King's Blood (40 page)

“I still do,” Henry said.

“Not today,” said William. “You should have. Richard wasn't your fault, either.”

“No?” For the first time Henry looked away from the fire into William's face. His eyes were bleak. “It wasn't an accident.”

“Of course it was,” William said. “You were there. The fool shot at a deer and hit Richard instead.”

“It wasn't a deer,” said Henry.

“Then what? Fox? Boar? Tree stump?”

“It was the Horned King,” Henry said, “and he knew very well what he was doing.”

“You're addled,” William said. “You've been brooding too long. It wasn't the—”

“There is flesh on his bones again,” Henry said, “but precious little of it. He drank our nephew's blood, but he didn't get the soul. He's free in the daylight, brother, and I knew it and did nothing about it. Richard is dead because I was too much inclined to just be. I moved too late and too slow.”

William's jaw had started to ache. He was clenching it. “Magic again,” he said, thick in his throat. “Damned magic. It's a curse on this family.”

“Britain is a curse on this family,” Henry said—without bitterness, rather to William's surprise. “We're all doomed to be some part of it, even if it's to be a gadfly in Normandy.”

William bared his teeth. “Yes, brother Robert's coming back from the holy war. He'll have my hide, too, for losing one of his favorite bastards.”

“Give him my hide instead,” Henry said, falling back into gloom again. “Yours will be forfeit soon enough. That was a warning, brother. If you go on resisting, Britain will come and take you.”

“This was an ugly, foolish, wasteful accident,” William said. “It was no more or less than that. God knows, it happens often enough. Our brother, this boy's namesake—you're too young to remember, but he caught an arrow the same way, and in this same forest, too. Everyone was weeping and wailing then, moaning about curses and ghostly hunters. I was there. All I saw was an archer with deer fever and a brother who made the wrong move at the wrong time.”

“Someday,” said Henry, “you'll stop lying to yourself. If you're lucky, you'll be alive to get some use of it. You can see what's happening in this kingdom: floods, famine, and there's rumor of pestilence in the towns. Now one of our kin is dead.
I
was there, brother. I saw the thing poor Gaulthier shot at. It was no mortal animal.”

For an instant William felt himself waver—felt the trickle of credulity in the back of his mind. He shut it down. His mind was made up. He was not going to listen to any talk of magic or powers—seen or unseen.

Henry thrust without warning, sudden and deep. “You're afraid. That's what it is. You're scared to death. If you accept the whole of your kingship, if you give in to it, you could pay a higher price than you ever wanted to pay.”

William clenched his fists and thrust them behind him before they pummeled that insolent young face to a pulp. “So I could. So I'll do, whether I give way to your doomsaying or not—if what you say is true. Why shouldn't I give myself what peace of mind I can? It doesn't make any difference.”

“It makes all the difference,” Henry shot back. “If you face the truth, Britain can be saved. Whereas if you will not—”

“Aren't there Guardians in Britain? Aren't there powers to protect it? If this is true at all?”

“They need their king,” Henry said. “Britain needs her king.”

“Britain has all the king she is going to get,” William said.

Henry rose. Whatever else he was, he was no fool. He knew when to let be.

He bowed stiffly. “Majesty,” he said. From the sound of it, his teeth were clenched.

William refused to watch him go. It was petty, but he did not care. He had had enough of bloody magic to last him for a lifetime.

For a long while after Henry was gone, William stayed where he was. His shoulders were aching with tension. He was ready to howl at the moon.

A soft step sounded behind him. He stayed where he was. Familiar arms slid around him, and a familiar body fitted itself to his back. “God's saints!” said Walter Tirel. “You're as stiff as a board. What did your brother do to you?”

“Enough,” William said. He turned in Walter Tirel's embrace. “Thank God for you. You're the only creature in England who isn't after me to be something I'm not.”

“You are all I need,” Walter Tirel said. He rested his head on William's shoulder and sighed.

