by James Blish
Someone knocked. After his first start, Roger jerked open the door with a great surge of relief travelling through his muscles. Anything that would serve to take him out of this prison-yard circling had to be welcome.
It was Adam. ‘Eheu,’ he said, twitching his long nose. ‘Stercor stercoraris! I was about to ask thee if thou’d supped, but that could no man in this chamber-pot. Ho, Roger, ware the candles—’
Roger missed the candles, but he did not miss the bed, though he tried. He gasped and glared at Adam.
‘God pardon me, and do thou, too,’ Adam said, instantly repentant. ‘Here, let’s sponge thee off and get fresh linen –hold off, thou’rt but making it more hopeless – and then we’ll have thee changed to higher quarters. Stay’st thou here and thou’lt suffocate; look how blue yonder candles burn; ‘tis like the vault of a sewer.’
He helped Roger to strip, steadying him, and bathed him again.
‘Full many a rogue’s died from taking such a refuge,’ he said, wrapping the still-damp surplice over the warm dry shift he had removed from his own back. ‘There’s a foulness collects over still sewage that kills even rats. I myself have seen spectral fires burning over cesspool-heads, in the midst of nights; demons, belike, come to breathe what’s closest on earth to their air in hell.’
‘How can a demon leave hell by first intention? Roger asked, staring with fascination at the nearest candle-flame. It was undeniably mantled with blue, but not the blue of incipient guttering-out; the flame itself was as tall as ever.
‘Ah, Roger, as to that, no demon’s ever left hell, nor ever can; yet, they appear. Don thy shoes, Roger. Did not the prophet Elijah appear before all during Passover to tell of the coming of our Lord? Yet left not that place where he abode? These things lie in Nature, or in Miracle; as to the latter, the Angel of Death is everywhere, and yet always in heaven; as to the former, the sun is in heaven, but his light is ubiquitous and all-pervasive – thus speaks one who comments on the Haggadah, with wisdom as I ne doubt. What doest thou? Save the linens, the King’s household will wash them!’
Roger carefully finished stuffing the window with the sticky bedding and clothing, adding straw judiciously here and there. ‘Peace, Adam, I mean not to throw them to the Thames. Mayhap I’ll trap a rat, should thilke chamber be such a death-cell as thou foresee’st.’
But to what purpose?’
‘None. To see an it will happen. Now I am ready. Whither away?
Adam shook his head. Thou’rt mad as Henry. Well then, away; I have in mind that we should while away our time with certain persons close to the King; whereby all may gain, be we politick enough. There, close thy door and let thy miasma collect, if that’s to be the boy’s bird’s egg, and take a breath. Now forward, for we’re already much delayed.’
The air in the corridor was to be sure so much better than anything Roger had breathed in the last few hours that it made him dizzy all over again; he had to steady himself against the wall for a moment. While he waited, another notion came into his floating, nearly detached head.
‘How didst thou read in this infidel text, Adam? Have you Hebrew?’
But it was too late; the preoccupied, eager, secretive Adam of the transit to London was back with Roger now. ‘But little,’ the Franciscan said. ‘Come now, for tomorrow is Henry’s day; tonight we must put his house in order, though he wis it never …. But first to sup in my chambers, where thou’lt learn ease a while; for truly I ne’er before saw clerk nor Emperor with so wild an eye. When thou opened to me first tonight, thy left eye was stuck shut, and thou didst know it not, nor when it opened; as a two-eyed Polyphemus I can conduct thee nowhere.’
‘I’ll see, an there be light. Go on.’
But, in fact, he saw little; or rather, saw as much as usual, some of it doubtless of pith and moment, but without understanding. To begin with, he remained more lightheaded from the miasma than he realized until too late. The meal with Adam gave him little to occupy his intellect, Adam waxing more secretive and preoccupied by the moment; and the meal being accompanied through some whim of the King’s with an excellent Spanish sack, and Roger having scarcely tasted wine of any quality since that crucial Fall of 1231, he left Adam’s table in a mixture of befuddlements.
