by Jack Whyte
As I watched him, thinking he had already lost awareness of my being there, he crossed one arm in front of his chest to support the other, drew back his upper lip in a rictus of frowning thought, and began to tap the back of one fingernail against his upper teeth. The sound of it carried clearly to me, and I listened as the tempo of his tapping increased then stopped. He sniffed sharply, then sighed and looked up at me, sweeping me from head to toe with his eyes before turning away to gaze out of the window.
“You look like a casualty. Mud, blood, and crusted dirt. Your mother’s going to be very pleased with you.”
I gazed at his back, unsure whether or not to speak and trying to gauge how angry he was with me. He hadn’t sounded angry. But before I could respond he spoke again, still facing the garden.
“You’re ten years old now, boy, more than halfway to manhood and big for your age. Do you think you’ll ever make a decent man?” He didn’t wait for a reply this time, but swung back to face me. “Chulderic thought you would, until today, but now he’s not so sure. And from what he has told me, I have to wonder, too.” He gazed at me for three long, pounding heartbeats, then closed his eyes, leaving his face expressionless. “Now tell me, do I need to wonder? What happened out there?”
My face was crimson, my chest crushed with shame.
“I got into a fight.”
He opened his eyes wide and raised one eyebrow high. I did not know the word sardonic at the time, but I recognized the expression on his face.
“I know that. You against three others, bigger and older than you. You won. That’s not what worries Chulderic. He’s the one who taught you to fight, and he might have been proud of you. But he tells me that when everything was over, and you had thrashed all three of them, you went wild and tried to kill the biggest one. Frotto, is it?”
When I nodded, he frowned. “Aye. Well, Chulderic is my Master-at-Arms, and a fighter born and bred, not some terrified old woman. He says you stopped, stepped back, chased off the other two and then went after the big one again, even though there was no fight left in the fellow. Chulderic believes you were trying to kill him. He says he yelled at you and you ignored him. He says that if he hadn’t torn you away and thrown you down you would have smashed the boy’s head in. So you tell me, now, the truth. Is Chulderic lying?”
I shook my head, trying to swallow the lump in my throat and blinking my eyes fiercely to stem the tears that threatened to spill out of me. “No,” I whispered, almost choking as I tried to speak. “I wasn’t trying to kill him … I only wanted to beat him badly, to teach him a lesson.”
My father’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Why? And what lesson?”
“To keep his big mouth shut and stop telling those lies about me.”
“What lies?”
I was crying openly now, the hurt spewing out of me. “The same ones he always tells. Every time I meet him he tells all his friends that I’m not really who I am. He tells them you’re not my real father, and that my real mother was a … was a faithless whore who left me and my father when I was a baby to run away with another man. He says his mother says that you and Mother took me in out of pity, and he says anyone can tell, just by looking at Gunthar and Samson and Theuderic and Brach, that I’m not their brother. I hate him and he’s always lying and I wanted to make him stop, to make him afraid of me so that he would stop.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, scrubbing at my face with my sleeves to dry my tears, and when I opened them I saw my father frowning at me in stupefaction.
“How long has this been going on?”
I knew then that my mother had never mentioned the first incident to him, and young as I was, something inside me shrank and withered. “For a long time. Since I was seven.”
“Three years? Why haven’t you told me this before?”
What could I say to that? I knew that if I spoke the truth my mother would have to answer for it, and in my confusion, wondering myself why she had said nothing to him, I could think of nothing else to say. He was glowering deeply now. “Answer me, boy. Why didn’t you come to me?”
“I …” And suddenly the answer sprang to my lips, along with the knowledge that I could protect my mother. “You told me not to,” I said, and saw his eyes widen. “When I told you about Ector stealing my knife you were angry at me. You told me that you had more to think about than silly boys’ squabbles and said if I came running to you every time someone did something to me that I didn’t like, I would never grow up.”
