Peace be upon you.
Chapter Three
I set my goblet down on the window-ledge without looking, and it found an angle and fell with a loud ring. Wine splashed cold onto my bare feet and I cursed, kicking away the goblet. It rolled under the bed, clinking its protest of a precious thing scorned. I could not see properly, so I leaned out of the window to catch the last of the sunlight. The note was written in a strong, precise hand using good ink and a well-trimmed pen. I did not recognise it, though.
Sol. That was clear enough: Jean de Sol. All well and good: a message from my employer, and nothing unusual about that. It was in Occitan, which made it seem authentic, for the language of the Captain’s homeland was the common tongue of the Cormaran. But why all this secrecy? The Captain was a prolific writer of instructions, and so was Gilles. We had a cipher that we used if secrecy was called for, but nowadays it was rarely needed and besides, as the Captain often said, when the world is unschooled a plain-writ word is cipher enough. But who was this stranger who wished peace upon me? And why did he wish me to meet with him in such an unwholesome place? I considered. He knew where I lodged – easy enough. I had made no secret of my presence here, for I did not need to. He knew my name … ach, this was vexing, I decided, but only that. Either the writer bore a message from Captain de Montalhac or he was some trickster looking to gull some money or perhaps some business from me. But we would be meeting in a place where a thousand people could be found at any hour of the day, the most public place in the city. I would meet him, and then ride out to Vincennes.
I studied the letter once more. Black ink, yellow vellum. An everyday note. My eyes followed the lines to the bottom of the little page: peace be upon you. The language, the words … They were Cathar words. Of course. Suddenly I had no doubt that this person had been sent by the Captain, and that I could trust him. It was instinct, nothing more, a confidence no stronger than the vellum in my hand, but somehow it was enough. Whoever he was, I would meet this man tomorrow by the pump. Là. It was decided. Breakfast with a heretic, luncheon with the most Christian king. All in a day’s work.
I rose early the next morning and put on my court clothes. I buckled on my fine belt of tooled and gilded leather, and arranged it so that my Moorish dagger hung across my left thigh. She was called Thorn, and her hilt was of pale jade that curved over like a frozen wave to form a smooth pommel. She had done for her former master, and so I treated her with a deal of respect. Then I drew on my travelling cloak. It was long, faded and stained with many months’ worth of travel, and when I fastened a simple black belt around it my finery was hidden. I stretched, sighing, and cracked a bad night’s sleep from my backbone and shoulder blades.
I should not have gone out, but the evening had grown distressingly empty in my apartments and at last, far too late, I had wandered out to a house of entertainment that more than one bravo at court had recommended to me. I had drunk far too much and had forgotten to eat, but drink takes a man in many a strange way, and as the madam had begun to tempt me with the flowers of her establishment I had begun to feel that my dignity was somehow at stake, this despite the fact that I had entered her door with every intention of swiving the tiles from the roof. The more lovely the proffered candidates, the flimsier their raiments, the greater grew my sense of a dim, puzzling affront to my person, until at last I had staggered to my feet, paid my bill with icy politeness (or so it seemed to me then: God alone knows what absurd figure I had cut in reality) and strutted out into the street, banging my shoulder painfully on the door-jamb as I left. I remembered climbing the stairs, and stopping half way to rest my forehead upon their cool tiles; shouting for water and bringing forth a muddled, barely civil serving-man; and then, no more until I woke, my mouth as dry as a fillet of salt cod. It gave me no pleasure to spend my nights thus, but more often than not I seemed to do so. But if I lacked the appetite for this aimless life, in equal measure I lacked any reason to avoid it. For I was a young man, wealthy beyond the dreams of most men, and I was alone.
