Gate of the Dead

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by David Gilman


  Brother Bertrand made the sign of the cross at the memory of his travels through the soldiers’ camp, disguising his true intentions by administering comfort to a wounded man. It was a place of corruption, where sexual acts were commonly seen. He had stood beyond a lit tent and watched a woman’s rump moving rhythmically astride a Gascon soldier, her breasts loose from her dress. The warmth that spread from Bertrand’s groin brought saliva to his mouth and he understood the devil’s insidious reach.

  ‘Brother?’ a voice carried on the wind. He turned and saw Blackstone close behind him, the war horse at the Englishman’s shoulder. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  The images of the women in the valley had insinuated themselves into his mind and caused him to falter. The wind lifted snow from the ridges and lashed the men. He was glad of the mountain, praised God that its torment was his flagellation.

  ‘There!’ he shouted to Blackstone above the roar of the wind. ‘You see it?’

  Blackstone raised a hand in acknowledgement. The low cloud had shifted suddenly, offering a brief glimpse of the distant valley. It was green and lush, the snowline barely touching it. It was like a promised land after the harshness of the mountain. Once into the valley the men would make good time. By dawn they would be there.

  ‘Keep going!’ said Blackstone, holding the hooded horse in check. It trusted Blackstone’s scent, but quivered when it felt Blackstone’s own uncertainty. The narrow ledge and jagged rocks still awaited man or beast if they fell.

  Blackstone had seen the novice’s haunted glance. The man was used to travelling such dangerous routes so he knew it had nothing to do with fear. In that one instant Blackstone thought he saw within Brother Bertrand a desperation that cut deeper than the hardship of life in a monastery, alone with only prayer and hard work for comfort. Self-denial was a cross the man bore, visible in the fleeting moment of sadness that crossed his eyes. It took someone who knew that loss to recognize it.

  Brother Bertrand nodded and carried on. He had prayed hard in his attempt to resist the soft musk smell of the woman who had offered herself once she had been paid by the Gascon soldier, but he had failed. He had abandoned himself to it, allowing himself to wallow in her sin. It was a delight that could not be imagined; a betrayal of every vow he had taken; a moment of submission to the flesh that scoured his mind and pierced his heart with shame.

  The woman had taunted him for his excitement and inadequacy and then gone to others, telling them what he had said to her in an attempt to impress her. And it was they who had questioned and threatened him until he had confessed the truth of what he had told the whore. He was one of many guides – not the most senior, not the most trusted – just one of many who escorted men through the Gate of the Dead.

  But this time he would return with Sir Thomas Blackstone.

  Bring Sir Thomas down through the narrow defile before the land broadened past the citadel and nothing would be said of his fornication, said a hardened-looking man – a Gascon who curled a fist around Bertrand’s habit, tightening it around his throat, as the other hand grabbed his privates and squeezed until the novice monk yelped in pain.

  Now, as he hunched his shoulders against the wind, he thought through what he had to do. Once the Englishman was through the pass, they told him, he could go quietly back to the life he had chosen. Keep your mouth shut, they had threatened. Spend your life in silence. No one need know you brought him this way.

  He smiled at the thought. A Judas act was the devil’s joy. Contrition would put him on the side of the angels.

  *

  They settled the horses into a wider, sheltered area of the mountain road. Water spilled from crevasses, not yet a spring melt, but the setting sun played some of its warmth onto the mountains and the weary men who huddled close to their mounts. There would be no hot food that night, only a strip cut from a smoked ham and dry biscuit. But there was no threat on the remote pass from Blackstone’s enemies, which offered some comfort.

  ‘He’s a funny one, that,’ said Thurgood, pulling a blanket around his shoulders.

  Halfpenny looked to where the Tau knight knelt in prayer; the blazon on his cloak had been their beacon as they followed him through the foul weather and now its shape was like a symbol of devotion in the shortening day. Mist and then snow, and the incessant wind, had forced them to go carefully on the treacherous path. Thank God the worst was over. The descent already offered them more warmth.

