Gods Concubine (39 page)

“Very well. What else eats at you?”

“There is something missing within me,” I said. “Some part of who I should be is…not there.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

I lifted one hand, then let it drop uselessly. “An emptiness, Silvius. An ‘un-rightness’. I can explain it no more than that.”

“You are not all you should be?”

“Yes. That is it, perfectly.”

He was silent, and I looked at him. He was smiling gently, his face so like and yet unlike Brutus’ in its gentleness that I felt like weeping.

I was suddenly very sorry that I was here in Damson’s body and not my true one.

His smile widened a little. “I could tell you what is so amiss, but you might not want to know.”

“What is it?”

Now he was grinning enough that I could see his teeth, and the wetness of his tongue behind them. I smiled, responding to the mischievousness in his face, and to the warmth and life dancing in his remaining eye.

“Let me see,” he said. “How can I put this without having you shriek down the cathedral?”

“Tell me!” I said. Then I laughed, for suddenly it seemed as if Silvius had taken all my cares into his capable hands, rolled them up into an insignificant ball, and tossed them carelessly aside.

“Well now.” He struck a pose, as if considering deeply, and without thinking I reached out and touched him.

“Tell me.”

He took my hand, curling it within his own.

His flesh was very warm. Very dry. Very sensuous.

My heart began to thud strangely within my breast, and I knew he could feel the pulse leap within my wrist.

“Let me see,” he said again, but now all the laughter had gone from his voice, and his gaze as it held mine was direct and strong. Confrontational, but still reassuring.

“You are Mag-reborn within Caela. Yes?”

My hesitation was only slight. “Yes.”

“And you are Queen of England, wife to the oh-so-pious Edward. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“As Mag you are the land, fertility personified, you are
Mother
Mag. You are the
bounty
of the land.”

I had a glimmer of where he was going. “Oh.”

“Oh, indeed. But as Caela, Queen of England, wife of Edward the Confessor, you are,” his lips twitched, “God’s Concubine. A virgin. Imagine,” he said, “how this undermines everything you are as Mag-reborn.”

“Oh.” I let out a long breath—I had not realised I’d been holding it.

“No wonder you feel a lack,” he said, and he laughed, breathily, and his hand tightened about mine.

“But what can I—”

He roared with laughter, and I looked about, sure the entire cathedral would be staring at us.

But in the hustle and bustle no one was paying us any attention and so I looked back to Silvius.

“You are a poor wretch indeed,” he said, “if you do not know how to fix the situation.”

I could see nothing but his black eye, feel nothing but the pressure of his hand, the warmth of his body, the skittering of
his
pulse. I could read the solution in his eye, feel it in his touch.

“I am not my son,” he said, very soft. “Never mistake me for Brutus.”

I knew what he saying.
Do not take me only because I remind you of Brutus.

I swallowed, and pulled my hand away.

He let it go easily. “It would be best,” he said, “that if you do decide to relinquish your state as God’s Concubine, that you do not do it in Damson’s body.”

“Yes,” I said, adding, without thinking, “she is no virgin, in any case.”

“Is that so?” He laughed again, and I coloured.

I forced my mind back to what he had said.
As Caela I was a virgin, and that contradicted everything I should be as Mag, as Mother of this land, as its fertility.

“The winter solstice approaches,” Silvius said. “It would be the best night.”

The best night in which to lose my virginity.

“In which to wed yourself entirely to the land.” His gaze had not once wandered from my face. “To fill that lack.”

He was right.
Everything
he said was right. Virginity was anathema to Mag and to all she represented, and the night of the winter solstice, the night when the land needed every particle of fertility it could summon to aid it through the long, frigid winter,
was
the perfect occasion to…

“To wed myself entirely to the land,” I whispered.

“And to the Game,” he said, as low as I, “should you choose aright.”

Ah, I knew what he suggested, and I knew then what I would do.

“Do not come to me as Damson,” he said, and his voice was thick with desire. “Not as Damson.”

“No,” I whispered. “Not as Damson.”

