The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  The wine sat unexpectedly sour in Tythe’s mouth. ‘I don’t understand. Why must you die?’

  ‘How else will Walsingham leave me? He has issued a warrant for my arrest. I am a traitor, to be held on sight and taken alive to the Tower. Only if I am dead will he desist.’

  ‘But if you are a traitor and die, your entire estate becomes forfeit to the Crown. If you have such gold as you say, Elizabeth will use it to fund her navy to retake Calais. She will steal the New World from the Spanish and the Portuguese; she will—’

  ‘Which is why I must die a pauper and the wealth be hidden for your lifetime and beyond.’ Owen smiled and cocked his grey-tinged head. ‘What is your greatest love, Barnabas?’

  That answer was easy. ‘Bede’s,’ said the Vice Master. ‘My college is my life.’

  ‘So then will you help me to give my diamonds to the college in such a way that Walsingham cannot get his hands on them?’

  ‘God, yes!’

  ‘Even if it means my death?’

  Tythe felt a pang of sorrow. ‘Would you fall on your sword for this man?’

  ‘Well, I would fall on somebody’s sword. My own might not be public enough for Walsingham’s tastes and we must not disappoint him.’

  Owen grinned at that, but the humour fell away all too suddenly, leaving him thoughtful. His face took on the keen sharpness of a falcon, not dissimilar to Walsingham’s own. It came to Tythe that he did not want to make an enemy of this man who had been his friend.

  ‘Who else is in Walsingham’s pay?’ Owen asked it sharply, with a new hardness to his voice.

  Tythe said, ‘Besides Maplethorpe, I cannot say for certain. I doubt there’s a Master of any college in Cambridge, or Oxford for that matter, who isn’t taking money from him in some form. After the Lutheran heresies here in the twenties, to refuse aid to the Queen would be as good as confessing treason. There will be others, but I know not their names; the spymaster does not keep his servants privy to his secrets.’

  ‘Then we must be doubly cautious.’

  The blue stone was fully clear of the cloak now, held balanced on one hand so that, from Tythe’s seat an arm’s length away, it appeared that the fire came from the centre point of its cranium.

  Owen stared into it a moment and then turned to the one-armed Spaniard who purported to be his bodyguard. There passed a wordless conversation at the end of which Cedric Owen cast his cloak once again over his blue skull-stone to hide it, turned to Tythe and said, ‘Barnabas, it is Christmas Eve. If I were to offer you the Mastership of Bede’s as my Christmas gift, what would you say?’

  Tythe laughed, with little humour. ‘That you should sleep and perhaps take laudanum and we should begin again with the clean slate of forgetfulness on the morrow.’

  ‘You don’t want to be Master?’

  ‘Of course I do! I have given my life to my college and am vain enough to want her to grant me her ultimate accolade in return. I would prefer it to being the next King of England, but it is every bit as unlikely and not a safe thing to consider. Maplethorpe is not a man to cross lightly. He has three manservants any one of whom could beat the best in London. He calls them his human mastiffs and they are well known for killing men on dark nights with no questions asked or answered. He hides behind a veil of abstinent piety and murders those who stand against him. It’s one of the reasons he was elected Master; none of us dared do anything else.’

  The Spaniard flashed a ferocious smile. ‘A challenge! At last! England is a good place, Señor Tythe.’

  Cedric Owen ignored him and thus, blessedly, Tythe could do likewise. He was about to turn the conversation to less dangerous ground when Owen rose and drained his goblet.

  He said, ‘Now would be a good time, then, for you to go to Robert Maplethorpe and tell him that you have unexpected visitors. Show him the letter and ask his advice as the Master of Bede’s, not as Walsingham’s spy. Tell him we are exhausted and came to prevail upon your Christian charity. It is Christmas and the roads are blocked. We cannot therefore be dispatched to London and so you seek his advice on what best to do.’

  ‘He’ll kill you,’ said Tythe flatly.

  Owen bowed. ‘Then you will have done your duty and will fly high in Walsingham’s favour. If I cannot give you the Mastership, what better gift than this, that we have not endangered your life or your standing?’

