Gods' Concubine Read online

  He fell, grunting in surprise as he hit the stones of the creek bed, slipping in the shallow water as he tried to right himself.

  The boar, Harold’s sword still sticking from its back, had turned and was now watching Harold with its vicious, intelligent eyes.

  Even though there were other men and horses milling about, and even though Harold could hear the frantic shouting of Ranuld and William, and of his two companions Thorkell and Hugh, it felt to him as if there were only two creatures in this world on this morn: himself, and the maddened, murderous boar.

  Very slowly Harold managed to rise to his knees, his eyes never leaving those of the boar, and slowly drew free the long-bladed knife from his belt.

  To one side William kneed his horse forward, grabbing a pike from one of the other men, and hefting it in his hand.

  The boar had its back to him, and would be an easy target.

  “No,” whispered Walter Fitz Osbern. Then, a little more strongly, “No!”

  He grabbed at the reins of William’s horse, pulling it to a sudden halt and almost unseating William.

  “Let the boar and Harold settle this,” Walter said, meeting William’s stunned and furious gaze. “Let God decide who has the right to take England’s throne, here and now.”

  “You fool!” William yelled, and, leaning forward, struck Walter a great blow across the face that almost unseated the man from his horse.

  Frantic, not even wondering why he should be so frightened, nor so determined, William turned his horse back towards where the boar faced Harold in the bed of the creek.

  To his side, Thorkell and Hugh were already moving ahead.

  They were all too late.

  The boar had charged.

  Harold was still on his knees, weaving backwards and forwards unsteadily from either the force of the impact in the fall from his horse, or in panic at the boar’s murderous rush, and barely had time to raise his knife.

  “Harold!” William yelled, discarding the pike and jumping down from his horse. He dashed forward, his sword drawn.

  The boar was roaring again, a horrible, terrible noise of squealing and grunting and screaming all in one, and as it came to within two paces of Harold, it tucked its head down against its chest, presenting its tusks and broad forehead to Harold.

  In that instant, that instant when the boar could not see, Harold fell back, his head slamming into the trickle of cold water.

  The boar was upon him, terrible pounding feet, hot, foul breath, a grunting and screeching that sounded as if it emanated from hell.

  Harold cried out involuntarily as the boar’s front feet slammed into his belly and chest and then, as the boar surged forward, as the boar’s great pendulous abdomen brushed over his chest, Harold brought up the knife with all the strength he had, plunging it into the boar’s soft underbelly, allowing the forward motion of the creature to tear it open.

  Blood and bowels erupted over Harold, smothering him, and in the next moment the entire weight of the boar crashed into his neck and head, then, mercifully, rolled off to one side.

  “Harold! Harold!”

  William was upon him, sure that the blood and entrails which coated Harold must be the man’s own.

  “Harold!” William fell to his knees, straddling Harold’s body, and pushed aside the worst of the gore.

  Beneath it, Harold slowly opened his eyes.

  “Harold?”

  Harold raised a hand, waving it weakly from side to side. He was gasping for air, and William realised that the boar’s death plunge must have winded him severely.

  If not worse.

  “Harold?”

  “I have…have…but lost…my breath…” Harold eventually managed. “And…and my chest and belly throb from where the boar stood on the scars of Tostig’s treachery. But I think it is nothing more than bruises.”

  William breathed a sigh of unpretended relief. “Thank Christ our Lord,” he said.

  “I thought the boar had me,” Harold said.

  “I have never seen such bravery,” William said, and all who now crowded about heard the admiration and respect in his voice.

  William rose.

  “I had thought you might have hoped the boar would take me,” said Harold, slowly raising himself into a sitting position. He grimaced as he saw the blood and entrails and pig shit that coated him, and in that grimace missed the cold look that William shot Walter Fitz Osbern.

  “You are my guest, and my equal. I had not wanted you dead,” William said.

  Harold looked up at him. “And you didn’t think that my death here and now would be only to your advantage?”

  William stared at Harold for a long moment before answering. “I did not want your death now,” he finally said, quietly but with great feeling, “as I do not want it for the future. England would always be the sorrier place for your lack, Harold. I would be the sorrier man for your death.”

  And he held out his hand.

  “You are a strange adversary,” Harold said, gripping William’s hand and using it to pull himself upright.

  “I am not your enemy,” William said. “I will not be one to laugh over your corpse, Harold.”

  Now upright, Harold changed his grasp so that both men gripped each other by the forearm rather than by the hand. Strangely, he seemed to know what William was thinking. “Do not trust Swanne,” Harold said softly, only for William’s ears. “Never trust her.”

  In answer William merely stared, then gave a very small nod. In this they understood each other.

  Then he let Harold’s arm go, turned, and dealt Walter Fitz Osbern such a heavy blow to his chin that the man staggered and fell to his knees.

  “Never dishonour me again,” William said, then stalked for his horse.

  NINE

  CAELA SPEAKS

  Moving the bands had many inherent dangers, yet the first and most difficult task (or so I believed at the time) was simply ensuring I was not missed.

  Moving the band was something Long Tom had told me I could not do as Damson, so somehow I had to make certain that no one would take note of the queen’s absence for what might be virtually the entire night.

