‘He wants to see you,’ he said.
The Captain was lying in his bed, propped against the bolsters. He was in a black robe, and it made his face seem all the more pale.
‘Now you are a bon homme,’ I said. He nodded.
‘The last great change in a day of changes,’ he said. ‘Sit here.’ He patted the bedcover. ‘Bonasasch has a ship for me. It leaves at dawn for Pisa.’ He drew in a breath carefully and let it out again, a long shuddering sigh. ‘I am leaving this with you.’ He pointed to the chest at the foot of the bed. On it lay the plain old satchel that held the Mandylion.
‘You are taking it to the brothers and sisters in Cremona!’ I protested.
‘No. It is nothing but an icon of torment. It stinks of death – have you never smelled it? The Devil dipped his brush in agony and despair to paint it. I believe it filled Bertrand Marty and the credente with a madness of some kind. How they would beg to see it, but then shrink before it as if it caused them pain …’ He took another wavering breath. ‘Do whatever you like with it. Louis Capet will give you a ship full of Moorish gold for it, and you have other customers. Burn it. Use it to bind your leggings. But do not believe in it, Patch. Do not.’
‘I won’t,’ I said.
‘And Iselda. I sent her away because … because I did not want to force a long and sad farewell upon her. But good Master Bonasasch has some papers she ought to sign, and some letters. She does not want what I am giving her, but I would like you to make sure, if you can, that she accepts … no, that she finds some good in all this. You will not be able to force riches on her, and she would make an appalling banker.’ He laughed, shallowly. There was a rasp in his throat that had not been there before. ‘Bring her something good. Promise me, Patch: bring her light. There is some left in you.’
‘I promise, of course. And I will bring her to you in Italy.’
‘Ah. Italy. I will be there,’ he said. ‘The ship leaves at first light. I would have liked to sail with you again, Patch, but not this time, not this time.’
I slept on the floor at the foot of the bed. My blanket was thin and sleep came only lightly, and many times I found myself awake, listening to the in and out of Captain de Montalhac’s breath, an ebbing tide leaving a pebble beach. We were both waiting. There was a ship. Bonasasch had found the Captain a berth on board a wool trader’s vessel bound for Pisa, and as the stars began to dim I got up and went to find Bertranz and the servants of the house. The Captain was awake when I returned. He was too weak to stand, and so we dressed him carefully in his tunic of fine black damask, very worn now from Montségur, and his travelling cloak. I buckled on his belt with its purse and knife, and then we carried him downstairs and out into the blue half-light.
We carried him through the cool alleyways, and before long we turned a corner and there was the sea, still as a mirror, just beginning to glow from the light of the barely risen sun. As we came out onto the waterfront, the Captain lifted his head.
‘Is that the ship?’ he whispered.
She was a Genoese galley by the looks of her, not very big and needing paint and polish. Dried salt crusted the waterline and she sat low in the water, fully laden, but she was a ship, and I ached to go aboard her. The master was a bow-legged Majorcan who greeted us solemnly in the lingua franca. He eyed the Captain for a little too long, and I wondered what Don Bonasasch had told him, and how much he had been paid, but then he stepped forward and greeted his passenger with gruff respect.
‘Men, come up! Carry this good man aboard,’ he called to his crew. But the Captain shook his head.
‘Put me down, Patch,’ he said. We helped him stand, and he held me fast around the neck, but he was upright, though his one good leg shook.
‘I’m going now, my son,’ he said. ‘This good ship is casting off for Italy. Wish me Godspeed.’
‘I know where you are going, sir,’ I answered, as best I could. ‘Gilles told me. I can’t come along, can I?’
‘Not now, Patch. Do not cry.’ He kissed me on the forehead, and his lips felt like dry leaves. I hugged him tight, feeling the bones of his back, the pyramids of his shoulder-blades, the hard path of his spine. ‘How strange, though. I will be free soon, and I have waited so long for it. But now I find that I am free already. There is light everywhere. The sun is rising. And look: they are waiting for me.’
