The Passionate Brood (18 page)

While Blondel was gone to round up some of the Austrians the others stretched themselves in the shade, talking in a desultory sort of way. It was almost time for dinner and the midday siesta, and they were all rather sleepy. Nobody but Johanna seemed to notice Berengaria’s silence.

“What do you wager old Saladin won’t send our men back after all, Richard?” said Raymond, shying a stone at a sun-bathing lizard.

“I gave him till sunset,” yawned Richard.

“But last time he let you down.”

“We hadn’t a whole town full of his people as hostages then.”

Berengaria had managed to get a grip on herself, but her thoughts kept wandering off on inconsequent excursions, one thing suggesting another. She was trying to picture Richard as a boy. Eleanor had told her how furious his father had been because he would draw castles instead of doing his Latin. And when they were in Cyprus he himself had said, “When Thomas à Becket gave me my first pony, Robin and I took turns charging the Oxford boys with a tent pole.” Odious little savages! But after all, one wanted a boy to have spirit. Berengaria drowsed a little, leaning against Richard’s shoulder, dreaming of their son.

She was roused by her improvised pillow being jerked away and her husband’s voice demanding sharply, “Well, where are they? Didn’t you give them my orders?”

Blondel had, and was still sore at the memory. “They say they do not speak Norman and they take orders only from the Duke of Austria,” he reported.

Richard sprang up with an ugly oath. In two strides he was verifying the unbelievable. The Austrians were still grouped picturesquely under the trees. It was a jolt to his self-esteem. “The insolent swine!” he muttered.

“They are in the right, Richard. Don’t take any notice of my squeamishness,” begged Berengaria, feeling that it was all her fault. “If you can’t spare the men I’m sure it would be better to leave the bastion than to provoke bad feeling with our allies.”

“I think I’m beginning to hate them rather more than our enemies,” he admitted, with a rueful laugh.

Hearing approaching footsteps Johanna looked round the angle of the north wall and came strutting back to them with blown-out cheeks in ludicrous imitation of a fat and pompous figure only too familiar to them all. “Here comes the Duke himself—breathing fire about it!” she warned, hastily reseating herself between Raymond and Blondel to watch the promising encounter.

“Humour him, Richard!” whispered Berengaria. “It saves so much trouble in the end.”

Ida took up a good position on the steps of the little watch tower, and as the footsteps came round the corner they all settled into hushed expectancy, leaving Richard the centre of the stage.

Leopold of Austria was a consequential little man, utterly devoid of humour. He was naturally kind and conscientious, but an unprepossessing exterior had given him a sense of inferiority which made him bumptious, and coming breathlessly into the midst of these good-looking, casual foreigners he was at his worst. When he had panted indignantly up the land gate stairs to give the King of England a piece of his mind, he had hardly bargained for the whole family. Their levity and habit of understatement confused his precise mind, and because he was really a very lonely man he sometimes found himself glancing enviously over the edge of his own dignity at their easy comradeship. “What is this I hear?” he demanded, strutting straight up to Richard and puffing out his cheeks just as Johanna had done. “You order my soldiers to make walls?” Actually, he had a sneaking admiration for this tall, energetic leader of the Normans and English but, being vaguely aware of the amusement of their audience, he spoke more truculently than he had intended.

Richard was positively ingratiating. “Good honest work!” he enthused, ostentatiously rubbing the dust from his own fine, swordsman’s hands.

“Almost as fascinating as planting bulbs, don’t you think?” chipped in that vivid, irrepressible sister of his, in revenge for many an hour’s boredom hearing about the Duke’s hobby.

Leopold acknowledged her presence with a stiff little bow.

“Flowers,” he said sententiously, “are a fit occupation for any peoples. But mending walls—”

“I admit I might have asked you first,” apologised Richard handsomely.

Anyone who understood him knew that apologies did not come easily from the Angevin; but instead of accepting it and so ending the matter, Leopold must needs labour the point with Teutonic thoroughness. “If I want a castle built, I do not lay the stones myself,” he explained complacently.

“Then you miss a good deal of fun,” said Richard shortly.

