The Passionate Brood (19 page)

Richard stared at her sombrely. Her bold admiration was balm after Berengaria’s distress, but her words reminded him of something Robin had once said about John. “I suppose it
was
sacred to him,” he said regretfully.

Across the girl’s bobbing head he sought his wife’s opinion. She looked so frightened he thought she was going to faint. Pushing Ida aside, he went to her at once. And Berengaria, who was so seldom demonstrative in public, clung to him shuddering. “Oh, Richard,” she sobbed, through an inexplicable storm of tears, “you have made an enemy for life!”

All through the breathless afternoon Johanna made her sister-in-law rest. They were housed in the harem part of a rich sheik’s house, but the fountains had long since ceased to splash in the neglected garden, and the stench of narrow streets seeped in through the heavy lattices. Yvette moved quietly about the darkened room trying to ward off the mosquitoes, and Berengaria lay staring at the high-pitched ceiling because every time she closed her eyes she saw the dreadful face of the dead Saracen.

From outside the high wall of the house came the shuffling of hurrying sandalled feet as the people of Acre suffered themselves to be rounded up with the gaunt remnants of their heroic garrison and herded towards the land gate to join Saladin’s unsuccessful relief forces In the hills. They would have to leave their battered homes, but at least this Cœur de Lion, so terrible in battle, had promised to spare their lives. “And Allah be praised, it’s the turn for the English guard to-night!” croaked a wizened old water-carrier. For they had come to know that the long, lean archers—so much like themselves in some ways—were good fighters but bad haters. Once you were taken prisoner they didn’t kick you or mock at your misfortunes but joked with you in their rough, incomprehensible way and as likely as not threw the children a bit of their rations. But all the same the citizens of Acre spat at the shadows of the conquering Infidels who climbed to the city walls towards sundown to watch the exchange of prisoners.

Berengaria got up and called for her bridal dress and her makeshift crown. It would be a formal occasion and Richard would want her to be there to welcome his men. As people made way for her through the streets, conquerors and vanquished alike eyed the sinking sun and said, “It won’t be long now!” The only dour faces to be seen belonged to the garrison to be left behind.

A cool evening breeze was blowing off the sea as Richard received his Queen at the top of the steps. “Come and see the Saracens marching out,” he invited, leading her to their usual vantage point. There seemed to be an endless procession of them streaming from beneath the great portcullis, most of them shuffling beneath pathetic bundles. Their camels and donkeys had long ago been eaten. The men were bound together with ropes but even that indignity could not quench the fiery pride in their sunken eyes. “What hundreds of them!” murmured Berengaria compassionately.

“Three thousand, my dear,” Richard told her.

“Can’t we do something for the women with their poor, wizened babies?” she suggested. Richard loved her for her compassion. He was far more interested in seeing her in her wedding dress than he was in the Saracens. The wind had whipped some colour into her cheeks and he thought how lovely she looked with a long white veil floating out behind her thick, dark plaits. But he would probably have sent the women some extra goats’ milk if Raymond, coming down from the watch-towers, had not reported that there was no sign of any prisoners on the mountain road.

“They’ll probably come winding out from that rocky canyon presently,” said Johanna uneasily. “Richard gave Saladin till sunset, you know.”

“The sun is making a gold path across the sea,” remarked Ida. The glow of it suffused her young, lineless face, warming the smooth olive skin. Like most women of her race she would probably be fat at thirty, but at seventeen she was ravishing. Berengaria, watching her, lifted an exploring finger to her own face for the first sign of a wrinkle.

Her cousin’s good-natured face was set and dour. “De Lusignon was telling me the other day that if ever he got any prisoners back the devils had blinded them,” he blurted out to all and sundry.

“Oh, no, Raymond!” beseeched Berengaria, as if he could avert it.

Richard looked from one to the other of the men about him with frowning uncertainty. “You really think Saladin may trick me? Send us back a band of blinded men?”

As Raymond did not answer he turned to Mercadier. The hirsute old campaigner shrugged. He had been out here before as a young hired mercenary. “If ne sends them back at all,” he said. “An Arab has no sense of time, you know, Sir. Next week—next month—whenever he happens to remember.”

“Remember!” snorted Richard. “But he can
see.
Isn’t his own garrison lined up and waiting down there? And aren’t those hills simply swarming with Saracens watching everything we do?”

