Popes and Phantoms

by John Whitbourn

  ‘Indeed,’ answered Slovo.

  ‘And it’s in my pocket I’m being hurt, boy!’ said Henry, with real feeling. ‘Taxes, dues, levies, they’re all being lost – along with the taxmen in some cases.’

  ‘And now an army,’ offered the Admiral.

  ‘Ah yes. Ruinous expense: prepaid mercenaries, German landsknechtes, Venetian stradiots and English bowmen, all with my – their – advance wages in their nasty little purses. Horses, cannons, silk banners, all gone! Disgraceful, I tell you it is!’

  Admiral Slovo covertly studied Henry’s jewel-encrusted doublet and reflected that times were not perhaps as bad as all that. Most impressively, the King didn’t miss a thing.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, patting the brooches and emblems covering his chest, ‘there’s still enough for the occasional treat. I risked my head for this country and if I should like a bit of shine and sparkle about my person, why shouldn’t I indulge myself? I deserve it!’

  Slovo’s taste in princely attire ran more to the plain black of the fighting Borgias but he had long ago embraced the endless variety of mankind. He smiled and nodded tolerantly.

  Meanwhile, his shot-across-the-bows delivered, Henry lapsed back into his previous lilt. ‘I’m an easy-going sort of King,’ he said, leaning back and surveying the window-view of the Tower through narrowed eyes, ‘just what this land needs. There’s been too much Civil War. A little is good for getting rid of bad blood but too much breeds poverty and other such nastiness. The English need a spot of peace and prosperity and I’m the boyo to give it ’em. It’s true I’m a Celt but I’m a desiccated Celt and that’s an important difference. All the nonsense has been wrung out of me by life. That means I can pass for English – at a distance – and makes me tolerable to them: for they’re a dry bunch of bastards, Admiral, I tell you that in confidence.’

  ‘Dry’ was not the term that would have surged into Slovo’s mind to describe the jolly-brutal, cudgel-wielding race he’d encountered en route from Pevensey Port to the Tower of London. From his fastidious perspective, the whole culture needed at least another five hundred years of development and suffering before polite judgement could be passed.

  ‘Mind you,’ Henry pressed on, ‘for bowmen and pragmatic traders, you couldn’t want for better – and there’s precious little tax to be had out of a Kingdom of poets. No, England’s what I always wanted and it’s what I got.’

  ‘The ancient prophecies, Your Majesty,’ mused de Peubla from beside them. ‘It was all the preordained will of God.’

  Henry grunted dismissively. ‘Didn’t seem that way when the clothyard was flying down at Bosworth, boy,’ he said grimly, ‘and that big bastard Richard was hacking his way ever closer. “The Armes Prydain” sounded pretty damn thin then, I can tell you – not many!’

  ‘A versified Celtic vision, Admiral,’ explained de Peubla helpfully, ‘predicting the union of the scattered Celtic peoples to defeat their Saxon enemy.’

  ‘“The warriors will scatter the foreigners as far as Durham …”’ recited Henry. ‘“For the English there will be no returning … The Welsh will arise in a mighty fellowship … The English race will be called warriors no more …” and so on and on. A load of old bardic guff, if you ask me. It’s the same as all the King Arthur stuff …’

  ‘Ah yes,’ interrupted Admiral Slovo – who had only a passing, say, one-night-stand, relationship with modern literature, ‘your lost King and his Holy groin …’

  ‘Er … yes, in a manner of speaking,’ confirmed Henry, only momentarily disconcerted. ‘Well, I’ll use all this, you see; like I named my first born Arthur just to get the Cymru vote, but don’t expect me to believe in it, man – that or the “Prydain”. It’s for footsoldiers only, like all this national-consciousness business.’

  Slovo signalled his agreement. This was getting pleasantly cynical.

  ‘I mean, you’ll hear it recited five times a day,’ Henry went on, ‘from the tribe of Cymru and Cornish nobles who have somehow ensconced themselves at court in my victorious wake. And all because their mother’s cousin’s friend lifted a blade on my behalf – or would have done if it hadn’t been so rainy that day. Ah! I’ve not much time for them, Admiral; they rub me up the wrong way, so they do. Besides, I know the English are mostly either ambitious or a bit slow, but if these idiots taunt them too much they’ll wake up! There’s six times as many of them as there are of us, even if every man-jack Celt combined – and who ever heard of that? We’d all get our throats slit that day and no mistake. No, as to these boasting Welsh boyos, I’ll disabuse them of their great expectations before too long, you wait and see.’

