Gods Concubine (6 page)

With that she rose and, a little unsteadily at first, made her way from the hall.

Harold might have followed her, but as Swanne passed behind Caela’s chair, he saw that his sister was staring at the Labyrinth with almost as much emotion as Swanne had been. Harold sent a final glance Swanne’s way—she was walking much more steadily now, and his worry for her eased—then he rose and went to Caela’s side.

“Sister, what ails you?”

She tore her eyes from the Labyrinth, and looked at Harold. “How do we know,” she said, “that there is Christ in the heart of the Labyrinth, instead of some dark monster? Promise me, Harold, that you will never enter that pathway.”

He attempted a smile for her. “Should you not be warning your husband?”

“I care not who he meets within the heart of the Labyrinth, brother. Christ, or a monster.”

And with that she, too, was gone, rising to exit with her ladies.

Later, as Martel was showing Edward the intricacies of laying out the string into the form of the Labyrinth, a man leaned against the wall of the Great Hall and watched with a cynical half-smile on his face as the King of England tried to learn the pathways of the Labyrinth.

He was a man of some influence within Edward’s court, and that influence was growing stronger day by day. He was a man liked and trusted by many, disliked by some others, overlooked by many more, and used by none. He was a man far greater than his outward appearance and station within society would suggest.

He was Asterion, the Minotaur, lover of Ariadne and victim of Theseus. Many thousands of years ago Asterion had been trapped within the heart of the Great Founding Labyrinth of Crete. There Theseus had come to him and, aided by Ariadne, Asterion’s half-sister, had slain him. But Theseus had abandoned Ariadne and, in revenge, she colluded with Asterion’s shade, promising him rebirth into the world of the living if he passed over to her the Darkcraft, the dark power of evil that the Game had been created to imprison. Asterion had agreed, handing over to Ariadne the ancient Darkcraft for her promise that she would destroy the Game completely.

But Ariadne had lied, and one of her daughter-heirs, Genvissa, had sought to resurrect the Game with her lover Kingman, Brutus. That attempt had ended in disaster and death—two of the things Asterion was best at manipulating—but the attempt had given Asterion cause for thought.

What if, instead of completely destroying the Game, he sought to control it?

Asterion stood within the Great Hall of Westminster, clothed in the guise he wore every day to confuse and deflect, watching Edward in his Labyrinth, his thoughts all on that prize: the Troy Game. To control the Game Asterion needed the six kingship bands of Troy, which were instrumental not only in the Game’s creation, but in its controlling.

The bands were a pitiful means to an end, considering that Asterion had the power to raise and destroy empires, but the bands continued to elude him as they had from that moment when Asterion, in his rebirth as Amorian the Poiteran, had invaded and razed Brutus’ Troia Nova. He had not been able to find them then. He had continued to fail in their retrieval for two thousand years. Brutus had hidden them well, imbuing their secret places with such protective magic they remained hidden from Asterion.

And, by all the gods and imps in creation, how Asterion had tried to uncover their location! He had thrown
everything
he had at that city…

He knew they were somewhere within London’s walls, just as he knew that the Game Genvissa and Brutus had begun was alive and well.

Asterion knew it, because every time he destroyed the city, whether in sheer fury or in another attempt to unearth the bands, the city regrew. Under Asterion’s direction the Celts, the Romans, the Scotti, the Picts, the various tribes of the Anglo-Saxons, and finally the Vikings, had invaded the land and razed or otherwise destroyed London in its entirety or by sections. In those lifetimes when invasion had not threatened, Asterion sent mysterious fires that swept through buildings, reducing swathes of the city to smoking cinders, or agonising plagues which left the city’s streets full of rotting corpses.

Every time the city was struck down, it somehow recovered. Perhaps not overnight, but it
did
recover. Other cities would have succumbed and vanished beneath the waving grasses of wild meadows. But not London. It refused to stay dead.

