Gods Concubine (15 page)

“Take this,” she said, “and hand it to the good Archbishop of York.”

Hawise, who knew far better than to ask what the message contained, merely nodded and slipped the parchment into the pocket of her robe.

Deep under London and the hills and rivers which surrounded it the Troy Game dreamed as it had dreamed for aeons.

It dreamed of a time when its Mistress and Kingman would return and complete it, when it would be whole, and strong, and clean. It dreamed of a time when the kingship bands were restored to the limbs of the kingman, and when he and his Mistress would dance out the Game into immortality.

The Game dreamed of things that its creators, Brutus and Genvissa, could never have realised. It dreamed of the stone circles that still dotted the land, and it dreamed of those ancient days when the stones danced under the stars.

In its dreaming the Game began to whisper, and the stones responded.

S
IX

“S
aeweald?” Saeweald jerked from sleep, the dark-haired woman beside him murmuring sleepily.

“It is I, Tostig.”

Saeweald relaxed a little, but not a great deal. He and Tostig had once been great friends, but as Tostig had grown first into manhood and then into his distant earldom, their friendship had ebbed.

Saeweald slowly swung his legs out of bed, wincing as his right hip caught within the blankets and twisted uncomfortably.

The woman beside him also started to rise, but he laid a hand on her shoulder. “No, keep my space warm for me, Judith. I will not be long.”

Tostig had disappeared into one of the outer chambers, and now he returned with a small oil lamp. He grinned at the sight of the woman. “I know you,” he said. “You are one of the queen’s ladies.”

Judith inclined her head. “Indeed,” she said, “and a better mistress I could not hope to serve.”

“Does she know you spend your nights here?”

“I cannot imagine that the queen would object,” Saeweald said tersely, pulling on his robe and belting it about his waist. “Tostig, what do you here?”

Tostig shifted his eyes from Judith to the physician. “I need your advice,” he said. “And your…Sight.”

Again his eyes slid back to Judith.

“She knows who and what I am,” Saeweald said. “You need have no concern for her.”

He led Tostig into an adjoining chamber. “What can be so urgent that you need to wake me from my sleep?”

“Edward,” Tostig said, then grinned charmingly, which instantly put Saeweald on guard. “I need to know how long he shall live.”

“You and most of England,” said Saeweald. “Why? Why so urgent?”

“I…I am concerned for my brother. I need to know what I can do that shall most aid him to the throne.”

Saeweald studied the Earl of Northumbria through narrowed eyes. “That is not what you want to know.”

Tostig abandoned his charm. He grabbed at Saeweald’s arm. “I want to know
my
future,” he said. “I want to know where
I
stand.”

“Why?”

“Does not every man want to know what lies before him?”

Saeweald gave a hollow laugh. “Some say that a wise man would give all his worldly goods
not
to know, Tostig.”

“
I want to know.
Why won’t you tell me…Do you want gold? Is that it? Does the physician Druid need gold to share his Sight?”

“If you think yourself brave enough, Tostig, then I can share my Sight with you. Give your gold to the beggars who haunt the wastelands beyond the gates of London. They need it more than I.”

Saeweald reached for the oil lamp that Tostig still held. The lamp consisted of a small shallow pottery dish in which swilled an oil rendered from animal fats. A wick extended partway out, resting on the rim of the dish, spluttering and flickering.

Saeweald rested the shallow dish in the palm of his left hand, passing his right palm over it several times.

“Well?” Tostig demanded.

Saeweald’s eyes shifted to the earl, and in the thin glimmer of light thrown off by the lamp they appeared very dark, as though they had turned to obsidian from their usual green.

Wait
, he mouthed before bending his face back to the lamp.

Tostig stared at Saeweald, then lowered his own eyes. And gasped, taking an involuntary step backwards.

That tiny lamp seemed to have grown until it appeared half an arm’s length in diameter, although it still balanced easily in Saeweald’s hand. The oil was now black and odourless, lapping at the rim of the dish as if caught in some great magical tide.

