by Jane Johnson
The young man took the almond solemnly and popped it into his mouth. “Thank you, Sorgan. You’re a gentleman. But we must get you home now.”
“You’re coming too, aren’t you?” Sorgan asked, alarmed.
“I am.”
“You are?” Zohra was even more alarmed by this prospect than her brother had been by the young man’s likely disappearance. What would the neighbours say to see her accompanied by a strange man, and a Jewish man at that? What would her father say? But they were walking so quickly that there was no time to address the matter in any polite way.
She waited until they reached the top of the hill, two streets away from the family house, and there she stopped. “We can get home safely from here. Thank you,” she said, sounding ridiculously formal. To make it worse she dug in her coin-purse, picked out two large pieces of silver and held them out to him. “For your trouble. And for the amber and almonds. We really can’t accept gifts from a stranger.”
The young man gave her a sardonic look. Then he picked the coins out of her fingers and returned them to her purse. In the guise of an extravagant bow (which dislodged his precarious skullcap), he bent over her hand and pressed his lips to her palm. Straightening, he jammed the cap back on his head.
“My name is Nathanael bin Yacub, known all over town as ‘the doctor’s son.’ You’ll find my house at the end of the Street of Tailors. Knock at the door with the hand on it. And if you don’t, I will send my djinns out to look for you.”
He gave her his lopsided grin, told Sorgan to be sure to look after his sister, and then walked quickly away, leaving Zohra staring after him, the burning impression of his wicked mouth against her skin.
1
Priory of St. Michael on the Mount, Cornwall, England
SUMMER 1187
I was born a godless creature.
Two mendicant friars walking the pilgrim’s way towards the Benedictine priory of St. Michael on the Mount found me among the ancient hut circles on the moors overlooking the bay, living off worms and berries and covered head to toe in dark whorls of fur.
Perhaps that was why my mother abandoned me, thinking me more animal than child. Or perhaps I grew that pelt as a defence against the elements. Either way, the friars decided to carry me off to the priory, to raise me in God’s house and make a civilized man of me. I kicked and fought all the way. I heard later they debated dropping me over the side of the boat in which we made the short crossing between the mainland and island. There have been times when I wished they had.
They gave me a scratchy hessian robe and a name: Savage. John Savage. I was taken into the priory as an oblate, although I had not been formally given up by my parents (if I even had any). The order of Saint Benedict forbids a child to be dedicated before the age of ten. No one knew my age: they made of me a servant and used me at their will.
Set upon by the older boys, I would snarl and give battle and prove myself the animal they called me, but whenever I tried to run away they would find me and drag me back before I could escape across the causeway that rose magically out of the sea at low tide. Novices, being the lowest in the order, love to have someone lower on whom to vent their frustrations.
When the falling fits came on me, they thought I was possessed by a devil. When I fell, frothing and talking nonsense, I was unable to fight back: that was when their kicks fell thickest. I would rise an hour later to find bruises all over my body and the afterimages of strange visions in my head.
Pillars of light and soaring arches, accompanied by the scent of roses. They haunted me, those visions. They haunt me still.
The day I dropped the reliquary, spilling Saint Felec’s foot bones all over the chapel floor, Brother Jeremiah hit me so hard his hawthorn stick broke in half.
I’d been in the priory fourteen years by my own reckoning, so no doubt the stick had been weakened by repeated acquaintance with my recalcitrance. I felt exultant, till I realized he now had two weapons. Covering my head, I fell to my knees on the rough slates, cowering amid the shards of bone and wood.
I swept them towards me. “I’ll mend it so you’ll never be able to tell the difference! And there are always more bones in the graveyard where these came from!” I remembered very well that October morning when the prior had sent the sacristan out into the churchyard to dig up the skeleton of an unknown monk and cut off its foot in order to create the relic of “sacred Saint Felec,” ancient king of drowned Lyonesse.
I realized too late my error in mentioning this shameful secret, for Brother Jeremiah flew from a state of anger into one of apoplexy.
