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CHAPTER THIRTY

Boleyn

B oleyn has been ready to meet her child for weeks. Months. But now she is not ready at all. Her thoughts, once so ordered, are too tangled to be fruitful. If she gives birth in this state, her child will be tangled too.

Seymour is bracing her. “Boleyn?” she keeps saying. If she carries on she will wear the name out. “Boleyn? What do we do?”

Boleyn shakes her head, squatting as another surge passes across her belly and up her spine.

She no longer knows what to do. Why does everyone want something?

Want her to give to them, give give give?

They have taken all the pieces of her and left her with nothing of herself.

There is no certainty any more, anywhere.

That is not true at all, dear heart , a voice says.

One moment she thinks it comes from a small, forgotten core deep within her.

The next she thinks it emanates from the cavern itself, from the sleeping queens bearing silent witness to her labour.

Boleyn spreads the fingers of one hand across the crystal, over the crossed arms of one of the women.

What do I do?

Trust yourself , the reply comes, swift as thought.

Seymour is spreading their discarded gowns across the floor into a makeshift bed.

She squeezes out into the silent mine shaft, just outside the cave, and returns with an abandoned miner’s blanket, covered in the dust of garnets and rock.

Seymour spreads it over the gowns. Boleyn’s child is going to be born into the presence of majesty upon dirty fabric.

“Lie down,” Seymour says, helping Boleyn to the ground. Her face is tight, eyes wide. “Lie back. That’s what happens, I think, isn’t it. It’s like a bed. It’s going to be all right. You’re going to be all right.”

She helps her down, but no sooner is Boleyn upon the floor than she rolls herself over onto all fours.

“Boleyn, lie back, then I’m going to fetch help.”

Boleyn shakes her head. She is listening for that small, still voice, and it is saying that her body does not want to lie down, to lie back, to be submissive. Her body wants to move, wants to sway and heave. It wants to plant her hands and knees on the rock and grow roots through them.

Dimly, Boleyn hears a commotion at the cavern’s entrance. Urial leaps through the hole and flows towards her. Behind him, more flustered than she’s ever seen her, is Syndony.

“The creature went wild,” Syndony is explaining to Seymour. “It kept pulling on my gown, like it wanted me to follow it. I thought it might burn me.”

Urial nuzzles into Boleyn, mewling over her stomach. Syndony crouches beside her, her eyes flicking to the sleeping queens and away again – she will tackle their meaning later. There are more pressing matters to deal with here.

“We need to get you out. You can’t give birth in here,” she says, her hands expertly kneading the base of Boleyn’s back.

“I don’t think she can go all that way,” Seymour says.

Follow the light , the voice tells Boleyn.

She gets to her feet, and stumbles through the cave, ignoring Syndony and Seymour’s alarm. She follows the smell of the sea.

There are more carvings on the rock faces here.

Boleyn cannot stop to read them, but as she lurches through the cave their meaning works its way into her, like a dream, recalled in snatches of clarity.

With every surge, a new vision. She sees those six women walk into the water of a volcano – the Font of Cernunnos?

Or the font of another divinity? They emerge from their baptism as queens.

She sees that same volcano rise from the earth, a great and terrible and beautiful woman.

The woman breaks parts of herself from her rocky, icy, heathery body and gives a piece to each queen.

A piece of stone that will become a gargoyle.

The spirit stones of the castles of Elben.

The divine power was a gift, not from Cernunnos, but from Her , and not to the king, but to the queens. The Hleaws may have called her Medren, but she doesn’t have a name. She is the rich soil and the tune of the nightingale. She is the gasp of the lover and the groans within Boleyn now.

The inscriptions tell of the six queens building their castles, establishing the bordweal.

Boleyn looks and looks as each new vision hits her, but nowhere can she see Him.

No king, no antlered god. The bordweal was never bound to him.

The power always, all along, came from the women in their six fortresses.

The kings somehow stole it, subverted it, manipulated it for their own glory.

Another surge, stronger than before, and Boleyn lets out a roar to break chains.

She stumbles around one final corner, and almost falls into shallow water.

The ceiling of this cavern, open to the ocean, is almost as high as the hall back at Brynd.

It glitters with garnets, turning the pool of water inside scarlet, like the colour of her wedding dress.

The cave’s entrance is concealed by a waterfall. Beyond it is the sea.

Boleyn wades out into the water. All she knows is that she needs to be out there.

“Where are you going?” Seymour shouts from the last dry step. Boleyn keeps going, letting the waterfall drench her hair, her body. There’s a ledge, and then a drop, and then she’s swimming, the chill of the waves numbing the next surge.

“Boleyn!”

Seymour wades out behind her, but clings to the side of the cave, beneath the waterfall.

