I sipped, cautiously on two counts, alert to the high heat of the brew and to the unimaginable taste. Both were acceptable, the flavor of the sweet, diluted spicy wine indescribably delicious. The King watched me suck in my cheeks and smile my pleasure before he raised his own cup to his lips, nodding gently.
“Sets the mouth a-jangling, doesn’t it?” He sipped a mouthful and savored it, rolling it around his tongue before swallowing, and seeing his pleasure I raised my own mug again.
“Be careful. Drink it very slowly, a little at a time. We have much to talk about tonight and you are not used to wine. I warn you, even watered down, it will go straight to your head. Especially when it is hot.”
I nodded solemnly and sipped sparingly at the delicious potion, wondering what he meant by saying it would go to my head.
“Well,” he said then, lounging back into his chair and stretching out his long legs to the fire. “Take off that robe now, if you’re warm enough.” I placed my mug on the floor and stood up, shrugged out of the warm fur-lined garment and folded it carefully over my chair back, and when I was seated again he sipped again at his own drink. “I’m glad you slept. It was a long, wearisome night and I was feared you might have lain awake, waiting for me.”
“I meant to,” I said, suddenly more shy than I had ever been in his company. “But I fell asleep anyway.”
“Hmm. I wish I could have. Instead I spent useless hours listening to the mutterings of drunken fools. So, you have had time to think about the things I told you earlier, which means you must have questions. Fire away, then. What do you want to ask me about?”
“My mother, if it please you, Sire.”
“Your mother. Of course that is what you would want to know … and it is what I am least qualified to tell you about, for I did not know her well. Your mother was my wife’s sister and my best friend’s wife, but I only ever met her twice and so knew little of the lady herself, apart from what others told me of her. But I can try to answer you. What would you like to know?”
“I …” I stopped, thinking hard about what I wanted to ask him. “You said Clodas did not begin his scheming until he set eyes on her. What does it mean?”
He sighed, and sat staring into his cup, his lower lip protruding in a pout. “What does it mean? I don’t know, Clothar … . In plain truth, I do not know … . That is a deep question, and there is much more to it than meets the eye, so let me think about it before I answer. What does it mean?” He drew one leg up, away from the fire’s heat, and looked into the flames. “It means, I suppose, that something was transformed in Clodas the moment he first saw your mother, the Lady Elaine of Ganis. Something happened inside him, at the sight of her; something dark in there, and shapeless, changed and grew hard and took a form it had not had before. It means all of that.” He threw me a fierce glance. “But your mother was no more guilty of willfully affecting or attracting Clodas than the winter frost is guilty of turning the waters of a pond to ice. The frost freezes the water but is no more than the breath of winter. The sight of your mother’s beauty undid Clodas, but her presence could have been no more than a beam of light shining into the blackness of his soul, showing it what might have been. And what was within that blackness we can never know.
“Would Clodas have been a better man had he never seen your mother? No, he would not, because the thing that changed inside him was already there.” He paused, looking at me curiously. “Can you guess what it was?”
I shook my head, and he nodded, unsurprised.
“What was inside him, boy, was plainly a sickness, unseen before then and unsuspected by anyone else, and it was born of a mixture of poisons: malice, gross ambition, discontent, and envy of anyone he thought of as being better off than he.”
“Was my mother that beautiful?”
“Aye, she was. But you must ask my wife that question. I am only a man, and men see women differently from women. Vivienne will tell you the truth. But be sure not to ask her when she is surrounded by the lovesick young admirers who swarm among my followers. I doubt she would thank you for that. Famed for her beauty as she is in these parts—and I know there is none more beautiful, within as well as without—my lady will tell you that she always felt plain around her sister. They were twins, born but an hour apart, but they were not identical. Elaine was the beauty of the pair, tall and upright, with raven hair and bright blue eyes, where Vivienne’s height was normal, her hair golden and her eyes were that sparkling green they are today. Elaine’s … your mother’s beauty, seen unexpectedly, could make a man’s breath catch in his throat.”
“Was … was the Lady Vivienne jealous of her?”
“Jealous, of Elaine?” He laughed. “God, no, boy! They almost breathed as one, the two of them, so close were they. They may have had their disagreements from time to time, as all siblings will, and each might have felt some envy of the other from time to time, but there was never any lack of love between them, and certainly no jealousy. Jealousy is a bleak and bitter thing, Clothar. Those two loved each other too much as friends and sisters to be jealous, and each was happy when the other found a man to marry—two men as close to each other as the sisters were to themselves.”
I digested that in silence, then continued with my catechism. “Clodas.” I hesitated. “What was it that made him want to kill my mother?”
“He had no desire to kill your mother. It was your father he set out to kill. Your mother took her own life, in the end, but his murder of her husband—and of you, she thought—was the direct cause of her death. He destroyed her family and loved ones, yet expected her to consent to being his wife. That is insanity. You understand that word, insanity? Well, Clodas was insane.” He paused, considering that, and then went on, “Clodas is insane. I suppose it might be possible to find some depraved woman, somewhere, who could accept that kind of thing, but Elaine of Ganis could never be such a one. Clodas was a monster whose existence she could not accept, and at the thought of having him control her life, she chose to kill herself.”
Another long silence while the King stared into the fire, then: “I do not often trouble myself to think about whatever it is that makes men do the things they do. If they do something I find it necessary to condemn, I will condemn them, discipline them—slap them down or cut them down, depending on the gravity of what they’ve done.
“I am not a talker. I’m a soldier—a fighter. But I am also a king, and that often complicates things for me because a king must speak out forcefully from time to time … . I am forever surrounded by people waiting for me to tell them what to do and what to think. Most of the time, when something angers me or when someone has offended me by breaking a law, or when I’m displeased and have a strong opinion to make plain, I attend to it with a sword in my hand. But this is a time for thought, and for clear words, so let me think, and then listen to what I have to tell you.”
I waited, and he soon began again. “Clodas is a monster. But monsters come in many guises, Clothar, and not all of them are frightening to look at. Some are born monstrously deformed, and they grow ever less pleasing to the eyes as they age. But that is no more than misfortune, pure and simple. Ill formed as they are, they are not often ill natured. Many of them are meek and gentle souls. We call them monsters because they frighten us, but that reflects our failings, not theirs.”
He thought for a while. “And then there are some men who grow to be monsters. They learn to be that way. You’ll see more than you want to see of that as you grow older and become accustomed to war and killing, and as a Christian you will deplore it while the warrior within you learns to recognize it and to use it. That kind of monster you will learn to recognize on sight, and even to employ at times, for many of them you will number among your own men. Their disfigurement—” He paused, shaking his head impatiently and clearly searching for another word. “Their affliction is a wanton disregard for human life, born of too much hatred and bloodshed. Those men become rigid with hate, incapable of kindness or compassion. They see all but their own—and sometimes even their own—as enemies deserving death, and they are masters of spilling blood and spreading havoc. They are cold and pitiless, devoid of love, or mercy, or even hope, and that is their crippling misfortune. Life holds no value for them, not even their own, and nothing seems to them worth living for.” His voice faded, but just as I was beginning to think he had finished, he began to speak again, his tone low and troubled, almost as though he were speaking to himself.