by Dave Duncan
Which was true, because I had discovered that I knew it by heart, and sometimes, in those hazy moments as one drifts off to sleep, I found the verses singing through my mind. And then I would dream. Who can chose to dream or not dream?
She embraced me. “I have spent more than half my life married to you. I want you to come back safely and make it two-thirds.”
“I want it to be three quarters or more,” I said. “It will never seem like too much.”
A leisurely ride through two wonderful spring days brought us to Westminster. I had visitor privileges at the palace, so as soon as I made myself known there, we were assigned comfortable quarters, together with water and towels. I had barely finished drying my face and hands when there came a knock on the door, which Lars opened to reveal a page in Queen Eleanor’s livery. He was no more than twelve, and looked absolutely terrified as he reported that Her Grace would receive Lord Durwin right away.
I felt a jolt of alarm myself, mingled with triumph. I tried to remain impassive as I looked at Lars.
“Just a hunch, mm?” he said coldly.
“We shall see.” I turned back to the boy and tried a soothing smile. “Lead me. I won’t eat you, you know.”
That comfort didn’t work. He did say, “No, my lord,” yet he seemed to cringe away from me as he led me downstairs to the Queen’s withdrawing room. A cleric I did not know, undoubtedly one of her secretaries, seemed just as apprehensive as he rose from his desk and went to announce me.
The queen dowager was alone, except for her faithful Lady Amaria, who sat quietly in a corner, embroidering a sleeve with only the rhythmic movements of her fingers to show that she was alive. Eleanor had no use for the gossipy chatter of palace women. Ever since she had inherited Aquitaine as duke in her own right, she had lived in a man’s world of war, rebellions, and crusades. She considered men best employed in the roles of troubadours or the gentle make-believe knights of chivalry.
She jumped up from her desk and came to greet me with hands outstretched, just as I seen in my dream. She was showing her age now—the long years of imprisonment had preserved her like a flower pressed in a book, but the exhausting work of ruling her son’s empire was making her pay for every minute twice over. Yet, while her face had more lines, the glitter of her eyes under the long lashes was as fierce as ever.
“Welcome, Lord Merlin!” She offered me fingers to kiss, which was a signal honor. “You are very prompt.”
“Prompt, Lady Queen?”
The smile deepened. “I had just finished dictating a letter summoning you, when word came that you had arrived at the gate. The news sent poor Francois into a paroxysm of prayer. I thought he would need a long sustaining draft of ink to recover.”
“It was purely by chance, Your Grace. No magic involved.”
“No?” She registered disbelief, but then let her amusement fade as she led me over to chairs and bade me be seated. “Well, the timing is suspiciously fortuitous. I need your service.”
“As healer, minstrel, or enchanter, Your Grace?”
“Probably all of them! Know you John of Alençon, archdeacon of Lisieau?”
I recalled a rather plump cleric with an amiable face whose constantly convivial expression masked a powerful, analytical mind. “I have never spoken with him, but have heard him address the council.”
She nodded. “He knows you. My son values him highly. I am sending him to Outremer to beg the king to come home. Beg! That shameless recreant, Philip of France, not content with spreading vile lies about him to anyone else who will listen, is now plotting against him with the German Emperor.”
I waited for her to mention her other son, but she did not. She said, “Philip swore to observe the Truce of God. He swore a separate oath with my son that they would not move against the other’s lands until both were safely home. Hah! Renegade! Perjurer!” She fell silent, biting her lip.
After a moment I ventured to ask, “Just what are you asking of me, Lady Queen?”
“You are Merlin Redux, Lord Durwin. Prophesy for me! Will my son be able to take Jerusalem?”
I drew a deep breath and said, “No.” Twice now I had dreamed of King Richard standing on a ship—at the stern, facing back over the wake, under billowing sails filled by a joyfully blustery wind. He was staring at the brown landscape fading into evening, and there were tears on his cheeks.
