by Sarah Rayne
Ahasuerus was looking about him with a confused air, almost as if he had forgotten where he was. His eyes slid over the watching crowd and then away, as if they were not worthy of notice. He looked almost bored and Catherine thought if she had not loved him before she would have done so in that moment.
But the guards had moved in and they were lighting torches from the brazier, and orange and scarlet flames leapt into the air. The scent of hot metal from the brazier drifted on the wind, and then, at a signal, the guards thrust the burning torches into the piled faggots, firing them in four places.
Catherine could not look away. She was beyond thought; she was beyond everything in the world but the helpless figure chained to the stake. The flames caught instantly: they licked hungrily at the wood and tore upwards, trickles of fire catching at the hem of Ahasuerus’s robe. Clouds of dark smoke belched out, partly obscuring Ahasuerus’s body and Catherine gasped and thrust a clenched fist into her mouth.
In another few minutes, the whole stake would be blazing and his entire body would be alight. He would burn: his flesh would singe and blister, and the blood would boil in his veins. And his eyes – unbearable thought – his sweet, lovely eyes would burn, he would be blinded, he would be sightless long before the end.
The scudding clouds were rolling in in earnest now, blotting out the sun, and with them came the feeling that something was stirring: something immeasurably ancient and something vast beyond belief and awesome beyond imagining. They’re harbingers, those storm clouds, thought Catherine, glancing up. Death’s heralds. Is Death creeping across the square now, wielding his immense, ebony scythe as he comes? If I looked round would I see him stealing up on me? She glanced across at the other scaffold, at the crouching bulk of the block, and for a moment a different fear brushed her mind – how close are any of us to death?
From overhead came the first brutish growl of thunder, and Catherine drew her cloak about her. Absurd to feel cold when in front of her a man was burning alive . . .
There were other sounds beyond the low snarl of the thunder now and Catherine frowned and half turned her head. Music, sly, rollicking music, and the sound of voices – several of them – singing. Strolling players of some kind? Troubadors? The word minstrels formed in her mind and her heart gave a great leap of hope. But did I hear it in truth or was it a trick of sound? She looked back at the burning pyre, her mind spinning.
Ahasuerus was struggling against the fetters, his head thrown back, his face contorted in agony. Catherine saw his hair catch fire and his hands come up to his face – terrible hands! clawed! Those were the hands that caressed me! Memory spiralled back to the sensuous feel of sheathed claws roaming across her body and drawing forth that astonishing response. There was no revulsion at the pitiful mutilated hands: there was only deep aching agony for whatever had happened to him in the past and for what was happening to him now, and there was pain at the memory of his arms about her and of his skin like velvet against her body, and of strength and silk-over-steel passion.
Ahasuerus’s dreadful hands were vainly trying to shield his face, they were clawing outwards and clutching at the air as if the flames were solid things that could be grasped and pushed away. But his face was starting to burn: Catherine could see it blistering and bubbling with the heat.
The thunder came again, much nearer now and the underside of the storm clouds was becoming suffused with angry crimson. To Catherine, huddled wretchedly in her corner, it was as if the tormented figure was already dying, bleeding and burning into the skies. Jagged lightning tore across the heavens and huge drops of rain began to fall, spattering on to the ground. The blazing pyre faltered and black, evil-smelling smoke gusted across the square. Catherine drew in a huge breath – if ever there is a chance to rescue him this is it – and clutching her cloak about her, sped across the square.
In the same moment, from the western side there streamed into the square not the guards or soldiers she had thought of, but a tumbling, dancing, cartwheeling troupe of travelling entertainers: minstrels and gypsy dancers and a shambling performing bear, and acrobats and jugglers. The tootling music of the minstrels and the rattling tambourines of the girls was shocking in that agony-filled place, but impossibly there was laughter and shouting blotting out the murmuring of the crowd and the grim crackling of the fire. As the rainbow colours of the dancers spun and whirled, Catherine stopped in mid-flight and scanned them eagerly and thought: Nicolas? Could it be? Delight exploded within her, because he was there: not bringing an army or soldiers or fighting brigands to rescue Ahasuerus, but bringing his own people: the vagabond brotherhood who roamed the countryside, performing in barns and meadows and tilt yards and inns. Troubadors and gleemen and puppet-makers and bards. Gnome-faced freaks, barely four feet high. Dancing dogs and wild-eyed Romanies with streaming hair and brown skins.
