Relics bp-1

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  I took her in my arms and let her offer up her tears. My own face grew wet with them, and I thought, how strange that I must have a surrogate to mourn Will for me.

  'He made a good end,' I told her after a while, when we were both sitting on the deck, our backs to the rail. How insufficient my words had become. 'He was clear in his mind, and he went with love… with love in his heart,' I finished, which was true in its way.

  'Did he suffer?' asked Anna, tremulously. I winced, and took her hand. 'If I told you no, would you believe me?' She searched my face with her salt-red eyes, then shook her head, a tiny shiver. 'No,' she whispered.

  Yes, he suffered very much, but less towards the end. He was brave and strong, and death had to wait his turn. We talked of many things, of…'I paused. I found I did not wish to tell Anna how I had sworn to Will that I would never let her go. Perhaps I worried she would be horrified, to be bound by an oath made to a dead man. But in truth that oath was the last thing that tied me to my friend, a secret shared with no one but him and so an invisible thread that connected us, stretching from the land of the living to wherever Will now dwelt. It had its beginning deep within my heart, and there was a tension in it, a thrum of motion sent through this lonely, fragile thread across empty worlds where the winds of loss blow coldly and without cease, that told of some presence holding fast to the other end. I felt it then, and it brought me solace. I feel it now. 'Do you still not weep?' she persisted.

  Will would not have approved,' I said, gruffly. 'Not of me blubbering, in any case. You, however… Besides, I wept a veritable Nile for the man, in error, while he still lived.' 'Oh! My God, Patch, you are a miser of grief.'

  I shook my head and took her hands between both of mine. 'I was wrong to grieve then: I should have raged! Well, now I shall. There will be no tears, my love, not one tear until…' My voice began to shake, and I pressed Anna's fingers to my lips until I had mastered myself. 'Sir Hugh de Kervezey…' I grimaced at the name, bitter as gall. 'I will have that man's life, I swear it. That will be the Mass I say for my brother. When I have stopped his breath, then I shall weep.' 'Patch, I…'

  'No, my love. I am burning up like a barrel of pitch! I must let the fire burn, and so must you.' I would have added, if I had known what words to use, that it was too wild a fire for me to control, although I knew that, as it burned through, I would see its form and know, from the embers, what my course would be.

  Soon, too soon, it was time for Adric to take his leave. With him, at least, we did not have to conceal our feelings with great care. The old man had never been one to bother himself with how others lived, so long as nothing interrupted his gathering of knowledge, but I was a little surprised how his cadaverous features took on a certain glow after first making Anna's acquaintance. He became positively courtly, although Anna assured me that he was only interested in the manuscripts that lay in her uncle's library.

  With me he seemed almost frightened, until I sat him down in the bows and convinced him that I did not blame him for Will's murder, for my flight from England or for any of the other dolorous strands of the web that held us both. After that we were as we had always been, although we both knew that nothing was really the same. I was no longer his pupil but a blooded outlaw, and he was no longer an abbey librarian with an appetite for esoteric wonders but an intriguer at large in a world that did not appear to frighten him in the slightest. I had never really thought of Adric as a brave man, only heedless of his safety in the way that eccentric people sometimes are. But after the events in Pisa, and remembering our adventure in Vennor long ago, I realised that not only was he fearless but that he was in possession of a very cool head indeed. We spent a happy two days running down the coast to Ostia. He was going back to Rome after all and there was no concealing his excitement.

  'I have unfinished business in the Vatican libraries,' he said dreamily, and I knew that he was understating the case more than a little. Had Adric the nine lives of a cat – indeed, had he the gift of life eternal, his business with libraries would never be done. What are you digging for this time?' I asked.

  'Hmm.' He treated me to an inscrutable look. 'A small investigation here, a few loose ends tied there. I will tell you everything when we meet again.' 'Do you think there's a chance of that, Adric?'

  'A chance? My dear boy, I believe we now serve under the same captain,' he said. 'There's every chance that we shall be heartily sick at the sight of one another before too long. No, no – you go to Koskino, and I to Rome, and we shall all meet up before the winter's here… Venice, perhaps? I rather wish I were coming with you, of course.'

