The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III (47 page)

He put his hand over his eyes. “How could you not tell Richard?”

“Because I didn’t want to be beholden to him. Just another youthful mishap, a ruined woman. I am not ruined.”

He exhaled, suddenly suspicious, remembering.

“Gods. The times I saw you with him, and thought nothing of it.”

“There was nothing to think.”

“Is that so?”

“He sought my opinion sometimes, though we rarely agreed about anything. We were… friends.”

“Friends? Without no desire for each other? No tender feelings at all?”

Her eyelids fell. She looked away.

“Christ, Kate, tell me the truth! You said you didn’t love him.”

“I’ve tried hard not to. I’ve not been as successful as I hoped.”

“Iesu’s blood. All the time I thought you loved me…”

“I do love you. But Richard is not easy to forget.”

“Is that why you can’t leave each other alone?”

“It’s why he and I are always arguing. And why I’ve not been able to marry you.”

“Then we’ve both had a lucky escape,” he said miserably.

Kate looked levelly at him, without remorse.

“Rail at me, be furious: you’ve every right. But do so later. We have a journey to undertake. You set me aside, so I’m sure you can set your anger aside, for Richard’s sake.”

Something cold hardened inside him. Everything he’d cared about was being stripped away and, strangely, this gave him courage.

“You’re not who I thought you were, Kate. Now I know I was right to part from you.”

“Get up.” She spoke briskly, but her voice trembled. “Here’s my mother.”

He obeyed. Eleanor came through the apple trees, magnificent in a full cloak of blue-black velvet with a hood half-concealing her face. Twilight chilled the sky from gold to grey.

She looked from Raphael to Kate. Her eyebrows lifted. “What has happened?”

Kate gestured helplessly. “He met Robin.”

“I see.”

“I know I should have told him. You warned me often enough.”

“Well. It’s done now.”

“Lady Lytton,” said Raphael. “Forgive me, but after this I can’t go on this journey with you. Perhaps Katherine didn’t intend me to find out until afterwards. I wish it had happened so, because I can’t…”

“Raphael,” Eleanor said gently. “Your distress will pass. You found out now, for a reason: that you’ll need the knowledge upon your journey. Come.”

Raphael looked at her in disbelief.

“Come with me,” Eleanor repeated, not to be disobeyed. “Kate shall stay here, then you won’t be arguing all the way. You and I shall go alone.”

###

The cave of the Cauldron Hollow thrummed with power. Raphael looked around, shivering. Everything was cold and white. The day’s warmth had not penetrated here. He saw the pale arch framing the cave, the flat silver river below, and a perfect opal moon.

Eleanor bade him sit with her by a stump of stone in the cave’s centre. On the stump she set candles, a wreath of nightshade and celandine, and a bowl of dark liquid.

An altar.

Raphael noticed a crude black goddess-figure sitting in her niche in the back wall. Eleanor was no longer Kate’s friendly if regal mother: she was a priestess. She was serious and self-contained; all business. That was reassuring. Fear streamed through him but he watched it from a distance, ready to give himself up to whatever Eleanor required.

“We call upon the protection of the elemental guardians to watch over us on our journey,” murmured Eleanor. “We call upon Auset, Dark Mother of all, to be present. Welcome, Great Mother; blessed art thou. Be our protection and our channel; unlock the mysteries of your faithful son Raphael.”

Candlelight and Eleanor’s words wove a sacred sphere around them. Beyond the cave, the world turned blue.

“Drink,” said Eleanor, passing him the bowl. “Just one mouthful.”

He obeyed. The liquid was foul, thick with bitter herbs and toadstools. Eleanor swallowed without expression, set the bowl down, and reached for his hand.

“Now we fly,” she said.

When he closed his eyes, he was in the hidden world. He was walking a thin precarious path, with mountain flanks falling away on either side. Huge toads clambered about on the rocks around him.

Eleanor began to cry out and shudder, as he’d done when caught in visions of battle. She tried to tear her hands out of his, but he kept hold. She was in the thick of it. From a safe distance, he glimpsed the images that assailed her. She is living it for me, he thought, awed. Now he knew he must follow the path until he met her at the other side.

He came to a fork, not knowing which way to take. Battle raged on either side, seen through layers of mist. He hesitated until the insistence of Eleanor’s grip made him take a step. The way branched again. He was looking at an infinite web of branches, all gleaming with spectral colours.

He was meant to make a choice, and couldn’t. Wordlessly he begged Auset for guidance. All she revealed was that the future would only become clear after he chose a path and set out. And then there would be no turning back.

If I could only stay here, at the centre…

He opened his eyes to see dawn flushing the sky. The candles had melted to stumps. Eleanor was looking at him with dark, tired eyes. He felt as if seven years had passed in seven seconds. The night was almost gone.

“Now I see what you have been enduring,” she said.

She’d taken his torment from him, at least for while. For that, he could have worshipped her. He laughed weakly.

“I understand your distress,” she said sombrely. “The scene was very confusing. One thing I saw clearly, and that was King Richard cut down and slaughtered. Again and again I saw it, and couldn’t help him.”

Raphael dropped his head. “I’m sorry, good mother. I didn’t mean to distress you. But you see, I’m no prophet. I feel I’m seeing thing that have already happened and therefore can’t be changed. Richard is going to die, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Then consider this,” Eleanor said slowly. “Let’s say you are right. These events have already happened, or are happening now; not to us, but alongside us, in a realm we cannot quite touch. Each path divides, and the one we decide to take leaves an infinity of others we can never take. Nor can we cross over, nor see the outcome of a different decision. But you have crossed, and seen things you were never meant to see. And this is… I don’t know. Warning, preparation?”

“Or the gods laughing at me,” he said darkly.

