The Enchanter General 03 - Merlin Redux

by Dave Duncan

  “The council was called to consider the ransom demand?” I was very glad that I had not been in England to attend.

  “I suppose so. It’s rumored to be a weighty one.”

  “It’s very close to impossible,” I said.

  Sunday or not, our business seemed so urgent that we decided to start our journey south immediately. As soon as we were on our way, riding three abreast, I asked what news there was of Lord John, for I had not dared try to farsee him since Bran of Tara had disrupted my vision. Lars recounted very much what I had espied that day—that John had done homage to Philip for all his brother’s domains in France and also, or so it was believed, England too. After that, I now learned, the renegade had tried to seize the crown by force, hiring some Flemish mercenaries and bringing them across the Narrow Sea in an armed invasion of England.

  The traitor had marched on London, but the city had rejected him and remained true to the king. So had the great majority of barons and other landowners. The privy council had raised an army to oppose him, and was meeting with much success. He was now believed to be holed up in either Windsor or Tickhill castle, both of which were currently being besieged by government forces.

  William promptly asked Lars what he was doing for a living these days, which I should have done sooner, of course. With an admirable effort at modesty, my son revealed that he was now the nation’s expert on the treatment of diseases found in Outremer. Employed by the college, he lectured both there and in provincial chantries on that topic, and he was also in demand by returned crusaders whose fevers had recurred, as many of them did. He didn’t say that he was raking in money like heaps of autumn leaves, but he certainly gave that impression.

  He then mentioned in passing that he was betrothed to the most beautiful girl since Helen of Troy. She had been widowed at sixteen when her knight husband died of wounds received in the siege of Acre. And, since he, Lars, had foreseen my return, he had assumed my approval and arranged for the wedding to be celebrated next Monday. He was, after all, very nearly twenty-one, and her parents were agreeable. I asked what his mother thought, and he smugly reported that she was enthusiastic about the match. She had helped him choose the house he had bought—in Oxford, a short walk from Beaumont Palace. At that point I most happily gave him my blessing.

  After the first day’s ride, William left us to head for his own seat, near Loughborough, and I was free to question Lars about his use—or abuse—of the Myrddin Wyllt enchantment. I was reassured as much by his air of hurt innocence as by his words.

  “We were all worried to death, Father! The whole country, I mean. We didn’t know if the king had left Outremer, and even Myrddin wouldn’t tell either me or Mother anything. Nothing! We were terrified that your ship had gone down with all hands. But then rumors began to circulate that King Richard had been taken prisoner somewhere in the empire. I tried the Myrddin Wyllt again, and this time I saw you and Baron William riding with a group of merchants. After that I checked on you every few days. I told no one except Mother, honest! Two weeks ago I saw a vision of a boat arriving in Grimsby with church bells ringing for Sunday mass. I don’t know how I knew it was Grimsby, I just did. And the queen sent for me . . .”

  And he hadn’t been able to resist impressing the queen with his prophetic powers.

  “All right then,” I said. “There are times when that enchantment seems to think for itself. It was very wise to blank you out for so long, because I think our old foe Bran of Tara may be able to eavesdrop on what it tells us. Believe me, Lars, I have done nothing I am ashamed of—nothing at all—but some of my actions could be badly misrepresented, with disastrous results. The important thing is that the king is alive and well, and he was not captured by King Philip.” Possibly thanks to me and Myrddin Wyllt. “The French dog has a personal hatred for Richard, but the emperor is only interested in money, and Richard has lots of that.”

  Lars and I spent our second night at Pipewell, with Harald and Hilda, who rejoiced at my safe return, and were certainly planning to attend Lars’s wedding. Our third day brought us to Oxford. We deliberately arrived there too late to call on the queen, but no hour would have been too late to waken Lovise, who would have sat up until dawn, waiting for us.

  It had been a long year since I rode out of her life. I won’t try to recall everything we said to each other that night. I doubt if I could, for most of it was incoherent baby talk and mumbling, during fondling and between kisses. Some sorts of happiness can’t be fitted into words.

