by Jack Whyte
Guntram, who was many decades beyond being a lad of any description, paid no attention to his lord and master. Carrying one large jug in each hand, he crossed the room quickly and placed them gently beside an array of mugs that sat on a long, narrow table flanking the King’s big worktable. He stood quietly for a few moments, gazing down at the table as though taking stock of everything it held, then turned to the King.
“Will you need anything else, Lord? Shall I pour for you?”
Ban finally smiled. “No, and I have kept you from your sleep for far too long. Get you to bed now, and sleep well. I may just have another task for you tomorrow.”
Again the old man ignored the raillery. “Aye, sir.” His eyes moved from the King to me and he nodded slightly. “Late night, for a young lad. Tomorrow, then.”
I watched King Ban watch Guntram leave the room, and as soon as the door closed with a thud, he swung away toward the table with its steaming jugs. He filled a mug for himself, then poured mine from the first, larger jug, and topped it up from the second before bringing it over to me.
“Spiced wine and honeyed water. For me, spiced wine alone. I dislike the taste of water, honeyed or otherwise.”
I could scarcely believe the privileges I was enjoying—first a uniquely private audience with the King, deep in the night, in quarters I could never have imagined being so intimately comfortable, and now this. I held the mug up to my nostrils, inhaling the fragrant steam that rose from it.
“I’ve never had this before,” I said.
“I know,” the King said, bending to thrust the long iron poker deep into the heart of the fire. He left it lodged there and sat back again. “But tonight is for talk of manhood and the preparations for it. Spiced wine is part of that. Try it. You might find the taste even better than the smell of it.”
I sipped, cautiously on two counts, alert to the high heat of the brew and to the unimaginable taste. Both were acceptable, the flavor of the sweet, diluted spicy wine indescribably delicious. The King watched me suck in my cheeks and smile my pleasure before he raised his own cup to his lips, nodding gently.
“Sets the mouth a-jangling, doesn’t it?” He sipped a mouthful and savored it, rolling it around his tongue before swallowing, and seeing his pleasure I raised my own mug again.
“Be careful. Drink it very slowly, a little at a time. We have much to talk about tonight and you are not used to wine. I warn you, even watered down, it will go straight to your head. Especially when it is hot.”
I nodded solemnly and sipped sparingly at the delicious potion, wondering what he meant by saying it would go to my head.
“Well,” he said then, lounging back into his chair and stretching out his long legs to the fire. “Take off that robe now, if you’re warm enough.” I placed my mug on the floor and stood up, shrugged out of the warm fur-lined garment and folded it carefully over my chair back, and when I was seated again he sipped again at his own drink. “I’m glad you slept. It was a long, wearisome night and I was feared you might have lain awake, waiting for me.”
“I meant to,” I said, suddenly more shy than I had ever been in his company. “But I fell asleep anyway.”
“Hmm. I wish I could have. Instead I spent useless hours listening to the mutterings of drunken fools. So, you have had time to think about the things I told you earlier, which means you must have questions. Fire away, then. What do you want to ask me about?”
“My mother, if it please you, Sire.”
“Your mother. Of course that is what you would want to know … and it is what I am least qualified to tell you about, for I did not know her well. Your mother was my wife’s sister and my best friend’s wife, but I only ever met her twice and so knew little of the lady herself, apart from what others told me of her. But I can try to answer you. What would you like to know?”
“I …” I stopped, thinking hard about what I wanted to ask him. “You said Clodas did not begin his scheming until he set eyes on her. What does it mean?”
