At first Eleanor’s forays into the limbo of eternity were brief, lasting seconds or minutes at most. There, as in dreams and as the Egyptians had proven mathematically, she found that time was indeed elastic. Wherein lay a trap for the unwary: it would have been easy for a less strong will to stay overlong in these other realms and return to find the neglected physical body too soon dead. Only Yussef’s training and Eleanor’s strength of purpose averted this peril.
Stage by stage she mastered the arduous spiritual apprenticeship which Yussef had gleaned from the adepts of the mystic Books of the Dead in the temple of Ptah. Eleanor’s absences from the body grew longer, her sojourns in the flesh of less and less interest to her. The breakthrough came after four years of rigid discipline and application when she acquired the ability to draw vital energy from the living, necessary to sustain her spirit throughout the long wait in darkness that lay ahead. From that moment on, she could choose when to die and when to live again. Impatiently she began the physical preparations for her return and sent Yussef with William the Marshal and a handful of men at arms to sow far and wide the cryptic sirventès which would one day draw together the far-flung strands of her cosmic spider’s web.
Hovering between this life and the next, she retreated even within the abbey, rarely emerging from her own quarters except for a daily walk in the cloister for an hour or so after Mass. There she could always find a shaded seat out of the sun or a warm dry corner on a day of cloud or rain. The herb garden that occupied the garth in the centre of the arcades filled the air with perfume. With the aid of a cane, the old queen walked the gravel paths between low rectilinear hedges of thyme and sage and rosemary while two ladies-in-waiting followed at a discreet distance. There was a nun guarding each entrance to the cloister to ensure privacy.
On some days the pain in Eleanor’s joints would have kept in bed a less determined person but she insisted on rising in time for Mass and walking to the church. After the service she took exercise in the adjoining cloister. If movement was too painful, she would sit and rehearse long conversations she had had with kings and princes and popes now dead. There were whispers in the echoing corridors of the abbey that it was not just the queen’s limbs that were nearing death but that her mind was also failing. Only Yussef understood the reason for this so rapid decline. For days, then weeks and months during her spiritual retraining, Eleanor’s body had been to all intents and purposes dead. Her teacher had barred even her own serving woman from the queen’s apartments on the pretext that she was in retreat. To use the word thus amused him, for she was indeed in retreat from the flesh, but not praying. Her body lay unmoving in his care as her spirit roamed the first reaches of limbo to accustom itself by degrees to the greater immensity that lay beyond. It took all Yussef’s medical skills to keep the queen’s aged flesh alive as the spirit’s absences grew longer.
Eleanor walked in silence, her thoughts far away. The only noise was the hum of insects and the crunch of her feet on the gravel. Occasionally a bell rang or the sound of chanting reached the cloisters. She was near the end of her self-imposed exercise period when the silence was shattered by the sound of a mailed fist hammering the door which opened to admit two men into the cloister. Eleanor’s failing eyesight made out the figures of a monk and a knight.
Yussef greeted her in Langue d’Oc which he now spoke fluently. He slipped the cowl back from his head to reveal the balding dome, the long grey beard and the eyes that burned in his now cadaverously thin face. A respectful six paces from Eleanor, he touched his forehead in greeting Arab style while beside him William the Marshal stood bare-headed with his helmet under one arm.
Eleanor held out her hand. On it she still wore Richard’s ring, which each man kissed in turn.
‘How pleasant to have visitors who speak the language of my childhood,’ she said vaguely, unable to put a name to either face. ‘Come, sit beside me, both of you.’
She motioned to the ladies-in-waiting to place cushions on the sun-warmed stone.
‘I’ll stand,’ said William bluffly. He felt it more fitting in the presence of his queen.
Yussef sat beside her on the stone bench that ran around the cloister.
‘You’ve been remiss,’ she said, still lacking a name for him. ‘You should come and visit me more often.’
‘I’ve been with William the Marshal,’ Yussef spoke slowly, understanding her confusion. ‘Since Easter we’ve ridden the length and breadth of your domains, my queen.’
‘And are they at peace?’ she asked vaguely. ‘Is there peace in Aquitaine and Poitou?’
