King's Blood

by Judith Tarr

  Lanfranc finished the sentence he had been dictating, as serenely as if this stranger had never burst into his schoolroom and insulted his students to his face. Only when the last word was spoken and copied and the last question answered did he turn to Anselm.

  Anselm was seething, caught between outrage and mortification. Lanfranc smiled at him, a sweet, vague smile with nothing either brilliant or inspired in it. “Good day, Brother,” he said. “You were looking for someone?”

  Anselm gaped at him. “What? You aren’t . . . ? But they said—Where is he? Where is Master Lanfranc?”

  “That is my name,” Lanfranc said. “Why? Am I a terrible disappointment?”

  “No!” Anselm cried. “No—no, never. It’s only, I expected—”

  “They always do,” Lanfranc said with the hint of a sigh. “So: you’re the latest prodigy from Italy. Will you forgive me if I don’t ask for a demonstration of your brilliance? It’s late and I’ve been teaching all day. I need the privy. Then I need my dinner.”

  Anselm had gone beyond disappointment. His dream had feet of thickest, blackest clay. He could think of nothing better to do than follow it to the privy and then to the refectory, where he ate coarse bread and drank sour ale and mortified the flesh until it matched the spirit.

  In memory he had gone sulkily to bed. In dream he found himself in the chapel, kneeling in the light of the vigil-lamp, while Lanfranc celebrated Mass at the altar.

  Except, he realized as it went on, it was not quite the Mass as Rome had ordained it, nor did it follow any other rite that he knew. The image above the altar, that had been hidden in shadow, came slowly clear: not Christ on his cross but the Queen of Heaven with her crown of stars and the world beneath her feet.

  Lanfranc’s rite invoked not the Lord but the Lady: not Domine but Domina. Anselm tried to recoil from the blasphemy, but the dream bound him. He had to endure the whole of it, all that rite of a fallen Goddess, clear to the end.

  As the last twisted words died into silence, Lanfranc came down from the altar. His vestments, like the rite, were subtly perverted. They were white and gold, as if for a Mass of celebration, but instead of crosses, they were embroidered all over with the sign of the crescent moon.

  Lanfranc stood over Anselm, looking down as he had in life: clear-sighted, a little wry, and indulgent of human foibles. “It is all one,” he said. “You’re not blind, child. You can see. What keeps you from it? What are you afraid of?”

  “Damnation,” Anselm said.

  “Ah,” said Lanfranc. “Yes, that’s reasonable. Still—what is damnation? To forge a chain of foolish rules and then tangle yourself in it? To be given great gifts but also great responsibility, and to accept the one but turn your back on the other? To invoke your own will as the will of God, and to refuse the task He has laid on you, for weakness and cowardice and lack of compassion for any human thing?”

  Anselm rose up in wrath. “You! Uncover yourself. Which of you is it? Henry? Cecilia? How dare you conceal your true face in this of all lies?”

  “No lies,” Lanfranc said. “No children of the Conqueror, either, though their frustration is jangling through the aether. Between you and William, this world never saw such a pair of stubborn fools. Pride is a sin, child. So is sloth, and anger, too. Surrender them. Offer them up. Face what God has given you to face.”

  Anselm set his teeth, though it made the worst of them ache. The pain was a sacrifice; in its way, it cleared his head. “God has sent me here. Whatever I do, I do it by His will.”

  Lanfranc was neither alive nor bound by humanity. He did not give way to frustration. But he shook his head and sighed. “Be careful of arrogance, child. Never presume to tell God what He should do.”

  “I do not—” Anselm began.

  “Listen to yourself,” Lanfranc said. “Know yourself. Tell me, child. If you could give up the power that is in you, would you do it?”

  “Yes,” Anselm said without an instant’s hesitation. “Dear God, yes!”

  “Even if there were a cost? Even if it shortened your life?”

  “Then I would be in heaven all the sooner,” Anselm said.

  “Even,” said Lanfranc, “if you were to lose the keen edge of your intelligence? Would you give it up then?”

