In Great Waters (23 page)

“Perhaps a gull would understand me,” John said, grinning and blushing slightly.

“Gulls are stupid,” Henry said, mostly for the fun of saying the word “gull” again.

“Then they might understand me,” John said. “If I sound stupid enough.”

Henry shook his head again, enjoying the foolery of the idea. “There are many kinds of stupid. You are only one of them, John.”

“The best kind,” John said. “Say your word for gull again.”

Gull
, Henry said. The word had never been difficult to say, had only been part of his everyday language. But faced with John’s inability to say it, the landsman’s slowness of his tongue and narrow scale of notes his voice could produce, Henry sat comfortably on his horse,
enjoying the feeling of being clever, able to make sounds impossible for a landsman. He knew that when John was gone he would have to be careful and studious again, guarding his words against the adults who pestered him, but he felt, for the first time, that he could afford a moment of hubris, just as a game.

John never mastered the pronunciation of the deepsmen’s words. His ear wasn’t fine enough to pick out the words a court hautbois imitated when playing an attempt at a deepsmen’s language—something Henry realised he himself could probably do the day John brought one along and played it, much better than Allard played the flute—and likewise John never managed to make a sound clear enough that any deepsman, even Henry, could have deciphered without knowing already what he was trying to say. The language depended too heavily on sustained sounds, on variations of pitch that were beyond John’s hearing in many cases and beyond his tongue in all of them. Some words remained inaudible to him, even if Henry tried to transpose them down into sounds that would have baffled a deepsman; other distinctions, simplify them as Henry might, eluded him. For the most part, what John could hear, a deepsman almost certainly would not understand; certainly no deepsman would have understood anything John tried to say. But with Henry as his teacher, he added words to his understanding if not to his speech, until Henry could make at least a few remarks in his mother tongue and have John understand him.

Movement had always been confined to Allard’s lands, but when John’s father came into his life, the rules tightened around Henry, becoming ever more frustrating. Hearing John speak of going hunting on his father’s grounds, Henry wanted to go with him. Horse-riding, once mastered, was a tremendous advantage, letting him travel as fast as he wished without recourse to his weak legs, and outside Henry rode everywhere. The upshot of this was that he tended to spend most of every day outside, however much John shivered in the snow or sat
resignedly under a tree dripping rainwater down from its leaves. Allard’s land had little hunting on it. The boys chased rabbits through the fields, Henry swinging a spear with steady accuracy to pierce and scoop up the shrilling, thrashing little bundles of fur—which he gave to John, having no taste for red meat himself—but John spoke of deer, creatures almost as big as his horse and fast on their feet as they flitted through the forests. Though Henry had learned hunting in the sea and was used to prey only big enough to give a handful of meat, he remembered the dolphins, the dominance fights, the clash and swirl of opponent against large opponent. These fights were the province of adults. Henry needed to measure himself against such creatures, to test himself. The idea of deer wandering the green fields, out of his reach and blithely unconcerned about him, offended him. He could not quite overcome his dislike of land animals; even horses, useful though they were, were jolting and wayward in movement, overheated in smell. Henry was a steady rider, harsh to any mount that refused his commands, but he knew better than to hurt a horse too badly. That would end their usefulness. A creature similar to them but huntable, happily wandering free while he had to stay within a few square miles, was maddening.

Demands to visit the Claybrooks’ land met with no success, though. “The time is not right, my lord,” was all that Robert Claybrook would say on the subject.

“Why not?” Henry was not to be put off. “John can take me.”

Claybrook gave a stern look to his son. John shifted a little on his seat, looking uncomfortable, and gave a surreptitious shrug, which Henry noticed.

“Do not blame John,” he said. “This is my idea. I wish to see deer. There is nothing to hunt here but rabbits.”

“My lord, the journey cannot be risked.” Claybrook smiled patiently as he said this, but Henry did not trust his smiles. They came too steadily onto his face, not flashing out in quick response to a joke as John’s did. Claybrook could be relied upon to smile before he spoke, and Henry disliked smiles that came with such politic predictability.

“Why do you call me ‘my lord’?” Henry asked. “That is not my name.”

“Your title, my lord Henry.”

“Of what am I lord?”

“You are royal by your birth, my lord Henry,” Claybrook said, gesturing as if to bow.

“Not when the king is so far from me,” Henry said. “I have more to do before I can be royal.”

“As you say, my lord.”

“Do not call me that when you refuse to do as I say,” Henry said. “If you will not let me on your land, I am not your lord.”

John laughed, and Henry relaxed a little, turning to him. “What does the king do when men disobey him?”

John opened his mouth to answer, but his father interrupted. “We cannot risk you being seen,” he said. “There is too much danger to all of us.”

“Have you not found an army yet?”

Allard stepped in. “Henry, you must listen to Lord Claybrook.” His hands, narrow-fingered with knotted knuckles, were gripped together. “If you were seen, you would be taken.”

“By who?” Henry, on the whole, preferred Allard to Claybrook these days. Though his preoccupation with books and insistence on learning tiresome facts never waned, Henry was at least accustomed to him. Allard provided food, tried to find fabrics that Henry hated less than others, made sure his horse was well shod and stabled. His anxiety around Claybrook was irritating, but in necessities he could be relied on. Nevertheless, it was hard to respect a man so twitchy in movements, always scratching with his pen or fidgeting with his fingers, who deferred so clearly to Claybrook’s regular smiles and neutral phrases. Half out of childhood habit, Henry bared his teeth a little at Allard as he spoke.

