by Judith Tarr
Magic. He spat past his horse’s neck. A trick of wind blew the spittle back into his face. He cursed and spluttered, but he took no such liberty again.
Get to England. Get the treasury. Get himself crowned. He made it a litany as the leagues spun away.
They paused near dawn to rest and requisition remounts from one of the ducal estates. William took a certain pleasure in that; Robert did not know it yet, but he was helping his brother take England’s crown away from him.
Just before the sun came up, they pulled themselves onto their new mounts and eyed the road again. William’s skin was twitching. Something was odd—but not the road, now daylight touched it. It seemed as if one particular color had gone out of the world.
Old William was dead. Young William hesitated for an instant. Here he was in Normandy, in one of the duke’s castles, with an arsenal and a bit of treasury that would do rather nicely. If he chose. If he would take a dukedom, and let the kingdom fend for itself until he went on to take it in its turn.
It was only a moment’s lapse. The crown was calling, and with it a greater treasure than anything here. William’s portion was the better one. Time enough later to take the rest.
The Abbot of Bec rubbed his eyes and sighed. It was ungodly late—past the Night Office, halfway to dawn. The letters on the parchment before him had begun to blur.
Time was when he could sit all night by candlelight, interrupted only by the summons to prayer, and every letter that he wrote or read was nigh as clear as if by daylight. Now he was not so young, and his eyes were not as steadfast as they had been.
The strain of thought had blurred with his sight and begun to slip away. He scribbled a few swift words before the last of it escaped, then straightened his weary back, and stretched and yawned. He was a little dizzy with the headlong return from the heights of theology to the reality of late nights, stiff bones, and inkstains on his fingers.
It was still summer in this part of the world, but the air in the scriptorium was cold. Almost he fancied that he could see a puff of mist when he breathed.
He shivered with more than the chill. The creatures of the aether who crowded everywhere were gone tonight; he had reveled in the solitude. But that, rather insidiously, was broken. Something was there.
He knew the breath of the dead. There was no mistaking it. He looked up without either fear or surprise, into a face that at first he barely recognized.
Anselm had not known the king when he was as young as that. For a fleeting instant he wondered what Prince Henry was doing in Bec. Should he not be in Rouen with his father?
Then of course Anselm knew. He bowed his head. “Sire,” he said.
King William’s spirit seemed remarkably keen of eye and sharp of wit for one who must have died within the day.
“Just now,” he said, reading Anselm’s thought with ease, as the dead or the powerfully gifted could. “It’s all done. Young William’s off to England. The others will find their own way.”
“It’s kind of you, sire, to pause on your journey, to tell me this,” Anselm said. He chose the words with care. Nothing about William alive had been kind; death could not have changed him so much. But Anselm judged it wise to pretend.
The dead king saw through it, inevitably: he laughed, a gust of chill wind. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “You know what I need of you—what Britain needs. You have the power to do it, however little you may like to use it. I’m commanding you.”
“You are dead,” Anselm said steadily. “Your day is done. Mine is far from it—and my place is here.”
“Your destiny is in Britain,” the king said. “I’ve raised that boy to be king. He’ll do it—he might even be good at it—but he can’t do it alone.”
“Surely not, sire,” Anselm said. “But I’m a scholar, not a courtier. My gift is for the nature of God. The nature of kings eludes me.”
“Don’t lie to the dead,” said the spirit. “Don’t lie to yourself, either. I did, in the end—you’ve seen where it got me. Don’t waste the power your God gave you. He gave it to you for a reason.”
“There is some debate as to that,” said Anselm. “If it were not God but the Devil—”
“Lies again,” the king said. The air crackled with frost. “Use some of those famous wits of yours and face the truth. No one else has either the strength or the training to do what must be done.”
“Lanfranc—” Anselm began.
“My old friend is old. He’s not much longer for this world. The young ones need younger Guardians. My daughter Cecilia is where she needs to be, and the Lady of the Lake as well. Lanfranc does what he can. One more pillar has to be raised, and you are that pillar. Deny it as much and as long as you like—but the longer you wait, the harder it will be.”
“Britain is no part of me,” Anselm said. His teeth ached from gritting them.
“On the contrary,” said the shade of that terrible king. “Britain is your destiny. As it was mine. As it is my son’s.”
He laid no spell, spoke no word of binding, and yet Anselm felt the force of his will. There was more in it than mortal wishing or a man’s desire to smooth the way for his heir. He had been bound to Britain for life after life. Britain was in back of him, a great wall of inexorable power.
Fate. Destiny. Compulsion so strong that it buffeted Anselm like a strong wind.
“The dead may not command the living,” Anselm said tightly.
The shade grinned—for a moment showing the skull that he had left behind. “The dead have no need. Fate is stronger than any of us.”
“God is stronger than fate.”
“God is fate,” the dead king said, “and the gods are its plaything.”
Anselm crossed himself. The shade laughed. “Take what comfort you can, father abbot. You’ll give in in the end. You won’t be able to help it.”
“God will help me,” Anselm said, but the dead king took no notice. He was finally, mercifully, letting go of what substance he had.
