Throne of Darkness: A Novel

by Douglas Nicholas

“My lord.”

  • • •

  THE UNNATURAL HYENA was stalking along the far side of the table; soon it would be round the end and at him. Even across the wide table, Hob could smell its blood-and-carrion breath, hear it rumbling deep in its throat, like the purring of an enormous cat.

  Make shift with what is around you.

  In a despairing rage, Hob seized the nearer candlestick and threw it with all his force at the bouda, striking it full on the shoulder.

  To Hob’s utter astonishment, the hyena screamed and coiled around on itself, snapping at its own shoulder, the mindless reaction of a fighting dog or wolf. A sudden pain in the wild often means a bite, and a swift savage snap at the pain often catches the biter in the act. Molly had said that shapeshifters in their Beast form could not think as men and women did, and the turnskin before Hob acted with animal illogic, snapping again and again at the air by its injured side.

  Where the candlestick had struck, there was a furrow in the hyena’s hide, the furred edges smoking, the interior beginning to run with blood, the wound widening a bit even as Hob watched. The candlestick, dropped to the floor, had rolled toward the wall, and it was coated with smoldering skin and fur. Hob looked at the remaining candlestick, gleaming softly in the firelight. He had a moment when he could hear Molly telling of the uses of iron against witchcraft. But shapeshifters were creatures that no iron would bite. He was thinking at a furious pace. This candlestick, it was not iron, but, but, it was silver: Could it be that—?

  The hyena had begun to turn its attention to him again, and was limping back toward the end of the table. Hob came to himself with a rush; a storm of fear and rage swept through his mind; there was a redness at the edge of his vision. He snatched up the remaining candlestick, put a palm to the table, and vaulted over to the far side.

  The hyena swung its heavy snout toward him and he bashed at the side of its head, the candlestick visibly denting the horrid countenance. The hyena emitted its shrieking laugh, signifying excitement or distress, and shook its head as if partially blind, backing away a few paces. The side of its face was smoking; it seemed about to burst into flame. Hob charged after it, raining blow upon blow at its head; he was cursing breathlessly but his arm rose and fell without cease. He felt as though he would never tire; paroxysms of fury shook him; he was filled with a frenzy, spasms of madness, a savage joy at seeing his enemy finally helpless before him.

  At some point he found himself half squatting, leaning over, cursing in English interspersed with occasional Irish maledictions he’d acquired from Nemain, striking again and again at a misshapen, blood-soaked, scorched bundle—the shapeshifter, now quite clearly dead.

  He ceased. He stood up, breathing heavily, and put his free hand to the table and just leaned there a moment, the candlestick dangling by his side, and then Molly and Nemain burst into the room and came to a halt, staring at the tableau of Hob and the hyena, already beginning to fade into its human form. Behind them came da Panzano. Upon seeing the half-human corpse, from which wisps of smoke still drifted upward, a curious expression of satisfaction, even triumph, came over his face. Hob, still catching his breath, was facing the legate, and thought that he looked like someone who has wagered on a footrace and won.

  “Let us return,” said Molly, “for I’m not wishing to leave Jack to himself.”

  “There was no packet,” Hob croaked.

  Da Panzano said, “Yes, yes, I am remembering now—I have it in the guest house.” Nemain turned and looked closely at him, but he shrugged and set off back up the corridor. Nemain came to Hob and put an arm about his waist, and then Molly was on his other side, and he limped along between them till he felt a little stronger, and stood up more straightly, and then they were back in the guest house, in the dining room.

  “Sit,” said Nemain to Hob sternly, pointing to a chair by the wall. She herself seemed to have recovered completely from her swoon.

  Hob, exhausted and numb from his encounter with the bouda, sat down heavily; his side ached—at some point he must have bruised his ribs. But generally he felt a great contentment.

  Molly went to Jack and got him on his feet; the dark man shuffled over, and dropped into a chair, which creaked alarmingly but held. Hob grinned at him, but Jack, still with a wisp of the Beast-dream on him, had not yet recovered the capacity for self-distance that lets one smile at grim events, and he just nodded at Hob.

