Warlord oc-4

by Angus Donald

  Since the attack by the Knights of Our Lady, I had worn my sword wherever I went in Paris; I also had my misericorde at my waist, but wore no mail. Hanno was armed to the teeth, as usual, with a sword, a dagger and a small axe shoved in his belt at the back. With his strong squat body, shaven head and scarred face, he looked the picture of the formidable warrior that he truly was.

  We walked towards the Germans, and they fell silent at our approach. ‘I want you to translate everything I say into German, Hanno. I don’t want them to misunderstand me.’

  Hanno grunted something, and I said to the table: ‘God be with you on this fine evening,’ and Hanno translated it into German for their benefit.

  I continued: ‘These English boys here are friends of mine’ — I waved a hand towards the table of students behind me — ‘and I understand that there has been some unpleasantness between you. And so I would like to buy you all a drink to make amends for any insult that you believe has been offered to you.’

  While Hanno translated my words, I pulled out an old scuffed leather purse from my belt and dropped it on the table. The purse was dark brown, worn smooth with the touch of my hands, it was very nearly worthless and contained only a few Parisian pennies, just enough for them to buy a henap or two of wine, perhaps something to eat.

  ‘I hope that you will accept this gesture of amity, and that this will be the end of any trouble between you and my friends.’ I casually put my hand on my sword hilt, to indicate that if they did not wish to be friends then there were other options. But I also grinned at them in what I hoped was a kindly, avuncular fashion and made sure that I looked every man there squarely in the eye.

  Hanno’s translation seemed to be taking rather a long time; he picked up the flaccid leather purse and shook it at the German students — and I saw every one of their faces suddenly blanch. Then he dropped it on the table, uttered another phrase or two, and we both turned our backs on them and returned to the table of our friends.

  The German students did not touch the purse of money. They all got up, as one man, and filed out of the tavern without a single word; though a few did give our table oddly fearful glances on their way out of the door.

  ‘What did you say to them, Hanno?’ I asked.

  ‘I only say what you told me.’

  ‘Hanno, what did you really say to them? Come, my friend, please tell me.’

  Hanno sighed: ‘I say what you say and I add a bit. Just to make sure they pay attention to you. I tell them that you are an English knight known all across Christendom for his bloodlust and ferocity in battle. I say that it is your custom always to cut off the testicles from your enemies, and to cure the ball bag, the scrotum, in salt and use it as a money purse. Then I told them that this purse, taken from a Saracen in the Holy Land some years ago, is now nearly worn out and you are very much hoping to cut yourself a new one.’

  Our laughter was interrupted by the arrival of Master Fulk. With tears in my eyes, I stood to greet the students’ teacher, and it was only when we had found him a place, and settled again and ordered more wine, and sent a boy out to fetch some beef-filled pastries from a nearby cook-house, that I was able to take proper notice of him.

  He was a big man in his forties, with battered features and sharp brown eyes below his bald head. His robe was even dirtier than the last time I had met him, and the stench of it as he sat beside me made my eyes water. But, though he may not have been fond of changing his clothing or washing his body, as Matthew had said, there was nothing wrong with his mind.

  He engaged the boys almost immediately in a conversation about the true nature of the Bible that dazzled me with its wit and elegance. Master Fulk maintained that the Bible was only part of the scriptures, the most important part for sure, and the part that contained the keys to Salvation, but merely a part of the teachings of God and His only son Jesus Christ. He cited the Gospel of Nicodemus, a book that I had never heard of, though the students all seemed to be conversant with it, and suggested that it should be included in the Bible as it offered an alternative version of the Crucifixion story that was a valuable addition to the lore of the Church. Matthew, typically, took up the opposite position, and claimed that if the Bible already contained the true and full instructions on how to attain Heaven, there was no need for any Gospels other than the four already contained within it. I lost track of the argument on several occasions — and found it again, and lost it once more, and as a result I said nothing, listening quietly in awe as Fulk demonstrated the depth of his learning, and the keenness of his mind. Matthew was drinking too heavily to be a true match in argument for Master Fulk — and after a while the student conceded his position with a laugh, and much jeering from his fellows.

