The King's Witch (10 page)

“Johanna,” he said, and came toward her, his hands out.

“My lord Philip.” She took his hands, held them away from her, and pressed her cheek to his. “I am glad to see you.”

“I am overjoyed to see you,” said the King of France. He sat down on the nearest stool. He had a pointed chin under a sparse beard, a wide forehead, pale deepset eyes; the left half of his face was smaller than the right, so he seemed always tilted. “Johanna, your brother is a devil.”

She sat, too, inclined toward him, earnest. “Philip, it isn’t Richard, it’s the Crusade. It’s evil. I’m convinced of it. You must unsnare yourself.”

His gaze traveled over her face, from eyes to lips to eyes again, and he said, “I would make you my Queen, if he would let me.” He shook his fists, his face twisting. “Who does he think he is—he is my vassal! Mine! I have had his hands between mine—but he won’t marry my sister and he won’t let me marry his!” His face had turned the color of a holly berry.

She murmured, consoling. For years everybody had known that Richard would never marry Philip’s scandalous older sister, in spite of their long betrothal, and now of course he had married Berengaria. Johanna certainly had no wish to marry Philip. The French King rubbed his hand over his face. He looked worn, unsteady. He was younger than Richard and had always been sickly, reptilian, given to bursts of rage. But he was wily also, with a fearsome grasp of his kingdom’s interests, a better King than his father had ever been. Suddenly he glared at her.

“I am his liege lord. Yet he comes in here and overstands me as if I were a peasant.”

“My lord,” she said, “it is the Crusade that poisons minds. You must go back where you belong. I plead with you, as a woman, as a Queen, as one who—loves you.”

His eyes blazed. “Love,” he said. Then he settled back, blinking. “What can love mean to a Plantagenet?”

Johanna glared at him, affronted. A furious response came to her, but angering him countered her purpose. This was the moment to leave, anyway. She rose to her feet. “Yet consider what I’ve said. I am glad to see you, sir; I have often thought on those days in Sicily, in the garden.”

“Johanna,” he said. “I didn’t mean what I said. Stay.”

She went to the door; Edythe came quietly up and followed her out. In the darkness outside, Edythe gave her a single sharp look. But she would keep faith, Johanna thought. Edythe was her mother’s woman, and Eleanor abhorred the war, too.

Johanna did not know what else she could do to destroy the Crusade, except to prize out the French King and send him home. Losing the French army, which was much smaller than Richard’s, would not stop the war; if Philip went back to France, Richard would have the whole command in his hands, with no rival. But back in France, Philip would certainly be tempted to meddle in Richard’s lands, left defenseless without their lord, and plenty of people would help him. At the right moment she would remind Richard how likely that was to happen, and he would go home.

Then she could marry whom she wanted. Her mother had promised that. She would have more babies. Her life would go again as it should. In the door of her own tent, across the way, she saw Lilia watching for her, and she led Edythe back to their own candles.

Edythe lay rigid on the pallet, listening to the other women breathe and snore around her. It was hot in the tent, too hot to sleep, and her mind too unquiet.

She could not keep the memories away anymore. Eleanor had told her, “Forget everything. You must not think of it. It will go away if you forget.” And she had managed not to think of it, for so long.

The unspoken reasoning:
If they know, no one will want you. You will be cast out, lost and alone. I love you, I will save you, but you must do as I say. So forget.

Seeing the King of France had brought it all up again, like a drowned body rising to the surface: this weasel King, whom Johanna tried basely to seduce. This King, who had brought Edythe’s family to their deaths.

Then her name had not been Edythe. She had been only thirteen. She had not been home; when the decree came she was in Rouen, far to the west, with her aunt and uncle, at some family festival. She still remembered the white dress, the pretty slippers that were too tight, the sound of a glass breaking. Her mother and father had stayed behind in Troyes because her mother was so near her time. Then the decree was published. Her aunt and uncle made ready to flee, and her aunt bundled Edythe off to England, with a letter to the imprisoned Queen.

It was only later that Eleanor told her what had happened to her family. “It is terrible. You must forget. Forget it all. Begin again, now, be Edythe and Christian, from now.”

She groaned, her fist pressed to her stomach. She knew the bitter wisdom in the Queen’s words. There was nothing she could do, anyway. She had no power of revenge. She had no will to revenge. But she hated him, that weasel King. And now she could not push it down below the top of her mind. Johanna had made her somehow complicit with him. In the dark of night, among the other sleeping women, she thought over and over of her mother and father, her tiny brother, burning.

In the gray dawn, the women buried Gracia behind the camp, in a graveyard already full, the mounded earth patchy with weeds. Most of the graves were marked only with rings of stones. Dogs had been digging at them. Johanna and Lilia both wept, and Edythe kept her head down and thought with an ache in her throat that Gracia would be alive if she had known what to do. She thought again about Jerusalem, where all of this would make sense. When she looked up, she saw Berengaria and her attendants there, a little apart from Johanna. After the priest was done, the little Queen went up to him and knelt for a blessing. Tears streaming down her face, Johanna trudged back up the slope, Edythe and Lilia behind her.

