Authors: Judith Tarr
King's Blood (41 page)
And there it was in the abbey, perched on a tall stool in the schoolroom, teaching grammar to children. Anselm was young and foolish; he was disappointed. “I thought to find you teaching theology to masters,” he said. He blurted out the words, abandoning all the care and thought that he had put into his rehearsals of what he would say when he met the great master.
Lanfranc finished the sentence he had been dictating, as serenely as if this stranger had never burst into his schoolroom and insulted his students to his face. Only when the last word was spoken and copied and the last question answered did he turn to Anselm.
Anselm was seething, caught between outrage and mortification. Lanfranc smiled at him, a sweet, vague smile with nothing either brilliant or inspired in it. “Good day, Brother,” he said. “You were looking for someone?”
Anselm gaped at him. “What? You aren't . . . ? But they saidâWhere is he? Where is Master Lanfranc?”
“That is my name,” Lanfranc said. “Why? Am I a terrible disappointment?”
“No!” Anselm cried. “Noâno, never. It's only, I expectedâ”
“They always do,” Lanfranc said with the hint of a sigh. “So: you're the latest prodigy from Italy. Will you forgive me if I don't ask for a demonstration of your brilliance? It's late and I've been teaching all day. I need the privy. Then I need my dinner.”
Anselm had gone beyond disappointment. His dream had feet of thickest, blackest clay. He could think of nothing better to do than follow it to the privy and then to the refectory, where he ate coarse bread and drank sour ale and mortified the flesh until it matched the spirit.
In memory he had gone sulkily to bed. In dream he found himself in the chapel, kneeling in the light of the vigil-lamp, while Lanfranc celebrated Mass at the altar.
Except, he realized as it went on, it was not quite the Mass as Rome had ordained it, nor did it follow any other rite that he knew. The image above the altar, that had been hidden in shadow, came slowly clear: not Christ on his cross but the Queen of Heaven with her crown of stars and the world beneath her feet.
Lanfranc's rite invoked not the Lord but the Lady: not
Domine
but
Domina
. Anselm tried to recoil from the blasphemy, but the dream bound him. He had to endure the whole of it, all that rite of a fallen Goddess, clear to the end.
Domine
but
Domina
. Anselm tried to recoil from the blasphemy, but the dream bound him. He had to endure the whole of it, all that rite of a fallen Goddess, clear to the end.
As the last twisted words died into silence, Lanfranc came down from the altar. His vestments, like the rite, were subtly perverted. They were white and gold, as if for a Mass of celebration, but instead of crosses, they were embroidered all over with the sign of the crescent moon.
Lanfranc stood over Anselm, looking down as he had in life: clear-sighted, a little wry, and indulgent of human foibles. “It is all one,” he said. “You're not blind, child. You can see. What keeps you from it? What are you afraid of?”
“Damnation,” Anselm said.
“Ah,” said Lanfranc. “Yes, that's reasonable. Stillâwhat is damnation? To forge a chain of foolish rules and then tangle yourself in it? To be given great gifts but also great responsibility, and to accept the one but turn your back on the other? To invoke your own will as the will of God, and to refuse the task He has laid on you, for weakness and cowardice and lack of compassion for any human thing?”
Anselm rose up in wrath. “You! Uncover yourself. Which of you is it? Henry? Cecilia? How dare you conceal your true face in this of all lies?”
“No lies,” Lanfranc said. “No children of the Conqueror, either, though their frustration is jangling through the aether. Between you and William, this world never saw such a pair of stubborn fools. Pride is a sin, child. So is sloth, and anger, too. Surrender them. Offer them up. Face what God has given you to face.”
Anselm set his teeth, though it made the worst of them ache. The pain was a sacrifice; in its way, it cleared his head. “God has sent me here. Whatever I do, I do it by His will.”
Lanfranc was neither alive nor bound by humanity. He did not give way to frustration. But he shook his head and sighed. “Be careful of arrogance, child. Never presume to tell God what He should do.”
“I do notâ” Anselm began.
“Listen to yourself,” Lanfranc said. “Know yourself. Tell me, child. If you could give up the power that is in you, would you do it?”
“Yes,” Anselm said without an instant's hesitation. “Dear God, yes!”
