The Prince in Waiting

FOUR

THE PRINCE OF WINCHESTER

THE SUMMER OF THAT YEAR—a year that ended wretchedly—was the happiest time of my life. This was not because the Spirits had named me heir to my father, a future Prince of the city. At least that did not seem to be the reason, though I suppose it must have been a part of it. There was excitement in the air and the city buzzed with activity and expectation. The resentments which had gathered over the years against Prince Stephen’s policy of skulking behind walls turned into a feeling of release. It lifted my father to a height of popularity which I do not think the other Captains, when they acclaimed him, could have anticipated. Wherever he went in the city people crowded round him, touching him when they could, blessing him in the name of the Spirits. When he rode out at the head of his army they cheered themselves silly: I saw a fat middle-aged man, having been pushed or having stumbled to a fall, lying in the gutter but still yelling for the Prince. He was drunk, of course, from ale, but the whole city was drunk on the subtler brew of pride.

I had begged to be allowed to go with him on the campaign but had been refused. He smiled at me.

“In a couple of years you will have all the fighting you want. But even with a jeweled sword you are no match yet for the men of Alton. And though the Spirits having promised you a crown greater than your father’s no doubt will protect you, they require a man to look to his own safety as well. The Spirits like to be respected but they are inclined to grow impatient with anyone who trusts to their help beyond common sense. This year you stay in the city.”

Peter said: “There’s a price to pay for everything, Luke, including being heir to the Princedom.”

They smiled at each other and grinned at me. I had been uneasy with Peter after the Seance of the Crowns, thinking he must resent my being preferred over him, even though the preference was that of the Spirits. Even when he had congratulated me I had been wary, looking for signs hidden in his face and bearing. But I came to realize that there was nothing to find. His feelings for me were as warm and friendly as they had always been: he rejoiced in our father’s rise to power and also in my being chosen heir.

We were in the palace. The room was quite small, merely an antechamber to the great Room of Mirrors which Stephen had most used for retirement. My father said it was too big: he did not like to hear his own voice echoing back at him. Nor did he care to see his own face whichever way he looked. So he had furnished the antechamber with simple things, including his wooden armchair from our old house, and he escaped there when court life bored him beyond bearing—which was not infrequently.

He said now to Peter: “A price for everything, you are right, and a duty, but the duties lie heavier on some than on others. I have never been a nay-sayer and I have already ordered the dwarfs to brew an ale to celebrate a victory at the Autumn Fair, but accidents can happen. I may fall off my horse and be trampled.”

We smiled at that. He was a superb horseman, his horse, a big chesnut called Guinea, the surest-footed in the city’s stables. He smiled as well, but went on:

“Or die of eating Alton’s ailing cattle. If any such thing should happen, Peter, I leave you a duty, to look after Luke.”

“I can look after myself,” I said.

“I don’t doubt it, but a wise man takes help where he can. As you know, there are some among those who have acclaimed me who do not wish me well. It did not please them when the Spirits crowned Luke. They are quiet just now because they have no choice. But if I were killed in battle . . .”

Peter nodded. “I follow that.”

I said: “Watch whom you ride with, Father. The men of Alton may not be the only danger.”

“Good advice, but I am already watching. That is part of being a Prince: one’s eyes do not get much rest. And the more so in a case like mine, a man born common and chosen Prince because others with better claims could not resolve their quarrel.” He looked at Peter. “You will see to this?”

“I will see to it,” Peter said.

• • •

The person who was bitterly aggrieved by what had happened at the Seance, and showed it, was my Aunt Mary. When I went to her house, although she did not say anything and I sat down to dinner at her table as I had always done, I could tell her disapproval. It was not that she was sharper with me or smiled on me less—her tongue had always had a roughish edge and her face did not seem to have been made for smiling—but I sensed resentment, anger, in small looks she gave me. I was not surprised by this. Peter meant everything to her, and had since my father divorced her. Peter was my father’s eldest son, born in wedlock, and his natural heir. What the Spirits said meant nothing to her; she would have defied all the Spirits in the universe for Peter’s sake.

