Patch moved to be closer to his master. Ingleborough smiled fondly. “Are you harmed, Patch? What a blunderer is Dee!”
“In all things,” agreed Lord Montfallcon, scowling at the brown robe as it turned a corner, “save cunning. It pains me that he should so influence the Queen.”
“But in no important way,” said Tom Ffynne. “And, besides, my navigation’s considerably improved by his knowledge. He is not altogether a fool. He has done much for the mariner, Perion.”
Lord Montfallcon ignored this unwelcome praise. He folded his arms upon his broad old chest and looked down at his friend. “You must be careful, Tom, to abjure piracy. Particularly in the Middle Sea where witnesses abound. And no Moorish ships. No ships of Poland-and none, of course, of Tatary at this time.”
“That leaves Iberia, the Low Countries, a few independents…”
“Fair game, surely,” said the Lord High Admiral, in thoughtless support of a disappointed Ffynne. Absently, with a gnarled hand, he stroked the head of Patch. “Eh?”
“You know the rule, Tom. Do nothing to embarrass the Queen. Do nothing to bring shame to Albion. Do nothing to complicate my diplomacy.”
Tom Ffynne let loose a high-pitched chuckle. “Oh, aye-do nothing, in short. Methinks, I’ll stay in the Narrow Sea and try a little fishing. If the herring nation is still uninvolved in your plots, Perion!”
Montfallcon was adamant. “I know you will respect the Queen’s honour, Tom.”
Ingleborough nodded, becoming grave. “Albion is an example to the world.”
“I’ll remember. Well…” He put out two scarred, strong little hands and gripped the arms of his friends. “Let not the air of this peaceful Court lull you too softly or you’ll sleep so well you’ll never wake. And look to your health, Lisuarte.”
Ingleborough touched his pale cheek. “I merely suffer the common ailments of the winter. When you return, Tom, I’ll be ruddy and as active as ever.”
Then Sir Thomasin Ffynne turned on his ivory heel and rolled, clack-slap, clack-slap, away.
Montfallcon and Ingleborough, with the beautiful lad following a yard or two behind, continued their journey, upon a constitutional they often made when exercise outside was impossible, and their steps took them gradually from the populated, busy corridors of the palace towards the East Wing, into the parts John Dee had recently left behind, though they went deeper, through wider, vaster halls, full of decaying pageantry-banners, armour, weapons-dull and dusty, into the echoing gloom of that cathedral of tyranny, the Throne Room of Gloriana’s father, King Hern, where rats ruled now, and spiders danced their precise, oft-repeated steps; where shadows moved, scuffled, and were gone. Here only one beam of light entered directly: it fell upon a mosaic floor silvered by the trails of slugs and snails. In that pool of light Hern’s captives-any prisoner or perhaps a courtier who had fallen from favour-were once displayed to those who, with Hern, hid themselves in the shadows. The throne remained; its shape asymmetrical, its back like a warped half-globe, on a dais reached by thirteen black steps. Here Ingleborough and Montfallcon came to remind themselves of the iron past they had plotted to destroy and against the return of which they still worked. It was cold; but the two old men remembered when braziers had burned in the glooms, their bloody coals stinking and hissing. They remembered the whisperings, the vengeances planned and taken, the poison, the corruption of any innocent spirit who ventured into this arena.
Their human figures were dwarfed by obsidian statues of grotesque and anthropoidal aspect-brooding statues, perhaps still dreaming of the heated, morbid and fantastical past, when Hern’s Throne Room rang with the wailing of wretched victims and the coarse laughter of the drunken, the degenerate and the despairing, too fascinated or too frightened to depart from the addictive atmosphere accompanying the indulgence of self-hating Hern’s horrible appetites.
The place disturbed Patch, who moved closer to his master and took his hand, for comfort. “Was King Hern mad?” he whispered. “Was he, sir?”
“His madness brought wealth to Albion,” Montfallcon answered. “Possessions of all kinds. For though he had no political ambition, in the ordinary sense, he encouraged such rivalries amongst his courtiers that they were forever adding to their own wealth and Albion’s. However, towards the end, it was almost certain that everything would be lost. Our enemies were ready to snatch them from us, for they thought we should have civil war on Hern’s death. Instead, young Queen Gloriana ascended the throne-thanks to the efforts of men like your master and myself-and in the thirteen years of her rule our world has changed from a realm of dreadful darkness into one of golden light.”
“The only pity of it all,” said Ingleborough sadly, “is that we should have been touched by Hern’s madness. There isn’t one of us from that time who was not in some way corrupted, distorted or harmed.”
“Not the Queen!” insisted Montfallcon.
Lord Ingleborough shrugged.
“And not you, sir!” said Patch to his master in loyal astonishment.
“Lord Montfallcon and myself served King Hern and served him well, make no mistake. But we dreamed of a nobler future, Albion’s Periclean Age, if you like. We guarded Gloriana as the symbol of our hope, turning the King against those who supported him most strongly, filling his poor mad brain with evidence of plots against him so that gradually he destroyed the worst of his supporters and employed the best-men like ourselves who had no stomach for the things that went on daily in this room.” Ingleborough sighed and hugged the boy to him. “And the Queen has nine children, none of whom are legitimate. It terrifies me. She will not deny that they are hers. She cannot name the sires. If she should die…oh, it would be Chaos. Yet, if she should marry…”
“Strife,” said Montfallcon. “Sooner or later. Certainly, if it were a man of Albion, such as we should wish, it would silence certain tongues. But she’ll only marry the one who will bring her to-who will give her peace…. And none has ever succeeded.” He looked up at the grinning statues. “Gloriana falls-and Albion falls back to this-or worse-inturned, cynical, greedy, unjust and weak-we should become small again and we should rot. Arabia wishes to preserve what we have gained, there’s no question of it-but Arabia would rule Albion, and thus disaster would come, inevitably. Arabia is too intractable, too proud, too masculine…. We survive through the Queen, her character, her very sex. She fills our people with her own idealism, with a sense of all that is best in Albion. Indeed, she infects the world. But as some men would drag the sun from the heavens so that it might be theirs alone, so do some who love Gloriana most see her as the fulfillment of their private desires: unable to see that Albion created her as much as she has created this Albion, and that if they destroy the root they destroy the blossom, too.”
“Is there no Prince, I wonder,” said Ingleborough, “in all the world, who would give himself to Albion so that he might then win Gloriana?”
“None we have met.” Montfallcon turned suddenly, thinking he had seen a tall figure moving behind the statues. He smiled at himself. “And no one who matches nobility of spirit with the means of comforting the Queen. By Xiom-barg! Enough have tried, Lisuarte. Soon, I think, she must reconcile herself.”
“I fear a reconciled Queen might also become a moody Queen-a careless Queen-for I have it in my mind that Albion and Gloriana’s circumstance are interdependent-that should she ever lose hope, then Albion’s hope, too, vanishes.” Ingleborough led Patch by the hand from the old Throne Room. Montfallcon hesitated for a moment before following them.
As they left there came a rustling behind the throne itself and, cautiously, the ragged, unkempt frame of the mad woman rose to stand with one hand upon the chair’s black arm, poised on tip-toe, alert in case they should return. Then she danced gracefully down the steps, curtseyed once to the empty throne, and drifted away into the shadows as mist might join smoke.