The King's Witch (40 page)

“Stand where you are, witch.”

She wheeled. It was de Sablé, his back to the blank wall.

He said,“ I have found your secret.” He held up a book before her.

It was her father’s book. She let out a cry, and reached for it, and he threw it down at her feet.

“A Jew book. You are a Jew.”

She stooped and picked the book up. He must have snooped through the hospital. She straightened, clutching the book, cold all over.

“Do you dare deny it?” he said. “Do as I wish, and no one ever need know.”

She looked him in the face. She said, “ I am a Jew. Let all know it, I will hide no longer. You are a lecher, a murderer, you killed Lilia, you threatened the Queen, you spied on the King, you dirtied your vows and the cross you swore them on. I will never do your bidding, ever.”

He straightened as she spoke, moved away from the wall; he seemed to swell, to give off some foul vapor like an adder. He reached to his belt. “Ah, you know too much. You need a bleeding.” He drew a knife.

She gathered herself, to run, to scream, and then, behind her, Rouquin’s voice growled out.

“She is not alone, Grand Master.”

The Templar tipped his head back. “You defend a Jew against one who wears the cross.”

“I’ll cut a slice out of that cross, if you don’t get beyond my reach.” He came up beside her. In his hand, low, his sword was a streak of wavering light in the darkness. She could not move. He knew. Surely he had heard what the Templar said, and he knew. De Sablé was backing away; he turned and strode off across the courtyard.

Beside her, Rouquin ran the sword back into its sheath on his belt. He did not look at her. He said nothing. She said, “You heard.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll take you where you’re safe.” He let her go ahead of him up the stair and across the balcony to Johanna’s empty chamber, and there he left her without a word. It was over. She stood for a long time, in the dark, not thinking or moving. It was over.

JAFFA

A Jew was almost worse than a Saracen.

He thought to himself:
Everything is a lie.
He was going to get drunk and find a whore. But he did not; he walked around the town until he was exhausted enough to sleep.

In the afternoon, the court gathered, to watch Richard eat, and then to eat themselves. Waiting, they all milled around, chattering. Everybody went to Henry of Champagne, who was now to marry Queen Isabella, and shook his hand and kissed it. The new King of Jerusalem. He was laughing, delighted, drinking to his wife-to-be with every cup. It was rumored she was pregnant, that he was getting more, or less, than he might have.

When Edythe came in, she saw Rouquin standing behind Richard, and he turned his face away.

She lingered by the wall, her head so flooded with memories, with pleas and excuses, that she saw nothing. No one spoke to her, although she saw the sideways glances. She should leave, and make them serve her in her room, which had been Johanna’s room. Then suddenly, behind her, a bellow of rage went up.

It was Rouquin. He shouted, “Do you tell me you’re giving him Cyprus?”

She jolted back to the moment. Up there in front of the throne, Richard and Rouquin stood face-to-face. Richard said, “Guy was a king. I will not let him be disparaged—”

Rouquin shouted, “He’s a fool. He’s incapable.” They were so close they almost touched. The whole hall had fallen still, breathless, watching.

Richard’s voice cut, almost a sneer. “ Did you want it? What’s the matter with you?”

Rouquin was still shouting. “ What about the Crusade? Everything we did—the marches, the wounds, the men who died—so you could give it all to a pretty face?”

A general gasp went up. Richard’s lips pulled back in a snarl, and he lifted his right hand and struck Rouquin across the mouth. No one in the watching crowd moved. Rouquin was flushed dark as raw meat and his hair bristled. Edythe gripped her hands together. He clenched his fist, and she held her breath; she could not move, it seemed even her heart was stopped.

He said, “You hit like a woman. You’re still half-sick. I don’t fight invalids.” Then he wheeled and strode away, headed for the door.

“ Rouquin!” Richard took a step after him. “ Turn and draw your sword!” Rouquin burst out through the door and was gone.

The crowd murmured, people bending together, their hands moving, and their voices rose to a general racket. She drew a deep breath, and another, dizzy. Richard had gone back up to his throne. In a moment he would send them all away. She turned toward the door.

De Sablé stood there, watching her. She made herself walk by him without a word.

Later, in the evening, when she heard he was in the hall, she went to Richard and said, “My lord, I need to talk to you.”

