When I finally reached the ancient church, surrounded by the spreading flat-topped pine trees of the Florentine hills, it seemed as patient as everything else, enduring the heat behind its patterned shield of black and white stone. I went inside to escape the bludgeoning sunlight, and strolled for a while between the columns, cooling off. But I could not escape the thought that was circling me like one of Saint Anthony’s tempters, which was if I found a good horse I could catch Remigius on the north road by tomorrow afternoon. One ill turn deserves another, and I would see that lanky body tumbled in a ditch, after he had told me why he had killed Isaac.
But he would not tell me, would he? Anyway, I already knew. I went and sat down in one of the side chapels. There were a few people in the church, mostly pious sightseers, pilgrims on their way to Rome, and the sound of northern voices echoed softly. John of Toledo, English cardinal, friend of Pope Innocent, had wanted me to understand something. He had taken me to see a headless alchemist, but apparently that hadn’t been enough. The plan had been to show me an apocalyptic weapon, but instead I’d witnessed a grotesque embarrassment. So Isaac, a disposable person, a Jew, had to die as well, to get my attention. I understood well enough: do not cross the line between godly and godless. Do not consort with Jews or heretics. Marry. All this, to prove I served the pope and not Frederick von Hohenstaufen. I took a candle from the box where it lay awaiting a supplicant, and rolled it between my fingers. What childishness it all was, teaching me a lesson with murder as a child is taught to count with acorns. One here, one here. Put them together. Do you see? Yes, I saw.
I dug my thumbnail into the white tallow, shaving off a little curl, and another. Soon my lap was full of them. So I was being invited to defy the Church, was I? Fuck them, all of them. Isaac hadn’t been disposable to me. I would accept their invitation.
I stood up and a shower of white, waxy curls drifted to the floor. I lit the candle, whittled as it was to a knobbled twig, and stuck it in the tray of sand before the altar. I did not check to see what saint I was honouring – already, in my mind, I was on the north road, my sword knocking eagerly against my thigh – but turned to leave. More pilgrims had come in out of the heat, and I passed by them unnoticed, just another foreigner. I felt brimful of rage, and it was tinged with bright, furious joy. To be doing something again. To be doing real business at last: blood for blood. The door was open, and I screwed up my eyes against the light that was about to ambush me.
‘Now, now. You lit a candle and didn’t put your coin in the box,’ said a voice I knew from somewhere. ‘That will never do, my dear Petroc.’ It was soft, this voice, tinged with the soft lilt of a northern country. A friend’s voice, surely, and yet it made the fine hairs prickle on the nape of my neck. And who in Florence, besides Isaac, knew my true name? I turned quickly. There, just beyond the door, stood a spare-framed shadow, a man-shaped black void in the afternoon dazzle that poured in from outside. Then he stepped inside and I saw that he was not black but grey – grey robe, grey hood, grey wisps of hair framing an elegantly chiselled face. And grey eyes, the colour of a winter sea. I had never forgotten those eyes.
‘Doctor Scotus?’ I breathed. ‘Michael Scotus?’
He pushed back his hood. I had not seen Michael Scotus for many years, and I had guessed, in fact assumed, that he was dead, for most of the world had thought him dead ten or more years before we had first met. And yet here he was, and nothing seemed to have changed. Time had long ago scoured all softness from his face, leaving it both aged and ageless. Between us, on the border between glare and shadow, the air seemed to swim like heat haze, as if Michael Scotus were regarding me from another place, just beyond the real. Then I blinked, and he was nothing but an old, straight-backed man in priest’s robes, holding out his hand, a smile on his gaunt lips.
‘You’ve had a fright,’ he said, with just a hint of rueful merriment.
‘No, no! But I thought … that is, I had heard …’
‘Such rumours seem to follow me, as birds follow the plough,’ he said. ‘And yet I plough on.’
I stepped out onto the hot flagstones. Michael was no spirit. I took his hard-palmed, cool hand and shook it.
‘What are you doing in Florence?’ I said. ‘Following me? This isn’t a chance meeting, my dear old friend.’
‘I came here on another matter,’ said Michael. ‘At first. But yes, I’ve been following you. Shall we go down? It will be cooler amongst the olives.’
