Chapter 29 You
You
The winter ends, as winters always do.
Spring brings shorter nights and shorter vigils.
You sleep sometimes. On your knees in the chapel.
Curled up on the floor in amongst the documents and books, soothed by the familiar smell of vellum and ink, even with the aftertaste of absence.
In your bed, in the middle of the afternoon, or in the early hours when the chaplain finds you dozing at your prayers and raises you gently by the elbow to lead you there.
Still your eyes are bruised and bloodshot, and your pallor provokes the court to rumour.
Your servants try to keep it from you, but you know what they’re saying.
That you’re mad. That you lost your mind when Bisclavret disappeared.
You didn’t lose your mind. But sometimes it feels as though he took your heart with him, and left you barely alive, your blood sluggish in your veins and your breath thin in your lungs.
You don’t fail to notice when his wife marries his cousin and heir.
It’s natural enough: he has some kinsman’s duty to look after her now that her husband is gone, and she could do worse than to marry him and keep her home.
But it takes some effort to push the uncharitable rumours from your mind and wish them both the happiness you’ve lost, and you do not invite his cousin to court to take Bisclavret’s place as a knight.
You withdraw from your councillors and advisors, leave your seneschal to handle the business of ruling, and let mourning dictate the rhythms of your life.
You would spend a year and a day in Masses for his soul, if only it would help.
Nunc suscipe, terra, fovendum, gremioque hunc concipe molli.
Take him, earth, for cherishing, to thy tender breast receive him.
Except that you have no body to bring, not even a ruin; no bones to settle in the soil to be planted with flowers where they sleep.
Perhaps if you did, you would not feel quite so much as though you failed him.
Your knights and nobles try to draw you from your penitential self-enclosure.
They beg you to spar with them, to hunt with them, to ride out to tournaments with them – but you’ve lost your stomach for the kill, or even the pretence of it.
You hunt once, and when you see the deer struggling in a pool of its own blood as the hounds slaver and growl, all you can picture is Bisclavret, pinned to the ground by the wolf.
The agony of those final moments. It sickens you; you turn back, and leave the rest to complete the hunt alone.
It will pass. You’ve been told this – that the grief will ease.
You aren’t sure how that can be true, when Bisclavret will never stop being gone and the world will never be any less empty of him.
But perhaps it comforts others to claim that it will grow easier.
Perhaps they find solace in those lies. Sometimes, you’re even capable of pretending that you believe them, mustering a smile and thanking them for their kind words and thoughts.
They cannot bring him back. You want them gone from you until they can.
It doesn’t pass. But you grow numb to it, as the weeks wear on.
Your mind hardens against the agony of remembering, as a body does to an old wound.
Bisclavret is dead ceases to be a fiery lance of pain every time you brush against it by mistake, and becomes a dull ache, a gnawing emptiness.
One day it will be nothing but a scar, inured to sensation.
As spring wears on and the weather grows warmer, you go less often to the chapel.
You speak prayers for him morning and night, but you trust the chaplain and his clerks to speak the Masses.
You commission a fine psalter. You donate gold to a monastery, that they will pray for his soul.
You begin once more to take care of your hair and clothes, to look a little more like a king.
Finally, with the hardships of Lent forgotten amidst Easter revelry, you put on your crown and sword and you play the king again.
The first few times you train with your knights, they’re careful with you, treading around your feelings and rusted combat skills as though you’re made of precious glass.
You would resent it, but these months of inactivity have weakened you, your body half-starved from long nights of desperate piety and endless fasting, so all you feel is gratitude.
Gradually, as your mask improves and so does your strength, they begin to treat you again as they once did, making jokes when you fail to parry an obvious strike and poking fun at simple errors.
They invite you to drink with them, and to your surprise, you agree, though melancholy creeps back as the wine chases the cold from your veins.
‘We miss him too, you know,’ says your knight in green, an uncharacteristic sincerity in his voice. ‘He was our brother, and we loved him as such.’
