The monarch kicked the snarling dogs out of his way and brought his face close to the rosy cheeks and long lashes. ‘You thought you were so pretty,’ he whispered, ‘that you could do as you wished, is that it?’
The boy was crying now. ‘Sire, I meant no harm.’
Richard released him, bored with teasing his current favourite. ‘No, you didn’t. But I love to see you weep, boy. Were we alone, I should lick the tears from your sweet cheeks as tenderly as you lick my moist flesh. Forgive me.’
‘I do, Sire,’ the boy whispered.
With one of the lightning changes of mood for which the Plantagenets were famous, Richard stopped playing pederast and became the bluff and hearty man of war. Not as bandy-legged as his father Henry Plantagenet, but stocky and with the coarseness of manner acquired in a lifetime of warfare, he strode close to the armed rider who had just clattered through the gateway into the courtyard. ‘You said gold?’
‘Aye.’ The man, exhausted from a long hard ride, dismounted from his lathered horse that stood, head down and lame in one foot.
Richard recognised him as one of the routiers, the mercenaries who served him for just so long as they were paid when there was no war to justify an army for the king to command.
‘How much gold?’ he asked roughly.
The man eased the helmet from his head. Like the king’s, his hair was cut short, for long hair got tangled inside an iron helmet. Unlike the king, who wore a well trimmed beard, the routier’s dirty face was covered with a three-day growth of stubble. He scooped a handful of water from a stone horse trough and swallowed thirstily, then poured another handful over his head.
‘A king’s ransom, Sire. No less. I swear I saw it with my own eyes.’
In a fit of rough good humour Richard embraced the man with both arms and kissed his travel-grimed cheek. He raised his face to the weak spring sunshine that was conjuring steam from the puddles between the flagstones and cried: ‘Here stands a king unransomed yet! There’s not a monarch in Christendom needs more gold than I. So speak, man. Tell me where it is, this king’s ransom of yours.’
He turned to the thickset, battle-scarred captain of the routiers who had ridden into the castle with the messenger. Mercadier threw the reins of his horse to a stable boy and dismounted, his greedy eyes narrowed at the thought of gold.
‘You love the yellow metal more than me, Mercadier.’ Richard cuffed the old warrior. ‘If you could swear allegiance to an element, you would, my friend.’
Mercadier laughed briefly at the king’s joke. ‘My only loyalty is to you, Sire.’
‘You lie as smoothly as a bishop,’ grinned the king, excited at the thought of gold. He led the two men out of earshot of the crowd that assembled so quickly at any unusual event. There was little privacy and no secrecy at the Plantagenet court.
Tethered to a well-head was an ox about to be slaughtered for the royal table. A wave of the king’s hand scattered cook and scullions alike until only the ox was left to hear.
‘Now …’ The king seated himself on the rim of the well surround and spoke in a quieter voice. ‘Tell me all you know.’
The routier looked to Mercadier. A nod from the captain bade him begin.
‘In a village by name of Châlus, which lies in the fief of the Count of Limoges, a poor husbandman busy at the spring ploughing uncovered two days ago a massy treasure of gold that covered the floor of a hay cart with precious objects and sacks of coin beside.’
When the man had finished his story, Richard asked: ‘What proof do you bring me?’
From inside his jacket of mail, the routier pulled a gold coin. ‘There are a thousand such. Nay, more. I brought this one as token of the rest.’
‘And where is it now, this treasure of yours?’
‘In the castle of Châlus.’
‘By what force is Châlus held, Mercadier?’ queried Richard, weighing the heavy coin in his hand.
‘The garrison is no more than three knights and a handful of men at-arms, Sire. I know the place well.’
‘Three knights only?’ Richard mused. ‘Then Aymar of Limoges is a fool if he doesn’t send reinforcements swiftly. We must move fast. Have you a hundred men, Mercadier, that can ride with me within the hour?’
‘Two hundred if need be, Sire.’
‘A hundred will do.’ The king was as mean as Mercadier was grasping; every man hired would have to be paid for. ‘Bid them follow when I ride out,’ he snapped. ‘And, Mercadier, bring sappers and siege engines to reduce the tower at Châlus.’
