[David Becket and Simon Ames 01] - Firedrake's Eye

by Patricia Finney

  Becket growled impatiently. ‘Be silent,’ he barked and I was, for I was afraid of him.

  ‘We must warn the Court.’ Dr Nunez said, ‘I will ask audience with my lord of Leicester this night…’

  ‘No, no!’ I shouted again, unable to bear it that they should be so near the truth. ‘The Queen Moon will never call off the Tilts, seek ye the dragon in God’s name, the firedrake of the deadly eye, like unto Basilicon that kills with its glance, yea, seek it by the sword of Damocles…’ Why was a devil hanging on my tongue to whirl my words into an egg froth of foolery? ‘Find the dragon and you shall find Cain that is also Lucifer…’

  Becket swatted me aside like an importunate fly. Dr Nunez took his cloak, and they left, leaving the children gazing solemn-eyed at me. Above Simon sweated and turned and his spirit leapt the fences of this world to dance about the daemons and Angel Governors of the sky, that he believed not in, and played in a cooling cascade of number and swam the waves and troughs of that foaming mathematical sea that maketh the storm of stars above us. Below I bowed to the angel in the doorpost and then took up a kitchen knife before the horrified eyes of the cook, put it in my belt and left the house.

  LI

  I cannot speak as Adam, for I cannot understand his world, how it could be so harsh and clear and simple to the mind’s touch, how truth could be one thing and one thing only and that the truth of Rome. I was brought up in it myself and think that for all the ancient Fath’s bloodiness it hath a gentler, less rigid nature than the Reformed. For those who cannot speak with the Queen Moon, Our Lady the Blessed Virgin Mary is a kinder holiness for prayers of the weak than that stern Christ of St Paul and St Augustine and John Calvin. But what do I know? To me the world is a thing of mist and truth also is doubtful as its shadows; to Adam all was illumined harshly, unkindly, by the bright light of his Faith. The world is much the same for Sir Francis Walsingham and his great enemy the King of Spain, the Kingly Clerk, and who am I to say such mighty worshipful men may lie? Is not the world of mist and the world of paper moved here and there and about by those who think so harshly? When men bum each other, always it is the ones that hear no siren singing of the Queen Moon who light the faggots, the ones who see clear and know the truth and intend that all shall be well because they shall see to it, they are the destroyers. I would have the world a veil, a tissue of fairest rainbow silk and you would have it a damascene sword blade, and we both know which is the harder and which cuts. And which is stronger and fairer?

  My trouble comes to me from our mother who wasted herself to nothingness and the image of the grave by her fasting and penances that England should return to her Truth, as if by her suffering she could turn the world about. Agnes was still at wet nurse, but Adam… She left him for a greater Truth, as she said, and so has he held to that Truth all his life, and would now finish her desire by the steadiness of his aim. He would destroy the Protestant Jezebel, the bastard of England.

  Cozening the key to Haarlem from Becket ten years ago, that was one thing, dirty but understandable and expedient. To seek to kill the Queen of England has a splendour in it. But to strangle a boy only because he had the means to reveal him – not for any cause that he had done so, nor even considered it, but because he might – no, I cannot comprehend how straight-edged, how razor-sharp and single must the world be to him, that Adam could do it. Had he no regret, no fear that the Pope’s forgiveness paid in advance might not suffice to clear him of it before the Judge?

  Well before sunrise upon the Accession Day, the river was thick with boats of folk going unto Westminster for the Tilts, and others lining the Strand for the great procession, and banners hanging from windows and hawkers selling woodcuts of the Queen, and ballad sellers doing hot trade with new-made songs of Eliza the Fair. As the Queen had growled the night before to the Earl of Leicester, it was as much as her throne was worth to call off the Accession Day sport, and nor would she for a mere riddle in a ballad sheet of a madman. So all of Simon’s haste was set at nought.

  Adam was in his place within the dragon with all his accoutrements, covertly winding up his small crossbow in readiness where it was placed to shoot from the eye, when there came a rapping on the trapdoor. His heart stuttering and his hat over the weapon he opened it to find Sir Philip Sidney smiling up at him, his silver and blue tilting armour burnished to dazzling, holding out a silver flask of wine.

