The Lute Player (44 page)

‘And your brother John—’ began Walter eagerly. It was as though seeing through Philip’s putative schemes comforted them a little for being victims of his perfidy.

‘My brother John was not born to take kingdoms,’ Richard said. ‘Nor is this the time. Leave me, trusty Algenais, good Walter; go to your beds. I shall have my bearings again by morning.’

‘Time brings solace,’ Walter said, as though he stood in a house of bereavement.

‘And vengeance,’ muttered Algenais softly.

They took their leave.

Raife, still crouched by the bed, lifted his head.

‘Sire, if it were just a matter of horses—I could steal them. They are so tame, the Arab horses that they are never picketed but wander at will amongst the tents. They come at a call and follow like sheep. I know the calls. I could steal ten a night and lead them to you. Fool that I am,’ he said wildly, ‘not to have thought of that before!’

‘Listen,’ said Richard, harshness invading the dullness of his voice. ‘Walter is faithful and ardent and knows his English well; Algenais is a true man; Robico of Bohemia is under vow never to take meat, wine or woman while the Saracens hold Jerusalem; the Templar, monk as he is, is a brave man. But tonight when Burgundy had spoken they were all of one mind.
This
crusade is over!’

Raife went to his bed and I heard him sobbing. I thought of his lost youth, plundered manhood, his hunger for vengeance that must go unassuaged. Presently he slept, sobbing himself into quietude like a child. How many times had he done that?

I lay still in my corner, thinking this and that. There had been the courier that day from Acre and I wondered whether it were by his means that Philip had sent his orders; whether the long arm of the friend turned enemy had reached out from Paris to snatch away all hope of victory in the very hour of its possible attainment. Or had Philip, when he left, charged Burgundy to proceed up to the final throw and then withdraw. Who could know? Would anyone ever know? And what now? When Richard had found his bearings in the morning, what would they be and where would they lead him? Back to the land he ruled, to the woman who loved him? Would he turn and seek compensation for thwarted ambition in the small sweetnesses of ordinary existence and live to say one day, ‘When I was on crusade…’ or ‘I remember once in Palestine…’

I knew that he was wakeful. Now and again he sighed and the bed creaked as he turned restlessly on it. Only once, and that for no more than an hour—though that was long enough for me to commit myself—had he seemed a hero, a little more than human to me; I did not love him as Raife did nor wholeheartedly admire and revere him as did Walter and Algenais. His behaviour to Berengaria always, in every issue, lay between us. But over this barrier I saw him more clearly perhaps than those whose emotions were free to run forward; and I could guess as shrewdly as anyone what his thoughts and feelings were in his hour of travail. Even that blessed sense of unity and peace which had lain over us all for the last weeks had its own bitterness to contribute to this moment. Without any sense of blasphemy I thought: Just so the triumphant procession on Palm Sunday was followed by the lonely agony in Gethsemane. (Anna, the wine fumes were still in my brain. It was merely an idle thought. Richard Plantagenet never seemed Christ-like to me.)

But Richard did not watch alone or agonise without pity. Presently I fumbled under my pillow. And I said softly, ‘Sire, you are awake, I know. Do you wish to sleep?’

There was no answer for a little time. Then he said, just as softly, ‘I’ve gone back step by step, Blondel, reckoning every mistake, every misguided action and every unwise word. Do you know when this crusade was lost? You were there, you saw it happen! I was turned back from Jerusalem that night in London, in William’s Tower!’

‘No,’ I said soothingly. ‘That is a night thought, sire. They are always feasible in the night and always hurtful. But in the morning we perceive their fallacy.’

‘This is true. If I had married the French princess Philip would have stayed by my side. And Leopold. Is that too deep for you? Isaac of Cyprus wouldn’t accept my bride because he had wanted her for himself. If I had married Alys, not Berengaria, I should not have attacked Cyprus and disinherited that little fat girl who is Leopold’s niece! The greatest joke and the sourest that God ever played on any man, my boy? Save for my mother, who once beat me for discourtesy when I was almost full grown and thought myself almighty, I never cared a fig for any woman; they mean nothing to me at all—and yet two women have brought me down.’

