The Prince in Waiting

FIVE

FIRE IN WINTER

THE VICTORY OVER ALTON WAS overwhelming. Five captains were taken for ransom, including the prince’s nephew—his probable heir since he had only one son whose poor health prevented his being a warrior. A sixth Captain had been killed and they left more than three score men dead or badly injured on the field. We for our part had one Captain crippled and scarcely more than twenty men dead or seriously wounded.

We had a triumphant Autumn Fair. They had ceded the village of Bighton to us, and altogether over a hundred thousand acres of land. Feasting went on for more than a week and the special ale my father had ordered the ale-makers to brew was exhausted in half that time, in toasts to his health and the city’s victory. (There was no shortage of milder ale and they strengthened it with raw spirits; men lay drunk in the streets not just at night but at broad noon.) The Hardings and the Blaines were quiet, raising their glasses with the rest but doubtless thinking their own thoughts. These were mixed, I fancy. I have no doubt they rejoiced in our triumph, for which they themselves had fought also, but it could not have pleased them to see so much honor paid to their stopgap Prince. We guessed that behind locked doors they were talking hard, with grim faces.

When the Fair was over and the prisoners exchanged for Alton gold, the Court rode out to hunt. I was one of the party, for the first time. I asked that Martin and Edmund might come also but my father would not agree: to belong to the royal hunting party was a great privilege which must not be awarded lightly. Martin was a commoner and it would be a scandal if Edmund, son of a man condemned by the Spirits, were included. Martin, I knew, was not sorry about this; he was neither fighter nor hunter by nature though he had helped me in the Contest. I had seen him turn pale when we watched a pig’s throat being slit at the slaughterhouse. But for Edmund, though he said nothing, it was salt rubbed into unhealed wounds. This would have been his first year for the hunt also.

One of the things that had made the summer memorable had been the weather. It was not just that it seemed better to me (one sees brighter skies in times of happiness): others, even the old ones, agreed that it was many years since we had been so fortunate. For more than a month, in July and August, no fires were lit in the palace except those in the kitchens. Very often the sun shone clearly, sometimes through the whole day with cloud obscuring it for no more than an hour or two. The harvest was good: all the granaries were filled and corn piled in bins in the mills.

And the sun which had shone on my rambles with Martin and Edmund and on my father’s campaign had not yet deserted us. We rode to the hunt on a morning sharp but clear; frost crackling in the grass under our horses’ hoofs, but the sky blue all round. I read a book once, the ink in places fading from the parchment, in which it was said that before the Disaster the sun shone almost all the time in summer. I had thought it a fantasy like some of the other things written there—as, for instance, that one of the wonders with which the devils seduced our ancestors before they destroyed them was the power to talk with and even see one another when they were a hundred miles or more apart. But now I could almost believe it. I was sorry for Edmund, left behind in the city, but it was impossible not to take joy in the air’s crisp freshness, the horse under me, all the colored beauty of the dying year.

We rode south, following the river, toward the forest of Botley. There had always been boar there and it had long been a royal hunt, but new stories had come back lately from the country people who lived on the outskirts of the forest. Their fields had been attacked by beasts of incredible size and wiliness. Polymufs, they said, and implored the Prince to destroy them.

It was forbidden to keep polymuf cattle or poultry: all deformed creatures must be destroyed and burned or buried. (There were some who would have done the same with polymuf children, but the Spirits decreed that they should live, though separate from proper men and serving them.) Wild polybeasts were killed also, within civilized lands. Elsewhere, in the barbarous places, it was said they lived and flourished, in all sorts of strange and monstrous forms, from rats that built houses, or at least mounds to dwell in, to the terrible Bayemot that destroyed everything in its path. From time to time, polybeasts came down into our lands and when they did it was the Prince’s duty to exterminate them. Not that we believed these boar were polymuf: country people are given to exaggeration and alarm. But a boar hunt was justification in itself.

We found nothing on the first day. We came on their spoor—tracks and droppings—but they were not, in the judgment of Bannock, the Master of the Hunt and one with great skill in reading signs, even fresh. Tents were set up that night in the fields by Shidfield village. My father had been offered lodging but declined, on the grounds of not inconveniencing the villagers; but as he said, laughing in private, also because he had never yet encountered a village lodging that was not overrun with fleas, and polymuf giant fleas at that. As it was, they brought meat and ale to us, and bread and cheese and honey cakes. Of no high quality: if it was their best, my father said, they deserved to have their taxes remitted on grounds of poverty, but he had no doubt it was not their best. They too were aware of conclusions that might be drawn and were wary. After being entertained by them three years before, Prince Stephen had increased their tax assessment.