The wick sputtered, and the smoke which rose from it thickened and then sank, twisting into the oil itself until the lamp contained a writhing mass of smoke and black liquid.

What do you wish to know?

“How long does Edward have to live?” said Tostig, unaware that Saeweald had not spoken with his voice.

The oil and smoke boiled, then cleared, and in its depths Tostig saw Edward lying wan and skeletal on his bed, a dark, loathsome miasma clouding above his nostrils and mouth.

“What does it mean?” he asked.

The clouds gather. He does not have long. What else do you want to know?

“Harold,” Tostig said in a tight voice. “Tell me of Harold.”

Again the oil and smoke boiled then cleared, and Tostig bent close.

He saw Harold climbing a hill. He was dressed in battle gear although he did not carry a sword, and he appeared weary and disheartened. He reached the top of the hill, and suddenly a shaft of light slid down from the heavens, wrapping Harold in gold, and Tostig saw that Harold wore a crown on his head and that the weariness had lifted from his face.

Then Harold turned around, and Tostig drew in a sharp breath, for Harold’s face was beautiful and wrathful and consumed with power all at once. As Tostig stared, Harold very slowly raised his hands, palms upwards, and light shone forth from them, as if they carried living, breathing gold within them.

“By the gods!” Saeweald muttered, and he suddenly dropped the dish, spattering oil over both robes and legs.

“I need to see more,” cried Tostig, but Saeweald shook his head.

“You have seen enough,” he said. “Edward has not long, and Harold will be a king such as England has never seen. What more can you want to know? What more can you desire for your blood kin?”

Tostig stared through the gloom towards Saeweald, but he could not make out the man’s face. Wordlessly, he turned on his heel and left.

Saeweald stood very still for a long time, the remnants of the oil dripping down his robe.

Eventually he turned, went back to the bedchamber, disrobed, and crawled in beside Judith.

“I think I know why Coel is back,” he said.

S
EVEN

H
e stood on the hill, the westerly wind ruffling the short dark curls of his head, the sun making him narrow his almost-black eyes. Behind him a group of his men-at-arms chattered quietly where they stood by the horses, and his close friend Walter Fitz Osbern sat in the grass, watching him carefully.

To his side stood Matilda. She was heavily pregnant, only weeks away from giving birth, and she and William were engaged in what had become one of the rituals of their marriage. In each of her pregnancies, a few weeks before she gave birth, Matilda asked William to bring her to the coast where she could stand and feel the sea wind in her hair and riffling through her clothes. It was this, and its memory, which enabled her to endure the weeks of confinement just before and after the birth of a child. Matilda hated the sense of detainment, almost of capture, that surrounded the rituals of childbirth; this single day of freedom, feeling the wind in her hair and her husband standing beside her, gave Matilda enough strength to endure it. Despite her diminutive stature, Matilda gave birth easily, although she found it desperately painful: this child would be their seventh.

Matilda also liked to stand here, her belly swelling towards the sea, because it gave her a sense of superiority over this witch that William still dreamed of. Well might Swanne be the first love of William’s life, but it was not she who bore his children, and it was not she who stood here now, William’s companion and mate.

She looked at William, and saw that he had his eyes fixed on the wild tossing grey seas and the faint smudge in the far distance, that line of white cliffs.

England.

“How you lust for that land,” she murmured, and William flickered his eyes her way.

“Aye. And it will be mine soon enough.”

She nodded. In the past two years William had finally managed to bring Normandy under his control. Rival claimants had been quashed, dissent had evaporated, and William enjoyed power such as he’d never had previously. Normandy was his, and would stand behind him whatever he ventured. Matilda only hoped that when William
did
venture, she wouldn’t be so heavy with child that she could not accompany him.

Their marriage was strong, stronger than Matilda had ever envisaged in their early months together. They had both agreed that truth was the only possible foundation on which they could build their partnership, and the truth had served them well.

