by Robyn Young
As they set off again, men and beasts stirring sluggishly to life, he sat straighter in his saddle, eyes flicking across the ridge above them, hand resting near the pommel of his sword, next to which hung the jewel-handled dagger he’d slipped from the offerings Henry had sent to the monarchs. A gift to himself.
The sun was sinking, flushing the western slopes of the mountains and sending shadows stealing down the eastern sides, when they heard it: a low rumble, indiscernible at first over the din of wheels and hooves, but becoming clearer, louder, a wave of thunder rolling towards them. All at once, Don Carlos was yelling and men were drawing swords and fixing quarrels in their crossbows. Infantry rushed to surround the pack-animals with their cargo, levelling halberds and pikes. Rodrigo’s sword flashed free, as he roared for his men to form up around him. Harry wrenched his own blade from its scabbard, pulling on the reins to control Nieve as the horse reared. The air was full of panicked shouts.
The rumbling was louder, the ground trembling, stones skipping down the slopes. Suddenly, the Barber bellowed, pointing his sword up the hillside to their right. Harry and Rodrigo twisted round to see men appearing on the ridge above them, silhouetted by the sun. The tips of their spears blazed like torch flames. Others of Don Carlos’s company, seeing the danger, were whipping round, pointing crossbows towards the ridge, but now the rumbling had become the drum of many hooves and hurtling down the path towards them came scores of horsemen. Harry’s heart hammered in his chest. His stomach clenched with that familiar terror he’d felt before, faced with battle. A couple of crossbow bolts shot upwards, premature and badly aimed, triggered by fear. The horsemen were approaching, slowing now. Suddenly, Don Carlos was roaring again, rising in his saddle.
Others took up his cry, sending it down the line. Harry blinked in bewilderment as, around him, men began lowering their weapons. Were they surrendering? Without a fight? He thought of the black slave girls he’d seen roped on Seville’s dockside and others he’d seen since in the markets, inspected like cattle by prospective masters. His insides felt like water. Now, absurdly, some of the men were smiling, laughing even as they sheathed their weapons. ‘What’s happening?’ he hollered at Rodrigo.
‘It’s our forces.’ The hidalgo grinned. ‘It’s the king’s men!’
Less than an hour later, the sun now set, the heat seeping reluctantly out of the air and a faint wisp of cool to prickle Harry’s tight skin, they were winding down from the heights to enter a valley. After all the grey, it was surprisingly verdant, two rivers running through it. Down on the flatter ground beside one of the rivers was a massive encampment: a great sprawl of tents, wagons, men, paddocks for animals and several huge structures that looked like wooden towers, in various stages of completion. Campfires were burning and smoke hung in shifting layers.
Some distance beyond the camp, just visible in the deepening shadows, was a large walled town, clinging to the side of a bald, grey mountain. No – not clinging – rooted, like some bony, obstinate growth. Beyond the walls, that rose sheer across the riverbanks, set with round watchtowers, was a mass of rooftops, towers and slender spires. Loja.
Harry had never seen anything like it. On high ground opposite the town, where the river cut through the valley at its narrowest point, were rows of artillery set on platforms and giant catapults, a line of angular beasts, silent and waiting. Loja’s walls were scarred and several of the towers were chipped, but only in the way a tree might be battered by a storm – a few branches lost, but the trunk still standing firm.
Soon, they were entering the encampment, heading for a red and gold pavilion at the centre. Men came to greet them, voices lifting in welcome, eyes on the mules carrying fresh supplies. Most were bearded, dirty and sunburned. All looked exhausted, hungry. Harry smelled sweat and wood-smoke, animal dung and the pungent stink of latrine pits. Dogs barked and cooks, bent over fires, turned to watch the weary train pass through.
Ahead, from out of the wings of the pavilion, strode a tall, dark-haired man with olive skin and the shadow of a beard. Harry guessed him to be in his early thirties. Over black, dust-stained hose, he wore a brigandine of stiff plates covered with red velvet, studded with silver-tipped nails. A great sword was strapped to his hip, hanging from a belt embossed with golden crosses. Although he wore no crown, Harry knew at once that he was the king, a host of men following obediently in the wake of his long-legged stride. Behind the monarch, outside the tent, a banner displayed the royal arms of Castile and Aragon, the splayed-winged black eagle glaring one-eyed from the expanse of cloth.
