The Stolen Queen (16 page)

And then, in a horrible surge, it began. The gates splintered, trembled, gave. In one explosion of steel, the knights unsheathed their swords, as one they brought up their horses singly and ran at the opening, tight as a tournament list. Othon was wild, tripping on the scattered planks, plunging, struggling between the heavier, well-trained destriers of the household. I tucked my head into my chest and gave him the rein, making no attempt to guide him, allowing him to steer us between two of his mailed and blinkered fellows. And we were in. Slithering, the horses hurtled over the rough paving of the little street, checked as they flew into the square, coming up four abreast and divided.
The Lusignan troops were waiting, and the king's men fell upon them. I saw des Roches at the head go down, his horse's belly sliced, scrambling through the steaming entrails as his squire brought a second mount, then the squire fell under an axe blow as des Roches and the king screamed the men onwards. The helmet fell over my eyes, I could barely see through the cross-slit in the aperture. My hands were sliding on the reins. I held Othon between my knees with all my strength and managed to pull the thing off, just as a whiplash of air passed my face and I threw myself sideways, almost falling, and the sword took Othon on his foreleg. He howled and reared. I looked round frantically for Tomas, a little ahead, swinging his sword as sure as if he had been born to it, brought Othon behind him and saw him point to the standard wobbling up the hill before us.

‘This way, this way, push through!' he yelled, but I couldn't move. I watched Tomas vanish into a roiling pool of bodies and horseflesh, Lusignan green and royal scarlet blurring into a porridge of gore, the screams of falling men rising in a hideous music that would suddenly arrest, so that in the silence I could hear only the scrape of steel and the kites calling, far above us in that cloudless sky. I don't know how long we remained there, men and horses pushing one another to their death, and I could not count how many fell, except that in a while the ground was sickeningly soft with trampled corpses. Ahead, the standard seemed petrified, I knew that the king would be in the fighting beneath it, and tried to push Othon up, but his poor chest was heaving and wheezing, he was losing blood, and then a Lusignan man-at-arms was before us, swinging his axe and I flattened myself
into the saddle as the blow came down on Othon's neck and we were tipped into the writhing mire. There was no time to bid my poor darling goodbye. I felt a hand on my arm, wrenching it almost from the socket, and I was up behind Tomas, making for a break in the line. We came up behind the standard, now surging forward.

‘No! Tomas! Othon, no!'

He had me gripped round the waist, riding with his legs to keep his sword arm free. I did what I could to kick out at the men as they came up alongside us, forced ahead by their own cavalry, the weight of the great Lusignan destriers sending them down the steep hill in an avalanche of bloodied green. Then Tomas's weight thudded against me and I felt him slump and lose his grip on the reins. He had been struck. I grabbed the reins and turned the horse. Tomas's face was blank steel, but as I watched the helmet slipped sideways and a great gout of blood spurted over me, hot and stinking, and Tomas's head peeled slowly from his neck as his body slid to the ground.
Tomas
… The horse tripped over his corpse, stumbled, righted itself and cantered on with me splayed over its wide back, unable to do anything but shield my head with my arm. ‘This way! Go! Go!'

Des Roches was rallying the men for the charge on the citadel, but as I was carried forward among them I saw that the yard was empty. The frenzied horses were gradually walked down. We circled aimlessly until one of the squires called, ‘Over here!' I was shaking too much now to control my mount, but he came up quietly and nosed at des Roches's third, or fourth, horse, I had lost count, as placidly as if they were nibbling at a hedge.

‘Majesty?'

I raised my head, my eyes still burning with Tomas's blood.

‘You are injured?'

I managed to shake it, no.

‘Come then, come quickly. The king is already inside.'

I followed him through a doorway, my legs like water, my throat heaving at the scent of blood. The hall was sweet with wood smoke and rosemary and summer dust. Within, a group of sergeants stood with drawn swords around a tableau on the dais. The trestle was covered with the remains of a breakfast, grapes, bread, a half-eaten pigeon pie. Hal, Lord Hugh and another lad were frozen, blenched, their hand at their sword hilts. Hal had a spot of grease by his mouth. Lord Hugh's face was as cool and still as ever, the serpent at his collar polished and gleaming.

