearing twenty pounds of iron.” He threw open the sterncastle hatch and began dragging out bows. All around the horns were shrieking, and on the crowded deck the hands were lowering a small boat over the side; men swarmed around him, grabbing weapons.

A crossbow in one hand and a small round shield in the other, he sprinted back to the amidships castle, taller and more rickety than the one in the stern. Slinging the shield on his back, he climbed one-handed up the crossbeams to the top level. Six of his men swarmed after.

Their galley was stroking down hard on the galley with the fake French flag, and all around them small boats from the fleet were scooting forward through the waves. The pitch and roll of the ship was worse on top of the castle. Rouquin braced himself against the mainmast, got his foot into the stirrup of the bow, slid a bolt into the box, and cocked it. He threw a quick glance down toward the foredeck, where Richard stood pointing ahead.