  That gave Anselm pause. “How . . . much? All of it?”

  “That I can’t say,” Lanfranc said. “Magic weaves through all that we are. If the threads of it are taken out, there’s no telling what will be left.”

  “My soul will remain,” Anselm said steadily. “I trust in God for the rest.” He paused. “Are you mocking my hopes? Or are you offering me a gift? Can it be done? If it is done, will I be free?”

  “From the archbishopric,” Lanfranc said, “no. From the other . . .” His hand traced ambiguity in the air. “We believe that if you surrender your magic, the Guardianship will go with it. It’s never been done. There has never been a Guardian as reluctant as you.”

  “Or, no doubt, as Christian.” Anselm bit his tongue. Arrogance had overcome him again; he had forgotten that Lanfranc too, in life, had held that office. Anselm had inherited it from him, just as he had found himself in possession of Lanfranc’s archbishopric.

  Lanfranc said nothing of it. He had other, no doubt greater concerns. “If you are willing,” he said, “we will try. We may fail. You may lose more than you wish to give up. But we are desperate—and so, I think, are you.”

  Anselm was shaking with the thought of it. Fear, yes, but fevered excitement, too. To be rid of the thing that had laired inside him all his life, that he had dreaded and fought and resisted like temptation—was it worth the loss of his mind’s brilliance?

  “If I keep my soul and its salvation,” he said, “then the rest is of no consequence.”

  “May it be so,” Lanfranc said. Or had he said, “So mote it be”?

  It did not feel like anything at first. He stood in the dream, and Lanfranc stood in front of him.

  Then Lanfranc laid his hand on Anselm’s brow. His touch was cold. Anselm stiffened but did not recoil. He held his ground.

  There was a tingling in his center, somewhere between his navel and his breastbone. The tingle turned to an itch, then to a burning. As the burning rose in intensity, the only word for it was pain.

  If he had been flayed alive and rubbed in salt, he would have felt no more pain than this. He was unraveling from the soul outward. The deep threads of his self and spirit worked loose one by one.

  Lanfranc had no need to breathe, but the strain was evident in his face. Even for the mighty dead, this was a great working. To take the magic from the man, but leave the man entire: the subtlety and complexity of it defied understanding.

  Then the magic began to fight. Anselm had nothing to do with it. It had a will of its own, to cling to the body and sink tendrils deep in the soul.

  Lanfranc worked each one free. His patience was infinite. Anselm did what he could to make it less difficult, which was terribly little; but maybe it made a difference.

  Except for the pain, he felt the same. His wits were no duller. He could still shape in his head, perfect and intricate and true, his proof of the existence of God.

  Magic could get no grip on that. The last of it slipped free. Lanfranc caught it, confined it. When Anselm looked up, he saw it in the gnarled hands: a white jewel netted in silver thread.

  So small a thing to have troubled him so much. He rose. He felt light—almost too light. He staggered. His mind and soul were intact, he was sure of it. And yet there was something . . .

  Lanfranc had slipped the captured magic out of sight. He laid his hand on Anselm’s brow, tracing the shape of a blessing. Anselm reared back, but too late. That blessing was not a cross but the thin curve of the moon.

  He woke rubbing his forehead as if to scour it clean. But Lanfranc’s blessing had sunk beneath the skin to lie like a brand on his soul.

  His unencumbered, beautiful, purely human, utterly un-magical soul.

&
nbsp; He had won, he told himself. Britain’s defenders had wielded their strongest persuasion, and taken the one thing of his that they needed. They were done with him. He would stay in Lyons; he had no intention of leaving and no need to do so—unless the king commanded him. And William, thank God, would do no such thing.

  CHAPTER 46

  The Isle was under siege. The Wild Hunt was a plague upon Britain, and pestilence ran in its wake. Both men and cattle were sick or dying. Grain withered in the ear; fruit shriveled and blackened on the bough. Whatever escaped either blight or relentless heat succumbed to swarms of devouring locusts.

  Sometimes at night, when Edith was trying to sleep, she felt the earth stirring uneasily, and heard the sea’s growl. It was stalking the land; all too soon it would spring.

