Castaways in Time

by Robert Adams

  In one spate of his perennial brain-racking, he thought of Cousin Brien and that monarch's patronage of all sorts of artists and craftsmen.

  Perhaps . . . perhaps the current roster might include a physician or two . . . ?

  Master Harold, the goldsmith, was locked in his private sanctum, carefully completing the wax carving for a bit of jewelry promised to his old friend James Whyffler, when an insistent knocking at the barred door finally brought him, more than a little angry, to throw open the portal and grimly confront the journeyman who had dared to so disturb his master. White with fear, the young man had stuttered that a noble visitor, a foreigner by his dress, had not only refused to return another day, but had solemnly promised to notch the journeyman's nose and ears did he not speedily present his master.

  Harold slammed the door, locked it, pocketed the big key, and stalked out to confront this arrogant foreigner. Artisans of precious metals lived and worked under the personal protection of both King and Church and were seldom subjected to such abuse by English nobles. He intended to say a few choice words to this foreign jackanapes, and if the noble fool chose to take offense . . . well, the fine sword Harold had brought with him into this world hung handy on the wall near his desk and he had not forgotten how to use it.

  The man who confronted him was as tall as was he, tall indeed for this undernourished time, big and muscular and lithe for all of it. His clothing was all rich silks and dyed doeskins, handsomely tooled leather and gold or silver buckles. The outlines of several large ringstones showed through the soft gray leather of his riding gloves; the hilts of both sword and long dagger were bejeweled gold and so were their cases—and the gold was fine workmanship, the goldsmith Harold noted professionally.

  The huge gold-and-amethyst brooch securing the nodding, deep-green ostrich plume to his baggy crushed samite cap was a true work of art, like the several small and single large order pendants hanging from the massy-gold, flat-linked chain round his neck. The man's face was masked, but a pair of sea-green eyes and a brick-red beard forked in the Spanish style were visible.

  "Does my lord speak English?" snapped Harold. At the stranger's curt nod, he then demanded, "All right, my lord, what is of such importance that my lord felt compelled to threaten my man with disfigurement did he not fetch me away from my work?"

  Chuckling a maddeningly familiar chuckle, the richly garbed man stripped off his gloves, then unfastened his mask. It dropped to reveal the grinning face of Emmett O'Malley. "The importance, Harold, is that I'm damned thirsty and the bouchal ne'er even offered me a stoup of ale. Well, man, are ye just going to stand there wi' y'r mouth open fit to catch flies?"

  Over dinner, Emmett talked only of his wife, family, work and the numerous small wars in which he had taken part, related current gossip of King Brien's court and listened to Harold talk of his own past few years in York. After the dinner, over pipes of Spanish tobacco and a dark, sweet wine of Malaga—the wine carefully chilled with ice cut from the River Swale in winter and stored in sawdust and straw in the spring-house of Harold's small establishment—O'Malley got down to business.

  "Ken, I didna come to England strictly to see you. I be here wi' a delegation of physickers from Tara; the rest be in Coventry at the summer court. I rode up to see ye and to broach on a matter."

  Harold thought Emmett had changed greatly over the years. He had not aged perceptibly, of course, but his manner now was that of a wealthy nobleman, accustomed to power and to unquestioned obedience to his commands; also, in addition to a honey-thick brogue, he had acquired a bit of longwindedness.

  "Ken, be it true that the longevity boosters incorporate a universal and powerful antibiotic? I seem to recall something of the sort frae lang agone, but it wasnae my field and sae much has happened since . . . but ye helped tae master the process, an' formulated the booster doses we brought wi' us."

  Harold nodded. "Yes, your memory is accurate, Emmett. The combination of drugs in the boosters will ward off any known disease except the common cold. Why?"

  "Prince Arthur of Wales be dying, Ken, of some wasting fever. Everything has been tried—pilling, purging, bleeding, decoctions of herbs an' God alane knows whatall, not tae mention nonstop masses an' endless chauntings o'er the bouchal—but I think me he'll nae last oot the moon. Y'r King Henry sent tae my ain King hoping, I suppose, that a physician of Tara might be more learned, but they all hae told me privily that nane of them can do aught what hasnae already been done."

