In Great Waters (44 page)

But then he felt hands tugging at his waist, unknotting, and his rope, the rope he had carried with him across the bay, was being looped, ready for him to use.

Henry sprang back again, reached out and grabbed, and the rope was in his hands. The deepsman kept hold of his shoulders, and Henry braced himself, feet against the deepsman’s chest. That was all he needed, a little purchase.

And, with his arms outstretched before him, the deepsman’s wrists were level. Henry reached out, and wound the cords, and pulled them fast.
There
, he thought as he tugged on the knot.
See how you like that
.

The deepsman let go, suddenly grappling with himself. Henry floated above him for a moment. The sea was movement, endless and unconstrained, and if you couldn’t swim, you drowned. Rope could be gnawed through eventually, Henry had learned in those first painful months as a captive in Allard’s hideaway—but the sickening dismay of constriction, the panic and horror it induced, was something he had never forgotten. Even with a lungful of air, this tribesman could not think.

He was confined. He had lost.

Henry flicked himself downwards and grabbed the tribesman’s legs, pulling him down into the dark.
Mine
, he said.
Yield. Yield to me. Yield
.

And, kicking and thrashing in the blue abyss, he heard the reply:
I yield
.

The tribe
, Henry said.
Everyone yield
.

The beaten deepsman’s voice carried upwards, and he heard it, crackling all around him: voices, each of them blending to the same final, blazing, longed-for, hard-won answer.
We yield. You are the king. We yield
.

The girl’s voice echoed from above him, a shriek of triumph:
Us! Us! Ours!

Henry bent his head to gnaw the deepsman free. The taste of salt filled his mouth.

So it was that Anne, Princess of England, walked naked out of the sea, and beside her walked a young man no one had ever seen before, a straight-spined young man balancing on his curved legs. He stood with his back steady, unbowed by a prince’s hunch, but his eyes were black to the edges and his teeth were sharp, his hands webbed across, and in his hand he held a lock of hair, pulled from the skull of a deepsman out in the bay.

Henry looked across a beachful of people, ornately dressed old men, long-legged young ones, a profusion of horses stamping at his presence. He had not seen so many landsmen at once since he had watched his brother burn. A spasm of shyness gripped his throat, and for a moment he could not speak. Then his fingers tightened on the lock he had torn from his beaten adversary, and he raised it aloft.

“I have heard how your country fares ill against the French,” he said. Anne had told him to mention France, to say nothing of himself. “They will not come to you now. I have taken this from the king of the deepsmen as token of his fealty, and I come now for yours.” They were courtier words, liar’s words; Anne had made him memorise them. She thought a speech was in order.

A man stepped forward, a man with a grey face and white hair. “Who do you come from?” he said. “Whose bastard are you?”

“Lord Wade, please.” Anne’s voice wasn’t conciliatory; it was sharp.

There had been more to the speech, but Henry decided against it. He looked the man in the eyes. “Do you want a French king?” he said. “I have come from the sea, and I have beaten the deepsmen. They will do what I say. So will you. Give me a horse: my legs are tired from standing.”

It was a long moment that passed, and then a man came forward. Samuel Westlake, Henry saw. He leaned his weight against the horse as he approached, and then handed the reins over. Henry took them, and mounted up.

B
OOK
S
IX
TROTH

A
NNE SAT ALONE
in the chapel, her hands clasped. She couldn’t kneel, but she was praying. Samuel had explained to her that it wasn’t royal privilege not to kneel before God, but a consideration for a prince’s weak legs; that no prince should ever consider himself too high to kneel, in spirit, before the Creator.

Anne hadn’t argued with him, but it hadn’t seemed relevant to her. Samuel was interested in theology. God, to Anne, was both infinite and simple: to pray was to be cradled in light. She reached out within herself now, tried to relax, open her soul, feel the blessings of God around her. When she prayed best, she could vibrate with the sacred, feel the atmosphere coil and hum with blessings, Holy Presence in every drop of air, every fibre of herself, her own body and the bench under her and the stone beneath her feet ringing with divinely omnipresent as salt in the sea. Christ had said to man,
You are the salt of the earth
, and Anne had listened. When she prayed, she could taste it: God, the flavour of every thread and scrap of the world.

What she prayed for was blessings upon her marriage. That had been quickly arranged; Henry could be crowned as her husband, she had declared herself intent, and who was to stop it? There had been some talk of getting Philip’s consent, some notional royal blessing, but Henry had stopped that: when one man wanted a woman in the sea, he said, and another man tried to stop him, they fought for her. Did Philip wish to fight? He said it dryly, and several people laughed, as if
he was making a joke. It could have been a joke, a reference to Philip’s infirmity, his unfitness to fight being his unfitness to rule. They thought it meant a resolute and witty king. In that moment Anne understood just how much everyone disliked her uncle.

