Great Maria (57 page)

A groom led up their horses. Richard took hold of her to put her on her mare. She said. “I want to see him.”

“He’s in the treasure-house.”

She mounted her horse and gathered her reins. The cathedral bells began to ring. She turned toward the harbor. Across the broad sweep of the bay, a thousand bobbing candles floated, sailing out into the black water, until like stars they were drowned in the night.

Forty-nine

She opened the padlock and stepped into the room. Roger stood in front of the window, his back to her, and his arms folded on the sill. An iron grate covered the window. The room was tiny, the only furniture a bed and a three-legged stool. Maria pushed the door shut. He ignored her.

“Roger.”

He wheeled around. “Maria. I thought you were the man with my dinner. What are you doing here?”

“I came to see how you are.”

She looked around the room again. He stood smiling before her, his hand on his hip. Her hands trembled. She sat down on the little stool. He went to the bed, sat, and picked up a ewer from the floor to pour wine into a cup.

“Here. You don’t look well. I’m sorry, I have only the one cup.”

Maria sipped the strong red wine. “Thank you.” The bruises on his face had faded. He was freshly shaven, and his hair trimmed, although he still wore it slightly longer than the fashion. She could not settle herself. It amazed her to see him so calm while she trembled head to foot. She handed the cup back to him.

“How are you?” he said. “Other than—” he nodded at her belly. “What is this, the fifth?”

“The sixth.”

He drank from the cup, filled it again, and passed it back to her. “I won’t ask about the well-being of my blood kin.” He sprawled across the bed, leaning on his elbow.

“Roger,” she said. “Why did you do it?”

“Oh.” His eyes slipped away from hers. His voice was thin. “I suppose there was nobody else worth fighting. You know me, sweet, I cannot bear to be next. Especially not to Richard.”

He got up onto his feet. “Is that what he sent you here for? I would do it again. Tell him that. I would do it again this afternoon. But this time I’d take him, he couldn’t hide behind a baby.” He put his back to her and stared out the window. “You know what Richard is.”

“Yes,” Maria said.

“He was afraid to fight me man against man. He knew I would win.”

“Yes.” She grew calm, her hands steadying, and her voice smooth in her throat.

He stared out the window, his head turned to watch something in the park. She went up beside him to see what he was looking at. He made space for her. Half a mile away, almost in the trees, Jilly and Jordan rode bareback on a pony. The boy’s red head moved like a beacon across the lawn.

“That’s my son, isn’t it?” Roger said.

“Yes.” She put her back to the wall, her eyes on him. “He looks like you, very much.” In the shape of Jordan’s face, his nose, his expressive mouth. She said, “I used to think you were the handsomest thing in the world.”

“Not anymore?”

“No.” She laughed. “Now I think it’s Robert.”

He put his hands on her. She backed away from him, down the wall, and faced him, angry. He swung back toward the window. The sunlight shone through the grate in squares on his face.

“Go tell Richard to get it done.”

She opened the door, reluctant to leave him alone in the tiny barren room. At last she went out. She locked the door and holding onto the hand rail climbed slowly down the narrow stone steps. The door at the foot of the stairs was locked, and she rapped on it.

“Mama.” Stephen opened the door for her. “I was getting worried.” He glanced keenly up the stairway. “You should have let me go with you.”

The knight on guard outside the door fastened the lock. Stephen took the lamp. Maria followed him across the storeroom and the antechamber, out of the treasure-house. They walked along the path back toward the palace.

“Is he sorry, Mama?” Stephen strode up alongside her. “Papa isn’t going to forgive him, is he?”

“Let me alone.”

He wrapped his hand around her arm and jerked her to a stop. “Why are you angry with me?”

Maria pulled away from him. “I have something to do. Please leave me alone.” She went to the wooden postern door in the wall and let herself into the palace.