  Clad in my best clothes—which were very loose on me now— and with my hair and beard newly trimmed, I presented myself in the morning at Beaumont Palace, where Queen Eleanor had waited for me ever since Lars had foretold my return. I was shown at once into her private withdrawing room, with no one else present, not even the normally inevitable Amaria.

  Eleanor was showing her age at last. There were lines around her eyes and mouth that had not been there when I left her, a year ago. I knelt to kiss the fingers she offered.

  “My Merlin! You are most welcome back.” She waved me to a chair.

  “And happy to be so, Lady Queen, but I fear that I failed in my mission. You ordered me to bring him home, and that I did not do.”

  “But he is well?”

  “He was grievously ill several times, but he has recovered his strength now. Prison boredom torments him, of course, but his captors are very careful to keep him from harm.”

  “His captivity is monstrous! I have written several very strong letters to the Pope.”

  I could imagine. “And the ransom the scoundrels are demanding is beyond belief.” I was still a member of the privy council and thus entitled to know what it had decided, but I dared not put direct questions to the queen dowager.

  “It may be beyond what his dominions can raise,” she said. “It seems likely that we shall have to tax every man in the kingdom a quarter of his income and a quarter of his movable property, men both in England and across the seas. Churches and monasteries will be melting down their plates. Can you wave a magic wand and create thirty-five tons of silver for me, Lord Enchanter?”

  “I don’t think so, Your Grace. I shall have to read over my spell books and see.” In fact, I was fairly sure that there were such enchantments in my collection, but at the moment I was trying to estimate what a quarter of my income would be. Certainly a lot less than the tax collectors would believe.

  Speyer is located on the Rhine, upstream from Worms. It is a small town, but much more imposing than the sprawling shanty clutter of Leopold’s Vienna. It boasts a magnificent cathedral, built of brown stone in traditional style. The long, high nave must always be breathtaking, and on the morning that Myrddin Wyllt showed it to me, it glowed with imperial majesty. Tapestries bedecked the pillars, trumpets blared and echoed responded. Emperor Henry VI himself was there, crowned and bejeweled on his throne, while the electors of the empire were assembling in their robes and riches, a feast for the eyes—the dukes and prince-bishops who select the emperors, gathered now to sit in judgment on Richard of England. Some were his enemies— Leopold of course, and Boniface of Montferrat, brother of the murdered Conrad. Some were his friends and even relatives, like Otto of Brunswick, the nephew who had ruled Aquitaine in his absence. The two dominant clerics of the empire, the archbishops of Mainz and Cologne, were there, and both must be very unhappy at the conflict between this trial and the Truce of God.

  A host of lesser grandees flanked them, including observers from England and some of his French lands, including the dwarfish William Longchamp. I also saw some of the companions who had survived the shipwreck but failed to complete the trek to Vienna. They were exhibited as prisoners, of course. I did not get a clear enough view of them to count them, and had no way of knowing how many of the missing were still alive, if any.

  And there was Richard, the tallest man there, clad in simpler clothes, but still projecting the royal authority of the anointer, as if he knew that God was on his side and would st
and by him. There was no precedent for such a trial.

  When the crowd had settled and the opening prayers been said, the charges were read: that Richard had sold out the crusade to Saladin, had failed to attack Jerusalem, had ordered the walls of Ascalon dismantled, had tried to poison King Philip, had arranged for King Conrad to be assassinated, had supported the usurper of Sicily, Tancred, to the detriment of the island’s rightful overlord, the emperor. And so on. There was no mention of a flag being thrown into the moat at Acre, which would have seemed a farcical trifle in such a context. Nor did anyone mention that the emperor desperately needed a lot of money to glue his empire together again.