I thought that her disappointment and bitterness would lessen with time and for a week or two carried on with my visits as though nothing had happened. Then one day I went to her house following heavy rain. I cleaned my muddy boots on the scraper outside her door but did not do it well enough, and there were dirty footprints on the polished boards of her little hall.

She saw them and tongue-lashed me. It was a thing she had done before, but again I found a difference in the scolding, a note of hatred almost. And she said:

“Even if you are to be Prince of Princes, you can still wipe your boots before you enter this house. Or do you already think we should all be servants, to do your bidding?”

The jibe stung and I felt myself flushing. She finished:

“Take your boots off, wash your hands, and come to the table.”

Gerda the polymuf had heard her, and I was the Prince’s son and heir. I looked at her, my own anger sharp:

“No, thank you. I will eat at the palace.”

And I turned, saying no more, and left her house. I have wondered since whether things might not have fallen out differently if I had contained my rage, accepted the rebuke, and eaten my dinner with her that day. Or if I had done as I intended next morning and gone to make amends. But I thought that when I went she would scold me further and my pride would not bear it. Two days later I saw her in the street. We approached from opposite directions, saw each other but did not show it, and I was torn between the desire to go to her and the fear that she would treat my overture with scorn. We were near the Buttercross and there were boys I knew sitting on the steps there: they would see and probably hear all that happened. So I passed her in silence with the smallest of nods to which she made no acknowledgment.

After that it was, of course, even more difficult to put things right, and with the passage of time, impossible. I missed her, but there were so many things to do that I forgot about her most of the time. For her, though, there were no such distractions. She had never had much to do with her neighbors. When I stopped going to her house—and a little later my father and Peter rode away on the campaign against Alton—she must have been lonely there with no company except the two polymuf maids and her cat. I did not think of that then, though I did later.

If my father’s triumph had turned sour for Aunt Mary, my mother reveled in the change. She had always been a sunny person but was happier than ever in being the Prince’s Lady. She had new dresses made, a dozen at least, in bright silks and satins and brocades, and a polymuf woman whose entire concern was to arrange her hair each day. There were no housewifely duties anymore—a butler saw to everything—and all she need do was look beautiful. She had always had beauty, but as a precious stone is made ten times more splendid by its setting, so hers was enhanced by the things my father lavished on her. She adorned herself to delight him, and he showed his joy in her. He said once when she told him (not seriously, I fancy) that he spent too much on her that it was for this reason only that he had become Prince.

Although there were things to do in which he could not accompany me I still spent a lot of time with Martin. With him I could forget about being the son of the Prince and there were times when, however much I enjoyed my new life, I was glad of this. We rode together—I found a pony for him in the palace stables—and fished for trout and explored the country for miles beyond the city boundaries. Once, deep in a wood, we found a dozen cherry trees laden with fruit. The fruits were so big and juicy, for all the long neglect of the trees, that we thought they might be polymuf cherries, but we ate them no less heartily for that and with no worse result than an ordinary griping that evening from having gorged ourselves.

We had one falling out. It happened in our den under the Ruins. We had arranged to meet there and I was late. I found him reading a book by candlelight. He looked up and greeted me. I asked him:

“What’s that you’ve got?”

Books were rare things—few of the common people could read and not all the nobles—and this one looked strange. Its covers were not stiff but limp, and the shape was odd: higher and wider than usual, but thin. There had been a picture on the front which damp had turned into a meaningless mess of colors, but I could read words across the top: POPULAR MECHANIX. “Popular” I knew, but “Mechanix” meant nothing to me.

Martin said: “I was digging in the rubble at the back of Clegg’s.” That was the baker’s shop in the High Street. “I saw the corner of an old cupboard—I suppose the quake moved whatever was on top of it—and I thought I’d see if there was anything inside. There were only books. Most of them were rotten but this one wasn’t too bad.

