In Great Waters (24 page)

Henry heard the rustle of clothing that suggested John was shrugging, and then his horse pounded forward, John’s voice yelling:
“Angelica! Angelica!”

There was a scrabble, a clatter of leaves, and the fox dashed out of the undergrowth. Henry leaned forward, thrust his arm down, his spear slitting flesh and piercing down to bone with a sharp, delicious crunch. The fox shrieked, and Henry shoved his spear forward, spitting it to the ground, sliding off his horse as John came out of the trees, grabbing warm, dirty fur and digging his claws into the fox’s neck.
Hot blood clogged the webs of his fingers, and then John was on the fox as well, clubbing its head with the butt of his spear, three sharp blows that Henry felt through his blood-stuck hands, and with each blow the fox diminished, grew slower, until, with the last blow, it was still.

Henry wasn’t out of breath, but the triumph was choking. He had killed a land creature, got his own hands on it; the staked rabbits were small prizes to this. The strangeness of a hot-blooded victim, to a boy used to hunting chilled silver fish, was too bewildering to think of, so instead he smiled at John, baring his sharp teeth in a joyous grin, holding up handfuls of the fox’s flesh.

“Better than rabbits?” John said, wrinkling his nose at the smell.

Henry leaned down, taking the fox’s sharp-toothed, wet jaw in his hand. Careful of his webs, he placed his palm against it and gave a hard shove down. Bone split apart, and then the jaw was dislocated, held on only with a strip of bloody-backed fur that Henry severed with a nail. There it was in his hand, the trophy, familiar from the battles with dolphins: the jaw and tongue, a pink scrap amid black gums and white teeth, nestled in his palm.

“Do you want some?” Henry said, offering it to John.

John looked a little distasteful. “Can I take the tail?”

“If you wish it.” Henry smiled at him as John happily took out a knife and started sawing at the body. “Why were you shouting ‘Angelica’?”

He shrugged. “That will be your battle cry when we go to war,” he said. “Angelica came out of the sea like you. That is what bastards say when they take thrones.” John spoke distractedly.

“Bastards?”

“Like you. Deepsmen on land who are not kin to the king.” John spoke distractedly, being more interested in the fluffy, white-tipped brush he had secured, busily cleaning it and stroking the fur.

Henry was still too delighted with his kill to be much involved in the explanation.
We win
, he said in his mother language, and raised the fox’s jaw to his mouth. The tongue was red-tasting, meaty and less to
his liking than fish, but this was his victory, his trophy to take, and this was how kills were celebrated in battles back in the sea.

He sank in his teeth and jerked his head back, capturing the tongue in his mouth, a narrow scrap of well-won meat. Blood wet his lips, the taste of gain, and he lifted his face to the treetops, swallowing his prize whole.

A
LLARD’S WIFE, MARGARET
, was a woman Henry seldom saw. He had little desire for her company: even from a distance, she did not look reliable. In his presence, she displayed an attitude similar to that he’d seen her show around the estate’s guard dog. That barking, grim-jawed beast had frightened Henry when he was little, and he supposed that was what lay behind her behaviour, but he had mastered his fear of the animal, riding to its kennel one day when he was unobserved, dragging it out by the chain when it barked at him and laying about it with a stick. The dog was almost as big as he was, but he was able to lift it one-handed, and the animal went from snarling fury to cowed whimpering by the time Henry was done with it. Afterwards, he left it a piece of fish he had kept from his dinner, and it gave him no more trouble.

While he had no desire for Margaret Allard to attack him, even if the idea had not been ridiculous—her husband had been no match for him at seven years old, and Margaret was far smaller—he could not respect her timidity. What he mostly felt was a sense of unease: a woman so constantly frightened was like a fish that might dart in different directions. Henry had never consciously tried to scare her, and her tense-handed wide-eyed fear in his presence deepened his mistrust of her. Her high voice and swaying movements were interesting, different, and he would have liked to get closer to her, test the heft of her
body and the texture of her flesh, but, unwilling though he was to confess it, she made him uncomfortable.