On the second day we drew boar and killed two. They were good specimens but although Bannock examined them long and carefully he found no trace of polymuf. We roasted one that night on a spit turned by two kitchen lads recruited from the village. The flesh was good and sweet. We killed another beast on the morning of the third day, an old tusker who crippled two dogs before Captain Nicoll ran him through. On the fourth day we found the polymuf.

We had ranged farther from our base, to a new part of the forest. The trees for the most part were thin enough for us to ride without difficulty, but there were patches of thicker growth. Spoor was found which impressed Bannock: the hoof marks were very big indeed, and the droppings also. We cast around and the dogs at last gave tongue. They led us to a stretch of dense undergrowth. While the beaters were working round it the beast broke cover and rushed straight for our lines.

It was enormous, five feet from ground to shoulder and large in proportion. And it moved fast, more like a horse than a boar. It got through while two men stabbed futilely at it with their spears. We turned to give chase but as my horse’s head came round I saw with astonishment that the beast had also turned, with amazing agility, and was heading back toward us. I did not waste time thinking about this but, realizing that it was coming my way, set my lance and spurred my horse to meet it.

All I saw was a massive blur of motion, gray and hairy, racing through the trees. Perhaps my horse saw more, or more clearly. At any rate he reared in fright. In controlling him I let my lance tip hit the ground. With bucking horse and the shock from the lance I could not keep my seat. I hit the ground, rolling to break my fall. I was cursing my misfortune and the fact that there was now another gap for the boar to break through our lines a second time. I looked for it and saw it. It was not going for the gap. It had changed its course and was bearing down on me. I could see it well enough now, see red-rimmed eyes and the savage white gleam of tusks. I tried to get to my feet and realized, as pain shot down my leg, that I was injured. Voices shouted, but a long way off. The boar smashed a bush aside like straw. The sight of it, almost on me, and its stink dried my throat with fear. Then from my left there were hammering hoofs. I saw a horse and rider and a lance which raked the boar along its ribs, forcing it away with a huge squeal of pain. The horse cleared me as I lay there. The rider was Peter, who had stayed close by me throughout the hunt.

He had not killed the boar but the wound helped the rest to run it down within an hour and dispatch it. It was a fearsome beast, I was told, seven feet in length from snout to tail. The size alone branded it polymuf, but apart from that it was double-tusked and its head was bigger in relation to its body than was usual. A polymuf strain was sometimes thought to be an indication of greater intelligence, as with the building rats that tales were told of, and this one seemed to have behaved with more than mere cunning, in doubling back to attack its enemies and in going for me when it saw me unhorsed. I gather it led them a fine dance before they finished it off.

My father said he would have dearly liked its head to hang on the palace wall: Bannock, in more than thirty years of hunting, had never seen anything that could come near matching it for magnificence. But the law held. They built a pyre and left the carcass burning. I did not see anything of this, having been helped back to the camp after Bannock had set my leg, broken in the fall.

I was taken back on a litter strapped between quiet horses. For two more weeks I had to lie on my bed, my leg splinted. After that for long enough I hobbled with a crutch. My friends came to see me to help me pass the time, Martin every day but Edmund less frequently. I knew why: it was still an ordeal for him to come to the palace, and I guessed he had to steel himself afresh on each occasion.

Autumn closed into winter. The good weather had broken even before the hunt was over and we paid for past beneficence with freezing fogs and, in early October, with blizzards that sent snow whirling round the city walls, piling high against houses, blocking the streets and drifting up against the windows of the palace to obscure my view out over the town. In other years I had loved the coming of the first snow, when gangs of boys were formed in snowball fights that raged all day (apart from the break for dinner at midday) through the grazing meadows and even up into the streets of the town until our elders put a stop to it. I was past the age for that, and for skating: my enforced inaction only emphasized my inability to take part, but it emphasized my boredom, too. I played games with Martin—chess and checkers and liars’ dice—but he beat me too easily at the first two and I won too easily at the third: he had no guile.