  From a chest in the far corner da Panzano withdrew a packet with the papal seal, and tendered it to Molly, who put it into a fold of her garments without looking at it.

  “You do not look?” asked da Panzano.

  “I will look later; if ’tis not what you promised, sure I’ll come to you again, my lad.”

  For something said so unemphatically, thought Hob, this managed to convey a sense of terrible menace: the creak of a longbow at full draw.

  “Is well, is well,” said da Panzano, still pale and shaken from the loss of Sinibaldo. He looked around the room. “I am counting these lupi mannari, and I say to myself, surely there was one more? I had hoped, when I sent this young man down that so-long corridor, that this beast-thing would show itself. They are feroci, ferocious, they have the, how do you say, the blood-love? The blood-lust. But I think to myself, it will be afraid to face these two women, with their unholy—forgive me, but yes, unholy—powers. This young man, so strong and tall, does not have such powers; it will attack, and then these women will come and destroy it. I did not think that you could do so yourself, my son.”

  Had Hob not been so weary, he might have noticed the stillness that had come over Nemain; how she slowly pulled herself up in her chair, weary though she herself must be; how she drew her legs under her; how she put her feet flat to the floor.

  “You’re after using my husband as bait? You’re after using my husband as bait?”

  Suddenly she was on her feet, almost without seeming to rise; suddenly she took a pace toward da Panzano, and another, whirling like a dancer to add force to the coming blow, the spin bringing her near to the monsignor, her hair, tangled, disheveled from the long night, whipping out behind her like a flag, her outstretched hand having acquired a dagger in some fashion, the arc of the blade inscribing a silver circle in the air that was destined to end in da Panzano’s neck, Hob frozen with shock, and there was a slap! as Molly’s strong hand caught her granddaughter’s slender wrist, the point an inch or so from the pulsing vessel in the priest’s neck.

  The women stood like carved figures for a moment, but Molly was far stronger, and forced Nemain’s arm down. She put her other arm around her granddaughter and guided her back to her chair.

  “We’re needing him in the future, and any road he’s one of those whose nature is to play chess with other people’s lives, and he’s not to be changing his nature. Let him aid us,” said Molly, looking back over her shoulder to make sure that da Panzano heard her, “and we will let him live his life.”

  The papal agent, drawing his hand-cloth from his sleeve, dabbed carefully at his forehead. “I apologize, madam; I have no wish to act other than honorably toward you.”

  Molly straightened and faced him. “Monsignor,” she said in a calm, almost kindly, voice, “it’s friends that we’ll be from this night forward, but think on this question. You have seen what we can do. Do you think that you can hide, even in the mighty Church, from us?”

  “No, I . . .” he began, but she held up her right hand, palm out, the universal gesture for stop.

  “Nay, ’tis not that I need to hear it; ’tis not that I’m asking it of you. ’Tis for you to ask yourself, on those nights when sleep will not come to you, and you lighting your bedside candle again and looking at the ceiling till the break of day. Ask it of yourself then, and study the answer, and live your life by that answer.”

  CHAPTER 36

  THERE MUST BE A NEST somewhere nearby, thought Hob. Some irregularity in the walls, a jutting stone that provided enough of a ledge to build upon. He could hear,
above the rhythmic crash of the sea against the headland far below, the burbling of rock doves, a pleasant sound on this summer day.

  They were in Sir Odinell’s favored meeting room, high in a seaside tower of his castle, Chantemerle: Molly and her family; and Sir Odinell, the Sieur de Chantemerle; as well as, from Castle Blanchefontaine, Sir Jehan and Sir Balthasar. On the bright cloths that covered the broad main table, jugs of wine and platters of meat pastries were set at convenient intervals.

  On a sideboard, its oak surface bare of covering but highly polished, was a single object: a square of parchment, and on it, in Latin, the terms of the agreement signed at Runnymede by King John and his rebellious barons. The sideboard stood beneath a window; the day was fine and with little wind, save for the inevitable breezes that blew in little starts and stops from the German Sea.

  “And I fear ’twas all for naught,” said Sir Odinell. “The king breaks this part of the treaty, and we that part, and in the end ’tis so many empty words.”