He dismissed the two men with a gesture, clapped his hands for a steward and shouted for his horse to be readied, the baggage train to be harnessed immediately, his arms and armour to be brought. As the stream of orders was acted upon, the court came to life in a riot of noise and the confusion of servants running to their duties. Only the page with the bleeding ear stood still where the king had left him.
The cook and his helpers crept back to the ox which regarded them balefully, pulling futilely on its tether until it had backed itself into a corner between the well and the wall of the Boissy tower.
‘Who speaks of gold at Chinon?’
The peremptory voice rang out clearly in the morning air, cutting through the hubbub of preparation. It belonged to the woman who had once styled herself in a letter to the Pope ‘Eleanor, by the wrath of God, Queen of England!’ She had been listening from one of the windows of her quarters in the tower.
As Mercadier clattered out of the courtyard to alert his men billeted in the town below, Richard turned to Queen Eleanor, his mother. After seventy-seven summers, she stood straight and proud in a time when most women were bent by toil and child- bearing before they were half her age. Her clear green eyes flashed with the intelligence that had outwitted popes and kings since she was crowned Queen of France as a girl of fifteen.
She did not deign to descend the stone steps, having no wish to soil the train of her velvet dress in the dung and urine that littered the courtyard. Instead she called the king to her and listened keenly to the tale of treasure trove. Below them in the courtyard, the cook thrust once, then again. He found the jugular vein and twisted his knife. Blood gushed out of the wound. Dogs lapped at it. The ox bellowed feebly, sank to its knees and subsided without resistance in a pool of blood.
‘My sword! My horse!’ the king bellowed.
Misunderstanding the reason for the excitement, a hunt servant loosed Richard’s hounds from the Dogs’ Tower. A pack of wolfhounds and four huge elkhounds from Ireland raced baying through the courtyard in a flurry of neighing horses, squawking chickens and cursing men.
‘Richard, stay!’ As the king turned to leave her, Eleanor shivered with a premonition. She clutched his sleeve with one hand and the hilt of his jewelled dagger with the other. ‘There are affairs of State here at Chinon which merit your attention more than this trivial siege.’
He turned on the carefree grin that had been Henry’s and which he knew she could never resist.
‘Come now, Mother!’ he chided. ‘There’s gold to be had and fighting to be done – proper work for a king. Yet you bid me stay here like some shrivelled clerk, furrowing my brow over documents that bore me?’
He took his sword-belt from a squire and buckled it on, ignoring the coat of mail he was offered. ‘As I see it, Mother, most affairs of state boil down to affairs of gold. And there’s an end to it.’
She held him, surprisingly strong for a woman, let alone one of her age. ‘I beg you, despatch Mercadier’s men to blockade Châlus and its treasure, if you will.’
‘He’d steal every coin for himself.’
‘Then send to Château Gaillard to summon William the Marshal. Trust him to conduct this siege, Richard. There is no hurry if Count Aymar is in Paris, talking treason with the French king, as they say.’
Richard pulled himself free. ‘You bid me wait?’ He spun the gleaming coin in the sunlight. As he caught it, he punned, ‘This is the only wait I acknowledge: the w
eight of gold in my hand. Where there’s gold, there’s always a hurry, woman. That’s one thing I’ve learnt from life. In any case, Richard Plantagenet is known not for his pauses but for the speed with which he rides.’
And there’s the truth, reflected Eleanor as the king leaped onto a mounting block and from there into the saddle. Her elder surviving son spent his life trying to live up to his own reputation. If only, she thought, Richard had his father’s shrewd brain as well as Henry Plantagenet’s valorous heart. If only he had just a dash of his mother’s sixth sense …
She stood unhappily at the head of the steps, attended by two ladies-in-waiting, an island of silent females surrounded by a noisy sea of men and horses and weapons. The king clattered through the gateway, heading down to the town and the bridge across the Loire which his father had built. He pressed on, heedless that most of his servants were still getting ready to follow. With a clanging of metal, weapons were hauled from the armoury and distributed. Saddle girths were tightened, draught animals were harnessed, men shouted at servants, swore and kicked and got in each other’s way.