  Calm, assured, and kingly. Richard rose to answer the charges. One by one, he demolished them. He described the events of the crusade, mocking Philip for deserting it in abrogation of the many oaths he had sworn. As for Tancred, he had been holding Richard’s sister, Joan, prisoner—what would any honorable knight have done except take up arms against the man? And when that problem was resolved, of course Richard had had to make peace with him so that he could journey on to the Holy Land and fight the Saracens. Hour after hour he spoke with such royal poise and majesty that he won over the entire assembly. The simmering antagonism of the opening faded into admiration, and Philip was exposed as the cowardly renegade he truly was.

  Last of all the accusations came the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat, and it was then that Richard pulled out a letter, written on a scrap of parchment bearing traces of Arabic writing from an earlier use. It was signed by Sinan, leader of the Hashshashins, and it witnessed—in very bad Latin—that King Richard had had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of Conrad. This was all true, but I had written this tract months ago to Myrddin Wyllt’s dictation in the priory on the island of Lokra, off Ragusa. Richard did not say so, and its evidence was accepted by his judges.

  This final revelation completely won over his audience. He walked forward and knelt to the emperor, who raised him and gave him the kiss of peace. The congregation cheered, and the vision faded.

  I had never been as proud of my king as I was at that moment.

  “Aha! So you’re back,” Lovise said. “I was about to send for the embalmers.”

  She was seated in my favorite chair at my desk in the work-room—portraying anger, but not quite masking the relief that underlay it. I lay stretched out on the couch, although I had no memory of arriving there. All I could recall was waking before first light, pulling on a woollen robe, and coming downstairs. A glance at the windows told me that I must have been there all day, for it was now evening. I decided that I was very hungry, and my mouth was drier than the hills of Outremer.

  “I am sorry if I worried you,” I mumbled, struggling to sit up. “You know I never come to harm in these trances.”

  “No, I do not know that! Did you plan this one, or did it ‘just happen,’ as you call it?”

  “It just happened. Today was the day of the trial. Oh, Lovise, it was marvelous! Richard utterly—”

  “I don’t give a fig for Richard! It is you I worry about, you, my husband. That damnable Myrddin Wyllt enchantment has enslaved you. You don’t summon it anymore; it summons you! You’re not trailing around after the king now, you’re home in England, and what does it matter to you what happens to him half a continent away?”

  I looked around in the hope that I might see a flask of something to drink, moving my tongue and lips in an effort to produce some saliva. “It matters to me whether our liege is Richard or that damnable treacherous brother of his. Oh, darling, he was magnificent! All those dukes and archbishops and the emperor himself, sitting there ready to condemn him as a criminal—and he won them over, every one of them! I thought he was going to steal Henry’s empire away from him.”

  “So?” my wife shouted. “What does it matter to you? Why does that devilish Merlin ghost have to pick on you? What does it expect you to do about this vision it has given you, anyway?”

  “I’ll send a note to the queen, and maybe Walter, telling them the good news. Those scoundrels have no excuse to hold Richard prisoner anymore! Under the Truce of God they have to release him now.”

  My wife spat out an oath I had never heard her use before. “Truce of nothing! You are as naïve as a baby! He won’t walk free until they’ve bled him of every penny they can squeeze out of him. And even then, King Philip may still put in a higher bid.”

  She was absolutely right, of course; her common sense was prophesying as truly as Merlin ever did. I did not argue with her, so I must have known then that she was right. She had foreseen Philip’s subsequent efforts to buy the prisoner, but fortunately even the emperor didn’t dare back out of the agreement he had made. Yet it was to be almost another year before Richard stepped ashore in England, a free man again.

  I stood up and stretched painfully.

  “Burn it!” Lovise stormed.

  “What? Burn what?”

  “The Myrddin Wyllt! Burn it and every copy and note you’ve ever made on it. Maybe then you will be free of it.”

  That would feel like tearing my eyes out. I shuddered and did not answer. “I must find a drink,” I said, moving toward the door.

  “Not so fast!” Lovise had not moved from her seat—my seat, at my desk.

  I realized with dismay that we were having our first real quarrel in twenty-six years of marriage. I stopped and said, “Yes, dear?”

