The Devil's Crossing

by Hana Cole

  Gui raced over, but Zonta was gone. The passageway was barely an arm-span wide; shuttered and still. A fine place to disappear. He crepted into the gloom. From up ahead, there echoed the murmur of voices. Gui pressed himself into the shadows. Padding forward, he glimpse the outline of a man vanish inside a low door.

  He waited a moment in the penumbra of the doorway, then knocked. After some conference behind the iron grille, it inched open. Zonta’s name was Gui’s Abracadabra. Inside, the wooden walls were covered with embroideries of carmine and gold, faded by salt and damp. The air was thick with fumes of seaweed kindling and the gossip of men who threw half glances towards the entrance each time a new client entered. There were no windows, each table instead lit by its own candle.

  Zonta sat in a corner entertaining another man with a carafe. Gui took a goblet from one of the whores winding around the tables. More important than having the money, he had learned, was acting as though you did. Another carafe spent, and Zonta’s companion was stumbling towards the rear of the establishment in the wake of a pair of breasts. The Venetian surveyed the room. Gui bowed his head, brushing some imagined dirt from his tunic. When the fraudster made to leave, Gui was in his path. The avuncular features opened briefly in surprise.

  ‘Please sit down,’ Gui said pleasantly.

  Zonta clutched him as though he were an old friend. Gui pinned the Venetian’s forearms to his side. ‘You may well have reason to take me for a fool. But it is you the fool for showing your face today.’

  ‘First calm yourself,’ the merchant spoke softly, making no attempt to distance himself from Gui’s grip. ‘Then tell me what you are talking about.’

  ‘It is your gamble,‘ Gui whispered. ‘You can stop this game, or I reveal your trickery to the patrons of this establishment and you will find yourself alongside the other thieves baking in the square for public amusement.’ Gui tightened his hold. ‘Your man in the back room did not look like a humble pilgrim to me. He looked like a merchant who will not take kindly to being made a fool of, much less being drugged and robbed.’

  The Venetian pouted. Gui guessed he had been plying his trade long enough to recognise a desperate man, and know that desperate men were dangerous.

  ‘I sit,’ he said.

  He explained to Gui that he was awaiting a flotilla, in whose protection his small cog could travel safely back to Venice. His problem, and the reason Gui had caught him engaged in such an insalubrious activity, was the arrival of a ‘rich, usurious bastard’ on the island; an Apulian grain merchant to whom he owed money.

  ‘He makes the Doge look like a pauper. Estates in Lombardy. Two villas in Venice. You think he makes all that from cereal?’ The merchant’s face coloured.

  ‘So you swindle other men to pay your debts?’

  ‘Swindle! I am in fear of my life for those debts. What would you have me do?’

  ‘I want my things back,’ Gui said. ‘Now get up.’

  The merchant held up his hands in surrender. ‘Don’t get carried away.’

  ‘I’m armed,’ Gui said. ‘And I haven’t begun to get carried away yet.’

  ‘As you wish. As you wish.’

  ‘Walk.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To your rooms. To my money.’

  ‘But I don’t have it there.’

  Gui patted the blade at his waist. ‘Walk.’

  Gui followed the merchant through the hive of backstreets. Low, dank tunnels, the tightest cut-throughs, steep, dog-leg pathways; Zonta made it hard as he could for Gui to keep his bearings. When they emerged onto a small square, a water fountain at its centre, the Venetian carved a smile. In front of them was a building tiled in Moorish design. An ancient Sicilian answered the bell, saluting Zonta in dialect. Gui eyed their exchange for any hidden signal as the merchant breezed through the hallway. The floor was a mosaic of fractured terracotta tiles. A large fan, levered by an Arab slave boy, churned the air above them. The owner had once been a man of means.

  Zonta’s room held no such faded charm - a grubby linen at a window gave out over a shambolic courtyard, refuse mounting in one corner.

  ‘You know this.’ Riffling through a bag of rags, he handed Gui his pouch. ‘He gave a lingering shrug. ‘I had to make some interest payments.’

