King's Blood (14 page)

“Then I'll die,” William said.

It was tempting—so much so that Anselm crossed himself, here in the world of nightmare, and resolved to do penance when he was in the world of the living again. Even to save his own peace, he could not let a man die.

Years ago he had learned to walk the paths of dream, to find his way from the depths to the waking world. Some of that skill remained; he had made use of it in prayer, when he meditated on the nature of God. It was painful to turn it to this irretrievably secular use.

He made of this place a house of many rooms, a palace of memory. Down its familiar passages and its steps of reason and logic, he led the king. William followed in silence. What he saw, if he could see anything, Anselm neither knew nor cared.

The light drew slowly closer. Each door that opened, opened on a larger and airier room. William had begun to drag at Anselm's hand, weighing like a stone. Anselm set his teeth and trudged onward.

The outer gate rose wide and tall. Anselm had not built it so. In his memory it was a wall of glass that would melt away before the waking world. This was the gate of a stronghold, with portcullis and drawbridge, and no doubt a moat.

Such sorrow it must be to be a king. Or was it simpler and more terrible than that? Was this what it was to be William the Bastard's child?

Anselm was forgetting discipline and losing strength to distraction. He forced his mind into focus. William's weight of reluctance had slowed him almost into immobility.

One more step. One more, and they would both be safe. It was no great distance; the gate was already growing transparent, and he could almost see mortal light beyond it. And yet it was the most difficult step that had ever been. Even the thought of it was daunting.

William had turned to ice and stone. Anselm could let him go. It would have been terribly easy.

Ease had never been his virtue. He set his whole will and as much of his body as could reach into this place, and heaved William out into the light.

 
The king lay weak and pale, but he was awake and alive. He had not spoken in the day and night since he came out of his Otherworldly fever.

Anselm was still there. People were not asking questions. The human will was an odd thing, and human understanding could alter itself to fit the world however it chose. For all Anselm knew, a shade of himself had shown itself in Bec, then departed in the direction of England. The Lady Cecilia was thorough and altogether ruthless.

He had found a place among the clerks, with decent light, ink, parchment, and freedom to do as he pleased. The nature of God that had so preoccupied him in Bec was slipping away here in Gloucester. Small weird beings kept flitting in through the window above his head and dangling from the rafters.

They were as pestilent as gnats. They fed on magic, and basked in it; the greater it was, the more of them there were to plague one's peace. Here in Britain they were larger and more solid than they were in Gaul—as if this troubled country bred them to be stronger.

He had no desire to study the nature of the fey. He was a theologian, not a magus.

As if the thought had brought him, one of the king's long-curled pages appeared beside Anselm's lectern and bowed extravagantly. “Good Father,” he said, “his majesty begs that you attend him.”

Anselm wondered how much begging there actually had been. He saw no purpose in refusal, although the fey were swarming about his head. The boy seemed oblivious to them, though how he could be, Anselm could not imagine. They were buzzing like bees.

He quelled the urge to swat them, tidied his lectern, pinched out his candle, and laid his pens away with care. The page shifted from foot to foot. An impatient servant of a less than patient master—Anselm sighed. Sweet heaven, what this world was coming to.

He was no more pleased by what he saw on his way to the king's chamber. Rain had set in before dawn; now, at midmorning, it was a drumming downpour. Courtiers who would have been out riding or hunting or practicing at arms were hanging about in the hall and the corridors. As if to mock the dimness of the day, they had put on their most extravagant plumage: silks and furs, jewels and gold.

The fashion for long curled hair had conquered this realm. So had another and even more pernicious madness. Anselm passed by it twice on his way to the king: lovers entwined in corners. One pair was kissing passionately. The other looked to be doing rather more than that. Which was not an uncommon sin among courtiers—but there was not a woman among them.

