Lionheart A Novel - By Sharon Kay Penman Page 0,89

Holy Land to the infidels. “My lord father was amongst those taken prisoner at the Battle of Ḥaṭṭīn. When my brother Conrad took command of Tyre, Saladin brought our father to the siege, demanding that Conrad yield the city or our sire would be put to death before his very eyes. He did not know my brother, though. Conrad shouted down from the walls that he’d never surrender Tyre, that his father had lived a long life and Saladin should go ahead and kill him!”

Boniface paused then for dramatic effect, and burst out laughing at the dumbfounded expressions on the faces turned toward him. “Conrad does not lack for filial devotion, I assure you. But he would never surrender the only city still under Christian control, and if the price of Tyre’s survival was our father’s death, so be it.”

Most of those listening were greatly impressed by Conrad’s piety. Only Eleanor thought to ask what had happened to his father. Boniface’s answer was somewhat anticlimactic. “Oh, Saladin eventually freed him, and he was allowed to join Conrad in Tyre.”

Boniface then diplomatically shifted attention back to his royal cousin, asking Heinrich about his Sicilian campaign. Eleanor was no longer listening, for Boniface’s offhand revelation had stirred an old memory from the waning years of England’s civil war. At the age of five, Will Marshal had been offered up by his father as a hostage, a pledge of John Marshal’s good faith. But Marshal had broken his oath, and when the outraged King Stephen had warned that his son would die if he did not surrender Newbury Castle as he’d promised, his ice-blooded reply had passed into legend. Go ahead and hang Will, he’d said, for he had the hammer and anvil with which to forge other and better sons. John Marshal had gambled the life of his son upon his understanding of his foe, sure that Stephen could not bring himself to hang a child—and indeed, Will had been spared. Eleanor wondered now if Conrad had been wagering, too, upon an enemy’s honor.

THEIR HOST HAD ENGAGED harpists to play while his guests dined. Afterward, Boniface’s renowned troubadour took center stage. Gaucelm’s repertoire was an extensive one, offering cansos of love and the dawn songs known as albas, interspersed with the stinging political satire of the sirvente. When he retired to thunderous applause, several of Boniface’s joglars were summoned next. They began with a tactful tribute to Boniface’s liege lord, performing one of Heinrich’s songs of courtly love, although only the members of the royal retinue understood German. They then accepted audience requests, and the hall was soon echoing with popular songs of past troubadour stars like Bertran de Born, Jaufre Rudel, and a female trobairitz who’d composed under the name Comtessa de Diá.

As the evening progressed, the songs became increasingly bawdy, culminating in Heinrich’s request for a song by Eleanor’s grandfather, Duke William of Aquitaine, a man often called “the first troubadour,” who’d delighted in outraging the Church both in his life and in his songs. The one chosen by Heinrich was surely his most ribald, the rollicking tale of a knight who’d pretended to be mute so two highborn ladies would think it safe to dally with him. After testing him by letting a savage tomcat rake its claws along his bare back, they’d taken him to bed, where he boasted that he’d sinned so often that he’d been left in a woeful state “with harness torn and broken blade.” When he’d recovered from his amorous ordeal, he’d sent his squire back to the women, requesting that, in his memory, they “Kill that cat!”

The song was a carnal celebration of sin, but if Heinrich had hoped to embarrass the English queen, he’d misread his adversary. Eleanor was proud of her incorrigible, scandalous grandfather, and she laughed as loudly as anyone in the hall at his amatory antics. It was her son’s betrothed who was embarrassed by the blunt language and immoral message. Berengaria had listened with discomfort as the songs became more and more unseemly. She’d been particularly offended that a woman could have written the lascivious lines penned by the Comtessa de Diá, “I’d give him reason to suppose he was in Heaven, if I deigned to be his pillow,” for the comtessa’s song was a lament for an adulterous lover. Berengaria kept her disapproval to herself, sipping her wine in silence as the hall rocked with laughter, but she’d not yet mastered one of the subtleties of queenship: