‘Oh, thanks.’
‘Scene two opens. Enter a Lebanese who’s mixed up with another Arab pretending to be a French gangster. They’ve got some kind of crooked deal going, but I don’t see why they chose a place like this in which to consummate it.’
‘Not Salem,’ Leila smiled. ‘He wouldn’t be mixed up in anything dishonest.’
Merlin stubbed out the cigarette in her ashtray. ‘I know that throaty, purring voice. Leila, my dear, you are in love again.’
Leila stretched luxuriously on the pillows. ‘I can’t help it, Merl. It’s the way I am.’
‘In case you’ve forgotten, we’re here trying to help Jay.’
‘Relax!’ Leila’s hand patted Merlin’s knee. ‘Salem is the most gorgeous man I’ve met in a long time but he’s leaving in the morning, so it won’t come to anything.’
‘They all are the most gorgeous men, at the time.’
‘Salem is different. I just know it here.’ Leila placed her hand on the bed clothes above her heart. ‘I’m as worried about Jay as you are, but what’s that got to do with the way I feel about this man?’
‘Nothing,’ Merlin sighed. ‘You’re right.’
‘What woke you up?’ she asked. ‘Or couldn’t you sleep?’
‘I had a dream.’
‘What about?’
‘I don’t remember,’ he lied.
But he did and, thanks to Jay, it was all so clear.
*
At Chassenon, Merlin stopped Leila’s car on the track leading to the ruins. Creaking on its rusty suspension, the deux chevaux rolled back on the slight incline. He ignored her instructions to wedge an old shoe beneath the handbrake and left Leila to immobilise the vehicle after her own fashion while he walked towards what remained of the baths.
Halfway there, he stopped in his tracks. This was what people meant by having a déjà vu. He had been here before! In the dream the ground level had been lower and the ruined walls and arches much higher. Where the modern road ran, Roman flags lay concealed beneath the surface, he knew. In front of him stood the remains of the domed vault of the caldarium or hot bath, built of solid Roman concrete which defied the centuries.
A small notice by the gate advised that the site was closed until Easter. There was no sign of a guide or custodian, so Merlin crawled under the wire fence where some sheep had pushed through to get at the lush grass inside the enclosure. They scattered in front of him as he walked towards the archway where he had stood sentry while Joanna and Eleanor screamed at each other.
‘No!’ Merlin voiced the thought, stopping in mid pace to light a cigarette.
Leila was sitting on the bonnet of the deux chevaux with her arms crossed in front of her. ‘What’s up?’ she called.
Merlin made a gesture: nothing.
He sat on the stump of a broken column with his back to her and thought: I refuse to get dragged into this spider’s web. Wherever the memories in that dream came from, I’m still me. I am not, repeat not, the reincarnation of someone else. And yet he knew where the gold was, as certainly as though he had put it there himself the previous night.
Merlin finished the cigarette and walked into the caldarium. The floor which, in the dream, had been deep in cow dung was now clean. A few vestiges of mosaic showed here and there, the rest filled in with cement, on which lines had been scored to show where the design was missing. On the exact spot where the coffin had stood, he looked around. On his right had been Milo’s makeshift altar and there, behind a wall of tiles, was the leaden cistern where Eleanor and William the Marshal had secreted the gold that had cost Richard’s life. They had plastered dirt from the floor to conceal their work and left it to the centuries to do the rest of the work, so that now the false wall looked as solid as the rest of the building.
Merlin threw down his cigarette end and walked outside. There were some tools in a wheelbarrow beside the ticket office at the gate of the site. He debated whether to break through the wall there and then, but decided against it. The treasure was the lure which would bring Eleanor sooner or later to this place. Put another way, it was the lure that would bring Kreuz here with Jay. What the hell was he going to do then? Suppose he walked up to them and said, ‘Jay, I’ve come to rescue you.’ And what if she said, ‘Go away.’ What then? He couldn’t compel her to leave Kreuz and come with him.
