use his siege engines. So do you know what he did? He moved the yearly fair from Saumur to Montreuil, and paid the fairgoers to assist his soldiers in filling up the ditch!”
Henry laughed and pushed his chair back. Ranulf glanced toward Maude, for it could not be easy for her to hear Henry speak so glowingly of Geoffrey. But she showed no overt displeasure; he supposed she’d had to accept it, that her son and his father would always be close. He’d noticed, though, that she no longer spoke of Geoffrey with such searing bitterness. Mayhap what he’d heard was true, that they’d finally made their peace. A pity they could not have done so twenty years ago. Why was it, he wondered, that whatever came to his sister, always came too late?
“Was that how Geoffrey took the castle?”
Henry shook his head. “No, Cousin Maud. Even though his mangonels were then able to do considerable damage, Berlai still held out. Whenever breaches were made in the walls, they repaired the damage with oaken beams, and Berlai boasted from the battlements that he’d never surrender. But he’d reckoned without Vegetius, a Roman sage who’d written a classic treatise on siege warfare. Papa got an idea from his writings, and he filled an iron vessel with Greek fire, then used a mangonel to hurl it at the castle walls. It ignited on impact and the wooden beams caught fire. Greek fire is very hard to put out and they could not keep the flames from spreading.”
“Greek fire,” Ranulf echoed thoughtfully. “Crusaders brought back tales from the Holy Land of Greek fire. But I’d not heard of it’s being used in the West ere this.”
“Papa was the first,” Henry said proudly. “When his father went off to wed the Queen of Jerusalem, he learned the ingredients and shared the secret in a letter to Papa. I’m not sure what he mixed-naphtha and lime and tar and sulphur-but whatever, it worked. In no time at all, Berlai and his men came-as Papa put it-slithering out like snakes!”
“Is it true that the French king got Abbot Bernard to excommunicate Geoffrey for refusing to set Berlai free?”
Henry looked over at his uncle and nodded. “It seems the Church has a third category of sin; in addition to mortal and venal, there is also political.” His mouth quirked at the corners, in just the suggestion of a smile. “Fortunately,” he said, “Papa appears to be bearing up rather well.”
“I expect he would,” Maude said dryly, for the counts of Anjou had always taken excommunication in stride; one of Geoffrey’s more infamous forebears had sinned on such a grand scale that he’d made no less than three pilgrimages of atonement to the Holy Land. “How long do you think this truce will last, Henry?”
As always, he smiled at her use of “Henry.” She’d made a good-faith attempt to switch over to “Harry” in order to please him, but she was so obviously uncomfortable with the informality that he’d soon taken pity and urged her to revert back to his given name. Now she alone called him Henry and she’d come to relish the exclusivity of it. He was still as restless as he’d been as a boy, never able to sit still for long, and he’d begun pacing as he considered her question. She felt a great surge of pride as she watched him, and an empty, hurtful ache, a bittersweet regret that this son she so loved could not have been Brien’s.
“It is hard to say, Mama. It all depends upon who has the French king’s ear. If it is Abbot Bernard and the Bishop of Lisieux, they may well persuade him to talk peace. If he is fool enough to keep listening to Eustace, we’ll all be the losers for it.”
Ranulf was intrigued by his nephew’s candor, for it was his experience that young men invariably proclaimed their eagerness to go to war, and with many, that eagerness was even genuine. But Harry had an uncommonly pragmatic view of warfare for one in only his nineteenth year; he’d proved himself willing to do what must be done to win, but it was clear he took no pleasure in it. To test his theory, Ranulf said, “So you hope your differences with Louis can be settled by negotiation?”
“Of course. I’d choose bargaining over bleeding any day, as would all men of sense. So it goes without saying, then, that Eustace is lusting after a bloodletting. The more I learn about this rival of mine, Uncle Ranulf, the more I realize that Eustace is the most convincing argument possible against hereditary kingship.”
Ranulf and Maud laughed, but Henry’s mother did not, for that sounded like blasphemy to her, even in jest. “How could anyone argue against hereditary kingship?” she protested, and Henry grinned.
“I can assure you, Mama, that I’d be the last one to make such an argument,” he said and was leaning over to give her a hug when one of Maude’s servants entered with an urgent message. Once such a message would have been for Maude; now it was for Henry, for “the lord duke.”
