Wyrm I.VI

                                                 Chapter VI: Michaelmas

The first snows had not yet fallen, but the halls of Framlingham were hung with holly boughs and garlands of waxed ivy, and with little bells that chimed when the wind sighed. They were ringing as Will took sir Ralph’s member into his mouth in the unused tower stair behind the tapestry of riders putting the sword to Saxon raiders, or perhaps it was the Danes. He oft confused the two. Blond beasts.

“When Sir Conrad had the care of me I was the best of wives to him,” whispered sir Ralph, his strong fingers twining through Will’s curls. “He was… ahh, slower… he was a Teuton, sworn to the service of Waldemar the Great, the margrave of Brandenburg, but he came to court with Bohemia’s ambassador in the summer before the Mortality fell on London and became a favorite of the baron of the exchequer. Not Pole — begging her ladyship’s pardon, I meant de la Pole, but his father, Bill Pole, who went by the plain article.”

He thrust rhythmically against Will’s face as he spoke. Will gagged, tears running down his cheeks. He thought sometimes with longing of the knights of those days, of sir Conrad and sir Ector Lake, who had seen the Madonna at a crossroads near Ulfpen, and sir Walter of Surrey who’d cut the Bruce’s bastard Robert in half with a single blow at the battle of Dupplin Moor where a thousand Scotsmen had been smashed to bloody ruin against the unbreakable line of the English tricorniers. It sounded so much grander than their petty squabbling with the Welsh rebels. Flies crawling over bodies. Mommy, mommy, I want my mommy. An arm in the crotch of a tree. “Such a city you’ve never seen, my girl,” sir Ralph was saying. “The great cathedral on its isle, the altar painted with the faces of angels and saints wreathed all in gold, and the towers soaring in the smoky sky. I will show it to you, someday. Dress you in silks and furs and take you as my lady walking by the river where the Bohemians fish and paddle their scalloped boats among the serpents, none of them the wiser, for so fair… so fair is my… my girl… ah.”

Some of it dripped from Will’s chin. He tasted salt and lake water as he swallowed, sir Ralph pulling away from him. For a moment strings of spit and semen glistened in the torchlit air between lips and member like the aureoles of Brandenburg’s saints. The knight sank back onto the steps with a deep sigh, stroking himself as a shiver ran the length of him. A few more drops spurted over the stone and Will’s hose. Warm. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“Dick tells me you have been scarce in the training yard,” sir Ralph said, his tone gentle. He reached for Will’s hand and drew it down to the coarse russet hair at the base of his sex. He was burning hot there, and damp, almost like a woman. Like Lizzie had been when they were twelve and playing at putting fingers into one another behind the kitchens. She had bitten him after, just above his ear and hard enough to make him bleed, and he had run back to his mother and wept in fear and anger into her skirts. “I will not have your swordplay shame me, Will.”

Will looked down, hot tears burning his cheeks. “I’ll try harder.”

Sir Ralph cupped Will’s chin and lifted it until their eyes met. “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…” The knight sighed, then broke into a crooked grin. “What am I going to do with you, my sweet?”

Kate had not seen the royal party’s arrival, but she knew as soon as she stepped out of the jakes that the king had come to Framlingham. The thunder of horns was in the air and her ladyship was sitting up in bed, a rarity in the month since her miscarriage. She had her blood most days, a steady trickle soaking through the folded cloth she wore between her legs, and her cheeks were hollow, her hair lifeless and shot through with gray. Now they undressed her, washed her, oiled and braided her hair which had lain lank and greasy on the bedclothes, and finally dressed her in her finest, though the gown hung loose on her shrunken frame and the fur-trimmed pelisse dwarfed her pitifully.

I did this, Kate thought numbly as she draped a belt of gold medallions over her mistress’s hips, beneath the still-loose skin of her belly where the growth marks of her previous pregnancies wended over her pale skin like rivers on a map. I did it.