Of course, there were always a few small secrets and, on William’s part, the occasional infidelity, but neither small secrets nor infidelities rocked the essential core of their marriage: Matilda and William were good for each other. Together, they managed far more than either of them could have managed individually.

“When?” said Matilda, although she knew the answer.

“When Edward dies,” he said. William was strong enough to venture an invasion now, but William also wanted to coat his claim with legitimacy, and he could not do that if he tried to wrest a throne from the incumbent king.

Once Edward was dead, however, then the path would be open for him.

William shifted slightly, as if uncomfortable, and he frowned as he gazed across the grey waters of the channel that separated Normandy and England.

“What is it?” said Matilda.

“There is something about to happen…matters are moving,” he said. He lifted his closed fist and beat it softly against his chest, underscoring his words. “I feel it in
here.
”

Matilda felt a thrill of superstitious awe run up and down her spine. Fifteen years had been long enough for her to realise that there were depths to her husband that she had not yet plumbed.

If the witch Swanne loved him, then why was that so? Was it because some power in William called to Swanne?

“It is not Edward,” she said, and William looked at her.

“How so? What do
you
know?”

Matilda managed to suppress the small smile that threatened to break through. One of the “small” secrets she had kept from William was that Matilda had her own agent in place within Edward’s court.

“I think you will find,” Matilda said, “that Edward’s queen shall be at the heart of it.”

“Caela? Why?”

Now Matilda allowed that secretive smile to break through. “A woman’s intuition, my dear. Nothing else.”

Caela intrigued Matilda. Initially, Matilda had set her agent to watching Swanne, but that watchfulness had, over the years, grown to include the queen as well. At first this had been because Swanne so clearly and evidently hated Caela, and that made Matilda wonder if Swanne feared the queen as well, and wonder further why this might be so. But then, as the years passed, Matilda came to understand via her agent that there was a small but dedicated coterie that surrounded the queen, and that Caela herself sometimes exuded an air of strangeness that Matilda’s agent found difficult to express.

“Caela is nothing,” William said, and the harsh tone of his voice made Matilda look sharply at him.

I wonder,
she thought.

As William lifted Matilda on to her horse his mind drifted to the dream he’d had some nights previously. Cornelia, or Caela as she was now, in her stone hall. That dream had been so real. The stone had felt hard beneath his feet, Caela’s flesh so warm beneath his fingers; the plea in her eyes as vivid as if he’d stood there in reality.

William had dreamed of her at other times—would this woman not cease tormenting him?—but never had the dream seemed so real.

Nor Caela so close. She was older than she had been as Cornelia, and lovelier. Her hair was darker, her skin paler, but her eyes still that strange depth of blue that they had been two thousand years ago.

She’d still held her face up to his, and yearned for him to kiss her.

And he
had
wanted to kiss her, whatever he might have said to her. He had wanted to kiss her more than he had ever wanted anything else in his life. More than the Game? Aye, at that moment, when Caela’s face had been so close, William thought he might have squandered even the Game itself in order to feel her mouth yield under his, to taste her sweetness…

Yet he’d stopped himself, just in time.

Was she the trap Asterion had laid?

Again?

William turned from Matilda—watching him curiously—and stared back across the wild tossing seas.

Soon. It was starting today—he could
feel
it surging through his blood—and within a year all would be won or lost.

E
IGHT

The Great Hall, Westminster

H
arold Godwineson, Earl of Wessex, slouched in his great chair in its habitual place to the left of King Edward’s dais. His dark eyes were hooded, his right hand rubbed through the short dark hairs of his moustache and beard, his left arm lay draped, apparently relaxed, over the carved armrest of the great chair, and his legs stretched out before him, one foot idly tapping out a rhythm only Harold could hear.

He looked almost half asleep, but in reality Harold was coiled, tense and waiting. Harold had spent his life either at court or on the battlefield, and over the years he’d developed a sense of danger so acute he could almost smell its approach.