She nodded, saddened but unsurprised. “It seems that the army is badly divided. The leaders, especially what are left of the French forces, oppose anything he wants to do. They squabble over who will be the king of Jerusalem. They disagree over what the army should do next. Go to him, Durwin, and tell him that his empire is falling apart without him. Outremer is a trap and a snare.”
She fell silent, perhaps remembering her youth, when she went there with her first husband, Philip’s father. She had been quite a hellion in those days, it was said. There had been rumors of an affair with her uncle.
“The king my liege puts no stock in my prophesies, Your Grace.”
“Then convince him! Go with the archdeacon. Bring my son home, alive and well. Or swear to me a prophecy that he will return safely.”
“I have no guidance to offer on that, Your Grace. But I do swear that I will do anything I can to help my king, according to my oaths.”
She smiled wanly. “His obstinacy may not be the worst of your troubles. That will be to avoid King Philip’s spite. It is said that Philip, on his way home, held a secret conference in Milan with the German emperor. If he has turned Henry into another enemy, then my son’s future is dark indeed.”
Now I could see why she had been desperate enough to send for me, but not how I could possibly help. Nevertheless, one cannot refuse frightened queens or sorely worried mothers.
“If there is a way, I will find it for him, Your Grace,” I said— rashly, as it was to turn out.
Later that evening I was formally presented to John of Alençon and in turn presented Lars. As I expected, the archdeacon was affable enough on the surface but hard as horseshoes underneath. In the presence of the queen, we were all very gracious.
An archdeacon is a bishop’s senior deputy. Clerics distrust enchanters, of course, suspecting them of dealing with the Devil, and they are almost as opposed to troubadours, who are given to singing bawdy songs mocking noble persons, or praising the allures of other men’s wives. The following morning, when we all set out with a troop of guards, John of Alençon and I rode side by side, and then the mask was dropped.
“I trust that neither you nor Sage Lars will be casting spells and summoning spirits while you travel with me, Lord Durwin?” I was a peer of the realm, a member of the king’s council, and just as much an emissary of the queen as he was, so I was not about to submit to bullying. “We will sing and play joyfully upon our gitterns, Your Grace. You may then wish we were castling spells and summoning demons of the most horrible aspect.”
He frowned. “If your talent be that threadbare, you had best stay clear of the king, for he is no mean troubadour himself.”
“Indeed yes, my lord. I have heard him sing. And Queen Eleanor herself praised my rendition of one of his compositions.”
We called it quits then, for the time being.
Only once on our two-month journey did anything out of the mundane occur to upset our divine. It was not by my design, but by then I had pretty much accepted that the Myrddin Wyllt had a mind of its own—and had taken charge of mine as well. We sailed from Portsmouth over to Dieppe, and from there we had a four-day ride to the archdeacon’s house in Lisieau. I would have called it a palace. There we spent two nights, enjoying the greatest comfort and best food any of us were to experience in the next year or more. On the second afternoon, I reached for another pigeon stuffed with truffles, and the room faded. . . .
I was standing in a grossly overcrowded street, or perhaps market place, for open stalls defined the sides of it. Half the people filling it were struggling to go either this way or that, while being
impeded by the other half’s clamoring to sell them something—garments, snacks, jewelry, fruits, themselves, their sisters, or drinks of uncertain nature poured from wineskins into much-used cups. The inhabitants blurred into the architecture. No one noticed me, much less tried to sell me anything, so I knew I was not present in the flesh.
When? Where? Why? What was I supposed to see?
The noontime sun stood higher over the rooftops than it ever does in England. The constant tumult of voices was dizzying, as were the odors of spices, cooking, perfumes, people, and the dung that paved the roadway. A plague of flies made the air almost unbreathable. Heavily bearded men wore strange head cloths and long robes, some black, some brightly colored; the women were packaged until only their eyes showed. But there were also monks, priests, and armed crusaders proudly flaunting the cross on their surcoats.
I was somewhere in the Holy Land, without doubt. Jerusalem itself, or one of the coastal cities? The background details all seemed very sharp, which meant that I was being shown imminent events, possibly even happening at that very moment.
