Daughters of Babylon (35 page)

The one reprieve to which Alix clung was that her husband, Count Theobald, was among the allies Louis was gathering to take up arms against the King of England, to secure the lands for her half-brothers that their father kept selling out from under them. If her mother could only stay safe a little longer—God willing, in Aquitaine, where people knew and loved her as the granddaughter of Duke Guillaume, troubadour and poet. She wrapped her arms around herself.
Be in Aquitaine, Mother, where husbands do not round up innocent men, women, and children for the way they love their God, and tie them to stakes and burn them, as my husband did
. A wind was picking up; she walked faster along the path that circled round the mill pond and back to the castle.
Be in Aquitaine, where the Courts of Love, I am told with salacious detail, of chivalry and romance, of poetry and sweet musics, refresh hearts and minds and recall the Goddess pleasures of the hanging gardens of Babylon.

“I never knew you like I needed to.” She turned and, walking into the wind, spoke aloud. “My sister Marie, countess of Champagne, consorts with the Albigensian heretics, the Cathars, and Theobald forbids me from seeing her. Sometimes I have hated you for leaving my father, for leaving us, but I have also buried three infant sons and know what the coldness of a husband does to a woman’s soul.” Gates were slapping, shutters banging at the castle windows. A lone pigeon flew low over Alix’s head toward the cotes, startling her. It was one of the homing birds. “Now, two fearsome kings are staring each other down, and your ten children moan in their sleep, ‘Where are you,
Maman,
where are you?’”

The first bird had carried an advisory message, nothing more, to the chamberlain who looked after the Castle of Blois in the Count’s absence.
Guests of unusual rank, possibly spies. Will update.
Sherurd had sent it, on the pretext of fetching more wine, while Pascal entertained their guests with tales of the joust.

“I still can’t place her,” Pascal whispered to Sherurd in passing, “but he is no shepherd, I can promise you that.”

The revelation came to the old knight when he dropped the entire pot of parsnips au gratin in the kitchen behind the house. Sherurd knew this because Pascal, instead of cursing, cried,
“Je l’ai!”
I have it! And the guests who insisted they’d eaten quite enough after the duck omelet—“The meal was lovely, thank you,” said the woman who called herself Garaine—were looking more discomfited with each passing moment.

Pascal came in with a square of linen and a bottle of cognac, the bottle they’d been saving for a momentous occasion. He placed it with an indelicate thump in the center of the table. “If you will forgive my rudeness, I couldn’t help noticing, Madame, your deftness with horses.”

The woman maintained a half-smiling expression. “I have grown up riding. I adore horses and falcons and trout, all living things.”

Pascal lifted each of the wine goblets, checked them for contents, and threw the dregs into the fire, raising a hiss. And then he methodically wiped each one. “Quite,” he said. “I too enjoy riding. When I was young, I worked in an eastern city in the employ of a Christian prince.”

“Is that so?” said the woman. “Which city?”

“Antioch.”

Oh, how the man who wasn’t a shepherd bristled! Sherurd considered moving the cognac while the bottle was still in one piece.

“And the prince?” she said lightly.

“Raymond. Prince Raymond. But what I especially remember, Madame, was an Anadolu pony about thirteen hands high, and the young woman who rode her with such elegance.”

“Except for one day,” she said, “when a coterie of knights was—”

“Milady,” said her companion. “You don’t need to do this.”

She placed a hand on his arm, which seemed to drain the tension from his body. “My dear heart, it’s over. Two angry kingdoms, a dozen duchies and counties slavering for whatever scraps might be thrown at them in the wars that are certain to ensue, regardless of my action or inaction. I am tired. I need for this to be finished.”

The man sat back and stared at the table, then thumped his empty goblet near Sherurd. “If you’d be so kind.”

Sherurd sat dumbstruck. This was the queen? Queen
Eleanor
, the renegade, the revolting, disobedient, carnal-loving, sure-to-be-damned-for-eternity wife of the English king? Both he and Louis had posted rewards! One was accusing her of high treason, the other praising her as a stalwart daughter of France. He wondered if both kings would pay out.

All right, so this was a momentous occasion.

He poured the fiery amber liquor into all of their glasses except Her Majesty’s. Her Majesty’s! She’d placed her hand atop and shook her head.