It had not always been so. After my return from Constantinople and those first days in Venice when the fortunes of the Cormaran had been won, I had had a companion. Letice Londeneyse, she was called: Letitia of Smooth Field, sometimes known as Magpie or Pyefote. If I had stolen victory from the darkness of certain failure, it had been she who had lighted my way. I had fallen in love with her, slowly and even, one might say, carefully, for she was not a mannerly noblewoman or a shy, chaste maiden. No, and no again. The first time I had seen her, her eye had just been blacked by her lover in a busy Roman square. The second time she had been scrubbing a man’s blood from a boarding-house floor. The third time I had been in her power, and she could have had me killed with a twitch of her eyebrow. That she chose to spare me might be seen as an auspicious beginning to our tryst, but it was not until much later that we came together after pain and the spilling of blood. No, she was not a mannerly woman, my Letice, but she was like no other, and I had loved her as a man alone in the night-time wilderness loves the spark and flare of flint upon iron as it lights his lantern.
We had lived, for a time, as man and wife in the Captain’s palace in Venice – the Ca’Kanzir – an ancient, half-forgotten refuge on the Rio Morto that was the closest thing I had to a home – but we had been betrothed and planned to wed in earnest, for with the sudden rise in our fortunes had come the urge in both of us for … what, exactly, I could not have said, but although I would not have admitted to a desire for respectability, I wanted that which I had not had since leaving Balecester – and that was peace. In Letice’s yellow hair, the colour of primroses in springtime; in her cool blue eyes, which read words and people with equal subtlety; in her pale skin, the arch of her eyebrows, the swoop of her too-long nose, the way her wide mouth fell into a pout when she was thinking: in all this I did find a strange, profound peace. She must have found something of the like in me, for when I had first known her she had seemed to burn inside with a trembling heat, as if she had foxfire in her soul. She was free, for Nicholas Querini, a rogue of terrifying wealth and power and the man who had called her his lover though she was nothing more than his slave, was ruined, and would soon vanish from this world. She had helped destroy him, but victory had not made her crow: instead it had revealed the girl she had once been before life had made her a whore and a thief. We were thieves together, of course, but we were carefree, for we had just picked the pockets of Christendom and been thanked into the bargain.
I had seen this gentle change in her, but she had seen something else happen to me, for the Captain had been paid his commission from King Louis for the Crown of Thorns, and though I will not divulge an exact sum, suffice to say that Christ at Cana did not perform so great a transformation as that which then came over the company of the Cormaran. The Cormaran was Captain de Montalhac’s ship, our ship, that had sailed for many years, roving far and wide across the face of the waters, from Alexandria to Skraelingland, or so the stories went; and the company had been her crew. Like a petrel she had crossed from land to land, kingdom to kingdom, bearing the Captain’s stock-in-trade, for in her hold she carried miracles.
Michel de Montalhac, as he wandered, had made himself the greatest dealer in holy relics in all the lands of Christendom and indeed beyond, for the Captain did not care who bought his wares, and the Mahometans give reverence to relics just as we do. He counted popes and kings as his customers and even his friends, but though his wares brought him an odd kind of power over them, they had no claim to him, for he bowed his knee to nothing but the wind in his ship’s sail.
Like their master, the crew were outcasts and outlaws, wanderers and exiles and malcontents from every land. Their only home, their country – if Herodotus was right, and countries can float upon the sea – was the Cormaran, and they loved her. Strange, then, or perhaps not so very strange, that as soon as the wealth of Louis rained down on them, those men of the sea suddenly regained their taste for the land. They took their shares and
straight away found that all along they had longed to marry and buy an inn in Thuringia, or invest in a company of mercenaries, or go into the wool trade. Some were close by: Zianni had bought himself a pardon for the killing which had got him exiled from Venice many years before and now lived in outlandishly lavish style across the Grand Canal in San Marco, married, no less, to a sweetly rounded, giggling cousin of the Doge. Istvan the Dalmatian had bought a palazzo off the Riva degli Sciavoni where his fellow Croats had made their home, and Dimitri the ferocious Bulgar master-at-arms had moved in with him. They had already set up a nice little business selling arms and ammunition to the government of the Serenissima, and we saw them often.
