The King's Witch (41 page)

He slashed out with his sword at a rider; the Saracen flung up a bow to fend off the strike and the sword cut it in two. Then the bay mare galloped up on his other side.

He saw Safadin’s dark face over the round target of his shield and lashed out with all his strength, blow on blow. The Saracen’s blade smashed his shield until his arm was numb. The swords rang together with a shower of sparks. Then the mare was pulling away. The roan horse, his neck lathered, faltered, and Rouquin reined him up.

All the knights slowed with him; they had learned that much anyway. The gap between them and the Saracens widened. The white-robed riders disappeared into a crack in the hills. The last to go whirled his bay mare and looked back.

Rouquin was still panting, soaked with sweat, his blood racing. He raised his sword over his head. He thought,
This is our one true faith, the House of War
. Across the plain, Safadin lifted his scimitar in answer, spun his mare on her hocks, and rode away.

Rouquin gathered up his men. They were scratched and banged up, a few wounded, and he turned back toward Jaffa. The fighting rage left him, and he rode along remembering what had happened, making a story of it. He liked Safadin a lot better than he liked some of the Crusader lords. That was heresy, but he believed it. She had said that to him. He remembered how lightly he had answered her. Bragged of being born half out of the church. To one wholly outcast. She must have thought him a fool.

He had lied to her, from the beginning, the devil’s bastard brat. She had not understood that, or how lost he was himself. And he wanted her, with a longing like hunger, to love, to be one with. To tell his truth to. Yet she had lied to him; how could he trust her?

He had to see her one more time. If there was nothing to her but a lie, then he would kill her, and put an end to this. He would know when he saw her again. He spurred his horse back toward the city.

Late in the day a Syrian woman brought a child to the hospital. Drawn by the child’s screams, Edythe met her at the door; when she saw the blood all over the side of the little boy’s face she gasped, and took them in to the nearest bed.

The mother babbled at her in the local tongue, which she understood very little, but she heard “ear” over and over. She made her sit with the child on her lap and brought vinegar and a cloth, but the howling baby would not let her touch him.

She went into the back and found a piece of honeycomb and brought that to him, and his mother sang to him and Edythe made faces and he settled and let her touch the bloody mess around his ear. She was afraid to use the vinegar, for fear of hurting him again. Drawing his hair aside, she uncovered his ear.

She snorted, relieved. The blood was all from shallow cuts around the outside of his ear; something pale and bulbous filled the canal. She looked at the mother.

“Earache?” She pulled her own ear. “His ear hurt, so you put garlic into it?”

The mother smiled and spread her hands. Edythe stroked the boy’s head with one hand, and groped for her pincers with the other, and in a single stroke she drew out the garlic. The gashes on his ear were knife cuts. The mother, failing other ways, had tried to dig out the garlic with a knife. Edythe pressed her lips together to keep from saying anything. She cleaned up the dried blood, tended the cuts on his ear, kissed him, and sent them away. She heard them singing off down the street.

Everything, she supposed, seemed reasonable at the time. She wiped her hands on her apron, looking around.

Besac had already left. She went to the people in the beds, making sure they would rest. There weren’t many: an old woman dying, a man with no other place to go who was pretending he had a headache. Night came while she was doing this. She stood in the doorway looking into the dark and thought of staying the night in the hospital, rather than going alone through the rough streets of Jaffa.

Whatever Richard did, she could not trust in it; there were Templars all over Jaffa.

She went out, and just as she stepped out the gate someone seized her from behind. She jabbed back with her elbows and kicked, but he held her effortlessly fast. She thrashed, afraid, feeling the knife coming, but then suddenly she knew who it was, by that touch, that strength.

“ Rouquin.”

He lifted her quickly up and set her sideways on his saddle. She grabbed the cantle to stay on. The light from the lantern above the hospital door shone on his upturned face. She said, again, joyful, “ Rouquin.” He leaned forward, his arms around her, and buried his face in her skirts.

Later, they lay side by side, in the little room in the middle house where his men were quartered. He said, “I have something to tell you.”

She stretched herself against the warmth of his body. “ Tell me, then.”

“ I’ve never said this before,” he said. “Not to anybody. That—you know they say my mother was the queen’s sister.”

