by Paula Guran
She couldn’t argue because she’d thought the same. She said, “This woman made me sleep with a glance. How would we kill such a thing?”
Even if they wanted to kill her. What if the woman was right, and if they acted against her she would find some way to kill Arthur? Perhaps they should bide their time.
“Highness? Are you there?” Doña Elvira called to her.
“I must away,” Catherine said, and curtsied to her brother-in-law. “We must think on what to do. We must not be rash.”
He returned the respect with a bow. “Surely. Farewell.”
She hoped he would not be rash. She feared he looked upon all this as a game.
“His Highness is not seeing visitors,” the gentleman of Arthur’s chamber told her. He spoke apologetically and bowed respectfully, but he would not let her through the doors to see Arthur. She wanted to scream.
“You will tell him that I was here?”
“Yes, Your Highness,” the man said and bowed again.
Catherine could do nothing more than turn around and walk away, trailed by her own attending ladies.
What they must think of her. She caught the whispers among them, when they thought she couldn’t hear. Pobre Catalina. Poor Catherine, whose husband would not see her, who spent every night alone.
That evening, she sent Doña Elvira and her ladies on an errand for wine. Once again, she crept from her chambers alone, furtive as a mouse.
I will see my husband, Catherine thought. It is my right. It should not have been so difficult for her to see him alone. But as it was the palace swarmed with courtiers.
She wanted to reach him before the woman arrived to work her spells on him.
Quietly, she slipped through Arthur’s door and closed it behind her.
The bed curtains were open. Arthur, in his nightclothes, sat on the edge of the bed, hunched over. She could hear his wheezing breaths across the room.
“Your Highness,” she said, curtsying.
“Catherine?” He looked up—and did he smile? Just a little? “Why are you here?”
She said, “Who is the woman who comes to you at night?”
“No one comes to me at night.” He said this flatly, as if she were to blame for his loneliness.
She shook her head, fighting tears. She would keep her wits and not cry. “Three nights ago I came, and she was here. You were bleeding, Arthur. She hurt you. She’s killing you!”
“That isn’t true. No one has been here. And—what business is it of yours if a woman has been here?”
“I am your wife. You have a duty to me.”
“Catherine, I am so tired.”
She knelt at his side and dared to put her hand on his knee. “Then you must grow strong. So that we may have children. Your heirs.”
He touched her hand. A thrill went through her flesh, like fire. So much feeling in a simple touch! But his skin was ice cold.
“I am telling the truth,” said the boy who was her husband. “I remember nothing of any woman coming here. I come to bed every night and fall into such a deep sleep that nothing rouses me but my own coughing. I do not know of what you speak.”
This woman had put a spell on them all.
“Your father is sending your household to Ludlow Castle, in Wales,” she said.
He set his lips in a thin, pale line. “Then we shall go to Ludlow.” “You cannot travel so far,” she said. “The journey will kill you.” “If I were really so weak my father would not send me.” “His pride blinds him!”
“You should not speak so of the king, my lady.” He gave a tired sigh. What would have been an accusation of treason from fiery young Henry’s lips was weary observation from Arthur’s. “Now please, Catherine. Let me sleep. If I sleep well tonight, perhaps I’ll be strong enough to see you tomorrow.”
It was an empty promise and they both knew it. He was as pale and wasted as he had ever been. She kissed his hand with as much passion as she had ever been allowed to show. She pressed her cheek to it, let tears fall on it. She would pray every day for him. Every hour.
She stood, curtsied, and left him alone in the chamber.
Outside, however, she waited, sitting on a chair in the corner normally reserved for pages or stewards. Doña Elvira would be scandalized to see her there.
In an hour, the woman Angeline came. She moved like smoke. Catherine had been staring ahead so intently she thought her eyes played a trick on her. A shadow flickered where there was no flame. A draft blew where no window was open.
Angeline did not approach, but all the same she appeared. She stood before the doors of Arthur’s bedchamber as regal as any queen.
Catherine was still gathering the courage to stand when Angeline looked at her. Her face was alabaster, a statue draped with a gown of black velvet. She might as well have been stone, her gaze was so hard.
Finally, Catherine stood.
“Es la novia niña,” Angeline said.
The princess would not be cowed by a commoner. “By the laws of Church and country I am not a child, I am a woman.”
“By one very important consideration, you are not.” She turned a pointed smile.
Catherine blushed; her gaze fell. She was still a maid. That was certainly not her fault.
“I demand that you leave here,” Catherine said. “Leave here, and leave my husband alone.”
“Oh, child, you don’t want me to do that.”
“I insist. You are some witch, some demon. That much I know. You have worked a spell on him that sickens him to death—”
“Oh no, I’ll not let my puppet die. I could keep your Arthur alive forever, if I wished. I hold that secret.”
“You … you are an abomination against the Church. Against God!” She smiled thinly. “Perhaps.”
“Why?” Catherine said. “Why him? Why this?”
“He’ll be a weak king. At best, an indifferent king. He won’t be leading any troops to war against France. He will keep England a quiet, unimportant country.”
“You do not know that. You cannot see the future. He will be a great king—”
“One need not see the future to guess such things, dear Catherine.”