He left Anselm in deep disquiet and no little ill temper. Which was hardly fitting for a man of God, and an abbot at that; but William the Bastard had never given a fig for what was fitting.
CHAPTER 6
The cry went up in the early morning: a long howl more of anguish than of grief. It rent the air of Rouen and flung the city into a frenzy.
Henry had left the body to grow cold on its own and gone looking for something, anything, to wash away the memory of death. Even before he found a tavern that would serve him at such an hour, he was more than half out of his mind, and knowing it, too. If he had been sane at all, he would at least have told the monks that the king was dead. But he had walked away, and kept on walking, until he was out of the monastery and in the city and slumped on a bench in a dim and dingy place that stank of ancient ale.
Better that than the charnel stink of his father’s deathbed. Some of that was still there, lingering like one of the spirits in the air. By the time one of the monks discovered the body, Henry had lost count of the cups that he had drunk. Maybe it was only one. Maybe it was a dozen.
None of it could shut the eyes of the mind. The monk had no need to touch the stinking thing to know there was no life left in it. He sketched a sign of the cross over it—good Christian cleric that he was—and gathered up his skirts and ran.
After that, there was a great deal of running. Shouting, too, and cursing—but no weeping. Henry was too blurred and bleared by then to recognize faces. They were all alike: human clods, no spark in them, and precious little soul.
They pillaged their king. They stripped the chamber of everything that had been in it, all but the bed—and that only because the body was too vastly repellent an object. They took the armor on its stand, and the stand with it; the chest of clothing and oddments at the bed’s foot; the smaller but much heavier box of jewels and precious things; even the earthen jar of water, and the cup, and the table on which the two had stood, and the cloth on it, and the rug under it.
It was a madnes
s, a passion of possession—and revenge, too, on a man who had taken and held everything within his grasp. Henry should have thought of it himself. But he had only been able to think of getting away from there and drinking himself into blessed oblivion.
That was not happening. He was drunk, there was no doubt of it, but his mind was all too clear.
He was the only waking creature in the tavern. There were sleeping ones enough, most of them snoring; the tavernkeeper had left a jar at Henry’s elbow and stretched out on the bar and gone to sleep—snoring louder than any of the rest.
The jar was empty. Henry counted the steps to the cask, and the bodies he would have to step over or around to get there. It was a great errantry, but he was duty-bound. He was not unconscious yet. He must be unconscious. Otherwise there was no purpose in being here at all.
Past the bar and the casks of ale and beer and the jars of wine, shadows stirred. They were a curtain, Henry realized, and something moved behind them: a living presence. His ear caught the sound of a shod foot on a wooden stair.
His nostrils flared. Even through the fumes of ale, he could smell the ineffable essence of woman. It was a gift, a peculiar magic; one that Christians deplored. But he was only as Christian as need demanded.
She parted the curtain with a hand that, though hardly elegant, was round and well shaped. The rest of her, as it emerged, matched the hand admirably. Her hair was the color of newly planed oak; her skin was milk-white beneath a golden dust of freckles. She had the features that went with the coloring: short straight nose, flat cheeks, firm chin. Her eyes were dark in the dimness, but Henry was sure they would be blue.
He was in love. Love came easily to him always; it was a sin, the priests said, but he never had believed in that narrow view of the world.
She was barely awake, her hair loose down her back, with a cloth tied over it and her skirts kilted up, ready to face the long day. She paused behind the bar, taking in the sprawl of bodies and the remnants of the night’s revels. Her face was resigned; she sighed.
Henry met her eyes, already tired with the weight of the world, and smiled. It was a pleasure as always to watch the smile take hold. Light dawned in her face. She had smiled back before she could have known what she was doing.
There were handsomer men than Henry in the world, and sweeter-tempered, too. But he had never found that to be an obstacle. Women loved to be loved. Henry loved to love them. It was a perfect exchange.
This one warmed to him as they all did, forgetting weariness and drudgery just as he forgot the horrors of the past days. When he rose and took her hand, she turned willingly and led him back up the stair.
She did not tell him her name, nor did she ask his. The heat of her body, the scent and shape of her, would stay with him. If he saw her again, he would know her, though she might long since have forgotten him.
For a little while she took away memory. There was only the moment, stretching as long as human flesh could bear.
But it was human and mortal, and the day was rising. The tumult in the city was beating on the shutters, piercing through it with darts of sound and light. A bellow from below brought her to her feet, slipping deftly out of his arms.
He made no effort to stop her. He could have stayed where he was; she had not ordered him out. But the world was calling. He made himself rise and find his clothes and put them on, taking more care than they strictly needed.
He was delaying the inevitable. She had asked for nothing, but he left a handful of coins on the table by the bed. It was her due; and however poor he might be in lands or titles, of money, thanks to his father, he had enough.
He drew a deep breath. Now, he thought. Face it; get it over. He made his way down and out of the tavern, into the glare of the day.
The king’s body was gone. The bed on which it had lain was stripped, the curtains taken down, and the room scoured. Henry’s eyes watered with the fierce stink of lye.