By the time they crossed the courtyard to the keep proper the stable hands were leading richly-barded mallards and ostri off to be curried and watered as the king’s men at arms and sworn retainers swapped gossip with the castle folk. Guardsmen drew up to attention as the women passed, and their greetings and the crisp air seemed to bring Lady Elizabeth back to her old self, if only just a little. There was color in her cheeks and she smiled laughed and whistled for Isabella, who came running to leap up and perch on her shoulder, a live mouth writhing in her jaws.

“You look so glum, Kate,” said Anne de Crecy, furrowing her brow in half-mocking concern. “Afraid the king will carry you off to London?”

Kate forced a smile. “It’s this weather,” she said. Her own voice sounded false to her ears. “The clouds. I feel a little wan.”

By the time they reached the hall through the back entrance, breezing through the kitchens where Mary Cutter pressed a honey roll into Kate’s hands (You’re a good girl, Katie. Don’t go spilling it.), the herald, Anne’s pimply cousin Robert, had already announced the king and several of his privy council and retainers. In the center of the hall lord Thomas knelt with his lips to the king’s signet ring. Richard was tall and handsome with a thin circlet of gold resting on his sandy hair and a comfortable pot belly spilling over the belt at the waist of his knee-length tunic. At his side stood Suffolk — Kate knew him by the swordbill and fleur-de-lis brooch that clasped his cloak — slight and fine-boned Michael de la Pole, who more than one of the duke’s men called Lady Pole behind his back. He wore neither beard nor mustache and his hair, braided at the temples and fastened with silver clasps, was as pale as ash and hung nearly to his waist. He was as pretty as they said; the queen looked half a drab beside him.

“My father says that parliament removed him as Lord Chancellor just last winter,” Anne whispered to Kate. “Pole, I mean. Yet here he is as bold as brass.”

“The lady Margaret Pole!” the herald cried as Lady Elizabeth went to curtsy at her husband’s side.

“de la,” Joan Howard muttered under her breath. Anne choked with laughter, hiding her mouth behind her sleeve. Kate could only stare. The tall, slender woman in the mouth of the entryway had met her eyes and broken out into a catlike smile, wide and white and toothy. Though she was in a fur-trimmed gown and cape instead of flying leathers, though her hair was in a long, dark braid and not coiled tight under an arming cap, it was Mordred’s rider. There could be no doubt.

A feast unfolded around them. Kate was conscious of taking a seat at Lady Elizabeth’s side, of picking at neeps and golden, crispy onions doubtless cooked by (you’re a good girl, Katie) Mary Cutter and her girls. There was venison, the stag brought out kneeling on his beaten bronze platter with his own hide draped over his steaming skin. He’s wearing himself, but he’s not himself anymore, thought Kate, and a shrill little giggle came out of her, high and hysterical. Nobody noticed, except for Margaret de la Pole who sat at her brother’s side, looking more a man than he did even in her gown, smiling at Kate from time to time across the bustling hall. The duke’s fool John Moon was setting fire to his farts again, once more to great acclaim.

Knights crowded the trestle tables to either side of the great doors and their jests and games resounded from the rafters, beating against Kate from every side. She glanced down the table at the duke , stiff-faced and bloodless as he listened to the king. They know, she thought, and her eyes crept of their own accord back to Margaret Pole’s odd, catlike face. Margaret returned her stare over the rim of a cup of wine, and that slow smile again twisted her wide and crooked mouth.

One of the duke’s raptors drew gales of laughter when she leapt up by king Richard and snatched a haunch of lamb off of his plate, but the king laughed loudest of all. He had a good laugh, warm and rich and a little foolish, so that you felt at ease joining in with him. Or at least others seemed to. Kate just watched the raptor, a big marled hen with chipped dewclaws and a stump for a right arm, tear at the haunch while her packmates circled around her among the milling servants and pages. Blood and drippings smeared the flagstones. She thought of the hot, red little thing that had slid out of her ladyship a few months past. At the king’s side the queen ate placidly, chewing like a mallard at its cud. Margaret Pole was laughing, too, her head thrown back like a soldier howling at a ribald story. A few seats down father de Brole was picking his nose with a long, tapering finger.