  It was at Luke’s suggestion that I put the mystery of the ‘man you cannot refuse’ before Master Fulk, and, with only a little reluctance, I was persuaded to do so — for the wine had warmed me, too, and made me loquacious.

  When I had finished my tale, to which Master Fulk had attended with complete concentration and in silence, the teacher gave me a strange, almost shamefaced look: ‘I thought that you seemed familiar,’ he said. ‘I must tell you now that I knew your father twenty years ago, and I remember well his expulsion from Notre-Dame. Have people told you that you resemble him?’

  I nodded and I remembered where I had heard his name before: at Verneuil, Father Jean had told me that Fulk was the name of the bully whom my father had thrashed.

  ‘I was not a very good student in my youth,’ said Master Fulk, ‘I drank too much, I was loud and loutish — you should all learn a lesson from my youthful sins — ’ The teacher pointed a powerful finger at the flushed, unlined faces gathered around the table. ‘Your father taught me a lesson, Sir Alan. We fought with our fists and he bested me; but more importantly he taught me to mend my ways. I was headed down the path of sin to certain destruction, and your father showed me the error of my ways.’ The teacher smiled at me a little shyly and I saw the honest truth of his statement in his eyes. ‘I honour your father’s memory,’ said Master Fulk, his voice gruff with deep feeling, and he lifted the henap, the big wine cup we were all sharing. ‘To Henri d’Alle!’ he said, and drank. I felt the choke of emotion in my own throat as he passed the cup to me and I took a long swallow from the vessel.

  ‘Perhaps you should give these sinful rascals a good beating one day,’ Master Fulk said, waving a hairy paw at the students gathered round the table. ‘It might teach them to mend their contumelious, dissolute ways!’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I do have need of a new purse!’

  The table erupted in laughter, and once the joke had been explained to the teacher, he laughed the loudest of all.

  Towards the end of the evening, when one or two of the students had slipped away to bed, Fulk leaned in towards me and said: ‘I do remember something concerning Bishop Heribert’s visit that may be of interest to you. It was mere rumour, of course, but we young monks whispered about it a good deal at the time. Heribert was supposed to possess a great and holy relic, a magical device that could defeat death itself. It was supposed to have the power to cure any hurt or illness and grant youth and everlasting life to the man who possessed it. I think the Bishop may have been heard boasting about his fantastical possession to de Sully by one of the novices who served at their table. Heribert may even have shown it to his host.’

  I was intrigued — it put me in mind of the ‘wondrous’ object that Heribert had mentioned to me before his death. Surely this was the relic that my father had been blamed for stealing.

  ‘Do you know anything else about it?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, and it was merely a rumour; perhaps completely unfounded. None of my friends had ever laid eyes on this relic. It may not even have existed outside of Heribert’s mind, for he was not always entirely compos mentis. But if it did exist, it would have been fairly small; there was some talk of it being contained in a box about so big.’ Fulk made a gesture with his hands, holding them a foot
apart. ‘But, as I say, it may have been pure invention — a fantasy concocted by a half-mad old man.’

  I was less than completely sober when I stumbled the short distance to the Widow Barbette’s house from the sign of the Cock; and it may have been the wine or the darkness — or just my own fevered imagination, but when Hanno stopped to urinate in an alleyway, and I idly gazed around the neighbourhood, I thought I saw a hooded figure, no more than a tall, man-shaped shadow, a hundred yards further up the street leaning casually against the side of a house. I rubbed my eyes, looked again, but it was gone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Early on the morning before I was due to dine with Sir Aymeric de St Maur at the Paris Temple, a maidservant called at Widow Barbette’s house. She was a very pretty, delicate girl with incongruously large breasts for her slight frame, which she evidently found most embarrassing. And while the students, who were helping Luke and Henry to pack up their beds in the salle, eyed her without attempting to hide their lust, she conveyed her message to me with a very becoming blush mantling her cheeks.