He was sitting on a bench at a table, two men beside him with a handful of papers, and a paper on the table between his hands. An inkwell and a quill lay on the table before him, and he picked up the quill and signed the bottom of the paper, handed it to the man on his left, and sent them both away. He gave her a surly look.

“What is it? I’m busy.”

“The Grand Master of the Templars came to me; he wanted me for a spy, and when I refused, he threatened me.”

His face altered, the temper smoothing away. Leaning back, his hands behind his head, he studied her up and down. “You are loyal enough. How could he get you to spy?”

“ He knows about me. What you know.”

“And you refused, even so. You have more honor than a Templar.”

She said, “ I would not have come to you, except he threatened to kill me. I will not ask a Christian king to defend me against a Christian knight, but if he kills me, I want you to know that he did it.”

Richard said, “You know, in this, for once, I can do as I please. I don’t want you to die, and he’s done me in, time on time, as you know. I’ll send him to Cyprus. The Templars managed it very ill while they had it, and they have accounts to put in order so Guy can pay me for it.”

She said, “Thank you, my lord.”

“No, you’re my good little monster, I’ll protect you.” He looked down at her from a great height of understanding. “ I cannot help you, though, with Rouq’, who won’t talk to me either.”

The days passed, the heat of the summer on them, the nights so hot the whole court often slept out on the balcony. She went down to work in the hospital, but it was as if her mind had jammed; she did everything wrong. She forgot what she was doing in the middle of a treatment, sorted medicines into the wrong jars and spilled bedpans, and when Besac squeaked at her in front of everybody she raged back like a fishwife. She was alone. There was no one to talk to. She felt thinned out, faint, and useless. Some plague had struck the town and many children were sick and she went from house to house, dosing them with lemon and oxymel, but a lot of them died anyway.

Rouquin had kept the long plume of her hair, tied with a thong, under the cushion of his bed; he burned it. He gathered whatever else he had of hers—a coif, a letter, a bit of linen—and burned them also. He went to church. Usually he could not endure even half a Mass, but he knelt and prayed and stood and knelt again with everybody else, all Sunday, until the final Missa Est.

None of this worked. He could not stop thinking of her. How she moved, how her mouth tasted, how she laughed. A Jewess, forever damned, Christ-denier. Creature of magic and devilish powers. No wonder she was a good doctor. She had enspelled him, polluted him. That was why he couldn’t stop thinking about her. She had made him soft. He struggled himself back into the hard, cold man he had been, who cared only about overcoming other men.

He could not remember how to be like that. Maybe he had never been that way, just an empty coat of mail with a bad temper. He needed his temper. When he was riding, when he was fighting, then he moved fast and sure, without thinking, without maddening himself with thinking. He rode out every day, to get away from Richard.

Richard had known, all along, damn him, the devil’s trueborn son.

He could not get away from Edythe, clinging there always in the back of his mind. She had sunk her claws into him like the monster Richard called her. He needed a woman, any woman, any other woman, to drive her out. But when he found a whore, the thought of touching what so many other men had touched made him sick.

She was his, he had broached her, virgin sweet, she belonged to him alone. He would kill her before anyone else had her.

He rode at the head of his column up the flank of a ridge, and across the way he saw the flash of a white robe.

He reined the roan horse back and cut along quick below the spine of the ridge, but he thought they had probably seen him. The roan bolted over the low brush, sure-footed on the slope. Where the dry wash cut the ridge, he slid down and bunched his men together and led them fast around the foot of the hill toward where he had seen the Saracens.

They were gone. The obvious trail led off down a seam through the lumpy sandy hills, where they would have to ride single file. He divided his men, sent Mercadier with half down the gully, and took the other half in the same direction, but up and over the ridge.

He was in the middle of the Saracen ambush almost before he saw them. Their backs to him, squatting in the brush, they were strung out along the lip of the gully looking down, their bows ready. He charged along the top of the bank, his men pouring after him; they pounded through the brush and across the sandy slope, the horses scrabbling for footing on the dry ground.

The Saracens fired a wild flock of arrows, bounded to their horses, and raced on ahead of them. He saw the sock-footed bay mare ahead of him and yelled, hot.

To the left the slope pitched off suddenly. The narrowing crest of the ridge was funneling the Saracens toward the plain with Rouquin on their heels and Mercadier coming out of the gully to their right. He spurred the roan to a flat run. For a moment, as the big horses bounded and slid down the slope and bolted out onto the open ground, his front ranks and the last of the Saracens galloped side by side.