Don Carlos slipped from his saddle to greet Ferdinand. Bowing low, the captain kissed the king’s proffered hand. Harry slid gratefully down from Nieve’s back, handing the reins to Tom. Men crowded around, greeting one another and bowing to the king. Their voices were just a jumble of sound to Harry. He was too tired to even try to understand them.
‘I will introduce you,’ Rodrigo called to him as he patted his horse affectionately on the rump, sending it away with his servant. But, before he could, someone shouted his name.
The hidalgo looked round, his face lightening at the sight of a middle-aged man marching towards him. Over a brigandine, the man wore a black cloak lined with white leather, pinned over one broad shoulder to fall in folds down his back. His hair, turning silver at the sides, was cropped close to his skull. He had a square face and deep-set dark eyes that seemed to hold a hostile intensity, at odds with the broad smile of greeting on Rodrigo’s face.
‘Don Luys!’ Rodrigo embraced the man tightly.
Harry wondered if they were family, so close they seemed as they stepped back to talk, still gripping each other’s shoulders. He stood there, uncertain, waiting for Rodrigo to finish, while around him men talked. He’d lost sight of the king among the milling crowd.
‘Harry? Harry Vaughan?’
He turned to see a tall, rangy man approaching, bright blue eyes narrowed in questioning surprise. His auburn hair had been bleached almost to the colour of straw and a ginger beard covered his angular jaw, partly hiding a scar, red and fresh, the stitches still knitted through his skin. But despite these changes, Harry recognised him at once. The man was Sir Edward Woodville.
13
Five days ago, in the back room of a ramshackle inn overlooking the mercato, where patrons with fistfuls of coins crammed nightly around pens in the cellar to cheer the dogs that ripped one another apart, a man was said to have died vomiting blood, boils rupturing on his neck, his fingers black with rot. Rumours of plague spread rapidly, the chief official of the quarter ordering the inn sealed up. It now stood empty, boards nailed over its windows and doors, ominously lifeless in the midst of the market’s clamour, a corpse in a crowd.
Jack, making his way across the noisy square, caught the acrid stink of vinegar, splashed on by those hoping to ward off the dreaded vapours. Most people gave the inn a wide berth, as if the building itself might bear the contagion, save for a small group of flagellants who had gathered outside, white hoods covering their faces, robes split up the back so they could strike at bare flesh as they prayed. Passing them, Jack felt Amelot draw closer at his side. The girl flinched with every flick and crack of their whips, eyes on the men’s skin, glistening red-raw in the sullen light.
One morning several weeks ago, airless and stuffy as this one, Jack had entered his room in the palazzo to find her bent over a basin of water scrubbing at her clothes, naked from the waist up. She had hissed like a cat, crouching to hide herself as he’d backed out mumbling an apology, but not before he had seen the scars. They decorated her pale back: long pink lines criss-crossing her shoulder blades, shorter, deeper ones carved between her ribs, ugly jagged ones stuttering across the bones of her spine and down beneath the rolled waist of her hose. So many there was hardly a patch of skin left unmarked.
The wounds looked old to him, but Amaury had said Carlo di Fante’s masked companion had tortured Amelot in London and Jack had been left to wonder if any of that mut
ilation could be down to him. If the girl could talk, what might she be able to tell him about his mother’s murderer? Might the bastard have spoken about his other kills to threaten her? Might Amelot even know how his mother died; what torments she had suffered in her final moments at his mercy? Sarah Wynter had been a beautiful woman. Jack had known that since he was a boy; catching the way men looked at her with sideways glances, noticing the purse-lipped jealousy of women. Questions of what that brute could have done to her – questions that scalded him with images that left him coiled with rage – had become more frequent these last few days, since Marco Valori had spoken of Lorenzo’s past.
