Son of the Night

by Mark Alder

Navarre looked down on the little wayside inn from the hillside. It was dusk and the smell of a fire was on the air, roasting meat for the presence of the nobility. Ten good horses were tied to the trees and the standard of Castile dropped limply from a lance sunk into the turf, beside it the fleur-de-lys of the Constable of France. The spleen of the man! A fancy wagon, painted in the colours of the Constable of France, blue and gold, sat there too. They had demanded a good ransom for the sorcerer they didn’t have. A couple of pages had made a fire outside to cook on while they guarded the horses. A rabbit or a hare turned on a spit above the flames.

  ‘La Cerda cannot know we don’t have him,’ said Pastus, ‘or he would not have ventured here.’

  ‘Where is he, though?’ said Navarre. ‘He must restore me to what I was.’

  Pastus raised an eyebrow.

  ‘He has a greater purpose than that. He is a living man who has been to Hell. I did not think that possible. He could use the third key. He could release Satan for you – strike a mighty pact to do so.’

  ‘What happened to my men in Paris? You were sure the girl was the key to luring the sorcerer out?’

  ‘Sure. And I was right, was I not? La Cerda would not be here if he was not.’

  ‘No. And we have no word back from the Dauphin who conveyed our message to this imposter.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, brother,’ said his brother Philip, mounted beside him. Nearly twenty years old now, a prodigy at arms, his chest as broad and deep as a bull’s.

  ‘Let’s get going, then,’ said Navarre.

  He walked stiffly back up to the brow of the hill.

  A hundred Norman men-at-arms waited on the hidden slope.

  ‘Follow,’ he said.

  The horsemen made their way over the hillside. It was impossible to hide so many, but Navarre did not think that La Cerda would run. Why should he? He was on the king’s business.

  The pages, of course, saw them coming and ran inside. Before the stream of men was a tenth of the way down the hill, men had emerged from the inn to watch them – knights by their swords, but unarmoured and unconcerned, too. No panic, no running for weapons, no mounting of horses. Good. That was what Navarre had expected.

  By the time they got to the road and made their way up to the front of the inn, the innkeeper was on his knees before them making the proper signs of respect, but La Cerda was nowhere to be seen.

  Charles rode at the head of his column, his horse lumpen beneath him. It was a torment to him that he could not ride a mount more fitting to his station but had to make do with this old plodder. It was the only one that had the nerve, or the senile stupidity, to carry him now.

  He was greeted by Osorio, a knight of Castile – a lean man with one of those sharp Spanish beards. He was backed by ten men.

  Osorio bowed, not deeply enough for Charles’s liking. He didn’t bother to acknowledge the formality.

  Osorio stiffened.

  ‘Where is our man?’

  ‘What ?’

  ‘The sorcerer ?’

  ‘Where is La Cerda? I don’t talk to the likes of you.’

  ‘He is within. The Constable of France does not come out to greet the likes of you. A thief and an extortionist.’

  ‘Kill him,’ said Charles to his beefy brother Philip at his back. The knight drew and spurred his horse forward. He raised his sword uncertainly.

  Osorio rolled his eyes.

  ‘Even you are not stupid enough to kill the retinue of the Constable of France,’ he said.

  ‘I said kill him,’ said Navarre.

  ‘Really,’ said Osorio. ‘This charade—’ He never finished his sentence as Philip spurred forward his horse and caved in his skull.

  The other nobles drew but Charles’s press of men were upon them, hacking them to pieces where they stood. Philip took three himself.

  A couple of the pages ran for it and horsemen went after them, but Charles called after them.

  ‘Catch them, don’t kill them!’

  He got down from his horse and strode towards the inn.

  The innkeeper was still prostrate in front of him.

  ‘Well, get me a drink,’ said Charles. The man stood and walked shakily into the inn.

  ‘Only you or staff?’ said Charles. Pastus was behind him, five men-at-arms at his back, along with Philip.

  ‘My wife and daughters are away,’ he said. Customary when large bands of nobles visited – wise too. Probably up in the hills for a few days, thought Charles.

  ‘You know who I’m after, lead me to him.’

  The interior of the inn was dark, windowless. A tallow candle burned in a nook and the innkeeper picked it up. They went in to an inner room, comfortable, draped with heavy cloths that you’d struggle to call carpets but would do a job of reducing draughts. In the light of a candle sat La Cerda, two lieutenants beside him.

