by Whyte, Jack
Thinking such thoughts, I made my way slowly back to my father's day quarters in the gathering dusk. It did not cross my mind that my father had not denied Frotto's taunts, as my mother had; I had too many other thoughts to occupy my mind. Because of the shame and humiliation I had already brought upon myself that day, I was convinced that nothing could make matters worse than they already were that afternoon.
My father was still reading when I returned. The broad chart he had been studying earlier, whatever it might have been, was still spread on the table in front of him, but his attention was now focused elsewhere. He was sitting in his huge chair, deep in concentration and whispering to himself as he deciphered the script on a thick wad of paper sheets held stretched between his hands. As I entered the room he finished reading one page and moved it to the back of the pile, and the entire wad sprang back into the tubular shape in which it had been delivered, rolling itself up over his left thumb. He anchored the moved sheet carefully against the others in his left fist and then straightened the bundle again before he continued to read. I could tell from the speed of his whispering that he had already read the script at least once before, for first readings were always slow and hesitant as the eyes and the mind struggled with deciphering the written words and separating them from each other, trying to make sense out of the densely packed mass of characters that covered the paper.
I stood patiently until he reached a natural stopping point, when he released the right edges of the missive again and allowed it to snap back into shape before he rolled it tightly and slid it back into the leather tube in which it had come to him.
"That's better," he grunted in my direction. "You look more like your mother's son now. How do you feel? Are your hands sore?"
"A little," I admitted, and he placed the leather tube carefully on the table.
"Aye, well, they will be for the next few days, I suspect. Come."
He led me from the room and past his guards, along the stone- flagged passageway to the wide, curving staircase of hand-carved steps that led up to the King's Quarters, where our whole family lived in a sumptuously appointed privacy that was unique in the kingdom. These quarters, elaborate and grand, formed the official center of the fortified castle and had been built for a Roman procurator more than a hundred years earlier, when this region had been one of the most prosperous provincial centers in the Empire. The broad, shallow stairs swept grandly upwards to a deep and spacious oval landing facing three tall and imposing doorways, the central one slightly taller and wider than those on either side, its double doors of dark, polished wood more elaborately carved. The doorway on the right was the entrance to the King's bedchambers, and its double doors opened into a suite of four large rooms, two of which were bedchambers, while the others were a living room and a private bath house for the sole use of the King and his wife. The imposing central doors concealed our opulent official reception rooms, the third and farthest of which was a private dining room that could seat upwards of fifty people in comfort and was built directly above the main kitchens on the ground floor. The third set of doors, to the left, led to what had originally been sleeping quarters for important visitors and imperial guests and now served the rest of our family—a long row of sleeping cubicles for myself and my siblings, with an extra common room, all of which opened off the left of a long passageway that ran along the wall of the central reception hall.
"Wait here."
I remained obediently on the landing as my father entered his own rooms, closing the massive doors behind him and leaving me to wonder idly what was going on. I let my gaze fall to the familiar colors on the floor beneath my feet, illuminated by dim, late- afternoon light from a narrow, open skylight far above my head. I slid the toe of one shod foot over the tiny bright mosaic tiles that formed an enormous and intricately worked oval depiction of the Chi-Rho symbol of the Christian Church. My mother had commissioned this work years earlier, when I was still a crawling tot, engaging the services of a brilliantly gifted artisan named Polidorus who traveled all the way from Antioch in Asia Minor to design and install the floor over the course of three years. I could still recall the rapt awe with which, as I grew older, I had watched the old man work, meticulously selecting tiny square fragments of polished stone—he called them tesserae—from the piles of red, white and blue. He would place them effortlessly but with great precision so that, from day to day, the picture he was creating grew in size and complexity. It had been endlessly fascinating to me to wonder how the old man would be able to fill the shrinking work space to perfection, completing the design with squares of stone so that the irregular, shapeless and rapidly dwindling space would be filled without obvious flaws to indicate where he had left off working. For every stone he set in place diminished the open area remaining for his work, and I was incapable of seeing how he would reduce the ragged, asymmetrical work area that remained so that it would eventually accommodate and accept exactly, at the very last, one final, perfect square of stone. But flawless he had been to the last, so that nowadays, although I knew the approximate position of the final tessera he had set in place, I found myself unable to identify the spot.
Alone on the landing, gazing at the floor, I became aware of the silence surrounding me. There were no guards up here. Only when King Ban was receiving guests and envoys did he station guards at these doors, more for display than for security, and even then my mother disapproved. These were her quarters, too, and she saw no need for guards. In truth, there were many things for which my mother saw no need—frequently to the great frustration of my father, I knew—and one of those was concern over the opinions that other people held of her. She was a conscientious and committed Christian, and that alone set her apart from the majority of the people whom her husband ruled and governed, as Christianity was something of a novelty among the pagan folk who peopled our land.