This told Asterion many things. One, that the bands
were
still here, for otherwise the Troy Game would not be able to function. Two, that the Game begun so long ago remained alive and well and grew more vital with each disaster as it absorbed the evil that attacked it. Three, the Game’s success at absorbing the successive waves of evil that washed over the city told Asterion he could not dare personally to attack, or attempt to control, the Game until he had the kingship bands. Finally, the city’s continued regeneration told Asterion
where
the Game was—where lay its heart.

When Asterion, as Amorian, had razed Brutus’ Troia Nova, he had not been able to determine the location of the actual Troy Game itself, where lay the Labyrinth. For decades the area surrounding the Llan River and the Veiled Hills had remained desolate. Then, very gradually, a modest village grew in the small valley between Og’s and Mag’s hills. The villagers traded with communities further upriver, and the village grew and became a small, prosperous town.

Flushed with their success, which they attributed to the beneficence of the gods, the town’s citizens built a temple of standing stones atop Og’s Hill. The town grew rapidly—and was then torn apart by Asterion’s fury in the guise of the invading Celts. The area surrounding the ancient Veiled Hills remained desolate for almost a century.

Then the Celtic Britons built there, a larger town this time, in the same spot that Brutus had erected Troia Nova, their streets following the contours of his streets. The town prospered, and the Celtic Druids erected a circle atop Og’s Hill, which they now called Lud Hill after one of their gods. This community Asterion murdered through disease, a horrific plague that wiped out much of the population of southern Britain in the third century before Christ.

Then came the Romans, who built a magnificent city reflecting their own pride and achievements. It, like the Celtic township, also followed the contours of Brutus’ Troia Nova, and atop Og-now-Lud Hill the Romans built a great temple to Diana.

Diana, the Roman Goddess of the Hunt, who had been known during the time of the Greeks as Artemis.

Asterion, who walked through Roman London as one of Rome’s overly-abundant generals, looked at that temple, and
knew
.

The Labyrinth was there. It had to be. It attracted to it the veneration, and the temples, of every manner of people who had lived within the city.

And yet the Game and the Labyrinth it hid would not allow Asterion to uncover it. No matter how many times he caused the temples and churches atop Lud Hill to be razed, Asterion could never discover the Labyrinth.

No matter how deep he caused his minions to dig.

Now a Christian cathedral graced the top of the hill. St Paul’s, the third construction on this hill to bear that name after Asterion had caused the first to be consumed with fire and the second to be razed by the Danes.

To his eye, still yearning for the grace and colour and beauty of the temples and halls of the ancient Aegean world, St Paul’s was a homely, stooped thing. To the English Saxons, Asterion supposed it was a wondrous construction, given that most of the other buildings in London were wattle and daub, wood, or ungracious and poorly-laid stone. Shaped as a long hall, a rounded apse to one end and a squat, ugly tower straddling the nave’s mid-section, the cathedral sat in a cleared space running east–west along the top of Lud Hill. The Londoners certainly adored it enough, and not merely for reasons of worship—most days the nave was almost as filled with market stalls as was Cheapside.

Suddenly Asterion’s eyes refocused on Edward. The fool had worked his way through the Labyrinth to its heart, and then back out again. Now he was calling for cups of wine to be handed out, so he could raise a toast to William of Normandy.

A servant handed Asterion a cup, and Asterion put a smile on his face, nodding cheerfully to Edward when the king looked at him, and toasted William of Normandy with wine while in his heart he cursed him.

Asterion was wary of William. Very wary. As Brutus, his magic had been powerful enough to outwit Asterion in his hunt for the kingship bands. Brutus’ power was the principal reason Asterion, for two thousand years, had kept those blocks in place which prevented William and Genvissa’s rebirth (and thus preventing the rebirth of everyone else who had been caught up in the battle).

But Asterion had never uncovered the bands, and thus, a few decades ago, frustrated beyond measure, he removed the blocks. One by one, women across western Europe had fallen pregnant and given birth to babies who, as they grew, drew on the remembered experiences and ambitions of a past life to shape their decisions in this life.

It was a nasty shock that Brutus had managed a rebirth so close to England.

Very nasty, and even now contemplation of it made Asterion uneasy.