I kissed him on his cheeks and on his lips, and stared for a moment into his grey eyes.
‘Captain de Montalhac will come aboard now,’ I said, and helped him step over the side and down onto the deck. Bertranz and a crewman caught him under the arms, and he showed them that he wished to lean upon the mast. But his legs could no longer hold him upright, and seeing he was about to fall I lunged and caught him around the waist and gently, clumsily lowered him to the deck. He was sitting, back against the mast, head tilted back a little. All of a sudden he seemed hollow. He blinked, and his eyes sought mine.
‘Are they making sail?’ His breath was shallow and harsh, and when he spoke there was nothing left of his voice, and yet it was still Michel de Montalhac. I gave him a sip of water from his flask and took his hand, all bones and papery skin, and fitted my fingers gently around his knuckles. Then I levelled my eyes at Bertranz and gave him the slightest of nods. He understood, and loudly bade the seaman show him where to stow his belongings. Then I saw him mutter something in the master’s ear and press something into his hand. The master looked over at me and then at the Captain, pursed his lips and glanced up at the sky. Then he clapped his hands, and all was work and the noise of ropes hissing and thudding and oars starting to churn the water. It was a good crew, and in a few minutes the galley was swinging its nose towards the harbour’s mouth and gathering speed, and the water fell in ropes of captive sunlight from the ends of the oars. The breeze caught the Captain’s hair, and he smiled and closed his eyes.
The master was bending over us. There was concern in his face, and pity, but the Captain was a stranger and there were matters of ill-luck to be considered. I knew that well enough.
‘Take us out to sea,’ I whispered to him. ‘Out beyond the islands. Let him ride on the deep water. Then …’ The master shook his head faintly, tugged at his ear and then nodded.
He stared down at the Captain for a long while. Then he crossed himself.
‘God grant him rest,’ he said quietly. He crossed himself again and then hurried back to the stern.
The hills with their white houses had already slipped past, and now the breezes coming down from the mountains caught the sail and we began to hiss across the barely ruffled water. Gathering speed, the mast creaked and the Captain opened his mouth. I bent close to listen, cupping my hand to my ear, for the headwind was getting stronger. His tongue was working dryly against his teeth, and I held the flask to his lips and forced a trickle between them. His hand fluttered against mine.
‘Did I sleep all day?’ he said. ‘Night is falling.’
‘There was no need to trouble you, so we let you rest,’ I said. He blinked slowly, and his eyes wandered, following things I could not see.
‘What a long time we have been at sea,’ he whispered. ‘But there will be land in the morning, and sweet water.’ His hand gripped my sleeve, hard, and his eyes cleared and found mine.
‘It is not far, Patch!’ he said strongly. ‘Not far at all.’
I let his head fall back gently upon the salt-jewelled wood of the mast. The breeze caught the Captain’s hair. The Isle de Pomègues was slipping by on the starboard side, and the seagulls had all woken up at last and were wheeling and shrieking in the galley’s wake as we slid out into the great silver sea.
Chapter Twenty-four
I stayed in Marseilles for a while, drinking too much, staring out at the horizon. I thought of following the Captain, and twice I went looking for a passage to Italy, only to stop myself at the last minute. The water was calling, but something was holding me back. But the weeks went past and I remained trapped between the land and the
water, for the truth was that I had nowhere else to go.
We had gone out, far out into the Gulf of Lions that morning, and then the sullen crew had rowed us back against the wind, muttering about the Evil Eye, and we had carried Captain de Montalhac ashore. Bertranz wanted to take his body to Italy, but the master of the galley would not wait and I took my leave of the solemn bon homme that evening. I could not bring myself to lie to a priest and have my friend, my master – my father – laid to rest in a Christian burial ground, so I had him borne to the charnel house and paid a dour brotherhood of glorified tanners to perform that rite called mos Teutonicus upon him. For the next four days I paced the alleyways, knowing that somewhere close by, the Captain’s body was being boiled in wine and his bones stripped of their flesh. The bones were clean when I collected them, white as clouds and reeking of vinegar and some cheap facsimile of myrrh. I put them in a Saracen bag of silk that Bonasasch had given me, and took them back to my lodgings.
