Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) (11 page)

Understanding had grown in Ieuan’s eyes too, but it was replaced almost immediately by puzzlement. “What if Boniface calls your bluff? Would you really take England to war against France?”

“If I have to,” I said. “I will not give way on what matters most. I will not.”

Chapter Ten

I
lay in bed, staring up at the canopy, my brain churning with worst-case scenarios.

Lili rolled over and put a hand on my shoulder. “You could at least close your eyes and pretend to be trying to sleep.”

“I’m deciding whether or not to get up.” I flung a forearm over my eyes, forcing them closed. They itched with tiredness, but my brain wouldn’t let me rest. It had been a wild day.

“If you don’t sleep, you won’t be good for anything tomorrow.” Lili laid her head on my chest, and I put my arm around her.

“That’s why I hadn’t gotten up yet.” I turned my head to look towards the window. I’d left the shutters open to better hear the rain on the window, hoping the steady drumming would help me empty my brain. Lili’s breathing slid into sleep, and after a moment, I eased away from her, leaving her head pillowed in the crook of her arm.

I was a lucky man, no doubt about it. I didn’t actually intend to throw my kingship away, which was one reason I’d focused my attention today on rescuing the heretic rather than repeating my speech about freedom of religion to the townspeople. I would fight for my throne as long as there was something to fight for, because I didn’t feel like my work was finished yet, but knowing that I had Lili to come home to made the possibility of any other loss easier to bear.

I’d sent a rider to Clare at Tonbridge, but his castle was in western Kent, forty miles away. It would be a day or two before I would hear back from him. I tried not to wish for a cell phone more than once a day. Since the busload of people had arrived, we’d acquired some technical ability we hadn’t had before, and a telegraph line was in our future. But not yet, and even if we did have it, odds were it wouldn’t have run from Canterbury to Tonbridge.

Meanwhile, I’d spent the day in conference with my advisers and cabinet, preparing for the possibility of war. The logistics were ridiculous. Just feeding the thousands of men I’d have to bring across the channel took an army of cooks. Weapons, ships, siege engines—not to mention strategy—all had to be worked out. The pope was not going to be pleased. And even if the preparations were a complicated bluff, it had to look real. It had to be more than talk and pretense, and that meant some serious activity on our part.

If Acquasparta had spies at Canterbury Castle, I wanted them to be reporting to him that I was going to war. I wanted him to be lying awake staring up at the ceiling too.

I pulled on my breeches and boots, since stone floors are really cold on the feet, tucked in my shirt, and threw the warm black cloak I’d worn to the Archbishop’s palace around my shoulders.

Before leaving the room, I poked my nose through the doorway to where Arthur slept in an adjacent room. My three-year-old son lay tucked up in his big bed, as befitted the future King of England. His nanny slept on a trundle bed beside him. Most nights, he ended up in our room anyway, wiggling under the covers between Lili and me. It was early enough that he hadn’t yet woken. I was thinking it must be somewhere around two in the morning. I’d lain awake a long while, but we still had some hours before dawn.

“Sire.” The guard on duty outside my door bowed as I passed him.

“As you were,” I said.

Another guard stood at the top of the stairs at the end of the corridor. At the sight of me coming towards him, he disappeared, only to return almost immediately. I knew what he was doing: the word would be spreading throughout the keep that the king was awake and on the move. It wasn’t fair that everyone else had to be awake when I was, which was why I hadn’t left my room earlier.

The monarchy had all sorts of hereditary and appointed offices, many of which were really cabinet members—the Lord High Treasurer, for instance, or the Lord High Chancellor. Clare, Bohun, Mortimer, Callum, and Carew all had their places. They didn’t serve in the royal household, however—though if the king was awake at two in the morning, certain companions might show up. As King of England, I had remarkably little authority over my own household, and whenever I tried to change these kinds of details, I only ended up hurting the feelings of the people whose job it was to be awake. I felt guilty about waking the castle, but not enough to return to bed.

At least I’d managed to dress myself without Jeeves, my manservant, but even as I thought that, Jeeves hustled down the hall towards me, straightening his soft hat. “Sire.” He bowed deeply. “What do you require?”

