The Passionate Princess Page 2

  Thou, my handsome brother, the former queen of Cyprus thought, gazing at him with more than fondness from beneath pale lashes, are just as arrogant as Leopold of the archduchy of Austria! The only difference, perhaps, is that thou hast more cause to be overweening proud! But unfortunately . . . less patience.

  “He has been here forever, Jo,” the king ranted on, pacing. “We durst not think of marching on Jerusalem to take it away from the Saracen until we had Acre, the most important port of this accursed land. They laid siege to it two years ago, lady sister! And one month, but one month after I arrived, it FELL! Because of MY planning, MY men, my guidance and siegework . . . and the fact that when the Syrian fever struck me, I refused to take meekly and weakly to my bed, like milord King Philip the Lamb-heart!”

  Joanna suppressed a smile. He looked wonderful in that snowy tunic, she thought, and scarlet leggings that hugged his skin like a sword’s tailored sheath.

  The red-bearded king paced, kicking the arrow with its two red bands. “And Acre FELL, and here we are in its palace.” He swept a long-reaching arm in a gesture that took in all the building. “But what did I find after I spent that first long day in constant chatter with the Saracen, who bargain like fishmongers? I emerged from working out the surrender terms to find fluttering above MY city Leopold’s twice-damned banner!”

  Joanna flowed to her feet, a tallish, slender, freckled woman of six-and-twenty years, widowed these few months and come here from Cyprus with her brother—who had worn no kingly crown when last she saw him, but arrived bearing news of the death of their father Henry of England.

  “I can understand your anger that day, my lord,” she said softly. “But . . . after all, Leopold’s anger is surely somewhat . . . justified. You sent your men to pull down his banner, yes. But . . . to hurl it into that noisome ditch outside the walls, piled high with the corpses of both horses and men, alive with flies and maggots . . . that, lord brother, was going a bit far!”

  He halted to fix her with his hawkish gaze. “No one on God’s earth talks to me as you do, my sister. But I tell ye in all frankness and honesty, Joanna, and as Our Lord is my witness: that was not my command. The men I sent were overzealous. Holy Mother protect the leader of a people from overzealous underlings who seek to serve him by doing whatever they’ve a mind to do! But . . . think you I’d have handed those men over to Leopold as he demanded, or even apologize to that arrogant Teuton? NO! I am who I am!”

  You certainly are, lord brother, Joanna mused, sighing as she gazed at the burly, almost giant of a man in bright red leggings under white silken tunic, red felt shoes—and the simple gold chaplet he wore atop his carroty hair, made unruly from years of sweating within a chainmailed skull-cap.

  You are who you are, Richard my dear, and what you are, and that is a good part of the problem! But . . . would that my poor dead kingly husband William had been such a man!

  “As for that thrice-damned Duke of Burgundy,” Richard raged on, “he be no more than a lackey of Philip’s! They speak as with one mouth.” He was pacing again, switching his leg with the Saracen arrow he had retrieved from the carpet, the unmistakable signature of The Butcher: al-Jazzar.

  “King Philip, after all, is his liege-lord,” Joanna reminded.

  Again the king rounded on her. “Now by God’s holy balls, Joanna, you go on and on—whose side be ye on, anyhow?”

  She met his gaze a moment, blue eyes staring into blue, then looked across the house-sized room at the wall. There, over the Turkish tapestries of cedar green and cobalt blue and buttercup yellow and wine red and the brown of walnut, hung two banners, side by side. On the left was the scarlet pennon of Anjou, Richard’s pennon with its three golden leopards crouching one above the other, turned broadside to the viewer but snarling at him. Already those leopards were being called lions, for they represented the Lion-heart, and thus England. The flag beside it was of plain white, divided into four equal quarters by a thick red cross. The Crusader’s Cross, borne and worn by those who did travel here to do their duty by God and Church.

