Pavane (21 page)

tore her arms from the men who held her, dropped to her knees and panted. When she had finished she raised a face that was blazing white to the lips; and she began to swear. She swore in English and French, Celtic, and Latin and Gaelic; she cursed Sir Anthony and his men, promising them a dozen different deaths in a flat, nearly gentle voice that seemed to hold the Provost Marshall fascinated. He stopped bothering with his thumb, stood frowning; then he recollected himself and bellowed for his men to fetch the riderless horses. The seneschal was forced to mount; a soldier swung Eleanor up in front of him and the party struck out past the crackling wreck of the steamer and across the heath, intending no doubt to rendezvous with some fishing boat that would take the captives out of reach of any pursuit. In those days there were men in Poole who would have ferried the King himself into bondage if the price was right. Whatever scheme Sir Anthony had in mind was never put into effect. Somewhere across the heath the Signallers had seen, watching the distant fight through their great Zeiss lenses, and the pall of smoke from the burning train had been easily visible from Corfe. Signals flew, alerting not only the castle garrison but the militia of Wareham; the party was intercepted before it reached the sea. The Provost Marshall checked when he saw he was cut off, and would have made great play of having Eleanor as a hostage had she not bitten the wrist of the man who held her and tumbled off a horse for the second time that day. She landed in a stand of gorse, rose scratched and bleeding and more furious than ever; the fight was over within minutes and Sir Anthony and his people threw down their arms. She limped to where they stood on the heath, surrounded by a ring of guns. Men ran to her but she pushed them away. She circled the prisoners slowly, rubbing her hip, picking unconsciously at the grass and twigs on her skirt; and it seemed the rage bubbled and boiled in her brain like the strange fumes of a wine. 'Well, Sir Anthony,' she said. 'We made a little promise on the road. And here in the West, you'll find we keep our word...' He tried to barter with her then, or beg his life; but she stared at him as if he spoke an unknown tongue. 'Ask mercy of the wind,' she said, almost wonderingly. 'Beg to the rocks, or the great waves of the sea. Don't come and whine to me...' She turned aside to the seneschal. 'Hang them,' she said. 'For treason, and for murder...' 'My Lady She screamed at him suddenly, stamping on the ground. 'Hang them...' Beside her a soldier sat a restless horse; she grabbed his jerkin and pulled, nearly tumbling him from the saddle. She was mounted and away before a hand could be raised, riding furiously across the heath, beating the neck of the animal with her fist. The seneschal followed her, leaving, the prisoners to their fate. She reined a mile from the castle, dropped to the ground, and ran to a knoll from where she could see her home spread out before her, the baileys and towers and the flanking hills clear in the bright air. She gripped the stirrup of the seneschal as he rode alongside, fingers twisting the stiff leather. If he'd hoped the wild ride would calm her he was disappointed. She was nearly too angry to speak; the syllables jerked out from her like the cracking of sheets of glass. 'Sir John,' she said, 'before our people came, and took this land with blood at Santlache Field, that place was called a Gate. Is this not true?' He said heavily, 'Yes, my Lady.' 'Why then,' she said, 'let it be so again. Go to my tenants in the Great Plain, and north as far as Sarum Town. Go west to Durnovaria, and east to the village on the Bourne. Tell them...' She choked and steadied herself. 'Tell them, they pay no tithes to Purbeck but in arms. Tell them that Gate is closed, and Eleanor holds the key...' She tore at the seal on her finger. 'Take my ring, and go...' He gripped her shoulder and turned her, staring into her wild eyes. 'Lady,' he said deliberately, 'this is war...' She knocked his hand away, panting for breath. 