Chapter 89: The Last Anointing

The servants had set the emperor in his chair beside the brazier, and the firelight made a ruin of his face. Louis the Pious sat with his hands folded in his lap like a man already laid out for burial, and yet his eyes—those pale, watery eyes that had wept over so many betrayals—held a clarity Drogo had not seen in months.

“Leave us,” the emperor said to the servant, and the man withdrew, closing the door with a softness that spoke of long practice in the art of disappearing.

Drogo stood where he was, halfway across the chamber, his mind racing through the possibilities. His father should not have been able to walk. The physicians had said the dropsy would keep him abed until spring, if he saw spring at all. Yet here he sat, propped on cushions that smelled of camphor and lavender, his breathing laboured but his will unmistakably present.

“You have been busy, my son,” Louis said. “The seal. The letters. The council summoned to Aachen.”

“Father—”

“Do not.” The word was quiet, but it cut. “I am not so far gone that I cannot read the signs. Brother Aldric came to me an hour ago. He confessed everything. The letters in my name. The promises to your brothers. The trap you have laid for Lothar.”

Drogo felt the floor tilt beneath him. Aldric. He had trusted the scribe, had given him the seal, had believed the man’s terror of Judith outweighed his conscience. He had been wrong.

“Where is he now?” Drogo asked, and was surprised by the steadiness of his own voice.

“Where you cannot reach him. I have sent him to Prüm, under guard, to do penance for his part in your deception.” Louis shifted in his chair, and the movement cost him. His breath came short, then steadied. “You think I am angry. I am not. I am tired, Drogo. I am so very tired of watching my sons tear each other apart.”

Drogo crossed the room and knelt before his father’s chair. The stones were cold through his hose, and the fire popped and spat, and for a moment the only sound was the rain that had begun again against the shutters.

“I was trying to save you,” Drogo said. “All of you. Lothar, Pepin, Louis, you—I thought if I could make them believe they had won, if I could bring them to Aachen under the banner of peace and then force them to see reason—”

“You thought to play God with your brothers’ ambitions.” Louis raised one hand, and the gesture was so like Charlemagne that Drogo’s throat closed. “That is not for you. That is not for any of us. Do you know what I dreamed, my son? I dreamed of stones in a river. Each stone was a son, and each one sank, and the river carried them away, and I could not reach any of them. Not one.”

“I am not a stone,” Drogo said. “I am the water.”

Louis looked at him for a long moment, and something moved in his face—not anger, not disappointment. Something that might have been recognition.

“Yes,” he said at last. “You are the water. And water wears away stone. But water also drowns. Which will you be, Drogo? The river that carves a new channel, or the flood that destroys the village?”

Drogo had no answer. He had spent so long moving in the shadows that he had forgotten what it was to stand in the light, to be seen, to be weighed and measured by someone who knew him better than he knew himself.

“The council will arrive in two days,” Louis said. “Lothar will come with his army. Pepin is already at the Loire. Louis of Bavaria marches from the east. And I—” He paused, and his hand went to his chest, where the pain lived. “I will not survive the spring. We both know this.”

“Father—”

“Listen to me.” The emperor’s voice was sharp now, sharp and clear, and Drogo obeyed. “I have one act left in me. One final decree. I will summon them all to Aachen—not to fight, not to negotiate, but to witness the division of the empire. I will give Lothar the middle kingdom, with the imperial title but not the power. I will give Pepin Aquitaine. I will give Louis Bavaria. And to you, my youngest, my water, I will give the rest: the lands no one else wants, the marches and the forests and the monasteries, and the task of holding them together when I am gone.”

Drogo stared. “You would trust me with that?”

“I would trust no one else.” Louis smiled, and it was a terrible thing, that smile, because it was full of love and grief and the knowledge that everything he had built was about to become dust. “But you will not get it by trickery. You will not get it by letters and seals and lies. You will get it because I will it. And when I am dead, and your brothers come to claim what they think is theirs, you will stand before them with a clear name and a clean heart, and you will say: Our father gave me this. And they will have to decide whether to tear the empire apart over a dead man’s word.”

“They will tear it apart anyway,” Drogo said. “Lothar will never accept it. He believes he was born to rule.”

“He believes he was born to be loved,” Louis said. “As you all do. As I did.” He closed his eyes, and for a moment Drogo thought he had drifted into sleep. Then he spoke again, barely a whisper. “Bring me the oil. The chrism from Reims. I would be anointed once more, as I was at the beginning, when I was young and foolish and believed God had chosen me for greatness.”

Drogo rose. He crossed to the small chest beside the altar and lifted the lid. The chrism was there, in its crystal vial, sealed with wax that had been pressed by a bishop’s ring. He carried it back to his father and knelt again.

“Will you do it?” Louis asked. “You, who have played at so many roles—will you play the priest for an old man’s last vanity?”

“It is not vanity,” Drogo said, and his voice broke on the word. “It is hope.”

He poured a drop of the oil onto his thumb. It smelled of myrrh and something older, something that had no name. He touched it to his father’s forehead, to the hollow of his throat, to the palms of his hands.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he said, and the words came from somewhere deep, somewhere he had not known he could reach.

Louis sighed, and the sigh was like a wave receding from a shore. “Amen,” he said.

They stayed like that for a long time, the old emperor and his youngest son, while the rain fell and the fire burned and the night deepened. And when Drogo finally rose and went to the door, he found Judith standing in the corridor, her face pale in the torchlight, her hands clenched at her sides.

“He has changed the game,” she said quietly. “Your seal is worthless now. Aldric has confessed. Bernard is free. And you have no more secrets to sell.”

“No,” Drogo said. “I have no more secrets.”

“Then what will you do?”

He looked back at his father, sleeping now in the chair, the oil still glistening on his brow. And for the first time in years, Drogo felt something he had almost forgotten: the weight of his own name, the thing that had been given to him at baptism, the thing that could not be taken away by any seal or letter or lie.

“I will go to Aachen,” he said. “And I will stand in the light.”

Judith’s smile was cold, but it was also, for the first time, uncertain. “We shall see,” she said. “We shall see.”

And somewhere beyond the walls, thunder rolled across the Rhine.