“Oh, and don’t get it near the iron knives.”
Henry shakily handed the lodestone back to Wiglaf, who plucked away the knives and fitted the rock into what looked like a wagon wheel attached to a chain.
“Where’s Excalibur?”
“Ahh! This way.” Wiglaf led Henry to a booth covered in black cloth. “I just assembled this from a diagram in Alhazen. Look inside.”
Henry’s first instinct was to shove Wiglaf inside ahead of him, but the scrawny monk seemed so focused on his gadget and so completely oblivious to danger that Henry just walked in.
“Watch the wall on your right!” yelled Wiglaf.
Henry turned. There was the sound of glass sliding on metal, and Henry flinched. An image had appeared on the black wall—a circular, upside-down image of the courtyard of the castle, thirty feet below.
“Can you see it?”
“Uh…it’s upside-down,” Henry said.
“Oh, right! Sorry about that. There’s a lens I have to position…” Once again, the sound of something sliding into place, and now the image was right side up, and perfect to the last detail. Henry smothered a gasp. This wasn’t just an image; he could see people walking, and trees bending in the wind. It was like looking into a mirror, but a mirror more clear and perfect than any he’d ever seen.
“Better?”
“Uh…yeah. But I don’t see Excalibur.”
“Right, it’s outside the walls. Hang on, I’ll change focus.”
Henry grabbed at the wall as the objects in the circle swam, blurred, and slid away to the right. In a moment, the circle revealed the jousting grounds outside the castle. Then the river. Then the pavilion from the wedding feast. Then finally, sticking up from a rock outcrop, there was Excalibur, its hilt gleaming in the sun.
“Damn.” The sword was surrounded by guards, of course.
The flap folded up and Wiglaf glanced inside. He held a writing tablet. “Tell me, can you still feel the presence of the sword, even now that it’s stuck in the stone?” He waited for an answer, stylus poised.
“I—” Henry thought for a moment, probing his skull like a tongue in an empty tooth socket. Was there a little tug toward the east and the tourney field? A sense of Excalibur out there, waiting for him? “I—” Henry looked away from the image, at Wiglaf’s pale, eager face. “Who are you, anyway?”
“‘Subject initially unresponsive…’” Wiglaf jotted in his tabula.
Henry pressed a little harder. “You didn’t think I believed you were actually a Brother of the Sword, did you? You’re not exactly Brotherhood material.”
“No need to get nasty.”
“You sold me out to Geoffrey!”
“Well, he was about to kill me.”
“So who are you? How do you know about the sword?”
Wiglaf put down the writing tablet. “All right, help me with the probatos automata, and I’ll tell you.” He gave Henry the copper coil and walked back to the wheel and lodestone.
“Take the cupros and wind it around the wheel, like so.”
Henry started winding the copper. After a moment, he turned to Wiglaf. “Still waiting.”
“All right. I was just gathering my thoughts.” Wiglaf cleared his throat. “Before the Great Flood, there was an island in the West, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Plato mentions—”
“Who?”
“The teacher of Aristotle. Plato mentions it in his Timaeus and Critias—”
“His what and his what?”
“Look, if you keep interrupting—”
“All right, all right.”
“Anyway, this island, which I have named ‘Hesperos,’ was bigger than All-Britain, and its lords had more skill and cunning than Solomon and Archimedes put together. They founded colonies throughout Africa and Europa, even as far as Lydia and Phrygia. Then God destroyed it in the Great Flood. Not so much copper on the right.”
Henry adjusted the copper strips, and Wiglaf continued. “I’d learned of Hesperos when I was writing my Treatise on Knightly Prowess. For—”
“Wait! You’re Gervasius Florentium?”
Wiglaf, AKA Gervasius, beamed. “You read my book?”
“Yeah. Great stuff.” Henry held back another barf. He had conned the greatest prince in Europe on the say-so of a lunatic.
