The King's Stone (page 15)
The King’s Stone sat embedded into the rocky top of a table mountain by the Elbe River in Saxony. Its cistern, its passageways, and its beam supports were hewn into the massive rock itself. There was also a well, which was so deep and its required rope so heavy, seven men, overseen by the Master of the Waterworks, peddled a wheel contraption with their continuous might to draw up the water. The stone fortress was impregnable. Its steep high sides could withstand attack. Not that anyone would be foolhardy enough to try.
In it lived the Saxon King August the Cold, and his current maîtresse en titre Constantia of Cosel. In a matter of years Constantia of Cosel will be banished to Stolpen Castle, twenty kilometers to the north, four hours away on foot across the Elbe, where she will be held forty-nine years in banishment. But not yet. Though she will spend from age thirty-six to eighty-four alone in her tower, which will come to be known as Cosel Tower, today she is still only thirty-three. Her son Friedrich is one and a half years old, and the Polish countess who will replace her as August the Cold’s maîtresse will not arrive for another few months.
In the halls of The King’s Stone, Constantia gathered her son to her. The toddler was fearless, which caused her to be fearful. He runs with alarming speed across the stone floors and steps, down the rock-hewn passageways, and to the precipices of the table mountain on which they stand. It was still summer, but the rock castle’s halls were cool, and Constantia shivered as she gathered her wriggling and loudly protesting son in her arms.
“August,” she hesitated, “will you hire the Jómsvíkings? Is that why you have written a letter, which will surely be carried to Jómsborg on the Baltic Sea?”
August the Cold gave his maîtresse a penetrating stare.
Constantia took a calculated move as she purposefully reasoned aloud, “After playing for you here, the Schumanns will go to Stettin and Königsberg in Pomerania, then onto Riga and St. Petersburg in Imperial Russia, before finishing Clara Schumann’s concert tour in Swinemünde on Usedom Island. To the west of Swinemünde is Vineta, and to its east is Jómsborg. Surely she will go to Jómsborg, to deliver your letter to the Jómsvíkings, which must have been why you invited her here to play the klavier.”
Constantia of Cosel, the daughter of the Knight Joachim, grew up learning German, Latin, Danish, mathematiks, riding, how to dress and behave correctly, and light weaponry. She was beautiful, intelligent, ambitious, and arrogant. She knew it was not possible to keep the attention of a man like August the Cold, but she wanted to try. She had felt his interest in her waning, and she wanted to secure a future for her son and herself. She thought if she showed him how much she could deduce of his plans, and that he could trust her, then she could have him.
But she was wrong, about his plans, and about him.