We set off down the hill, into the groves, the patient kingdom of brown birds and thin cats. ‘What are you doing here, Michael?’ I asked again after we had walked for a while. ‘I am intended to ask that, aren’t I?’
‘Of course. So that I might tell you I came here to meet a German alchemist.’
‘Nibelungus?’ I stopped, and he turned and looked up at me from a lower step. The world had become even stiller than it had been. ‘Why, Doctor Scotus?’
‘He was manufacturing something for me.’
‘Jesus Christ. The Drug – that bloody Drug? Then you are with Cardinal John?’
I stared into his face, but saw nothing. He could make of that face a mask as hard and cold as diamond: that I knew from our past friendship. I had seen him mourn, though; and laugh, and despair. But that was rare. The face Michael Scotus wore most often was the ethereal, impenetrable one that shifted like sunlight on mercury. ‘Do you think I have brought you here to kill you, like poor Isaac? What a squalid end for such a noble man. All those ideas. All that knowledge seeping out into a Tuscan gutter. No, take your hand off your knife, Petroc. I am not with Cardinal John in any sense. But what did the good cardinal want with you?’ he asked.
‘To show me your supposedly terrible Drug – which, by the way, is about as useful as a blind man with a poleaxe – and to warn me about choosing sides. I thought he wanted me to procure some ridiculous magical ingredient for him. And Michael, if that is what you want with me, once I was indeed someone who went off hunting for strange and wonderful things. But I don’t do that any more, so if you think I’m going to go and find you dragon’s sweat or some such nonsense, you are mistaken. The needs of the alchemist are more strange and more self-deluding even than those of priests.’
‘Now, now. I am a priest. And I am an alchemist. Strange that you did not know that. Nibelungus was my student, once upon a time, until he put too much faith in a bad recipe. He was my pupil, but he outshone me like the sun does the moon. And he’d used the best sal nitrum foliatum, from Aleppo, which I bought for him. But it turned out to be fortunate, in the end. It would have been quite a disaster if his talents had fallen into the hands of the great enemy.’
‘So on the subject of choosing sides, you have chosen yours at last, then? There was a time when you could not decide.’
Michael took my arm and we walked slowly and, to a casual watcher, companionably down the path. The groves were ending, and we were coming to the gardens that lay outside the walls. And here was the gate, guards half-asleep in the shade. ‘Didn’t Michel de Montalhac, God rest his soul – if that is the right thing to say about a Cathar – teach you anything about appearances?’ he said when we were through the arch and back inside the city. ‘Nothing is as it seems. Which is demonstrated rather aptly by this pope who has called himself Innocent. I have chosen nothing. But I have ended up here, now, because—’
‘But you did have to choose, Michael,’ I cut in. ‘Cardinal or necromancer? That was your title once, so I heard. Necromancer to the Emperor. Truthfully, I can picture that more readily than you in a cardinal’s biretta.’
‘I counted old Gregory as a friend,’ he said patiently. I remembered my own meeting with the late pope, and how his ancient eyes had bored into me like awls. ‘But our new pope is … is a lesser being entirely. Despite the endless tempest of lies blown out by Rome, Frederick von Hohenstaufen is not a bloodthirsty man.’
‘Really? And yet, if I’m understanding you, you’re trying to make him a weapon that will blast th
e world to pieces.’
‘If he is seeking to master the Drug, it is only because, if it falls into the pope’s hands first, he and all his family will be destroyed as if they were rats in a hayrick. You will ask whether the same would be true were Frederick to have it first. I do not believe so. Frederick is the wisest … no, not wisest, cleverest man I have met in my long life. I have known many who were wiser by far, but none so adept at drawing knowledge into himself and using it as a tool to master the world of men. He knows he cannot defeat the pope, for to do that he would have to defeat the Church, and with it faith itself. And he is not a Mussulman or a devil-worshipper, no matter what the priests say. In fact he is an unimpeachably orthodox Christian, save where the power of Rome is concerned, and … well, no matter.’