He gazed at me for a long time, his lips moving together soundlessly as though he were nibbling something, and then he drew himself erect and breathed out through his nose. “That’s true, I did, didn’t I. But that was a long time ago. You were, what, six at the time? And I had a fresh war on my hands. That very day you came crying to me over your stolen knife, as I recall, I had just received word that an entire unit of my men had been ambushed and wiped out by marauders, less than ten miles from here.” His hands moved to the heavy buckle at his waist and he undid the belt of his leggings, folding them over one arm and dropping them heavily over the back of his chair, beside his sword belt. “But at six, I suppose you would have been too young to know anything about the seriousness of that. You saw your own problem that day as the most serious one in the world, and I barked at you like an angry dog and sent you off to resolve it by yourself. And you’ve never brought me another problem since, have you? Not until now.”
He walked to the window again and stood staring out at the garden, clasping his hands behind his back. “I need to think about this, but I’ll tell Chulderic he need have no fears about your savagery—that you did what you did for good reason—good enough to satisfy me, at least. Leave me now. Go to the bathhouse and clean yourself up. Tell Lorio I want him to look at your injuries. I’ll have someone bring you fresh clothes. And we’ll say nothing to your mother about your punishment today. When you’re presentable again, come back here.” He turned back to face me. “Show me your hands.”
I went to him and did as he had asked. He took one of my hands in each of his own, turning them over to inspect my swollen fingers and mangled nails. When he was satisfied, he grunted and released me. “Well, they’re not permanently damaged, but you’d better be sure to have Lorio bandage those two fingers on your left hand. I imagine that’s all he’ll be able to do for you, other than to rub in some liniment. The bruising will go away and the nails will grow back, but you’re going to be sore for a few days. I think that, and the punishment you’ve already undergone, will be sufficient for the sins you’ve committed. What about Frotto?”
I blinked at him. “Frotto? What about him, Father?”
“What am I to do with him and his friends? Do you want me to have them whipped?”
“No!” I surprised myself with my vehemence and with the realization that I was no longer angry with Frotto. “No, if you please. Let them go.”
“I already have, but I could bring them back and have them flogged. Are you sure you want to let this quarrel end that simply?”
“Yes, Father.”
He shrugged, but I could tell he was pleased with me for some reason. “As you wish. We’ll say no more about it. Do you think you frightened him enough to make him stop baiting you?”
I frowned. “Perhaps not, but I think Chulderic did.”
My father’s face broke into the wide-mouthed smile I loved. “Aye,” he said. “I believe you might be right about that. Off with you now, and see Lorio, but waste no time. Come back here as soon as you’re clean and dressed again.”
How easy it is for us to delude ourselves in matters we simply do not want to confront. Thinking back on that afternoon—and it is a scene I have revisited countless times—I am constantly astounded by my own lack of perception. Of course, I was only ten years old, no matter how grown up and worldly I believed myself to be, and yet it has often seemed to me that the mindless relief with which I sought my freedom, scampering off to the bathhouse to be tended to and fussed over
by Lorio, would have been unchanged had I been twice the age I was.
I threw myself into the task of washing away all signs of my misadventures that day, accepting the stinging pain of hot water on my bruises and injuries as an easily bearable penance. When I was clean and dried, Lorio massaged my aching hands, then smeared them with unguents and bound them carefully in clean bright white bandages of boiled linen. I was appalled by that clean brightness, for the sight of it filled my mind immediately with the impossibility of concealing the bandages from my mother. She would immediately want to know what I had done to myself. The fact that my father had told me we would say nothing to her about my escapades that day became meaningless. Neither of us, I knew, could lie to her, for my father’s celebrated courage and heroism were all confined to what he did in battle. Even at ten, I knew they counted for naught in his own household whenever he clashed with his wife. My father would tell her the truth, and she would be angry.