He muttered that there was peace. She nodded approvingly. ‘Henry would have been pleased. He liked peace. The taxes come in more easily, he said.’
Yussef was racked by a fit of coughing and spat on the ground. Blood stained the gravel at the queen’s feet. ‘It is time I travelled south to breathe kinder air, O queen, after all these years you’ve kept me locked up in a nun’s damp cell,’ he gasped. ‘My mission here is accomplished. The Marshal and I have ridden north and south and east and west throughout your domains. We have left carved on church and castle wall the sirventès which you and I wrote out together. We have secreted parchment copies in archives that will be handed safely down through the centuries. We have done all that can be done.’
He coughed again and spat. The behaviour was normal in a time that knew nothing of hygiene. Eleanor poked at the bloody sputum with her cane. She had no pity to spare for the man who had broken his health in her service.
‘I thought you would be quicker, Moor.’ The queen sounded petulant but her brain was alert enough to switch to Latin so that William could not follow. ‘At times, your magic was so slow I feared that death would scythe down both you and me before our plan could reach fruition.’
‘If I was slow, the fault is yours,’ Yussef defended himself. ‘By seeking to return in identical form, you trebled my work. You asked of me what no man has heretofore achieved. Not once in the three thousand years when the religion of the dead held sway in the land of the Nile is there mention of any physical resemblance with the past incarnation.’
There was nothing like argument to sharpen Eleanor’s wits and bring a flush to her withered cheek. ‘The pharaohs,’ she countered, ‘were a decadent and enfeebled species at the end of their line, while Henry and I founded a new and vigorous dynasty.’
She gestured at the nun standing by the doorway that led into the church. ‘You’ve seen the effigy on his tomb, Moor. It doesn’t do him justice.’ Eleanor smiled. Behind her rheumy eyes were images the Moor could not see. ‘Now there was a man! Henry had a prick like a stallion. I bore him seven children.’
She cackled. ‘If he hadn’t been king, busy with the affairs of state from dawn to dusk each day, he’d have peopled half Europe with his bastards! Oh, yes, with that stallion’s seed in my womb I know I have founded a dynasty so vital that one day the humours of my flesh will recur exactly in one of my descendants. In her body I shall live again.’
They sat in silence for several minutes before Eleanor roused herself. She looked at Yussef with piercing clear eyes. ‘Vale, serve fidelis,’ she said softly. Farewell thou faithful servant!
‘Stay!’ Yussef half rose. ‘Before you quit this flesh, remember that you promised me reward.’
Eleanor looked at him with a hint of the smile that made Yussef wish he had known her younger. ‘I promised you a bed of gold, so large that no part of you should touch the ground.’
‘What would I do with gold?’ Yussef studied the bright red blood on the gravel. He was using a small nugget of yellow metal as a worry bead, rolling it between his fingers. ‘From this small piece I can make all I need, Madam. In any case, like you I’ve little time to live. But I wish to die in a garden of orange and lemon trees, smelling the blossom and hearing the sound of my native tongue in my ears. The only reward I ask of you is safe conduct as far as the first Muslim kingdom across the Pyrenees. From there I’ll make my own way south an
d ask for nothing more.’
‘You may go,’ said the queen. ‘After I have left this flesh, I doubt a heathen wizard like you will find a patron in that half-witted son of mine who sits askew on England’s throne with so grotesque a lack of the aplomb his father had.’
‘I have one last favour to crave,’ the Moor asked hurriedly. ‘Give me William the Marshal as escort until I am safe in Muslim territory. He is an honourable man.’
Eleanor’s mood changed again as abruptly as before. ‘No, no,’ she said irritably. ‘I have decided to send Mercadier with you as escort. ‘Tis all arranged.’
‘I do not trust Mercadier,’ said Yussef bluntly. ‘He is an evil fellow, drunk or sober.’
‘He carries out my orders,’ said Eleanor. ‘Have no fear.’
‘Men fear the unknown,’ Yussef corrected her. ‘I did not say I fear him. But I’d be safer travelling alone than with such a brigand to keep me company.’
