The King's Witch (23 page)

The wind was blowing off the land, hot and gritty; Edythe drew the tail of her coif across her mouth and nose to keep from breathing sand. Johanna, beside her, moved closer into the protection of the wall. Below them the great gate of Acre was full of men, some on horses and some on foot, milling around talking, many times looking up the road, and into the sky.

Out beyond the city a little, on the slope, the captured garrison was lined up, thousands of men jammed together, their hands tied together and to each other, surrounded by mounted knights.

It was almost noon; the Saracens would soon bring the ransom and their prisoners, and these would go free and Saladin would return them the True Cross. Then, again, Johanna would hammer on her brother that the Crusade was fulfilled and he should go home. She had confided this to Edythe at the same time she had warned that someone else was spying on them for the Templar Grand Master.

Edythe plucked at the front of her gown, trying to peel it away from her body. The heat of the sun pounded down on her, and sweat soaked her shift; she thought with all the coming and going in the citadel that de Sablé likely needed no real spy but only to ask a few questions now and then. She wished she could ease Johanna’s mind, but Johanna believed the worst, because she did not dare otherwise.

Edythe frowned. The road up and over the hill toward Saladin’s camp was still empty. This was taking too long. She looked up at the sky; the sun seemed to be at its peak.

Down there Richard nudged his horse forward, looking at the ground. He wore a fine white silk surcoat over his mail, and on his head was his gold crown, each engrailment studded with a jewel; his shield with its three leopards hung from the cantle of his saddle. He looked impatient. Edythe could tell what he was watching now; the shadow his horse made, however he moved, stayed directly underneath. It was noon.

He rode back toward the gate, scowling. On the wall around Edythe and Johanna and the other women, a crowd of people was pushing closer to the edge to watch, more and more coming up every moment. Someone whispered, “I’ve heard Saladin has killed all his Christian prisoners. The devil. He cannot meet the terms.” A woman sobbed, her hands to her face.

Edythe glanced at Johanna, who was leaning over the wall. “Look there,” the Queen said.

She rushed over, hoping to see some sign that this was coming to a good end, but it was only Richard in the midst of a crowd of yelling, shoving men. They were all on foot around his horse, and their arms stretched toward him like waving tentacles. Edythe looked up the road again: nothing.

Below, King Conrad shouted, “Time, sire, he needs more time, surely—”

“They aren’t coming,” Edythe said, under her breath, and Johanna grunted.

A brawny knight in a red surcoat shoved Conrad out of the way. “Sire, he’s making a fool of you. He’s broken the bargain. Now we should make these prisoners pay their own ransom in blood.”

Richard recoiled at that. Edythe thought,
Oh, God, he won’t. He can’t.
His horse half-reared, his hand tight on the reins. King Guy shouted, “Yes, yes, he’s had time, he thinks you will yield, again, sir, he’s testing you.” Richard’s head turned, taking in the other men around him, all clamoring at him.

The brawny knight flung a fist up. “Our dead cry from their graves for revenge! Let these prisoners pay for what we’ve all suffered!”

“Who is that?” Edythe asked.

“Hugh of Burgundy,” Johanna said. “Richard hates him; they had an argument once and Hugh called him an awful name. There’s de Sablé.”

“The Saracens—” someone yelled. “Kill the fucking Saracens!”

The Grand Master of the Templars was forcing a way through the babbling mob around the King. “Sire—Sire—”

Edythe felt almost dizzy from the heat; Johanna wiped her face with her sleeve. Below them, de Sablé was saying, in a voice that pierced all the babble, “Sire, after Hattin, when they massacred my brothers, it’s said Saladin looked on with joyful face. Now might we repay.”

“Revenge,” somebody shouted, and other voices picked it up. “Revenge!”

Johanna said, “He needed that money.”

“Besides,” Edythe said, leaning on the wall, faint, “now Philip is winning.”

