by Andy Duncan
I went to her.
She watched me approach. She was nearly my height. Her eyes! . . . I dare not describe them. She looked into mine, and then, without moving her head or glancing away, she refocused, and looked at me again. I knew in that moment she had seen me more clearly than her father had, than the gaoler had, than anyone had since home. I held my breath, sure she would turn away. Instead she gravely bowed her head, reached for my arm, and guided me into the line at her side. The stooped crone behind her hissed at my insertion, but a steely glance from Madame shushed her.
“Do you speak Latin?” Madame asked me, in that tongue.
“I do, Madame,” I replied in kind.
“Do so, in this public place. Here, in this procession, we are pilgrims only, and will draw no attention. You know who I am.”
“I do, Madame.”
“Have you seen my father?”
“I have, Madame.”
“You have an advantage over me, then. How is he? In mind, spirit, and body?”
“In mind, keen. In spirit, resigned, but anxious for you. In body, intact, save for the injuries he inflicts himself.”
“God inflicts them,” she said. “So he told me, when I was a girl, and saw the bloody linens. A man who would keep secrets from his own household should do his own washing. Now tell me who you are.”
“Only your servant, Madame,” I said.
She blew air from the corner of her mouth. “Please. You are no one’s servant, least of all mine. Who are you?”
We neared the tomb and the guide, his pockmarked face, his maimed hands. Many in line had some scar, or limp, or hump.
“Call me Aliquo,” I said.
“Your position?”
“In this land, only emissary.”
“From whom? What business had you with my father?”
Heeding her manservant’s warning, I chose the truth.
“I offered to free him,” I said, “and to convey him home in triumph.”
Her eyes widened. “You are mad. How? Home to Chelsea? Home to me?”
“No, Madame. To my homeland across the sea.”
“The impertinence! What name is given this homeland?”
“It is called Utopia. Your father wrote of it.”
She laughed aloud, and a score of heads turned our way in shock as the echoes rained down from the arches above. Beside the tomb, without interrupting his recitation, the guide shook his head, placed the stump of a finger to his chin, and blew.
“He wrote of it, indeed!” she said, in a lower voice. “A fairy-story for his friend Erasmus, invented of whole cloth! A series of japes at the follies of the day.”
“Is all this a jape?” I asked, with a gesture at the soaring chapel all around. “Is this statue atop the tomb a jape, because he has a silver head, as the king did not in life? Mere representation is not a jape, Madame. Your father represented us, but we are not his invention.”
By now we had reached the tomb. It bore a plaque, in Latin:
Henry, the scourge of France, lies in this tomb.
Virtue subdues all things.
A.D. 1422.
“Above, you see good King Henry’s funeral achievements,” droned the guide, in nasal English, as he studied Madame for signs of outburst. “His battle helmet, sword, shield, and saddle. Note the dents in the helmet, through which good King Henry’s life was spared, glory be to God. . . .”
As she passed, Madame addressed herself to the marble of the tomb. “I have met many scoundrels,” she said, “but never one claiming to have stepped from the pages of my father’s books. And whom do you claim sent you on this mad errand? King Utopia the Nineteenth?”
“Our king, Madame . . . is not like yours. He is more like the officers of this temple. He has unique responsibilities, yes; he has certain authorities, in certain settings. Yet I was not sent by him, Madame, but by a council of the people.”
“An emissary from a headless land. Interesting. But this might explain why, a mere half-day after you stepped ashore at Woolwich, having left your private cabin on the Lobo Soares, out of Lisbon, before even buying a meal or engaging rooms, you proceeded not to York Place but to the Tower, and sought an audience not with the king, but with a condemned prisoner. A strange emissary, indeed.”
“Madame is well informed.”
“Madame is wholly uninformed,” she retorted, “on the one subject of any importance. They keep me from my father, and thus I must make do with the world.”
“You call your father condemned,” I said, “yet you grieve too soon, surely. He is not yet tried, much less convicted and sentenced.”