'Will you go,' she fumed, 'or shall I send another?...' He said nothing else but touched heels to his horse and turned it; galloped north, trailing dust, along the Wareham Road. She mounted again and rode yelling into the valley, scattering the little chugging cars, sending them batwinging into the hedges; and though her soldiers raked their horses bloody, none could match her speed. Messages were despatched at once to Charles in Londinium, but all the semaphores brought back was the news that the King had already sailed for the Americas. Sir Anthony's stroke had been well timed; for though there were rumours the Guild could even get a message to the New World, by means no one could guess at, there was no known way of contacting a ship at sea. Meanwhile the Provost Marshall's supporters were rampaging round the capital threatening death, destruction, and worse while Henry of Rye and Deal, under direct instructions from Rome, was hastily assembling his force. What Eleanor had predicted had to a large extent come true; all sorts of dogs were yapping in the absence of the King. The fact that the quarrel had originally come about as a result of what was now generally admitted to be an administrative error made the situation even more ironic. Her Ladyship faced many problems down in Dorset. She could levy men from the districts round about, the commoners would flock to her banner soon enough; but a standing army must be fed and clothed and armed. For days the rage sustained her while she worked with her captains and house people drawing up the lists of what she would need. Money was clearly the first essential; and for that she rode north, to Durnovaria. What passed between her and her aged grandfather was never known; but for a solid week the crimson-dressed steamers toiled down to Corfe Gate, hauling in produce free. Flour and grain they brought and livestock, salted meat and preserves, shot and powder and wads and musket balls, rope and slow match, oil and kerosene and tar; chain hoists rumbled all night long, derricks powered by panting donkey engines swung load after load high into the keep. Eleanor had no idea what support might be forthcoming from the rest of the country and planned for the worst, packing her baileys with men and supplies. That was how Henry came to find the place so well prepared, and in such a lethal temper.

Eleanor called the seneschal to her room on the evening following the massacre. She was deadly pale, her eyes ringed with dark shadows; she waved him to a chair, sat awhile staring into the firelight and leaping shadows. 'Well, Sir John,' she said finally, 'I've been sitting here thinking up a glorious phrase for the... thing that happened this morning. This is it. "I've blown a Roman gadfly off my walls." Don't you think that's very good?' He didn't answer, and she laughed and coughed. 'It doesn't help of course,' she said. 'All I can see still are those creatures in the ditch, and writhing on the path. Somehow beside that nothing else seems real. Not any more.' He waited again, knowing there was no help in words. 'I've expelled Father Sebastian,' she said. 'He told me there was no forgiving what I'd done, not if I walked barefoot to Rome itself. I told him he'd better leave; if there was no forgiveness he couldn't be a comfort and he was only putting himself in mortal sin by staying I said I knew I was damned because I'd damned myself. I didn't have to wait for any god to do it for me. That was the worst of all of course; I only said it to hurt him but I realised afterwards I meant it anyhow, I just wasn't a Christian any more. I said if necessary I'd raise up a few old gods, Thunor and Wo-Tan perhaps or Balder instead of Christ; for he told me himself many years ago when I was still taking lessons at his knee that Balder was only an older form of Jesus and that there have been many bleeding gods.' She poured wine for herself, unsteadily. 'And then I spent the rest of the afternoon getting drunk. Or trying to. Aren't you disgusted?' He shook his head. He'd never criticised her, not in all her life: and this wasn't the time to start. She laughed again, and rubbed her face. 'I need... something.' she said. 'Maybe punishment. If I ordered you to fetch a whip and beat me till I bled, would you do it?' He shook his head, lips pursed. 'No,' she said. 'You wouldn't, would you... Anything else, but you wouldn't have me hurt. I feel I want to... scream, or be sick, or something. Maybe both. John, when I'm excommunicated, what will our people do?' He'd already considered his answer carefully. 'Disavow Rome,' he said. 'It's gone too far now for anybody to turn back. You'll see that, my Lady.' 