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“Homo is a common name to all men.” Henry IV, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 1.
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Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance,
Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit
The oldest sins the newest kind of ways?
Be happy, he will trouble you no more. Henry IV, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 5.
***
Night comes in a slab of cloud, unbroken and so low to the sullen earth that barely a hands-width of bloody sky shows between its somber thickness and the equally somber, equally thick mud. He stares at the advance through a gap in the ill-fastened panels of his tent door, willing the chill to keep at bay, though his hairs are already prickled from nape to arse and his naked toes are tingling in the dampness seeping through the dirt-clotted rushes and the hard dark soil beneath.
So much for the glorious green fields of France. It will be another foul evening. How many more will be taken by chills and fevers? If only the French would stop taunting him, refusing to do more than skirmish or slit the throats of unlucky pages. Three nights ago they were heard on the other side of a valley, chanting nasty little songs, about as bad and off-rhyme than any he'd ever heard in London town. Him and Hotspur, him and John, even him and Thomas, all manner of unlikely positionings of limbs and members. Le roi anglais, de tous anglais, le petit avec la bouche bourrée. Plug your ears, he'd told the men; another use for the wax peeled from the cheeses they've been taking from the abandoned farmhouses.
He turns at a rustle from his bed. The slitter of throats, the composer of scurrilous ditties, the heir to the crown of the kingdom with which he is at war is stretching, rising like Venus through an untidy sea of coverlets and releasing a short, amused huff. "Come," says the enemy, throwing his damnable yellow hair all around his face, clucking as though calling a cat. "'enri, come."
He goes.
***
Before this, only once had he bedded a lad. He could've had any man in Eastcheap, of course. There were days but more often nights, unsteady nights, when he looked around and without any braggartly airs thought, that one and that one, or that one too. If he'd but looked at them through his eyelashes, shaken his hair back, shown the gleam of his neck, they'd have been his for the hour, the evening, the week, or the eager remainders of their illiterate lives.
Then one twilight he'd done it, taken off his cap and undone two buttons of his jerkin and put on an extra swagger as he went to the alley of the Ganymedes.
He hardly remembers the wherefore. A tiff with John, almost certainly. The King and John shared almost naught in common, save their disapprobation of sodomites. At least old foul Henry had some reason for it, coming up after mad Richard and his handsome favorites. But it was a chore to see John's merriment fly away whenever they passed one of the boys with their hair long and greased lips glinting, when the old man had no trouble whatsoever with the girls mewling and pawing in just the same way for gold and supper and a bed for the night.
He hardly remembers the whom, either. A fellow growing too old for the trade, near his own age, but with an odd forward look that caught him straight like a gray blade through the shaded, sticky corners of Mistress Meg's Three Oranges. Hair the color of butter, and sweet-smelling and soft like it too. He'd marveled but hadn't deigned to ask how it was kept that way. A practiced mouth, a strong hand with well-tended calluses, and an easy wordless nod when he'd shaken his head to paying back what he'd taken.
He had been curt, throwing down the coins that'd been asked for and no more and hastening back to the Boar's Head, though he was weary through and he had no fear of the man filching what few farthings he had left, or cutting the wretched clothes off his back. He hadn't cared about John's glowering, either.
Lying now, here, another yellow head smooth and warm under his fingertips, another pair of hands pressed much less gently against his flanks, he understands that the only thing he'd feared was himself.
"You think of another, little King," says the Dauphin, letting Hal's member fall free from his mouth with a slurping grin, and licks his swollen lips. A whore's trick, doubtless. Rather more than one man, for this one. "My sister? English wench? I will grow angry. I will bite. Even if it is not so tiny after all."
The white incisors graze skin, shedding sparks that fall up Hal's spine and set fire to his tongue; he barely keeps from shouting. "Oh, and this pleases him—ah!" The heavy hair is easy to pull, and Hal jerks hard.
"Do you want to die?" It is the second time he's asked since this began. There was no answer the first time; there is no answer now. The Dauphin has arched up, instinctively, to lessen the tug on his scalp; his face is cloaked by the shadow of Hal's hand, and, then, the addition of his own, wrapping around Hal's wrist, without force.
Silence around them, punctuated by some distant clanking: the sluggish wind catching the resting wares at the smiths' tents. Farther still, there's a passel of men bawling a sordid tune about French cows, or maybe French maidens, or both. Unless Sir Thomas and Sir Brannon have become as stealthy as he forever instructs them to be while attending his tent, a most unlikely condition, they've thoroughly obeyed his hasty earlier dismissal. Indeed, it might be them among the singers.