“You foul little demon!” he roared. The first stick fell. “Liar! Ingrate!” Whack! Shoulder. “You’re a wild thing, possessed by unclean spirits.” Whack! Shin. “And if I can’t pray them out of you …” Whack! Arm. “I must beat them out!” Spittle shimmered in his grey beard.
I curled in on myself like a dying wasp. “Mea culpa, brother, mea culpa!”
He grimaced and raised both arms as if to beat a giant drum. I prepared myself for the agony to come, but it never did. Instead, a thin, dark man appeared at the door of the chapel and came towards us, the skirts of his black habit kicking up as he ran.
“Stop! He’s just a boy! Leave him be!”
Brother Jeremiah gave the newcomer a ghastly smile. “Being a foreigner, you won’t understand our ways, brother. He is a fallen being. We must chastise such a sinner in this world, for else he will not mend his ways, and his soul will be tormented in the next.” When he raised his arm again I ducked and waited for the blow to fall.
When it did not, I glanced up and saw that the dark man had taken hold of Brother Jeremiah’s arms and was pushing him back against the wall. The monk struggled wildly, calling his attacker infidel, unbeliever, blackie, wretch, ignotus. But for a thin man the stranger was remarkably strong. Brother Jeremiah was subdued; his weapons clattered to the ground. Over his shoulder the dark man called, “Get up, John, and go outside.”
But I knelt, rooted. I had seen Brother Jeremiah strangle one servant and bash the brains out of another. He might have been old but he was as grim as Death. Even the prior was frightened of him. Who was this stranger who knew my name, and must therefore have been here long enough to know the evil power of Brother Jeremiah? I risked a glimpse at his face. Fine-boned, ascetic: like a saint in an illumination. Except that his skin was as dark as leather. A vague memory stirred. Some weeks back, during the winter storms, there had been a wreck off the rocks of Tater Du, west along the coast towards Land’s End. Sailors brought three men in that wild night, to the hospital here at the priory, all as limp as knouts of wet kelp. The two bigger men died. Was this the third? The only survivor?
I forced myself to my feet and shuffled outside. Night was falling. The sky and sea were the same deep shade of grey, the horizon merging into cloud. The distant mainland was a black whaleback in the gloom, tiny lights flickering from fires and candles in the village across the water. How often had I wished myself inside one of those tiny houses, away from the monks and the novices? But there was no escape from this place, except in death.
Around me in the falling dark, small upright stones marked the passage between worlds of previous inhabitants: the priory’s graveyard, each man’s resting place memorialized in the same way as his neighbour, no difference in rank or degree made between them, as Saint Benedict decreed in the second chapter of his Rule. I had always thought I would join them there, sooner rather than later.
I shivered in the rising breeze, then crept to the chapel door and pushed my head around the door jamb.
Brother Jeremiah was on his knees in front of the altar, motionless, eyes closed, hands pressed together, palm to palm in prayer, like a good child. And beside him, the dark man, visible in the shadow only by the gleam of his eyes. As if he had intuited my presence by some minute shift in the air, he said, without turning, “Brother Jeremiah has passed away, and we should leave, too.” I left St. Michael’s Mount with the stranger, who told me to call h
im simply “the Moor,” in the small hours of that summer night.
At last I was going to escape this hated place, and no mean-spirited novices would stop me. We left with some of the prior’s gold, but the Moor said that was all right, because we were going to put it to better use than that corrupt old churchman ever would. The first use we put it to was to bribe a young fisherman to row us across the narrow strait between the island and the Cornish coast. Then we walked the pilgrim’s way by night, and slept in the rough embrace of furze and bramble in the day.
We kept out of the sight of other travellers, though the Moor did not appear anxious.
“How did Brother Jeremiah die?” I asked at last.
He did not answer for a long time. Then he said, “Best not to ask, John.”
“Will they seek us as murderers?” I had seen men hang, could imagine the scratch of the rope around my neck.
“There is no mark on him. God called him home. He was not a young man.”
