Relics bp-1

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  'Good, good,' said the Captain. 'So, Petroc, it seems we owe you for the life of our royal guest. But now we have difficulties. How do we get Kyria Anna back on board? We have a rowdy crew and no whalebone handy.'

  'Captain de Montalhac, I will not be smuggled or hidden any more. I would rather take my chances with your crew.' Anna's face was set once more in its imperial mask.

  'My God, Vassileia, do you know what you are saying?' gasped Pavlos.

  'Pavlos is right,' the Captain agreed. 'The men are in a vile temper. I have kept them too close to heel these past months. They have had no proper shore leave-' 'What about Gardar?' Anna broke in. The Captain winced.

  'Gardar can hardly keep its own people alive, let alone entertain a company of villains like mine. No, they are apt to take very badly to the arrival of a lady on board, no matter how high-born or needy. I will not risk it.' And he folded his arms across his chest and regarded Anna down the length of his nose.

  'Seigneur de Montalhac, if I am shut away in that corpse-hole again I shall die anyway. Unless you want to crack my skull and keep me insensible, you must announce a new crew member. How long until we reach Venice?'

  Weeks, Kyria Anna, long weeks, even if the winds are kind to us,' said the Captain.

  Well, I am sure I can tie knots or whatever it is you do to sail a ship, good Monsieur de Montalhac.' She spoke flippantly, but from the jut of her chin it was clear that she meant every word. The Captain saw it too. He sat down beside her.

  'Let me see your hands,' he said gently. She held them out to him and he took each one and turned it over. I saw his expression change from amusement to surprise.

  'Not the ivory hands of a princess, I'm afraid,' said Anna. At the convent we washed clothes for the poor, even if we had to break the ice with an axe to do so.'

  The Captain stared at her for a long moment, then at me. You don't, by any chance, speak Basque?' he asked hopefully.

  So it was that Mikal joined the Cormaran. He was a poor, half-starved Basque fisherman's son, only survivor of a ship that had foundered in a storm. For three months he had lived on gull's eggs, and had all but abandoned hope when our sail came into sight.

  'The Basques have plied the ocean for generations,' the Captain told us. 'They tell no one where they go – it is the greatest secret in the wide world. So if a shipwrecked sailor appears among them, the crew will not be so surprised. You must have a disguise, and you must have a reason for being here. This is the only way I can see that solves both problems. And this mummery need only last until we leave Dublin. I believe the men will be more cheerful after a few nights of hard-earned riot, and I will re-introduce you as a wealthy passenger.'

  'I cannot speak a word of Basque, however,' said Anna. It was plain she was already enthralled by the idea. 'But are there any Basques aboard?'

  'That's the point,' said the Captain. 'There are none – dare I say it, the only language of the world not represented. I believe that Gilles speaks a little Euskadi, but that is all. You will be respected, believed – the Basques keep their own counsel, that is well known – and can retreat into silence whenever you wish. On the other hand, you will have to speak something.'

  'I am speaking your Occitan now,' she answered. Will that do?'

  'Indeed it will,' said the Captain with a little bow that was part mockery and part undeniable respect. Well, you have a man's clothes already. But you will have to cut your hair.'

  'Certainly not!' she snapped. 'The silent sisters could not cut it, and nor shall you or anyone else. I shall plait it. My teeth may drop out, but my hair stays put.' And she wound a black, defiant rope around her neck.

  'A female Samson, no less,' laughed de Montalhac. 'Very well. Here is what we shall do.'

  After the Captain left, Pavlos stayed with us until it grew dark. Then we crept down to the ship and slipped inside the Captain's tent. The next morning I would make a pretence of climbing back to the high point, something none of the other crewmen were likely to want to join in, and come back with Mikal. I hoped the plan would work. I could not see Anna as anything but intensely, wonderfully female, as I discovered when I tried to picture her as a boy. It was as if a strand of that ink-black hair had begun to wind itself about my heart. As I watched her sup with the Captain and Gilles I remembered my hands under her tunic and nearly choked on the succulent morsel of fresh mutton I was mumbling at with my rickety teeth.

  Later, as the Captain, Gilles and I left the tent to sleep by the fire outside, she was stretching out on the bright rugs that covered the sand. 'Good night, Petroc of Devonshire,' she said. 'Sweet dreams – if the dead can dream.'