“As I was saying,” she said to Pascal, “my husband assigned a coterie of knights to keep the pony and me in check that day, and you were among them. What flank did you take?”

“Right flank, Milady.”

“The side of the precipice, as I recall, most susceptible to covert marksmen. I appreciate your valour.”

“Milady.” Pascal blushed the colour of beetroot, then slid off his chair and with a few creaks and groans dropped to one knee. “To be in your presence again is an honour. The reputation of your fine Court at Poitiers precedes you.”

“For now, I suppose it does, but reputations have a way of distorting and disappearing, faster than we know. Please, do get up. We’re none of us as young as we used to be.”

Pascal pressed his lips to her hand, then used her hand to leverage himself back onto the seat. “Erm, thank you, Milady.”

“The pony’s name was La Pistache,” she went on, “and she was beautiful. My dear friend here, who will introduce himself if he chooses, once risked his life to save that horse. I am honoured to sit amongst great bravery tonight.”

Sherurd choked on his drink, Pascal blushed again, and the wagon driver shrugged and raised his glass. “Greetings,
chevaliers
. I am Arturo of Padrón, Galician and Knight Dedicate to Her Royal Majesty…and may I say, this job is never dull.”

All of them laughed, so much so that the Queen changed her mind and accepted a splash of cognac. They toasted to peace and equality and a good harvest.

“And a good chase,” Eleanor said, setting down her cup. “Now I am ready for a night’s sleep. Sherurd, if I may be so bold?”

“I am at your service, Milady.”

“Homing pigeons don’t like to fly in the dark, but I’d be most grateful if you’d send a second message to the Castle of Blois in the morning. There’s a small possibility that my daughter, the Countess Alix, might be there. We haven’t seen each other in quite some time. It will be good to catch up.”

“Silvie, Silvina, wake up! Come back to us, please!”

Whoever invented this mattress needed to be taken to the deep woods and introduced to moss. It was like sleeping on alligator teeth. And why was Gavriel Navarro—it was him, wasn’t it?—slapping her? She lifted an arm to fend off the poet.

“Geez, would you stop it already? I’m awake!” Silvie cracked an eye open, tried to rise from her face down sprawl, and howled.

“Careful!” He slid an arm across her solar plexus. “I thought you were dead. Shit!” He slid his other arm across the front of her thighs and lifted her about a quarter inch.

“Ow, ow, ow!”

“Sorry. I don’t know how you could sleep like that. On the stairs. I’m going to roll you over slowly, get you into a sitting position. Just relax.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“I can’t.” She could feel Gavriel wedged in beside her on the narrow stairs. She could almost hear his calculations as he looked for ways to relieve her zigzagged body. So acute was her sensitivity to movement, she could feel her veins unkinking and blood surging like rivers through a burst dam.

“What happened to you last night? Did you get drunk?”

“On one mini-bottle? Hardly.” Her eyes were still closed. “I was finding patterns. Did I give you a key?”

“No.” His breath was becoming audible under the strain, she supposed, of dead weight.

She lifted her arms above her head and stretched—ow! “So how’d you get in?”

“The door was unlocked. I knocked for five minutes.”

She was now lying on her back with Gavriel holding her in the hammock of his arms. She wriggled her backside and found a step, so she was sitting, spine arched, almost back to normal. Silvie ventured opening an eye again, but the inside of her eyelids felt like sandpaper. “Is it morning yet?”

“It’s nearly noon. I came to invite you for lunch and to sit in on my poetry session. Why is it all we ever do is exchange invitations?”

“Because life,” she proclaimed with a flourish of her arm, “is continuous invitation, a flow of, would you like? would you like? ‘Why, yes!’ is all we have to say, and ‘thank you, thank you very much.’”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wiley Forrest, jester to the Queen.”

“Ugh, I still don’t like him.” He placed one arm across her lap, the other across her middle back, and folded her like an airplane seat to an upright position. “How does that feel?”

“Whoa! Like free fall.”

“Rub your eyes gently. They’re probably dry. Then open them, and tell me what you see.”

She rubbed with the balls of her hands until her eyes felt lubricated, but the light, when she opened them, nearly made her scream. Rays streaming through the kitchen and parlour windows to the base of the stairs felt like solar flares. A few more minutes, her clothes would catch fire.

“What do you see?” he said again.

Gavriel’s face was inches away, mostly in teal shadow. “Um, I see caring, worry…maybe too much of the latter, lots of travel.”