“That is a truth so strictly and carefully laid as to be a lie,” she said, “and one more lie to me, however small, will earn you an enemy beside which our present King Henry would seem a stick-puppet. Do you believe me?”
“I do, Madame. Tell me, the man in the tomb . . . he is the current king’s grandsire?”
She winced. “No relation. After good King Henry died, his widow married a Tudor. And there Katherine lies, as if in life. So they say.”
Only if in life she was drawn, shriveled, and waxen of complexion, I thought, but said nothing. Where one might have expected an effigy lay instead the body, not even shielded but available to all. Katherine was blessedly clothed, arms folded across her sunken breasts. The one-eyed gentleman in line before me, his absurd rapier hilt stuttering along the pedestal as he walked past, half-burst into tears, bowed, and kissed Katherine’s face.
“I apologize for my countrymen,” said Madame. “They prefer their women venerated and dead. Some attribute miracles to this poor corpse, and seek her elevation by Rome. Humph. ’Twould truly take a miracle, now—and our current king has rather discouraged miracles.” She had looked almost merry, enjoying my discomfiture at the spectacle before me, but now her face grew taut as Katherine’s. She shook her head, and the moment passed. “Tell me, friend Aliquo,” she continued. “What becomes of Utopians when they die?”
“Burned to ashes, Madame.”
“What, no burial?”
“No room, Madame. Ours is an island nation, at its widest scarcely 200 miles across. We must colonize the mainland as it is.”
“And Utopian souls? What becomes of them?”
“They . . . remain. Invisible, but among us still, seeing and hearing all. They observe, are pleased to be addressed and honored, but they cannot participate.”
“Interesting. And have your dead ones traveled with you, here to our island nation?”
“I hope not, Madame. This place would be most . . . distressing to them.”
“I know how they feel. My father refused you, of course.”
“Yes, Madame. Doubtless you’d have thought him mad, otherwise.”
“No. But I know that even locked in that fortress, he is the king’s servant and God’s, and if it’s the will of both that he—that he—” She faltered. “He would have refused you, had you come at the head of a legion. My father is the best man in the kingdom, and how I have prayed he were otherwise.”
We had left the chapel and entered the cathedral’s main chamber, where the line of supplicants broke apart and flowed into the larger crowd. We walked slowly together toward the west door, where her manservant stood, his gaze intent upon us, poised as if to spring.
“Madame, I have told you what you wanted, and I have only troubled you with my tidings. I am sorry for that. I pray you grant me leave.”
“Stay a moment, friend Aliquo. I am told that earlier today, two cutpurses were found dead in a rain-barrel in Woolwich, a quarter-hour after you set foot on the dock. Their necks were broken. Does this news surprise you?”
“No, Madame. Many rough men meet such fates.”
“Oh, indeed. Tell me, why did you not bring a legion? Why did your headless land send only you, alone?”
“My people have faith in me, Madame.”
“I think it’s because you didn’t need a legion. I think you could have brought my father out of the Tower unscathed and singlehanded, had he but said the word.”
“You think me a wizard, Madame.”
“No. I think you’re a killer, and I have a job for you. I want his head.”
“The king’s head? Now you are talking madness, Madame.”
“Henry? Fie! What need would I have for that? Not Henry’s head. My father’s. More’s. You have told me something of your land’s customs, regarding the dead. Let me now tell you something of ours. When the headsman on Tower Hill separates my father’s pate from his shoulders, his poor skull will be taken to London Bridge, impaled on a pike, and mounted atop the Stone Gate, to feed the ravens and remind all Henry’s subjects of the fate of traitors. I would spare my father that. I want his head. I want it brought home to his family. I want it brought home to me.”
At that moment, I could have turned and walked out of the temple, the city, England, her gaze entire, perhaps even beyond the range of my memory of her. Instead I tarried, forever.
“Do not ask this of me,” I said.