A storm is coming. The clouds gather above Boleyn, and the waves reach for them.

Boleyn rides them, waiting in power, like those clouds.

She lets the sea pull her under for a moment, communing with the hidden currents.

Syndony appears next to Boleyn, her own gown discarded.

“Let me check the babe?” she says, her voice gravelly. Boleyn nods. Syndony takes a deep breath and ducks beneath the waves. Boleyn feels her steady hands, pressing, pushing. When she rises again, her expression is impenetrable.

“Your womb has broken in the wrong place,” she says.

“What does that mean?” Boleyn asks.

“The babe is stuck. It cannot get out. We need to get you help.”

“No. I must give birth here, now.”

“I don’t know if I can get this child out safely without aid.”

Boleyn thrashes, no longer at one with the sea. Urial, from his position at the edge of the water, sends up a plaintive roar. Seymour sees that something is wrong. She throws herself into the water with ungainly strokes. When Syndony tells her, she takes hold of Boleyn’s shoulders.

“Boleyn, listen to me. The baby could die if we don’t find a physician.”

“This is not what I want,” Boleyn says.

“I know, my love. I know.”

Boleyn pulls away from her, searching for the voice that told her that this is what she needs.

She cannot lose this child. She would rather die with it than lose it.

But this is not what she wants. Her child is not meant to come into the world on a stale mattress with its mother curled on her back like a stranded turtle.

“Boleyn? Are you ready?” Seymour says.

“We must go now,” Syndony says. “Or it won’t just be the babe we lose.”

It is only seeing Seymour’s fear at those words that Boleyn recognises her own. Another surge comes over her. This is her body. Hers . She will do this the way that feels right to her. She screams, long and loud and furious.

The storm clouds hover, and the sea screams back.

The roar cannot be heard by the naked ear, but is felt in the water that eddies around the women. It is a roar not of rage or malice, but of hunger.

Shapes appear through the waves, dipping and rising through the froth. They move like fish, but their faces are of a different beast entirely. Kelpies. They skim towards the women, their horse heads fierce and fanged.

“Sweet gods,” Syndony whispers. “What do we do?”

“Wait,” Boleyn says.

As the kelpies reach them their faces morph, the muzzles shrinking, the seaweed manes condensing.

Their front legs become arms. From the waist up, they are women, green-skinned, still fanged.

They dart in and out of the water, their hands massaging Boleyn’s belly.

They chatter to each other in their own language.

Boleyn, Seymour and Syndony wait, poised in the water, holding each other against the wonder of it.

At last, one of the kelpies rises. She holds Boleyn’s face in her hands, and she utters a single cry. It is time.

Boleyn takes Seymour’s hands, and Syndony holds her hips from behind, and steadied by the kelpies she begins to push. Her screams echo off the cliffs, and the kelpies scream with her, enveloping her in the strength of their noise.

She labours until the storm clouds break and the sky meets the sea. She is at once not of herself and entirely herself, more than she has ever been. There is only her and her strength and the knowledge of her body.

When the baby is free of her, she reaches between her legs and pulls it from the water. Syndony and Seymour hold her as she stares at her creation. The child, bloody and wet, blinks half-closed eyes. A daughter fit for a prophecy. A wild daughter of the sea.

“You did it,” Seymour whispers, kissing Boleyn’s shoulder.

The kelpies approach mother and daughter, crooning in their alien tongue at the sight of the child.

Gently, they cut the cord with their teeth, and press their green, calloused fingers into the girl’s flesh, and then the pack of them is gone, turned back into horses, darting through the flotsam and back into the depths of the ocean.

Syndony and Seymour help Boleyn to swim back to the cave, the baby pressed to her chest. She is heavy after the weightlessness of the sea.

Urial cleans and warms the baby with his tongue as they cover themselves with dirty gowns.

Together, they hobble back through the mines, towards the sound of hammering, brutal after the water’s embrace.

The miners drop their tools when they see the women. Oswyn rushes towards Boleyn.

“We must make sure she does not catch fever,” Seymour mutters, over and over.

“Your Majesty, will you allow me to carry you?” Oswyn says, wrapping his dusty shirt around her and the baby.

He lifts them as gently as though they were made of the finest porcelain, following Urial through the passageways and out into the forest, where rain finds its way through the leaves and cleans the dust and salt from Boleyn’s upturned face.

“What will you name her, Your Majesty?” Syndony asks, one hand on Boleyn’s as they move.

Boleyn thinks of all she has learned, and she thinks of the traitor queen who, she is beginning to suspect, was not a traitor after all. She cannot name the child Isabet, but she can come close. A baby born into storms, in the territory of the queens of truth.

“Her name will be Elizabeth.”