Falconer and the Great Beast

by Ian Morson

  ‘He's right, you know. The king will see the murder of a sodomizing friar, falsely accusing Sir Hugh's brother of outrageous conduct, as nothing more than a minor peccadillo. He will be laughing in all our faces in a few days' time.’

  Falconer's expression remained calm. He chose not to reprove de Ewelme for his incorrect assumption that Bernard could both be a sodomizer of Geoffrey Leyghton and be falsely accusing him of sodomy at the same time. He stuck to what he had learned from the Templar, whose order had a network of spies at courts throughout Christendom. ‘Not if de Beaujeu is to be believed. He tells me the king is not sure whether he wants to make an alliance with the Tartars or not. What he is sure of is that he wants to sit on the fence at the moment until he sees which way to leap. Sir Hugh was entrusted with keeping the matter open, something which he has signally failed to do. He even plotted to kill the Tartar ambassador, which act could have tainted Henry himself. No, I don't think Sir Hugh will find the king such a friend as he imagines.’

  De Ewelme beamed in obvious relief, reassured that the reputation of the university would not be sullied in the eyes of the king.

  ‘Then all is nicely resolved. The murder of Brother Bernard has a solution, as it would appear that Bernard himself was the murderer of the Tartar. That he met his own end because of his … unsavoury past is poetic justice.’

  Falconer held up his hand. ‘Not so fast. You heard David say that Bernard confessed to an earlier sin, but not to the murder of Chimbai.’

  ‘But surely …’

  De Ewelme suddenly realized that the others in the refectory were now listening to him. David had adopted his former role of translator and was whispering into the ear of Guchuluk. Though his face was as impassive as ever, the young Tartar bahadur was listening attentively, and his eyes gleamed. With a ready audience, and ever eager for the simple solution, de Ewelme pressed his case.

  ‘This man' – he indicated David with an imperious wave of the hand – ‘himself says Bernard was given a weapon by Sir Hugh, and wished to see Chimbai dead. And I understand that his Dominican brethren in this very friary saw Bernard covered in blood. What could be more conclusive?’

  ‘The weapon Bernard was furnished with was a sword – Geoffrey Leyghton's sword – and Chimbai died with an arrow in his chest; that does not exactly incriminate Bernard.’

  ‘A sword? How do you know this?’ stammered the discomfited chancellor.

  ‘Because I found it where Bellasez said Bernard hid it in the Domus Conversorum. And the blood on Bernard, which he left also on the mattress of his cell, was his own. When I examined his body, there were freshly healed scars on his forearms, where he had clearly mutilated himself. No, Bernard was not the murderer we are seeking.’

  ‘Then who is?’

  Falconer frowned, and turned to address Guillaume de Beaujeu and the Tartar men assembled round the table. As Falconer spoke, David translated for Guchuluk and Yeh-Lu, though Falconer knew that the Cathay man knew every world anyway.

  ‘I have been experiencing difficulty in establishing how Chimbai could have been killed, other than by magic. So I would like to call on the skills of a very powerful necromancer, who I took the liberty of inviting to this assembly.’

  He strode over to the door, and ushered in a slight figure dressed all in grey. It was the white-haired Roger Bacon, who stood solemnly before the motley crew of Tartars, university chancellor, Templar and regent master, while the last exalted his reputation as magician and diviner of truths. Then Roger stepped forth and expounded upon those matters his astonishing mind truly believed possible, though mortal brains might marvel at this impossibility. He spoke in Latin and waved his arms theatrically in the air to further enhance his theses.

  ‘Nam instrumenta navigandi possunt fieri ut naves maximae ferantur uno solo homine regente, majori velocitate quam si plenae essent hominibus … currus possunt fieri ut sine animale moveantur cum impetu inestimabili … possunt fieri instrumenta volandi ut homo sedeat in medeo …’

  Falconer was familiar with Bacon's theories on ships driven by a single person, a wagon moving without animal power, and a flying machine. These had seemed like magic to him when Bacon had first proposed them. Now, he was sure he could make a flying machine himself. Still, he could see that everyone in the room was shaken by Bacon's assertions and was wondering where they might be leading. Finally the little friar came to the crux of his argument.

