Painted in Blood

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  Chapter Twenty-three

  We came to Marseilles the day after Ash Wednesday, to the house of Don Bonasasch. The Captain was very weak, and could barely keep himself in the saddle. Bertranz and I had taken turns riding at his side, to make sure he did not slip and fall. He had a fever again, and his wound was seeping through the bandages and leggings and making a faint but foul reek. Bonasasch greeted us calmly, although we were no doubt shattering the peace of his home, and took charge immediately. He had the Captain carried to his own bedroom, and sent for the only physician in Marseilles worthy of the name, as he said bluntly, who turned out to be another Jew from Valencia. He was an old man with a beard the colour of old ivory, and he looked at us all with grave suspicion, until I began to blather at him of things that Isaac the Cormaran’s surgeon had taught me over the years, and then he softened somewhat, especially when he heard I knew someone who had studied at Toledo. He sent us out of the room while he made his examination, and he stayed inside for a long, long time. There were mumblings and at one point a ghastly sound, a sob mixed with mirthless laughter, rang out. When the doctor came out again, wiping his hands with rosewater, he was muttering to himself.

  ‘How long has he had this wound?’ he snapped. I told him a brief version of our tale, and he began muttering again.

  ‘Gangrene. Do you know what that is? Of course you do. And there is nothing to be done. I have cleaned it, cut out as much of the infection as I dare, but the rot has its teeth too far into his flesh. If the wound were lower on his leg I would take it off, but it is much, much too high up.’

  ‘What will happen?’ I asked, feeling ice cold from my neck down to my toes. I suppose I had known. I had seen many people die of infected wounds: men, women, even a child hit by a little splinter from a stone ball. It is not a smell one forgets.

  ‘He will die. Not immediately, for he is a strong man, though he appears to have been denying himself food. I have, as I told you, cut out the necrotised flesh and packed the wound with clean linen and various unguents. He will prefer the smell of myrrh to that of his own rotting meat, and that will help his spirit. If he stays here, and I attend to him every day, he will live a week, perhaps more, though he will begin to sink much sooner than that.’

  ‘And if he does not?’

  ‘That, my boy, is an unnecessary question. Two days, three at the most. I have left medicines for the pain. If he wishes to leave his bed, make sure he takes more of those, rather than less. He is sleeping now. Leave him. I will come back in the morning.’ And he left, giving Bonasasch a disappointed look, as if in reproach for involving him in this nonsense.

  Captain de Montalhac was indeed asleep, his head on a dazzling white pillow, a white counterpane pulled up to his chin. My heart gave a lurch when I saw him, for he looked diminished somehow, small and lost on a snow-drift of linen. His mouth was slack and a thread of spit was running down his cheek. I wiped it away and felt his brow, which was hot but not burning. I kissed it, and left him to his rest.

  The next morning I stole through the sleeping house and put my head round the Captain’s door. To my horror he was sitting up, and had managed to swing his legs over the side of the bed. They looked very thin and white, and there was a great winding of cloth around the top of his thigh, but when he looked up his eyes were clear and the room smelled like crushed rosemary. I ran over to him and caught his arm as he was trying to stand.

  ‘Help me up, Patch,’ he said firmly.

  ‘No. You must stay in bed. The doctor has commanded it,’ I told him sternly.

  ‘The doctor is a fool. No, he is a kindly man, and … just poking about in my thigh must have taken a good year off his life – and alas, a little more off my own. Help me up, Patch. I want to sit near the window. I have something I must tell you, and it appears that time is not our friend.’

  I could not refuse his order, and so I slid my arm under his shoulder and heaved him up. He gave a throttled hiss but managed to settle his good leg under him, and we half-dragged, half-hopped ourselves over to the bench that stood beneath the room’s only window. He sat down heavily, and I saw that there was a weakness in his eyes, a kind of softly gripping fear, that I had never seen there before. He was looking through me as if I were thin air. ‘Are you all right, Michel?’ I said, for I feared that my dear master was suffering an apoplexy. So I reached out and touched his sleeve, and he shook his head again and this time saw me sitting before him. He took a deep breath.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  ‘To Italy? We shall wait,’ I said, trying to calm him.