Down below Richard spurred his horse, driving away from the press of men, as if he fought free of enemies. Alone on the road, he swung the horse neatly on its hocks and faced them.

“Yes, kill them. I can’t feed them, anyway—I can’t let them go—I can’t leave them here—kill them all.”

Edythe gasped. Johanna covered her face with her hands a moment. Then she lifted her head, and her eyes turned toward Edythe; she reached out and caught the other woman by the arm. “Let’s go home. Let’s go home.”

Edythe felt as if the sun’s heat pinned her fast where she was. Below her the knights were riding toward the captives on the slope. She saw the swords drawn, and the captives saw them, and began to scream. Johanna was pulling her. She stumbled away after the Queen, down to where their horses waited. She thought,
This is why you are a monster, my lord. Not the other thing.
The screams rose, out there, shrill with terror, and inside the gate knights and men-at-arms fought to get out, to join in the slaughtering. Their voices rose, howling. She shut her eyes, following Johanna away, away.

She went into the garden, where Berengaria had coaxed some green things back to life; Johanna followed her like a lamb after the bell. Neither of them spoke. Berengaria was indoors, the little Queen having more sense than they did, knowing to stay out of the heat and away from the men. Edythe kept having to dash tears from her eyes. She concentrated on picking bunches of yarrow, which she would grind later into a paste. She had found some beautiful jars in the apothecary shop to store such balms in. A healing balm. Her stomach twisted.

A page came in the garden gate. “The King.”

She straightened, moving away. He had shed the crown, the surcoat, the mail; he wore a Byzantine tunic with a plain border, scuffed riding boots, a belt of braided gold. He had just murdered three thousand men. Her stomach was cramped. He was hers, still, hers, no matter, but her belly hurt.

He came up before his sister, who had stood to greet him, and they kissed. Johanna took one of his hands. “Will you have some wine?”

“No. I have a lot to do, Jo, I can’t stay long. I wish I could.” He put her hand away. He looked tired, or distracted. Not especially remorseful. Edythe realized he would never speak of what he had done.

“You’re leaving Acre,” Johanna said. “You won’t reconsider.”

“No. I’m taking the army down the coast to Jaffa. You can stay here.”

Edythe drew closer; she said, under her breath, “Jaffa.”

Johanna said, “Richard, you must take care. This is a strange place, and they have such strange ways—I am afraid.” She put her arms around him, and they held each other; he laid his cheek against her hair. Edythe thought, again,
Of anyone, this is whom he loves
. Johanna stood back.

“Will—the Templars go?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He glanced at Edythe.

Johanna’s face smoothed out, calmer. One problem solved. She sat down on the stone bench behind her. “Very well, then. But we should go with you. Berengaria and I.”

Edythe thought she said this to be dutiful; surely she knew he had already made up his mind to leave them in Acre. Berengaria had come in the gate and stood there listening.

Richard said, “This will be a rough march. We’ll have some fighting, maybe a lot of fighting. And I don’t know what we’ll have when we get there. You should stay here until I send for you.”

Johanna bowed her head, as if submitting to this. Then Richard was turning to Edythe. “Can you treat wounds?”

Edythe said, “I—I have—” Thinking of the bumps and scrapes of pages, a lapdog’s broken leg, and digging a needle out of Alys’s finger.

Johanna surged up off the bench. “You can’t take her—by herself—she’s a woman!”

Richard said, “She is the only doctor I have, and she’s done well at it. I’m taking the fleet down, too. She can go on shipboard. She’ll be in no danger.”

Edythe said, “I want to go.”

Johanna said, “Why?” and Richard said, at the same time, “Good.” He moved a little closer to Johanna, and his voice fell. “She’s good luck to me. And if I get sick.”

Johanna was staring at Edythe. “But I need her.”

“It will only be a little while,” Richard said. He patted his sister’s cheek and turned and went, passing Berengaria as if he never saw her at all. Edythe turned back to picking yarrow. She was going to Jaffa. She was going to Jaffa to find out what it meant to be a Jew.