There was a strangeness in his manner—part excitement, part something else. I went round behind him to have a look. There was a picture on the page where he had the book open. Because it had faded I could not tell what it was at first. Then I saw and knew what the something else was. It was guilt. The book was a relic from olden days: the picture was a picture of a machine.

I could not tell what kind of machine it was and did not want to. I put my hand over his shoulder, sweeping the book from his grasp. It fell closed on the floor and I put my foot on it.

He said, sharply for Martin: “Don’t do that!”

“A forbidden thing . . .”

“I was only looking at it.”

“That makes no difference. You know it doesn’t. Seeing is thinking and thinking is as bad as doing. Have you forgotten old Palmer?”

He had lived in a cottage outside the city walls, a long way from the road. A peddler, desperate to sell his goods, had called there one day and later reported what he had seen: this man, neither farrier nor armorer nor metalworker, was brazing metal and building something from it. The soldiers rode out of the Prince’s command and took him. He was tried and found guilty and hanged. For a week his body hung on the gibbet outside the North Gate.

Martin said: “He was making a machine. And in his cottage, where anyone might find out. We are the only ones who know this place. I have not shown the book to anyone else and will not. I will hide it; not even in here. Under rubble, outside.”

“But it is a forbidden thing! Whether you are discovered or not, that is true.”

“But why forbidden?”

“You do not need to ask that. Because our ancestors made machines and the machines destroyed the earth, causing earthquakes and volcanoes that killed men by the hundreds of thousands. That is why the Spirits decreed that the making of machines was an abomination.”

“I suppose there were bad machines. But there may have been others as well. This one—I cannot follow the details properly—but it is about something that cuts grass. How could that cause earthquakes and volcanoes?”

“I tell you the Spirits condemn machines. All machines.”

“The Spirits, or the Seers?”

“The Seers are the servants of the Spirits.”

“Or their masters.”

“You must be mad! No man can rule the Spirits, who are eternal.”

“If they exist.”

“You have seen and heard them.”

“I have seen strange things, in the dark.”

“That is blasphemy!”

I spoke in anger. I almost hit him, moving a step forward and doubling my fist. We stared at each other in the flickering candle’s light; then I stooped and picked up the book. Martin made no protest as I shredded the pages: they were not parchment but made of some flimsier material. There were more pictures of machines and I averted my eyes so as not to see them. He watched me as I crumpled the pages on the floor and put the candle flame to a corner of one. They burned slowly because there was no draft down here, and smokily. When the heap was charred and black I put my heel on it and ground it into fine ash.

I said: “I’m going up now. There might be news of the fighting. Are you coming?”

He nodded. “All right.”

I wanted to tell him why I had been angry. Not because of the blasphemy in itself but because of the risks that it involved. It was true that he had only said these things to me and in a place where we were quite alone, but even that was dangerous. What point was there in giving word to thoughts like that? One took risks, in battle for instance, but only for a worthwhile end. There was none here.

But I said nothing because, my anger cooling, I thought it best to let it all drop, to forget this unprofitable and perilous subject. We did not talk about it again except one night, weeks later, when we stood together on the northern wall and watched the red glow of the Burning Lands beyond the hills. As we looked a spot brightened, sign of a new eruption. Martin said:

“How could they have caused it?”

“What?”

“The machines. How could any machine make the earth produce burning mountains? I have listened to a man who has seen them quite close. Thousands of feet high, he said. How could any machine do that?”

I said: “It doesn’t matter how. And it is not worth talking about. It happened, and that’s enough.”

I was not angry now but anxious for him. For myself, too. I could hear voices from an alehouse behind and beneath us, spilling out through the night air. But Martin said no more.

• • •

I had the chance of making many new friends at that time. Boys, of my own age and older, paid me a lot of attention, seeking my company and flattering me when they had it. I suppose something of the sort might have happened simply because of my victory in the Contest, but of course there was more to it than that. From being nobody, the second son of an obscure Captain, I had become the Prince’s heir.