  That cheered me, as I had feared this would be our last parting. So while I was terribly sorry to see him clamber, in his long, spidery fashion, down into the fishing barque that would take him up the Tiber to Rome, I drew some comfort from the knowledge that he would be the happiest man in that city as he burrowed ever deeper into its endless libraries. We will see each other soon, then,' I had said as I helped him over the side, and although he only nodded in reply, his mind on the shaky rope-ladder and the waiting books, I felt it might be true, and when he struggled upright in the fishing boat – to the evident concern of the fishermen – and waved back to the Cormaran, I understood that if Adric said we would meet again, we likely would.

  In the days that followed it was almost impossible to be alone with Anna, and so we made do with hasty caresses and now and then a kiss, separated by long spans of time in which the blue waters sped by, mile after mile, beneath the hull. Although the knowledge that, sooner or later, she would be put ashore in Venice cast a faint shadow, we chose, I think, to put it from our minds, there being much else – and worse – near at hand about which to fret. But one night Anna had woken me from a deep sleep and led me through a maze of slumbering men to her lair in the hold. We had spent an hour of agony and pleasure there in the dark, brazenly alive to every fingertip, every touch of skin upon hot skin, while keeping as silent as the dead. It was torture, but exquisite. By some miracle we were not discovered, and afterwards we sat together on deck, watching the stars. Anna's head was on my shoulder, and she traced a slow circle with her fingernail on the back of my hand. I heard her sigh, then she turned and spoke softly in my ear: 'I never did tell you about my time in the Norse lands, did I?'

  You did not finish – or you did, but we were interrupted,' I said. It seemed a very long time ago.

  'I told you they locked me up?' I nodded. 'They kept me locked away for two years,' she went on. 'Two endless years, in a plain white room with no glass in the window.'

  You didn't… it must have seemed a lifetime,' I said, taking her hand. 'And I was only a child, really, at least at the beginning.'

  'How did you – you know, how did you manage?' I asked carefully.

  'There was a kind priest. Father Jago,' she said. 'He was a good man, for a Frank – no, by any measure. He did not try to cram his doctrines down my gullet. Instead he bought me flowers for my window-ledge, and found my belongings where they had been thrown in the cellars, so I could hang my tapestries. And he bought me my books. He was amazed, quite amazed, that a woman could read, and we spent hours together. He gave me hope.' 'So you were not very lonely?' I asked.

  'I have never been so alone,' she said. 'Jago would read with me – Virgil, Aristotle, even Augustine – and I would see my home. Bees would come to sup at my flowers, and I would mourn, for they would never taste the rosemary or the lavender of our palace gardens. The mind plays cruel games.' 'Terrible games,' I agreed.

  'Petroc, can I tell you something?' I nodded absently, looking up at the peaceful river of the Milky Way.

  'Do you remember when we… back in Bordeaux? The first time?' I nodded again, and kissed her hand.

  'It was not the first time. Not for me,' she said. I dropped her hand. 'Really?' I said, my voice reedy with surprise.

  'No. You are shocked,' she insisted. I paused, considering. Then I picked up her hand again.

  'I have no right t
o be shocked by anything,' I said. 'The greatest shock I ever had was discovering that you desired me. I have never judged you, Anna.'

  'That is not true,' she protested. 'The day after Bordeaux, you acted as if I were Eve and Salome rolled into one.'

  'No, no!' I shook my head furiously. 'No, it was the blood! I was sickened to my very soul by what I had done. And you had blood on your hands – I mean just that: your hands were all bloody, and I did not want more blood on me. That was all, Anna! I swear it!'

  'I thought that you were revolted by me, by who – what – I was, what we had done. No, listen! In Trondheim, I was so lonely that I took one of my guards for a lover. He was a boy – big, blond, a peasant – and I was a girl. We did it exactly twice, then he boasted to his mates, there was a fight, and he lost the use of his arm. The whole castle found out. They put me in the cells, Patch! They would have tortured me were it not for my imperial blood.' She spat the words out distainfully. 'Then they decreed I should go to the stake. To burn. They would have done it, but Jago, my old priest, saved me. That was how I ended up in Greenland.' What about the guard?'

