The Golden Horn (18 page)

He rose somewhat more abruptly than he had meant to, lips tight.
“It’s late,” he said. “I’m tired. Good night,
Althea.”

“You see?” She downed the stew with relish,
helping it on its way with bread and cheese and sips of wine. “Sophia
says you hold grudges and I don’t. You can certainly sit on a grievance
as long as anyone I’ve ever seen. Do you intend to detest me for the rest
of your unnaturally long life?”

“I do not detest you,” he said through clenched
teeth.

“Wasn’t I precise enough? Very well then: I
irritate you, annoy you, and drive you to distraction. In that order. You’re
a frightful prig, do you know that? And a bit of a pedant besides.”

“I’m very well aware of it.”

Her eyes widened, miming astonishment. “Who’d
have thought it? Brother Alfred can see his hand in front of his face. Shall we
try for the arm? You’re arrogant, too, assuming I’d come to heel in
the palace just because you ordered it.”

“You did, didn’t you?”

“What else was there to do? I wasn’t about to
let old Beetlebrows prove me a fool and have me holding off the mob while he
stole the crown. On my way to tell the truth to my friends I found you slinking
about, mildly suicidal as usual and fancying yourself clever. Naturally I
humored you. Why not? My mission was a lost cause in any case, and I saved your
precious skin.”

His nostrils were pinched and white; his eyes glittered. She
clapped her hands. “Ah, joy! At last I see you in a temper. Go on, hit me
if you like. I don’t mind.”

His fists clenched, but he did not raise them.

She reached for the roast fowl in front of her, dismembering
it neatly, biting into the leg. Her teeth were white and sharp; she ate like a
cat, at once delicate and fierce. “The trouble with you,” she said,
“is that you don’t know how to handle your temper. Either you crush
it all into a tiny box and sit on the lid, or you nurse it and pamper it and
tend it like a baby till it grows into a monster and devours you. Why don’t
you just let yourself go?”

“The last time I did that,” he said, low and
controlled, “I killed a man.”

“No.” She finished stripping the bone and turned
it in her fingers. “Even that, at the last, was coldly logical. An execution,
not a murder. There’s passion in you, no doubt of it, but every time it
makes a move toward freedom, you either throttle it down or go out of your mind
with fear of it, or escape it by telling yourself its object means nothing to
you. Doesn’t it go against all your priestly training to lie to yourself
so much?”

Her light dispassionate voice struck Alf deeper than any torrent
of abuse. She had done with her meal; she sat back, sipping wine and watching
him over the rim of the cup.

“You don’t care for me,” she said. “Oh
no. You would have come to the palace for any stranger, ignoring all your instincts,
that, sir prophet, should have told you there was no danger at all for me. Can
it be that after all you’re blindly and hopelessly in love with me?”

He drew a sobbing breath. Without warning he struck her.

But she was not there. She stood just out of reach, not
quite smiling. “So,” she observed with a world of understanding in the
single word. “I’ve flattened you twice for saying the same thing to
me. Do you want to try again? Do you love me, little Brother?”

“Yes!” It was a cry of pain.

Thea drew closer to him and laid her hands on his shoulders.
He trembled and would not look at her, staring fixedly at the air above her
head. “There now. Old grudges die hard, don’t they? And the truth
can be agony. Will you believe me if I promise you that your pride will
recover?”

He shook his head from side to side, tossing it. “It
should die the death.”

“That’s not wise, either. Look at me, you lovely
idiot. Do you know what you’ve been doing to me with all your cold-shouldering?
The best friend I’ve ever had, for all your shortcomings, and you’ve
cut me off as if I were your worst enemy. For nothing.”

“You call it nothing?”

“Wasn’t it? You asked me to marry you. I said
no, and told you why. You stalked off in a rage. And stayed in that rage for well
over a month. You’re still in it. Are you always like this when you can’t
have what you want, precisely when you want it?”

That startled him into meeting her gaze. She regarded him steadily,
neither yielding nor resisting. His throat constricted; he forced words through
it, painfully. “You…said I had to be the one who ended this battle.”

“You came to the palace for me.”

“I didn’t intend—” That was not
exactly true, and he knew it as well as she. “You were going to alert the
Guard. That would have precipitated a civil war with you in the very middle of
it. Could I lie here safely out of the way and let you do that?”