  ‘No. I will not … that bed is soft, but I will not say farewell to the world in it. I am going. Bonasasch is looking for a boat. You are not the earliest riser, my boy. But there is something weighing me down, and …’

  ‘The Mandylion? I will carry it. Please don’t worry.’

  ‘Not that. Something much heavier.’ He paused, and, leaning his elbow against the windowsill he stared out through the olive leaves. ‘I cannot leave this way,’ he said at last. ‘There is something you must hear.’ He shook his head, as if a fly were bothering him, but there was no fly. His eyes had lost their focus again. The room was quiet save for a sparrow scratching on the window ledge. He seemed, in that moment, quite lost.

  ‘Have you had some news, from Don Bonasasch perhaps? My God, is it the Ca’Kanzir?’ I blurted, for the Captain seemed like a man whose home has been destroyed, and if Michel de Montalhac ever had a home, it was there in Venice.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head and gave a me tiny, haunted smile. ‘Very good, Patch. But it is not my home. It is my family.’

  ‘The company?’ I began, frowning, puzzled. He gave his head another weary shake and looked down into the trough.

  ‘I have a daughter,’ he said, so softly that I thought I had not caught his words properly. ‘A daughter,’ he said again, and looked up.

  ‘Then … my God, sir, you have lost her?’ I said, softly, for in his stricken face I could find no other explanation. I hardly dared to breathe, not knowing what was the more shattering discovery: that my master had a family that he had never once spoken of, even made the smallest hint of, in all the years I had known him; or that he was suddenly bereaved.

  ‘Lost her? Lost her? Yes …’ I took a step back, fearing I knew not what, but knowing the earth was shifting beneath my feet. ‘I had lost her,’ said the Captain. ‘And then I found her.’

  ‘Sir, I do not understand.’

  ‘Nor did I, Patch,’ said the Captain, and sighed painfully. Then he gave me a tired smile and patted the bench next to him. ‘Come,’ he said kindly. ‘I will tell you.

  ‘When I was something like your age I … No, wait,’ he said, and, folding his hands in his lap, he winced and leaned back against the wall. His eyes had gone soft again. ‘I told you about the siege of Toulouse, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did. About the tower going down in flames, and your charge, and de Montfort’s head stove in by the ball from a mangonel.’

  ‘It is a good tale, is it not? Better if one had not lived through it. And now you know something of that, of course. Yes, I saw de Montfort go down. And it was a woman who let fly with the stone. The mangonels were manned by women – ha! By ladies, rather, so that the men could fight. That particular machine was commanded by Domna Assenda de Gaja, and Domna Assenda had two daughters, Alayda and Gazenda, who worked the mangonel with two of their kinfolk. Gazenda was pretty, twenty-two years old, almost my age; but Alayda … Ah! She was twenty and as lovely as a field of wild iris. Their father was dead, of course, like mine, and … Well, we fell in love. It was a strange time, a war, and we fell in love.’

  ‘Nothing strange about that,’ I said.

  ‘No. It didn’t seem strange. Domna Assenda was a credenta, like me, so she approved of the match. And like all Good Christians she did not believe in marriage, but considered us man and wife. Alayda and I lived under her roof …’

  ‘Wait, Michel … you were married? I
…’

  ‘Not married.’

  ‘Then what?’ I was pressing him, and I knew I must seem rude, but I could not quite take in what I was hearing.

  ‘Our love was like …’ He fumbled for my hand and held it tightly. His own fingers were cool and trembled as if with an ague. ‘I do not mean to unearth things that time has laid to rest, but we were something like you and your lady Anna.’ He squeezed my hand reassuringly. ‘Did you never see how I watched you? How I tried to smooth the way for your happiness, the both of you?’ I could do nothing but gape at him. ‘Good. Then I did as a credente should – as Domna Assenda did with us. We do not believe that the race of man should continue itself, as the Church of Rome so delicately puts it, through the marriage bed, for by doing so we merely create another prison in which the Evil One will lock up one more soul. But while the bons hommes tell us that the flesh is not good, they also tell us that it is not so very bad, for as all sins can be washed away by the Consolamentum, the doings of the flesh do not matter very much. Which is a lovely thing to tell two young lovers,’ he added. ‘And as you have realised, that which we had tried, not very diligently, to avoid, came to pass. When Alayda was heaving on the arm of the mangonel that day on the walls, she was already carrying our child, though we did not know it then.’

