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. Youcould 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 wellenough 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.
Youwilldo 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 paidfor, 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.
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 familiarface. 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.
