‘I have been looking everywhere for you.’
Eleanor turned at the sound of Kreuz’s voice echoing along the nave. The language he spoke was unfamiliar, but the timbre of the voice was unmistakably Mercadier’s. She stood in the pool of sunlight and sighed with relief at the sight of the man coming towards her.
I’ll offer masses for your soul, Moor, she promised. You did your work well.
‘Mercadier,’ she said. ‘Serve fidelis, adveni!’
Kreuz halted in mid stride at the sound of spoken Latin. It was not just the language but the tone in which Eleanor had spoken …
‘Miss French?’ he queried.
‘Adveni!’ Eleanor ordered again, holding out her right hand for him to kiss.
Kreuz walked slowly up to her. He ignored the outstretched hand, noting the way the woman in front of him held herself. There was something different about the eyes and the voice was more peremptory.
Eleanor recalled Yussef’s words, ‘An evil fellow, drunk or sober.’ But this Mercadier walking into sunlight was thinner and had none of the low-browed cunning written so plainly on his ancestor’s features. He looked an educated man to her. A priest perhaps? Suffice it that he resembled his ancestor enough for her to recognise him.
‘Alianor regina sum,’ she said slowly. Would he understand Latin, this descendant of Mercadier, or should she try Langue d’Oc? And what would she do, if he spoke neither tongue?
A huge excitement swelled in Kreuz’s chest and a matching smile spread over his thin features. At the very moment for which he had planned so long, his Latin deserted him from sheer excitement. Then he flushed and stammered, ‘Mater Ricardi regis atque sponsa Henrici es?’
‘Et tu,’ Eleanor felt an immense relief, ‘filius servi mei nomine Mercadier es.’
Kreuz fell to his knees. The genuflexion was instinctive; it seemed natural to kneel in front of this woman and kiss the imperious hand. ‘So, my queen,’ he said in Latin. ‘You have come back.’
A half-smile of satisfaction floated on Eleanor’s face for an instant as she took stock of her situation. She was young and beautiful! She had a servant and a language in which to converse with him! Yussef could not have arranged a better beginning to her second span on earth. ‘Are you to serve me in this life as your ancestor did before?’ she asked.
A loud laugh escaped Kreuz’s mouth, startling the queen. ‘Where is your respect?’ she chided him. ‘I asked a question and you did not reply.’
Kreuz stood up and peals of laughter echoed round the church. He clutched the hand rail for support and laughed until tears ran down his face. He was almost hysterical with a sense of his own power: all that he had planned over the years was going to be possible, once he had traded with Eleanor for the knowledge which she had. He forced himself to calm down and wiped the tears from his eyes. ‘We live in an age devoid of respect for greatness, lady. You will see.’
‘No respect for greatness?’ Eleanor wondered. ‘What then do men worship now?’
‘Possessions.’
‘It was Eleanor’s turn to be amused. ‘Well, that was ever so, son-of-Mercadier, for thus I think of you: as fitz Mercadier. In truth, man’s nature does not change. The provisions I have made for my return depend on it. But what else is new?’
‘Machines.’
‘We had machines.’
‘Outside,’ he said, ‘I have a machine that will transport you with the power of a hundred horses.’
Eleanor laughed at the idea of riding a hundred horses at one time. ‘Surely one’s enough? Even Henry Plantagenet never exhausted more than five or six mounts in a day and, God knows, he rode them hard. What are you, fitz Mercadier? A soldier, like your forebear?’
‘I am a scholar,’ said Kreuz. ‘And you must understand from the outset that I also have a great destiny to fulfil. We are equals, you and I. You need me as much as I need you.’
Some things will never change, thought Eleanor. Here I am, scarcely back from eternity, and already a servant is haggling with me over his reward.
‘Speak on,’ she ordered. ‘Tell me, fitz Mercadier, what’s your price?’
Kreuz’s hands were outstretched as though he would touch her but dared not. They hovered just short of her body. His cold blue eyes were wide and staring.
‘The gold,’ he stammered. ‘I don’t want any part of the treasure of Châlus.’
Eleanor laughed. ‘From the mouth of a Mercadier, that surprises me.’