“It is from Papa,” Henry said, gazing down at the familiar seal. Moving toward the nearest lamp, he read rapidly. “That contest over the French king’s ear? Well, it seems that Eustace lost. Louis has agreed to enter into negotiations and Papa wants me to return straightaway, for we are expected in Paris in a week’s time.”
“Thank Heaven,” Maude said fervently. “Now we can concentrate upon the real enemy-Stephen and his wretched son.”
“Easy, Mama,” Henry cautioned. “We’ve not made peace yet. These talks might well come to naught. But we have nothing to lose and possibly much to gain. So…it looks like I’m off to Paris.” He glanced at the letter again and then over at Ranulf. “At the very least,” he laughed, “I’ll finally get to meet Eleanor of Aquitaine!”
They had just passed the abbey of Saint-Denis, so Henry knew Paris was only seven miles away, and he spurred his stallion to catch up with Geoffrey. “Tell me,” he said, “about the French king. What sort of man is he?”
“One of meagre importance if not for a hungry sow.” Seeing his son’s bafflement, Geoffrey grinned. “You never heard that story, then? Louis was the second son, pledged to the Church. But when he was ten, he was snatched from the cloisters and thrust back into the world, courtesy of that aforesaid pig. It was foraging for food along the River Seine just as Louis’s elder brother, Philippe, happened to ride by. When the sow spooked his horse, Philippe was thrown and killed. So little Louis was suddenly the heir apparent, and it is a great pity, for he would have made a far better monk than he has a king.”
“Tell me more, Papa,” Henry urged. “What are his virtues and his vices?”
“His greatest vice is that he has none.” Geoffrey laughed at his own joke, and then gave his son a serious answer. “He is very devout, has good manners and a good heart. Nor does he lack for courage. But he is cursed with the worst sort of stubbornness, the stiff-necked, inflexible obstinacy of the weak. And because he is so troubled by self-doubts, he tends to be too easily influenced-invariably by the wrong people. He is melancholy by nature and suffers periodic pangs of guilt over his disastrous attack upon Vitry-that the town where more than a thousand villagers took refuge in the church and died when it caught fire. And he is burdened with a paralyzing sense of sin, a truly pitiful affliction for a man wed to one of the most desirable women in Christendom!”
“He shuns her bed?” Henry was incredulous. “Jesu, the man must be mad!”
“You’ll get no argument from me, Harry. But monks are not supposed to indulge in carnal lust, and Louis remains a monk at heart, a monk married to Eve. They sound even more mismatched, by Corpus, than your mother and me!”
“They do, indeed,” Henry agreed cheerfully; he had no illusions whatsoever about his parents’ marriage. “Tell me more about Eve. Is she that, in truth?”
“Well…she is indeed willful, much more than any woman has a right to be. She is worldly for certes and high spirited and too clever by half. Is she a wanton, too? Mayhap yes, mayhap no. I never had the opportunity to find out for myself. But then, I never thought wantonness to be a female character flaw, at least not in another man’s wife!”
Off to their right, a village came into view, which Geoffrey identified as Clignancourt. In the distance the wooded hill of Montmartre rose up against the hazy August sky. Geoffrey said there were the ruins of an ancient Roman temple on the summit, which offered an impressive view of Paris. Henry was sorry they did not have time to stop and see. He’d never paid much mind to gossip himself, but his father was a reliable source for humor and scandal. “I’ve heard such unlikely tales about their crusade, Papa. Just what did happen in Antioch?”
“Louis made an ass of himself, refused to go to the rescue of Edessa, and doomed the crusade, the Prince of Antioch, and his marriage-all in one fell swoop.”
That made no sense to Henry. “I thought it was the fall of Edessa that stirred men to take the cross. So why did Louis balk?”
“That is what Prince Raymond wanted to know, too. Ever since Edessa’s capture by the Turks, he’d feared that Antioch would be next, and he was relying upon the French king’s crusaders to stave off disaster. When Louis insisted that he could do nothing until he’d fulfilled his vow to reach Jerusalem, Raymond took it badly. Eleanor agreed with Raymond, but she had no luck in changing Louis’s mind, and by all accounts, the quarreling got very