S
IX

S
wanne was feeling edgier by the day. There was something happening, yet she could not scry out the “what” of that happening. Caela had changed, had become far more confident within herself, and Swanne did not like that. The Game was setting children to hopping over lines in the flagstones outside St Paul’s (and their fathers to battling out the Troy Game in labyrinthine horse games). Harold had vanished, ostensibly to his estates in Wessex, but Swanne had sent him a message there several days ago and he had yet to reply.

Swanne wished she’d been more circumspect the night Tostig attacked Harold. She should have concealed her delight. She should at least have
pretended
some dismay. What if Harold decided to set her aside? She still needed her place at court. She couldn’t lose it now, when William was so close. Swanne resolved to make at least a pretence at contrition when next she saw Harold. She’d manipulated him for almost twenty years, she could do so again.

As Harold worried her, so also did William; or rather, his refusal to answer her pleas for the location of the kingship bands of Troy irritated her. He must know that Asterion hunted them down. He could not afford to let them lie vulnerable.

To cap all of this was Edward’s decision to request Swanne to accompany himself, the queen and a small group of courtiers and clerics to view the almost-completed abbey of Westminster. Swanne could not understand why he’d invited her. Edward and she barely spoke, and Swanne only attended the king’s court when Harold was in attendance. On the occasions when they did speak their mutual dislike was obvious to all. Edward disliked the Danelaw wife of Harold, not only because of the sensual beauty that Swanne never bothered to drape with modesty, but because Swanne and Harold’s union was not recognised by the Holy Church and was therefore, in Edward’s eyes, a horribly sinful affair. He had even referred to her and Harold’s children as bastards on more than one occasion.

In Swanne’s view Edward was a contemptuous and cowardly old man, hiding behind his religion and his sharp, sarcastic tongue.

Edward’s one great love was the abbey. It had been fifteen years in the building (the fact that Edward had been married to Caela for fifteen years, and that his Grand Plan for the abbey was conceived at the same time he wed her was the occasion of much ribald comment: Edward found in stones and mortar what he could not find in his wife) and had absorbed one-tenth of the total wealth of the realm. Edward meant the building to be a marvel of its kind, the most wondrous abbey in Europe and, Swanne supposed, Christians would think he had succeeded.

The abbey was enormous, by far the largest single structure in England. It occupied the western portion of Thorney Isle, its central tower, crowned with a cupola of wood, rising some several hundred feet into the air, its cruciform layout (still a novelty in Europe) stretching over five hundred feet east to west. The abbey was constructed of huge blocks of grey stone, unusual in a country where most churches—indeed, most buildings—were constructed of wood, or wattle and daub, had a magnificent lead roof, a graceful rounded apse at its eastern end, and dazzlingly beautiful stained glass filling its windows. In the two towers at the western end of the abbey hung five great bells that were to be rung for the first time this day. From the southern wall extended the foundations and partly-constructed walls of the cloisters, infirmary, rectory and the infirmary gardens: they would be completed within the next few years.

Edward, accompanied by Eadwine, Abbot of Westminster, and a bevy of other clerics including Aldred, Wulfstan of Worcester and the Bishop of London, his queen, Caela, two or three of her ladies, a handful of earls and a score of lesser thegns, guards and hangers-on, and three ragged children who tacked themselves on to the very end of the party, set out for the short walk on foot from his palace to the abbey at mid-morning. Swanne, who had decided that attendance might give her a better opportunity for observing Caela than that provided within the confines of court, walked a few paces behind the queen and her ladies. It was a fine day, if crisp and cold, and most people had wrapped themselves in fur-lined cloaks and heavy woollen robes, with sturdy leather boots on their feet. A fresh southerly breeze blew, tugging at the veils of the women and making everyone’s eyes water.

Swanne kept her eyes on the ground, her skirts lifted delicately away from the ever-present mud.
Gods,
she thought,
could not Edward have seen to the laying of a few flagstones to make the way a little easier?

As they approached the eastern apse, the bells of the western towers suddenly burst into tongue.

