The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  Quint was called first. Breach of the peace, assaulting a constable, resisting arrest. Clearing his throat, and placing one foot on the lower step of the three that ran along the base of the colonnade, he doffed his wide-brimmed leather hat, somewhat awkwardly on account of the manacles, and embarked on his defence.

  ‘That I did intervene on behalf of the man who, in the past twelve hours or so, has since become one of my most honoured and revered friends, I do not deny . . .’

  Honest and revered friend! That monstrous charlatan, or, if not a charlatan, then a man who had made his bargain with Beelzebub . . .!

  ‘But since I could see no fault in any of his actions and while I reacted with possibly unconsidered impetuosity I would therefore ask you to examine not the physical manifestation of what my intellect prompted me to but what the Stagirite in his Nicomachian Ethics calls moral intention. For instance in Book Five, chapter . . .’

  ‘Beware, Saxon, lest you fall into the error of Pelagius, the Briton, whose favourite saying was “If I ought, I can”, thus denying the necessity of Divine Grace.’ This from a judge whose robes and mushroom-shaped head-gear suggested the ecclesiastical, and whose lean but rosy visage indicated both constipation and a certain meanness of disposition.

  The secular judge whose eyes sifted truth from lies by looking in different directions intervened with prompt acerbity.

  ‘Guilty, as charged,’ said with heavy emphasis on the last two words. ‘Fined twenty pieces of silver and to be beyond the city limits by nightfall. Don’t come back. Next please.

  ‘Your honour, please . . . your honour.’

  ‘Well, what is it? Be brief and utter no more blasphemy. If you know what’s good for you.’

  ‘Your honour. I don’t have twenty pieces of silver. Just a handful of coppers. You see, on my way here I was robbed-’

  ‘Six weeks in the City jail on bread and water and then banished beyond the city limits. Next case-’

  ‘Your honour!’ The voice this time was deep, mellifluous and issued from the tall lady with red hair. ‘I will pay his fine, and see he is gone by nightfall.’ And with all eyes on her she surged up the almost empty courtyard like a queen and was gone.

  ‘NEXT CASE, PLEASE,’ bellowed the presiding judge, and Taillefer was pushed forward.

  The charge was blasphemy. Five witnesses described his illusions with the three-in-one and one-in-three piece of rope and then how he had caused to be re-enacted the impregnation of the Virgin by a dove in a lewd and suggestive way. The ecclesiastical judge summed up at some length, citing various verses from Divine Writ and chapters from the Holy Fathers all of which added up to, yes, such manifestations as had been described were indeed blasphemous. Taillefer offered no defence other than a wry smile and shrug of his shoulders.

  ‘Guilty as charged.’

  The judges now formed a huddle dominated by the ecclesiastic and deliberated the sentence. At this point Walt felt his left hand taken in Adeliza’s right. She squeezed, the pressure became greater. He saw how, under her hood, her countenance had gone white, she bit her lower lip and her finger-nails dug into his palm.

  At last the huddle broke up, reformed itself into a line. Walt noted the expression of elated triumph on the ecclesiastic’s face. The Presiding Judge came forward.

  ‘Crucify him,’ he bellowed. ‘An hour before dusk this evening.’

  Walt’s heart rose in exaltation but to his amazement, as she released his hand and looked up at him, he found Adeliza’s face too was wreathed in smiles,

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad,’ she cried. ‘Daddy’s so good at being crucified. I’m always just terrified that one day they’ll suggest beheading. Now that could be a problem.’

  The show was not over yet. As the guards gave a yank on Taillefer’s chain he reached up his manacled hands to the nearest soldier’s helmet, contrived to lift it and thereby released two white doves who were roosting beneath it. They soared up, just as the one the evening before had, and again, as she turned and made her way out, descended in their tumbling flight on to Adeliza’s shoulders.