There was no one in the room of the star ceiling. From the big chest at the foot of the bed, she took Roger’s death warrant. While the wax melted, she found the R in Richard’s name and turned the charter right side up. Richard had already forgiven him. Richard would forgive him a dozen times, until finally Roger overturned Marna. She spread the charter on top of the chest and used her Saracen ring to seal it. The charter she folded and put in her sleeve, to give to Rahman. The ring she threw into the fire.

***

Although the shops and stalls were closed, as if for a holy day, the cathedral market was packed with people. Mounted men kept the center of the square cleared. The wooden block stood on the paving stones. Under the draped scaffolding that covered the facade of the cathedral, Maria sat beside Richard, her children on the step below her. William was on her left. The new baby, not well, had stayed at home with its nurse. She still had not agreed with Richard about its name. The bright sun was making her head throb. Directly before her, Robert took Henry on his knee. Jilly and Stephen sat on either side of him. Maria fought down the impulse to touch Robert’s hair.

Three brass horns sounded. Through the crowd a murmur of anticipation ran. They crushed forward to watch.

On foot, in a black coat, Roger came into the square. The sun turned his hair bright as copper. Many women in the crowd called out softly. On the step at Richard’s feet, Jilly suddenly twisted to look up at him. Stephen reached behind Robert’s back for her hand.

Roger stopped before the block. He faced Richard. The three knights ranged themselves behind him. Richard’s dark beard masked his face. His pale eyes did not blink. The two brothers stared at each other. Roger was utterly composed.

The priest and the executioner came out of the crowd. Roger knelt down. The priest anointed his forehead and his heart with oil, blessed him, and gave him a crucifix to hold. When the priest stepped back, the executioner said something, and Roger nodded, indifferent, half-turned away, and wheeled back and spoke.

“My lord,” the executioner called. “He asks that his hands not be tied.”

Richard nodded. The crowd sighed with a sensuous pleasure. The long, honed sword rang out of its sheath. Roger knelt down before the block, his hands on it. The strong wind off the bay caught his hair and tumbled the black ribbons on the lances of the knights. He laid his head down on the block, his cheek to the smooth wood, and the executioner stepped forward, raised the sword in both hands, and struck his head off.

The crowd shrieked. Richard was on his feet. Jilly wailed in terror. The executioner cried out, “God is just.” Maria pulled her eyes away from the dripping head in his hands.

A wagon rolled up through the crowd to take the body. Jilly was screaming, her eyes white with horror, and Maria stopped to pick her up in her arms. Richard raked his hand across his face. Robert stood before her, his cheeks slimed with tears. He plunged down past Maria into the crowd and ran away. Henry still sat motionless on the step, his mouth open.

“Here,” William said. He took Jilly from her. “Stephen—” He and Stephen collected the children and led them away. Richard was staring into the crowd before them. He had not moved except to stand. Maria went up beside him.

The crowd was packed like a feeding animal around the wooden block, struggling to dip their handkerchiefs in Roger’s blood.

***

Maria named the new baby Mabille. She lived only a few days. They buried her under the altar in the cathedral, next to Roger. Robert did not come to witness it. Maria felt it deep that he refused, although she said nothing to Richard about it. Later she heard them arguing. She went down the corridor in the direction of their voices.

“You’re breaking your mother’s heart,” Richard shouted, beyond the closed door.

“Papa, leave me alone!”

She pushed open the door and went in. The room—Robert’s room—was bare and monkish. The two men swiveled, their strained faces toward her. They glanced at her just long enough to see who she was and snapped at each other again.

“You could have come down there—”

“Papa, what good is it? What use is it?”

“If you don’t know that—” Richard charged out of the room. The door crashed shut and rebounded open. Maria swallowed. Her hands were trembling. Robert turned away from her. He mumbled something at the far wall.

“I didn’t hear you.” Maria went up beside him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, belligerently loud.

“Why?” She sat down on his bed, her eyes traveling the plain, neat room. All along one wall his weapons hung.

“He said I’m…something about breaking your heart. Something like that.” He sat down beside her.

“Not my heart, Robert.”