Then, Roger was reasonably sure, they had gone to the apartments of someone who could only be the King’s sister Eleanor, where Adam had disappeared for what seemed in retrospect like a long time, but might have been shorter than a low mass, considering all the poisons – material and spiritual – adrift in Roger’s brain. There was perhaps nothing very unusual about this, since everyone knew that Adam was Eleanor’s confessor – and yet, Adam beforehand had been so full of conspirator’s airs about it that even a clear head might not have known what to think. The apartments themselves were sumptuous, far more so than any possible apartments at Beaumont, which, after all, was closer to being a castle than a palace, but Roger was in no position to enjoy their richness even had he had a taste for such things; for it shortly became plain to him that his role, as Adam had intended it, was to be a lure for a brash tiring-wench named Judy who otherwise would have been an inconvenience to the Lady Eleanor and the Franciscan.
Thus the visit to Eleanor’s rooms was long, uncomfortable and mysterious, and if the King’s household was in any way set more in order thereby, Roger did not come within bow-shot of knowing how or why that night. Adam looked stern when he emerged at long last, and he left behind him the sound of suppressed weeping – but perhaps tears were the customary cost of settling a Crown more firmly. If so, Roger was grimly happy to remain a perpetual antechamberer in such matters.
Yet, he was at the same time in a fury with Adam, and promptly turned on him a denunciation so stammering and disconnected that he scarce understood two words of it himself.
‘Eh?’ Adam said. ‘Master thyself, Roger, I pray thee. What’s this? There’s no harm in Judy for thee, be thou only on thy guard as becomes a churchman—’
‘That – that’s naught to the purpose. Deny thou if thou canst that thou intendedst naught else but to throw us together, for thine own easement? I’d have thee know that I’m no brawling clerk. I’ll have no more to do with women, ne ladies nor tiring-maids nor whores, attendest thou me? How dost thy conscience rest to have led thy fellow in Christ into such a test?’
‘Swef, swef,’ Adam said. ‘’Twas not meant to be a test, Roger, only a diversion; whyfor so savage? A peasant girl is not a pestilence.’
‘Devils live in them,’ Roger said, the sullen fumes in his head seeming to issue forth in wreaths with the words. ‘They are all thieves and whores, to the Last Judgment.’
‘No Christian may declare another eternally damned except on pain of sin,’ Adam said. ‘How wilt thou preach, and yet have naught to do with women? They are the half of mankind.’
‘Nor will I preach, be that the price of it, whatsoe’er the Capito would have me do. Better to teach than to go down among these placket-pickers.’
‘A grave matter to be making puns upon,’ Adam said, looking at him speculatively. ‘Then thou hast decided for Paris, Roger?’
‘Mayhap,’ Roger said. ‘Another trap, Adam? Is this then the comer that thou meanest to drive me into? Take care, I may bite thee!’
‘Thou’rt ill,’ Adam said. ‘I was mistaken to take thee at all. Thou’rt so disputatious at thy worst, Roger, I’m forever mistaking it for thy best. Go thou to bed; I’ll manage without thee; there’s still more to undertake, but needs a brow as cool as stone, else better not to undertake it at all. Dost remember the way?’
‘Better than thou. Go to; I’ve had enough.’
Adam nodded curtly and turned off through a door which Roger had not even noticed, leaving him alone and suddenly much more befuddled and afloat than he had realized. He had, he understood with the awful clarity of the drunken man, just created a disaster for himself, though how it had come to this end he could not riddle. Nay, he had not created it entire by himself; Adam had been as m
uch to blame as he. And now the Franciscan was gone, with a brusque order to Roger to return to his room, his promise to find Roger something better than that sink-hole quite forgotten in his passion to play with the lives of more important people.
So mote it be, the self whispered icily inside Roger’s swimming head. Time will discover who these self-same worthies are. Snatching a torch from a bracket, Roger blazed his uneven way back to his room, at the head of a comet of smoke and sparks. He butted the door open blindly and thrust the torch inside.
The whole room turned into a solid block of blinding yellow flame. The door slammed against his forehead. The slam was like a summary of all the thunderclaps since creation. The floor shuddered with it, the very palace seemed to rock.