“My family is broken,” she said. “My friends fear to be seen with me. My servants have multiple employers. My enemies watch me, and all others avert their eyes. I have no one else to ask.”
I glanced at he who stood apart, glowering at me. “But your manservant?”
“That is William, my husband,” she continued, looking only at me, “and he is a good man, but for this task, Aliquo my killer, my emissary from the land of dreams, I have no need of a good man. I have need of you.”
“Ho, you knaves, you fishwives!” bellowed my leather-lunged boatman as he sculled straight across the paths of threescore other vessels, missing each by the width of a coat of paint. Whenever the river ahead seemed passable, he changed course and sought congestion once more.
London may once have been a great city, but I was privileged to see it too late, in its twenty-sixth year of groan beneath the man Henry. And swirling among all was the reek of the Thames. That foul brown stream flows more thickly above its surface, and knows no channel, but floods all the nostrils of the town.
I had struggled on foot onto the city’s single bridge, in hopes of achieving a perspective not granted to the scullers below—only to gain a fine view of the tradesmen’s booths that line the thoroughfare on both sides. Each swaybacked roof sprouted a thicket of faded standards that snapped overhead like abandoned washing, their tattiness mocking the very memory of festivity.
Finally, midway along the span, I entered a public garderobe—for which honor I waited a quarter-hour in line, as some men around me gave up and relieved themselves standing—and once inside, I peered through the privy-hole, to obtain a fine round view of the Thames, my only one since setting foot on the bridge. Amid cascades of filth from above, a grimy boy of perhaps ten summers sat, fishing, in a vessel the size of a largish hat.
“Ay, look out there, you swag-bellied antic!”
The boatman’s roar returned me to my present sorry state. I was under no obligation to More’s daughter, I still told myself; but there was no harm, surely, in seeing whether her task could be quickly discharged, before my departure for home. A Utopian may be forgiven the odd good deed. But I had seen enough already to complicate matters. I had hoped, once having achieved the battlement, to lift down the pike and use it to bridge the gap to the next building; or, failing that, simply to dive over the wall into the water. But the battlement was twice as high as the adjacent roofs—about twelve stories to their six—and as the Stone Gateway perched atop a bridge that was itself eighty feet above the river, any dive from the height would be two hundred feet, and fatal. A head dropped into the river would be lost on the instant, while throwing it onto the adjacent roof would be a desperate move; the twice-unlucky head would roll off, and land who-knew-where.
No, the only feasible way to bring down the head would be to carry it down the stairs and out the front door. And the only feasible way to gain the battlement in the first place was via the same stairs in the reverse direction, up. Neither up nor down looked likely, short of a safe-passage guarantee from Henry himself.
Would Madame recognize her own father’s head? Or, more to the point, would she recognize a head not her father’s? The thought of substituting a more easily recovered head gave me no pride, but that at least would be feasible, and would give the lady some measure of comfort. Yet I did not wish to see her so easily gulled.
I leaned an elbow on the saxboard, let the river lap my thoughts as the Stone Gateway bobbed before me. Assume, then, that the battlement was impregnable. From execution site to point of display, the head must travel more than a mile through the London streets—the teeming, crime-infested, unpredictable streets.
Why, anything could happen. And only fivescore cutpurses, fishwives, alemongers, soldiers and spies would have to be bribed to look the other way.
And once the display was over, well, the head would have to make its way downstairs again, to clear a space on the battlement for the next statesman.
“What do they do with the heads, after?” I asked the boatman.
His grin had gaps into which a mouse could wriggle. “Into Mother Thames they go, milord—and don’t they make a pretty splash!”
So I could just wait beneath the bridge until the head was thrown to me. A tempting plan. A simple plan. A foolish plan. I would gain only an unobstructed view of the thing sinking to the bottom of the river. And this was, of course, the thought with which my musings began; I had rounded the globe and met myself upon return.
