The Coin of the Realm Volume III of the Glastonbury Chronicles: the Glastonbury Chronicles, #3

By S. P. Hendrick

Earth was but a distant memory, lost in a cataclysm which rocked even the domed cities on Mars and had profound social and spiritual effect on the furthest planets colonised by Man. Once called New Britain, Britannia was the last remnant of a new British Empire, governed by the last in a long line of royalty which had made its bond with the Land of the home world.

New Planet, New Rules.

When Henry IX dies childless, the Crown falls to his cousin Stephen, first generation Britannian and last male heir of the Windsor family, who is of a spiritual line older still. Together with his soul-friend Richard Watkins he must learn the ways of the Land in which the vegetation is all tinged with blue, three moons hang in the sky, and even the boiling point of water changes at the whim of the weather. He must also manage to stay alive long enough to find out who has systematically been killing off his family, and why.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pendraig
• Release date: Feb 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781936922147

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tmp_7d1894436d5cd759d7ecd288485e6841_f3XoEX_html_2cb9ebf1.png Table of Contents tmp_7d1894436d5cd759d7ecd288485e6841_f3XoEX_html_2cb9ebf1.png

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

More Great Books by S.P. Hendrick

Other Fiction Novels from Pendraig Publishing

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tmp_7d1894436d5cd759d7ecd288485e6841_f3XoEX_html_2cb9ebf1.png Dedication tmp_7d1894436d5cd759d7ecd288485e6841_f3XoEX_html_2cb9ebf1.png

To all those who have understood

as I burned with Musefire

and become so drunk on words

that nothing seemed impossible,

and to those who made even that possible:

Jay, Peter, Linda, Jim, Susan,

Anne, Mark, Jesse, Elle,

Margaret, Marlene, Diane.

And always to Phil

who dreamed with me

of both the past

and the future

and helped me

make them real.

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I shall never forget the sound that night, not ever in the time remaining to me in this life, nor the colour and the shapes in the midnight sky. The shrill piercing wail seemed to come from everywhere and from nowhere, rising and lowering like the mournful wind in the Grey Hills, but it was not the Grey Hills in which I slept, but my own bed in New Glastonbury, safe and secure behind the Palace walls, and warm against the blue snow which fell in drifts all around the city. The lights rolled through the clouds, red and green sheets, gold and silver bolts of phase lightning travelling through the night, calling to each other with their arcing thunder in basso profundo counterpoint to the shrill whine upon the wind.

Death had come to my cousin Henry. I knew it before the servants found him, and when they opened the door of my chamber to greet me with the words Your Majesty I had already shaved my beard in mourning, a custom begun here when the news of Earth’s demise had been confirmed. A custom it was, no more, for although I had loved my cousin dearly, he was a frail old man who had outlived his entire family except for me and who had courted the Morrigan for years, hoping She would take him from his pain to the next world, but for years She had kept him at an arm’s distance. He was free at last, and at peace and I, the last of the Windsor line, was just about to begin to find out the price of the crown.

It was Destiny, Fate, Kismet, by whatever name you choose to call it that I was there at all. Had Mother known she was pregnant they wouldn’t have allowed her on the transport, for they still didn’t know at that time what stasis did to an embryo in utero. I’m living proof that it doesn’t make any difference, but then I come from a long line of embryonic firsts: my many-times-great grandfather had been a frozen embryo for more than a hundred and twenty years before his great-great niece had gotten herself impregnated with him; I am a direct descendent of Richard Windsor and Kathleen O’Conor, the first Windsor on the throne in generations whose bloodlines were not mixed with those of the Tyrell family, the first male in generations not to have at least chopped the head off the barley stalks in his rite of passage, and the first King of Britannia to be born upon its indigo soil.

Still, the wailing of the Banshee is, I’m told, no more fearful here than it was on Earth, although the first time Her singing was heard here, back when the planet was still called New Britain, it startled all but descendants of the O’Conor family. They couldn’t imagine one of theirs’ passing through the veil between the worlds without notice; whether it be welcome or warning it did not matter. The deaths of all my line have been heralded in such a manner since 2065, and although Prince William was not an O’Conor, his grandchildren were. The accolade in that case seemed to have been for the benefit of the living, not the dead.

