The abbey was crowded, but everyone save the Demon-King had faded into grayness, their eyes staring unseeing ahead, their ears stilled, their consciousness suspended.
Archangel Michael walked slowly down the aisle toward the Demon-King.
The abbey trembled with each of his frightful footfalls, and as his wings dragged behind him a great dry wind of retribution rose to rustle through the frozen assembly.
Hair lifted, and cloaks shifted, but no one saw, no one heard.
No one save the Demon-King.
“What do you here?” said the Demon-King as the archangel stopped at the foot of the dais.
“Come to offer your congratulations?”
The archangel smiled, and it was terrible to behold.
“You think to have won,” said Michael, and raised his arms above his shoulders, his hands twisted into claws, as if he were about to rain God’s wrath down upon the Demon-King’s head.
The Demon-King leaned forward, one hand on the hilt of his sword. “I have not won yet,” he said, “but I am so close … so close …”
The archangel dropped his arms, and screamed with thin laughter.
The Demon-King’s face flushed with anger. “I wield love as my weapon—what do you have?
Hate? Indifference? Your ever-cursed righteousness?”
“You know what my weapon is!” Michael said, and flung an arm toward where Neville stood, gray and unseeing.
Sparks arced from the end of the archangel’s fingers and scattered heedlessly over the stone flagging of the abbey.
“But,” Michael continued, now leaning forward to the Demon-King, “you have absolutely no idea how I am going to use him, do you? You have absolutely no idea who and what he is, do you?”
The Demon-King narrowed his eyes at his angel-father, but he did not speak.
“You pride yourself on your ‘royal’ blood,” the archangel said, “but I spent the least part of myself in your mother. I put my excrement into your mother! You are foulness made flesh, imp, and you are nothing compared to the forces ranged against you.”
“Your rage is merely a measure of your impotence,” the Demon-King said.
Michael drew back, and his form collapsed into a raging pillar of fire.
God is working His purpose out, the fire spoke, and your time is drawing nigh.
And then it vanished, and King Henry of England was left staring into the cheering nave of the abbey, his right hand clutching at his throne in furious frustration.
God is working His purpose out, as year succeeds to year!
He turned, his eyes ice, and stared at Neville, and wondered what treachery the man’s heart hid.
So came the Demon-King to reign over England.
EPILOGUE
PONTEFRACT CASTLE
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings: How some have been depos’d, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos’d, Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d, All murder’d—for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp; Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks; Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus, Comes at the last, and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!
—William Shakespeare, Richard the Second, Act III, sc. ii
Friday and November 1380
Pontefract Castle, Yorkshire
ALL SOUL’S DAY —
THEY CAME IN the pre-dawn, hooded men slouched within the anonymity of rough woolen cloaks. Richard had barely time enough to jerk out of his sleep before the first two had seized him by his arms and flipped him over onto the mattress, forcing his face into the pillow. He struggled, but the men were too strong, and within a moment they had torn his nightshirt from his body and used it to tie his hands behind his back.
“You have no right,” Richard cried, his voice embarrassingly distorted both by the pillow and by his own terror.
“We come on orders of the king,” one of the men said. “We have the right of England behind us.”
Richard struggled a little more—now that his hands were tied only one of the men had any hold on him—and managed to turn his head to stare about his chamber.
A man was bending over the grate, stirring the coals into life with a poker and tossing on more wood. Light flared as the wood caught fire, and Richard could see that his small chamber was now crowded with five or six men, all hooded and cloaked.
Sweat broke out along his entire body, even though he was naked and the room was still chill. “You come to murder me!”
“We come to assure England’s future,” said the man who had replied before, and Richard realized it was the man who had stirred the fire to life.
The man had finished stoking the fire, and now he slid the black iron poker deep into the glowing coals.
Richard’s eyes bulged in terror, and he tried to throw off the man who had hold of his body.
For an instant the man lost his grip, but then he laughed, and subdued Richard simply by sitting on the small of his back. He bounced up and down slightly, causing Richard to cry out in pain.
“I had thought you would be pleasured by the feel of a man atop you again,” the tormentor said in a high, false voice.
Several other men in the room laughed.
“If you murder me,” Richard said, his voice now shrill in his terror and panic, “then you murder England.'”
“Murder? Murder?” said another of the hooded figures. “We merely thought to come here this day to give you pleasure, my Lord of Bordeaux. We thought you had spent too long grieving for your sweet Robbie de Vere.”
Now there was general laughter among the men, and one of them made a foul comment as he stepped forward and caressed one of Richard’s buttocks.
It was slimy and cold with sweat and panic.
The man wiped his hand on his cloak, then looked to his companion standing by the fire. “Is it ready?” he said.
The man by the fire leaned down and lifted out the poker, inspecting it carefully. “Soon,” he said. “We might as well begin. Hold him.”
Richard twisted about with all his might, but now four of the men were holding him firmly, and all Richard managed was to wriggle a little on the bed. He saw the man by the fire reach into the depths of his cloak for something, and he turned his head away, not wanting to see the instrument of his death.
Besides, his panicked, terror-ridden mind already knew what it would be.
The man lifted an object free from one of his inner pockets, smiling a little at Richard’s refusal to look, and held it out in the firelight to study it.
It was the funnel-shaped tip of a physician’s enema can, a smooth earthenware implement about twice the length of a man’s finger, and a little thicker.
A foul smell filled the chamber as Richard’s body vented gas.
“Ugh!” one of the men holding him down said. “Be quick about this, my friend, for this boy is more obnoxious than a sewer pit.”
The man with the earthenware cylinder wrinkled his own face in disgust, then spat a gob of phlegm onto the narrower portion of the funnel. He rubbed it all around, then, without further ado, strode over to where Richard lay, forced apart his buttocks, and slid the funnel deep into his anus with a single rough thrust.
Richard twisted anew, screaming, but he was held fast now, and nothing he could do managed to dislodge the funnel.
The chief assassin calmly walked back to the fire, lifted out the poker, and held its glowing tip up for the others to see.
“Hurry,” one of the men said in a tight voice.
The assassin nodded, then walked back to Richard. “My Lord the King asked me to remind you,” he said, “of how Lady Neville screamed when you raped her. He thought that you should know, in your last earthly moments, of the degree of torment that you visited upon her.”
Then, carefully, making sure not to mark Richard’s outer skin, he slid the poker into the earthenware funnel.
There was a hideous sizzling sound, and a smell so vile that several of the men gagged.
Richard shrieked, then shrieked yet higher, his body bucking and twisting even under the weight of the four men holding him.
The assassin slid the poker in six inches, then twelve, all the while stirring and jabbing it about.
Richard’s shrieks rose higher, mutating into the unearthly bowling of the damned. His body now convulsed, jittering about in an agonized death dance, and the men had to strain themselves in order to keep him still enough for the poker to complete its work.