I remembered long hours spent on a boat slowly beating home through winter seas, watching Michael Scotus swing in an agony of the mind between his two great loyalties; that for his friend Pope Gregory, who had almost made him Archbishop of Canterbury, and for Frederick von Hohenstaufen, who had made him his necromancer and astrologer and allowed him to wrap himself in the shadows where he felt most at home. But Gregory was dead, and Innocent – Innocent! A fine name for the man who had burned the Cathars of Montségur and set the Inquisition tearing like maddened beasts at the bodies and spirits of faithful and heretic alike – had resolved to destroy the emperor for good.
‘Titles never impressed you,’ I said.
‘Ach, well, I would have made a decent archbishop,’ he replied wistfully. ‘But no, I went over to the emperor in the end. And do you know why? I find him a more godly man than Saint Peter’s current successor.’
We had come back almost to the Ponte Vecchio, and the stench from its butchers and tanneries was eye-watering, even from afar.
‘Well, Lord Necromancer,’ I said, waving away a cluster of bluebottles, for we had reached the outskirts of the verminous swarm that hung about the bridge. ‘I have been wooed by the Holy Father. But since we are old friends, I will tell you plainly: you find me about to leave Florence. I am going hunting for Cardinal John of Toledo and his servant – one Remigius, a boneless abomination. Remigius killed Isaac, and I shall kill him. I have to tell you, too, that at this moment I see no reason why the cardinal should be left alive. I looked into his eyes just two days ago, and I can recall nothing that might suggest he deserves mercy.’
‘Really, Patch? Murder? I cannot blame you, of course. The world is already a duller place now that he is gone. I was planning to go and speak to him, in fact: he shared with the emperor a fascination for the inner workings of this human form. Isaac would have enjoyed the Hohenstaufen court, you know: his own people, and many fine Arab doctors, learned discourse, a fresh cadaver whenever he required one—’
‘I have nothing left of my past,’ I interrupted. ‘Isaac was all that remained. The captain, Gilles – and all those nights on the Cormaran, planning and scheming. All their stories, all that they’d seen. All dead. I’m still here, but I feel … I feel like a murderer, actually. The men around that table would have avenged him, and as I’m the only one left, it’s my job.’
‘And your pleasure?’
‘Why not? The world is full of murderers, and the more they kill, the more easily they escape punishment. For instance, what temptations does the emperor bring me? I assume that’s why you are here, Michael. Cardinal John put it quite plainly: I should take care to be on the side of the godly, not the godless. The Drug doesn’t look like it’s going to work, so what other slaughter am I being asked to fund, eh? Why should I throw in my lot with godlessness? If I’m to use my gold to buy the death of many, why shouldn’t I take a life or two with my own hands? Who, in this vile fucking world, would dare object to that?’
My voice had risen and I saw an old man at the edge of the street looking at me with his toothless gob open in surprise.
‘An excellent question,’ said Michael, calmly. ‘Jesus Christ would dare object, but alas, he is not much in fashion these days. Another reason I turned my back on Rome. But to answer your more simple question, I haven’t come to tempt you, Patch!’ he said, and laughed in his hollow fashion. ‘No,’ he went on, striding unperturbed into the reek that roiled, invisibly, from the bridge. ‘Nibelungus was my only reason for being here. But when I discovered you were in the city, and after I heard of Isaac’s murder, I decided to warn you.’ We were on the bridge now, walking on trampled chicken guts, bloody sawdust, feathers, the fumes of boiling piss and spoiled blood all around us.
‘About what?’ I wheezed. God, I was becoming soft: time was when a city’s foulness would not have made me so much as blink.
‘Cardinal John …’
‘You’d do better to warn him about me, Michael. I have the measure of that piece of—’
‘The cardinal is but one scale of the basilisk,’ said Michael. ‘If you are thinking of revenge, I would advise against it. There, you have your answer. When I heard that Isaac was dead, I knew what would be in your mind. This you know: you are caught up in things, Petroc, very deeply caught. Do kings disappear? Do popes vanish into the air?’
‘Of course not,’ I snapped.
‘Well, you are a king, Petroc. You rule over a vast kingdom of money. You cannot disappear while you still wear your crown.’
‘Then I’ll throw it in the privy and be done with it.’
‘Kings abdicate when they are allowed to. You are far, far too important to the schemes of Christendom. You may take Iselda and sail to Skraelingland, and they will bring you back, so that you may sign their loans.’