Leopold, who had been talking in an undertone to Philip of France, turned to savour Richard’s discomfiture. “Watching, yes—and laughing,” he sneered. “At the omnipotent English lion.”

“No man makes a fool of me and gets away with it,” growled Richard.

Egged on by other foreign leaders, the little Austrian felt safe enough to bait their successful rival. “Make him obey your orders then, the way you try to make us,” he jeered.

Richard ignored their enmity. He had bigger things to think about. It was one of those moments for a quick decision. What was it he had said to Robin back in Dover? “A man who can’t burden his conscience with occasional ruthlessness hasn’t the right to rule.” And Robin had agreed with him.

“And if Saladin won’t obey you can punish him—with three thousand Saracens in your power,” prompted the Cypriot hostage at his side, forgetting how lenient he had been to her own countrymen.

Richard looked across the empty plain and struck palm with fist. “And by the foot of God, I will!” he swore.

Ida gazed up at him as if he were some superman. Her eyes burned with excitement. “You will really blind them all?” she asked.

He pushed her out of the way and strode to the top of the city gate. “Of course not. I don’t torture people,” he said grimly. “But when I must, I kill.”

The girl clapped her hands as if he had offered to take her to a mumming or a bull fight; but Berengaria ordered her to be quiet. She caught at the King’s cloak as he passed. “For pity’s sake, Richard, what are you going to do?” she cried.

Apart from the cruelty of it, Raymond judged that such a wholesale massacre would be bad for Richard’s reputation. He put himself in his friend’s impetuous path. “Heavens, man, remember most of them are bound!” he warned, lowering his voice so that their whispering allies should not hear.

But it began to look certain that the Christians had been fooled. “If we let Saladin get away with it once he will do it again,” pointed out Richard, and Chalus and Burgundy and most of the French nobles agreed with him. There was only one man who could prevent his vengeance now, and he was an outlaw in some English wood. “Line up the prisoners on the plain and surround them,” Richard shouted down from the gate head.

His own men moved reluctantly to the order, but the envious leaders of his allies, to whom a few hundred Saracens meant no more than so many sheep, rejoiced covertly over a story that would discredit him in the eyes of the world.

Raymond put his broad shoulder like a shield between Johanna and the proposed carnage. “It’s the sort of thing John might have done,” she moaned. But Berengaria, the timid, forced herself to look as long as there was any chance of averting it. She saw the reluctant English, standing in a hesitant circle with drawn blades and the sudden doubt and terror of the huddled captives. Most clearly of all she saw the piteous, upturned faces of the women, their swaddled babies clasped like little mummies beneath their dull blue veils. “You gave them till sunset,” she insisted clearly.

Richard laid a hand on the great portcullis chain while he waited. A ruby set in the back of his leather gauntlet gleamed like blood in the roseate light. Berengaria watched it pale, afraid to look behind her towards the West.

“Perhaps Saladin will send a message,” suggested Blondel.

But Islam mocked in silence from the hills.

Ida stood beside Chalus, erect as some mystic priestess, watching the last rim of light kiss the sea. Suddenly she lifted both arms and her bangles jangled together like clashed cymbals. “The sun has set!” she called shrilly.

The short Eastern twilight was upon them. All men’s eyes waited on Richard. “Separate the women and children,” he called to Mercadier, who had gone down. “And then kill the rest.”

Berengaria saw the women try to shield their bound husbands and lovers with their own bodies—saw them being dragged away. And compassion meant more to Berengaria than being sorry. Cherished daughter of Navarre as she was—and intellectually Richard’s superior—she threw herself down on the dusty stones and clasped his knees. “Richard, Richard, I implore you—by our love…” she cried incoherently.

But Richard disengaged her clinging hands. His mouth—of which she knew only the tenderness—was a merciless line above the hardness of his jaw. “God’s breath, d’you suppose I enjoy this butchering that you must try to make it harder?” he asked roughly.

Johanna came and pulled her to her feet. She felt that Beren-garia’s prayers only underlined her brother’s cruelty and was angry with them both. “Robin would have known how to stop you!” she told him. He turned on her fiercely and a flame of Plantagenet fury licked round them, momentarily scorching their mutual love. “Curse your interference!” shouted Richard. “Why must you remind me of him now?” But even the memory did more than Berengaria’s prayers. For a moment he seemed to hesitate, but Leopold chose the pregnant moment to make some stinging comment about “the only man who had guts to make and stick to a decision.” Even Raymond had to admit that reprisals were justifiable. So Richard drew his sword and with forced cheerfulness called to Philip and Leopold to come down. He knew they would be only too glad to see him shock some men’s consciences and, having given an unpopular order, felt that he himself must be the first to strike.

