Lammas Night (44 page)

Suddenly, he was in another body, looking through another man's eyes. He opened his physical eyes, but he was not seeing the familiar room. He was not even in a room at all.

He stood on a darkened hilltop, his Garter mantle whipping against his ankles in a wind tangy with salt, the heavy velvet almost black in the firelight. His hand was clasped wrist to wrist with Gray's, but both of them wore different faces and different names. At his elbow stood another Garter Knight, also known in both lives, though he could not place the modern one just now.

“Where are you, William?” a low voice asked out of limbo.

He ignored the voice, for that was not his name, and tried to see more clearly what was going on around him. He was masked, as was the other Garter Knight beside him, but the people foregathered on the hillside all around knew them by function and office, even if not by name. The garters bound around both men's knees spoke far more eloquently than words. More important, the assembled folk now knew Francis, flanked by England's chancellor and her lord admiral, for what he was. The royal sanction could not have been more firmly put unless the Queen herself had come to the point above Plymouth Sound.

“William, try to tell me what you're seeing,” came the outside voice again.

But he jerked his head in denial, wishing the voice would leave him alone. He had work to do, things and places to see. Even in his slight irritation at the intrusion, he felt time ripple again.

He closed his physical eyes, but the images still came: kneeling before the Queen to present the gilded sword … the sword set flat-bladed to the shoulders of the man whose link even now kept some part of him anchored in another time.…

William knew the meaning of the garter the Queen dropped that day on the deck of the
Golden Hind
, just as he understood the role laid upon Francis when he picked it up. Like many other men at court, he and Francis had long been students of the occult. Over many a pint of good ale, the two of them had sat and talked of such things well into the night, even as he and Gray had begun to do of late, though in modern terms of cognac, coffee, and cigarettes. His lips curved upward at the memory, savoring the dual flavor of strangeness and familiarity, but he tensed as the scene began to shift again.

The images came more swiftly now, moving steadily backward in time: greeting Francis at the New Year's court earlier that year when the Queen wore the crown of emeralds that her bold captain had brought back from the New World; the day he received his own commission as captain of
her
guard; and his first appearance at court, that Twelfth Night masque nearly twenty years before when he first had caught the Queen's eye.…

But there was no time to dwell on that. With a suddenness that made him gasp, he was plummeting backward again, going even deeper than he had ever been before.

William knew in some shadowed part of himself that he was not really climbing stone steps inside some vast, dim-lit cathedral, but the sensation was so real that his feet twitched under the tartan lap rug, and he shivered with the cold. The winter chill penetrated even the heavy vestments he wore. Ahead of him, carrying a processional cross, walked the young monk who had helped him vest only a few minutes before. It was dusk. Somewhere in the crypts below, voices were chanting the Office of Vespers.

The whole scene was wavering, threatening to slip away before he could read it, but he tried to hold on, sensing that it was important. The effort distracted him, though, and the next clear image he could focus on was of three armed knights approaching him by the steps, naked steel in their hands—and cold stone at his back as he faced men he knew had come to kill him.

Words were exchanged in a strangely accented language he could not quite follow, but the sense was clear enough. All of them, including himself, were following a familiar script. When the men laid hands on him, he made only token resistance, his eyes meeting those of one of the men and seeing Gray's eyes. The rest was lost in the stunning pain of that first sword blow—Gray's blow!—and utterly shattered in the ones that followed.

He clawed his way back to the present and found himself gasping for breath in Gray's arms, rolling his head wildly from side to side but not really seeing. Only gradually did Gray's voice begin to seep through to his terror.

“It's all right, Will! It's all right. Look at me! Focus on my eyes!”

“No! No eyes!” he managed to whisper.

“Then
close
your eyes,” Gray commanded. “Relax. Take a deep breath and let go. It's all right. You're safe. We'll take you down and bring you up slowly. You're all right.”