“Or the gods showing you what must happen, because it is what always happens.”

“Are you telling me there’s no hope? Just some ghastly joke, that I’m cursed to see Richard betrayed, slain and reviled after his death? How am I supposed to bear this knowledge?”

“By seeing that all knowledge is a gift. And that the path is not yours to change, dear.”

“Can you tell me any more?”

“Your journey is not quite over yet. Go now.” Eleanor held out the wreath of drowsy-scented flowers. “Pass beneath the archway, Briganta’s Bridge. You will see a path, one of the ancient ways. It leads to Mag Tor. Climb up to the stones at the peak and leave these flowers as an offering to the Goddess.”

He obeyed, leaving the cave and passing under the soaring arch. The path – a faintly shining indent in the grass – led him upwards through misty half-light. He was almost too tired for the climb, but forced himself, one foot in front of the other. A tall stack of stones loomed before above him, an almost human-shaped monolith full of brooding earth-power. He shivered. He felt tiny.

Kate was waiting for him beneath the stacked rock. He gave the wreath to her, and she laid it at the stone goddess’s feet. She gave a pale smile, reaching out to him. He took her hand. His anger was gone.

“Can you forgive me?” she asked.

He nodded, looking at their joined hands. “I don’t blame you for loving Richard. And can you forgive me?”

“For what?”

“For abandoning you. It’s not you, Kate. I feel like an ascetic. Nothing of the flesh touches me anymore. I must follow another road.”

She wiped moisture from her cheeks. “You’re still as dear as a brother to me. As brother and sister, we can forgive each other anything.”

He grasped her hand tighter. “Which way?”

She pointed downhill. A thin faint path wound away, marked here and there with fragments of white stone. “Follow the track where it takes us next.”

###

The path led them down into a wooded gorge. Dawn gleamed through the veil of leaves. At the lowest point the track turned and wound along the valley floor. They moved through a thick wood, with oak leaves massed around them. The silence was green and eerie. Here it was damp and cold, the greens intensified by a slight mist. Kate felt the cold drip of dew down her neck as they pushed forward through the foliage, following the path.

“This feels strange,” said Kate. “This isn’t Lytton Dale.”

Diamonds of light shone. The oaks gave onto a clearing that glowed pale green and dew-gemmed in the dawn. Within the clearing stood the ruins of a church, with a small lake to one side. Kate and Raphael looked at each other and went on, without speaking, towards the church.

Loneliness and desertion sighed within the stone shell. She expected to see elementals, but there were none. None tangible, at least. A stone tomb drew her. She moved towards the tomb and ripped aside a cloak of ivy to reveal a plaque with words carved in precise, thin letters she couldn’t read. She gave a soft cry.

“What is it?” said Raphael.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel that my son lies in there. Where is this place?”

“Eastwell Church,” said a voice.

A woman came out of the shadows. In this strange realm, her presence seemed natural. She was willowy, with long light brown hair, circles of glass held in gold frames over her eyes and nondescript clothes such as a peasant might wear in the fields. She had quiet confidence about her, as if she belonged here. To Kate she was obviously the spirit of the place: a goddess or a muse.

“He was the finest king we ever had, Richard the Third,” said the woman. “Shamefully betrayed. This is reputed to be the tomb of his natural son, Richard Plantagenet.

Kate pressed her palms to the rough surface of the tomb. Cold spread through her. “My son’s grave. I knew it. Good lady… how old will he be when he dies?”

“Upon your path, I don’t know,” said the muse. “Upon this path, he will be more than eighty. There’s a legend that he fled here when the king his father was killed, took employment as a bricklayer and lived in obscurity for the rest of his life. Thus he avoided being executed by Henry the Seventh. It’s a heart-rending story, too strange not to have some grain of truth.”

“Then he died in old age,” said Raphael. “A long, peaceful life at least.”

“A life in hiding,” said Kate, her voice shaking. “Never truly knowing his father, never receiving all that should have been his. Raph, if your visions are real, Richard has only a few months of life left.”

The air chilled her eyes. She stared down at the frigid tomb that contained the bones of her son. The whole of creation reverberated like the skin of a vast drum.

The muse’s face became sombre with grief. “Upon this path, his father died five centuries ago,” she said. “Here, everything you know is long gone, ruined. To me, it’s the present; but I can still weep for a past that I can’t touch or change.”

Raphael went a step closer to the woman. He seemed transfixed by her, as if he’d forgotten Kate was there. He asked unsteadily, “Can you tell us what will happen?”

“Haven’t you already seen it?”

“I’ve seen many terrible visions, but I can’t fathom what they mean, nor what I’m supposed to do with these hellish premonitions.”

The muse reached across the corner of the tomb and laid her hand on his forearm. “You’re real,” she said softly. “I can touch you. Raphael.”

He looked questioningly at her. She went on.

“It’s as Eleanor says. With every action, our world divides along different ways until there are infinite possible realities. Perhaps there are paths where Richard never was king, or was never born at all. Your path and mine are so close that I can only differentiate them in small ways. I think that’s why you’ve been tormented by echoes of my world, Raphael. Because they are so close, and you’re sensitive.”

“I’d rather have heard nothing, seen nothing.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” the muse said gently.

“I cannot stand by and see Richard die.”

“You may have no choice. I can’t go back and change history, much as I’d give anything to do so. You may have to stand by and watch it all unfold as in your worst nightmares, powerless to make a difference.”

“No,” said Kate.

“All you’ve seen is true, Raphael. I could show you a hundred books that tell the story. He will be reviled after his death. His enemies will take every rumour and magnify it, blacken his name in order to justify their seizure of power. They’ll say he was hunch-backed, an outward sign of evil–”

“That is a lie!”