  ‘To warm you, Goodman,’ he said. ‘It will be a long day and I would have you strong for it.’

  At sunrise the firedrake wheeled ungainly from the gates of the Hanging Sword yard, to have its wings better folded and strapped for their passage through Temple Bar. Here Broom, wheezing with excitement and an unhealthy colour of flush on parchment, also looked in at the trapdoor and nodded. Adam smiled at him: it was a thing he did rarely, even as a boy, and it was an easy thing to behold and broke open his sealed face for a moment.

  The horses set themselves in their traces, ridden by a boy in olive green velvet, and began their long trek, turning into Fleet Street and passing through the Temple Bar. Then there was a delay whilst the wings were unfurled and Adam must work at the central winch to be sure they could still flap. Sidney had caused to be removed part of the Fleet Street midden’s overspill, so that he could pass and the horses snorted at the tottering heap of ordure that neither the City of London nor Westminster would remove, it being, as each side insisted, upon the other city’s land.

  And then all went into the Strand at a crawling pace, the joints creaking and Richard Broom dancing between them with oil and tallow to ease them. At Charing Cross they waited for the others in the procession where the final tweaks were made by anxious masters of ceremony, of horses caparisoned as unicorns and a multitude of children being the Children of Discord, marshalled by schoolmasters with hoarse voices and nervous whips. These were the dragon’s allies and after his taming by the Queen, they would fight in her behalf with paper roses.

  There was a minotaur also and harpies, and a great shambling beast made upon carts like the dragon, which was the Beast of the Apocalypse. It was very hairy, having consumed a strange quantity of goats, and foul-odoured, being scented within by burning flowers of sulphur and honey, and had for its head the Pope’s face and crown, with a necklace about it of three sixes to be sure none could mistake it.

  The Beast had been made at St Giles in the Fields and was ridden by Fulke Greville in disguise as the King of Spain. It came with a clashing of cymbals and blowing of bagpipes and comical clownish monks beating each other and singing cod Latin that he and Sidney had made up over a quart of sack. The dragon also had his consort of instruments in a further cart behind, but they were harps and viols although playing untunefully at variance as part of the metaphor.

  When the procession finally went its way down Whitehall towards the vast concourse milling about St James’s Park and the fields near the old lazar house, great shouts were thrown up to see such magnificent sights. Adam was working hard, puffing smoke with bellows out of the dragon’s mouth, flashing the mirror eyes and with his legs working a drum machine from a playhouse for the dragon’s roaring. Now Sir Philip rode up on his fine grey tilting horse, all caparisoned in blue and silver, and his tilting helmet now capped with a dragon enamelled in red. The crowd roared to see him, and the silly maidens in it screamed in a most disorderly way. The music fell silent, and Adam too.

  ‘Fiere is the Dragon of Discord!’ (Loud blowing on trumpets and banging of drums, so Sidney must pitch up his voice a notch) ‘He late hath marred the Kingdom. Shall I ride him?’

  Some in the crowd shouted ‘Yea!’, others shouted ‘No!’ which was not in the script so he ignored them.

  ‘Ye tell me yes. Then I shall essay it!’

  Adam was sweating already in the belly of the dragon. He turned one winch to make the wings flap their red samite and another to move the head. The tail being on the smaller cart behind was moved by a boy hidden underneath.

  Sir Philip Sidney made to climb
up the side of the dragon, but with Adam’s conscientious pulling on ropes and winding of winches was in truth thrown off.

  ‘This drake is too wild for me,’ he cried, and the crowd roared at the pun. ‘Yet will I lead it and hope it shall follow me to one who may tame its mighty rage and humble its uncouth pride.’

  This was done three times in the procession to the Court Gate so all could see it. Fulke Greville had his piece to say also, which he did with a Spanish accent and approval of the Dragon of Discord.

  There in the enclosure were the courtiers who could beg or buy or steal a space sufficient to stand upon and no more, all in their finest broidered velvets and silks. It was many days’ harvest of lilies of the field from St Paul’s, and every shade of colour beginning in black and deepest violet, verging on the treasonous, rising up through cramoisie and crimson, slashed with tawny, now hopping over the rainbow to emerald and viridian with a pause at citron and buttercup, and on through rose and blush and salmon, London Bridge ransacked for blazing finery, even pale peachy cream for those whose skins could withstand it. None dared white, the Queen’s colour. And every cloak was overburdened with small flowers and wildly looping vines, every stomacher engulfed in coloured thread, every sleeve wildly puffed and slashed and pinked, and every chin craned high by a newly starched white or yellow ruff.

