The King's Witch (8 page)

Then the ship began to heel over, and Rouquin grabbed for the mast as the galley swung broadside to the fake French ship.

On the enemy’s raised afterdeck he could see men running up a little catapult. Around him his men were lifting their bows; three knelt and the other three stood up behind them. Two of the small boats bouncing over the waves had almost reached the big galley.

The catapult shot a hail of objects into the air, and on the small boats men thrust their arms up and cowered. Rouquin aimed his bow and pulled the trigger. The string twanged. His men fired with him; their bolts disappeared into the next volley from the catapult, which pelted the small boats below. One of the little boats turned turtle.

For a moment the two galleys slid along side by side, moving in opposite directions, bow to stern. He loaded the crossbow again. On the other ship a man in a fancy hat stood on the afterdeck and, deciding this was the captain, Rouquin swung the crossbow toward him, and then another spray of missiles hurtled through the air at him.

He ducked, trying to get as much of himself as possible behind the shield, which now seemed smaller than a button. Stones and arrows clattered down around him, a jar that broke and splattered oil, a pronged iron caltrop. Something hit his shoulder, hard. The other men yelled, and two crumpled and fell over the side of the castle to the deck below. Rouquin swung up again, leveled the crossbow, and shot at the other galley’s captain, gliding away from him.

The oily deck under him rocked and yawed, and he slid toward the edge. For a moment there was nothing between him and the water, twenty feet down. The other men were clinging to the high side of the castle deck; the ship rolled the other way and, with a scream, one man dove headlong. Skating on the oil, Rouquin lunged for the mast and fell flat. The blaring of the horns and the shouts of the men below him suddenly doubled. He twisted to look toward the enemy galley. Small boats surrounded her, closing in. They had her now, and he let out a yell, exuberant.

But a plume of dark smoke was rising from her open hatch. His ship was trying to turn, to cross the bigger vessel’s stern. Rouquin shouted, got to his knees, still holding the crossbow; he had lost the shield. The other three men staggered up around him. He fumbled for a bolt. The smoke rising from the enemy galley flattened on the wind, flowing east. Under the dark plume, men were streaming up through the hatches, running across the deck, and diving over the rails. Rouquin realized at once what this meant, even before the big galley began to list.

“They’re scuttling her!” He scampered down the side of the castle again, nearly losing the crossbow, and went toward the prow.

Richard stood there with his hands at his sides, watching the big galley sink. The small boats were clawing frantically away from her. Her prow rose into the air and her stern disappeared into the sea; for an instant she hung there half in and half out of the water. The surface around her was dotted with heads and pieces of cargo. Then the ship slid down and away, taking some of the closer swimmers with her. The sea boiled over her grave.

Richard said, “I guess we took care of that.”

Rouquin felt the wave from the sinking ship roll away under their keel. “I guess so.” He uncocked the bow and took the bolt out.

Johanna said, “I never thought . . . you never think, do you. That in the end everybody dies.” She wiped her eyes. “A thousand things I should have said to her, now I’ll never say.” She wiped her eyes again.

Edythe’s arm was around her shoulders. She had covered Gracia up in a blanket; they would bury her in a churchyard in Acre. The Queens’ ship had turned, was holding its place with the oars set in the water. Looking out across the railing, she could see ahead of them, where they were fighting again.

The first rank of Richard’s fleet had surrounded the strange galley; horns were blowing, and she thought she saw things flying through the air. Arrows, rocks. Smoke rose in a thick black plume from the strange ship. The trumpet blew again. People were screaming. It looked as if the big galley were sinking. She leaned on Johanna, wondering what was going on.

All around the fleet, the small boats of the Crusaders were hauling the sunken galley’s floating cargo up out of the sea. With oars they thrust off the Saracen sailors trying to climb on board. Rouquin stood by the rail, and Richard slung one arm over his shoulders.

“Look!” With his free hand Richard pointed across the galley, out over the rail. “Look!”

Rouquin thrust the crossbow into a squire’s hands and turned to see. Their galley was coming around to due east, standing well wide of the headland there. They had reached Acre, the city they had sworn to save.

Reefs and rocks cluttered the shallows along the headland and made a foamy crease out into the sea, and they were sailing well wide of it. As their angle changed, so the sun-gilded city on its headland swung past them. Now they were thrashing into a broad bay, cradled on the north in the arm of the headland. The far shore stretched straight south into the haze. The city on the headland stood silent, like cliffs against the sky, but from the shore across the bay a distant yelling rose.

The open beach there was packed with a solid mass of cheering people. They waved banners, they held up crosses. Those were his people, the Crusade. He flung one arm up, saluting them. And all along the beach, in a vast teeming motion, they threw their arms up in answer.

They were cheering for him. For him and Richard, for sinking the Saracen ship, for coming to save Acre. Richard’s arm hung over his shoulder. They swept on, at the head of the fleet, toward the welcoming mob before them.

