“No,” said the mad woman in a thick, terrible voice. “She has been bad. She banished her only true suitor.”
“She saw Hern rape you. She watched from her hiding place within the walls,” said Montfallcon. “He waited until you were exactly the same age, and raped you on your birthday. Do you remember, Gloriana?”
“While the Court looked on. That leering Court.” She said: “I remember. Mother…”
The mad woman ran towards Montfallcon, who took her by the arm. He said: “Kneel.”
She was passive with him. She looked into her father’s eyes. Into her hero’s eyes. She smiled and knelt.
Her head was resting on the block and Montfallcon’s sword was lifting before Gloriana could cry out. “No!”
The broadsword fell. The auburn head burst free of the shoulders. Dee whimpered and then he, too, died.
“Your own flesh,” said Gloriana. “Why?” She left Dee and began to crawl up the steps, one by one, away from the corpses.
“Corrupt flesh,” Montfallcon equably explained, putting the sword on his shoulder again and looking down at his victim. “She should have died when the rest of the girls died. But she agreed to Hern’s proposal. To save her life. I could not stop her then. When you were born, I hoped that you would come to redeem all that had taken place here. But you followed her to corruption, soon enough. My wife and the boys went next. I would not let him have the boys, you see, or my wife. He had a poor imagination, your father, like most monsters. What it was, to be in the power of an all but mindless beast! Yet I waited. I made my plans, developed my ambition. I wanted you to be the golden creature who would give point to all my suffering. You and Albion. And for almost thirteen years it seemed my work, my sacrifices, proved worthwhile and that together we achieved the Age of Virtue. Then you, too, gave yourself to a monster. And now I shall kill you and be done with it.”
She had expected this. She could make no appeal to him. She began to scramble up the steps, one by one, faster and faster, as he came after her, in creaking iron, his eyes fixed upon her throat. She reached the throne, was seated in it before she knew it. He paused. “It can begin again soon,” he said. “With the bad blood extinguished once and for all.”
She began to fear for her surviving child.
“Come,” he said, and gestured towards the block. “You shall die where you were born. You should never have existed. You are a nightmare.”
She made a gasping sound, pleading not so much for her own life, but for his soul, for the life of the great-granddaughter he did not, at this moment, know had been saved from his revenging mob.
“Sin upon sin,” he said. “I should have stopped it then. It went on for too long and Albion was almost brought to ruin by it. Come.”
“No.”
He reached out his grey, gauntleted hand and he took her almost gently by the wrist. “Come.”
Her great strength was all gone. She became reconciled. She rose slowly and was obedient. At her feet the candle began to gutter.
She reached the circle of moonlight. With his hand still on her, Montfallcon pushed her mother’s headless body away from the block. Gloriana, swooning, fell to her knees. Fell into blood.
From the gallery a cool, amused voice called out to her. “Aha, Glory. I see you’ve found your old friend.”
Montfallcon growled and forced her head towards the granite.
“Here I am,” said Quire. He spoke conversationally, as if to Gloriana. “He’s been searching for me for weeks. ‘Tis a game we’ve been playing, Mont and me, in the walls.”
“Ah!” She broke free and began to crawl back towards the dais.
Montfallcon stumbled over the corpse of his daughter, regained his footing and slowly began to raise his broadsword as he pursued her.
Then Quire was flitting down the steps, his own rapier in his little hand, his black cloak flying, his sombrero thrown clear, his thick hair bouncing around his long face, darting towards Montfallcon as a terrier at a bear, until he stood grinning between them. “Here I am, Mont.”
The broadsword swept down, whistling, to crash with all its weight on Quire’s guard. Montfallcon voiced frightful glee as Quire went down. Quire steadied himself with his free hand and tried to reach for the dagger in the scabbard on his hip, but it had slipped too far around his waist. He ducked, instead, and came up behind the turning Montfallcon, who sideswept with a blow that would have cut Quire in two at the thigh. But Quire had danced back, aiming his riposte at Montfallcon’s cheek, just below the eye, but was knocked back with an iron arm. The broadsword rose again.