As a result, when she fell from her horse and broke her leg one day in Henry’s eleventh year, he was not overly concerned. She meant something to Allard, who went around stiff-faced and wet-eyed, but her injury had little effect on Henry’s own life.

Her fate, though, hung in the balance, and Henry discovered he was supposed to care about this. John came around looking grave and said earnestly, “I am sorry about your mother.”

The phrase alarmed Henry for a moment, and he gave an angry scowl. “What do you mean?”

“Her accident,” John said, puzzled. “How is her leg?”

Understanding dawned: John was talking about Margaret Allard. “Mortified, I think,” he said. “Why do you call her my mother?”

John was not often short of words, but this question seemed to quiet him. “Will she die, do you think?” he asked after a moment.

“Perhaps,” Henry said. She wouldn’t starve with people to feed her, leg or not, but wounds festered on land.

“Has she seen a surgeon?” John seemed concerned about the woman. This was amiable of him, as Henry didn’t think he knew her very well.

Henry shook his head. “I have seen no one come,” he said.

“Why not?” John looked frustrated.

Henry shrugged, a gesture he had learned from his friend. “Maybe Allard thinks a physician would see me and tell the king.”

“My father will find one,” John said firmly. “We shall need a physician when we have an army, we could begin now.”

“If you wish,” Henry said. A physician might be useful, and Margaret might as well be treated as not. “But why do you call her my mother?”

John looked at him a moment more, then sighed. “Because you live with her, and she and her husband care for you, or have their servants attend you, and they try to advance you. That is usually what a father and mother do. By adoption, that is what I thought they were to you.”

“You look like your father,” Henry said. “I do not look like Allard. I only live with him.” A thought struck him. “You have your father’s name. Does this mean people think I am called Henry Allard?” The idea of people going around behind his back, applying names to him without his knowledge, was a disagreeable one.

“Perhaps,” John said. “Not a name you should keep when you are king, though. The Allard family is a small one, not powerful or rich. It is not a strong name—that is, a name that will make you sound strong.” Years of experience had taught John to speak to Henry as literally as possible.

Henry wasn’t surprised. “Do you call me Henry Allard?” He didn’t want his friend misnaming him in secret.

John shook his head. “Just Henry.” He reflected for a moment. “Did you have another name, before?”

Henry froze. He did not like to talk about his time in the sea, even with John. “Yes,” he said. “But you could not pronounce it.”

“What was it?”

“It means nothing,” Henry said. “Could you find a physician for Margaret? I would like to meet one.”

John sighed. “I will ask my father.”

John must have asked to some effect, as two days later a physician arrived. The days had passed unhappily in the house: Margaret lay behind a closed door, but Henry had occasionally caught the sound of her, harsh, guttural moans he had not known a landsman could produce. The moaning voice troubled him. He did not especially like Margaret, but she lived in his house, and it nagged at him to hear her hover between life and death with no decisive action taken either way. Allard, he felt, should be doing something for her. His reluctant concern did not mean he liked Margaret any better—if anything, he felt some resentment of her for driving him to worry—but still, he was troubled by a sense of responsibility.

So, when Henry was ushered to his room by Allard because the physician was due, Henry objected less than he otherwise might to the idea of confinement. Allard was white, his hands shaking, as he herded Henry upstairs. Henry, who disliked the crutches he was
supposed to walk on, climbed the stairs on all fours by way of asserting himself, but then went quietly to his chamber and stayed by the door, listening for what would happen.

It was some time before Henry could hear anything more than murmurs, strain his sharp ears though he might. There was a pause, whispers, the sound of instruments.

After a while, there was screaming. Henry had never heard such sounds before, not from any man or woman. Margaret was shrieking like a spitted rabbit, high, harsh screams mingled with human sobs, and the noise of it froze Henry in fascination for a moment, listening with intent ears to this new, strange sound. Then he decided that this would not do, that the surgeon must be making matters worse, possibly even taking advantage of Margaret’s weakness to do something to her. He might attack or injure her or take her flesh for food, and no stranger was to do that to someone in his household, however tiresome they might be.

Ignoring his sticks, he crossed the floor on all fours and reached for the door, only to find it locked.