But mostly the crew had scattered to the four winds. Nizam the helmsman had sailed for Cairo to find the Sufi master he longed to study with. Latchna the sail maker had gone back to Dublin, Carlo to Rome, Mirko to Genoa. Even the Cathars – and there were still a few of them, though once they had been the backbone of the crew – even they drifted away, to risk their lives in Languedoc or just to find peace in some country where the hounds of the Inquisition were not so numerous. Of the old company, suddenly only the Captain, Gilles de Peyrolles, Roussel and Isaac of Toledo remained – and myself, of course. We had to do something with all the silver and gold that King Louis kept giving us, and so we followed the fashion of the day and started a bank.
It was startlingly lucrative almost at once. Fortune had caused us to batten on to the great artery that pumps silver and gold from Venice and Florence up to Lyons, Bruges, London and beyond, just as it had started to flow. It was not exciting business, and I did not care for the short-sighted, long-fingered coin-counters who peopled it, or the vast ledgers, for those were the oceans we sailed now, endless pages ruffled by the winds of greed and commerce into rolling waves of inky numbers. But the life it brought us made up for the boredom, for a time at least. It was a world we had regarded from the outside with the eyes of thieves, but it was exciting to learn the many ways one could rob a man with a few strokes of a quill and win the acclaim of respectable men for it, and so we settled, slowly, and the Cormaran became a company of bankers, though the ship herself was still berthed out on the Molo, and the Captain would go and sit in his old cabin often, when the ink and the numbers became too numbing.
And in the midst of all this change, Letice and I were engaged to be married. When we had first met I had been, if not a boy, then not exactly a man. I had been in my twenty-first year, but although I had seen things, done things that many an old man could not claim to have experienced in the longest of lives, I was – I will admit it now – somehow unformed. In many ways I believed my life was already at an end, for I had just suffered the loss of my beloved, my Anna, murdered in the muddy streets of London, and my own life, shaped as it had been by violence and death, had turned itself inward. Letice was the same: she had fought against the world her whole life and it had not destroyed her, but made her very hard. But in the end it was she who changed, and I who did not. Because when she found herself loved and admired, not just by me but by the Captain and Gilles, and discovered that the infinitely mutable society of Venice accepted her without question now that she was wealthy, though she had been a rich man’s whore, she began to shed her armour and to find that ease and pleasure could be had without suffering.
I, meanwhile, had eagerly taken on the responsibilities that the Captain had given me, for I was now a full partner in the company of the Cormaran, and the man whom Louis of France trusted to bring him more relics from Constantinople, and so I started, by slow degrees, to be seduced by the world I had learned to despise, and Letice could not bear the change it brought to me. One day she left the Ca’Kanzir for good, a month before our wedding. I had just returned from a brief journey, a quick dash down the coast to Zara to outbid a rival on a cargo of silk. It was nothing, but in my hurry to beat everyone else to the prize I had forgotten to tell Letice I was leaving, and when I returned I had lost her. She told me that I was becoming like the men who had used her in the past, so seduced by power that they felt nothing but the desire for it, and their lust, as it could never be satisfied, had to content itself with causing pain. I was not there yet, but, she told me, red-eyed but not crying, she could not bear to see the rot begin to work in me. And then she was gone, on a ship bound for London, and I was left alone with my money.
She had been right. I had seen it clearly myself in the weeks and months after she left. I tried to claw back something of the man I had once been, and found release in travel, for Venice, with its endless layers of seduction which a man might never exhaust in two lifetimes, began to trouble me. I spent my time criss-crossing the lands between Paris and Constantinople, bringing one relic after another from the Pharos Chapel to King Louis, who dug more deeply into his kingdom’s treasury for each new holy morsel. I tried not to stay in one place for too long. I drank too much, and when I thought of the love I had squandered I would take myself off to the Rose Street or the Gropecunt Lane of whatever town I was in, for they all have them; or seduce some maiden of the court who wanted me only for my wealth. Two years went by, and though I was Purveyor of Relics to the King of France, and equal partner in the Banco di Marangone, which is how one says Cormaran in the dialect of the Florentines, I found that I could not find any stillness in me. Perhaps I had not become what Letice had feared, but I was nothing but a finely dressed vagabond with a bottomless purse and a heart that I kept locked up tight inside me.