“You will address me as Your Highness, as is proper.”
“Of course, Your Highness. You must trust me—I will not kill Arthur. If his brother were to become king—you have seen the kind of boy he is: fierce, competitive, strong. You can imagine the kind of king he will be. No one in Europe wishes for a strong king of England.”
“My father King Ferdinand—”
“Not even King Ferdinand. From the first, he wanted a son-in-law he could control.”
Catherine knew it was true, all of it, the chess-like machinations of politics that had ruled her life. Her marriage to Arthur had given Spain another playing piece, that was all.
There was no room for love in any of this.
She was descended from two royal houses. Her ancestors were the oldest and most noble in all of Europe. Dignity was bred into the sinews of her flesh. She stood tall, did not collapse, did not cry, however much the little girl inside of her was trembling.
“And what of children?” she said. “What of the children I’m meant to bear?”
“It may be possible. Or it may not.”
“I do not believe you. I do not believe anything that you say.”
“Yes, you do,” she said. “But more importantly, you cannot stop me. You’ll go to sleep, now. You will not remember.”
She wanted to fling herself at the woman, strangle her with her own hands. Tiny hands that couldn’t strangle a kitten, alas.
“Catherine. Move away. I know what she is.” The command came in the incongruous voice of a boy.
Prince Henry stood blocking the chamber’s other doorway. He had a spear, which seemed overlarge and unwieldy in his hands. Nevertheless, he held it at the ready, feet braced, pointed at the woman. It was a mockery of battle. A child playing at hunting boar.
“What am I, boy?�
� the woman said in a soft, mocking voice.
This only drove Henry to greater rage. “Succubus. A demon who feeds on the souls of men. You will not have my brother, devil!”
Her smile fell, darkening her expression. “You have just enough intelligence to do harm. And more than enough ignorance.”
“I’ll kill you. I can kill you where you stand.”
“You will not kill me. Arthur is so much mine that without me he will die.”
She’d made Arthur weak and subsumed him under her power. If that tie between them was severed—
Catherine’s heart pounded. She could not stop them both. They would not listen. No one ever listened to her. “Henry, you must not, she is keeping Arthur alive.”
“She lies.”
The woman laughed, a bitter sound. “If Arthur dies, Henry becomes heir. That reason will not stay his hand.”
But Henry didn’t want to be king. He’d said so …
Catherine caught his gaze. She saw something dark in his eyes.
Then she tried to forget that she’d seen it. “My lord, wait—”
The woman lived in shadow—was made of shadow. She started to flow back into the hidden ways by which she came, moving within the stillness of night. Catherine saw nothing but a shudder, the light of a sputtering candle. But Henry saw more, and like a great hunter he anticipated what the flinch of movement meant.
With a shout he lunged forward, driving the spear before him.
The woman flew. Catherine would swear that she flew, up and over, toward the ceiling to avoid Henry. Henry followed with his spear, jumping, swinging the weapon upward. He missed. With a sigh, the woman twisted away from him. Henry stumbled, thrown off balance by his wayward thrust, and Angeline stood behind him.
“You’re a boy playing at being warrior,” she said, carrying herself as calmly as if she had not moved.
Henry snarled an angry cry and tried again. The woman stepped aside and took hold of the back of Henry’s neck. With no effort at all, she pushed him down, so that he was kneeling. He still held the spear, but she was behind him, pressing down on him, and he couldn’t use it.
“I could make you as much my puppet as your brother is.”
“No! You won’t! I’ll never be anyone’s puppet!” He struggled, his whole body straining against her grip, but he couldn’t move.
Catherine knelt and began to pray, Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and her lips stumbled trying to get out all the words at once.
The prayers were for her own comfort. Catherine had little faith in her own power; she didn’t expect the unholy creature to hear her words and pause. She didn’t consider that her own words, her own prayer, would cause Angeline to loosen her grip on Henry.
But Angeline did loosen her grip. Her body seemed to freeze for a moment. She became more solid, as if the prayer had made her substantial.
Henry didn’t hesitate. He threw himself forward, away from Angeline, then spun to put the spear between them. Then, while she was still seemingly entranced, he drove it home.
The point slipped into her breast. She cried out, fell, and as she did Henry drove the wooden shaft deep into her chest.
The next moment she lay on the floor, clutching the shaft of the spear. Henry still held the end of it. He stared down at her, iconic, like England’s beloved Saint George and his vanquished dragon.
There was no blood.
A strangeness happened—as strange as anything else Catherine had seen since coming to England. With the scent of a crypt rising from her, the woman faded in color, then dried and crumbled like a corpse that had been rotting for a dozen years. The body became unrecognizable in a moment. In another, only ash and dust remained.
Henry kicked a little at the mound of debris.
Catherine spoke, her voice shaking. “She said she was keeping Arthur alive. What if it’s true? What if he dies? I’ll be a widow in a strange country. I’ll be lost.” Lost, when she was meant to be a queen. Her life was slipping away.
Henry touched her arm. She nearly screamed, but her innate dignity controlled her. She only flinched.
He gazed at her with utmost gravity. “I’ll take care of you. If Arthur dies, then I’ll take care of you, when I am king after my father.”