  Admiral Slovo smiled in concurrence.

  King Henry returned the favour with an appraising glance. ‘Come with me,’ he said eventually, as if some inner debate had been resolved. ‘I’ll show you what this is really all about.’

  Admiral Slovo allowed himself to be guided around the table and to the nearby window.

  ‘There!’ said Henry triumphantly, indicating the courtyard bustle below. ‘The Tower of London! It has a ring to it, don’t you think? It means something in the counsels of the mighty. Now, that could not be said of, for instance, the “Tower of Llandaff” or the “Tower of Bangor”, could it?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ replied Slovo meaninglessly, whilst actually occupying his mind with thoughts of his wife and where she might have fled.

  ‘It’s like a bull’s-eye, Admiral,’ Henry explained. ‘The very precious centre of a target that any man might care to hit. This is where it starts from – power and control. Now, in the ordinary course of events one would deal with outer rings of the dartboard as and when convenient. But what do I find? I find that someone or something is extending these zones by stealing parts of my sovereign realm and pushing back in towards the very centre, look you. That is why I’ve called you from your Roman employ – and paid His Holiness a pretty penny for the privilege too, I might add.’

  ‘I shall not see a coin of it, I assure you, Your Majesty,’ said Slovo, fearful of association with the Borgia Pope’s rapacious ways.

  ‘No doubt, more fool you,’ replied Henry, closely supervising the off-loading of a haycart for signs of wasteful practices. ‘Still, you’d think I’d get a discount, loyal son of the Church and all that.’

  ‘I couldn’t say, Your Highness,’ said Admiral Slovo, miles away. ‘I have no knowledge of the world of commerce.’

  Henry looked on the Admiral as he would one afflicted. ‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that,’ he said. Then, he swiftly retreated from compassion and resumed business as normal. ‘Just sort it out, will you, Admiral,’ he said briskly. ‘Leave tomorrow and get things back to normal. What I have I hold, that’s the name of the game, and what I hold I intend to pass on – intact – to my two fine sons.’

  Slovo nodded, ‘They are handsome-looking youths.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ snapped Henry, suddenly all sharp-edged suspicion. ‘How would you know? Arthur, Prince of Wales, is at his court in the Marches and young Henry is with him.’

  ‘Then who,’ said Slovo calmly, ‘are the two golden youths below who have been smiling up at us all this while? They surely know you, and such familiarity I attributed only to Princes …’

  In fact, their smiles seemed more akin to triumphant smirks to Slovo’s mind but this had only reinforced his guess as to their princely origins.

  Henry went to look in the direction indicated but corrected himself just in time. His bejewelled hand flew up to cover horror-struck eyes. ‘Come away from the window, Admiral,’ he said in an anguished voice. ‘And leave this very night; not tomorrow, do you hear? This very night! And just get things back to bloody normal, will you boy? Please?’

  ‘You weren’t to know,’ said Daubeny. ‘His Majesty doesn’t encourage discussion of the subject.’

  ‘Although, of course,’ said de Peubla delicately, ‘he has nothing to answer for in respect of … that matter.’

  Slovo’s sight of
the two ‘Princes’, where none should have been, had caused a disproportionate fuss. There was the matter, he gathered, of previous young claimants to the throne meeting untimely ends – the merest commonplace of court life in his own native land. Here, though, it was a touchy subject and the parade ground for troubled consciences. Blame had been successfully attributed to some dead King and it was evidently bad form to revive the issue. Slovo had swiftly taken the hint and pleaded poor eyesight, the deceptive evening sun and so on. Nobody believed him but the gesture was regally appreciated.

  ‘Well, this is where we broke ’em,’ said Daubeny. ‘What more do you want to know?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Admiral Slovo with brutal honesty. ‘I’m awaiting inspiration.’

  ‘Could be a long wait then, mon-sewer Ite-eye,’ said the baron resignedly and reached into his saddle bag for his ever-faithful flask of fire-water.