Yes, they miss him too. And no matter how much you wish to tell them that they cannot possibly understand your mourning, you know that would do them a disservice.
Of course they understand your grief – especially this knight, who took Bisclavret under his wing and treated him as a brother.
You could have wept together, all this time, if you were not too proud to come to them with your agony.
‘He was taken too soon,’ you say, which isn’t anything they don’t already know, but they raise their cups in salute and drink to honour the remark, because it’s true enough to be worth toasting. He was taken far too soon.
You’re deep in your cups, all of you, by the time the conversation comes around to Bisclavret again; none of you have the courage to talk about him sober, too afraid of your own grief. ‘Will you avenge him?’ one asks you. ‘Find the wolf who took him and have it skinned?’
You’ve thought of this often, remembering the implacable gaze of the wolf, the pitiless glint of those eyes.
Would it help at all, to know that his killer is gone?
Perhaps, but the thought of it exhausts you.
Your previous wolf-hunts have borne no fruit, and to pin your hopes of closure upon its death is to condemn yourself to heartache.
I have no taste for hunting wolves, he told you once, and you have come to know how he feels.
‘It won’t bring him back,’ you say instead, which isn’t a real answer, but they take it as one and don’t press you.
Except for one. ‘Nothing will bring him back.’ Your knight in green, again.
His tongue is sharp with truth and has an edge honed by years of friendship.
He has known you since you were beardless and green as new branches, and once you trusted him with your joys and griefs and foolishness.
There’s no malice in his words now, but they still cut like axe-heads.
‘Grief will not bring him back. Nor will laughter. Seeking comfort in others or secluding yourself to mourn – it makes no difference. He’s gone regardless. ’
‘What,’ you say with difficulty, ‘would you have me do?’
‘Live, my lord,’ he says. ‘And I think I knew Bisclavret well enough to wager he’d say the same if you asked him. You’re no use to anyone withered into an early grave and a crown left spinning in your absence.’
You’re no use to anyone anyway.
But he’s right. You cannot live in a world with Bisclavret in it – a cruel truth – and you cannot unmake yourself or change the past. But your people need a king who cares enough to rule them, not a man who locks himself away in his chambers and leaves the decisions to others, consumed by his own desires and his own grief.
Your father did not send you away that you might hide when the time came to use the lessons of your exile – and if you did not learn the bloodthirstiness that he hoped for, what of it, when your kingdom is at peace? You learned to do better than this.
You will do better than this.
Neglect has grown like moss over your understanding of politics and your grasp of the sharp rocks in the currents of your nobles’ petty disputes and longstanding grievances.
You are fortunate that your seneschal is a true and honest man, unready to take advantage, but you are perpetually aware that he honed his acumen in your father’s service.
If he has practice at ruling the kingdom, that is only another sign of your father’s failure, and you will not perpetuate the injustice of his self-serving rule.
But you are not too proud to learn from such a vassal as this, and the seneschal guides you readily through the weeds of inheritance laws and unpaid taxes, the conflicts over the drawing of borders and the struggle of a failed crop or three fishing boats lost to the sea.
Gradually, you become canny, and start to see again the pieces of the game.
You begin to understand the reports from your treasury, and no longer need explained to you every careful column of figures.
Your father may have hosted great feasts and hunts with little care for how they would be paid for, but he left you with debts.
Frivolity, charity, and necessity all must be diligently budgeted, expenditure recorded with care in the castle’s ledgers.
If you wish to summon musicians and poets to chase the mourning from the shadows of the hall, you will need coin to pay them with, and food to feast them with, and a merrier court to hear their stories.
You throw yourself headfirst into the complications of kingship, your mind so full of figures and names that you’ve no time to sink into the mire of grief that held you captive before.
The grey fog that has always haunted you nips at your heels, persistent as ever, but where you might have expected grief to feed it, instead it has diminished it, made farcical the weight.
What emptiness was that, what loss, compared to this? Your mind is clear, lanced by pain.