“Yes,” she said. She had heard this for years. “The lady Petronilla—”

“No. Eleanor was my mother. My father was the king. But I was born before they married, when they were not queen nor king.”

That jolted her; she said, “ How do you know?” She touched the star-shaped scar on his shoulder, where he had taken the arrow. In her mind bits and pieces joined together and now made more sense.

“I just figured it out. Little by little, it seems, I understood it, growing up.”

“Are you sure?” she said. She was sure. She laid her palm flat against him, her head on his arm.

“Even my name is a lie. My aunt christened me Philip, but nobody calls me that. De Rançun was not my father. My—my aunt—Eleanor called me Rouquin. She said when I was angry I looked like a little redheaded hedgehog.” His voice stopped.

She waited, thinking he would say more. His mother had given him away. She had taken him back—in act, at least, if not in name—but she had sacrificed him, the eldest son, on the rock of her ambition, and he could not forget it.

He said, “ I’ve never told anybody before. It feels different now, saying it.”

The pallet was too narrow for both of them; she had to lie half on top of him, her leg between his. It was too hot to be so close, but she loved to lie so, touching him all the way. Her clothes were strewn everywhere. The men out in the main hall must be watching the door for any sign they were coming out. They would get a jeering then, whistles and whoops; there would be no chance to lie. Richard had said, once, “My brother.”

“Then you should be King,” she said.

“No, I am baseborn. I could not be such a king as Richard, anyway. But I am their true brother, his and Jo’s, and Mattie’s and Nora’s and John’s. They all know it. No one says anything. We all lie.” He burst out, “You can’t trust any of us.”

“They love you.”

“Oh, we love each other. We hate each other, too.”

Her cheek against his shoulder, she nodded, having noticed this.

“It’s like everything else in this family,” he said; “it’s doubletongued. It was twisted from the start, when the first one murdered his way into the first title. So not even Richard could make the Kingdom come.” He put his hands over his face. “ I am sick of lies. I will live the truth or nothing.”

She thought of Yeshua ben Yafo and what he had said to her. “People think in one world and live in another.”
But it is the dream that saves us
, she thought.
Isn’t it? Which is the lie, and which the truth?

He said, “ What’s your real name?”

“ What?”

“I want to know. You didn’t escape from a nunnery, and you weren’t named Edythe, were you?”

“No,” she said. “No.” She had not heard her own name in more than twelve years. She said, “My name is Deborah.” She went hot all over, her skin tingling, as if she woke up.

She felt him smile, his face against her face. “Deborah,” he said. “My Deborah.” He kissed her again. “My truth.”

She lay against him as he slept; she wanted him again, right away. There was still so little time. They were still doomed. Richard was talking things over with Saladin; and when he did, even if it took a year, they would go back to the west.

Let it take a year. In the dark she touched his chest, the broad muscle covered with curly hair, and tried not to think past the time they would go to France. He woke enough to put his arm around her and went back to sleep.

What would happen, back in Poitiers? Would he love her there? How could they be together? What he said—about the truth—that would not work in France. Truth did not carry well from one place to another. In France it would be impossible for them. Unless she went back to being Edythe. Which would not be the truth anymore.

It was near the full moon, and Richard had begun nagging her to bleed him. She saw the Saracen horsemen in the courtyard and came up to the hall as Safadin was leaving. She drew back out of the Saracen’s way; he ignored her, although she knew he saw her. Richard called her into his little room.

She looked Richard over, felt his pulses, and listened to his back. He was strong as ever, his long body lean and white. Maybe bleeding him was a good idea, to keep his humors active. The lance slash under his right arm had healed well, in rows of little dots where the needle had pierced his skin, a narrow white scar between, no puckers or proud flesh. He had a bruise on his shield arm, another argument for bleeding him. He was putting his shirt back on.

“You saw the Saracen there. We have agreed on a treaty, Saladin and I. I have now officially failed.”

He paused a moment, as if she might argue, or burst into applause. She knew nothing to say and kept still. He said, “ We are monsters, you and I. God has one idea, and we are not it.” He pulled his shirt straight.

She said, “ What is the treaty?”

“Three years with no war. And unarmed Christian pilgrims can go to Jerusalem. That’s what I have won, a handful of days.”

“ What does your treaty say of Jews?”

“There is nothing about Jews. The Jews have nothing to do with this.”