  And on the way, before she reached the portico, four more doves flew down from the architraves and epistyles to join them.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Taken with Adeliza as Walt was, and feeling that for all her confidence in her father she and Alain might still be in need of help, he was disappointed to find that Quint and the mysterious lady were anxious to be off. Apart from anything else he had never seen a crucifixion and to witness one carried out on such a deserving case would add to the interest.

  However, before going to the clerk of the court and paying the fine that would release him their benefactress had bound both of them to her service. She was on her way, she said, to Sidé, in Pamphylia, on the south coast of Asia Minor, and she would not part with her money until Quint solemnly undertook to accompany her there as protector and companion, for she had no one to travel with. And yes, of course Walt could come too. She would pay whatever expenses they incurred on the way. Later she told them that she was a widow, and was carrying on her dead husband’s occupation as a merchant dealing in small but rare gem-stones, intaglios, cameos and the like, which she purchased in Italy and sold in Samarkand where she bought - lapis lazuli. Her most recent paid companion and guard had been killed by a bear.

  Hurrying through the streets, the lady told them they could call her Theodora, for indeed, as far as they were concerned, she truly was a gift from god. First they called at a livery stable, where she had a white palfrey already waiting for her and a mule for Quint. After some brisk bargaining with the horse-trader, she bought an ass for Walt.

  Walt took Quint to one side.

  ‘I can’t ride a donkey,’ he muttered.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Beneath me.’

  ‘It will be beneath you if you get on it.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Quint stood back, pushed up the brim of his hat.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘coming all over the gent, are we? You should look in a mirror.’

  Walt felt the crusted scabs on his face, looked down at the mess his clothes were in, despite the fact they’d washed them only two days before. Since then he’d been rolled in the dust and bled on them too. He rediscovered something long dead or rejected. Shame. He was feeling ashamed.

  ‘Have you ridden a horse since you lost your hand?’ Quint asked.

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then start at the bottom and work up.’

  Quint turned away and addressed himself to the problem of mounting the mule. He was hardly an adept himself -- for while he did not end up facing the wrong way, he very nearly fell off the other side.

  Theodora watched all this with a hint of scorn on heavy carmine lips painted in an exaggerated bow. When they were ready she tapped the flank of her pony with a flexible ivory wand and led the way out of the stables and through the city gate. Her newly employed retainers followed her as best they could. The road led into a wide valley with a river which descended from a considerable range of mountains beyond. The valley was filled with evergreen oaks, but widely spaced, as if in park-land.

  In the distance, about a league away, they could see a large cloud of dust which marked the progress of the caravan that had finally left the far side of the city an hour or so earlier. Trotting briskly they caught up with it and were then able to proceed at a more leisurely pace, which suited Walt. The jogging had set off the ache in his battered face and sent shards of pain through his broken teeth.

  The caravan consisted of a hundred or so men, women, children and babes-in-arms, and some three hundred animals: mostly asses and mules but with four chains of camels, six or seven to a chain. It was led by a donkey, followed by the first of the camels on which was mounted the Conductor, an old man but thin and upright with a grey beard, swathed in loose cotton garments beneath a vast turban which swayed like the lantern on a ship leading a fleet. His sons collected dues for the pro
tection the caravan afforded.

  The oaks were for the most part topped out for charcoal, leaving them stunted and often with only two or at the most three large limbs that turned the trees into oddly cruciform shapes. Walt was put in mind of Taillefer and his fate.

  ‘I envy no man who is to be crucified,’ he said to Quint as they followed the tail and rump of Theodora’s pony, ‘and certainly I feel for the two children who will be thus orphaned. However, I confess I have no love for Taillefer.’

  ‘Because he tricked your Harold into the mumbo-jumbo of swearing fealty to the Bastard on a couple of dog bones?’

  ‘And because he led the Norman army into battle, singing the Song of Roland.’

  ‘That was his penance.’

  ‘Penance?’

  ‘For supporting and encouraging what by then he saw was the wrong side. After all, he was killed in the performance.’

  ‘Evidently not. Anyway, how do you know all this?’

