The Vault of bones bp-2

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

I could not argue with that, so I huffed peevishly and set off after her. I knew her well enough to know that if her mind was made up, nothing I could say or do would change it, short of binding her hand and foot. Cheapside was crowded – it was always crowded, but at the middle of the day it seemed as if all the people in the world were hurrying along it, on foot, in carts or on horseback. Anna was hurrying along, heading for the place where a stepping stone had been laid in the kennel, for that foul and stinking runnel of shit and night-water was almost too wide to jump over. She stopped and waited for a haywain to pass, and when it had creaked by, she darted out, shouldering her way past a stout countrywoman shuffling along with a yoke and two baskets of dead geese, heads lolling, thick pink tongues jutting from their open beaks. Looking past her towards the Blue Falcon, my eye was caught by a man who had paused at the door, and who seemed to be looking in our direction.

  He was quite tall, and crop-headed like a soldier, and even from this distance I could tell that his face had suffered in battle, for the thin winter sun caught the silver trail of an old scar as the man turned his head. But if he recognised Anna, he made no sign, and kept his place at the door. Still I hurried to catch up with her, for now we could not go into the inn through the front, if we went in at all. I had almost caught her when she stepped neatly around two fat burghers talking loudly about money and skipped up on to the stepping stone. Now I was blocked by a man with a barrow, who swore at me absently, the quick-tongued foul geniality of London. I was about to curse him back when the words seized in my throat, for a beast was screaming, high and sharp, and a woman's voice had joined it. I shoved the barrow-man aside with my shoulder in time to see Anna, in the street beyond the kennel, raise her arms high over her head as if to grasp the great hooves that flailed there, for a great piebald horse loomed above her, dwarfing her, and then all at once her slim shape was for an instant caged in the living bars of its legs before it reared up again and came down upon her with both hooves, dashing her to the mud. The rider seemed to be grappling with the reins and let out a despairing cry as the horse came up again, seemed to walk for an instant like a man upon its hind legs, before plunging forward and setting off down the street, rider clinging to its back like a ragdoll.

  Anna was lying crooked in the mud, pressed into the paste of earth and dung, one arm beneath her, the other flung back behind her head. Her hair was across her face and trampled into the filth like a dead crow. I knelt, babbling, cooing wordlessly to her in my panic, and brushed the hair away. She turned and looked at me, and I gasped with relief, for our eyes met and her lips parted, to tell me it was all right, it hurt a little bit here, and here. The world stilled, I reached for her, told her not to move, for her leg was broken; slid a hand beneath her head, bent my own head to catch her words.

  Then her good leg gave a kick and her neck shuddered beneath my fingers. Her eyes fixed on mine for a moment longer and then slid away, seeming to flutter across the hedge of muddy legs that surrounded us. No words came, only a throttled, rattling hiss. I pulled her from the mud and tried to cradle her head in my lap, and found that my hands were wet with blood. I could feel it, flooding hotly across my legs. Her leg kicked again, like a snared beast, and the world started its heedless dance once more, and the London sun trickled down upon us, pale as piss, while an apple bobbed past down the kennel.

  She was alive when we carried her into the Blue Falcon, myself and a page, an egg-seller and the barrow-pusher, and laid her on the bed she and I had awoken in two mornings ago. Captain de Montalhac burst in with Gilles, just that moment returned from some business out in the city, and a doctor was sent for. I relate these things as if I were aware of them, and I was, though only as a reader is aware of the tiny painted figures crawling about the margins of a book. For Anna did not move, though a woman came and sponged the blood from her face and chafed her wrists, and I whispered in her ear and stroked her cold forehead. She was still, save for the rise and fall of her chest, and silent, but for her breath, which hissed and creaked and held not the slightest hint of her voice.

  The doctor came, a grey old monk from that same Hospital of Saint Bartholomew we had passed just an hour or two ago. He came to the bedside and ran his hands gently, over Anna's head. She did not stir, nor did her breathing change its timbre. He peered into her ears, put his ear to her chest, and lifted her eyelids with a careful thumb. Then he looked up and met my desperate gaze. He patted my hand where it lay upon Anna's collarbone, and sighed.