At the sound of the king’s departure, the page boy thought it must be safe to move at last. The only person near him was the slow-witted cook standing beside the huge carcass of the slaughtered ox and wondering what to do with all that meat. The queen, a few paces away, was oblivious of him. She studied the coin Richard had pressed into her hand. On it was the head of the Roman emperor Augustus, crowned with laurel. She groaned aloud. No good would come of this venture, she was sure.
‘He’s so damned hungry for gold,’ she declaimed to the world at large. ‘If the devil opened the doors of hell and held out a coin, my Richard would reach inside to snatch it from the fiend himself.’
She clenched the coin in her fist and hit herself on the mouth repeatedly with the back of her hand until the lips bled, to take her mind off the premonitory pain in her heart.
*
As the sounds and images from the past faded, Jay opened her eyes to find her father kneeling on the ground beside her.
‘Are you feeling better?’ he asked.
Jay looked from him to the worried faces of her mother and the guide. They were all strangers. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Where have the other people gone?’
Thinking that she meant the other visitors in the tour group, her father said, ‘We’re the last ones left.’
Jay pulled herself up to a sitting position. She knew now who he was. ‘What happened to me?’ she asked.
‘You fainted, that’s all.’ He smiled a professional smile to reassure the patient. ‘You fainted from the heat, Jay. Nothing to worry about.’
‘Oh no!’ Jay touched her lips which were swollen. There was a trace of blood on her finger. ‘I must have bruised my lips as I fell.’
‘Not possible,’ said her father. ‘You didn’t hit the ground. The guide caught you when you fell against him. There’s no way you could have bruised your lips.’
‘I have, I tell you!’ Jay’s voice rose in anguish. It was a flautist’s nightmare: she could feel her lips swelling as she touched them. ‘I won’t be able to play for days!’
Chapter 3
The old man plodded steadily onwards, upwards and away from the city of Beirut. He had deliberately kept away from the bomb-pitted highways along which sped jeeps full of armed men, choosing instead to use a network of old tracks remembered from his youth. Now he was following paths along which the Crusaders once had ridden and which had been trodden by Greek, Persian and Egyptian merchants a thousand years before the Roman legions marched that way.
He recalled riding along the same track on a mule when he was a boy. It was after an illness when he had been sent to the mountains to convalesce. The servants had been laughing as they walked alongside their young master, happy to escape the heat of summer in the city as they headed for the cool of the Chakrouty family’s mountain home. The sea breeze had carried to the boy’s ears the distant noises of the most prosperous city in the Middle East. Now as the old man climbed slowly upwards into the foothills, the sounds borne on the wind were of artillery belching from East Beirut answered by a salvo from West Beirut. A concrete apartment building split apart like a rotten fruit and subsided in clouds of dust. For no reason except boredom a sniper shot dead a woman who had left her shelter for one incautious moment in a search for water to give to the child clinging to her skirt. Then he shot the child.
From the south, a flight of Kfir fighter-bombers with Star of David markings screamed in low to drop their bombs precisely on a building vacated only ten minutes previously by Yasser Arafat. In the refugee camps Palestinian teenagers manned outdated, hand-cranked anti-aircraft guns which loosed off a few shells, more for morale than anything else. An obsolete Russian-built SAM 7 missile got lucky, swerving between the decoy flares that littered the sky with puffs of smoke. It detonated with a flash near one of the Israeli aircraft, which turned seaward, trailing smoke. A dot ejected but no parachute blossomed and both plane and dot were swallowed by the blue waters of the Mediterranean.
High in the hills above the city, the village of Tel el-Sultan had been a resort where the cosmopolitan rich of Beirut came to escape the hot weather of the coastal plain. It was now a pile of rubble, still smoking from the shells of the Syrian guns which had been turned on it when the PLO took possession the previous day. As the old man came in sight of the ruins, he was singing a song he had learned forty years before during another war: ‘It’s a long, long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go.’
His English accent was surprisingly good for an old man in Arab robes who looked like a beggar.
‘Halt! Where are you going, old father?’ The challenge stopped him in his tracks.