William echoed the sigh. The tension was draining out of him little by little. Maybe in a while he would want more, but for now, this would do.

CHAPTER 45

Anselm's dreams had been haunted of late. He had left England with a light heart, thanking God—albeit with a twinge of guilt—for the exile the king had imposed on him. Once he was free of that island and the burden of office that he had never wanted, he had allowed himself to be happy. His dreams had been of peaceful things, of his faith and his philosophy.

But all that summer, since the feast of Pentecost, he had dreamed of Britain and its obstreperous king. The dreams had been harmless enough at first: visions of that wet green country, remembrances of William at court or in one of his processions, flashes of faces familiar and not so familiar, all in William's shadow.

As summer advanced, the dreams darkened. Strange things crept into them, creatures of the Otherworld, dark spirits walking free in daylight. News that came from across the water must have fed his dreams; Britain was beset with storms and famine, and after a brutal winter had entered a fierce and unforgiving summer.

It was God's justice. Anselm could be unforgiving, too, and William had been beyond unreasonable. No amount of Christian charity could excuse the quarrels they had waged over matters as trivial as the training of a knight and as vital as the reform of the Church in England. They had struck sparks from one another like flint and steel.

He could still hear that brass bellow ordering him off the island, consigning him to perdition with the Pope he insisted on consulting, as William put it, for every damned little thing. “Isn't there anyone in England to get advice from? I'd think the Pope would get advice from you—aren't you the wisest man in Christendom? What do you take us for? Get out! Get out of my sight!”

Which Anselm had been sinfully delighted to do. He had never belonged in that court of sinners and sodomites; he had certainly never wanted to be an archbishop. What he had here in Lyons, peace and solitude and the indulgence of an archbishop who was content to hold that office, was all he had ever asked for.

He was happy. And that, of course, could not be allowed to persist. The other office he never thought of, the one that had been even less welcome and even more difficult to escape, was tormenting him with these dreams.

Britain's king had forced an archbishopric on him. Britain itself had forced him to be its Guardian. That made him, whether he would or no, a magical pillar and strong support of the hidden realm, a protector of its magics and a defender of its land and borders against powers that would destroy it.

There were three other Guardians. Every realm—or so he was told—had four. Some had more. Three were not enough.

He had tried to abdicate the office. But unlike the miter and cope of the archbishop and the estates that went with them, which William had stripped away, this Guardianship could not be laid aside by mortal will. If Britain insisted that he continue, then nothing that he did or desired made the slightest difference.

He had done what he could. His wards were stronger by far than they had been when Cecilia abducted him from his study in Bec. Dreams might pass them, but mortals could not. Magic broke against them.

They had been under siege since shortly after Beltane, if Anselm would suffer himself to contemplate that pagan festival. He was losing strength as the summer lengthened. He was old; he was not as hale as he had been.

On the night after the feast of Mary Magdalene, Anselm lay in fitful, tossing sleep. His body prickled with heat; the buzzing of insects was a constant torment. He had been ill that day, beset with coughing and fever. Night had brought little relief.

“If you would open yourself to your magic, your body would heal itself, too.”

This was a new face in his dream, though not in his memory: Henry FitzWilliam, looking more like his mother than Anselm had remembered.

However much Anselm had deplored Queen Mathilda's lack of Christian faith, he had admired her greatly. Her husband had been a bully and a brute, but she was a lady of tact and discretion, and notable intelligence.

Henry had the face and the wits and a good deal of the tact. He also had his father's ruthlessness and his own distinct lack of moral rigor.

He smiled at that: in dreams, thoughts could be as clear as spoken words. “We can't all be saints,” he said. “Some of us have to keep the world going, or what would become of it?”

“We should all strive to create heaven on earth,” Anselm said.

Henry's smile widened to a tiger's grin. “Ah! Sanctimony. I'd thought better of you. Be honest, now. Is it not an insult to God, to be so eager to abandon the world that He has made?”

“The world is a dim and corrupted image of the truth,” Anselm said.

