Shield of Three Lions (18 page)

Everyone went wild, cheering and tossing pieces of clothing, clinking tankards. Dagobert and I watched, still perplexed, for the frenzy went far beyond students’ causes. Suddenly we were both enclosed by two black-clad arms and hugged to Giselle’s soft body.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she boomed.

“What’s happened? What’s all the excitement?” Dagobert asked.

“King Henry’s dead! Richard is now King of England!”

And I fainted.

WHEN I REVIVED I WAS LYING UNDER a tree with my head in the lap of the girl who’d been singing, Berthe. Behind her stood Fat Giselle and Dagobert, the dappled sunlight swaying over their bodies and making me feel sick so that I closed my eyes again. In the distance I could still hear the roistering crowd and knew we were somewhere in the villa. I wanted my mother.

“I think he’s conscious,” Berthe said. “Alex, can you hear me?”

She touched my cheek and I turned away fitfully, not wanting to wake, not wanting those awful words to be repeated. Oh, what would become of me? How would I ever retrieve Wanthwaite?

I knew that Giselle had knelt next to me, by the strong smell of her rosewater.

“Come on, boy, you’ll be all right. You’re not hurt. Drink this.”

My eyes closed, I sipped a burning liquid.

“Go back to your friends, Dagobert. Berthe and I can look after Alex.”

There was no escape: I must wake. Berthes lavender eyes protected me tenderly and she smiled. Fat Giselle, too, appeared much softer than she had when haggling with the student. It wasn’t really fair to call her fat, though she was buxom, but she was also shapely and quite attractive. Her large brown eyes were friendly as a cow’s, her skin dewy white, her mouth wide and turned down at the corners, her black tunic cut shamefully low to her nipples and her straight dark hair clipped at her neck.

“My, my, aren’t you a luscious apricot,” she crooned. “My, my, I’ve never seen a boy more beautiful. Berthe, look at that skin, the eyes. Do you have all your teeth, Alex?”

I nodded, feeling the blood flow back to my face.

Berthe smiled. “’Tis almost a shame to waste such glory on a boy.”

“Boys have their uses too,” Fat Giselle answered.

I sank dreamily into the warm liquid of memory: how nice to be with females, how sweet their voices, how kind their flesh. The courtyard cries faded into the distance; there were only the gold-edged elm against a cerulean sky and women doting on me.

Fat Giselle stroked my cheeks. “Roses are blooming again. You’re feeling better, aren’t you, honey-pot? Would you like to talk now? Dagobert said you came to learn about King Henry.”

The elm blurred into puddles of green; I turned my face against her bosom.

The women were silent as I listened to the solid thump of Fat Giselle’s heart; then Berthe asked me gently if I’d like to look at their menagerie: they had apes, a bear and a cat from Africa big as a dog. I nodded and struggled to my feet. Fat Giselle scrutinized me carefully from head to foot as if I were a prize horse; she turned my face this way and that, lifted my hair to see my ears, pulled my upper lip to
count my teeth, ran her hands along my sides, e’en sniffed my skin. I was repelled but not offended by her odd inventory for it seemed so impersonal. Yet she lost her motherly kindness by her acts; I now noticed heavy bulges under her smudged eyes, hard lines around her mouth, a brisk professionalism in her hands. Berthe, however, remained the same.

She chatted as we began to move. “You’re in Zizka’s school for jongleurs, you know, and his animals are trained by Tue-Boeuf and his wife Pax.”

She spoke as if I should know Zizka, but I couldn’t recall him from the Petit Pont.

“Who’s Zizka? What’s a school for jongleurs?” I asked shyly.

Berthe explained that Zizka was a Bohemian, the topmost jongleur (that is, performer) in France, oft appearing before royalty. He was the first to receive love songs (
trouvères
) from the south writ by famous troubadours and he introduced them to cultivated people everywhere. Furthermore he knew all the heroic tales (
chansons de geste
), including the most recent rage, the stories of King Arthur and his Round Table. He had a legendary library of manuscripts. Would I like to see it? I nodded.

