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

My men came through, bellowing the call until the people around them joined in. I lifted my hands again to raise the people to their feet, even as Carew and Callum pulled the heretic away, through the gateway in the wall behind me that separated the graveyard from the monastery grounds. I had none of my men beside me, but I didn’t need them. The people were on their feet, bowing as I passed them, and the threat was over.

I couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t what I’d said, but because I’d been the most recent person to speak to them. They’d been about to lynch a man on the word of Acquasparta. Like any crowd, they were quick to anger, slower to calm, but eager to follow whoever was willing to lead them.

For the last few minutes, that person had been me, but it had been touch-and-go there for a minute and could have just as easily ended badly. I’d been lucky.

I’d also just defied, in the most blatant and open way possible, those who wanted to see the Inquisition in England. I’d thrown down my gauntlet at Acquasparta’s feet. Even if I wanted to, there was no turning back now.

Chapter Eight

I
strode back into the great hall of Canterbury Castle, my heart still pounding from the encounter with the mob. We’d brought the heretic with us, along with the ringleaders who’d been about to hang him, for no other reason than because I couldn’t simply release them all into the city again. They were cooling their heels in separate rooms in the barracks—probably adjacent to the room where Mike and Noah had been left—until we could figure out what to do with them.

In faltering English, the heretic had said his name was Martin. Once we switched to French, he became more voluble, explaining that he’d come to Canterbury from Gascony with his family, having heard that England had become a refuge for those who believed as he did. He swore he’d never shared his beliefs with anyone, and it wasn’t clear how Acquasparta had learned of them. After hearing that he had a family, I’d immediately sent men to find them and bring them into the castle too. With the crowd subdued and dispersed, I hoped we could put the incident behind us.

William de Bohun, my squire, was waiting for me a few paces inside the hall. He looked to top out in height at about five foot ten, a few inches shorter than I was, but he’d filled out in the last year. Soon I would have to knight him and find myself a new squire. Before he could speak, I pointed at him. “I need my sword.”

He bowed, “Yes, sire,” and scuttled away to do my bidding.

I turned around to find Callum, his face calm, looking at me. His eyes flicked right and left, drawing my attention to the various onlookers in the hall. I wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding my emotions, and an angry king was a fearful sight. I’d been king for only four years, and many still remembered the towering rages of King Edward. By contrast, I worked hard not to expend my temper on my underlings and never in public.

Instead of speaking—because I didn’t trust myself to speak—I stalked towards the doorway that would take me to my receiving room, Callum on my heels. Once inside, I dismissed my various secretaries who were laboring over today’s papers and turned on my friend. “What was that?”

“An ambush, my lord.”

I waved a hand at him. “Don’t call me that. David. I’m David to you right now.” I paced to my throne but didn’t sit, instead turning back to look at Callum. “Why did Acquasparta arrange for that man’s arrest? Why the three untenable requests?”

Callum took in a breath and let it out. “He arrested that man in this city within your vicinity to test the limits of your position. He wanted to bring the matter of heresy to a head and dispatch it.”

“Well, he sure did that.” I was already calming down. I ran a hand through my wet hair and came to a halt before the fire, which was smoldering low in the hearth. It wasn’t a cold day, but the rain, which had lessened while I was speaking with the papal legate, had picked up again during the ride back from the cathedral to the castle.

Callum added, “I do not believe he foresaw any of the events that followed, neither the mob nor the extent of your determination to prevent him from pursuing heretics in England. Fortunately for us, whatever plan he did have backfired, and now Acquasparta has nothing to show Boniface for his efforts.”

“He doesn’t?” I said. “Why do you say that?”

“You saved a man from a lynching,” he said. “You gave a speech too, first to your men in front of Romeyn, which before today I wouldn’t have recommended, and then to a crowd of commoners. But none but they heard it, and who among them could understand more than one word in three? It gives us breathing space.”

I scoffed under my breath. “I would have preferred a direct challenge. I don’t want breathing space.”