“Ah, the Treatise. It’s a minor work now, but when I rewrite it in Latin, it will have some real authoritas.” The monk tied down a few of the copper strips and gave the lodestone a shove. It spun freely on the axle. “It was my first opus. But as I worked on it, time and again I would hear tales of a land in the West, the source of the Nine Swords and of all magic. Home to Prester John. Refuge of the Kings of Babel when they fled there after the fall of their Tower, and took with them a cutting from the Tree of Knowledge. Avalon. The Hesperides. Mag Mell. Elysium. The Fortunate Isles, Annwn, Tir na n’Og—”
“Wait. I have heard this tale. It’s called Atlantis.”
“‘Hesperos’ is more technically accurate.” Gervasius’ eyes were beginning to glow with enthusiasm. He’d lost his stammer, and Henry could see crazed certainty practically seeping up through the soles of the man’s feet into his brain.
Oh, no, he thought. Another one.
Gervasius raised his hand like a university lecturer. “But—and this is a big but—Hesperos was lost beneath the waves millennia ago. So how, I asked myself, could these legends persist, let alone be so specific and agree over a distance as great as that between London and Athens? How?”
Gervasius leaned forward and grabbed Henry by the tunic. “I’ll tell you how! Because there are still Hesperans in Europa, Henry, trying to regain their lost dominion!” He raised his arms triumphantly. “THEY are the Brotherhood of the Sword! THEY built the Chapels Perilous in Glastonbury and Bordeaux and Constantinople! THEY got me kicked out of St. Gregory’s Young Choirboys Association of Marseilles! And they are even now plotting to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!”
“What, from all the way out there in Glastonbury? With all the snow, and the ice in the chamber pots?”
“Yes! With weapons like Excalibur, they could do it easily!”
“Then why haven’t they?”
“Um…”
“And if I were going to take over the world, I’d do it from someplace warmer. Rome sounds good.”
Gervasius hesitated. “Yes…Wiglaf never actually mentioned world conquest per se…”
“Wiglaf?”
“The uh, real Wiglaf. I was his secretary for a year, before he left for Constantinople.”
“And he told you all their secrets, huh?”
Gervasius coughed and looked embarrassed. “Uh, no. Not as such. There was more, uh, laughing at me, than actual sharing of secrets. But I did see some of his teknematoi. That was how I knew, you see. I found a room full of Hesperan devices that he had preserved—a mechanical bird that flew; an unrusting blade that was springy as sinew, but sharp as death; and a bronze head that spoke.”
Henry leaned forward, interested despite himself. “The head spoke to you? What did it say?”
Gervasius now looked even more embarrassed, if possible. “It said ‘Stop! Thief!’”
Henry burst out laughing. Gervasius smiled and then returned to work—clearing a path between the lodestone machine and a badly stuffed dead sheep that had been placed near the door.
“I tried to build a head of my own, but no matter how many gears I put in, it never worked.” Gervasius examined the sheep, and nudged it a few inches to the left. “Anyway, Lord Raymond believes in my work, so the last few weeks have actually been very satisfying. I think you’d enjoy working here, too.”
“Oh.” So that’s it, he thought. Pump me for information, then use it to take control of Excalibur. “Well, uh, Gervasius—”
“Call me Gerry.”
“—Gerry…say, what is this?” He pointed to the lodestone machine, now fully wound about with copper.
“That is my Automatic Shepherd,” said Gerry with pride.
“Have you ever rubbed wool onto amber, and then noted that the amber attracted bits of parchment?”
“Uh, I’ve been busy.”
“According to the Aethiopica of Marcellus, the Hesperans were able to generate more of this force of attraction by means of a lodestone device like this one. Now, as you can see, I’ve placed a stuffed sheep here by the door. And of course, parchment is merely dried, cured sheep’s skin. If my calculations are correct, once we fire this baby up, it should attract the sheep’s skin, and the sheep should fly across the room to the device. Imagine it. Sheep filling the sky! Shepherds’ crooks, obsolete! Come on, help me spin the axle.”
Dubiously, Henry joined Gervasius by the wagon wheel, and together they began to spin the lodestone, which was surprisingly resistant. After a few minutes, Henry felt heat coming from the copper strips.
“Uh, Gerry—”
“Keep spinning!”
The heat grew. A curl of smoke rose from the device’s frame.
“Gerry—”
“Faster!”
