Of Beginnings and Endings Read online

  Bare months prior to his own demise, King Arthur II Tudor and his council had arranged a marriage of Prince Richard of Wales with the daughter of the Pope of the West, Angela Hasheem. Harold of York and not a few other churchmen and nobles, all well aware of just how devious and acquisitive was the Moorish Bishop of Rome, designated Pope Awad, had protested this choice in the harshest terms, but had found themselves ridden over roughshod by the councilors just then in ascendancy and well in control of a senile king in his dotage.

  Angela had brought a full shipload of Moorish, Spanish, and Italians of various sorts in her entourage, and no sooner was her regal father-in-law decently interred than even more southerners flocked to her husband's new-formed court, displacing countless English men and women, making plain their disgust with England and English folk and customs.

  Though loving, good, and pious, Richard IV Tudor did not prove a good king, for he was weak and all too soon his scheming, strong-willed Moorish-Italian wife had both him and his kingdom dancing willy-nilly to her Roman-Moorish tunes, while appalling amounts of the wealth of the Kingdom of England and Wales streamed out of the realm and directly, not a small amount of it, into Roman coffers.

  Moreover, everyone at court and not a few outside it seemed to know that which her overly trusting husband did not know or would not, could not admit even to himself: In addition to a crown, she had been setting horns on his head ever since he had ascended the throne.

  Since the very first of the Priests' Plagues and the sudden elevations of once-humble commoner priests to the English prelacy, anti-Roman sentiment had been rife in England and Wales, and under King Richard IV, it burgeoned, becoming both widespread and outspoken in all quarters and classes—noble, ecclesiastical and common. Then when the rumor began to circulate that the devious Angela—known by then, country wide, as the Roman Tart was hard at work persuading her loving, well-cuckolded royal spouse to go on pilgrimage to Rome, there to give over his kingdom to the Holy See, then receive it back as a feoff from the papacy, matters really began to boil.

  The political, very nationalistic petard was already set and its fuse was sparked and spluttering, a delegation of high nobles had already surreptitiously journeyed to Aquitaine, closeted with Duke Arthur Tudor, Richard's younger brother, and he was upon the very point of sailing for England when word reached all of the death of Pope Awad, Angela's sire (although he himself had always in public referred to the young woman as "our niece, Angela") and the election of a replacement of the Italian Faction, one Boniface XI.

  It had been decided by all and sundry in England, Wales, and Aquitaine, at that point, to hold fire and wait to see what might now develop in the changed circumstances. The faction of cardinals called Italian had always been less dogmatic, devious, and money- or land-grubbing than that opposing faction called Moorish. But then, all too soon, had come word that the new Pope had been assassinated, to be replaced with yet another Moor, Abdullah of Tunis, the godfather of Angela. It had been for this reason that Duke Arthur Tudor of Aquitaine had been already in England—though none within the court circles and very few others anywhere else had known of his presence—when the sudden death of King Richard was announced along with the fact that the royal council had met and declared that they had intent of summoning Duke Arthur back from his duchy.

  As was later to be revealed, the widow had vociferously objected to and protested the council's decision, declaring herself to be even then pregnant with Richard's child and thus deserving to be named regent, but the council, after a fiery-hot debate which had raged on for many days and resulted in actual bloodshed on at least two occasions, had finally made their decision, announced it, and in a gesture of mollification directed at the storming widow, indicated their intent to suggest that Arthur at least consider himself marrying her.

  But with the crown upon his head and all the realm rejoicing, King Arthur III Tudor had flatly declined the "honor" proffered by the royal council, saying, "Gentlemen, the stenches raised by the open dalliances of her who was married to my late brother are such that they were wafted clear to Aquitaine and beyond. I would as lief couple with a brood sow as with that Moorish-Roman harlot. No, we shall find us a chaste girl out of some other house, that I may be certain that the children she births are of mine own loins, not the get of some mincing, perfumed foreign courtier . . . or worse."

  Of course, his words quickly reached the ears of the widow, and within his first week as king, two of Arthur's tasters died horribly of poisons. But as he quickly cleared the court of the coterie of Angela's importation, replacing them all with loyal English and Welsh, there were no more overt attempts on his life.

