‘You know who they work for?’
‘I suspect but have no proof, and without proof what can I do? A rich and powerful family can buy its own truth.’
Dai nodded to himself. It was as he had suspected.
Guiseppe said, ‘There were others who came yesterday asking questions. One I recognised: Francesco da Ginstinianis. He was my friend. Now, I do not know. There was another with him, a tall, dark man, a foreigner like yourself. Francesco called him Thomas, like the saint.’
Dai was silent, pondering. ‘I know Francesco da Ginstinianis. I think the other is my good friend.’ Twm, who should have left the city by now. ‘What did they want?’
‘Like you, asking for information about my uncle. No one was willing to speak, and I dare not. You, and these two, and later that day the custodi came. Now, the old beggar is dead. Poor old Tonso. I feel it is my fault. I dared not sleep in my usual place. He must have seen the empty place and decided to sleep there where it is warm against the wall of the furnace.’
‘No use blaming yourself, is it now? Best come with me to a safe place. Soon they’ll realise it’s the wrong man they’ve killed and come back again.’ But best make sure they were not followed, he thought grimly, not until he’d decided what best to do to cut through this tangle of lies and treachery.
4
Ieper
Late January 1337
Where have you gone leaving me alone,
my soul, my warrior?
(The Book of Dede Korkut, c. 9thC)
All day it was dark. So dark neither candles nor lamps nor hearth fire could penetrate the gloom of the hall and chambers. A pale sun dragged itself across the sky in a low arc, weighted down by leaden clouds. A howry winter’s day. That was how Blue would describe it. Just when winter’s at its bleakest and it seems spring’s never going to come. Snow in the air but no snow as yet.
‘But it’s coming,’ Heinrijc Mertens said cheerfully. ‘One last blast, dear girl, and then spring will come again. You’ll see.’ He rubbed his hands together and held them out to the glowing fire burning in a hearth that was larger than most; a modern hearth built against a wall with stone hooding and huge circular chimney. Glazed windows and bright tapestries blanketed the room against draughts. There were chair covers and cushions artfully embroidered but with warmth and comfort in mind to keep out the bitter winter weather, and bitter it was. Bitterer than the coldest winter on the Çukarova coast. Warm was how he liked it, and he had need of warmth and comfort, this old man whose outstretched hands showed transparent against the flames. ‘Before nightfall, I say.’
He was right. By dusk snow was falling, thick flakes that settled on pitched roofs and cobbled streets and spiralled over the dark waters of the Ieperlee canal that flowed through the town, past this brick-built merchant’s house with its stepped gable and tall round chimney, past the great church, past the jetty at the western end of the huge magnificence of lakenhalle, the cloth hall, with its high belfry and four sharp turrets, and miles away to Nieuwpoort on the coast, the trading route to England. A canal, like Venezia. Same but different. Different, and not the same at all. Water, certainly, in this low-lying country, water that constantly encroached on the hard-won land. Marshes and lakes and waves beating constantly on the coast, and clouds hurrying across the sky, and rain, constant rain, beating down on the sodden land until rain turned to ice and snow. But its soil was fertile.
Neither land nor sea, this was a country that had flourished. Men had won land from the sea, had built towns, free men who traded with many countries, whose coins circulated as far as the Black Sea and Caucasus. There was no weaving like Flanders weaving, no cloth like Flanders cloth. But those who worked were kept in a state of near slavery, threatened constantly with unemployment until there was no bearing it, and a fierce civil war erupted, workers against patricians. The Men of the Claw against the Men of the Lily: Clauwerts against Leliaerts.