  'I believe this is a dream, and I am only afraid that I will wake from it,' I said, without knowing where the words had sprung from. 'Am I in yours, or you in mine?' She spoke softly behind me. 'Death in life, life in death. We are the same, you and I.' I looked back, but she had blown out the lamp and I could not tell where she ended and the night began. Then, soft as a moth's wings, her lips brushed mine and cool fingers rested for an instant on my cheek. Another instant passed and I felt her leave me.

  I stepped outside. Under the great sky the fire seemed like a little spark. The stars danced their old, solemn dance above me, far, far away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  So it was that Mikal came aboard the Cormaran. It was as the Captain had predicted: the castaway boy was welcomed like a long-lost mate. He set to with a will, and if he wasn't the most expert seaman, he was excused – after all, it was his first voyage, and he hadn't got very far into the bargain. He had to endure the usual filth about sheep-shagging, and endless seagull jokes, but after a few days he blended, unsuspected, into the general melee.

  As the two new boys, it was natural that we should be friends, especially as I had found Mikal somewhere on the other side of the Godforsaken island and brought him back to the world. And the truth is that we were inseparable. Although I was the more experienced seaman – a strange thought, this, to one whose only experience of water had been paddling in mountain streams – then Mikal's ferocious energy more than made up for his lack of skills. I taught him what little I knew, but he was precocious, and soon the crew found they had an insatiable student on their hands. By the time we passed the isle of Rathlin, off the north-east tip of Ireland, he was prattling about knots and broad reaches with all the joy of the newly converted.

  Anna had folded and twisted her black mane into three short ropes, which she plaited at the nape of her neck. It was a little strange, but she passed it off as the fashion in her village and that seemed to suffice. Mikal was too young to shave, fortunately, and as Anna had starved with the rest of us her face was gaunt and quite mannish. As I have said, we were inseparable, but in ways that the rest of the crew could never know about. There are precious few private moments on a ship at sea, but Anna and I sought them out like gold dust in the bed of a river. Since that first, night-hidden kiss on the island – the first of my young and so far celibate life – my mind and flesh had been consumed by Anna. We would brush past each other, her touch striking sparks from me that I half-imagined were visible to the crew. Sometimes we could hold hands for minutes at a time, the desperate lock of our fingers the only outlet for passion. Often she would whisper such things to me in her dark voice – she took an endless delight in shocking my hopelessly innocent self – that I felt the deck lurch beneath me even though the sea was calm. And three times – no more – we kissed, hesitant with fear of discovery but full of heat and urgency, only to fly apart at the smallest hint of an approaching footstep. It was torture, but of the most wonderful kind. In truth I thought that, if this was to be the height of my earthly pleasure, it would almost be enough. But once the flesh has awakened, only death can still it, and Anna had awakened me as the sun awakens the earth in springtime. As an odd counterpoint to all this – salt to temper the honey – Pavlos got it into his head that I would have to be schooled in those warlike arts which I had never so much as considered. It was sheer lu
ck, he told me sternly, that I had bested the island madman, and my clumsy attack could just as easily have brought about the death of Anna or – and he emphasised that this, under the circumstances, would have been the preferable outcome – my own demise. So I found myself being tutored, every morning, by a terrifying college of teachers: Horst, Dimitri and Pavlos himself. Dimitri was the ship's unofficial fencing master and held his classes – I saw them as such, but they were both less and more than that: vicious games that honed skills and headed off any ill-feeling or rage that might otherwise have festered into real bloodshed – as soon as the sun had risen and the day was fair. In time I would join in these melees, but, as the first lesson proved, at my present level of accomplishment I would lose a duel with Fafner the cat. I faced Horst, both of us armed with a blunt sword and a round wooden buckler shield. Copying my opponent, I dropped into a crouch, shield before me, sword up. Then, in the blinking of an eye, Horst dropped his sword, knocked mine from my hand with the edge of his shield and felled me with his shoulder. Before I had even squawked in surprise he was sitting on my chest, the rim of his buckler pressing into my throat.