Thinking such thoughts, I made my way slowly back to my father’s day quarters in the gathering dusk. It did not cross my mind that my father had not denied Frotto’s taunts, as my mother had; I had too many other thoughts to occupy my mind. Because of the shame and humiliation I had already brought upon myself that day, I was convinced that nothing could make matters worse than they already were that afternoon.
My father was still reading when I returned. The broad chart he had been studying earlier, whatever it might have been, was still spread on the table in front of him, but his attention was now focused elsewhere. He was sitting in his huge chair, deep in concentration and whispering to himself as he deciphered the script on a thick wad of paper sheets held stretched between his hands. As I entered the room he finished reading one page and moved it to the back of the pile, and the entire wad sprang back into the tubular shape in which it had been delivered, rolling itself up over his left thumb. He anchored the moved sheet carefully against the others in his left fist and then straightened the entire bundle again before he continued to read. I could tell from the speed of his whispering that he had already read the script at least once before, for first readings were always slow and hesitant as the eyes and the mind struggled with deciphering the written words and separating them from each other, trying to make sense out of the densely packed mass of characters that covered the paper. I stood patiently until he reached a natural stopping point, when he released the right edges of the missive again and allowed it to snap back into shape before he rolled it tightly and slid it back into the leather tube in which it had come to him.
“That’s better,” he grunted in my direction. “You look more like your mother’s son now. How do you feel? Are your hands sore?”
“A little,” I admitted, and he placed the leather tube carefully on the table.
“Aye, well, they will be for the next few days, I suspect. Come.”
He led me from the room and past his guards, along the stone-flagged passageway to the wide, curving staircase of hand-carved steps that led up to the King’s Quarters, where our entire family lived in a sumptuously appointed privacy that was unique in the entire kingdom. These quarters, elaborate and grand, formed the official center of the fortified castle and had been built for a Roman procurator more than a hundred years earlier, when this region had been one of the most prosperous provincial centers in the Empire. The broad, shallow stairs swept grandly upward to a deep and spacious oval landing facing three tall and imposing doorways, the central one slightly taller and wider than those on either side, its double doors of dark, polished wood more elaborately carved. The doorway on the right was the entrance to the King’s bedchambers, and its double doors opened into a suite of four large rooms, two of which were bedchambers, while the others were a living room and a private bathhouse for the sole use of the King and his wife. The imposing central doors concealed our opulent official reception rooms, the third and farthest of which was a private dining room that could seat upward of fifty people in comfort and was built directly above the main kitchens on the ground floor. The third set of doors, to the left, led to what had originally been sleeping quarters for important visitors and imperial guests and now served the rest of our family—a long row of sleeping cubicles for myself and my siblings, with an extra common room, all of which opened off the left of a long passageway that ran along the wall of the central reception hall.
“Wait here.”
I remained obediently on the landing as my father entered his own rooms, closing the massive doors behind him and leaving me to wonder idly what was going on. I let my gaze fall to the familiar colors on the floor beneath my feet, illuminated by dim, late-afternoon light from a narrow, open skylight far above my head. I slid the toe of one shod foot over the tiny bright mosaic tiles that formed an enormous and intricately worked oval depiction of the Chi-Rho symbol of the Christian Church. My mother had commissioned this work years earlier, when I was still a crawling tot, engaging the services of a brilliantly gifted artisan named Polidorus who traveled all the way from Antioch in Asia Minor to design and install the floor over the course of three years. I could still recall the rapt awe with which, as I grew older, I had watched the old man work, meticulously selecting tiny square fragments of polished stone—he called them tesserae—from the piles of red, white, and blue. He would place them effortlessly but with great precision so that, from day to day, the picture he was creating grew in size and complexity. It had been endlessly fascinating to me to wonder how the old man would be able to fill the shrinking work space to perfection, completing the design with squares of stone. so that the irregular, shapeless, and rapidly dwindling space would be filled without obvious flaws to indicate where he had left off working. For every stone he set in place diminished the open area remaining for his work, and I was incapable of seeing how he would reduce the ragged, asymmetrical work area that remained so that it would eventually accommodate and accept exactly, at the very last, one final, perfect square of stone. But flawless he had been to the last, so that nowadays, although I knew the approximate position of the final tessera he had set in place, I found myself unable to identify the spot.