“Silvie, you’re making me crazy here.”

“You asked me what I see.”

He waved his hand in front of her. “I’m holding up fingers for you to count.”

“Well, you should have said! Four.” And then, in her peripheral vision, she saw the walls of the stairwell on either side. “Oh my God, I thought I dreamed this. I feel like I’m still dreaming.”

“You are. You’re awake and dreaming. Most people need drugs to do what you’re doing.”

Silvie craned her head in both directions to look all the way up and down the stairs. Every inch of wall space to her full extended height was covered with cascading pages of poetry, prose, and fragments of thought, arranged in columns. Seven headings were printed on coloured paper, ascending from red to violet on the left wall; seven again, descending from red to violet on the right. “I must have used a lot of tape.”

“I think you’ve had a head injury.”

“No, no, no, I know what I’m looking at. This is what I do—it’s just usually in soft copy.” She looked down at her bare feet; her toes were the colour of the walls under the poetry. She rotated her ankles until some pinkness returned. “Could you help me down the stairs, please? I’m kind of tingling.”

“Sure.” Gavriel lifted her arm over his shoulder and slowly raised her to a standing position. She felt as if she were made of petroleum jelly. Pins and needles shot through her legs every time she placed a foot down, and the feeling of being split between here and some other here complicated the task. But Gavriel kept a firm grip, and they made it to safety. “Hold on,” he said, leaning her against the arched doorway of the
foganha.
“I’m going to get you some water. You shouldn’t eat for a little while.”

“Use the dipper.”
Fewer dishes. Builds immunity.

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind. A glass is fine.” That remark about the dipper had sounded like Vivian, as if some invisible thread of camaraderie had slipped a bobbin from the seventies. Silvina had even rolled the r, Scots-like:
dipperrrr
. She felt like she could pull the thread too, tug at entire conversations that never left the house.

Gavriel pulled two bar stools out from under the island and brought them to the hallway at the base of the stairs, and made a second trip with two glasses of water. “Front row seats,” he said. “How about you walk me through these patterns? If we wait until you’re feeling normal, reason will kick in. You’ve worked too hard to let that happen.”

The King’s hunting lodge
Leebotwood, Shropshire
SEPTEMBER, 1174 A.D.

Condensation covered the small arched window like a net embedded with tiny perfect pearls. Through distorting waves of glass, a 12-point buck wanted to be seen. He stood in quarter profile amongst the shadowed beech and oak, every muscle, every hair of his rich amber pelt alert.

Eleanor stood at the window and wondered if the magnificent creature, who’d been lingering near the lodge for days, knew when the king’s horses and men, bows strung and quivers full, were arriving. She wondered if he felt their intent to kill through the clattering hooves and elevated pulses, and if he did, was his stepping forth an act of agreement?

She pressed the fingertips of both hands to the glass and felt cool miniscule rivulets flowing through the whorls. The shape her fingers left behind resembled the twin arcs of the top of a heart. Not a broken heart nor incomplete, but half above the surface, and perforated. All one had to do was draw a line continuous from dot to dot, and the heart would become clear.

“
Mon Dieu, Álie
.” She turned away from the window. The dream was dead. She might as well be. A captured queen, a traitor, enemy of King Henry of England, she had not been escorted here to the middle of a Shropshire wood as guest but prisoner. In less complicated times, she might have been burnt at the stake or pulled apart by horses, saving the Crown a fortune in upkeep. But Henry, despite his flaws and passion for the hunt, the latter of which was sometimes endearing, had never enjoyed butchery as spectacle. And they had, long ago, loved each other.

When she was brought, manacled and bruised from careless handling to his throne at Rouen, Henry ordered the fetters removed, and he did not insist on more of her obeisance than a bowed head.

“So we have come to this,” he said, in doleful, almost gentle tones.

There was no trial and no argument. She had, indeed, attempted to unite her sons, if not unseat their father, and she’d failed. The consequences of her failure were only beginning to ripple out, and unlike the circles from a stone tossed into water, they would grow in strength, accelerate. The monks from Haughmond Abbey who brought her meals and, given their vows of silence, should not have been heeding worldly events and speaking of them, heard that Richard, to assuage his father, was now sacking the castles of the Aquitainian lords who’d supported the rebellion. Making foes of those who’d loved him, foolish boy.