Heinrijc Mertens spoke of it in the dark of the winter evenings. He told how the Men of the Claw, the workers, rough sons of the people, fought against the Leliaerts. He told how the terrible Philip le Bel, King of France, Isabella’s father, brought knights from Picardy and Normandy and Artois; from Hainaut and Brabant. And the Men of the Claw armed only with weapons of iron-headed clubs stuck with hooks or spikes. Heinrijc Mertens chuckled. ‘We called them goedendags.Good mornings, dear child,’ he explained, and laughed at her expression of horror. ‘Only a handful of knights to command them, my own father amongst them. And they won, these Clauwerts. Impossible, you’d say. But you must remember, child, they knew their country, its marshes, their countrymen. They took no prisoners. How could they? Who could guard them? No prisoners and no booty. That was the order. Anyone picking up treasures was to be killed as the enemy was killed. Even the nobles. Not one was spared. Not even Robert d’Artois, crying his name aloud as he was dragged from his horse, surrendering. ‘We do not understand French,’ they said, and killed him. Desperate times, child, and desperate deeds, but they won us our freedom. For a time.’
He was silent, gazing into the burning hearth fire. ‘It couldn’t last. What does? There were the terrible years of famine and then the French attack that cut our men to bits. That was not even ten years ago. And now no one remembers the names of the Clauwerts and Leliaerts. All of Flanders surrendered and the captains tortured to death.’ He sighed. His father had been one of the captains. ‘They made up songs about our kevels, our workers, mocking them but we are proud of these songs. We sing them ourselves. Listen.’ He sang off-key, with flamboyant gestures to emphasise the words, this ancient scarecrow of a man who had once been well-fed, plump and who was now hunch-shouldered and shrunken. Still he delighted in fashionable clothes, the most sumptuous to be had. Today, he wore a gown of fine crimson wool edged with furs and embellished with golden embroidery.
Let us sing of the churls
their ragged clothes are fit for the sty
their hats are too small for their heads
their hoods are all awry
their hose and shoes are worn to shreds
with bread and cheese and curd and gruel
they all day stuff their guts
the churl is such a fool he never eats but gluts
‘There was more of the same. Your grandfather would remember the words, I’m sure.’ He stared for so long into the fire she was sure he had fallen asleep. ‘He would have approved,’ he said suddenly. ‘Your grandfather was always one for the little people, the workers, the ones of no account. And now, child, it begins again. Not that it ever went away. There has been simmering discontent in this land ever since suppression. It is thanks to the goodness of our Countess of Flanders that we still have our independence but she bought it at a great price. Now the English king has forbidden the export of English wool, who knows what will happen? It seems he has ambitions to create a textile industry of his own. They say he plans a blockade as soon as the winter weather lifts. And of course France will retaliate and attack the English ports. What it means for us, God help us, is no work and starvation. England may be our ally but our neighbour is France. And a cruel neighbour she can be. There’ll be trouble, child.’ He sighed again. ‘Always trouble.’
She stirred. ‘If that is so, Father Heinrijc, then I must go to England before this blockade. Before the French attack. Winter will soon be past and I made a promise to Nene to find my grandfather.’
They were silent.
‘He will come, my daughter. Have faith. He will come.’
There is always room for faith. Allah’s will – God’s will. Two old men, one Muslim, one Christian, who had both lived through desperate times and yet their mantra was the same: keepfaith. Her grandfather would have said it was in the gods’ hands. For herself, she dared not think. Sometimes thinking didn’t do you any good.
It was in Padova she had known for certain he would not come. The German merchants went on ahead after all, and their own small party waited for two days. They went w
ith her to the chapel of the Scrovegni family, Giles and Edgar and Agathi and Rémi. One of the monks led them in and smilingly watched their awestruck faces as they stood in the infinity of the blue space around them. Figures moved before their eyes, so real did they seem, so different from the stiff, expressionless faces they had seen in the churches on their journey to Venezia. Here, agony and anguish, love and forgiveness blazed from the painted faces of the Christ and his mother and Mary Magdalene. There was the birth in the stable with the great comet blazing overhead and there – just there – was the youthful, well-knit young man who was her grandfather, curly brown hair and wary eyes. Wary as a child, wary as a man, Nene had said. She stared at him but saw only another brown man with dark, inscrutable eyes. To go on to the cold country where her grandfather may or may not be alive? To go back to Venezia where her soul’s mate may or may not be alive? Don’t think. Thinking doesn’t do you any good. There was no choice. She had made her promise to Nene and her promise to Dafydd. She must go on.