  Sooner than might otherwise have been the case, King Arthur III had taken to wife a daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, one Ilke. The wedding took place about two months after Angela had been delivered of a male infant; for all that the boy bore not one iota of resemblance to the line of her late husband—indeed, looking amazingly alike to her then lover, the Neapolitan ambassador—she almost immediately had begun to crow that he was the rightful King of England, that King Arthur was a usurper and should be deposed if not slain.

  But her words reached precious few receptive ears in England or in Wales. Long disgusted with the weakness of his brother where his adulterous wife and her larcenous clique of foreigners had been concerned, all sorts and classes within the kingdom had mourned the dead king for a scandalously short time and then had rallied unrestrainedly to his successor. The very last thing that most in the kingdom desired to see was a return to the bad old times, and such would surely come to pass if Angela should be named regent for her probable bastard.

  But others—powerful others—elsewhere heard the woman's pleas and these others took them to heart, one other in particular. Pope Abdul wrote from Rome during Arthur's first year of reign, suggesting that in all fairness, he should step aside in favor of his late and lamented brother's son. Arthur dictated three letters, each one far more heated than the one preceding it, before he finally turned the matter of answer over to his council.

  But their diplomatic, courteous, infinitely reasoned letter did not mollify Abdul. His next letter, though still courteously phrased and couched in friendly terms, bore the bare trace of an edge of threat; so bare indeed was the trace that some of the councilors failed to even notice it on first reading and others had to point it out to them. These men, taking their initial letter as a framework, reiterated in greater detail all that they had said before—all that could be said, really, to such a demand—and duly dispatched it to Rome.

  The third letter from the south was, though addressed to the king, delivered by papal messenger to the Archbishop of York, at Yorkminster, along with another letter from His Holiness Abdul to "Our esteemed Brother in Christ, Harold of York." Taking both letters, Harold had immediately set out for London, wherein the king and court were just then residing.

  In cold fury, Arthur had waved the two letters before the full council before handing them over to be read by the hastily summoned men, declaring, "That despicable Moorish camel's turd! Know you, gentlemen, old Abdul is even as we speak here suborning, inciting treachery and treason against your king, in diverse parts of our realm. Of course, you all know His Grace Harold, Archbishop of York, here. Well, the first of these two letters was sent to him. You will note that His unholy Holiness endeavored to bribe His Grace of York, to bribe him most blatantly, and a quite handsome bribe, too; indeed, we do not know if we could have so quickly refused it, had we been in the place of His Grace of York."

  "But thanks be to God that His Grace recalled—and we repeat his very words, mind you all—that he was an Englishman before he was a priest. We can but pray our Savior that all men of power in our realm recall that sentiment when they are offered bribes by this most dishonorable Bishop of Rome."

  Musing, now, in his alchemical laboratory, the aged man called Harold of York thought, "All that the late Abdul had offered me then—for the performance of what he called
my 'holy duty' of moving to see King Arthur III deposed and/or slain and Angela named regent for her son—was a mere cardinal's hat. Now he's dead—some say of poison—Angela and her bastard are dead, Arthur is firmly on his throne, and, with a multinational movement afoot to make of York another papal city, like Rome, Constantinople, and Addis Ababa, two of the most powerful cardinals of the Italian Faction have sent a secret letter offering me, once more, a cardinalcy with a strong hint of even more wonderful things to come do I but give over plans now afoot, deliver up England, Wales, and Scotland back into the Roman papal camp, and travel myself to Palermo in Sicily for consultation with my two benefactors."

  "Just how am I to answer these powerful churchmen? That is the question. Am I ambitious enough a frog to trade my small puddle for a bigger one? Here I am a very big frog indeed; in all modesty, I think that I can state that I'm the second most powerful man in this kingdom. Would I own so much power in Rome? I strongly doubt it."