All the time Berthe talked, I was aware that Fat Giselle continued her appraisal of my person and I wondered—though without too much concern—if she’d discovered that I was a girl. I was also aware that King Henry had died, but I wasn’t yet prepared to confront the hideous fact.

The library was housed in a large cottage, which also served as home for Zizka though he wasn’t there at present. I’d never seen so many leather-bound volumes assembled in one place and wondered if this Zizka was a sorcerer. I doubted that even Magister Malcolm had such a collection.

Berthe pointed. “Those are the
chansons de geste
, but Zizka claims that their day is finished which I hope is true, for they inspire war. I much prefer the songs from the south; love is a sweeter subject than war, don’t you think? My father was Papiol, you see.”

Before I could inquire who Papiol was, Fat Giselle asked me abruptly if I could sing.

“Aye,” I said uncertainly, not sure what the question imported. Certes I could sing Christian responses and the Celtic lays my mother had taught me. If she meant could I sing
well
, I would have had to confess that I was not so gifted as Berthe. Yes, I decided, not too well, but loud, forsooth.

We went back into the sunlight to look at a bear called Belle-Belle, a friendly beast but treacherous. Pax, the lady handler, was teaching it to appear more fierce than it was.

Although the menagerie was diverting, I was more intrigued by the human activities around me. A family of midgets was practicing a balancing act on a pile of straw and though they hadn’t far to fall, being so small, ’twas a dangerous activity. More alarming was a woman dancing on a high rope with no straw below to protect her. She had the darkest skin I’d ever seen, a huge mane of crisp black curls and performed with an utter disdain for safety or modesty, for we could see straight up her flashing skirts.

“That’s Dangereuse,” said Fat Giselle.

“An appropriate name,” I said wittily.

“So we thought when we gave it to her, though we’d not seen her on the ropes then, but it suits her in all ways. Her Gitano name is unpronounceable.”

So far all I’d seen had charmed me, but now I noticed disturbing practices on my left, people twitching almost as Dagobert did.

Fat Giselle caught my frown. “Those are Jobelins. You remember Job, patron of thieves. Look you how cleverly they can dissemble. Those applying sores and tumors are Pietres; it takes years to learn to hobble convincingly. Behind them, the Sabouleux have soap in their mouths to simulate froth; the Francs-Mitoux are trying falls for they faint in public places. These profitable arts pass largely through families, but other deceits can be learned by any honest applicant, how to forge documents for example, or various hoaxes such as pretending to be robbed. The variations are as many as there are fools to believe them.”

The offhand smugness of her words belied their evil and at first I heard them as from afar. Then suddenly my ears and my conscience
came unplugged together, as if I were rising from water, and I recoiled in horror.
Benedicite
, I must leave at once!

“Where’s Dagobert? I have to get back to my brother,” I said.

Hands of iron gripped my arm. “Soon. Only first we must talk of why you came.”

“There’s really no need, now that—” and I managed the awful words—“King Henry’s dead.”

But I was forced to go to her upper chamber with her as Berthe stayed below, forced to say that I was carrying a message from my dead father—but if the king was dead, that was that. Naturally I didn’t feel so resigned, but I was desperate to leave. It was time for Enoch to be home.

“Why King Henry?” Fat Giselle offered me a cup which I refused. “Why not King Richard?”

“I know naught of King Richard,” I said uneasily. “Some of my family fought with King Henry, you see; he would have remembered us.”

She raised skeptical brows. “Old Henry had many soldiers in his time. Surely Richard would appreciate the message just as much, perhaps more. He’s a very noble person, Richard of Poitou, Eleanor’s son through and through.”