  ‘Religious fanatics, them lot,’ said Halfpenny, passing a piece of cut meat to his friend. ‘Still, if any of us gets a bad one, something like a knife in the guts, then he’d give you the sacrament, so that’s some use, I suppose.’

  Thurgood chewed the cured strip of pig. ‘They say they touch God in their prayers, or God touches them. Don’t like that idea. Me and God are best kept at arm’s length. Bad enough He knows what I’m thinking most of the time; don’t want Him touching me. God touches a mortal man and he’s a goner. Dead, I reckon, like being struck by lightning.’

  ‘Which is God expressing Himself how He does best – striking down them that’s unfortunate enough,’ said Halfpenny.

  ‘Aye. You’re right. We’ll sleep well away from him. There’s lightning in these mountains and if he’s spending half the bloody night in prayer then him being touched could spell pain and grief for us all.’

  ‘He’s a good fighter, mind,’ said Halfpenny. ‘I saw him back there and he can fight like a proper bastard, he can.’

  The grumbling archers made the best of what they had. A stony path for a bed, a blanket and shoulder of rock to rest their heads. If it snowed they would lie, cramped and unmoving, until forced to start another day.

  ‘Hard to think of him being a man of God,’ said Thurgood finally.

  ‘Worst kind,’ said Halfpenny, rolling himself into his blanket and pulling his cap down tighter over his ears for as much comfort as he could get.

  The two archers were not the only ones watching the Tau knight pray. The stony ground must have hurt his knees, but he knelt with barely a tremble from either the cold or the pain.

  Brother Bertrand waited for his moment. Blackstone and his men slept, or were at least curled into what little warmth could be had beneath their cloaks and blankets. Caprini made the sign of the cross and kissed his fingers. The monk walked quickly; his feet, covered in rough-woven sacking and sandals, made barely any noise over hard stone, but even with the wind’s ghostly howl in the high peak Caprini heard his approach. His hand was already at the dagger in his belt when Bertrand stopped and raised his hand in a gesture of submission.

  ‘Brother, I need your guidance,’ he whispered, loud enough to be heard by Caprini. ‘And forgiveness.’

  *

  Blackstone awoke with a boot dug into his back. The clear, cold morning showed a smudge of pink on the snow-crested mountains. He peered up at the Italian.

  ‘Get up, Sir Thomas,’ he said and turned to where Brother Bertrand knelt in painful penance, head bowed, hands clasped in prayer, dried blood crusting a swollen lip.

  By the time Blackstone had raised himself and eased out the cold cramp, others had stirred. It was eerily silent. The wind had eased in the night and, once it had blown the last of the cloud away, it had finally ceased, as exhausted perhaps as the men.

  Will Longdon yawned and relieved himself against a slab of rock. ‘His prayers have worked then,’ he said, meaning the kneeling man, then shivered with pleasure and relief.

  John Jacob kicked Thurgood and Halfpenny awake, and followed to where Blackstone had walked to the kneeling monk. The gathering men stood back and waited.

  The Tau knight put the toe of his boot beneath the monk’s chin. ‘Open your eyes.’

  As if from a deep trance Brother Bertrand blinked in the morning light. His tongue licked his cracked lips, dry from the night air and lack of water.

  Caprini pointed at him as he addressed the men. ‘He asked me to hear his confession. And that which is confessed is between h
im, me and God. Unless he tells you why I had him pray throughout the night and struck him to clear him of his sin.’

  The men shuffled in the cold, hugging themselves for warmth, yawning and scratching from the night’s privation.

  ‘That is permitted?’ asked Meulon. ‘To admit what was said in confession?’ The thought could worry any man devout in his belief that only God and priest would share knowledge of his sin.

  Will Longdon hawked and spat, then rubbed his face to flush some warmth into the skin. ‘Meulon, you’re the best throat-cutter I’ve seen, don’t tell me you’re scared of God knowing it like the rest of us?’