The music altered course suddenly, it took on the strange elusive beauty of the melody Nicolas had taught her that night and that she had played to the King. Catherine could see Nicolas clearly, at the centre of it all, leading his people into the fire-drenched square, scattering his marvellous, irresistible music like quicksilver over the cobblestones of Henry Tudor’s torture yard.
The guards were shouting and pushing the entertainers out of the way, and Catherine fought her way forward, trying to see the best way to help. Because all the while he was burning, Ahasuerus was still burning . . . A hand closed about her wrist, and Nicolas’s soft voice said in her ear, ‘Keep back if you value your life, mistress, and leave this to us!’
Catherine felt her heart give a great lurch, but without taking her eyes from the blazing pyre, she said, ‘You can save him?’
‘If we are not too late – the King’s men brought forward the time of death! But we will do our best!’ And then he was gone, darting forward, caught in the whirling confusion again.
As the fire burned up, fighting the quenching rain, Catherine saw the bright figure with its cap of red-gold hair vanish into the heart of the billowing black smoke.
Martin had seen Nicolas through the smoke and the shouting: he had seen the minstrel moving forward to the terrible blazing prisoner. The descendant of Ahasuerus and Isabella Amati, he thought; the seed of the Devil’s Piper going into the flames to reach the immortal High Priest.
He fell back on the floor of the scaffold, almost gratefully. Nicolas knows what must be done. It will be all right. And I kept faith. I kept the vow. Now I can keep faith with God.
He caught the sound of furious shouts from beyond the blazing pyre, and then of mocking laughter followed by hoofbeats. There was the pounding of running feet, and Martin’s lips curved in a painful smile. He’s got him. Nicolas has got him away.
He felt the guards’ hands on him, rough and impatient, as if they might be saying: this one at least won’t escape, and he cried out with the pain of his dislocated limbs. As the shadow of the gibbet fell across him, the noose slid about his neck and tightened as he was jerked upwards. Upwards into the dark sky with its bloodied storm clouds, he thought wildly.
There was vicious pain again as he fought the hanging, and the rope bit into his neck, strangling him, choking him . . . He felt himself treading air, knowing it to be useless to fight, but fighting all the same. Sweat mingled with rain poured down his face, and a red mist obscured his vision. Knife-like pains sliced into his lungs and he knew himself to be slowly strangling.
As the red mist turned to black and blessed unconsciousness closed in, they cut him free, and air rushed into his lungs. He fell gasping and choking, hitting the floor in a sickening crunch that jarred his mutilated bones, so that he hunched over in agony, sobbing for breath.
He barely heard the soft footfall of the executioners as they moved forward, but they were there, bending over him, straightening him up from his foetal crouch. There was a moment of obscene intimacy as they removed his robe and drew down the cotton under-drawers. Their hands were calloused with jagged nails that rasped his skin, and they brea
thed noisily as if they might be aroused by what they were doing.
He was aware of his own voice screaming as they gouged out his bowels, and of pain that clawed scorchingly up through his throat, so that he retched and vomited into the sawdust beneath him. Almost immediately there was the terrible stench of his own entrails being burned. But I am almost there, he thought. I kept the vow and Ahasuerus is safe. And now, finally and at last, I can feel God’s love. God’s mercy descending about me.
As they dragged him to the block, one of the guards slipped in the blood and vomit on the ground and let out a curse, but Martin scarcely noticed. He was concentrating on God’s love and God’s mercy, and somewhere just beyond his vision, a light was beginning to shine on the horizon he could barely see.