I stared at the black drapes swaying behind her in the faint breeze, trying to adjust to this new circumstance; my father’s words had been so explicit, so positive about King Henry. I’d never dared tell Enoch that my own father had been with the expedition which had captured Scotland’s king for Henry, the very day after Henry had done penance for killing Thomas à Becket. Feeling the victory was a sign of God’s approval, the old king had been so jubilant that he’d declared a national holiday and sent commendations to each English nobleman personally who’d been in the field, the parchment I now carried. Surely Richard would be unimpressed by such news since he’d fought his own father. But personal considerations aside, would he honor England’s law and restore Wanthwaite even so?

Giselle interrupted my reverie, almost as if she’d read my mind. “King Richard will be a most gracious monarch, you’ll find. All new
kings work to redress the wrongs of the old; it’s to their advantage to appear beneficent in comparison to what went before.” She stood and paced, paused to play with my hair. “Of course I know not your business with the king, but I can tell you this, Alex:
I can get you a private audience with him, that I promise!
Zizka will be sending a message to Ambroise soon; be sure you’re ready if you want to be included. I’ll take you to Zizka now if you like.”

“Ambroise?” I hedged.

“Richard’s official troubadour, Zizka’s oldest friend.”

“I—I’ll have to think about it. There are—things,” I trailed miserably.

Her eyes, cowlike no longer, burned into mine.

“Think it over, but don’t take too long and don’t deceive yourself that there’s another way. No small boy with a message about Henry will reach King Richard, I can assure you, for the new king must get his kingdom settled and leave on his Crusade. Only those critical to his grand project will have audience. This is a rare turn in Fortune’s Wheel for you, my pigeon.”

She spoke with chilling authority and though I sensed both sin and crime in her person far beyond what I’d seen or learned of in Malcolm’s class, I believed her.

“Thank you, you’re—very kind. I’ll let you know,” I muttered. “Now, could you please take me to Dagobert?”

I thought on her words all the way home, sinking more and more into a melancholy slough that turned my liver cold. With Henry, all my hopes for recovering Wanthwaite had died as well. My mind ran through one dark labyrinth after another but found no exit.
Benedicite
, King Henry had been hard enough to chase, and now I was told that King Richard would be impossible, what with his Crusade to the Holy Land which might last years. And then what quality of king was he? Sister Petronilla hadn’t liked Henry, of course, but my father had; I’d try to learn all I could of Richard, though I came back to the undeniable point that it would avail me nothing to know his character if I was never able to see him.

Of what might happen if I never returned to Wanthwaite, I dared not think.

AT FIRST I DIDN’T CONSIDER ACCEPTING FAT GISELLE’S offer to help me. Soothly I didn’t trust her kindness and wondered how such a fleshy trollop had gained access to a great king. Yet a strange thing happed: once I’d actually met with the hussy I seemed to hear “Fat Giselle” on everyone’s lips and all of it good. Of course most of the gossip came from students who were not famous for their fine moral discrimination, but anyway they thought she was Queen of the Universe because she’d formerly been a Goliard wandering from one master to another and had accumulated most of the knowledge of this world. In any case, she might have been a great Latin student once but she’d sunk into a sinful pit.

My resistance to Fat Giselle came to an abrupt end about a week later when the Scots talked openly about Wanthwaite. ’Twas right after a class on testing innocence by ordeal, a subject which stimulated Enoch and his master to a heinous plan. It concerned a single challenger to battle,
which was always on the issue of ownership of land.
Fought on foot or on horseback, the state paid the bill and decided on the methods, and winner take all.

“Do ye believe England would permit a Scot to challenge a Norman?” Enoch asked eagerly.

“Not Henry’s England,” Malcolm drawled. “But Richard’s England will be a kingless England. While Richard is on the other edge of the world, who will go to the marches to adjudicate? Eleanor? Her worthless son, Count John? Many a northern English lord is loyal to Scotland, and this is our time to move.”

Enoch showed surprising modesty. “Of course this Roland de Roncechaux appeared to be a fierce fellow. ’Twill nocht be easy …”

“In which case the clan moves. We’re free now, free at last of the English yoke! By the time Richard returns—if he ever does—’twill be a completed fact.”