  ‘Interest payments?’ Gui said, shaking the pouch to guage how much was gone. Ten ducats was the last price he had heard quoted for passage to Crete and that wasn’t Venetian prices. He had had eight before the theft.

  I want your cloak and hat as well.’

  ‘What for? You’re mad,’ the merchant said, animated.

  ‘Don’t argue with me.’

  ‘You’re crazy. All I have to do is cry out…’

  ‘And they’ll come running to find a man with his throat cut. Now give me your hat and cloak.’

  ‘This one?’ He pulled at his cloak dubiously.

  ‘Now.’

  The merchant took off his cloak to reveal a large, purple birthmark on his neck.

  ‘Leave the brooch,’ Gui instructed as Zonta fiddled with the gold buckle at the neck fastening.

  Gui made his move as the merchant was folding the garment. Wrestling the trickster to the ground, he silenced his shouts with a shirt sleeve and bound the thrashing man by the hands and feet.

  ‘They’ll find you soon enough,’ he said over the merchant’s muffled abuse. ‘I have business far more urgent than you can imagine.’

  Attention straining for sounds in the corridor, Gui tore through Zonta’s belongings until he found another small purse and a garnet ring. Then, donning the merchant’s garb, he was gone, swift as a deer, through the warren of streets, following the sun’s clues towards the harbour.

  In the early hours of the next day, dressed in the embroidered cloak and plumed hat of the Venetian, Gui stood on the stern of a merchant vessel flanked by a trireme. The landfall of Sicily just visible at the vanishing point of water and sky. The fleet was ultimately destined for Trebizond, but would harbour first at Alexandria two or three weeks hence. On his cloak was a brooch that would answer most questions and in his hand a large portmanteau: a prop of merchant’s cloth, including a Templar’s tunic that Zonta had clearly appropriated from the Brethren of the some priory. He also carried a letter of introduction stating that he was Roberto Blanchier, representative of a group of textile traders from Lille, bound for Alexandria seeking new export opportunities.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The moon was only a few days old. Its nascent light dappled the stones before her. A sliver of the heavens by which to see was all she needed. The map was tucked into her bodice, its contents already burned into her memory. Agnes had a stolen shovel strapped across her back, and a knife belted over the tunic and hose she borrowed from her uncle. Hair chopped to her neckline, enough to scrap under a headdress if need be, but not so long as to interrupt the masculine costume she now wore. She knew her best chance of surviving the long road home was to inhabit this twilight, to play with the shadows.

  For all the planning, the hundreds of times she had played this route in her mind, she was shocked by what she saw. The house was a ruin. Not even fifteen years gone and most of the stone had been chipped away. The roof had collapsed in on the plundered walls, the remaining window frames gapped like eye sockets. Had it all been taken by local peasants to shore up their own dwellings? If so, it meant only one thing – there was no tenant farmer. Yet the surrounding land was farmed, that much was clear. Why would someone tend to the land but forsake such a valuable asset to demolition? For the first time that night, tiny beads of sweat prickled her skin as the steel vault of her purpose felt the smelting heat of doubt.

  Agnes closed her eyes and listened to the night, determined not to feed the fear that was nagging her to turn around. She had been thirteen years old when she came with her father to view the unexpected inheritance, and now in the silence she could almost hear his footsteps beside hers, scraping at the leaves on the ground. He had been wea
ring a green Spanish doublet on that day, and she recalled how he pulled at his beard as he considered the estate.

  ‘E que fare?’ He made light of the castellany, but still she felt the unease beneath his casual bravado. A discomfort she knew came not from the task of managing the land but from the knowledge that it lifted his daughter into the ranks of men whose ideals and armies he did not trust. Her father had been raised in a land of the troubadours, a land that believed in love. The petty nobles who had considered his wealth too brackish to vie for Agnes’s hand now had their permit.

  The spot Estève had marked was a way on from the house, just beyond the confines of the estate. A dirt track took her through an abandoned orchard, its floor a mulch of fallen fruit that no-one had collected. The locals had stripped the stones from the house, but ignored a bounty of fruit? Fruit fit for a rat trap she thought as she edged onwards. All around her she could hear the twitching and rustling of the animals as they went about their hidden business, companions to the grate of her breath.

