The Gallows Curse

by Karen Maitland

  Ma didn't even turn her head to look, but stared instead at the symbols on the three strips of parchment the bird had pulled from her hand.

  'The wind carries treachery, Master Raffaele. But whether you are the betrayer or the betrayed, you alone know.'

  Raffe rose, flinging the chair back. He strode from the room and thundered down the stairs. He didn't know what he had hoped to achieve in that chamber or what he had thought he would learn. He had meant to tell Ma not to admit Hugh again, but he knew that even had he begged her on bended knee she would do precisely what it pleased her to do. How much did Ma know about the message from France? Was that demonstration with the bird meant as a threat not to remove Elena or a warning of something else?

  Without even thinking what he was doing, he hurried across the courtyard to the room where the boys entertained. It was deserted, as he expected it to be, since the noon bell had not yet sounded from the churches in the city.

  He made his way to the back of the room and found the low doorway. He peered at it, looking for a latch, but the thick boards were smooth. It had been five years or more since he'd last forced himself to come here. How had Ma opened the door then? Surely there had been a latch? He tried to visualize Ma standing in front of him at this door. She'd stood on tiptoe, reaching up for something. He remembered that. Was it a hidden key?

  Raffe groped back and forth along the door until he felt a small hole. It came back to him now. She'd used a knife. He withdrew his own knife from his belt and slid the point inside until it hit metal. Wriggling the blade, he managed to slide it under the metal bar and felt the latch rise on the other side. He pushed the door and it swung open.

  It was as well that he'd had to bend double and almost crawl through the doorway, otherwise he would have surely cracked his head open on the stone archway on the other side, but once under it, he could just about stand upright at the top of the stairs. The stench of animal piss, rotting meat and dampness hit him with the force of a siege engine, making his eyes sting and water. Surely it hadn't been this foul before? He groped his way down, sliding his hand along the dripping walls until, half-way down, he reached the torch burning on the wall and removed it from the bracket.

  As he passed each cage, the animals snarled or growled, some shrinking back from the blazing torch, others hurling themselves at the bars, their sharp teeth glistening in the flames. How many times had they beaten themselves on those bars over the long days and nights that stretched together to form interminable years? And yet they had still not learned that the iron would not yield. Was it impotent rage or unshakeable hope that made them do it, Raffe wondered, or perhaps making humans flinch just amused them.

  He threaded his way past the animals, keeping to the middle of the passageway so as not to brush against any of the cages. He knew what such beasts were capable of. Behind him he could hear the rasp of hot, fetid breath and the click of sharp claws on iron as the beasts restlessly prowled up and down in their straw. The heavy animal odours of fur and dung filled his nostrils and burned the back of his throat. He closed his eyes, wondering just how long it would take a man to get used to these smells and sounds and know it for his home.

  Opening his eyes again, Raffe edged forward until the light from the torch fell on the last cage. Its occupant was awake, sitting up, no doubt roused by the disturbance of the beasts and the flames moving towards him. He stared at Raffe, blinking in the sudden light. His expression revealed no recognition, only curiosity. He lifted his arm, brushing the wild hair back from his eyes with his stump, and tilted his face up. He shuffled forward on his knees, dragging the twisted remains of his legs behind him, holding out his mutilated arms as if he was begging, though Raffe noticed he didn't extend them through the bars, as if afraid that someone might hurt him. The bars were as much his protection as his cage.

  Raffe crouched down until he was on a level with the man.

  'You know me?' he asked Softly.

  The man blinked his startlingly blue eyes, holding out his arms again, this time more insistently, but with no sign of recognition in his face. Raffe cursed himself that he hadn't brought food. Then he remembered the leather bottle he always carried at his waist. He felt for it. He'd drunk most of the contents on the journey here, but there was a little wine left. He took out the wooden stopper and held the mouth of the bottle through the bars. For a while the man in the cage simply stared at it as if he had forgotten what the object was.

  'Drink,' Raffe urged.

  Slowly the man shuffled forward again, finally putting his lips to the bottle. Raffe tilted it and the liquid ran down, making the man choke and cough, but when Raffe tried to ease the flow, he grasped it with both stumps, pulling it towards him and sucking and sucking until finally convinced there was not a drop more left inside, then he it let go.

  Raffe squatted down on the damp flags of the cellar opposite the cage. For a long time the two men stared at each other.

  'Do you remember me?' Raffe asked again, searching for the merest flicker of recognition, but the man's face was expressionless. He offered nothing.

  A man had looked at him like that once before, when he was just a boy. Raffe could remember it even now, his father standing there framed in the great doorway of the abbey church, the sun burning so fiercely behind him that the hills were bleached white in the light. Raffe had looked back as the priest led him away down the long aisle of the church. His father was just standing there motionless, his broad hat in his hand, his face tanned to the colour of the soil, but there had been no expression at all in his eyes. Nothing. He'd watched his son being led away, as unmoved as the ancient olive trees on their farm. Relieved, maybe, that he need not work so hard now; proud, perhaps, of what his son would achieve? Who knows, Raffe certainly didn't, for his father had never seen the need for words.

