Chapter 37
You
The war threatens endlessly like summer thunder, heavy in the air but never breaking.
You see only scattered showers of rain – small skirmishes in the borderlands, little more than the usual disputes.
You send knights out to scout the marches and count them as they ride back home, relieved whenever they return unharmed and sorrowful when they don’t.
You lose two, in total – one young and beardless, with a singing voice to shame an angel but only when he’s in his cups, and the other a tried and tested warrior whose loss will be keenly felt by all who knew him.
On the battlefields to the north, your neighbouring kingdoms are losing a generation of warriors to siege and slaughter, and this is a small bereavement by comparison, but still those two deaths grieve you, bitter and painful.
You might well have retreated to carry your grief alone, but your knights have learned from past mistakes, and will not allow it.
Your knight in green is their leader, you know, but all of them take up the task of persuading you to each feast and bout and ride.
You toast the departed with them, and as days pass and the sting of sadness fades, your men return to their joking – but occasionally you see their wistful looks, as though they’re caught by a memory or an idea of what their lost comrades might have said, were they here to say it.
It should bring you comfort, to have company in your mourning, but if anything it only intensifies the weight.
I had their oaths, I held their lives, I owed them protection, I have failed them – and ever the threat of greater failure draws closer.
Your knights may understand your grief, but they do not understand your inactivity.
They are men bred for war and restless with the urge to join and end the violence.
They would have you sell your books, send letters seeking military aid instead of intellectual stimulation, teach the kingdom’s youth the handling of a weapon instead of their alphabet – and each night on your knees in the chapel you wonder if they’re right, if you have doomed them all with this hunger for peace.
If it is even peace you want, and not merely to keep your own hands clean of blood.
Your father’s voice echoes in your ears, decrying your inadequacy, and you know – you think you know – you are sure that he was wrong, but it becomes harder to believe with each day that passes.
The wolf is your sole point of stability, your truest ally, the only one who demands nothing from you that you cannot give.
Much as you might like to, you cannot hide from the world while your kingdom is in danger, so you have started to allow him to follow you to meet with your barons and knights: at least you will have the comfort of his warmth.
He’s there the day the messengers arrive, begging for relief to help them withstand the bitter siege that has become the centrepiece of the struggle – for supplies if not men, food if nothing more than that.
How they think you might offer such aid when the whole place is surrounded, you aren’t sure, but your barons would have you answer the plea anyway.
You’re tempted, nagging guilt weakening your resolve.
Supplies are not weapons – food is not joining the fight.
But it might as well be, in the eyes of your enemies.
If you enter the war like this, it will not end with aid to the starving. Not once you have declared allegiance.
With gentle violence, you tell the messenger of your decision.
It is not received gracefully. The messenger ducks his head to hide his disappointment and steps away in peace, but your barons – oh, they’re angry, furious at your refusal to heed their counsel, to do even this small thing.
The argument grows until you think for a moment that your seneschal might strike you – but the wolf steps between the two of you and growls low and dangerous in his throat, bringing you both back to your senses.
A few days later, a small number of knights, sworn to one of the lords who opposed you, take it upon themselves to answer the call you’ve been ignoring.
They ride out at dawn and cross the border before nightfall, but news of their departure only reaches you two days later, when your barons use it against you.
‘The people are ready and willing to fight,’ says one. ‘This enforced neutrality is unpopular.’
‘What concern of mine is popularity?’ you ask mildly, when inside you are seething and grieving, afraid for the men and furious with them.
You are afraid for yourself, too. You know well enough that a knight given no enemies may go looking for them, and that they are not trained for peace.
‘I had thought it was by divine will that I found myself with a crown on my head, and that the word of the Almighty still carried some weight among His faithful.’ Divine will.
If this is the will of God, then let it be over soon.
Let nobody else die for this. Kyrie, eléison. Lord have mercy, for men have none.
‘If they have a will to fight, sire, what harm can it do to send them?’
‘Ask me again when they come back,’ you say, and walk from the room.
You don’t have long to wait. Within a fortnight the young men’s bodies are returned, stripped of armour and valuables. One is missing, presumed lost rather than survived.
They’re laid out on biers, and you walk between them.
Most were your own age, or near enough, and you weep as you look at their still faces.
You did not know them, but any young life wasted is a life to be mourned.
