In Great Waters (27 page)

Henry shook his head. “I will not let you. You cannot fight me, John. Either we go to the burning together, or I go on alone and try to
find it by myself. You can sit in the mud beside this road and wonder where I am.”

John swallowed, looking at Henry’s sharp, small teeth and narrow nose, his black eyes and white skin. “Your face will reveal you, Henry. You would be taken the moment you saw another person. You cannot go into a crowd.”

Henry gave him an innocent stare. “Then you must protect me, John. You are my friend. Protect me from my folly.”

John looked for a moment, then shook his head. It was a gesture Henry had often seen before, when an argument had broken down with John laughing and giving way. He wasn’t laughing now, though. He drew a deep breath, and shook his head again. When he looked back, his face was set more in its own lines—though still pale as bread. “Is that your only cloak?” he asked.

Henry nodded. It was thin wool, grey and warm-smelling, and kept out the cold but little; he had never much cared for warm clothes.

“We must change, then,” John said. “Mine has a hood. Here, take it.” Henry shrugged off his own cloak and reached down for John’s, a dark grey affair of heavier fabric. “Put it on and pull it over your face. I swear, Henry, if this does not work then we must go home.”

Henry settled the cloak around his shoulders and pulled up the hood. It weighed down on him, thick and oppressive, blunting the bite of the morning air, smothering him from the world. John pulled Henry’s thinner mantle around his own frame, shivering. “You landsmen are always cold,” Henry said. “My cloak is too small for you. Look, it barely reaches your knees.”

“I am a good friend to wear it,” John said, clapping his arms around himself. “Raise your hood.”

Henry pulled the hood up around his face. The fabric, warm from its former wearer, covered his ears, shuttered his vision, enshrouding his head in dullness. To be so screened from his surroundings made Henry more nervous than before, and his hand twitched, wanting to pull it off.

“Further forward,” John said. His teeth were chattering. “How far forward can it go?”

Henry reluctantly covered his face. The cloth hung down on his forehead, like a ceiling blocking out the sky. The further forward the hood, the more vulnerable he felt, but John seemed to relax. “Well,” he said, “that is not perfect, but if you keep your head lowered, it will do well enough. Pull it down. Keep it over the tops of your boots, so nobody can see your legs.”

The folds of the cloak were difficult to arrange, but Henry twined his legs back, tucking the cloth over them. “Good enough?”

John shook his head. “We are lucky I am taller than you. That cloak is barely big enough as it is.” He pressed his hands against his forehead, fingers splaying over the white skin. “I do not like this, Henry.”

Henry bared his teeth from the depths of the hood. “I do not like this hood, but I wear it to please you.”

“Why must you see this burning?” John lowered his hands, looking up at his friend.

Henry did not know how to answer. He shook his head. “I wish to know what is happening,” he said in the end. “And I wish to know the worst that can happen to me.”

“If you wish to know that, let us go home now and I will set fire to a cat for you,” John said.

Henry shook his head again. “I wish to know what I am fighting against.”

John said little on the rest of the journey, and Henry said nothing either. The two of them plodded side by side, down the road. The first time someone passed them Henry’s hands tightened on his reins so fast that the horse shied, but the traveller only raised his hand and nodded, saying, “Good morrow.” John hailed him in return, and they passed on. The stranger was a man dressed much like Allard, with yellow hair and a pink face, startling in his unfamiliarity, but gone down the road, no threat, no danger. Henry resisted the urge to turn and stare after him.
If all goes well
, he told himself,
I shall rule that man one day. I will not have to hide from him. I will show him my face, and he will bow
.

As the numbers of people increased, though, Henry grew uncomfortable. John was right, many of them wore cloaks, and as they thickened on the road, becoming a crowd, a shoal of cumbersome horses and riders, more and more of them pulled hoods up covering the bewildering variety of faces, as if to shield them. There was nothing in any of their features that needed hiding. They just drew up their hoods, covering their heads from what surrounded them.

The pyre had loomed immense in Henry’s mind, casting a black, flickering shadow over his spirit, but the sight of it was so mundane that for a moment he couldn’t believe this was what they had come so far to see. A tall stake of wood, roughly hewn and set in the ground, surrounded by bundles of fuel, a simple cone heaped around a stick, like a pile of snow with a spade stuck in it. It was not tall like a tree or black like ink. Just a fireplace heaped up in an open field.

“Henry.” John’s voice was low, too low for anyone but him to hear. “We should stay at the back of the crowd. If we are too close to the front, we will have to dismount, and then you will have to walk.”

And then people would see his legs. Then he might as well climb up on the pyre and lie down to sleep out the last few minutes of his life. Henry said nothing, but pulled hard on his horse’s reins and dug in his heels, forcing the animal to back up.

Having followed John all night, ridden so far and tired his horse to get here, Henry expected the burning to begin at once, but it was hours of waiting before anything happened. People arrived, people upon people. Henry was no judge of clothes, but they had more the look of Claybrook than of Allard or the servants; tall people, people on fine horses with servants attending them. More and more. Henry hung at the outskirts of the crowd and backed up his horse more with each arrival, and they kept on coming. The sight was overwhelming. In all his life, he had known fewer than a dozen people. Now there were scores of them, thronging together, a great gathering, all strangers, numerous, various, terrifying.

It was some time, too long, before an unfamiliar sound came to Henry’s ears, piercing and sharp. He looked up, reached to tug on John’s arm.

“Your hand,” John hissed, pushing him away.

Henry hid his webs back in his fists, folding his fingers around the reins. “What is that?” he whispered.

“The fanfare. The King is coming. Can you not understand it? It is meant to be the deepsmen’s language.”

