by Paul Doherty
During the day, all was well. Sir Otto would stay in his cave, sleep, pray or pore over the battered copy of the Scriptures he had bought before leaving Rhodes. Sometimes, if he saw a camel train or merchants on the road below, he’d go down to beg for coins or food, assuring his would-be benefactors of his prayers to God Almighty. He was always treated gently by Christian, Turk or Jew. Some saw him as a holy man, a hermit; others a madcap fool to live in the heart of the wilderness and haunt the ghostly ruins of Masada.
Sir Otto, feeling the heat of the sun, walked back to the coolness of his cave. He knelt down and stared at the makeshift wooden cross placed on a ledge beside his bed.
‘I cannot blame them, Lord,’ he murmured. ‘I am what I appear to be: a sinner, a lost soul.’
Otto combed his iron-grey, straggling beard. His brother would not recognise him now. He drank a little of his precious water and lay down on his bed.
‘God bless you, Raymond,’ he whispered. ‘Wherever you are.’
He knew they’d never meet again, yet, sometimes, whether it was a temptation from the devil or not, he just wished he could clasp his brother one more time, especially now, before he died. Otto, deep in his heart, realised the Demon had found him. Turning on his side, he stared at the tangle of wild roses, now decaying, where he had thrown them into a corner of the cave. Otto had found these about a week ago, after he had come back from the road below, placed on a stone outside the entrance to the cave. Wild roses! He didn’t know where they had come from or how they could survive for so long in the fiery heat, yet they were a token, a warning: the Rose Demon was, once again, about to enter his life.
Otto rolled back and clasped his hands. He was ready for death. He had atoned for his terrible sin. He had spent seven years here: a life of atonement, for breaking his oath and, above all, loosing the Rose Demon into the world of man.
Otto could never forget Eutyches lying on that marble floor, the blood seeping out of his hoary, cracked head. Raymond and he had taken the princess out of the sarcophagus; so beautiful, so delicate, her body exuding the most fragrant of perfumes. She had not said much but thanked them softly and asked for their protection, which they had solemnly pledged.
Then the Turks broke into the Blachernae. He and Raymond, the princess between them, had fled along the gloomy gallery and up steep stairs which took them out on to a hillside just beyond the walls of Constantinople. They had hoped to reach their ship but a squadron of Sipahis, Turkish light horse, had cut off their escape. He and Raymond were threatened with a violent and bloody struggle. God knows why or how — perhaps in their souls they realised what they had failed to do — but Otto and his brother had allowed the Sipahis to seize the mysterious princess. In return, the Hospitallers had been permitted through.
Bloody and bruised, Raymond and Otto had secured passage on a small boat. By dusk that day they were on board a Venetian galley and, like the rest of the refugees, could only stare helplessly at the shoreline, watching columns of smoke float up from the city. To the Venetians the fall of Constantinople was a disaster but, to the two brothers, it was a personal shame. They had broken their oath. Eutyches had been killed — and the princess? Otto could never forget the hateful look she threw at them as the Sipahis seized her.
‘We did not mean to hand her over,’ Raymond later told the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitallers when they reached the island of Rhodes. ‘The Sipahis took her. It was impossible to rescue her.’
The Grand Master, however, had sat grey-faced, open-mouthed, staring at them. At last he shook himself and rose slowly to his feet.
‘You should have killed her,’ he whispered.
‘Why?’ Raymond had asked.
The Grand Master sat in a window seat and put his head in his hands.
‘Why?’ Raymond followed him across the room. When the Grand Master looked up, his face was suffused with a terrible anger.
‘In his last letter to me,’ the Grand Master jabbed a finger at Raymond, ‘His Imperial Highness, the Emperor Constantine, asked me to name two Hospitallers, two of my most trustworthy men for a task which only a priest and a soldier could perform. I chose you. You took your oath and you broke it. Now, because of your perfidy, not only is a good and venerable priest killed but a terror, much worse than any Ottoman army, has been unleashed on the world!’
Raymond had fallen on his knees before the Grand Master, head bowed, hands clasped. Otto had done likewise.
‘Father,’ Raymond confessed, ‘we have sinned before Heaven, before earth and before thee.’
