Gods' Concubine

  “But we are not moving,” Matilda observed, and William turned to her and grinned.

  He leaned down and planted a kiss on her forehead, and rested a hand briefly on her belly. Matilda was five months gone with child, and William was grateful for no other reason than that pregnancy would keep Matilda at home when otherwise she might have insisted on embarking with him.

  “We shall be soon,” he said. “This northerly will not last a lifetime, and the instant it changes, we sail.”

  “Yet in the meantime Hardrada threatens to seize England from us.”

  William shook his head, his eyes now scanning the fleet as it bobbed at anchor. “Harold is good. Very good. Hardrada may test him, but I doubt very much that he will best him. He will tire him. With luck, my love, Harold’s force will be exhausted by the time it meets mine.”

  “I wish my agent was still in place,” Matilda said, her voice sad. She’d heard some time ago of her agent’s death, and Matilda worried that it was her orders that had placed Damson in danger.

  “We will manage without her,” William said, kissing the top of Matilda’s head.

  “I wish I knew who killed her,” she said.

  “When I have England, then we shall hunt down her murderer. I promise you that.”

  Matilda relaxed, trusting in her husband. She, too, looked over the fleet, reviewing in her mind all that had happened in the past months. The Norman magnates’ enthusiastic acceptance of William’s plan; the Pope’s blessing; the aid—both monetary and in the form of troops—sent by the nobles of Flanders, Maine, Brittany, Poitou, Burgundy, five of the Italian states and a score of others.

  All lusting for the spoils William promised would be theirs at his victory.

  “I will keep Normandy safe for you,” she said, and William again smiled and kissed her. He was leaving Matilda as co-regent of Normandy with their eldest son, Robert. At fourteen Robert was coming into an age where he needed to shoulder the responsibilities of the duchy which would eventually be his. William had needed to fight for decades to establish his right to rule Normandy, and he intended to make the process of succession much easier for his son. He loved his son, as he loved Matilda, but not with the deep-hearted passion he was capable of. That he reserved for…

  His eyes slipped over the estuary and out to sea. Wondering what was really happening in England…in London.

  Swanne had been quiet. Too quiet for his liking, and for the events that were gathering. He had heard that she kept her place in Aldred’s bed, and he found that disturbing.

  Why?

  Harold he had understood (if not Swanne’s neglect in telling him that Harold was Coel-reborn). William’s chance to take his rightful place on England’s throne (as England’s kingman) had been delayed by so many years because of the (Asterion-driven) revolts within Normandy itself. In the meantime Swanne had needed to establish a place within the English court, and Harold had been the perfect vehicle with which to do that.

  William could forgive her Harold. Could understand Harold.

  But not Aldred. The man was not unknown to William, for the corpulent Archbishop of York had acted as one of Edward’s emissaries to Rome on numerous occasions, and when travelling through Europe Aldred had often stayed with William. Aldred’s sympathies were clearly with William, because he’d acted as the go-between for the letters between Swanne and William for years.

  William repressed a sigh. Perhaps that’s why Swanne was with him. Payment owed?

  No, that wasn’t Swanne at all.

  “Your thoughts?” Matilda said beside him, and William jumped a little guiltily.

  “I was thinking of Swanne,” he said. “I was wondering why, out of all the intelligence I’ve received from England, so little of it has been from her. I had expected more.”

  Far more, damn it. There is not just a throne riding on this!

  “You’re worried,” Matilda said.

  “Yes.” What was Asterion doing? Where was his hand in all of this?

  “You can do nothing save what you have already done,” Matilda said, leaning in against him and placing her arm about his waist.

  “Aye. You are right. As usual.” William lightened his face and tone. “Tell me, how do you think I can possibly crown you Queen of England when in all probability you shall be too round and cumbersome to fit on to the throne?”

  She laughed. “You shall be a great king.”

  William’s face sobered. “I hope so.”