  Raffe turned his face away from the man in the cage, kneeling on the cold flags.

  'Talbot told me that this is not my country. So why should I care who sits on the throne of England? John is not my king. I owe him nothing. I am betraying nothing. All that matters, all any man can be expected to do, is to protect the ones he loves. I have to save them.'

  Raffe stood up and began to pace back and forward, as restless as the caged beasts.

  'Anne and Elena, they are both part of Gerard. As long as Elena still carries what he did in her soul, there is hope for Gerard in the next life. But I don't know how to protect them. I don't know what to do. If I take Elena from here, I might be taking her to her death. In here she is safe. She is alive.'

  He turned to face the man in the cage whose blue eyes stared out at him fixedly from the grime-blackened face.

  'I had to make that choice once before, and I need to know if I was wrong, if I made the wrong choice. This may be the last time I can come to you. What I did, what I am about to do, I do only for love. You cannot ask any man to harm what he has given his very soul to protect.'

  Raffe gripped the bars of the cage, shaking them violently, as if he could wrest an answer from the man who crouched in the straw.

  'You have to forgive me. You have to give me absolution. There is no one else left who can ... speak to me, damn you, just speak! Just one word, one sign even, that's all I ask, just one!'

  But the man in the cage didn't move. The torchlight flickered as twin flames in the great black pupils of his eyes, but he didn't take his gaze from Raffe's face. All around him the animals prowled restlessly up and down, their paws rustling through the straw, their claws clicking against the iron bars, and somewhere in the far distance came the hollow dripping of water, like a giant heartbeat, falling ceaselessly down into the gaping black hole in the floor.

  Raffe picked up the torch and threaded his way back up between the beasts' cages. They too stared at him as the flame passed them, and they watched him as the darkness ebbed back behind him. Raffe felt their glowing eyes on his spine, but he did not turn around. As he mounted the steps, the darkness obliterated any trace of his presence
as the tide washes footsteps from the sand.

  But it wasn't until the very last ghost of light had vanished from the cellar that the man in the cage finally whispered, 'I do forgive you, Raffaele, because I know you will never forgive yourself.'

  But only the great black cat heard him utter a word.

  The Day of the Full Moon,

  September 1211

  Seagulls — To kill a gull is to murder a man, for gulls that hover restlessly over the waves are the souls of drowned men. A gull which flies unerringly in a straight line follows a corpse that drifts beneath the waves. It is the unquiet spirit of that mortal, which cannot abandon the body that once was its home.

  When sailors or fishermen die they are transformed into gulls, for the wind and the waves have captured their souls and they cannot leave the sea. The mortals took from the sea while they lived and now in their death they must pay for what they took. It is a devil's bargain.

  If a gull should strike the casement of a house, a member of that household out at sea is in mortal peril.

  When seagulls fly inland, a storm is brewing out at sea. But if they fly out to sea or rest upon the sand of the shore, the weather is set to be fair.

  Mortals fear to look a seagull in the eye, for if they do the gull will know them and remember them. And should that mortal then ever venture to swim in the sea or fall from a ship into the waves, they will be at the mercy of that gull. It will peck out their eyes and leave them blinded and helpless to their fate.

  For like the sea itself, gulls show no mercy to mortals who are foolish enough to venture into their kingdom.

  The Mandrake's Herbal

  The Sea Is Coming

  Raffe stepped from the boat on to the island that was Yarmouth. He slid a coin into the palm of the boatman, who appraised it carefully before hiding it among his clothes. Shivering in the grey dawn light, he picked his way along the slippery wooden jetty that jutted out into Breydon Water, where the three great rivers surged into the salt water of the estuary. The gravel beneath Raffe's feet sparkled with silver fish scales. They were everywhere, dried and blowing in the wind, heaping in tiny transparent drifts like snow against the buildings.

  He made for the Rows stretched out on either side of him, a hundred or so alleys running parallel to one another down to the open sea. He chose one at random and edged down it; the passage was so narrow that in places he could have touched the walls on either side. An open sewer ran down the middle, like the vein on the back of a shrimp, but the sharp salt breeze funnelling through it mercifully blew away much of the stench of excrement and rotting food, leaving only the overpowering smell of fish which clung to the tarred wood of the buildings like a second skin.

  Many of the dwellings also served as shops or workshops, their goods spilling out into the narrow street to make space for the day's work in the tiny rooms. Dotted between the tiny wooden houses were small courtyards where he glimpsed women cooking over open fires, weaving creels or pounding linen in their wash tubs. Their fingers never once paused in their labour, nor did their tongues cease from chattering to their neighbours, but their sharp eyes missed nothing. Raffe kept a firm hand on his purse as he was jostled backwards and forwards, for ports were notorious for the rogues they attracted.