‘Yes you have,’ the Grand Master retorted, turning his back on them. ‘And, in all justice, I must tell you about your sin. For years there has been a secret held by this Order. I shall not tell you the details.’ He shook his head. ‘There is a woman in England who knows the full story, a devilish tale of horrible evil. In the vaults of the Blachernae Palace at Constantinople a great demon, the Rosifer or Rosebearer, was held fast in a human body.’ He sighed noisily. ‘This Rosifer is both an incubus and a succubus, one of the principal demons of Hell. This Duke of Darkness can move from one body to another, be it male or female, and possess it to its fullness. Only the Sacrament and fire blessed by a priest can destroy its hold and send it back to Hell.’
Otto had just knelt, open-mouthed, whilst his brother had put his face in his hands and began to sob quietly.
‘The Emperor’s letter called on our help,’ the Grand Master continued harshly. ‘According to him, years ago this Great Demon Rosifer, Lucifer’s henchman, was brought unwittingly by Westerners into Constantinople and possessed a Byzantine princess. The Emperor of the time would have burnt her as a witch but her father and others pleaded for her life. Somehow, I can’t explain, she was put in a drugged sleep and placed in the vault. The Emperor decreed that she would be safe there as long as the Empire was safe. His successors took a great and secret oath that if the city were ever to fall, what should have been done at the beginning would be done then.’
‘And we failed?’
‘Yes,’ the Grand Master snarled as he turned round. ‘You failed!’
‘Father, what can we do?’
The Grand Master refused to answer then. However, a week later, he called them into the Priory church. He was calmer as he walked in silence between them, up and down the transept. At last he stopped and stared up at a picture of Christ in Judgment. On the Saviour’s right the saints, on the left, the damned being driven off to Hell.
‘Every so often-’ the Grand Master began, ‘and I am a man of sixty years, a priest and a soldier of Christ — every so often our humdrum lives are broken by something extraordinary such as this. I have reported as much to His Holiness in Rome as well as our Vicar General but there is little they can do.’ He held a hand up. ‘I have already told you all I know. A great evil has been unleashed on the world and only the Good Lord knows where it will end. You two are responsible. So this is my judgment and there is no appeal. You must leave the Order.’ He silenced their gasps. ‘One of you must spend a life of atonement, prayer and fasting, the life of a solitary hermit well away from the affairs of men. The other, well, the other must spend his life hunting for this demon.’ He paused. ‘It’s now Sunday. Your answer must be with me within fourteen days, the Feast of St Peter and St Paul.’
The two brothers had conferred, their decisions made. Raymond had left for Europe. Otto had come to Palestine on a pilgrimage and founded his own hermitage here on the rocky slopes of Masada. Now and again he had travelled to one of the ports — Sidon, Tyre and even into Acre — but never had he heard anything about his brother. Only once, when he made enquiries from a merchant who traded between Cyprus and Constantinople, had he learnt about a Byzantine princess being given to one of Mohammed’s commanders in his harem. Otto could never discover whether this was the same woman he and his brother had taken from the vaults beneath Constantinople.
‘But she has not forgotten me,’ he murmured. ‘Who else would climb a rocky pat
h to leave roses outside my cave?’
He closed his eyes and cleared his mind. Every time he dreamt, he was back in that vault, the air rich with the smell of roses and, recently, even here, he had caught their fragrance. But no one was ever seen round here apart from an Arab boy tending some goats. Otto had considered returning to Rhodes, to seek the help and assistance of the Grand Master but, the last time he had been at Acre, a pilgrim had told him that the Grand Master had died in rather mysterious circumstances.
Otto sighed and got to his feet. He left the cave and stared down into the valley. The goat boy was moving his herd towards the nearby oasis. Faintly, on the breeze, Otto heard the chime of bells and boyish shouts. He returned to his cave, opened the Scriptures and, once again, turned to the Apocalypse. He read the lines about the Great Beast, the Devil from Hell who wandered the face of the earth determined to destroy God’s creation. Otto closed his eyes.
