Down: Pinhole (15 page)

The king bore no resemblance to the classic Holbein portraits of Henry or any modern actor’s portrayal. This man was heavy-set but not excessively fat. He seemed a tall, well-muscled fellow in his late middle-age with a deeply lined, shaved face with no trace of the famously red beard he was known for in life, or for that matter, the jowls. He was not handsome, nor was he ugly. If anything, there was an ordinariness about him. His hair was completely gray and longish, parted in the middle, and he absently combed back unruly forelocks with his fingers. Only his outfit matched John’s conception of the sixteenth-century monarch: a belted burgundy tunic, hose, slippers and an over-sized, padded, fur-trimmed cloak. Otherwise, the man seated on the throne would have been laughed out of some modern pub’s Henry VIII look-alike contest.

The small man in black told John to halt when he got within ten feet of the king.

Henry inspected him closely and sniffed a few times.

“It is customary to bow to the king,” the small man said.

Before John could decide whether and how to comply, Henry said, “We can dispense with that, Cromwell. He is not from our time, nor is he from our realm. You do not even belong here, as I understand it, John Camp.”

“That’s correct, sir, or Your Majesty. I don’t want to offend but I’m not sure how I’m supposed to address you.”

Henry waved his hand dismissively. “Your Majesty will do. Master Wisdom has informed me of your peculiar circumstances. I do not profess to understand them.”

“That makes two of us,” John said. Then he added, “Your Majesty.”

Henry smiled. “You do not have to say that every time you address me. It will slow down our communication. Tell me, John Camp …”

John interrupted him. “You can just call me John. So we don’t slow down our communication.”

Henry laughed heartily. “Very good, John. Tell me, are you hungry?”

“I could eat.”

“Then we shall lay on a feast where we might talk at length. Cromwell, give our guest accommodations where he might refresh himself for a spell.”

A silent Cromwell led John from the hall down a long, empty corridor. John had to slow his gait to match Cromwell’s mincing steps.

“Are you Thomas Cromwell?” John asked.

Cromwell stopped and looked at John, his dour expression turning to one of evident pleasure.

“You know of me?”

“In my day you’re almost as famous as King Henry.”

“You flatter me, sir.”

“Mind if I ask you something?”

“Please do.”

“Henry had you executed. Now you’re at his side.”

Cromwell sighed. “He regretted his actions and when we were reunited in this realm a very long time ago, he asked for my forgiveness and I granted it. Hell is a hard, hard place and to have a king’s grace is no small thing. I trust the bond we have will endure for the eternity of our time here.”

They started walking again.

“You’re the king’s advisor?” John asked.

“He has many but I am his principal advisor, his chancellor.”

“Then I hope you’ll advise him to help me.”

“I will listen to what you desire and we shall see if an accommodation can be reached.”

John’s room was small with a window overlooking a horse meadow. Once alone, he washed his hands and face from a basin then lay on the lumpy mattress. While he waited for someone to come and fetch him, he allowed his eyes to flutter closed.

The MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was flying low over the Sangin district of Helmand Province. It was a pitch-black night but John didn’t need to see the land to know its features. Countless missions had taught him that the terrain was a vast plain of rocky nothingness, baked brown and tan by the hot, relentless sun. On his first tour, he had reckoned that the rural Afghan landscape had a certain spare beauty, but his admiration for it had drained away like sand through an hourglass. He had come to feel it was as alien and lonely as the moon, a place where he and his men didn’t belong. But in five days they’d be out; if this wasn’t their last mission it was, at worst, their penultimate.

The Black Hawk co-pilot radioed that they were approaching the LZ.

“Five clicks,” he told his men.

The eleven Green Berets under his command were a scrappy-looking bunch, most of them heavily bearded with non-regulation haircuts. He knew more about them than his own brother and he cared more about them too. God willing, they’d be back at Elgin in a week, getting drunk together in a Fort Walton Beach dive-bar and hauling each other’s asses back to base. Maybe he’d do another tour with them, maybe not. He was getting pretty damned tired of the mission of training up the Afghans and worrying about one of them turning his M-16 on them. Tonight they were on their own which was the way he liked it. All he had to deal with was the Taliban.