He did not know that he had fallen until the back of his head struck the stone. The shock was stunning. When he was able to see and think again, he was as sober as though all the wine had been bled out of him by some miraculous barber. He was slumped against the opposite wall, every bone aching. In the distance, he could hear shouts and the sound of running.
It was impossible to imagine entering that room again, much less striking a light there. A demon had come to breathe the poisoned air in very truth. But the sound of running was coming nearer – and tomorrow was the day of all days for King Henry; he would be sure to take such a blast as the worst kind of an omen. Suppose he were to discover that it had taken place in the room of that same man who had flung ‘stones and rocks’ in his face at Oxford? Men had been burned as sorcerers for less.
Someone in mail ran by him in the blackness, clinking and wheezing, and trod without noticing it on Roger’s out-turned ankle. Biting his tongue to keep silence, Roger wormed his way up against the wall to a sitting position, drew his knees into his chest, and drove himself to his feet. The runner went on. Calling upon God in his heart, Roger crossed to the door and pushed it. It opened at once.
The air in the room smelt burnt, but no longer foul; perhaps the demon had gone. Holding that thought high, Roger groped across the room to where he had last seen his box. It was there, and in it the two flints, a bit of tinder, the stub of a candle. It was hard to strike a light with hands that shook so, but he got one after only five tries.
In the weak light, the room seemed utterly undisturbed. No: the plug of wet bedding at the window was gone, doubtless destroyed by the flight of the demon. The tapers that had been brought earlier had been blown out, but not toppled, and he lit them from his stub.
The air was flocculent with fine fingerlings of falling soot. When his hand came trembling away from his cold wet brow, it was smeared greasily with the stuff, as though it had been settling on him for hours. Also, there were splinters in his face – a sizeable number. He closed one eye, then the other; no, they had missed his eyes; but they were beginning to hurt. And he did not dare call for a surgeon, nor take a needle to them himself – such wounds would be marked at tomorrow’s convocation; better to appear tomorrow with a puffy face and let it be ascribed to excess. Adam himself might be the first to so interpret it, if perhaps not the first to speak it out. The soot could be wiped off somehow.
The hubbub was farther away now, and sounded as baffled as it was angry. The immediate danger seemed to have passed. As for tomorrow that would take care of itself.
But how under God had it happened? Surely demons did not come to live in poor students’ rooms simply because they liked the air there; after tomorrow, someone else might sleep here, and become slowly surrounded by the same miasma, and become as sick. And suffer the same lightning? Perhaps, if he sealed the room … and thrust a torch in it after … Clearly there was some connection, but Roger could not grasp it. Abruptly he was felled by exhaustion as though by a hammer. He barely had time to shed himself of his coat before sleep claimed him on his straw, leaving all the candles still burning.
That Henry had been shaken in his Hall was at once to be seen in the High Chamber that merciless April morning, for he came before his earls and his barons, his Poitevins and their relatives in search of preferment, and before Edmund Rich and his bishops with the face of a man who has slept not at all, but wrestled the whole night long with terror and a bad conscience. He seated himself without a word and regarded all before him with alarmingly bloodshot eyes.
Roger, less than nothing among all these high counsels, was not noticed at all, except by Adam, who shot him one startled glance and a half-smile of commiseration, and as promptly seemed to forget that he existed. With Edmund was Grosseteste, magnificent and strange, not yet consecrated but full of works, and often consulted by the bishops around Edmund; and at Grosseteste’s elbow was Adam. Among the barons Roger recognized Simon de Montfort, somehow no longer beautiful but as sternly handsome as a shaft of granite, yet oddly ill at ease, as though he found himself torn between the earls and the Frenchmen who were his countrymen. If de Montfort looked ill at ease, however, Peter des Roches looked positively ill; his plump face was like whey.
The King continued to say nothing at all. At last, however, a herald ventured to offer him the mace. He took it without seeming to notice what it was; his eyes shot open in alarm when he heard the trumpets.
‘Eh?’ he said hoarsely. ‘Well then. Speak, someone’
‘I will speak, my lord King,’ Edmund Rich said. His voice was quiet, but it filled the Chamber. ‘We are here that thy kingdom be no more dismembered. These thine earls and barons have gathered with us under the protection of Christ the Almighty King and His vicar on earth, under whose sign and seal thine earthly kingship has its patent, and under none other.’
