by Whyte, Jack
The King frowned. "I intend to, Vivienne, as soon as I may."
I looked from one to the other of them. "Who is Germanus?"
"A friend." The King looked at me again, his eyes narrowed. "You'll remember what I said about your father and I being brothers in arms. I said there were three of us, one of them a man who outranked both of us by far. That was Germanus, Legate Commander of the Imperial Armies of Gaul, appointed by the Emperor Honorius himself."
"An Imperial Legate Commander? He was my father's friend?"
"Friend and brother, as he was to me. The three of us were as peas in a pod for years. But whereas your father and I were warriors and minor kings, Germanus had great power at his command, with almost a hundred thousand troops at his disposal before he left the legions. He left the same year your father and I left, but where we returned to our former lives, Germanus joined the Church. He is a bishop now, still wielding great power, though of a different kind, and people are saying he has become a worker of miracles, a very holy man."
He thought about that for a moment, and then smiled. "Your father would find that amusing. I do, too, God knows, because the Germanus we knew as young men loved to laugh at other people's folly and he was no one's idea of a very holy man. He was a fine man, completely admirable, among the best of the best by anyone's standards: strong, courageous, afraid of nothing and absolutely trustworthy." He smiled again, a savage kind of grin. "And now that I think of it, he worked miracles even then, years ago . . . but those were miracles of soldiering—achieving the impossible, it sometimes seemed, with very few resources." His smile faded but remained in place, as though at something only he could see. "He was always a noble man, Germanus, when we three rode together . . . honest and straightforward as the day is long . . . But we would never have thought of him as holy"
"What does holy mean?" I asked.
"Mean? I'm not sure what it really means. Devout, pious, unworldly and possessing sanctity, I suppose. A man of God. It means all of those things yet more than all of them, for a devout and pious man—an ordinary bishop, for example—cannot expect to cast out devils easily or bring dead people back to life. A man needs true holiness to do such things. Yet I have heard tales of my friend Germanus doing them, and often. And they are tales from people I know and trust."
"Where is he now?"
"He's here, in Gaul. He is the Bishop of Auxerre, about two hundred miles northwest of where we sit now."
"Oh-zerr?" I had never heard of such a place. "What kind of name is that?"
"It's what the local people there call their town. What more explanation do you need? Its old Roman name was Autessiodurum, back in the days of the Caesars when that part of Gaul was officially called Gallia Comata. But I suppose Autessiodurum was too much of a jawbreaker for the local folk, much the same as Gallia Comata turned out to be. It's been hundreds of years since anyone has called that region Gallia Comata."
"Comata? That means long-haired. How could that be the name of a country?"
The King grinned at me, his fine white teeth flashing. "Because all the people who lived up there were long-haired back then, when Julius Caesar first came strutting, thinking to conquer us. That was the explanation I was given, anyway, when I asked my tutor the same question at about your age."
"What were we called, then?"
"We?" He laughed. "Your people were Salian Franks. They lived up there, below the Rhine River. This part of Gaul down here was called Gallia Cisalpina, Cisalpine Gaul, because the Alps lie between us and the northern borders of Italia. My people called themselves Ripuarian Franks—but do not ask me what that means because I have no idea. The Romans, however, called us all Gauls."
"So why did people in Auxerre stop calling it Autessiodurum? I like that name."
Another smile and a shake of his head. "Why do people do anything? I can't tell you anything about that, lad . . . other than that they were Gauls and they wanted nothing to do with any Roman place called Autessiodurum. They'd had their own name for the place, long before the Romans came.
"Anyway, it's Germanus's home country. His family have been there for hundreds of years and own most of the land for many miles around. Or they used to own it. It has new owners nowadays, apparently. I've heard tell, again from people who know, that when he swore allegiance to the Church, as a bishop, Germanus turned over all of his possessions to his superiors, keeping nothing for himself, since he has no heirs."
"He gave away everything?"
"Aye, to the Church."
"Why?"
"You will have to ask him that for yourself. He will be here within the month. The letter I was reading when you came to me today was from him. We have not seen each other since our legion days, and he will be passing close to here on one of his missions, so he will stay with us for a few days."
"Will you be spending lots of time with him while he is here?"
"All of it. Why would you ask that?"
"Will you tell me more about my father before he comes?"
He looked slightly surprised. "Aye, I will."
"When?"
He turned his eyes away from mine to look at his wife, and I looked at her too, wondering what was passing between them. The Lady Vivienne simply smiled at him, her lips curving faintly upward, but her face was very pale. He nodded, tensely, I thought, and then looked back to me.
'Tonight, if you would like that. It's almost dinnertime now, and I have guests to look after. You eat, then go to bed at your appointed time, and I will wake you when I am done with my tasks. You and I can talk then and no one will interrupt us."
As though she had received some signal that I missed, my mother—and that word seemed suddenly strange to me—rose and crossed to where I sat, then stooped to kiss my cheek and told me gently to go and take my place with my brothers in the dining hall. As I left the room, I could feel both of them watching me.
5
I was so excited that evening that I did not believe I could possibly sleep when bedtime came. I ate without awareness of eating, my eyes fastened on King Ban and his guests at the head table as I willed the King to look towards me and nod some kind of acknowledgment of his promise. But he paid me no attention, his entire being focused upon the entertainment of his guests at the high table, and shortly after they had finished their meal and left the hall, Ludda came looking for me to gather me up and supervise my bedding down for the night. Ten years old and more than halfway to manhood I might be, but my nurse's word still ruled my behaviour.
On this occasion, however, I made no demur about going to bed. I was looking forward to lying awake in the warm darkness, thinking about my real father and mother and imagining the tales King Ban would have to tell me. And of course, once in bed and warm, I fell straight to sleep.
I awoke to the sound of my name, to find the King standing above me, holding a flickering lamp.
"Up, boy. Or would you rather stay there and go back to sleep?"
Almost before he had finished speaking, I was rolling out of bed, wide-awake, my heart already hammering. In anticipation of being summoned, I had gone to bed still wearing my tunic and leggings, and as I groped for my felt shoes the King threw me a heavy, fur-lined robe that had been folded over his arm.
"Here, put this on. It's cold tonight."
I followed him quickly, clutching the warm, heavy robe around me as he led me down the great curved staircase and back towards his day quarters. I had no idea what time of night it was, but I knew it must be very late because it was so cold, and because the hallways were utterly deserted and several of the bracketed torches lining the walls had burned themselves out. King Ban did not look back at me but strode directly to his private quarters, where he threw open one half of the heavy doors and swept through. I closed the door quietly behind me, looking around me in surprise. The room was awash with the leaping light of flames from a huge number of fine candles and a roaring log fire in the brazier in the hearth. The windows were firmly shuttered and secured against the
night, and it was warm in there for the first time ever, to my knowledge.
"Sit, over there."
I sat in the comfortably padded chair the King had indicated, on the left side of the hearth, and he crossed to its twin on the other side, but he did not sit down immediately. He stood with one hand on the back of the chair and stared back towards the door. I looked to see what he was staring at, but there was nothing.
"Where is the man?" As he spoke the words, the door swung open again, and Guntram, Ban's veteran personal servitor, entered carefully, holding the door ajar with his buttocks as he stooped to gather up two steaming jugs.
"Worthy lad," the King addressed him, "I was beginning to think you might have died in the kitchens."
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 work table. 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 towards 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 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.