  'Oh, I'm sure they killed him,' she replied. There was mockery in her voice, but it did not conceal the pain.

  'Anna, you are neither Eve nor Salome. You did not kill that boy. Yes, there are many who would say otherwise – your husband, for one, and those pious murderers who administer the noose and the pyre as if those were Christ's sacrament. It is they who are damned, Anna. I judge them, not you.'

  'Oh, what nonsense, Petroc!' she cried. I hushed her with my finger.

  'Listen to me,' I said. 'That morning, after the fight, I was recoiling from what I had done to that man, not from what we had… There has never been anything finer than that in my mean little life. What you did in Trondheim, whose affair is it but yours? My God, Anna, how long were you in Gardar – two years? Well then, you have even done your penance as it is written down by the Church itself. But do not ask absolution of me. In my sight you are spotless. You are as pure as the whitest lily, my love.' 'Do you really mean all that?' she asked, quietly. With all my heart.'

  'Then you are a fool,' she said. Her words were harsh, but her lips on mine were not.

  The saint who watches over lovers and fools – and over foolish lovers most of all – was guarding us that night, for no one saw us, or if they did, chose not to make it their business. We were not so reckless again, but that night had battered down every last vestige of the reserve that had come between us for so long. If we were not so bold, then at least we spent our idle hours, be they night or day, together. And if my terrible rage was not quenched, it was tempered, and I saw, at last, that although I had come to know death, I had also found out life's store of sweetness, and how to share it with another.

  Thus we had passed the great Bay of Naples and the great smouldering peak of Vesuvius, of which I had read in Pliny, and then down past the flames of Stromboli and the smoke of Etna – I remember these sights more than any other, as they were the strangest and filled me with wondering dread. We passed Stromboli at night, and Anna's lips found mine for a moment as we stood at the rail and watched the flames from the mountaintop cast ghastly pink and orange shadows on the black cloud that lowered overhead.

  Then, as we passed the Straits of Messina and left Italy at Cape Spartivento, setting off into the Ionian Sea – I loved to hear these names, and pestered Nizam all I could to learn them – I felt a change in Anna. She was quivering like a courser about to be slipped free, and grew silent, although she seemed to seek my presence more. But most days she spent in her station at the bows, wedged in the angle between the rail and the bowsprit, watching the dolphins and flying fish that kept us company and gazing endlessly at the blue distance which hid Greece. She had taken her place there early on the morning we reached the island, as soon as land showed itself as the merest sliver on the horizon. Now her hair was stiff with salt spray, and her eyes were distant and slightly fevered.

  'Do you hear it?' she asked. 'The land is singing to us. That is the song of my home.'

  We were making for a gap in the lower cliffs that seemed to ring the island. Smaller breaks in the rock gave onto little beaches, each with a grove of trees clinging to whatever level ground there was. But Nizam had pointed the Cormaran at a stone gateway, where the cliffs dipped down into tapering spits and finally broke, letting the sea flow in towards the base of the greater mountain. At the end of each arm of rock stood two small stone turrets from the top of which spun four triangles of pure white cloth. They were windmills, childlike compared to the creaking giants of home but strangely festive amid all this water and arid rock.

  We passed close enough to the starboard spit to hear the swish of the mills and to see the rock drop sheer into the deeps, white stone gleaming through the air-clear water. Thick red weed grew there, with fat sea anemones and clusters of black, spiky orbs.

  'Echinoos,' said Pavlos, licking his lips. "You would say "urchins".'

  I told him we had no such barbaric creatures in Devon, and that I wasn't going to have them anywhere near my mouth. 'No, no: you are the barbarian here, Patch,' Anna reminded me. You will eat echinoos, I insist. They are sublime. They taste like… you'll see.' I huffed. But in truth I was strangely drawn to this place already. We had made only one other landfall in the Mediterranean Sea, at Pisa, a place of man's artistry and artifice, and the filth that always accompanies man had turned the water a sickly, opaque grey. We had skirted the arid coasts at a distance, close enough to smell the herb-laced breeze but too distant to make out details. Now it was close enough to touch, and I felt a sudden shiver of excitement. Then we were past the point, and the Bay of Limonohori opened before us.