‘Yet it’s true.’ He spoke eagerly. ‘I’ll help you recover the gold. All I want in return is knowledge.’
He told her where the treasure was hidden, which made Eleanor wary. Kreuz’s hands were trembling. His lips were dry but spittle ran from one corner of his mouth down his chin. His usual coherence deserted him, making him stammer.
Dear God, Eleanor asked herself, have I survived death and rebirth, only to find myself at the mercy of a babbling madman? She turned at the sound of the party of diggers returning, talking loudly among themselves after a good lunch.
‘Who are these people?’ she asked haughtily. The effort of talking had tired her. ‘And why are they digging up my church, fitz Mercadier?’
‘We must leave here,’ said Kreuz, finding his voice at last.
‘He took several deep breaths, forcing himself to calm down. ‘Talk to no one,’ he counselled her, ‘and rely on me.’
He held out an arm, to lead her outside. Eleanor did not take it. The smile on her face was replaced by an expression of sheer terror. She stood unable to move, clutching the railing with a hand that trembled visibly. The muscles of the body that had given her such exquisite pleasure so shortly before now refused the brain’s commands. She felt herself falling and could do nothing about it.
‘Oh, fitz Mercadier,’ she said in a voice that betrayed her fear, ‘I cannot move hand or foot!’
Chapter 7
No way, Merlin told himself. Except for her instruments, that car is Jay’s proudest possession. She’d never leave it unlocked in a strange town, with the keys in the ignition. He sat brooding at a cafe table, his fingers toying with her bunch of keys as he watched the rain slant down on the cobbles of Fontevraud’s market square in which the gleaming red Alpine looked forlornly out of place.
Leila’s ancient deux chevaux crouched sheepishly at the next parking meter. Her tour of the town’s few hotels had been as fruitless as Merlin’s search of the abbey, where the only suggestion that Jay had been there was a prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck when he stood by Eleanor’s tomb, like an echo of what he had felt in Chartres cathedral. That something had happened to Jay right there, Merlin was certain.
At the rear of the café, a group of young people in anoraks were playing billiards and using the juke box. Leila returned from the toilets with one of them in tow: a plain-faced, bespectacled girl of eighteen. ‘This is Elise,’ she announced. ‘She’s an archaeology student, working on the dig in the abbey church.’
Merlin waited.
‘Tell the man what you saw,’ Leila prompted.
‘En anglais ou en français?’
‘In English, if you can. He doesn’t speak much French.’
Elise hesitated, then the words came out in a rush. ‘It is just after the lunch-break. Is that how you say?’ She got a nod from Leila and continued. ‘There is this lady. Not a lady. I mean she is a girl not much older than I. She is in the church with a gentleman.’
‘What colour was her hair?’ Merlin glanced at his watch. Five hours had elapsed since the time the girl was talking about.
‘Blonde,’ said Elise. ‘She is standing in a place of sunlight, yes? And she has long blond hair.’
‘Dis à mon copain ce qui est arrivé,’ prompted Leila.
‘In English, please,’ said Merlin.
‘Well, the blonde lady, she falls.’
‘Was she hurt?’
‘No, the gentleman with her helps her to stand. He calls down to us in the trench that she … Comment
dit-on qu’elle s’évanouit?’
‘She’s fainting,’ translated Leila.
‘So I and another girl climb up to help her, while the gentleman goes to get some friends.’
‘What kind of friends?’ asked Merlin.
‘Le monsieur est allemand. He is German and he comes back with two other German peoples – a man and a woman. They help the lady who is fainting. They have to carry her because she cannot walk.’
That explained the car being abandoned, thought Merlin. ‘During the time you were alone with her, did she say anything, the blonde lady?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
A shake of the head. ‘She look very ill, I think. She don’t talk to us but …’ The girl gave up and relapsed into a torrent of French.
‘What was all that?’ Merlin asked.
Leila looked from him to the girl and back. ‘Well,’ she hesitated, ‘Elise says that she did hear Jay talking with the monsieur allemand, i.e. Kreuz.’
‘What were they saying? Can she remember?’
Leila shook her head. ‘She’s a bit confused about this.’
‘About what?’ Merlin’s linguistic frustration caused him to raise his voice.