Henry listened, frowning with angry concentration. There was something of the creak and drone of his mother tongue there, and he knew court musicians were supposed to imitate the deepsmen’s language with their instruments. Probably there was something to hear in that displeasing mix of sounds, but he wasn’t about to converse with it. He shook his head. “It means nothing,” he said.

There was a rustle, the snort of horses and the sound of voices whispering, and the crowd pushed back. Henry found his legs being jostled by other men; to his alarm, he could feel knees, calves, the clear shape of others being pressed into his skin. If he could feel them, they could feel him. “Back up, back up,” he hissed to John, yanking hard at his horse’s mouth. The animal, over-driven and exhausted, jumped under his pulling, and Henry loosened the reins in panic: if the creature reared now, it would tumble him onto the ground, legs strewn out for the world to see. Heart thrashing against his ribs, he took a gentler grip and pulled back, trying to see John around the suffocating hood.

Preoccupied with his battle to get out of the crush, Henry missed the royal litters’ arrival. When he looked up, there was an array of people, a man, a woman, both crowned and stiff-backed, and something else, a fat shape slumped beside the woman—but they did not have their faces to him, and he couldn’t see. His hands convulsed in frustration; if he had his axe, he could ride up to them now, three hard swings and this whole parade would be over with. If it weren’t for the crowd. They were too far away from him, and he couldn’t see their faces. They could be landsmen, could be deepsmen, could be anything.

There were no speeches. The crowned woman raised her hand, and brought it down again. There was a murmur, and then men were coming forward, dragging behind them a shuffling, lurching figure,
whose weeping rang in Henry’s ears, got inside them like an itch, a burr he couldn’t dig out. He looked at John, desperate and bewildered. “That is not a bastard,” he said.

John shook his head, raised a hand to shush him. “That is the man who found him,” he said. He opened his mouth to say more, then stopped, shook his head again and laughed. It was not a happy sound.

The man wept, and when his leg touched the ground, he groaned.

Guards climbed up the pyre, dragging the man after them. Yanked his hands above his head, tied them with rope, left him hanging there, lopsided, his face contorted, his body flopping with sobs, helpless as a dying cod. His voice, coming out in broken lumps, was the only sound in the field.

Other men followed. In their arms they carried someone, a shape Henry recognised instantly. Two tails, pallid skin, a thick sturdy waist and a fan of webs between its fingers. A child. His child, his brother. It struck Henry, as the child was tied up back-to-back with its finder, that the boy might actually be his brother. His mother had found a landsman to her taste once before. The thought gave him a passing moment of hostility towards the little shape on the pyre.

Then two men stepped forward with lit torches.

Flame caught quickly on to fuel, lapping round it like a climbing vine, ragged edges roaring in the wind. The man’s sobs rose quickly to screams, but it was the child’s voice that Henry heard: the shrilling cry of an animal, the shriek in the language he had not heard for many years from any throat but his own:
Help me! Help me!

A man in robes was standing grim-faced before the pyre, making square gestures and muttering something in what Henry supposed was Latin. One of his legs was faulty and he stood at an angle. As the heat washed over him, stinging his skin, it seemed to Henry as if the whole of creation was lurching, sick and crooked in this dry, hard world where no water cushioned you, where you landed as you fell with nothing to break the blow.

The child screamed for his mother.
No help to you now
, Henry thought, ash in his throat.
She pushed you out here to meet this
.

There was a racket coming from the royal gathering, the lumpen shape of the man beside the queen rocking and yelling in his chair. People were standing beside him, squeezing water over his skin, and the sight made Henry so sick with anger that his stomach heaved. With another twist in his heart, Henry recognised a man standing beside them, directing their motions. It was Robert Claybrook.

The flames were rising and the screams were fading. Henry caught a glimpse of bubbling skin as they finally tore their way upwards to close over the child’s head. On the firewood below, something frothed and hissed: fat melting off as the meat cooked. The smell was no worse than any other roasted joint, any other hearth fire Henry had ever encountered. Now it seemed he had always been right in his hatred of both.

The fire roared for a long time and no one spoke. With the sight of the child gone, Henry had no more reason to stay. They were at the back; they could set out and go. As Henry turned to tell John to come with him, he looked down, and horror broke through his body in a wave of cold that blotted out the heat of the fire.

His leg was uncovered. Something, some movement, had pushed the cloak back, and there it lay, a limp snake down the side of his horse, accusing him.

Henry covered it with a frantic tug, and looked around him. All eyes were still on the pyre. No one was looking at him. He was safe, surely he was safe; if anyone had spotted him, he’d be burning right now, thrown in with the others; why waste wood when there was a fire already lit? A laugh coiled in his throat; he was getting light-headed and stupid. Time to go.

Henry backed his horse out of the crowd, slowly and carefully. The movement was enough to get John’s attention, and the two of them set out together.

A little way down the road, they heard a voice hailing them: “John? John!” Recognising Robert Claybrook, the boys stopped their horses.

“Dismount,” Claybrook said. The fire had flushed his face, making
it scarlet, and his voice was hard. Henry slithered down after John; the horse would need rest soon anyway, or it would collapse.

“John.” Claybrook’s voice was clipped. “Who is that with you?”

“Henry, sir.” John spoke to the ground, barely above a whisper. The sound of it hurt Henry’s ears.

“The fault is mine,” Henry said quickly. “I followed him all the way and would not go home; he stayed with me to make sure I concealed myself well.”

Claybrook gave Henry a brief look. His eyes glittered as he turned back to his son. “You brought him here,” he said.

John did not look up.

“Answer me.”

John lifted his head a little; his face was haggard. Henry could see his legs were shaking. Claybrook stood over his son, and raised a hand.