“I require you to go back to sleep,” I said. “How am I to trust your assessment of my attire if I know you’re operating on half a night’s sleep?”

“My lord—”

“Go, Jeeves. I’m fine. Just off to do a little paperwork.”

“Yes, sire.” Jeeves bowed and backed away. I hoped he would actually sleep, but more likely he’d lie down fully dressed to await events.

The square keep of Canterbury Castle stood six stories high, with towers on the corners adding the last level to the battlement. The exterior was all stone, but the interior was constructed in wood, which made the whole structure far more comfortable than it would have been had the castle been built all in stone. The corridors and stairs were built inside the eleven-foot-thick walls, allowing passage from room to room. The toilets (sometimes called
garderobes
) were in the walls too, accessible usually by an offset hallway in an attempt keep the smell contained and discourage it from wafting into the corridors.

Great wooden beams supported each ceiling and floor above. The bottom floor contained the kitchen and storage areas. Next up was the great hall, which took up almost the whole of the level, but also included my receiving room/office for smaller gatherings, in which I met my advisers throughout the day. Above that were the apartments of lords such as Callum and Ieuan. Then came a whole floor devoted to my needs, though Ieuan and Bronwen, with their small daughter, Catrin, had a room there too. And above that were more apartments and quarters.

The stone stairways were in circular towers on opposite corners of each floor. They spiraled down to the right, so if an invader was moving up towards me, he’d have to fight me left-handed. Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem today, and I met no opposition as I went down the steps to my office. When I reached the next level down, however, I glanced into the corridor to see three men of the garrison in heated conversation halfway along it. It was dark in the stairwell, so they didn’t notice me right away, but when the conversation continued, and after a moment included the words, ‘wake Lord Ieuan,’ I revealed myself and came forward. “Is there a problem?”

The eyes of the guard closest to me bugged out. “S-s-sire!” All three men stiffened to attention, bowed, and stiffened again as if unable to decide which form of obeisance was most appropriate when caught unawares at two in the morning in a corridor with the King of England.

These men belonged to Canterbury’s garrison, and I didn’t recognize any of them. Still, I canted my head, waiting for an answer. After a few seconds’ pause, one of the other guards, a young man of perhaps twenty, spoke up. “I noticed an unusual light coming from the toilet just now. We were wondering if we should wake someone to inspect it.”

“What’s your name?”

“George, sire.”

“Unusual how?” I said, though I hadn’t ever seen a medieval toilet with any light coming from it at all unless someone had left a candle burning in a sconce. I thought back to the Spiderman nightlight that had been plugged in above the sink in my bathroom back in Oregon. Even after I’d repainted my bedroom and bath orange at the age of thirteen to reflect the loyalties of my new teenage self, I’d left the nightlight in the socket.

“Well—” The soldier glanced at each of his companions, neither of whom gave him any help. “There’s a … a … glow coming up the shaft.”

“Show me,” I said.

George turned smartly on his heel and paced away down the corridor towards the far end. He took me first to the guard room that marked the corner of the keep, and then through it to the toilet.

Medieval latrines varied in quality and cleanliness. My sister, Anna, had a thing about them, and designing a better toilet had been a quest of hers. The best simple latrines consisted of a small room with one or two wooden toilet seats, which wouldn’t have been out of place in any American home, placed over a chute of varying sizes that emptied outside the curtain wall.

The most hygienic and best-smelling ones dropped the waste into a moat or a channel filled with water, which then had a mechanism to move the waste away from the castle. The monastery associated with Canterbury’s cathedral, like other monasteries I’d visited in Wales and England, had an elaborate underground water system with channels and pipes that moved fresh water into the complex and waste water out of it. The monks had built these systems without access to modern concepts of cleanliness or disease. It wasn’t rocket science—just forward thinking and a basic knowledge of hydraulics.

The toilets in this castle, however, were less advanced because the keep wasn’t built into the curtain wall. While the guarderobe looked the same as anywhere—a narrow cubby hole built into the wall of the keep—the toilet shafts consisted of a chute leading to a cesspit below.

“My apologies, sire, but you have to look right inside,” George said, wincing at having to ask.