  Stretching to his full height in the stirrups, Slovo surveyed the battlefield. Since it was, for the most part, the Celtic peoples that were seceding willy-nilly through King Henry’s fingers, it had seemed sensible to visit the scene of their most recent trial of strength. Here, a mere two years before, Henry had methodically massacred an insurgent Cornish army. Today however, Blackheath, Kent, appeared to have nothing further to teach the curious other than, by dint of the burial-pit mound, the old perennial that rebellion is folly.

  ‘It got a bit tasty down there by the bridge,’ pointed Daubeny with a shaky gauntlet. ‘A fair few of my lads got turned into pincushions. Mind you, after that, as I recall, it was all pretty straightforward.’

  ‘They had no cavalry, no cannon, no armour,’ said de Peubla in a knowing voice. ‘It was like harvesting wheat so I am told.’

  This struck Admiral Slovo as frightfully unnecessary. In the Italy of his youth, before the grim incursion of the French, tens of thousands of well-paid mercenaries could strive in battle all day long at the cost of a mere handful of deaths per side. The dispute was still settled but with so much less waste.

  ‘And it is the same “Cornshire” that most frequently departs from King Henry’s realm, is it not?’ he asked.

  De Peubla nodded. ‘Along with Powys, Elmet, Cumbria and other such long-gone entities.’

  ‘And ones we’d never even heard of,’ laughed Daubeny. ‘The army we lost was in Norfolk – or somewhere called logres as it briefly became. Not a man jack has come out yet and don’t suppose any will: all been eaten by now I shouldn’t wonder!’

  ‘I have never read of the Celts as displaying cannibalistic traits,’ said de Peubla, clearly racking extensive mental files. ‘There was once the distinctive cult of the severed head, it is true but—’

  ‘Oh shut up, you Iberian ponce!’ barked Daubeny, and de Peubla obediently did so.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said the Baron to Slovo, his patience likewise strained to the limit. ‘Bits and bobs of the place keep drifting in and out of bloody history. You can never be sure when you send out the taxman or a travelling-assize, they won’t come up against a “Free Kernow” or resurgent “Elmet”. Then they either disappear, never to emerge, or, the natives being more confident than they’ve any right to be, they get driven off with a barbed yard of arrow in their backside.’ He paused to take another reviving swig. ‘Then, shortly after, even a few hours in some cases, everything’s back to normal and the nice, peaceful inhabitants don’t understand what the hell you’re on about when you question them – hot pokers or no. So, you can’t take reprisals against innocent people (well, you can – but His Majesty forbids it), else you’d have a real rebellion and for no good reason either.’

  ‘How interesting,’ judged Slovo, musing that in their rough equal division of initial territorial advantage, all battlefields looked much the same.

  ‘Indeed so,’ agreed de Peubla, bobbing up and down on his pack-horse with the intellectual excitement of it all. ‘If it wasn’t for the urgent problem it presents, and the needs for such secrecy as can be mustered, oh how I wish I could investigate these glimpses of other worlds!’

  For the first and last time, Admiral Slovo and Daubeny saw eye to eye and their glacial glances froze de Peubla to silence. His enthusiasms, his bourgeois origin, Slovo could forgive; his doctorates in Civil and Common Law commanded respect (or caution). Even the irregularity of his Spanish salary and consequent impoverishment might have been points to solicit sympathy. It was common knowledge that de Peubla was obliged to lodge in a London inn of low repute and that the timing of his visits to Court were prompted by a simple desire to eat.

  All this was enough to make even dry-hearted King Henry like the little fellow – in fact their friendship had grown to be quite genuine by regal standards. But not so Admiral Slovo and Daubeny. To the Baron, he was a foreigner: enough said. To the Admiral, well, his Stoic ethics could not accept the man’s conversion to Christianity. If someone was granted the surpassing gift of Judaic birth, he believed they should accept that life would be painful and stick to their guns. Humanistic thought, quite the rage in certain circles at that time (and ever since), did not play a large part in Admiral Slovo’s life.

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ said Daubeny, already bored. ‘Not much to see, is there? All the deaders and body-bits were gathered up and the local proles doubtless gleaned all else away. Learn anything?’

  ‘No,’ said Slovo without inflection.

  ‘Better if you’d seen the battle,’ added the Baron glumly.

  ‘Unhappily, I was otherwise engaged,’ the Admiral replied, his conversation in free fall as he pondered. ‘The Duke of Gandia, Juan Borgia, was murdered that day.’