  ‘Fra Stefano isn’t talking about how we live and fight, you dumb bastard, he’s talking about what happens to a man’s soul,’ said the Norman.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Blackstone ordered without anger. The last thing he needed at this time of day was two of his captains bickering like village women. He turned to Caprini. ‘He’s confessed to what? Being involved with the ambush?’

  ‘I am not permitted to tell you,’ said Caprini, and eased his boot again, toppling the monk over like a pot.

  ‘He’s had his hand down his braies like the rest of us, I’ll wager,’ said Thurgood. ‘Self-pleasure is a sin for the likes of him.’

  ‘And the only pleasure you get when a whore sees that face of yours,’ Longdon told him. ‘Be quiet.’

  ‘Brother Bertrand,’ said Blackstone, ‘I’ve no time or patience for a monk’s misdemeanours. I’ve a full bladder and a day’s ride ahead. If you had a hand in our betrayal we’ll cut your throat and be done with it. It’ll be quicker and less painful than being flung onto the rocks below. What’s it to be?’

  The monk prostrated himself before Blackstone and began a litany of jumbled, almost incoherent words into the frozen ground.

  Blackstone looked imploringly at Caprini, who shook his head.

  ‘I am not permitted to tell you.’

  ‘Get him up,’ Blackstone said irritably. Jacob and Longdon hauled the burbling monk to his feet. ‘Give him water,’ he instructed Gaillard, who took a water skin from the nearest horse’s pommel and dribbled water into the weakened man’s mouth. He coughed and spluttered, and Gaillard tipped more over his head. The cold, almost frozen, water made him gasp.

  ‘You heard my question?’ Blackstone said.

  The monk nodded vigorously.

  And told them everything.

  23

  A month’s ride away, across many horizons, an ailing woman lay on a bolstered couch, supported by cushions of the richest silks, finely embroidered by the most skilled hands. Her indigo velvet dress, smooth as brushed fur, exposed her arms to the man who stooped at her side. Her ladies-in-waiting hovered dutifully in the background as the physician eased away the silver bowl that held the royal blood. Master Lawrence of Canterbury had bled the King’s mother for the second time that day. Despite her pallor he knew that the moment he left to ride back the seventy miles home that this ageing beauty would have her ladies attend her. They would apply make-up and comb her raven-black hair, now shot through with silver, and clothe her in the finest dresses, whose style would have come from Paris or Rheims. Her illness would not defeat her sense of fashion, nor her royal bearing. When he had first been honoured by the command to attend the dowager Queen he had been nervous. He had served the King, and his sovereign lord had then seen fit to make his skills available to the woman who, in her youth, had seized the crown of England in what many saw as a pretence to hold it in safekeeping for her son Edward. It was a history of intrigue and deception by a woman who to this day still held some power and influence behind the throne of Edward III. Master Lawrence had witnessed the affection still shared between mother and son, acts of kindness that denied the rumours that she had been exiled to one of her castles years before. The physician led a privileged life. Not only was he intimate with all that befell the royal family but he was an eyewitness to history, much of which would never be recorded by any scribe.

  This woman who lay in his care would ever be known as Isabella the Fair, once Queen of England and renowned for her beauty and intelligence. She was born to be Queen and her lineage connected her to the royal houses of Europe. Married at twelve, how old would she have been when she gave birth to the future King of England? Sixteen perhaps? It was said her husband had lain with her as a matter of duty. Master Lawrence barely stopped himself from snorting with derision as his thoughts meandered back through time. How could any man not desire her? Unless they preferred the company of young men, of course. Edward II had defied the rumour that he was a weakling. Yes, he had loved art and music, but he was known to be a man of strength; known too, perhaps, as one who had failed in military conquest. And perhaps it was that which caused the ambitious Isabella to take a lover, though this did not stop her leading a life of piety and pilgrimage. Master Lawrence had witnessed her acts of compassion and charity, most of which had gone unrecorded and did not quell the intrigue and gossip and, he acknowledged, the fear that surrounded her life.