  ‘Sir Alan,’ she began, ‘I come directly from my mistress the Lady d’Alle, who beseeches you to meet her this morning after Prime in the choir of the great cathedral of Our Lady, on the northern side. She wishes to speak to you urgently about a family matter and hopes that you will agree to the rendezvous and tell no one of this affair.’

  She glanced around at the staring students. ‘I hope these young gentlemen can be trusted to be discreet?’

  I said that they could, but in truth I had my doubts: they would probably be gloating to their friends about the visit of this petite angel before noon. But it could not be helped. I dispatched Luke, the least lascivious of the students, to escort the maid back home to the Rue St-Denis, and prepared myself to meet the lovely Lady of Alle.

  It might seem from my descriptions of her that I had fallen in love with Adele — and, if I had not sworn to tell the truth in all matters in these pages, I might have made a pretty romance of the ‘affair’ as the maid described it — a young lusty knight who was not yet twenty and the beautiful wife of an older lord. I have written many a canso on this popular theme myself. But I swore to tell the truth, and the truth is that my heart belonged to Goody, my betrothed, as it always has — and always will do. My own lovely girl might have been far away in England, and we might have done no more than kiss each other, but I loved her. And as soon as I had solved this mystery concerning my father, my heart’s desire was to be wed to her and to hold her in my arms for ever. To be sure, I was almost as prone to bouts of lustful thoughts as my student friends, but I swear, as Almighty God is my witness, I did not lie with any other women during my long absence from Goody.

  Having said that, Adele’s beauty squeezed my chest when I saw her in the cathedral of Notre-Dame two hours later, sitting on a corner of one of the square pediments that support the mighty pillars. She wore a silk gown the colour of young leaves, and even through her white mesh veil I could see it perfectly matched her eyes.

  ‘Oh, Sir Alan, do not stare at me so,’ she said when I stood before her seat under the pillar on the north side of the choir. ‘Sit here, quickly now and do not look at me, we must pretend that we are strangers. I do not want to heap yet more humiliation on my husband with vile rumours.’

  I perched on the adjacent corner of the pediment, the carved stone already worn smooth by countless pairs of weary buttocks before mine. Adele’s slight maid — she of the bountiful breasts — waited just out of earshot and spent the time with her back to us, praying at a small shrine to St Botolph. The arrangement of the seating on the pediment meant that I was facing north-west, and Adele was facing south-west; we were not in each other’s line of sight, so it would appear as if we were not known to each other and had no connection either — and yet a quiet word spoken by one could easily be heard by the other.

  ‘I thank you for coming, Alan,’ said Adele. ‘And I’m sorry that we should have to meet this way — but you did promise to come and visit me again, and I waited and waited, and you did not send word. So I had no choice but to summon you here. Do not speak, now, but only listen, for I must tell you a tale so that you may understand something about your father — and your uncle, too.’

  Out of the corner of my left eye I could see that beneath her veil her lips were hardly moving as she spoke. Directly in front of my eyes, along the side aisle of the cathedral, passed a constant stream of humanity: pilgrims, priests, men-at-arms, mendicants — men, women and children of all ranks and conditions and from all over Christendom. All were coming to marvel at the splendour of the rising cathedral and to say a prayer or light a candle or purchase a saint’s medal at one of the little alcoves that lined the northern wall of the choir. As the lady spoke, and I listened, I watched this stream of souls all seeking something, and many finding it, in God’s holy house.

  ‘I first set eyes on my husband Thibault on the day that we were betrothed — twenty, oh twenty-five years ago. I was very young and the match was arranged by my father, and by Thibault’s father, who was then the Seigneur d’Alle. I liked Thibault well enough, and I wanted to please my father, and so I consented to the match. A month later, we were wed.

  ‘I first set eyes on Henri, your father, on the day of my wedding: and from that moment onward I knew what true love was. I was very fond of Thibault — he was a fine man, a strapping fellow, lusty and well made — but your father I loved with a mindless yearning passion. It was a soul-hunger; I wanted him so much it was an ache in my chest: when I heard him sing, I nearly swooned from the sheer beauty of his voice. And I knew that I must have him or I would surely die.

