The King's Witch (42 page)

“Then I can go to Jerusalem,” she said.

He flipped his belt around his middle. “No, dear little fool, it is still too dangerous. You’re a woman. The place is full of bandits. You wouldn’t last a day alone. You’d have to find company, and pay for that somehow, and even then . . . You’d be dead, or in a slave market, too old for anybody to want you. I am leaving, very soon, for the west, and you’re coming with me.”

“ I am going to Jerusalem,” she said.

He looked puzzled. “I command you. What about Johanna? And my mother surely wants you back.”

She paced around before him, so that he had to turn to watch her. “ But I am outside your Christian realm, my lord. Your treaty has nothing to do with me.”

“ Edythe,” he said. “You’re mad. I’m the only one who can protect you.”

“That’s not my name anymore. I have to go. Besac has the tincture,” she said. “Find the Jew Yeshua ben Yafo and he will tell you how to take it.” And she went.

She walked in quietly through the barracks, to the room where Rouquin was asleep; the door was open a hand’s breadth. She stood there awhile and looked through the crack at him. In the morning when she left the whole pallet to him, he had stretched out and his head was cradled in his arms. She could not bear to wake him. If she told him what she was doing, and he wanted her to go with him instead, she would, even to the farthest reaches of the world. She would be Edythe again to keep him.

She went out again to take the road. She had to go through the gate before Richard decided to stop her. She went by the hospital first, and put her books and the pouch of medicines and some food she had packed in a big bag to carry on her shoulder.

At the gate no one challenged her. Maybe she had given herself an excess of importance. She walked out through the new gatehouse, to the beginning of the long road east. A wave of uncertainty rose around her. She started out, one foot in front of the other, the bag already heavy.

 

 

Mercadier said, “Your woman, she was here, and then she left.” He filled the narrow doorway.

Rouquin washed his face in the basin. “Where did she go?”

“ How would I know? She is like a wild mare, that one; she goes where she will. It’s all over the city that the King has made a deal with the Sultan.”

“ Really. And what do you think this means?” He reached for his swordbelt, hanging on the wall.

“ I think we are going home, my lord.” Mercadier shrugged, but one hand rose, palm up. “ Whatever happens, there will be some war. I am your man, whatever comes.”

Rouquin bopped him with his fist. “ I think from now on you will be Richard’s man.”

“The King!” The Brabanter’s eyes widened, awed. Then, loyal, he said, “No other, though. No lesser would I ever follow.”

Rouquin laughed and went out of the house to the yard. A squire brought him the roan horse, and he rode up to the palace and found Richard pacing around the hall, eating a chicken and giving orders. Rouquin had not seen him in days, since Richard hit him. The King chased everybody else out of the hall and turned on him.

“So you finally show up, do you? Over your sulk? What, do you want me to apologize? After what you said?”

Rouquin said, “ I don’t want much of anything from you, actually. I hear you sorted it out with the Sultan.”

Richard flung down the carcass in his hands. His eyes blazed; his voice snapped like ice cracking. “ What has come over you all, some plague of defiance? I should have whacked your damned head off. We are leaving. Philip and that damned German are apparently waiting for me, but they won’t be looking for you. I want you to go straight back to France and start raising an army.”

Rouquin sat down, folding his arms over his chest, enjoying this. “Actually, I am not going back. There’s nothing for me back there, and I’m done with following you.”

Richard flung his arms up. He gave Rouquin another furious look and stalked away. Rouquin sat where he was. Someone came in the door, saw the two of them there, and went away. Finally Richard had to walk back toward him.

“So, you’re deserting me too? You can’t do that. I need you.”

Rouquin said, “ I can do exactly that. I’m your brother, but it’s not my kingdom. I’ve given you everything due you. You have no power over me.”

Richard stopped, silent. He put his head to one side, and said, in another voice, “So that’s what this is.”

“Yes. I’m done lying. I’m done with the whole family. I am not going back to France. Take Mercadier, pay him and my men, and they’ll never leave you. But I’m going to find my woman, and then go to Jerusalem, which I swore to do.”

Richard walked away again, and came back. “You can’t carry a sword. The treaty says, unarmed pilgrims. What are you without your sword?”

“Let them find out,” Rouquin said, “who try to stop me.” He stood up.

The King faced him, and their eyes met. There was a long silence. Richard said, “Well, you’d better start soon, she’s already left. She’s on the road now.” He put his hand out. “This was no choice of mine. I always loved you. You were always my true brother to me.”

“ I know that.” Rouquin gripped the King’s hand.

“Better than a brother. God forgive me for the times I failed you.” Richard pulled him into an embrace. “Go find her. With you some of me goes to Jerusalem.” He stood back. “Go. With my blessing.”

Rouquin said, “Maybe we will come back.” But if she had already left he had to hurry. He went out the door, down to his horse.