In November my father went to Romsey, to visit the Prince of that city. Prince Stephen’s refusal to send his army into the field, his reliance on walls built higher every year, had been part of a more general isolation. There had been no state visits, made or received, for some time. My father’s accession, followed by his victory over Alton, had changed that. It was not only Romsey that wished to see the new Prince of Winchester.

My father took his bodyguard with him, of course, and a few of his Captains, but for show rather than protection. Men did not make war in the winter and such a visit as this was in any case safeguarded under the customs of all civilized peoples. We waved him good-by as he and his entourage rode out from the South Gate and then we turned back to our ordinary occasions. Dull always at this time of the year—halfway between the Autumn Fair and the Christmas Feast—I found them duller still with my father away, and the summer’s excitements fading into memory. The days passed and the evenings lengthened as winter tightened its grip. I wearied of games played by lamplight, and of the amusements which delighted my mother and her friends: the polymuf jugglers and clowns, the guitarists strumming and singing melancholy love songs. My leg was still splinted so I could not ride during the day. I was restless, bored, wanting something to happen. But when it did happen it was not during the dragging day or tedious evening but at night, while the palace slept.

I awoke to a smell that was so strong one almost tasted it, and sat up coughing, the smoke in my throat and lungs. It was pitch black. I hobbled to my window and flung the shutters open. Cold fresh air streamed in. The night was dark apart from the glow of the Burning Lands, and a light nearer at hand, blossoming from a window beneath me, and with it the dreaded crackling that told of fire.

I shouted an alarm and, wasting no more time, headed for the door and the stairs. My room was to the right of the staircase, my mother’s apartments on the far side of it. But as I opened the door the crackling was more like a roar and automatically I shielded my face from the light and the heat. The staircase was a torrent of flame, spreading, moving upward. It had passed the landing and was ravenously eating its way up toward the attics.

If I could leap it, I thought, and get across to where she was . . . The surgeon had said my splints could come off in a few days. I got back to my room and, needing no light from the brilliance of the fire behind me, found my knife and slashed the binding cords. My leg was terribly weak and I winced with the pain of putting my weight on it, but it would do. I headed back to the staircase.

It was impossible. In the short time I had been away, a matter of seconds only, the fire had spread and strengthened. It was frightening to look at, like a living creature in its raging hunger and power. I could not get within feet of it without being scorched.

There was another chance. Wooden gutterings ran along the side of the building, below the windows. I got to my bedroom and clambered out, holding onto the sill with my hands. People were gathering in the courtyard, more than twenty feet below. I heard their voices, shouting, calling, a woman screaming, and tried to ignore them. The gutterings were wide and shallow and I had already discovered that one could use them to get from room to room. It was not easy—one had to stand on this narrow ledge and inch one’s way along with one’s face flat against the wall—but it was possible. I started on my way. I thought only of my progress, closing my mind to everything else: to what I would do if I reached her and also to the terrifying possibility of a misstep.

But what I could not close my mind to was the increasing heat of the boards against which I was pressed. The fire, triumphant inside, was beating out against its confines. In a spot where the timbers were not properly caulked I caught a glimpse of the furnace within. But I was getting past the worst, I thought, the part that lay over the staircase. I risked a look in the direction in which I was edging and saw no sign of flame. I had come at least a dozen feet and probably had no more than that to go before reaching a window. I was cool in mind and increasingly confident. And I remember no more until the point at which I woke up, in bed, in daylight, my head splitting with pain.

One of the pegs that supported the guttering, weakened by the heat perhaps, had given way and I had fallen. A soldier in the crowd below had tried to break my fall. He succeeded in part—my recently knitted leg did not snap again—but my head struck something which knocked me unconscious and, as sometimes happens, took away my recollection of the accident as well.

Wilson told me this, sitting beside my bed with his long face, never much better than melancholy, a solemn mask. He was Sergeant in charge of the palace, an old and well-trusted follower of my father. They had served in the ranks together as young men. My father, on becoming Prince, had wanted to make him a Captain, to ennoble him, but he would not have it. He had had a wife many years before but she had died, broken-hearted, after giving birth to a polymuf child. He had not married again and apart from my father had no real friends.

My mind was confused, my head aching. I sat up and it was worse. Wincing, I said:

“And the fire? What happened . . .?”

“That wing is gutted. The rest was saved.”

I think it was his look of misery which recalled what my own purpose had been. I said:

“My mother . . .”