Then I heard shouting drawing nearer through the babble. The words were mostly in French, being repeated in a harsh tongue I did not recognize. “Make way!” they proclaimed. “Make way for the king!”
I heard horses, saw armed riders advancing through a surf of angry protest from the displaced throng. What king? Richard himself? I felt a sickening presentiment that I had been brought there to witness something both epochal and horrible.
Indeed I had. As the vanguard passed me, I saw their principal following, a finely dressed man of around fifty, wearing the crusader cross, and mounted on a curiously nondescript horse. He alone in that mob had some space around him, although not much. He was smiling, acknowledging the cheers of the Christians, ignoring the sullen silence of the browner faces. He seemed every inch a king, but he wasn’t Richard.
A couple of monks shouted to attract his attention, holding up a letter. He edged his horse closer and reached down to accept it. They grabbed his arm, pulling him out of his saddle. Knives flashed. There were screams, blood—
I recovered my wits lying on the floor, looking up at many worried faces. Apparently I had started shouting, “No! No! No!” and then fallen off my chair. Someone had thrust a knife handle into my mouth to prevent me from chewing my tongue, although the Myrddin Wyllt chant did not produce that sort of fit. They told me I had been unconscious for a very few minutes, however long it had seemed to me.
I managed to sit up, with Lars’s help, and demanded a drink. In a few moments I was back on my chair at the table, and John of Alençon had dismissed the servants.
Our host disapproved strongly. “Does this happen often, my son? I mean, you are facing a long and strenuous pilgrimage, not a journey to be undertaken by anyone whose health is precarious.”
“It is a very rare event, Your Grace. How many kings are there in the Holy Land at the moment?” I racked my memory for any clue to the victim’s identity, but he had worn no armorial bearings, and his guards had been Templars.
John of Alençon’s frown darkened. “To the best of my knowledge, only our own King Richard. The German emperor died on his way there, and his son and successor, Henry VI, has remained at home, struggling to hang onto his crumbling dominion. King Philip tucked his tail between his legs and fled after a couple of months. The king of Jerusalem, of course, but the last I heard there were still two rival claimants—Guy of Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat. Why?”
“Because I just saw either Guy or Conrad murdered, Your Grace, struck down by two assassins dressed as monks.”
The archdeacon stared hard at me for a long minute, then turned to look at Lars, who sprang to my defense.
“If my father says that this is so, Your Grace, then you should believe him. I have never known him be wrong. He told Queen Eleanor of King Henry’s death a week before the official news arrived.”
“So I have often been told.” John of Alençon made the sign of the cross and then drained a beaker of the superb wine. “I cannot see that this makes any difference to our mission. If anything, it makes King Richard’s departure even more urgent. When we reach Outremer, you will be able to issue warnings to whichever claimant was elected, Durwin.”
I said, “Aye, Your Grace, but I doubt that there is still time to do that. I believe the deed was done while I was watching.”
We followed much the same path to the Holy Land that King Richard had taken two years before. We had no trouble within his empire, all the way south to Gascony, or even after that, when we rode across Toulouse. The count of Toulouse was officially one of Richard’s vassals, but not one he would trust very far. Fortunately, an archdeacon on pilgrimage was not to be hindered or impeded. In the port town of Marseilles, we were fortunate to obtain passage on a ship of the type called a buss, which had thirty oars and one mast with a square sail. It was cramped and foul-smelling, but we had been warned about that many times.
The master, whom I knew only as Onfroi, specialized in shipping pilgrims and crusaders to the Holy Land—and back again, although he grumbled that there were far more going than coming. He was waiting for a full load, but the archdeacon had royal money enough to change his mind, and we left the following day.
From Marseilles we followed the coast all the way to Sicily, touching in at Genoa, Pizza, Salerno, and finally at Messina—so many wonderful cities, but never did we have long enough to explore them properly. A couple of hours to stretch our legs in the docks or along the beach was all. Lars went half mad with frustration, and I was not much better. We played and sang every day the weather permitted to keep our hands in. Our repertoire was chosen more to amuse the sailors than the archdeacon, but when he celebrated mass on Sundays, we duly switched to holy songs.