“You do, actually,” Callum said gently. “We need time to figure this out, especially after the murders.”

He’d brought me back down to earth. A quiet knock at the door at the back of the room did the rest. Callum went to open it, revealing Lili standing on the threshold. She looked past him to me, and I held out an arm to her. She hurried forward and wrapped her arms around my waist, hugging me. I kissed her temple. “I’m okay.”

“Carew told me what happened. First with Mike and Noah and then at the Archbishop’s palace. You—” She broke off, seemingly at a loss for words.

“I did what I had to,” I said.

“I know that, but you could have been hurt!” Her voice went high on the last word, and I heard tears in it.

“Nobody was going to harm me. They had no weapons—”

“Nor did you! And you didn’t know that at the time.” She gave a very Welsh ‘ach’ at the back of her throat and pounded me on the chest with the flats of both hands. “Why do I even bother? You will do what you think is right.”

I took both of her hands in mine and kissed them. “I have to.”

She blew out her cheeks. “I know.”

“If it’s any comfort, Acquasparta seemed to have been taken by surprise by the vehemence of the crowd,” Callum said. “He intended to arrest the heretic in front of David, not kill him.”

“Why?” Lili said, which had been my question, but before Callum could answer, Lili waved a hand. “Never mind. I know why.” She looked up at me. “To test Dafydd.”

I released a sigh and walked to one of the ornate chairs near the fire to sit, very tired where before I’d had too much energy to contain. “Everyone’s motivations are murky. I can’t figure out the purpose of the pope’s demands either. Why put me in a corner, first by asking something of me he knows I can’t give easily, and then by forcing me to show—in public—how far I’m willing to go to protect a heretic?”

“What demands?” Lili said.

I regaled her with the tale of Acquasparta’s three issues.

Her brow furrowed. “He wants you to refuse. He wants you to deny the requests.”

Callum gave a low growl. “She’s right. The latter two, in particular, are outrageous. He has to know that you would never agree to them, and that you
could
never agree to them.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” I said. “What happens when I do refuse? Does the pope retaliate by excommunicating me? By placing all England under interdict? What would he gain by that?” While an England under interdict meant priests couldn’t perform sacraments and ceremonies, the populace would still belong to the Church. Excommunication, on the other hand, would mean I was thrown out.

“The pope would gain England,” Lili said, “or at the very least, control over it.”

Callum nodded. “Either you capitulate, giving him authority you are currently withholding, or a fight with the Holy See could be the tipping point that forces your barons to unseat you. I wouldn’t have said you were weak at home, but perhaps he knows something we don’t.”

“He doesn’t,” Lili said.

I tapped a finger on the arm of my chair. “And if the barons unseat me? What then?”

“He would seek a more malleable king,” Lili said, “someone he could control more easily.”

“Does he know my barons?” I said, with a laugh.

“Maybe not, but whomever he found might not be so quick to defy him. He would see what happened to you and be more conciliatory.” Callum looked at Lili. “Particularly if he was young like Thomas, Edmund’s son.”

“Pope Boniface has to know about my family’s rocky relationship with the papacy, I suppose,” I said.

“How could he not?” Lili said.

At King Edward’s request, the previous pope had excommunicated my father twice, in 1276 and again in 1282. My great-grandfather had been excommunicated once too for the same reason: refusing to kowtow to the English king.

“Boniface has to be wondering how much of your father’s son you are,” Callum said.

Lili nodded. “He would want to nip any rebellion on your part in the bud.”

“My personal ancestry aside, English kings have a long history of taking a hard line against papal decrees they don’t agree with,” I said. “In fact, Edward persuaded the last pope to excommunicate my father in the first place by putting pressure on him through his moneylenders, who threatened to call in his loans if he didn’t do as Edward asked. Boniface will know that too and think it sets a bad precedent.”

“The new king wouldn’t be placing his throne in jeopardy over a few heretics, either,” Lili said.