In the grey daylight the plan that had seemed so obvious after his dream was either preposterous or illegal. And yet, standing alone among the ruins, watched by the chewing sheep and by Leila still sitting on the bonnet of the car, Merlin knew that Eleanor would be there soon. There was no point in trying to find where Kreuz had taken her. All he had to do was to wait at Chassenon and they would come to him.
But how long would he have to wait? Not long, he decided. Because Eleanor was a woman who had never liked wasting time.
*
Kreuz was wearing his hooded cloak, in keeping with the medieval furnishings. The only incongruously modern note in the room was Eleanor herself. She had changed her clothes three times that morning, ignoring Kreuz’s presence. Now she was studying herself in the polished bronze hand-mirror. From Jay’s available wardrobe she liked best the effect of jeans, a man’s shirt and a thin anorak, clothes which gave her a freedom she had never known before. Wearing her hair unbraided and unconfined by wimple was another pleasure.
‘Do you play chess?’ she asked.
Kreuz looked at Eleanor as though she were mad.
‘Well, do you?’ she asked sharply.
‘Games are a waste of time.’
‘A pity,’ she said. ‘It would pass the time agreeably.’
After a good night’s sleep, a hot bath and another massage, all traces of the hysterical paralysis had gone. She felt ready in body and mind to leave this sanctuary that Kreuz had prepared for her and begin her exploration of the new world outside. The problem of learning the right language did not bother her; she had spoken both Langue d’Oc and the northern French tongue fluently, as well as English, Latin and some Arabic, so she was confident of picking up any language swiftly. She had travelled many times to far countries with customs different from her own and enjoyed every experience of her life, except being locked up. She was now ready to tackle the exciting prospect of life in the twentieth century.
Twice Eleanor had proposed a visit to the nearest town and twice Kreuz had refused. It was time to show him who was mistress and who the servant. ‘If you were a chess-player,’ she added, ‘you would understand what stalemate means.’
‘I understand the term,’ he said. ‘It’s a common enough metaphor.’
‘Good.’ Eleanor smiled and sat down beside him. ‘In that case, fitz Mercadier, you will know that one of us must give way. I shall not tell you what you want to know before I have in my hands the treasure of Châlus. You say that you will not help me recover it before I have told you. That is a stalemate.’
‘And how do we break it?’
She smiled, ‘You give way.’
‘I?’ Kreuz raised an eyebrow. ‘Why not you?’
Eleanor stroked her long fingers. She remembered them as old and knobbly with arthritis. Now they were smooth and beautiful. It was a pity that this descendant of Mercadier’s was not someone younger and of noble blood with whom she could have passed the day in unemotional carnal pleasure. She put the thought away. ‘I have already waited many generations for what I want,’ she said, ‘and I can wait more if necessary. Oh, I’d rather not, but I can. You, on the other hand, will be dead within a few years. And, as I found out with poor Richard, once you’re dead, no one can bring you back. The work must begin long before then. So you have no choice.’
Eleanor took a deep breath. This young woman’s body would give her much pleasure, she was sure, but how wonderful that her mind was still her own. Henry himself, she thought, couldn’t have played that stroke more neatly.
‘You’re right,’ admitted Krcuz. There was no point in arguing.
‘Of course I a
m,’ said Eleanor. ‘Tonight we shall recover the material provisions I have made for this new life. Perhaps we shall visit a town beforehand, I haven’t decided yet. But first, let us pass an hour or so in music. Do you know a song that Richard wrote in captivity: Ja nus hons pris? You take the tenor part and I’ll play soprano.’
*
The Renault 25 was parked in a clump of trees, half a mile from the ruins. Kassim shaded his eyes. There had been no time to replace the binoculars lost when he was attacked by the Dobermans, but he could see Merlin well enough at that distance and wished that he had a longer-range weapon than the Uzi. With a sniper rifle he could have killed the American with one shot at that range. He watched the man who had been his prisoner amble round the site, head down and deep in thought.
‘What are they doing?’ asked Salem from inside the car.
‘Waiting,’ said Kassim. ‘It looks like a rendezvous of some sort.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We wait too.’