I supposed that I owned the Ca’ Kanzir now, or half of it at least, and I called no other place my home. But the Captain and Gilles would never come there again, and I knew that now it stood dark and empty, as I had first seen it: wrapped softly in cobwebs, reflections from the canal dancing on the ceilings for the ghosts to enjoy. I could not return to that, not now. I thought often of Devon, and of the deep valleys that bit into the flanks of Dartmoor, where a man might measure his years with nothing more troubling than the coming and going of the bluebells in his woods. Devon, though, was Richard of Cornwall’s domain, and I would never be free there.
I was a rich man now. What did half the company of the Cormaran mean? I had no idea, but I would never want for money again. The very thought of money was strange to me now, after so long in the ascetic world of Montségur, and I would find myself turning silver coins over in my hand, weighing them, as if I were some barbarian from beyond India who had never heard of such things.
One night I drank myself into that strange state where the body is numb but the soul is flayed raw, and in my confusion I laid my hands on the bag that held the Captain’s bones and beseeched him for help, as though he were an oracle. There was nothing but silence and the wine ringing in my ears, and then my eyes fell on the dark bundle of the Mandylion. I grabbed it up and unwrapped it, flicking it open so that the phantom man suddenly appeared in the room, and let it settle upon the floor. A man outlined in blood. So much more blood had run since I had first seen it. Those I had never met, the Inquisitors and their men at Avignonet; every corpse carried out of the gates of Montségur, frozen by death and by winter, to be stacked beyond the walls; and now my master, brought to agony and vile decay. Perhaps I would have destroyed it then. There was wood in the cold fireplace, and a tinderbox. I thought of it ablaze, of the bearded face haloed in flames and being swallowed by its own darkness. I had the tinderbox in my hand. But I thought of the Captain, and of the calling he had taught me, and how I had learned to fear nothing on earth and in heaven. So I threw the tinderbox into the hearth and, my legs starting to grow soft as my stupefaction grew, I sat down on the floor beside the shroud, then lay down and stretched out on the boards, my hands crossed over my body.
‘Teach me about death,’ I said to the image. ‘Tell me where they go. You are looking at me from there, aren’t you? So what have you done with them, you bastard? Tell me where everyone has gone.’
But the shroud was silent, and the bones kept their peace, and soon the wine closed my eyes. When I woke, much later, the night was thinning outside, and the floorboards had pressed their grain into the side of my face. I lurched to my feet and gulped down a pitcherful of water to slake my horrifying thirst, and only then did I notice the shroud laid out on the floor and remember last night’s one-sided conversation. I lit a lamp and began to fold the old cloth until only the face was left, nothing more in this poor light than a collection of rusty stains. I knew it was there, and I ran my finger over the smooth, brittle tissue of the linen, shuddering a little as I did so, as one does when one stares into the face of a dead friend. Here is the mouth, here the eyes; this is the beard, and these are the bloodstains on the brow. This was a man, I thought. This is how you’ll end up: stains, nothing more. But as I traced a strange but very clear realisation struck me: this was not a relic of the dead. I shuffled on my knees over to the chair where I had set the bag of bones. I put my hand on it, and felt the smooth, chalky shifting of the things inside. Here was a dead man: my teacher, my friend. My father. And here was what the dead feel like: they are dead, nothing more. I have held many, many dead things in my life: people I have loved and people I have hated; withered corpses and bits and pieces of them, saintly and otherwise; bones, the hard tar of ancient blood; the honey-tinted vellum of human skin. But none of them have horrified me beyond their clear message: we are gone, we are not here. There is no artifice to the dead. They have no power, save to remind us of our own certain end.