  ‘At this time, both Thibault and Henri were in training to be knights. Your father was about your age, and a truly beautiful man, but I persuaded Thibault that he must be allowed to teach me music, which was always his first love. And so for an hour a day after the noon meal, I would be with Henri in a small chamber on the third floor of the castle, while he tried to teach me music. I lived for that hour; it was the centre of my life; for me that was the only hour in the whole day in which I felt alive. All morning long, I trembled as I waited for the music hour to come; and when it was finished I longed for the afternoon, evening and night to pass so that I might be with Henri again for that fleeting, thrilling, wonderful patch of time.

  ‘Though I tried to hide my feelings, your father must have realized that something was amiss. He was fond of me, he liked me, I am sure, but he did not feel the same passion in his heart that I did. And I had no ear for music — none at all. Henri realized soon enough that trying to teach me was an impossibility — and so he went to Thibault. I heard them laughing and joking about my lack of ability, and so inevitably the lessons came to an end.

  ‘I was at my wits’ end: I loved Henri with my very soul but I knew that he did not love me, although I sometimes saw him looking at other women — my God how that cut into my soul — and I knew that he had carnal desires like any young man. I was in black despair, and in that melancholy state the Devil entered my mind, and inside it he deposited a cloud of dark spawn that hatched into a plan that nearly destroyed us all. Perhaps it did destroy your father.’

  I stirred uneasily on my stone seat. I have to admit that I was shocked by Adele’s words. I did not care to think of my father being pursued by another man’s wife; I did not care to think of him in sexual terms with anyone but my mother, if the truth be told. But I held my tongue and Adele carried on with her sad tale.

  ‘One night, after Thibault and Henri had been drinking late together following a long day of hunting, I went to your father’s chamber while he slept and — oh, I was shameless — I crept into his bed. I am not sure Henri could tell whether he was awake or dreaming, but he was naked and that night I took him hungrily in my arms and we made love. For one stolen night he was mine… And then the foundations of my world came crashing around me.

  ‘In the chill light of dawn, Henri saw that I was beside him naked in
his bed, and he knew that what he had done had been no drunken dream. He cursed me and threw me out of his chamber, shouting that I was the Devil’s whore, and then he went straight to Thibault that very morning and confessed to his crime.

  ‘I thought Thibault would kill him — and I think he would have liked to have done so, but his roaring at Henri and the blows that he struck roused the whole castle. The Seigneur, torn from his bed in the great chamber, only just managed to separate his two sons and prevent a murder. Henri was banished, packed off to Paris and a life in the Church that same day — and I never set eyes on him again.’

  I heard a sob, and despite the lady’s instructions, I turned my head towards her and saw that she was weeping. I had the strongest urge to enfold her in my arms, but I knew that to be seen in public in the arms of another man would not be helpful to her already much besmirched honour. Then, shockingly, across on the other side of the cathedral, I caught sight of a tall, familiar shape, the face partially hidden by a deep hood, but, I could tell, a face dark as a Moor’s: it was the watcher I had seen from the night at the Cock. For a moment, I thought that I recognized him from somewhere, but my mind, awhirl after Adele’s lustful revelations, could not grasp that eel-slippery memory. The crowds of pilgrims grew thick on that side of the cathedral and when they cleared the figure was no longer visible. Was I imagining this fellow; was my fear giving me visions? Or was he another assassin awaiting his chance? Either way, as I scanned the faces of the passing pilgrims, I could see his dark face no more.

  I had to wrench my attention back to Adele: she had composed herself and was continuing with her tragic story.

  ‘And so, you see, Alan, when you came to us and told us that you believed that we had abandoned Henri because of some silly accusation of pilfering, I had to tell you that you were wrong. After he was expelled from the Church, Thibault would not have Henri in the castle — because of me, because of my passion for him. He did not trust me with your father. It has nothing to do with some petty crime. I wanted you to understand this, so that in understanding, you might forgive us.’