  'A kick from a horse, was it?' he said. 'There is little to be done. Perhaps…' and he paused, and raised his hands. I thought he was about to pray, and my heart shrank within me, but instead he interlaced his fingers. The bones of the skull are fitted together thus, like the vaulting of a stone roof. The lady… her skull is shattered in one place, and the vault is collapsing in upon her brain, which is inflamed and has started to swell. There have been seizures?' I told him of her kicking leg. 'They will worsen, until…'

  'Is there truly nothing to be done?' I croaked, searching his grey eyes and finding nothing there save resignation.

  'I could attempt to remove the pieces of bone, which might relieve the pressure upon her brain.' Then do it, for God's sake! Do not hesitate!'

  ‘I do not have the instruments with me, my child,' he said gently. 'And I fear that if we try to bring her to the hospital, the motion…' He looked at the faces gathered around the bed. ‘I will fetch my tools, but I fear that this poor child will not live even until I return.'

  I saw the Captain's face go grey. 'Go, sir,' he said. 'Maybe she is stronger than you think. Fetch your instruments, we… the company begs you.'

  The doctor nodded gravely. He patted my hand again and took his leave. After he had gone, the room was silent save for Anna's laboured breathing. I had laid my forehead on the cool linens to calm my battering thoughts, when Pavlos gasped. Anna's eyes had opened. At once I bent over her, and tried to meet her gaze, but to my dismay I saw that it wandered, now slowly, now flickering aimlessly across the ceiling beams. But here, surely, was a sign, for she had awoken! Where was the surgeon and his cursed instruments?

  I whispered in her ear and held tightly to her hand, but still her eyes searched calmly amongst the cobwebs. Somewhere nearby, a bell rang the quarter-hour. A serving-girl looked in at the door and, seeing our stricken faces, hastily withdrew. As the latch snicked, Anna's left leg gave a twitch and then a kick. Her fingers began to flutter and pluck at the sheet, and then her spine arched and a terrible gasp burst from her. Her eyes were still and wide, and were looking straight into mine. Then both legs began to thrash madly, and I threw myself across them. Pavlos choked out a prayer and took her shoulders, pressing them into the mattress. Gilles knelt beside me and took Anna's right hand, and the Captain grasped her left. She gave another gasp and thrashed again. There was a terrible strength in her legs, but it was not willed, was not Anna's. I called out to her and fumbled my hand under the Captain's, reaching for her fingers. They twitched and shuddered, her nails scrabbling at my palm, and then they were still.

  One of her eyes was open. It bulged through the bruised lids like a blood-streaked pearl, lustrous but not alive. Blood had burst from her ears and her nose, and a red froth clung to her mouth. But all the blood had left the skin of her face, and a livid red mark curved from her smashed right ear to the corner of her mouth, and under the skin the contours, all the lines and declivities that I had mapped out upon my own heart, were wrong. I beheld a ruined country, and there was no map for it. I lay there for an infinity, one hand in Anna's, the other cupped around her chin, that grew cold even as I held it. I pressed my face into the muddy silk of her dress, her scent already fading, the clumsy vapours of death gathering. When at last I lifted my head, strong hands grasped me and helped me stand. The Captain stood there, and he drew me to him in an embrace that all but squeezed the air from my lungs. Then he took my face in both his hands and kissed me hard on the forehead.

  'She is dead’ he said, hi
s hands still on my face. You must leave her, just for a little while, for she must be attended to’ I searched his eyes, but they were black and hard as coal. So I stepped away from him and turned to where the flat white glare of the London winter was lighting up the dingy room.

  'An apoplexy’ I heard the doctor say wearily behind me. 'The brain swelled and burst its vault of bone. Thus the eye was forced.. ‘

  Words I had not spoken in long years, words from a life that might have belonged to another man, welled up in me: Deus, in adiutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina. Gloria Patri, et Filioy et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen. Alleluia. The prayer at Vespers: 'O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me’ But I had abandoned such help. 'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end’ The world had destroyed my love, turned her fiery beauty into a mask of ruin. That terrible, blind and staring eye would never close again, world without end. Without end. Amen.

  Gilles and someone else helped me to an outer chamber and sat me down, brought me wine, took a wet towel and wiped Anna’s blood from me. They talked to me as men talk to animals, soothing, empty words, and I did not listen, but stared at the plaster of the walls while my thoughts thrashed like a rabbit flayed alive. Horst came in, and Zianni, and many others of the Cormaran, some angry, some weeping, some merely dumb.