When the Dauphin lifts his eyes again, they are glowing like will-o'-the-wisps, and the pink tip of his tongue shows between his lips. "Just the little one, tonight." He smiles, and Hal winces at the sweetness of it, this mad infant's mien—a mad infant in charge of an army, and practically a kingdom too. "And you, 'enri. Do you wish to die?"
As he watches, the smile grows. It is like watching simultaneously an angel's descent to earth and a demon's rise from Hell. "Or not, why are you here, in my France?"
Now the Dauphin laughs under his breath. It is the exact laugh by which he had made himself known nearly two hours ago, when Hal had begun to, with sword drawn, unroll the strange French gift of a huge Eastern rug in which, as it turned out, this royal fool had had himself thickly bundled. He'd snickered up at Hal, lying on the priceless bright-colored stuff there among the rushes, ruddy-cheeked, unarmed, and with the point of Hal's weapon at his breast. "Oh, you hope for a second ball, little King?" In neither case does the smallness of the suppressed sound contain the pure delight that creases the unearthly face.
"I am not sure I really am here," Hal says. "Or you either."
"Parfait," the Dauphin replies. "No questions more." He bends again, greedily, and Hal has to cram his fist into his mouth to strangle a cry. His other hand is seized and tangled, encouragingly, in the chaos of the Dauphin's hair as it swings, picking up a rhythm. After he comes—languidly, for it's the third time—he sees a few threads of gold coiled around the roots of his fingers. Then, even as he struggles not to, he falls asleep.
***
He dreams he is pursued by his father come alive from the deathbed, raging, spitting, full of invectives. He flees through Westminster, sour-mouthed, and finds himself entrapped in mud rising quickly to his knees, then hips. Turning his face toward his pursuer, he sees only the silhouette of a laughing man, flickering in his panicked vision: it might be bony Gascoigne, or fat-bellied John, or still his father, trailing shreds of ermine that sink into the wet earth. He screams as he is swallowed down, and wakes with his mouth open noiselessly under the Dauphin's cool hand. "Vas-y, Henri, tais-toi."
He shudders without meaning to let himself do it. "Ils m'ont entendu?"
"Lucky your English men are lazy," continues the Dauphin in English, smirking. "They have not come again to their posts."
"Feh," he says, rising onto his elbows. "I'm luckier you haven't cut my throat." He feels a lump there, in fact, as he sees that the Dauphin, as nude as Adam, straddles him. Stripped, the body before him is less slender than it'd looked under linen and velvet, the flesh solid along the shoulders and arms and ribs, a few pale scars across the forearms. He clenches his lips, feeling his sore prick twinge as he looks on his foe's, its tip shining with enthusiasm between their bellies.
"I would not yet, with my debts unpaid." The Dauphin's thighs cord as he ruts himself against Hal, viciously. "Eh, little King," he pants, "where is your honor?"
"And you, king's son, have you none?" A little clumsily, a little heavily, Hal closes his fist around the Dauphin, who throws back his head and lets out a strangled noise, then shoves Hal hard into the bed, knees pressing Hal's tight, as though to bruise.
"They have asked that of you in your time also, 'enri. No talk of fathers," the Dauphin adds through a low groan, now pushing himself into the circle of Hal's fingers, "or of sons."
He swallows, letting his fist be fucked, hardly knowing what to do even as he feels his own limbs moving. His other hand clenches the Dauphin' hip, fingertips rough against the firm expanse of arse, pushing backward until he can rub himself against the meat of it, from behind; his eyelids flutter sluttishly, his mouth falls lax; his toes curl from the almost stinging sensation in his prick.
"Mouth," murmurs the Dauphin, pressing forward and opening his in demonstration. Hal swallows at the sight of that tongue but shakes his head, a tingle in his lips as they brush against the Dauphin's cock, almost glowing hot. "Trou de cul. You petty English—fils à putain!" The Dauphin scrabbles behind him at Hal's hand, which has sunk its index finger to the second knuckle inside him; he tries to pull free, but Hal's fist has closed punishingly tight. "Cette putain de—merdaille—"
"We English are not a squandering lot. I'll repay you in one what you gave me in three."
"Vantard, imbécile—"
"Chut, hush," says the King of England, dragging his mortal enemy toward him until their mouths collide. The hard dance of their tongues helps him not think about how much he enjoys the heat and the squirming and the tiny sounds he draws out of this man, this lad in a man's clothes, really, as he flexes, with effort, his finger.
The Dauphin trembles, compliant, and soon, when he spills between them in a gush that seems it will never end, stifles himself against Hal's shoulder. Hal can't tell if he is mouthing something. A curse? A prayer?