‘Go on,’ Henry said.
‘Aye, that we will. My lord King, didst hear the earthquake eat at thy kingship only last night? What dost thou say to this? Shall these ancient stones quiver, and thine heart be unmoved?’
‘We called you, as we called you all oft before, to seek composition,’ Henry said with a whisper of the old arrogance. We have never sought else. Therefore, say forth, and affright us not with thunders.’
The words were brave, but the tune was almost humble. Here is a king, Roger thought, with a heart of wax.
‘There is no way but this,’ Edmund said. ‘Thou shalt repair thine errors, my lord King, or thou shalt be excommunicated. The church bath protected thee long and long, since thou wert in swaddling clothes. It will withdraw that protection momently. Act now. Begin with these Poitevins, who have leeched at thee and thy kingship long enough.’
The King turned suddenly to look at Grosseteste. Adam whispered into Grosseteste’s ear; the great head nodded slowly. The King clenched his hands and looked away again, and his eyes lighted on Peter des Roches. For a long moment these two stared at each other in a passage at arms which was as silent and furious as an embrace.
‘Thou,’ Henry said, ‘thou adder in our ear.’
‘My lord King, consider—’
‘Speak no more, thou compromiseth thine holy mission,’ Henry said, his voice beginning to rise. ‘We command thee. Obey.’
Des Roches looked at the flagstones.
‘Go thou back to thy bishopric and attend to the cure of souls, as God permits thee. And thenceforth, on no account, meddle with the affairs of this our kingdom.’
Henry’s head jerked sidewise. ‘Peter de Rivaulx.’
‘My lord King.’
‘We command thee without fail to give up our royal castles to us, to render us an account of our royal monies, and immediately to leave our court.’
‘My lord King, it shall be so. Only a few days for the accounting—’
‘Leave our court!’ Henry said, lurching to his feet. ‘By Goddes bones, wert thou not beneficed and admitted to the rights of the clergy, we should order thine eyen twie enriven from thy skull, thou that stolst from us the loyalties of our earls, and whispered blood, blood, blood in our ear all the nights and days! Out, out!’
Rivaulx knew his king; he picked up his skirts and ran. Peter des Roches hung back, ashen but clinging to some last unim
aginable shred of dignity, but most of the Poitevins were swirling after Rivaulx, trying to sneer into the blackly triumphant faces of the barons.
‘Go not without our charge, pack-rats,’ Henry shouted after them, brandishing the mace. ‘You are expelled one and all, from our court and from our country and from the charge of our estates. Go you away to your own burrows, and never show your faces before us again, else we shall use your skulls as bowls.’
The last pair of Poitevin heels scuttered out of sight like magic. Roger had to press his hand over his splinter-stitched lips until the pain came to keep from bursting into laughter. The King, his chest heaving, looked over the rest of the Chamber and saw nothing but solemn approval. After a while, he sat down, and settled his trembling body forward in an attitude of command.
‘First things first,’ he said, in a voice that shook only a little. ‘And now, Archbishop Rich, let us compose our kingdom as well as may be. Wilt thou to Wales? We’d have Richard earl-Marshal back, an it could be brought about; let us all make peace, by Goddes bones.’
Edmund Rich bore toward Henry the look of an eternal judge. ‘How can that be, my lord King?’ he said, in a voice as unforgiving as riven stone. ‘Dost thou believe I can undo all thy treacheries with Richard Marshal?’
‘Then take with thee whomsoe’er thou willst. Whoso’er is highest in probity in thine eyes, and in Marshal’s. We see with thee the Bishop of Chester, and eke the Bishop of Rochester. That should be a deputation worthy of trust. What think my barons of this?’
There was a short consultation. Then de Montfort stepped forward.
‘Thou, Simon? Art so quickly leading earl of the realm? We hike this not.’
‘Nay, my lord King. I am the least, and therefore can speak for all, rather than for myself alone. And this is our rede: An thou become reconciled with Richard, we shall be reconciled with thee.’