‘Well, that’s it,’ said Daubeny, already bored. ‘Not much to see, is there? All the deaders and body-bits were gathered up and the local proles doubtless gleaned all else away. Learn anything?’
‘No,’ said Slovo without inflection.
‘Better if you’d seen the battle,’ added the Baron glumly.
‘Unhappily, I was otherwise engaged,’ the Admiral replied, his conversation in free fall as he pondered. ‘The Duke of Gandia, Juan Borgia, was murdered that day.’
‘Not Cesare’s brother?’ whispered de Peubla, as though the Beast of the Romagna himself might be eavesdropping.
‘The same; their joint father, His Holiness, Pope Alexander, requested that I investigate the murder and so …’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ interrupted Daubeny, spluttering his way out of a long pull at his flask, ‘I fully understand why you couldn’t grace my battle with your presence. And I do wish you’d keep that “m” word to a minimum – particularly in the context of the Princes?’
‘Your forgiveness,’ asked Slovo insincerely.
‘Not that we’ve anything to hide, mind,’ added Daubeny, now more than a little tipsy. ‘It’s just that we don’t want the evil eye put on our own two jewels in the crown.’
‘Arthur and Henry, oh yes,’ smiled de Peubla, moving charitably in to rescue the Baron from his self-made quick-sand. Daubeny remained appropriately quiet and still as it was done. ‘Two fine prospects for the English nation to gaze upon and wish long life to. Even the most fleeting thought of harm to them is painful.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Slovo, apparently with great seriousness.
‘Arthur’s the one they make all the fuss about,’ bellowed Daubeny. ‘Prince of Wales and Lord of the Marches. Got his own little Court he has and a name calculated to get the British all expectant. If you were to ask me, well, there’s more chance of finding a book in his hand than a sword – or anything else interesting and rounded.’
‘A reference to horse-flesh, doubtless,’ commented de Peubla primly.
‘Whatever!’ laughed the Baron. ‘Tall and serious, that’s what he is. Very interested in chivalry – ha! Give me Prince Henry any day: a real little Englishman: rosy-cheeked, stocky little chap and already very sound on the Celts. Hates anything to do with poetry and prophecy!’
Daubeny sadly observed his flask was now empty and, with the uncanny facility Admiral Slovo had already noted in the rough-as-coal-bunkers nobility of this land, sobriety instantly returned when he next spoke.
‘Still, it’s all in God’s hands. We shall see what we shall see.’
It was seeing what they saw as they turned the horses for home, the new and marvellously changed prospect of London now spread out, that halted them in their tracks.
‘Sod this,’ said Daubeny quite calmly. ‘I’m not going down there. Where’s London?’
De Peubla did not answer, being too busy fixing the scene in his mind as a solace for the disappointed old age he fully expected.
‘London is still there,’ answered Slovo, waving his black glove towards the transmogrified metropolis below. ‘But no longer, I suspect, known by that name. What would you hazard, Ambassador?’
De Peubla rocked his head from side to side in a charmingly hybrid Hebrew/Iberian gesture. ‘I do not speak any of the British tongues, Admiral,’ he replied. ‘Londres perhaps? Londinium possibly?’
Slovo noted that Sir Giles Daubeny was dumbfounded, but then the poor man had just lost his Capital City. He turned to smile on him. ‘Some foreign name like that, I expect,’ he agreed with de Peubla.
‘It may not have lasted long,’ said de Peubla as they trotted along slowly, ‘but I am most glad to have seen it.’
‘Speak for yourself, Hispaniol!’ growled Daubeny. ‘I like my severed heads in their proper places – on battlefields or adorning spikes at the King’s order; not all over a City Wall dangling on chains with bells on ’em! What sort of a welcome do you call that?’
‘An instructive one?’ suggested Admiral Slovo, gamely entering into the spirit of things.
‘It’s that all right,’ replied Daubeny with a bitter laugh. ‘Likewise all the idols and symbols – all those curls and swirls – not a blasted straight line or plain picture to be seen: fair made me nauseous it did! Oh yes, it spoke pretty clear to me: Saxons not welcome! Praise God that it faded!’
‘Just so,’ agreed Slovo (though actually his indifference knew no bounds). ‘And none that we questioned were aware of their brief transformation. One can only surmise therefore that some twist in the skeins of fate permitted us a glance of what might have been …’
‘Hmmph!’ snapped the Baron.
‘Or what might be,’ continued the Admiral implacably.
‘Enough!’ said Daubeny, chopping the air with his metal-clad gauntlet. ‘It is not going to be. You heard His Majesty’s words – sort things out – so get sorting. That’s what we’re meant to be about, isn’t it? Why else would I allow you to drag me down to this god-forsaken tail-end of nowhere?’
‘Why indeed?’ answered Slovo politely. ‘Cornshire is, I agree, impermissibly barren and stark. Why, I wonder, do people persist in living amidst such extremes of Nature?’
‘Habit?’ postulated de Peubla, endeavouring to be charitable.
‘Some such strong force,’ agreed Admiral Slovo. ‘And I do apologize to you both for so exposing you to the very outer fringes of the World. It is merely that I somehow sense that we are tracking the mischievous shift-phenomenon to its lair.’
‘Good,’ sighed Daubeny. ‘So let’s kill it and go!’
‘Would it were so simple,’ murmured Slovo, schooled in a more ancient culture and thus aware that murder was but the beginnings of politics.
The little party with its most curious of missions should have been acting in all urgency. Each day brought a fresh dispatch from King Henry, urging them on by news of further outrages. The North had been raided and there had even been an insolent proclamation received from ‘Free Surrey’ (Libertas Suthrege, if you please!), and His Majesty had estates there. Henry’s Celtic powers of fancy and invention were being fast exhausted by the explanations he was having to concoct. Dark hints were dropped in his letters about Slovo’s fee and the current state of the Royal coffers.
However, the Admiral would not be rushed. ‘We do not have enough time to hurry,’ he grandly explained in a reply to the King – thus causing a Regal headache and a spoilt banquet. To Henry’s considerable but unspoken distress, Slovo was methodically tracing the zig-zag of his thoughts across the shifting map of barbarian England: there had been musings in St Albans, a glimpse of devastation where Winchester should be and ‘Dumnonian’ resurgence at the Gates of Cirencester. Each time he and his group, plus escort of soldiery, arrived just that instant too late to experience for themselves immersion in the ‘shift’. It could not however escape a mind so subtle as Slovo’s that each encounter was closer and closer, and that their steps were drawn inexorably west. Only too able to empathize with spiders, he recognized a web when he saw one.
The Celtic land of Cornwall had seemed a good place, just sufficiently off-centre, from which to pluck the cobweb and see what stirred forth to seize its prey. In purely aesthetic terms, though, Admiral Slovo had to agree with his comrades: he had had better ideas.