Alone on the landing, gazing at the floor, I became aware of the silence surrounding me. There were no guards up here. Only when King Ban was receiving guests and envoys did he station guards at these doors, more for display than for security, and even then my mother disapproved. These were her quarters, too, and she saw no need for guards. In truth, there were many things for which my mother saw no need—frequently to the great frustration of my father, I knew—and one of those was concern over the opinions that other people held of her. She was a conscientious and committed Christian, and that alone set her apart from the majority of the people whom her husband ruled and governed, as Christianity was something of a novelty among the pagan folk who peopled our land. It amused and delighted my mother that the people around us thought her both unnatural and magical. Her Christianity they could take in stride, although they might wonder at it among themselves, but they truly believed she was a faery creature: a water sprite; a supernatural being whose true element was water and who lived as easily beneath the surface of the lake, communing with the spirits there, as she did on land by day, where she mixed with normal folk. They called her the Lady of the Lake, and although others assumed that this name derived from our castle’s position on the shores of the lake the Romans called Genava, they knew within themselves what the name really signified, and they smiled at the foolishness of others. They knew all about my mother and her strangeness, our local folk, for my mother’s magic was that she could swim, and she did so as easily and naturally as did a fish, for the sheer pleasure it gave her.
But what our people saw as strange and unnatural was perfectly straightforward and unremarkable in lands not much farther to the south and west. My mother had learned to swim as a child, on a long-ago visit to the imperial island of Capri in the Middle Sea when she and her mother had been privileged to accompany her father on official business for the E
mperor Honorius. For an entire summer there, in the warm, pellucid waters surrounding the beautiful island, she swam every day and developed a lifetime love of the pleasures of swimming underwater, marveling at the beauties that abounded there. The waters of our lake of Genava were far colder than those of the Middle Sea, but such was my mother’s love of being underwater that she had grown inured to the discomforts of our more northerly climate and plunged into the lake every year as soon as the chill temperature grew bearable in summer. Once begun then, she swam every day, sometimes for hours on end, stopping with great reluctance only when autumn was far gone and the winds and frosts of each new approaching winter threatened to bring ice.
To our local people, such behavior was incomprehensible. They had a passing familiarity with hot-water bathing, thanks to their hundreds of years of association with the ruling Romans, but even that activity seemed alien to them. They themselves simply did not bathe, in the sense of immersing themselves in water, hot or otherwise. Bathing, voluntary self-immersion, was madness to them, since no one could breathe in water without drowning. By that logic, therefore, swimming in the open waters of a vast lake demonstrated complete insanity; or, alternatively, it endowed the swimmer, my unique and beautiful mother, with supernatural attributes. People chose to believe the latter, because they could see in their daily dealings with her that the Lady Vivienne was as sane as they were. Besides, the alternative explanation provided rich fodder for their imaginative murmurs and whisperings over the long winter nights.
And so my mother was perceived and talked about as a water sprite, which caused her great amusement and enabled her to go about her life as a conscientious Christian wife and mother without being concerned that her true beliefs might attract unwelcome attention. That reluctance to be noticed as a Christian was no empty fear, because outside the primary Roman spheres of influence—the towns and fortifications throughout the province—Christians were few, and because they had a reputation for meek submissiveness in turning the other cheek to aggressors, they made easy targets for predators. Tales of slaughtered, robbed, and despoiled families of Christians were commonplace, although such depredations were usually carried out by strangers or wandering bandits, rather than by any of my father’s people. On the whole, the ordinary people of our lands were pagan in their beliefs, but not savage; a large proportion of them were completely godless, but the remainder shared their worship, when they did worship, among an entire pantheon of gods imported over the ages from all parts of the far-flung Empire.