The Winter King Read Free Page B

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    And that, the man reflected as sleep finally took him, would actually have been quite ironic …
    Half a day’s ride from Lilas’s village, another voice was speaking out against King John’s rule. The voice was that of a passionate, idealistic and naive young monk named Caleb, and he lived at Battle Abbey.
    Bemused, innocent, and not a little deranged, Caleb believed fervently that King John’s rule and its attendant hardships were a punishment from God. In private, Caleb had been taking secret measures – fasting, self-flagellation – to try to appease the terrifying version of God that he had been taught to believe in, hoping thus to move the Almighty to have pity on the people of England.
    Although it was hard to say how it came to happen, Caleb had heard whispers concerning the happenings in Hamhurst. One whisper in particular – the strange new name that Lilas, in her trance, had bestowed upon the king. Now Caleb, too, deep within the confines of his monastery, began to refer to John as the Winter King.
    Caleb’s superiors, however, were not in the least happy at the young monk’s growing notoriety. Battle Abbey had recently paid the vast sum of fifteen hundred marks to the king, in order that he should confirm the abbey’s ancient privilege of being answerable directly and only to him, and not to the bishops who would otherwise have had control over the abbey and its life. It was not the moment for one of their congregation – even a young, innocent and slightly daft one – to upset the king by complaining that his rule was so terrible that it could only be a punishment from God.
    The bishops were not at all pleased with the new arrangements at Battle. Not that it mattered very much; since the interdict had begun, English bishops had been steadily leaving the country, and their displeasure was thus largely irrelevant. The climate in England was not good for senior churchmen, for the uncompromising terms of the interdict were making people question if they really needed the church after all. Give or take the odd marriage service or funeral rites, they seemed to be managing quite nicely without it. The muttered grumbling was becoming gradually louder.
Why do we have to pay tithes and taxes to the church when it doesn’t lift a finger to help us in our time of need?
People were, moreover, unconcerned at seeing the king continue to extract all that he could from the church and the religious houses. King John, the rumours said, needed chests full of money for some campaign he was mounting against the Welsh.
Well, if he gets what he needs from the church
, men muttered,
he won’t have to tax the people so heavily
.
    The insuppressible Caleb, who refused to be turned from his God-ordained path by threats or cajoling, was now saying that King John was not fit to rule. Perhaps this was another phrase that the young monk had overheard; it was, or so it was claimed, the view of the church’s most senior figures. The Pope, should he finally lose patience with this king upon whom both excommunication and the imposition of the interdict had had so little effect, might well conclude the same, and then he would formally depose John of England, and release his subjects from the duty of allegiance to him.
    By some strange mechanism of fate, Caleb appeared to be saying just what the people of England wanted to hear. His fame spread, and men and women flocked to Battle hoping to hear him speak. They were disappointed, for, having experienced just what happened when the young monk was allowed out, his superiors now kept him firmly within the abbey walls. But in every tavern in the town, there was only one topic of conversation; so loudly and frequently were Caleb’s pronouncements repeated that few visitors came away unaware of exactly what the young monk had said.
    These included the three nondescript merchants who, as the spell of fine weather finally ended and the cold November rains began, prepared to leave Battle