Johanna tittered and immediately sought to cover her lapse by making violent signs to Ida to hand the Duke some fruit. He was hot and thirsty, but it seemed incompatible with dignity that two important people should discuss the affair while sucking oranges and, before the ladies, he wasn’t quite sure what to do about the pips. Moreover, he was embarrassed by the fact that this disinherited hostage of theirs, waiting on him in her Eastern finery, was in fact his own sister’s child. “I do not see how one can mix fun with war,” he said gravely.

Richard, who was never preoccupied about dignity, helped himself without embarrassment to another nectarine. “No, no, I could hardly expect
that
of you,” he agreed blandly, spitting the stone expertly over the battlements. Leopold glanced round the little group with puzzled, short-sighted eyes. He was never quite sure whether these pleasant, easy-mannered Normans were making fun of him or not. Recognising the slow sincerity of the man, Richard met it with plain speaking. “But at least you must see how important it is to leave behind us a chain of strong fortresses in good repair all along the coast?” he appealed.

“Without them we shan’t be able to get supplies of that succulent veal you like so much,” added Raymond.

The Duke loved his stomach, but he loved his dignity still more, and this relative of the charming new English queen was always ragging someone. So he decided to ignore him. He looked down at the sweating workers at the gate and felt hotter than ever. A mad, mongrel race working with cheerful profanity in such a climate! “Then let your men finish the repairs since they do not seem to mind,” he compromised. “What need is there to disturb mine?” The words were euphemistic. Everybody knew that once those stolid Junkers of his had settled down to their drinks he would have the devil’s job to make them obey. And the comparison did not improve his temper.

Richard still tried persuasion. After all, the cause was always more to him than the means. He winked at Berengaria and set his elbows companionably on the wall alongside his sulky ally. “Do them good, Leopold!” he laughed. “Just look at them lolling down there in the shade stuffing olives. They’re getting too fat for their armour.”

“And all bemused by the lovely veiled ladies!” drawled Raymond lazily.

They were all so used to chaffing each other, but unfortunately the pompous little Austrian couldn’t take it. He was one of those tiring people for whom one must weigh every word. He killed light-hearted conversation by taking it literally. “What have their morals to do with you?” he demanded, glaring at the laughing Frenchman.

Poor Raymond was nonplussed. It was Richard who answered. He suddenly stopped being either funny or persuasive. “Nothing, thank God!” he admitted sharply. “But the discipline of my army has everything to do with me. And I consider it of the utmost military importance that Acre should be left in sound and sanitary condition and that the troops should have regular employment while we are stuck here waiting for Saladin to carry out the terms of surrender.”

But Leopold was considering nothing but his own importance. His short, fleshy neck was almost purple. “
Your
army!” he fumed. “Mein lieber Gott!”

“Yes, mine,” snapped Richard, all his virtuous patience exhausted. “Mine every time we are in a tight corner. Mine whenever hundreds of lives depend on one man’s decision—which none of you ever seems to have the guts to make. French, Germans, Austrians, Venetians—all the hang-dog pack of you are glad enough to obey me then. And I say that when you cannot be fighting you shall build.”

“It is an indignity—” spluttered the Duke, almost speechless.

But Richard cut him short as if he were a junior squire. “I see no indignity in keeping oneself physically fit and using one’s muscles on any job that comes along.” That was his philosophy of life—his and Robin’s—and he knew that Berengaria found it good. Hadn’t they all a full size task pushing on to Haifa without this exasperating idiot holding things up? Why should his own men have to start out tired because some other contingent had let the climate turn them rotten? It was perhaps unfortunate that at that very moment a breath of hot, sand-laden air should stir the standard above them, filling out Leopold’s emblems for all the world to see. The sight of them at such a moment inflamed Richard’s annoyance. “And another thing,” he went on, “since we’re discussing those lily-handed henchmen of yours down there, I’d like to know what part they took in subduing this ward of the town that you should have the effrontery to set up your personal bit of heraldry here?”

Perhaps Leopold had hoped the breeze wouldn’t lift just then to draw attention to it. But it had given him such pathetic pleasure to have it put there. Every time he looked at it from his lodgings in the opposite tower it made him feel he wasn’t such a bad general after all. Of course, he had had no idea that the family of the partner who had played him to victory would choose that very spot for their sun lounge. “It was agreed that we should share—” he muttered, momentarily shamefaced.