We had two days at Messina, in Sicily. Lars went off with some of the younger sailors, John of Alençon disappeared on his own business, and I explored the city. I hated the local language, which sounded like Latin run through a flour mill, but our second day there was a Sunday and I was deeply impressed by the singing in the cathedral.
No sooner had we raised sail and continued on our journey, than John of Alençon beckoned me to where he was standing on the fo’c’sle, his gown writhing in the wind. He was wearing his archdeacon face.
“Good morrow, my son.”
“Good morrow to you, Your Grace.”
“I learned in Messina that the dispute between Guy de Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat over which should be king of Jerusalem was settled in the latter’s favor. A few days later, in Tyre, he was dragged off his horse by two infidels dressed as priests and stabbed to death. That happened on the 28th day of April.”
I just nodded. It had been a farseeing, then.
“You receive these prophetic visions often?”
“More often than I would wish, Your Grace.”
“You do not summon them? Then who is sending them?”
I was not about to mention horned gods, of course. “I have to believe that they come from Heaven, not Hell, my lord. I try to put them to good purpose, never evil.”
John of Alençon pursed his lips in frustration. “Queen Eleanor told me she dictated a letter summoning you and you arrived at the palace before it could be copied and sealed. I assumed that this was a blessed coincidence, but your description of an event that was happening hundreds of leagues away has to be a sending from either God or Satan.”
I shrugged. “Did you learn who ordered this devilish murder?”
His Reverence scowled at the way I had changed the subject. “Sinan. Or so one of the murderers confessed before dying.”
I suppose I looked utterly blank, because he continued. “Known as the Old Man of the Mountain, Sinan lives in Alamut, a mountain fastness somewhere in Syria, controlling a sect of infidels who worship him and will reputedly do anything he tells them to, believing that they thus go directly to Paradise. They will leap off cliffs at his command—or kill people. Even other infid
els fear him. Reputedly even Sultan Saladin himself does, because he has found some of Sinan’s followers among his own bodyguards.”
If the Myrddin Wyllt enchantment expected me to battle this Sinan, it was backing the wrong tortoise.
“So tell me, Lord Enchanter,” the archdeacon said, “why were you vouchsafed this revelation? And how will you use it in Our Lord’s service?”
“I don’t know yet, Your Grace.” That was a lie. The vision had been sent to convince my companion—a personal friend of King Richard—that my prophecies were reliable. He would so inform the king. The king would believe him and start to trust me. It would be up to me to nourish that trust and use it to good purpose.
From Sicily we headed eastward to Corfu, Rhodes, and Cyprus, then sailed as close to southeastward as the wind would let us, aiming for Outremer. Saracen pirates had been a problem there in the past, so the master told us, but King Richard’s ships had cleaned the sea of them. By then the archdeacon had taken my measure—or succumbed to my irresistible charm, as my irreverent son put it—and our relationship had become less formal.
He demonstrated this as we were standing together in the prow, watching the coast of the Holy Land creep up over the horizon. “I am not entirely looking forward to this, Enchanter.”
“What in particular, Your Grace?”
“Having to tell our king that his mother says it’s time for him to stop playing and come home.”
“If his temper is as bad as his father’s was, then I certainly do not envy you.”
“And I confess I do not envy you either, Durwin. Richard has always detested practitioners of the occult. He is convinced that you are all either frauds or devil-worshipers.”
My lord king had made that very clear even before he left England.
We came, then, safely to Outremer, and specifically the city of Tyre. After the fall of Jerusalem, five years earlier, Tyre had been almost the only part of the Holy Land still in Christian hands. In the twelve months since King Richard arrived, he had recovered a narrow strip of coast, marked by a line of small ports like a string of beads—from north to south, Tyre, Acre, Jaffa, and Ascalon. I was to see all of these, but very little of the interior. Tyre is the largest, and was where Conrad of Montferrat had been murdered.