  'It must have been a destrier’ said Horst to Gilles. 'A war-horse. Patch said it took her with its forelegs – no untrained beast would do such a thing! Well, have you ever heard of it? I know: I have ridden those creatures into battle. An ill-tempered riding horse will kick out with its hind legs, yes, but… Christ. Some knight's battle-shy mount, I'd guess. Those creatures should never be taken out in the common street. I'd like to find the fool..

  There was a man’ I started to say, but I trailed off, for the fellow with the scar had not been looking at Anna, not been waiting for us at all, and in truth I had all but forgotten why we had even returned to the Blue Falcon, for now I felt night falling upon me. Except it was not dark, it was a silvery, cold oblivion, drowning me like quicksilver. When at last the Captain came for me I rose like a man in heavy iron mail and plodded after him, each footfall a labour.

  Anna lay there on the bed we had warmed for each other just yesterday, dressed in white linen. Tall candles burned at each corner, the flames invisible in the sunlight. Her face was covered with a square of white muslin, and her brown hands were folded on her belly and held a golden cross. Pavlos the guardsman knelt at her feet, his face buried in the coverlet. He was weeping, and I saw he had torn his clothing. Like a man drugged with henbane I walked, infinitely slowly, through the empty light, until I could see the outline of the face beneath the cloth. With numb fingers I tugged it away.

  One eye was still open. It jutted from its distended socket, an obscene thing, an abomination. The terrible bruise on her cheek and temple had turned a dark, turgid red. Tendrils of black hair pushed from beneath the white strip of cloth that bound her jaw and clamped her mouth into a disapproving line. Gently I placed my fingers upon her cold lips and tried to form something I recognised, some illusion of Anna, of her smile, but they sullenly reset themselves. I bent and kissed them anyway, eyes closed to block out the terrible white orb. The Captain was pressing something into my hand. I looked down: it was a thick plait of black hair, tied with thread of gold, no bigger than my thumb. But it glistened with the oily sheen, the crow-shine, the dark light that always hung around Anna: her own stormy nimbus.

  I tried to pull the cloth back over her face but one of my fingers brushed her eye, and at the touch of it I came undone. I tried to gather her rigid form into my arms but whether I did, and what I did after I cannot tell, for I do not remember. There is a memory of a terrible sound that perhaps tore itself from me, and a confusion, as comes with a dreadful, racking fever, and then nothing. I will relate what came to pass in the days that followed, but it will be a cold telling, for I was not really present. Everything had become a grey blur. Anna’s strange letter was put away with her things and I forgot that it had ever existed. I walked and talked, but my soul had followed Anna down through whatever appalling drift had engulfed her and I had no more life in me than does a revenant.

  We buried her in the Church of Saint Faith Under Saint Paul's. Cormaran gold bought the services of a reluctant, hand-wringing priest, for only the communion of money could induce the Church to treat the mortal remains of an unwed, schismatic woman with any sort of deference. The only mourners were the Cormaran’s crew, but even so the little church, which stands in the shadow of the great, ugly cathedral, was full. The Greeks could not teach our poor priest how to bury Anna in her own faith, but every man kissed her farewell, and Pavlos stood and chanted in his tongue some spoken hymn, words I do not recall that rose and fell like the waves of the sea, or starlings wheeling and flocking at sunset. Anna lay in state before the altar dedicated to the service of a faith she despised, and was laid to sleep in a stone tomb in the heart of a land she felt nothing for, surrounded by the bones of reviled Franks. But she has a fine slab carved with Greek letters in the custom of her people, and there she will rest for all time.

  Whatever business we had in London was concluded, I presume, and days later, or perhaps weeks afterward, the Cormaran slipped down the Thames, past the brown marshes, the desert of hissing reeds, the frost-painted meadows grazed by sheep, the towns where folk were living and dying; and out into the bleak oblivion, the cold comfort of the sea.

  PART TWO

  Rome

  Chapter Two

  Rome, April 1237

  ‘Do you not mean "Where am I?" or perhaps "Who are you?"? asked the man. I shook my head. Thoughts were whirling around my skull like flying ants around a summer lantern. I took another draught of water. One by one my thoughts began to take hold of one another. Faster and faster they spun until they were one thought, and at that instant my reason returned to me.