  He did not stand, hardly raised his eyes.

  ‘Are you mad?’ he said.

  ‘Well, to be perfectly truthful,’ said Charles, ‘the idea has occurred to me that I might be. I prefer to say “a little odd”. Off-centre, you know?’ More of his men-at-arms came in behind him; he heard them as they came in.

  ‘You’ll die for what you’ve done today,’ said La Cerda.

  ‘Well, may as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb, then.’ Charles drew his sword with his human hand.

  ‘You’re going to kill a Constable of France? This makes no sense. Look, we’ve a cartload of gold here. My ransom alone will buy you half of France. You’re acting like a barbarian, man.’

  ‘France needs me,’ said Navarre. ‘It needs you too. It can do without one of us but not both.’ He strode towards La Cerda, but La Cerda jumped up from the table, picking up his own sword from where it lay behind him and drawing it in the same movement.

  ‘You’ll not best me in single combat. I challenge you,’ said the constable.

  ‘A little old-fashioned for my tastes. Not quite in fitting with the times,’ said Charles. ‘With me!’

  He pushed the table aside and swung his sword towards La Cerda’s head. Unfortunately, the ceiling was low and his sword caught a beam. La Cerda drove his blade into Charles’s ribs but the mail, the coat and the iron corset were impenetrable to it. There was no second attack. Charles’s men were in the room now, a dozen or more of them, and they swept La Cerda and his men to the floor, less like knights in combat than toughs in a game a of village football. The three went down under the weight of numbers and were quickly dispatched with misericord and knife.

  Charles knelt over La Cerda.

  ‘I played the game subtly,’ he said. ‘I connived and used sorcery to get my way. For what? This is so much better, so much more direct. One blow of the sword yields me all the progress that years of intrigue failed to do.’

  He stood. Two whey-faced pages were dragged in.

  ‘You said you wanted them alive,’ said a man-at-arms.

  ‘Of course,’ said Charles. ‘Welcome, fellows. Innkeeper, fetch them a meal. Tell my pages to ready them good horses. Boys, boys, you ride for Paris with the news that Navarre has butchered the Constable of France. The killer will be coming to the court at the Louvre forthwith. Make them prepare the way! Prepare the way!’

  6

  ‘Gilette ! You’re safe !’

  ‘No time for that now, Osbert, no time. With me.’ She grabbed him by the hand and ran him on through the darkness of the narrow rat runs, Dowzabel behind her and two others Osbert hadn’t time to see.

  ‘We need to go back to the kitchens, my love. There is a warm pie there, or a piece of one, I’m sure.’

  She said nothing, just kept dragging him on.

  Eventually the low door of a low house. Osbert was bundled inside. The others followed.

  Osbert saw that he was in a very poor person’s dwelling. There was no furniture, not a scrap of anything. The surest sign of poverty was when even the rags had been burned. The ceiling was low and sagged and a thick air of damp pervad
ed the one tiny room.

  ‘Light a candle, for God’s sake. I cannot see what’s what.’

  Instead a sword was drawn from a scabbard – a sword that glowed with the light of the dawn. Osbert’s jaw dropped. It was Aude from the village where he had killed Richard, where he’d fought for the poor. She wore his coat of angel’s mail, carried his angel’s sword – the very thing that was now illuminating the mean little room.

  Beside her was someone Osbert had never seen – a squat little man, old, but with the body of a warrior. He was a pauper and in rags.

  ‘Who’s he?’ said Osbert. Everyone ignored him.

  ‘You’ve got something we want,’ said Dow.

  ‘And pleased to see you after so long too,’ said Osbert as Dow searched him. The boy was thorough. ‘Gilette, what has happened? Why are you with these people?’

  Gilette kept her eyes fixed ahead. She was changed subtly, he thought. She stood taller, more proudly, and, though she still wore the plain kirtle of a scullery maid, she carried in her hand a bodkin of the sort the English archers used, largely for punching through the armour of stricken knights.

  ‘Search him,’ said Dow.

  Gilette searched him, running her hands under his clothes, feeling down his legs – everywhere. Osbert felt he might cry. It was a parody of the loving intimacy he had imagined existed between them. She found the key to Hell in his codpiece. The angel’s feather was tucked down his boot.

