The King's Witch (34 page)

Someone was coming, and she turned. Rouquin walked up beside her and leaned on the rail.

“The King has a message for you, as well.”

“Oh,” she said. “ What, is he marrying me off, too?” And put her hand over her mouth, before she said too much.

He laughed. “No. He said, ‘ Tell her she’s a good little monster.’”

She lowered her hand and looked out to sea. “He thinks I’m his familiar, like a toad.”

“They call you the King’s witch. You saved Acre,” he said. “Guy could not have kept Conrad out. He wasn’t even ready when the safe conduct came, much less when he saw how many men Conrad had brought, and ships, too. If I and my company had not been there, Conrad would have Acre now.”

She said, “ I’m glad he doesn’t.”
Berengaria would have lost her garden, then
, she thought. She turned to him, wanting to hold him there, to keep his attention. “How can he do that? Attack Christians on Crusade, when he thinks he’s King of Jerusalem?”

“ I think his Jerusalem is different from ours,” Rouquin said.

She had not seen him since the night before they marched on the Holy City. She said, “How close did you get, last month?”

One of his shoulders lifted and fell. “A few days’ hard riding. But they would not continue. The other lords. They were threatening to leave on their own—Hugh of Burgundy and the French, the Flemings, all the local men, even Guy—just ride away from Richard, run back here to the coast where it’s safe.”

She said, “Oh, God.”

“It was harder every step. The Saracens burned all the villages in the way, all the fields; there was no forage, hardly any graze for the horses. They shot down horses from ambush. We were running out of food. They had poisoned the wells. We’d have to fight all the way back, too, and we had nothing to eat but dying horses. Saladin’s army may be gone, but they hate us out there.”

She said nothing. Her lips tasted salt; the wind sang off the edge of the roof behind her.

“ I don’t blame them,” he said. “They’re great fighters and Jerusalem is theirs, as much as ours. If I were one of them I’d be fighting us too.”

She gave him a startled look. “That must be heresy. Are you going to confess that?”

“Oh, come,” he said, scornful. “ I was born halfway out the church door. Angevins don’t confess, it would take too long.”

She laughed. “ What does Richard say?”

“ Richard wants that city. But I’m beginning to think even he . . . There’s this marriage offer.”

She said, “He can’t mean that. As you said. He is just having a little joke with Saladin.”
Still
, she thought,
he is looking for other ways out of this
. Her heart clenched; she thought of what the beggar had said, and Yeshua ben Yafo.

“Anyway,” Rouquin said, “I came back.”

She remembered what she had told him, before they left, and leaned toward him, and he bent and their mouths met.

“ I have to go soon,” he said, a while later, his arms around her. “ When my men are all loaded on the ships. We have to get back to Ascalon; we’re building a fortress, and trying to take another place, down the coast toward Egypt.” He kissed her cheek and her nose and her mouth again.

“How will you know when the ship is ready?”

“They’ll ring the church bell.”

“ Why can’t we come down to Ascalon? Jaffa is boring.”

“ It’s just a pile of rocks, right now. We have some hovels raised. Johanna won’t endure that. You stay here.” He kissed her again.

She leaned her head on his shoulder. Better he leave. Better they keep this to a few kisses. But even as she thought that, she was lifting her head and he was turning his. He licked her lips and she parted them and he slid his tongue over hers. She shut her eyes. He was groping through her gown; he had too knowing a way with women’s clothing. She laid her hand on his chest. She wanted to touch his body, to feel his skin against hers, to taste him, mouth him, to study him and know him. The church bell began to ring.

He drew his hand out. “Next time,” he said, and kissed her mouth again and went away. She shrank back to the wall, thinking this could go nowhere good. But she would not turn back; she wanted where it went, whatever happened afterward.

Saladin had gone to Damascus. Humphrey said the Sultan was having family trouble, maybe an uprising, that the Muslim priests were preaching against him and the Caliph himself had rebuked him for losing Acre and Jaffa to the Christians. Humphrey had told Richard about the
hashishiyyun
, the sect that practiced political murder, and now came a report that Saladin had wakened one morning to find two of their knives by his bed.

In the countryside around Ascalon were men who had not stopped fighting just because the Sultan was gone, who fought, simply as a matter of course, whoever tried to rule them. Richard was hammering these, attacking their villages and running them down piecemeal, driving them to submit or leave. Every day he rode out with enough men to move fast and punch hard and went looking for enemies.

He said, “ We found nobody today, not even any sign.”

He sounded gloomy about that. Rouquin thought the local small game was no solace for Jerusalem. They were in the hall in Ascalon, small and grim and cold in spite of the smoky braziers. “My sister is well?” the King said, abruptly, turning toward Rouquin.

“Like an ox. She has Edythe make her all kinds of potions and elixirs and infusions.”

“Can she make her an infusion that will keep her out of trouble?” Richard slumped in his chair, his feet thrust forward.

Rouquin laughed. He said, “ What we need is to plan another attack on Jerusalem.”

Richard’s head went back, his eyes shut. “There is no army anymore. Who would go? You and I and Mercadier?”

