'I don't speak Flemish,' I muttered.
'Don't worry. I'll teach you all the necessary profanities,' said my friend, and headed off into the night. I followed: there was nowhere else to go.
We were in some sort of street, lined with low huts which, judging by the lumpy shapes picked out by the moonlight, were built of cob or perhaps just mud. There was no one about, and no lights showed in the dwellings around us. The mud beneath us was thick with rubbish and shit: animal and human, judging by the smell. We had started off at a quick walk, but soon we were running, trying to keep from the puddles and little streams that seemed to criss-cross our path. Once we surprised a herd of pigs that were sleeping in the middle of the street. Will saw them first and swerved, but I had no choice and leaped, the fear of landing on an enraged hog driving, for an instant, every other fear from my mind. We left their resentful squeals behind, and soon enough the huts thinned, and we were among fields. The moon shone on the rows of winter vegetables and the first green shoots of spring, and the air grew sweeter. Ahead I could make out a line of trees, great spreading shapes that must be the willows lining the river's banks.
The street, such as it had been, had narrowed to a track between the raised fields. I remembered how the land had a slow roll here, some gentle dips and ridges, unlike the water-meadows downstream, which were as flat as a counter-pane. It was friendly country. My breathing began to slow a little. We slowed to a trot, then a walk. By and by the track dipped and we saw the river before us. A few paces from the bank another track crossed ours and we took it, heading upstream.
'There's a road up ahead about three miles,' said Will. 'It'll take us to the Fosse.'
I did not like the idea of the Fosse Way. The great road, built by the Romans many ages past and still the main route from west to east, would be crammed with traffic of all kinds. We would have to travel by night, of course, unless we cobbled together some sort of disguise. But I did not feel capable of deceiving anyone. Again my thoughts turned to surrender, but the night air smelled sweetly of cow-parsley and wild garlic and I said to myself: 'Not yet, not yet.'
The first hint of morning showed on the horizon as we reached the road Will had described. It was a wide, well-surfaced trackway, hedged on both sides. We came upon it through a gap in the hedge and scrambled up onto it over a wall of neatly cut stones. I glanced down and noticed a number, XI, carved sharply into one block, clear in the last light of the sinking moon. So the Romans had built this road too. What odd people they must have been, numbering and ordering the world. But their neat lives had been no more immune to chaos than mine.
A fox ambled away from us up the way, and we followed. The moon fell abruptly behind the thick wall of oaks that had replaced the hedge to left and right. It was suddenly very dark, but there was a faint glow overhead. We walked fast in grim silence until the sky had lightened to the colour of ash, that strange time the instant before dawn when everything is dead and cold, and the magic that conjures a new day out of the void of night seems to have failed. We were visible now. I saw that Will's face was drawn and set. A few paces on, and he paused and pointed.
'See there. That's the Fosse.'
I looked, and saw a break in the tree line, perhaps half a mile distant. Beyond, the land opened out, and I saw patches of fields and woods. In places a faint dark streak was visible against the rolling land: the great road. It seemed dreadfully exposed.
We'll get to the end of the trees, and see who's abroad,' said Will.
'But they will be scouring all the roads, man,' I said.
'This far from the city any men will be on horseback,' said Will. 'There won't be many of them, and we'll hear them coming. We'll stay out of sight today, though - but wouldn't you like a bite to eat?'
In truth I had not considered hunger. My stomach felt like a cobblestone in my chest, and the thought of swallowing food made me queasy. Will, however, was made of even stronger stuff than I had imagined, for he began to ramble on about breakfasts. Salt pork and smoked fish, small-beer and hot bread appeared in the air before me as he spoke, and despite myself I smacked my lips. My belly rumbled and came to life. Soon we were both cackling like schoolboys, rubbing our guts as ever more furious gurglings rang out in the lane. It was time for the birds to awaken, and it was easy enough to believe it was our hungry bellies that had roused them from their nests. I wondered, for a moment, whether the past night had not been a foul dream, and I was now awake.