‘Michael, you have always made these grand predictions. Not so long ago you thought the Crown of Thorns would make peace between pope and emperor,’ I reminded him. ‘That was what you believed – that an apocalypse was coming. It hasn’t, though, has it?’
‘You should know, Petroc.’
‘Meaning?’
‘What were you doing five years ago, when you were still unimportant enough to disappear? No, don’t worry. You have nothing to fear from me, or from the Hohenstaufen. But you vanished for a while, you and Michel, and Gilles too. I heard you were at Montségur. Tell me: were you waiting for Emperor Frederick to send reinforcements? Did you curse the pope as your friends died? I will not ask how you survived, but wouldn’t you call what happened to the poor Cathars an apocalypse? It is all about power – always has been.’
‘Don’t lecture me about power, Doctor,’ I said, bitterly. ‘I deal in it every day – cut it up and dole it out like bread. So you know that Isaac was fascinated by blood, and how it travels around our bodies? He showed me once. Cut a man open and laid it all bare, like a great, wet map. But Michel de Montalhac showed me how power moves. That was his life’s work, I’ve realised: mapping out the secret roads and streams on which power travels about the world. Everything is connected, nothing is chance. “Pay attention” was what he used to tell me. Well, I’ve been paying attention, and now I am so filled up with what I’ve learned that I’m beginning to sicken with it. Do you know what I talked to Isaac about, the last words we had? Whether I should end all this – the bank. Just walk away. I don’t care, Doctor. About any of it. Let the emperor and the pope claw each other to bits.’
‘With your money paying for the show,’ said Michael, gently.
‘Listen. I will gather all the money in the bank, pile it in the middle of a field in Lombardy, and let Guelphs and Ghibbelines tear themselves to pieces over it. Isaac was all that was left of the Cormaran, Doctor. Now he’s gone, there’s no point to any of this.’
‘Ah, but you won’t.’
‘Will I not?’ I demanded.
‘You cannot. You are caught, my poor friend, at least for a while. And that is what I came to warn you about. The pope is going to use you to force Louis’s hand against Frederick. And you might say, then let them kill me, like they killed Isaac. But they won’t. They will torment you, Petroc. Even if you kill John of Toledo, they will let you live, so that they can
make your life a living hell.’
‘They would not catch me. And why? Why do you predict all this horror for me?’
‘Listen to me. Even if the pope himself caught you with Cardinal John’s guts in your hands, he would let you go. As you’ve understood yourself, you are worth a thousand Cardinal Johns. If the Curia arrested you and convicted you of murder – or heresy, or whatever else – and confiscated your estates, would they get all that you are worth?’
‘Of course not,’ I scoffed. ‘I’m a banker, Michael. I have more secrets than the Sphinx, now.’
‘Precisely. They will keep you alive so that they can find out your secrets and punish you for them, one by one. Who do you love? They will find out, and destroy them. They will leave you standing in the midst of a burned wasteland, and only then will they start on you. Innocent intends to do that to the emperor – the emperor, Petroc! You are just one common banker, with many, many things that would interest the Inquisition on your conscience, many crimes, of body and of spirit. I do not judge you, but they will, they certainly will.’
‘What exactly would you have me do?’ I cried, helplessly. He was right, curse him. I stood in the middle of the street, fingernails digging into my palms, hopelessness settling upon me like the snows of Greenland. ‘Choose your side? Pay for you to make that Drug of yours? Buy you the end of the world?’
‘If only it were that simple,’ said Michael. ‘Forget the Drug. The Mussulmen know of it, and have used it in their wars, but it is still a weak thing, a flash and a bang to scare the peasants. Frederick was excited by it – one of his fly-by-night passions – and Nibelungus was trying to make it more powerful, but …’ He sighed. ‘There was no more skilled alchemist,’ he went on. ‘Even he could not control the thing, and I am too old to try. Frederick will abandon this scheme on my advice. Let the cardinal and his spies fiddle with the recipe if they wish – nothing will come of it. However, they will terrify themselves, believing that we have some terrible secret. No, I’m afraid the emperor’s true strategy is something of a let-down compared to the Drug. He simply intends to let Innocent make such a fool of himself that the other princes of Christendom abandon him or even knock him off his throne.’
The Fools’ Crusade Page 6