King's Blood (7 page)

In the last instant he flung it away from the crowd, but he had neither the strength nor the speed to unmake it. It plummeted into the midst of the city. Blood-red flames roared to heaven, then sank down into mortal gold and blue and the black of smoke.

The crowd fled in a chorus of screams. The few with their wits about them surged toward the flames. The rest scattered in panic no less mindless than Henry's, but far less perilous.

Only the monks were left with the king's body, and Henry with the drawn and empty sensation of too much power expended too quickly.

The monks continued their slow procession toward St. Stephen's Abbey, which the king had built long ago to console the Pope for his marriage to the royal and magical Mathilda. Henry followed even more slowly. The fire was burning, too fierce to stop.

He sought inside himself for a glimmer of power, enough to raise a bit of cloud, a brief fall of rain. But there was nothing. Only cold laughter under the earth, and things stirring that should never have been awake.

They were gathering beneath the abbey. There were old scores to settle, old battles lost. The great soul that had bound them was gone, but the body it had inhabited was prize enough, all things considered. If they could not devour his soul, they would dishonor his bones—and that would be his remembrance.

Henry had been well and properly duped—betrayed by his own impatience and his foolish cowardice. He could only go on as he had begun. The monks were chanting, in part to honor the dead, in part to shorten the way: a slow dirge in time to the rhythm of their pace.
Dirige, Domine, in conspectu tuo viam meam . . .

It was an incantation, if one chose to make it so. Henry joined his voice to the rest.

 
The roil of darkness beneath the earth drew back—shrinking from the power of that invocation. Henry drew a breath of relief. But he did not leave off his chanting. The stronger the wards that the words could raise, the better.

 
The abbey's gate lay open before them. Gold and silks gleamed within: miters and copes of bishops, archbishops, holy abbots. The lords of England and Normandy had forsaken their king and duke, but the Church—in a grand irony for that son of an old goddess—had come out in force to bid him farewell.

To make sure he's well and truly dead,
Henry thought. He could hear the words in his father's voice, with the familiar grim humor.

They steadied him, those words, as little respect as they had in them. His strength was trickling back. Here within the walls that his father had built, where magic had always been as welcome as prayer, there was sanctuary of a sort.

Not peace. Henry would not have that for a long while to come. But he would take what he could get.

It was a grand funeral, with so many prelates to celebrate it: worthy of a king. Henry let himself subside into the beauty of the words and the music, and the mist of holiness that rose over it all, turning the light in the abbey church to gold.

 
Henry woke with a start from a half-dream. The sermon had droned to its end. The choir was stirring, the bearers rising, preparing to lay the body in its tomb.

A voice rose above the murmuring silence, harsh and strident. A man was standing in front of the open tomb. He seemed prosperous: not a noble by his dress, but well enough off as townsmen went. He had a broad face, rather red, and a bristle of beard; and his fists were planted on his hips.

“Justice!” he cried. “I demand justice!”

The Mass lurched to a halt. The bearers paused with the bier half raised to their shoulders. People were gaping.

So was Henry, but he shut his mouth with a snap of temper and pushed to the front of the crowd. “Who dares disrupt this holy rite?”

The man flushed redder still, but his jaw jutted, and his beard stood on end. He had fortified himself with no little quantity of wine, Henry judged. “This is not your land! That one there—he stole it. It was ours. It
is
ours. And we'll not have him lying dead in it.”

Henry opened his mouth to blast the fool, but someone behind him said with a hint of a quaver, “He is right. I remember at the time, we asked if he should investigate, and at least give the family a charter, but he said—”

Henry turned on his heel. The man who spoke was elderly, and wore the habit and tonsure of a monk. Although his eyes were clouded, there were still stains of ink on his fingers, and the calluses of long hours in the scriptorium.

“I did see the original charter,” the clerk went on, innocently relentless, “and this man's father, whose name was Arthur, did own the land. And the king said to pay him no mind. God wanted it for Himself. The family should consider itself well paid by the honor of it.”

Voices rose in outrage. “This is a mockery! To demand recompense here, now—how dare he—”

Henry's sentiments were much the same, but he had had a bit of time to think. The townsman was an innocent, but what lay behind his eyes was anything but that. It was laughing—mocking indeed. It would feed royally on contention.

Not if Henry had anything to do with it. It vexed his pride to say the words, but he knew he must say them. “You, Brother, since you seem so well versed in the matter—take whomever you need. Settle it. Pay him fair value for the land, from the abbey's treasury.”

The abbot sucked in a breath to protest, but Henry stared him down. There were advantages now and then in having inherited his father's cold grey eyes. The man blanched and kept silent.

Henry did not look to see whether he was obeyed. He turned back to the bearers, who were wheezing with the weight of the bier. “Finish it,” he said.

Their gratitude was palpable. The tomb lay open, waiting. Darkness coiled within.

It was only the slant of a shadow. The choir began the antiphon, blessing the body and the tomb.

The king had had it built not so long ago, made to his measure. It was a good fathom long, and nigh as wide: William had gone greatly to fat as he aged. It was more than broad enough to hold him.

The bearers lowered the bier as slowly as they could, with its great weight. Henry saw the tomb's walls draw in, closing like a mouth.

The bearers stopped perforce. The swollen mass beneath the pall bulged, overflowing the confines of the stone. Somewhere in the congregation, someone tittered.

One of the bearers must have acted without thinking. He set his foot on the body and thrust.

Henry held his breath. Others were not so fortunate. Fire from heaven had scattered the funeral procession. This stench from below sent the whole of the assembly, gagging and retching, toward the doors.

Henry drew his mantle up over his face and breathed as shallowly as he could. The run on the doors had had the inevitable consequence: people crushed and trampled, and eruptions of fists and curses.