I wonder who will hear Her call when I pass. So many of us did not survive the comet; the warning came too late, and most had hoped the magic would save them as it always had. I have seen the ayvees of the Sacrifice, Geoffrey II bracing himself between the upright stones of a trilithon at Stonehenge as his friend and Prime Minister Jeremy Tyrell ran him through with the ancient sword. The blood spread like a melting rose upon his green robes as the sword was withdrawn and he collapsed, smiling, into Tyrell’s arms, expiring there in seconds.

Whether the magic had failed or the Land had decided it was time to join the King in death, or the Lady had made other plans for us all it didn’t really matter. The effect was the same; the comet came anyway. Those hearty souls who had already sought out the stars were the only remnants of humanity I know for certain survived, at least physically. The Honours of Britain, the Crowns and Swords, a piece of the Kingstone, and other symbols of the Monarchy, the Hallows as we now call them, were sent on ahead with Jeremy Tyrell’s twin sons, Edwin and Edmund along with the Glastonbury Archives. Prince Henry was already on New Britain, part of the first graduating class of Oxbridge University, and my mother had just met my father in Croydon Dome on Mars Colony when it happened. Mother said the explosion was visible to the naked eye from Mars, and the meteor showers continued for years. Had they not been self-sufficient already it would have doomed that colony. Actually, it was when Bolshoi Dome was struck by the largest fragment and the whole city killed that the talk of emigration to New Britain became serious.

Whether I was conceived on Mars or in the first week of flight is not important; Mother could not have been more than a week pregnant when she left. She and father had opted to wait out the first week of the journey as Watchers, for they both loved to travel. After the initial fascination, however, they allowed themselves to be put into stasis for the remainder of the trip, and arrived here as Sleepers. Perhaps it was the stress of reentry, perhaps the atmospheric compensator didn’t quite equalise; whatever it was, Father never came out of stasis. Terrence Albert Phillip George, Duke of Windsor, was buried in the Cave of the Hallows at the foot of the Grey Hills, while his pregnant wife Bernice wept in the arms of his cousin, Henry IX Rex Britannia. Queen Julia insisted she move into New Balmoral Palace with them, for family was scarce, and she was, if only by marriage, family.

I was born at the Palace as the second moon, the Mother, set in the sky. The Crone and the Maiden were in ascendancy, the latter eclipsing the former as they rose. The season was still celebrated as Yule, although calculated by what it would have been on Earth if there were still an Earth and we were upon it. The tides of Moon and Sun, of Solstice and Equinox and all the times between had been observed for millennia on that lost world, and we had spent only a few short generations on this one, yet as our ancestors had done as they migrated around that planet so did we bring our traditions and our Gods with us, trying to force them upon this malleable planet in the same way we had terraformed it, with limited technology and sheer strength of will, but it was not Earth, not even of the same solar system. However, the inhabitants of Britannia, like their ancestors before them, did their best to ignore this. Like Brits on safari in ancient Africa, the tea trays came out at what we had supposed to be their proper time, and we contented ourselves with the local substitute for camellia sinesens, a charming native plant called Uilleanus Britannicus, from the sound of the wind rushing through its reed-like leaves, moaning like the small pipes. Its berries yielded a beverage better known as Uillean tea, strong, soothing, and narcotic if brewed at too high a temperature.

The problem was that the boiling point of water changed with the atmospheric tides on Britannia, and the tides changed without warning. When the pressure was high, the boiling point rose up to ten degrees, past the point at which the Uillean juice becomes potent and produces a whole range of effects ranging from sleep induction to hallucination, depending upon the dosage.

I had not had Uillean tea the night Henry died. The voice had been real, as real as the phase lightning I had both heard and seen, and that had been real enough to fry the groundskeeper as he had run for cover. They found him the next morning, charred from the inside out to his skin, his face in the same contorted grimace that I had seen on the faces of my cousins, Henry’s sons, when they had failed to make it to shelter in the storm.

And so by these improbable means and the will of Our Lady I was crowned three days later upon the Stone by the hands of Lady Deanna Montrose, High Priestess to the Order of the Sword and the Rose, attended by my mother, Duchess Bernice, and a young priestess named Jessica Tyrone whose eyes were the deepest shade of green I had ever seen in this blue world.