Might I, too, be unexpectedly called home one night as I slept beneath a gorse bush? I decided I had better make a friend of the Moor. I had never had a friend before, and I did not know what to do. I made a nuisance of myself, asking eager questions. In the end he told me he had been travelling with a master mason when their ship had been caught in the storm and gone down on the rocks. He said he had come from Cordoba, a city far to the south, where he had spent years copying manuscripts in the library of a great man.
“Are you a scribe?” I asked.
“I’m a bit more than a scribe,” he said with an enigmatic smile.
“I like to draw,” I said. I had watched the monks in the scriptorium at the Mount. Their scribblings fascinated me, and when they were gone for the day and I cleaned the room, I would gather up the pieces of vellum and broken quills they had discarded. I poured gall-ink into whelk shells I had brought from the beach and tried to copy their work. I made lines on the paper—like writing, but not like writing. My lines looked like wiggly worms. I drew a wiggly worm, added eyes and a mouth. It made me laugh. Then a crow flew past, and I drew that, too. Soon I was drawing all sorts of things: black-backed gulls, arch-backed cats and bare-branched trees. Gargoyles with saints’ faces; saints with gargoyle heads. Caricatures of the monks, hoods up, scythes over their shoulders: Death’s army. And the strange visions that came to me in my falling fits. Those were the hardest images of all to draw. I could never master the trick of capturing in miniature the immensity of what I saw in my head. It frustrated me to the point of fury.
The Moor regarded me with interest. “You are more than you seem, John. I like that.”
No one had ever said anything like that to me before. It made me flush with pleasure. I decided I would follow him anywhere.
“Where are we going?”
“We are going to see the things we must see and do the things we must do. But travelling the world does not come cheap.”
“We have some gold now,” I said brightly.
“It will not last forever. Nothing ever does.”
We were standing on the edge of Bodmin Moor in the early-morning sun when he said this. A buzzard passed overhead on slow, steady beats of its broad wings, and then it was gone. I blinked and looked back at him.
“The monks always seem to have a lot of gold,” I said.
“People give it to them for the favour of the saints whose relics they own—to grant their prayers, cure their ills or cancel out their sins.”
I thought about that for a while. Somewhere in the distance there was a brief, agonized cry. It sounded almost human, but it was probably a rabbit, lost to the buzzard. Then I told the Moor about the “relics” of Saint Felec.
A gleam came into his eye. “Bones,” he echoed speculatively. “Well, that is interesting.”
A few nights later we found ourselves beneath a yellow moon at a charnel pit on Slaughter Moor. I blew on my hands, stamped some life into my feet. How could it be so cold in the middle of summer? “Hurry up, can’t you?”
A laugh rumbled up from the pit. “There are some things, John, that can’t be hurried, and that includes the dead. If you want it done quicker, you’d best come down here yourself.”
I wanted to please him more than anything in the world, but the thought of all those unquiet spirits … “I en’t coming down there for love nor gold.”
He shifted soil carefully. Unearthing a skull sliced clean across, he held it for a moment, examining it in the golden glow cast by the oil lamp we’d bought from the fisherman. The flickering light picked out the hollow orbits and the triangular nasal cavity. Then he put it aside, tenderly, as though he knew the owner, and bent to his task once more. Not many would dare desecrate such a place, especially after dark, but the Moor said the dead were dead, and the body was no more than a vessel from which the soul wings free. He said spirits did not linger, and bones were only bones.
“Those who owned them may have existed long ago, but before their carcasses were thrown down here like so much rubbish their lives were full of passion, sorrow and delight.” He sighed. “War is madness, John. Fighting never achieved anything of value.”
The hollow we were in was full of vapours that twisted in the moonlight like phantoms. There were strange lights here, the sort of lights that would lead you into the bogs and drown you in the deep brown water where the piskeys lived. I shivered and sat down on the edge of the hole, dangling my legs. The Moor looked up at me, his eyes gleaming like half-moons.
To confound him, I jumped down, and was rewarded with a wry smile. “We’ll be here all night else,” I said shortly. With loathing, I laid hands on a bone and tried to dislodge it, causing a tumble of earth.
“Go easy,” the Moor admonished.