A group of young men and boys, some of them barely adolescent, surged through a break in a cactus hedge. Armed with Kalashnikov submachine guns, old rifles and knives, they surrounded him threateningly, bombarding him with questions, jostling and slapping him more from habit than intent to harm. He gave them his name and could see from their faces that it meant nothing, which told him that they were not from Beirut. Some had bloodstained bandages and dressings recently applied. By their accents he knew them for Palestinians.
‘Where is your respect for my age?’ he asked, but they only laughed.
He tried another question: ‘Where are you going, my sons?’
‘To kill the Jews and the Christians!’ A dark-eyed, curly-haired boy of twelve swung his loaded AK 47 in a wild arc, pretending to pull the trigger. ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’
The others laughed. ‘None of your business, old father,’ said the leader, who looked no more than twenty years old.
As they headed noisily in the direction of the city, excited at the prospect of combat, he stood and watched them go. The sun was getting hot and he had not much food and no water left, but he was nearly at the end of his journey. He gathered his strength and ignored the pains in his chest and the difficulty in breathing which had prompted him to come to Tel el-Sultan before it was too late.
Far below, in the city, Merlin Freeman lay on the filthy earthen floor of a cellar in one of the refugee camps that clustered around the periphery of Beirut like flies around the eye of a dead dog. For three months – it could have been longer, for he had soon lost count of the days and nights in the timeless dark – life had been the same alternation of hunger, thirst, fear and boredom. Now fear replaced boredom as the crump crump crump of explosions walked steadily nearer to his underground prison like the footsteps of a terrifying giant. He felt the nervous sweat start on his skin and shivered with the cold. The butt of a Kalashnikov beat on the cellar door and a voice shouted, ‘Prisoner, face the wall!’
Merlin was not a person. People had names. He was just The Prisoner. It was always: ‘Prisoner, do this!’ or ‘Prisoner, do that!’
Obediently he rolled over and faced the wall. His bed was one moth-eaten old blanket laid on the damp earth floor. Behind him, he heard the cellar door th
rown open. Anonymous hands thrust over his head a thick, foul-smelling black hood which made it difficult to breathe. A handcuff was snapped round the prisoner’s right wrist and ratcheted tight. The metal cut into the suppurating sores that made a bracelet of pain around his wrist. Merlin’s groan earned him a savage jerk on the chain as the other cuff was clicked onto a ring of iron sticking out of the wall.
The explosions were still coming nearer. Merlin could feel them pulsing through the ground and shaking his whole body. Through the open cellar door came the sound of shouting. Then a direct hit collapsed the building next door and literally blew away the ramshackle house above the cellar. The floor beneath Merlin’s thin blanket heaved like an animal turning over in its sleep and a tongue of fire curled through the cellar as the pressure wave of the explosion squeezed the breath out of his lungs. He thought he was dead until he remembered the hood and pulled it off with his free hand. To his surprise the other hand was free too, the handcuffs dangling from his wrist. The iron ring in the wall had been cut cleanly through by a piece of white-hot metal that had missed amputating his hand by less than a centimetre. It lay now smoking on the ground behind him.
He blinked at the daylight shining through a great hole in the floor of the house above. Lying beneath the hole was the crumpled body of the guard who had been handcuffing him when the shell landed. Half the man’s shirt was burnt off and the skin of his right shoulder looked like a well done steak.
Silence changed to a ringing in Merlin’s ears as his hearing returned. There were men moaning and a woman screaming not far away. Using muscles that were weak from disuse, he stood up and walked unsteadily to the hole. By standing on top of the inert body he could reach up far enough to see out. There were bodies lying everywhere. The light hurt his eyes. He squinted and reached up to grasp a metal reinforcement bar sticking out of a piece of smashed concrete. It was just out of reach. He panicked, then forced himself to think calmly. It was now or never; in a few moments somebody would come looking for him. He bent down to take the blood- stained headdress from the body on which he had been standing and wound it around his wrist to conceal the handcuff. Then he reached up, using the guard’s assault rifle, reversed, as a hook to pull himself up the ramp of rubble and out of the hole.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 2