‘Perhaps not,’ replied Slovo meaninglessly, whilst actually occupying his mind with thoughts of his wife and where she might have fled.
‘It’s like a bull’s-eye, Admiral,’ Henry explained. ‘The very precious centre of a target that any man might care to hit. This is where it starts from – power and control. Now, in the ordinary course of events one would deal with outer rings of the dartboard as and when convenient. But what do I find? I find that someone or something is extending these zones by stealing parts of my sovereign realm and pushing back in towards the very centre, look you. That is why I’ve called you from your Roman employ – and paid His Holiness a pretty penny for the privilege too, I might add.’
‘I shall not see a coin of it, I assure you, Your Majesty,’ said Slovo, fearful of association with the Borgia Pope’s rapacious ways.
‘No doubt, more fool you,’ replied Henry, closely supervising the off-loading of a haycart for signs of wasteful practices. ‘Still, you’d think I’d get a discount, loyal son of the Church and all that.’
‘I couldn’t say, Your Highness,’ said Admiral Slovo, miles away. ‘I have no knowledge of the world of commerce.’
Henry looked on the Admiral as he would one afflicted. ‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that,’ he said. Then, he swiftly retreated from compassion and resumed business as normal. ‘Just sort it out, will you, Admiral,’ he said briskly. ‘Leave tomorrow and get things back to normal. What I have I hold, that’s the name of the game, and what I hold I intend to pass on – intact – to my two fine sons.’
Slovo nodded, ‘They are handsome-looking youths.’
‘What d’you mean?’ snapped Henry, suddenly all sharp-edged suspicion. ‘How would you know? Arthur, Prince of Wales, is at his court in the Marches and young Henry is with him.’
‘Then who,’ said Slovo calmly, ‘are the two golden youths below who have been smiling up at us all this while? They surely know you, and such familiarity I attributed only to Princes …’
In fact, their smiles seemed more akin to triumphant smirks to Slovo’s mind but this had only reinforced his guess as to their princely origins.
Henry went to look in the direction indicated but corrected himself just in time. His bejewelled hand flew up to cover horror-struck eyes. ‘Come away from the window, Admiral,’ he said in an anguished voice. ‘And leave this very night; not tomorrow, do you hear? This very night! And just get things back to bloody normal, will you boy? Please?’
‘You weren’t to know,’ said Daubeny. ‘His Majesty doesn’t encourage discussion of the subject.’
‘Although, of course,’ said de Peubla delicately, ‘he has nothing to answer for in respect of … that matter.’
Slovo’s sight of the two ‘Princes’, where none should have been, had caused a disproportionate fuss. There was the matter, he gathered, of previous young claimants to the throne meeting untimely ends – the merest commonplace of court life in his own native land. Here, though, it was a touchy subject and the parade ground for troubled consciences. Blame had been successfully attributed to some dead King and it was evidently bad form to revive the issue. Slovo had swiftly taken the hint and pleaded poor eyesight, the deceptive evening sun and so on. Nobody believed him but the gesture was regally appreciated.
‘Well, this is where we broke ’em,’ said Daubeny. ‘What more do you want to know?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Admiral Slovo with brutal honesty. ‘I’m awaiting inspiration.’
‘Could be a long wait then, mon-sewer Ite-eye,’ said the baron resignedly and reached into his saddle bag for his ever-faithful flask of fire-water.
Stretching to his full height in the stirrups, Slovo surveyed the battlefield. Since it was, for the most part, the Celtic peoples that were seceding willy-nilly through King Henry’s fingers, it had seemed sensible to visit the scene of their most recent trial of strength. Here, a mere two years before, Henry had methodically massacred an insurgent Cornish army. Today however, Blackheath, Kent, appeared to have nothing further to teach the curious other than, by dint of the burial-pit mound, the old perennial that rebellion is folly.
‘It got a bit tasty down there by the bridge,’ pointed Daubeny with a shaky gauntlet. ‘A fair few of my lads got turned into pincushions. Mind you, after that, as I recall, it was all pretty straightforward.’
‘They had no cavalry, no cannon, no armour,’ said de Peubla in a knowing voice. ‘It was like harvesting wheat so I am told.’
This struck Admiral Slovo as frightfully unnecessary. In the Italy of his youth, before the grim incursion of the French, tens of thousands of well-paid mercenaries could strive in battle all day long at the cost of a mere handful of deaths per side. The dispute was still settled but with so much less waste.
‘And it is the same “Cornshire” that most frequently departs from King Henry’s realm, is it not?’ he asked.
De Peubla nodded. ‘Along with Powys, Elmet, Cumbria and other such long-gone entities.’
‘And ones we’d never even heard of,’ laughed Daubeny. ‘The army we lost was in Norfolk – or somewhere called logres as it briefly became. Not a man jack has come out yet and don’t suppose any wilclass="underline" all been eaten by now I shouldn’t wonder!’
‘I have never read of the Celts as displaying cannibalistic traits,’ said de Peubla, clearly racking extensive mental files. ‘There was once the distinctive cult of the severed head, it is true but—’
‘Oh shut up, you Iberian ponce!’ barked Daubeny, and de Peubla obediently did so.
‘It’s like this,’ said the Baron to Slovo, his patience likewise strained to the limit. ‘Bits and bobs of the place keep drifting in and out of bloody history. You can never be sure when you send out the taxman or a travelling-assize, they won’t come up against a “Free Kernow” or resurgent “Elmet”. Then they either disappear, never to emerge, or, the natives being more confident than they’ve any right to be, they get driven off with a barbed yard of arrow in their backside.’ He paused to take another reviving swig. ‘Then, shortly after, even a few hours in some cases, everything’s back to normal and the nice, peaceful inhabitants don’t understand what the hell you’re on about when you question them – hot pokers or no. So, you can’t take reprisals against innocent people (well, you can – but His Majesty forbids it), else you’d have a real rebellion and for no good reason either.’
‘How interesting,’ judged Slovo, musing that in their rough equal division of initial territorial advantage, all battlefields looked much the same.
‘Indeed so,’ agreed de Peubla, bobbing up and down on his pack-horse with the intellectual excitement of it all. ‘If it wasn’t for the urgent problem it presents, and the needs for such secrecy as can be mustered, oh how I wish I could investigate these glimpses of other worlds!’
For the first and last time, Admiral Slovo and Daubeny saw eye to eye and their glacial glances froze de Peubla to silence. His enthusiasms, his bourgeois origin, Slovo could forgive; his doctorates in Civil and Common Law commanded respect (or caution). Even the irregularity of his Spanish salary and consequent impoverishment might have been points to solicit sympathy. It was common knowledge that de Peubla was obliged to lodge in a London inn of low repute and that the timing of his visits to Court were prompted by a simple desire to eat.
All this was enough to make even dry-hearted King Henry like the little fellow – in fact their friendship had grown to be quite genuine by regal standards. But not so Admiral Slovo and Daubeny. To the Baron, he was a foreigner: enough said. To the Admiral, well, his Stoic ethics could not accept the man’s conversion to Christianity. If someone was granted the surpassing gift of Judaic birth, he believed they should accept that life would be painful and stick to their guns. Humanistic thought, quite the rage in certain circles at that time (and ever since), did not play a large part in Admiral Slovo’s life.