Johanna said, “This is what he did at Messina; he had trumpeters and drums and lots of flags, and him up there by himself on the prow of his ship, like an old statue. There were mobs of people. Nobody could hear anything, it was so loud.”

Edythe had met Johanna in Messina, long after Richard’s famous entry into the conquered city. Now, in the dying afternoon light, as the women got off the skiff onto the sand, the bang of the drums and the shrill shriek of horns sounded far away. They had come to land well up the beach from Richard’s entry. Several porters were waiting for them, and a tall young lord in a broad-brimmed hat.

“Henry!” Johanna cried, and rushed to him. “You’ve grown so.”

The young man swept off his hat. He bowed to her properly, his face wide with his smile, and then embraced her. “Aunt Jo. Richard sent me; I’m here to take you to your quarters.” He turned and spoke rapidly to the other men, who went onto the skiff, muttering to each other. Edythe herded the other women to one side while they carried out Gracia’s body, crossing themselves with every other step.

Seeing her maid, stiff now in her wraps of cloaks, Johanna burst into weeping again, her hands pressed together. The young man, Henry, said, “Oh, Jo, just a maid,” and, taking her arm, led them off up a trail.

Edythe put her hands together. The death still worked on her, as if Gracia’s passing had torn a hole through a necessary wall in her mind. Among the other women, she plodded after Johanna. They were not part of the joyous entry over on the beach, where now the cheers doubled, and doubled again.

That must be Richard coming ashore, that sudden piercing intensity of yells. She stumbled along the sand after this Henry, who was getting Johanna to talk, to smile even, with Gracia’s body not ten feet in front of them. Henry cast a lingering glance toward the swelling uproar to the south. Clearly he wished he were there and not here.

“That was very brave, sinking that ship. She was bringing supplies to the Saracens.”

Johanna said, “The Saracens did it, not him.”

“Now that Richard is here, everything is going to change.”

“Oh, you think so. Well, let’s pray for that.”

Henry was leading them into the camp by a back way. The porters came groaning after, and they climbed a long flat rise, well inland of the city. The path wound through mounds of rotted garbage, bits of gnawed bone, shredded cloth, piles of shit. The rain had pounded everything into a stinking mush. The smell of urine made the air sick. Lilia crossed herself, tears sliding down her face. Johanna’s shoulders were hunched again, and now Henry did not try to jolly her out of it. Every few yards they passed an abandoned cesspit. Up on the top of the ridge was the first line of the camp, a row of wretched little hovels, dug halfway into the ground and cobbled together of scraps of wood and stones and cloth. Gritty wood smoke hung over everything.

They passed through these clots of huts, fire rings, and heaps of garbage toward the long ridge of the hill. There on the only flat high ground, a dozen tents had been pitched in a circle. Henry said, “This is the royal compound,” as if it were a palace. They carried Gracia into one of the smaller tents, and the other women followed, praying and moaning.

Edythe drew back, unwilling to go inside. A vague horror tingled on the back of her neck. She stopped outside the door and turned toward the city. From this height she could see what lay before them. She went out past the next tent, to the top of the slope.

The smoke from the nearby fires drifted in the air, but she could see all the way to the far wall of the enormous city, larger than any city she had ever seen before, Troyes or Rome or Messina. Curved around the top of the bay, the headland itself was low and flat, but on every inch of it was a house or a wall or a street, many piled on other houses and walls, all made of yellow stone, or maybe the smoke made it yellow.

Much of it lay in ruins. The whole city seemed knocked to earth, to rubble. The great walls along the water stood untouched. On the narrow neck of land where the headland connected to the coast there had once been a wall, but now it was a crumbled mass of rock, the tower blasted, the gate broken down.

The whole sweeping view was quiet now. At first she saw no people there at all. In the litter of rock, bits of wood stuck up, scaffolds, wheels. Down toward the beach some giant siege engine stood half-burned, its base whole but the uprights only charred and broken stubs, like grotesque fingers. Closer to her, she saw signs of a great fire, which had blackened even the stone.

Not a green thing grew on this place, not a stem or a leaf. Here and there a bent figure crept hunched among the rocks, feeling around the ground and picking things up. A haze of smoke and yellow dust hung over everything.

As she watched, Richard’s grand entry was passing the far side of this ruin from her, along the crumpled wall. On the barricades behind the rubble, a few defenders appeared, but they made no sound and skulked along like wolves from cover to cover. Outside, the Christians had gathered all along the way to whoop and cheer. The wind tore their voices away, inhuman howls that swelled and fell to a mutter.

The serpentine parade of armed men would be gone in a moment. The Christians would come back to the hovels and shanties cluttering the slope before her like the dens of animals. The sprawling wretched wreckage of the city, the stench from the pits behind her, and Gracia’s death all weighed down on her. She struggled to see the hand of God in this. To fit that image over this truth like a magic shield that would ward away all the evil. She could not master it and she went on into the tent, grateful for once for its closeness and dark.