  ‘We talked all through the night. He is a very clever man and I would say a good one. I told him of your past, that Harold was your lord and so forth. He expressed a wish that you should know he did not feel the oath sworn had had much effect on the outcome. At all events, he regrets now what he did.’

  ‘He can’t get away with that.’ There were things here Walt understood very well but could not express. For all it had been obtained by trickery, that oath had hung over the battlefield like the crows and kites, nagging at men’s minds, weakening or strengthening their resolve.

  Nevertheless Quint seemed to understand a little of what was in Walt’s mind.

  ‘It must have weighed on the Bastard’s conscience too, you know, that the oath was extracted by trickery.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You don’t know that man. He revels in getting things by whatever means he can. And if he can congratulate himself on his own cleverness as well, so much the better.’

  Quint nodded serious agreement.

  ‘Maybe you’re right. But to return to Taillefer. The old Taillefer really was killed on Senlac Hill.’

  ‘How so? What do you mean . . . the old Taillefer?’

  ‘Just that. The court minstrel, loaded with money and respected by all as a great artist and performer, truly died. He was reborn as a wandering mountebank -- a person and an occupation with far more honesty about them than the posturing pretension of the court sycophant. Reborn, yes, and he has sworn to follow in body and soul the greatest Mountebank of all.’

  Walt jogged on, occasionally kicking the sides of his very small moke (his feet brushed the tops of the etiolated grasses that grew by the roadside). Because of his animal’s size, he found it a constant challenge to keep up with the others, especially since the movement again exacerbated the various pains in his mouth and face.

  ‘Well, he’s done for this time. And you’ll forgive me if, in spite of all you’ve said, I add - Good riddance!’

  Soon they left the plain and entered a gorge whose beetling cliffs far surpassed those of Cheddar - the only other place like it Walt could clearly call to mind, though his wanderings the year or so before had taken him through several similar places on the Rhine and the Danube. Choughs gave their whistling call against the lower walls, which were hung with emerald ferns and big blue flowers where water coursed down them. Far higher, so as almost to be invisible, eagles and vultures slowly soared and spiralled.

  Presently they heard a distant trumpet, and then a rumbling that seemed to bend the air and shake the ground. An earthquake? But no. The Conductor’s sons scurried down the column, urging all off the road and against the walls of the gorge on one side or into the river, now little more than a rushing brook, on the other, and just in time, too. A family of Egyptians at the very rear were ploughed into and ridden down, their baggage animals breaking free and careering away below the boughs of the trees as the out-riders of a corps of armed horse galloped into them. The main body were heavily armed, the leaders wearing flat-topped cylindrical helmets of a style Walt had not seen before and plumed too, and they went by, as many as five thousand of them, all at a slow gallop, stirring up great clouds of dust through which the sun’s beams flashed from polished metal. The sound of their hooves reverberated like thunder between the rocky ramparts. In their midst they carried a huge banner, supported between two poles, emblazoned with the Chi-Rho of Christ.

  ‘Who were they? Who the fuck were they?’

  Quint turned to Walt. The Englishman was white and shaking. The sight of armed men on horseback, in numbers, had clearly recalled memories too painful to be easily borne. For a moment the Frisian feared Walt might succumb to a fit similar to the one that had afflicted him early in their acquaintance.

  ‘Not Normans, not Normans I assure you. I should guess they are the Emperor’s men on their way to do battle with the invading Seljuk Turks.’

  He watched carefully for a moment or two, as Walt struggled with himself, straightened, shook his head, then, without further comment but a definite grimace of disdain, remounted, swinging his long leg over the back of his moke.

  He is, thought Quint, getting better. He has regained the childish pride of a petty lordling and so will not ride happily on an ass; he is coping with the problem of Taillefer; he has withstood the memory of squadrons of armoured horsemen. In a small way all this somewhat saddened Quint - while he wished nothing but the best for his friend, he knew he would become less interesting as an object of study and compassion the more whole he became. Quint was an intellectual and as such not likely to find an adequately reconstructed, barely literate soldier and lordling, with all that those stations in life implied, a compellingly interesting companion.