It amused and delighted my mother that the people around us thought her both unnatural and magical. Her Christianity they could take in stride, although they might wonder at it among themselves, but they truly believed she was a faery creature: a water sprite, a supernatural being whose true element was water and who lived as easily beneath the surface of the lake, communing with the spirits there, as she did on land by day, where she mixed with normal folk. They called her the Lady of the Lake, and although others assumed that this name derived from our castle's position on the shores of the lake the Romans called Genava, they knew within themselves what the name really signified, and they smiled at the foolishness of others. They knew all about my mother and her strangeness, our local folk, for my mother's magic was that she could swim, and she did so as easily and naturally as did a fish, for the sheer pleasure it gave her.
But what our people saw as strange and unnatural was perfectly straightforward and unremarkable in lands not much farther to the south and west. My mother had learned to swim as a child, on a long-ago visit to the imperial island of Capri in the Middle Sea when she and her mother had been privileged to accompany her father on official business for the Emperor Honorius. For an entire summer there, in the warm, pellucid waters surrounding the beautiful island, she swam every day and developed a lifetime love of the pleasures of swimming underwater, marveling at the beauties that abounded there. The waters of our lake of Genava were far colder than those of the Middle Sea, but such was my mother's love of being underwater that she had grown inured to the discomforts of our more northerly climate and plunged into the lake every year as soon as the chill temperature grew bearable in summer. Once begun then, she swam every day, sometimes for hours on end, stopping with great reluctance only when autumn was far gone and the winds and frosts of each new approaching winter threatened to bring ice.
To our local people, such behaviour was incomprehensible. They had a passing familiarity with hot-water bathing, thanks to their hundreds of years of association with the ruling Romans, but even that activity seemed alien to them. They themselves simply did not bathe, in the sense of immersing them
selves in water, hot or otherwise. Bathing, voluntary self-immersion, was madness to them, since no one could breathe in water without drowning. By that logic, therefore, swimming in the open waters of a vast lake demonstrated complete insanity, or, alternatively, it endowed the swimmer, my unique and beautiful mother, with supernatural attributes. People chose to believe the latter, because they could see in their daily dealings with her that the Lady Vivienne was as sane as they were. Besides, the alternative explanation provided rich fodder for their imaginative murmurs and whispering over the long winter nights.
And so my mother was perceived and talked about as a water- sprite, which caused her great amusement and enabled her to go about her life as a conscientious Christian wife and mother without being concerned that her true beliefs might attract unwelcome attention. That reluctance to be noticed as a Christian was no empty fear, because outside the primary Roman spheres of influence—the towns and fortifications throughout the province—Christians were few, and because they had a reputation for meek submissiveness in turning the other cheek to aggressors, they made easy targets for predators. Tales of slaughtered, robbed and despoiled families of Christians were commonplace, although such depredations were usually carried out by strangers or wandering bandits, rather than by any of my father's people. On the whole, the ordinary people of our lands were pagan in their beliefs, but not savage; a large proportion of them were completely godless, but the remainder shared their worship, when they did worship, among an entire pantheon of gods imported over the ages from all parts of the far-flung Empire.
King Ban was Christian, too, of course, as were we all, his sons and daughters. But even at the age of ten I knew that Ban's was a nominal Christianity, held and observed more to please his wife than to save his soul. Left to himself and living his life as King Ban of Benwick, nominal vassal to whatever sub-emperor might be in power at any given time, my father was a responsible warrior king first, an administrative imperial official next, and a working Christian last and least.
As these thoughts of my father filled my mind, the door opened and he stepped out halfway, looking at me with one eyebrow raised.
"Come," he said, and stepped back inside, holding the door open for me. I entered the long lamp-lit hallway that I had not seen in more than two years and stood there, blinking, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. My father walked directly towards the brightness spilling from the room at the far end, and I trailed behind him, glancing at each of the doors on my right as I passed.
The first, I knew, concealed a deep, narrow storeroom lined with shelves, and the second led to the family's private bath house. I also knew that behind that door, at the end of a short, narrow passageway, hung double floor-to-ceiling curtains of heavily waxed cloth that contained the steam and moisture from the baths and prevented it from spilling out into the passageway. The next room was my parents' sleeping chamber, containing an enormous bed, framed in dark, richly polished wood and surrounded by curtains of the finest, most diaphanous cloth made by the nomads of Asia Minor. My mother would be in there, I assumed, but the thought had barely entered my head when I saw her instead peering anxiously towards me from the room my father had just entered, the family room at the end of the hallway.
This spacious room was the heart of their private quarters, and it was filled now with the evening light that shone through the hundreds of small, translucent rectangles of colorless glass in the high, arched windows in the outer wall. There were six hundred of these glass panels—I had counted them many times—all uniform in size and held in place by a mesh of lead strips, and they were the wonder of all our land. People marveled at them, I knew, because I had often heard them speaking of their beauty and speculating on the cost of them. They were unimpressive from the outside, looking up at them, but the light that poured through them during the day transformed the room's interior in a manner that seemed magical.