They weren’t gone long enough to have made it to the main battlegrounds, or come close to the sieged castle; they must have fallen at the hands of border guards and deserters.
You linger longest on the last body in the row, the youngest of the fallen, scarcely a wisp of beard on the young man’s face and a youthful body not yet hardened into full manhood.
He would have thought it an adventure, to ride out like this in search of glory, hero of his own song, and what has it brought him? No immortal fame. No joy or riches.
Boys like this will always leap to answer the call of any who might summon them.
Perhaps his lord promised him a future, as a churchman might promise absolution for those who wash their sins in blood in the Holy Land.
Such violent and self-serving lies sicken you; you cannot blame the youth, but you will not readily forgive the man who led him.
You raise your gaze to look on him, there at the front of the hall where he waits, ashen and unarmed. ‘What have you to say for yourself?’ you ask, in the mildest tone you can manage.
He kneels. He grovels. He begs you for mercy. He kisses your feet. His excuses are many and his apologies florid, but none of them justify this waste, or explain it.
You permit his self-abasement a little longer, and then you say, ‘Did you order them to go?’
Did you disobey my orders? Did you send these men to their deaths? Or are you so poor a lord that you cannot expect even the obedience of your own sworn men?
You already know the answer. But you would hear it from him.
‘Sire,’ he says. ‘I thought . . . I believed . . .’
You regard him for a long moment. You know him.
He was not precisely a favourite of your father’s, but he was close enough, and knew something of his friendship.
Perhaps that memory of preference fed his arrogance.
‘You have killed these men,’ you tell him.
‘You have betrayed your king. You have invited danger into your kingdom. You have violated your oaths and my trust and your honour.’
‘My lord . . .’
‘Do you deny it?’
His tears are many, and will not save him. ‘No, sire.’
You gesture to the seneschal to have him taken away. You will not have him here, disrupting the dead. You will not look on him again until the moment of his death.
Perhaps some expect you to be kind, and grant him clemency as once you showed mercy to poachers and thieves, but what would be the worth of that kindness when a dozen mothers’ sons are lying dead because of his actions?
Because of his disobedience? He was sworn to serve you, and they him, and every choice you have made has been to keep youths like these from harm, but he dishonours your judgment with his own.
There can be no clemency for a man who betrays his king and his own men in this way.
If the chaplain disapproves – and well he might, cleric that he is, forbidden the wearing of arms or the using of them – he doesn’t say as much, when he finds you faltering at your prayers.
‘Is this peace?’ you ask him, eventually. ‘You would tell me, surely, if I am making a poor judgment.’
He is tired and worn from his vigils and his prayers, the masses he has spoken for the dead. Perhaps that is why he takes a long moment to think before he says, simply, ‘It is the law, and the king’s seal that makes it so.’
Scant comfort, to know that if you act thus, you do so supported by your father’s judgment and his father’s before him.
But there is nothing else you can do, when already your perceived weakness emboldens nobles to ignore your orders.
If this man lives, more will follow his example, and you will walk among the dead again and again until there is nothing left of your kingdom.
The chaplain clasps your shoulder. ‘You are the king,’ he says, ‘and a good man. You will do what you feel you must.’
Of course you will. You have sworn oaths too. You have your duties, and your obligations, and your service.
The lord’s death, when it comes, is swift.
Swifter than he’d have got in battle. It turns your stomach and steals your appetite – Coward, says your father’s voice – but you stand as witness and do not look away, because he was yours.
For the sake of his oaths, violated as they were, you have an obligation to him.
He will be buried as a traitor, but you will add his name to your prayers.
He is the last of your people to die for this war.
A few hundred miles away, a man besieged to starvation raises a flag of surrender, and an army falls.
It is not long then until the war comes to an end, without ever encroaching further on your marches.
Letters begin to arrive again, of counsel and of comfort, and you know that you are, for now, safe.
It should be a relief. But you’re simply tired, still aching from the betrayal and the loss, uncertain of your choices.
There must have been a path you could have taken, you think, where nobody would have had to die, a path where you might have saved lives, rather than leaving them to starve in a distant siege – but you could not see it.
This is hardly victory for a peace-weaver, to avoid a war instead of end it and to kill a man for joining it, and though the chaplain will order no fasts or penance, you feel the stain of the act on your hands regardless.
Perhaps a king and a wolf have this in common: they are killers both, however carefully curbed their violence.