  The chanting of the Ladies and their acolytes was a steady murmur, constant beneath the yapping and yowling of the Hunt. Three of the Guardians were here at the heart of Britain, but the fourth pillar was missing. The rest were the weaker for it.

  For Edith it was a kind of torment. She kept feeling in her heart, altogether without reason, that she should be able to do something. What little she did, lending her voice to the rite and her magic to the weaving, was never enough. There was more. There had to be more. But what it was or how she would use it, she could not imagine.

  They were all desperate. Some of the younger or weaker Ladies were beginning to falter. Angharad had taken ill and had to be carried off to the healers. She was carrying a Beltane child, a fact she had concealed so that she could go on defending the Isle. Now both she and the child were endangered, and the rest of them were under close scrutiny.

  Edith had no such secret to keep. She had her magic and her duties, and the hope that somehow the war could be won.

  She was stumbling to her bed one early morning, having spent the night chanting life into the walls of air, when she tripped and fell. The puca squawked, skittered, and laid her ankle open with a slash of claws.

  Except for the ferocious stinging in her ankle, Edith was not unhappy to be lying on grass, staring blurrily up at fading stars. The puca sprang onto her breast and glared down into her face.

  She saw then why his squawk had had such a strangled sound. He had something clamped in his teeth: a pendant on a chain, it seemed to be. The jewel was netted in silver wire; it was white like moonstone, and it glowed strangely, here in the dark before dawn.

  She reached up dizzily to take it before he dropped it. It felt as strange as it looked, both cold and hot, heavy and light, powerful and—

  Powerful. She sat up, spilling the puca into her lap. The chain was tangled in her fingers. The jewel was singing.

  She knew that song. It resonated in the earth of Britain, thrumming deep in the stone circles and whispering with the wind in the forests or across the heaths and moors. The folk of air sang it in their dances. Even the Hunt sang a discordant mockery of it, beating its rhythm on the ribs of their skeletal horses.

  She closed her fingers about the jewel. The singing was as clear as ever. It was inside her—as it had always been. It was in her magic and in her blood and in her heart.

  As she rose, the puca climbed to her shoulder. Its purr was part of the singing. It was satisfied. What it had wanted, what it had always meant to do, was done. Now the rest could begin.

  Morning light was growing around them. Mist rose off the lake. The Ladies’ chanting was losing strength. The earth felt like a thin film of ice over turbulent water.

  All their labors were coming to nothing. Because, Edith thought, they were fixed on the wrong enemy. Earth and sea, even the Hunt, were not the cause of it all. They were part of it, shaped by it, but they were no more than a diversion.

  Maybe she owed Sister Gunnhild more than she knew. They had studied logic together, and the science of causes. Edith had learned to see past the moment; to find her way to the place where it began.

  Or maybe it was only that she had come from the place where the blight began, and knew it better than anyone here—even Cecilia, who had lived in it and made use of it but never truly been a part of it. Edith’s own blood and kin had wrought this; now the whole of it was gathered into one soul and spirit.

  She stood by the lake. The others were in the Lady’s house, but it did not matter. They were all together wherever their bodies were. She raised her arms. The jewel swung from her right hand, catching fire as the sun rose.

  In the chapel of Wilton Abbey, the Abbess Christina lay prostrate. Her arms were spread in imitation of the cross. The air about her was thick and grey, as if choked with fog. The earth beneath her was as black as oblivion.

  Her nuns stood in the choir, chanting the morning office. They sang the verses in Saxon.

  They had lost their faces. They were a blur of black robes or grey, and blank white ovals within the veils, and empty eyes. There was nothing left of them but the voices.

  It should have been a vision of hell. But through all that darkness rang a chorus of exultation. Victory was near. The abbess’ heart swelled with the joy of it. Yes, the kingdom would fall—but the Normans would fall with it, and all that was stained with sin would be swept away.

  Edith threw all her power against it. “No!” she cried in her strongest, clearest voice. “You will not!”