It was a far cleaner stink than had been there before. He found a monk at last, after too long a search, who would admit to knowing anything at all.
He was a novice, and somewhat simple. He babbled of angels and devils, and scourgings of sacred fire. Somewhere amid the nonsense, Henry gathered that embalmers had come, and a knight had overseen them. They had taken the body out of Rouen.
Henry was nigh as fuddled as the novice. He had been fighting his way through the city, with bruises and a cut or two to show for it; his mind was full of fog, as if he and not his father had wandered out of the world of the living.
The last of the ale had purged itself from him some while since. This was something else. Something . . .
For the second time in that endless day, he stumbled through the abbey’s gate. Outside the walls, he was little less confused than he had been before.
There was no duke in Normandy, no king in England. Henry, who had been deprived of either, stopped short in the road.
The earth’s spirit was in him. Its emptiness had crept into him; its confusion had swallowed him. He had been a fool not to strengthen the wards of his magic when he saw death standing close above his father.
His blood was king’s blood, although he was not to claim the power that went with it. He was the youngest. He had no rights but what his father and his elder brothers gave him.
That way was bitterness. He must not indulge in it. He was perilously close to losing himself now, because he had given way to the shock of his father’s sickness and all of its consequences.
He gathered the disparate parts of himself, the wits that were so terribly scattered, the magic that he had been in danger of forgetting how to wield. The cold of death seeped slowly away. He drew in the sun’s warmth, feeding the power that was in him, as his mother had taught him to do when he was a child.
As his strength grew, his senses sharpened. He saw and felt and heard the confusion that reigned in this part of the world, now that his father’s iron grip was loosed. Of his father there was nothing left.
And yet the body was still in the world, and powers gathered about it. They drifted on the winds of the spirit, knotting and tangling like threads of spider-silk. They laid a track for him to follow.
He poised on the edge of it. There was power to take, if he had the courage—if his strength was enough. If he had the right.
If he turned back, he could try to take one kind of power: earthly power, the rule of men and lands, maybe even the duchy, if he moved quickly enough. If he set foot on this path, his way would be longer and his victory less certain. But the prize would be greater by far—if he lived to win it.
Either way, he could lose it all. He was the youngest son. Nothing was his unless he fought for it.
He turned his back on Rouen and his face toward the old gods knew what. It was a road, but it touched only slightly on the earthly track. Men were in great disarray there: the last of the king’s vassals escaping the city, riding hard for their own demesnes, to fortify them against a war they reckoned inevitable.
None of them spared a thought for the king who was dead. He was powerless now to help or harm them. They had to live in the world; and the world was turning cold.
Either they were fools, or Henry was. He entrusted himself to the straight track. The king was on it ahead of him, borne away by more than mortal hands.
CHAPTER 7
The ship floated by the quay, down the river from the city. It was an old ship, its paint worn, the gilding faded from its high prow. Yet there was no concealing the lines of it, the swift deadly shape of a dragon ship.
A lantern hung on the tip of its mast, dim to invisible in daylight. Yet at night it would blaze like a beacon, a great power of the Otherworld.
Henry’s breath caught. He knew what ship this had to be. Mora, the ship made of Druid oak, shaped and fashioned for the conquest of Britain. His mother had given her as a love-gift to his father; when Mathilda died, the king had ordered her sunk in the sea.
She had risen again, somewhat worse for wea
r, but with all her magic still intact. A great flock of spirits crowded about her. They cared at least that the king of all Britain had passed to the Otherworld.
“For a while,” said a person perched just behind the dragon of the prow. He had the appearance of a bearded dwarf, thickset and massive for all his lack of height. But he was neither human nor mortal.
“Messire Turold,” Henry said, bowing.
The boggart, who had been the king’s friend and ally, grinned from ear to ear: a very literal and disconcerting thing. His teeth were numerous and sharp. “Prince,” he said. “Will you sail with us?”
“That depends on where you go,” Henry said. “I’m not ready to leave the world.”
“Not yet,” said Turold. “We’re taking the rivers and the sea to Caen.”
“Not Falaise where he was born?”
“Not by sea,” said Turold. “It’s what he wanted. We’re bound to give it to him.”
Henry bent his head. As light as the boggart’s tone was, he could sense a grief so deep that it caught at his own heart.
No human thing had grieved for that terrible old man. These creatures of airy magic mourned with honest sorrow. He had belonged to them as much as to the children of Adam; although he had turned his back on them after his queen died, they had never forsaken him.
Henry understood a very great thing just then, standing on the quay in the plain daylight. Exactly what use he could make of it, he did not know yet. But he had seen a way through this riddle that his father had set him, and allies whom his brothers had neither the power nor the skill to call on.
The ship was waiting with a strong taste of patience about it. Henry swung over the side.
As he struck the deck, he staggered. He was light on his feet, trained and strong, as a knight should be; but the power in these timbers—the sheer force of magic that was in them—nearly flung him flat.
The crew were already casting off, lowering oars, dipping them in unison into the swift water. The ship leaped like a bird into flight.
