by Ian Morson
It suddenly occurred to Falconer that, when David had ducked back into the tent the first time, he could only have been conferring with Yeh-Lu about his request to see what they called the ‘sacred tent'. It had been Yeh-Lu, then, not Guchuluk, who had put Falconer off until the following day. Bearing that in mind, he continued the charade of speaking to Yeh-Lu through the agency of the Nestorian.
‘Do you or Yeh-Lu know of anyone who had a reason to kill the noyan?’
The priest paled, but shook his head vigorously.
‘And Yeh-Lu?’
David looked puzzled, but Falconer persisted. ‘Tell him what I said – does he know of anyone with reason to kill Chimbai?’
David reluctantly did so, and Yeh-Lu laughed, and answered with a single word.
‘What did he say?’
The priest blushed, and mumbled, ‘Everyone.’
Falconer was exasperated at Yeh-Lu's obtuseness, and almost started to question him direct. Perhaps realizing what might happen, Yeh-Lu spoke again to David, though his eyes never left Falconer. The priest clearly did not want to translate what was said, and shot a reply back. His whining tones didn't impress Yeh-Lu, however, who waved a peremptory hand at David. Reluctantly, the priest spoke for the other man, fear in his eyes.
‘He says there is someone here who was particularly adverse to how Chimbai ran matters.’
Yeh-Lu spoke in the guttural tongue again, obviously urging David on.
‘He says that one man had good reason to kill Chimbai …’ He still hesitated to say the word, but Yeh-Lu's look cowed him into submission. But before he could utter the name, he had to qualify it with his own statement. Quietly, but insistently, he warned Falconer, ‘You must realize that Yeh-Lu is not a Mongol. He is from a subject race who do not have the same sense of loyalty.’
Falconer smiled inwardly, knowing Yeh-Lu understood everything that David was saying about him, and nodded. ‘Yes, but who is he talking about?’
David grimaced, and whispered the name: ‘Guchuluk.’
*
Miles Bikerdyke waited outside the chancellor's quarters, nervously glancing over his shoulder, and picking the head off the boil on his neck. The student would have preferred not to have been seen in Nicholas de Ewelme's doorway, but when he had knocked to gain admittance, the ancient servant who opened the door had asked his business, then slammed the oaken door in his face whilst he carried the youth's message to his master. Halegod – no one knew his first name – had been servant to the chancellors of Oxford University for nigh on fifty years. He was long past being able to cope with his duties, but no chancellor, least of all de Ewelme, had had the courage to dispense with his services. So the ancient roamed the halls of the chancellor's residence, and interfered with the smooth running of the establishment at every opportunity. His firmest maxim was that no student should be allowed into the house – especially so after one chancellor, Thomas de Cantilupe, had been almost split in two by a drunken student's sword during a brawl. The fact that nothing worse than a tear to the hem of de Cantilupe's ceremonial robe had resulted, hadn't changed his mind.
Miles was on the verge of fleeing from his prominent position in the chancellor's doorway when the door was flung open, and de Ewelme himself pulled the youth inside. The redoubtable Halegod could be seen scurrying to the rear of the house, clucking his disapproval at the chancellor's rash act. De Ewelme slammed the door behind them both, then, as if he had run out of decisiveness, hovered uncertainly in the gloomy passage that ran from the front door of the house to the rear. Miles Bikerdyke rubbed his boil in embarrassment. Finally the older man spoke up:
‘It is done, then?’
Miles nodded, and grinned. ‘It was easy, I just had to be in the right place at the right time, and …’
De Ewelme held his hands up in horror, staving off the youth's flow of words. ‘Please – the less I know about your actions the better.’ He thrust a bag of chinking coins into the youth's hand. ‘It is sufficient that they have been successful.’
