“He was afraid to face you, sire,” Morgan said sadly. “He thinks your plight is all his fault. We’ve tried to reassure him that you’d not blame him for breaking under torture. I thought we’d succeeded, but he lost his nerve again once we reached Worms.” Morgan was reasonably confident that Richard would not blame the boy, but kings were not always tolerant of human frailties, and so he confided, “He is very young, my liege, even younger than we knew, not yet fifteen. . . .”
“Go find him, Morgan, and bring him here. If he balks, tell him it is a royal command.”
It was only after Morgan departed that Richard noticed the parrot. He was very knowledgeable about falcons, but he knew nothing of pet birds and was regarding it dubiously as Fulk insisted it would be good company. He declared that it had potential, though, when Fulk stuck his hand in the cage and was promptly bitten. He and Guillain and Longchamp were laughing at the clerk’s sputtering oaths when the door opened and Morgan half coaxed, half pushed Arne into the chamber.
The boy stumbled forward, sinking to his knees before Richard, his head bowed. Grasping his arm, Richard pulled him to his feet. “Look at me, Arne.” For a long moment, he studied the youngster, his eyes tracking the crusted red welts that had been burned into his forehead and neck. “I am going to tell you something about courage, lad. It is not a lack of fear; it is overcoming fear. You endured great suffering for me, more than many men could have withstood. You have no reason to reproach yourself.”
Arne’s throat had closed up and he saw Richard through a blur of tears. Richard reached out, tracing with his thumb the worst of Arne’s injuries, the one slashing from his eyebrow up into his hairline. “Others will look at this and see a scar, Arne. But they are wrong. It is a badge of honor.”
Morgan and Guillain thought Arne seemed to gain in stature before their eyes, having had an oppressive weight finally lifted from his shoulders. “The king is right, Arne,” Morgan said with a grin. “And that ‘badge of honor’ will serve you well in the future. When you go into a tavern and tell men how you got it, you’ll never have to pay for another drink again.”
“It will also prove useful when you want to impress a lass,” Richard predicted, and when the men laughed, Arne joined in, awed that so much pain could be healed with a few well-chosen words. Their German guards watched, puzzled by the merriment, agreeing among themselves that the English truly were a strange breed.
ON THE TWENTY-NINTH OF JUNE, Richard sat on the dais beside the German emperor in the great hall of the imperial palace at Worms as the terms of their agreement were made public. Heinrich’s smile was triumphant and somewhat smug. It amused him to imagine the French king’s dismay when he heard of this pact, especially since Philippe was responsible for his having gotten most of what he’d demanded from the English king; he could have no more effective weapon to hold over Richard’s head than the threat of that Paris dungeon.
Richard had summoned up what he hoped was a smile of his own; it felt more like a grimace to him, the involuntary rictus seen so often on the faces of the dead. He was determined that none would know how much anguish this agreement had caused him. So he kept that smile steady even as the outrageous new terms were read aloud. His ransom had been raised to a staggering one hundred fifty thousand silver marks, and he would be freed only upon payment of two-thirds of that vast amount, one hundred thousand marks. He must provide Heinrich with sixty hostages and Duke Leopold with seven to guarantee payment of the remaining fifty thousand marks within seven months of his release. If he succeeded in making peace between the emperor and his brother-in-law, Heinrich der L?we, the payment of that fifty thousand marks would be waived and no hostages would be required. But since the demands made of Der L?we included his acceptance of the marriage of his son’s betrothed to the Duke of Bavaria, Richard knew that peace would never come to pass. He had also been compelled to agree to wed his niece Aenor to Leopold’s eldest son and to deliver Anna, the Damsel of Cyprus, to the Austrian duke to be wed to his younger son. He could take consolation only from the absence of one earlier demand—that he personally take part in a campaign against the Sicilian king. But that gave him little comfort on this hot Tuesday afternoon, not when he thought about the cost of his freedom, a sum so stupendous that it defied belief, more than three times the annual income of the English government.