The King's Witch (19 page)

“The Queen Isabella has asked me to help her get an annulment of her marriage,” she said. “And she has excellent grounds. She believes Conrad is still married to a woman he met at the Imperial court. He’s her sister’s first husband’s brother, making him well within the forbidden bonds of kinship, and she was wed against her will, no matter what her mother says.”

She had met Rouquin in the courtyard, which was still crowded with donkeys and wagons; he had been out of the city for two days, on some work for Richard. His men were leading their horses off, and she had guided him back into the shade of the wall, overhung with a flowering vine.

He said, “So what? All this was true a year ago, and he married her then.” He looked tired. There was blood on his surcoat and he had his helmet in one hand.

Johanna leaned toward him, breathless with this scheme that did so many things so well. She had the secret letter, and she held it out to him. “We will get her marriage annulled, and then you, you marry her—you will be King of Jerusalem.”

His jaw fell. Unaccountably he was angry. She had not seen him this angry at her since they were children. She had forgotten the red rage that took him. His eyes glinted. He bristled. He said, “Apparently, anybody can be King of Jerusalem. Is this your way of buying me? Am I a slut you can pay off?” He slapped at the paper in her hand. “Forget this, Johanna. This is trouble.” He walked off, shouting for Mercadier, his officer.

She told Edythe what had happened, because she had to tell someone. “I don’t know what he meant. It was wicked of him to be angry. I only meant to advance him.”

“Do you think he would want to stay out here?” Edythe said.

“No,” Johanna said, reluctantly. She was beginning to see it differently and that meant thinking about things she preferred to forget, and she gave up the idea.

But the one good thing she could do was gone, now. She felt heavy with ill feeling. At any moment de Sablé could expose her to Richard, a worthless, two-faced sister who had betrayed his Crusade.

She was putting her whole will into the work of making the household, and yet it did not please her. The food was too little, not good enough, not hot when it reached the table. The new gowns were ill-fitting. She was sharp and scowling, and nothing anybody did served her. More than ever, she longed to go home.

Almost at once a market appeared in the main square, where also the fountain began to flow again, although the broken angel disappeared. Edythe went there, to get away from Johanna’s viperous tongue and constant whining, and in among the jostling of the other market wives she found some very fine mushrooms, and more zingiber, and short hollow sticks full of a sweet juice. Honey cost more, and she bought several of the sweet canes to make Johanna’s oxymel. Sending the page back to the citadel with the full basket, she went on alone, ignoring the screams and pleas of the vendors, looking at the lace, the pots, the plucked chickens, and the strings of dried peppers. Few of the voices around her spoke French. The vendors rushed out at her from their stalls, shouting as if they were old friends. Among the crowds of women swathed in their shawls she felt out of place. Then suddenly, someone was plucking at her skirt.

“Lady! Lady!”

It was the old beggar. She turned, startled. The crone’s hand went out. “Alms. Alms.”

“I have nothing.” She backed up.

The beggar lunged at her. “Alms.” Her hands like talons plucked at Edythe’s skirt, at her belt, felt along her hands for rings. Edythe wheeled and ducked away into the crowd.

She went quickly down a lane, turning corners every few yards, and then across another square; when she looked back, the beggar was gone. She stood, panting, at the corner. She had no idea where she was. The beggar still made her scalp tingle. The old woman was horrible, a walking corpse, who should be dead but wasn’t. She crossed the square and walked down the opposite street. Nothing seemed familiar. On either side blank stone walls rose from the edge of the street, higher than her head, topped with tiles or cutwork; behind them, she knew, were houses, yards, orchards. But she was lost. She passed a gate. The little niche set into the wall had been stripped to one last row of glazed brown tiles. Someone would put an icon there again. She turned right, and then at the end of the next lane, through a broken archway, she came into another market.

On either side baskets and hemp sacks offered nuts, spices, heaps of bright green powder; cages packed with live chickens hung from the roof poles. A vendor rushed at her fluttering a length of cloth. “Lady! Lady!” In a stall a man was hacking up a hanging headless carcass, its body a hunk of red muscle and white muscle sheath and bone.

“No,” she said, “No,” and shook her head, dodging people waving bowls and boxes at her, screaming, “Lady!” She passed a huge tawny beast squatting on the ground; on its long, narrow moth-eaten neck, its head was eye level with hers. As she went by, it let out a horrible aggrieved moan. She stepped around a heap of dung. “Lady!” Someone dangled a silver chain in her face. A hammer clanged. A small boy was beating a donkey with a stick. Then, at the end of the square, she saw a fountain, where several horses were drinking, and she recognized the big gray horse in the middle.