“Mama, why can’t he ever admit when he’s wrong? He likes being wicked.” He thrust his hands out in front of him, palms up, the fingers like blades. “He’s just a bad man.”

Maria grunted. She saw how much he was like Roger. Everybody loved him and gave him whatever he wanted: he had no will of his own. She touched him, and he turned into her arms like a child and hugged her.

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

“I know.” She rubbed her cheek against his hair. He smelled pleasantly of horses and sweat. “Why don’t you go to Iste? There’s work there to be done.”

“I’ve been thinking of taking the Cross.”

She stiffened. One arm around his neck, she held him against her, but she made herself move away from him, her hands falling to her lap. “Well, in the meantime, go to Iste.” Anywhere away from Richard. For some time there had been talk of a new Crusade to free Jerusalem. Perhaps it would never happen. She kissed him and went off through the palace.

***

She and Richard hunted over the dry sand hills east of Mana’a. The winter had driven the deer down from the mountains into the steep cedar-choked gulleys along the coast. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the wind off the sea stung with salt. Maria rode hard, choosing the hard trails, and in the close terrain lost the dogs and Richard. She drew rein under a tall fir tree to let her mare rest. The dogs sounded far off. A dry barren valley stretched away from her, studded with thickets of aloes. Her mare lifted its head and neighed.

Maria rode down the slope in the direction of the dogs’ distant barking. The air smelled acridly of dust. The quiet and the solitude lightened her spirit. Riding along a sandy slope, she came on a deep pit in the ground.

It was tremendous, hundreds of feet across. The gray-brown slopes ran down evenly to a pool of scummy water in the bottom. Nothing grew anywhere around it. The dogs were bugling in the distance. Maria tried to put her mare down the slope of the pit, but the horse refused. She dismounted. The ground crunched under her feet. Stooping, she picked up a bit of pumice stone, light as froth. The pit bewildered her: it was so evenly circular she suspected someone had dug it, but it had no obvious use. She went down the slope. The sunlight lay deep into the far side, but where she was the shadow was cold and dark. Her feet sank into the crumbling soil.

Nearby, there was a piercing whistle. Her mare neighed again, a ringing call. Above her, all around the edge of the pit, deer-hounds appeared against the sky, and Richard rode up.

“What are you doing down there?”

She scrambled up to the rim, kicking the dirt in a cascade down the slope behind her. Richard dismounted and pulled her up by the hand onto the solid edge of the pit.

“What is this?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “There are two more up there.” He gestured to the north. “The Saracens call them the Devil’s pots.”

She threw a stone into the pit; it fell halfway down the slope. “Why?”

“The water is poison.”

“It’s like a dead place,” she said. “Did someone make it? The Saracens?”

He shrugged. He picked up another pumice stone and turned it over in his hand. Gray dust coated his palm. “They don’t know.” He threw the stone down. “It took me awhile to see that in spite of all they have they don’t know any more than I do.”

That made her laugh, and she put her hand on his chest. “Nobody knows as much as you do, Richard.” She leaned on him, to make him put his arm around her.

In the distance a horn called. He swung around and took his horn from his saddle. Maria picked up her mare’s trailing reins. She looked into the pit. It was like a grave, like a dead world. At the blast of Richard’s horn her mare leaped and shied across the sandy ground and the dogs all threw back their heads and howled.

They rode side by side toward the sound of the horn, in the direction of the sea. Birds hopped and crashed in the bush around them. The dogs ranged through the cedar wood.

“What happened to the deer you were running?” she asked.

Richard shrugged one shoulder. “In this country we’ll be all day before we kill.” He raised the horn and sounded again.

They rode out onto a broad open meadow, through brown grass rumpled in the sea wind. Stephen galloped toward them and drew rein.

“Father Yvet is coming, he will reach Mana’a by sundown.”

Maria lifted her head. She saw a coincidence with Roger’s death. Richard said, “I guess even a priest can move fast to get something he wants.”