  ‘Possunt instrumentum fieri … No, not can be made – I have made an instrument that can predict the course of the sun, moon and stars, and tell the hours of the day. With it, I will predict the very name of he who killed the Noyan Chimbai. I will go and set the astrarium in motion, and the answer will come at dawn tomorrow.’

  The categorical prediction was accompanied by a final flourish of the hand, and Bacon bowed triumphantly out of the room. De Beaujeu leaned across the table and hissed a disbelieving aside to Falconer:

  ‘This is nonsense. You can't really think he is capable of this, William?’

  Falconer's response was enigmatic. ‘It doesn't matter what I think. It's what the killer thinks that's important. And only time will tell on that.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  So I hid my face from them and handed them over to their enemies, and they fell, every one of them, by the sword. I dealt with them as they deserved, defiled and rebellious as they were, and hid my face from them.

  Ezekiel 39: 23–4

  The old gatehouse standing at the southern end of Grandpont had seen better days. It had been built as a secure vantage point to protect the bridge; now the crumbling edifice was home to a skinner, the stink from whose trade assailed the nostrils of all those who chose to enter Oxford from the south. That he was not allowed to ply his trade inside the city walls was sufficient evidence of the scale of the rancid stink. Of course the upper room in the tower housed the altogether more acceptable pursuit of scholarship, which afforded no such assault on the nostrils.

  Any nocturnal wanderer would have seen that scholarship did not keep to the regular hours pursued by the skinner and his fellow tradesmen. A candle's light flickered in the upper windows of the gatehouse tower, and, every now and then, the shadow of the tower's occupant would pass across the window arch, suggesting the man was restlessly pursuing some knotty problem. But there was no one to observe this fretful movement, as all good citizens had long retired to their beds. Even the thieving night-stalkers had abandoned the shadows, for at this late hour there was no one for them to prey on. The heavy silence was broken only by the occasional snuffle of a nocturnal creature in the nearby fields, and the insistent tinkle of the river that flowed, oblivious to the hour, past the foot of the tower, and on across Oxford's southern meadows.

  Suddenly, one of the deep shadows marking the shape of a doorway close under South Gate moved and flowed quickly into the doorway next to it. Soundlessly, it flitted from doorway to doorway until it stood below the lighted window in the gatehouse tower. Lurking at the edge of the soft oblong of light cast by the candles high above, it became clear the shadow was a figure wrapped in a long, dark cloak. The head, hidden deep in the cloak's generous hood, glanced up at the window where the occupant of the room continued his restless pacing. For a moment the lower half of the person's face was caught in the yellowish rays of light, then was lost in the hood again. It was too brief a moment to identify the wearer of the cloak, even if there had been someone to observe the lapse. The figure backed away from the light and stood by the door that gave access to the broken stairs leading up to Friar Bacon's eyrie. Whoever it was blended into the darkness again, and waited patiently for his moment.

  Eventually the candle was snuffed out, and the oblong of light on the ground disappeared. Again the figure waited, to allow the tower's occupant to settle into sleep, and became part of the stillness of the night that surrounded him. Finally, he tried the latch of the door. It was unbarred, and he slipped inside. The figure outlined briefly against the whitewashed wall inside
the door, was holding a dark object shaped like a cooking pot in his left hand; from the way his shoulders were set, the object appeared heavy and awkward to carry.

  Inside the tower he looked up at the spiral stairs – each step was heavily worn at the centre, where hundreds of feet had passed, and the rope disappearing up the left-hand wall was threadbare and unsafe. He would not trust his weight to it. Hefting the heavy object he carried into his right hand, so that he might keep to the wider part of the stairs' tread on the left, he began his cautious ascent. Part way up, he stopped and turned his head to one side, alert to the slightest noise, like a wary, wild bird. He had thought he heard something above. Perhaps the friar had tossed in his sleep, or perhaps it was just the creak of cooling timbers in the roof … whatever it was had now ceased, and silence reigned. He continued his steady climb, regulating his breathing so that he did not betray his presence with an unguarded gasp for air. At the top of the stairs, the door to the turret room stood closed before him.