“Careful, Father,” Henry said. “Someone might hear, and brand you a heretic. Heresy is such an easy accusation these days. Even if you don't think the world was created not by God but by the Devil, would your accusers believe that?”

“Will you tempt them to accuse me?” Anselm inquired. He should not be proud of his self-control, but after all he was mortal and fallible, and this hallucination was testing him sorely.

“I?” said Henry. “Why, no, because then you would accuse me of being no Christian at all—and I'd be hard put to deny it.”

That put an end to Anselm's patience. “Begone! Vanish! Get thee behind me, Satan!”

Henry laughed. He was as solid as ever behind Anselm's eyes, sprawled at ease in a tumbled bed. Anselm caught himself peering toward the limits of the dream. It seemed improbable, but as far as he could see, the notorious libertine was alone.

The libertine was dreadfully adept at reading Anselm's thoughts. “No, there's no one in bed with me tonight. There often isn't. Are you disappointed? Have I taken the fire out of Sunday's sermon? Or will you be denouncing my brother again instead?”

“I do not deliver sermons,” Anselm said stiffly.

“Ah,” said Henry. “Your pardon. I forgot. You are spared the burden of a public ministry. You write letters; you advise, you counsel, you exhort. You are a happy man—a man freed from any obligation but that of pleasing himself.”

“You have a tongue like an adder,” Anselm spat—then caught himself. But the words were spoken. He could not un-speak them.

“Britain will sink beneath the sea,” Henry said, sweet and deadly. “All her people, mortal and otherwise, will go down with her. That will be your doing, my lord archbishop.”

“No,” said Anselm. “That, you cannot lay on me. Your intemperate, degenerate king—he will bring his kingdom down.”

For the first time Henry seemed less than composed. “You are the great philosopher, the master logician. Parse this, O prince of theologians. A king who refuses to be king, a Guardian who will not guard—which is worse? Or is there any choice between them?”

“What are you, then, messire? What is Britain to you, or you to her?”

“More than she is to you, it seems,” Henry said. “Do you care nothing for her? Does it not matter at all that between you and my brother she will fall?”

Anselm set his mind and heart against temptation. He crossed himself, fixing his mind on the glory of God.

“You are worse than the Saxons,” Henry said. His voice was thick with disgust. “They only destroyed her piecemeal. You would cast her into the sea.”

“God's will be done,” Anselm said.

His heart was a fortress. Henry assailed it with all the power and knowledge he had—and those were formidable. But God was Anselm's strength.

Whatever guilt he had known, whatever hesitation might have beset him, all that was gone now. He was pure in his faith. He would not yield to the lure of pagan magic or the will of Godless sorcerers.

“Tell me,” said Henry, dangerously mild. “If the king summoned you, would you go?”

Anselm's heart stopped. But it began to beat again, and he remembered how to breathe. “I am sworn to that, yes. But William will not call me back.”

“Nevertheless,” Henry said, “if you were to receive word from the king, you would obey it?”

“That would be my obligation,” Anselm said.

“Will you swear to that?”

“I am sworn to it,” said Anselm, “by the servitude that was imposed upon me.”

“Indeed,” said Henry, cool and dispassionate. “I wish you well of your heaven. Until you come to it, may you live the life you deserve. And if God hears me, I pray you may die as you never wished to live: as Archbishop of Canterbury.”

Deep in his stronghold, walled and armored in faith, still Anselm shuddered. That prayer was as exquisitely honed a curse as Anselm had heard. He could only pray in turn that God might see fit to avert it.

 
Anselm would have wished to wake then, to escape further bedevilment. But his tormentors were not done with him. Having failed of the direct attack, they resorted to subtlety.

This, unlike the other, was true sleep and honest dream. And yet Anselm was keenly aware of where he was and what he was doing. His dream had the flavor of memory: of a day long ago, when he was hardly more than a boy. He had come all the way from Italy to Bec in Normandy, following a word and a dream.