Eleanor’s patience was gone. ‘Choose. You can stay here coughing your lungs up for a few more months or leave with Mercadier. In either event, we shall not meet again.’ To her there was no point in prolonging this life when the future lay so enticingly ahead of her.
Yussef kissed the huge ring on the queen’s gloved hand. He knew that he would not die in a garden of lemons and oranges, yet he was a man at peace with himself, for he had solved the greatest problem a human brain had ever tackled. Eleanor’s dispositions were complex. His own, more modest, hinged upon a single tile fired in the nun’s cell which had served as his combined alchemist’s den, scholar’s library and workshop during the years he worked for her. That the tile had reached Granada safely, he knew from the Templar who had brought back his son’s ring as a token for payment; Templars would do anything for a bag of alchemist’s gold.
There was also the sirventès Yussef had given to Mercadier without Eleanor’s knowledge, but he placed no great hope in the mercenary captain returning so nebulous a favour by letting him go free.
Without any false pride, Yussef knew that he had designed for Eleanor what would later have been called a programme of genius. If into it he had injected some viruses, he considered that his legitimate prerogative; he had long foreseen that the metal with which he was about to be paid was not the promised bed of warm yellow gold but a single piece of steel, both sharp and cold.
Chapter 6
Jay realised that she had achieved something by her resistance when momentary flashes of vision reached her from the eyes of the woman standing in the church. She saw first the stones of the column, then a sunlit window and the pious effigy on the tomb as Eleanor turned her head. She sensed the former queen’s surprise at the alterations in the architecture since the twelfth century and the trenches dug by the archaeologists – a surprise swiftly overcome as Eleanor realised there must have been many changes.
There was an asthmatic wheeze and a groan as Eleanor heaved a deep draught of air into her lungs. Then came an orgasmic ripple of pleasure that spread through the whole body as she raised her face to the sunlight pouring in through a window and cried in Latin: ‘Vivo atque senso!’ I live and feel again.
She raised her hands to explore her face, Jay’s face: the lips, the nose, the eyes, the formation of the bones. Her fingers found no wrinkles. She lowered her hands to feel firm breasts and a flat belly. A once familiar dull pain in the lower abdomen made her cry out with joy: ‘I have the menses! I am young again!’
She felt Jay’s will fighting for possession of her skin, her eyes, her hands. But Yussef’s training had foreseen this. It was for this final confrontation that Jay had been progressively bled of her energy. With one last huge effort, Eleanor summoned all the vitality she had stolen and used it to shrug away into the void the mind which had inhabited the body that was to be hers.
Jay felt bruised and torn, as though the trillion synapses within the soft matter of her brain that made up her thoughts and feelings, her very identity and personality, had been squeezed between sharp claws, pried loose from her skull and thrust into the whirling, timeless limbo of space. It would have been so peaceful to let go and become nothing, but still she fought back.
As the form of the sunlit window receded to a dot of light in the blackness, she strained towards another pinpoint, which grew and resolved into a face. It was Merlin, sitting at the wheel of Leila’s car, she laughing and saying: ‘Ghosts? I don’t believe in them.’ And Merlin, staring into the void so intensely that Jay was sure he could see her, saying: ‘I’ve just remembered where I saw Jay before that day she came running along the tow-path.’
The anguish in his voice reached out to her.
‘Merlin!’ Jay cried as his face shrank to a dot and then disappeared completely. Despairingly she fought her way back to him. There was an untimeable moment when the combat with Eleanor’s spirit was almost like an embrace, when Jay’s mind picked up Eleanor’s flash of pride that this descendant of hers was no spiritual weakling but a worthy opponent. She understood in that second that Eleanor’s thefts of energy were not a recent thing. They predated Canterbury and even Chinon. They had been going on since long before the day Jay was born. As a child she had often awoken screaming in the night, to find her mother trying to calm her. It had always been the same nightmare, a creature immensely old and alien coming in the dark hours to crouch over the bed and suck something precious from her. But the terrified child could not put that into words when her mother said, ‘You had another bad dream. It’s all right now, Jay. You can go back to sleep. I’ll leave the light on.’
