‘There’s nothing more here for us, Kazan,’ Giles said. ‘Let’s go on to find Edgar and Agathi.’ He was worried by her quietness. ‘They may have news of Dafydd. Remember what Heinrijc said? He would send word to Edgar. Besides,’ with a lift in his heart, ‘it’ll be good to see those two again.’
‘Yes, let us do that,’ she said, but there was no answering gladness in her voice.
Go by boat, they were told, up the Witham River to Lincoln. That is the easiest way. Brother Hugh had told Giles, ‘It is the way Will-the-Wordmaker started his long journey to Wales.’ And so, one April morning, they were at Boston Haven boarding the boat that would take them up the Witham to Lincoln. ‘It’s a fine town,’ said Simon Salter, ‘and a good road from there to your friend’s manor. God speed.’ The wind and rain had gone and that morning the great flat sky over the flat land was bright blue. As far as she could see was blue sky and white sheep grazing on greening salt marsh where there was sea in winter. Birds were everywhere. The air was full of their din. Their horses were brought on board the flat-bottomed barge. Yıldız was snorting, alarmed by another water journey, but she lifted her head and her ears pricked. Her eyes fixed on Kazan and she came quietly enough, following the girl on to the boards, nuzzling the sleeve of her kirtle. Kazan soothed her, whispered words of love into the mare’s ears. Yıldız snickered and mouthed her bridle but she was quieted. Sadık the Faithful gave no cause for alarm. He followed the mare on to the boat boards and stood by her side, whickering gently.
The wharf faded out of sight. The salt marsh gave way to fen and the fen to green fields and long orchards, bare branched now. ‘But spring is coming,’ said one of the boatmen. His home was close to Bardney Abbey, and soon he would have leave to return there. ‘It’s a pretty sight in spring,’ he told them. ‘The lime woods smell sweeter than anyone can think and the ground is thick with white wood anemones. Later, there’ll be daffodils and honeysuckle, and in autumn fat blackberries.’
‘I think you love your home,’ said Kazan.
‘That I do, Mistress. There’s no place like it in the whole world, I’ll be bound.’
No place like it. She thought about the summer camp in the high valleys that bloomed scarlet with anemone and poppy, pale purple with crocus and white daisies with yellow eyes waving through grass that was lush and fresh; craggy mountain sides backed by range after range, all blurring into blue; steep-stepped half-circle of ruins climbing to the highest, loftiest, top-most point where, on a clear day, she could see the glittering blue of the sea far below, and the yurts sheltering in their own grassy harbour in the dip of the valley.
‘No place like it,’ she agreed. She slept after that, lulled by the suck-and-slap of waves against boat, the dip-and-pull, the quietness of it all. She slept past Barlings and Bardney, Steinfield and Bullington, past the great stretch of lime-wood forest where the ‘Wild Man’ lived by stealing cattle and sheep. Giles let her sleep on. That was what she needed most. There was another passenger, a man returning to his family in Lincoln. ‘Business in Boston,’ he said briefly. He roused himself to point out places they passed and told him the story of the ‘Wild Man’. He nudged Giles and pointed in the distance to where a great building rose from a high cliff. ‘That’s the cathedral,’ he said. ‘We can see it well enough. That’s good.’ Giles was puzzled. ‘It means mild weather from the west,’ the man explained. ‘If it’s mist-shrouded, it means we’re in for cold, wet weather from the east.’ He smiled, the tight-lipped smile of a serious man. ‘Spring’s on its way at last,’ he said.
Giles woke her in late afternoon.
‘Lincoln,’ he said briefly.
No need for warning. There was clamour enough: boats docking; wares unloaded; shouts and yells reverberating across the wharves; carts standing ready. And always the fetid stench that lurked in a city in this country. She rubbed sleep from her eyes, bewildered by the bustle after the quiet journey and her long sleep. Like Venezia, but not like: same but different. And so very different was the high cliff and, on top of it, pressing down into the earth, was the great cathedral, like a ship sailing out over the hilltop, proud and free, its high tower flaunting itself high in the sky. It seemed like it was the highest building in the world, towering into clouds that had massed again in the late afternoon, sharp angled light and dark by turn. It strode over the high cliff, dominating the little lives below. Kazan shivered. This was power indeed.