Arthur died in the spring. And so it came to pass that Henry, who had been born to be Duke of York and nothing else, a younger brother, a mere afterthought in the chronicles of history, would succeed his father as King of England, become Henry VIII, and marry Catherine of Aragon. He would take care of her, as he had promised.
He was sixteen at their wedding, a year older than Arthur had been. But so different. Like day and night, summer and winter. Henry was tall, flushed, hearty, laughed all the time, danced, hunted, jousted, argued, commanded. Their wedding night would be nothing like Catherine’s first, she knew. He is the greatest prince in all Europe, people at court said of him. He will make England a nation to be reckoned with.
Catherine considered her new husband—now taller than she by a head. Part of her would always remember the boy. She could still picture him the way he stood outside Arthur’s chamber, spear in his hands, fury in his eyes, ready to do battle. Ready to sacrifice his own brother. Catherine would never forget that this was a man willing to do what he believed must be done, whatever the cost.
She wanted to be happy, but England’s chill air remained locked in her bones.
SHIPWRECKS ABOVE
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan as “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Mythopoeic awards). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, and, soon, a second “best of” volume. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse and working on other projects.
Kiernan rarely delves into the vampiric, but when she does, the result is—as with “Shipwrecks Above”—both darkly poetic and highly original…
This one, she rides the tides. She has been hardly more than a shade drifting between undulating stalks of kelp, and she has worn flickering diadems of jellyfish, anemones, and brittle stars. The mackerel and tautog swap their careless yarns of her. For instance, that she was once a dryad, but then fell from Artemis’ favor. Weighted about the ankles, so was she drowned and whored out to the sea, cast down from all sylvan terrestrial spheres, from all pastures and forests that have not been drowned. But this is no more than the bitter fancies that fish whisper to one another, tales told in school, and such stories have even less substance than what has been left of her. She was never a dryad. She was only a woman, very long ago, though not so far back as the tautog and mackerel might have you suppose. The imagination of fish knows no bounds.
She was once only a woman, as I’ve said, and a woman who had the great misfortune to attract the attentions of something that was not only a man. He loved her, or at least he named it love, knowing no other word for his desires and insatiable appetites. He loved her, and so must she not, by right, be his? After all, she was the daughter of his sister, and had he not loved his sister and shown to her all the ruthless dedication of that love, before she ungratefully fled from him? Hence, might not this fatherless Székely child—christened Eõrsebet Soffia by some mangy Calvinist priest—be reasonably considered flesh of his own flesh? Yet, when the noble boyar claimed her, his impertinent sister dared protest the allegation. So he had her killed, and István Vadas, hero of the Thirteen Year’s War and cherished ally to the Wallachian Prince Michael the Brave, did take the girl away from her village in the year 1624.
&nbs
p; On that day, Eõrsebet was sixteen and seven months, and had never yet looked upon the sea.
Her father and lover, her self-appointed Lord in all matters of this world and in any to come hereafter, ferried her high into the Carpathian wilderness, up to some crumbling ancestral fortress, its towers and curtain walls falling steadily into decrepitude. It was no less a wreck than the whalers and doggers, the schooners and trawlers, she has since sung to their graves on jagged reefs of stone and coral. And it was there, in the rat-haunted corridors of István’s moldering castle, that she did refuse this daemonic paramour. All his titles, battlefield conquests, and wealth were proved unequal to the will of a frightened girl. When he had raped her and beaten her, he had her bound and, for a while, cast into a deep pit where she believed that the Archangel Michael, bringer of merciful Death, might find her and bear her away from this perdition unto the gilded clouds of Heaven.
“You have chosen to spurn the Light of my devotion,” István told Eõrsebet Soffia, his dry lips pressed to the hagioscopic squint of her cell door, murmuring through that “leper’s window” rather than allow her to glimpse even the flickering of torchlight. “Therefore, it seems more than just that I should aid thee in seeking out the lightless realms.” István went away, leaving her with no further explanation of intent, but at the dawn of the next day, upon the crowing of the cock, his jailer blinded the girl with an iron poker heated in glowing coals. The wounds were bound with the finest Chinese silk, taken from ravaged Ottoman caravans.
Her screams were nothing new to the rats, or to the mortar, the spiders, or the limestone blocks of the keep, for her Lord knew well the worth of torture, just as he knew the worth of a good warhorse or a Karabelá sabre.
In a greater darkness than she had ever imagined, and in greater pain than she’d had cause even to suppose could exist, Eõrsebet wept and prayed her delirious, fevered prayers to St. Michael. She knelt in filthy straw and dirt and offal, beseeching any angel or saint to intervene on her behalf. But, as before, all her supplications went unanswered.
And when another Transylvanian night had crept across the mountainside, the sun abandoning the steep Bârgu forests to the wolves, István Vadas came to her again. Her father told her, solemnly, that she might serve him still, for what need had he of a bride who could see? “You are not diminished,” he assured her, his voice as smooth as honey and cold as a serpent’s blood. “You may yet attend and obey me in matrimony, and know my mercy. Merely assent, and you will be set free, and never again know pain or the humiliation of imprisonment.”