“You must stop asking!” Allard’s anxious frustration was preferable to Claybrook’s patient courtesy; at least it was clear what he was feeling.

“It angers you that I keep asking,” Henry said. “But you do not
answer me when I ask why the risk is so great. Why are you so certain I would be taken? Are there soldiers surrounding the land?”

“No. The risk is not worthwhile,” Allard said, with a nervous glance at Claybrook.

“Is it so great?”

“No, but the price is,” Allard said. He turned on his heel, looking angry, and picked up a book, opening it before Henry. “This is the price. For all of us. Do you wish this to happen?”

Henry studied the lines on the page. Reading had never interested him enough to motivate study, especially as Allard was always there to read things for him, and pictures, flat scribbles on a flat page, were difficult for his eye to take in. A little figure stood atop a triangle, swirls going up around him. “What is this for?” he said.

“It is a burning, Henry.” Allard sounded angrier still, whether at Henry’s incomprehension of the image or at the image itself Henry couldn’t tell. “That is a stake, and those are flames. Princes do not care for bastards ready to threaten them. If they find you, they will burn us all.”

Henry swallowed, keeping his face blank. The fire was lit in the hearth, its flames crackling over the flaking logs, sending out a heat that tingled uncomfortably on his skin even from yards away. Tiny motes of ash swam up the chimney, lifting up from the cracking logs beneath.

Henry raised his head and stared straight at Claybrook, refusing to show fear. “That will not happen to me,” he said.

Nevertheless, he dropped the subject of visiting Claybrook’s grounds.

It was a few weeks later that John rode in on his own, a jerking sack tethered to his saddle. Henry, who had been riding Allard’s fields throwing spears at points on the ground, looked up in interest. “What have you there?” he said.

John grinned, a little breathless. “My father thinks I am practising riding on his land,” he said. “I crept away. Look what I have.” He untied the sack and it fell to the earth with a flurry, something inside it struggling.

“What is it?”

“A fox. I found a burrow and set a snare for it. This will be better to hunt than rabbits.”

The sack convulsed on itself, and a narrow face emerged, a tawny orange shade that Henry didn’t care for at all. The next moment dark, slender limbs followed, the creature thrashing its way out of the sack.

“Let me have one of your spears,” John said, looking excited. Henry tossed him one without looking, eyes still on the bag. “We should have dogs, really, but it will run when it gets out.”

The sack tumbled over, and then the fox was running, dragging coarse threads behind it, shaking its limbs free as it dashed across the green field. John shouted “Come on!” but Henry, accustomed to grabbing at prey the moment an opportunity arose, had already started his horse forward, spear in hand, following the bounding creature as it leaped from tussock to tussock, its feet barely brushing the ground. To Henry’s eyes, the fox was flying, not the unpredictable lollops of a hopping rabbit but smooth, fast, fast as a dolphin through the air, and he grasped his spear, nothing in his mind but excitement and a predatory fervour. Everything about the fox—its size, its speed, its unforgivable colour—concentrated itself to a fine point, a red scrap of life racing across the green, ready for his spear. Behind him he could hear John yelling, John whose horse was finer than his but less obedient, and he called back, “Go ahead! That way!” For there were trees ahead, and if the fox got in between them, it could sleek in and out away from them while their horses stalled and swerved. John veered his horse around and the fox darted away, staying out on the open field.

This was different, Henry realised, this was new. This wasn’t the dive and strike through the sturdy currents of the sea: this was rough ground and varying terrain, places to negotiate and footing to watch and his friend behind him to direct as they ran their quarry down. Light-footed rabbits left few tracks in the grass, but the fox trailed ravelling threads of sack, and flower heads swung as it streaked over them: Henry’s horse and the fox were both fighting the ground for footing, an interplay between the land and the prey, Henry and
the prey, everything swinging in and out of balance as the seconds flashed by.

The fox was fast, and the boys chased it over the field, John laughing and Henry silent except for shouted commands. John’s riding wasn’t quick enough, and before Henry could warn him, the fox wheeled round and dashed for the trees again. It was only a small copse, Henry knew, having explored it over and over on days when John was away and there was nothing to do but ride and practise, but a fox could slip through it any one of a dozen ways. Henry slowed his horse a little and gestured to John.

“Go around that way,” he said, pointing to where the trees were thickest.

“Where are you going?” John asked, breathless.

“Go!” Henry said, not waiting; this was no time for discussion. John peeled off, making for the section that Henry had indicated.

Henry slowed his horse, picking his way into the copse. Light shone through the trees, vivid green overhead, and Henry closed his eyes; the earth beneath him was too dark and overgrown, he’d never find the fox if he let every movement distract him.

A mild breeze rustled the leaves overhead, but it was quiet among the trees. Henry sat still. Over the breathing of his horse, he could hear the clopping of John’s, twigs snapping under its hooves—and …

There. “Go left,” Henry said to John. “Go left and shout.”

“What?” John’s voice was muffled. “Can you see me?”

“No, I can hear you,” Henry said. “Do what I say.”