  It was a gigantic cove, a giant's stone basin tipped towards the sea, the lip just submerged, the walls rising on all sides until they fused with the mountain that towered high over everything. Straight ahead, a white village on a strip of white beach shimmered through the heat. Suddenly we were out of the wind and the air was still and hot and filled with the shrieks and rasps of unnumbered legions of insects. I smelled pine resin and thyme, and herbs that I could not name; stone dust, and a faint, pungent stink that was not unpleasant. The place was soaked in scent and noise and dry heat, as if the bay were an alchemist's alembic and we had intruded on some miraculous operation.

  As we moved on, I could see houses on either side of us, small whitewashed cubes with roofs of red pan tile standing out from the dark grey-green trees. On the beaches, men sat mending nets while their brightly painted boats skipped at anchor in the clear, silver-blue shallows. I waved – something not done aboard the Cormaran, but I could not help myself – and a few waved back. At my side the Greeks were visibly shaking with joy. They whispered back and forth, their hands drawing urgent signs in the air between them. 'Have you been here before?' I asked them.

  'I have,' said Pavlos. His face fell for a moment. 'They were not so pleased to see me then. It was when I sailed with… when I was with the pirates. I think we raided every village on these islands, but we didn't see the people. They would hide in the mountains, and besides, they had nothing to steal. But Venice is strong now, and the pirates are all dead or fat and old. Or respectable-' and he dug Panayoti in the ribs. 'They don't seem to be afraid of us at all.'

  'Because we bring trade, not ruin. In any case, this time our brand of piracy will be more – what shall I say? – delicate.'

  'He means that we aren't going to land, collar the first old man we see and tell him we've come to pinch their Saint Tula.' It was Gilles. 'The Captain is very, very good at his work.'

  The truth, of course, was that we were here to steal these people's most precious possession. Tula's body was the beating heart of Limonohori and of Koskino itself. Although I did not believe that – nor did any of us -1 had not forgotten that I had once been one of the faithful, the credulous. I missed it, that feeling of certainty. When you lose faith you never quite fill the emptiness left behind. And so I was not
yet so estranged from my past to wave away the import of what we had come here to do.

  But then I thought, as the cypresses and those strangely gnarled, grey-leaved trees slipped by, if no one knows that Tula has gone, has she really left? It is faith that has the true power, not the object, and provided we left their faith intact, maybe we would have done no great wrong. I spat over the side. Well, I had solved that problem, I thought, bitterly.

  I am a little ashamed to report that these dark thoughts slipped away as soon as I heard the rattle and hiss of the anchor cable and felt the Cormaran stall beneath my feet. We were perhaps four rods' length from shore, but the cable paid out twenty fathoms before the anchor struck. It was deep below us, and the sun's rays, very low now, made darts of speckled gold that dived and vanished. The village was there before us, a scatter of houses and a strange little church, with a merry chaos of painted boats at anchor in the shallows and drawn up onto the glaring white pebbles. A crowd was gathering at the edge of the water. They certainly were not afraid of the Cormaran, I thought, as I watched men wade out to their boats and begin to row out to us. They rowed standing up and facing forward, pushing their whole bodies into the task, sunburned men with curly black hair and beards, wearing simple tunics as white as the stones of the beach.

  Pavlos, with Elia and Panayoti at his heels, was clambering into the gig. Anna made to follow, but Gilles held her back gently. 'Not yet, Vassileia,' he murmured. We will do this properly, with a little style.' Meanwhile the three Greeks were rowing madly towards the villagers. They met in open water, and the villager in the lead boat grabbed the gunwales of the gig and pulled it alongside him. I saw Pavlos put out his hand and felt a certain relief when it was taken warmly. There was much hand waving in the Greek style, and then the flotilla pulled towards us again.

  'So they trust us for now,' said the Captain behind us. 'That is good.' The village headman had ordered a feast in our honour, and despite the short notice, pigs and goats were already sizzling on their spits by the time Anna and I waded ashore. Trestles had been set up in the square beneath two great trees whose bark was smooth and peeling, showing the creamy skin of the trunk beneath.