Daughters of Babylon (16 page)

“Why don’t you let me lead the horses for awhile?” Ezequiel said. “My shoulder feels much better now that you’ve worked your magic on the leather. I’ve heard there are fine hunting trails for the next few leagues. Perhaps while we inch and grumble our way forward, you could snare a few rabbits for the evening meal.”

The thought of running, simply running, free of the horses, the carts and Betta’s indifference, sent lightning bursts of joy through Arturo’s limbs. They had come upon a straight stretch, with the trail even broadening a little. The sheer mountain wall sloped to a gladed, woodsy hillside with a brick-red carpet of needles, burnished to gold by the pale winter sun.

“Are you sure you can manage?” Arturo said. “The queen’s pony can be headstrong. She’ll work up the other horses if you let her.”

“I’ll summon your companion if I need help. What’s her name again?”

“La Pistache.”

“No, I mean your companion.”

“My companion?” Was he speaking of Betta? Surely not. Companionship implied something steadier than an ache in the heart and a poem that would not come. He must mean Catarina. “Yes, Cati would know what to do. She has a way with horses.”

“Then off with you, before the king and his men know you’re gone.”

The Crusade hadn’t progressed a quarter league along the trail when Arturo, rope coiled at his shoulder, spotted a mountain hare nibbling at a patch of dried fern. He’d felt an edge of dread but shrugged it off; this was a grass eater, nothing to fear. He approached with soundless steps, careful to avoid the half-frozen rotted log that would have snapped—or maybe they weren’t soundless. The hare’s left ear twitched; her neck straightened, and with a flash of white tail, she leaped over the fern patch.

The chase was on.

Arturo ran with the vigour of youth, his strong legs pumping, spirit alight. Both he and the rabbit knew it was a game, for she would stop now and then, taunting her predator with a full-on look, letting him come sometimes within ten to twelve paces before setting off again in bold, graceful leaps. For a long, timeless stretch, he drank in lungfuls of crisp mountain air and exhaled plumes of soft white vapour. His thigh muscles ached and his mind sharpened with the effort of running on slopes that were treacherously icy in places and threaded with vines and old roots.

He ran and thought of Galicia where the fishing boats would be out in high seas. He thought of his mother, aunt, and sisters, pulling fresh loaves from communal ovens. He ran and thought of Lizibetta whose dark, disdainful eyes made him want her all the more. He leaped and cleared an outcrop of smoky graystone and thought of Eleanor, his queen, who would be watching and worrying from the encampment at Cadmos.

That he’d cleared the outcrop without a stumble, that he’d never once lost sight of his prey convinced Arturo that life held greater possibilities than a dead-slow march of a lackluster Crusade led by a king they hardly ever saw.

And then he saw the king.

Arturo skidded to a halt, the hare forgotten. He stood on high ground, looking down in astonishment upon Louis, king of the Franks. He sat astride a black stallion, surrounded by a phalanx of six knights with long swords and bows at their sides, silver-bright shields strapped to their horses. Their visors were up, and they were riding slow, some with heads nodding. Squires led the procession on foot; the tallest in the center carried the
oriflamme
, a fire red banner on a golden lance, announcing them, truncated from those ahead and behind, as the Second Crusade.

But what shocked Arturo more than this sadsack parade was the king himself. Dressed in the drab browns of a commoner, Louis wore no crown and no royal ermine graced the edges of his cape. He had greasy dark hair that curled at the shoulders, and he rode slump-shouldered, lazy. A wave of bile soured the back of Arturo’s throat. This was their mighty sovereign?

Realizing that the slope above the road offered no concealment if the king or anyone else chanced to look up, he took several steps backward and crept toward the outcrop he had cleared moments ago. There he received his second shock.

The mountain hare who’d danced him a merry chase now swung in mid-air, head hanging. He’d not seen her doubling back, had, for the moment, forgotten all about her. She was still alive. The snare had caught her at the upper hind legs, and her long lean body twitched and bucked in the effort to free herself. At first, he imagined himself as liberator. He approached slowly, thinking it was only right to release the creature, in gratitude for the happiness she’d brought him. Then he saw that one hind leg was rigid, not engaged in the struggle; it was probably broken. She would be dinner to a wolf or fox before nightfall, and that he would not allow. He pulled his dagger from its sheath. The hare froze, as if aware of his intentions.