  The Irish nobleman puffed his clay pipe back to life, then took a long pull at his wine goblet. "Had I brought any of my ain boosters wi' me, I'd hae tried ane or twa on Arthur me ainsel' but they all be carefully hid in the false bottom of a small casket an' in the care of the good fithers at Fora, so I thought of ye and saddle-pounded me poor arse up here. Ye may say all ye wish about the endless wars of Sweet Ireland, but for a' that, our roads at least are good an' well tended. I'd ne'er before heerd of mudholes in the heat of a dry summer, Ken, not till I rid the track frae Coventry tae York, I hadnae!"

  Harold left his shop and house in the care of his guild and look the road to Coventry astride his big, smooth-gaited mule, followed by his body servant and a pack animal. As befitted a noble-in-law of the High King of Ireland, Emmett's train was much larger—a dozen servants and armed retainers and no less than eight heavy-loaded pack mules. O'Malley's spotted stallion was the first of the famous Irish leopard-horses Harold had ever seen.

  The shoulders of the big horse were loaded and straight, the chest was deep and powerful, the quarters broad. Like all the better specimens of its breed, the destrier stood nearly seventeen hands at the withers and weighed a good fifteen hundredweight; the neck was comparatively long and the head comparatively small, a testament to the rich Arab heritage of the breed. Mane and tail were long and snow-white and the back was indented as if nature-designed to hold the richly tooled saddle fitted with brass and silver. Though the skin beneath was black, the stallion's base hair color was an off-white and the odd-sized and -shaped spots were a very dark gray. He was high-spirited and Harold's mules were terrified of him.

  ——«»——«»——«»——

  The old Archbishop sighed and closed his eyes briefly. "Travel was pleasant in those days, Bass; for all that the roads were no better than Emmett had complained, there were no bands of robbers to contend with between here and Coventry and such highwaymen and footpads as may have worked the area were no doubt intimidated by Emmett's well-armed and clearly pugnacious Irishmen."

  "When first I saw him who later became King Arthur II, he was all but dead, only sallow skin and bones, his head and body covered with sores from the leeches. I doubted then that even the longevity boosters could save the boy. Nonetheless, I began to dose him with them, ten a day for a couple of weeks, by which time he had recovered sufficiently to begin to eat broth and syllabubs."

  "King Henry had been so frantic upon my arrival that he had hardly inquired my name; at that point I think he would have allowed a being with horns and cloven feet to try to cure Arthur, since all the vast assemblage of physicians and surgeons had frankly despaired. Nor were they at all happy that I had succeeded where they had failed; indeed, they had me hailed before an ecclesiastical court on a charge of sorcery and witchcraft."

  "There was no possible way that I could have explained the compounding of the longevity boosters to a tribunal consisting of a Renaissance bishop, two abbots, and two monsignors but that never became necessary, fortunately. King Henry's men surrounded the monastery where I was being held prisoner and solemnly promised to raze the entire complex unless I was delivered—safe, sound, and whole—to them. Once I was free, the cloak of royal protection was cast over me."

  "Of course, the clergy appealed to everyone of power from the Roman Pope on down, and the Physicians' Guild made no secret of the fact that they were out for my blood after I had informed their representatives that much as I would have liked to do so, I could not share with them the formula tha
t had cured the Prince."

  "The upshot of it all was that sly old Hal, knowing that there was little likelihood of the Church's hounding me were I one of their own, had me whisked off to Canterbury—where the Archbishop then had his seat—ordained a priest, and then advanced to a monsignory. In this world, clergy are allowed, nay even encouraged if they demonstrate a talent, to dabble in alchemy and all matter of arcane pursuits. I then was publicly rewarded for saving the life of the Prince of Wales with the post of Court Alchemist."