This flattery did not please me as at one time I would have thought it would. On the contrary the few fits of depression I endured during that splendid summer were directly caused by it; because it all seemed meaningless when it was lavished on me and worse than meaningless: destructive. The victory had been a true one, and hard-earned; my father’s acclamation and the honor paid me by the Spirits were both great things. To hear them mouthed by sycophants was to have them cheapened, and I was forced to turn away before they were made entirely worthless. Two or three times I went back to my room in the palace, not wanting even to see Martin, and lay on my bed, my thoughts black with despair. What sense was there in striving for anything, when all achievement ended as the prey of mean minds? But the moods were few, and they passed quickly.

I knew what was said of me when I turned away—that my head had been swollen by my success and my father’s, that I was too proud to mix with those I deemed lesser mortals. So at times I gritted my teeth and made an effort to put up with them; not because I cared much for their opinions but because these were my father’s subjects and would, in due course, be mine. Between a Prince and his people there must be good will or at least its semblance. I do not know how far I succeeded in my wooing of them. Not much, I fancy. My heart was never in it.

The one whom I did take to my heart and who became my second friend, strangely enough, was Edmund. My father had been magnanimous in his dealings with Stephen’s family. There had been some who had argued that his sons should be killed and many who had favored exiling them from the city. They had stood with their father in defying the Spirits and removing them meant removing a future danger. But my father would have none of this. They had done their duty as sons in supporting their father and provided they made due allegiance to the new Prince no harm should come to them: Charles was permitted to keep his Captaincy.

But their position was a poor one. Poor as far as money was concerned—their father’s goods were forfeit and they and their mother went to live in a small house, a hovel almost, in Salt Street—and poor in reputation. No one now had a good word to say for the dead Prince and his sons incurred the same scorn. The boys who crowded round me spurned Edmund, whom a few weeks earlier they had courted.

One day I was with a group of boys at the Buttercross when Edmund joined us. There had already been attempts to make an Ishmael of him by showing that he was unwelcome, but he had stubbornly refused to accept it. The boys started this again and one of them said something about a smell of death and traitors. Others laughed. I saw Edmund go white. He said:

“My father was no traitor, but killed by one. A traitor from a gutter in Dog Alley . . . and now you lick his boots!”

It was true that my father had been born in that street, one of the meanest in the city. The eyes of the others watched me greedily to see what I would do. I did not want to fight him here, in front of them. I made a jest instead.

“Dog Alley—that runs into Salt Street, doesn’t it?”

They laughed in support of me. Edmund said:

“Yes. Times change. Scum comes to the top.”

He spat at my boots as he said that. I had no choice but to hit him. They formed a ring around us, and we fought.

His family had been noble as long as could be remembered in the city—since the Disaster, it was said—and he had a look of breeding, being tall with a long face, thin lips, arrogant blue eyes. But he was strong, too, and he fought with the anger pent up since his father’s death. He threw me and leaped on me. I rolled clear and got to my feet. We grappled and he threw me again. He knelt on me trying to spread-eagle my arms. Panting, sobbing almost, he whispered: “Scum . . . scum!”

I realized I could be beaten, disgraced before this mob, and the demon inside me rose in a fury to match his. I tore free and as he came for me got a wrist and brought him across my body to land heavily on the cobbles. The blow winded him but he was up as soon as I was. He came at me. I straight-armed him, punching to the body. He winced and tried to hide it.

After that I kept him at a distance. Although he was the taller my arms were longer. My demon served me well as he always did. There are some who fight wildly in the rage of battle, their minds hot and confused, but mine goes cold and thoughts come quicker and more sharply. I concentrated on body blows, on that vulnerable part between and just below the ribs. These sapped his strength. He went on fighting and once succeeded in throwing me a third time but he could not press it home. I was up before he was and punched him as he rose. From that point it was only a question of how long he would last. It seemed an age to me and I was giving the punishment, not receiving it. I had switched my attack to his face which was smeared with blood. At last he dropped and could not even attempt to rise.