  In the end, this first obstacle was reasonably easily accomplished. I gave a moan during our supper, placed a hand on my belly, and looked apologetically at Edward, who had paused with a spoon of broth half raised to his open mouth.

  I managed to colour. “My flux,” I murmured, lowering my eyes modestly.

  And so I removed myself to the solar, where I usually slept during these phases of the moon. Edward kept his bowerthegn, and I dismissed all my ladies save for Judith.

  There, at the darkest hour of the night, Long Tom came to me.

  We descended from another of his strange, eerie trapdoors (I resolved that I should ask him how he managed it, this descent into the twists of the Labyrinth), and into that even stranger tunnel through which he had led me only the previous night. Again the metal rails that lined the gravel bed trembled and vibrated from time to time, and again I was overwhelmed as a great rush of air would fill the tunnel and rush past us.

  A part of the Game which is yet to be.

  “We will have to be very careful tonight,” the Sidlesaghe said, and I nodded, lost in thought of what was to come.

  “This will be the one time you are going to be able to do this in relative safety,” he continued.

  “I know,” I said. “Once Asterion and William and Swanne realise that one band has been moved, then they will be alert for a further…” I stopped, not knowing how to express myself.

  “Intrusion,” said the Sidlesaghe, and again I nodded. He took my hand, and squeezed it. “So we will make the most of this night, eh?”

  I tried to smile for him, but in truth I was nervous. Not so much by the thought of Asterion’s—or any other’s—wrath and reaction, but at touching the bands themselves. I remembered how they had always been so much a part of Brutus, so much of a wholeness with him, that I could barely imag
ine the thought of the bands away from him.

  And yet they were apart from him, were they not? And were they not also to be given to another, in time? I remembered the vision of the stag god Og, alive and vibrating with power, running through the forest, the bands about his legs. My lover, and thus I must be the one to take these bands, and give them to him.

  At this moment, walking down this otherworldly tunnel with the Sidlesaghe, it all seemed impossible.

  “Faith,” said Long Tom, giving my hand another squeeze. “What seems hopeless when you look across the vast distance to what ultimately must be accomplished, seems possible when you only look at the task a step at a time. Tonight you will move one of the bands and make the Game and this land just that little bit safer. In a little while, perhaps a week, perhaps a month, you will move another band, and we will cope together with whatever danger threatens us on that occasion.”

  “You say I must move the bands. Are you not able to touch them?”

  “No,” he said. “Only the Kingman or the Mistress of the Labyrinth can truly touch them, and not suffer.”

  “Then how can I? I am not yet—”

  “But you will one day be.” The Sidlesaghe paused, both in speech and in walking, and I stopped as well and watched him as he tried to find words for what he wanted to express. “The Game sometimes shows portions of itself which are yet to be,” he said, “and sometimes it can accept things that are not yet, but which will be.”

  “Because it wants me to be the Mistress of—”

  “No. Because you will one day be the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

  My mouth twisted. “The Game hopes?”

  “The Game knows. It has already created the future, and in some manner, already lives it.”

  I was suddenly, inexplicably, angry. “Then why do I fight, or strive, if all this will be? Why do I worry, if all this is set into stone as surely as…as…” I waved my hand about the strange tunnel.

  Just then there was an eerie whining in the tunnel, and one of those almost incomprehensible rushes of air. The gravel rattled under our feet, and the metal strips vibrated and sang, and both the Sidlesaghe and I had to take a deep breath and steady ourselves until the phenomenon had passed.

  “Because,” the Sidlesaghe said very gently once the wind had passed, and our world had calmed, “the Game needs you to strive.”

  I stood there, gazing into the creature’s gentle face, and felt like weeping. At that moment I did not feel like Mag, or like the Queen of England. I just felt…I just felt like poor, lost Cornelia, caught in a struggle which she neither wished for nor had instigated.

  The Sidlesaghe reached out his large hand and laid it softly, warmly against my cheek. “There are many futures,” he said, “all existing side by side. We all need to strive to ensure we reach the right future.”

  I nodded wordlessly, hating the tears in my eyes. That I could live with: many futures, not just one certain one.

  “And in all of them,” he said, “you will be the Mistress of the Labyrinth. Thus, you can touch the bands.”

  I nodded again, feeling a little better.

  “And in some of them,” the Sidlesaghe continued, “you will also be Asterion’s whore, his creature, his vassal. We must avoid that future.”

  My mouth dropped open in my horror. “You can see—”

  “I know only of the possibilities,” he said. “No more.”

  I shuddered, and we walked on. We held our silence for some time, then I spoke again, wanting to hear the Sidlesaghe’s amicable voice.

  “I sometimes feel an emptiness within me,” I said. “An incompleteness. Is this because I am a virgin, and this is anathema to what I should be as Mag?”

  Long Tom nodded. “This is very true. I am glad you thought of it.”

  It was Silvius who had thought of it, but I thought it best to let the Sidlesaghe believe I had come to this understanding on my own. “I need to unite myself to the land. Mate with it.”

  “Aye,” the Sidlesaghe said, looking sideways at me, his mouth curling in a smile. “Choose well,” he said, and winked.