Steering Amelot from the blood-streaked flagellants, Jack headed down one of the alleys that wound away from the market. Rats scurried through rubbish, ignored by toothless old men with leather skin conversing in doorways and youths crouched around gambling boards, kissing their fists before casting the die. The innkeeper of the Fig gave his usual effusive greeting as Jack passed through, no doubt keen for word of his hospitality to be passed on to il Magnifico. Up a zigzag of stairs, Jack and Amelot climbed to the top floor. They heard Titan barking as they approached the door.
The four men had, with what little they owned, tried to make the cramped lodgings in the eaves their own. Valentine’s apostles, filled with black powder, were stashed in one corner with his arquebus, the scarred wood of the stock carved with words: God’s Messenger. On a shelf, warped with age, Ned had set out his prized collection of stones and shells, some gathered from the banks of the Thames, others dug from the mud of the Seine and the Arno, while Adam and David’s crossbows – gifts from Thomas Vaughan for the brothers’ service during the wars between York and Lancaster – were stowed under the pallet they shared. Valentine and Ned slept in the other bed, and Titan had a hair-matted blanket beneath the window. The place smelled of unwashed bodies, old cooking odours and dog.
‘Jack?’ Ned greeted him with a surprised smile. ‘Well, you’ve come in good time. David just went to get food.’ He appraised him as he entered, noting Jack’s russet and gold-trimmed doublet – another loan from Lorenzo – with a click of his tongue. ‘You look more the part every day.’
‘Looks be deceiving,’ muttered Valentine from the table he was sitting at, rocked back on a stool, arms crossed behind his head. He glanced at Amelot, taking in the small pack she carried on her back, in which Jack had stuffed her cloak and blanket. ‘What’s this?’
‘She’s staying here, with you.’ Jack bent to ruffle Titan’s ears as the little dog skipped around his feet.
‘Like hell—’ began Valentine, the stool thudding down as he sat forward.
‘Just for a few days,’ Jack cut in, rising. ‘I need you to take this,’ he added to Ned, pulling his father’s war sword from its scabbard. As the great blade caught the light, the Latin inscription along its length flared to life.
As Above, So Below
‘I’ve been summoned to Lorenzo’s villa, outside the city at Fiesole. He’s holding a feast there in a few days. He’s making an announcement.’
‘About what?’ Adam asked, rising from his pallet, folding his muscled arms.
‘I’m not sure. But some of the city’s highest dignitaries have been invited, so I assume it’s important. Keep it safe,’ Jack pressed, as Ned reached for the weapon. He felt reluctant, handing it over, but he didn’t want to leave it unguarded in his room and couldn’t take it with him, the inscription tying the blade – and him – to the Academy.
Ned accepted the sword carefully and laid it on his pallet, pushing Titan away when the dog came sniffing at it. ‘How long will you be gone?’
‘I don’t know.’ Jack knew little of what to expect from Lorenzo’s invitation, except the man wanted him at Fiesole partly to keep up the pretence of his role as honoured guest and, partly, to get closer to Pico. His confession that he’d overheard the conversation between the young man and Poliziano seemed to have given Lorenzo the idea Jack might be useful in finding out what, exactly, Pico thought he knew or suspected about his private business, in the wine-infused atmosphere of a feast. He likes you, the signore had added, making Jack think with discomfort of Pico, naked with Poliziano beside the crumpled bed. ‘Not long. I hope.’
‘So,’ said Valentine, elbows on his knees, his bald head greasy with sweat. ‘We fools are to stay in this plague heap, while you plays at lord of the manor?’
‘Valentine—’ Ned began.
‘You heard the same tale as me,’ said the gunner, turning his black eyes on Ned. ‘Them guards shutting up that house not an arrow’s flight from here. Only a rumour of plague,’ he continued, addressing Jack, ‘but they shut it all up – nails and boards – the people still inside. No mind if they was sick or fine.’
‘What do you want me to do? I cannot see off the pestilence.’
‘No,’ cut in Adam, ‘but you can get us out of this city. Get us on our way.’ He was less riled than Valentine, but his blue eyes were keen. ‘A new life. That’s been your promise, Jack, all these months.’