  ‘You are Isaac’ I told him. I am.. My mind throbbed. I thought of the city of Balecester, that was destroyed. No, not destroyed: that had been a dream. But I had been in those water meadows, once. I had washed up there, after a madman had killed my best friend – or so I had believed – and knocked me senseless into the river. Balecester was lost to me, sure enough, as certainly as if it had indeed been consumed by fire. I had stolen a holy relic and been accused of murdering a priest. Then I knew myself. I was Petroc of Auneford, monk of the Abbey of Buckfast in Devon, erstwhile scholar, fugitive, outcast. My home was a ship called the Cormaran, and for two years I had known no other.

  ‘I know who I am’ I said. And we… but this is not London, is it?' My last memories were of that great, stinking town, of rummaging through a market with the Lady Anna Doukaina at my side.

  The man put down the cup and clapped his hands, then raised them, palms up, towards the ceiling. 'God be praised!' he laughed. 'Praised indeed! I did not know if it was the fever that had broken, or your spirit. No, we are not in London. We are in Rome.'

  'But that is… oh.' I tried to sit up, and found my backbone as weak as a poppy-stalk. 'How long have I been…'

  'Ten days. There was a storm off Oran, and you fell from the mast. You landed on your head – a hard head, to be sure, as it did not break. But you fell into a deathly sleep. My dear friend, I feared we would be burying you in the blue water.' 'Ten days? From a knock on the head?'

  Isaac shrugged. You developed a brain fever.' I shuddered. A brain fever had carried off both my parents when I was very young. 'That I could treat, and the lump on your pate. But there was something else working in you, I think. You really remember nothing?'

  'No,' I said impatiently. Then I did recall the ghost of a memory, Is Anna nearby?'

  Even in my addled state I saw that Isaac's smile had frozen on his face. He grimaced, and feigned an itch alongside his nose. I jerked uprigh
t, and my head swum horribly. But I seized him by the sleeve and feebly shook his arm. Isaac said nothing, but looked grave, the way doctors do when they must tell you that your running nose will kill you within the day. He gently eased his arm from my grasp and, going over to a table in the corner of the chamber, poured a dark liquid into a goblet. To this he added something from a small vial. When he held it to my mouth I found it was wine, with something bitter and sharp mixed in. But the wine was strong and gave me some warmth, so I drank down half of it. To my surprise, Isaac drained the goblet himself and sank down on to the pallet next to me with a sigh.

  The wine was closing in on my reason like thick ivy around an old ruin, and I felt my eyes grow heavy, although I desperately willed them to stay open. Perhaps I had not heard Isaac properly. I opened my mouth to speak, but he placed his palm on my forehead, and his fingers pressed gently into my temples.

  'Sleep a little, and then things may be a little more clear,' he murmured.

  I tried to protest, but a deep, soft darkness was engulfing me. It was the friendliest oblivion, and I gave up struggling against it. But just as the last spark of light went out in my skull I glimpsed an image. It was Anna, a dark cloak about her shoulders, tears painting streaks of kohl down her cheeks. She turned from me. Turned away, and stepped through a great stone doorway into shadow. Darkness swallowed her, and then it swallowed me. When I woke next, it was morning. At least, I supposed it was morning, for the light was coming in through the window at a sharp angle and lighting up the walls of my room. Without thinking I swung myself out of bed, only to find that I had no strength in my legs. I slumped on to the bedcovers, and then managed to haul myself upright. Leaning against the wall, I shuffled over to the window. The sunlight was strong, and blinded me for a moment. I blinked, and saw, stretching away below me, a field of tumbled stones and ruined walls. My heart gave a lurch as I remembered how I had seen Balecester destroyed. Had it really happened? Then I blinked and saw goats clambering over the stones, and the silver-green of olive trees. I rested my elbows on the cold stone of the windowsill. Tears started to prick my dry eyes, and then I heard a noise behind me. I turned and found that I had not been alone. Captain de Montalhac was seated in a narrow chair, his long legs thrust out before him. He had been sleeping, I supposed, for now he yawned and rubbed his hands through his greying hair.