A second incantation, but harsher, more forceful, rather than the pleading of before. Not a summoning, but a banishing. I held my breath, steeled myself for the return of the light.
May 5th, 1502 – The Garden Tower, London
“And then?” More is captivated by this episode. He leans over his ledger, as though his body is pulled into Tyrell’s orbit by the dark, sucking pools of the condemned man’s black eyes.
“Nothing. The light did not return. There was no sign of any response to her incantation, and we departed in utter despair. I to Calais, where I busied myself in my Guisnes duties, hoping to forget what England was to become. Margaret I never saw again – but I will never forget the sight of her standing over the spot where the Shining Splendour had birthed, where the remains of children were buried, and where the sun refused to shine. I have never seen such desolation. Richard once said, ‘Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women rail on the Lord’s anointed.’ And it appeared his dark prayer was answered; Margaret’s was not.
“But distance from England made no difference. My arm continued to wither and my nights were filled with horrors. I shared Clarence’s dream of drowning and Stanley’s nightmare of a boar triumphant over England. I saw Clarence rise from the Malmsey butt like a serpentine sea beast from the deepest abyss, spilling blood that filled the tower and overflowed, drowning England. I saw a boar with Richard’s face, and its crookback sundered to pour forth unspeakable abominations that burrowed into battlefield corpses and fed mightily, and animated the dead, giving them new life to ravage the kingdom with bloody strokes and mortal-shearing warfare forever.
“I dreamed of the princes, whose eyes were black, empty voids in which the light of stars birthed, lived, and died in an instant, and who gleefully told me: The Seal has been broken by Anjou, the Mother of Ruin. Azathoth’s dread servants are building a mighty eyrie to nest in, which will scorn your sun. And we will make prey.
“I did not need the weekly dispatches to know the kingdom suffered under the usurper. I knew I was jointly responsible for the tyranny and despaired with the realisation there was nothing I could do, that it would only worsen. Until the following spring, when the sign that had so cruelly evaded Margaret shone in the heavens.”
More looks momentarily confused. He flicks through his documents, frowning.
“16th of March, 1485,” Tyrell says with a hint of reproach. “The death of Richard’s queen. She passed on the same day as the sun was eclipsed by the moon.”
More’s hand trembles on the sheaf of papers.
“Even in Calais I saw it,” Tyrell continues. “While some took it to be the final sign of England’s damnation, that the Lancaster queen cruelly usurped by Richard had passed and God hid His sight from the world in despair, I saw what others could not.”
His black eyes glisten. “I saw hope. I saw through the darkness, saw the light beyond this veil fade and vanish – and I knew the curse could be lifted.
“It was the same month Henry Tudor raised Wales and I knew: the Shining Splendour of Azathoth had birthed on the battlefield, so logic dictated it had to die on the battlefield. Two of York’s suns had been extinguished, yet the third remained triumphant, his rays shedding darkness and damnation upon a benighted land. It was I who would eclipse him, and I knew how to do it. I had to return to England, fight Richard, and ensure his departure would seal the portal.”
More’s quill falls from his fingers. His jaw drops. “You fought at Bosworth. That is why King Henry did not punish you as he did the other Yorkists, why he accepted your service.”
Tyrell nods. “I was at Bosworth. I note your king did not see fit to inform you of this. We are both being used, Thomas More. I a blunt instrument, you a more… elegant one. Yet used as tools by greater powers – who do not realise they themselves are toyed with by forces older and more terrible than Satan Himself – even older than the one who cast Satan from Heaven.”
August 22nd, 1485 – Bosworth Field
Spears guaranteed York’s victory at Tewkesbury, and now spears would see the House fall at Bosworth. It would be a fitting end for the Boar.
I was welcomed to the armies of Richmond with open arms. I was not the first to turn coat against the usurper, and I would not be the last; Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William would commit their forces to the Tudor cause when the battle was at its height, and help Richmond win the day.
