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 takesa 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, toavoid 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.
38
You
Doubt and melancholy are prone to linger, but your seneschal has other ideas. He informs you in no uncertain terms that, with the war behind you, the ordinary festivals must be observed once more, and that the harvest feast is fast approaching and will require your attention.
The harvest feast. Always quite the celebration, at least in years when the weather has been kind and the crops fine – and this year there will be relief as well as gratitude in the harvesting of them, for they have been spared the devastation of war and the burning that would likely come with invasion. It would ill become you not to acknowledge that relief, or celebrate the flourishing of fields under the new systems you introduced, or mark the death of summer with all the joy that is needed to bid farewell to the light while still staving off the darkness a little longer.
You assure the seneschal that you’ll deal with it, and push aside your gloom to focus on the practicalities. It will need to be quite the gathering, after the hardships of the last few months, and after weeks with feasts and celebrations suspended to fund the arming of men. Your barons will have to be summoned, of course, even those holed up in castles on the far-flung coasts. There are men sworn to you that you have not seen since yourcoronation feast, and not missed them, either, but they will expect to be hosted.
You cannot think of your coronation feast without remembering Bisclavret. It is unlikely that the harvest festival will bring you such an interesting companion again, and any who appeared would find themselves compared unfavourably to their forerunner – an unfair behaviour, you know, but you cannot help yourself. Still, perhaps there shall at least be some distraction. And you will have the wolf’s company, of course, providing both comfort and enough threat to keep strident guests away.
When the feast day comes, you’re melancholy again, your mood greyed; you’d rather spend the time in your chamber with the wolf, half-slumbering in front of the hearth. But this, too, is duty; this, too, is kingship. You allow yourself to be dressed in all the silks they can drape about you, and then you process to the front gate with the wolf to greet your barons as they arrive.