We had rehearsed it devoutly, as close to the old ritual as we could make it, the only changes being that it was performed by torchlight within the most magnificent cavern on the planet, the Blue Grotto of Our Lady of the Chalice, instead of upon Glastonbury Tor, and instead of a white rose and a red rose the single rose was indigo, a blue deep enough to be mistaken for black, for that was the only colour in which roses grew upon Britannia.

The whole ritual had seemed strangely familiar to me in rehearsal, although there had been none performed during my lifetime; I attributed it to old ayvees of the Earth ritual, but I’m not certain the ayvees showed the ritual from the point of view of the King. When it came time for it to happen in actuality I felt for sure I had swallowed a whole potful of Uileann tea, for nothing in the world seemed the same.

There was one part we could not rehearse. The body of my cousin Henry lay upon a bier just outside the cavern’s entrance. At my command, just before the Coronation party entered the cavern, Sir Richard Watkins, OSR left his post guarding the body of the old King and removed the ancient crown from his head. Sir Gregory Patton, OSR stepped forth with the torch which led the procession and handed it to me, blazing a bright red orange against the deep blue sky. I touched it to the pyre and stepped back as the flames shot up toward their feast, releasing the shell of my cousin back to the elements.

It was a moment before I could pull myself away from the sight, for pictures danced within the building wall of fire, pictures which raced through my mind, unlocking doors within it I had never known before existed. I moved as if in a dream down into the cave, down into the hidden chambers of this world into which I had been born, down into the very womb of Britannia.

It was not I who knelt before the High Priestess and the Stone of Destiny, not I who broke, crumbled and scattered the barley upon the ground as the torchlight echoed the flaming pyre in the world above, and not I who felt the cold weight of the crown being placed upon my head. It was certainly not I who felt the stone begin to tremble beneath me, felt the trembling turn into a hum and the hum turn into a pure clear tone which rang throughout the cave like the pealing of a crystal bell. It was we, us, all of us, faces and places and lives and deaths and the wonder of it all surging through us beyond time and space and life and death and we flew with that wonder and euphoria back along the silver strand of our existence, the web of the spirit, the net of all our lives and I saw them all, in one sweeping instant, saw, knew and experienced all the joy, all the passion, all the love which had bound me and set me free.

The pale Lady kissed me with lips as red as blood, first upon the mouth, then upon the forehead, then vanished before my eyes as did the visions. When the pealing ended I heard the voice of the High Priestess proclaim that I, Stephen Geoffrey Arthur Neil of the House of Windsor was by Her hand and confirmed by the Stone the duly crowned King of Britannia.

I looked down to the man who knelt at my feet in burgundy robes, the Knight who had brought forth the crown from my predecessor to be placed upon my head and now, as was his right, claimed the honour to be the first to swear fealty to his newly crowned King; I found my eyes locked upon those of Richard Watkins, eyes as blue as my own, and as deep, and as full of knowledge. The smile was there, the same smile I had always known, and when I covered his hands with my own to accept his oath I knew we had been bound by more than those pale words for all times past and all times yet to come.

When we had finished with the formal exchange I gave his hands an uncalled for squeeze and my smile and nod to him signalled my recognition.

Welcome back, Sire, he replied, though whether it was in a whisper or within my mind I do not recall.

Suffice it to say no one else heard the exchange, not the three priestesses who stood behind me and at either side, not the Grand Knight of the Order, Edwin Tyrell, nor his brother, the Grand Archivist, Edmund, nor any of the knights and nobles assembled to take their oaths. It had been but a brief exchange, three words, whether or not spoken, but it had opened up flood gates within me and I went through the motions of the ceremony while my emotions remained elsewhere.

Welcome back indeed, to a world I’d never seen before which was so unlike my Earth, my green island, my England. What were the rules of the Game this time upon a world in which the Green Man was blue and so were the roses? It did not matter. The King was a pawn of the Gods, and a pawn did not question the hands which moved him.

At least I had the companionship of my Knight, my anmchara, my soulfriend and sometimes brother whose lives and mine had intertwined throughout the ages, my dearest friend and ultimately my executioner.

Life was good.

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It was the next morning before we were to have time alone together; the celebrations which attend a combination King’s Wake and Coronation are long and, to the new King if not the old, somewhat exhausting. I had shaken the hand of every person in