Too simple, of course, to be taken as fact; it ignored too many things which had contributed to this situation but it was feasible and it was hurtful—it was a night thought! I knew the kind. But it was new for Richard Plantagenet to lie awake in the night and look backwards, he who had always cast his spent days behind him as soldiers throw orange peel, who had always pressed forward to the glittering future which had proved to be a mirage.

There was nothing I could say, except, ‘If you would sleep, sire, I have here the means to make you.’

It was the kindest thing I could do for him who had, whatever his faults, been invariably kind and indulgent to me. I offered him a night of sleep, of strange and beautiful dreams which, unlike the ordinary ones, bore no relationship to waking life but took the dreamer into places and amongst creatures which had no like on this earth: Waking, of course, would be horrible but then tomorrow would in any case be a hard day for him and it might even be helpful to have something else to blame.

‘You’re a good-hearted boy, Blondel, but I don’t want your drugs. What has happened has happened and must be borne. You go to sleep.’

I remembered that Christ in the hour of His agony had turned His head away from the hyssop and myrrh on the merciful sponge.

I swallowed a pill myself and slept.

XVI

That is my account of the crusade which Anna Apieta bade me write, saying, ‘Write what you saw and what you know, Blondel.’ The Third Crusade ended that night in Bethany; and by rights I should end my account with this final falling away of an ally and the abandonment of the war.

But I am going to write on a little for my own diversion and my own satisfaction. So many writers, both priestly and secular, have moistened their quills in order to record their own opinions and guesses concerning what happened next that it will amuse me to set down what I saw and what I know of what happened when the crusade was over. Philip the Penman, writing seven years ago in his cloister at Rheims, expressed himself thus: ‘The time between Richard Plantagenet’s sailing from Acre and his appearance in Vienna is a time shrouded in mystery. Some stories assert that he was at that time accompanied by a lute player, a person represented by some writers as a servant of faithful devotion, by others as the traitor who gave him over to his enemies. The most reliable authorities now agree, however, that this lute player was a mythical character, having no existence outside the minnesingers’ imaginations.’

So much for “the most reliable authorities”; so much for Philip the Penman.

In that early spring of the year the crusade was over but there was fighting still to do. The Saracens closed in and besieged the garrison we had left at Jaffa and when Richard reached that town there was a hard and successful battle, in which he fought with all his old vigour and daring and skill as though he enjoyed a brief resurrection of the spirit. Resurrection is, I think, an apt word for, save at such moments, the man who rode back from Bethany to Acre was a dead man. He ate food when it was served to him but it had neither taste nor nourishment in it; he shovelled it into his mouth and it might have been chopped hay. He grew thin and gaunt. He lost what little care he had ever had in his appearance, never combed his hair or his beard, would never have changed his shirt save for the fact that I occasionally handed him a clean one. He no longer rode in the van and he had given his cream-coloured horse to Raife of Clermont who was suffering from the festered blister on his heel. His leg was now grotesquely swollen and Richard had said, ‘Ride the Arab; its smooth pace will jolt you less,’ and had himself ridden the lame and stumbling steed which Raife had acquired after Lyard had been killed.

The lame horse had been glad to accommodate its pace to that of the men on foot—the vast majority now—but the Arab would grow restive and occasionally Raife, grimacing with pain from his poisoned leg, would give him his head and let him gallop on a detour.

From one such he returned on the morning when the retreating rabble, which had been an army, wound its way around the south of a line of low hills which divided it from the city which it had marched out to take Jerusalem.

‘Sire,’ Raife said in the tender voice which we all used towards Richard now, ‘you have never looked on Jerusalem. Take this horse and ride to the top of that hill and you will see it shining in the sun.’

Richard turned on him a face as bleak and stripped as a winter countryside.

‘Those who are not worthy to take it are not worthy to look on it,’ he said.

But for Hubert Walter, to whom discipline was, as it were, a self-contained virtue, something to be cherished for itself alone, the retreating army would have been more demoralised than it was. As it was, it was bad enough. Until we came to Jaffa which the Saracens had retaken. There Richard fought like an inspired fiend trying, I thought, to get himself killed.