  25

  Bede’s College, Cambridge, Christmas Eve 1588

  BUT FOR THE falling echoes of the night bell, the streets of Cambridge were softly quiet, and absolutely dark.

  Snow fell lightly, with less wind behind it than before. The young moon had fallen below the earth’s edge, leaving only a scattering of stars by which to see.

  This once, Cedric Owen did not need sight to find his way. Guided by instinct and memory, and with his hands held out in front of him for when these two failed, he followed Barnabas Tythe down the path from Magdalene Street and along the river towards Midsummer Common.

  His knuckles brushed against wood and he turned left on to the arch of John Dee’s geometric bridge. By the changed timbre of his snow-muffled footsteps, and the sudden warming of his heart-strings, did he know that he had come home.

  He squeezed his old mentor’s arm. Tythe was not a fearless man by instinct; he had a different kind of courage, that acted in spite of gut-emptying terror. ‘We’ll wait here,’ Owen said. ‘You are safe this far. Keep out of the fighting and you will remain so.’

  ‘What if your subterfuge with the torches fails?’ Tythe asked. His voice was not firm.

  ‘It worked in Sluis and twice before that,’ Owen said, ‘it will work again. Men fight more poorly if they do not know the true numbers they face. Dark is our ally and their enemy.’

  ‘He has three men to guard him and he can fight as well as any of them. Probably better.’

  ‘And there were six in Rheims. All are dead. If you can trust anything in this world, it is the speed of Fernandez’ blade.’

  ‘You will not fight?’

  ‘I won’t have to.’

  Owen made his own voice certain. He watched Tythe screw up his courage and step out into the cushioned night. The flame of the old man’s torch made oblique progress to the gates of the college and was presently drawn inside.

  They were two men alone in the dark of a Christmas night. Putting out his hand, Owen felt the familiar press of de Aguilar’s tawny velvet against his palm. He heard the scrape of iron against tallowed leather and saw the faintest smirr of a polished blade sweep across the starlight.

  ‘Thirty years of preparation and all for this,’ de Aguilar said softly. ‘It does not seem so long.’ He, too, was breathing more deeply, without the overstrung tension of Barnabas Tythe’s house.

  ‘It was long enough,’ Owen said. ‘The heart-stone gave us three decades’ gift. All that remains is to find if we can fulfil the tasks it requires of us, for if we fail it has all been for nothing.’

  ‘It is far from certain, my friend.’ He felt the Spaniard’s eyes on him. ‘There were only five men in Rheims and two of them too drunk to move. Maplethorpe forbids drink to his men. We will be harder pushed here than there.’

  ‘I know. But Tythe needed courage. You and I have sufficient to succeed.’

  They waited a while, who were well versed in patience and could bear a little cold.

  The blue stone sang quietly. Just before the darkness parted, it changed the tenor of its tune.

  There was no sound from the porter’s lodge of Bede’s College, but the small side door opened and this time three torches appeared where there had been one.

  ‘Only three. Maplethorpe has not come,’ de Aguilar hissed.

  ‘He will. I knew him as a student. Even then, he baited bears for pleasure. He will not miss a chance to kill men now for the sport of it. Wait and he will be here.’

  They waited. The torches came forward in a line abreast. At a certain moment, a line of light blazed briefly wide as the porter’s door opened
and shut on the candles within. Two shapes stepped out into snow and were lost in the cloaking dark.

  ‘Now,’ said Owen.

  He struck flint against tinder to light a single torch, and then two others from it. Handing one to de Aguilar, he emerged from the line of trees at the edge of the river walking crabwise, bearing a torch in each hand, with his arms spread wide apart. De Aguilar followed in like manner, his torch held behind him so that it might seem as if three or four men walking line astern had crossed the small arched bridge and entered the college grounds.

  Approaching the porter’s door, Owen let out an oath in Fenland brogue, and doused his torches. In more of an academic voice, he said, ‘God’s bones! Did you not bring a better light on such a night as this?’

