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
It 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.
Perhaps my father was not quite what my mother's family had in mind, but in the event he proved an excellent choice. The abbey, of course, obtained the promise of the de Rosel lands in return – generous as the abbot was, the aggrandisement of a yeoman sheep-farmer would have been out of the question. But it was a fine match even so. Mam gained the freedom of the high places, and a quietly adoring man. Father found, I think, an anchor for his soul.
And I learned to read. The priory had managed to teach Mam her letters – Latin and French – and infected her with a passion for them besides. She had no luck with Father, who, while he did not have the rustic's usual fear of books, felt that he would be an unworthy student, that in some way his shepherd's attentions would corrupt the written word. But he would sit by the fire for hours and watch my mother at work over the lives of the saints or holy martyrs. It was a sight that seemed to enthral and comfort him.
The little scholar soon came to the attention of the abbey, like a branded man is noticed by bailiffs. In my innocence I presumed that I would be a shepherd like my father, but in reality I had been chosen for a loftier destiny. And if I had suspected what that destiny was to be, how I would have savoured every single moment of my simple and ordinary life. I would have walked every hill, picked every flower and thrown a stone into every pool. But, to trim my tale a little, I did not. Instead, in my tenth year I became a novice monk.
Mam and Father must have been sure that they would have other children to offer up their only child so willingly. But a year after I left home they fell sick with a brain fever and died within a day of each other. My mother's parents having also been carried off by old age, I was left with no other family but my brothers in the abbey, but because a religious community is in itself a family I did not feel the shock of my parents' passing at the time. It was a slow, creeping bereavement, and I am still surprised by how deeply it cuts me even now. But I still loved the hills, and would slip away from the abbey whenever I could to walk through Holne Chase or beside the river Dart where it runs through the forest of Hembury. At the age of seventeen I left that paradise, to study under the scholars who in those days had formed a college in the cathedral city of Balecester, a day's ride east of Bristol. The abbey itself remains with me as nothing more than a medley of smells: candle-wax, boiling cabbage, spilt beer, old parchment and leather. I made only one friend, and a peculiar one at that.
Brother Adric was the abbey librarian. He was tall and sepulchurally thin, with the sharp nose and sunken eyes of a gargoyle. He was interested in me, I think, because I was interested in his precious books and had a wolfish appetite for knowledge. I do not believe that Adric had taken orders to be closer to God, or to atone for any grave sin. He simply wished to be as near as possible to books and learning. One day, soon after I joined the school, he found me peering through the library keyhole and, instead of sending me aw
ay with a clout, as I had expected, opened the door and let me look around. After that, I came to rely on the library and Adric – whose ghoulish looks hid a sweet soul – as an escape from the monotony of monkish life. But Adric was not tied to his books like some librarians I have known: the pallid creatures whose skins gleam like fish from underground caves (I have seen such monsters) and who guard their lairs like basilisks guard treasure. My friend liked to wander the villages and fields, talking to the people he met there about their customs, old stories, odd beliefs, and soon I was accompanying him on these 'investigations', as he called them. He was a collector of strange facts, which he noted down in a vast ledger that no one else was allowed to read. And what fascinated him most of all were the numberless ruins that dot the moor: the circles and rows of stone, the mounds and cairns that hang above the valleys and crown most hilltops. I, of course, had learned of these from my father, something which made Adric value my company as something more than simple friendship.
As far as I knew, the stones had been put there by the faery folk – except, that is, for the ones that were the work of the Devil himself. Adric, however, had another idea. He believed that the moor had been settled by the Trojans who, led by Aeneas, had escaped from their burning city as the Greeks put it to the sword. One of the Trojans, Brutus, had founded the city of Totnes – that was a well-known fact. But Adric theorised that, after Brutus had defeated Gogmagog (one of the terrible giants who, as any schoolboy knows, once guarded Britain), the grateful people had given him the moors upon which to build a new Troy. I think that Adric wanted to prove this theory so that he could rewrite the history of our islands. He would be a new Geoffrey of Monmouth, and put Devon in its rightful place at the centre of the world, which he, I and everyone else I knew believed to be the case anyway.
Relics bp-1 Page 6