He sighed, and sat staring into his cup, his lower lip protruding in a pout. “What does it mean? I don’t know, Clothar … . In plain truth, I do not know … . That is a deep question, and there is much more to it than meets the eye, so let me think about it before I answer. What does it mean?” He drew one leg up, away from the fire’s heat, and looked into the flames. “It means, I suppose, that something was transformed in Clodas the moment he first saw your mother, the Lady Elaine of Ganis. Something happened inside him, at the sight of her; something dark in there, and shapeless, changed and grew hard and took a form it had not had before. It means all of that.” He threw me a fierce glance. “But your mother was no more guilty of willfully affecting or attracting Clodas than the winter frost is guilty of turning the waters of a pond to ice. The frost freezes the water but is no more than the breath of winter. The sight of your mother’s beauty undid Clodas, but her presence could have been no more than a beam of light shining into the blackness of his soul, showing it what might have been. And what was within that blackness we can never know.
“Would Clodas have been a better man had he never seen your mother? No, he would not, because the thing that changed inside him was already there.” He paused, looking at me curiously. “Can you guess what it was?”
I shook my head, and he nodded, unsurprised.
“What was inside him, boy, was plainly a sickness, unseen before then and unsuspected by anyone else, and it was born of a mixture of poisons: malice, gross ambition, discontent, and envy of anyone he thought of as being better off than he.”
“Was my mother that beautiful?”
“Aye, she was. But you must ask my wife that question. I am only a man, and men see women differently from women. Vivienne will tell you the truth. But be sure not to ask her when she is surrounded by the lovesick young admirers who swarm among my followers. I doubt she would thank you for that. Famed for her beauty as she is in these parts—and I know there is none more beautiful, within as well as without—my lady will tell you that she always felt plain around her sister. They were twins, born but an hour apart, but they were not identical. Elaine was the beauty of the pair, tall and upright, with raven hair and bright blue eyes, where Vivienne’s height was normal, her hair golden and her eyes were that sparkling green they are today. Elaine’s … your mother’s beauty, seen unexpectedly, could make a man’s breath catch in his throat.”
“Was … was the Lady Vivienne jealous of her?”
“Jealous, of Elaine?” He laughed. “God, no, boy! They almost breathed as one, the two of them, so close were they. They may have had their disagreements from time to time, as all siblings will, and each might have felt some envy of the other from time to time, but there was never any lack of love between them, and certainly no jealousy. Jealousy is a bleak and bitter thing, Clothar. Those two loved each other too much as friends and sisters to be jealous, and each was happy when the other found a man to marry—two men as close to each other as the sisters were to themselves.”
I digested that in silence, then continued with my catechism. “Clodas.” I hesitated. “What was it that made him want to kill my mother?”
“He had no desire to kill your mother. It was your father he set out to kill. Your mother took her own life, in the end, but his murder of her husband—and of you, she thought—was the direct cause of her death. He destroyed her family and loved ones, yet expected her to consent to being his wife. That is insanity. You understand that word, insanity? Well, Clodas was insane.” He paused, considering that, and then went on, “Clodas is insane. I suppose it might be possible to find some depraved woman, somewhere, who could accept that kind of thing, but Elaine of Ganis could never be such a one. Clodas was a monster whose existence she could not accept, and at the thought of having him control her life, she chose to kill herself.”
Another long silence while the King stared into the fire, then: “I do not often trouble myself to think about whatever it is that makes men do the things they do. If
they do something I find it necessary to condemn, I will condemn them, discipline them—slap them down or cut them down, depending on the gravity of what they’ve done.
“I am not a talker. I’m a soldier—a fighter. But I am also a king, and that often complicates things for me because a king must speak out forcefully from time to time … . I am forever surrounded by people waiting for me to tell them what to do and what to think. Most of the time, when something angers me or when someone has offended me by breaking a law, or when I’m displeased and have a strong opinion to make plain, I attend to it with a sword in my hand. But this is a time for thought, and for clear words, so let me think, and then listen to what I have to tell you.”
I waited, and he soon began again. “Clodas is a monster. But monsters come in many guises, Clothar, and not all of them are frightening to look at. Some are born monstrously deformed, and they grow ever less pleasing to the eyes as they age. But that is no more than misfortune, pure and simple. Ill formed as they are, they are not often ill natured. Many of them are meek and gentle souls. We call them monsters because they frighten us, but that reflects our failings, not theirs.”