“Even if there were a cost? Even if it shortened your life?”
“Then I would be in heaven all the sooner,” Anselm said.
“Even,” said Lanfranc, “if you were to lose the keen edge of your intelligence? Would you give it up then?”
That gave Anselm pause. “How . . . much? All of it?”
“That I can't say,” Lanfranc said. “Magic weaves through all that we are. If the threads of it are taken out, there's no telling what will be left.”
“My soul will remain,” Anselm said steadily. “I trust in God for the rest.” He paused. “Are you mocking my hopes? Or are you offering me a gift? Can it be done? If it is done, will I be free?”
“From the archbishopric,” Lanfranc said, “no. From the other . . .” His hand traced ambiguity in the air. “We believe that if you surrender your magic, the Guardianship will go with it. It's never been done. There has never been a Guardian as reluctant as you.”
“Or, no doubt, as Christian.” Anselm bit his tongue. Arrogance had overcome him again; he had forgotten that Lanfranc too, in life, had held that office. Anselm had inherited it from him, just as he had found himself in possession of Lanfranc's archbishopric.
Lanfranc said nothing of it. He had other, no doubt greater concerns. “If you are willing,” he said, “we will try. We may fail. You may lose more than you wish to give up. But we are desperateâand so, I think, are you.”
Anselm was shaking with the thought of it. Fear, yes, but fevered excitement, too. To be rid of the thing that had laired inside him all his life, that he had dreaded and fought and resisted like temptationâwas it worth the loss of his mind's brilliance?
“If I keep my soul and its salvation,” he said, “then the rest is of no consequence.”
“May it be so,” Lanfranc said. Or had he said, “So mote it be”?
It did not feel like anything at first. He stood in the dream, and Lanfranc stood in front of him.
Then Lanfranc laid his hand on Anselm's brow. His touch was cold. Anselm stiffened but did not recoil. He held his ground.
There was a tingling in his center, somewhere between his navel and his breastbone. The tingle turned to an itch, then to a burning. As the burning rose in intensity, the only word for it was pain.
If he had been flayed alive and rubbed in salt, he would have felt no more pain than this. He was unraveling from the soul outward. The deep threads of his self and spirit worked loose one by one.
Lanfranc had no need to breathe, but the strain was evident in his face. Even for the mighty dead, this was a great working. To take the magic from the man, but leave the man entire: the subtlety and complexity of it defied understanding.
Then the magic began to fight. Anselm had nothing to do with it. It had a will of its own, to cling to the body and sink tendrils deep in the soul.
Lanfranc worked each one free. His patience was infinite. Anselm did what he could to make it less difficult, which was terribly little; but maybe it made a difference.
Except for the pain, he felt the same. His wits were no duller. He could still shape in his head, perfect and intricate and true, his proof of the existence of God.
Magic could get no grip on that. The last of it slipped free. Lanfranc caught it, confined it. When Anselm looked up, he saw it in the gnarled hands: a white jewel netted in silver thread.
So small a thing to have troubled him so much. He rose. He felt lightâalmost too light. He staggered. His mind and soul were intact, he was sure of it. And yet there was something . . .
Lanfranc had slipped the captured magic out of sight. He laid his hand on Anselm's brow, tracing the shape of a blessing. Anselm reared back, but too late. That blessing was not a cross but the thin curve of the moon.
He woke rubbing his forehead as if to scour it clean. But Lanfranc's blessing had sunk beneath the skin to lie like a brand on his soul.
His unencumbered, beautiful, purely human, utterly un-magical soul.
He had won, he told himself. Britain's defenders had wielded their strongest persuasion, and taken the one thing of his that they needed. They were done with him. He would stay in Lyons; he had no intention of leaving and no need to do soâunless the king commanded him. And William, thank God, would do no such thing.
CHAPTER 46
The Isle was under siege. The Wild Hunt was a plague upon Britain, and pestilence ran in its wake. Both men and cattle were sick or dying. Grain withered in the ear; fruit shriveled and blackened on the bough. Whatever escaped either blight or relentless heat succumbed to swarms of devouring locusts.
Sometimes at night, when Edith was trying to sleep, she felt the earth stirring uneasily, and heard the sea's growl. It was stalking the land; all too soon it would spring.