“No.” She pushed her hands at the chains, the lengths of cloth, a woman with a double handful of eggs, and went gladly to the gray horse, looking for Rouquin.

He stood by the horse’s head. He wore his mail, but not his helmet, his long surcoat filthy. When he saw her, he said, “Alone again,” as if he had caught her stealing sweets, and came up between the horses to her.

“I was lost,” she said. She had not seen him much since they came into Acre. She remembered the times he had helped her with Richard, when the King was sick, his tenderness then, but now, disappointed, she saw only the angry sullen brute he had been at first. He snorted at her.

“What you deserve,” he said. “I guess I ought to take you back.” With no more courtesy than that, he set his hands on her waist and hoisted her up sideways on his great saddle, led the horse away from the others, and vaulted up behind her.

She held to the saddle, her feet high above the stirrup. His arm with the reins came lightly along her waist, and his other hand rested on the pommel of the saddle, encircling her. She was trapped; perhaps he didn’t mean this. Perhaps he did. She had to keep him talking.

She said, “Thank you.”

“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. You should realize that by now.”

She was silent a moment, in no position to argue. She searched for a safer line of talk. “Where will the Crusade go next?”

“First Richard has to get this money. The ransom for the prisoners. Philip is threatening to leave. A lot of people want to go straight to Jerusalem.”

He was riding down a narrow way, past a donkey and two shoemakers, a wall seamed with the dry crusty roots of vines, not the usual way to the citadel.

“How close are we to Jerusalem?” she said.

They came up to a gate, and now, beyond the wall, she saw the tower of the citadel: This was a back way in. “Not really close enough,” he said. “For my liking.” He slid from the horse and lifted her down, and, stepping back, opened the gate.

She went through the wall into the ruins of a garden. The little trees were brown, and many had broken branches like dead dangling arms. The plants in the herb beds looked like thorny black claws. “I didn’t know this way was here,” she said.

He had left the horse and come after her down the measured little path. There was nobody else around; they were far behind the citadel’s kitchen, the closest building, with a line of spindling trees between. She could hear the sea dashing up against the far wall. The garden was laid out in quarters, each framed in a waist-high course of stone. Even the stones were chipped and broken and fallen out of place. She said, a little breathless, “What a hell war is.”

Rouquin said, “Yes. But then life is hell, isn’t it?” They had come to the end of the path, where she had to turn, and he sat on the wall there so when she turned she faced him.

“But why make it worse?” she said.

“I’m not sure it is worse,” he said. “I know what I’m doing when I’m fighting.” He took hold of her hand.

“Fighting for God?” She drew her hand away, and he let her go easily enough, his fingers rough with calluses.

“This isn’t about God, whatever Richard says. This is about power.” He took her hand again.

“Please,” she said.

He lifted her hand to his mouth, kissed the inside of her wrist, his tongue against her pulse, his eyes on her to see how she took this. She trembled. Some wild urge woke in her. She remembered again that night when he helped her with Richard, his gentleness, the hidden sweetness under his harsh temper. He said, “What, are you afraid of me? You’re not afraid of anything.” He drew her closer. She put her hands on his chest, meaning to push him away, and felt the hard body under the mail, and suddenly she leaned forward and kissed him.

He murmured. Their mouths pressed together, tentative, tremulous, soft. She felt suddenly that they were surrounded; where before they had been too much alone, now anybody might come on them at any moment. She shut her eyes, all her body quickening. His lips parted. He slid his tongue into her mouth, his hands on her hips. He pulled her against him, one hand stroking her hip, the other smoothing down over her backside.

She broke the kiss; she stepped away, her mouth dry, and her heart thundering. “This is not honorable,” she said, and ran toward the back of the citadel.

Rouquin went to the end of the garden, where it overlooked the sea; a slop of white foam showed momentarily above the top of the wall. He thought:
honorable
.

She had kissed him first. She had given him her mouth, she should give him the rest. He had heard the story about her. Some man had abducted her from a nunnery, or she had gone willingly, and Eleanor had rescued her. Either way, she had surely lost her honor then.

He thought, uneasily, she must have been very young then.

It had nothing to do with honor, anyway. It had to do with her. Her touch had saved Richard. Johanna depended on her. And her kiss . . . She had kissed him first. He wanted more than just to have her. He needed something of her.

He did not know exactly what. He stood looking out at the sea, his mind clogged, stuck on some thought he could not pick apart into words.

At least his bone had wilted. He wondered, briefly, if the Templars’ lambskin drawers ever let them stand tall. He raised his hands to his face and smelled her body on them; his chest felt the pressure of her leaning against him. His mouth remembered the shape of her mouth. The touch of her tongue against his tongue. The bone was coming back. He walked swiftly to the gate, where he had left his horse.