  Still he listened hard, until he was satisfied that he had not disturbed the occupant of the room. He placed the pot he carried on the boards immediately outside the door, and carefully arranged the tallow-soaked wick that protruded from the top of the pot so that it hung over the side. The rest of the top was firmly stoppered. He stood up and removed the stub of a candle from the pocket in the sleeve of his gown. He dare not allow a spark from his flint to fall on the pot, so he would have to light the candle first, then, using the candle flame, light the wick. That should give him sufficient time to escape down the stairs before the device worked. The sound of the flint striking steel was horrifyingly loud, but it had to be endured. No other source of flame was available to him in the dead of the night. Finally, he had the candle lit and, with trembling hands, held it to the tallowsoaked wick.

  The shock of the door flying open almost threw him backwards. A lantern was thrust into his face, almost blinding him.

  ‘You were right, William,’ Bacon called over his shoulder. ‘It is Yeh-Lu.’

  Falconer's face peered triumphantly over the friar's shoulder.

  ‘Of course it's Yeh-Lu – only he knew about the horologium, and how he could rig it up to fire an arrow at a certain time, ensuring he himself was in our company when the fatal hour arrived. The perfect alibi: he was talking to me, the man who ended up trying to unmask the murderer, when the murder was committed – how could he possibly be the one?’

  ‘Only by the use of a clock mechanism …’

  ‘Which you told me you could use to mark the cloistral hours more precisely than a monk. Only you couldn't show it to me, because the crucial wheel that was so difficult to make was missing.’

  ‘Stolen by Yeh-Lu.’

  The two men grinned at each other with self-satisfaction, almost ignoring the prostrate form of the man from Cathay at their feet. He roared in defeated frustration, then realized the candle stub was still in his hand, and still alight. There was yet a chance. The law of getting rid of someone who has outlasted their usefulness echoed in his head: niao chin kung ts'ang, t'u szu kou p'eng – literally, when the rabbit has been killed, the hunting dog goes in the cooking pot. He thrust the candle flame at the wick hanging from the pot. The wick sputtered, almost died, then caught and began to burn rapidly. Falconer and Bacon looked at each other in bewilderment, while Yeh-Lu scrambled to his feet and grabbed the rope at the top of the stairs. He now had precious little time to escape before the chen t'ien lei – the thunder-bomb – exploded, sending flames and splinters of metal everywhere.

  Falconer grabbed at Yeh-Lu's heavy cloak, and called out to Bacon to extinguish the wick. Whatever was in the pot, he knew it was not going to be pleasant when the flames got to it. Bacon bent over the pot, flapping at the wick, inadvertently sending sparks everywhere, including into the opening at the top of the pot. Yeh-Lu's eyes opened wide in horror, and he tore himself from Falconer's grasp. He took a few lurching steps down the stairs before losing his balance. He grabbed at the rope that spiralled down the wall and for a moment he held it, almost pulling himself upright. Then the rotten rope parted just above his clutching fingers, and, with an awful cry, he tumbled down the stairs and out of Falconer's view.

  Falconer heard a fizzing sound behind him, and turned to see Bacon staring bemusedly into the pot from which unearthly green sputtering flames emanated. The friar's white hair was singed right across his blackened forehead, but there was a smile on his face.

  ‘He must have got the mixture wrong – saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal … notoriously difficult to get right. Did you know the Arabs call saltpetre Chinese Snow?’

  Falconer found Yeh-Lu at the foot of the perilous spiral steps with his head twisted at an impossible angle. His neck had been broken. Bacon expressed some feelings of sorrow at this fatal conclusion to Falconer's murder hunt. The man from Cathay had been an engineer of some brilliance, with a repository of knowledge handed down from his Peking ancestors. His chief expertise had been in the construction of clocks, which Su Sung had invented a hundred years earlier. Unfortunately this knowledge had been of little interest to the Tartars who had overrun Cathay as brutally as they had the eastern part of Christendom. They were more interested in the military inventions of the Peking scientists, which included explosive powder, incendiaries and smoke bombs.

  ‘I spoke with Yeh-Lu about clocks on the road to Oxford. He feigned only a polite interest at first, but when I gave him some mathematical details about a pinion of twelve carrying a wheel of twenty teeth meshing with a wheel of twenty four on the great wheel, he could see that I knew what I was talking about. Then we spoke together as fellow scientists. I even told him I had the makings of a clock in my baggage.’