I had no men or arms with me, but I had intelligence of King Richard, how his mind worked, what tactics he would employ. That was enough, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I made my leave from Richmond’s tent, thankful he had not asked me about my true reason for turning my coat. Yet I remember his hooded eyes resting on the chain around my neck, the bulge it made under my doublet. I remember the faint smile, and I wondered what he and Margaret of Anjou had discussed.
The Sunburst, the instrument of the eclipse of the suns of York, was no longer fearful to me. Digging it up from the failed sacrificial site at Tewkesbury had filled my heart with joy rather than fear. The hunger pulsing from that black and terrible jewel was still there, but I knew now I could turn this hunger to England’s advantage.
“Sir James.”
I halted at Richmond’s softly-spoken, sinuous words.
“We thank you for your counsel. Yet, we would know more of the supernatural course that York is bent upon.” He beckoned me, spoke in a whisper. “I know of the dreams that affect the Boar, for they did visit me.”
“Dreams, my lord?”
Henry’s knowing smile chilled me. “Rivers, Grey, Vaughan… Hastings, Buckingham… King Henry and the Prince of Wales. The princes in the tower. Their spirits did visit me, promising me victory, and cursing Richard. They spoke ill of you too, Sir James… the instrument of their deaths. Yet Lady Anne’s ghost spoke well: ‘Good angel will guard thee from the Boar’s annoy; Tyrell be his name, and his spear will strike for joy.’ What am I to make of this, Sir James?”
I thought quickly. “I would put little stock in dreams, my lord. Although… I was a billman once. My skill with staff and halberd will not have faded.”
Richmond nodded. “That you were. At Mortimer’s Cross, I believe.”
I felt my cheeks grow hot. “You know my past well, my lord.”
“I know you very well, Sir James. So be it: you shall be in the pike wall. I hope you will forgive me if I do not put you in a position of command; it will be better for you if the battle goes against me and the Boar prevails, that you be unseen and escape.
“I trust, however, that your withered arm does not make bearing a pike too arduous…”
These words ran through my mind as I watched the beginning of Richard’s cavalry charge. Already the eighteen-foot stave with its steel head wavered in my hands, exacerbated by the near-uselessness of my withered left arm, but the sight of the Boar leading the charge with several hundred men – his whole battle – made even the experienced billmen around me, Frenchmen and Welshmen, tremble.
It was not the numbers of the Yorkist force that unnerved them, but the monster which led them. Even I was shocked.
Over his armour was a loose-fitting scarlet robe bearing the royal coat of arms and his personal badge, the white boar triumphant. And his face was the very personification of this rampaging beast.
Twisted, snarling, his lower teeth jutting like tusks, gleaming in the sun that shone behind us – and against him – and his body hunched over his huge mare like a gigantic spider clutching it and injecting venom, his crookback tight against his robe, bulging, pulsing like the spider’s abdomen ready to give birth to monstrosities.
“Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood!”
Even his voice sounded different. Loud like thunder, echoing through even our massed ranks, and without a trace of desperation or self-doubt. It promised death and destruction and made virtues of both, and his men loved him for it. Even I felt a stirring and a pang of loss, forever excluded from the company of York’s warriors that had
been my only family.
I shook myself. I saw the monster, and knew what he presaged; his followers did not, or had been blinded by the glory of York.
Richmond dismounted to present a less visible target. Pikemen pulled back from the vanguard, dropping back at a run, and closed round to protect him, forming a square that cavalry would be unable to penetrate: the Swiss Formation.
The front rank knelt with pikes sloping upward, the second behind them with their halberds angled, the third – of which I was a member – with pikes horizontal, at waist level.
Still the Boar and his mounted army came. The sun rose behind us, a disadvantage for an approaching army caught in its glare, yet the momentum of the horses carried them on, and Richard exulted. His eyes shone black in the reflected sunlight and his head tilted, a cry of joy roaring.