  ‘And you had a little girl.’

  ‘Yes. She was born in January. Tiny, as the babies of that year were, for their mothers went hungry in the siege. I could hold her so …’ He held out his hand, palm up, cupped it gently, and touched his other hand to his arm just above the wrist. ‘She came to here. I have a scar – see? That was our measure for her.’ He curled his fingers up into a fist and let out a ragged sigh. ‘Though I never saw her grow past it.’

  ‘She …’

  ‘No. She lived. It was I who died, at least to her. The Crusaders would not go away, you see. De Montfort’s son tried to take back his – his – lands, as he thought of them. We fought him, one little skirmish after another, and he slipped away and burned another village. In the spring he turned and fought, at a place called Baziège. We were led by Raymond, who was young then and went through the land like a flame, and we destroyed them. But I was knocked from my horse and kicked in the head, and when I came to I was a prisoner. They were fleeing, the Crusaders, and when they stopped to see if they could ransom me they realised I was a faidit. I had no lands, no wealth at all. It was customary to slit the throats of wretches like me, but I suppose they needed to rescue something from the ruin they had brought on themselves, and so they sold me as a slave. Not so boldly as that, of course, for Christians cannot sell other Christians, and because I wanted to live, to see my Alayda and my baby girl, I did not tell them I was a credente. So I was forced to sell my labour to a rich trader from Boulogne, and my contract bound me to him for two score years. He put me to work in his warehouses, and that first year I was beaten half to death every other week. But this is not the story you need to hear, and I will tell it to you another time, eh?’

  ‘I will give you no peace until you do,’ I told him, gritting my teeth against the sadness that rose up in me. It seemed, meanwhile, as if the blood were draining from his face drop by drop, for his pallor was growing more ashen, and he had slipped his hands between his knees to stop the palsy that was shaking them.

  ‘My boy,’ he smiled. ‘Yes. After two years I was given to a monastery to settle a debt, and they discovered I could read and write, for in those days the sons and daughters of Languedoc were not brought up in darkness and sloth like the fools of the north. And so I made myself useful, and then indispensable; and then I stole their most precious relics and all the silver I could find, and my course was set. But in the meantime I had written again and again to Alayda, bribing messengers with money I stole from the abbot. I did not know if any of my letters had reached Toulouse, but I never 335 stopped writing, and then – four years had gone by, I think – I had a reply at last.

  ‘The writing was Domna Assenda’s, and I knew at once – I cannot explain it now, save to tell you that the ink itself seemed to leach misery onto the page – that Alayda had died. There had been a contagion in the city and it had carried her off. But not Flower.’

  ‘Flower?’

  ‘My … our daughter. She was safe with her grandmother, who raised her as her own child. Now Domna Assenda was well known, in her younger days, as a singer, indeed she was a trobairitz in her own right and exchanged songs with many a famous troubadour. No doubt her skill as a singer of stories helped the world to know who had killed Simon de Montfort. Anyway …’ He broke off, coughing, and a shudder went through him.

  ‘Do you mean to tell me that she didn’t kill de Montfort?’ I said, to distract him. He chuckled weakly and raised his chin, the southerner’s shrug.

  ‘It was a good story, though,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she did do it, at that. There was more than one mangonel on that stretch of wall, and you cannot really aim those things. And besides, they were flinging great chunks of masonry, which go whichever way they please. But let us say she did. And that famous old trobairitz raised my little girl in her own image. She taught her the songs she knew, and how to make music and dance. And … Patch, you are all slack-jawed. Have you not caught on yet?’

  ‘Caught on … Oh, dear God. Iselda de Rosers. Oh, Christ almighty!’ I buried my face in my hands, overcome – with what, I could not have said, but it began as burning shame at my own grimy suspicions, and after that the floor seemed to have melted beneath my feet.