  TWO

  It was all falling apart—had been for months—and Saeweald had no idea how to stop it.

  It had all seemed so simple: pass control of the Game into the hands of Mag and a resurrected Og and all would be well, forever and aye.

  The land would flourish, and no one and nothing, ever, would be able to stain its brightness. Asterion and all his malevolence would be contained, Swanne and William and all their ambitions would be broken, Mag and Og would again reign supreme and the waters and the forests would rejoice.

  Yet nothing had quite happened that way, had it?

  Saeweald had known that Caela always felt that she lacked something, that there was an emptiness within her where there should have been fullness, and that she had somehow failed to truly connect to the land. Since the failure of her “marriage” to the land that night she’d lain with Silvius, that sense of emptiness had become even greater, undermining Caela’s confidence within herself. After that terrible day when Swanne and Asterion had slaughtered Damson, Caela had rejected the Mag within her completely.

  It wasn’t so much that Mag, or her potential, was dead (as Silvius had so melodramatically pronounced), it was that Caela had been ill—physically and emotionally—for so many months after Damson’s death that she had completely suppressed the Mag within her. She refused to acknowledge its existence; she would hear nothing of the Game, would not speak to Silvius, and even barely spoke to Saeweald and Judith…she wallowed in her guilt at Damson’s death.

  Even the Sidlesaghes, undoubtedly knowing she would not want to see them, had stayed away.

  Ah, Caela had allowed her guilt to overwhelm her. In the months since Swanne and Asterion had killed Damson, Caela had seemed to go into a fugue. She didn’t know what to do, or where to go, and she refused to act on any suggestion that there must be some means of redressing that emptiness within her, or fulfilling her potential as Mag. Caela merely smiled sadly, and shook her head, and turned aside. She continued to live quietly within St Margaret the Martyr’s, and Ecub and Judith stayed close. Silvius came occasionally, but Caela did not respond to him any better than she did to others, and so his visits became less frequent. Caela spent her days sewing, talking quietly with one or other of the sisters of St Margaret’s, or, more and more, she took solace in wandering the hills and meadows beyond the priory’s walls.

  She did not enter London.

  As far as Saeweald was concerned, the Mag within Caela might not be dead, but it might as well be while Caela refused to acknowledge it.

  And without Caela, without the Mag within her, everything was doomed.

  Saeweald tried to talk with Caela, tried to reason with her, tried, on one disastrous day, to seduce her (if Silvius had not changed her, then surely he, Saeweald, could!). To all efforts and words, hands or mouth, she had only smiled, and laid a gentle hand to his cheek. For months Saeweald had felt sure that he was to be Og-reborn, but in his failure to touch Caela, to be able to communicate with her, he now began to doubt even that. He wasn’t strong enough.

  And Caela wasn’t strong enough.

  Meantime Swanne and Asterion went from strength to strength.

  Or so Saeweald supposed. He’d had very little to do with Swanne in recent months—he had no reason to see her and would only arouse her suspicions if he insisted. Besides, knowing of her alliance with Asterion, Saeweald didn’t feel like going within a hundred paces of the woman. Instead, Saeweald heard of Swanne through gossip and the occasional glimpse of her moving through the
streets of London. He assumed that she and Asterion were biding their time, waiting for William to arrive so they could…

  Saeweald shuddered. So they could seize him. William would arrive, fall straight into Swanne’s arms…and find himself trapped by Asterion.

  Saeweald didn’t know what to do. These months of inactivity, of nothingness, had drained him. Caela turned aside her head, Silvius had slunk off somewhere unknowable, Swanne and Asterion planned and shared nights of passion, and Saeweald paced and fretted and wondered what in creation’s name he could do.

  Warn William?

  That would be the sensible course of action, but how? Saeweald had no avenue of communication by which he could reliably reach William. Anything he sent, whether spoken word or written, might well be intercepted by one of Asterion’s minions—thus exposing both Saeweald and, through him, Caela. If by chance a communication did reach William, then Saeweald seriously doubted that William would believe it. If he understood that it came from Loth-reborn then he most certainly would not believe it.