She will kill me, Kate thought suddenly. I’m only a danger. A loose end. She’ll kill me.

She looked down at her trencher, and into the depths of the cup of small beer beside it.

Maybe she already has.

“It’s worse than we feared, your grace,” said Stephen. Tom Mowbray’s solar was a somber room, as dark and dour as its lord, who sat staring into the fire as it died and crumbled in upon itself, sparks rising with each fresh collapse. “Barons close to the king are raising levies from Manchester to the Scottish border. The crown is spending lavishly with metalworkers in Milan and Tuscany. Polearms. Swords. Chainmail and artillerer’s pins.”

The fire popped. Lord Thomas, elbow on knee and chin on fist, let out a long, heavy sigh. “I thought he might have come with peace in mind,” he said, and there was a childish gentleness to his sorrow that made Stephen sad, for a moment. “He seems a little tempered by his parliament. Pole is out of government, de Vere nowhere in sight…”

“My lord, they may no longer hold their titles, but they are as close as ever to the king, and the gold he pours upon them buys the troops that even now are drilling in secluded towns. The slander they pour in his ears points those spears North, at your grace and Bolingbroke and all the rest.”

Thomas passed a hand over his face, still sharp and narrow even in his fortieth year. “Will you not sit, sir Stephen?”

Stephen took the seat across the hearth from the duke’s own. “I try never to presume, your grace.”

“I had a pennon a week past from the convent of Saint Claire in Dover, by the sea. She’s dead, Stephen. A fever.”

His bastard daughter, pretty as her golden, fertile Howard mother, squirreled away behind the convent’s walls some twenty years or more. “Your grace, I grieve with you.”

“Henry. Jane. Even little Madeline, and now my Annie…” Tears glistened in his eyes. Stephen recalled the little red-faced babe he’d seen the great man hold when the old duke still ruled in Framlingham. They had been riding south to speak with Buckingham on the king’s business. To whip the fool’s cheeks red and scatter his levies, more like, and Mowbray had taken them through a little town the name of which had slipped from Stephen’s mind and called upon a woman there, and shown the babe to his companions, fair glowing with pride all th while. “My seed is spent. My unborn babe is gone, my wife is hollowed out, most like to die before the winter’s done. Now I must go to war against a man I love?”

We may have pushed him too hard, thought Stephen. He had seen that look a hundred times before in the eyes of soldiers, sailors, merchants — but never a great lord. The English were a queer people, forever hiding boyish, fumbling trysts behind cold steel and perfumed words of adoration for their wives, who more often than not sat locked rotting in high towers, fingers gnarled from spinning.

“I wish my news were other than it is,” said Stephen carefully. “But your grace, Caesar’s die is cast. The war will not wait on your conscience.”

The duke shot Stephen a flat, cold look that told the knight he’d gone too far, or nearly so. For a time afterward they sat in silence. Stephen took in the great tapestries that graced the Western wall, the Old Blood kneeling before Athelstan to offer up the first hatchlings of the great lines. A tricorne. A raptor. A mallard. All lies, Pale had told him, years ago. Four hundred years of lies wound tight enough to choke. No more.

How strange for everything to rest now on this man, Norfolk, neither comely nor ugly, a little short, a little thin, grieving the love of his boyhood. Or perhaps it rested on Richard and his paramours, the flashing diamonds he hung in de la Pole’s silken hair, or on Pale’s iron will, or on the little pouches of ground hellebore and tansy spirited by serving girls and grooms and prostitutes into a hundred manor houses and great castles all over the isles. Perhaps it stirred fitfully in the great glass wombs of the ark, sleeping but not dead. Not quite.

“Leave me,” said the Duke, not looking at Stephen. “I must pray on this.”

Stephen rose, offering a shallow bow. “Your grace.”

He left the solar by the rear stairs. Sir Godfrey waited for him at the second landing, looking out over the courtyard at the rookery where swordbills and bloody vicars roosted. A few cocks perched atop the roof, grooming and preening with their long, curved bills and flaring their crests at one another. At dawn they would sing in their high, fluting voices.

