The Tyrant and the Squire

by Terry Jones

  Emily, for her part, was thinking . . . but then who knows what the daughter of the brother of the king of France might be thinking?

  By now the tide of night was up to their chests . . . and they were wading through the rising flood of darkness, hoping against hope to see the realm of candlelight. But there was nothing. The gates and walls of Marvejols were still out of eye’s reach . . . over the hills and far away . . . and with every passing second they were being sucked further into the gullet of blackness.

  Tom and Emily found themselves walking closer to each other. And Tom could hear Emily’s breathing in his ear. And suddenly all the problems between them vanished. He was there to protect her. And protect her he would – until the last breath in his body . . .

  Suddenly her breathing stopped. Tom’s reverie stopped at the same moment. ‘Look!’ whispered Emily. ‘A light!’

  They had been climbing for some time now, and the moment Tom looked up to see what Emily had seen, the absurd rush of hope that he would see Marvejols stretched out below them, fell with a splash into the sea of night behind them.

  They were still a long way from that strange flat top, but there was a slight glow over to their left. So they turned towards it – away from the cheerful sound of the stream that had become their reassuringly garrulous companion, gabbling into their ears for the last hour or so. They stumbled and fell over rocks and into the holes of unnamed animals, staggering towards that faint glimmer of hope, that seemed so fragile in the immense darkness, and then suddenly went out!

  Tom knew that tears had sprung into Emily’s eyes, but she didn’t say anything. She simply gripped his hand a little harder.

  ‘I can’t see anything!’ said Emily.

  ‘It can’t have been far away,’ whispered Tom. Though why he was whispering he had no idea . . . perhaps he didn’t want to wake the night.

  ‘Maybe we didn’t really see a light?’ suggested Emily helpfully.

  ‘You mean, maybe the light we both saw a few moments ago wasn’t really there at all?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Yes!’ breathed Emily, a note of drama creeping into her voice.

  ‘Oh!’ said Tom, mustering perhaps slightly more sarcasm that a true chivalric knight ought to when addressing the lady whom he loved and served. ‘You mean it might have been a will-o’-the-wisp or a jack-o’-lantern . . .’ and even as the words left his lips and were swallowed up by the smug, all-knowing darkness, he realised that that might very well have been the case.

  It was Emily who found it first. ‘Ow!’ she cried.

  ‘Ow!’ agreed Tom. They both picked themselves up from where they’d fallen backwards. ‘I think we’re there,’ said Tom.

  He reached out and could feel the wooden sides of a hut. There was a shingle roof at head height and as he followed the line of the wall he discovered a doorpost.

  At the same moment that the wall hit them, the realisation also hit them that whoever had extinguished that light was most probably still here in the hut . . . and yet there was no sound . . . no greeting . . . no ‘Who’s there?’ Just silence . . . not even the sound of someone looking at them – which is of course the slightest of all sounds.

  ‘Well? Is anyone there?’ demanded Emily in a loud voice.

  ‘Sh!’ said Tom, even though they’d already made enough noise to wake a hibernating bear.

  ‘We need shelter for the night!’ said Emily again in her most authoritative voice. ‘Will you let us in?’

  Silence.

  After fumbling around for some moments, Tom found the door latch. ‘I’m opening the door,’ he said, and he lifted the latch.

  ‘We’re coming in,’ said Emily, and she suddenly kicked the door and the latch flew out of Tom’s hand. If it was pitch black outside the hut, it was even blacker inside, and neither Tom nor Emily felt like taking the first step into the unknown.

  ‘We’re lost,’ went on Emily, ‘and we need shelter for the night. May we come in?’

  Something stirred in the black. Tom and Emily instinctively took a step backwards.

  ‘We’re sorry to intrude,’ said Tom.

  They waited and listened . . . something was definitely moving inside the hut. They could hear scrabbling sounds . . .

  ‘Hello?’ said Tom.