“Yes—share,” agreed Richard grimly. “As I will make your men share the drudgery and dirt.” He made a motion as if to hail them and his audience sat enthralled, backing him with silent fervour. Goggle-eyed pages had already spread the news that the King of England and the Duke of Austria were quarrelling and the armies themselves were taking sides. The English stopped hammering to listen to the sound of angry voices on the walls. They were spoiling for a fight—and not with the Saracens this time. And now their King wasn’t going to stand any nonsense either. Only Berengaria, while loving Richard for his indignation, saw the folly of it.

“You wouldn’t dare!” blustered Leopold, into the tense silence.

He couldn’t have said anything more unfortunate. It sounded like a challenge before the two watching armies. Richard’s eyes narrowed savagely as a cat’s, and Johanna and Blondel—who had had their entertainment and enjoyed it—realised that this was the moment when Robin should have intervened. In the old days at Oxford he would have sauntered on to such a scene with a friendly grin and a well-timed joke calculated to keep his foster-brother’s dramatics within the bounds of common sense. His unostentatious control had been so unfailing that they almost looked round for his comforting presence, but there was no one now to avert a tragic finale. Berengaria half rose, sensing the moment; but, being a woman, lacked both the casual manner and the right remark.

“Dare!” barked Richard, swinging round on his ally. “By God’s wounds, that’s a word no man uses to me twice!” Lithe as a man half his weight, he sprang on to the coping of the little tower, catching at the fluttering ends of the banner. Steadying himself by an iron window bar, he leaned far out and scores of men below craned their necks to watch him. They saw the flag staff bend like a bow to his strength and the flash of his great, two-handed sword as he slashed away the silk. It slithered like a lifeless woman to the battlements, sinking into helpless folds with a rustling sigh, and as the tall Angevin stepped backwards he trampled it unintentionally with his dusty, mailed feet. The Austrians on the other side of the fosse rose and shook their fists with anger, but their abusive shouts were drowned by the derisive guffaws of Englishmen whose comrades had been killed taking that very bastion. Richard knew their temper well enough. They wanted to see either their dragon or his leopards flying there. They were coming to blows with the Austrians about it. He sympathised with every blow but for discipline’s sake he shouted for a red cross crusading standard and ordered one of them to run it up. “This isn’t a private war,” he snarled.

Poor Leopold flung himself upon his torn standard, grasping it clumsily with gloved hands. “Ach, meine estande so dishonoured in the sight of men…Give it to me!” he cried, trying to pull it from beneath Richard’s heel.

But Richard stood firm. He might have been the boastful young redhead astride his first pony challenging the youth of Oxford with a tent pole. “Fight me for it, then,” he laughed contemptuously.

Leopold looked up enviously at the splendid figure outlined against the sky. “You know very well I am not strong enough,” he said, with a kind of dignity. The very simplicity of his avowal made them all feel vaguely ashamed.

Richard jumped down awkwardly. “Oh, go and dice!” he muttered, walking away without even looking at the man. Berengaria was right, he supposed, simulating great interest in the way a man from the
Trenchemer
ran up the Red Cross. Few things are worth the wear of anger. He saw her white, unhappy face and felt about as heroic as a chidden page boy. Out of the tail of his eye he could see the wretched Duke gathering his raped standard to his breast and kissing it. The others averted their eyes, embarrassed by such an orgy of Teutonic sentiment. But they could not close their ears to the irritating guttural Norman of his parting shot. “You do well to remind me that now we fight under a common banner. But if ever the good God should put you in my power afterwards, Richard Plantagenet, you will pay for this deadly insult!”

He went trailing his soiled heraldry towards the land gate stairs. “A pity, after we all tried so hard to be pleasant!” sighed Johanna, rather over-awed for once.

Raymond got up and stretched himself. “I’m sorry, Richard,” he apologised, “about the veal and the veiled ladies…”

The tension was broken. Blondel gathered up his tools, and Ida left her grandstand on the tower steps. Her dark eyes sparkled as she danced a sort of fandango round Richard. “You are so much bigger than my pompous old uncle that you can afford to spit on his most sacred things!” she exclaimed exultantly.