  "Close as Arthur and I became during his long reign, Hal and I were even closer friends, confidants, by the time he died, nine years later. He was a levelheaded and completely practical man, Bass, but open-minded, for all. Though he often put on great shows of piety for public consumption, he actually was an agnostic and he recognized the Church for what it truly is: this world's most powerful and wealthy political force."

  "After careful consideration, I told Hal the whole truth about the advent of Emmett and me into this world, and, at his insistence, we journeyed up here, to Whyffler Hall, that he might see the console. And well it was that we came just when we did, too. Both his first two wives having died in childbirth, James Whyffler had wed a young heiress, replaced the stockade with the present stone wall, and was in the process of leveling the hill to lay the foundations of this hall when His Majesty's retinue arrived. It had been his original intention to dismantle the upper levels of the old tower-keep, utilizing those precut stones in the foundation of the hall, while filling the lower level with earth and rubble for a ready-laid stretch of foundation."

  "Of course, King Hal forbade any such thing, citing as public reason that the old keep had withstood the Balderites plus God knew how many generations of Scot reavers; he ordered that instead the tower be incorporated into the new hall. And after he had seen the console and I had shown him the operation of one of the hand-stunners, he had the masons wall up the only entrance to the tower cellar, marked the closure with the Royal Seals, then had James Whyffler vow that only I or the King would ever be allowed to break those seals. I'm sure James thought that royal treasure or religious artifacts or both had been deposited in that cellar, and no doubt he was highly flattered by the secret honor thus accorded him and his house."

  "In 1508, the first of the so-called Priests' Plague outbreaks occurred. The disease had afflicted portions of Armenia and Turkey as early as the waning years of the fifteenth century and was thought to have died out there, then it burst like a petard in the Balkans during the summer of Arthur's illness. After lying dormant through the winter, it moved north, into Europe proper, the next summer."

  "Yes," said Foster, "I've heard talk of this Priests' Plague; it had something to do with the senior archbishopric being moved from Canterbury to York, didn't it?"

  The old man shook his head. "No, not this first outbreak, Bass, but the second, which occurred during the reign of Arthur II. There have been other outbreaks since that one, but not in England, thank God."

  "Okay," said Foster, "the obvious question, Hal. Why the designation 'Priests' Plague'? Simply because it wiped out the then-Archbishop and all his household?"

  The white-haired head shook again. "No, Bass, the disease was called Priests' Plague long before it came to these islands. Why? Because eighty percentum of the victims were clergy nobles or merchants—chiefly in towns, but in the countryside as well, notably in monasteries."

  "I theorize, Bass, that the plague is transmitted by way of luxury goods, likely Asian in origin. I've never been able to pinpoint any closer than that general classification. But consider you this: the Court was hard hit, the King and his two sons only lived through my lavish expenditure of my longevity booster capsules; the queen refused to take them and so died. Throughout the rest of this realm, almost nine out of ten town-dwelling clergy were stricken and more than half of those died; in the wealthier monasteries, there frequently was not a single survivor . . . yet very few of the simple, comparatively poor village clergy were afflicted and the stricter, less luxurious monastic communities survived intact."

  "Inside two months, three-fifths of the greater nobles of England were dead, along with their families and even their entire households, like as not. Of the commoner sorts not connected with service of nobles or clergy, most deaths occurred among merchants dealing in commodities from overseas, their households and employees, or those commoner townsmen grown wealthy enough to afford luxuries."

  "Even as England was slowly recovering, a fresh outbreak was raging through Italy, southern France, and Catalonia, so there was no objection from Rome when the King took upon himself the old royal right to fill vacant sees and other clerical offices. Right many a humble, middle-aged priest suddenly found himself with the ring of a bishop on his finger. And, if the truth be told, Bass, the anti-Rome sentiment of the English people began at that time, through the preachments of these commoner-priests-cum-prelates against the sloth, indolence, money grubbing and posturings of the Church hierarchy."

  "I was invested Archbishop of York, though I saw precious little of my see while Hal remained alive, or during the first few years of Arthur's reign. You'll have heard the tale of Hal's death, I'm certain, of a broken neck while hunting. It's the way he would have preferred, I trow, for he had a very terror of a slow, lingering final illness, God bless his gallant old soul."