I was about to suggest that we jump into the river to wash away the grisly reek of the dung-heap when all of a sudden I stopped dead. Something was amiss. It was as if we had stepped through an invisible door into a silent room. The birds, pouring out their songs in front and behind us, were silent on each side. The river had looped back on itself and to our right the lane touched upon the outside edge of a deep, lazy curve of water. To the left, a line of old oaks and may trees stretched ahead to where the land opened up and the lane met the Fosse Way, a few hundred yards off. Will looked about him, all laughter vanished from his face. I dropped to one knee, following some deep-hidden instinct. Then the sky filled with beating wings and the may trees burst open and flung a great horse out into the lane. With the horrible clarity of deep nightmare, Sir Hugh de Kervezey's pale face seemed to float above the gigantic, plunging beast. I felt no glimmer of surprise. As in the nightmare that returns again and again in the same form, so I felt not fright but a horrible resignation.
The man's right arm whipped round. As I saw that he held a flail, the iron bar on the end of its chain struck Will, who seemed frozen in mid-flight, catching him across the back of his neck. I heard his skull burst and he dropped like a sack of bones and meat. He was gone, I knew, even before the shock of it took me. I blinked as if moonstruck as huge hooves danced over his body; then the horse was above me. Sir Hugh stared down at me, his mouth drawn back in a skull's white grin.
'Do you surrender, Petroc?' He swung the flail before my face, a faceted rod of iron that shone dully. 'I hope not. Better dead than alive, eh, boy? Eh? Eh?' And with each barked word he urged his mount a nervous, high-stepping pace nearer to me. Behind me was the river. I could see Will's lifeless, muddy feet framed by the legs and belly of the horse. Closer and closer swung the flail as Sir Hugh jabbed his spurs, one evil graze at a time, into the lathered flanks. I made a desperate grab for the flail, felt the smooth metal slide through my hand and lurched forward, off balance. Suddenly my nose was against the knight's leg and I clutched at it, sliding down the cloth until I was hanging from his stirrup. I must have turned his foot, for I saw the spur, a sharp gilded beak, open a deep gore in the horse's side. The beast gave a shriek and reared, spun and reared again. Sir Hugh shouted a curse and tried to shake me loose, digging his spur again into the spurting wound. The horse shrieked again and bucked. I felt Sir Hugh slip in his saddle, then I was under the horse and I was tangled, for an instant, in its back legs. It was like being caught between two living millstones. The breath was forced from my chest and I was sure every bone inside me would be ground to dust.
Then the horse, no doubt panicked to feel himself wounded and now hobbled, gave a last shriek and threw his bulk sideways. But the grass of the roadway had run out, and the three of us, a writhing puzzle of men and beast, plunged abruptly into the freezing river.
A dark swirl of water, bubbles and limbs surrounded me, seemed to chew me up like a vast mouth. Blind, I breathed water and choked. An implacable weight was pinning me against stones, crushing my breast, and I knew that I was dying. Sadness rushed into me, became the river. I was drowning in regret. The weight vanished and I floated in blackness. As my life guttered out, my last, absurd, thought was of an old, one-eyed sheepdog I had loved as a child, barking and barking, begging me to play.
Chapter Five
I
t was dark and cold, and a dog barked in my ear. I floated, caressed by the cold which tugged at my fingertips and my feet. I was lying on my back, and found I could see stars through the
branches of a tree. Then I understood. I was floating in the river, held somehow against the current. I felt about carefully, and found that my rolled habit had snagged on some part of a dead tree. Then I panicked, struggled, and almost drowned a second time. It was agony to twist myself around and grope with frozen hands until I had a firm hold on the branch and could pull myself close enough to it to free the cloth. Spiderwebs of pain shot across my chest, and the memory of the horse's terrible weight pinning me down came to me in a flash.
I do not remember how I dragged myself up the bank. Much later I awoke in a nest of dry grass and rushes. The dog was barking again, very loud, and I opened my eyes to find a wet snout a hand's breadth from my face.
'Hello, dog,' I said, and fell back into darkness. It was night again, or late evening. I sat up, and the pain rippled over my chest again, not nearly so bad this time. My clothes had dried, at least the front of them, so I must have slept through a sunny day. There was no dog to be seen, and I wondered if I had dreamed him. I got up and staggered away from the water. I was in flat country, that much I could tell in the fading light. I was in a swale of bulrushes that lay in a crook of the river, but all around me stretched fields, and I could see the dim shapes of cattle standing about, hear the soft scrunch of chewed cud. Away upstream a darker mass flecked with faint lights hunkered across the skyline. I was in the water-meadows.