I was determined to hide how terrified I was. Together, we shifted soil and rotted cloth, stones, bones and bits of rusted metal. After a while, a large bone came clear and I hauled it out. “What about this?”
The Moor brought the lamp closer. “Scapula,” he declared.
“What’s a scapula?”
He touched my back. Beneath the rough weave of my shirt, my skin tingled. “There. A shoulder blade.”
“Who ever heard of a holy shoulder blade?”
“Far stranger items are found in your Church’s golden reliquaries. The Pope in Rome keeps Isa Christ’s sandals and foreskin beneath the altar in the Lateran basilica. In Venice, I saw a molar from the mouth of Goliath, and in Constantinople I hear they have the axe Noah used to make his ark and a phial of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk.”
“It would be long curdled to cheese!” I snorted. “What fool’d fall for such hogwash?”
“Never scorn the faith of believers, John. But it’s true that a scapula is not ideal.”
At last he uncovered an arm, the bones pitted with age but still intact. I thought—one day my arm will look like this—and shuddered. He brushed earth away. Still clutched in the weird fingers was the crossguard of a hilt decorated with twining beasts, leading to a long, lean blade.
I had never held a sword before. He passed it to me, and as I held it, it was as if power flowed through the metal into my arm. It made me feel like a king. Yes, just like a king …
“Careful, John.” The Moor stepped back as I flourished the weapon clumsily.
“Behold the bones and sword of good King Arthur, saviour of the English!” I said. “The hero who drove the heathen from our shores, before falling in the Last Battle.” The locals had told us this was the site of the battle of Camlann, where the English army had made its last stand against the invading Saxons.
The Moor looked thoughtful. “This King Arthur is not a saint, though. Will monasteries pay good money for parts of a dead king?”
“Everyone loves the hero of Monmouth’s tales, from the poorest ploughboy to the richest knight. They’ll queue for miles to touch his bones. The monks en’t fools—they’ll take popularity over sanctity any day of the week if it brings in trade.”
The Moor sighed. “It
is the same the world over, John.”
2
Glastonbury
FESTIVAL OF ALL HALLOWS 1ST NOVEMBER, 1187
The Moor tilted his head to examine the complex carvings above the door of the chapel. “Just three years to create this. Remarkable.”
I gazed up, smelling in the air the scent of winter: woodsmoke and cold earth.
The old church, originally raised by Joseph of Arimathea, had burned down; they’d built this Lady Chapel with almost miraculous speed. We had arrived in time for the consecration. All Hallows is when the saints are at their strongest and can hold back Satan’s power.
Word had travelled far and wide of the marvellous relic making its way to Glastonbury: King Arthur’s arm, still clutching the sword that saved England. Spurred on by curiosity, desperation and hope, some of the pilgrims had made journeys of more than a hundred miles to see it. There was a huge crowd milling about, waiting for the procession to complete its circuit.
“What’ll they do to us if they realize it’s a fake?” I had asked over and over as we trudged through Devon and into Somerset. But the Moor had just laughed. It didn’t reassure me.
A chill breeze came out of nowhere and I ran a hand over the unfamiliar baldness on the top of my head. I hated having a tonsure, but the Moor had insisted: we had to play our part. I was wearing a white robe given to me by the abbey’s monks, the traditional colour for the All Hallows mass. Used to Benedictine black, I felt exposed. The Moor, on the other hand, was in startling Pentecostal red. “I stick out like a sore thumb as it is,” he had said as he put on the vestments. “People will remember a black man no matter what he wears, but they are less likely to question a black cardinal.”
Quiet had fallen for the arrival of the guests of honour. First, the justiciar, Ranulf de Glanvill, known as the King’s Eye since he watched over the kingdom when Henry was in France. I hoped that eye wouldn’t fall upon me. Beside him, his brother, Geoffrey. He had the face of a butcher, red and fleshy, and the meaty fists of a born bully. The justiciar had eyes of winter-blue, sharp and penetrating. They grazed me and came to rest on the scarlet Moor, and my heart stopped. But the Moor just nodded, equal to equal, and the two men passed on.