The Mandylion, though, had power. I could feel it now, still tingling in my fingers, the gaze from its face stroking the hairs on the back of my neck even though, in the flickering light from my lamp, it was no face at all. It was a feeling I had had before, but I could not place it. I bent my head and laid my forehead on the bag. The limestone breath of the bones brushed my nostrils. The Captain had only been dead a fortnight, and already his remains smelled like an ancient cave, a tomb, a … a chapel. That was it. In the Pharos Chapel, where the shroud had lain hidden, there had been a great mural of Christ crucified. Our Lord had hung, a pallid, wrecked giant. The painter, some Greek from the days of Constantine, no doubt, had managed, with nothing but plaster and pigment, to saturate the image with pain, despair, horror. Death seeped from it like it never does from a corpse or a relic: death as a presence, despair made tangible. It was artifice – a miracle, of sorts, but the work of man. And now I saw, as somehow I had not in all this time, that the Mandylion too was something made.
Whoever it had been – and I would never know, for he was lost down the black well of a thousand and more years – had painted a man on a winding sheet, and had done it so well that he had given it life. He had raised the dead: with paint, and blood, and linen, he had made a ghost.
A chill ran through me like the first grip of an ague and I hastily fumbled the thing back into its box. It was a curse. However it had been created, it was a curse. Somehow, the world – or so it seemed – had come to wish for nothing more than to worship this thing that reeked of agony and despair. Even the heretics, who sought the light of truth, had been seduced in the end, and they had longed for the baleful horror of the shroud even as it gave them pain. Now it was mine, if it could belong to anyone. And though I did not want it, there was no one left alive who could tell me what to do with it. I lay down on the bed and wrapped myself tight in the blankets and lay there shivering until sunrise, the relics of death gathered around me like my family.
So time passed, but when I had been idling for a month or so I chanced to meet Don Bonasasch in the street one day, and as we exchanged pleasantries, and he gave me some business news and told me of some papers I should sign, I caught him regarding me with a look in which pity and embarrassment mingled. He hid it well, and I promised to visit him the next day, but I heard the Captain tell me, as he had hundreds or even thousands of times, pay attention. Bonasasch was a good man and all his cool efficiency could not hide the vein of kindness that ran through his character, and it does not pay to ignore the warnings of the good. So I made up my mind then and there in the narrow street that it was time I carried out the Captain’s last order to me. I would find Iselda and try my best to make her accept her father’s legacy.
I picked up a sheaf of papers from Bonasasch, bought myself some decent clothes from the traders from Outremer who sold fine and rare stuff from their wharfs, had my shield repaired of the gouges it had received coming down the pog, and packed the Captain’s bones at the bottom of my saddlebag, and the Mandylion on top of it where it would look like a soiled nightsh
irt if anyone bothered to look. Bonasasch had found me a good horse, and I rode out of the gates of Marseilles on the sixteenth day of March. I decided to start my search in Toulouse, for the city of Iselda’s birth was as good a place as any to hunt for her. It was an easy ride, and in a week I was there at the pink brick gates, looking up at the walls from which women had once shot stones from mangonels. There seemed to be something smothering the alleys of the city, some gloom that had not been there in Marseilles or as I rode through Provence, but which had begun to build when I crossed over into Languedoc. I found myself an inn and went to bed early, thinking I would begin my search in the morning.
I was woken by a peal of bells, which was strange as it was not Sunday. At first I thought it was an alarm, but it sounded triumphant, and I stuck my head out of the window to see what might be going on. Of all the spires in Toulouse, though, only one was sounding, and down in the street people were looking angry and muttering amongst themselves. I got dressed, and for the first time in a long age I unwrapped Thorn from the greasy cloth where she had been imprisoned, deep in my pack, and hung her from my belt. I put the Mandylion in a new satchel I had bought, such as a lawyer might carry, and went out. I found a stall selling slices of bread and goose-fat, and I bought one and a mug of cider. As I chewed I asked the woman why the bells were ringing.
Painted in Blood Page 32