The hairs were standing up on the back of Henry’s neck. Tiny sparks crept through his tunic. “GERRY!”
A flash of light too bright to look at arced away from the machine. A thunderclap blew Henry to the floor.
When he was able to sit up again, his eyes full of green and purple splotches, the device was gone. Gervasius was stretched out on the floor a dozen feet away, and the door had been blown off its hinges.
Henry got to his feet. He checked Gervasius—the monk was dazed, but alive—and then picked his way past puddles of molten copper and iron, to where the door had been. The stuffed sheep had been blown to bits, and nothing was left but a few scraps of wool. Mixed with the stuffing were the remains of a clay jar Gervasius had apparently left next to the sheep. Henry picked up one of the shards; it was labeled “aqua fortis”—the acid that the royal coiners used to dissolve base metals like iron and lead.
So that’s what happens when lightning hits it, thought Henry as he sidled out the door.
The good news was that the workroom hadn’t been at a dead end; the corridor ran off in both directions. The bad news was that Henry could already hear footsteps coming up from the stairway to his right. He ran left.
The corridor took a sharp right to another door. Henry pulled it open, and found himself in what must have been Gerry’s storeroom. It was filled with furniture under cloths, more clay jars, and bits of ironwork and brass tubing. The one thing Henry didn’t see was a staircase. But there was a door, and the door led into a garderobe.
Oh, I hate this. I really do. The garderobe looked just like the ones he’d used in the Chapel or in the half dozen donjons he’d seen in his travels—just a stone shelf with a wooden bench on top. The bench had holes; you sat on them and did your business. Below the hole was a shaft—usually it led to a dungheap that was mucked out by peasants; sometimes it led straight to the river. The only real question was—were the holes under the bench too narrow for a skinny fugitive?
Henry heaved, and the bench came loose. Underneath were three holes. And they were wide enough. Henry sighed, took off his shoes and tunic and tossed them down the shaft. He’d have to crabwalk down the shaft by pressing his feet to one side and his shoulders to the other; clothes would slip and slide around him. Sucking in his gut, he wiggled into the hole, and pulled the wooden bench back above him.
Twenty feet down a toilet shaft wouldn’t be so bad. And if he slipped, at least there would be something at the bottom to cushion his fall.
24. Same Sword, New Stone
Excalibur jutted up from the rock in the center of a pavilion packed with people, lit by torches and surrounded by guards.
Dressed in a ragged smock and peasant sabots, Henry wormed his way through the mob. He needed the outfit for more than a disguise—after his trip through the toilet shaft and out of the (unguarded, thank St. Dismas!) cesspit, Henry’s original clothes were good for nothing, and it had taken an hour bathing upriver and a waterskin full of soap before he’d even started to feel clean again.
He was trying to get a better view of Excalibur, but the crowd was enormous. It was democratic, too—everybody was there, from barons to serfs.
“It just appeared—”
“The Matter of Britain—”
“—rightwise born king of—”
“—miracle—”
“—Excalibur stone chips! Gitcher Excalibur stone chips! Pieces of the rock Excalibur touched! Only ten dixaines a bag!”
Before Henry could get any closer, a squad of soldiers in Plantagenet livery parted the crowd and entered the pavilion. In less than five minutes, they had erected a fine silk tent over the sword, hiding it from view.
The crowd shouted and booed. The guards took two steps forward, hands on their swords, quieting the crowd and clearing a space in front of the tent. Then the tent flaps parted and Geoffrey emerged. Henry oozed his way back into the crowd.
“People of Toulouse!” said Geoffrey. “A miracle has come among us, a sword of kings! Already many knights, brave and true, have tried and failed to draw this sword from the living rock. So that all worthy men of valor may have their chance, I have arranged a special joust!”
The crowd cheered. Nothing like a free show to keep folks happy, thought Henry.
“He who wins in the lists may try to draw the sword. He who fails must abandon hope. We begin two days hence, on the feast of my patron, St. Pancratius Martyr, at the hour of Terce. To the winner, the sword!”