He thought for a while. “And then there are some men who grow to be monsters. They learn to be that way. You’ll see more than you want to see of that as you grow older and become accustomed to war and killing, and as a Christian you will deplore it while the warrior within you learns to recognize it and to use it. That kind of monster you will learn to recognize on sight, and even to employ at times, for many of them you will number among your own men. Their disfigurement—” He paused, shaking his head impatiently and clearly searching for another word. “Their affliction is a wanton disregard for human life, born of too much hatred and bloodshed. Those men become rigid with hate, incapable of kindness or compassion. They see all but their own—and sometimes even their own—as enemies deserving death, and they are masters of spilling blood and spreading havoc. They are cold and pitiless, devoid of love, or mercy, or even hope, and that is their crippling misfortune. Life holds no value for them, not even their own, and nothing seems to them worth living for.” His voice faded, but just as I was beginning to think he had finished, he began to speak again, his tone low and troubled, almost as though he were speaking to himself.
“But yet another kind of monster walks among us, sharing our daily lives and giving us no sign, until it is too late, that they are deeply different from us.” He turned his head to look at me. “Clodas is one of those, and they are almost impossible to guard against.”
“Why, Father?”
The word father sounded alien in my mind as I spoke it, but I used it because at that moment I could think of no other name to call him. Uncle would have seemed ridiculous.
“Because they are so different from the ruck of ordinary, honest men. They take the trust on which we live and turn it into poison.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That does not surprise me. Trust is not … it’s not something we think about very often, but we depend on it for everything worthwhile. We all deal in trust, Clothar—people’s lives are founded on trust. D’you understand that?”
“I think so.”
“It’s true. We form our own opinions of the folk we live among, the friends and neighbors and companions and soldiers with whom we share our lives, and we trust them to behave in certain ways—as they do us—with honesty and dignity and respect for themselves and for their neighbors. And based upon that trust, that mutuality of trust and common interests, we make laws and rules to govern how we all live with one another. But these monsters I speak of now, monsters like Clodas, are governed by no laws, no rules. They are predators, wild beasts who prey upon honest, ordinary men as victims—perceiving them and treating them as weaklings and helpless fools created solely to fulfill their needs. They have—they know no honesty, these creatures. Worse, they have no understanding of what honesty is, and that, alone, makes them dangerous to all who cross their paths. They see no worth in trust, because they themselves have no belief in it. It is alien to their nature, and therefore they exploit the trust of other people as a fatal flaw.
“By far the worst part of such beings, however, is that they quickly learn to keep their true natures hidden from the eyes and knowledge of others. They learn to ape the manners and behavior of others unlike themselves, behaving outwardly as they believe others think they ought to behave, and concealing their own monstrousness. Their entire existence is a lie. They deal in a kind of treachery that ordinary men cannot imagine, and that treachery grants them a power against which no one else can be prepared.”
His words chilled me, because as he spoke them I found myself, without warning, seeing my brother Gunthar in my mind instead of the faceless Clodas who was no more than a name to me, albeit a name I had already begun to hate. The King’s voice had grown quieter as he spilled all of this out, and when he had finished he sat frowning into the flames, his eyes fixed on some far-distant recollection. I remember wondering whether he was thinking about the treachery of Clodas or whether he, like me, might be aware of another, similar monster, closer to home and even more troublesome to his peace. I waited again for him to continue, but this time he showed no signs of having anything to add and so eventually I prompted him, clearing my throat three times before he noticed.
“What? There’s a question in your eyes.”
“You said they have a power no one else is prepared for. What kind of power is that?”
“The power to deceive. And to betray.”
I blinked at him. “But anyone can deceive anyone else.”
“True,” he conceded without hesitation. He looked away briefly and inhaled sharply before turning quickly back.