I peered past the seat to where he was pointing and then, holding in a breath, looked closer. A faint white glow lit the interior of the chute about eighteen inches below the level of the toilet seat. A flashlight would have been better, but I swung around to one of the other soldiers who’d come with us and snapped my fingers at him. “Get me a candle.”

He ran to the nearest sconce on the wall, which held three candles behind a clay shield to block drafts, took out one candle, and brought it to me. Leaning with it into the toilet chute, trying to breathe only through my nose and hoping the flame wouldn’t ignite the methane gases that had built up in the chute from the waste below, I tried to figure out where the light was coming from. Now that I’d brought the candle closer, the glow had diminished in comparison, but it was still there, emanating from a block of clay that had been smushed into the crevices between the stones that made up the toilet shaft.

The light would have been brighter if a layer of the clay hadn’t been inexpertly smeared over it. By the same token, if the clay had been laid on a bit thicker, hiding the light inside the brick, and the toilet had been less engulfed in darkness, nobody would have seen it at all.

Which would have been a disaster beyond imagining.

My heart beating out of my ears, I straightened up, bringing the light with me, and looked at the soldier who’d brought me the candle. “Wake Lord Callum and send him here. Right now.”

“Yes, sire!”

Before the soldier took a step, however, I caught his arm. “And when you’ve done that, wake Lord Bevyn, Lord Carew, and everyone else on the floors above us.”

The man nodded and ran off.

I pointed at George. “Lord Ieuan’s chamber is opposite mine. He will rouse the men of the garrison. Wake him, and then go to my wife and son. It will be your job to get them out of the castle. Tell her ‘Cilmeri’, and she’ll come with you.”

Without cell phones, I’d worried that in times of danger I would almost always have to send a messenger to Lili instead of going myself. ‘Cilmeri’ was the emergency code word Lili and I had chosen.

“Get everyone up: William de Bohun, Arthur’s nanny, Jeeves—all of whom should be sleeping in rooms adjacent to my chamber. Take all of them out of the castle by the wicket gate to St. Mildred’s Church. You know it?”

It was a little church a stone’s throw from the castle. It was the first place that came to mind that was a safe distance away but was also where I could find them easily. The Archbishop’s palace was too far away, and I didn’t want to send them there anyway.

George nodded vigorously, though his brow furrowed. “Cilmeri?”

“She’ll know when you say it that your message came from me.” Cilmeri was the place where my father would have died in an ambush had Anna and I not arrived in my aunt’s minivan to save him. “Everyone must be as quiet as possible. I don’t want anyone outside the castle to know that the alarm has been raised until it’s impossible to hide. Get them out!”

Wide-eyed but obedient, George disappeared. I looked at the last soldier, an older man with white in his beard and calm gray eyes. My urgency was clear, but he gazed at me steadily, awaiting orders.

“We need the whole castle cleared, down to the last man, woman, and child,” I said. “Go first to Sir Thomas in his quarters above the gatehouse. He will wake everyone else. Send the women and children to St. Mildred’s chapel, same as George. Quietly.”

“What about the men?”

“Once they’ve cleared everyone out, they need to get out too. Don’t wait for me or further orders. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

I didn’t think we could avoid a panic, but since I was the only one who knew what the glow in the toilet might be about, I hoped to contain everyone’s fear as long as I could. I didn’t want whoever had put the bomb in the toilet to panic and set it off prematurely. Particularly when I was standing on top of it. Whether or not that was a danger depended on whether the bomb had a timer or could be detonated remotely.

The soldier left, replaced within a few seconds by Callum. “What is it?”

Never in my life had I been more relieved to see anyone than I was to see him in that moment. Callum was the soldier, not me, and I was out of my depth in this.

I directed Callum’s attention to the light shining up from the shaft below the toilet seat. Wordlessly, Callum took the candle from me and, as I had, leaned close so he could look into the chute to see what was causing the glow. “It’s PE-4, what you call C-4.” He kept the tone of his voice completely even. When I’d given the orders to the guards, I’d had to grit my teeth to stop them from chattering so badly I couldn’t speak. Still bent over, Callum turned his head to look up at me. “I can dismantle this right now, but are there more explosives somewhere else? In other toilets perhaps?”