The old men of the town had urged them to leave: could they not smell the storm that was brewing? The marroniers – the guides – gravely nodded. It was true: travel now or wait out the winter. Dai’s instructions in his ears and the dour advice of the old men and marroniers, Giles rented mules from the hospitallars and bartered for thick furs. The mountain tracks were too steep for horses; they must be led. Safer to travel on mules. It was a long, bitter-cold journey into the heights of the mountains where fragile wooden bridges crossed chasms too deep for reckoning. The flimsy structures swayed and jolted under the weight of the pack animals and their human cargo. The mountains were higher than any in Anatolia, their tops reaching into the heavens, lost in mist. Lodgings were at flea-ridden hospices, each one dedicated to a saint, and run by monks, and no charge for these wayfarers. The wind whistled through cracks in doors and walls and windows and there was not the comfort of hot water baths at the end of the short, exhausting day. It was Agathi, so frail-seeming, who was most stoic. She never complained, not of fatigue nor cold nor hunger. ‘She learned how to endure when she was taken as a slave,’ thought Kazan. ‘It is how she survived.’ There was a memory of cold night and falling water and danger; the time when Kazan first met Niko, Agathi’s young brother. He had helped her escape from the slave traders, hidden her behind the waterfall, brought her what scraps of food he could pilfer, and a ragged blanket to protect her from the wetness and the chill night. What was it he had said of his sister? ‘I wish my sister was brave but she cries all the time.’ You were wrong, Niko, Kazan thought. Your sister is brave but it is a different courage from yours.
The marroniers told them stories; one of a young man who was engulfed by an avalanche. His wife was with child and she refused to believe he was dead. One day in the spring he came back to her. He had made an air hole through the snow and so survived, on breath and water from handfuls of melted snow. He said his unborn child spoke to him in his icy prison and it was this that gave him courage and faith. She refused to believe he was dead. Even when it seems all hope has gone, there’s always a thread. And so do I refuse to believe you are dead, Dafydd, Kazan had thought. I cannot think of you as other than alive. My heart would surely stop beating if you were dead. So you must be alive.
After the frozen heights came the slow descent and the transfer to water and then again to road and another slow journey through forests ravaged by wild boar and wolves and then into garrisoned towns where tolls were charged and searches made because this was a country on the brink of war. To Troyes, where the roads met and parted, one heading towards Paris, theirs towards Rheims and Bruges, and the last few miles of the long journey through the dead of winter in a landscape bleached of colour and shuddering cold such as the girl had never known.
Rémi had led the way into Ieper, past the new earth-banked defences, through the great gates, into the town and to Heinrijc Mertens’ brick-built townhouse. And his welcome – such a welcome. Arms open to catch Rémi close; a welcome for his friends; a check when he realised ‘Davit’ was not there. Those pale grey eyes could not quite hide his loss. The frail voice trembled on a note of regret. ‘But he will come, no fear of that. He is a cat with nine lives, and five are left to him. He will come.’ Mertens’ gaze rested on the girl with empty, exhausted eyes. He rested a hand on her bright head. ‘He will come, dear child. Do not fear.’ He raised his brow when told of Thomas’ choice. ‘A Franciscan?’ he murmured. Then he nodded, perhaps not so surprised. When Rémi revealed his hidden cache of treasure concealed in the padded jerkin – the little things Heinrijc Mertens loved – then the pale eyes bleared and the old man’s fingers trembled as he lifted the objects one by one. There was a strange two-pronged device he had longed for, ever since he had heard of it. A barjyn, he said, that was sometimes called a furca or fork, used by the Musselmen but despised by the Christians but mark his words; this would be as much used as the daggers men kept about them for eating at table. See how useful it was? For keeping meat still and so make slicing a morsel neater and easier; and how much more seemly than fingers dipped in the common bowl. So useful. And this small goblet of carved rock crystal. Davit must have bartered well for such a work of craftsman’s skill. Did they know the Ancients believed rock crystal to be alive, taking a breath once every hundred years? ‘It is said to be an incarnation of the Divine.’ He chuckled. ‘If you believe such things. Ah, and this.’ He breathed deeply and reverently turned the leather-tooled binding of a small Koran. This beauty, this God’s Word though another’s God. How splendid. How rare. He gave thanks to his son Davit for such gifts. He would thank his son when he returned. ‘In the spring, dear child. Do not look for him before the spring.’