Chapter Ten
I will set fire on Magog and on those who live undisturbed in the coasts and islands, and they shall know I am the Lord
Ezekiel 39:6
Sometimes, Falconer found the little enclosed world of scholarship quite stifling. He longed for the fresh air and wide vistas of sea travel, and the excited anticipation of arrival at an unfamiliar destination. At one time in his youth each great city on the northern waterway of Europe had been new to him. Paris, Bruges, Augsburg, Prague and Cracow had all seemed outlandish, slowly opening up their secrets to him. Then, travels with merchants had brought him to Naples, Barcelona and Marseilles, through which flowed oil, wine, rice and grain from the edges of the world scattered around the Mediterranean Sea. From there he had gone to the source of those products, until one day he had suddenly felt a yearning to return to England. Not that he was jaded by the extraordinary sights he had seen for the last ten years. He simply had had a feeling that he would make greater sense of what he had seen from the perspective of his own country. He would have explained it to his students now in this way. Having filled himself with knowledge per experientiam propriam – from his own experience – he needed to seek the causes, and demonstrate propter quid – why things were so. But lately he had become tired with the quibbles demonstrating why such-and-such was so-and-so. Why not just lie back, accept that it was so, and enjoy the world?
He sighed, and thought of his friend, Roger Bacon, closeted in his tower, trying to define the world in a vast treatise, and failing to involve himself in its reality. He had gone straight from the Tartar encampment across the city to Bacon's tower. He had hoped for some assistance with his investigations, and perhaps a revival of his old friendship, only to be confronted by a distraught and pale-faced old man. Bacon had, for once, allowed Falconer into his chamber, and the scholar had been astonished at how, in the few days that the Franciscan had been resident, the room had accumulated a chaotic collection of strange items and documents. It was as if the room and its occupant had attracted all the unusual detritus floating around Oxford for the ten years that Bacon had been absent. Large tomes that the friar could not have brought in his small satchel had been piled on the single table, and more were stacked on the floor. Several glass alembics stood in one corner, some half-full of noxious-looking liquids. One had been dropped, and its contents oozed from the spidery network of cracks into the chipped and scarred floorboards. Strangely shaped pieces of wood and metal lay in profusion everywhere.
It was no surprise to Falconer, therefore, that the distracted Bacon, after letting him in, had wandered round the room, muttering, ‘It is lost. It is lost.’ Falconer had attempted to help him, but the conversation had gone from bad to worse.
‘It is lost.’
‘What is lost?’
‘I cannot say.’
‘But, if you do not know what it is that is lost, how do you know it is lost?’
‘No, no, William. You do not take my meaning. I cannot yet tell you what it is that is lost.’
The irritable Bacon continued to rummage around the piles of jars, metal shapes that took the form of wheels with spikes, and weighty cylinders. Falconer suddenly felt ignored, not only at that moment but from the day that Bacon had returned to Oxford. He must have had contact with other scholars – where would he have got all this clutter otherwise? – but he had not seen fit to talk to his oldest friend. Clearly the friendship had not survived its ten-year hiatus, and would not be restored. Aggrieved, he left the friar to his search, and crept down the spiral stairs, and through the stinking skinner's yard below.
Now, full of gloom, and not sure that he wanted to continue the investigation into Chimbai's death, he returned to Aristotle's Hall. Like his heart, it, too, was empty and cold, and he climbed the staircase up to his solar in the highest part of the building.
Before he could raise the latch on the door, he heard the low murmur of a familiar voice. Opening the door, he saw Ann Segr
im sitting at his table, with the normally aloof Balthazar perched on her wrist, enjoying a caressing finger on his downy head. The owl's big eyes were closed, and Falconer envied him Ann's gentle touch. As he closed the door, he wondered if anyone in the hall had seen the woman's arrival. The concern must have shown on his face, for Ann grinned.
‘Fear not, no one saw me come. And if we take care, no one will see me go.’
Balthazar opened his eyes at the cessation of Ann's caresses, and cast a baleful look at his master. With a hop and a disdainful flap of his silent wings, he retreated to his perch in the far corner of the room. Falconer's mood still enveloped him, and so Ann continued:
‘I came to market with Humphrey's steward, Sekston, so I thought I would take the opportunity to seek you out.’
‘I am honoured.’ Falconer had not meant the words to sound tart, but they did, so he quickly added, ‘Where is he now?’