“You can deceive someone without betraying him, Clothar. Deceit is usually self-serving, but it need not be harmful to others. Betrayal, on the other hand, is always harmful. And when someone who has gained a high position of trust betrays that trust as Clodas did, its effect has the power of a hard-swung ax, smashing through everything it encounters because there are no barriers, no armor or defenses, to stop it. Clodas was your father’s blood kin, his first cousin. His mother and your grandfather were brother and sister. He destroyed your family and part of mine because he had placed himself in a position from which no one expected treachery, and until he struck no one had ever suspected that he might. His betrayal was monstrous, a crime no normal person could have imagined … your father least of all.”
He emptied his mug at one gulp and I sipped at my own, surprised to find that I had drunk most of it and what was left was almost cold. The King rose to his feet and pulled the iron poker from the fire. It was bright yellow, whitening toward the tip. He tapped it against the side of the iron fire basket, then held it out to one side and crossed to the table where the pitchers sat. He plunged it into first one and then the other, sending clouds of fragrant steam billowing across the room.
“Bring the mugs.”
I did as I was bidden, then returned to the hearth to add more fuel to the fire, thinking about all the King had said. He rejoined me moments later, bringing my drink with him, and when we were seated again I asked him the question foremost in my mind.
“Do you really think Clodas would send men to kill me, Father?”
He turned his head toward me quickly, his eyes narrowing. “Without a doubt, if he suspected you were still alive. Not because you are a harmless boy, but because you will soon be a man. So we can take no risks in that matter. None at all. Bear that in mind above all else and say nothing of this to anyone. Not to anyone. We have no control over the way tales spread. One word leads to another and the information spreads like ripples on a pond.”
“But you said he is five hundred miles away.”
“Aye, he is, but that changes nothing about the risk. You have five more years to go before you reach full manhood, and much could happen before then. I can protect you against an invading army, but no one could defend you against a hired,
faceless murderer acting alone. So by keeping your mouth shut, you might save your own life.”
I fell silent again, then remembered something else. “You said no one—and least of all my father—could have imagined Clodas’s crime before it was committed. What did you mean by that … that he was least of all?”
The King shrugged, dipping his head. He drank again, then clasped both hands around his cup. “I have never known anyone like your father, Clothar. He was my best and dearest friend, closer to me than anyone else has ever been or could ever be today, and yet the two of us were totally unlike each other. We saw things differently, thought differently, and responded differently—often very differently—to the same things. In this case, I would never have trusted Clodas the way your father did. I had met the man, although only once. But with some·people, once is enough. I disliked and distrusted him on sight, without reason. He set my teeth on edge and made me feel suspicious, even although I had no reason to suspect him of anything at the time.”
“Did you tell my father that?”
“Aye, and he laughed at me and called me an old woman, reading omens and portents where there were none to be read. Clodas was his cousin, he said, a loyal chieftain and a fine warrior. His deeds spoke for him, your father said, and they were many and worthy. He would put no credence in my doubts. I wasn’t surprised, but nor was I offended. He and I had differed on such things in the past—probably more times than we. agreed, if truth be told—and so I shut my mouth and said no more. But when Chulderic brought me word of what had happened, it only confirmed that I had been right from the beginning, and by then it was far too late and useless to seek any comfort in thinking that.”
“What was he like, my father?”
“What was he like?” He twisted in his seat and looked at me more closely than he had before, scanning my face. “He was much like you, to look at—or you will be much like him, when you are grown. Same eyes, same hair, same mouth, I suspect, once your face fills out. You’ll certainly have his nose when you reach manhood, although yours will be straighter. I do not normally pay attention to such things, but even I can see you resemble him far more than you do your mother. Her hair was glossy black, like crow feathers, and in bright light it sometimes looked almost blue, like the sky at night. Yours is not quite black—it’s more like your father’s, dark, deep brown, and your skin is dark, like his. Your mother’s skin was very fair.”