  'Now you are dead,' he told me, smiling icily. And for the better part of an hour he showed me the many ways I could expect to die in the short moments between drawing my blade and deciding what on earth I should do with it next. It was not a cheering experience, but the next day I was a little quicker, and the day after that, faced with Dimitri – who had already tripped me three times and pretended to skewer my cods with his knife – I felt myself vanish – that is to say, the bumbling, anxious, flinching Petroc vanished – and when I came to my senses again, Dimitri was howling with laughter as blood poured in a torrent from his nose. "Yes, yes! Magnificent, O Petroc! You have it! Again!'

  This time I did not lose myself, but it was as if the scared, inept Petroc was trapped in the same skin as a man who could act on nothing more than brute instinct. In time I would lose this sense of division and realise that I was simply allowing myself to be free, to use my body as freely as I had when I was a child. But at first, although I learned fast and faster still, I was uneasy, and worried, for a while, that I was being posessed by some maleficent, violent spirit.

  Off the mouth of the Liffey the Captain ordered the Cormaran hove to. He took Gilles off in the gig, and the little boat went bobbing off over an agitated grey sea. It was late in the day when they returned, and several large bundles wrapped in well-greased hides followed them on board. To our surprise we were ordered to make sail on a southerly course. We would not be stopping in Dublin after all. The crew muttered darkly but stuck, white-lipped, to their work.

  On a muggy, grey morning a week later, we entered the mouth of the Gironde and, after a pleasant enough sail upstream past low hills stitched with the coarse green lines of vineyards, drew near to the wharves of Bordeaux. It had been an uneventful passage, save for a hail-filled squall that lashed at us as we coasted past the He d'Oleron. Now the walls and spires of the city danced against the sky, which had cleared as if in welcome.

  The port was full. Ships of all shapes and sizes jostled against one another all along the great length of the quay and at anchorages further out into the river, and we drifted past them under a wisp of sail. Big cogs bumped tarry hulls with fishing smacks and barges. Pilot boats and gigs bustled to and fro, ferrying people and goods from ship to shore. Many vessels flew warlike pennants and gonfalons, and bright shields hung on their sides. Between the swaying masts, the quayside was swarming, not just with the loading, unloading and portering of trade but with groups of armed men standing, sitting of running about with no seeming purpose. Pikes and halberds bristled in clumps, and the sound of drums and shouting came over the water.

  I stood beside the Captain on the bridge. The crew, those who were not handling the sail, lined the sides and the forecastle. They saw the soldiers on the quay, and like hounds they scented blood. I glanced at the Captain, and saw that a wolfish look had settled there as well. "What is happening over there?' I asked Gilles.

  He shrugged. 'The English King and the French King, going at it like scorpions. When has it been different? But-' he paused, and I saw a look of sour disdain pass over his face, '-the English scorpion seems to be annoyed. An army is landing – a real one. It'll be battles this time, not skirmishes.'

  Nizam wove us through the tangle of ships and anchor-lines until, at a signal from de Montalhac, the sail dropped and we weighed our own anchor between two fat-bellied cobs that bobbed and rolled like huge pitch-caulked barrels. Soon the gig was pulling away towards the wharf, the Captain sitting alert in the prow. I watched the men ply their oars, and wished myself among them. Here was life again as I knew it: the smell of real food drifting from good stone houses, bells chiming from proud steeples, the yelling and bantering of Englishmen. Anna had slipped to my side and was gripping the rail tightly as she gazed hungrily at the shore. She was quivering like a hound on a leash.

  'If I could swim, I would be on dry land by now,' she muttered.

  'I can swim,' I told her, 'and I would gladly pull you along, Mikal. But much as I would love a mug of beer and some good red meat, our balls would shrivel and drop off in that water.'

  "Well, I agree we wouldn't want anything to happen to those balls of yours,' she breathed, leaning in close. I felt a familiar quickening below. 'But it is summer, you oaf – the water is warm. They have beds over there, you know,' she added. And doors. With locks.' I cleared my throat somewhat dramatically. 'Well, what do you say, brother?' she added loudly in her croaky man-voice. Will we see what trouble there is to find? I fancy a fight, a fuck and…' she waved her hand, as if to pluck words from the seagull-loud air, '… and a fried… a fried fowl,' she finished, and glanced at me, pleased with herself.

  'Don't overdo it, brother,' I hissed. Nizam was chatting to Dimitri right behind us, after all. But they seemed unaware of our presence.