He shook his head very slowly. No more was needed. I could not believe it, though I knew it was true. I had seen her only a few hours before, her eyes half closed, foot tapping, head slightly swaying to a tune she loved. She was fond of music which I was not. I had slipped away without, I now remembered so sharply, bidding her good night.

I concentrated my wits and asked Wilson questions, which he answered. I think he thought me strange, perhaps callous, to do so at such a time; but it seemed to me that my sorrow was my own, a private thing, and not to be talked over even with one so well known and well trusted as Wilson. Pigeons, he told me, had been sent to Romsey, calling my father back. To my query as to how the fire had started he said it was fairly sure it had been deliberate, a murderous act. This had always seemed likely because, living in wooden houses as we did, we observed strict precautions against accidental fire. A special patrol checked the palace each night. But it was not a matter of supposition only. One of the guard had found a polymuf watching the fire from hiding. He had flint and steel on him, and oil-soaked wadding. Moreover he was known for a crazy loon who loved playing with fire. There had been trouble before and he had been exiled in the end; he was not allowed in the city and lived in a ramshackle hut beneath St. Catherine’s Hill, shunned even by the other polymufs.

I asked: “How did he get into the city?”

Wilson shrugged. “It is not difficult.”

That was true. The gate guards were supposed to check all who passed through but I had myself slipped past their backs when I did not want to call attention to myself.

“And why the palace?”

Wilson said: “That will bear looking into.”

“Has he been questioned?”

“No. We await your father’s return. But we have him safe. I set the guards myself. No one will get to him, either to rescue him or to close his mouth.”

“No other trouble?”

If this were a plot, laid by the Hardings or the Blaines, maybe both, now would be the moment to rise, before my father could get back. I saw by Wilson’s face that he took my meaning.

“No trouble. And we are ready for any that comes.”

• • •

My father was back before evening. It snowed heavily in the afternoon, obliterating the familiar tracks, but that did not stop him. He rode up through the city streets and into the courtyard in advance of his laboring escort. I heard a distant cry—“The Prince!”—and the clatter of hoofs on stone and ran to the window of the room in which I had been bedded. I saw him dismount, a snow man from a snow horse, and stand there, staring in front of him, while the horse was taken by a groom.

He was looking at the wing in which we had lived. It was a sight I had already seen, with sickness and a sad thumping of the heart. The snow, which had mostly been cleared from the courtyard, lay thick there, in uneven mounds from which a few blackened upright timbers pointed toward the gray sky. It was a whiteness and desolation that chilled the blood, a wilderness made more horrifying by the buildings which still stood all round. I saw him take a step, as though to go toward it and then with a twist of his head turn away. Then I called to him from the window; in a low voice, but he heard me and looked up. Even from that distance and with the light beginning to fade I could see the grief and anger in his face.

I threw clothes on and, ignoring the protests of the nurse who was attending to me, hurried downstairs. I found my father in the Great Hall along with others—Peter, three of his Captains, and a number of commoners, including Wilson. Wilson was talking, telling the story of what had happened, and my father was listening. His face was a cold hard mask now. He said at the end:

“Has the polymuf talked yet?”

“Only in crazed words.”

“Have him brought in.”

Peter said: “It may be he acted on his own. He is known to be a lunatic.”

“Yes,” my father said, “well known. And therefore a good weapon to another’s hand.”

Neither Blaine nor Harding was there, and none closely linked with them. If the polymuf had been set on by someone, I wondered which. Perhaps both. They had made no move but it might have been their plan not to—to wait until my father’s return and attack then, while he was shattered by the earlier blow. He looked like a man of iron, waiting for the polymuf to be brought. If they thought a blow could shatter him they were in for a surprise.

The polymuf, his hands chained, was pushed forward by the guards and sprawled at my father’s feet. I recognized him as one I had seen wandering alone in the fields beyond the East Gate. The Spirits had marked him with a hare lip, fissured red up to the nostril, and his voice showed that his mouth had no roof. He lay on the floor and talked nonsense, the words themselves scarcely understandable. I heard him babble about fire . . . the Spirits . . . death . . . and fire again.

My father stooped down and took him by the hair. He said:

“Who told you to do this?”

His voice was cold and sharp; only his eyes blazed with anger. The polymuf spoke again, but still in nonsense. My father shook him, with force enough to send his legs skittering across the polished boards but not letting go of his hair. The polymuf howled. My father said:

“I have a gift for you, polymuf. Tell me who put you up to it and you die quickly. It is a good reward. I do not think you care for pain.” He shook him a second time, a dog with a rat. “There was another. Was there not?”