  “It will be war, and the French will be in it—some want Louis to come over—and there will be chaos. . . . Precious Christ! It will be the days of Stephen and Matilda all over again,” said the grim Sir Balthasar.

  “We’d do as well to light this evening’s fire with it,” said Sir Odinell. “It might be of some use, then.”

  But Molly had gone over to the sideboard and was feeling the parchment, running her fingers along the edge, then smoothing it flat against the wood and running her finger slowly along the lines—she could read Latin, but not well, not easily, and so she had to pause, and think, and slowly derive its meaning. Now she looked up, her fingers still rubbing gently at a corner of the Charter.

  “Nay,” she said, “there’s a tinge, a taste, a faint . . . I feel it has some power and some use, but not now.” She turned to Hob. “You remember when you found those caltrops, and they lying in the road?”

  Hob nodded.

  “And wasn’t I saying that I had no idea what good they might do for us, but that it seemed that they would do some good for us, and we carrying them along from that day, and they saving you and Jack from those arrachtaí, they bounding up the path, and so eager to get at you?”

  Again Hob nodded, and Jack gave a growl that, to those who knew him well, merely signified assent, although the three knights gave a slight start: it was the sound of a bear, grumbling in its den, deep in the earth.

  “Doesn’t she have the second sight, now,” said Nemain, “and that more strongly than any I’ve seen, and what she foretells coming to pass, time and again.”

  “Al-Kahina,” said Hob, who could recall virtually anything that he had once heard. When everyone looked at him, he said, “ ’Tis what the Arabs called that Amazigh woman, Dihya, their hero, that Father Ugwistan said you were like—al-Kahina; it means ‘the soothsayer,’ because she could foretell the future.”

  “You can foretell what is to be, madam?” asked Odinell. He had seen too much of Molly’s powers to be openly skeptical, and yet, and yet . . . “How can you do such?”

  “ ’Tis like explaining the claírseach to a deaf man,” said Molly, “but . . . that pigeon we’re hearing, we hear it because it’s right there outside the window, and the wind calm. Think of a wind that blows strongly toward you—it carries sounds of things you’re traveling toward, things you cannot yet see. Is the sound of children laughing just over the hill you’re going round, children you’ll meet in a little while, is that not a sign from your time to come? You’re saying to yourself, ‘Sure I’ll be meeting children soon,’ and so ’tis—you come around the hill, and there are the children, and you meeting them, but you knew that you would meet them, soon, when you were coming round that hill. ’Tis like that with me—only ’tis not hearing, ’tis some other way, and how can I tell you of it, you as it were deaf to the sound of time to come. I feel this parchment, as I felt the steel of those caltrops, and something within me is saying, ‘This will be of use’; I know not how, nor when, but ‘This will be of use.’ ”

  “But the treaty is broken on both sides; of what further use can it be?” asked Sir Jehan.

  “ ’Tis not that I can see myself what use it might have,” said Molly slowly. “ ’Tis not clear even to me; but what I feel is, is . . . a sense that an arrow has left the bow, and ’tis not to be taken back.”

  She turned again to the parchment, and bent to peer at the bottom. “This is one of those in the meadow with you that day by the Thames,” she said. “ ’Tis never a monk’s copy, for here is the king’s signature.”

  “Yes,” said Sir Odinell, “ ’tis one of several copies signed that day.”

  “Be said by me,” said Molly, tapping the parchment where John Lackland had signed, “this king wi—” and then her face went slack and she slapped a hand to the sideboard and held to it a moment, swaying, very pale.

  “Seanmháthair!” cried Nemain, and came up and around the table to her; Jack arrived a heartbeat later and caught Molly around the shoulders, and eased her into a chair. Hob and the knights had come to their feet, but there seemed to be nothing to do. Jack hunkered beside Molly’s chair and took her hand in his, looking keenly into her face. She was a big woman, but her hand disappeared into Jack’s huge paw.

  Molly made waving-off motions with her free hand. “Nay, ’tis nothing, ’tis nothing. I’m just after seeing . . .”

  “What is it, seanmháthair, what?” Nemain sat down beside her.