“What do you think they sing for?” Stephen asked as he came to stand at Godfrey’s side. He felt a heaviness settling on him, a clinging gray shroud he recognized well from his youth and from campaign. Too much black bile, the Greeks would say. “I wonder, sometimes.”

Sir Godfrey smiled. “I leave such thoughts to God, my friend. Is it done?”
“It is. The rest is up to Greene.”

Godfrey said nothing for a while. They stood together, watching a pair of bloody vicars squabble over who would perch atop a particular merlon which, to Stephen, looked like all the others. Drowsing butcher’s boys sidled out of the way of the cantankerous giants. An old song, the strong crushing the weak in their petty feuds. It would happen again, soon.

One last time.

Sir Ralph’s first swing put Will on his arse. The shock made him bite his tongue and as he levered himself back up to his feet with the blunt end of his training sword, blood ran from his mouth. He spat red and wiped his face on the sleeve of his arming jacket, breathing hard. Little crystals of snow drifted down to melt against his nose and lips. The king’s men and the castle’s laughed, good-natured enough, but with an edge to it. Two days of hosting the king’s household had left everyone with fraying nerves.

“Come on, come on,” said sir Ralph, circling slowly through the light snowfall. He waggled the tip of his blunted sword, jabbing lazily. “I know you can take more than that.”

More laughter. Will’s face burned as he squared up with the older man, shield arm aching and backside sore. Behind sir Ralph an old bull tricorne rubbed its flank against the paddock fence to satisfy an itch. Will circled. Footwork, he thought in Dick Preston’s thundering training yard bellow. Footwork, footwork.

He saw Henry and Lame Llewelyn watching him from the crowd. Henry’s nose had healed crooked where Lizzie had broken it. He’d been careful of Will ever since, though he was cheering for him now. “Come on, Will!” he shouted, pumping his fist in the air. “Ring his bloody bell!”

Sir Ralph lunged. Will skittered backward with a yelp and

beat the bigger man’s sword aside. One of the king’s big tattooed Norman knights was laughing into his beard. Will wished sir Ralph would break his sword with a single swing and take him in his arms in front of that hooting, stamping crowd, in front of that laughing man with his gold tooth and his scarred and puckered knuckles. Sir Ralph came on.

Don’t run.

He swung again and Will stepped into it, his instincts screaming at him to drop to the dirt and curl into as tight a ball as he could manage. It glanced off his shield with bone-shaking force as he jabbed at sir Ralph’s side, pushing weakly at the other man’s chainmail hauberk. The next moment he was spitting dirt out as Henry and Llewelyn helped him to sit up. His head was ringing.

“You got him!” Henry shouted, pounding Will’s shoulder. His voice sounded thin, and very far away. “You got him, Will!”

Across the circle sir Ralph stood toe to toe with the Norman knight. “It was a feather’s stroke,” sir Ralph snarled. “I scarce felt it. More than he can say.”

“The pup made his touch,” the big knight said softly. “Be a man, Lackland, and kiss his cheek.”

There was an ugly silence. Some of Lord Thomas’s men looked ready to crack heads. Then Sir Ralph put on a smile in a way that made Will think of a dagger flashing as the first inch of steel cleared the sheath. The moment ended. He stalked toward Will and offered his hand. Will took it and let the older man pull him up swiftly to his feet, away from Llewelyn and Henry. Rough lips pressed his right cheek, then his left.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, red-faced and ashamed, tears stinging at the corners of his eyes.

“Everyone needs a little lesson in humility from time to time,” sir Ralph replied in a hushed, purring tone that made Will’s cock and balls want to creep back up inside him. I’ve ruined it, he thought, remembering the arrogant warmth that had burned in his stomach when sir Ralph chose him as his squire. The certainty that now things would be different. I’ve ruined everything.

“Three pence says Arnault can take him!” someone shouted from the crowd. Jeers and shouted wagers answered, and as sir Ralph broke away the hulking Norman stepped into the circle, smiling. Someone handed him a training sword. The hubbub grew.