  ‘This Sidé place we’re heading for,’ Walt now asked. ‘What sort of a place is it?’

  ‘I understand from our mistress that it is a port at the top of the Bay of Adalia. She assures me we should be able to take ship for the Holy Land from there. Oh. Oh, dear.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Our mistress. She’s not here. She must have been separated from us when the Emperor’s horsemen went by.’

  Presently they found her some fifty paces further up the column in the company of a Jewish merchant and his family. She seemed to be getting on with them very well, almost as if she had met them sometime in the past, certainly as if she shared much in common with them.

  She turned on Walt and Quint and sounded off at them roundly for losing her, telling them that if they wished to continue to enjoy her patronage they must remain close at all times.

  All this confirmed Walt in certain suspicions he had begun to entertain concerning her: she dealt in lapis lazuli, she had Jewish connections, he felt sure her red hair was a wig.

  The trek continued for another two tedious days, following a road that wound tortuously through ravines and gorges, up to watersheds and down the other side. They passed villages where hovels built of undressed stone huddled round small castles or forts. Out of these came armed men, cloaked in furs from the mountain fauna, bearded and moustached like Vikings, save that their hair was black, to demand tribute more often in kind than cash, for in these mountain fastnesses what use was there for coin?

  They stopped the nights inside huge cathedral-like caravansarays with stabling instead of side-aisles and rooms for hire where the galleries would have been, and it was in these that on successive nights their lives were strangely threatened.

  On the first night Theodora gave Quint the money with which to buy ground up mutton and three loaves of bread, telling him to borrow a skillet, fry up the cakes of ground meat, and bring one to the room she had hired for herself in the upper gallery. He bought the food from a cripple with one foot missing, the stump being bound in rags, and hands and nails that were filthy. Quint did not want to buy from him, insistent though he was, pushing his way through other less repellent salesmen, but Walt, feeling a kinship for a man thus mutilated, said why not? Clearly he needs the money.

  They took it all into their stable
and using straw for kindling and three lumps of charcoal soon had a hot fire going beneath the skillet and the rounds of meat sizzling nicely in their own fat. Walt turned away to cut the loaves and suddenly cried out, dropping his knife.

  Embedded in the bread, though not presumably baked in, since it was still alive, a large orange centipede, cut in two by the blade, still wriggled convulsively, rearing its cephalic plate, twisting this way and that, searching blindly with a wicked pair of sickle shaped mandibles on whose tips tiny drops of poison had already formed. Hearing Walt’s cry of anger and fear Quint dropped the skillet and dashed the half-loaf from his hand before stamping as brutally as he could on the beast until it was mashed up with the bread in an awful mixture of legs, chitinic casing which crackled beneath his soles, and fluids yellow and brown. The creature, whole, must have been as long as the span of a grown man’s hand spread from the tip of the little finger to that of the thumb.

  ‘Had it bitten you,’ Quint gasped at last, ‘it would have caused severe pain, inflammation and necrosis, leading to gangrene and death.’

  ‘That pedlar tried to kill me,’ Walt shouted.

  ‘Or possibly me. He was not to know which of us would cut the bread.’

  ‘What about the rest of the food?’

  ‘Chuck it. Theodora will have to give us more money or do without.’

  ‘But why? Why did this happen? It surely was not an accident.’

  ‘We could find the man and ... ask him.’

  But of course he was gone, not to be found.

  On the second morning, in the second caravansaray, Quint, rolling up the quilted bag they still shared at night, found beneath it a large tarantula -- striped and hairy. It should have been crushed but they had spread the bag over flagstones where a small stone had been lying loose. Walt had kicked the stone away, leaving a declivity which was now filled by the giant arachnid. Yet there was no hole in the declivity which might have served the monster as a nest and from which it might have emerged during the night. How it got there remained a puzzle.