The King's Witch (32 page)

“He is asking again, that’s all. He needs you to be here. Johanna is in some kind of trouble. He thinks you can keep her in line.”

The breath went out of her. She lowered her head. Richard, after all, had kept her secret. Explained not taking her with this false trail. She had no way with Johanna, who would do as she pleased. The mere fact that Richard was leaving her behind would make Johanna suspicious of her. But he had kept the true reason to himself. Finally, she looked up.

“ But you are taking de Sablé. To Jerusalem.”

“Of course.”

“Then there is no worry—it is de Sablé at the root of this.” She was glad to say it. Let Richard deal with it. She hated Richard now anyway.

“Maybe the root, but some of the branches have gone elsewhere.” He said, “I am going to Jerusalem. I will take something of yours, if you want.”

Her lips parted. This was why he had come out here, to say this. She stood on her toes and kissed him.

“That,” she said. “ Take that. And come back.” She kissed him again, and went up the stairs, lighter.

Two days later the army marched out of Jaffa, all trumpets blaring, and the horses tossing bright colored plumes in their manes, and the knights waving to the women in the crowds and the men-at-arms tossing their quarrels up and catching them in fancy ways.

She watched them a long time, from the wall. Their dust moved up the long brown road toward the hills, Jerusalem at the end, the heart of the world.

There was no army between them and the David Gate. They would ride straight into the Holy City. Then she would go.

She thought about Yeshua ben Yafo; surely he was wrong, surely there was a right way to be, one right way, that would warrant everything. In Jerusalem she would find at last what to believe, how to pray, whom to love. Who she really was. She yearned after them, up that long brown road into the hills, as if toward the gate of heaven.

That afternoon, while they sat on the breezy balcony, a messenger brought in a letter from Tyre.

Johanna laid it on the table, and her gaze flicked toward Edythe, across from her. Edythe kept her eyes away. As she had thought, Johanna suspected her of spying for Richard, but the Queen had no one else she trusted even that much, and finally, she said, “ Well, look at it.”

“My lady, it is for you.”

Johanna grunted. Impatiently she ripped off the seal and unfolded the heavy sheet of paper, and in a singsong voice read the formal greetings of the Queen of Jerusalem. Edythe looked off to sea. The day was cloudy; she wondered if it rained, inland. Maybe God showed a distemper to the Crusaders.

Johanna was prying apart the two halves of the letter, and she read the inside one. “Hunh.” She put it on the table. “ What do you make of this?”

Edythe picked it up. “ It’s on the wrong side again,” she said.

“ What?”

“When she wrote calling off the escape, remember, the secret letter was written on the back of the front page. Always before she had written on the front of the back page.”

Johanna took the letter from her, turned it over, and turned it again. She said, “ Well, that’s very clever of you. But does it mean anything?”

Edythe shrugged. Johanna arched her eyebrows at her. “ Well?”

“My lady, maybe she is trying to warn us. Maybe she had to write this; maybe someone was forcing her to do it.”

Johanna’s gaze was steady, but the letter in her hand quivered. “Conrad.”

“My lady.”

“The lying snake.” Johanna crumpled the letter swiftly in her hands and flung it over the rail of the balcony. “ Well, I shall send her an answer, but very off the point.”

“My lady—”

“ What, not to Richard’s taste?” Johanna gave a nasty laugh. “ But I cannot simply ignore her, can I?” She whisked her hand at Edythe. “Go, make whatever report you care to.”

“My lady,” she said, “ I report to no one.”

“Yes, yes,” Johanna said, but would not look her in the eyes. She said, “ I could not sleep last night—make me another potion, will you? A strong one.” Edythe, dismissed, got up and went away.

Days went by. In the hospital, with the army gone, there were few patients: a drunken man who had been hit by a wagon; another man, not drunk, who had fallen from a new building and broken his skull and now could not move. She was keeping him clean and moving him around in the bed, but she knew he would die soon. His family came around the hospital and prayed by him. When she came they kissed her hand, but she had done nothing.

She comforted herself that Besac could have done nothing, either. As the beggar had said, everybody lost eventually. She went up on the wall and watched, straining her eyes, to see the messenger coming from the east with news of the triumph of the King.

A pouch came from Tyre, with many new medicines in jars and envelopes. One envelope was full of leaves and flowers and labeled in Greek letters. She struggled through the first few letters and realized it was the artemisia. He had said to make a tincture, but not with what. Softly heated. She ground the leaves and flowers together in a mortar jar and mixed them with a sulfurous oil, good for the stomach and easy to boil, and set the jar on a shelf, covered.

After the army had been gone more than a week, one of the French knights came back.

Richard had not sent him to announce a victory, to call Johanna to Jerusalem. Nobody had sent him; he had deserted. He limped in wearily on foot at nightfall, when Edythe was getting ready to leave, and showed her an evil wound in his arm, a deep knife cut, full of pus and rot.