“By then, of course, I’d come to the same
conclusion. I understand oblique apologies, little. Brother, though this one is
more oblique than most. I accept it. Now kiss me, to put the seal on it.”

He hesitated. Her eyes laughed; her hands linked behind his neck.
Laughter bubbled up within him for all that he could do.

With sudden resolution, he bent his head and did as she
bade.

Cartwheels rattled on the road; cattle plodded behind and among
the wagons, lowing their complaint, while sheep milled and bleated and herdsmen
hemmed them in with cries and curses. Over all rang the clamor of iron on iron
and iron on paving stone: the heavy destriers, each bearing an armed and armored
knight.

Jehan looked back along the column. As far as he could see before
trees and the road’s curve concealed it, the army advanced ponderously
but in good order, each knight or squire or sergeant in his place, mail-coif up
and helm ready at his saddlebow. One or two caught his glance and grinned.
Victory had lifted all their spirits, the town taken and plundered behind them,
its booty safe here among them or sent ahead to the camp, food and drink enough
to sustain the army for a full fortnight.

His red stallion fretted, sidling, threatening the bay
beside it with flattened ears and bared teeth. He brought the beast sternly to
order and grimaced at the bay’s rider. “He hates to drag along at a
walk.”

“Don’t we all?” Henry of Flanders eyed the
trees that closed in upon the road. “I’ll be glad to come out into
open country again.”

Jehan nodded. “I like to see where I’m going,
and what’s waiting for me. Though this road is better than anything I
ever saw in a forest at home. Deer tracks, those were. This is a road.”

“We’re spoiled. All this Eastern luxury: roads
and baths and spices, and silk by the furlong. Do you know, I have it on good authority
that the Greeks don’t heat their houses with simple fires. They put the
fire in the walls or the floor and stay warm all round.”

“That’s the old Roman way. Furnaces and
hypocausts. I saw it in House Akestas.”

There was a small silence. Henry brushed dust from his
helmet, saying slowly, “I…heard something in one of our councils. A
rumor only. Before the new Emperor seized the throne, old Isaac had his fortune
told. It wasn’t to his taste. The soothsayer—he was, they said, no
more than a boy, but he wore the robe of a master surgeon. They…disposed
of him.”

“I know.”

There was no expression in Jehan’s voice. Nor could
Henry read anything in his profile with its strong Norman arch of nose and its
stubborn jaw.

After a little Jehan said, “It was Alf. Who else could
stand up in front of an emperor and say what he said?”

Sudden anguish twisted Henry’s face. “How could
he let himself die like that? So horribly, and for so little.”

“He didn’t.”

Jehan had spoken so quietly and so calmly that for a moment Henry
did not trust his own ears. “He—”

“He’s alive,” Jehan said. Face and voice
had come to life again; Henry saw a touch of mirth there, and a touch of [compassion.
“Not that he isn’t capable of running after his own death. But it
would take a good deal more than a senile old fool to finish off the likes of
him. You can lay wagers that he read the future for His Majesty and didn’t
soften the truth to the smallest degree, and that afterward he arranged to drop
from sight for a while to keep his friends safe.”

“He sent you a message.” It was less a question
than an accusation.

Jehan shrugged. “Not really a message. Just…I
know he’s alive and well. I’d know if he weren’t. Don’t
ask me to explain, my lord. Alf’s not precisely amenable to explanations.”

Even to himself Henry could not admit the depth of his relief.
He turned aside from it to consider the road ahead.

Nothing moved on it, not even a shadow; above the laced branches
of the wood the sun was shrouded in cloud. The trees were thinning; beyond them
he could see the open sky and the long stretch of winter-bared hills rolling
down to the camp.

Somewhere behind, a pair of sergeants argued. Their voices carried
on the cold still air, both amiable and contentious.

“Well now,” drawled one, a light voice with the
liquid accent of Provence, “surely one emperor is as good—or bad—as
another. By the time anyone learns how to pronounce the name of this latest eminence,
we’ll be princes in Jerusalem.”