‘Isabelle?' Hal was gasping, his surprise at seeing me wiping the fear momentarily from his features.

I didn't care to look at him. I felt no triumph, only nausea.

‘Take them,' my husband's voice from somewhere above us. He was already climbing the inner staircase to the second floor of the keep. Shuffling, holding the drooping hem of my drenched hauberk over what was left of my gown, I began to follow him. I could feel Lord Hugh's eyes on my back, measuring, as he had once appraised me in the hall at Lusignan when I came to my betrothal. In his look, I sensed that he did not believe it was finished, not even now, when he was the king's prisoner. I knew the madness that glittered in the black depths of those eyes, and I would not return his glance. Still, I could wish myself back at Lusignan, I could have wished even that I had been married
to Hal and safely at home in Poitou if I could have been spared what I had seen in the last hour. I forced myself to turn and find the eyes of the other boy. Arthur.

A flash of blue in the darkness of the hall. Deep blue, the blue of a halcyon's feathers. His gaze held mine, and while I tried to dip my reddened lashes, I could not. Turquoise and sapphire, our eyes' light the ink of a lapidary. He inclined his head courteously, his bright hair the sun to my bloodied moon. Madly, I thought of the poets' stories so beloved of my mother's maids. In the songs of the troubadours, love strikes like an arrow, like a blade in the heart. But perhaps that is because poets seldom see battle. When I looked at Arthur, the world was still. Just that, a tiny, plenteous moment, a question silently asked and its answer silently given. In that flash of illumination between us, I saw what I had to do, and beneath the exhaustion of the journey's sleepless nights and the as yet unbroken storm cloud of my grief for Tomas and Othon, I felt another great weariness. There was only one way to end it, I thought, only one way to defeat the Lusignan demon. A sacrifice. Then my legs buckled under me like willow wands, and I fainted like a woman.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

O
VER TWO HUNDRED LUSIGNAN KNIGHTS WERE TAKEN
at Mirebeau that day. Many were sent to Corfe, my husband's favourite English castle, where he had spent a thousand pounds on fortifications. The king had Hal, Lord Hugh and Duke Arthur manacled and sent north by cart, the most disparaging and humiliating spectacle that could be made of a warrior. Arthur and Hal were sent to Falaise in Normandy and Lord Hugh was to be confined alone at Caen. With the king, I travelled first to Fontevraud, so that the people of the countryside saw two queens of England riding side by side in the same litter, though I might have been Queen Eleanor's great-great-grandchild. I had been so curious to meet this legendary woman, queen in turn of France and England, Crusader, rebel and, many said, adulteress, but what I found was a bent-backed, crack-voiced old crone, her eyes milky with cataracts, barely in her wits long enough to thank the son who had delivered her. After leaving her in the care of the nuns, we, too, made for Normandy.

If I had felt love for John, briefly, at Mirebeau, that feeling was extinguished forever by the time the Christmas feast at Caen was over. I had reason enough to hate Lord Hugh, but I knew that it was ignominious to show him thus to the peasants, trussed up in a farm cart, and while I was glad that he should be so stripped of his dignity I knew that the magnates would dislike it. But the Angevin spirit which had called my husband to win the greatest victory for the English since his brother the Lionheart had relieved the garrison at Jaffa in the Holy Land before I was born, had simmered and curdled in him, making him swaggering and arrogant. He flitted about the victory, drinking more and more wine each night as he recounted it over and over. The lords said nothing, but I could see their looks.

Worse, the king still insisted that I join him in his bed each night, and kept me there until noon each day. The fumbling attempts he had made since Paris were repeated, but this time, when he failed, he would turn furiously away from me, and it was only by endless caresses and promises of my love that I could keep him gentle. I hated the way the men at court looked at me, the lewd whisperings that followed me to dinner. At Mirebeau, I had felt magnificent, but now, in the veiled contempt in their eyes as they knelt to me, I could see that they thought again that I was a little slut, who had infatuated their king and forced him to leave the business of governing to them while he wallowed in my bed. And while it suited me to have them think this, just as it suited me that each night my husband grew more frustrated by his inability to make me his true wife, I was disgusted, and despised them.