They could not do other than follow him, and all the sight-seeing crowd trooped after them. Only the King’s squire remained unnoticed with the women. His princess needed him. “Help me with the Queen,” she had whispered, under cover of the general excitement. Between them they carried her into the little watch-tower and laid her on a rough camp bed used by the officer of the watch. For Richard’s sake neither of them wanted people to know that she had fainted.

“Where is Yvette?” asked Blondel, hastily improvising a pillow out of the old crescent standard that Leopold had had hauled down.

“Down in the town still superintending the packing,” Johanna said. He sent a passing man-at-arms in search of her, but she must have been on her way because before they could send for her she appeared in the narrow doorway. “Oh, my poor beautiful!” she cried at sight of Berengaria. She took charge at once, loosening the Queen’s dress and telling Blondel to take off the tight, makeshift crown. “She hadn’t been well for days,” she said, “and you know how she hates all this moving from camp to camp.”

Reacting to her ministrations, Berengaria began to stir. “Richard?” she murmured questioningly. Then her dark, curled lashes fluttered wide and her pansy-brown eyes darkened with the horror of remembrance.

“He didn’t mean to hurt you, Madam,” apologised his squire. “He was just mad with rage…”

Berengaria knew he was more concerned for the king’s credit than for her hurt, but loved his loyalty. She lifted a limp hand and touched him reassuringly. “I know, Blondel,” she said.

The bare, vaulted room beneath the flagstaff was only big enough to hold the four of them. The city wall seemed quiet and deserted. Normally the Moslems would have been at prayer, but suddenly the evening stillness was rent by piercing shrieks. Yvette straightened herself beside the low bed. “What’s the matter? What are those people shrieking for?” she asked, looking from one to the other of them for enlightenment. The shrieks were followed by a dreadful, long-drawn wailing and, as no one answered her, she went briskly to the door. But Blondel was quick to bar her way. “It’s nothing fit for your pretty eyes,” he said, holding her fast in the gathering gloom. He had bent to kiss her before a movement behind him reminded him that Ida was still watching the last of her hero’s vengeance. Glancing over his shoulder, he added disgustedly, “She egged him on to do it—she and the Austrian!” And Yvette, beginning to understand something of what had happened, clung to him gratefully. It seemed that only in such stark moments snatched from war was their love destined to unfold!

Inside the watch-tower Berengaria turned her head wearily so that the end of one heavy plait dropped with a soft plop to the uneven floor. “Although he will never admit it, Richard will be sorry for this all his life,” she said.

Johanna ranged back and forth across the little room. It was her personal shame. “It’s as if he’d smeared an ugly stain across our escutcheon,” she said. But she had promised to let Raymond take her to one of Chalus’s amusing parties, and so she was only too willing to forget the incident when Berengaria professed herself better and said she would rather be alone.

Knowing how she hated a fuss, they all took her at her word, and presently she sauntered out on to the wall…It was pleasantly cool now, the stars were beginning to come out, and the scene of the recent reprisals was mercifully shrouded in darkness. Music and laughter were already bubbling from a large lighted house in the best part of the town, drowning the muted lamentations from the slums round the harbour. Ida was nowhere to be seen, and the fitful strains of native music suggested that she too had gone to Barbe of Chalus’s party. She and Barbe got on well together, and it was guard-room gossip that she sometimes condescended to dance for him.

Berengaria was in no mood for the monotonous nasal music of the bazaars, which was becoming such a rage with the younger crusaders. She waited, thinking of her loved ones in Pamplona, until Richard came to her for comfort as she knew he would. Even in the darkness she could see the tired lines on his face, but there was none of the elation with which he used to return to her from battle. “Are you going to forgive me?” he asked.

“A great deal more readily than you will forgive yourself, I expect,” she assured him, trying to speak lightly.

Richard looked up in quick contradiction. “My roughness to you in front of all these people, I mean. Not this necessary reprisal.”

“Can’t you see that my feelings were nothing compared with the suffering of those women? Besides, I knew you didn’t mean it. You were furious because what Johanna said was true.” Berengaria broke off suddenly and pulled away her hand. “Oh, look!” she cried. “Your sword is dripping blood on my wedding dress!”