  The reply was a series of short sharp blows, like stones banging together . . . and then suddenly there it was again . . . a flare . . . and then a glimmer and then the soft glow of candlelight reflected on the rough planks of a shack . . . but the candle itself and whoever was holding it were still hidden behind the door.

  ‘Come in,’ said an old voice that cracked like a rusty hinge that hadn’t been used for a long time.

  The interior of the hut was almost bare. There was a pile of rags up against one corner, however, and it seemed to be speaking to them. It was certainly holding a stub of candle in a broken pottery holder.

  In amongst the rags, Tom could make out the features of an old woman. The lines on her face made it look as if her skin had been thrown onto her in bits and pieces – just like the pile of rags around her.

  ‘You are lucky,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, we thought we might have to stay the night in the open.’

  ‘Few people survive,’ creaked the old woman’s voice.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it got that cold at this time of year?’ said Tom.

  ‘No, not the cold,’ said the woman. ‘The Beast.’

  Chapter 11

  Pavia 1385

  For some reason, Tom found those words, spoken so long ago, rattling around in his head as he crossed the courtyard of the castello of Gian Galeazzo the morning after he arrived. ‘It wasn’t the cold that would get you . . . it was the Beast . . .’ Could the Beast be a serpent with a wolf’s head? he wondered.

  He had spent the night in Ricardo’s room, but he had not slept very well owing to the rather lively sleeping habits of his new friend. Ricardo had ended the day having got the better of so many bottles of wine that he’d lost count. He must have decided to check how many, because he suddenly regurgitated them all onto the floor of the chamber . . . it was certainly a lot.

  Tom, who happened to be trying to sleep on the floor where all this took place, had to leap out of the way to avoid being part of the accounting process. Ricardo, meanwhile, collapsed back onto his bed, where he disappeared under an impenetrable blanket of heavy-duty snoring interspersed with a sort of low moaning. The moaning may have kept Tom awake, but it also became a valuable indicator of future accounting activity: the moans would gradually get louder and louder until they invariably climaxed in another generous deposit on the floor.

  All in all Tom had had better sleeping companions.

  But now he was thankfully up and out of the chamber and heading for his first meeting with the illustrious Lord of Pavia.

  That morning, the great man’s captain general, Jacopo Dal Verme, had appeared, wrinkling his nose up at the stinking room, and informed Tom that his lord would receive him in the small chapel that lay on the south side of the palace courtyard, which in those days formed a complete square with a tower at each corner. Jacopo had then accompanied Tom across the courtyard, which was surrounded by an elegant colonnade where gentlemen and ladies could stroll, shaded from the midday sun, but halfway across the captain general had remembered some important business, and had hurried off after pointing out the way to Tom.

  Tom stood there, gazing at the chapel. It struck him as a curious place to hold a meeting, but nevertheless here he was, standing outside the door, with its ornate terracotta surround. Above the lintel, an amazingly lifelike painting of Christ beckoned the viewer to step out of the violent world of wars and men and into the peaceful world of God within.

  Tom accepted the silent invitation, and stepped into that serene interior, where he was immediately grabbed by four heavily armed soldiers and propelled backwards towards the door.

  Tom was about to explain that he was reluctant to leave the peaceful world of God
so quickly when a voice – which could well have been the voice of God, even though it was no more than a murmur really – eased itself across the chapel and rapped the military types on the shoulders: ‘Let him approach,’ said the voice.

  The guards froze, as if they’d been caught drinking the blood of babies, and fell back to allow Tom through. He could see a figure in grey, kneeling in front of the altar, but the face was turned away and the eyes closed once again in prayer. It seemed so unlikely that this could have been the owner of the voice that Tom found himself looking round for someone else. But the chapel was otherwise empty.

  Tom approached the kneeling man, and as he reached him, the figure in grey – without so much as a glance at Tom – indicated for him to kneel as well.

  The next hour was the longest in Tom’s life. In fact maybe it wasn’t an hour. Maybe it was six hours. It couldn’t have been six days, because the sun didn’t rise and set during the course of it, but it might just as well have been. In fact it actually felt more like six weeks.