  The abbess rose as no human creature could: straight up like a cross raised against a storm-wracked sky. Her face was terrible, thin skin stretched tight over the living skull. She had fasted and mortified her flesh until it was nearly gone. All that was left was the implacable will.

  She smiled as if in welcome—not a sight for the fainthearted. “Edith! Sister-daughter. At last. We have been waiting for you.”

  Indeed. The web was spun, the trap baited. And there was Edith in her youth and strength and her trained magic, blood of the abbess’ blood, with the abbess’ hooks sunk deep into her and her mother’s before them.

  All her life she had imagined that she was free; that she had chosen the other way. And all the while, they had been waiting as the spider waits, in poisonous patience. Every moment she had spent in her mother’s presence or in the abbess’ had come to this: to frozen stillness and soul-deep shock, and the spirit draining out of her like blood from a wound.

  She had been so proud; so full of her strength. She had brought the whole power of the Isle to this place, and given it as a gift to the one who above all would destroy it.

  Henry had paused in Salisbury on an errand for his brother, conveying the royal will to a pack of quarreling barons. The barons’ quarrel was settled without excessive bloodshed, and Henry was riding back slowly, reckoning the state of the kingdom as he went.

  Salisbury suffered less than most, but sickness had come to it, felling the old and the very young. That particular morning, he had gone out early after a night full of strange and troubled dreams. In one of them, he had seemed to be exhorting the exiled Archbishop of Canterbury to take up his magical duties. That should have been preposterous, but he woke with the conviction that he had actually done such a thing—and Anselm had been as intransigent as the king who had exiled him.

  As the sun came up, he walked the streets of the town. Even the dogs took cover after dark, in terror of the things that rode in it, hunting blood and souls. With the rising of the light, they came creeping out, with the beggars close behind them. Then came the mourners with the night’s dead, to bear them to the charnel house.

  There were too many dead—and not a pleasant death, either: coughing their lungs out, choking up blood. He could hear those still living who were sick, racked with coughing, and the voices of their nurses, soothing or exhorting or gone raw with grief and fear.

  The earth itself was sick. Henry dared not let down his protections: he would drain himself dry trying to heal it. Even shielded as he was, the temptation was all but irresistible.

  As he approached the market square, people began to emerge from their houses. They walked warily, many with cloths over their faces to guard against
the pestilence. There was little conversation; eyes met and flicked aside, then they hastened past one another. No one laughed.

  There were no children. No urchins playing at mock war or pretending to hunt one another through the streets. No infants in arms; no schoolboys trooping to the cathedral for lessons. All the children were dead.

  A knight learned to harden his heart. A prince was a master of it—especially if he was William Bastard’s son. But to look at those faces and see no beardless boys or unbudded maidens, and to know by the twisting of his gut that the plague had taken them all, was more than even he could easily bear.

  He stopped a man who would have hurried past: harried and worn, dressed in clothes that looked as if he had been in them for days. A pale and haunted-eyed younger man trotted behind him, carrying a physician’s bag.

  Neither of them was delighted to find his way barred by a man in mail armed with a sword. The physician might not even have paused for the sword, if Henry had not gripped his arm too tightly for escape. “Messire,” he said. “Tell me the truth. Are all the children dead?”

  The eyes that rested on him were weary beyond exhaustion. “Why? What difference does it make to you?”

  “A great deal,” Henry said, “as well it should. Without our children, what hope does any of us have?”

  “Good, then,” the man said sourly. “A knight with the gift of compassion. They’re handing out crowns for sainthood in the cathedral, I’m sure. Why don’t you go and see, and let me get back to my work. There’s still a child or two left alive, whom I might be able to save.”

  That was insolence so breathtaking that Henry almost laughed at it. He let the man go. He received no thanks for it, but he had not been expecting any.

  “Why the children of Salisbury?” he called after the retreating back. “Why not the old and the weak, too, the way it is elsewhere? What is in the earth here, or in the air?”

  The physician stopped and turned, somewhat to Henry’s surprise. “Believe me, messire, if I knew, I would tell you.”