  She offered the key to Hell to the pauper. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Give it to the Praenuntius.’

  Osbert recognised the Latin for ‘Herald’ or ‘One who comes before’.

  ‘He used to have an angel’s toe around his neck,’ said the pauper.

  ‘How did you know that?’ said Osbert. ‘I’ve never seen you before in my life.’

  ‘I’ve seen you.’

  Osbert was having difficulty taking all this in. He’d dropped the angel’s toe on the field of Crécy. It had belonged to the body the Archangel Jegudiel had taken when he came down from the light, the body that had been killed by Orsino, the mercenary. And then possessed by Hugh Despenser. Something about the toe had made him fear Despenser might find a way to come back again, to reinhabit it and find a way to get back at Osbert for killing him. Accidentally! Accidentally! That wasn’t the sort of excuse Despenser accepted.

  ‘Have you now?’

  ‘I saw you at the Temple, I saw you at Crécy. I know where you went, what you did. There’s only one thing I don’t know. Where is the Evertere? Where is the dragon banner? Our ympes lost you in the dark of the angel’s death and did not pick you up again until you had rid yourself of it.’

  ‘I got a long way south,’ said Osbert.

  ‘Where ?’

  ‘At Poitiers. I had met a fellow who assured me he could get a good price for relics and stood in good esteem with the monks of the town. I sold it to them.’

  ‘Did they know what it was?’

  ‘I think so. Their abbot had a number of such relics. A piece of the True Cross. I think he sought to put it where it could never be recovered.’

  ‘How much did you get for this act?’ said Dow.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Osbert. ‘I was low on money and they have some very strong ale. A bit, I think. I was drunk for a month after.’

  Gilette put her head into her hands.

  ‘Well, it was beginning to spook me. It made a lot of noise. I mean, it could have been digesting the angels. It’s a sort of snake, isn’t it? They say the snakes of the Indies only eat once in their lives. They must have awful gut rot after that big meal.’

  ‘We will need it in Hell,’ said Dow.

  ‘What do you stand for, sorcerer? When the final trumpet blows, whose side will you be on?’ said the pauper.

  ‘My own. And I would have been on Gilette’s too, had I not been cruelly deceived.’

  ‘But you are a strange man, Osbert the Sorcerer. A very strange man. Things happen around you. You are a man of destiny.’

  ‘God forbid I should be marked by destiny,’ said Osbert, and crossed himself.

  ‘God’s good at forbidding,’ said the pauper. ‘But I find myself wondering about you, sorcerer. Someone or something has marked you out. It makes me wonder if I should kill you here.’

  Osbert laughed. ‘Murder. How quaint. The world paved with bodies from the frozen castles of Scotland to the boiling lands of the Middle Sea. Well, be quick, sir. These are no times for lazy or sluggish killers. You are apt to find your victim dead in the street before you reach him. The Plague must return soon, it always does.’

  ‘You are no instrument of God,’ said the pauper. ‘So who do you serve ?’

  ‘Whoever shouts at me. Whoever shoves and bullies. Would you have me serve you, sir? All you need to do is whip me or kick me and you will find me most compliant. I’m surprised you didn’t just have me worked about the ears with sticks and bricks. No need to fuck what you wanted out of me.’

  ‘You weren’t always so easy to beat about the ears,’ said Aude. ‘I’ve seen you fell a charging knight without getting off your arse.’

  ‘But why her?’ said Osbert. ‘Why Gilette? To offer me sweet kisses, to exchange gifts and have her call me “Darling”. It seems so unfair.’

  Now the pauper laughed. ‘Unfair? Look at the world around you and cry “unfair” that we sent you to bed with a girl so soft and lovely.’

  ‘You are a spy,’ said Osbert to Gilette. ‘How did you even know I had the key? I never mentioned it!’

  ‘You sent a creature to ask for the other two,’ said the pauper.

  ‘You could just have asked for it, Gilette.’

  It was safest in the King’s court until we needed it,’ said the pauper.

  ‘Why drag me out here to get it?’

  ‘We were saving you, if only you knew it.’

  ‘From what ?’

  ‘Navarre had ordered you kidnapped. Those were his men.’

  ‘What are you going to do with the key? It’s mine, I should know.’

  Dow approached him. Looked into his face.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the business of Lucifer.’

