Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish

Author:James Blish [Blish, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780575104006
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-05-30T12:00:00+00:00

VIII: KIRKBY-MUXLOE

The announcement of the King being even more wearisomely held back than was usual at a commanded secret audience, Adam March cleaved, perforce, to his room; where, even after many prayers, he found ample time remaining in which to think of what he might say to Henry, and Henry to him; and each of these imagined interviews was more disquieting than the last.

The very walls and village were disturbing, not only because Adam had never been there before, but also that the King himself was strange to them, as belike all of his line had been. The castle at Kirkby-Muxloe, a property of Simon de Montfort’s, was beyond being merely ancient. Regarding it, one could hardly bring one’s self to guess at who had built it, maugre what might have happened in its narrow precincts since. In so rude and disproportioned a keep might the Grendel-worm have been slain, that the most brutish of the serfs used under their breaths to frighten their children. The outer works might have been more recent, but looked much older by fault of neglect; for a work of Norman design cannot simply be maintained, it must be constantly under construction, otherwise it falls down almost at once.

Without a past, it frowned emptily upon the town from its tonsured hill. Someone had been there, once, for torches had smudged the ceilings inside; but who? No one could say. This room and a few others had been hastily furnished, but only because Henry had demanded of Simon a place of meeting secret and unlikely enough to permit him to pursue one single matter of state without interruption until the King should in his own time have done with it. Hence they were in Kirkby-Muxloe now, but neither wind nor wall would grant that they occupied it. Here they were less even than ghosts, for that nothing that had ever happened to their ancestors was more than a rumour of a rumour. It was not only for warmth and for the modesty of his Order that Adam kept his hands inside his sleeves, and not only from diligence that his thoughts pursued imaginary audiences with Henry which gave him no satisfaction nor comfort.

About the Inquisition itself, he believed, he might with confidence offer certain reassurances. The King necessarily still had vividly in his mind that series of Lateran edicts against heresy by which the Emperor had bought the favour of Honorius III for his coronation, and later, the favour of the Church as a whole despite his break with that Pope. In these Henry, a pious king, could hardly have seen any real access of devotion on the part of the Emperor; it was very plain that Frederick was no friend of the Church, nor in fact of any religion, true or heretical. No, the real motives had to lie elsewhere, and where but in the greater aggrandizement of the imperial power, over even such lands as England? And if so, what could be more alarming

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