“I’m not going to let you suffer,” Arturo said softly. “You are going to feed my friends tonight, and we will give proper thanks. I shall make a purse of your fur for Ca—for Betta, and if she’ll listen, I will tell her the story of our merry chase.” He moved in from behind and took hold of her neck. She was thin and bony beneath the gray fur, and with his other hand he drew the dagger swiftly across her throat. She gave one final spasm while her blood spurted and fell still.

A time would come when Arturo looked back on this day and know that the rabbit had saved his life. If she’d not been snared, if he’d chased her back toward the rotted log that was probably her home, he’d have run straight into the Seljuks who were creeping down the hillside toward the pilgrims.

The screaming began before Arturo understood what he was seeing. From behind, the warriors of Phrygia looked like women—it’s what he thought they were! They wore no metal armour but long silky tunics of floral and quilted brocade. Their tightly wrapped turbans were scarlet and sapphire and emerald green; some wore braids that reached their waist.

What stopped Arturo cold, what nailed him to the ground with spikes of horror, was their silence. He
had
seen them—and not just now, while he approached, carrying a dead hare, but back then, when he felt a frisson of terror and shook it off. These infidels had been in the forest all along, hiding, watching and ignoring the silly boy with his coil of rope and grandfather’s dagger. There were hundreds of them, flowing in a seamless shimmer like a quilt through the trees. This was no army or banner-toting regiment but a unit of indivisible, pure malice.

It was the scream of dying horses that finally jolted Arturo. He drew his dagger a second time and, throwing the hare aside, leaped from the same low cliff that his enemies were clearing, safe for the moment because all of their attention was focused ahead.

The ambush had been well planned. Seljuks landed upon the mounted knights first, slitting their throats with short curved swords and gutting the horses beneath them. Sprays of blood mingled with the chaos of pilgrims trying to escape, caught at the edge of the precipice.

Arturo’s mind had slowed so that while he moved through the seething mass of men, women and children, he was able to ascertain that the invaders only numbered between thirty and forty. His thinking there’d been hundreds was a mirage, a looping visual trick that was somehow part of their strategy. He looked around for Ezequiel and found the shoemaker holding a huge rock above his head while approaching an infidel, who at that moment was thrusting his blade into the belly of a pregnant woman.

The rock came down and the soldier staggered, but his crimson turban had cushioned the blow and he turned with a face diabolical in its serenity, and pulling the sword from the woman in a single unbroken arc, he sliced Ezequiel across the chest.

Arturo ran toward the murderer, dagger held high while a roar of pain and anger poured from his throat. In a moment of gloating satisfaction, the soldier had lost focus, and Arturo managed to slash his face from the left eye diagonally downward, puncturing his eyeball and severing his nose.

From that initial bloodlet, instinct took over, and Arturo moved between shouting instructions to the defenseless—“head for the baggage carts, hide behind them”—and driving his blade into the bare necks of warriors distracted by their own butchery.

He received slashes too, one across the arm, the face, and a long searing wound across his thigh, at the end of which he met the cold eyes of the Seljuk who did it. Once or twice, he was grabbed, but always managed to slip free, in every instance seeing a passage through the weaknesses of whoever held him.

What he could not stop and would never entirely stop hearing were the sounds of people and horses being driven off the cliff’s edge, alive. They were high-pitched screaming choruses, ligatures of steel to the ear, keening endless with horror that somehow gathered momentum, pulling more of itself over the edge, as if the pilgrims were tied at the ankles in a single dying mass.

“Turo!”

He heard Cati’s voice and swung around, his knife, hands and tunic drenched in blood. A Phrygian held her by the underarms while a second took hold of the collar of her gown and ripped downward. The flash of pale skin, of newly budding breasts, aroused more indignation in Arturo’s heart than anything he’d seen yet. He grabbed the second soldier’s braid close to the nape and with a ferocious yank pulled his head back, slicing his throat cleanly, as if he were a hare. The first soldier let go of Cati to attack Arturo, but Cati swung round and delivered a swift, hard knee to the groin. Arturo pulled her away and dragged her, both of them stumbling, to an overturned baggage cart where several bodies lay heaped over chests broken open and spilling with pearls.