‘Calm down,’ Leila counselled. ‘If you start shouting, you’ll frighten the girl.’ And to Elise she said, ‘Go on, tell my friend what you told me. Take your time.’
Elise played with her spectacles nervously. ‘It sound so stupid, but you see, I am taking classical studies for my baccalauréat. Well, this lady and gentleman, I am sure they are talking in Latin.’ The girl looked from Leila to Merlin. She shrugged, ‘I could be wrong. Maybe they are speaking Italian or Portuguese. Is possible.’
‘Did you catch what they said?’ Leila asked.
The girl shook her head. ‘No. I was so surprised to hear Latin and they talk so fast.’
‘Okay,’ Merlin cut in. ‘You’ve been a great help.’ He took a hundred-franc note from his wallet and pressed it into the girl’s hand.
‘Are you a detective?’ she asked.
‘No.’ Merlin had often been asked. ‘The blonde lady is a friend, that’s all.’
Elise looked excited. She handed the note back and turned to Leila, to ask her in French: ‘He is her lover, is he not?’
‘Yes.’
The plain round face behind the glasses lit up with joy. ‘How beautiful!’ sighed the girl. ‘He is pursuing his true love who has been stolen by le monsieur allemand. It is so romantic!’
*
Eleanor lay face down on a solid oak table. Cushioned by several layers of furs, it made a good massage bench. There had been a moment when her spirit almost failed as Kreuz’s bodyguard and his blonde companion carried her out of the church, unable to move a muscle to help herself. Fortunately Kreuz had foreseen the possibility and brought along his personal masseuse from the Valley of Songs. The girl knew her job; as her skilled fingers probed and dug, control of the paralysed muscles was restored and the fear which Eleanor had felt in the church began to ebb – the awful fear that for whatever reason this flesh would refuse the commands of her spirit.
As a queen, she had been used to female servants dressing and undressing her, but it was strange to have a man watching her naked. Twice she had told Kreuz to leave her presence but he had refused, saying that he had much to tell her which could not wait.
‘After all, I am a doctor,’ he had said.
The joke was lost on Eleanor; to her the word had only its Latin meaning: a learned person. Otherwise Kreuz’s usage of the Roman tongue was stilted but they could understand each other well enough. Eleanor flexed her fingers, enjoying the feel of suppleness returning to Jay’s muscles and joints as she listened to fitz Mercadier’s babbling about this plan of his he wanted to tell her about.
‘The age in which I live was not ripe for our magnificent dream, lady. Imperium mil annorum, we called it: the Thousand Year Reich! We wanted to build a society of excellence that should have lasted a millennium and changed the course of mankind’s evolution.’
‘So what went wrong?’ she asked, to humour him.
‘We lost a war.’
‘And that’s new?’ Eleanor mocked him. ‘It was ever thus with great designs, O fitz Mercadier. You lose a war, you bide your time, you make new alliances, you start again.’
‘This was total war,’ Kreuz argued. ‘A hundred million died. We were defeated not by men of valour but by base people and their machines. It was the cult of the common man that foiled us.’
‘And has the common man machines like the one in which you brought me here?’ she wondered.
He laughed at her ignorance. ‘Wars are now fought with engines that are many thousand times more powerful than my automobile. We have flying machines that drop fiery engines capable of destroying whole cities like that.’ He snapped his fingers.
‘Truly?’ Eleanor toyed with the thought. Total war was an interesting concept. Richard would have liked to be alive in this new age, she thought. Given these wonderful engines of war, he would have conquered the world or destroyed it in the process.
Oh, Richard! She closed her eyes and could picture him still with a pain that was a fresh as the day he died in the hovel below Châlus Castle.
Most beautiful of men! she said to his image. Would that I had sought out the Moor while you yet lived, to weave his spells and bend his wisdom in both our service so that we could have come back to life together. They had shared so many wonderful times. She had taught her favourite son music and poetry and he had rewarded her adoration by excelling the troubadours at both arts. In return he had taught her the rudiments of manly skills, taking her hawking and teaching her to hold a sword and use a long bow and shoot one of the new-fangled crossbows, like the one that had taken his life. He had once halted the fall of a besieged castle simply to bring Eleanor there so that she could share his boyish glee as Mercadier’s siege engine demolished the outer wall and brought a tower tumbling down in a confusion of stone and broken bodies.