Gloriana cried to them: “No!” She could tolerate no more killing. She would rather die herself.
Quire was smiling as his thin blade struck into Montfallcon’s right eye and pierced the head.
The crash of the grey lord’s falling echoed and echoed in Gloriana’s brain. She covered her ears. She closed her eyes. She was weeping.
Through the darkness Quire approached her and again she began to climb backwards towards the throne, as afraid of him as she had been afraid of her grandfather.
Quire paused. “I have saved you, Glory.”
“It does not matter,” she said.
“What? No gratitude left? No love?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You taught me well. You taught me to love only myself.”
He was pleased with his victory over Montfallcon. He advanced with his old swagger. “But I am a hero today, not a villain. Surely I have reprieved myself a little? A kiss, at least, Glory. For your Quire, who loves you dearly and always shall.”
“You are a liar! You cannot love. You are a creature made up entirely of hate. You can imitate any emotion. You can feel very few.”
He considered this. “True enough,” he agreed. “Once.” He came on again. “But I love you.” He sheathed his sword. “I’ll go. Only thank me first.”
“How long were you there? How long were you watching? Did you let the drama run its course to maximum effect until you acted? Could you not have saved that poor creature’s life—my mother, whom you used so badly?”
“Dee found her pleasant and, while her mind was soothed by what I gave her, she was pleased by Dee. They were happy for several months. Happier than they had ever been before. And she killed Dr. Dee, do not forget.”
“You could have saved her.”
He shrugged. “Why?”
“You are still the old cruel Quire, then.”
“I am still a practical fellow, I know that. It is others who put these definitions on me. My name is Captain Arturus Quire. I am a scholar and a soldier of good family.”
“And the mightiest, most evil rogue in Albion.” She mocked him. “You’ll have no kiss from me, Quire. You are a deserter! You fled. You removed your support.”
“What? With all those witnesses accusing me? I was tactful, certainly.” Quire took another pace forward.
She smiled. “None accuse you now. There’s the real irony. Your victims forgive you or refuse to believe you the cause of their distress!” She retreated.
He stopped. He put his hands on his hips. “I see no point in playing hero. I was always told that when one saved a fair lady from death one received a favour.” His tone became serious. “I want you, Glory.”
“You cannot have me, Captain Quire. I am Albion’s Queen. I am not mortal. Besides, you taught me how to hate. I was innocent of that emotion before.”
He began to lose his temper. “I have waited for you. I have been patient. I taught you strength. And I learned love from you. Name your terms. I’ll accept ’em. I love you, Glory.”
“Patience has no reward save itself,” she said, still full of fear. “I used to give myself to anyone whose loins ached a little, because I knew what it was to ache. I ached so, Quire. Then you soothed it away and I lost myself. Now I ache again, but I have no sympathy for you or anyone at all. I would rather ache than satisfy another’s lust, because always, when that lust is satisfied, I remain—aching
still.”
“Romance is ever attended by Guilt,” he said casually. He drew his sword again. He motioned. “Come to me, Glory.” He glared.
“You threaten me now. With the very death from which you saved me, and so proudly, too. Very well, Captain Quire. I’ll return to the block for you.” She began to descend.
He snarled and he took her with both his hands, abandoning his blade. “Gloriana!”
“Captain Quire.” She was stone in his grip.
He dropped his hands.
She walked past him, through the cold, haunted corridors, and into the gardens. They smelled of warm autumn, still.
She crossed the gardens and went through her private gate. She passed her maze, her silent fountains, her dying flowers. She entered her own bedroom.
He had not followed.
Recalling her anxiety, she thought, for her daughter, she entered her old secret lodgings and faced the door to the seraglio.
She passed, on yielding carpet, through into the soothing dark. None lived here now. She recalled that her daughter had been sent to Sussex. She made to return, but paused. Suddenly a thousand bloody images came to her. “Oh!”