  When her sixteen-year-old son seized back the crown of England with a small group of devoted young noblemen he showed that he had inherited some of his mother’s political skill by having her lover, Roger Mortimer, sent to London for trial by Parliament. Had the boy acted on impulse and slain the usurper he would have been seen as little more than an emotional, uncontrolled youth. The physician felt a shudder down his spine. When Mortimer was judged guilty he suffered the unspeakable agony of being hanged, drawn and quartered. Through this baptism of blood and foresight, young Edward had taken the first step towards being a warrior king.

  Isabella the Fair was banished from court, but not from England or her son’s heart. She was granted castles and a pension of more than four thousand pounds a year. The old physician had heard that she spent more than a third of it on jewellery. She was a woman who would never present herself as anything less than a queen.

  ‘What vile liquid must we drink this time, Master Lawrence?’ she asked. ‘Is there no improvement with the humour of my blood?’

  ‘Some, highness. Among other prescriptions I recommend white, clear sugar. It will purify the chest and the kidneys, but it can cause bilious humours, so it will be mixed with sour pomegranates and a glass of theriac and barley water each hour.’

  ‘That sounds disgusting.’

  ‘But I am aware that my lady is an exemplary patient,’ he said, knowing there was a degree of familiarity permitted. A degree.

  ‘Your examinations are almost complete?’

  ‘Almost, highness.’

  ‘Good. We have business to attend to.’

  He had seen the horseman ride in – a hard ride given the lathered horse – and the mud-spattered Lord Robert de Marcouf had paced the courtyard awaiting his audience with Isabella. So, the intrigue went on, Master Lawrence thought as he watched his assistants clean and bind the Queen’s slender arm. He was at an age when he lanced his own curiosity as soon as he would a boil. Too much inquisitiveness could fester into a risk to life.

  A Norman lord was at the gate: a man who lived among squirming snakes who had once plotted against the King of France. And now? What more could be done? The French King was Edward’s prisoner. What need was there now for a nobleman who had sworn allegiance to Edward? It was no secret that the King used his mother for diplomatic missions to further England’s influence. It was no secret to those close to the King that she had influenced his decision to invade France in the first place. What other intrigues she shared with the King the physician could not imagine. His was not a political life, for which he was grateful, and what he heard and witnessed from those in his care could prove fatal should he speak of it. To have his hand on the pulse that beat from the royal heart was as close as he wished to be. He had no desire to know what lay within its dark chambers.

  Few words passed between the physician and his patient, often only simple pleasantries, sometimes questions from her that probed sharply like the instrumen
ts he used to open her veins – precise and skilled; questions that fed her information. She was ruthless, manipulative and one of the most beautiful women who had ever graced the royal palaces. Master Lawrence of Canterbury wrote his prescription.

  Isabella allowed one of the assistants to wipe a smear of blood from her wrist. ‘We have scoured books over the years,’ she said wearily, ‘written by noble and literate men who have searched for the alchemy of everlasting life. If your prescription is the elixir we have always sought, your weight in gold would be given to you... forever.’ She bathed him in the smile that made him think of a seductress or a she-wolf – he had never determined which.

  ‘My humble skills are recommendations to your apothecary, highness. I myself would wish no longer a life than God may grant me.’

  ‘Then you would deny me life if it were in your power to give it,’ she said.

  He sighed. He had stepped into one of her bear traps yet again. ‘Highness, you show me to be the old fool that I am.’

  ‘And we tease you, Master Lawrence. We could not wish for anyone better to serve us.’

  He bowed his head. Her gracious remarks always flattered him. ‘May I suggest that I be housed nearby? In case I am needed again at short notice.’

  The determined tone of her answer reminded him that her reputation was well earned. Her dark eyes flicked quickly at him – a change as sudden as a cloud passing over the sun. He feared rebuke – but an instant later she smiled and he could see how a man would submit to her desires.

  ‘Master Lawrence, we are, as always, in your debt. You have a long ride home and we would not wish to keep you from your duties elsewhere. We thank you.’

  It was a gentle dismissal. He bowed and left the chamber. Her glance towards her ladies-in-waiting was sufficient for them to hurry forward and help her from the bed so that she might be dressed in more fitting clothes to receive her guest.

 

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