  ‘Not Cesare’s brother?’ whispered de Peubla, as though the Beast of the Romagna himself might be eavesdropping.

  ‘The same; their joint father, His Holiness, Pope Alexander, requested that I investigate the murder and so …’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ interrupted Daubeny, spluttering his way out of a long pull at his flask, ‘I fully understand why you couldn’t grace my battle with your presence. And I do wish you’d keep that “m” word to a minimum – particularly in the context of the Princes?’

  ‘Your forgiveness,’ asked Slovo insincerely.

  ‘Not that we’ve anything to hide, mind,’ added Daubeny, now more than a little tipsy. ‘It’s just that we don’t want the evil eye put on our own two jewels in the crown.’

  ‘Arthur and Henry, oh yes,’ smiled de Peubla, moving charitably in to rescue the Baron from his self-made quick-sand. Daubeny remained appropriately quiet and still as it was done. ‘Two fine prospects for the English nation to gaze upon and wish long life to. Even the most fleeting thought of harm to them is painful.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Slovo, apparently with great seriousness.

  ‘Arthur’s the one they make all the fuss about,’ bellowed Daubeny. ‘Prince of Wales and Lord of the Marches. Got his own little Court he has and a name calculated to get the British all expectant. If you were to ask me, well, there’s more chance of finding a book in his hand than a sword – or anything else interesting and rounded.’

  ‘A reference to horse-flesh, doubtless,’ commented de Peubla primly.

  ‘Whatever!’ laughed the Baron. ‘Tall and serious, that’s what he is. Very interested in chivalry – ha! Give me Prince Henry any day: a real little Englishman: rosy-cheeked, stocky little chap and already very sound on the Celts. Hates anything to do with poetry and prophecy!’

  Daubeny sadly observed his flask was now empty and, with the uncanny facility Admiral Slovo had already noted in the rough-as-coal-bunkers nobility of this land, sobriety instantly returned when he next spoke.

  ‘Still, it’s all in God’s hands. We shall see what we shall see.’

  It was seeing what they saw as they turned the horses for home, the new and marvellously changed prospect of London now spread out, that halted them in their tracks.

  ‘Sod this,’ said Daubeny quite calmly. ‘I’m not going down there. Where’s London?’r />
  De Peubla did not answer, being too busy fixing the scene in his mind as a solace for the disappointed old age he fully expected.

  ‘London is still there,’ answered Slovo, waving his black glove towards the transmogrified metropolis below. ‘But no longer, I suspect, known by that name. What would you hazard, Ambassador?’

  De Peubla rocked his head from side to side in a charmingly hybrid Hebrew/Iberian gesture. ‘I do not speak any of the British tongues, Admiral,’ he replied. ‘Londres perhaps? Londinium possibly?’

  Slovo noted that Sir Giles Daubeny was dumbfounded, but then the poor man had just lost his Capital City. He turned to smile on him. ‘Some foreign name like that, I expect,’ he agreed with de Peubla.

  ‘It may not have lasted long,’ said de Peubla as they trotted along slowly, ‘but I am most glad to have seen it.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Hispaniol!’ growled Daubeny. ‘I like my severed heads in their proper places – on battlefields or adorning spikes at the King’s order; not all over a City Wall dangling on chains with bells on ’em! What sort of a welcome do you call that?’

  ‘An instructive one?’ suggested Admiral Slovo, gamely entering into the spirit of things.

  ‘It’s that all right,’ replied Daubeny with a bitter laugh. ‘Likewise all the idols and symbols – all those curls and swirls – not a blasted straight line or plain picture to be seen: fair made me nauseous it did! Oh yes, it spoke pretty clear to me: Saxons not welcome! Praise God that it faded!’

  ‘Just so,’ agreed Slovo (though actually his indifference knew no bounds). ‘And none that we questioned were aware of their brief transformation. One can only surmise therefore that some twist in the skeins of fate permitted us a glance of what might have been …’

  ‘Hmmph!’ snapped the Baron.

  ‘Or what might be,’ continued the Admiral implacably.

  ‘Enough!’ said Daubeny, chopping the air with his metal-clad gauntlet. ‘It is not going to be. You heard His Majesty’s words – sort things out – so get sorting. That’s what we’re meant to be about, isn’t it? Why else would I allow you to drag me down to this god-forsaken tail-end of nowhere?’