The other spoke in a rumbling basso, a solid Flemish peasant’s
voice with a hard head behind it. “I can say it already.
Mourtzouphlos——Mourtzouphlos. Mourtzouphlos the warmonger. He’s
no coward of an Angelos. You don’t see him sitting on his behind
listening to soothsayers, or dithering about from Latin to Greek and back
again. Hasn’t he opened war already? Shoring up the walls, bricking up
the gates, building those towers on top of the towers he already has, to keep
us out; and riding abroad whenever it suits him, to harry our foraging parties.
He’ll give us a good dose of cold steel before he’s done.”

“Empty defiance,” said the southerner,
undismayed. “He’ll never go beyond a threat or two. These Greeks
are lazy; effete; effeminate. One show of genuine force and they’ll
topple.”

The Fleming grunted. “Tell that to the Varangians. If
you can persuade them to lay down their axes long enough to listen to you.”

“Ah, but those are mercenaries. The Greeks are made of
lesser stuff. Haven’t we just overrun a whole town full of them?”
The southerner laughed. “Oh, no, old friend. We’ve nothing to be
afraid of. Come spring, we’ll twist the Greeks’ arms to get our
money and sail down to Outremer.”

Henry sighed a little. He had not thought that anyone clung
still to that dream.

The Fleming most certainly did not. “If we leave this
place, it will be by fighting our way out of it. Or conquering it, if it comes
to that. Never trust a Greek, boy, and never underestimate him.”

The southerner’s laughter rang clear and mocking over
the manifold noises of their passage.

Abruptly it stopped.

Before Henry’s mind woke to alarm, his body had hauled
his horse about, his eye flashed to find the armored figure toppling slowly
from its saddle. One eye was wide, astonished. The other had sprouted an ell of
black arrow.

Someone thrust Henry’s helm into his hand. Jehan’s
was already on, the priest reaching across to aid his friend. One of the cattle
bellowed, struck by a dart; men cried out, screams and curses and prayers to
every saint in heaven.

The bay destrier wheeled on its haunches. The wood swarmed
with Greeks, an army all about the Frankish column, and at its head under the
imperial banner, the Emperor himself, crowned, cloaked with purple. His
soldiers slipped beneath the lances of the knights to strike at the horses with
swords and daggers, or shot from the branches of the trees where none could
reach them, or plunged a-horseback into the howling chaos of men and cattle and
wagons.

Henry filled his lungs. “Drop lances!” he
bellowed. “Out swords! Form up around the wagons!”

Even as he spoke he let his lance fall, drew his greatsword,
spurred the charger forward. A Greek plunged toward him, a wild-eyed fool who
wore no helmet, only a circlet of gold about his brows. Henry’s blade
swept down; the man’s face dissolved in a spray of scarlet.

The young lord laughed, for he realized suddenly that he was
himself without a helm. He had dropped it somewhere, he knew not where, nor
cared. “To the wagons!” he roared. “To the wagons!”

Jehan’s world was a clamorous darkness lit by a thin
line of light, the eye-slit of his helm. He heard Henry’s voice, his lance
already forsaken, his sword red with blood, and in his mind a bitter clarity.
What fools we were
, it observed, watching his
sword cleave its way through the massed attackers,
riding like ladies on a holiday and never looking for an
ambush. If we survive this, we’ll take no credit for it
. And:
It’s an honorable death, I suppose
. And:
By our Lady! What bold brave knights we are!
He
whirled his dripping blade about his head and whooped, and drove his stallion
into the midst of the enemy.

Shapes whirled past him, a blur of blood and steel. A banner
whipped in the wind, bright, strange, heavy with purple and gold. A mailed
knight matched blade to his blade; another crept up behind, a crawling in his
spine. He touched spur to his stallion’s side. The great horse gathered
and leaped, lashing out with deadly heels even as Jehan’s blade clove the
helmet of the man in front of him.

An image floated above the press, a shimmer of gold and jewels:
a gentle Lady whose great eyes stared serenely into nothingness; whose lips
smiled, impervious to the clamor of battle. Beneath her rode a figure of
splendor, a knight in gold-washed armor on a milk-white mare, his helm
surmounted with a cross; for surcoat he wore a garment of cloth of gold, across
its breast a cross of gems and gold.

Jehan grinned within his helm. A poor priest, he was, in his
plain steel with his surcoat all bloodied, and the Patriarch of Constantinople
flashing and glittering under the icon of the Virgin.