‘There’s time before dark to travel through the town to St Catherine’s,’ said Giles. You’ll be comfortable there, both of you, the serious stranger had told him; it’s Gilbertine, for men and women alike, and it’s on your road.
Through the lower town, taking the High Road that led out of the city. It was still well paved, one of the old Roman roads. Some of it had been cut into, where the good stone of the road was used as foundations for buildings, like the guildhall that had once been a king’s palace, but a good road for all that. They could follow it for miles, all across the country and down to the southern coast. Better still, for them, it met with the road they would need to take the next day, another good, straight road. But for now, no need to think about that. St Catherine’s was before you came to Cross o’ Cliff, near to where the first Edward had raised a cross for his dead wife, the Queen Eleanor. No need go so far as the joining roads. Malandry on your left, lepers’ colony but hardly any lepers these days. The monastery was just through Great Bargate. No distance at all, and do the horses good after being cramped on the barge for so many hours. Watch out for pickpockets and vagrants at Swine Green.
She nodded, willing to have it all arranged. She felt limp and helpless, not like Kazan at all. She had done so since she was told her grandfather was dead. And before that? Without Dafydd she felt half-alive. I left him, she thought, and all for nothing.
‘Now that’s not true, cariad.’ She heard his voice clear as if he had been standing next to her. ‘You made your promise to your nain to go in search of him, didn’t you now? You have done as you promised. There’s nothing you have to regret.’
I have my grandfather’s swan pipe, Dafydd, though rightfully it belonged to his brother. I have my grandfather’s story. I have Nene’s stories of my grandfather and the jade stone that he gave to her as a love token. I have the bracelet you gave to me, I think as a love token, and I long to see you, sevgilim, fy nghariad, beloved. Now we must go, Giles and me, to find Edgar and Agathi. That is our sworn promise. Our lives are all promises, she thought despairingly. When can we follow our own hearts?
14
Ieper
April 1337
Often the wanderer pleads for pity
And mercy from the Lord; but for a long time…
He must follow the path of exile…
(The Wanderer, Anglo-Saxon)
March became April. It was late evening and the lamps were lit. Heinrijc Mertens was nodding by the fire, Rémi frowning over a book of lettering. He heard a loud knocking at the outer door but no stir. Karel must have fallen asleep. He was an old man to be steward, as old as Heinrijc himself. The pounding came louder. The boy’s head came up, alert. He stood up and stared across at the old man by the fire. Heinrijc Mertens opened his eyes and smiled.
‘He keeps us waiting almost a six month,’ he murmured, ‘and now he’s impatient to be let in. Best go, my boy, before he wakes the whole household.’
Rémi hurried out of the room, down the stairs and into the passage. He almost collided with Karel. They both hurried towards the outer door, barred now against the night.
‘Who is it?’ demanded Karel.
‘Thomas Archer with a sick man. I have Dafydd-the-Welshman here with me but he needs help.’
A grating rasping noise of bolts drawn back and there was dark-faced Thomas, very thin, his face exhausted, holding up the gaunt, yellow-faced, drooping skeleton that was Dafydd.
15
The Island
April 1337
The city which forgets how to care for th
e stranger
has forgotten how to care for itself
(Homer: Odyssey)
He woke to whiteness. Was this death? Couldn’t be, not for him a white death. Roaring hellfire, more like. He stirred, and the movement had him groaning. May’appen this was death, and he was damned and in hell, on the rack, some evil little demon tearing into him with red-hot pincers.
‘Lie easy now,’ said a voice. French but so heavily accented he could barely understand. Where was he? Who…
‘Who are you?’
‘Brother Francis. You were hurt in the shipwreck. Lie still. All is well. All are safe.’
The shipwreck. This wasn’t death and damnation. It was here and now. ‘Hatice? Niko?’
‘Safe, my friend. All your friends are safe, and all the crew, thanks to you. Sleep now.’
Slipping into sleep. No pain. No thinking. Let everything go. All safe. Waking again to whiteness and the same voice, the same soothing words.
‘Hatice? Niko?’
‘Safe, my friend. All your friends are safe, and all the crew, thanks to you. Sleep now.’