  ‘And you showed him the clock when you set it up in this room?’

  Bacon nodded his head sadly. ‘Yes. He was here once when you came round. He had extracted a promise from me that I would tell no one of his visits, so I had to get rid of you. My apologies for so upsetting you. Then he rewarded me by stealing the central mechanism – in order to use it for an automatic device to kill Chimbai.’

  ‘How did you work out it was Yeh-Lu, and not Guchuluk or David, who killed Chimbai?’

  Guillaume de Beaujeu was walking the ramparts of the city with Falconer the day after Yeh-Lu's body had been returned to the Tartars. Neither man knew what Guchuluk would do with the corpse, but that was a matter for the Tartar bahadur. Although the consequences of Yeh-Lu's act would no doubt be felt far away in remotest Karakorum, it would cause scarcely a ripple in the placid atmosphere of Oxford. Scholar and Templar watched as the Tartar soldiers began to strike their camp and the strange circular tents were stripped to skeletal ribs of wood. Then even this framework was pulled down, leaving only a pale circular patch on the grass, which would itself disappear within a few days. Ironically, the Tartars had come and would soon be gone without any great effect on the lives lived by Falconer and his fellows – a passing curiosity as ephemeral as the elephant that had preceded them.

  Falconer's reply to de Beaujeu's question was teasing; ‘Or you, Sir Hugh Leyghton, or Bernard de Genova, for that matter.’

  The Templar knew it was unlikely to have been one of these. He felt the two letters that were stuffed inside his jerkin, one of which commanded a member of Chimbai's entourage to kill him. He now knew it had been intended for Yeh-Lu, and to have shown it to Falconer straight away would have simplified the scholar's investigations considerably. But he had been under instructions to keep the letter secret, and in the end Falconer, as clever as ever, had worked it out for himself. He listened politely as Falconer concluded his exposition.

  ‘I was diverted for a long while by the seeming impossibility of Chimbai's death. How could a man be killed by an arrow in an otherwise empty tent? I wasted a lot of time assuming the arrow had been fired from outside. But that proved impossible, too. I had been told by Guchuluk at the beginning how Chimbai's body lay in the tent, but it took me some time to see what that fact told m
e: if Chimbai lay face up, with his head towards the tent opening, and the arrow in his chest, he could not have been killed from outside. The arrow must have started and ended its journey inside the tent. It was only when someone spoke to me about wishing to be in two places at once –’ for a moment Falconer's thoughts lingered on Ann Segrim and her sweet form – ‘that I realized how useful that would be for a murderer. If the murderer could kill – or at least arrange the killing – and be somewhere else when it happened, his innocence would be evident. Without a human agent to be found and broken, the murderer was safe. Until I asked to look inside the tent. You see, Yeh-Lu had not had a chance to remove the clock mechanism, and he knew that if I saw it, I would understand its significance. So he set fire to the tent to burn the evidence.’

  ‘But why suspect Yeh-Lu specifically?’

  ‘Because he was the only one who had gone out of his way to set up witnesses to prove where he was when Chimbai stood in front of his gods and was killed. He chose me and Roger Bacon, because we had no connection with Chimbai, and no reason to be suspected of his death ourselves. I knew it was Yeh-Lu then, and his knowledge of both clocks and Chimbai's morning routine only confirmed my suspicions. My little subterfuge at the meeting I asked you to call – Roger's extravagant claims for his astrarium – was simply to get him to reveal himself to us. To either of the other Tartars, the pronouncement would be just what Roger claimed it to be: a magical prophecy. Only Yeh-Lu would know that Roger's mad claim carried a veiled threat to reveal the truth – that Roger knew what he had done – and would draw him into trying to obliterate that truth.’

  ‘You used Bacon like Tartar suicide troops fleeing from the enemy, only to draw them into a deadly trap.’

  ‘The mangudai manoeuvre. Except the suicide troops – both Bacon and myself actually – nearly got blown up in the process!’

  Falconer's final words were accompanied by a doleful toll of a distant bell. They waited for it to cease, but it continued with a demented persistence. The truth then dawned on Falconer: Roger had at last got his horologium to mark the hours, but he had failed to work out how to get the device to cease. The peal of the bell was joined by the two men's peals of laughter.