The fool who had tried to wedge the body into its tomb like an overfull sack of meal had fainted. The body lay abandoned yet again, with a stain spreading beneath the pall, seeping from the burst belly.

There was a horrible humor in it, but Henry had no laughter to give it. This foulness made a mockery of a hard man and a strong king; nothing in his life became him less than this last vestige of it.

He could hear the sermons already, the priests preaching of pride fallen and pretension destroyed: the Conqueror conquered by the inevitability of decay. It was a gift of the old powers that had hated the king for so long, to the mortals who had hated him while he lived, but never dared speak until he was dead.

Let them enjoy their revenge, Henry thought. It would not last long. William's children were not all ingrates or fools. They would remember—and take revenge in turn.

CHAPTER 8

The coast of England was suspiciously quiet. The sun was shining, the wind blowing soft, favoring the ship as it sailed for the harbor.

One or two idiots on board reckoned that an omen, declaring that William's errand was blessed by heaven. William was more inclined to regard it as the calm before the storm.

That cursed sight of his persisted in showing him a different country beneath the green swell of the isle. Parts of it were green, parts glimmering gold with magic. But wide swaths of it were grey, and parts were black, pitted with rot. Magic was dead there, or dying fast.

Which should have been all to the good, but it reminded him too vividly of his father on his deathbed: gross and moribund. This, he should want to rule? It would suck him in and kill him, too. That was the way the Old Things kept themselves alive: with kings' blood, and kings' lives buried beneath the green earth.

He thrust the thought down and set his foot on it. He was going to take an earthly crown and a mortal treasure—to rule men. Magic be damned.

 
They had sailed for none of the great ports, not even for Pevensey, where the elder William had made his conquest. William the younger wanted speed and quiet, and as clear a road to the treasury in Winchester as he could manage. For that, he reckoned, the quieter the better.

The ship was small and handy, and settled neatly into a fold of the coast, where a village barely big enough for a name clung to chalk and sand. Fishing boats hailed the stranger on her way in, calling out in broad Saxon, but few of the men on the boats were of that tall, narrow, fair-haired nation. These were people of an older breed, wiry and dark, like the common folk of Brittany and Normandy. William had an odd sense that among themselves, the language they spoke was neither Saxon nor Norman, but something of much more ancient vintage.

There was a man waiting for them on the strand. He was no fisherman, and no old Briton, either. His height and breadth and the cut of his clothes were Norman, and he wore fine mail under a mantle of deep green English wool. Up among the dunes, a handsome bay horse was grazing, with saddle on but bridle hung from saddlebow.

William raised a brow at that. There was a man who trusted his horse, to turn it loose in open country.

The man was young, not much more than a boy: seeming younger the closer the ship came. His waving hair was dark but with a hint of red, worn to the shoulders in the new fashion; it grew in a peak on a high fair forehead, above level brows and steady eyes that, William was sure long before he was close enough to see, hovered somewhere between gold and green.

He was a splendid young thing, and bold, too, to stand so comfortably alone in a world of strangers. As the ship slid within reach, he ran out with a gaggle of villagers and the ship's own crew, splashing through the waves, to catch and steady it.

William had had a thought that a king, even one as yet un-crowned, should stand in royal dignity and let his subjects sweat for him. But he could not be that kind of king. He vaulted over the gunwale and down into the sharp cold of the water, heaving and laughing with the rest.

He made sure that the one nearest him was the young lord, and equally sure that once they were all sorted out, the ship moored and the horses and baggage unloaded, they were side by side. Last to come off the ship had been Robert the clerk, carrying in his arms the wrapped bundles of crown and sword and scepter, and the king's seal guarded as close as his life.

Robert laid down his burden reluctantly and set to wringing out his skirts, while the rest of them found their feet and settled the horses. The boy from Britain stepped neatly around rather than over that most precious of the ship's cargo, just as one of the horses broke loose and charged him.

He stopped and stood quiet. As the big grey lunged, blind with God knew what passion, he caught the flying lead and shifted his weight from foot to foot. The stallion's leap turned into a spin, then a halt in confusion, while the man rubbed the sweating neck and murmured into the twitching ear. The long head drooped; the horse sighed. The wildness had gone out of him.

“That was well done,” William said.

The young man smoothed the mane on the grey's neck and handed over the lead to a fiercely apologetic owner. “It's nothing,” he said to them both. He bowed to the knight, then bowed low to William. “My lord,” he said.

“You know me,” said William. God: if he had seen this boy before, surely he would have remembered.

A smile hovered in the corner of the boy's mouth. It never quite escaped to fill the rest of his face, but William felt as if the sun had grown suddenly, notably brighter. “My name is Robert,” the boy said, inconsequentially enough. “My father is sheriff in Kent.”

“Robert?” said William, casting his glance across at least three of them on that shore, and God knew how many of the younger villagers might share the name as well; not to mention half of the Norman males in England. “Then you're what? FitzHaimo?”

“Robin,” the boy said. “Robin will do. I came to guide you where you need to go.”

“I know the way to Winchester,” William said. He should have bristled, perhaps, but in that bright orbit, it was impossible.

“Surely you do,” said the boy. Robin.

William's brows lowered. The light had darkened. His sight had cleared—enough at least to see what was behind that so-captivating face. “You're one of them,” he said. “What was your mother? A nixie? A fey?”

Robin laughed. It was a robust, mortal sound, for all the shimmer that was on him, that he was deigning at last to let William see. “She was a perfectly ordinary child of old gods, a Lady of Avalon. She didn't corrupt me too badly. I'm not to turn you into a wizard or give you a devil's horns. I'm to stand beside you, no more, and be whatever you need me to be.”

“That's a great deal,” William said.