  Frankly, Saeweald wasn’t sure if anyone could convince William that Swanne had allied with Asterion. He would never believe it. Never.

  Just as Saeweald and Silvius and Caela had not thought it possible…and thus had not given it consideration.

  Meanwhile, the land slid towards chaos and despair.

  Almost two weeks ago Hardrada and Tostig had invaded the north, sailing up the Humber and defeating the earls Edwin and Morcar in a desperate battle, before seizing the northern city of York. Harold had been caught by surprise, even though he’d known of Hardrada’s intentions, and had marched north to meet the Norwegian king and his own brother.

  That had been ten days ago. The only word that had reached the south was that a great battle had been fought, but as yet, no word of the victors or of the defeated.

  In one hateful part of his being Saeweald almost hoped that Hardrada had been successful, that Harold had been killed, and that England would suffer under a Norwegian king rather than brief Norman rule before that king succumbed to the great darkness.

  But why pretend that darkness belonged to the future? Wasn’t it here already?

  THREE

  CAELA SPEAKS

  Iknow that those about me regarded me with disappointment, perhaps even with shame. I know they wanted me to rage, and do, and act.

  But I could do none of these things.

  They thought I had suppressed the Mag within me, had suppressed all Mag had given me: the more that I had carried about like a mantle.

  But I had not. Not truly.

  I was simply waiting.

  Damson’s death shocked and appalled me. I had been responsible for it, not so much for deciding to approach Swanne, for I truly believe I had little other choice, but because I had not been able to protect Damson. If I had been at full power, at full strength, in command of all of me and without that damned lack within that tormented me, I should have been able to protect her.

  That I was not in command of my potential, that I had not reached the fullness of that potential, was my responsibility. Not fault so much—I did not think of it in terms of fault (although I know Saeweald thought I spent much of my time wallowing in guilt)—but in terms of responsibility.

  It was my responsibility to reach that potential, to protect others where I could not protect Damson.

  I knew how to do it. I needed to mate with the land, marry the land, meld with it completely. Silvius had told me that. The Sidlesaghes had told me that.

  But how? I had thought that lying with Silvius would have accomplished it perfectly. After all, he was the warm, breathing representative of the Game, and as Game and land had merged…

  Yet that had been a failure, emotionally, physically, magically.

  The consequence of that failure had been Damson’s death, and I could not afford to fail again. The next time, far more people would die.

  I did not wallow in guilt or grief, although I had to deal with both of those damaging emotions.

  Instead, I waited.

  I waited and I approached the problem from a different direction. In order to aid the land I needed to ritually mate with it, to meld completely with it. This was not only my problem, and responsibility, but that of the land as well.

  It had to act. It had to do, as much as me.

  I waited for the land to show me what to do and where to go.

  FOUR

  Harold hunched atop his weary plodding horse; he was exhausted, bruised, despondent. His cloak clung to him in sodden patches. His hands—his gloves lost days ago—were gripped cold and tense about the horse’s reins as if they would never let go. About him rode the men of his immediate command: the rest of the army was following as and when it could.

  Harold’s warriors sat as hunched and bruised over their reins as did their king, their eyes fixed on some point between their horses’ ears, unblinking, unseeing.

  The horses, having little instruction from their riders, simply moved forwards in the direction their riders had set when they’d still retained some purpose. South, south, ever south away from the battle which had been fought and towards the one which still needed to be fought.

  Stamford Bridge had been a nightmare of rain and mud and blood. Harold had arrived in the north the day after the earls Edwin and Morcar, Alditha’s brothers, had met Hardrada and Tostig in battle at Gate Fulford, two miles north of York.

  The earls had been routed. Indeed, so many Englishmen had died that it was rumoured Hardrada reached the earls to take their surrender by walking across a fen of dead bodies.