Only a very little way to go now, he thought, and his mind reached for God, not the narrow vengeful God of Henry Tudor and his sycophants, but the real God; the God of love and light and compassion. Even though Martin’s body was suffering almost beyond endurance, his mind was beginning to unfold to receive that beckoning light, and his heart was singing with the sweet promise of Heaven. The golden beckoning of the New Testament pledge was bearing him up and taking him forward into the light; it was the air beneath his wings . . .
‘For eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him . . .’
I’m nearly there, thought Martin, laying his cheek against the smooth hollowed-out shape of the block.
As the axe came down, severing his head, he was still smiling.
The sun was setting in a blaze of crimson and gold behind Curran Glen, as Nicolas seated himself in Father Abbot’s study and regarded the elderly monk levelly.
‘We are greatly indebted to you.’ Father Abbot thought it was difficult to know quite what to call this odd man, who was neither young nor old, and who had simply introduced himself as ‘Nicolas’. It was even more difficult to thank him sufficiently for what he had done. Father Abbot had come across most kinds of men – and women as well – but he had never before encountered anyone quite like this Italian minstrel.
Nicolas said, ‘It is not necessary to thank me, Father. I did not succeed in all I set myself: Brother Martin died at the hands of Henry Tudor’s butchers and I had hoped to rescue him. I am sorry I did not do so. But he died as a man of God should – you and your people will be pleased to know that. He died bravely and calmly and he kept faith to the end. The burial was of necessity inside the Tower,’ he said. ‘There was nothing I or my people could do about it. But the other one—’ He made a brief gesture to the uncurtained window, through which they could see the small horse-drawn cart with its burden standing on the quadrangle. ‘The other I have returned to you, in accordance with your vow and my own,’ said Nicolas. ‘The coffin was made by two journeymen in Cheapside; it is plain and makeshift, but I dared not stay in England any longer.’
‘Goodness me, of course not,’ said Father Abbot, at once.
‘Your devil’s music-maker is bound by the grave once again.’
Father Abbot said carefully, ‘How did you—That is, I have never quite understood—’
‘How he is re-captured? How he is sent tumbling down into the dreamless sleep until the music wakes him again?’
Father Abbot thought you might trust a ballad-maker – and an Italian at that! – to put it in a flowery way, but in fact it was precisely what he had meant.
Nicolas said, ‘Father, I do not know. I do not think your founder, Simon, knew, either.’
He glanced to the window, and Father Abbot, cold fear brushing his spine, said, ‘He is – forgive me, but you are sure that he is – not awake?’
‘Awake and sealed into his coffin? Yes, it would be a gruesome thought, that,’ said Nicolas. ‘One could not sleep at nights for thinking of it. But he is not awake, Father.’ For the first time, he hesitated. Then he said, ‘I know of Ahasuerus from my mother, who had it from her father, and he from his father—Many, many generations back. And although I know the story of the renegade High Priest who was condemned for heresy and who claimed immortality, and although I know, as you know, what wakes him—’
‘You do not know what it is that sends him back?’
‘No. But,’ said Nicolas, ‘I have thought about it.’ He paused as if arranging his thoughts, and then said, ‘Three times now Ahasuerus has been sent into the grave. In Jerusalem, in Cremona, and this last time in England. And each time a particular sequence of events was present. A trial, agony by fire, the music, and—’ He paused, and a smile curved his lips. ‘And the presence of a certain lady,’ said Nicolas.
‘In Jerusalem he was tried for defiling the Temple with Susannah,’ said Father Abbot thoughtfully.
‘And the Triple Death was pronounced.’
‘The extreme penalty,’ said Father Abbot, with a shudder. ‘But we know of it from Brother Simon’s journal.’
‘And I from my ancestress,’ said Nicolas. ‘Also from my ancestress I know that in Cremona Ahasuerus was put to the per Dei judicium—’
‘Trial by ordeal and God’s judgement,’ said Father Abbot.
‘Yes. His hands were badly burned and they withered into claws, although he escaped death.’
‘And now in England he was again sentenced to burn,’ said Father Abbot, staring at his unusual guest.