I crossed the river and rode north through the narrowest of streets. Even this early they were stiff with people going to and from the market: servants lugging baskets out of which lolled blank-eyed goose-heads or hares’ legs, barrows piled high with cages of nervous pullets, stolid mud-booted men carrying staves hung with quail, thrushes, partridge. A countrywoman and her daughters were pushing a barrow on which lay a gigantic hog, trussed up and watching the world resignedly through its little red eyes; and next to them a funeral procession passed, an old cleric in a threadbare surplice ringing a hand bell while four men bore the sheet-wrapped corpse. The city’s burial ground was ahead, the walls of its charnel house blocking out the light. I rode past it, wrinkling my nose at the stench. I guessed they had opened a tract of old graves and dug out the bones, for there was a dolorous odour of rot and wet clay, something like old mushrooms, save far worse. I pushed the mare through the crowds and was cursed from all sides, but I ignored the words as I ignored the flies that were already filling the air. At last the street gave way to the great market square. I dismounted and led the mare over to an inn I had spied over by the church of Saint Eustache, and found a stable-boy who agreed to watch the beast. I gave him copper and showed him the silver he would get when I returned.
My feet slapped and slopped in puddles of blood as I wove my way through a press of market-goers. The pungencies of cheese, spices, spring onions, and the rust and shit stink of animal insides almost overpowered the cemetery’s exhalations of decay, until I could not tell quite what I was smelling. A fat game seller was busily skinning rabbits, jerking the glistening pink bodies from their furry cocoons like a grotesque midwife, his great bare arms matted with hair and slime. I asked him where the tripe butchers might be found. He pursed his fleshy lips and pointed across the market. Then he held up a slick, flayed coney and waved it alluringly at me. I shook my head and ducked back into the crowd.
There was the pump, and there were the tripe butchers, washing their tripes. It was not a sight I found myself relishing at that hour of the morning. Like a gaggle of blasphemous washerwomen, four or five burly men in crusted leather aprons were gathered around a plain stone column, from the side of which jutted a green-stained bronze pipe and a crude iron handle. There was a sort of shallow marble basin at the pump’s foot. The marble was worn, the colour of old tallow veined with bluish-green. The men flopped pallid festoons of corrugated stomach lining around on the stone of the basin while a boy, no doubt an apprentice, worked the handle and kept a steady pulse of water
falling. The water that flowed from the basin was grey and flecked with chewed grass. The smell, wafting from great wooden trays of flaccid tripe, was brutal, and I felt my eyes begin to sting. One of the butchers caught my eye and gave me a look both pitiful and pitying, the look reserved for the rich and idle by those who toil in filth and reek. There was a secret knowledge there as well, though. I was on the outside, being regarded from within some place of pride, of belonging. I shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable, for I knew that look of old; and at that moment a hand tapped at my sleeve.
A grey man stood an arm’s length from me, in front of a curtain of split hogs. His cloak was grey and dusty, his beard was grey and his skin was the colour of wood ash, and all was rendered more grey by the contrast with the pinks and purples of the pig-flesh behind him. He regarded me levelly from beneath unkempt eyebrows that seemed sprinkled with moth dust, but his eyes were bright and filbert green.
‘Señor Petrus.’ He spoke quietly, but I heard the two words clearly above the clamour of the market. I cocked my head, searched his eyes for a moment while I waited for my instincts to tell me whether or not to trust him. They did.
‘You have words for me,’ I said.
‘I do. This way, please.’ He turned and, skirting the split hogs, wandered calmly into the nearest aisle of stalls. I followed him, down one aisle and up another, and as he paused here and there to inspect an offering of spring onions or a quaking basket of snails I began to wonder if I had found my man after all. At last he stopped in front of a sausage-maker’s stall and ran his eyes over the bunched and stacked goods. He caught the attention of the woman, asked her a question, nodded at her reply and fished in his purse for some change. Meanwhile the woman had gathered up a fistful of black blood sausages, wrapped them in chestnut leaves and bound them with twine. She handed them to the grey man and to my surprise he passed the little package to me.
Painted in Blood Page 3