As I stepped into the room, I lost awareness of all else as my attention became focused instantly on my mother's distress. Her face looked gaunt and distraught, her eyes deep set and haunted, but she did not appear to be angry at me, and I felt an instant of selfish relief. She seemed afraid, more than anything else, and that frightened me in turn, for I could not imagine what kind of terror might have frightened her here, in her own castle, with her husband by her side and his warriors all around us.
"Mother?" I said, beginning to ask her what was wrong, but the moment I uttered the word she rushed to me and drew me into the kind of enveloping embrace she had not shared with me since I had entered training as a warrior. Her hand clasped behind my head and drew me to her bosom and her other arm wrapped about my back, pulling me close, so that I felt the womanly softness of her body as I had never been aware of it before, and as she held me I felt her shuddering with grief and heard her anguished sobs above my head. Mystified, I did not know what to do or how to respond and so I simply stood there, letting her crush me to her until I felt my father's hand gripping my shoulder, pulling me away. As I obeyed and stepped back, I saw that he was grasping both of us, one in each hand, prizing us apart.
"Enough, Vivienne," he said, and his voice was gentle. "The boy's unhurt. A few scrapes, no more than that. Nothing that will not heal and disappear within the week." I saw him wince, as though in pain himself, as he uttered the last words, and I understood immediately that he wished he had not said them. My mother groaned and swung away from his now gentle grasp, catching her breath in her throat and turning her back on both of us. My father looked from her to me and shook his head tightly in what I recognized, even at ten years of age, as frustration with the behaviour of women.
"Sit down," he said to me, pointing to one of the room's large padded armchairs, and then he slipped his arm about my mother's waist and murmured something to her that I could not hear. She sniffed and fumbled for the kerchief in her sleeve and then, wiping her eyes, she permitted him to lead her to a couch, where she sat staring at me for long moments until fresh tears welled up into her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
"Vivienne." There was a warning tone to my father's voice, and she looked up to where he stood beside her, watching her.
"Must we, Ban?" Her voice was plaintive, beseeching him.
"Yes, we must. Now."
Both of them turned their eyes on me then, and I spoke through the panic that had been building in my breast since this strange behaviour began. "What is it. Father? Mother, what's the matter, what's wrong?"
"Nothing. Nothing is wrong, Clothar—not in the way you mean." My father perched on the arm of Mother's couch and leaned slightly to rest one hand lightly on her shoulder, his thumb moving soothingly against her neck. "I said something to you earlier today, when you first came to me, about your age. You were ten, I said, more than halfway along towards manhood. Do you remember?"
I nodded.
"And then I asked you if you thought you would ever make a decent man." He was looking intently at me now. "I had never doubted that you would, until I heard that report from Chulderic today, and your explanation satisfied any doubt I had then. You will be a fine man when you are grown, and you are growing quickly. You have the makings of a warrior and a king, both. Any father would be proud to have you as a son."
He glanced down to where his thumb still stroked his wife's neck, comforting her. My mother had stopped weeping and sat gazing at me, and I frowned in puzzlement at what my father had said—not about his pride but about having the makings of a king. I was the youngest of five sons, with little chance of ever becoming King of Benwick, and I had known and accepted that all my life. Mine would be a warrior's life, but not a king's.
"This fool, Frotto . . . Your mother told me earlier today, while you were at the baths with Lorio, that you came to her three years ago, when he first began taunting you. She told you then he was lying, but she said nothing to me at the time, thinking it was no more than a boys' spat and would pass." He glanced sideways at my mother, who showed no reaction but stared stead
fastly at me. "I am not displeased over that. I might have said and done the same things, at that time, had I been faced with the dilemma you presented to her.
You were left to deal with Frotto's bullying for three years, but that's a normal thing that all boys have to undergo, in one form or another."
I felt myself frowning at him now. He saw my confusion and rose to his feet, sighing deeply and expelling the air noisily through pursed lips. "Damnation, boy, you understand nothing of what I'm saying, do you?" He did not expect an answer and moved away, pacing the length of the floor three times before he spoke again, and by the time he did, nameless terrors were clawing at my guts.
He approached and stood directly in front of my chair, holding out his right hand palm downwards in the ancient, imperious gesture that demanded fealty and obedience. I leaned forward and took his hand in both my own, feeling the calluses of his weapons- hardened palm.
"Time for truth, boy. Time to grow up, to leave childhood behind and face the world of men. Do you fear me?"
I shook my head, wide eyed. "No, Father."
"Do you doubt my love for you as a son?"
"No."
"Good, so we are as one on that. In all respects save one, you are my son, and I am proud of you."