Johanna had brought only a few chests and a bed, which they had put in the back of the tent, well separate from Berengaria’s corner. The two maids slept on a pallet, which they folded away every morning. A page came in with a basket of bread and cheese and some wine and they ate. The bread was bad and not much of it. Johanna lay down on the bed and buried her head in the cushions. Berengaria had brought the priest back with her to pray and, with Lilia, Edythe went about their small daily chores.

The ordinary work settled her, the pattern of what she knew, what she was supposed to do. Lilia’s eyes were red. They went out to shake the bedclothes; the day was blooming with the summer heat. The city lay still as a graveyard, nothing moving beyond the crumbled wall or on this side of it, except for a row of men who stood on the slope looking the place over. Already it seemed familiar, as if they had been here for years. But it wasn’t, she knew; everything was different here, everything had changed. Lilia lifted her apron to wipe her eyes and plodded back into the tent, and Edythe followed her to bring out the chamber pots.

The men worked along the walls, dragging in the pieces of the great war machines from the ships and putting them together. The heat was terrific. Rouquin shaded his eyes, looking toward the city. The battering that destroyed the wall had left in its place a broad, almost impassable barrier of rubble. Ahead of him among the enormous stones, six men—naked but for their hose—were digging a tunnel. On the broken stones of the wall a darker shape moved, a sniper with his bow.

Richard was riding toward them, a dozen other men behind him. Rouquin picked up his shirt and wiped his face with it, and took off his hat.

“Mind the archer,” he said, when his cousin reined his big black horse around beside him.

Richard looked toward Acre. “They’re all over. They can’t hit anything at this reach; they’re just wasting arrows.”

Among the men behind him, someone said, “Word is at night they sneak out here and pick them up again. It’s worth your life to come down here at night, my lord.”

Richard leaned on his saddlebows. There were lines around the corners of his mouth, and his eyes had a dark sheen. Rouquin thought he was beginning to regret the promise he had made the night before, to take Acre within the biblical forty days. The King’s gaze traveled over the men trying to clear a ground for the belfry. “This is slow work,” he said.

Somebody shouted, “Watch out!”

From the city came the whine and thunk of a catapult, and then a high arching shower of junk, arrows, pebbles, and jars of burning oil began to pelt down just short of the Crusaders. The oil stank. A stone bounced past Rouquin’s shoe. He turned to Mercadier.

“Get somebody to collect all those arrows.” He turned back to Richard. “You were saying?”

Richard rubbed his hand over the pommel of his saddle. “I’ve had an offer from Saladin to talk.”

“You know what I think of that.”

The King laughed. He looked tired. He said, “Well, come up to Johanna’s tent, and we’ll discuss it.” Which meant he would accept the Sultan’s offer and order Rouquin to go along. Rouquin turned his eyes to the war machine. A truce might give him the chance to build it much closer to the walls. He shouted at Mercadier to bring up the next crosspiece of the frame.

ACRE

Berengaria and her women now spent most of their time with the priest, who kept church in a separate tent, so Johanna and her women had more room in theirs. They brought in new reed mats for the floor and kept the door flaps folded back, to let in the air and light. The dust from the camp drifted everywhere. In the evening, while Lilia and Edythe shook out the Queen’s linen and made her bed ready, Lilia said, under her breath, “You will never guess who loves me now.”

Edythe glanced at her. “Who?”

The girl had shed her gloom about Gracia. She smiled; she had dimples at either corner of her mouth. Her dark eyes flashed. “You will never guess.” She flipped her hips back and forth and put a finger to her lips.

Edythe shut her mouth tight, ashamed of even caring. Lilia would get nothing for this but a few baubles, maybe worse. But the girl was happy, glowing. Someone loved her. Edythe felt a low roil of envy, herself old and juiceless.

She bent over the pallet bed, tucking down the corner. “Then I won’t try. We should bring her some bread and wine; it’s getting late.”

“The King is coming,” Lilia said.

“Well, then definitely we should get some wine.”

Johanna came in, a train of pages after her, carrying a table, and some ewers. Right behind them another page appeared, stood to one side, and piped out, “The King!” Johanna fussed over the placement of the table, and Richard sauntered in, trailing Rouquin and King Guy and Guy’s brother Hugh and the Templar Grand Master. They crowded the place. Edythe drew back almost to the bedside, the sharp smell of sweat in her nostrils. Johanna called Lilia to light the candles.

Richard came up to his sister. “Not getting on so well with my dear bride?” He kissed her cheek. “God, what a shrew.” He left the ambiguities of this hanging in the air. Edythe, watching, was startled at how pale he looked, his face gray beneath the brown of the sun. While Johanna bustled around she stood quietly watching them all.