  Up ahead she made out the silhouette of a bosk, its needled trees holding off the moonlight. A fortress of brambles covered the floor, tearing at her ankles as she waded through them to place her father had sketched out. The ground before her subsided sharply and she skidded down the escarpment, observed by sombre-featured guardians on the crumbling pillars above. It looked to Agnes like an old family sepulchre.

  Beneath the slime of composting leaves her fingers met cold stone – the first of several steps that led down into the earth. A rising tide of panic pressed at the gates of her self control. Where have you brought me, papà? She shuffled forward, casting out with her feet to test the ground before her. Loose chunks of masonry disinterred as she skidded downwards. It felt as though she was raking the dead. When her foot hit the hollow knock of wood she cried out, her yelp ringing out amid the scuffle of the night hunters and their prey. How much easier it is to withstand the fear of a mortal enemy, she thought.

  Finger snagging on a piece of flint, Agnes sucked on the warm, salty taste of blood. It was an unexpected, earthly comfort in this other-worldly terrain and for a fleeting moment the damp musk of the autumnal earth was transmuted into the rich smell of sandalwood. The smell of her father’s pomander.

  ‘Then you are with me,’ she whispered to the night.

  Tucking a few strands of loose hair under her cap, she rolled up her sleeves and scythed her spade into the earth until it hit wood. A flurry of wind agitated the trees. There was dampness in the air that told her a downpour was on its way. A patter of rain that would dull her hearing, conceal the tell-tale snapping of a twig, or an unnatural rustling. She scraped away at the earth, shovelling it aside to the rhythm of her own breath until a panel was revealed – the top of a hatch.

  The night was yielding to a band of ultramarine on the eastern horizon. She was about to lose her cloak. If they had followed her, now was when they would strike. Agnes lay down on her belly as the first drops of rain began to fall. She rooted around until she felt a metal ring. The rain quickened as she tugged to free the handle, and soon she was enveloped in a muddy puddle, hair plastered to her face, blurring her sight. She drove the spade into the edge of the panel, levering back and forth until its prison of dirt was loosened. Aware only of her labouring breath, she hauled open the seal on a decade of calamity.

  Cold damp earth and the stench of decay filled her nostrils. Momentarily she recoiled, shrinking from the task ahead, bone marrow frozen in grim anticipation. She pressed her hand to her chest where the map was folded, seeking reassurance. The rain pounded down in demonic baptism as she unbelted her tunic, secured the leather strip to the hatch and swung herself down.

  The only sound in the chamber was the clamour of her own fear thundering through her veins. Muscles rigid, she squeezed her eyes shut, then open, adjusting to the dark blue light that filtered through the hatch. What she saw tore the breath from her lungs, then sent a shriek scraping through the tomb. This is what father had seen.

  Time had melted the flesh from their bones, but she could make out distinct bodies amid the tangle. Stomach heaving, she turned to flee but her legs buckled beneath her. For a moment she was paralysed, the world reduced to the horror before her eyes and the roar of blood in her ears. Around her she imagined movement, the roots of the living earth reaching out to claim her. Her body began to shake with effort, as though she were holding up a dam against some monstrous tidal wave of memory.

  Garnering all her strength she yelled at herself to move. It was enough to break the spell and free her limbs. Scrambling onto a pile of lime blocks, she pawed for the leather belt above her and dragged herself out of the chamber of forgotten corpses. The sound bubbling in her throat diminished to a groan as she emerged back into the world. Panting, she snatched up her belongings and kicked the trap door shut, pausing to make the sign of the cross before covering her tracks with hasty fistfuls of soil and leaves.

  Muscles cramping with the violence of her shivers, she raced back along the road. She ran to the sound of her footsteps and scattered recollections from those childhood days - her mother’s shawl of russet lace on her shoulders, the thick, comfy blanket into which she huddled on the journey home, a soft mist of autumn rain falling.