After a while, Kassim added, ‘In Fontevraud last night, while you were so obsessed with the Jew woman, I was making enquiries. They told me in the town that this Queen Alianor lived eight hundred years ago. There is a legend that she buried a treasure somewhere in these parts.’
‘So? There are legends like that, all over the world.’
‘The tile of Yussef el-Kebir has been in our family’s possession for forty generations, or so you told me. That matches: forty generations equal eight centuries, more or less. So this Queen Eleanor or Alianor was the person who cheated our ancestor, my brother! The treasure she buried must have been his due and is now ours.’
The tables have turned, thought Salem. To begin with it was me pretending to believe what was on the tile; now it is Kassim who does believe, with the same fanaticism as he holds all his other beliefs.
‘How can she pay a debt,’ he asked, ‘if she’s been dead so long?’
‘Everything will come to pass as written, my brother. I think that whoever the American is meeting here is going to pay us this long overdue debt.’ Kassim stared at the two distant figures by the ruins. If the treasure lay somewhere on the site, no one was going to risk digging it up in daylight. So he would keep his distance, wait if necessary all day and creep closer as soon as it grew dark. Then the Uzi would come into its own. He opened the boot of the car, lifted out the brief case containing the weapon and fitted it together. Even with the silencer screwed onto the muzzle, with the stock folded it was a weapon easily concealable beneath a loose coat or anorak. On hearing the click of the magazine being rammed home, Salem got out of the car. He looked with horror at his brother holding the short, ugly weapon across his chest.
Unsmilingly Kassim said, ‘I did not tell you about this, because you would not understand.’
Salem’s face was pale. ‘You are right that I would not understand,’ he muttered. ‘We are not in Lebanon now. The time of killing is past.’
He reached for the Uzi. ‘Give that thing to me.’
Kassim thumbed the fire selector and stepped back to keep a constant distance between them. ‘Keep away,’ he ordered coldly. The Uzi was pointing at Salem’s belly. ‘This weapon is nothing to do with you.’
‘Of course it is to do with me,’ he said slowly. ‘You are my brother, Kassim. If you kill someone in France, you will go to gaol. I cannot allow that.’
‘They will never catch me,’ Kassim sneered.
Salem took a step forward. His brother’s face was now white with tension. His eyes glittered and his teeth were clenched. ‘One more step and you die!’ he promised.
Salem hesitated. Would Kassim pull the trigger? The message in the fanatical, staring eyes, was yes. He groaned inarticulately and turned away.
Kassim felt a thrill of power course through his veins. Since leaving the Beka’a Valley he had missed the stature conferred on him by a loaded weapon in his hands. The feel of the Uzi and the look of horror on Salem’s face made him feel strong and authoritative once again.
‘Your job,’ he ordered his brother brusquely, ‘is to drive the car. Nothing more. The rest you leave to me. Is that clear?’
Salem found his voice at last. ‘And if I refuse?’
‘Then I shall kill you.’ Kassim was looking right through Salem as he spoke.
‘You will kill me?’ Salem wondered aloud. ‘Your own brother? Just to get your hands on some gold?’
‘The gold is nothing,’ Kassim sneered. ‘It is a means to an end, no more.’
Salem subsided weakly back on the passenger seat, his feet still on the ground outside the car. He felt ill at what was happening. ‘What kind of man have you become, my brother?’ he asked rhetorically.
‘I am not your brother,’ said Kassim harshly. ‘Your father is not mine, for my father is the jihad. I am its sworn son and have no brothers except my comrades in the struggle. As it is written that a father must be obeyed, so I shall kill you, if necessary to safeguard my mission.’
Chapter 11
Kreuz had assumed that Eleanor was bound to be disorientated for days or even weeks. During the time she was a helpless prisoner in his power, he had thought to plunder the esoteric knowledge she had acquired from Yussef El-Kebir. It did not work like that. After waking from a good night’s rest, she seemed in full possession of her faculties and as capricious as any queen had ever been, changing her clothes and altering her make-up, ordering the driver and masseuse about despite an almost nonexistent common vocabulary, and throwing questions at Kreuz in Latin about every subject under the sun.