The new treasures were ranged alongside other treasures brought back from other journeys: glass from Murano that made Kazan remember the night-time meeting with Sanuto, and her fear for Dafydd. There was ancient glass, tiny stoppered flasks that were almost opaque yet had a rare delicacy; a brass bowl inlaid with gold and silver and with a pattern of mounted huntsmen running just below its rim, with lean hounds running alongside, forever and forever encircling the bowl; a painted silk robe from the Far Country; fragments of fabrics that were very old and very precious. ‘See, my child; these carpets are said to have knots two hundred to an inch. How splendid is that? See – this one – brocaded with gold and silver thread and studded with jewels and pearls. Such working we in these low lands never dream of, though we are master cloth makers.’ Stars and octagons on a pale green ground of worked silks; a procession of horses on a madder background. There were books of great beauty: a bestiary, a copy of the Gospels, a psalter. ‘And now this Koran,’ said Heinrijc Mertens, and laid the precious book down next to its Christian neighbour. He loved these treasures not for their monetary value but for their learning and craft.
‘And now there are plans for a new Guild for our own painters and sculptors,’ he said with satisfaction, ‘but not to work alone in monastic cells. No. Our craftsmen live with their fellow man, in the daily coming-and-going of our lives. This is the way it should be.’
‘I think perhaps I saw something of this in Padova.’ Kazan told him of the seeming-living figures in the Chapel of the Scrovegni and he nodded his head. He had heard of this great artist. But here, where there were the most beautiful of cloths, the most delicate fabrics, the richest weaves, the finest dyes…how much more beautiful would the painted figures be? The light and shade that caught the garments draping the body; the dignity of the wearer; the nobility! ‘And drawn from living people, my dear girl, from life itself! One day we shall be renowned as the greatest sculptors and artists the whole world has ever known.’ He nodded his head with sober certainty.
There were jade figures that made her cry out in amazement. She showed the old man her own jade axe. He fingered its smoothness. ‘This is a great treasure, my daughter.’
‘My grandfather will know me by it,’ she said, ‘but after that, after I have shown it to my grandfather, I would li
ke you to take it for all your great kindness to me.’
He shook his head. ‘It is yours, my daughter. You must keep it close.’
‘But I have this.’ She lifted her arm to show him the bracelet cunningly worked in twists of gold and silver and copper. ‘Dafydd gave me this beautiful thing.’
The old man smiled and shook his head. ‘A fitting gift from my son to you but even so, dear child, keep the jade. Do you know what they say of this jade, these people of the Far Country?’
‘Nene told me it would protect me.’
‘Let me tell you what a great man from the Far Country said many, many years ago. Many hundreds of years ago. He was a man of great wisdom. He said that this is a stone that is soft, smooth and glossy, like benevolence. It is fine, compact and strong, like intelligence. It is angular but not sharp and cutting, like righteousness. It hangs down like humility. When struck, it yields a note so clear and prolonged but finishing suddenly, like music. Its beauty does not conceal its flaws nor do its flaws conceal its beauty. Like loyalty. It has inner radiance, like good faith. It is bright like a rainbow, like heaven. It is exquisite and mysterious, appearing in the hills and the streams, like the earth. It stands out against all ranks, like virtue. It is esteemed by all under the sky, like the path of truth and duty.’ The old man stopped, catching his breath. ‘Truly, this is a great gift. To give such a gift to your grandmother tells me he loved her deeply.’ He stroked the girl’s cheek. ‘She gave it to you. You are like this jade, my daughter. You are bright and true and loyal and loving and virtuous. I am very happy to give you to my son Davit.’
She lowered her gaze. ‘Father Mertens, we are not betrothed.’
‘Perhaps not before the priests but in your hearts I think you are, my daughter.’ He touched the bracelet. ‘Does this not tell you so?’
‘He called it a trinket to wear with my new fine feathers.’
The Heart Remembers Page 7