  Harold then did what few men could have done: turned a disaster into a means of eventual victory. While Hardrada and Tostig were celebrating, and conducting lengthy negotiations with Edwin and Morcar over the fate of hostages, Harold and his army had arrived unannounced from the south and attacked without even halting for sustenance to fuel their effort.

  The battle at Stamford Bridge was long and desperate, and, apart from the surprise of his attack, the only thing that tipped the balance in Harold’s favour was that Hardrada’s men were either bone-weary, or drunk with their previous victory, or both.

  Hardrada had died on the field. So had Tostig. Harold had faced him, in the end, battling his way through the fighting bodies of the living and the slumped bodies of the dead, and had taken the head from his brother’s body with such an immense swing of his great sword that Harold had all but stumbled to the ground with the weight he’d put behind it.

  He’d not needed his balance for by then the invaders were themselves routed, their leaders dead, the greater of their number dead or crippled enough to wish they had been killed.

  Olaf, Hardrada’s son, had survived the carnage. Morcar, who had acquitted himself better in this battle than in the one of the previous day, brought the young man before Harold.

  England’s king was standing before a sputtering fire, still in his chain mail and bloodstained tunic, his bloodied sword hanging at his side.

  Olaf stood before him, his head high, his eyes glittering proudly, expecting nothing less than death.

  “Take what remains to you,” Harold said, his voice harsh and exhausted, “and take whatever ships you need, and go back whence you have come. I want you no more in my land.”

  Olaf had stared, then nodded tersely, bowed his head, and turned on his heel and left. In the end, he’d needed less than twenty ships of the original fleet of three hundred to take what remained of his men home. The rest of the ships stayed at anchor in the Ouse River where they’d arrived a week or so earlier: their timbers kept Yorkshiremen warm through the five following winters.

  When Olaf had gone, his pitiful twenty ships vanishing into the northern sea mists, Harold had sighed, cleaned his sword, and turned south once more.

  He’d won against Hardrada, but at a frightful cost. Edwin and Morcar’s defeat had cost him almost half the men he could have summoned to battle William. Moreover, many of the elite among Harold’s pe
rsonal troops had been killed or wounded at Stamford Bridge.

  Fate—and Hardrada’s ambition—had dealt William a kind hand.

  Harold existed in a state of half-waking. He’d been riding for days, barely taking the time to stop and rest or take sustenance, or allow his horse to do likewise. Now, when he was about a half day’s ride from London, Harold was so exhausted he could barely think, let alone take note of what was happening around him.

  The weather had closed in. Misty rain had surrounded the horses and riders for hours; now it thickened into a dense fog that obscured most of the surrounding countryside. Harold occasionally blinked and wiped the fog from his eyes. Whenever he did so he saw that his companions drifted in and out of the mist, almost as if they were ghosts. Even the hoof-falls of the horses were curiously muffled, and the constant jingling of bit and spur and bridle faded until it was little more than a distant memory.

  Harold sat, huddled within his soaked cloak, swaying to and fro with the motion of his horse, and descended into a trance that was not quite a sleep.

  Thus, he was not truly surprised when he finally blinked himself into a state of semi-awareness and saw that one of his men had dismounted and was now walking at the head of his horse, a hand to its bridle, ensuring that his king’s mount did not stray off the road.

  And then he saw that the figure walking by his horse’s head was not one of his men at all, and that it had led his horse so far off the road it now plodded silently through sodden meadowlands.

  “Who are you?” said Harold, shaking himself and sitting more upright. “What is—?”

  He stopped, for the figure had halted the horse and then turned around, and Harold saw that it was not a man at all. Oh, it wore the shape of a man, but there was something in its long, bleak face, and in the knowledge in its grey-flecked eyes, that told Harold this was a creature of great enchantment.

  Strangely, Harold did not feel the least sense of fear. “Who are you?” he said, leaning forward a little in the saddle. “Where do you take me? Are we in the realm of faeries?”