  In truth, this might be Mikal's last day on earth. Mikal the luckless Basque boy would disappear into the stews of Bordeaux. The crew would think he had slipped away homewards, or that his purse and gizzard had been cut and his body flung into the harbour. Sad, but such things happened. Either way he would be gone, and soon afterwards I would introduce Anna Doukaina, mysterious adventurer in need of our protection. The masquerade would be over, and not before time. Anna had been wearing her Mikal disguise ever lighter, and I had begun to feel a constant knot of anxiety lest she give herself away.

  I felt her frustration, of course. It came off her in waves, like heat from coals. Her bound breasts were a constant torment. She was in a state of permanent fury about the fuss involved in a simple thing like pissing – having to wait until no one was looking, so that the crew would not notice how hard it was for her to make water standing up with her back to the boat like the rest of us. Neither of us could believe that Mikal's secret had not come to light, but, I believe now, that was due to the intense focus of a long sea journey, when everyone's world shrinks, through boredom or discomfort, to the task in hand, and to one's own tormented body. Although I would not have dared to think such a thing then, I suspect that, if Anna had climbed the mast and stripped stark naked, as she had often threatened to do, not one of the scorbutic, half-starved, salt-burned wretches below her on the deck would have turned so much as an eyelash. They would have spit a little more blood over the side and gone back, grumbling, to their mindless work. But that picture – Anna standing bare amidst a snarl of wild-eyed men, her skin glimmering white through the half-light of an approaching squall – floated through my dreams and woke me more than once as we made our way south from Scotland.

  The Captain had urgent business ashore. There were deliveries to be made, and cargo taken on, as in every port. But further, there was a man in Bordeaux who had availed himself of de Montalhac's special services, and who, the Captain assured me, was waiting most anxiously for the Cormaran's arrival. A prince of the Church, a man of power. No seedy, passed-over failure like the Bishop of G
ardar, but a person of rank and wealth, who was expecting an item that befitted that rank. The Captain was happy to oblige, as ever, but this was not the matter, I was sure, that had stirred him up and lit the eerie foxfire which had been nickering in his eyes since we left Dublin. It was not just war he had scented as we made our way up the great water-road of the Gironde. I had no proof, but something about his mood had put me in mind of the night we had passed in Greenland.

  Thus I was not surprised when the gig returned without him, to collect Gilles and Rassoul. Before he swung himself over the rail, Gilles gathered the crew around him.

  There will be shore-leave when I return,' he announced. The men were silent, but I could feel their taut excitement. 'Pavlos will organise a roster for the watch. I will be back shortly.' And with that he was gone.

  The crew burst into life. We had felt the scorbutus lift its foulness from the ship as soon as the fresh meat and good kale of the island was inside us, and our gums were beginning to heal. Not so stiff and agued now, the men almost danced about the deck. Good clothing appeared magically from sea-chests, satchels, even parcels of oil-cloth that had been wedged God knew where for the past months. Beards were trimmed or shaved. Men stood in little clusters, untangling each other's hair with combs of whale-bone. Sword-belts were greased until they shone, weapons polished and, I noticed, given a new edge. Although not one of us had more on his mind than the taverns and bath-houses that awaited us on shore, the men of the Cormaran were preparing as if for a fine tournament.

  I was no exception. The blue tunic that Gilles had given me that night at the White Swan, and which had come off worst from my last meeting with Sir Hugh, emerged from Dimitri's sea-chest, miraculously restored. 'A little sea-water,' he grunted, 'and a deal of scrubbing. Too good to throw away,' he added, watching with a flicker of pride as I fingered the place where Thorn had stabbed me, now all but invisible save for a faint spider's web of tiny stitches. I almost hugged the man in my joy, but did not dare. Instead I took his hand and wrung it while I poured forth a veritable fountain of thanks, and I swear that his butchered face almost blushed. So now I wore my tunic, a cloak of deep blue edged in red silk, a good long-caped hood of black wool, some fine black hose that Abu offered to lend me and my soft leather shoes, given to me by the Captain my first day aboard but never worn for fear the salt-spray would devour them. Thorn rode upon my hip, her hilt of green stone glimmering with a vaguely malign light. You look like a Rostock pimp,' Horst said, approvingly.