The King's Witch (9 page)

ACRE

Berengaria said, “I tell you stay in Cyprus.”

Johanna said, briskly, “Oh, I think this is much better.”

Edythe and the other waiting women led in the porters, and Lilia pointed out where they should put the trunks and chests. After the cramped deck of the galley the tent seemed huge, and Edythe felt like leaping and dancing in and out of the poles that braced up the canvas. The last sunlight streamed in through the cloth, veiled, mysterious. The wind puffed up the fabric in a constant ruffling. The floors were covered with thick woven stuff, rapidly becoming filthy under the trampling feet. Another train of men hauled in more trunks.

Outside, the raucous crowd still shouted; Richard had issued them all huge rations of wine and they were roaring around bonfires and yelling fight songs and Te Deums and pledges to die for God. Inside the tent, Berengaria, flanked by her women, went to one side and plunked down on a stool. Her sunburned face was thin with fatigue, her long gown dirty. She crossed herself, which she did a dozen times an hour. Johanna glared at her. The air between them crackled with dislike. Berengaria turned her face away.

Night had fallen. Edythe drifted to the door of the tent, her hand over her face; the stench of the camp made her nose burn. A man passed her, hunched over under a sack half full of bits of wood, cloth, metal, his gaze on the ground, picking up anything he saw. In the big tent just down the slope, a number of men were cheering and shouting. They were having another of their endless councils. She turned back into the tent, where they had laid Gracia’s body beside the wall.

Johanna was kneeling there, her head bent, praying and crying. Berengaria had withdrawn with her two women into a corner. Edythe circled the place lighting the candles. Slowly their light swelled up into the room. Outside, the shouting and cheering suddenly doubled, but it was far away. The Queen rose, crossing herself again.

“Where is Lilia?”

“I haven’t seen her, my lady.”

“Oh, she’s got a new flirt.”

Edythe thought briefly of Rouquin, her old flirt. She wondered why that mattered to her. She could hear voices yelling, in the biggest tent across the way, where soldiers were gathered also outside the canvas walls, listening, passing the word around of the Kings’ deliberations. Suddenly Johanna came up beside her.

“You must go with me,” she said to Edythe. “I have a task to do.” She favored Edythe with a candid look. “None other would I trust than you in this.”

“My lady,” Edythe said, warned by the edge in Johanna’s voice. She went to fetch her cloak.

Rouquin drifted to the back of the council, toward the tent flap, where he could see out to the city. The council did not interest him much. All the great lords had come in to shout and complain and threaten and ultimately to hear what their leaders decided. Those leaders were in the center of the tent, on a quick-made wooden floor. Richard had finally caught up with Philip Augustus, the French King, small, one shoulder lower than the other, as if his crooked mind had warped his body. A German duke had come up to sit beside them.

The other men crowding around them were the lesser lords who had answered the Crusading call a lot sooner than either King: local men, some Germans, a lot of northern French, Burgundians, Lorrainers. A cup went around among them, and a squire took it to fill it again.

Rouquin turned his back on this, his eyes aimed out the tent flap toward Acre. The late sun shone on its honey-colored walls and made even the rubble look beautiful: a golden city. That was what mattered: the prize.

He had looked over the ground when they came in. Since then, talking to a couple of people, he had formed a picture of it in his head—Saladin’s camp was just to the east of this hill, and numbered less than the Crusaders, with Richard’s army come.

They were not equal man to man, either, he guessed, the Saracens mostly mounted archers, lightly armed and armored. They couldn’t stand against mailed knights. Even Guy de Lusignan had had some early victory over them, before, typically, he had thrown it back. But with a shrewd general who knew how to pick the right fights, the Saracens camped just inland would attack the Christian camp whenever the Crusaders attacked the city, so that the Christians had to fall back to defend themselves, and Acre could recover. By all accounts the Sultan Saladin was such a general.

This strategy would work for the Saracens as long as they could keep the defenders of Acre supplied. The Crusaders had never been able to block the city completely from the sea; that was why sinking the big galley when they arrived was such a triumph. As for the land side, Richard’s war machines, catapults, a belfry forty feet high, could roll right up to what was left of the wall and drop a bridge onto the top of it.

Then, he thought, with the numbers they had now, they could throw a lot of force against the gate while part of the army waited, ready to meet Saladin’s counterattack, and drive the gate and hold the city in a week. It wouldn’t matter what Saladin did after that.

Rouquin turned toward the council again, where a gaunt man in a dirty surcoat had come up through the general yells and snarls to stand in front of Richard.

“I am Baldwin of Alsace,” he said. His voice cut through the noise, and everybody hushed. He went on, “I have come here to ask you one question. I have been here over a year. In that time I have drunk mud and eaten wormy dog meat, and gone days without eating anything. My men and I have burned in the summer sun and slogged around barefoot in the winter in the pouring rain looking for dry wood; we have battled the assaults of the Saracens and dug tunnels and burrowed into the walls of the city only to meet Saracens burrowing toward us. And we have died. We have died by the one and the two, and by the dozen. We have died of Saracen arrows and rock barrages from the city and tunnels collapsing, of hunger and of plague. Now”—he folded his arms—“tell me why we should pay any heed to you at all.”