I shook my head, trying to clear it. Pain clanged inside my skull and I began to understand. Dead to the world, I had floated right through the city and out the other side. How far -two miles? Four? Why had I not drowned? Now I remembered, in tiny, tattered rags of memory, a sensation of weightlessness, of flying, water dragging through my fingers. Some instinct had kept me on my back. Then I remembered my burden, and felt for the golden hand. It was still bound to me, but it had slipped, knocked in the fight, I supposed, and was now hanging against the small of my back. So there was part of the answer: St Euphemia's hand had been my ballast, my keel, keeping me face-up and arse-down. I rebound it tightly to my chest, but could not bring myself to look at the thing and recoiled from the oily coldness of the metal. I felt a sudden and overwhelming urge to tear it from me and throw it far out into the river, but Will's voice came back to me. 'It's all you have, Patch,' he'd said as he wiped the blood from the gold.
Sound advice as ever, dear friend, I thought. And then I remembered: Will was dead, lying in a ditch away on the other side of the city. A new pain flared in my breast, as if some part of my vitals had been torn away as I slept: the raw, bloody void was filling with grief and with an awful, bitter guilt. No more beer or whores for Will, no more laughter or warmth. He would never see Flanders now, and I would not see his crooked smile again in this world. I fell forward into the wet grass and his face swam before my mind's eye, slack and lifeless as it had been the instant after Sir Hugh's flail had caught him. I had killed Will as surely as if my hand had struck the blow: Death had followed me from the cathedral. And Sir Hugh himself? I seemed to recall the horse rolling over him as we went into the river. Dead as well, I supposed, the madman undone by his own madness, his game finished too. And the end of any hope for me. I had no doubt that these new corpses would be laid to my account. Night was coming in, and I felt Death, like an old friend, settle down beside me to keep the long vigil until dawn.
The water-meadows were ravishingly lovely in the dawn. They wore a shimmering silver cloak, dew clinging to festoons of spiders' webs, bright points of colour glowing through the sweet grass. The big red cattle grazed oblivious as they waded through the spectral veil. I must have slept: the spiders had woven me a glimmering winding-sheet of my own. The city-was close: much less than a mile lay between me and the last hovel of the tannery quarter.
Still, the black mood of last night had lifted a little, and I no longer felt brim-full of despair. It might be worth living a little while longer, perhaps, if for no other reason than to give Will's death some meaning. I had been skulking here for too long already. I took stock of myself. I had the golden hand, and the clothes I stood up in, which were dryish but by no means magnificent. Save for my tonsure, I looked like a farmer who had taken to sleeping in hedgerows - and there I had it. I was a farmer's son, sent up to one of the Midlands fairs with a load of wool, on my way home. I had fallen among thieves, and must needs go on foot. So it seemed I was going home - or at least towards it. I found I did not have the stomach for London now. Some linen torn from my gaiters made a passable head-cloth, and as I covered up my shaven scalp it came to me. There was one person left in the world who could help me. I turned to the west and set out on the long road back to Brother Adric.
There was much country between us. The Mendips, Sedge-moor, the Blackdown Hills. I travelled by starlight when there were people about, by day when I moved through empty country. It was a long journey, and a hard one, but there is little to tell of it. I ate berries, fish from streams, small beasts I could trap. I was a Dartmoor child - I would not go hungry outdoors. And luck paid me a visit in the guise of a halfwit carter who let me ride on his rickety old wain amongst a load of oakum bound for the shipyards of Plymouth. The man did not want money, which was fortunate. Carrying superstition about him like heavy armour, he took me for a wandering demon, I believe, and helped me in order to forestall any mischief I might work on him. We met at a crossroads outside Cullompton, and he carried me almost to the threshold of my destination.
So I was alone with my thoughts for the two weeks it took me to cross Somerset and half of Devon. I had little I wished to dwell upon from the immediate past, but still I worked the nightmare over in my mind endlessly until the colours and the horror had receded a little. It seemed as though not a minute passed when I did not think of Will, and how we should be sharing this adventure - although there was nothing adventurous about my condition now - and every such thought was a knife thrust. His death, and I suppose the likelihood of my own, followed me like ragged shadow and brought with it the chill of the grave. To escape it I thought about the past. I was a young man who, out of the blue, had lost his future, had been stripped of the life he knew. I had nothing left but my story, and I told it to myself, for it gave me comfort when hope felt stretched as thin as spider-webs wafting in the mist of an uncertain dawn.
