Epilogue
The dream takes the queens one by one, creeping across Elben like a cloud’s shadow.
It takes Aragon in her royal sheets, and she cries out, waking Princess Tudor who has been slumbering on a cot at the foot of the bed.
Parr is thrown from deep dreams of movement in shadows into the tempest of the nightmare.
Seymour, curled in her grief, eyes and heart raw, falls from doze into the vision.
Howard, cocooned in Florin’s arms, the wash of the Kyttle Falls outside her window, twitches.
And in a darkened dungeon, cold and shivering, a lonely woman, gown studded with priceless pins, thinks she has passed from waking nightmare into insanity.
This is what they see.
The procession is maudlin as it trundles inevitably up the icy mountain paths and comes to a stop outside the royal baths.
Cloaked figures emerge from the bath house as though they have been expecting the procession’s arrival.
The large, low carriage at the centre of the train is secured, and six men in the cambric of minor courtiers scuffle to pull something from inside.
Cromwell, his skin covered in the scars of welts, barks orders.
Wolsey, huddled in large fur coats and looking very, very ill, says nothing but only watches through pale eyes.
A stretcher carrying a large bulk swaddled in velvets and silks is conveyed into the bath house.
It is unmoving, but the queens have a sense of malice rearing from that bulk, that prone shape.
Howard thinks of stifled songbirds; Seymour of her dying and desperate brother.
The prisoner thinks of the soldiers’ drumbeat.
Aragon thinks of her first husband, the cruel boy and his stonelike father; Parr is reminded of nothing so tangible, only the sickbeds of her first two spouses, and the knowledge of the mercy of their deaths.
The dream takes them into the baths, where the steam whirls and eddies around so many shapes.
Cromwell talks in a low voice to the keeper of the baths, a short, austere man wearing the headdress of Cernunnos.
They look together at the nuns, all six of them in their doe-inspired hoods and simple gowns of white linen.
Charles Brandon bends over the bundle on its stretcher, and pulls back the covers.
In her sleep, Howard reaches for Florin’s hand, clinging to him.
Henry, the king that was, lies pale, his skin blotched and blue, on the stretcher. The wound at his neck, the one inflicted by his sister, is a strike of scarlet that is almost black in that dim light.
There is a commotion, like a fluttering of butterfly wings, and the six does step forward to look upon Henry’s body. Their faces are blank. Parr recognises the expressions, even in her sleep, as the result of drugs. Perhaps the flower of Esphagia, which makes one suggestible.
The keeper of the baths leaves, and returns momentarily with a bundle of fabric.
He opens it to reveal six golden knives, each one sharp as midwinter.
Aragon has the strangest sensation of inevitability.
Seymour does not wish to see what happens next.
She knows she dreams. She knows she must wake, and yet whatever power is showing her this vision will not release her.
The keeper’s voice is hoarse, unused to speaking loudly, but it grows in confidence as his words pour forth: “Oh Highfather, on this, the mountain where you declared victory over the heathen goddess, we offer you blood freely given. Blood humble and loyal and true. We invite you, we beg you, oh Highfather, to bestow your presence upon our most worthy king.”
As one, the does raise their golden knives. As one, they draw the blades across their necks, their white gowns turning red. They do not utter a sound as they bleed out upon Henry’s corpse. Even their death fall is delicate, muffled by the steam.
Wolsey surveys them in horror, but the rest are stoic. This must be done. This is war. There will be blood and suffering.
The keeper raises his hands once more. “Bless us, oh Highfather! Bless us, and bless our martyred king, who died in pursuit of your glory!”
He pants with the passion of his words, perhaps more overcome by the death of his companions than he might like to admit. The steam of the baths swirls, flickering strangely in the dimness.
Then, one by one, the candles lighting the space go out.
In the hush that follows, there is a sense of impending thunder.
There is a shifting sound in the darkness. Moving, shaking and then an awful cracking, like bones being broken. Crack crack crack crack crack.
“My lord?” Wolsey’s voice says, tremulous.
One by one, the candles flicker back on. At first, the queens can see nothing through the thickened steam. Cromwell frowns, also peering through the fog. Then the keeper starts back, pointing at the stretcher.
It is now empty, and of the bodies of the six does of the baths, little remains but their discarded gowns, still red with their spilled lifeblood.
The men spin round, and their faces fill with wonder and horror and everything in between. Cromwell is the first to kneel.
Towering over them, rising from the water of the baths, which bubbles red, is Henry.
Yet this is not the Henry who wed Howard and Seymour, Parr and Aragon.
He is handsome still, in form very much the same man, but he is taller, stronger, his muscles bulging from his naked body as though they have a life of their own.
Aragon feels the loss the most – she still remembers the loving boy who rode to her from his father’s deathbed to ask her to marry him.
There is no vestige of that boy left in the king who stands now in the baths.
His eyes are smaller than they were before, his mouth a mean little line.
No human words come from that mouth, only a godly roar as two horns, like the horns of a stag, erupt from his forehead and branch out like spiders’ legs.
The horns are like no stag horn known on Elben.
They are made of human bones, delicate and strong.
The bones of the women who sacrificed themselves to bring him to the mortal realm.
Cernunnos-who-was-Henry looks up at the ceiling of the baths, and it is only then that the queens see he has been crouching.
With one hand he pulls down the roof of the baths, tearing apart the rock and ice as though it were nothing.
He stands fully upright, the height of two men now, and surveys those kneeling at his feet.
“Oh Highfather,” Cromwell says. “We serve you and your cause.”
Cernunnos surveys the land beyond the baths, and Howard shivers in her sleep, as if feeling his gaze come to rest upon Plythe and the treacherous women sleeping therein.
Cernunnos, Henry, roars once more, then looks down at his servants. “Rise,” he says, in a voice unused to worldly speech. “Rise, and let us crush the heathen woman once and for all.”
“Your will,” the men say. Their heads touch the ground, and their bodies begin to bubble and morph. Far above them, the inky sky flickers, for a breathless moment, in shades of dawn.