  “I be on the side of those banners,” she answered quietly, nodding at them. “One because it belongs to the first knight in Christendom, my brother. The other because it represents Christendom, and is supposed to unify us all. You, and Philip King of France, and Hugh Duke of Burgundy, and Leopold Archduke of Austria, and Henry Count of Champagne . . . and all the thousands of men who have been here and those who will follow”

  For a time he was silent, struck by her words, staring at the brave pennons. Then, “Unified!” the king snorted. “Well, Joanna my lady sister, I am willing! But the others . . .” He swung about suddenly to stare at the oddly shaped door. “Body of Christ, what takes Guy of Messaria so long to get here?”

  Joanna smiled. “Leila,” she said.

  *

  Queen Joanna was right. Guy Kingsaver of Messaria, called the Human Crossbow, and The Crusader, was gazing down at the top of Leila’s glossy black head as she bent over his groin. She was sucking his cock like a hungry calf at the teat.

  Warming floods of sensation surged through his bollocks and he shivered, gazing down at her sweet face while she glided her full purple-red lips back and forth on the length of swollen maleness stuffing her head. How she loved it! Both of them knew that. It was as if she were feeding on his meat, her moist lips encircling the massive, reddened rod like a tourniquet and her tongue laying and teasing it constantly, lovingly.

  She was a small dark young woman, hardly more than a girl, and lovely. Her heart-shaped face was beautifully framed by the gleaming mass of her hair, which was blue-black and wavy. The purple-red was no more the color of her lips than the heavy black around her eyes, but Guy, The Crusader, knew now that these Saracen women, these daughters of Allah, used this substance and that to enhance their coloring and the size and shape of their eyes. Despite what the prelates said, Guy liked it. The king’s sister Joanna, he thought, would be well-advised to apply a bit of this Arab kohl to her pale lashes!

  The hot slippery sheath of her torrid mouth sucked sweetly away at the big cocky prong that poled into her strained face as if she had been training for this moment and this activity all her life. In a way, she had; the daughters of Islam were trained to please men. Guy felt her tongue flicking sexily over his staff, listening to her sucking and gasping and swallowing, and his brain staggered in lust.

  Their meeting had hardly been auspicious. He had been a part of the contingent sent here to secure the palace the day of Acre’s surrender. And she . . . she had been one of four Saracen who attacked him and two companions here, in this very room!

  Never having fought a woman, Guy had flung her aside, twice, each time smiting her backside with his overlong, wire-wrapped bow. And thwocked her with it still a third time, across the stomach through her clothes, keeping her out of the fight whilst he defended himself and bested her companions. He had left her here, bound and gagged, while he reported to Richard his king, and Richard had understood and bade him return to this “secret” room of the palace, and so had it begun, Leila of Syria and Guy of Cyprus.

  That was a month ago, and he remembered her soft gaze, and her words: “If you take me to your king,” she had said, “perhaps I’ll be sold. I had rather be slave to him who conquered me. But you do not understand Muslim women, who are taught from infancy to exist only for men. How may I show you that I am conquered, and your woman, and not a threat to you?”

  He had mentioned weapons; she had stripped on the instant, called him her lord, and said, “You have conquered me. I have felt your bow on my bottom, and it made me desire you. Saw you not the stripe it left? I can feel it; I bear your mark as a brand! You are my lord.”

  Strangling, staring at her magnificently sensuous nakedness, he had said, “Then we will eat later.”

  Leila smiled. “My lord does find me attractive?”

  “Yes!” he assured her in a hoarse voice thick with lust.

  “My lord . . . wants me?”
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  “Yes.”

  “Then,” she had said with a small shrug of one shoulder that hardly moved her high-set, tightly conical breast, “my lord is over clothed!”

  Thus it had begun, and a short time later he had heard her words, like bolts of lightning through his brain and down into his genitals: “Ah . . . ah! Oh . . . oh, fuck me, my lord, my master!”

  And several panting minutes later, with his semen sloshing inside her raven-haired slit, she had told him again that she was his, and asked if he would not sell her or take her to the “terrible Lion-heart.”

  “I would fight him for you,” The Crusader had told her.

  “Umm, my lord! And you will beat me?”

  Trembling, Guy said, “Only when you need it.”

  Those deep brown eyes met his in an arch look. “I shall be certain to need it then, my darling lord!”