Just as I saw light, hope of salvation in the absence of sunlight after Lady Anne’s death, he saw something that thrilled him in the blight glare of our most natural, wonderful, God-given sun – he could only have seen darkness, and gloried in it.
He bore no shield, and his sword remained sheathed in its scabbard, dangling from the saddle’s pommel. His battleaxe was in his left hand, and looked unsteady; his right arm dangled uselessly by his side.
I gritted my teeth, sweat drenching my forehead underneath the leather liner of my sallet, pike wavering in my unsteady and unequal grasp, and my left arm felt numb, as lifeless as Richard’s sword arm. Our shared sign of damnation, our martial weakness.
The York charge did not break until it struck the second rank.
The horses careered into our Swiss Formation, impaled by steel, shattering pike shafts and unseating their riders. Sheared horseflesh and blood filled our vision, screams of man and steed echoed like thunder, and the thunder of approaching, fresher horses joined them – Stanley’s army had joined our side.
The mêlée again, just like at Tewkesbury, world of spouting blood and torn flesh and crashing steel…
But this time there was a clear end: Richard of York was everywhere in my sight, his black eyes glistening in the sun, fixed hungrily upon Richmond’s battle standard, hacking and pummelling and slashing his way ever closer.
Until the gap between us closed and I realised my comrades were nowhere to be found: dead, twitching their last under the hooves of the Boar’s monstrous steed, or fled in terror.
“Tyrell!” The Boar snarled with hatred. “My brother in darkness, joined with the shallow Richmond, that milksop of Bretagne? For shame!”
His horse reared, its mighty hooves ready to crush my head into the blood-drenched soil of Bosworth. His battleaxe glittered in the sun, ready to finish what his night mare left. His golden circlet gleamed, as brightly as the blood that spattered the circlet of Edward, the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, and his eyes, as black as the void revealed by the light of Tewkesbury, glittered and hungered and exulted.
I dropped my pike; the effort required to hold it was too much for my withered arm. But I did not despair. The true spear to impale the bloody boar was around my neck.
“Let us to it, pell-mell, my brother in damnation. Not to Heaven, but hand in hand to Hell.” I held Anjou’s processional cross aloft,
and the monstrous jewel made the Corpus within squirm and writhe and shriek abominations in my grip as it faced the final sun of York.
And Richard smiled. In that smile was relief, from one who knows his suffering is at an end, and that his true purpose is thwarted, and he can die a soldier on the battlefield. He could die a man, and not a mother to ruin and desolation. He dropped his battleaxe and extended his sword arm – his withered arm – to my own ravaged limb.
May 6th, 1502 – The Garden Tower, London
It is dawn, and Sir James Tyrell’s last sunrise on Earth shines through the window. The white roses gleam with summer freshness and purity. Tyrell looks through the window with gladness, cocks his head at the sound of birdsong and sniffs the scent of rose blossom.
“The sun is bright today,” he says. “I know I can look upon it fully without despair.”
I am as silent as More, who is still writing. I am still trying to envision Tyrell’s description of Richard III’s destruction and I fail miserably. How can Tudor’s agent do it justice in mere words?
Who could? The veterans of Bosworth described an eldritch light around Richmond’s standard and can remember little else until the moment Richard’s crown was hacked from his head. Only the most demented – the ones who live and breathe in the taverns, obliterating their minds with drink – recall a scene from Hell wherein Richard III died, hacked to pieces, and his crookback exploded in a welter of flesh and blood and light, and birthed monsters that defied human imagination.
They say a holy fire did burn upon the site of Richard’s fall, and a solitary pikeman held aloft a cross that emitted the fire of three suns to cleanse the land of the Boar’s corruption. Some saw the shade of a woman in red rise from the holocaust, a regal figure who looked the image of a Lancastrian queen, and her smile was that of a saint.
Others say they heard the last king of York cry out for a horse, offer his kingdom for it, and that a pale horse appeared, upon which sat a pale rider.