Anselm's teeth set. The sooner he answered the king's summons, the sooner he could win leave to go. Then he would shut himself up in Bec, with wards far stronger than those which Cecilia had penetrated with such contemptuous ease, and not even the Lord Pope would lure him out again.

She was there in the king's bedchamber, side by side with another black-clad woman. A tall young man stood by the bed—a guard, though ranked high. He was dressed like a nobleman of considerable wealth. That, thought Anselm, must be the notorious sheriff's son, fair Robin as rumor called him.

He was neither as effete nor as visibly dissolute as Anselm might have expected. He had the look of a fighting man, but the eyes that rested on Anselm were bright with intelligence—and something else.

They were all sorcerers here, all but the king. He was lying with his eyes shut, but Anselm could feel that he was awake. He looked like a well-preserved corpse: hair and beard unnaturally bright, skin greyish-pale. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes hollow.

Still, he was alive. He spoke clearly enough, a strong man's voice out of that image of death. “I owe you thanks. You saved my soul.”

“It was my duty, Majesty,” Anselm said.

William's eyes opened. They were blue—not faded silver as they had been before. “You do your duty well.”

“I am sworn to obedience,” Anselm said.

The corner of William's mouth twitched upward. “Are you now?”

Anselm's back tightened between the shoulder blades. There was a purr in those words—a rumble of satisfaction. Anselm could feel the bars of the cage closing in, even as a pair of monks glided into the room.

They bowed low to the king and lower to Anselm. Anselm looked in a kind of despair at what they carried. Cope and miter and crozier, and on a silken napkin a ring that gleamed with gold and amethyst.

“My lord,” the king said. His sister lent him her arm, shifting him and banking him with pillows until he sat nearly upright. “Duty calls. You will obey.”

“I will not—” Anselm began.

The monks were large men, broad of shoulder, with muscles honed by long hours in their monastery's fields. Their grip on Anselm was light but firm. Soft hands laid the cope on Anselm's shoulders and set the miter on his head.

He clenched his fists against the crozier and the ring, but the monks were relentless. They pried at his right fist. He resisted with all his strength—though the pain of aging joints and merciless prying brought him near to tears. For a moment as he met those cold eyes, he knew they would break his hand if they must—but they settled for pressing ring and crozier to it. The metal of both burned his skin like ice.

He glared into the eyes of the two ladies. Cecilia he knew too well. The other he knew not at all—and yet he felt in her a deep familiarity.

“Another age,” she said in a low sweet voice. “Another lifetime. You were always contrary, my old friend and enemy. But the gods will have their way.”

“There is no god unless it is God,” Anselm said grimly.

“What, are you a Saracen?” She was laughing at him. “That is their profession of faith, as near as makes no difference.”

“I am a man of God,” he said, “and I will not—”

“Duty binds you,” William said.

“You cannot force this on me,” Anselm said—struggling against his captors and doing his best to wriggle out of the cope. But even the miter refused to shift. They were bound to him.

By sorcery, he told himself. Not by his will. “Only Rome can give this honor. Only Rome has the power to—”

“I am the king,” William said, very quiet—and that was alarming in that hot-tempered blustering man. “The Church in my kingdom is in my power and its offices are in my gift. I give you Canterbury. Lanfranc left it to you, more or less, and I was enormously remiss in leaving it vacant for so long.”

Anselm went still, with a quiet that in its way was as ominous as William's. “Why? Why inflict this on me?”

“Because Lanfranc thought you were the best man for it,” William said. “So do these ladies here, and this friend of mine. It's your fate, my lord. Live with it.”

“As you are?”

William grinned. If Anselm had been a timid man or a superstitious one, he would have recoiled. The king's face, just then, looked like a death's-head wreathed in flames.

“I don't know if I'm living with it or not,” William said, “and in any case, unlike a priest, I'm not necessarily bound to practice what I preach.”