He was shoulder-to-shoulder with his warrant officer, Mike Entwistle, another West Pointer who was poised to pick up his own special forces team when he got his promotion to CO.

“Mike, your guys are going to take a couple of minutes longer to get to the rear of the house. Give me three clicks on the radio when you’re in position.”

“Roger that. What’s the HVT’s name again?”

Andy Tannenbaum, the team’s intelligence sergeant was sitting opposite. He pulled a grainy photo from a breast pocket. “Fuckhead’s name is Fazal Toofan. He likes to kill people with explosives.”

SFO Stankiewicz piped up, “So do I.”

The medic, Ben Knebel, snorted, “Christ, T-Baum, most people carry pictures of their girlfriends. You’ve got a fucking Tali in your wallet.”

“Zip it, guys,” John said. “Focus and don’t fuck up, okay? I want all of us to make it out in one piece. We’re supposed to bring this mother back alive but if we have to smoke him then we’ll smoke him. Follow my lead.”

The men checked the safeties on their MP-5s and the batteries on the lights and lasers hanging off the gun rails, a study in the art of being loose and tense at the same time. This wasn’t their first rodeo.

John got the countdown to the LZ from the cockpit and said his usual silent prayer as the chopper thudded against the cold desert floor.

John awoke to someone thudding against his door with the heel of a hand. He rubbed his eyes and swung his feet to the floor.

A lethargic young man informed John that he had come to bring him to the king’s table. He quickly shook off the effects of the nap. He was used to it; he’d had the dream before. Passing along the long corridor he asked the young man questions such as how many people were at the palace, what eras were they from, but after a series of “dunnos” and “can’t say” he gave up. The great hall was empty now but walking across its expanse, John heard a multitude of voices in the distance and when he crossed the threshold into the banqueting hall he saw at least a hundred people seated at long, double-sided tables. At first, John wasn’t noticed but when his presence was recognized, the room quieted as men lowered their tankards and their voices, watching him approach the king.

As he passed among them, John’s stomach soured at the pungency of the assembled masses, an unpleasant mixture of body odor and the peculiar aroma of decay they emitted, as if they were alive and dead at the same time. Some wore loose robes, others, Elizabethan doublets; some had military uniforms that spanned the centuries. Their clothes suggested they clung to the time they had lived, patching and re-patching the cloth and nursing the fabric through the eons. There was a smattering of women too, perhaps one for every twenty men. The women stared hardest at him, through grim, hollow eyes. As he passed within a few feet of one of them, a young woman who might have been pretty once, she suddenly reached out with a hand and almost touched his leg then pulled it back with a faraway, almost longing look on her face. The man sitting next to her, a stocky brute in a medieval robe with a food-littered beard slapped her hard with the back of his hand.

John stopped in his tracks and glowered at the man.

“You do that again and I’ll rip your arm off.”

The man rose, his hand on the pommel of his sword. John was taller by a foot and a half but the man had rage in his eyes and didn’t seem intimidated by size. John readied himself for conflict and the room fell into complete silence.

The man spoke his English with a heavy French accent, “This is my woman and I will do with her as I please.”

John fixed him with a hard-man stare. “Not while I’m around.”

The man began to pull his sword when a voice rang out, “Blouet, you Norman hound, sit down or my dogs will feast on your brains!” The king was standing at his table, bellowing with full lung-power. “John Camp, do not bother yourself with a sorry soul such as our Blouet. He comes from a time where men used their swords rather than their heads. Join me now.”

Blouet let his sword drop to its hilt and cursed under his breath as he slunk back to his chair. John winked at the astonished young woman and strode toward the king.

Henry’s table seated about twenty, three of them female. Wisdom was off to one end, his hands greasy with meat. Henry sat between two women. To his right, a stately, silver-haired woman in a brocaded gown of green silk, to his left, an attractive, petite blonde in a yellow dress like something a twentieth-century flapper might wear. There was an empty chair opposite the king and that was where John was intended, flanked by Cromwell on one side and a brooding, raven-haired young woman on the other.

“Sit yourself down,” the king ordered. “Have food. Have drink.”