  Tom studied the floor in tremendous detail for about a week. Then he studied the altar, with its embroidered blue and gold cloth, for another week.

  There was also a painting, in three folding sections, standing on the altar. The central section depicted a religious theme that was, currently, extremely popular with the devout: it showed a mild-looking man with a tonsure having his entrails pulled out. The poor fellow had a gash in his abdomen through which his greater intestine was hooked onto a windlass operated by two dubious-looking characters, while four elegantly dressed courtiers were shown watching the operation with the expressions of true connoisseurs.

  Tom realised that the picture represented the martyrdom of St Erasmus – patron saint of children who suffer from colic. What Tom didn’t know, however, was that the account of St Erasmus’s martyrdom, upon which the painting was based, was the result of a misunderstanding.

  St Erasmus was originally celebrated for preaching during a thunderstorm and for refusing to stop even when a lightning bolt struck nearby. His bravery in the face of the elements also made him the natural choice as the patron saint of sailors. That crucial piece of naval gear – the windlass – was therefore chosen as his emblem.

  The idea that the windlass represented some form of torture came of someone not reading their history book properly, but once the mistake had been made, it became embedded in the legend of St Erasmus. Part of his gut was shown coming out of his abdomen, to reassure children with stomach problems, and then attached to a windlass and wound out from his body, to give heart to those at sea.

  Tom knew nothing about this, but even so he couldn’t help thinking that the painting was a curious thing to be an object of veneration. And he couldn’t help wondering why the figure in grey should be spending what seemed like a month kneeling in front of it.

  At last, however, the figure in grey murmured: ‘Amen’ – as if he’d been engaged in one long, unbroken prayer – and rose to his feet. Tom, who had almost forgotten how to stand up straight, struggled into a more or less vertical position and found himself staring into the grey-green eyes of a man of his own age.

  ‘Welcome to Pavia,’ said Gian Galeazzo in that soft yet strangely compelling voice. ‘Sir Thomas English, I have heard you are a man of learning.’

  ‘Scarcely that,’ replied Tom. ‘I have a facility with language. More than that I cannot claim.’

  Gian Galeazzo nodded, but his eyes never left Tom. Those eyes seemed to be searching into Tom’s soul . . . ‘He knows why I’m here,’ thought Tom in a panic. ‘He can tell that I have been sent as a spy as clearly as if it were written in large letters on my forehead,’ and he could not stop himself wiping his hand across his forehead as if to remove the offending inscription. ‘Any moment now he’ll call those guards over,’ Tom’s thoughts continued, ‘and I’ll end up like St Erasmus, with part of my stomach . . .’

  But the gentle voice of authority cut his thoughts short.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ said Gian Galeazzo. And Tom found himself being swept out of the chapel, with the soldiers snapping to attention and bowing to him as he went.

  Gian Galeazzo appeared to be a man of few words. He certainly had few words to say to Tom as they strode across the courtyard towards one of the corner towers. In fact he didn’t have any words to say at all. The soldiers, Tom noted, were keeping close behind them, as they entered one of the towers overlooking the deer park.

  Gian Galeazzo still had not added another word to the six he’d already said by the time they’d climbed up to the first floor. Here, however, he broke his silence by telling the guards to stand outside the room which they were now entering.

  It was a long time since Tom had been in a real place of books. His mind flashed back to the great library of Laon, with its thousands and thousands of volumes, and the terrible fire that had consumed it. That had happened so long ago, when he was just starting out on his adventures. At the time it had seemed the most dreadful calamity that had ever happened in the history of the world, but since then Tom had witnessed so much destruction and devastation that the event had begun to diminish somewhat in his mind.

  Now, however, confronted by this smaller but equally beautiful collection of books, the shock of that distant disaster suddenly jolted him.

  ‘You are surprised to see so many books?’ asked Gian Galeazzo.

  ‘Yes . . . that is . . .’ murmured Tom. ‘I was just remembering something.’