‘I find it so hard to believe,’ he whispered. ‘So difficult, Lord. She was so young, so beautiful, so serene. Her skin was soft as shot silk. And those eyes, so blue, so innocent.’
He recalled how, when they had hurried along the underground passage, the princess did not lose her dignity but kept up with the knights. When they paused so Raymond could scout ahead, she had simply leant against the wall and begun a song softly in French about a rose, a beautiful rose, which bloomed before Creation ever began.
Otto opened his eyes and stared at the crucifix. Recently, at night, he had begun to hear that song again and he did not know whether it was the wind or his stupid mind playing tricks on himself. Yet he had gone out and stood at the mouth of his cave and seen shapes and forms moving amongst the stones. He had called out, crossed himself and, putting his trust in Christ, returned to sleep.
Otto returned to his study of the Scriptures. For a while he dozed and then, as customary, walked round the ruins. Once the sun began to dip, he took his precious tinder and, gathering the kindling he had collected together and some of the camel dung he had taken from the road below, he lit a weak fire.
For a while Otto just sat and warmed himself, and then he stiffened. The voice was so pure, clear, lilting.
‘In Heaven’s meadows before the world began
The mystic Rose grew there.
But I plucked it as a gift
For the daughter of God.’
Otto whirled round. In the firelight he could see a young boy dressed in a simple white tunic with a stick in his hand.
‘Who are you?’ he stammered.
The boy moved forward. Otto caught the smell of goat but then stood up in horror as the heady fragrance of a rose garden seemed to envelop him. The boy was now walking slowly towards him, tapping his stick on the ground, his dark face broken by a grin. His teeth were pearl white, his eyes full of laughter. He dropped his stick and held out his hands towards Otto.
The hermit could only stare and, as he did so, in that Arab boy’s eyes he recognised the look, the same glance, the same soul he had glimpsed so long ago in the eyes of the Byzantine princess.
3
St Paul’s Graveyard, London, May 1471
Rosa Mundi, rapta excoelo non munda:
The Rose of the World,
Stolen from Heaven,
Is not pure.
The crowd thronged about the gaudily garbed herald who stood on the step of the towering cross of St Paul’s. He lifted his hand and a shrill bray of trumpets silenced the clamour, bringing to the foot of the cross traders, journeymen, tinkers, priests, monks, friars as well as the rifflers, the bawdy girls, the strumpets of the city. All were eager to hear the latest news. The herald raised his hand and again the trumpets brayed.
‘Come on!’ a burly tinker bawled from the back of the crowd before shaking his fist at a pickpocket coming too close to his wallet. ‘Come on! What news?’
The herald ignored the tinker. He lifted one gloved hand, drawing in his breath. He knew his trade: here, at St Paul’s, news of the kingdom was always proclaimed and people would wait for his message. He would proclaim it here, and again at the cross in Cheapside before taking a barge downriver to make the same announcement before the cross at Westminster. A hush descended over the crowd. Even the whores took off their scarlet wigs, stretching their necks to catch the cool breeze and allowing their shaven pates some relief from the constant itching of their flea-infested hairpieces.
‘Know you this!’ the herald began. ‘That Edward IV, by the grace of God, King of England, Ireland, Scotland and France. .’
‘Aye, and of every woman in this city!’ someone shouted from the back of the crowd.
‘Know ye!’ the herald continued relentlessly. ‘That the King and his two brothers, Richard, Duke of Gloucester and George, Duke of Clarence, having destroyed the traitor’s army on the field at Barnet, have now moved west to seek out and destroy the rebel Margaret of Anjou. Yes, she who calls herself Queen, together with her coven of foreign mercenaries, outlaws, wolf’s-heads and other traitorous subjects who have withdrawn their rightful allegiance from the said noble Edward. Know ye this! That any man, giving sustenance to the said rebels, or who refuses to give sustenance to the King’s rightful subjects, will himself be declared a rebel and suffer the full rigours of the law!’
The herald raised his hand again and the trumpets brayed. Then the royal messenger and the trumpeters mounted their horses and rode across the graveyard into Paternoster Row.
The crowd, however, did not disperse and the water-tipplers, their leather buckets slung round their shoulders, did a roaring trade as they moved amongst the crowd, slaking dusty throats and wetting dry, cracked lips.