'And the Pope?' He thought again for a moment. 'He'll certainly act,' he said, 'and that quickly; but I can't see him ferrying an army all the way from Italy just to put down one strongpoint. What he's almost bound to do is instruct his people in Londinium to march against us in force; and I think too we'll be seeing some of the Seigneurs from the Loire and the Low Countries coming over to see what they can pick up in the confusion. They've been wanting to stake out a few claims on English soil for years enough now, and they'll certainly never get a better chance.' 'I see,' she said wearily. 'What it comes down to is I've made a complete mess of things; with Charles out of the way as well I've played right into their hands. They'll be flocking into England, with the Church's full blessing, to put down armed revolt. What the end of that will be I just can't imagine.' She got up and paced restlessly across the chamber and back. 'It's no good,' she said. 'I just can't sit still and wait, not tonight.' She sent for a writer, and the officers commanding, her troops and artillery; they worked into the small hours drawing up lists of the extra provisions they would need to withstand a full-scale siege. 'There's no doubt,' said Eleanor with a flash of her old practicality, 'that we shall be bottled up for a considerable time; till Charles gets back in fact. There won't be any question of chivalry either, of being let to walk out with our arms or anything like that, the whole thing's far too serious; but at least we shall know by the time we're through who's actually running this country, ourselves or an Italian priest.' She poured wine. 'Well, gentlemen, let's hear your recommendations. You can have anything you need, arms, men, provisions; I only ask one thing. Don't leave anything out. We can't afford to forget any details; remember there's a rope, or worse, waiting for every one of us if we make a single slip…' The seneschal stayed with her after the others had gone, sitting drinking wine in the firelight and talking of all subjects from gods to kings; of the land, its history and its people; of Eleanor, and her family and upbringing. 'You know,' she said, 'it's strange, Sir John; but it seemed this morning when I fired the gun I was standing outside myself, just watching what my body did. As if I, and you too, all of us, were just tiny puppets on the grass. Or on a stage. Little mechanical things playing out parts we didn't understand.' She stared into her wineglass, swilling it in her hands to see flame light and lamplight dance from the goldenness inside; then she looked up frowning, eyes opaque and dark. 'Do you know what I mean?' He nodded, gravely. 'Yes, my Lady...' 'Yes,' she said. 'It's like a... dance somehow, a minuet or a pavane. Something stately and pointless, with all its steps set out. With a beginning, and an end... ' She tucked her legs under her, as she sat beside the fire. 'Sir John,' she said, 'sometimes I think life's all a mass of significance, all sorts of strands and threads woven like a tapestry or a brocade. So if you pulled one out or broke it the pattern would alter right back through the cloth. Then I think... it's all totally pointless, it would make just as much sense backwards as forwards, effects leading to causes and those to more effects... maybe that's what will happen, when we get to the end of Time. The whole world will shoot undone like a spring, and wind itself back to the start...' She rubbed her forehead tiredly. 'I'm not making sense, am I? It's getting too late for me...' He took the wine from her, carefully. She stayed quiet awhile; when she spoke again she was half asleep. 'Do you remember years ago telling me a story?' she asked. 'About how my great uncle Jesse broke his heart when my grandmother wouldn't marry him, and killed his friend, and how that was somehow the start of everything he did... It seemed so real, I'm sure that was how it must have been. Well, I can finish it for you now. You can see the Cause and Effect right the whole way through. If we... won, it would be because of grandfather's money. And the money's there because of Jesse, and he did it because of the girl... It's like Chinese boxes. There's always a smaller one inside, all the time; until they get so small they're too small to see but they keep on going down and down...' He waited; but she didn't speak again.