I had sent my pearl ring to Agnes at Chinon, and she joined us at Caen with my women. I could not begin my plan until her arrival, and between John's repulsive caresses and the endless feasting, time stopped once more. I might have ridden, there were plentiful horses for me to choose from, but after losing Othon I no longer wished to ride. I mourned Tomas, my friend and my saviour, but I was a warrior's child, one way or the other, and I was not so sad for him. He had died bravely, at a great age, and I knew that he would have been glad to do so, glad to die like the men he had armed and trained all his life, gloriously, instead of keeling over in the stable yard with a bunch of keys for company. The Lusignan lands were now forfeit and my husband would tax the tenants heavily but I wheedled a grant out of him that would keep Tomas's family in Poitou comfortable for many years. I tried to tell myself that Othon had died as a warrior, too, that he would have wished it so, but when John was finally snoring beside me in the darkness I saw his eyes, rolling and terrified, heard the great heaves of his ebbing heart, saw him fall, again and again, into that mess of bodies, and I knew that I had wronged him with my pride, with my wish to act out my childish game instead of staying safe at Chinon where I belonged. When Agnes came she said that perhaps the household would not have fought so hard had they not known their queen was among them, that perhaps it was my presence which had inspired the victory, and that Othon had not been slaughtered for nothing. It was kind, but I knew it wasn't true, and besides, she had never liked him.

As the year turned, we received news from Angouleme that my father had died. John asked me, quite gently, if I should like to go south to join my mother, but I refused. I never wanted to see her, or my brother Pierre, again. It was a wise choice, for William des Roches, to whom the king had promised the care of Duke Arthur after Mirebeau, was infuriated when the prince was locked up at Falaise without his consent, and turned his coat once more to the king of France. And with him went Aimery de Thouars, a great magnate, and together they began attacking the borders of Anjou. We heard of a plan to kidnap me at Chinon, when it was given out that I would be travelling to my grieving mother, and John laughed it off, saying he had mercenaries enough to defend his wife without troubling his treacherous vassals, and was the queen herself not a match for any knight? Just a few months before I should have thrilled at such a compliment, and I tried to smile prettily as he chucked me under the chin and praised my bravery at Mirebeau, but I could see, as he could not in his arrogance, that his men were turning against him, and that while I had no child and Arthur lived, I should never be safe from the Lusignans.

And did I grieve for my papa despite now knowing the truth? I could not think of him that way, could not think of him as anything other than my rough-bearded father who had seemed the grandest man in the world to me when I knew nothing beyond the walls of our home at Angouleme. His presence had filled that little world, his dogs and his horses and his weapons, his hunting boots and hauberks, his huge gentle hands that swung me up on his shoulders as my mother
laughed and looked on. Yet that father had given me to Lord Hugh and then plotted to make me queen twice over. I could not blame him for his ambition, for at least it was clear and honest, after his fashion. He had never known of the Lusignan plan to make an empire, or of how my mother had made him a cuckold with a creature who wore horns of a different kind. I sorrowed, and ordered Masses for his soul, but I could not grieve, not truly. I was glad that he had been spared what was to come. Still, in some way, I wished that he had lived, for perhaps he could have advised my husband, have made him listen as I, a woman, could not. John had never lived in the south, he was English born and bred. As I had heard in his voice the first time I heard him speak, and he did not understand as my father had done the ways of the men there; men whose strength came from a darker source than the crosses blazoned on their surcoats.

With des Roches and de Thouars gone to France, my husband judged it politic to release the Lusignans, thinking that their gratitude would bind them to obedience. But as soon as Lord Hugh and his son were free, they ignored the noble promises they had made him in Normandy and took their knights to Poitou to make war yet again. The English strongholds in the Anjou were falling, one by one, and now the Lusignans were raising Aquitaine. Daily, there were reports of pillage and burning, and as my husband sought to strengthen his fortresses by filling them with mercenaries, those same hired troops took to plundering the towns and the abbeys. It was said that the peasants shut themselves in their homes, too fearful to work the
fields, and if the crops were not planted then in a year my husband's people would begin to starve. And still, he did nothing. He drank and boasted and spent more and more of the taxes raised from the grudging English barons on masterless foreign soldiers, while the knights he had imprisoned after Mirebeau escaped from Corfe and starved themselves to death in the English hills rather than kneel to their king.