  Upon the other side, beyond the smoothly raked tiltyard, stood the common populace of London on rickety stands, shouting and craning and drinking and singing lewd songs back and forth regarding bears and dogs and Eliza the Fair. Uncompared with the lurid brilliance of the Court, they would have seemed a very flower garden of folk.

  Now came the procession down through a lane made by the Queen’s Gentlemen before the Court Gate, with Sir Philip speaking like Stentor: ‘Way there, way for the Dragon of Discord and all his company!’

  Leicester has doubled the guard, I thought. But the Beast of the Apocalypse had lost a pin from the axle and so must stand while a sweating carter pounded in a new one and prayed it would hold. Then went the procession through another gate in the fence to the tiltyard itself where the Queen’s Majesty waited at her accustomed balcony above the yard. It was all fringed with black and white hanging samite, and vines, and speedily wrought silk flowers so it seemed a bower of the Queen of Spring.

  As Proserpine she stood on the dais, a shimmer of white velvet and satin with a single pomegranate worked upon it. Light cast back softly from the creamy pearls and brilliantly from the diamonds and rubies all set about the colours of her kirtle, which were black and white and cloth of gold. There was a jewel upon her breast of the Snake Wisdom and another upon her sleeve of the Pelican, that giveth the blood of its breast to her young.

  Now a boy descended in a basket, dressed as a cherub with golden wings, shivering in the sharp air and his skin staring on him, to orate upon the sorrows of a land beset by the Dragon Discord, whilst Sir Philip dismounted and took off his helmet and then stood before the dragon, head flung back to gaze upon the Queen her beauty.

  She listened as she ever does, with her head on one side and rapt attention on her face, as the boy rambled piping through his speech which had not been made by Sidney and was the worse for it.

  I, meanwhile, went to crawl between the legs of the crowd to fight through them and surprised two cutpurses in the plying of their trade. Both were of Gabriel’s flock, I knew.

  It so happened that Adam also was in straits, for with fear and excitement wrought up tangled in him, along with Sidney’s kindly wine, he longed to piss, and had forgot to bring a bottle with him. He aimed into the silver flask in his haste, and had barely finished when Sir Philip began upon his own speech.

  ‘Alas,’ he said, ‘for this poor realm, not only oppressed by the pride and untameable wrath of this Dragon of Discord, hath also been threatened from without. Here is the Guest Beast, ridden by a Prince of Darkness and all unknowing our Dragon maketh common cause with him, yet all the while loathing. How may we defeat such a Beast that comes against us when Discord rules our hearts? Yea, for is it not in the prophecies of Merlin written that a Dragon shall fight a Beast…’

  The horses drawing the carts, themselves clad in red samite, must pull forward a few paces to allow the Beast of the Apocalypse its place. One lifted his tail and unleashed great copious quantities of manure, for all the drench he and his fellows had been given by Sidney’s horse-coper the day before to empty them out. The other beside him began to stamp, frightened by the glimpses of the hairy beast he caught beyond his blinkers.

  Adam sweated to draw up the moveable part of the dragon’s head to its highest extent, then climbed quickly up inside to where the crossbow was ready nocked with a poisoned bolt, aimed through the firedrake’s eye and now straight at the Queen’s heart.

  He wedges his feet on the ladder to steady himself, draws breath to aim at the woman a few feet from him. But the horses stamp their feet again, snorting: they have seen a thing at last beyond their experience and wisdom, a strange creature bursting from the crowd, a scrawny jumping bundle of sticks wrapped in tawny velvet, a creature with his hair and beard in elflocks and blood streaking his tattered arms and hands where he had scratched them with a nail. It was all I could do, to deny him a firm platform to take aim, to confuse and bedevil his one clear shot at the Queen. What else could I do?