For days the castle rang with activity; Eleanor's messengers rode out to scour the countryside around bringing in more men, provisions, meat on the hoof. The great lower bailey was prepared for the animals, pens and hurdles lined against the outer walls. The steamers toiled once more bringing cattle cake and baled hay from Wareham, chugging down the road with trailers empty, clanking back through the outer gate to discharge their cargo in heaps on the flattened grass. Everything possible was shifted under cover; what stacks remained exposed were covered by tarpaulins, and turves and stone rubble strewn on top. The fodder would be a prime target were the enemy to bring fire machines with them. All day the hoists clattered and most of the night too, taking the provisions down to the cellars, bringing up quarrels for the crossbowmen, powder and ball for the harquebusiers, charges for the great guns. The semaphores seldom stopped. The country was aflame; Londinium was arming, levies from Sussex and Kent were marching towards the west. Then came worse news. From France, from the castles of the Loire, men were streaming to fight in the Holy Crusade while to the south a second armada was embarking for England. To Eleanor, John sent no word; but his intentions were plainer than speech. Her Ladyship redoubled her efforts. Steamers towing vast iron chains scythed the banks of the wet ditch; working parties fired the scrub from the castle motte, the bushes and trees that had seeded themselves there over the years; and down over the blackened grass went ton after ton of powdered chalk. The slopes would glow now in starlight, showing up the silhouettes of climbing men. Through it all the sightseers came, parking their little cars in the village square, flooding into the castle, through the gates and across the baileys, staring at the guns and the sentries on the walls, poking their noses into this, their prying fingers into that, impeding everybody nearly all the time. Eleanor could have closed her gates; but pride forbade her. Pride, and the counsel of the seneschal. Let the people see, he murmured. Invite their sympathy, appeal to their understanding. Her Ladyship would need all the support she could get from the country in the coming months. On the thirtieth day after the massacre the seneschal rose and dressed at dawn. He walked down softly through the still-sleeping keep, through chambers and corridors let honeycomb-fashion into the huge walls, past arrow slits and fenestellas pouring livid grey light. Past a sentry, dozing at his post; the man jerked to attention, bringing his halberd shaft ringing down onto stone. Sir John acknowledged the gesture, raising a hand thoughtfully, mind far away. Outside, in the raw air of the upper bailey, he paused. Round him the curtain walls loomed from the night, massive shadows topped by the tinier shadows of men; the breath of the guards showed in wisps above their heads. Far below huddled the roofs of the village, dim and blue, odd lights burning here and there; out on the heath a solitary glow showed him where some mason's boy trudged lantern in hand to work. He turned away, eyes seeing but not recording, mind locked inward. At this dawn hour it seemed as always that Time might pause, turning and flowing in on itself before speeding again, urging in the new day. The castle, like a great dim crown of stone, seemed to ride not a hill but a flaw in the timestream, a node of quiet from which possibilities might spread out limitless as the journeyings of the sun. No one, not the seneschal and certainly no one else, could have understood his thoughts at that time. The old thoughts, the first thoughts of the first people ever; for the seneschal was of the ancient kind. At the tip of the second bailey the squat Butavant tower jutted over the precipice of burned grass like a figurehead from the prow of a ship. The seneschal paused at the lower door, queer eyes on the horizon, swivelled slowly to face the Challow tower. And instantly, gracefully, the jointed arms began to flap. He climbed the tower steps, feet shuffling on stone, hearing a drum behind him and a voice. A Page-Signaller scuttled across the bailey; something not more than a lad, hose wrinkled and tabard askew, message pad in hand, knuckling his eyes. Far out over the heath, in the cobalt intermingling of sea and sky, a light gleamed and was lost. Then another and another, and a patch of lighter dark that could have been a sail. As if a fleet had come to anchor, lay dressing its ranks and waiting. At the top of the stair a locked door gave access to a tiny cell set in the thickness of the stone. To that door, the seneschal alone held a key. The key itself was strange, a little round-headed thing that carried