Lammas Night (48 page)

This was the place. Casting a surreptitious glance up the way they had come, he stooped and laid both hands flat on the floor beneath the inscription for a few seconds, Michael watching him oddly. He was not sure why he was doing it or what he was supposed to feel as a result, but he detected nothing. Dusting his palms together distractedly, he stood and beckoned Michael closer.

“Did Gray tell you anything about what we did last week?” he murmured, craning his neck to glance down a passage farther to the right that led into the undercroft.

Michael shook his head, mystified.

“No, sir.”

“Well, we did a past-life regression that seemed to touch on Becket. I think I need to find out a few more things. I'm going into the chapel to see what I can do, and I'd like you to see that I'm not disturbed.”

Michael looked very doubtful. “Does Colonel Graham know what you're planning, sir?”

“No. But he didn't say I shouldn't.”

“With respect, sir, I doubt he said you shouldn't conjure demons, either, but one would hope you'd know better than to try. You can't possibly have a great deal of exper—”

As a young couple emerged from the crypt, lost in one another, Michael smoothly shifted into a low-voiced explanation of some feature of the carved screen separating the chapel from the transept where they stood. William glanced at them in surprise and caught back a pang of bitter grief and loneliness, for the young man's lady reminded him very much of Caroline Marie. But the two did not even seem to notice him and Michael as they passed through and out the cloister door.

Before he could pick up the thread of his earlier conversation with Michael—which was fast assuming the scope of a major disagreement, he suspected—three men in uniform wandered down from the nave and spent several minutes exclaiming quietly on Becket's place of martyrdom. As Michael continued to dissemble about architecture, keeping himself between William and the men to shield him from full view, an organist somewhere deep in the undercroft began running arpeggios up and down the scales, soon soaring into the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The opening chords sent chills up William's spine, making him flash again on the face of the girl who looked like Caroline Marie and underlining Michael's warning. He was more subdued when he turned back to Michael again, after the men finally moved on, but more firmly resolved.

“Michael, it's true that I don't have a great deal of experience, but this is something I feel I must do. If I get into trouble, I'll simply have to trust that you can get me out. Gray has a great deal of confidence in you, so I do, too.”

“I still wouldn't advise it, sir.”

“Very well, I take your meaning. Now kindly do as I say. That is only just short of a command, Michael.”

Before Michael could reply, William turned on his heel and entered the chapel. He regretted having to put it on those terms, but Michael had left him no choice—even though he knew the young man meant well and was very likely right. Still, as he slipped into the back row of chairs on the right, as close as he could get to the actual spot where Becket was supposed to have fallen, he was relieved to see Michael taking up a post in the doorway, leaning casually against the door frame as if he were simply contemplating the beauty of the chapel beyond.

Smiling a little, William drew up the hood of his coat and laid his head back in the corner, hands clasped loosely in his lap. With luck, if anyone did see him, they would think he was simply meditating. He only hoped that nothing would come up from yet another life. If he had multiple incarnations, like Gray, he would just as soon tackle them one at a time. Now that he knew more about Becket and his circumstances, he thought he could handle that one by itself.

He closed his eyes and let himself settle for a few seconds, trying to make his breathing slow and even, the way Gray had taught him. He took a deeper breath and let it out slowly, imagining the touch of Gray's hand on his forehead. The now-familiar sensation of detachment he had learned to associate with trance came easily, as if Gray himself had been there to direct it. That reassured him.

He let himself go deeper then, concentrating on whatever essence of Becket might still permeate the walls of the cathedral all around him—some essence of
him
with which he could make connection, if he had, indeed, been Becket. He nudged himself backward and felt a stirring, halfway between a flutter of anticipation and the sinking sensation Gray had once described to explain how
he
felt when he was slipping into deeper trance.

Then, with a twinge of vertigo, William was in that other set of memories—deeper, yet enough removed to realize that part of him remained with his body in a cathedral quite different from the one Thomas Becket had known.

In memory, he stood with his back against a column not far from where his present body sat. A young monk stood at his side bearing the great primatial cross, but Becket's eyes were only for the three knights slowly mounting the steps from the cloister door, where a shadowed fourth moved to cut him off from his men in the back of the nave.

Fools! Did they not realize he would not run? He had received the kiss of peace from Henry and assumed the sacred mantle. King and archbishop had long been one in sacrificial worth. FitzUrse knew that even if the others did not. FitzUrse was his own vassal and follower of the same path. FitzUrse would see that his suffering was no more than it must be.

His would be a good death, fulfilling the several needs. He would be a martyr for the Christians and a god incarnate for the old faith. The taking of his life would light a spiritual beacon in Christendom, but the spilling of his blood would fecundate the land. It was a role he had played before, though never in this fullness, doubly blessed for serving double needs. To shrink from his destiny was not even thinkable.…

“Do not try to escape, archbishop,” FitzUrse called. This time, William knew he spoke in Norman French—his own tongue, the language of his birth. “Will you raise the anathema you pronounced on the King's men or no?”

As Becket shook his head, William shook his. Though the William part of him did not fully understand what was about to occur, Becket did. It was all a part of the sacred dance.

“I may not, for the sake of my office,” Becket replied, speaking of more than one office.

One of the other knights took another, step forward, brandishing his sword. “Do not provoke us, Thomas of London. You force us to drastic measures by your stubbornness.”

“Here am I, the priest of God,” Becket/William breathed, opening his empty hands. “Do what you must. I will not be moved.”

As he turned his back on them, he knew what they would do. Mailed gauntlets clutched at his pallium, his vestments, twisting him around, and he knew brief anger at the presumption of the other two knights. He had chosen FitzUrse.

“No!” he protested. “Reginald, you are my man!”