  Gian Galeazzo’s heavy-lidded eyes rested on Tom and remained there as if testing the truth of this statement, until Tom felt bound to explain.

  ‘I was once in a library . . .’ he began, ‘when someone set fire to it . . .’ and suddenly he found he couldn’t go on. The memory, now he came to confront it, was still too raw.

  Gian Galeazzo curled his lip slightly, but that was the only clue as to what he was thinking, and Tom had no idea what it meant.

  ‘These . . . these are beautiful books,’ Tom finally managed to say, as he gazed around the shelves that rose from floor to ceiling all the way round the room. Most of the books were chained to the wall, and there was a reading shelf running all the way round, with benches and stools.

  ‘See!’ exclaimed Gian Galeazzo, seizing a book off its shelf and opening it in front of Tom. The page was solid with colour: it showed a bright blue sky and green, green grass and figures robed in white. A man crowned with laurels was sitting against a tree, pen in hand and a book upon his knee. Another man was pulling back a curtain and pointing the writer out to a man-at-arms.

  Below, a peasant was chopping down a thorn bush while another sat milking sheep.

  ‘Have you ever seen such painting?’ asked Gian Galeazzo eagerly. ‘The people are alive, aren’t they?’

  Tom was speechless.

  ‘This book belonged to our great poet Francesco Petrarca. He ordered many of the books in this library. He helped my father organise it.’

  ‘He was a man of genius,’ said Tom. He had read some of Petrarch’s poetry, and actually found it a bit pompous, but the Latin was very fine, and surely it took a man of genius to write pompous poetry in fine Latin.

  ‘Perhaps you will help me expand this library, Sir Thomas Englishman?’ said Gian Galeazzo.

  ‘There’s nothing I’d rather do in this whole world! How did you know?’ Tom was about to say, but something inside told him not to reveal everything he felt to this great lord, no matter how benign he might seem. So instead Tom bowed rather formally and merely said: ‘It would be a tremendous honour.’

  ‘Then stay here and look around, if you so wish,’ said Gian Galeazzo. ‘The Lord be with you.’ And the ruler of Pavia swept out of the library without more ado.

  Tom sat down on the nearest bench. He could hardly believe his luck.

  And yet twenty years ago, if you’d asked him to help build a library, he would have told you he was too busy . . . he had other things in mind . . . he was off to see the world . . . to exp
lore the far-flung corners of the earth . . . he was going to become a knight in shining armour . . .

  And some of those things he had done, and some he had not. But in almost every single case, his assessment of those things had changed. And so it was in this case. As a child he had turned his back on the world of books. When the Abbot of Selby had wanted to train him to be a clerk, a priest, to be able to read and to write, he had run away from home. But that was then and this was now . . .

  Tom looked around at all those books sitting on their shelves. They seemed to be jostling against each other with excitement. ‘Look! There’s someone who can read us! Someone to choose one of us . . . me! Me! Oh please let it be me! I haven’t been read for so long!’

  It made him almost dizzy to think of them . . . each one a distant voice from the past . . . and now the great Lord of Pavia had actually asked him to add to their number . . . to swell the choir of knowledge. It was beyond his wildest dreams.

  Except . . . how could he? Of course he would love to serve the Lord Gian Galeazzo, to be his librarian, to travel the courts and towns of Europe buying books for him – to catalogue them – to arrange them on their shelves in their correct order – perhaps even to read them aloud to the nobles and ladies . . . but it was impossible. Tom had to rescue Squire John, and once he had done that, neither of them would be safe anywhere in the dominions of the Visconti.

  No. Gian Galeazzo’s suggestion was a mirage. Tom had been offered the phoenix’s egg, the golden fleece, something which no matter how much he desired it he could never possess.

  And a gloom would have settled over his spirit, had it not been for all those voices calling to him from the shelves, and also another voice that was calling to him from the past – from years ago – that he could not quite identify . . . until suddenly he could hear it quite clearly . . .