In Great Waters (22 page)

Anne blushed, placed an anxious hand up as her cheeks glowed their embarrassing blue. “I did not know if you had been told,” she said. “I did not tell the doctor to tell you it was me.”

“No, my lady Princess, but Master Shingleton mentioned your kindness when I was recovering,” Westlake said. “I must thank you again for your goodness. It was a most Christian act.”

“Did Master Shingleton use the horn?” Anne said.

“I believe he did,” Westlake nodded. “Though I was too ill to ask what was in his medicines at the time of taking them.”

Anne was fingering her pearl cross, thinking of the pearl she had given to purchase the horn. Erzebet had been angry with her for spoiling her dress, but Anne could not regret it. The dress had not been Erzebet’s gift. “I am glad you are well, my lord Samuel,” she said. “I do not wish to see—suffering is a curse difficult to bear.”

“We must look to our Saviour, my lady Princess,” Westlake said. He patted her hand again as he said it, and Anne thought of Christ upon the cross. Just at the moment, thoughts of the Five Wounds, the scourging and the crown of thorns and the nails, were too painful to consider.

“I have prayed to the Virgin,” Anne said. “But I do not know what to do.”

Westlake picked up her hand. “You have been kind and charitable to me, my lady Princess,” he said. “If I may counsel or comfort you in any way, I am your man.”

Anne looked at him, towering over her in his chair. “I thank you,” she said. “I do need your help.”

“Name your wish, my lady Princess.”

Anne hesitated. “I—have heard of your charity, your mercy,” she said. The burned bastard was in her mind, the slaughtered child Westlake had wished to spare. Erzebet had held her when she asked for mercy. Erzebet had also ordered the child burned alive. Her mother was dead, and Anne was lost in an incomprehensible wilderness.

“Name your wish, Princess Anne,” Westlake said. “I say again, if I may help you, I am your man.”

“Samuel …” Anne said. “My mother died of poison. Someone put poison in her bathwater.”

Westlake crossed himself, not taking his eyes off Anne. “May God receive her Majesty’s soul.”

“Someone killed my mother,” Anne said. “I need you to help me find out who.”

B
OOK
T
HREE
DURANCE

H
ENRY COULD HARDLY
believe the stories John told him. John said that the king was an old man, weak and fragile in body, but that nobody ever challenged him. John said the king had had two sons, but one of them had lately gone to war in Scotland and been killed, and the other one was stupid and couldn’t walk. John said it was only women and an old man on the throne now: Princess Erzebet, who came from a long way away, and two little girls, younger than themselves. And, John said, the king was still on his throne.

Henry was eight when he first met John. This boy was like nobody he had ever encountered, in the sea or out of it: quick with a smile, easy to laugh, fast and energetic on his feet. To begin with, John laughed a lot at Henry, whenever Henry fumbled words or said something strange. Henry, who hated to be laughed at, began by hitting John in angry retaliation. The blows, even from a boy as small as Henry, were heavy ones, usually knocking John off his feet. Allard had never learned how to discipline Henry, too aware that any reach for a cane would likely land him flat on his back with his protégé throttling him, and attempted to deal with such outbursts by a firm “No, Henry.” Henry was, at first, too angry at being mocked to listen.

Soon enough, though, he stopped hitting John. John never retaliated; instead, he simply got to his feet and faced the other way, turning aside if Henry, slow on his bent legs, tried to get round to face him. This cold-shouldering made Henry far more nervous than he was
prepared to admit: if he couldn’t see John’s expression, there was no knowing what he might be planning, and in addition, John was his friend, a bright spot in a world of didactic adults, the first time in his life that Henry, accustomed to the flickering round of fear and safety, flight and hunting, had ever been entertained. John was funny; sometimes even Henry, fierce-faced and inexpressive, couldn’t help but smile when John laughed. Amusement was such a new sensation, bringing with it a lightening of his tense muscles, a brief surcease from thinking ahead and watching all sides and waiting to see whether what happened next would be safe, that he was in no way prepared to give it up. It was easier, after a while, to keep his fists to himself. John might ride away for the day after a quarrel, but he would be back the next, cheerful and lively as before, apparently with no sense of grudge.

While Henry couldn’t quite admire the recklessness of forgetting injuries so easily, trusting again so soon—John had the memory of a mackerel when it came to past arguments, or so it would appear from his behaviour—he also was willing to trust John. John did not push books or weapons into his hands, or force clothes on his limbs, or drop food he hated on his plate. John, in fact, never made him do anything. He was willing to do what Henry said, and to do it happily, with no stern gaze or note-taking or whispered asides. John did not seem to want anything from him. Therefore, Henry considered what John said to be more believable than anything Allard told him.

“If the king is old and he has no good sons left, why can we not go and take the throne now?” Henry asked.

Allard’s answer would have been long and involved history, but John was straightforward. “Because you are too young. You need to lead an army into battle against the king’s forces, and you need to be grown up to do that.”

“Could I not start?”

“My father knows a lot of men who can raise armies,” John said. “He is waiting to see who will join him. The king fares ill enough now, but he will get worse as he gets older. And when he is older, you will be bigger.”

“But I have to hide now,” Henry said. “I have had enough of it.”

“You would feel worse if they catch you before you have an army at your back, deepsman,” John said amiably.

This was true in theory, Henry knew. Allard had told him that the king would kill him if he was caught, though he had not gone into details. “I can fight a grown man now,” he said. “Landsmen are weak.”