Still, he kept William busy and distracted with problems within his own duchy. Asterion did not want to meet William until he, Asterion, was well and ready.

And Asterion did not want to meet William, or to have to cope with the problem of William, until he had both the bands, but…
Her.
His eyes slid from Edward to the door through which Swanne had vanished.

“Enjoy what happiness you can find, Swanne,” Asterion said. “It won’t last long.”

F
OUR

M
arriage to Harold had brought Swanne many benefits—her current proximity to London, and so the Troy Game, being prominent among them—but, at this moment, Swanne was grateful only for the fact that their seniority within Edward’s court meant they had a private bedchamber.

She had brushed aside Harold’s concerns, she had brushed aside the concerns of her attending woman Hawise, and now Swanne stood wonderfully alone, her back against the closed door of the bedchamber.

“Brutus,” she whispered, the tears flowing again down her cheeks. Then, more loudly, more emphatically: “
William!
”

William of Normandy!
Oh, what a fine jest that was, that Brutus was reborn within the land where the savage Poiterans had lived so long ago. Yet, how right it seemed. Brutus as the military adventurer, the struggler, the achiever…the
foreigner
. With her new knowledge, the future became instantly clear to Swanne: once again Brutus would invade, once again he would seize control of the land.

Once again, he would reign as king over England and London and over her heart. And this time, they would succeed…into immortality.

“William,” she whispered, rolling the word about her mouth, loving the feel of it, joyous in her new discovery.

He had sent that ball of string as a message to her! He yearned for her as much as she for him!

It seemed such a simple thing, discovering what name Brutus went by in this life, but the lack of knowing had been a torture for her. She needed to know
who
he was to be able to contact him and much of her life to this point had been spent in that search.

Where are you, Brutus? Where?

Always that search had been frustrated over and again by circumstance.

Swanne had been born in a county a long, long way from London to a nobleman of little consequence. For years, ever since she was some ten or eleven years old and had come to full awareness and remembrance, Swanne had been desperate to leave her father’s home and get to London. Somehow. Anyhow.

To get back
home
.

To find Brutus and to finish what had been so terribly interrupted.

But Swanne had been reborn into a life and a world in which women had very little power, and even less say over the destiny of their lives. Her father had laughed at her pleadings to be allowed to live in London, and said that she needed a husband to tame her waywardness.

The thought of a
husband
made Swanne even more desperate—the Mistress of the Labyrinth did not submit to a
husband
—but as she grew older, and rejected the hand of every suitor her father tossed her way, she grew ever more desperate. She hoped Brutus-reborn would one day ride into her father’s estate and claim her, but he did not, and Swanne realised he probably would not.

The only way out of her father’s house, and the only way to London, was via that hateful institution of marriage. Maybe she
would
submit to a husband, if only to use him for her own ends.

One day, Harold Godwineson had ridden laughing and strong into her father’s courtyard, and the instant Swanne had seen his face, felt his eyes upon her, she had
known
.

She had known who Harold was, reborn, and she knew she could use him. He would be her bridge to Brutus-reborn and to London and the Game. Coel. Swanne wasn’t sure why he had been reborn, what had pulled him back, but the thought of using Coel-reborn to get to London, and eventually to Brutus, was of some amusement to Swanne.

The blessing in all of this was that Harold himself had no memory of his past life. If this had not been so, Swanne would have had no chance at him at all. She had no idea as to the why of it—perhaps it was merely an indication of Harold’s complete meaninglessness in what was to come—but she was very, very grateful.

Swanne had smiled and shaken out her jet-black hair and tilted her lovely head on its graceful neck, and had won Harold before he’d even dismounted from his horse. She went to his bed that night, and in return he had taken her from her father’s house the next morning.

They were wed, but under Danelaw rather than Christian. That had been Swanne’s demand, and Harold, desperately in love with her, had agreed without complaint. Danelaw marriage gave Swanne more independence, and far more control over the extensive lands which had been her dowry, than a Christian marriage would have done. Under the hated Christian law, everything—her estates, her chattels, even her very soul—would have become Harold’s. Under Danelaw it remained Swanne’s.