Our audience was cheering me and mocking him. I went to the horse trough below the Buttercross, soaked my handkerchief, and returned to bathe his face. It was swelling already and would look terrible in a few hours.

I said: “It was a good fight. The Spirits were on my side.”

He stared at me, making no answer. I crumpled the handkerchief in my pocket and put an arm out to him.

“You are filthy, and so am I. Let’s leave this lot.” I gave my head a small contemptuous jerk in the direction of the watching circle. “Come back with me, and we’ll get ourselves cleaned up.”

“Back” meant the palace, which had been his home. He still did not speak and I thought he would refuse. But at last he nodded slightly. I helped him up and we went off together. The onlookers parted to give us way and watched us go in puzzled silence.

• • •

After that Edmund and I were friends. One day the three of us—he and Martin and I—were strolling down the High Street past the Seance Hall when the Seer came out. He stopped and spoke, addressing himself to me.

“You keep strange company, Luke.”

I said: “It is the company I choose, sire, and which chooses me.”

The remark must have been aimed at Edmund—he had seen Martin and me together often enough—and I did not like it. It was said that the Seer had been among those who were for killing the sons of Stephen, and I supposed he was angry that Edmund had escaped and angrier that I should befriend him. But he went on:

“It is good to see quarrels mended before they become feuds.” He turned to Edmund. “Your brother is with the Army?”

“Yes, sire.”

There was something in his voice which was not quite contempt but a long way from the deference which was reckoned to be the Seer’s due. He had not been to a Seance, I knew, since his father’s death. He believed in the Spirits, I think, and acknowledged their power, but hated them. His long face was without expression but I saw scorn in the blue eyes under the high forehead.

Ezzard, disregarding this, if indeed he saw it, said:

“He fought well in the battle.”

“What battle?” I asked.

“The battle at Bighton, where Alton was defeated.”

I stared at him. “We have only just come from the Citadel. There is no news yet. The pigeons have brought none.”

Ezzard smiled his thin cold smile. “The Spirits do not have to wait on the wings of pigeons.”

“This is from the Spirits?”

“Would I tell you else?”

“And a victory?” Martin asked. “At Bighton?”

“The pigeons are already flying,” Ezzard said. “They will be in their cotes before sunset.”

It must be true. I asked:

“And my father . . .?”

“The Prince is safe.”

I was too excited to speak further. But Martin said:

“How do they bring the news?” Ezzard looked at him. “The Spirits? If not on wings, how?”

Ezzard said: “A wise man, or boy, does not ask questions concerning the Spirits. They tell him what he needs to know. That is enough.”

It was a rebuke, but Martin persisted. “But you know things about the Spirits, sir, since you serve them and talk with them. Is that not true?”

“I know what I am told, boy.”

“But more than the rest of us do? How they bring their messages without wings, perhaps?” Ezzard’s eye was on him. “I am not asking how, sir—just if you do know.”

“I know many things,” Ezzard said, “and I keep my knowledge to myself, imparting it only to those who have dedicated their lives to serve the Spirits. Would you do that, Martin? Would you be an Acolyte?”

It was a good reply, and one that must stop his questioning. Even if I had not heard him blaspheming the idea would have been ridiculous. One would have to be crazed to be an Acolyte—shaving one’s head, fasting, droning prayers to the Spirits all day and half the night. I expected him to be abashed.

But to my astonishment he said: “I might, sir.”

Ezzard stared at him keenly, nodded, and went his way. Edmund and I poked fun at Martin when he had gone. He joined with us. It had been a joke, he said, at the Seer’s expense; and the old fool had believed him! I accepted what he said but I was still not sure. I had watched his eyes as well as the Seer’s. If the earnestness had been deception it had been marvelously done.

• • •

Two days later I stood on the walls by the North Gate and heard the wild cheers of the crowd as our army returned victorious. A big man led them on a big chesnut horse: my father, Prince of Winchester.