Furious, Henry considered breaking it down, or at least trying to. Soberer thoughts prevailed: it would take a while, and by the time he had succeeded, Margaret would probably be dead. Instead, he called out: “Allard! Allard!” Allard was worried about people seeing him, and frightened of Henry making a noise when strangers were in the house. If he couldn’t protect his wife, maybe the fear of discovery might stir him to action.

There was a sound of running footsteps, and Allard appeared in the door, pale as a deepsman. He looked at his charge, but seemed to find no words.

“You should stop the surgeon, he is hurting your wife,” Henry told him.

Allard stared for another moment.

“Can you not hear her? You should do something.”

Allard came into the room and sat down on the floor beside Henry, careless of his neat clothes.

“You should stop the surgeon,” Henry said again, louder, as Allard seemed in some kind of stupor.

Allard looked at him, then, to Henry’s discomfiture, reached out and stroked the boy’s shaggy head. “Her leg has mortified,” he said in a hoarse voice. “The surgeon has to amputate it to save her from dying.”

“Amputate?” The word was unfamiliar.

“Cut it off.” Allard wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“But then she will be no use,” Henry said. Having said it he realised that she would still be faster than he was, given a crutch, but Allard withdrew the stroking hand. The woman had never been much use, for all Henry had seen, but Allard seemed distressed at her pain nonetheless, and though he thought Allard’s attitude towards her unreasonable, Henry sensed a need to rephrase. “Will this not make her worse?” he asked. Cuts let in diseases in this dry, contaminated world, and to create a gaping gash where there had once been a limb sounded like madness to him.

“It may save her,” Allard said. His voice was barely a whisper. “And she will die if he does not do it.” The screams had stopped, leaving a grim silence behind.

Henry thought of the cleaning fish in the ocean, little pecking silverlings that nibbled parasites off his flanks. That was as far as medicine had advanced among the deepsmen. If you were injured in the sea, you recovered or you died with no one mauling you in the meantime. “Is the surgeon wise?” he asked.

Allard drew a breath, grasping his hands together. “He is the King’s surgeon, Henry. If he is not, there is no one better.”

“Then he must do what he can,” Henry said. The damage was done now; they might as well make the best of it.

Allard reached out and patted him again. Henry did not much care for the caress; his head was vulnerable and best left alone, in his view. However, Allard tended to pat him when he was pleased. There was an advantage here worth pressing.

“Will I meet the surgeon?” Henry asked. “You said he worked for the King.”

“Why do you say that, Henry?” Allard’s hands were shaking in his lap, his eyes on the door.

“He could bring me to the King, or kill the King for us. He can
use a knife,” Henry said. Personally he preferred a direct route in conflicts, but if no one was going to let him meet the King for years, perhaps this surgeon might be a useful short cut.

Allard closed his eyes for a moment, then got up and headed for the door. “I must go to see my wife,” he said, and closed it behind him. Henry heard the lock click shut.

It was more than an hour later that it opened again, and a stranger was ushered in, Allard hovering tensely behind him.

Henry looked up from the floor, where, frustrated at the enforced idleness, he had been whittling away at one of the canes he was supposed to use for walking with a dagger he was supposed to use for fencing practice. The man standing in the doorway was sturdy, well-fed looking without being flabby: rosy-faced and sandy-bearded, almost fox-haired in colouring. Henry refused to show it, but his heart was beating faster and he held his breath; he was actually a little reassured by Allard’s presence. It was years since he had met a stranger.

The man crouched down, bringing himself as low as Henry. People seldom did that in his experience, and Henry sat still, waiting to see what else the man would do.

“Good day, Henry,” the man said. His voice was cautious but gentle, as if speaking to a small child. “My name is Francis Shingleton.”

Henry stared.

“Would you like to speak to me?” the man persisted.

“Why would I like to speak to you?” Henry demanded. “Why do you ask? Do you mean to offer me something?” His tone was harsh, but in fact the man did not seem that bad. He was clearly wary, which was only sensible of him, but he didn’t have the fixed smile Claybrook did. Possibly he was all right; it would be interesting to see how he reacted to being challenged, anyway.