  ‘I wondered how long it would take before he got a mention,’ said Osbert.

  In his experience, Dow never went more than a couple of breaths without saying the name of the bright angel/fiend of the Pit/depends on your point of view. He turned to Gilette.

  ‘So it all was . . .’

  She lowered her eyes.

  ‘We work to greater purpose. What does it matter what I felt for you? What does it matter what those who loved the dead and the gone felt? This world is fleeting. We seek a better one.’

  ‘The thing I have noticed about those who seek to improve the world,’ said Osbert, ‘is that invariably they make it worse. Kings, rebels. You’re all the same, shitting on the little man. Shitting on me from a height. Who are you?’ He pointed at the pauper.

  ‘A sorcerer,’ he said. ‘But not one of your worth. I am Good Jacques of the Knights Templars that were. The servants of Lucifer, bright angel and maker of the world.’

  ‘And what do you want the key for?’

  ‘Lucifer is coming to earth. Eden will be here again. We will let him from Hell.’

  ‘Aren’t there four gates of Hell?’ said Osbert. ‘You only have three keys.’

  ‘We may not need the fourth,’ said Dow.

  ‘Why not ?’

  ‘Because Lucifer works through me,’ said Dow. ‘And has done things I could not imagine. How many dead surround us?’

  ‘A multitude,’ said Osbert.

  ‘An army,’ said Dow. ‘Now go, back to your drink and your women and, if you like, your devils. Lucifer is coming and, when he does, you will, I hope, turn to him.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘Who would not?’ said Jacques. ‘Who would refuse a place in Eden?’

  ‘Depends on the rent,’ said Osbert, glumly. ‘Gilette, my love, say it was not all lies.
’

  ‘It was not all lies,’ she said. ‘Only some of it.’

  Osbert smiled. ‘Then it was as good a tryst as ever man and woman had between them. For some of it is always lies. Will you kiss me ?’

  She put her arms around him and kissed him.

  ‘Cannot I come with you?’ he said.

  Jacques shook his head.

  ‘You are a hare now. And soon the hounds will be released. We must be as far from you as possible when that happens.’

  ‘But what shall I do?’

  ‘What you always do,’ said Jacques. ‘Prosper. You seem to find that easy. Follow and I will kill you.’

  Osbert put his hands in the air. ‘Shan’t follow, then.’

  Gilette kissed him.

  ‘Goodbye, Osbert.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘South or north,’ she said.

  ‘Well, glad you’ve narrowed it down.’ He held her hands. ‘I shall find a way to make you have me back.’

  ‘I loved you, Osbert, but in these days, love is not enough. You are a liar. And, because you could not be swayed by duty or by the love of the light, you made me a liar too. When you stand in the light of truth, when you are within what you appear without, then perhaps. I loved you, Osbert, but in these days, love is not enough.’

  ‘I shan’t hold my breath, then.’ He kissed her.

  ‘Come on,’ said Dow. ‘We must get away before he is missed at the palace.’

  Good Jacques made the sign of the three-pronged fork. ‘I am sorry to have to take all the available Ympes.’

  ‘Your mission is clear,’ said Dow. ‘You need them more than we. Let them fly you swiftly and safely in your great business.’

  They went through the door and into the street.

  Osbert followed them out, but by the time he entered the alley, they were gone.

  He stood in the gloom, in the pissy, shitty smell of the alley. Rats scuttled at his feet. He could not go back to La Cerda now – the loss of the Key of Blood would be enough for that great lord to hang him. Where could he go? Somewhere quiet, somewhere free of devilry and horror, free of people.

  What a world. Nothing as it seemed, nothing pure or decent, deception at every turn.

  ‘So I have lived,’ he said to himself. ‘I have gulled men with false nostrums, I have sold the bones of pigs as those of saints, the teeth of debtors dead in jail as those of holy saints. I have been a bad man who has lived by lies. But now I forswear lies. From now on, I am a man of the truth. I shall deceive and trick no more. I shall live the life of an honest man and no saint shall ever have been as innocent as I. Women, I have lied to but I shall lie no more. Nor shall I pay them for a mocking echo of love, a false silk that frays and discolours from the moment it is worn. I shall be worthy of love, if not from Gilette then from . . .’ He stumbled for words. ‘Just worthy of love.’