“What do you say, Norfolk’s man? A friendly bout?”

“Arnault, Arnault!” cheered the king’s party, clapping and stamping. “Arnault, Arnault, Arnault!”

The back of sir Ralph’s neck flushed blotchy red. Will was glad he couldn’t see his face from where he stood. The others around him had gone silent. Henry and Llewellyn looked to him, nervous. A few yards away the tricorne began rubbing up against the fence with renewed vigor. Butcher’s boys crawled over its pebbled hide and through its thick, dark ruff of feathers, hunting for ticks and wyrm-lice. Its horns were freshly oiled and glinted in the early sun.

“To the blood,” sir Ralph said, his voice bright and cold beneath a thin pretense of cheer. First blood with a training sword meant an ugly match. Arnault looked undeterred. He nodded, smiling. The circle tightened, Llewellyn pulling Will back from the combatants. Will saw sir Edmund Greene standing quiet and grim-faced beside Hugh the armorer and the stablemaster, Meeks, with his pitted cheeks and red mustaches. Greene mouthed something to sir Ralph that Will couldn’t understand.

When Arnault moved it was so fast that for a moment Will didn’t understand what he’d seen. A streak of flesh and steel. Chainmail ringing. The knights’ swords struck sparks, a ringing thunder overlapping, echoing. The bull tricorne snorted in irritation, rubbing his feathered shoulder harder at the fence. The two men circled, struck, and parted. They came together in a tangle of mail and flashing steel, blades scraping. A pommel thudded into someone’s ribs. Grunts of effort like lovers wrestling.

Will he ever touch me again?

Arnault drove sir Ralph back with a flurry of hammering blows. One of their swords chipped, the fleck of steel striking someone in the crowd, who yelped in pain. More staggered back from the combatants as they neared the circle’s edge. Arnault’s sword rose. Sir Ralph was on the backfoot. Will’s stomach churned. His teeth were chattering.

Sir Ralph dodged, rolling left, and the Norman’s sword bounced off the horn of the bull still rubbing himself against the posts. The tricorne’s piggy eyes went black. He let out an ear-piercing squeal of rage, swinging his huge frilled head. The tip of one horn caught in Arnault’s hauberk and jerked him off-balance, sending him staggering across the circle into the spectators’ arms. They pushed him back, the king’s party crying out in protest and disappointment. Blood dribbled over the dirt from the wound where the tricorne’s horn had scored him. The bull shoved his massive bulk against the fence, which creaked, wood popping and splintering, but held.

Arnault dropped to one knee, sir Ralph’s sword cutting empty air over his head, and threw himself into a clumsy lunge. Sir Ralph knocked the Norman’s blade wide with the rim of his shield. His own sword, a flashing blur, caught Arnault high on the jaw with a sickening crunch. To his credit, Arnault didn’t fall. He fought on for a dozen heartbeats, blood in his beard and soaking his arming jacket from the great gash in the side of his face, before finally collapsing to one knee. Sir Ralph stood over him for a moment, breathing hard. Will wondered if he would smash the kneeling man’s skull.

“Well fought, sir,” sir Ralph said at last, offering the fallen man his hand. Arnault took it. He rose, moving slowly. Sir Ralph kissed him with deliberate precision on his injured cheek, a slow and lingering caress of the lips against the bloody wound. Arnault’s knuckles whitened where he gripped sir Ralph’s wrist. Will thought he saw a flash of tongue against the gash, and then the two men parted, sir Ralph smiling, blood on his mouth and chin.

“And you,” said Arnault, his voice muffled by a cheek already swelling and purple.

Sir Ralph’s eyes sparkled. He made no move to clean his face. “Go see our surgeon, will you? It will be a dashing scar, but all the same you ought to have it sewn.”

The look sir Ralph gave Will as he left the circle could have cut ringmail without slowing. Will thought of boiled wine poured over bloody knuckles. He thought of Edith Lackland’s sunken, crooked cheekbone and her eye that wouldn’t open all the way when it was cold out.