In the absolute darkness of the seraglio she fell upon her cushions and began to weep. “Quire!”
Quire spoke from somewhere. “Glory.”
A delusion. She looked up. Beyond the archway into the next vault there was a candle burning. It moved towards her, revealing Quire’s tortured face, floating.
She stood up, stone again.
He sighed and put the candle into the bracket on one of the buttresses. “I love you. I shall have you. It’s my right, Glory.”
“You have none. You are a murderer, a spy, a deceiver.”
“You hate me?”
“I know you. You are selfish. You have no heart.”
“Enough,” he said. “It was no wish of mine. I betray all my own faith. But you taught me to believe in love, to accept it. Won’t you accept mine? And love yourself, too.”
“I love Albion. Nothing but Albion. And Gloriana is Albion.”
“Is Gloriana never mere Self?”
For the brevity of an insect’s memory this notion gave her pause, placing thought where only blazing impulse ruled. Then she shook her fiery head and blood spoke: “We are the same. Gloriana and Albion are One. That is our destiny, Captain Quire.”
“It is your doom, madam.” A beast moved beneath his skin and then was immediately harnessed. His voice bore all the innuendo and amusement which had charmed her and sought to charm her still. “Shall I, then, rape Albion?” He drew his sword and as if in play placed the point to her throat. In her turn, she pressed towards it, challenging him to kill her; and her smile bore all the deadly power, all the reasoning sincerity he had seen on no other face but his own.
“Albion is not commanded by brute force, Captain Quire.” She stroked her neck like a cat’s against his rapier, her playfulness in imitation of his own, her voice a soft purr, its note as accurate as a Ludgate chorister’s. “Albion is not raped.”
The beast took control of his eyes. He reached and twisted a fold of her gown in his fingers, his shaking fingers, and he tore it away from her. The beast took control of his breath, his noises. She did not move as he tore with both his hands at her shift and tore and tore at every scrap of cloth until she was naked. And still she did not move, but now stared with contemptuous dismay into his face. She was a vibrant lioness to his thwarted lion. He dropped his sword. He seized her breasts and her buttocks, her womb, her mouth. She would not move, save to sway a little when he threatened to make her fall. He reached, half-clambering up her thigh, towards her head.
He pulled her down to the cushions. He spread her legs. He ripped away his breeches to reveal what she had seen so many times before.
It was then that a sudden determination came upon her. She refused to weep for the love he meant to destroy; she refused to plead with him not to reduce himself and her to this. She became filled by an overwhelming sense of outrage—an outrage that this should not happen to her, that he, in turn should not commit the act he intended, should not destroy the one thing, other than himself, he had ever valued.
She felt as if she were awakening at last from a trance only a shade less deep than her mother’s, and one which had like origin; a trance half Terror, half Divine Power. A burden of unseemly responsibility.
Now she understood the only way in which she might stop Quire’s terrible deed from taking place. She could not let that deed occur, be it in the name of Albion, in the name of Peace, or Revenge—or any name that disguised or brought spurious Chivalry and false Romance to the brutal actuality of his intended crime.
Now, by the medium of her furious certainty, all her emotions were brought in check. She studied his well-muscled arse as it arched to plunge. Over his shoulder she saw the knife, sheathed at his belt, its hilt easily within her reach. She found it. She took the silk-bound bone in her hand and pulled the weapon from its scabbard as he grunted and cursed and kissed and prepared for his important heave.
She raised the dagger, looking beyond him into the candlelight and a sudden image of blood-washed stone, sharp and hard, as it appeared so frequently in her dreams. The image brought burning tears, yet served only to strengthen her resolve.
She could have struck him easily, slain him almost before he knew the truth. But there was no hesitation in her actions. She had set her course and would not falter. For the first time in her life she acted with a sureness born not of physical terror but of psychic dread. Her anger grew as she thought of Montfallcon, training her like a bird, to know the fear of failing in her duties so that he might then place the burden of her blood upon her and then, again, teach her the ways not of losing that burden but of bearing it. And thus Hern’s daughter was made Albion and tranquillity enforced upon the Realm.
