Gods Concubine (67 page)

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?

T
HREE

CAELA SPEAKS

I
know 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.

F
OUR

H
arold 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 personal 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?”

That would not have surprised Harold in the least. His sense of unreality had been growing stronger and stronger over the past few days. Now he wondered if that was a precursor for this otherworldly journey.

The creature smiled, but sadly, and Harold saw that its teeth were rimmed with light.

“I am Long Tom,” he said, “and I am taking you to your bride.”

“Alditha?”

“No,” Long Tom said, drawing the word out until it was almost a moan.

Harold frowned, but then the creature gestured to him to dismount.

“We need to take a journey, you and I,” he said.

“Where?” said Harold, swinging his right leg over his horse’s back and jumping lightly to the ground. His weariness was falling away from him as if it had never been; even the horse snorted and pranced as it felt the weight of its rider vanish.

“Do you remember?” said Long Tom.

“Remember what?” said Harold. He was standing directly in front of the creature, and, despite his own height, he had to crick his neck slightly in order to look the creature in the eye.