The next time he stayed awake long enough. ‘What do yer mean? Safe? Where are they? Where am A?’
Brother Francis was pleased. The big man’s soul had come back to them. He smoothed the man’s forehead with the sign of the cross, murmured a blessing. ‘You are here in our Abbey. Your ship was wrecked in the storm but all – every soul – were saved. Your family waits for you to come back to them. They are well, thanks to you. The crew is safe and well, thanks to you. We have lit candles and offered our prayers for your safety and your soul these past two days and nights, and now God has heard our prayers. Thanks be to the good God and his Son and to the blessed Mother Mary. You are safe with us. God loves the stranger, and you were cast on to our shore cold and hurt. We shall care for you, and your friends, and rejoice that God sent you to us.’
Blue cast about in his battered skull for a memory of what had happened. The storm, and casting themselves overboard to try to reach the sandy bay. Hatice all but swept from him, and him clutching at her hair, yanking handfuls, then the relief of the sandy shore, staggering to safety, looking back at the foundering ship. Its lateen sails were ripped to shreds and the masts broken. He’d seen that in one quick moment. He’d uncoiled the rope and told Hatice to fasten it to a jagged rock. She’d clutched her head and cursed him, he remembered now. ‘Later, my Hatice. There are souls need rescuing, woman.’
He waded out into the wild waters, stood braced, rock-solid as he could, while the spluttering, drowning, gasping crew grabbed hold of the rope tied about his broad girth, and from him they hauled themselves to safety on the shore line. The force of the waves crashing against him was too much, even for a man-mountain, and he was knocked backwards off his feet and under water, drowning and gasping and spluttering in his turn. Fleetingly, he thought he remembered a hard hand hauling him to dry land and sharp rock against his cheek. Now, here he was in a Benedictine monastery, in a white cell, and cared for. And so he had slept, woken, asked the same questions, slept, and now he was awake, wide awake.
Niko came to sit by his mattress, a pale ghost-boy haunted by the fierce storm and their fight to live and, yes, the resurgent memory of Asperto falling to his death in the landslide in the mountains. The mischief was gone from his eyes. ‘I thought you were dead,’ he whispered. He didn’t sob; he sat head bowed, streaming silent tears.
‘Well, A’m not, so stop yer snatterin and ditherin. We need to be out o’ here and away on the next ship. And doön’t yer tell me it int doäble.’ He raised himself up, though his head swam. ‘Come here, yer greeät daft lummox. A’m not to be drownded by a few splashes o’ watter.’ The boy threw himself at Blue’s broad chest and the man wrapped his arms about the shivering child. He looked over the boy’s head at Hatice. She was pale, as pale as the boy, with great purple shadows beneath her eyes. She looked haggled, she did. ‘Eh, my Hatice, that were more close-run than A like. The priests tell us as it’s a narrer, rough roäd to heaven, an’ a stright, smoothe way to hell, but A reckon as they’ve not nivver been in no shipwrack. Rough roäd all the way.’
‘May’appen we were on our way to heaven, husband.’ She had started to use some of the Fen language Blue used.
‘We’ve left our worldly goods be’ind, that’s fer sure. All drownded with Hazim’s ship. I’ve nowt to keep yer with, lass.’
‘We’re well enough, husband. We have our lives, and each other.’
‘That’s the truth on it. Where’s the boy?’
She knew he meant Mehmi. ‘He lost the tanbur. He says it is given to the sea as an offering for our lives, but I think he mourns it, all the same.’
It was a loss for him, more so since the tanbur had been a cherished gift from his father, and had belonged to his father’s father before that; a beautiful instrument, its pear-shaped belly fashioned from mulberry wood. It should have been given to Aksay, the eldest son, but Aksay had declared he was no player, no singer of songs, no weaver of music magic. Let it be given to Mehmi, the youngest, the dream maker. And now it was gone. It had been strung around his shoulder but he couldn’t hold Niko tightly enough and so he had let go the tanbur. He had gone down to the shore with the rest of the men to search the wreck for what they could salvage. He had found the tanbur – pieces of it, at least – washed up into the rocks and stones around the sandy shore. Its long neck was broken, its strings drifting in a pool of water like strands of silver hair, tiny silver fish darting through them. He lifted it out, cradled it in his arms. Al-Abjar, nicknamed for his big-belly, laid a heavy arm round his shoulders.