Swanne flinched, as did most people. Although everyone had known the bells were to sound out for the first time this morning to welcome the king into the new abbey, the actuality of their tremendous peal was a shock to both ears and nerves.

If Swanne flinched, then Edward stopped dead in his tracks (forcing everyone to stumble to a halt behind him) and crowed with delight, clapping his hands and raising his face heavenward.

“Glory be to God on high!” he shouted, and the shout was dutifully taken up by the clerics clustered in a small adoring flock behind him.

Glory be to God on high!

Swanne mumbled something which she hoped would be taken for a similar response, feeling such a rush of loathing for the entire Christian church and its damned crucified sons, saints and sundry martyrs that for an instant she had a surge of sentimental longing for Mag. At least that silly bitch hadn’t wrapped herself and her followers in ridiculous conditions, sins and unachievable objectives in order to keep them unthinking and under control.

At least she hadn’t demanded the building of cold, dark, useless stone tombs in which to herd her mindless minions.

Swanne looked ahead, and realised with a jolt that Caela had turned and was looking at her with a small smile on her face—almost as if she knew exactly what Swanne was thinking. The fine linen veil Caela wore about her forehead and over her hair had fluttered loose in the wind, as had a few wisps of her dark hair. The wind had also brought a glow to her cheeks and a sparkle to her eye, and for a moment, a single moment, Swanne was struck at how lovely the woman looked.

How certain. How happy.

Then Swanne hardened both her heart and her face, and Caela turned away as Edward resumed his triumphant march into his abbey and his immortality.

As Swanne had expected, the internal space of the abbey could have been a block of ice for all its warmth. The abbey’s nave was full of dust, dirt and a few remaining scaffolds for workmen to put the final touches to the sculptures about its soaring walls.

At least the screech of the bells was muted in here.

Edward was almost capering in his joy, pointing out this and that for his equally joyous sycophants. He had taken William’s ball of golden string from a pocket within his robe, and Swanne supposed he was about to lay out the Labyrinth. Fool.

Swanne turned away, trying to seek out Caela in the shafts of weak sunlight that filtered through the stained-glass windows.

“Is this not a sight to gladden one’s heart?” came a voice behind her, and Swanne managed, just, to put a pleasant smile on her face as she turned around.

It was Aldred, the Archbishop of York, beaming at her as if she would truly think this abbey the most wondrous site in creation.

“Indeed,” she said, inclining her head politely.

Aldred looked around, checking that no one was within hearing distance. “And won’t William enjoy it, don’t you think? So…
Norman.”

Swanne drew in a sharp breath of dismay, her eyes glancing about, praying to whatever gods were listening this morning that no one had heard Aldred’s remark.
The fat fool!

“You need not be so indiscreet!” she hissed.

His face hardened. “Indiscreet, madam, is passing written intelligence from your chamber to his!”

“To which you have ever been a willing party,” she retorted.

Swanne found Aldred repulsive, but he had been her means to contact William for the past eight or nine years. Aldred was a man of great influence who knew many people
and
he was a Norman sympathiser. Over the years he had told her (in foul-breathed whispers, his liking of sweet pastries having rotted away most of his teeth) that he would like nothing else than to see William ensconced on England’s throne and would work with her to ensure this end.

Swanne wasn’t sure if she could truly trust the man…but he had not failed her over all the years she’d been communicating with William, and Swanne was sure that if treachery was to have been forthcoming, then it would have engulfed her by now.

Aldred had his hands clasped across his not inconsiderable girth, his eyes narrowing as he studied her. “I have heard that Harold has set Caela to procuring him a more suitable wife, my dear. One who can comfortably sit next to him on a Christian throne. One who is not…” he drew out his pause with infinite delicacy, “…tainted.”

Swanne considered his words. Aldred, after all, was a cruel man underneath his jovial flab and enjoyed a taunt almost as much as he enjoyed a pastry. “Are you certain?”

Aldred raised an eyebrow. “Of course, my dear. Now you are more, ahem, married to William’s cause than ever, eh? A pity about Matilda, though. I hear also—”