  "Oh, I know well what Sicola and d'Este are about. Northern Europeans, especially, have been disenchanted by the bickerings of Rome for years now; the power there has rocked unsteadily from Moorish-Spanish Faction to Italian-French-Hungarian Faction and precious little in the way of power or gain has gone to those of any of the smaller factions. If our schemes and conferences here succeed, if York is established as a new papacy, Sicola and d'Este and certainly not a few others are terrified that York will soon come to completely replace Rome, just as Addis Ababa replaced Alexandria long ago under similar circumstances. So can they really prevail upon me to bring this kingdom, the hotbed of the scheming, back under the sway of Rome, it will be well worth anything they need to give me to achieve that end. They haven't written such, of course—they'd be fools, and fools is one thing they certainly are not!—but I doubt not for one minute but that were I to mention a desire to sit on the Throne of Saint Peter, they'd offer me that, too . . . maybe even deliver on that promise, though just how long I'd live after that is anybody's guess; assassination is a fine art and a hoary, honored profession in Rome."

  "Ah, but how can I go to Italy, no matter what the inducement? No one questions my incredibly long, unnaturally long life here, in England, but there surely would be questions in plenty there, and no good answers, no answers that could or would be believed by Renaissance churchmen, and I'd more than likely end up burnt at the stake if the preceding tortures didn't kill me first."

  "If young Emperor Egon and his army have purged Rome and Italy as thoroughly as it's said they have, have broken the back of the Moorish-Spanish Papal Faction, truly, then I believe that this new papacy business should be ended, here and now, and that all participating kingdoms should return to Rome, go back under Roman power and go about strengthening there the smaller factions, trying to combine them into a Northern European Faction strong enough to fairly compete with the Italian-French-Hungarian and the certain-to-become-resurgent Moorish-Spanish Faction. But how to say these thoughts of mine, how to word them without seeming to be betraying those who have come here from their own lands to attempt to form something new and, hopefully, better than the sorry kakistocracy Rome has projected of the most of the last century?"

  "However, I must come up with some kind of an acceptable reply soon, for there is a definite limit to just how long I can expect to keep d'Este's messenger, that papal knight, Sir Ugo d'Orsini, cooling his heels here in Yorkminster. For, for all my vaunted security measures, I can be damned certain that a whole host of folk here know just who and what he is, maybe even why he came here to me, though I doubt strongly that anyone else knows just what was the gist of the correspondence he brought and it would take more technology than anyone in this age owns to get to that correspondence where it now is reposing."

  Glancing down at his notes, he smiled. "And it would take a person from my own world and time to read any of this, too, while not a few of this age and world can't even read their own language or write any more than their names. A spy would find little but discontent in my private chambers, God be thanked."

  Then, thinking better of the matter, he corrected himself. "Well, Bass Foster or Rupen Ademian both have enough education and a provenance close enough to my own time to probably absorb the gist of these notes, anyway, though some of the words and usages no doubt would be obscure even to them." Then the old man showed worn teeth in a grin, adding, "But Rome and her minions would play merry hell trying to get either of them to spy against the interests of me or the kingdom. And they're neither of them any more of this particular time and world than am I. And it's clearly my fault that they're here in this time and world, too, dammit, for all that the both of them—fine, caring men that they are—try to reassure me and tell me that the two malfunctions of the projector console that precipitated them and the folk who arrived with them were merely happenstance. No, I know the truth of the matter full well; I should have either made Emmett cut it off after his last failure of so long ago or, myself, at least axed through the power cable that still connected the wretched thing to our old world, Emmett's and mine."

  He sighed deeply. "But, of course, had I then done so, there is an excellent chance that Rome and her crusader minions might long since have conquered this kingdom. Lacking the very valuable knowledges and abilities of Bass Foster, Peter Fairley, Buddy Webster, Carey Carr, and, yes, even that egocentric, treasonous lunatic Professor William Collier, that accursed adulteress might reign even now, and King Arthur and all the rest of us loyal subjects might be dead or forever exiled and the wealth of the kingdom be flowing remorselessly into the bottomless coffers of Rome."