‘Yes. There was no trial, but there is something known as the auto-da-fé. The passing of sentence on one regarded as a heretic and the public burning of the heretic. Used during the Spanish Inquisition. And,’ said Nicolas, ‘Ahasuerus had already been branded as a heretic once.’
‘Yes, I understand. And,’ said Father Abbot, ‘the lady?’
Nicolas paused, and then said softly, ‘I believe the lady was there each time.’ He glanced through the window to the silent coffin again, and then said, in a different voice, ‘You understand that he is burned? They brought forward the time of the execution – perhaps they heard of the rescue plan – and we could not get to him in time. The flames burned his legs very severely. And his face was mutilated—’
‘Dear God,’ Father Abbot sketched a small cross on his breast.
‘We covered it,’ said Nicolas softly. ‘A thin dun-coloured mask with eyelets. It does not really matter, but I could not let him lie in his coffin without some semblance of dignity.’
‘That was considerate. So,’ said Father Abbot, half to himself, ‘Ahasuerus has become a hideous outcast in addition to everything else he has suffered.’
Nicolas said gently, ‘Without the mask he is a distressing sight,’ and into the warm study with its splendour of sunset beyond the latticed windows, a little sighing breath gusted.
Both men looked uneasily over their shoulders, and then Father Abbot said briskly, ‘It does not, of course, matter, because we shall ensure that he does not escape again.
‘Ahasuerus will not rise again. No one will ever look on his face.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
Moira was beginning to feel as if she had fallen into a Fifties thriller film: the kind where Dana Andrews fought back the walking corpses or Janette Scott fled from triffids, and where everything was set against one of those perilously shaky backdrops so that you could tell that the swamp or the smoke-wreathed graveyard was painted-on, and the car chases all had the give-away rims of light denoting back-projection. Father had indulgently dubbed them rubbish and had wondered that his clever girl could find entertainment in such flimsy nonsense, but Moira had derived a kind of comforting nostalgia in watching the TV re-runs and getting glimpses of how the world had been before she was born, although presumably grappling with carnivorous plants or passing death-bringing runes on to enemies had not been an everyday occurrence in those days.
Heathrow Airport had been a seething mass of people, even at eleven o’clock at night, and Moira, trying to look as if she was used to all this, was secretly very glad indeed that Isarel and Ciaran were familiar with the proce
dure about collecting tickets and boarding passes and surrendering luggage. She managed to cash some more money at the Bureau de Change, and went into one of the airport shops to buy an extra shirt and a spare pair of jeans or cords, and some more underthings. Lauren, who had accompanied them to the airport, came with her, and watched her thoughtfully for a moment, before taking from the rack a vivid turquoise-green silk shirt and an ankle-length mohair skirt the colour of moss. ‘Because, my ewe lamb, you can’t go off with those two without something halfway decent to wear in the evening.’
‘It’s not that sort of journey,’ said Moira. ‘It’s—’
‘It’s a journey with two of the sexiest guys I’ve come across in ages and you’ve got to grab every opportunity you can in this life.’ Lauren winked at the assistant, who was listening, round-eyed, and turned to survey the rest of the tiny shop.
‘And I think you should have a daytime jacket as well, don’t you – oh look, how about one of those green waxed things, you’ll be a Sloane abroad in that, very British, you’ll look terrific.’
The waxed jacket was the kind you saw being worn by the Queen and Princess Anne at horse shows and the silk shirt was Italian with a designer label, and Moira nearly passed out at the prices. They had quite an argument in the shop because Lauren had produced her American Express card to pay for everything and Moira was determined to be independent, even though neither the silk shirt nor the mohair skirt, and certainly not the waxed jacket had entered into her careful calculations. In the end, Lauren said, ‘Listen, kid, you got into this by mistake, and you’re doing Kate and Richard a very big favour by going to Eisenach. If it makes you feel better I’ll bill the firm – legitimate business expenses,’ and then clinched the matter by scribbling a signature.