The young man in this story is myself, but then again, he is as different from myself as the worm is to the butterfly. Although what I am today - worm or butterfly - is not so clear to me. Enough. The eyes, squeezed shut against the summer sun, preserve an image of the world that lasts for an instant and then changes, becomes grotesque, a shifting field of darkness and glowing patterns that mock reality. I wish to preserve that first moment, before the grotesqueries of the present blot out my past.
I was born in the twelve-hundred and seventeenth year of Our Lord, the second year of the reign of Henry Plantagenet, in the village of Auneford on the southern foot of Dartmoor. I was named Petroc for the village saint and for my grandfather. My father, like his before him, was a yeoman sheep-farmer, and grazed his flocks on the high moorland common that rose up behind our house. The house itself was long and low, built of granite the colour of a fox's tail, and stood on a south-facing slope a bow-shot from the village proper. A brook ran past the left wall, and below the river Aune flowed amongst smooth boulders and great oak trees. The water was clear and brown, and full of gold-green trout that hid under its rocks when I tried to grab them, and sometimes big salmon that would splash and flop in the shallows when night fell.
Lowland people are frightened of hills. Mountains and moors, which perhaps they have never even seen from a distance, are empty wastes where monsters play and set snares for feckless travellers. But our moor was anything but empty. Sheep wandered the high grassland, and the valleys and folds of the landscape swarmed with the works of man. Tin, copper and arsenic lay in the stream-beds, and Auneford men dug out the ore as they had done since the beginning of time, or at the very least since the Flood. Our village lay in the demesne of the abbey of Buckfast
, but had never known a lord, and so formed a refuge for landless people, those with a past that needed escaping, or a future that did not include serfdom or fealty. As a result, the villagers were taciturn, rabidly independent and as turned in on themselves as any closed monkish order. Those who did not farm the valley bottom or run sheep over the moor worked the tinning pits, and they were the toughest of all.
My father was a big man who talked little but laughed more, a kind man who had spent too much time wandering the moors to be very adept with words. Although his sheep had made him quite wealthy - certainly the richest man in Auneford, if not exactly a second Midas - he preferred to live the life of an ordinary shepherd, roaming with his flocks with only his two dogs for companionship. When I got older, I would trespass on his happy solitude. We would hardly ever speak, but he taught me every inch of his grazing land. Green Hill, Old Hill, Gripper's Hill, Heap of Sinners, Redstairs, Black Tor Mires - remembering these names is the only way I can recall his voice. He would show me larks' nests, and how to tickle the little trout parr - speckled red and marked with blue thumb-prints along their flanks - that swarmed in the brooks. We would build a fire amongst the boulders and toast them on blackthorn twigs. We watched ravens soar and tumble, and picked bilberries until our hands and mouths were stained dark purple.
My grandfather, whom I never knew, was a man of energy. As a youth he had performed some service for the Abbot of Buckfast, and as a result enjoyed the abbey's special favour. God alone knows what that service was - something to do with boundary stones that left him with a game leg, Father once let slip - but Grandfather was able to sell his wool for the highest price and pay the lowest tithes of anyone in the Aune valley. He built our stone house, and must have had some status, as well as money, for my father married above his station. My mother was the daughter of a minor knight, Guy de Rosel, who held lands in the South Hams, that broken, hidden country that lies between the moors and the sea. Life had reduced my maternal grandparents to genteel wrecks. Taxes, obligations and the workings of fate had paupered them, and their manor, more wood and mud than stone, was falling down. The match was brokered by, of course, the abbey, and the old knight jumped at the chance. My mother was, I think, happy to leave the priory where she had been sent and find the pure air of the hill-country. I truly believe that she loved my father, and I know that she loved me. She was beauty itself to me, and words and laughter where my father was touches and secret smiles. She was tall for a woman, straight-backed, long of neck. Her hair was the colour of candlelight through amber, and her eyes were green.
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