  And a while later, as he was again sliding his swollen prick down her vaginal throat, they had heard the shouts from the banquet below, the banquet Guy was missing: “Acre is conquered! Long live Richard of the lion’s heart!” And a smiling, hip-grinding woman had whispered in Guy’s ear, “Leila is conquered. Long live Guy of the lion’s organ!”

  And she had been his, ever since.

  She was his, but she treated his cock as hers. She loved to hold it firmly in the passionate embrace of her mouth, as she was doing now, and coat it with warm saliva, as she was doing now. The feel of her tongue and warm oral juices running over the turgid head of his prick made him groan aloud. He surged forward, reached for her head to twine his fingers in the black waves of her hair while he fucked her face—and he froze.

  “Guy!” It was the voice of the king’s page, Yves of Anjou—as often called Yves Know-naught. “Guy Kingsaver! GUY—the king calls for you!”

  Making a little sobbing sound, Leila grasped Guy’s buttocks in her hands and tried to stuff her throat with his cock. She sucked furiously, clinging tenaciously with mouth and hands in an effort to hold him there.

  But he knew he could not stay, that he must hurry when the king called, and sadly he pushed at her head with one hand. Trying to back away, he used his other big hand to pluck her small one from his backside.

  She looked desolately up at him. His eyes were just as sad, but he smiled. “Later, my love,” he told her, and struggled into his leggings.

  Moments later he was hurrying down the strange, private little stairwell and rushing to the palace’s largest room. The king’s squire of the body, Reynald de Poitou, was outside the door, talking with the troubadour Blondel. He motioned Guy inside, though Guy could hear the king’s voice raised in anger. He wondered: am I interrupting another of his quarrels with the Navarrese wife he does not love and who cannot abide his soldier’s ways?

  But no the woman with the king was his sister Joanna, and both of them ceased talking to turn as Guy entered the room.

  “My lord king, my lady,” he began, but Richard was already holding out the object in his hand, a headless arrow. Guy looked at it, blinking. Richard twitched his hand, offering, and Guy hurried forward to take the arrow from his chosen liege-lord.

  “Return this,” the king of the English said.

  Guy turned the shaft over in his hand, staring grimly down at it. “Him again! Yarok al-Jazzar!”

  Chapter Three – The Crusader

  For eighty-eight years, since the time of the First Crusade, the holy city of Jerusalem and the walled seaport bastion of Acre were Christian communities. Then from Egypt came the Turkish sultan who had unified his people and proven a mighty conqueror, and in 1187 Saladin’s Turkish armies took the coastal cities and towns of Jaffa, Haifa, Sidon, Caesarea, Ascalon, Toron, and Acre . . . and then Jerusalem itself, high in the mountains of Judea.

  It was Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem because of his marriage with the former king’s daughter Sibylla, who besieged Acre and its seemingly impregnable walls, dominated by the Tower called Accursed. Having successfully defended beautiful old Tyre against the conquering Turkish horde, Conrad of Monferrat assumed its command as protector. It was Conrad who spread the alarm through Europe, and soon King Guy was joined before Acre by thousands of the others the Turks called Franks, mounted fortresses impossible to meet in pitched combat.

  In May of 1191, King Philip of France arrived to join the siege. A month later came Richard of England and Normandy. And now it was August in the Christian year 1191, and Acre was once again in Christian hands. In the searing morning sun that shimmered on the land and created the mystic illusions the Turks called the mirage, the great gates of Acre creaked open, and five mounted men rode forth.

  Two were knights, mailed and helmeted in head-swallowing iron pots that made them recognizable only by the devices blazoned on their shields and fluttering from their long, thick lances. A squire rode with each man, armed and armored as well, and prepared to give his lord another lance—or even his own mount, should the golden-spurred one be unhorsed.

  But this morning all four were riding, unaccustomedly, as escort for the young but tall and muscular archer riding in their midst. He carried a bow remarkable for its length, the extraordinary power of its spring, and thus the distance of its shots. Though he also wore a sword, he was lightly armored and carried neither lance nor mace nor ax.

  He was the king’s friend and sometime fucking companion, and this clear morning he was on a mission for the king.