He saw what he took to be an instant of reluctance in FitzUrse's eyes—in
Gray's
eyes!—as the others took other meaning from his words and hesitated, and he contrived to stumble closer into FitzUrse's grasp. Could the man not see that death's embrace was welcome in such a cause?

“FitzUrse, you pander! I am your liege! Remember your duty!” he shouted, at the same time imploring FitzUrse with his eyes to strike and be done with it. Mortal courage and resolution could last only so long!

The knight's hoarse cry reverberated in the cathedral as he jerked Becket around, the clerical skullcap flying off with the force of the turn.

“Take him! In the King's name, strike!”

He saw the eyes no more—only Gray's sword descending. In that last instant, he managed to raise one hand to shield his sight, that battle-trained reflexes might not betray him into flinching from his fate. The first stroke stunned him past all further pain, the second following so closely that he was already dying as he sank to his knees. Neither as Becket nor as William did he feel the other blows.

An odd sense of fulfillment surfaced briefly and then was gone as awareness of Becket faded. Still, William felt a surge of vertigo as he catapulted back to waking consciousness, and his breathing was ragged. He found Michael sitting anxiously in the chair next to him when he opened his eyes. His lightheadedness must have shown because Michael immediately forced his head between his knees and pulled back his hood, beginning to knead the back of his neck with both hands.

“Keep your head down for a few seconds, sir, or you're going to have God's own grandfather of a headache,” Michael murmured. “You just came back a little too quickly. It happens to the best of us. Take a few deep breaths and let yourself reconnect.”

William obeyed, gratefully surrendering to Michael's ministrations, and after a minute or two, the dizziness eased. At least this had been better than the time at Gray's flat. As he finally straightened cautiously, feeling no hint of the threatened headache, he staved off Michael's queries with a gesture and a reassuring shake of his head. He was all right, but he needed to sort out what he just experienced.

It had been about sacrifice, not murder, he realized now. Murder had been the outward form, but that had not been the real reason. All the political motivations for Becket's killing had been contrived as a cover-up for something else far more convoluted.

Clearest was Becket's almost joyful resignation to his fate as a Christian martyr, slain in affirmation of certain prerogatives of his office as archbishop that could not be surrendered to any earthly king, however close the two had been. The controversy with Henry over that point had been long-standing and quite expected, given the two men involved.

Less clear was the dual nature of the killing, aspects of which overlapped quite strangely with what William thought he understood. One part whose importance he sensed was the ritual kiss of peace the two had exchanged in private. Both men had attached some mystical meaning to it, but William did not know what it was. The significance of the kiss was doubly puzzling because William had thought, from his perusal of historical sources, that the King's refusal to give the kiss had been a major bone of contention leading to Becket's murder. Now it appeared that as a result of privately accepting that kiss, Becket had also accepted some kind of sacrificial role in Henry's place, in addition to the almost incidental role of martyr. It was all very vague, but throughout ran the thread that the archbishop and the King were somehow interchangeable in this context.

“Michael, is there or was there something in your religion having to do with human sacrifice?” he whispered almost inaudibly, not sure he really wanted an answer to the question. “Was Thomas Becket somehow involved in the old religion?”

Michael stiffened, then stood and gestured toward the doorway with his chin. “I think such matters might be better discussed in the car, sir.”

Their conversation on the way back to London was guarded at first; for Michael did not know how much the prince had been told about the elder faiths. But William's obvious familiarity with much of the terminology soon had the young agent talking freely about the idea of the sacred king, who was wed to the land and whose blood must be spilled at intervals to ensure prosperity.

“I'm not the expert Gray is, but I do know that it was on a seven-year cycle,” Michael said, picking up speed as they left the outskirts of Faversham. “As long as the king was strong and in good health, substitutes were sometimes ritually slain in the king's place, though it was usually made to look like something else. Generally, they were raised to royal rank or the equivalent—archbishop in the case of Becket—and actually wielded the power of a king for a while.”

“Like Becket being chancellor before he became archbishop?” William asked.

“That's right, sir. After a period of weeks, months, or even years of power, the surrogates eventually appeared to fall from grace and were charged with some capital offense, of which they were almost always innocent. Treason was a particularly convenient charge since the penalty almost always involved the shedding of blood—beheading, or else hanging, drawing, and quartering.”

William grimaced, rubbing the back of his neck. He was getting a headache despite Michael's earlier attentions.

“Let's go back to Becket,” he said. “Was there some kind of tie like that between him and Henry so that Becket could have been killed in place of the King?”

Covering a yawn, Michael nodded. “For sacrificial purposes, I think the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury were often interchangeable. The association goes back to the days when the king was also a priest.”

“Ah, yes. Gray mentioned the remnants of that in the coronation ceremony.”

“That's right, sir. Some of the elements are close to an actual ordination, I'm told. Anyway, it's pretty much accepted among our people that Becket was a substitute victim.” He smiled. “It's said that William Rufus had tried to get Saint Anselm to do the same thing for
him
when he tricked him into becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, only Anselm wasn't having any of it. Maybe that's why Rufus ended up in the New Forest with an arrow in his chest instead of the archbishop—though they say he knew he'd been chosen from a very early time and was well aware of his duty when the time came to die. A willing victim was always best.”

“Like Becket,” William murmured. “One would almost think he sought death.”

Michael shrugged. “I don't know that I'd put it that strongly, sir, but I think he probably saw it as his duty and accepted that, the same as Rufus. For that matter, Jesus fulfills all the requirements. As you may recall, he wasn't too fond of the idea of dying, either, though he did what he had to in the end.”

“Let this cup pass from me …,” William murmured. “That's right. It's difficult for me to think of Him in this context. Who else?”