They lie there without moving for a long time. Just when Hal is sure the Dauphin is asleep and tries to stir the blood back into his numb arms, he hears, "C'est l'heure d'y aller, Henri."
"Yes, it must be near midnight, if not—I'll send back the rug, or—but you've no weapon and they're all ripe for a fight, after the pages—" It would have to be the rug again, suspicions be damned, so long as he avoids letting John or Gascoigne find him out. Who'd be fastest, and least likely to blab? Could he bring his own horse outside the patrol lines without being seen, or if he were, call it a test of their alertness?
Sitting up, he chews his lip for not having put mind to this when he'd let himself be pulled down to that cursed rug in the first place. He must find a bedmate, anyone unpoxed and whole will do. Eight weeks without and here he is, nearly assassinated by the idiot weapon in his own breeches.
"No, that you go. Go to England. Go and live." The Dauphin is not smiling. "It is not too late."
He makes no show of concealing the fury that chokes him. "So you came a-whoring yourself for your father's sake after all." He shoves like a child, and the Dauphin, surprised, staggers from the bed. "Get yourself away."
"Not my father," bites out the Dauphin. "But myself, I tell you again. My father is mad." A rictus of unknown emotion passes over his face, curls his lip, flashes in his eyes. "I hate him." His look is a fist in Hal's belly. "Tu sais."
"I do not know. You carry his blood," Hal says, unrelenting, though his guts ache. "And one day, you'll wear his crown. You've taken souls for him. Go." He jabs his finger, once, at the heap of the Dauphin's dark rich clothes, the disarrayed rug. "I'll take you beyond the picket."
"Henri—"
"Go, else I'll take you hostage as you deserve."
***
He goes out on Roy, meek in her old age, instead of restless Caesar; though she kneels patiently, it is far from easy, tying down the uneven roll on the old mare's rump without help. Disheartening, also, that not one of the half-dozen of his men along the way paid him mind as he, wrapped in his cloak crown to heel, led Roy back to his tent from where she'd been hitched with the other cart-horses.
"Putain, I will just walk," the Dauphin protests, when Hal lands an accidental elbow in his ribs. The struggle too much resembles a time a dozen years ago, when he and Thomas, knapping each other about while penned up in the stormbound keep of some little castle in Wales, had ripped a tapestry flat from the wall in their laughing scuffle.
"You tax my honor, sir," he mutters as he mounts, all of his joints creaking. They say nothing more until he deposits the bundle on the soft damp needles beneath a stretch of ill-grown pines, a half-mile and a creek between them and the torches of the English camp.
"Farewell, little King," says the Dauphin, peeling himself free. "The carpet, it is yours." Hal glances once, regrets it, and fastens his eyes on the faintly moon-limned branches above. He doesn't look again until the resinous crackle of the Dauphin's soft-soled boots on the twigs is too far away to hear. He doesn't take the rug.
***
Challenged, he had sighed as he picked up the dead man's sword, heavy with fatigue or with foreknowledge even as the Dauphin lowered his visor and stepped forth; victorious, he had not gone back to that pit of mud for an entire day, save to help bring John's pall to the creek, where he also helped wash the body for its waiting coffin.
Now he stands over his main prize, looking at the yellow hair trod into the stiffened black ooze, the flies alighting on the bits of broken bone that gleam through rents in the dark armor and darkening flesh like white teeth. The barons and Gascoigne congratulate him. But he doesn't feel anything. He takes no trophy bit of hair, no ring from the fingers, though some of the men have already done. He lets others carry the corpse.
***
At the feast Charles gives at Troyes for the peace, for his new heir, and for his daughter's engagement, Hal finds himself stared at from across the quadrangle of tables on the dais by a golden-headed boy, just growing into knobbly adolescence. The child is seated to the French king's left, while Catherine demurely examines her folded hands on her father's right. "The youngest Capetian brat," whispers Gascoigne with a grin, inclining to Hal's ear.
"I've rid him of his patrimony, then."
"No, Majesty, it's another brother who's run off and set up in Bourges." Gascoigne exhales with mirth. "The King of Bourges they call him. That there's but the baby. Another Charles."
"He must detest me." The wine is good; he gulps it until the dregs brush his lips.
"The triumphant are always hated. That, your noble father knew well. Be unconcerned, sire. With this family's luck, he'll be mad or dead before his majority."
"Gascoigne," he says, low and fast and flat, lest the strange prickling warmth that has oozed into his eyes seeps out, "never raise my father to me again."