The little girl had wanted to scream, ‘It’s not all right. It’s all wrong!’ But the anguished wisdom of the young told her that there was no way of explaining such things to a grown-up.
Now Jay knew how Eleanor had sustained herself throughout eight centuries. Like a spiritual vampire, she had come in the night to suck not blood but their very life force from her living descendants, generation after generation. The knowledge accounted for so many things. All her life, Jay had felt – she groped for images – not hollow exactly but incomplete, that was the word! Except for once. Just once, she had been whole. When Merlin held her in his arms and together they wept at the beauty of rain drops sparkling in the sunshine, she had been whole, made whole by him. Was that what true love was: the power to make someone whole, healed, healthy?
‘Oh, Merlin!’ she cried. ‘Help me, Merlin.’
*
Eleanor took two experimental paces, one hand holding the column for support. The centuries she had spent in limbo were as seconds to her now. She wondered why was it so extraordinarily hard to co ordinate the muscles of Jay’s body. Of course, the answer was obvious! The body she remembered had been old and shrunken and bent, while Jay’s was taller by several inches than Eleanor had been even in her prime. The difference in height made Eleanor feel as though she was toppling over. The soft-soled trainer shoes on her feet did not help; they gave no purchase by which to steady herself. She thought of a stick to lean on and then forbade herself any such idea, forcing one foot and then the other to support her.
Patience, she cautioned herself. It was as the Moor had warned: there were the seeds of madness in this experience of feeling through another’s skin, looking out through her eyes and hearing with her ears. Sensations once taken for granted were lacking; a million new ones kept hammering insistently at her consciousness, leading to nausea and dizziness.
Panic threatened as Eleanor felt Jay’s chest muscles pumping air into her lungs. They were the expanded lungs of a flute player, so filling them with oxygen made her more dizzy, not less. She forced herself to breathe shallowly until her vision cleared.
The body shivered. Why? I’m cold, she thought, that’s all. No need for fear. Just take everything as it comes. It took every ounce of Eleanor’s will to fight the desire to relax control of a thousand rebellious muscles and simply collapse on the planking beneath her feet. Instead, clutching the hand-rail for support, she progressed several agonizing paces a
long the walkway into a patch of sunlight before stopping to work out what to do next. Here the sun was warm on her cheek.
What, she wondered, is the language people now speak at Fontevraud? Was Latin still the international tongue among educated folk? But supposing she had come back to earth during another Dark Age, to find the world populated by brutish peasantry with no lingua franca, what then?
Beneath the walkway was her own effigy on the tomb, flanked by those of Richard and Henry. Ever vain, Eleanor was pleased that whoever made her death mask had been kind enough to smooth out the wrinkles in the face. She had been so proud of those long tapering fingers faithfully reproduced by the long dead sculptor. She looked more closely at the hands of her new body. They were the same, but bare of rings.
She touched again her neck and hair. Nothing, not so much as an earring or a necklace. So, this unknown descendant of hers whose body she now inhabited had worn no jewellery with which to buy service in an emergency. That was a small problem she had not anticipated; in her other life she had never, from the cradle onwards, been without a bauble or two with which to bribe or buy service. Eleanor felt in the pockets of the unfamiliar garments but found nothing of value as far as she could tell. So how, she wondered, would she find servants to look after her immediate needs? Suppose the Moor had not accomplished everything he promised?
In one pocket of the anorak Eleanor found a powder compact. She flicked the lid open to gaze at her reflection in the mirror for a long moment. The face in the glass was the exact match of the portrait Henry had commissioned on their wedding day. She smiled at herself, admiring the perfect teeth and the lips that the randy Count of Anjou had so lusted to kiss. But Henry was just an effigy in stone she could reach out and touch, if she chose, while she was alive. Nothing else mattered.
Another wave of nausea threatened to drag Eleanor down into the trench. She put away the compact, gripped the hand-rail more firmly and focused her eyes on one of the stained-glass windows above the altar. As her sense of balance returned, she smiled at the irony of falling off some scaffolding to injury or death in the very moment of rebirth.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 29