  By the time she reached the main road the day had dawned. A liminal silence hung under the weak sunlight of a world that was at once exactly as it had been and at the same time forever changed. The cold wind of late autumn ripped through her damp clothes, the exhaustion of her labours and of her fear, like a hod of stones upon her back. The past months making her way back from the South, the lies she had to tell, the friendless places here she had lain.

  She hadn’t often wondered what life would have brought had her father lived, but she thought on it now as she stumbled across the fields; the hardships she would have been spared, the lover she would never have known, the child that never would have been. It had been her duty to make sure that child never lived a day to regret opening his eyes on the world. Tears blurred her vision as she dug for the strength to find the next step.

  Resting against a tree, she tipped her head towards the heavens. The rain had eased, but the air was a damp vapour, smothering her as she sought to recover her breath. Her bones felt so heavy, as though they were answering a call to return to the earth – the call of those poor souls whose fate her father had discovered. Agnes reached into her bodice, drawn by the need to see her father’s hand writing, to be near him. She felt for the parchment, warm and soft from heat of her body.

  ‘Oh papà, why did you need me to see?’

  Agnes scoured the plains around her. Shorn of their harvest, a horizon of stubble was relieved by small copses of woodland and thickets. The edges of a charred world beyond the reaches of her blackened past. She ransacked her childhood for some clue, but her mind was a swirling mist of half memories and lingering instincts that she couldn’t quite shape into words.

  Then, deep within her gut, a recollection stirred. Out of the void she felt the grip of his powerful hands on her neck. She clutched her hands to her throat. Suddenly, the mist about her was a torrent, pouring poison into her lungs instead of air. She pawed at the vision before her, just as she had done that night, wrestling uselessly to free herself from his bulk, the heat of his groin against hers, the tearing pain.

  The fire-rimmed world began to darken, her stomach convulsing bile. Tiny circles danced before her eyes.

  ‘Have mercy,’ she whispered. Then there was nothing more.

  Chapter Ninteen

  The air is warm and sweet. Campfires punctuate the dusk. Smoke drifts in low banks, carrying unfamiliar aromas. Voices murmur in prayer. Away from the roadside, little stick figures rise then kneel in genuflection, their backs to the setting sun. Beyond the fires Etienne can see the outline of mountains rising up from barren, sandy plains. It is dusty, and the smoke from the fires stings his eyes. On the bench beside him, his companions sag as if in sleep, although sleep is not possible on t
his bumpy, parched journey, only exhaustion. Exhaustion and fear of what is to come.

  Every so often, just before their prayer time, the caravan halts and their captors disappear under an awning of rugs. Through an air slit in the wagon’s panel, Etienne watches them keenly - one improbably tall, his limbs waving as he strides off, the other, fat, barrel-chested, waddling behind. Etienne is pretty sure that no praying goes on inside. These roadside tents seem to be the desert version of an inn, and he has observed this routine enough times to know that shortly after the chanting stops, a servant boy will emerge from the tent-inn to bring them a sip or two of water. Usually it is just enough to make him wish he hadn’t had it. Still, it lifts his spirit to see the water-bearer come shuffling out, bucket in hand. They never spill a drop.

  ‘The water is coming.’ He nudges Marc excitedly even though he knows Marc won’t respond. He hasn’t said a word for days. Still, Etienne refuses to believe that the spark-eyed boy, always so ready with a put down or a boast, won’t rally from his glazed silence. Although he has often thought bad things about Marc, Etienne feels sorry to see him like this. Sorry and guilty that it has taken such a calamity for him to understand that being friends doesn’t mean you have to like the other person all the time. He realises now that Marc was his friend all along, and he wishes he could have the old Marc back, even if he did say stupid, mean things sometimes.

  ‘T’shirabu,’ the water boy says, plunging a ladle into his pail. He wears a disc-shaped cloth cap and a long, white dress. He has the longest eyelashes Etienne has ever seen on a boy. He looks about the same age as Etienne and the sad sympathy in his smile makes Etienne think he is not that much better off than they.

  ‘Tashrab,’ Etienne repeats. ‘Water?’