  He was Guy, son of a peasant named Peter, from Messaria, on the island of Cyprus.

  He it was who, as a stable boy on Cyprus, had saved the life of the Lion-heart from a night-stalking assassin, thus earning himself the surname Kingsaver—and a place as one of Richard’s squires.

  He it was who had outshot the best of the English longbowmen, an archer who had been unable to bend the Cypriot’s ridiculously long, wire-wrapped bow enough to string it. Then he had proven that he could drive an arrow as far and with as much accuracy as a powerful crossbow, an unequaled feat. Thus he had earned another sobriquet, used only partially in jest: the Human Crossbow.

  He it was who, wearing heavy armor and carrying lance for the first time in his life, and the king’s armor and lance at that, and mounted on the king’s own horse Fauvel, had turned the charge of a sallying force that would certainly have resulted in the loss of many Christian lives. No other had been mounted that morning, save only a landless young Austrian, Sir Geldemar the Bastard. The two of them had routed the Turkish charge, and had been richly and personally rewarded by their liege-lords.

  He it was, too, who discovered the spy in the Crusader camp, the spy whose activities had cost so many lives of her fellow Franks: the sex-hungry young widow Luisa of Vermandois. It was he, along with his king, who stuffed up her normal slit and violently buggered her—after which a long line of men-at-arms had thrust their own erections into that same torn-open anus. He it was who had slain her Turkish contact and lover.

  And he it was, too, who had slain, in close combat, no less than six of the defenders of Acre’s palace—and at the same time won for his own one of them, a notably unwar-like young woman named Leila.

  He was Guy Kingsaver of Messaria, the Human Crossbow and The Crusader, and now he was on yet another errand for the king he had made his king. On a swift horse and accompanied by two knights and their squires, all accustomed to yeomen escort but hardly to riding as escort for a yeoman, he held back his swift Arabian mount. Closer and closer they paced to the sprawling encampment of Saladin’s mighty army, still less than two miles from Acre and watching, ever watching.

  The Saracen archers watched now, following the approach of the five horsemen and wondering. But they held their arrows. If the Franks dared draw close enough, then they would be met with a singing swarm of deadly shafts and, with the blessing of Allah, they would feel their adder sting.

  But the Frankish quintet reined in before they were within bowshot. The watching Saracen yeomen sneered. Waving their bows and shaking their fists, they cried out their jeers and cha
llenges—while behind them a fork-bearded emir prepared to mount a small charging force. Then one of the archers sprang up upon his army’s rampart to scream his invective at the five enemies of Allah and dare them to move their cowardly carcasses just a bit closer . . .

  He and his fellows laughed as they saw the unhelmeted and lanceless Frank nock arrow to bow and draw string. The Saracen warrior on the rampart laughed and danced, holding wide his arms, bow in one hand and arrow in the other.

  Then The Crusader drew string, sighted, and, all in the same second, let fly the shaft, newly equipped with a wired-on head.

  Silence closed about the jeering Saracens as the impossible bow-shot drove the arrow half through the body of him who danced on the rampart. Indeed, he was hurled backward by the impact, to land with a squishy thump and rattle in their midst. Only for seconds did they stare down at him, then they nocked shafts to bows and let fly, again and again.

  The five crusaders sat their mounts in seeming unconcern as the bee-swarm of Turkish arrows keened toward them. But concern was not necessary; they had not misgauged. They were out of bow-shot. The arrows fell to earth well short of them.

  Then Guy of Messaria and the four-man escort wheeled their mounts and cantered back across the plain to the city.

  Behind them, a slit-eyed man in black armor held the arrow in his black-gloved hand. From it still dripped the blood of his countryman. But he recognized it. The shaft was banded by two red stripes.

  “Only one man among those accursed unbelievers could have driven an arrow so far,” Yarok al-Jazzar muttered, staring down at his red-banded arrow and knowing full well what this meant, its being returned. “Someday,” he muttered, raising his expressionless face and narrow-eyed gaze to the five horsemen cantering toward the distant walled city, “someday we will meet,” the man called The Butcher said, “and his brief legend will be at an end!”