“You could not fight an army, and that is what they would send. And it would be all of us in trouble, not just you.” John, unoffended at the slur on his kind, did not look too frightened. It was puzzling, because the thought of an army, thundering down on him with hundreds of black-hooved horses, sharp swords out and ready to swing fast through the air, was definitely frightening. But John had never seen a battle in the short years of life he had lived, and perhaps did not realise what it would be to be in one.

“I could be the king’s son,” Henry said. “I could marry his daughter.” The deepsmen sometimes formed pairs, and it seemed like something he could do. Landsmen seemed to take such bonds more seriously—as far as he could understand from Allard’s explanations, marriages were supposed to last for ever, even if the couple grew tired of each other or a better offer came along—but he was unlikely to do better than a king’s daughter anyway. It didn’t sound like a bad idea.

John laughed. “You mean Erzebet? His daughter-in-law? She is married to Philip, much good that will do her. You do not want her, Henry, trust me. You would be happier married to a shark.”

“Nobody would marry a shark,” Henry said. In his mind, Erzebet stood before the throne, a rock in her raised hand. She could go, when he took down the king.

“Another shark?” John grinned at him.

“Sharks do not marry, they just fuck,” Henry said.

“Do not say that in front of my father,” John told him. “He will only hit me for teaching you bad language.”

John taught Henry a lot, but Henry was teaching John too. To begin with, John had had a patient air when he explained things, as if talking to someone stupid. Henry, who had no patience at all with stupid people and saw no reason why anyone else should, determinedly
argued and questioned and tested John’s logic until he succeeded in driving home the point that he wasn’t stupid, just foreign. John’s swordsmanship improved rapidly with hasty, strong-armed Henry as his sparring partner. The two of them rode together on Allard’s grounds, John explaining the names of animals, Henry pointing them out, quicker-eared when they rustled in the bushes, able after a few days’ study to predict the directions they would dart, the paths they would take, the best direction to throw a stone in order to bring one down.

Language was a question of its own. Little though he was interested in Latin, Henry picked up English as quickly as he could, realising that a spoken refusal would get him out of unwelcome tasks more effectively than feigned incomprehension, that a spoken demand was easier to grant than vague pointing, and that it was harder for people to discuss him when he was there listening to what they said. He did not care to be discussed. But when it came to understanding things, John’s mind was set in a different pattern from his, and it could be difficult to make things clear to both of them.

John, for example, explained to Henry that Allard’s grounds were near the coast. “Coast” was a difficult idea. “Where the land meets the sea,” was how John put it, explaining that England was part of an island, but Henry, accustomed to flying through the water, could not think of land and sea meeting. Land carried on under the sea, down along the sea bed. Land was simply where the water ran out and there was nothing left to hold you up. John often came with fish for Henry to eat, telling him how he had gone out on a small fishing boat, but however John explained the mechanism of nets, Henry found them difficult to picture, struggling to understand that his image of John plunging his hands into the water to catch fish for him was in some way inaccurate. The day John brought a net to show him was worse: Henry’s hands, flexed together between the digits with webbing, could find no purchase on the interlocking strings, and the thing slipped out of his grip, a frustrating tangle of lines and angles he instinctively found ugly.

It was Henry’s language, though, that gave him an advantage.
One day as they rode together and a brown creature swooped overhead, Henry gestured upwards, saying, “What is that?”

John squinted upwards. “A bird.”

Henry shook his head. “The thing you showed me yesterday was a bird. This one is brown.” Colour was a new concept in itself, to have words for the shades of things, all the panoply of tones that the landsmen’s sun revealed away from the grey seas. Henry had lost most of his fear of red things, but the complexities of colour were still of interest to him, and he wasn’t prepared to ignore them when John seemed to be making a mistake. “And it has a different shape.”

“Oh.” John waved a hand. “That was a crow yesterday. This is a swallow.”

“What is a bird, then?”

John shrugged. “Something that flies. Like a crow or a swallow. Both are birds.”

Henry considered. The creatures he had seen sometimes flying past his chamber window came to mind, the ones he had seen dive into the sea. He had refused to discuss them with Allard, but he wanted to know about them nonetheless. “There are birds that fly past my room” he said. “They are white, with grey backs.” Colour was such a useful abstraction, once you understood how to talk about it. You could describe things that weren’t there.

“What kind of bird?” John said.

Henry shrugged in puzzlement. “I do not know. Allard called it a bird. You know …” He gestured in frustration. “One of those white birds that can swim.”

“Swim?”

“Yes, a bird that can swim. A—” Henry gave up, naming it in the deepsmen’s language. There was a word for it there.

“What’s that?” John perked up, a mixture of amusement and interest on his face.

Gull
, Henry chirruped. “That is what they are called.”

“You have a name for birds in the sea?”

“Yes, these ones can swim.” Henry was growing impatient. “They sit on the sea and then swim into it to catch fish.”

“Oh,
gulls,”
John said, catching on. “Gulls dive under the sea sometimes. Grey backs, white breasts … I see. How deep can they swim?”

“About from here to here,” Henry said, indicating roughly fifteen yards.

“Truly?”

“Yes, they swim with their wings,” Henry said. “Gull,” he added to himself. It was a convenient word to say, short and contained within the mouth.

“What was that word again?”

Gull
, Henry said, using the deepsman’s expression.

John imitated the word. The sound was ridiculous, and Henry laughed out loud.

“Hm.” John tried again.

“You say it very ill,” Henry said happily.

“Can you understand when I say it?”

Henry shook his head. “I know you are trying to. But if you said it to a deepsman, he would swim away.”

John made a few more attempts, but his voice, unbroken though it was, lacked the range to deliver the high word at a steady enough pitch.

“You are just squeaking like a bird,” Henry said.