  ‘Hush now. Silence about the Master’s work.’ In thirty years, de Aguilar had learned English as if born to it. On board the smuggler’s skiff from the Netherlands, he had perfected both the scholar’s drawl and the sliding, nasal east Anglian vowels. In these latter, gruffly, he said, ‘We’d best douse the torches. There’s no need for more than one when all we’re hunting is a one-armed man and a fop.’

  ‘No need even for one, when we have three.’ The authority in the voice that came from the porter’s lodge exceeded that of any porter, however far above his station he might set himself.

  Robert Maplethorpe stepped out into the crescent of churned snow that marked the gateway to Bede’s College. The blade of his sword flickered naked in the grey snowlight so that Owen’s eye was drawn to it first, and the unshaven darkness of his visage second.

  His three men came behind him, each bearing aloft a lit torch of a quality that did not spit pitch on their master. In their other hands, with the carelessness of men for whom the breaking of limbs is a daily delight, they bore ironwood cudgels bound about with wool and cloth that they might more silently maim those against whom they were set.

  Barnabas Tythe stood framed in the doorway, leaning a little to the left, to support his lame leg. He pitched his voice out over the heads of Maplethorpe’s three thugs. ‘Joseph, is that you?’

  Cedric Owen said, ‘Aye,’ and hawked and spat into the snow. ‘At your service, Master Tythe. We are come as you asked, bringing all we could muster. Your enemies remain in your rooms still, making free of your hospitality.’

  He thrust his own torch into the snow, creating a flash of darkness that engulfed him; by chance, or good luck, or skill, he and de Aguilar stood beyond the semicircle of light cast by Maplethorpe’s men.

  De Aguilar cursed, and appeared to trip, and stumbled out to the side.

  ‘You’re drunk!’ Maplethorpe hissed it with a venom that made his men seem mild as milkmaids.

  ‘N-nay, Master.’ De Aguilar cowered at the margins of the light. He threw his hand up and staggered further backward in evident terror. As far as anyone could see, he was not armed.

  The three men behind Maplethorpe leered knowingly as their Master brought his blade up to fighting height. He was a fit man. In two strides, he was beyond the arc of the blazing torches, and in two more he had passed beyond the grey-silver of the snow’s reflection so that he, like the man he pursued, became a dark, uncertain shape.

  ‘Hold! I will have no man of mine drunk at any time, and least so on the day of Our Lord’s birth.’

  Maplethorpe spoke with no sense of irony. The three armed men rolled their eyes. From the dark, coarsely, Cedric Owen said, ‘Master, is it not the Spaniard that we seek, not the death of your loyal servants?’

  ‘I will not kill him, only … teach him a … lesson.’

  The sentence was twice punctuated by the scuffling of feet and the sleek whistle of a sword blade slashing air.

  On that last, higher, note, a man gave that sound, partway between a grunt and a squeal, that is the earnest signature of death. All of those listening heard a body fold to the ground. None of them was so innocent as to believe that the man had learned any lesson other than that which his Maker might choose to offer at his final reckoning.

  Maplethorpe’s voice said, ‘A pity, but a lesson learned.’ The bulk of his shape loomed in the darkness, hand on hip, cloak a-flying. ‘Why are we still lit like a festive bonfire? Can you not find your way to Tythe’s lodgings by starlight?’

  His three thugs doused their lights. The man they believed to be Maplethorpe strode to the nearest – who had just time to see that his assailant was thrusting left-handed before the sword thus deployed cut through the leather of his vest, sliding in up a line from the sternum to pierce his heart.

  He fell back, choking blood. Of his two companions, only one had the speed of reflex to leap forward, swearing. Barnabas Tythe, with a surprising courage, knifed the other in the back and kicked his legs out from under him so that he fell forward on to the snow.

  Which left only the third of Maplethorpe’s three mastiffs still dangerously alive.

  That man had no care that he was outnumbered. Already he had deduced the source of greatest threat and was advancing on de Aguilar. Breathing hard, he made a feint with his unarmed hand and then swung in ruinously hard with the other.