As soon as he sat a servant appeared and filled his tankard with ale. The table was narrow enough for John to smell Henry’s beery breath. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the moment, sitting across the table from the most illustrious of all kings, surrounded by all these dead souls. He grabbed the tankard and drank half of it down.

“Ha!” Henry said. “A man of appetites! Do you see that, Cromwell? I told you I liked this man.”

Cromwell offered a thin smile.

Henry placed a hand on the older woman’s shoulder. She had an austere, regal bearing and sad eyes. “John, I would like to introduce this woman to you. She is dear to me, dearer than any. She is my wife, my mother, my sister, my queen. I give you the Empress Matilda.”

John stood and extended a hand but Matilda only nodded, keeping her hands to herself. He awkwardly sat down, searching his mind for Matildas in history but coming up blank.

As if reading his mind, Henry expanded on the introduction. “Matilda, daughter of King Henry the First, good wife to Henry the Fifth, Holy Roman Emperor, mother to King Henry the Second. She herself battled her brother Stephen for the crown and came within a whisker of being queen of England in her own right. Well, all that is far, far away now. She passed in the year … what year was it again, my dear?”

“1167,” she said.

“Such a long, long time ago,” the king said. “She is a saint of a woman who, but for the sake of some utterly meaningless transgression or another would be in Heaven, not here. Still, I am pleased to have her by my side.”

“Happy to meet you,” John said.

She looked him over and sighed with the weariness of a woman who had endured a thousand years in Hell.

“Eat, John, eat!” the king said.

The table was groaning under cooked game, fish, the eggs of large fowl and small, and meat pies. He saw no utensils; people were using their hands and their belt knives.

“Norfolk!” the King said to a handsome, scowling man with a tidy, black beard, seated beside Matilda. “Give our guest a knife.”

The Duke of Norfolk stood, withdrew a dagger from his belt and reaching over the table, aggressively plunged it into the table only inches from one of John’s hands. John didn’t flinch. He loosened it back and forth and used it to spear a capon’s breast from a platter under Norfolk’s dark gaze.

Henry laughed and bade Norfolk to be seated.

“Our Norfolk, John de Mowbray here, is full-blooded,” Henry said. “He warms to new men slowly, if at all. Yet he is an excellent soldier and commander of men at arms. He served my predecessor, Henry the Fifth, as his Norfolk. Because, alas, he expired at a young age, he has proven to be a most vigorous presence in my court.”

“Thanks for the knife,” John said, pointing it provocatively at Norfolk. “Seems to work, just fine.” From the corner of his eye he saw the raven-haired woman beside him hiding a satisfied look behind the cover of her hand.

“More introductions,” Henry said. “This fair maiden by my left hand is Faye, a woman more of your time than mine. For reasons that are transparent, she is one of my favorites.”

Faye gave him a nervous smile and said hello.

“Do not be shy. Tell him your story.”

She had a high-pitched, nasal voice. “Not much to tell, honestly,” she said, looking down at her plate of food. “I died in 1923 in London. I did some things, you know, and I wound up here. Mr. Wisdom found me and thought the king might fancy me. That’s pretty much it.”

“And fancy her I do,” Henry said, letting his hand wander over her bosom as Matilda turned her head away in tired disgust. The king abruptly changed the subject. “Master Wisdom tells me you are also a soldier, John.”

“I am. Or I was.”

“Once a soldier, always a soldier,” Cromwell observed.

“What army did you fight for?” Henry asked. “What wars did you wage?”

“I fought for the United States Army. I was a kind of soldier called a Green Beret, an officer in the special forces. We fought in the Middle East mostly, a place you’d know as Babylonia.”

Henry nodded agreeably and stood, commanding all in the hall to rise. “A toast to our guest, John Camp, who, I have just learned, is a latter-day warrior and Crusader. When we have conquered our enemies in Europa, we will one day turn our wrath upon Selim and his hordes to the east.”

When Norfolk sat down he asked John a question, his voice dripping with contempt.

“When you fought, did you use weapons like the ones I have heard of, which kill a man from an unfathomable distance?”

“As far a distance as possible.”

“A true warrior is able to kill his opponent at close quarters, feeling his hot breath against his face.”