  "And Rupen Ademian is every bit as invaluable, in his own way, too, as any of those who were projected here before him. Peter Fairley attests that the man is a constantly flowing fountain of detailed information regarding the manufacture of nineteenth-century firearms and accessories. Furthermore, thanks almost entirely to the experiments of Rupen and Peter to improve upon the cannon primers Peter had been making, we now have matches in this world and time—not very many, just yet, true, but due to the meticulous records of their experiments kept by Rupen, we now know just how to make them. And Rupen says that that knowledge wasn't gained in our old world until at least two and a half centuries beyond the current date in this world, and that is a big something; I can but speculate just how far and how fast this world may go on to develop on the basis of that one tiny invention alone."

  "And, better, they did finally come up with the cannon primers. They're just simple, waterproofed tubes of metal filled with a dried mixture of sesqui-sulfide of phosphorus, with a twist of wire at one end to which to attach a lanyard and to serve when given a sharp jerk as the friction device for striking into fire the compound, the fire thus produced then proceeding down the tube, melting out the waterproof seal and igniting the propellant charge in the chamber of the cannon."

  "The king was almighty pleased when these were demonstrated to him, for he's nothing if not a great captain, all too conversant with all aspects of war and warfare, and he knows just how many lives the implementation of such a device will save, especially on the crowded gun decks of ships at sea, where open casks of powder and linstocks holding smoldering slowmatches have presented a very real and ongoing hazard to the lives and well-being of all aboard since the very first cannon was mounted onboard a ship."

  "And when Rupen and Peter remarked to His Highness that, even as they spoke, Carey Carr was back at the Royal Cannon Foundry here in York hard at work on the development of waterproof primer caps for use on shoulder arms and pistols, explaining to him just what such a development would mean to an army in the field, Arthur saw Peter and Rupen initiated into his new Order of Royal Champions, Carey Carr to be so initiated and sworn immediately he can find time from his labors to get to court, declaring him an esquire of the order, meantime, and that's a signal honor in itself, in that it makes our Carey officially a gentleman in this society."

  "Alas, these are things that I possibly should have thought of and at l
east experimented upon over the years, but so very much specialized was education become in my old world that I simply lacked any in-depth knowledge of anything save my particular field of endeavor, it just required men from a less specialized age to find ways to adapt their knowledge to this age, this world."

  "But it's not only in weapons of war, new and more efficient ways of killing, that these unspecialized men have helped and are helping this new world into which they were projected, either. Thanks mostly to Bass Foster, the royal camps now are much cleaner, healthier places, with latrines and royal orders that they be used, refuse pits, and water sources upstream or uphill of both, and regular details of soldiers to tour the camp and keep it clean of litter, fill in standing water, chase off swine and stray dogs or chickens and scoop up the dung of horses, mules, and draught oxen. After he became Lord Commander of the Royal Horse, Bass implemented such measures in the cavalry camps, and so impressed did Arthur become at the exceedingly low incidences of the usual camp fevers and diseases in those camps that he sent for Bass, questioned him at length and in some depth, then rode roughshod over the many objections of his other commanders and promulgated the present strict rules to apply in future to all royal encampments as well as to encampments of the court when traveling."

  "Not only that, but thanks to Peter Fairley, the king, the court, and not a few others—my episcopal self included, God be praised—are bodily cleaner and sweeter-smelling these days, while the coffers of the archdiocese are now blessed with a new source of most welcome revenue, and all these blessings of the same cause."

  "Bass Foster, sick and tired of either going dirty or burning his skin with the caustic semisolids that passed under the name of soap in this world when first he arrived here, appealed to Peter to apply his inventive genius—a very real genius, too; the man had precious little formal education in his own world and time and still speaks what I am told is a very crude dialect of twentieth-century English—and with no real knowledge of chemistry, Peter proceeded to go by trial and error until he had produced a fine, hard-milled soap that was not only far less caustic than current products but was scented with oil of lavender. When gifts of it were sent to the king, it created such a sensation at court that an immediate and impressive demand for it was created, and far more was needed to fulfill orders than Peter could produce in the small corner of the Royal Cannon Foundry and Powder manufactory that he had allotted to it."