He understood, as he never had from all his research, the hell that had been the life of a medieval courtier, literally at beck and call both day and night. Halfway through the afternoon Eleanor ordered him to take her for a drive so that she could begin to familiarise herself with things modern. Only with great difficulty did he dissuade her from taking the wheel herself, so excited was she by what she called ‘the new machines’. Eleanor’s confidence in herself grew by the minute, the fears of yesterday at Fontevraud forgotten the moment she discovered that by using rather than fighting Jay’s neuro-muscular patterns she could operate zip fasteners, a slot machine, a radio, and even something as complex as a car with automatic transmission.
At the railway station she made Kreuz explain to her how trains worked and television functioned, about the telephone system, the postal service, and all the cosmetics displayed in a pharmacy window. She bombarded him with a constant stream of questions that fed her insatiable curiosity. At the same time, her gift for languages was allowing her to build up a reasonable working vocabulary of modern French. In a hardware shop she insisted on dealing with the salesman herself in pidgin French, buying a hammer and chisel, a spade, sacks and torches. In a bar next to the store, some teenagers were dancing to a video clip. Eleanor was fascinated. She made Kreuz buy her a huge, succulent hamburger in a fast-food restaurant, mocking his vegetarianism, which she called ‘the diet of peasants’.
Then she had taken the wheel of his car and, thanks to the automatic transmission, driven far too fast northwards to Chassenon. With difficulty Kreuz persuaded Eleanor to slow down through towns but her excitement as they came in sight of Chassenon and found the moonlit ruins still relatively intact, grew so much that she forgot to brake. She stopped Kretiz’s car by crashing the bonnet through a hedge and stalling the engine. She strode ahead of him towards the ruins while he followed, burdened with the paraphernalia she had bought in the hardware shop.
In the caldarium, Kreuz set down the torch on a ledge in the masonry and selected a wide beam that lit the whole chamber dimly.
‘There,’ Eleanor showed him the place. ‘Dig there, fitz Mercadier. The wall is thin, you’ll find.’
She left him tackling the wall with hammer and chisel and walked outside into the crisp night air. There was time to be alone with her thoughts for a moment. The last time she had been at Chassenon, Richard had been dead but a few hours. His corpse had been dragged out of the
coffin by William the Marshal and there had been the confrontation with Joanna which Eleanor had won by sheerest bluff and the thickness of a single plank. Remembering her daughter’s anger that night, Eleanor thought: God, how that woman loved screaming! The only regret was that Richard was not there to share her new life. How he would have loved all the wonderful machines of which she was learning!
She felt the firmness of her breasts and flat belly. Perhaps she would beget another Richard? No, that was not possible. To give Henry his due, the Plantagenet genes mingled with her own Aquitanian blood were what had made their third-born son so handsome, so fearless and so talented. Eleanor sighed, picturing the Lionheart for a moment. It still hurt. Then the vision seemed to come to life! There he was, striding up the path past Kreuz’s car, the same spring in his step. In her mind, Eleanor heard him cry out, ‘Mother!’
She held her breath as the figure of a man came closer in the moonlight. Was it a man, or some wraith conjured up by her own associations with Chassenon, long said by peasants to be haunted by the earthbound spirits of the giants who had built the baths? Behind her the chink chink chink of hammer on chisel told her that Kreuz was labouring away. There was an echoing thud as a lump of ancient mud and masonry fell to the floor of the chamber.
But this was no apparition, Eleanor saw. This was a man of flesh and blood approaching her, holding some kind of weapon in his hand. For one wild moment she wondered whether the Moor had excelled his own expectations and magicked a descendant of her favourite son here to greet her. Had there been issue? Not from poor Berengaria’s virgin womb, that was sure. But there had been rumour of one bastard by some serving wench. The man came closer. Eleanor’s spirits sank as the resemblance with Richard grew less at each step. Then disappointment changed to alarm: what could an intruder be doing at this isolated spot in the middle of the night? Until the gold had been recovered, they could not afford any interruption. Was this some peasant who lived nearby, awoken by the noise of them driving up in Kreuz’s car? Was the resemblance to a beloved man just a figment of her over-stimulated imagination?
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 33