“Oh, is that the state of it, y’say?” roared my boatman, in response to the ribald gestures of a passing fisherman. “Ye don’t fray me, you cullion! I’ll cuff you like Jack of Lent, I will!”
The trial, and the sentence, and the execution, went as Madame had foreseen. One always should trust the natives. By then, I had settled on bribery and substitution. Cross the smallest number of palms with a few paving-stones, replace the head to conceal its absence, and be done.
Utopia borders the land of the savage Zapolets, useful neighbors in that they always are willing, for pay, to perform errands that are too base for Utopians. There is no dishonor in hiring them, as Zapolets are debased already. London, too, has its Zapolets, and so, a week after More’s severed head took its place atop the Gateway, I found myself directly beneath, alone in a boat, by midnight, having silently rowed myself into place, awaiting the descent of my package.
Above me, a low whistle—and again.
I crouched in the boat and looked up at the flickering darkness. Sound was magnified beneath the stone arch, and I heard as if in my right ear someone grunting and panting from exertion. In moments, something came into view, swaying in mid-air like a pendulum, ever closer. A heavy sack was being lowered to me.
Just as I reached up and took hold of it, someone on the bridge shrieked. Suddenly the full weight of the sack was in my hands, and I lurched off balance, nearly upset the boat as I sat heavily on the bench amidships. A hot, iron-smelling liquid pelted me from above, and then something plunked into the water beside me. In the torchlight I registered the staring, agape face of the poor Zapolet I had bribed, as his severed head rolled beneath the river’s leathery surface. Just before it vanished, I snatched it by the hair, swung it streaming into the floorboards. The act was instinctive; it might come in handy. Then an arrow studded from above into the bench between my thighs. Thus encouraged, I set down the sack and rowed for the far riverbank.
Sounds carry on a river, but I heard none as I reached the stilts of some enterprise built over the water—a tannery, by the smell of it. No voices called after me. I ducked my head and rode the boat into darkness, till it bumped the barrels lashed to the quay. I tied my boat fast, risked a candle, and peeled back the
sacking, to see the head for which I had paid a guard’s life. I stared into the broad, lumpy face, its cheek triple-scarred long ago, as by a rake.
For my troubles, I now owned two severed heads, neither of them More’s.
In mid-climb, my feet against the outer wall of the Gateway, I clutched the rope, straining to hear and see what was happening on the battlement above. Had my hook been noticed? Apparently not. I heard a murmuring conversation among guards, perhaps three men, but they were distant. I pulled myself up to the edge of the wall.
More than once, in my slow progress up the wall—one window level at a time—I had been tempted to let that damned not-More head that weighted my shoulder-sack, and became only heavier each minute, simply drop into the Thames. But no, a substitute head would be useful. With luck, no one would notice that More was missing.
I waited there, just beneath the battlement, for the guards to go below. Possibly they would not, in which case I would have to kill them all quickly and silently. I determined to give them a quarter-hour, and began to mark my heartbeats as I looked out over the nightscape of the city. But sooner, all three voices moved into the stairwell, and I clambered up and over.
I counted my way to the More-pike, hoping the heads had not been rearranged since sunset, easily lifted the heavy pole out of its socket and stepped backward, laying it onto the flagstones as silently as I could. The head end necessarily was heavier, and hit first, bouncing once. I walked up the length of the pike. I reached beneath the iron band—grimacing as my fingers dented the head’s tarred surface—and tugged.
The head did not budge.
I put both feet against the severed neck, braced myself, and pushed.
The flesh buckled.
I pushed again, and the head slowly began to stutter up the pike.
I was thus occupied when I heard voices ascending the stairs.
Frantically, I managed to slide the head clear of the pike just as the first guard crested the roof—facing southward and away from me, thank Mithras. The head fell only an inch or two to the roof. I let the pike down quietly and rolled sideways, putting a low wall between myself and the guards. I hoped they were not in the habit of counting the pikes.