‘I hope the bloody war ends soon!’ A journeyman pushed his way to the foot of the steps. He placed his sack of goods on the ground, his eyes fiercely sweeping the crowd. ‘It’s no good,’ he continued, ‘to walk the lanes and trackways of England when armies are on the march with soldiers who steal from any honest man. Not that Edward of England’s men would do that. .!’
The crowd nodded. The war between the Houses of Lancaster and York did not really affect them but they always listened avidly to the doings of Great Ones. Not far from here, in the Temple garden near Fleet Street, or so popular legend had it, the Dukes of York and Lancaster had each plucked a rose, white for York and red for Lancaster, as badges for their opposing armies. All because their king, Henry VI, was feckless. Oh yes, a living saint but too weak to rule effectively. The two great factions had fought the length and breadth of the kingdom. Now York was in the ascendant, led by the golden Edward and his two warrior brothers, Richard and George. Having smashed a Lancastrian army at Barnet, to the north of the city, they now intended to sweep west to bring to battle and kill weak Henry’s French wife, Margaret of Anjou, and her young son.
The journeyman continued his harangue, extolling the prowess of Edward of York. A black-garbed preacher, standing with his back to a buttress of the cathedral, smiled bleakly. He studied the journeyman’s clothes, his broad leather belt, well-fashioned boots, the dagger in its embroidered pouch.
You are no journeyman, he thought, but a Yorkist spy, travelling the length and breadth of the kingdom on your master’s work.
The Preacher’s smile faded. He, too, was on his master’s work. He pushed his scrawny, black hair away up above his ears. He wetted his lips, calling across to a water-tippler to bring him a stoup. The man did so: the water tasted brackish, but at least the tippler refused the Preacher’s penny.
‘No, no, brother!’ he declared. ‘I can see you are a holy man.’
The Preacher did not contradict him. After all, he was a messenger from God, a man whose skin had been scorched by the sun and wind of Outremer.
A lay brother in the Order of the Hospitallers, the Preacher had travelled the roads of Europe seeking out that great opponent, the Demon, described to him in hushed tones by Sir Raymond Grandison, his commander in the Order of the Hospitallers. The Preacher had become accustomed to his task. He had delivered the s
ame sermon on the banks of the Rhine, in the piazzas of the great Italian cities, even under the towering gibbet of Montfaucon in Paris. Now he would give it here. The Preacher’s eyes wandered to a buxom young courtesan. She was dressed simply in a costly blue samite dress tied at the throat by a pure white cord. She moved her hips provocatively and, sensing she was being studied, glanced over her shoulder and smiled enticingly at the Preacher. The self-styled man of God swallowed hard and looked away. The temptations of the flesh, he thought, were ever present. But, oh, the woman was beautiful: soft, golden skin, mocking eyes, lips meant to be kissed and hair like fire. She made to move towards him but the Preacher, seeing the journeyman, the Yorkist spy, had finished his declamation, moved quickly to take his place on the steps.
‘Listen to me!’ he shouted, arms flung wide. ‘Listen to me, people of God, because I am His messenger!’
The crowd, on the point of breaking up, now clustered together again, congratulating themselves on a good morning’s entertainment, a welcome break from the humdrum of trading. The Preacher did look interesting. Dressed in black sackcloth, bound round his waist by a dirty cord, wooden sandals on his feet, he had a face which attracted attention: wild, staring eyes in a dark, seamed face, like one of the prophets from the Old Testament which they had seen painted on the walls of their parish church.
The Preacher dramatically lowered his hands.
‘The Rose of the World,’ he began in a hoarse whisper, ‘is cankered and rotten to its core!’
The people strained to listen. The Preacher caught their collective sigh as if savouring what was coming.
‘The Devil walks!’ His voice rose like a rumble of thunder. ‘I have seen his stallion, black and swift as a storm cloud. Satan has come to ransack the treasures of the earth!’ He spread his arms out. ‘I have seen at night the horned goats of Hell and, on their backs, flesh-shrivelled hags. I have, in the howling of the wind, heard the squawking of crows and the hiss of serpents!’