‘And that’s in progress.’ Jack felt irritation nipping at him. He was used to Valentine’s crustiness, but recently Adam, too, had become more insistent in his questions and demands. He wished David hadn’t been the one to go for food. The man, who usually sided with him, was able to calm his brother in these altercations, ending any argument before it began.
‘Progress, my arse,’ spat Valentine. ‘Them men might be interested in meeting you. When the air cools?’ the gunner mimicked. ‘If the signore’s truly so troubled why don’t he just end the company? He’s got the might to do it. Round them up? Interrogate them? Find who took the priest.’
Jack shook his head, thinking of Lorenzo’s response to this same question, the signore describing the Court of Wolves as a web stretched taut across the city, with threads in all the grand houses and guilds. It cannot simply be disbanded. Not without a struggle. ‘All you have to do is wait, Valentine. You’ve got lodgings, a generous account for food, wine and whatever else you want. It’s more than most men can say.’
‘And if you fail?’ Adam cocked his head. ‘If Lorenzo turns on his word? What then?’
Jack said nothing. Since meeting Marco that question had been swirling more and more in his own mind.
‘Then we’re back where we started,’ Adam answered for him. ‘Food in our bellies, yes, but no coin in our fists. All those crusading in Spain, filling their purses with infidel gold? That could be us. It should be us.’
Valentine grunted his agreement.
‘Why fight a war?’ Jack demanded. ‘When we’re on a promise from the richest family in Christendom?’
‘The Medici didn’t get rich by being generous. They got rich by tricks and by the dagger. You’re a fool if you don’t see that.’
‘Come, let’s take some air.’ Ned clasped Jack’s rigid shoulder. ‘This place is hotter than the devil’s pit and Titan’s clamouring to be out.’ The dog, lying on the pallet by the sword glanced up at his name, but didn’t lift his head from his paws.
After a moment, Jack took his gaze from Adam. With a last glance at Amelot, who was huddled in the window, staring over the rooftops, he crossed to the door.
Ned slapped at his neck as they headed out, walking down the alley to enter the din of the mercato, where fears of the Great Pestilence hadn’t dissuaded citizens from their usual fight for space at the stalls, shouting over one another as they haggled with traders. ‘Christ alive! How much more of me can the little bastards eat?’ The large man was covered with insect bites. One, on his elbow, had swollen into a pus-filled blister the size of a plum. A physician had given him an ointment, but it apparently smelled so foul the others had forbidden him from using it. ‘Don’t mind them, Jack. They’re just twitchy in this heat.’ Ned’s eyes flicked towards the boarded-up inn on the other side of the square.
‘But I’m in now, with Marco,’ Jack responded, tugging at the stiff collar of his tunic. He felt as though he were b
eing suffocated.
‘You must understand, Jack. We were raised for war. To sit idle isn’t in our natures. Even beyond the battlefield each of us had purpose.’
‘All our endeavours these past years. The map? Prince Edward? We might not have been successful, but you cannot say we didn’t have purpose.’
‘Then we did. But this is your mission now. You’ve not told us what Amaury told you in Paris – not allowed us to truly understand your reasons for coming here. I know you gave the priest your word,’ he went on before Jack could speak. ‘We came because we thought it would be in all our interests. Now . . .?’
They moved deeper into the market, in the centre of which was a grand pavilion, where butchers bellowed the prices of their cuts and flies swarmed around gutted carcasses dangling from hooks. Spiralling out from the pavilion were scores of other stalls, selling vegetables and books, hats and shoes, bolts of every colour cloth. The smell was overwhelming: a sweltering stew of body odours, animal dung, pungent cheeses, overripe fruit, newly tanned leather and smoke from roasting spits. The whole place was frenetic with movement, even the bruised sky where swifts shrilled and swooped.
‘Titan!’ Ned summoned the dog from a bloody pool beneath a fishmonger’s stall. ‘What about the map? Has Signor Lorenzo said anything about the land it shows?’ He glanced at Jack. ‘I mean, if Pyke’s brother-in-law was right, back in Southwark? That it could be the coastline of Cathay or Cipangu . . .?’
‘It’s gone, Ned. In Tudor’s hands.’
‘The map, yes. But we know there’s something out there.’