Anne didn’t think it was a joke, though. She was not sure if she should be afraid of Henry.

But marrying him was the only option, and it might be a good one. She could have sons, lots of sons, a shoal of them to lead out to the delights of water, to help her guard the shores. The idea of childbirth seemed inconceivable in this moment, procreation unreal, but she reached out to God, asking for strength. In this moment, she was safe in the arms of the Lord; what would follow, would follow. And whatever became of her, it could not be a worse death than shrieking in bloody sheets, skin boiled from her body. She would marry Henry, and God would support her.

Anne sat in the chapel and prayed. She could find no form of words appropriate to the situation, but God would forgive her for that. God forgave. There was infinite mercy in Heaven; this she believed. There had to be, when there was so little mercy on earth.

Anne opened herself to God, and felt God around her. The living heart of the world beat within her chest.

Henry was surrounded by men he didn’t know. They had escorted him to a palace, a stone building broader and higher than any he’d ever seen before, with buildings and buildings around it. This was London: no estate, but a reef of landsmen, wood and stone, thickets of people and dwellings. The city made him nervous; there were too many obstacles, blind spots on every side. There was no way to know what would approach.

Seated at a table, uncomfortably swathed in rich clothing too narrow around his chest that some servant had brought from a royal wardrobe—Robert Stone, he had asked the man’s name, told him the clothes were too tight, made him promise to find or make new ones, noted his name and the speed with which the man bowed and
retreated—Henry was talking to too many people. The men from the beach. Anne had said they were important men, they controlled the land on the coasts, and the rivers. Claybrook was among them; Henry could barely look at him, so choked with anger did he feel. But Claybrook’s land included most of the Thames, Anne said. The great river that led out to the east sea. Ridiculously, she even addressed him as “Lord Thames.” Until they could bring him down, he was a man of consequence.

He looked around the table, trying to weigh these men up. Lord Wade, the man who had spoken to him on the beach, he had decided against; the man was sharp, but not sharp enough. He had the wit to know he must be a bastard, but not the wit to hold his tongue until he knew what to make of Henry. The man had spoken to him, demanded to know whose bastard he was, as if he was somebody’s horse. Henry intended to be king, and was quite prepared to fight for it. He had seen deepsmen in the sea circle each other and pose, striking the water to show their strength. But only a stupid man would posture at an opponent he couldn’t beat.

The others? He weighed up their stances, trying to get a sense of them. Samuel Westlake sat silent at the end, his eyes flitting around the group. They all seemed to have multiple names, a quirk Henry felt he could soon tire of. He had accepted as a child that landsmen tended to have two names, one for themselves and one for their family. It made a certain amount of sense; deepsmen didn’t have family names, but you could refer to other tribes by naming their usual haunts. Landsmen’s names were more random, but he’d grown used to it. Now, it seemed, landsmen
did
sometimes name themselves for their territory—but, insanely, only one man per territory got to do so. There were even two brothers in the room—Greenway, Anne had said—who he was expected to address by different names. Henry was entirely unwilling: the custom was stupid, and more than that, offended him. Why should he address one Greenway man as Severn and the other as Mersey, but none of their families, none of the people who lived by Severn or Mersey waters? No man was a river, or owned a river: land and water were where you lived, not what you were, and
it was arrogant to claim a whole rushing body of water for your own. Henry had every intention of ruling England, but that did not make him England, and if he wasn’t doing it, he didn’t see why his subjects should. He was not about to give Robert Claybrook any more titles, that was for sure. It struck Henry, thinking about it, that Allard had never called Claybrook “Lord Thames,” or not in his hearing. But everyone else did, to Claybrook’s face. Claybrook must have been very determined to keep him ignorant of his location.

The whole business was angering, and Henry had stuck to addressing the men by their actual names. He could see it causing a flicker of insult every time he did it, but they could just put up with it. If they didn’t like it but did not protest, it was a secure sign of his dominance.

There was a man from the west, of Wales, called Forder, a man seeming too large in his clothes, restless and watchful, as if ready to charge at any moment. The Greenway brothers disturbed him a little: they looked to each other more than to anyone else. For a moment, Henry’s heart twitched; then he gathered himself. If they could be loyal to each other, they could be loyal to him, if he could persuade them. Do well by each, and the other would follow. Anne had said their best chance was the largest man, a man called Hakebourne. Henry studied him: big, still, watchful. Not making a judgement, holding his nerve. He could use such a man.

There was another man at the table. Narbridge. Lord of Cornwall. It had been in Cornwall his brother was found. This was the man, this tall, loose-limbed man in fine garments, who had handed his brother over to the queen. The man was bright-eyed and alert, paying attention to all in the room, but Henry was having none of him. Anne said he was loyal, but Henry did not wish to know. The man was a burner of bastards, and soon, when he had the crown on his head, Henry and he were going to have a reckoning.