‘We could ally ourselves with the men he fights,’ Nita Qwan said.
Every head turned.
Mogon’s head bobbed up and down, and there was a sound like a strong pair of men using a two-man saw. The Duchess was laughing.
‘We could go to war, and ally with men,’ she said softly. ‘We, the last free peoples in the West, could ally with our oppressors to fight off one of our own.’
Tapio met her eye. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, we could.’ He laid a hand on Mogon. ‘Victory in war is usually the result of compromising what you want and behaving like those you despise.’
Later, Bill Redmede couldn’t remember a vote, or a show of hands, or even further discussion. Merely that Tamsin came to the door and seemed to bring a scent of peppermint and cinnamon with her, and then they were all in the hall, dancing – men, and irks, and bears, and Wardens and one boglin wight.
All the females formed a circle in the middle, and began to dance widdershins, turning first outward to the males and then inwards to each other, with many a gesture and a twist, while the males circled them like hungry wolves dancing the other way around, clapping and turning as the music rose. Redmede found himself with Bess again, and she grinned at him and he loved her – reached out and took her hand, and she pressed his tight and then swept past as the music swept higher and faster – left to Mogon, nimble on her feet, and right to Lady Tamsin and her entrancing smile.
The males left the great circle, and they formed smaller circles of their own, so that the central figure of women was surrounded by a dozen small circles of men. Redmede found himself behind a short, dark-haired man he didn’t know, who was speaking to Tapio, who was next in the progression. The circles dissolved into a promenade, and Redmede caught Bess’s hands again as Tamsin laughed behind him.
‘It is like the old days,’ she said. ‘All the barriers are down, and anyone can dance.’
She laughed, and the man with her – the short man – laughed as well, and a trace of smoke came out his nostrils.
Harndon – The Queen
Sometimes, things can be saved by nothing more than custom. The King’s indifference – she couldn’t call it more than that – might have ripened into something worse, except that it was Christmas and he was a great knight, a good king, and a good husband. The habit of being a good husband at Christmas stopped him from taking any terrible action and so the day itself came.
The Queen had sent a dozen notes to her allies. As the war between her servants and those of the Galles at court was nigh on open, she took precautions learned in her father’s court to the south, and her training stood up to the test. It began with mass and she attended with Lady Almspend, Lady Emota and ten more of her ladies, all in dark red velvet and ermine as warm as the spirit of fire.
Mass was held in the great cathedral of Harndon, built by six generations of wool merchants, goldsmiths, knights and kings. Its spire towered over even the royal palace; the central window of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas was accounted one of the fairest in Christendom, and with the first light of a winter day shining through the east wall’s magnificent depiction of Christ’s birth, men might be forgiven for thinking that they were watching the selfsame event as it happened.
A dozen Gallish squires and twenty more Albans who aped their style were waiting in the square outside the cathedral door with buckets of slush and truncheons. They loitered around the Queen’s cross, built by the King’s grandmother to celebrate the birth of his father.
They thought themselves hidden by the press of the crowd, and for a little while, the mob shouted, ‘The Queen is a foreign whore!’ and other epithets.
The leader of the squires was disturbed to see a dozen men on black horses, in matching black surcoats, ride down the Cheapside. They filled the mouth of the Cheap from shop front to shop front, their massive horses breathing plumes of vapour like so many equine dragons.
He pointed them out to another squire.
‘Time to go!’ shouted the second man. ‘The bitch has friends!’
But the mouth of Saint Thomas Street was suddenly filled with apprentices, and every man and boy of them had a wooden club. They came right up to the edge of the mob and halted, very well disciplined.
The mob stopped shouting cries against the Queen.
The trained men came marching down Saint Mary Magdelene towards the square, and the rattle of their drums cleared the mob as fast as boiling water clears ice from a pump handle. There was only one way for them to go, past the King’s Arms tavern and along Dragon Street, and so they went. Or rather, some did, and others edged towards the knights of Saint Thomas and away from the noisy squires by the cross.
The square was empty when the Queen passed through. Two hundred shop boys and apprentices bowed deeply as she came, and when she turned and smiled at the trained men, Edmund thought he might die on the spot.
But the Queen herself knew full well that she had not won a victory, but merely set back the day of reckoning.
The King didn’t seem to think anything of it, although he did, at the end of mass, comment on the number of militia in the streets. ‘A nice demonstration of loyalty,’ he said.
The Queen couldn’t see whether the Captal was discomfited by it or not.
Later, at the palace, teams of minstrels and jongleurs arrived, and the Queen and her ladies changed hurriedly – although an outsider might have been forgiven for mistaking their speed for something other than hurry. And then, in a long procession led by the Queen, nearly every woman in the palace not actively involved in cooking or laying the Christmas table walked down into the yard with torches and were met there by the King and as many gentlemen, pages, servants and hangers-on, and the whole multitude went out into the streets by torchlight. There was a fair snow falling, and the air was brisk and cold, and the King kissed his wife a dozen times.
‘Will we dance?’ he asked.
The Queen smiled. ‘My lord, if it is your will, we may dance while we carol.’
The King’s eye was drawn to something at the edge of the torchlight. ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, and his voice was far away, ‘adventures would come to us at Christmas – giants, and wild men, and once, the Fairy Knight himself, riding on a unicorn, challenging my father’s knights to a tournament on the frozen river.’
‘Oh!’ said the Queen, in delight. ‘What happened then?’
‘The showy bastard dropped a dozen of my father’s best on their arses and we all drank wine and felt like the lesser men. But he gave us the most beautiful gifts, and it was like living a chanson.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve heard – I’ve heard some evil things recently.’ His eyes met hers. ‘About you. I don’t think I believe them.’
‘My lord-’ she began, but it was time to sing.
They sang the ‘Three Ships’ and they sang a carol about the slaying of the innocents, and all the Queen could see in her head was a man-at-arms slaying her new-born babe. Then they sang the ‘Agnus Dei’ and a mighty hymn, and then the ‘Rising of the Sun’ and the circles formed to dance, the women as the deer, the men as the hunters.
They were in the great square below the castle, and they danced down the river steps and out onto the Albin, which was frozen six feet thick already and would freeze further before spring arrived. Palace servants came by on skates with warm wine, and then they sang again, this time ‘Jesu the Joy of the World’ before they were away again in six great circles in the torchlight.
The crowd mixed with the palace servants and the court itself, so that there were apprentices and their girls, knights and their ladies, merchants of the town – the Queen curtsied to Ailwin Darkwood and he turned her sedately and handed her to a tall journeyman wearing an iron badge and steel ring of the armourers’ guild.