Paul Kearney: The Heretic Kings

“Pah! You have your father’s gift for drama, Lofantyr. Was it you who brought the Merduks to the gates of Aekir?” the woman retorted sharply behind him. “The kingdom won a great battle of late and is holding the line of the east. You are Torunnan, and a king. It is not seemly to voice the doubts of your heart so.”

Lofantyr turned with a twisted smile. “If I cannot voice them to you, then where shall I utter them?”

The woman was seated at the far end of the tall tower chamber in a cloud of lace and brocade. An embroidery board was perched on a stand before her, and her nimble hands worked upon it without pause, the needle flashing busily. Her eyes flicked up at her son the King and down to her work, up and down. Her fingers never hesitated.

Her face was surrounded by a deviously worked halo of hair that was stabbed through with pearl-headed pins and hung with jewels. Golden hair, shot through with silver. Earrings of the brightest lapis lazuli. Her face was fine-boned, but somehow drawn; it was possible to see that she had been a beautiful woman in her youth, and even now her charms were not to be lightly dismissed, but there was a fragility to the flesh which clothed those beautiful bones, a system of tiny lines which proclaimed her age despite the stunning green magnificence of her eyes.

“You have won the battle, my lord King-the fight against time. Now you have a Pontiff to parade before the council and quell these murmurings of heresy.” She caught her tongue between her teeth for a second as the needle bored in a particularly fine stitch. “Unlike the other kings, you can show your people that Macrobius truly lives. That, and the storm which approaches from the east, should suffice to unite most of them under you.”

She set aside her needle at last. “Enough for today. I am tired.”

She stared keenly at Lofantyr. “You look tired also, son. The journey from Vol Ephrir was a hard one.”

Lofantyr shrugged. “Snow and bandit tribesmen-the usual irritants. There is more to my tiredness than the aftermath of a journey, mother. Macrobius is here, yes; but beyond the city walls thousands upon thousands of Aekirians and northern Torunnans are screaming for succour, and I cannot give it to them. Martellus wants the city garrisons moved to the dyke, and the Knights Militant promised to me will now never arrive. I need every man I can spare across the country to hold down the nobles. They are straining at the leash despite the fact that I promised them the true Pontiff. Already there are reports of minor rebellions in Rone and Gebrar. I need trusted commanders who do not see opportunity in the monarch’s difficulties.”

“Loyalty and ambition: those two irreconcilable qualities without which a man is nothing. It is a rare individual who can balance both of them in his breast,” the woman said.

“John Mogen could.”

“John Mogen is dead, may God keep him. You need another war leader, Lofantyr, someone who can lead men like Mogen did. Martellus may be a good general, but he does not inspire his men in the right way.”

“And neither do I,” Lofantyr added with bitter humour.

“No, you do not. You will never be a general, my son; but then you do not have to be. Being King is trial enough.”

Lofantyr nodded, still with a sour smile upon his face. He was a young man like his fellow heretics, Abeleyn of Hebrion and Mark of Astarac. His wife, a Perigrainian princess and niece of King Cadamost, had already left for Vol Ephrir, vowing never to lie with a heretic. But then she was only thirteen years old. There were no children, and a severed dynastic tie meant little at the moment with the west struck asunder by religious schism.

His mother, the Queen Dowager Odelia, pushed aside her embroidery board and rose to her feet, ignoring her son’s hurriedly proffered arm.

“The day I cannot rise from a chair unaided you can bury me in it,” she snapped, and then: “Arach!”

Lofantyr flinched as a black spider dropped from the rafters on a shining thread and landed on his mother’s shoulder. It was thickly furred, and bigger than his hand. Its ruby eyes glistened. Odelia petted it for a moment and it uttered a sound like a cat’s purr.

“Be discreet, Arach. We go to meet a Pontiff,” the woman said.

At once, the spider disappeared into the mass of lace that rose up at the back of Odelia’s neck. It could barely be glimpsed there, a dark hump nestled in the fabric which transformed her upright carriage into something of a stoop. The purring settled into a barely audible hum.

“He is getting old,” the Queen Dowager said, smiling. “He likes the warmth.” She took her son’s arm now, and they proceeded to the doors in the rear of the chamber.

“As well I became a heretic,” Lofantyr said.

“Why is that, son?”

“Because otherwise I’d have to burn my own mother as a witch.”

The audience chambers were filling rapidly. In his eagerness to show the living Macrobius to the world, Lofantyr had allowed His Holiness only a few hours to recover from his journey before requesting humbly that he bestow his blessing upon a gathering of the foremost nobles of the kingdom. There were hundreds of people congregating in the palace, all clad in the brightest finery they possessed. The ladies of the court had emulated Perigrainian fashions with the King’s marriage to the young Balsia of Vol Ephrir, and they looked like a cloud of marvellous butterflies with wings of stiff lace and shimmering jewels, their faces painted and their fans fluttering-for the audience chambers were hot with the press of people and the huge logs blazing merrily in the fireplaces. It was a far cry from the austere days of Lofantyr’s father, Vanatyr, when the nobles wore only the black and scarlet of the military and the ladies simple, form-fitting gowns without headdresses.

Corfe and his troop had quartered their mounts in the palace stables and tried to spruce themselves up as best they could, but they were muddy and worn from the travelling and many of them wore the armour they had spent weeks fighting in during the battles at the dyke. His men made a dismal showing, Corfe admitted to himself, but every one of them was a veteran, a survivor. That made a difference.

The court chamberlain had hurriedly procured a set of purple robes for Macrobius, but the old man had refused them. He had also refused to be carried into the audience chamber in a sedan-chair, and to let anyone but Corfe take his arm and guide him up the long length of the crowded hall.

“You have guided me on a harder road than this,” he said as they waited in an antechamber for the trumpet blasts that would announce their entry. “I would ask you one last time to be my eyes for me, Corfe.”

The doors were swung open by liveried attendants, and the vast, gleaming length of marble that was the floor of the audience chamber shone before them, whilst on either side hundreds of people-nobles, retainers, courtiers, hangers-on-craned their necks to see the Pontiff they had thought dead. At the end of the hall, hundreds of yards away it seemed to Corfe, the thrones of Torunna glittered with silver and gilt. Lofantyr the King and his mother the Queen Dowager sat there. A third throne, that of the young Queen, was empty.

The trumpet notes died away. Macrobius smiled. “Come, Corfe. Our audience awaits.”

The tramp of his military boots and the slap of Macrobius’ sandals were the only sound. Perhaps there was a faint murmuring as the crowd took in the soldier in the battered armour and the hideously mutilated old man. Out of the corner of his eye, Corfe glimpsed some of the spectators looking hopefully back at the end of the hall, as if they expected the real Pontiff and his guide to come issuing out of the end doors in a sweep of state and ceremony.