instead of wards a wavy crest of brass. He inserted it in the lock, twisted; the door swung open. He left it ajar behind him; his hands worked deftly, assembling the apparatus of magic the Popes in their wisdom had long since disallowed. Shapes of brass and shapes of mahogany tinkled and clattered; a tiny spark flashed blue; his name and questionings fled into an undiscovered Ether, invisible, silent, faster by a thousand times than the semaphores. He smiled quietly, took down paper and stylus and began to write. Footsteps clunked overhead; a voice called urgently. He ignored it, lost to sensation, all his being focused on the thing that sparked and flashed between his fingers. Behind him the door swung inward. He heard the intake of breath, the scrape of a shoe on stone; he half turned, papers in his hands. Behind him the thing on the table clacked shrilly, untouched and unbidden. He smiled again, gently. 'My Lady..-.' She was backing off staring, hand to her throat clutching the wrap she had flung across her shoulders. Her voice husked hollow in the shaft. 'Necromancy...' He left the machine, pattered after her. 'Eleanor..." He caught her at the bottom of the stair. 'Eleanor, I thought you had more wit...' He took her wrist, drew her after him. She moved unwillingly, pulling back; above her the device banged and tutted frantically. She edged round the door, lips parted, one hand flat against the stone, saw the little thing chattering devil-possessed. He started to laugh. 'Here. It isn't good for your people to see.' The door was closed behind her; the lock shut with a snap. Her mouth trembled; she couldn't take her eyes from what lay on the bench. 'Sir John,' she said falteringly.' What is it...?' He shrugged impatiently, hands busy. 'A manifestation of the electric fluid; known to the Guild now for a generation.' She stared at him as if seeing him for the first time. She said wonderingly, 'This is a language?' She drew nearer the bench, no longer afraid. 'Of a sort.' 'Who speaks it to you?' He said shortly, 'The Guild of Signallers. But that is unimportant. My Lady, the semaphores will clack all day. That is what they will say; are saying...' Before he could finish a voice sounded over their heads; it came thickly through the stone, full of resonance and wonder. 'Caerphilly has taken arms...!' She jerked sharply, staring up; her mouth moved, but no sound came. 'And Pevensey,' said the seneschal, reading. 'And Beaumaris, Caerlon, Oxford... Bodiam has declared for the King, Caernarvon has burned its charter. And Colchester, Warwick, Framlingham; Bramber, Cardiff, Chepstow...' She heard no more but ran to him, laughing and swinging her arms round his neck, waltzing round in the tiny space, upsetting wires and batteries and coils. And all day long the noise from the hill went on as the messages came lagging through on the old arms that were no longer of any use. All day till nightfall and far into the dark, spelling out the names in streaming arcs of flame; the old places, the proud places, Dover and Harlech and Kenilworth, Ludlow, Walmer, York... And from far out of the west, calling through the sea mist, the words that were like the tinkling of old armour; Berry, Pomeroy, Lostwithiel, Tintagel, Restormel; while the lights crawled forward from the heath, and far out on the sea. At midnight the arms stopped working; by next morning Corfe Gate was invested, and nothing moved on the semaphore towers but the swaying bodies of men. The rising of the royal and baronial strongholds in every part of the country spared the defenders the main weight of the armada; the armies pushed inland, moving hurriedly and by night, harried by Eleanor's artillery as they passed through the gap in the hills. Some five hundred men remained to lay siege to Corfe. They brought with them or built on the spot a whole range of engines, ballistas, and mangonels; and these with the three great trebuchets Persuader, Faith of Rome, and Dierwolf made play at the walls from the valley and surrounding hillsides. But so extreme was the range, and so great the elevation, that few of the missiles so much as cleared the outer curtain. Mostly they struck the stone below the battlements, bouncing back with hollow booms; the odd shots that landed in the baileys were welcomed by Eleanor's men as additions to their own supplies. The machines set up by Her Ladyship had better sport, and with the great guns caused such havoc that the lines of the besiegers were soon withdrawn beyond the wet ditch. From there the Pope's men mounted attack after attack, varying their methods in the hope of taking the defenders by surprise; but they were invariably driven back. Mantlets were employed, each carried on the backs of a dozen men; sharpshooters blew