  Cudgel met blade – and broke it. There was a moment’s shattered silence before de Aguilar threw himself sideways, rolling, and rose with the stolen cloak already off his shoulders and spinning round his only arm. He danced light-footed on the snow, dodging and ducking the swinging cudgel. His assailant aimed half a dozen fruitless times at the Spaniard’s wraithlike shape, then cursed and drew his eating dagger and held it out, fish-silver in the starlight.

  He was harder to avoid then. For all his bulk, he, too, was light on his feet and he had the full-shadowed dark at his back, with the greyer light in front of the college to his fore. The starlight was not great, but it was enough for eyes that knew night as a friend. He had more practice of fighting in snow than de Aguilar, and he had two weapons, against a one-armed, disarmed man who had only a rolled cloak for protection.

  He moved fast and hard and in three breathless moves had jabbed his dagger into de Aguilar’s thigh and swung the cudgel at his head. Owen watched the Spaniard crumple to the snow.

  The cudgel-man stepped in to finish his work.

  ‘No!’

  A long time ago, Cedric Owen had promised Fernandez de Aguilar that he was never going to wield his own sword in anger.

  In the Jesuit bloodbath at Zama that had seen Najakmul dead, in Rheims, in Sluis, in the harbour at Harwich, where they had nearly been taken by Walsingham’s agents, he had used his knife, or a club, or – in Zama – a Dutch musket, and let the Spaniard set his serpent-fastness against other men’s flesh and blood. He had seen it strike from the dark against greater numbers so often now that he had begun to believe his friend invulnerable.

  And yet there was that one night in Seville, where he had used his own blade in de Aguilar’s defence. He had no sword now, and his knife had not the reach he needed, but a dead man’s cudgel lay at his feet. He swept it up and waded forward through the snow and let the cold, heavy wood carry him past his own incompetence.

  He was not too late. That thought filled him as he measured the distance to his adversary; he was not too late and he had once used his sword to good effect in de Aguilar’s name.

  He was thinking of that when the cudgel-man struck. The first blow took him in the ribs and he felt three of them crack. The reverse swing struck his head, with the full, skull-cracking force of the big man’s arm, and felled him.

  In the long, long moment of falling, Cedric Owen heard Barnabas Tythe shout his name and fancied he saw his old tutor hobble up to stab a dagger into the back of his assailant – his murderer, in fact, because he had no doubt that he was dying.

  His one thought, as the snow received him into its embrace, was that he was about to meet Najakmul and that she would know that he had failed.

  26

  Oxfordshire, June 2007

  IN A SMALL side room off the ICU in the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, a consultant physician in
a white coat spoke to the senior nurse, ignoring Stella and Kit who sat at the bedside.

  They smelled of smoke and hurt and fear but were not in need of medical aid. Ursula Walker, by contrast, lay bandaged and unconscious. Her strong, expressive face was slack with sleep and drugs. Her veins stood out blue against grey-white skin, streaked with angry red lines along her arms and across her forehead.

  A ventilator breathed for her, through the endotracheal tube that poked out of the side of her mouth. Plasma expanders dripped into the veins in her arms. Other bags delivered their drips more slowly into the veins of her neck.

  A drain sucked fluid from the side of her chest. A urine bag tied to the end of the bed filled slowly. An array of green traces on the monitor recorded her pulse pressures and expired gases. A twelve-lead ECG bleeped as it threw up patterns that Stella could not read.

  The consultant signed a note and left. The nurse drew the curtains round the bed.

  Left alone with Kit in the clinical white, Stella pressed her fingers to her eyes. The skull was quiet now, its warning given. In its place, where had been blue peace, a wash of flame filled her mind, and the sting of smoke, and the stench of burning flesh. When she opened her eyes, the flames were less, but not gone. The smell of smoke and burned hair remained.

  ‘Why did I let her go back in?’

  ‘You couldn’t have stopped her,’ Kit said. His breath still smelled of smoke. His words came out wreathed in it.

  ‘But I didn’t try. She said she knew what she was doing, that she had found something vital in the diaries. I believed her. I wanted to believe her.’