The chanting of the Ladies and their acolytes was a steady murmur, constant beneath the yapping and yowling of the Hunt. Three of the Guardians were here at the heart of Britain, but the fourth pillar was missing. The rest were the weaker for it.
For Edith it was a kind of torment. She kept feeling in her heart, altogether without reason, that she should be able to do something. What little she did, lending her voice to the rite and her magic to the weaving, was never enough. There was more. There had to be more. But what it was or how she would use it, she could not imagine.
They were all desperate. Some of the younger or weaker Ladies were beginning to falter. Angharad had taken ill and had to be carried off to the healers. She was carrying a Beltane child, a fact she had concealed so that she could go on defending the Isle. Now both she and the child were endangered, and the rest of them were under close scrutiny.
Edith had no such secret to keep. She had her magic and her duties, and the hope that somehow the war could be won.
She was stumbling to her bed one early morning, having spent the night chanting life into the walls of air, when she tripped and fell. The puca squawked, skittered, and laid her ankle open with a slash of claws.
Except for the ferocious stinging in her ankle, Edith was not unhappy to be lying on grass, staring blurrily up at fading stars. The puca sprang onto her breast and glared down into her face.
She saw then why his squawk had had such a strangled sound. He had something clamped in his teeth: a pendant on a chain, it seemed to be. The jewel was netted in silver wire; it was white like moonstone, and it glowed strangely, here in the dark before dawn.
She reached up dizzily to take it before he dropped it. It felt as strange as it looked, both cold and hot, heavy and light, powerful andâ
Powerful. She sat up, spilling the puca into her lap. The chain was tangled in her fingers. The jewel was singing.
She knew that song. It resonated in the earth of Britain, thrumming deep in the stone circles and whispering with the wind in the forests or across the heaths and moors. The folk of air sang it in their dances. Even the Hunt sang a discordant mockery of it, beating its rhythm on the ribs of their skeletal horses.
She closed her fingers about the jewel. The singing was as clear as ever. It was inside herâas it had always been. It was in her magic and in her blood and in her heart.
As she rose, the puca climbed to her shoulder. Its purr was part of the singing. It was satisfied. What it had wanted, what it had always meant to do, was done. Now the rest could begin.
Morning light was growing around them. Mist rose off the lake. The Ladies' chanting was losing strength. The earth felt like a thin film of ice over turbulent water.
All their labors were coming to nothing. Because, Edith thought, they were fixed on the wrong enemy. Earth and sea, even the Hunt, were not the cause of it all. They were part of it, shaped by it, but they were no more than a diversion.
Maybe she owed Sister Gunnhild more than she knew. They had studied logic together, and the science of causes. Edith had learned to see past the moment; to find her way to the place where it began.
Or maybe it was only that she had come from the place where the blight began, and knew it better than anyone hereâeven Cecilia, who had lived in it and made use of it but never truly been a part of it. Edith's own blood and kin had wrought this; now the whole of it was gathered into one soul and spirit.
She stood by the lake. The others were in the Lady's house, but it did not matter. They were all together wherever their bodies were. She raised her arms. The jewel swung from her right hand, catching fire as the sun rose.
Â
In the chapel of Wilton Abbey, the Abbess Christina lay prostrate. Her arms were spread in imitation of the cross. The air about her was thick and grey, as if choked with fog. The earth beneath her was as black as oblivion.
In the chapel of Wilton Abbey, the Abbess Christina lay prostrate. Her arms were spread in imitation of the cross. The air about her was thick and grey, as if choked with fog. The earth beneath her was as black as oblivion.
Her nuns stood in the choir, chanting the morning office. They sang the verses in Saxon.
They had lost their faces. They were a blur of black robes or grey, and blank white ovals within the veils, and empty eyes. There was nothing left of them but the voices.
It should have been a vision of hell. But through all that darkness rang a chorus of exultation. Victory was near. The abbess' heart swelled with the joy of it. Yes, the kingdom would fallâbut the Normans would fall with it, and all that was stained with sin would be swept away.
Edith threw all her power against it. “No!” she cried in her strongest, clearest voice. “You will not!”
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