King's Blood by Judith Tarr Page A

about them surged toward the flames. The rest scattered in panic no less mindless than Henry’s, but far less perilous.
    Only the monks were left with the king’s body, and Henry with the drawn and empty sensation of too much power expended too quickly.
    The monks continued their slow procession toward St. Stephen’s Abbey, which the king had built long ago to console the Pope for his marriage to the royal and magical Mathilda. Henry followed even more slowly. The fire was burning, too fierce to stop.
    He sought inside himself for a glimmer of power, enough to raise a bit of cloud, a brief fall of rain. But there was nothing. Only cold laughter under the earth, and things stirring that should never have been awake.
    They were gathering beneath the abbey. There were old scores to settle, old battles lost. The great soul that had bound them was gone, but the body it had inhabited was prize enough, all things considered. If they could not devour his soul, they would dishonor his bones—and that would be his remembrance.
    Henry had been well and properly duped—betrayed by his own impatience and his foolish cowardice. He could only go on as he had begun. The monks were chanting, in part to honor the dead, in part to shorten the way: a slow dirge in time to the rhythm of their pace. Dirige, Domine, in conspectu tuo viam meam . . .
    It was an incantation, if one chose to make it so. Henry joined his voice to the rest.
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Adorabo ad templum sanctum tuum in timore tuo: Domine, deduc me in iustitia tua. . . .
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The roil of darkness beneath the earth drew back—shrinking from the power of that invocation. Henry drew a breath of relief. But he did not leave off his chanting. The stronger the wards that the words could raise, the better.
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The abbey’s gate lay open before them. Gold and silks gleamed within: miters and copes of bishops, archbishops, holy abbots. The lords of England and Normandy had forsaken their king and duke, but the Church—in a grand irony for that son of an old goddess—had come out in force to bid him farewell.
    To make sure he’s well and truly dead, Henry thought. He could hear the words in his father’s voice, with the familiar grim humor.
    They steadied him, those words, as little respect as they had in them. His strength was trickling back. Here within the walls that his father had built, where magic had always been as welcome as prayer, there was sanctuary of a sort.
    Not peace. Henry would not have that for a long while to come. But he would take what he could get.
    It was a grand funeral, with so many prelates to celebrate it: worthy of a king. Henry let himself subside into the beauty of the words and the music, and the mist of holiness that rose over it all, turning the light in the abbey church to gold.
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Henry woke with a start from a half-dream. The sermon had droned to its end. The choir was stirring, the bearers rising, preparing to lay the body in its tomb.
    A voice rose above the murmuring silence, harsh and strident. A man was standing in front of the open tomb. He seemed prosperous: not a noble by his dress, but well enough off as townsmen went. He had a broad face, rather red, and a bristle of beard; and his fists were planted on his hips.
    â€œJustice!” he cried. “I demand justice!”
    The Mass lurched to a halt. The bearers paused with the bier half raised to their shoulders. People were gaping.
    So was Henry, but he shut his mouth with a snap of temper and pushed to the front of the crowd. “Who dares disrupt this holy rite?”
    The man flushed redder still, but his jaw jutted, and his beard stood on end. He had fortified himself with no little quantity of wine, Henry judged. “This is not your land! That one there—he stole it. It was ours. It is ours. And we’ll not have him lying dead in it.”
    Henry opened his mouth to blast the fool, but someone behind him said with a hint of a quaver,