Rouquin knew Baldwin somewhat, Count of somewhere, who held important lands north of Normandy and France. He was in fact a close counselor of the King of France, which was probably what was going on here: a challenge to Richard. Everybody in the place was watching, intent.

“Have I asked you to bow down to me?” Richard said. “We own the same liege lord.” His head moved a little, toward Philip Augustus, as much acknowledgment as he would ever give the little French King.

Baldwin said, “Yet you dare come in among us with banners and trumpets and a grand display, as if Acre is yours now, and we should step aside.”

Rouquin saw a smile tilt the French King’s mouth. This, then, was going his way. Richard got up from his stool and came forward to face Baldwin.

“My lord Baldwin, as a Crusader, I should bow down to no one but Christ, and I expect that you would agree; this is not the matter. I am not here to disparage any man, but to take this city. You have been here two years, true, some of you”—he looked around for Guy de Lusignan, who had begun the siege, and tilted his head slightly toward Philip Augustus, who had arrived only weeks before—“but you are still on the outside.”

The crowd let out a howl of wrath. Rouquin grinned; he stepped back into the open tent door, where the air was better.

Baldwin cried, “We have suffered—”

Richard thrust his hand up, pointing, as if he could see the sky through the canvas. “You can suffer, or you can win. Which is it? Listen to me. In twelve days the moon is full. Mark that. I want forty days. In forty days, that moon will be full again, and I will have this city. Are you going to be with me or not?”

A roar went up from them all. The scraggly Baldwin, who did look as if he had been sick, flung a glance from side to side. “Who made you lord here?”

Richard had stopped talking to him. He lifted his gaze and took them all in, and under his gaze the whole place gradually fell still. Richard spoke to them all. “I am not lord. Christ is lord. I serve Christ. Do you?” He looked from side to side, meeting all their eyes, one at a time. “I need every man with me. I promise you Acre, but you must follow me, and give me everything you have.”

The crowd’s mutter rose steadily, for and against. Somebody yelled, “We don’t need him—” Someone else called, “Lead us, Lionheart!” On his stool Philip Augustus was hunched over in a coil of bad temper.

Richard’s voice rang out over all the others. “And to every man who follows me I will pay four bezants a month as long as the war goes on.”

For an instant the tent was utterly still, as if the whole crowd had lost its breath. Then they bellowed, full-throated, beating each other on the shoulders. Suddenly they all agreed. The wordless yell became a score of voices screaming Richard’s name. Two men dashed out the tent flap with the news, and outside the cheering began also.

Philip Augustus stood. Rouquin could just see him through the weaving bodies between them. The King of France was talking, his voice lost in the yelling, but the meaning was written on his face: Richard had done it again, Richard had undercut him again. He got up and rushed out of the tent by a back way. Rouquin laughed. The German was still sitting there as if somebody soon would tell him what had just happened. Richard stood in the middle, looking nowhere, silent in the uproar. He looked tired suddenly. Rouquin turned back to the city of Acre, which he would begin to attack in the morning.

Edythe thought:
This is why she promised me a husband.

They had not come far, she and Johanna, only two doors along the hilltop ring of tents that housed the great men of the Crusade, to the one where the French King’s banner hung. Johanna had sent a page ahead, so they got in with no fuss. Now Edythe kept to the shadows at the back of the tent, stacked with crates and gear; up in the lighted part, Johanna walked restlessly around. The floor was spread with a carpet, but there wasn’t much space and she walked two steps one way and two back.

Through the cloth walls of the tent, the sounds came from the nearby council: an uproar, a cry, a sudden cheer. Edythe, in the shadows, shivered even in the warm summer night. Her stomach hurt.

She was sitting in the tent of the King of France, where she should not be. Johanna should not be here. The Queen of Jerusalem should not have been where she had been, last night at Tyre. What Johanna had promised on the ship—the husband, the dowry—that had been a bribe, not a reward, for just such a moment as this, to keep her quiet. She wondered what she ought to do. She wondered how she could be sitting in the tent of the King of France and not bay like a wolf in rage.

She had had the dream again. It was almost every night now. Not all night, just toward morning, and nothing but a voice.
Awake
, it said.
Awake, awake.

After a while, Johanna thought,
This is folly, now, I should go
, and just then, in a burst of noise, several men came through the tent door.

The first, so angry his lopsided face shone, came three steps inside and saw her and stopped cold. His face softened like warm wax. At once he waved at the others. “Go. Leave me.” His eyes never left her, and Johanna smiled, seeing she had the same grip on him as ever. She bent her knee to him, a sovereign lord, and bowed her head a little.