‘I gave him a coin to spend at his favourite tavern, but it will not last him, so I cannot be long.’ She paused, as if embarrassed to explain her reason for calling. Then she took a deep breath and began. ‘I went to see the elephant. The poor thing is near death, as far as I can see. And its keeper has all but abandoned it. I saw him drinking in the same tavern that Sekston entered. What can we do to save it?’
Falconer pulled a face – the demise of the great beast was the least of his worries. So he replied in a rather offhand manner.
‘We can do nothing – the beast's way of life is unknown to us.’ Ann's whole body stiffened, shocked that the man she trusted and admired could be so uncaring – and unscientific. She pushed herself up from her seat and swept over to the door. ‘Then we should learn about it. If we understood its life, and didn't repeat stupid legends about it – 'her face reddened, but she spat the word out – ‘copulating back-to-back, we might be able to save its life.’
With that, she stormed out, leaving the perplexed Falconer wondering if his tutelage was still required.
Guchuluk was angry. Having expressly forbidden the interfering Falconer from the camp, he had emerged from his yurt early in the afternoon to see the man returning to the city's North Gate. The look on David's face was enough to tell him that Falconer had been poking his nose in where it was not wanted. He had grabbed the priest by the collar of his greasy black robe and pushed him back into the yurt. With Yeh-Lu looking on in amusement, he had squeezed the truth out of David – Falconer wanted to see the yurt where the murder had taken place, and the fool priest had agreed to his demand. Guchuluk could not believe it – the Englishman would be wanting to interrogate him next. And that he could not have.
He had only just finished scaring Sigatay and his confederates into submission, and now it seemed likely he would have to do the same with the two civilian members of the embassy. The soldiers had been easy to scare: he simply had to threaten them with death for their dereliction of duty as regards Chimbai. Their fear would ensure absolute loyalty to the new commander. David and Yeh-Lu would be a little more difficult to handle, the latter especially, because Guchuluk could not fathom the man from the city of Cambaluc. He was as devious as most of his race, and Guchuluk knew a livelier mind operated behind the subservient mask than was shown in his role as administrator. But at least he had no reason to be in contact with the English, and could not speak their outlandish tongue.
The priest, on the other hand, was required to act as interpreter, and therefore was in constant intercourse with the locals. This position, and his unfortunate inability to control his tongue, made him a volatile and dangerous tool, who could give away secrets about Guchuluk that he would prefer kept dark. On reflection, Guchuluk decided, David was the more problematic of the two men in his party, and resolved to keep a close eye on him. If necessary, he would have to be dealt with swiftly and finally. In the mean time, he had to plan for the consequences of Chimbai's murder.
Darkness can hide many sins, and though Oxford appeared quiet that night, Peter Bullock knew that it was an illusion created by the soft, all-enveloping gloom. There was much happening under cover of darkness that the perpetrators would not undertake in daylight. In Torold's Lane, not far from where Guillaume de Beaujeu had lodgings, a night-stalker robbed a drunken and unwary sheep farmer of his purse, hamstringing him with a dagger in the process. The sheep farmer was never to walk properly again. A regent master of divinity, Ralph Wyght, paid the first of many nocturnal visits to a tailor's wife, her husband having been despatched on a fruitless overnight errand. His foolish dalliance would eventually bring him before the Chancellor's Court, to be censured by his peers. One of Nicholas de Ewelme's servants lost all his money dicing at the Cardinal's Hat tavern with a motley crew of travellers who professed to have just met each other. Under cover of the same darkness, those travellers moved on together to find a gullible mark in Banbury. By comparison, the fire was a trivial matter to each of these people. Especially as it was in the Tartar camp.
Peter Bullock saw it first, from the top of the city walls. He had just finished getting the facts of the robbery from the bleeding sheep farmer, and had got him carried off to St John's Hospital outside East Gate. The friars would tend to him there, but the leg wound was vicious and deep, and Peter doubted if he would walk without a limp. He had finally convinced all the on-lookers hanging out of their windows that there was nothing more to see, and that the king's peace had been re-established. With all the shutters reluctantly closed, and dust scuffed over the dark bloodstain in the lane, he returned to his nocturnal observation of the Tartars. He knew it was foolish – knew that they presented no military threat – but he could not tear himself away. It wasn't even as though there was anything to see, as the camp was usually as dead as King Henry's father.