  He breathed easier when he finally burst from the end of the Row and found himself on the seashore. There was no less activity here. Everywhere as far as the eye could see along the sand, men were busy making or repairing boats, or striding past with baskets of fish, or unloading bales, kegs and boxes on the precarious wooden jetties that jutted out into the waves. And beyond them in the grey sea, the great sailing ships rolled at anchor, while tiny shoreboats plied back and forth among them like shoals of sardines among whales.

  Raffe tramped half the length of the beach looking for the Dragon's Breath, but it was impossible to pick out one vessel among all the ships out there. He enquired of a few of the men, but each shook his head, too many boats coming and going.

  'Toll house.' One fisherman jerked his head towards the far end of the shore. 'They keep tallies of all ships, so as they can collect the toll.'

  Raffe found the wooden building easily enough, but finding someone to speak to was another matter. He made his way up the outside steps to a square room, crammed with small tables and crowded with merchants and ships' captains shouting and waving rolls of parchments heavy with wax seals. Eventually, Raffe managed to force his way through the throng and by sheer dint of grabbing hold of a man bodily, managed to get his attention.

  'Can you tell me if the Dragon's Breath has put in here?'

  The harassed-looking clerk gave a squeak of laughter at the sound of Raffe's high-pitched voice, but quickly straightened his face and wearily gestured towards a great stack of parchments on his table, rolling his eyes. Raffe slipped a silver coin into his palm.

  'Came in yesterday,' he muttered. 'Dealt with her myself. Wine, spices mostly, some timber, not good quality. Ivory, five bales of furs, wolf and bear, no sable and —'

  'Where's her shoreboat?' Raffe interrupted impatiently. The clerk huffled a little, clearly insulted that his feat of memory was not being given the admiration it deserved. His hand slid again over the table, but Raffe was not about to part with another coin. He'd not forgotten or forgiven that laughter.

  He leaned across the table, pushing his face into the clerk's. 'I said, where is it?'

  The clerk glowered at him, but seeing that Raffe wasn't going to move away, he gestured back in the direction he'd come. 'Crew'll be in the Silver Treasure, up Shrieking Row.'

  It took Raffe a while to find the Row for the names were known only to the local townsfolk. Finally one old fishwife grudgingly directed him to Shrieking Row and, once there, Raffe quickly spotted the Silver Treasure by the carved herring above the door, together with the few twigs of a dried bush that proclaimed it as an alehouse.

  It was still early morning, so most men were hard at their labours, but those who had no pressing business to attend to sat in the small yard to the side of the house, pouring ale down their throats from blackened leather beakers as if they hadn't slaked their thirst for a week. From the stench of them, Raffe took them to be fishermen. He ignored them and peered into the tiny room beside the courtyard. Three men sat on benches around a narrow table, talking in low voices and evidently haggling over some deal. The only other furniture in the room was a rickety ladder leading through a trapdoor to the attic above.

  As Raffe slid in through the open doorway, blocking out the light, the men looked up sharply and, just as swiftly, a hand covered some object lying on the table and swept it from sight, but not before Raffe had glimpsed the wine-red flash of a ruby.

  'I'm looking for the crew of the Dragon's Breath.''

  'You have business with them?' one of the men asked in a thick Spanish accent.

  'I've come to take delivery of some cargo.'

  The man's mouth shrugged, as if to say he would need a good deal more than that before he revealed anything.

  The sunken-cheeked alewife came in from the yard, rubbing her hands on a filthy old scrap of ship's sail tied around her waist to protect her skirts. 'More ale, masters?'

  All three heads swivelled in Raffe's direction. He knew what was required of him.

  'Bring a large flagon and another beaker.'

  'As you please,' the woman said without the flicker of a smile. Raffe wondered if any emotion ever crossed her sallow face. All the life and colour in her eyes seemed to have been bleached out by sun and sea, leaving them with only the faintest tinge of faded blue, like watered-down milk.

  One of the men slid his buttocks a few inches down the bench and Raffe took that as an invitation to join them at the rough table which was blackened with old tar, having been assembled from bits of old ships' timbers and driftwood.

  After the alewife had slopped a brimming flagon of ale down between them and drifted back outside, Raffe poured the ale into the men's beakers and tried again.

&nb
sp; 'The cargo I've to collect is a live one.'

  They regarded him steadily, their faces tanned almost to the colour of the beakers, betraying nothing. Raffe wondered if they could even understand him.

  He delved into his scrip and laid a tin emblem of St Katherine's wheel on the rough table.

  All three men regarded it for some time in silence, then the leader picked it up and returned it to Raffe. 'This cargo, where does it come from?'

  'Spinolarei in Bruges.' It was what Talbot had told him to say, though Raffe doubted his visitor had ever set foot on that particular quayside.

  The sailor nodded.

  'Can you take me out to him?' Raffe asked, taking this nod to be the only sign of acknowledgement he was going to get.

  'No, no!' the sailor said with unexpected vehemence. Then he seemed to realize some kind of explanation was called for. 'Captain does not want strangers on ship. But I fetch him. You have money?'