Geoffrey extended his arms, and the crowd roared. With that, he walked inside the tent. Satisfied, the crowd dispersed. Henry snuck behind a tree, impressed despite himself. Geoffrey hadn’t said anything especially smart or inspiring. But by the end of his tiny speech, he had the crowd eating out of his hand and ready to abandon the greatest attraction in Toulouse just so they could return again in forty-eight hours, on nothing more than his say-so. Maybe Geoffrey did deserve Excalibur…No. Henry shook himself. There was a difference between a born leader and a good leader. And for all his skill and talent, no one could put the words “Geoffrey” and “good” in the same sentence.
Henry hunkered down behind a tree and waited for the crowd to thin out. After a few minutes, he heard thudding in the brush, and Percy was sitting next to him.
“My Lord, it was all my fault, I—”
“Just the facts, Perce.”
Percy sighed. “Lord Raymond had men stationed outside the feasting tent. When you fled, they followed, and before I could do anything, you were down. Lord Raymond grabbed your sword and ran, but before he could go more than three horse-lengths, he screamed in agony, fell, and the sword flew out of his hands. It was most miraculous, My Lord. It flew through the air and buried itself point first in the living rock.”
“It’s a magic sword, Perce.”
“Well, duh.”
Henry raised his eyebrows. Sarcasm? From Percy? Was he becoming…human?
“Your comrades-in-arms filled me in. Is it truly Excalibur?”
“Yeah.”
“And did you truly take it from the stone?”
“Did I take it…yeah, I guess I did.”
“And this game with the shells and the pea that I played with Aelfred—are my chances of winning truly one in three?”
“Er…no. Not really.”
“I see.” Percy was silent, staring out at the crowd.
Henry shifted uncomfortably. “But the magic sword means that I’m no knight. If it hadn’t been Excalibur, I’d have been the one on my knees on the bridge when we met. If you want to leave, I understand.”
“You’re right, you’re no knight.” Percy picked up a blade of grass and chewed it for a moment. “You’re a king.”
“Are you cra—”
“You bear Excalibur. I think I’ll stick with you for now. My Lord.” Percy stood. “Let me know if you need anything.”
Henry shut his mouth and shook his head. Percy waved and strolled off.
As night fell, Henry was still waiting for the guards to break their concentration. When he heard the faint rattle of dice, he stood up.
The outside torches were burning low, and the two guards were crouched over their game. Henry left the shelter of the tree and looped wide around the pavilion, passing between the tents of the various knights and knightly service providers—smiths, brewers, vintners, peddlers of armor wax and helm polish—until he was facing the rear of the pavilion from across an empty swathe of grass. When one of the nearby torches guttered out, he walked across to the tent.
Henry could hear voices inside. Even better, the wind had risen, and he could see light from inside the tent—it would be hard for Geoffrey and whoever else was there to see or hear him. He crouched down, gently lifted the bottom of the tent panel, and peered in.
There they were: Excalibur, Geoffrey, and John, a few hench-knights, and good old Brissac. Geoffrey was pacing, and he wasn’t happy.
“Remind me, Edmond.” Geoffrey stopped in front of Excalibur and drummed his fingers along the hilt. Don’t you touch her! Henry wanted to scream. He bit his lip instead.
“When the boy came out with the sword, did he tell you where he’d found it?”
Brissac looked miserable. “No, My Lord.”
“Did he tell you how he’d retrieved it?”
“No, My Lord.”
And now Geoffrey’s hand was on Brissac’s throat, lifting Brissac from his chair. “Did you think to ask him before you tried to gut him like a fish?”
“NO, LORD! MERCY—”
Geoffrey released him, and Brissac slumped back down. Outside, Henry shuddered. Brissac weighed at least twelve stone, but Geoffrey had lifted him one-handed.
John smirked. “You could try drawing the sword now, dear brother. No one here but us chickens.”
“I’ve already tried, Johnny. Did you expect me to deny it?” Geoffrey smiled. “Of course, if you want your turn, I won’t stop you.”
John pouted. Geoffrey put his hand on John’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Johnny. The right to rule isn’t decided by some magic trick. It’s determined by blood, brains, and courage.”
Well, that cuts John out, thought Henry. Richard too, probably. I wonder if John even realizes what his brother is saying.
The Wrong Sword Page 17