Anselm had known William since he was a boy. There had never been much in common between them. William was no scholar, and Anselm had little care for men of the world or men of war. Now, as he stood weighed down by the miter and cope of the primate of all England, he realized that he did not like William at all. Hate was too strong a word for it, and too unChristian in any case. But there was no love there, and as for liking, however deep he delved inside himself, he could find none.

William laughed. Anselm had never taken him for a perceptive man, but it seemed he could read his new archbishop as easily as Anselm could read words written on a page. “Buck up, man,” the king said. “You'll be good at it—and it doesn't take love to make a marriage work. Rather the contrary, your fellow priests might tell you. Love and lust are incompatible with the sacred institution and bondage between two well-propertied people.”

“Bond,” said Anselm with gritted teeth. “Not bondage. Bond.”

“I know what I meant,” William said sweetly. “You leave for Canterbury tomorrow. Your new see is waiting anxiously for you. Today, I'm sure, you'll want to do all you can to make yourself familiar with it.”

“You will regret this,” Anselm said. It was not a threat. It was a plain fact.

“Probably,” said William with no sign of dismay. “Welcome to the Island of the Mighty, my lord. May your tenure here be long, prosperous, and full of the gods' blessings.”

Anselm bowed, stiff-backed. His guardian monks were still beside him, watching him with steady, implacable stares. So too were the silent ladies and the king's catamite. The lines of those stares shaped the dimensions of a cage.

There was no hope of flight. He crossed himself and laid aside, with grim effort, the anger that threatened to blind him. “Thy will be done,” he said—but not to the ferociously grinning king, and certainly not to any pagan god.

CHAPTER 16

Edith's knees were aching. She had been kneeling in chapel, it seemed, forever. All the novices were there, doing penance for a terrible sin: Aldith and Ethelfleda had escaped to the town, left their veils behind, and—most appalling on a fast day—indulged mightily in sweets and meat pasties. The sinners had been flogged as well as condemned to kneel on the stone floor between matins and vespers; the rest were held at fault for having failed to prevent the escape.

Edith would have been tempted to run away herself if she had not already been sinning—but no one had ever caught her. She slipped between shadows into the Otherworld, where only Sister Cecilia could follow. In fact she had been there for much of yesterday, while the sisters all thought her elsewhere being dutiful. She had come back to a great outcry and the capture of the culprits, and Mother Abbess' wrath upon their heads.

Aldith was weeping and shaking; she had always been a delicate thing. Edith was rather astonished that she had run away; she had never seemed rebellious. Ethelfleda on the other hand had been a difficulty ever since she came to the abbey the year before—dragged behind her father's horse, screaming and cursing every step of the way. She had no calling whatever to this life, and she openly hated every moment of it.

She was courting expulsion: she made no secret of that. Edith reckoned she would succeed—if not this time, then soon enough. She was stiff and erect now, far more proud than ashamed. Even Mother Abbess' rod had not been able to bow those shoulders.

It was a long day for thinking. Edith had been counting the years in days and weeks: six years within these walls, with a letter from her mother now and then, and from her father never. She was not as young a child as she had been. Under the grey sack of the novice's habit, her body was changing: growing tall and long-legged like a yearling foal, and finding shape in places that had never had it before.

Other things were happening, too. Her magic was changing. It was rooting deeper inside her. Her body was waking as if from a winter's sleep.

If she had been a simple novice of the abbey, she would never have known what was becoming of her. But in the Otherworld, people were different. Those who were human or nearly were given to smiling when they saw her, and observing that she would be a woman soon. “Then you'll dance in the Beltane fires,” they said.

Those were a thing that the Christians had forbidden with a great thunder of denunciation. They were most well versed in that. But the fires would burn in spite of them. The Old Things and the humans who knew them would dance the dances and sing the songs, and those who were minded would leap the fires and run away together into the welcoming dark, two by two.

Edith knew fairly sensibly what they did there. She had seen animals mating, and heard servants talking when she was small. She had heard them doing other things, too, up in haylofts or hidden away in corners.