ACRE

Johanna said, “I shall miss you very much. I don’t know why you’re going.”

Edythe said, “I can do some good.” She kissed Johanna’s hand. “My lady. Pray for me.”

“I will,” Johanna said. “And pray for me also, I will think of you every hour.”

Edythe went down the plank to the galley; the captain met her, short and lively, with bright blue eyes in a dark face. His name was Ayberk and he spoke strange but fluent French. He said, “Welcome, lady, welcome. Richard the Basileus has placed you in my care.” He crossed himself, Greek-wise. “I will watch you close, and you will have fear of nothing.” He took her to the foredeck, where a little tent was rigged.

Almost at once the galley set its huge triangular sails. One of half a hundred ships, they went south across the long shallow bay, turned the hilly cape at the far end, and anchored in the shallows just off a white beach.

Night fell. They fed her excellently, stewed meat and yogurt and bread. She slept in the tent; Ayberk himself slept on the deck just outside. In the morning, the army still had not appeared on the shore. Ayberk seemed unconcerned. And in fact by midday groups of horsemen were straggling down over the hill toward them. There was no sign of any Saracens. They made a camp, and Edythe spent another night there on the ship.

The next day they sailed south again, going close along the coast, the army marching just beyond the sand of the beach. The heat and the idleness had her half-asleep; she pushed the little tent open, to get some breeze. She missed Johanna, and she was wishing she had something to do, when Ayberk came up.

“Saraceno.”

She jerked upright. Shaded her eyes with her hand. Ahead of them, under their great sails, the galleys stretched in a line into the south, hardly a length apart and only a hundred yards off the beach. Just above the white sand the Crusader army rode, studded with upright lances and little pennons. Beyond, on the hills, a white dust cloud was rising.

Her scalp prickled up. She could hear them, even over the relentless sawing of the oars: a faint warbling scream, and then the low rumble of their drums.

Ayberk was calling, motioning with his hand, and the ship slid in closer toward the beach. “Rocks,” he said. “Rocks all everywhere here. Look.” One hand on the mast stay, he leaped onto the gunwale of the galley and stared to the east. She went to the rail and looked down; through the clear blue-green water she could see the sand, far below, pale between shoals of flat mossy rocks like the ones at Acre. The ship glided above as if through the stumps of teeth.

Out on the land the dust cloud swirled closer. On all the galleys in their wavering line ahead of her, men with bows were climbing up onto the wooden frames around the mainmasts. Ayberk turned to her.

“You see, the Basileus Richard good on this.” He tapped the side of his head. “The flank we cover. See?”

She leaned on the rail, breathless. They were near the tail end of the line of galleys, and most of the army was ahead of them. She wondered if she imagined the main body moving faster than the rear guard, this disorderly crowd of horsemen and men on foot on the shore directly opposite her.

They were close enough that she could see the men turning toward the cloud of dust approaching from the east. Then, out of that oncoming dust, a flight of arrows rose and pelted down.

Ayberk yelled to his helmsman again, and their ship slowed. On the wooden castle at the mast, ten men stood with crossbows. Edythe clutched the railing. Ayberk maneuvered his ship closer to the beach and kept them at the flank of the Crusader army there; if the white wave of horsemen tried to sweep down the beach and surround the Christians, they would come within range of the crossbows. She saw that this was well done and looked on him with more admiration. The Saracens, their arrows loosed, veered and rode off.

Moments later they came back from another angle, loosing another storm of arrows, their shrieks thin in the distance. They were striking with all their force at this rear guard, she saw, but she saw also that they could not overwhelm the Crusaders. Armored in their mail, their shields up, the Christians rode along unscathed through the waves of arrows. The bolts hit and stuck, in shields, in mail, but they did not kill. Arrows poking out of them, men went on as if nothing had touched them. On the edge of the pack of knights, the men-at-arms with crossbows and javelins kept the Saracens from coming too close, and the crossbows of the fleet held the other flank.