“Yes!” the polymuf cried. “Yes, Lord . . .”

“Name him.”

“Not a man. It was . . .”

My father dragged him upright and stared into his face. “Do not say it was the Spirits or I will not keep my temper.”

“Not the Spirits. It was . . .”

I thought I grasped the words but he spoke so badly I could not be sure. And it made no sense. My father said:

“Say again.”

“Your Lady, Lord.”

“You fool!” my father shouted. “Are you saying my Lady told you to light the torch that burned her? You get no gift for that. You will . . .”

“Your other Lady, Lord!” My father’s hand dropped from him as though it too was scorched with flame. “She who lives on the River Road.”

• • •

At first my Aunt Mary denied everything, claiming that the story was an invention of the polymuf to save himself from torture. But when she was confronted by a farm worker, who had seen her coming away from the polymuf’s hut, she fell silent. Thereafter during her trial she did not speak, not even when the sentence of death by burning was pronounced on her. I was in the court and saw her eyes go to my father’s but I do not think it was in appeal. It was his gaze that, after a moment, turned away. Her look followed him while she was being taken off by the guards.

The execution was fixed for the next day. That evening I had word that she wished to see me. It was her polymuf servant, Gerda, who brought it. She had been weeping, it was plain, and wept again when I hesitated.

“Master Luke, I beg you! For a few minutes only.”

I had never heard my aunt give her anything but scoldings, but her grief might have been for a mother. That by itself would not have persuaded me to go. It was my aversion which did so. I had felt for my aunt, since I heard the accusation that spilled from the lips of the crouching polymuf in the Great Hall, both horror and a kind of fear. I would not give in to this. I told the maid I would see her.

The Sergeant of the prison guard demurred at first about admitting me. When he did, he accompanied me to the cell and himself stood there while we talked. From time to time he cast my aunt uneasy glances, as though fearing that, although unarmed and helpless, she could by some witch’s art strike me dead.

She looked very old in the gray shapeless felon’s gown. And feeble, though I knew she had not been put to torture. But her eyes were as sharp and strong as ever; and her mind had not budged from its single concern. She asked me:

“Where is Peter?”

“Under guard.”

“What will they do with him?”

I hesitated. In fact, I did not know. There had been no evidence to link him with the crime but to some it was condemnation enough that it had been done for his sake. Others said that even if not treacherous in the past he could not be trusted now, the son of such a mother.

My aunt said: “Speak for him, Luke.”

I said: “It was me you wanted dead, Aunt, wasn’t it? Not my mother.”

She shook her head, as though impatient, almost angry, at an irrelevance. She said:

“Peter knew nothing of it. You must believe that.”

“You wanted me dead.”

Her eyes met mine, unwavering. “Only because you were named heir. There was no right in it. My son is the elder, born in wedlock.”

“The Spirits named me.”

“There was no right in it,” she repeated.

“You would do it again, if you could.”

I did not say that as a question, although in my mind still it was a question. I could not believe that she had tried to kill me. She looked at me.

“Yes.”

“And you ask me to speak for Peter?”

“They are burning me tomorrow. Is that not enough? And Peter saved your life in the hunt.”

“To your regret.”

“No. I would not have him different from what he is.”

“But were ready to kill to make him heir.”

Weariness for a moment showed through her determination. She said:

“What he is and what I would do for him are different things. I will pay for my part, in the morning. Speak for him, Luke.”

• • •

I went to my father from the prison and asked him to release Peter. It was not because of my aunt’s plea. (She had only made this to me as a last resort; she had asked to see my father but he had refused.) Except in her reminder that Peter had saved me from the polyboar. By speaking for him now I could cancel that debt and make us quits.

My father listened in silence then, but ordered Peter’s release the next day, as soon as the burning was over. I did not go to see it. My father did, and sat, I was told, like stone.

It was not a long one; he had made sure of that. The people cheered, for his safety and the destruction of his enemy. The only trouble came from the Christians. They opposed the taking of life, even in battle or the execution of murderers, and always made a nuisance of themselves on such occasions. The people pelted them with filth and abused them. And one who called the Prince a murderer was taken by the guards. He was tried later but only condemned to the stocks for a day. The Christians, it was well known, were all mad, and no one took them seriously.