  I laughed, partly at his mischievousness, but mostly because he had allayed those few, niggling reservations I’d had about what Silvius had suggested.

  “Oh,” I said, “I shall.” Who better than Silvius, so closely associated with the Troy Game?

  We lapsed into silence once more, and eventually the Sidlesaghe led me into a side tunnel, as narrow as that which once had brought me to the approach to London Bridge.

  This time we did not emerge before the bridge, but just before the great west gate of London. In former times, when I had been Cornelia and the sad, abused wife of Brutus, this gate had been called Og’s Gate. Now the people called it Ludgate, after Lud Hill.

  The gates—thick wooden constructions—hung between two ten-pace-high stone towers. The towers had narrow slit windows so that archers could shoot at any approaching enemy—I half expected an arrow to speed towards us at any moment—and parapets at their tops where archers and spearmen could let fly their missiles.

  Beyond the gates stretched the ancient stone and brick walls of London: part Roman construction, part British, part Saxon and, from what I understood of them and of what had founded them, of part magical construction as well.

  I looked back to the towers to either side of the barred gates. I knew that, normally, guards watched atop these towers at night. I peered closely, and saw motionless shadows just behind some of the stone ramparts.

  I looked at the Sidlesaghe.

  “Will they see us?” he said softly, returning my querying look with one of his own.

  It was a test, but of understanding rather than of power.

  “No,” I said, “we do not exist within their perception. We are here, but not within their own expectations of reality. We are beyond what they expect, or can even imagine, and so they will not see us.”

  “And if it were Asterion, or Swanne, or William watching on those towers?”

  “Then we would be discovered.”

  “Aye. Come.”

  We walked forward and when we reached the gates they swung open as if by invisible hands, closing silently behind us once we had walked through. The Sidlesaghe led me through the empty street leading to St Paul’s atop Ludgate Hill, and as he did so I thought about what I had said.

  The guards could not see us because we existed beyond their expectations of reality; beyond what they could even imagine.

  If that was so, then what could I see if I truly opened my eyes?

  The instant that thought passed through my mind, and I had opened myself to possibilities beyond what I expected, the empty street suddenly filled with life. A great shadowy crowd thronged the street. These people were not alive, not in this present, but they were the memories of people who had been and the possibilities of people who would be.

  I stopped, gazing open-mouthed at people dressed in the strangest of apparels: the great draperies of roman senators, or the tightly-clothed passengers who sat in horseless vehicles that seemed to move of their own volition, placing burning fags in their mouths, as if in enjoyment!

  “Don’t!” the Sidlesaghe said.

  I jerked my eyes to his face.

  “We have not the time for this now,” he said.

  And I heard his unspoken thought: Besides, if you see the myriad possibilities inherent in the many futures which await you, then you may not have the heart to continue.

  I blinked, suppressing…not the vision as such, but the understanding of the possibility of it.

  Slowly the shadowy, unnatural throng faded from view.

  “You have the power to see too much,” the Sidlesaghe said, more gently now, “and you will overwhelm yourself. Now, come with me, and we will walk softly for a time.”

  In a short while we stood at the base of the steps leading to the western—and main—doors of St Paul’s. I raised my foot to begin the climb, but the Sidlesaghe’s grip on my hand tightened,
and I stopped.

  “We do not enter?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Where do we go?” I said.

  “Tonight we will move the closest band. Brutus hid them within the city, and around its boundaries.”

  I turned slightly so I could look down the street we had travelled to reach St Paul’s. “Ludgate?”

  “Aye,” he said. “An obvious choice, and one Asterion himself thought of.”

  “Why couldn’t he find it, then? There cannot be many places to hide a golden kingship band for one who is prepared to raze everything to the foundations and beyond.”

  “Because the band must be approached in a certain manner.” He faced me completely, taking both my hands in his. “Caela, what do you understand of Asterion? Of his nature?”

  I thought, remembering all I had been told, and what I had gleaned during my long wait in death. “He is the Minotaur, the creature in the heart of the Labyrinth whom Theseus slew.”

  “Aye. And…?”

  “Asterion controls great power, dark power, the power trapped in the heart of the Labyrinth which is…which is…” I did not know quite how to phrase it, and the Sidlesaghe, seeing that I understood but lacked only the ability to explain in words, finished the sentence for me.

  “Asterion controls the dark power in the heart of the Labyrinth, which dark power is kept in check by the Labyrinth, by the Game itself.”

  “Yes, thus Asterion wants the Game destroyed so that he and his dark power can ravage free across the world.”

  “Brutus hid the golden kingship bands using the power of the Game, which—”

  “Which Asterion does not yet know how to use or control, thus he cannot find them!”

  The Sidlesaghe laughed in delight. “Yes!”

  Now it was my turn to smile. “But you know the Game, and you are of the land. Both land and Game know where the bands lie. You know how to approach them.” I paused. “But only I can touch them.”

  “So I will show you the path, and walk it with you, but when it comes to the band itself, you are the only one who can touch it. You are the only one who will be a part of their future.”

  I thought of my lover, running wild and free and strong through the forests, the bands glinting about his limbs. “Apart from…him.”