  “I’m just after saying that I’d a sense about the parchment, but that it’s vague, and more a feeling than a clear thought, and then I’m tapping that signature, where the king’s hand itself rested; I was about to say of him—well, ’tis gone, but it was concerning King John. And then . . .”

  “What, mo chroí?”

  Jack took a goblet of wine from the table with his free hand and held it to Molly’s lips as though she were a tot, and she drank, and shook herself, and patted the hand that held hers. The color was coming back into her cheeks.

  “ ’Twas as though I were blind for a moment; this room, wasn’t it gone entirely, and myself on a bleak shore, a rocky shore, and the waves crashing on the rocks, and with every crash saying ‘Faoi cheann bliana. Faoi cheann bliana.’ And this went on for a long time.”

  “ ’Twas but a moment till you spoke to us.”

  “Sure it seemed a very long time, and after a while I’m noticing a crown caught in the rocks below, very near the water, and washing to and fro with the waves, and they saying ‘Faoi cheann bliana.’ ”

  “This is Irish, then?” asked Sir Jehan.

  “ ’Tis,” said Molly. “These dreams, or visions, from Herself are always in Irish, or it seems like Irish to me in the dream.”

  “But what does it mean?” asked the knight.

  “It’s meaning ‘one year,’ or ‘in a year’s time,’ ” said Nemain.

  Molly said, “And the waves were chanting it, as it seemed, and then a wave caught the crown and pulled it out into the water, and it sank from sight. And wasn’t it that very moment that the waves stopped their chant, and were just waves, beating on the rocks, and then I was here, and glad to return to you, so I am. ’Twas like an ill dream. ’Tis a vision: some sign from the Mόrrígan. I have had such before, but not for a while. And strong as it was, clear as it was, I know not what to think of it.”

  “Do you not?” said Nemain.

  Something in her granddaughter’s voice made Molly turn to look into Nemain’s face. The young woman’s green eyes glittered with intensity. Hob and the knights had resumed their seats, but were reduced to onlookers, Hob a family member and the others powerful magnates of the North Country, but all excluded from these matters of Art. Jack was concerned only for Molly’s health and well-being; he did not care about the meaning of portents, so be it that she was safe.

  “What is it, child?” she asked Nemain.

  “A crown caught in the rocks on a desolate shore, and the waves chanting ‘One year,’ and trying to pull th
e crown from the land into the deep, and then succeeding, and the crown sinking into darkness, and the chant ceasing at that moment. Think, seanmháthair, what can it mean? I have a thought, but I’m not wanting to say it, lest I taint the purity of your message—’twas to you it came, and not myself.”

  Molly thought, and then said, “Ah!” and turning to Jack, said, “Give us another sip of that wine, a rún.” When she had drunk again, she drew a deep breath. “Sure the crown is King John, and the bleak shore the perils that compass him about, and one year is the time, and at the end of that year it’s down into the dark he’ll go, so he will.”

  “ ’Tis my thought exactly,” said Nemain.

  Sir Jehan looked from one to the other. “You mean that in one year John Lackland—”

  “Will be dead,” said Nemain with just the least trace of impatience.

  “Precious Christ!” said Sir Balthasar.

  There was a general silence, as everyone reflected on this, and what it might mean, and what, if anything, should be done in preparation. Then: “Things seemed simpler when I was young,” said Sir Odinell.

  Sir Jehan roused himself, and said, “The world is wide, and many things therein.”

  • • •

  THERE ENSUED a pragmatic political discussion among the three knights: What would be the effect were King John to die? Who would be regent for the boy Henry were he to take the throne? Was Anjou, then, lost completely? Hob, sitting quietly, his mouth full of a pork tart and a goblet of good red wine at his elbow, listening to his elders debate, thought that a few years ago these men would have thought Molly a witch or a charlatan; now they accepted her prediction as iron-hard fact, and discussed the possible consequences without hesitation. Al-Kahina!

  CHAPTER 37

  AFTER A WHILE SIR JEHAN, coming round to some of the business for which the meeting had originally been called, stood, raised his goblet, and said in formal tones: “Let us drink to Queen Maeve, who has saved us yet again from foes too terrible for simple knights to face.”