by Max Gilbert
'That was mighty kind of her, to send someone all this way.' 'It was her Christian duty,' said Bane.
'Well, I'll find out where he lived and tell his folks,' said the sheriff. 'You can go back home now, English; your Christian duty's done, and I wouldn't hang about here if I was you. You're on the wrong side of the border!'
Chapter 7
Straccan had waited six days at Pontigny. The group of people hoping to see the archbishop changed daily, some arriving, others leaving; a few had even seen him. Nobles and peasants, monks and nuns, priests and merchants, came and went. There were occasional messengers from Rome, bringing papal encouragement for the exiled archbishop, and from King Philip of France, stirring mud for all it was worth. It suited him well to have England and the Church at each other's throats. The archbishop's absence from his appointed place did not mean he was out of touch. Far from it. A constant stream of representatives from various English foundations poured in with complaints and problems, asking his advice.
On arrival, they gave their names and some stated their business to the guest master of the great monastery at Pontigny, where Stephen Langton, the latest in a long line of disaffected English churchmen, passed the time while waiting to enter into the see the pope had bestowed upon him, and King John so indignantly refused to hand over. Then they waited to be summoned to the archbishop's presence.
Straccan found himself in a small stuffy dormitory with three other would-be visitors: a plump Paris merchant who whistled constantly and tunelessly through his teeth; a silent grey-haired nobleman in rich but soiled clothing who eyed the rest suspiciously and spoke to no one, biting his nails all the time; and a shabby little Irish monk, Brother Dermot, who carried a scroll from his prior and the gift, for the archbishop, of a precious thumb-bone of Saint Brigid. This he showed Straccan who eyed it with professional interest and made an offer; whereupon Brother Dermot hastily wrapped it up again and stowed it back in his bosom, abashed.
Straccan sat and waited, stood and waited, walked about and waited, ate and slept and rose again, and waited. The Paris merchant was summoned in the middle of the night and departed, still whistling, to be seen no more by the rest of them. Familiar faces in the courtyard disappeared as the days passed, and new ones took their places. On the evening of the sixth day, as the sky began to turn all shades of gold and the shadows to grow long, a cloaked and hooded man red with the dust of travel, rode in just as the gates were about to close for the night. Dismounting, he handed his reins to a lay brother who appeared at a trot from the porter's lodging. The guest master himself, a venerable broad-bellied monk, appeared to lead this new arrival in at once.
'God's bones,' cried the grey-haired nobleman, the nail-biter.
'Who is he to be whisked in at once while we wait day after day?
‘You, Sir!' to the dusty traveller, 'When you see His Grace, tell him Lord Beltrane waits on him still!' And he rushed forward, seized the man by the shoulder and shook him furiously. Brother Dermot stuck out a dirty sandalled foot and the nail-biter tripped, falling heavily. Starting to rise, he grabbed at Dermot and pulled his dagger, but Straccan's boot connected with his elbow and the knife went flying.
'Lord Beltrane, whoever he is, needs a quiet place to recover himself,' he said to the guest master. It was quite dark now and monks came running with torches and lanterns. Light and shadow danced and flickered on faces. Two monks led Lord Beltrane away. At Straccan's words the dusty visitor swung around and reached towards him.
'Sir Richard? Sir Richard Straccan?'
'Yes?'
'Richard! It is you! I know your voice! Don't you know me?
See ...' He dragged his hood back. 'I am Sulpice de Malbuisson.'
'My God,' said Straccan, staring at the thin bearded face with its one-eyed eager stare. 'Jesus, Sulpice, is it really you? I thought you were dead!'
'I usually eat in the refectory with the rest of the community,' said Stephen Langton. 'But when I have guests we can be private here.' Straccan sat after supper with the archbishop and Sulpice de Malbuisson. The young monk who waited on them cleared away the dishes and crumbs and trimmed the candles. Langton leaned back in his chair and gazed at Straccan.
'My nephew has talked of you before, Sir Richard,' he said. 'He owes his life to you, and I owe you much thanks. Sulpice and my brother are all the kin left me. His mother –my sister—died when he was very young, and his father died before he was born.'
'I thought you were dead too, Richard,' Sulpice said. 'After you got me back to the camp, they told me you had disappeared. Then we were all bundled into wagons and taken to the ships. When I came to my senses I asked for you but you were not aboard. I asked and searched at Cyprus when we landed but you weren't on the other ship. Many of the wounded had died on the voyage and been thrown overboard. Not all their names were known. I have prayed for your soul ever since!'
'I'm sure I'm the better for it.' Straccan smiled. 'I never made it to the ships. I was still in the camp when the infidel raided it and I was captured. I had a year in a galley until it was taken by a Spanish vessel, a pilgrim ship that took me back to Acre.'
'What then?'
'I had no money to reward my rescuers, so they ... leased me you might say, to a Jew in the town, a spice merchant. As a servant.'
'How shameful,' said the archbishop, his face dark with anger, 'for a Christian to sell another Christian to a Jew!'