Kreuz was striding around the chamber, gesticulating as he spoke. ‘Now machines and baseness rule men’s lives. All that is mean and ugly is lifted up. The lowest is exalted and all the excellence of mankind is devalued. Thus our great dream of a new society will not now be achieved even in my extended lifetime. It will be centuries before the time is ripe again. And when that time comes, we must not make the same errors. The knowledge I have accumulated from my study of Greece and Rome and Egypt must be available for the new Leader …’ He used dux imperatorque to translate Führer. ‘… when our time comes again.’
Eleanor tried to follow his meaning. ‘Who is this new leader?’ she asked, flexing an arm. The blonde masseuse gave a professional smile and started working on her other side.
‘He’s not yet born,’ said Kreuz, ‘and may not be for centuries to come.’ Even to Eleanor, he was still unwilling to reveal his ultimate ambition.
‘You talk in mysteries, fitz Mercadier,’ yawned Eleanor. ‘You say you’re a scholar. If so, then write a book which this unborn Messiah can read. Isn’t that what scholars do?’
‘Books get lost,’ said Kreuz, ‘and messages fail to be understood. How many clues did you leave, O Queen? Of those only a handful survived the passage of eight centuries. No, no, no! I must return to earth in person as you have done, in the body of a descendant. You were right; it is the only certain way.’
He waved an arm around the quarters he had prepared for her. ‘So, this is the bargain I propose: everything you need, I have prepared for you. In return, you must tell me all that you learned from your servant Yussef the Moor, so that I can do as you have.’
He’s clever or mad, thought Eleanor warily. Perhaps both. To distract Kreuz, as the masseuse moved her onto her back, she parted her legs slightly.
‘I had many children,’ said the queen. She saw Kreuz’s eyes fasten hungrily on her breasts and pubic hair. ‘When I died, I knew that among the dynasties they founded I should fin
d a suitable body in which to be reborn.’
Kreuz sniggered as the masseuse spread a towel over Eleanor’s loins. ‘For the last ten years,’ he said slyly, ‘ever since I was certain what you and the Moor had planned, I have begotten four children every twelvemonth. They are raised in my homeland until the age of five and then adopted by rich and powerful families all over the world. Since I intend to live for at least another three decades and shall continue to procreate at the same rate, my available pool of descendants will be many times greater than yours.’
He came close to the table and ran a trembling hand over Eleanor’s firm breasts ‘Now, if one of them were to be your seed mingled with mine … If we were to beget a child, now that would be a union of genes to make the world tremble!’
The arrogance of the man! thought Eleanor. She would have slapped him if all her muscles were under her control. Instead she closed her eyes, wishing he would leave her alone. When I take a lover, she promised her new body, he’ll be of noble lineage, not some crazed descendant of a mercenary captain.
But for the moment she needed Kreuz. She had to admit that the provisions he had made were excellent. Apart from the modern clothes which she had to get used to wearing, he had equipped this refuge to which she had been brought exclusively with replica furniture and genuine artefacts of the twelfth century. It was a place where she could feel at ease and gather her strength, where none of the startling sights she had seen on the journey from Fontevraud could intrude and disturb until she was ready to handle them. From the pine-resin torches on the stone walls that provided the only lighting, to the crude oaken furniture and the huge log fire in the open fireplace, everything was familiar to her. The dishes off which she had been fed could have come from her own apartments in the Boissy tower at Chinon. The food prepared by Kreuz himself had been exactly what she would have eaten eight hundred years before.
Yes, she had to humour him, but also to put him off his guard by pretending that the adjustment to her new body was more difficult than it really was, thus feeding his sense of power over her. Once she had complete control over Jay’s reluctant nerves and muscles, she planned to act fast to recover the gold and then master whatever new languages were necessary. At that point her need of the man she called fitz Mercadier would be over and she could get rid of him without a qualm. Eleanor had no intention of becoming Kreuz’s prisoner as once she had been Henry’s.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 30