“Where are your mother and sister?” he asked.

“I don’t know!”

He peered around the cart and caught sight of Pistache, rearing and whinnying behind a heap of mangled carts. He took hold of Cati’s shoulders.

“I need you to listen to me.”

She nodded quickly, shivering beneath his grip.

He pulled his blood-encrusted tunic over his head.

“Can you ride bareback?”

“Yes.”

Catarina struggled only briefly while Arturo pulled the tunic down over her half-naked breasts. With her long dark hair tucked in, she looked almost like a boy. Men dressed in skirts here; the chaos might be enough to save her.

Shock kept Cati silent, while Arturo spoke. “Pistache thinks she’s pinned behind those carts, and she’s terrified. If you can grab hold of her bridle, you’ll free her easily enough. She knows you. I’m going to clear a path for you to reach her, and I want you to ride through the fighting—all of it. Ignore what you see. Ride until you find the king and his men. Tell them what’s happening, but then keep riding until you reach the queen’s encampment at Cadmos. It may be a half day’s journey, I don’t know. Pistache can do it.”

Cati’s mouth hung open. She was breathing hard, her gaze hooked on his, and then she rose, pushing down on Arturo’s shoulders. “I can reach Pistache without your help. Find my mother and sister.”

And just as surely as the hare had distracted and saved Arturo, something cleared a passage through twenty yards of butchery for Catarina to reach the queen’s pony, to release and mount her, and to ride unharmed, eastward toward the king.

Arturo never found Maria del Carmen or his beloved. One of the old women who’d been left for dead told Arturo that Maria del Carmen had fought with teeth and nails to protect Lizibetta, and was among the first to be hurled off the cliff. Betta had been trampled by horses while trying to run. Mercifully, she had been dead or at least unconscious when she joined her mother in the river gorge below.

Of the five hundred travelers who’d made up the rear guard of the Second Crusade, sixty-eight survived. All but four of the horses assigned to the queen’s baggage carts were dead. A makeshift hospital was set up near the outcrop that Arturo had cleared with a single happy bound less than twenty-four hours before.

Several days after the slaughter, King Louis, wearing a jewelled crown and ermine-trimmed cape, moved among the wounded, bestowing small crosses on bits of red cloth for the men and rosaries for the women. Arturo lay bandaged on a fleece pallet, aching and weak but alert enough to hear the kind of succour he dispensed. “Yes, dear sister, it is true what you’ve heard. Our Lord saw fit to save the Frankish throne by providing a tree for me to climb that would keep me safe until the infidels departed. We shall offer thanksgiving mass every morning from now to the end of our Crusade, so that we may continue to find favour.”

Half dozing, Arturo was working and reworking how the Seljuks could have concealed themselves in an open forest of russets and brown while dressed like foot stools from a sultan’s harem, when he felt a soft touch on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw the face he’d seen this close only once before, though he’d dreamed of that face many times.

“My queen,” he whispered, through a throat bled raw from screaming.

She smiled and stroked his unbandaged cheek with the back of her hand. “My shining knight.”

Tears filled Arturo’s eyes, and he shook his head, hoping she would understand that he was no knight. He was a water boy and tender of—no, he was a failure. Most of the horses he’d been hired to tend were dead because he’d been too besotted and bored and selfish to stay at his post.

“Your friend Catarina reached me,” Eleanor said, “and told me of your bravery. She and Pistache are both resting safely with the Emperor’s knights.”

Arturo opened his mouth to speak, but she stopped him with a finger to his lips.

“His Royal Majesty will be coming around soon to promote you to squire, first step to the knighthood I am certain awaits you. When we return, God willing, safely to Poitiers, I would like you and Catarina to join my Court.” From the folds of her royal blue gown, she drew a small clay cylinder. “I’m not sure that my effluents are worthy of comparison to the roses of Zaragoza, but I do know we shall have need of beauty when these Crusades have run their course, and I sense that gift in you.”

Arturo stared at the object in her hand. At first, he was confused, and then he was furious. Catarina had sworn an oath to pass messages to Lizibetta without intervention. She had assured him that her sister had indeed received the poem, adored it, and had slipped the clay cylinder between her breasts so that she might dream more sweetly.