I suspect More’s frantic scribbling is an attempt to rewrite history, that what he has heard is too shocking, too terrifying – too real – to be recorded.
He does not accompany Sir James Tyrell to his execution, and I remain at the window. He has left white-faced, trembling, clutching his parchments and books and documents to his chest.
He has left the processional cross with the dark jewel. I wonder if that was deliberate.
Only when I hear the priest’s last words to the condemned man, and know this chapter of England’s past is at an end, am I able to move from my frozen position.
I see the headsman’s axe rise, but the roses hide its descent. The dawn sun shines upon them gloriously, at one point turning the white blooms to red. They flare, flash, like a sun in splendour.
And the light shines gloriously and deeply within the cell, the last resting place of the third sun of York’s enabler and destroyer, before darkness falls across my eyes and natural light denies me – the sun has scorned me.
In the darkness I hear childish laughter, young voices with ancient tongues, telling me of an eyrie, which will scorn the sun and from where they will make prey upon this world.
And then a light bathes me. Words spill from my lips, yet I do not recognise the voice.
“Loyaulté me Lie.”
“We will unite the white rose and the red. Smile, Heaven, upon this fair conjunction…”
Richard III, Act V, Scene VII
A Reckoning
Guy Haley
“When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”
As You Like It, Act III, Scene III
Eleanor Bull owned the house.
Small places full of vice and sin, with such houses Marlowe was well acquainted. Mistress Bull’s was low-beamed and dark with smoke, a place where light did not penetrate easily on the brightest day, and on the darkest not at all.
Within three others awaited him, his death upon their right shoulders surely as ravens perch upon the gibbets of unrepentant men. Fellows so sick with a malignancy of the soul, from whom the caladrius would turn its snowy face without demur. All three his comrades once, some soon to be his enemies.
Still he must meet them, and so he responded favourably to the invitation to a feast. Red blood flowed in Marlowe’s veins, not whey. Under a lintel borne down by sorrow’s weight and desperation’s call, Marlowe stooped, his hand upon his sword’s pommel, a smile upon his lips.
The widow Bull expected him, and took him from the common spaces of the victualling house into a little room, wood warped from true, only big enough to contain the table, benches and a couch behind. Marlowe went into it as a fish swims into
a trap.
Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley were present. Their guarded talk ceased at Marlowe’s entrance. All were garbed as generosi, but in habit they were far from gentle. Marlowe, fairer dressed than they and fairer in countenance, took his place among them. Make no error, all were wealthier than the run of men. Grim work pays a goodly wage. Fine clothes clad them, pearls adorned them. But the clothes of the three — Frizer, Skeres and Poley — seemed the dirtier, though they were not in objectivity smirched.
Marlowe, Marley, Kit or Christopher. He was as much a liar and cheat as the three, but the lies he told were beautiful, his gift to cheat a man of cold reality for an hour or two, and replace it with something higher. The three had none of that, though their wits were sharp. This one, Skeres, had a charming mask where weasel’s eyes lurked cruelly. His words were lures to the unwary, and their purses oft became his. Frizer, his accomplice of old in such deception, was a darker man in both hair and in temperament. His smile was wide but hid a terrible bite.
Poley’s truths were everything but he was an issuer of lies more tangled than a knot of eels. Marlowe trusted none of them.
They rose and greeted Marlowe in a flurry of false amity. Hard eyes hid murder.
“Kit! Kit!” called Poley in cheer as hollow as a serpent’s tooth, and just as full of venom. “Now the company is complete!” He slammed his mug against the wood. “Food and ale, or matters first?”
“Marley,” said Skeres. Frizer nodded, eyes hooding all but his contempt. Mistrust opened a gulf between he and Marlowe long before. They vied for the affection of their late master, Walsingham, too hard, to the detriment of good relations. No resolution to their contest could likely be attained, now Sir Francis lay coldly in his grave.
Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Page 20