Tonight was no different, and he was on the verge of giving up his vigil for the night when he thought he did see some movement. He cursed his old eyes, and screwed his face up to see better in the gloom. There was nothing, and he assumed it must have been his imagination, or at most a stray dog looking for scraps. Then he was sure he saw a light flicker and disappear, and wondered if someone were wandering around the camp with a burning torch. Suddenly the flame appeared again – this time more distinct. There was somebody abroad in the camp – he could see a black figure outlined by the now steady glow. Then flames shot up into the night sky, illuminating the tents around it. And Bullock could see that the source of the flames was one of the tents itself – the small one where the noyan's body lay. With an audible roar, the side of the tent was engulfed in flame, and sparks flew up into the sky, drifting dangerously close to the tinder-dry hovels along St Giles.
For a moment the constable stood with his mouth agape, then, realizing the danger to the town, he scuttled down the steps into Sumnor's Lane and burst into the silent church of St Michael. The bell rope hung down from the blackness of the tower, and he grabbed it, yanking it ferociously. At first the heavy bell swung in infuriating silence, then the clapper hit the bell, and the alarm was raised.
Falconer stood disconsolately on the edge of the blackened grass. The stench of burning still hung heavy in the air, along with the whitish smoke that drifted lazily from the remains of the noyan's last resting place. The tent was no more than a skeleton of halfburned poles, poking into the red dawn sky. The covering of felt, soaked in pitch to shed the rain, had burned away completely – as had most of the contents of the tent, including the noyan's body. The ash was still hot, and Falconer could approach no further than the circle burned on the earth. There was no hope now that he could examine the tent and discover where the arrow had been fired from. All the evidence had literally gone up in smoke. More in resignation than expectation, he fumbled in his pouch and held his eye-lenses up. In the mass of charred remains at the centre of the pyre, all he could see was the white of some bones, and the greyish leftovers of some metal – weapons or armour, presumably. The heat at the core of the fire began to scorch his face, and he pulled back, pocketing his lenses.
No one
from Oxford, roused by St Michael's church bell, had bothered with the seat of the fire. It was the sparks flying into the night sky, threatening the huddle of the thatched and largely wooden houses on St Giles, that had occupied the citizenry. As one large cinder after another floated down from above, people beat out the incipient fires with brooms and bare hands. The occasional bucket of water taken from the moat surrounding the castle and passed along a chain of hands also helped to save the quarter. Only one man had died, falling from the roof as he tried to pull his smouldering thatch down. Left to their own devices with an already raging fire to tackle, Guchuluk's entourage could only stand and stare as Chimbai's impromptu funeral pyre blazed. Of Guchuluk himself, there had been no sign.
Glumly, Falconer felt that this was a murder investigation that had ended before it had ever begun. He had had no more than a brief glimpse of the corpse before it had been burned beyond recognition, and the scene of the crime, and any clues it held, had been reduced to ashes. Even the murdered noyan's countrymen didn't want him to pry into the killing. What facts did he have to apply his logic to in order to deduce the greater truth – the identity of the murderer? Chimbai had apparently been killed by an arrow shot by an excellent marksman, between the hours of prime and sext, while surrounded by guards who saw nothing. According to rumour, more than one person had wanted him dead. Nicholas de Ewelme had certainly threatened dire action, and Yeh-Lu said there was friction between the noyan and his second-in-command. Precious few facts to develop a scientific theory on. But, for now, Guchuluk must remain the primary suspect, especially as he was conspicuously absent, and may have set the fire himself to destroy evidence.
A nervous cough behind him alerted Falconer to someone else's presence at the site of the conflagration. It was the Nestorian priest. He clearly had something to say, though, as he shifted from one foot to the other and picked at the frayed edge of his sleeve, he was having some difficulty in coming out with it. Falconer wondered if what he had to say was going to be crucial – would it finally give him a way into this frustrating investigation? but when David spoke, it was of Yeh-Lu, and must have been based on envy of the other man's position. He said he didn't want Falconer to take Yeh-Lu's words about Guchuluk being Chimbai's nemesis at face value.