off the legs of the wretches beneath, tumbling them and their engines back into the stream, leaving long swathes of redness on the flanks of the mount. An attempt at mining was watched with more sympathy than concern, while belfries could only be employed against the outer gate. One was constructed, out on the heath beyond long cannon-shot; a heavy tower hung with wetted hides and with three storeys inside it for snipers. It made its approach one dawn, rumbling through the village street, propelled by a hundred sweating soldiers; but Growler, entrenched behind a triple line of sandbags, disembowelled it with a single shot, blowing men and parts of men into the great ditch to either side. After that there was a lull in the fighting; and the besiegers hailed Eleanor, promising her the forgiveness of John (which wasn't theirs to offer) and asking her what she intended, if she thought she could war with the entire world. Then they sent a herald, with letters purporting to be from Charles, telling her the cause was lost and she must yield to Rome. Him she dismissed; though she offered, if he came again on such a bogus errand, to load him in the sling of a trebuchet and send him back by an airy and quicker route. There followed a greater bombardment than ever. All day long the stones roared in the air, while dust rose from the nearby quarries where roughmasons toiled to shape more rocks for the slings. Men charged the scarps, urged on by officers with primed muskets who offered to shoot waverers in the back. Eleanor taught a terrible lesson. The defenders withdrew, seemingly in confusion, from an entire section of the lower wall. The attackers, yelling like frightened fiends, ran for the Martyr's Gate, bunched there hammering and tearing at the bars of the portcullis. They realised their mistake too late to save themselves. The outer grating, hauled out of sight in the stone, slid down, imprisoning them like animals in a cage; and through the vents above their heads poured the scalding oil. Then the besiegers, rendered more cautious, sat down in earnest to starve the castle out; but when November came round, and Christmas and the New Year, the flags still flew above the high keep, the oriflamme and the flowers and leopards of Eleanor's house. Still there was no word of the King; neither thaumaturgy nor wireless telegraphy availed the seneschal now, the land was dumb. Then at last there was news, brought by a Serjeant of Signallers who worked his way through the enemy lines one dusk, dying already from an arrow broken off short in his back. Beaumaris had fallen, and Caerlon, and the mighty Tower of Dubris had taken forty days before abandoning the fight. Eleanor stayed up late that night, walking the tower rooms and the baileys, heaped now with the debris of the battle. To her came the seneschal, in the dim time before dawn when the torches burned amber and guttering, when the sentries nodded at their posts or started up alarmed at the whisperings of oiled silk windowpanes. The mist was rising on the Great Heath, and the moon eclipsed by cloud. 'Tell me, Sir John,' she said, and her voice was lost and tiny, barely stirring the harsh air. 'Come to the window here, and tell me what you see...' He stood silent a long time. Then, heavily, 'I see the night mists moving on the hills, and the watch fires of our enemies...' He made to leave her; but she called him sharply. 'Fairy...' He paused, back turned to her; and as he stood she used his proper name, the sound by which he was known among the Old Ones. 'I told you once,' she said acidly, 'when I required the truth, then you would know. Now I charge you. Come to me again, and tell me what you see.' She stood close while he thought, head in hand; he could feel the warmth of her in the night, scent the faint presence of her body. 'I see an end to everything we know,' he said at last. 'The Great Gate broken, John's banners on the walls.' She pursued him. 'And me, Sir John? What for me?' He didn't immediately answer and she swallowed, feeling the night encroach, the dark slide into her body. 'Is there death?' she said. 'My Lady,' he said gently, 'there is death for everyone...' She threw her head back then and laughed, as she had laughed months before in the face of Rye and Deal. 'Why then,' she said, 'we must live a little while we can...' And that morning they sallied before it was light, fifty strong, and burned Direwolf; his bones still lie there on the hill. And the long gun Prince of Peace broke the arms of his fellows, arms so stout and long there was no wood to replace them. So they brought the great gun Holy Meg, and she and the culverin talked to each other across the valley till the smoke rolled back between the hills like steam from a boiling pot.