At first the road was full of people, going in both directions, donkeys and carts and barefoot porters carrying loads in and out of Jaffa. Along the side of the road eight monks were creeping along on their knees, chanting as they went. She thought of Rouquin and put him firmly out of her mind. A few moments later she was putting him out of her mind again. By noon there were fewer people, the land broad and flat still, the hills beginning to rise before her, gullied and seamed. On the slope above her she saw two Saracens on horses. She remembered the road from the winter march, although now it was dry and hot and the brown grass tall. A group of pilgrims, with their hats and staffs, walked along ahead of her singing, and she tried to stay within range of them. The bag on her shoulder felt full of rocks.

Other people passed her, and she saw a few heads turn, taking notice of her, a woman alone. She ran to get closer to the pilgrims. They might not defend her anyway. She had her knife in her belt. She found a big stone and carried it in her free fist. But night was coming; she wondered how she would do that. She would ask the pilgrims if she could sleep in their camp. She had enough food, she could even barter some for room by a fire.

She heard the jingle of harness and the jogging hoofbeats and moved off to one side, to let the horse pass. It dropped to a walk up beside her, and she wheeled, warned of the attention.

“ Deborah.”

The name rocked her; she looked up, astonished. He smiled down at her from the height of the roan stallion’s back. He wore mail, but no sword, only a long dagger in his belt, and instead of his helmet he had wrapped a white cloth around his head like a Saracen. His eyes were startlingly bright.

He reached his arm down to her. They needed to say nothing. She dropped the stone and held up the bag of her things, which he hung on his saddlebows. He reached down again and she grasped his arm, and he swung her up behind him. She sat astride, her legs spread wide on the broad back, and put her arms around his waist.

“ Tighter,” he said.

She leaned against him, her cheek against his back, and clasped her arms tight as she could around him. They jogged off up the road to Jerusalem.

The First Crusade in 1096 was not the first Crusade. By the end of the eleventh century, Christians and Muslims had been fighting for more than four hundred years. At first the Arabs had things pretty much their own way, taking Spain and Sicily, Sardinia and the Holy Land and everything south of there from Morocco to India; there was an Arab emirate at Bari, on the heel of Italy, for thirty years, and Arab fleets raided Rome and Marseilles. Only hard-fought Christian victories at Constantinople in the late seventh and early eighth centuries and in central France at the Battle of Tours in 726 kept Arab armies from romping through backward, poor, and feeble Europe. There are those who, viewing the brilliant civilization of Umayyad Spain, still think that would not have been a bad thing.

By the eleventh century, however, the Arab conquest was over and its fragmented empire was in retreat. Under the duress of having to defend itself not just against Arabs but against Vikings and Magyars and Avars as well, Christian Europe had grown into a powerhouse: strong, organized, numerous, and rich. Especially, they had learned a formidable new way of fighting: mailed knights, mounted on powerful horses, whose massed charge mowed down everything in its path. With such knights in the eleventh century, the Christians recovered Sicily and a lot of Spain.

Constantinople, however, had suffered a terrible defeat at Manzikert in 1076 at the hands of the Seljuk Turks, recent converts to Islam coming out of central Asia. Subsequently the Seljuks overran Anatolia and the Holy Land. The emperor in Constantinople appealed to the pope for help against them, and the so-called First Crusade was what he got.

That sudden attack on the disorganized Levant won the Crusaders Jerusalem, as well as a number of other valuable places, which they held for almost a hundred years. But the Turks recovered, and in 1187 at the Battle of Hattin the great sultan Saladin crushed the Crusader army and swiftly rolled up the rest of the Christian domain, except for the cities of Tyre and Antioch, on the northern coast of the Holy Land, and a few other isolated fortresses.

The Christian west reacted with shock and horror. At once the great monarchs of Europe—the emperor Barbarossa, the king of France, and the king of England—pledged to go to the rescue of the Holy Land, and although practical politics delayed their leaving for years, in which one king of England died and another took up his vow, eventually they all set out for the east. Barbarossa, the legendary emperor, drowned in a mountain stream. The kings of France and England reached the Levant in 1191.

Theirs was the Third Crusade, the Kings’ Crusade, in which Richard the Lionhearted defeated Saladin but could not take Jerusalem.

There were nine numbered Crusades and a variety of smaller ones, but by the end of the thirteenth century, the Holy Land was completely lost to Christendom. Nonetheless, the long, bloody struggle continues to this day.

The public events of this novel are based on the primary sources of the time, including Muslim sources, for the siege of Acre, the massacre of Acre, the battles of Arsuf and Jaffa, the infighting among the Crusader lords, the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, and the eventual settlement between Richard and Saladin. Richard, who was the superstar of the twelfth century, is often quoted directly in these sources; he is one of the most vivid characters in medieval history, a true knight and a great general. He could not take Jerusalem back, but the territory he did conquer, including Cyprus, allowed the Levantine coast to stay in Christian hands for another century.