'Oh, it is often done, Your Grace. To a Jew, to a Saracen, to another Christian, even. But I was lucky. Simeon was a good man. Compassionate. He fed and clothed me, and when he found I could read and write he used me as a clerk to write to his associates in France and England. I had the good fortune to apprehend a thief in his storeroom and Simeon rewarded me by paying my debt to the Spanish captain.'
He remembered vividly the brief murderous struggle in Simeon's storeroom --he bore a welted scar across his ribs to remind him –the heat, the overpowering scent of spices, the panting, grasping, sweaty grappling with a body unseen in the darkness, the knife scorching across his chest, then wrenched away, dropped and kicked among the sacks. All the power of his galley-toughened muscles was behind the fist he drove into the robber's belly. Lights and shrieks as Simeon's men, hearing the fight, arrived with lamps. Himself slipping down into the puddle of his own blood. The smell of blood and cinnamon ...
'So you lost the eye,' he said to Sulpice.
'The arrow pinned eyelid to eyeball.' Sulpice frowned. 'They got the arrowhead out but it went bad on the ship. It was all very nasty, cautery and that, you know, but here I am and the other eye still serves me. I don't remember how you got me away when we were ambushed.'
'The arrow hit you and you fell from your horse. I took a slash across the collarbone but it wasn't too bad—it knocked me out of the saddle, though, and I fell on you. We rolled down a sandbank. You were dead to the world with the arrow sticking out of your eye socket. I just dragged you. There were some rocks and a hollow behind and beneath them. We tumbled into it; I remember praying there would be no snakes. Nobody noticed. It was a nasty hot little fight up above us. Our lot was wiped out. The Saracens cut their heads off and dragged the bodies away behind their horses. When it grew dark and you had come round, we started walking.'
Sulpice turned to his uncle, smiling. 'He dragged and supported me twenty miles,' he said. 'At the end, I kept passing out and he carried me like a child, on his back.'
'We propped each other along much of the way,' Straccan said.
'It was only the last mile or two that you couldn't stagger.'
The archbishop leaned forward, his elbows on the board and his chin in his hands. 'Tell me, Sir Richard, what is your errand here?'
'I want to buy one of your relics, Your Grace.'
'Which one?'
'The finger of Saint Thomas.'
Bane reached Stirrup again a few days after Straccan's return.
'You're thinner,' said Straccan as Bane hobbled into the central courtyard, leading hi
s limping horse.
'I've got a blister the size of a duck egg,' grumbled Bane.
'Adeliza! Bring food and ale! Come into the office. You can stick your feet in a pan of water, and tell me your story!'
Chapter 8
'Robert de Beauris of Skelrig is your man,' said Bane. 'It's his picture. He sent his servant Crimmon with it to his sister at Arlen Castle.'
'Arlen Castle?' Straccan rubbed his unshaven chin with a rasping noise. 'What does the lady there?'
'She's the baron's wife.'
Startled, Straccan said, 'What was the man doing, carrying such a precious thing to a noble lady with no escort? Why a man alone, skulking through the country like a felon?'
'It's all a bit queer,' said Bane. 'After they shuffled me off at Berwick I asked around, quietly, and found people who knew this Crimmon. He came from Mailros, they said. So I rode south out of town, as if I was going back home, and then turned back west. There are three big hills; make for them and you're there. There's a fine abbey and a bit of a town, not much, but growing. I presented myself at the abbey, told them Prioress Rohese had sent me and showed her token. Here it is.' He pulled a cord over his head and dropped the prioress's token on the table. 'They were hospitable and the lay brothers were gossipy. They fed me and gave me a bed, and told me all they knew about the lord of Skelrig. He's some sort of nephew to Gerard de Ridefort.'
'Exalted circles we move in,' said Straccan. 'Barons and their ladies, and now de Ridefort! He was Grand Master of the Templars at Jerusalem, twenty years or so gone--which makes the business of the paltry messenger stranger still.'
'This Robert has been away from his barony for some time, they said, on knight-service. He returned just after Christmas. Seems he asked to enter the abbey at Mailtos as a novice, but the abbot wouldn't have him. Robert got very worked up and begged to be let stay, even as a lay brother, but the abbot said no and threw him out. He went back to Skelrig, and hasn't been seen since.' Bane yawned and stretched, wincing as stiff muscles pulled. 'So I went there, and as soon as I asked to see Lord Robert I was grabbed and shoved into a nasty little hole next the stable, and locked in. They seemed scared stiff of me. They shouted through the door, who was I, what did I want. I said I had business with Lord Robert and they'd better let me see him or they'd be sorry, all the usual stuff. Everything went quiet after a while and I reckoned it must be night-time so I had a go at the lock, but there was a bolt outside as well.