  “I want to know what all these incantations are here for.” She gestured at the spell rolls I had been working on the previous day and had intended to work on today, had Myrddin Wyllt not carried me off to Speyer. Lovise had had hours, perhaps all day, to read them, and she must know exactly what they were for.

  “They’re alchemy spells,” I said. “I’ve had them for years and never really had time to—”

  “To start turning lead into gold?”

  “Well, I was afraid all England would have to pay ransom to get its king back, but now that the German princes have found him innocent, we shouldn’t have to—”

  Lovise’s icy blue stare never wavered. “The last time I suggested we magic up some money to pay taxes, you told me that this would be dabbling in black magic. Suddenly the ethics of counterfeiting have changed?”

  Realizing that we must talk this out, however dry my mouth, I sat down on the edge of the couch. “Yes, dear. They have changed. In the first case, we were being taxed to send our king off to the Holy Land to recover Jerusalem from the heathens. That was money for a holy cause. But the ransom the Germans were going to demand would be against the Truce of God, and therefore a very unholy cause. I would happily cheat them.”

  “You are splitting hairs. You think the Germans won’t think to test the coins to make sure they’re genuine silver?” Lovise’s voice drooled contempt.

  “They can try. First, they’ll scratch a coin or two to make sure they aren’t just lead with a wash of silver on top. And then they’ll weigh them against a standard weight. Every metal has its own density, as you know. Ordinary counterfeits are easy enough to detect. But the alchemists know how to combine metals so that the mixture weighs exactly what that same volume of silver would weigh, and how to enchant it so that it has the same bright luster. If the Germans do persist in demanding a ransom as if Richard had been captured in a fair battle, then their cause is ungodly and we need have no scruples in paying them with fake coinage.”

  For a long moment my wife just stared at me. Then she said softly, “We discussed this with Lars once, remember? The three of us. We discussed the danger of the slippery slope? You are sliding, Durwin! What once you saw as utter evil now just seems like bad taste to you. Suddenly ends justify means. Black magic is only a darkish gray. Fall into that pit and you will never emerge again.”

  I rose and held out a hand. “The point is moot, darling. They won’t dare demand a ransom now, so the council won’t have to wring out the country’s lifeblood. I promise that I’ll tuck all that alchemy lore back in its chest in the crypt.
Let’s go upstairs.”

  I was wrong, of course. Richard had to agree to contribute that gigantic “dowry” to marry off his niece, and the council had to find the money somehow.

  I was called to attend the next meeting, and I had never seen so many glum faces. As the queen had predicted to me, every man in England would be required to pay a quarter of his annual income and the value of a quarter of his movable property, while the country had not yet recovered from the brutal “Saladin tithe” of two years ago, levied to pay for Richard’s crusading army. There would be many hungry bellies come next winter.

  Furthermore, since there could be no hope of raising such a sum without Lord John’s six counties paying their share, a truce had to be arranged. An uneasy and unhappy peace settled over the land.

  Near the end of June, I was called to Westminster for another meeting, but the news was no more cheerful. Money was coming in so slowly that it might be years before we could buy our king back. No truly helpful ideas were presented. Earlier, I had requested a private audience with Queen Eleanor. As soon as we adjourned, she received me in a small and heavily perfumed dressing room, where a Moorish girl was trimming her nails for her. She had said very little at the council meeting, and her face had given away nothing at all, but it was an easy guess that she was very unhappy at the current situation. She addressed me in Latin, which the slave girl would not understand.

  “Have you brought any cheerful prophecies, Lord Durwin?”

  “No, Your Grace. My sight has been neglecting me lately, but it does that often. I did bring you these, though.” I handed her six silver pennies, each inscribed Henricus Rex, because Richard had not yet changed the coinage.

  The queen examined them, holding them at a distance as many elderly folk do. “It always flattered him, you know. He was never this handsome.” She was referring to the gross caricature of Henry on the obverse of the coins. “These are very welcome, my lord, but taken all together they will not scratch the total of our needs.”