Still shaking, William managed to draw the ordered breath and obey. He felt relief wash over him like a wave as he sank back on the couch. Gray's hands on his shoulders helped pin him to the present. For what seemed like another lifetime, he listened to Gray's voice soothe and reassure, grounding him back to the here and now, blurring the past memories for gradual remembering, taking away the blind fear.

He was quite calm when Gray finally brought him out, feeling a little silly to have put up such a fuss. As he opened his eyes, Gray was sitting back in his chair and looking as if nothing particularly out of the ordinary had happened. Somehow William knew better.

“Feeling better how?” Gray asked.

Slowly, William drew a long, careful breath and let it out with an audible sigh.

“Yes.”

“Good. Just stay where you are and don't try to get up. I'll be right back.”

Very shortly, Graham returned with a tea tray laden with sandwiches and biscuits. He let William sit up then, but he would not let him stand. He poured strong, sweet tea for both of them and made William drink a cup and eat most of half a sandwich before he would allow him to talk. Graham himself managed to get down a cup of tea and tried nibbling on a biscuit, but food was out of the question. His stomach was only barely tolerating the tea, churning with a sick apprehension over what the prince had seen.

“So, do you think you have both feet firmly back on earth?” Graham asked, trying to keep his voice casual and confident.

“I was that bad, was I?”

“On the contrary. So far as I can tell, you had a devil of a regression—if you'll pardon the expression. Want to tell me about it? You weren't too talkative at the time.”

William gave a derisive snort. “I do seem to remember someone nagging at me to talk. It just seemed like too much of a distraction.”

“Now you know how I felt at Buckland,” Graham replied, managing a wan smile. “You may recall Alix badgering me, trying to get me to stay in touch. I know from experience that it's sometimes unavoidable, but it's a little tough on the operator, who has no way to know what's going on in the subject's head. You must have been working on something very important.”

“I think I was,” William said slowly. “I can't seem to remember the last bit—you know, the part that was so frightening. Did you do that—make me forget?”

“Yes. If you'll start at the beginning, the rest will come back as you're ready. For that matter, you don't have to tell me about
any
of it if you don't want to,” he added, though he had no idea what he was going to say if William
didn't
.

“No, I want to,” William said, to Graham's intense relief. “As a matter of fact, it may help to explain a lot of what's been happening. I think I understand now why I offered you my services as a Garter Knight. I'd done it all before.”

“Oh?”

“I was Hatton, Gray. I knew you when you were Drake.” The prince grinned self-consciously. “Does that sound silly? I don't think I'm just making it up.”

Graham pursed his lips thoughtfully, wondering whether he dared relax a little. Alix had said William might have been one of Drake's Garter Knights. If the prince had been Hatton, it would certainly explain a great deal. Nor was it difficult to check. When he had told William of Hatton's role in his own flashback of Drake and the Garter Knights, he had not given much in the way of detail. He wondered whether William could. At least it would delay the other recall.

“No, I don't think you're making it up, either, William,” he replied. “Why don't you tell me what you saw? Where were you?”

“I was standing with you on a hilltop at night. I could smell the sea.” William's eyes shifted from his and took on a faraway look. “Howard of Effingham was with us, too. He and I wore our Garter mantles—only they were a darker blue than the ones we wear today, almost black. I remember being aware of the garters buckled around our left knees and the fact that we were masked—Howard and I, not you, though everyone knew who we were. I clasped hands with you, wrist to wrist—though maybe that part was from here, because I think I remember twisting my hand around to grab your wrist.”

Graham felt a chill run up his spine, for William was describing precisely what he had seen in that other flashback at Deptford, giving details Graham had not mentioned. He was sure he had never spoken of the masks.

“Go on.”

“Then I was on the
Golden Hind
, watching the Queen knight you,” William continued. “She asked for my sword. I understood what the garter meant, too, even though I was only captain of her guard at the time—but there was more before that. You and I used to talk together after a good meal, just as we do now—and about some of the same kinds of things, too—magic, and such.”