“That would be a start. A smaller army. Better supplies. If we could stash supplies on the way, then getting back wouldn’t be such a problem. We know better how to fight them now, too.”

Richard lay sprawled on the throne. “I think this is, as usual, more complicated than you make it. Although if I had eight thousand soldiers like you, I could take heaven. That was good work, in Acre.”

Rouquin would not let him turn off the subject of Jerusalem. “The winter is ending. We could try an early campaign. I could do some scouting. Start planning the supplies.”

Richard’s fingers tapped on the arm of the throne. “ It’s tempting. I just came back and I’m already itching to get into the saddle again.”

Rouquin said, “Then scout with me.” This was how it felt to lose; you wanted to go win again as soon as you could, to erase the humiliation. The loss rode you like a bear on a stag until you got it down under you and ate its heart. Richard would come around. Jerusalem was still out there; they could still reach it. He went down to the half-ruined city, where his men were quartered in an old mosque.

Rouquin would not stop talking about Jerusalem, and Richard began considering a new attack. But first he sent for Humphrey de Toron, who had come down from Acre with Rouquin. He would not stay long, rude and harsh as the place was; Richard thought it would take years to rebuild Ascalon, and the harbor had a problem with sand. Yet the oldest parts of the city were beautiful, even broken and ruined: a dense pattern of tiled arches and courtyards, fountains, grillwork, balconies, part Arab, part Greek, part something else indefinable. He and Humphrey talked of this for a while, the young man standing before him several moments before Richard remembered to tell him to sit.

He liked talking to Humphrey, who was clever and observant. When this was over, finally over, he wanted to do a lot more to Humphrey. In the meantime, there were these conversations. “You were in Acre,” he said. “ For this plot of Conrad’s.”

“Yes. Your cousin is a master of these things; he put a lot of men in the right places, and Conrad abruptly changed his mind.”

“Rouq’ is good on the ground. What he cannot see, sometimes . . .” Richard sat forward, his arms on his knees. “Jerusalem is much farther than it seems. There is more between us and it than mere country. More trouble.”

The young man said, “Yes, my lord. I believe that.”

“ It’s so far from the coast. The supply problem is the backbreaker.” Richard rubbed his hands together. “The old Kings held it for a hundred years. Baldwin, my great-grandfather Fulk, Amalric, the Leper. Yet now I cannot see how they did it.”

Humphrey said, “They never did hold it all. What they did control were the right places—where you must be master, to keep Jerusalem. Nablus, Kerak, Ramleh, the fords of the Jordan. They had a truce with Egypt. And they weren’t up against Saladin.”

Richard sat staring at the floor. He was remembering that campfire two months ago, halfway to Jerusalem, and Guy telling him,“ We can’t go on.” Even Guy, who owed him everything, telling him, “ I will start back with the others in the morning.”

He said, stubbornly, “These lords now are a pack of greyhounds, who are happiest watching the game from far off.” Humphrey, of course, the prettiest of them.

Humphrey said, “ What they wanted, you have given them—Acre, the coast, Jaffa. Cyprus.”

Richard said, “ What I want—”

He stopped. The taste of turning back still sour. Even the great victory at Arsuf was a rock in his gut now. He had to take Jerusalem to get this over with, but he could not shake the suspicion that he had let his reach go past his grasp. He stood up.

“ What I want is the Holy City. What I came for.”

“My lord, you can take it, perhaps, and even hold it while you are there.” The young man rose with him. “But you will go back to the west, and then we will lose it all again. Because none of us is like you.” In Humphrey’s slim young face, his dark eyes widened, solemn. “As Safadin said, you are the Alexander of the Franks.” Then suddenly Humphrey leaned toward him and kissed him.

Richard caught hold of his wrist. But he took the kiss, held it deep and hard, all the pent-up desire in him like a scorching brand. In his hand the slender wrist turned, and Richard let go, and Humphrey wound his arms around his neck, his lips greedy, their bodies pressed together. Richard thrust himself against him. The creak of a door warned him that someone was coming. He drew back, and Humphrey stepped away, his face red.

A page came into the doorway; Richard nodded to him and the boy approached them, a bow to Humphrey, a deep bow to his King, his face clear, suspecting nothing. “My lord, there is a letter—”

Humphrey said, “I take my leave, then, my lord.” His voice trembled. He would not meet Richard’s eyes, but went out.

Richard reached for the letter, watching the young man go. The hard lust packed him, a heat past fire. Humphrey wanted him, too. He had guessed but not known. He could not speak; his mind leaped on to what came next between them. He had to collect himself. He looked down at the letter in his hand; he felt as if he had just fought a battle.

The letter in his hand bore his mother’s seal, much tampered with, and his sister’s, clean. He thumbed it open. His mother greeted him with a scold, that he had gotten them into this, and then told him his brother John was conniving with King Philip to steal Normandy.

He balled up the letter only half-read. Philip would not even heed the Pope, and why should he, if Richard could not take Jerusalem ? He stamped around the rough little hall, the urge rising in him to attack again.