“Do you want to fuck?” Prince Edward asked me. His messenger had just left with another letter for Piers. We were lounging in the grass watching Simon practicing farther away. None of the other men around us seemed surprised by what he had just said.
“What?” I said. “No.”
“Why not?” he pressed. “You and Simon fuck. I heard you last night. I’ve seen you running off into the woods together for your private moments. You kissed in the canal the other day. Why don’t you fuck one of my men? Or me?”
I laughed. “Aren’t you like seventeen?”
“All the more reason to want to fuck me,” he said. “It’s military strategy, you know, it’s good for morale. The Romans kept boys like me as pets back in the day, little trophies to take with them on their battles. Oryoucan be my pet if you want. I take good care of my pets when I’m on deployment.” He reached back to a soldier behind him and grabbed his leg. The soldier obediently leaned forward and kissed the prince’s cheek, tousled his hair.
“What about Piers?” I asked.
The prince’s face dropped. His tone soured. “That’s different.”
“He’s your boyfriend?”
“My what?”
I tried another combination of words for what I meant: lover, romantic companion, helpmate. The prince shrugged but nodded slightly. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that although my knowledge of British history was negligible, I knew for certain there had never been a King and King of England.
“You write to him every day?” I asked.
The prince nodded again. “My father sent him to the front,which means he’s trying to get him killed. Pathetic old man, playing toy soldiers like its Anglo-Saxon times. He’s looking for formal war where there isn’t one, or at least not how he expects it to be, not one he can drum up money for. These Scots are grunts and rogues, compulsive gamblers beholden to barons more than anything else, they don’t care about military formations and ceremony, which actually shows they’ve got something worth fighting for. That’s what will get Piers killed—an ambush while my father wanks off to a war dance from his Crusader days.”
“He’s expecting King Arthur.”
“Exactly. That’s what I thought he wanted you for, but I suppose he’s found a new mythical beast to chase. Giant lizards. You know King Arthur’s tomb was empty when we dug it up? We sparked riots across Wales all because of an empty hole in the ground, and for what?” He looked out across the meadow. Simon was pulling arrows from a hay bale. “I feel bad for your little squire. He’s cute, getting all worked up for nothing. We’ll drink all the mead tonight, look up at the sky, and have an orgy. Then we’ll send a messenger to my father in the morning and let him know his precious Yorkshire is safe from dragons and we’ll be off. You’ll get a commemorative letter at the new year if he remembers and your squire can use it to get your roof fixed.”
“He’s not my squire,” I said.
Edward laughed. “Right. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. I know that face—I see flashes of it in Piers sometimes. You can spit in it and he’ll still call you his man.”
“We don’t have that kind of relationship.”
“I’m not saying anything about your relationship. I’m sure you love each other, but it’s a nonstarter with a squire. I get it with Piers all the time. We fight, he bolts, I call him back.He pisses me off, I send him away, I call him back. He says something out of turn, he pisses my father off, he gets sent away, I call him back. He comes whimpering back to me. His obsession is in his blood. It’s sick but that’s what I love, that’s what I’m looking for. I’m Prince of Wales and I need that. As king I’ll need that. The unconditional love I’ll have to give to this country—I expect it in return just from one person, one man, that’s all. Now for you—a man who doesn’t even get to be king? I can’t imagine the difficulty. I wouldn’t be able to get it up.”
I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong but stopped myself. I sighed long and hard and stayed silent. Swallows and finches chased gnats and mosquitoes. I watched Simon draw his bow back, let go, and hit a clean, pointless bull’s-eye. Then I spoke.
“How do you stop it?” I asked quietly. I looked at the prince.
He leaned back and stretched, put his hands behind his head. “If Jesus Christ himself appeared to us right now and told us to stop worshipping him, our belief in him would only be stronger. You need to find someone who’s not been raised like an animal, who has his own mind, not just yours.”
“Simon’s not like that,” I said. “He’s been spooked by all this, sure, but he’s not like that. He’s his own person.”
“You love him, so you don’t see it, but it’s there, it’s hardwired. Sadly the only way out the other side is to break his heart, really destroy it—which is your heart—shatter his reality and hope he’s able to put something of it back together on his own and then maybe, possibly still love you again. He’ll come back to you like a dog one final time and hopefully won’t bite.”
I considered this for a moment, then scoffed. “You don’tknow a thing about love.” I stood up and felt the eyes of all the prince’s bored soldiers watching me.
“I never said I did,” said the prince, giggling. “And I’ve got no reason to know. Love is a peasant’s game.”
“Is that what you say in your letters to Piers?”
I left him there and walked out into the field, to Simon, who was readying another arrow. He stopped and looked up as I approached. He smiled at me and I smiled back. I paid careful attention to the order of initiation, how Simon reached out a hand first, how he beckoned me close, and I only reciprocated, following his lead, and how serendipitous it felt, as I placed a hand on the back of his neck, and him with a hand on my lower back, and in full view of the prince and all his men and the setting sun, we kissed.
Then the smoke came.
The change in the environment was faster than an eclipse. The setting summer sun was there and then it wasn’t. A veil of white smoke spilled across the land as if from a glass. It came from the north, spreading down the slope of the hill, thicker than snow, quieter than silence.
My first instinct was to grab Simon. We held each other at the elbows as the rush of opaque encompassed everything around us.