'When they opened the door it was mid-morning, and there was this little priest standing there shaking and as grey as my shirt, and half a dozen fellows with bows and swords huddled behind him like children behind their mother. He started shouting Latin and suddenly chucked a cup of water over me—holy water as it turned out –cos when I didn't vanish in a puff of sulphur he turned pink again right away, and the others shoved him aside and took over. Before they could really get started on me I shouted, 'Crimmon, Crimmon's dead,' and they listened to the rest. Someone went off to tell Lord Robert and I was taken into the tower. It's just a very small tower with a few outbuildings, though they say he's a very rich man. Anyway, three floors up, there he was, behind a closed door and shouting through it just like we'd been doing below!'
'Mad?'
'Barking. And terrified.'
'What of?'
'Demons.' Bane poured and drank more ale. 'He's shut himself up in this room. He let me in after I'd yelled all about Crimmon and the picture and the Prioress of Holystone. Well, he didn't let me in, he had a lad in there with him, a dumb boy, to do things like that –fetch and carry, open doors, empty pots—because he, de Beauris I mean, is sitting up there inside a great circle, all made of candles and incense-burners and bowls of holy water and crucifixes and relics and bunches of herbs. No one else goes into it, and he won't budge. He's got a bed in the circle, and a table and chair, and a chest full of money. He's wearing a monk's robe over a hair shirt, he's festooned with relics and crucifixes and he stinks to high heaven.
'I told him the whole story: how his man died, how the prioress got his letter and the picture and wanted to know what to do with them. And after going over it again and again for hours, he finally told me he'd sent it to his sister Julitta, the lord of Arlen's wife.
She knew what to do with it, he said. Then he opened the chest that's how I know it was full of money –and took out a handful of coins and threw them into one of the bowls of holy water, and told me to take it, and thank you very much, and why didn't I start back right away?
'I headed straight for Alnwick. The roads up there are unbelievable. Thank God it was dry; if it had been wet I'd never have got there. I might never have got back home either; it's all bog when it isn't flood. On the road a galloper passed me, going my way head down, but I'd seen him before back there at Skelrig. And there he was again, in Alnwick when I stopped for the night, lurking about and watching me. So when I'd had enough of it I gave him the slip and followed him for a change. He panicked about a bit when he realised he'd lost me, and then went into a house and presently came out again with another man. And this is where it gets queerer still. Guess who the other fellow was.'
'Who?'
'That Gregory's man, the one who came here after the finger of Saint Thomas.'
'His name's Pluvis,' said Straccan thoughtfully. 'You're sure it was him?'
'No mistaking him, ugly sod.'
'Did he see you?'
'He didn't know me. I watched them while they talked, and then the Skelrig man got on his horse and set off back the way we'd come. And wotsisname, Pluvis, shouted to a servant and went back inside, and presently five horses were brought to the door, and out he came with two other men and two archers. Now one of the men I've seen before; he was Eustace de Vesci. The other I didn't know. White face, black hair and moustache. He and de Vesci wore mail. The archers looked foreign, I think they were Saracens. I whined for charity and one of them threw a handful of horse shit at me. De Vesci went off by himself and the others rode north. I hung around a bit to ask who the pale man was '
'Well?'
'Nobody wanted to talk about him. I couldn't find out a thing beyond his name: Rainard, Lord Soulis.'
Chapter 9
The small thick gold coins felt unpleasantly greasy, and Straccan rubbed his hands on his tunic after counting them, glad to be rid of them. Pluvis had taken the relic, paid the balance due and gone. The strange figure on the ugly coins wasn't an octopus, it was no creature Straccan had ever seen –something like a toad with tentacles round its mouth. Whatever it was, he disliked it and the gold it decorated, and took it all to Eleazar the Jew to change for other coinage, keeping just a few for curiosity's sake. That done, clean silver in his purse and more at home in his safe place, he rode again to Holystone to tell Prioress Rohese what Bane had discovered.
'I am amazed that your man was able to learn so much,' she said. 'Our bailiff's son had no luck at all, and was a week away.' (Straccan had given her an edited version of Bane's account and a list of his expenses.) 'He ate and drank enough for two,' she observed sourly, casting a critical eye down the listed items.
'Bailiff Ambrose's son?' said Straccan.
'No, your man Bane!'
'I told you he was intelligent. I never said he was abstemious,' Straccan protested with a smile. 'It was a long hard journey, and he was ill used by Skelrig's ruffians as well.'
'I am sorry for that, indeed. I suppose this precious thing must now go to the Lady Julitta. Do you think she might be persuaded to sell it?'
'Who knows? I'll ask her, if you wish.'
'I know nothing of her brother,' the prioress said. 'I wonder where he got the picture.'
'His uncle, or whatever he was, the Grand Master, would have been able to lay hands on almost any holy thing,' said Straccan.
'Julitta de Beauris was no great heiress,' the prioress observed.
'Her mother was Alice de Ridefort, the last of twelve daughters if I remember right, and her father some petty lordling, a Scot, I
suppose. However, Julitta inherited nothing. What there was went to the heir, her brother, who was niggardly with her dowry. But she's a great beauty. I have seen her, and all they say is true--a great beauty. Arlen would have her, dowry or none. It made quite a stir.'