‘Ah, my song-bird, this is sad. Very sad. You’ve had your wings clipped.’
‘There will be another, Mehmi,’ promised al-Muḥibb. ‘Like women – there is always another.’
‘But not when there is no other woman quite the same, as this tanbur was. The woman, thetanbur, Muhi.’
‘The Niko, friend,’ Muhi said unexpectedly. ‘Only one of him. I saw what you did – save the boy not your tanbur, even if it were your soul, and the soul of your ancestors. You sacrificed it for a boy of flesh and blood, and Allah be praised for this. It was a good act, and shall never be forgotten.’
Mehmi sucked in his breath. ‘What’s this, Muhi? Next you’ll be telling me there is the woman in your life.’
‘And so there is. Don’t drop your mouth open like that; it makes you look like Abjar when he’s loading his mouth with riza. Who knows what a shipwreck can do to a man? I prayed to Allah, if he saved me, Inşallah, I would go home and marry the little brown mouse of a girl I nursed in my arms when she was an infant. There! Laugh if you like.’
‘I am not laughing, Muhi. This is good, the best. I envy you. And you are right; the boy Niko was worth saving. There will be another tanbur for me, not the same but a tanbur, even so. There is no other Niko. There can never be another Niko. His sister would be desolate without him.’
‘Your friends Blue and Hatice also.’
‘Yes. We are family now. Not through blood but through love and pain and struggle.’ Mehmi looked down at the cradled tanbur, his long lashes casting little shadows on to his sharp cheekbones. ‘I shall sing songs of this time, of the terror of storm and sea, and of how we escaped, each one helping his brother, whether Christian or Muslim.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘Go on to Venezia, and from there to England to find our friends.’ He smiled. ‘More like our family,’ he corrected himself. ‘Edgar is like a son to Blue, and Agathi a daughter to Hatice. Perhaps we shall find the rest of our companions. We have missed them.’ His lashes flickered upwards. ‘Our hearts are heavy without them.’
But we shall find them, he thought. Blue and Hatice are determined, and they will have their way, no matter what storms and tempests are tossed in their way. There is nothing as powerful as a heart filled with love. He thought again of his lost tanbur, and longed for it so that he could make a song fitting for
his friends.
16
April 1337
Bradwell
…they feared
That fierce and frenzied boar
Whose tusks could slash and tear
(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 14thC Trans. Simon Armitage)
They had been tracking the boar all morning. First they had driven the sheep and goats up on to the common land on the high pasture close to the High Dyke, left the youngest boy to make sure they were secure. After that they had set about tracing the spores and rootings and droppings left by the escaped boar in the Long Wood. Thorns and thickets, that’s what pigs liked best. They’d taken one of the dogs with them, an old bitch used to herding sheep but now too old for service.
‘She’s a good nose,’ Oluf said. ‘If she tracks the boar, then we can use our sticks to herd it back to the village. The Master will be grateful. He will say we are men, not boys.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘It will be a fine offering for Easter Day.’ The group of small, eager boys clustered about him shivering in the sharp north wind. They grinned and nodded. The Master would be pleased. Everybody wanted to please the Master. He was a good man. Their das said so, and their mams. And Oluf said it would be a good thing to do; Oluf, whose da, Bernt, would be a free man because of the Master. He had promised so. And his mam, he boasted, was lady’s maid and close friends with Mistress Agathi.
They’d seen signs the day before: broken branches; a whole stretch of earth ploughed up by powerful tusks; droppings of pig shit; a tuft of black bristle caught in a blackthorn bush, white blossom dying now. For sure, the boar had come this way. And then they heard it; a snuffling, whittling, snorting somewhere in the undergrowth. Grunting. Crashing of branches as the boar tussled its way through the woodland. Suddenly, it was there. They had not thought it could move so fast, leaping across ruts in the earth, powerful back haunches sloping down to a tail that twirled and twitched and twisted; a creature whose ears, snout, tusks threatened danger. It was more wild boar than farmyard escapee.
The Heart Remembers Page 18