  ‘Iselda. We found each other at last. How strange it has all been. I have been watching over her all these many years, you know. When I began to make my mark in the world I sent Assenda a little silver, and then some more, whenever I could. And I have seen to it that Iselda never lacked for anything, except a father. But I never dared come home for fear …’

  ‘You were an outlaw,’ I said, gently.

  ‘Yes … No, not really. I did not come home – and of all the things I have told you, this is the hardest to admit, but I must – I did not return because I had set myself up against Rome, and everything the Church did I tried to corrupt, to undermine. I heard what had befallen my Languedoc when King Louis forced old Count Raymond to kiss his boots, and how the bons hommes were hunted again, and dead bodies dug up and burned, and old women taken from their deathbeds and thrown onto bonfires – and how my people starved and had to bow their necks to the French. I did not dare return for fear that my anger would destroy me, but worse, that in destroying myself I would somehow bring destruction down upon my child.

  ‘So I let her be, and, is it not the strangest thing? She has grown beautiful, and within her, like a lovely walled garden, she carries everything that was good about this land as it once was. When she sings …’

  ‘I heard it,’ I whispered. ‘The first day I spent on Montségur. I thought, then, it was as lovely as almond blossom and as cold and pure as the north wind.’

  ‘Beautiful and yet desolate,’ he murmured, nodding his head. Then he turned and gazed out of the window. ‘I believe the desolation is what little she has of her father. I would give the earth itself to be shown I am wrong. But she is like me enough to have grown up hating the French, and though she is not a believer she chose to follow her people to Montségur. Assenda died there, you know, two years before we arrived. And Iselda had become a trobairitz – not as famous as her grandmother, but no troubadour can live without fear or suspicion these days – and went from castle to court, singing the old songs and her own, and passing news and messages among the believers and those loyal to Count Raymond. When Assenda went to the pog to live, and then to die as a perfecta, Iselda became one of the … I would say spy, but that has no honour to it. She went out into the world and saw, and listened, and brought things back to the faithful. Gilles saw her and wrote to me, quite unknowing, of the singer who carried messages, and I knew who she must be. It took me almost a year to … to summon up enough courage to tell her who I was, and to convince her.
And – she will tell you.

  ‘Listen, my boy,’ he said, and reached for my shoulder. ‘I have to leave you. I will be on the sea very soon. Out on the silver sea. This journey … I have plotted my course, do not fear. I am ready at last. Now, good Bonasasch has done two things for me. He has given the affairs of the Cormaran entirely over to my children.’ He reached up and I felt his fingers run through my hair and come to rest, cradling the back of my head. I thought of his hand that I had seen so many times, and of the baby he had held cupped in it, all the life I had never guessed at.

  ‘I do not know what you mean, sir,’ I said, blinking something hot from my eye.

  ‘I mean Iselda, and I mean you, Petroc. My daughter and my son. Why are you weeping? It’s I that should be weeping: all at once I have not one child but two, and I am such a dullard that I have only just discovered it. And now I must leave. So listen: I will ask your forgiveness, for you had a father and lost him, and now I am giving you another whom you must lose. I would not dare ask to be your father, Patch. But would you like to be my son?’

  ‘Sir, I have been your son since you found me at Dartmouth! You have cared for me, taught me … you have shown me this whole wide world, and how to find myself in it, in all its vastness and shadow. And I never knew the world was so wide until you showed me.’

  ‘So you will do me this honour?’

  I caught his hands and, pressing them together, put my own between them and pressed my forehead to his fingertips.

  ‘I will serve you for ever, sir. I have forgotten how to be a son, though, I fear.’

  ‘And I have never known how to be a father, until now.’

  The evening had turned everything the warm, pale orange of a tabby cat’s dusty fur when I went back to the house of Don Bonasasch. I had spent the hours wandering along the beach, trying to empty my mind of everything, of all the thoughts that filled it like a million dark little pearls, but I did not have much success. I wandered through the door and up the stairs, but outside the Captain’s door the hushed sound of voices coming from within stopped me with my hand on the latch. It was the slow, careful measure of the Consolamentum that I had heard so many times, easing the ripe soul from the shackles of the world. Hate this world and its works, Bertranz was saying, and the things that are of this world. I sat down on the top step and waited for him to come out, and when he did at long last he gave me a tired, faded smile.