“No!” she cried. “No! You shall not rape me!” And with easy strength she placed the knife directly between his legs, startled to sense a power so awful that it thrilled every nerve in her body. Her queenly conscience was shed not through the familiar submissions with which she had earlier sought to grant herself release, but through this manlier understanding of habitual threat, of naked power, unchecked by courtesy or chivalry. Her threat carried with it an unwavering intention of pursuit to the bitter end. It was a threat as chilling and deliberate as any Quire had ever employed against his victims. Perhaps for the first time in his life Captain Quire knew hindrance, knew dread, knew fearful respect as she smiled, in mirror of his old habitual triumph, and she let the razoring steel rest upon his retreating manhood.
That single word, that brief syllable, had released her, had returned to her the ownership of her spirit and her flesh. She possessed her senses, her blood, her sex. She possessed them for no one else. She had responsibility to no one else. She knew an exhilaration which yet did not confuse her threat to the baffled Captain who in her face perceived something which distracted him from his own imminent unsexing and brought a different, disbelieving smile. “Glory?”
She was no longer Albion. No longer justice, mercy and wisdom, no longer the personification of righteousness, the hope and ideal of her people. She was Glory. She was Self. She was fighting not for principle but in her own interest, for everything she had ever honoured. Now she understood her commonality as well as her singularity, of what she shared with all women, of what she shared with men and of what was unique in her. At that moment she ceased to be the embodiment of anything but her own desperate, uncorrupted soul.
He stumbled back, tangled in his dark velvet clothing. The beast cowered for an instant in his eyes before fleeing entirely exorcised, and leaving him looking at her with the awesome ancient hermit might have lavished upon the face of a deity revealed, for the first time, in all its mighty omnipotence. He could not speak.
“You shall do nothing to me, Captain Quire, that I do not command.”
Whereupon, weeping, he fell to his knees upon the flags, n
o longer able to raise his head to look at her, as if he felt unworthy. He had been able to plot the dragging down of this Queen, this nation, but could not even begin to conceive the humbling of this woman. He bowed before the only authority he had ever recognized. He bowed before this supreme manifestation of the Self.
And then, as he knelt before her, Gloriana gasped. Her newly discovered sensibilities overwhelmed her, even as she stood, knife in hand, like some Tragic revenger, and she began to tremble, thinking that the whole palace quaked, that the roof must fall. And she cried out, yet still he dared not look at her. And she cried out again and her voice was so powerful it seemed to increase the space constricting it: some Cosmos-striding goddess displaying her triumphant pleasure.
Gloriana shook again, mightily. She had never known more than a hint of this ecstasy. It was as if she received recompense for every disappointment she had ever known. She lifted her head to let forth another, wilder, celebratory shout which pierced the walls and rang through the entire palace, disturbing the dust of centuries, and echoed through every inch of Albion. Now Gloriana knew that one thing for which she had always ached and which had always been denied her. She had claimed back her own soul, her own urgent humanity.
She did not celebrate Albion. She celebrated nothing but herself. It was she who had resisted and defeated the power of the beast, not her nation, not her duty. Her blood was furious with caressing heat. She seemed to become a furnace illuminating the whole chamber and the palace beyond and the fires that she generated poured through corridors and crannies cleansing away forever the bloodstains and old bones, the old hypocrisies and lies.
And still she quaked, groaning and roaring, like some ethereal sphere in the first moments of its creation. She extinguished Guilt, banished Horror. She raised her hands, dangerous with iron, and roared her triumph for the third time, oblivious of Quire sobbing at her feet and drowning in a remorse harder to bear for its complete unfamiliarity.
Her skin looked to her like mercurial gold, as if she had passed into Dee’s great crucible to be forged into this ideal not of the State but of a natural woman, unfettered by the demands of an alien philosophy, a free agent.
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