She worked all night to clean it, feeding him strengthening potions and watching for signs that the infection had traveled elsewhere, and over the course of the night when it hurt too much to sleep, he told her of the march and why he had given up. There was no Saracen army, but there were Saracens by the hundred. They assailed the Crusaders from hiding, unseen, unpredictable, a flurry of arrows in the dark, a sudden rockslide, a waterhole full of horseshit. Everybody was on edge, but there was nobody to fight.

And King Lionheart was moving too fast. It was hard to keep up. Even the local men were grumbling: King Guy, the Templars. The wounded man, lying down now, his arm dressed, said, “Then my horse was killed, and I just came back.” He shut his eyes and slept.

It was daybreak, and no use going home, she thought. She slept a few hours in the back. By midmorning she was up again, at Besac’s desk writing down the medicines that had come from Tyre. She stowed them away in the big chest and locked it. The man with the cracked skull had died, and the hospital was empty now but for the man from the army. She fed him broth and raw garlic and oxymel and changed the dressing on his wound.

She meant to go back to the palace when this was done, but then two more men came in the door, one with a slash in the leg, the other with a broken forearm.

They too were from Richard’s army. They were hungry, and as they bolted down bowls of porridge they too cursed the hard march, the Saracens who shot at them from ambush, hurled rocks down on them, and threw dead horses into the streams.

“ Why keep going?” the man with the broken arm told her. “They were just killing us.”

When she had their wounds dressed, she went out to the city wall again, and looked east. The road was empty, except for an old woman hobbling along on a stick.

Surely these wounded were cowards, weaklings, who fell out of the war. Surely in the east now the Crusaders had cut their way through to Jerusalem. Only the brave deserved to win it. God would winnow out the unfit. A horrible feeling seethed in her belly. She felt her soul yearn out of her body, stretch out along the road after them, until she caught herself standing on tiptoe, straining to fly over the top of the wall. She hated him for leaving her behind, but she wanted with all her heart for him to succeed.

There was nothing to do but wait. She went back to the hospital and tended the wounded men.

“ We’ ll all go to Jerusalem,” she said, “when the King takes it.”

The young man with the gashed leg groaned and flung his arm over his eyes. His wound was festering and she cleaned it, flushed it with vinegar, and left it open to the air.

Then in the afternoon more men appeared.

They had bumps and arrow wounds and broken bones, more than she could manage, but fortunately Besac was there among them. Unfortunately he had bad news.

“The Crusade has failed.” He stripped off his cloak and muddy boots, looking around the hospital. He flapped his arms up and down, his gaze expansive, glad to be back. He said, “Missed me, have you?”

“ What happened?” she said. “ Didn’t you reach Jerusalem?”

“ I told you, the Crusade is over. Richard has broken his vow. We turned back. We all failed.”

She felt her legs go soft. “ Where is the King?”

“He’s gone south, to Ascalon.” Besac laughed. “He will not dare face us now. His vow a turd in his mouth.”

She needed to sit down, and she did, on one of the empty beds. In a rush of fury she hoped Richard swallowed it whole. His pure, shriven, Christian vow. She felt shrunken, as if his failure had dried her like a leaf.

Still stunned, she went up to the palace; the Queen was nowhere. Edythe went out onto the balcony, hearing this, over and over, in her mind:
We all failed.
Somehow they had turned back. She could not fathom it. Jerusalem was so close and yet they could not reach it. Enspelled, it floated in another world, just beyond their grasp.

Johanna came out behind her. Her face was a blaze of high feeling. “ Have you heard? They deserted him. There was trouble, certainly, but they would not keep up. Even Guy wanted to turn back, the little lapdog. It wasn’t Richard’s fault they failed. But they will all blame him.” She put her hands to her face and wept. Edythe went to her, and put an arm around her, and they stood bound together, wretched.

Johanna called in a priest and harangued him for an hour, until he agreed to deliver a sermon the next day on the Crusade, saying that the failure wasn’t Richard’s fault, that the evil men around him were to blame. At the church, when he started in saying this, half the people listening turned and walked out, and a mob of boys stormed around Jaffa, throwing mud at the palace and cursing Richard’s name and beating old people with sticks.

Much of the Pisan fleet left for their home port. They took half the Poitevins with them, who had used up their feudal dues. Richard was behind on his payments to them anyway.

Edythe went to the hospital, now overflowing again with wounded men. They whined and complained, and sneered at Richard, and damned the Saracens, and many of them died in spite of all she and Besac could do. But Richard kept to himself in Ascalon, and Rouquin with him.

JAFFA

Johanna said, “Here, read this.”

It was another letter. Edythe took it and saw at once it was from Isabella, and written on the wrong side again.