“What Boniface really wants is for you to acknowledge his secular power,” Callum said. “We know that. He hasn’t said it out loud yet, but we don’t need him to do so to know what he is thinking.”

Lili looked from Callum to me. “You’re talking about something that happened in Avalon’s history?”

I nodded, my eyes still on Callum. “There’s still something we aren’t seeing. I think he does know something we don’t. He feels he has an advantage over me, beyond his ability to excommunicate me, though I can’t see what that might be.”

“Acquasparta wasn’t exactly forthcoming,” Callum said.

“Did you speak to him or Peckham after you saved the heretic?” Lili said.

“No,” I said. “We left as quickly as we could.”

“Was that wise?” she said.

I laughed. “I don’t know. I wanted to let him stew a bit, to have him unsure of what I was thinking for a change. Besides, I couldn’t see talking to him after what happened.”

Callum smiled. “David might have taken off his head.”

“Deservedly so,” Lili said.

I waved her closer, and when she obliged, I pulled her down to sit on my knee.

Callum was standing with his arms folded across his chest, staring into the fire, not looking at us. “The religious issue is important to Boniface—genuinely so—but I think it is the third item that Boniface cares most about.”

“I was wondering that myself,” I said. “Do you think he’s made a deal with Philip?”

“From the bit Acquasparta let slip, I think he has to have,” Callum said. “He has no business involving himself in Aquitaine otherwise.”

Not always, but often throughout the middle ages, the kings of France had held the ear of the pope far more than the kings of England. England was too independent, with an unruly barony overly concerned about its rights, and with a thriving mercantile class that grew larger and more influential every year and didn’t fit in well with the feudal system.

In classic feudalism, the stratification of society was rigid with very little movement between classes. Sitting at the top of his personal pyramid was the king, with nobles below him, followed by knights. Merchants and craftsmen took up the next level, with peasants and serfs occupying the vast bottom class. This was a generalization, of course, and Boniface felt he should be sitting pretty above the king. Not all churchmen agreed, however, and certainly very few kings did. Especially English kings.

Rather than accept such an arrangement, a little over two hundred years from now, King Henry VIII had made himself head of the Church in England, upending the social and religious order of his time and giving a huge boost to the nascent Protestant Reformation. Nobody but the few of us time travelers were even aware that such an act was possible. Certainly, it would never have occurred to this pope that I could declare myself the head of my own church. But I would rather follow in Henry’s footsteps than sacrifice a single one of my beliefs on the way to giving in to Boniface.

I’d asked my mother about the exact words King Henry VIII had used the day he’d declared himself the head of a church, denying centuries of tradition. But as it turned out, Henry hadn’t. He hadn’t made a bold speech. He’d instituted a process, which began because he wanted to annul his marriage to one of his wives. Martin Luther had already nailed his
Ninety-Five Theses
to the church door in Germany (Saxony at the time), detailing all that was wrong with the Church. And in England there was general unrest and resentment—dating back hundreds of years—against the way the Church was run.

Over the course of the next five years, Henry worked with Parliament, getting them to pass act after act that increased his power over the Church and diminished the Church’s independence from the Crown. This culminated in 1534 with the
Acts of Supremacy
, which declared Henry the “supreme head … of the Church of England.”

My Parliament wasn’t nearly as long-established as Henry’s, and the House of Commons was only four years old, not a couple of hundred years as in Henry’s day. I’d already asked them to revoke any previous laws that prevented Jews from living freely in England, and just last month, they’d agreed that a man’s religious beliefs should not subject him to sanction or punishment by the state
or
by the Church.

If the Pope had heard about that, it was no wonder he’d sent Acquasparta to urge me back into line. I was pretty sure I could convince Parliament to stand with me again if I put my mind to it. There was a reason freedom of religion was part of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, along with its cousins, freedom of the press and freedom of speech. I was willing to stake my entire rule on this one issue, and I’d known from the start, even from the day I’d knelt before the Archbishop of Canterbury and received my crown, that I might have to.