He shook his head, passing one hand over his eyes.

“There was more about my earlier life, too: receiving my commission from the Queen—and the first time she noticed me, when I performed in a court masque at Twelfth Night.…”

He blinked and looked at Graham again, his eyes once more normal.

“Do you think I
was
Hatton, Gray? Did we know one another before, and that's why we've come together this way now? Is that what you started to tell me when you read my horoscope?”

Graham controlled a shiver and poured another cup of tea for each of them, busying his hands with sugar and milk while he tried to think. He was reasonably convinced of the Hatton incarnation now, and that could certainly account for everything William had done so far, but what of the future? What of the other recall, now temporarily blocked?

What of Graham's other lives besides Drake?—Tyrrel and FitzUrse, in particular. Was it possible that William also fit into those, since he fit into Drake's? Who else had William been?

“Well, I don't think there's any question that you were Hatton,” he said, toying with his spoon. “The parallel has been close almost from the beginning. The relationship would even account for what happened at Buckland when I thought you were Selwyn. Incidentally, did you know that even though he and I are absolutely certain we've been linked in past lives, we've never managed to track down who we were?”

“Really?” William looked pleased. “I must be doing better than I thought, then. Maybe there
is
something to this old-line inheritance you keep mentioning.”

Graham wished William had not said that, for the links Graham was worried about had precisely to do with old line inheritances, more literal than even William dreamed. He wished there were some way around it, but he knew he had to ask about the rest of William's recall. Denying it would not make it go away.

“You're doing fine,” he said neutrally. “If you're up to it, how about looking at the rest of your recall, though? I'd like to know what frightened you so. Neither of us has seen anything in the Drake-Hatton relationship to account for that kind of panic.”

“All right.”

William sounded confident, and he did not draw away as Graham reached across to touch his wrist lightly in posthypnotic trigger, but he shivered a little as the memories came flooding back and closed his eyes. After a moment, he looked up at Graham warily.

“Do you remember?” Graham asked.

“Yes. I'm not sure what to make of it, though. I—think you were in it again, only—” He lowered his eyes in confusion. “We weren't enemies, I know that. I think we were friends, or maybe vassal and lord, but you—”

As he broke off, shaking his head, troubled, Graham had a flash of prescience and suddenly
knew
what William was going to describe.

“Why don't you take it from the beginning?” he said softly, hoping desperately that he was wrong. “Tell me the first thing you remember.”

William closed his eyes. “I was a—a cleric of some sort. I could hear voices chanting Vespers as I climbed some steps in a church or cathedral.…”

Instantly, Graham's own memory of the scene came flooding back, seen through the eyes of Reginald FitzUrse as William sketchily described the scene from Thomas Becket's point of view. William, not as experienced at recall, could not bring back as much detail as Graham had—and, indeed, did not even realize whom he was describing, much less the true reason for the killing—but he had been Becket. Graham was as sure of that as he was sure that
he
had been Drake and FitzUrse. Graham had never even mentioned his own FitzUrse and Becket memories to William.

He forced his own stunned suspicions aside and willed himself to listen impassively to the end of William's account. The prince was trembling by the time he finished, shaking his head in denial as he looked for reassurance that it had
not
been Graham who had slain him in that other life, already making up rationalizations to account for what he could not accept.

“Maybe I was dreaming there at the end,” William ventured. “Didn't I read somewhere that one will sometimes shift from a trance into sleep? It's very late, after all, and I'm very tired. You don't think you
really
killed me in a former life, do you?”

Graham drew a cautious breath and did his best to cover his own uneasiness. He was beginning to be afraid he might have done just that, though now was hardly the time to go into details on why. For if he and William had been FitzUrse and Becket, slayer and slain in the sacred ritual, where did that put them now? He no longer doubted that they had been linked in their Drake and Hatton incarnations, but he would like to believe that only that parallel was intended in this life—one recognizing the other, to continue the sacred dance.