  "So Arthur II became king at the age of twenty-five; he was then a recent widower with two young sons and an infant daughter, but he quickly rectified that marital situation by taking to wife the Princess Astrid of Denmark and she bore him two more sons before she died."

  "He's beginning to sound," remarked Foster, "a bit like the Henry VIII of my—of our—own world."

  "Not so," replied the Archbishop. "That Henry put aside one wife, executed two, and annulled his marriage to another. Arthur's bereavements were none of his deliberate doing; both Catherine and Astrid died in childbirth, and Brigid of Tara, his third wife, died shortly after a birthing, of what I strongly suspect was puerperal fever. On the twentieth anniversary of his coronation, Arthur was once more a widower; so too was his brother, Duke Henry of Aquitaine . . . and that situation spawned the War of the Three Marriages."

  "That was the war in which Henry was killed, right?" asked Foster.

  "Well . . . in a manner of speaking, Bass," answered the old man. "He was badly wounded in one of the last battles and, before he could regain his strength, he died of Priests' Plague . . . but that is all getting ahead of the tale, again."

  "Francois III was then King of France, and a widower, too. He made overtures for the hand of Marie, daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, but Burgundy and France are traditional enemies and the old Duke saw in these French overtures a hidden plot to gain a claim to the duchy by the French king, so he married his daughter to Arthur of England. Only a few months later, Duke Henry of Aquitaine became the son-in-law of his neighbor, the King of Navarre-Aragon, and at almost the same time, a match was arranged between the Grand Duke of Savoy-Corsica and Arthur's once-widowed eldest daughter, Camilla Tudor. Whereupon Francois III began to feel threatened."

  "I can't imagine why he should have felt threatened," chuckled Foster, picturing the situation on a mental map. In this world too, England and France were age-old enemies. Only a couple of centuries before the time of which the Archbishop was speaking, the Kings of England had held more French territory than had the Kings of France and, though they had then lost all save Aquitaine and the bare sliver of territory around Calais, Francois III must have lived in mortal dread of a fresh English invasion of Normandy and Brittany, especially at a time when his armies might be occupied with difficulties on other borders.

  No doubt the unhappy French monarch had suffered waking and sleeping nightmares of English foemen pushing out from Calais, Aquitaine-English and Navarrenos marching up from the southwest while Aragonese ships harried and raided the Mediterranean coast, Savoyards coming from the southeast, and Burgundians from the west and north, all intent upon
slicing sizable chunks out of the French pie.

  "Of course, I cannot speak for the aims of Savoy or Navarre-Aragon or Burgundy or even, really, for Henry—who was always a warhorse champing at the bit—but I assure you that Arthur II had no immediate designs upon France," the old man went on. "For a Tudor, Arthur was a singularly peaceable, unacquisitive man."

  "But Francois chose to anticipate the worst and commenced to levy troops, fortify his borders, and try to foment trouble for everyone involved, especially for England. He first approached the High King, but Arthur's third wife had been the half-sister of Brien IV and he likely would not have joined France in attacking England even had he not had a plentitude of homegrown problems to occupy him and his army."

  "Then the Scots were sounded out. Ailpein Stewart, the grandson of that King Robert whom Hal had aided against the Balderites, was then on the throne . . . but just barely. He was a young and a foolish man and a very weak monarch."

  Foster nodded. "Sort of like the Alexander who led the invasion, last year?"

  The Archbishop frowned. "No, Bass, not at all. Alexander was a strong, a very strong, king. But neither strong kings nor weak last long on the blood-splattered throne of the Kingdom of Scotland; only the shrewd men who know when to display strength and when to bow to the wills of the powerful nobles who are the real rulers of Scotland."

  "These Scots be a strange race, Bass—two races, really, two, at least. The Lowlanders share in a full measure of the native pugnacity that seems to mark the Celt, wherever you find them. Over the centuries, they have caused their own kings almost as much trouble as they have caused the English kings, escalating reaving raids into border wars at times most inconvenient to Scotland."