Brother Cadfael 20: Brother Cadfael's Penance

were now paler than the night without.
    "Yours," said Philip with soft deliberation, not questioning, not exclaiming, only saying over the single word to himself as if to incise it on the steely metal of his mind. "What satisfaction would your life be to me? What grudge have I against you, to give me any pleasure in destroying you?"
    "What grudge had you against him? What bitter pleasure will you experience in destroying him? What did he ever do to you, except hold fast to his cause when you deserted yours? Or when he so thought of what you did," Cadfael corrected himself stoutly, "for I tell you, I do not know how to interpret all that you have done, and he, as I well know, would be less ready to look not once, but twice, thrice and again, before judging."
    No, the protest was pointless. Olivier's fiery scorn would be enough offence. A match for Philip in his towering pride, blazing forth in unrestrained reproach, as if Philip's own mirror image cried out against him. Perhaps the only way to put that mortal wound out of mind had been to bury the accuser out of sight and out of memory.
    "You valued him!" said Cadfael, enlightened and unwary.
    "I valued him," Philip repeated, and found no fault with the statement. "It is not the first time I have been denied, rejected, misprized, left out of the reckoning, by some I most valued. There is nothing new in that. It takes time to reach the point of cutting off the last of them, and proceeding alone. But now, since you have made me an offer, why should you, why do you, offer me your old bones to moulder in his place? What is Olivier de Bretagne to you?"
    "He is my son," said Cadfael.
    In the long, profound silence that followed, Philip released held breath at last in a prolonged soft sigh. The chord that had been sounded between them was complex and painful, and echoed eerily in the mind. For Philip also had a father, severed from him now in mutual rejection, irreconcilable. There was, of course, the elder brother, William, Robert's heir. Was that where the breakage began? Always close, always loved, always sufficient, and this one passed over, his needs and wants as casually attended to as his pleas for Faringdon had been? That might be a part of Philip's passion of anger, but surely not the whole. It was not so simple.
    "Do fathers owe such regard to their sons?" he said dryly. "Would mine, do you suppose, lift a hand to release me from a prison?"
    "For ought that I know or you know," said Cadfael sturdily, "so he would. You are not in need. Olivier is, and deserves better from you."
    "You are in the common error," said Philip indifferently. "I did not first abandon him. He abandoned me, and I have accepted the judgement. If that was the measure of resolution on one side, to bring this abominable waste to an end, what is left for a man but to turn and throw his whole weight into the other scale? And if that prove as ineffective, and fail us as bitterly? How much more can this poor land endure?"
    He was speaking almost in the same terms as the Earl of Leicester, and yet his remedy was very different. Robert Bossu was trying to bring together all the wisest and most moderate minds from both factions, to force a compromise which would stop the fighting by agreement. Philip saw no possibility but to end the contention with a total victory, and after eight wasteful years cared very little which faction triumphed, provided the triumph brought back some semblance of law and normality to England. And as Philip was branded traitor and turncoat, so, some day, when he withheld his powers from battle to force his king's hand, would Robert Bossu be branded. But he and his kind might be the saviours of a tormented land, none the less.
    "You are speaking now of king and empress," said Cadfael, "and what you say I understand, better than I did until this moment. But I am speaking of my son Olivier. I am offering you a price for him, the price you named. If you meant it, accept it. I do not think, whatever else I might think of you, that you go back on your bargains, bad or good."
    "Wait!" said Philip, and raised a hand, but very tolerantly. "I said: perhaps a life. I am not committed by so qualified a declaration. And, forgive me, brother!, would you consider yourself fair exchange, old as you are, against his youth and strength? You appealed to me as a fairminded man, so do I turn to you."
    "I see the imbalance," said Cadfael. Not in age and beauty and vigour, however glaring that