Then when the terms of the treaty with Saladin were under discussion he came to life again. Jaffa and Acre must be left in Christian hands. Saladin fought hard for Acre—it was the key to Palestine—but Richard held firmly to his demand. ‘I may not be able to take Jerusalem with the force at my command but I can and will hold Acre till Judgment Day.’ And with that in mind he roused himself, reissued, too late, his orders against women camp followers, drinking, quarrelling, fouling camp, opium taking, waste and general disorderliness.

Saladin capitulated over the question of Acre and the treaty was drawn up for peace for three years, three months and other threes down to three seconds. And there was a hint there that one day, in some computable and not far distant time, hostilities might be renewed. That one day, with new allies or no allies, Richard would take the van again and the standard of England would open its folds anew to the eastern sun. But he said nothing, hinted at nothing. With something that had been an army, had degenerated into a rabble, had been half reclaimed and was now mainly a mass of men eager for home, he came back into Acre, camped and began to make arrangements for the embarkation.

There was now no shadow of excuse for his avoidance of the palace as a place of residence but his tent and his bed were set up as usual near Hubert Walter’s; and the common soldiers, noticing this, amused themselves for a whole day with ribald comment about what
they
would be doing in the circumstances. Not that they were now suffering from lack of women for Richard, in his new mood, seemed not to notice that many of his orders had fallen into desuetude; and although he had fought in the old fashion at Jaffa, after its retaking that town had been the scene of loot and rapine on an unprecedented scale, unchecked and unreproved. This was no longer a disciplined crusading army; it was a mob of defeated soldiers on their way home, not averse to a little fighting now and then but unamenable to the former strict rule.

Many Saracen women, especially of the poorer sort, who had lost their husbands and their homes, followed the retreating Christian army to Acre and when the embarkation began there were some pitiful scenes. Women whose future obviously held nothing but starvation and degradation clung to their temporary protectors and begged to be taken aboard; and although many men took the parting as lightly as they had taken the women, there were others who felt the wrench sharply. Maybe to the end of their days, lying beside their sturdy-bodied, stolid Flemish and French and English peasant wives, they remembered and dreamed of the small, honey-coloured, doe-eyed women with the downpouring black hair and pleasantly flattering Eastern subservience to the male; women who could never nag or scold because they knew so few foreign words. And doubtless the memories grew more enchanting as the men exaggerated the exotic charm of their temporary mistresses and forgot the drabber aspects.

Indeed, one or two knights with money enough to bribe or craft enough to outwit or power enough to ignore the shipmasters, did smuggle women aboard; and that, too, was food for speculation. Did they live, these women, and give birth to little half-breeds fairer than their mothers, darker than their fathers; or did they pine and die in the stern cold castles of the bleak North and West? How were they explained? How comforted?

The King of England, for whom the loveliest and most lovable woman in the world waited, sent her a courteous message announcing his safe return and then on the third day another, equally courteous, saying that if it were agreeable to her he would sup with her that evening. The page came back with a letter, a single sentence but written by her own hand: ‘My lord, I live for that hour.’

‘Now, Blondel,’ Richard said, ‘hunt out our best clothes and tie a ribbon or a bunch of flowers on that lute of yours. And if you can think up a
pretty
story, relevant but fit for women’s ears—’ He broke off, and that bitter, beaten look of dead defeatedness washed over his face again. It was more painful to watch than physical torture. Not thus had he meant to return to her.

I managed to wrench my mind away from my own comparatively petty problem.

‘Her Majesty will have little thought or time to spare for any story or for music. You have returned safe and sound, sire, and that will suffice to make her very happy.’

‘Where other people have spit in their mouths, Blondel, you have the sweetest oil of almonds. Would all were like you!’

‘Now
my
tongue,’ said Raife from his bed in the corner, ‘drips bitter aloes—but it says the same thing. The Queen has long ago forgotten that there is such a place as Jerusalem; and if Blondel, telling his story, mentions Jaffa, she will think: Oh yes, Jaffa, where the oranges grow! That is the great virtue of women—the blind capacity to comfort. God made them soft and smooth and silly—buffers—like chamois jerkins.’