Chapter 29 You #2
But some moments serve only to remind you of what you’re trying to forget.
Bisclavret’s cousin and steward, now his heir, comes to you with a petition for help.
His land is not flourishing: they’ve lost more than a dozen animals to wolves, and the winter is not yet returned.
You send him away with half a promise of help, but before long, the families who work his land come to you begging to be allowed to move elsewhere, to find another lord less afflicted by poor luck.
Every plea is a reminder of what else – who else – has been lost to you.
‘A hunt, sire,’ say your knights, when you mention it to them. ‘The wolves cannot hide forever. We know they’re in those woods; we’ll find them if we search long enough. And your people will thank you for it.’
Still you refuse, though by now you’ve lost all sense of your reasoning. Are northern superstitions so catching, that you’ve attributed to the wolves a supernatural significance, and in doing so, given them a new power over you?
When you confess to the chaplain your fears of irrationality, he only gives you a soft sad smile.
‘It is not irrational,’ he says, ‘to fear confronting the beast that killed your dear friend. For if the wolf is indeed only a beast and can be vanquished with a hunt, then there will be no true relief in the revenge – only the knowledge that Bisclavret fell against an animal, and not some untouchable foe.’
The words sting. You have long accepted the bitter truth: that Bisclavret was taken by misfortune, not amidst a heroic struggle or in a blaze of chivalric glory.
It’s the crushing banality of it that pains you.
Still, the chaplain may not be wholly incorrect.
Once the beast is slain, there’ll be nothing left to imagine, no comfort you can bring yourself.
It will be over, and Bisclavret will be entirely gone.
You are not ready to let go of him yet.
The wheel of the year turns, and your grief ceases to be an overwhelming, all-powerful force, but it doesn’t fade.
It clings to you like a shadow, ever-present, and still you keep walking forward: keep ruling, keep fighting, attend to every business to which a king might be expected to attend, applying yourself to solving problems others may not have dared to tackle.
If you don’t stop working, then you never have to think. If you are always busy, then you need never be alone with your grief.
Your kingdom may have survived your distraction, as it survived your father’s neglect, but now, slowly, it begins to thrive.
You remember your exile, the scholars and abbots with whom you kept company, and you extend an invitation to them.
You consult them about agriculture, religion, literature, the arts.
You learn of the debates happening across Christendom and beyond, and have books copied that you might read of them yourself.
When scholars and scribes present themselves to you at court, your heart lifts with the hope of glimpsing a familiar face.
But he is never among them, nor do any of them bring word of your story-spinner, book-master, scribe and friend.
You swallow your disappointment and lose yourself in the new ideas and tales they bring you, but at night you return to your small volume of lais and trace the spiked letters with your fingertips, remembering the hand that wrote them.
They speak of a world more magical than your own, where knights may fly as birds or find a wife from a world of fairies, and sometimes, when all else feels impossible, you imagine slipping between the lines and being made strange yourself by the enchantments of the storytellers.
But always you wake in the real world, and after the first bitter moment of loss when you open your eyes in the morning, you push aside the marvels to attend to your people, your land, and all that you owe them.
You initiate reforms. You levy taxes to rebuild villages devastated by past war; train men to defend them; have priests sent to minister to them.
You take the focus you’ve always dedicated to the sword and experiment with what happens when you commit it to the pen.
After weeks of conversation and study, you pick up your own quill and begin to write what will become the first of many letters going back and forth to great minds across the land – to the friends of your exile and to their friends and to those abbots you have heard tell of and more besides.
What news, what scandal, what heresy, what wisdom? You beg for it all and the edges of your world expand with every letter that returns, stretching far beyond the borders of your own kingdom.
And sometimes, when one of your barons questions a decision or your seneschal raises his eyebrow at a judgment, you doubt yourself, until you remember the knight who advocated for the life of the wolf that would kill him, and then you pick up your pen again.
There is brotherhood in this, a spiritual friendship, a connection that goes beyond the body.
These men understand your desire for more than your father’s wars and skirmishes.
They do not think you weak. They do not think you lacking.
‘I want to be a king of peace,’ you tell the chaplain, first, like a confession. ‘Not only of not-war. Of something bolder and brighter than that.’
Peace is a hard-won thing; respect is earned more slowly through farms and roads than through bloody victories.
But farms need tending and roads need repairing nonetheless, and though there’s no glory in the work of building, each stone laid strengthens the foundations of your kingdom.
Trade flourishes, goods more easily moved from the coast to the markets inland.
Farmers thrive. Day by day, the land begins to blossom, and your reputation spreads.
That young king, the peace-weaver, the road-builder, the letter-writer.
No longer your father’s inadequate only son, the dismal heir. Now, the king of peace.
And as your reputation grows, so does that of your kingdom. For so long a rustic backwater to be ignored, it soon demands the attention of rulers who once saw it as beneath their notice. They send missives and envoys and merchants and thieves, and all of them have designs on you.
But strangest of all is the fact that these are not the only bargains they’re trying to strike with you – for now that you’re known as a careful king and a thoughtful man, they’ve set their sights higher.
They have started to send their daughters to pay you court.