You see what she drives me to?

In his paddock, the old bull tricorne bellowed, turning away toward the wallows, and dropped a load of dung.

There was a mass just before dawn on Michaelmas, the chapel blazing with candlelight, fra de Brole and his boys in their little white gowns trailing coils of incense from their censers as they came one by one to the altar. Kate listened to the rite without hearing it. The voices of the choir washed over her without meaning. She received Christ’s body and his blood, but it tasted only of ashes. The king and the duke made a great show of clasping hands, exchanging kisses, and the queen and lady Elizabeth as well.

Latin, Latin, Latin. Kneel. Stand. Latin. Kneel. Joan Howard beside her, pale eyes and auburn braid so beautiful by candlelight, her throat long and slender like the throat of Kate’s nurse as a child. Latin. Stand. Margaret Pole seated with her brother and some others of the royal party. Cat’s smile. Latin. Latin. Kneel. She thought of the pennon, Lizzie Preston, and the battlements, wind pulling at her nightgown, the dark reaching for her, yearning in silence for her to reach back.

If you want to do it right, use the rookery, or the old tower at the end of the West wall.

They came out of the chapel into gray light and biting cold. Snow flurried. The mallards and ostri of the king’s party waited saddled in the courtyard, grooms currying feathers, adjusting saddle girths, affixing feed bags to their restive charges. A big roan mallard had gone up on her hinders to crop ivy from the rookery walls and several stablehands were trying to bring her back to heel, none with any success. Lady Elizabeth leaned on Kate’s arm as they crossed the

“I feel a chill,” the lady said. Her voice was so much thinner than it had been, as pale and fragile as she’d become. “Kate, be a good girl—” You’re a good girl, Katie. “—run and tell Mary in the kitchens to send up some pavers for the bedding. Oh God’s wounds, nevermind, you’ll have to stay for this.”

The duke and king Richard were saying their goodbyes. “Let us not quarrel again, dear friend,” said Richard, smiling as he took duke Thomas by the shoulders. His eyes crinkled warmly at the corners when he did. The duke returned his smile and they embraced to cheers and applause. Kate clapped as best she could with her lady hanging on her arm.

“I am your servant, majesty,” the duke replied. They broke apart. “Now and always. Never doubt it.”

The two parties split, the king’s mounting their wyrms as the portcullis rose, the road over the downs and past the frozen lake a thin, dark ribbon against the drifting snow. They rode out, the duke’s trumpeters and hornists playing merrily, and as the Poles (de la) passed by where Kate and her ladyship stood the lady Margaret turned and smiled, dark eyes glittering with fierce good humor, and laughed heartily like a man at some ribald jest. She was still laughing when she rode through the gate and out into the wind, her mallard — a man’s mount, more properly — breaking into a slow canter. A little red thing in the midwife’s palm. Slick and hot and dead.

It was a girl, Katie.

“Tell Mary Cutter in the kitchens we want pavers for our bedding,” said lady Elizabeth. Her eyes were glazed. “Three or four of them, I think.”

“Of course, my lady.”

A little girl.

A knock at Stephen’s door a short while after midnight stirred him from the composition of a letter. He’d heard on the road that the captain of the Red Lady, a trading ship on which he’d sailed for a time, had put in at Dover and had thought to write the man, of whom he had been fond. Once he had quill and ink, though, it seemed that all things he’d thought to ask bled slowly from his mind and into nothingness. He had learned songs at captain Jacobs’ knee. He had felt the cut of the man’s lash for questioning orders. He had felt the tenderness of those strong hands, fourth finger missing on the left, and seen him weep at the news of the death of his son. What more could a letter add? He was relieved by the distraction.

The duke stood in the torchlit hall, eyes red, mouth set in a bloodless line.

Stephen stood very still. He felt the moment’s weight. He thought of another ship, of another day. A man with a face like his. A look of sorrow deep enough to break the heart without a word. “What is it, my lord?”

A tear ran down Tom Mowbray’s cheek. “War.”