  The horses snort and stamp at the smell of blood and when the creature throws aside a Yeoman and leaps the fence to caper demented before the grave giants of horseflesh, first Jupiter shies and then Titan and Juno, and then all back and start forward together, moving the dragon in jerks, sidling and bumping it and neighing in panic. The nearest to the cart begin to kick backwards at its front board.

  Some of the urchins in the crowd are cheering; the cherub still hanging in his basket and blue with cold clutches the rope and starts to cry, and the head of the dragon sways back and forth.

  Sir Philip sees disaster looming at the comer of his eye: embarrassment, humiliation. The capering lunatic punches a groom that runs up to control the horses, who are now throwing their weights at venture into their collars and are determined to escape, if need be with their burden behind them. Another begins to kick at the traces.

  Dropping half of his carefully composed speech, Sidney launches into its finale.

  ‘And now celestial lady, fair sister to Artemis and Aphrodite, incomparable Queen and most reverend Prince, only vouchsafe to turn your most imperial and beauteous gaze upon this rebellious dragon…’ The crowd laughed at his wry expression, making a comedy of his difficulties, as to say, what can you expect of a Dragon of Discord? ‘…If you will but bend your diamond eyes to his, so his Discord shall be tuned to a sweet harmony by your great glory.’

  The Queen smiled graciously, with a wicked twinkle in the aforementioned eyes, which are not diamond indeed, but snapping and black. After a moment, as the script dictated to Adam, the high swaying head of the dragon lowered and a puff of submissive smoke escaped. In the cart behind, the musicians who had been playing as they pleased and against one another, slid very aptly and gracefully into harmony.

  Sidney smiled sweetly in that moment when all eyes were on the moving dragon and I danced a little incautiously near to him. He took two steps forward, caught Tom’s arm in his mailed fist, and stunned me with a great blow to the side of my head with the other. I could hear the laughter and cheers rolling out of the crowd who had seen as he dropped me down, considerately away from the horses’ hooves, and turned again to mount the steps of his Dragon of Discord.

  ‘Sir Philip,’ called the Queen, leaning over her balcony, ‘must you also fight with Bedlam beggars?’

  ‘Why yes, Your Majesty,’ he answered straightfaced, with his helmet in his hands. She raised her brows severely. ‘For this was a part of the pageant vouchsafed by God, being the Spirit of Unreason and Melancholy, which I have now defeated in fair and knightly combat!’

  The Queen laughed once more and inclined her head as Sidney stood up on the dr
agon’s back and shouted, ‘So end all who trouble the Queen’s Peace!’ The crowd roared.

  LII

  In the finances of the ungodly, Accession Day bulks large. Where there is such a press of people gathered together, there also will be the cutpurses, the nips and foists, and in the alleys for the unwary the footpads. If there had been one there with eyes to see, he would have wondered at the fact that all who mingled with the holiday crowds were of Tyrrel’s party and paid their tithes to him. None of them were the followers of Laurence the King, which must have been a sore loss to him.

  No matter. For a greater gain he was willing to take such a loss. Pickering himself was at the front rank of the common folk who watched the Tilts, raising his voice from a growl to a yell as the knights in their gleaming armour set their horses and charged towards each other, until with the clash at the centre all the audience shouted and cheered. Next to him sat his wife and upon the other side her sister and beside her the hangman of London in festive dress of red with little skulls to be his buttons.

  Behind them all in the city, round about a large house not far from Old Fish Street, was a gathering of his men, and at their head Becket that had been so busy for the past few days. In one fist he held a shotted dag with the wheel-lock ready wound, in the other a broadsword, and behind him were three men with crossbows likewise wound up tight, ready to fire.

  The first of Tyrrel’s men to fall to their bolts were his guards upon the door. Then up came four big men with a small swinging ram that had been practising in an old house of Pickering’s to break the door down. Axes thudded into the wood of the back door and Pickering’s raiders were into the house and piling up the stairs, Becket roaring at their head.

  It was Tyrrel’s affectation that he had no need ever to leave his house with the Watch in his pay and his partisans all about him: but to a fierce frontal assault at a time when all the apprentices were out of the city to see the sport and the Watch likewise, to this he had no answer. The fighting boiled through the house and fat Tyrrel swept up his dagger and launched himself into it, but Becket took his aim coolly and shot him dead.