The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  Mercadier’s eyes flicked from the sappers in the tunnel to his small battery of mobile catapults, thudding in the still, damp air with a repetitive rhythm as they hurled over the ramparts rocks, fire and filth of all descriptions. A cry went up as a group of defenders were sighted trying to put out a fire in the castle stables. Mercadier barked a hoarse command and his bowmen loosed a volley. The same savage screaming shew shew shew as more arrows arched over the ramparts to impale living flesh within the walls. One of the distant figures in the smoke fell to the ground, which raised a rough cheer among Mercadier’s band of archers.

  There was a thud and a scream of agony not ten paces from where Richard was standing. A huge boulder, thrust over the ramparts by the defenders, had rolled down the hill to smash its way through the screens and crush one of the peasants carrying faggots. Two mercenaries tried to roll the rock off the man’s body, then left him to die, screaming in agony from the broken ribs puncturing his lungs. Another boulder bumped and crashed its way down the hillside, carrying away more of the screens and crushing to death a faggot-laden mule.

  The king who had taken pleasure in the slaughter of three thousand Muslim prisoners at the siege of Acre eight years before paid no heed to a single dying peasant. ‘Good work.’ Richard clapped Mercadier on the shoulder. ‘Tomorrow the gold of Châlus is mine.’

  Side by side, monarch and mercenary strode towards a stone horse-trough where the king’s mount was with his squire, safely out of bow-shot. At a cry of warning from the men by the catapults, they turned to face the castle and raised their kite shaped shields to fend off a volley of arrows from the desperate defenders. One bounced feebly off the king’s shield, its energy spent, and fell to the ground. Most fell short, one impaling another mule which had just been unloaded. It whinnied and bucked and reared, trying vainly to bite the thick shaft sticking out of its withers.

  Twenty paces on, thinking himself safe in the poor light of dusk and well out of bow shot, Richard handed his shield to the squire who was walking behind him. He lifted the iron helmet off his head and handed that to the squire, then slipped the coif – the hood of his mail hauberk – back from his head in order to scratch the itching at the base of his neck. The mail armour protected the wearer from casual blows and projectiles but it also protected the royal lice from their hosts’s scratching.

  ‘Ah!’ he sighed with the pleasure. Besieging a castle was always a race against the arrival of reinforcements. In this case, there was no news of Count Aymar coming to the rescue so it seemed to Richard that the treasure would be his next day.

  The king of England and half of France grabbed the reins from the peasant boy who was holding them, placed one foot on the edge of the horse trough and vaulted into the saddle. He turned his horse and reached down for the shield. As the squire passed it up to him, Mercadier turned back to the sap where he would drive his men hard all night long, if need be. He heard a gasp and a thud and turned to see the king stretched full-length on the ground, his horse rearing in fright. A short metal bolt from a crossbow had penetrated deeply into the mass of muscle at the base of the king’s neck.

  ‘Mercadier, I’m hit.’ Richard sounded more surprised than in pain. A professional in the business of warfare, in a momentary lapse he had failed to allow for the extra range of the newly invented crossbow. He allowed the squire and the mercenary captain to pull him upright into a sitting position, from where he could see the castle. There was a white blur at the arrow slit where the marksman’s face peered down to see who his lucky shot had felled.

  ‘Pull it out,’ said Richard hoarsely, clutching at the bolt in his flesh.

  As Mercadier’s strong hands gripped the short missile and pulled uselessly, the king’s face went white. Then, with a huge effort, he showed why he had been dubbed Lionheart. He thrust Mercadier aside and hauled himself painfully to his feet, to be half-lifted into the saddle, where he sat swaying, his sword arm held uselessly against his chest.

  ‘No one is to know I’m hit, Mercadier,’ he groaned, fearing the mercenaries might desert in the night. He grimaced with pain as the horse moved under him. Through gritted teeth he ordered the squire, ‘Ride fast to my lodging in the village and tell Chaplain Milo to prepare infusions and unguents for my wound.’

  The youth stood, mouth agape.

  ‘Ride, I said,’ snarled Richard, his face drawn with pain.

  The squire leaped into his own saddle and whipped his mount into a gallop, scattering a path through the peasants carrying fuel for the fire in the sap.

  *

  A hundred miles away in the Boissy tower of Chinon Castle the sound of voice, recorder and rebec rang out in the queen’s apartments.

  ‘Stop!’ Eleanor commanded. ‘I am suddenly in no mood for melody.’

  The troubadour and two ladies-in-waiting put down their instruments. The queen shivered and pulled a fur-lined cape round her shoulders for warmth. Troubled, she went to the window and peered out in the direction of Châlus. She felt again the premonition she had had on the day when Mercadier’s man had clattered into the courtyard at Chinon with news of the treasure and she had tried vainly to stop or at least delay her impetuous son. The door closed quietly as her companions left the room. Outside, dusk was drawing in. The reflection in the glass of Eleanor’s face, lit by the last rays of the setting sun, was lighter than the scene outside.

  ‘Who are you, old woman?’ she wondered aloud. ‘How have I come to be trapped in your weak and withered body, while my spirit is yet so youthful and vigorous?’

  In the reflection, she saw her left hand clench suddenly and clutch at the folds of the wimple above her right shoulder, as though pulling something through the fabric. She took the hand away and looked with distaste at her arthritic knuckles. Coloured by the last rays of sunlight, the skin of her hand was blood-red.

  *

  Jay was staring at the blood-red sun through clouds of smoke. Then the colour changed, the smoke thinned and vanished in front of her eyes. She found herself staring at the sun in order not to see the void below. Blinded, she shut her eyes and clutched with her right hand at a thick stem of ivy growing on the wall.

  Although it peeled away from the stone almost instantly, the moment’s resistance gave her the time to regain her balance. She pulled herself back to safety, heart pounding from the narrow escape, and fell back onto the ledge where she lay, regaining her breath. Her left hand was bleeding where she had cut it. She wound a handkerchief roughly round it, closed her eyes and fell into a restless sleep peopled by figures who had been dead eight hundred years.

  On waking, she remembered only fragments of the dream but the narrow escape from falling to her death was a vivid memory. Looking at the stone where the ivy had been, she found a line of stylised Gothic letters carved into the wall. It was part of an inscription still largely obscured by greenery. Warily, Jay wedged one foot and one hand into the arrow slit, found a narrow foot-hold between the stones for her other foot and reached out to tug the remaining ivy away from the wall. The carving was hard to read, although thrown into sharp relief by the angle of the sun. It looked like six lines of a song. But why, Jay asked herself, would anyone carve a song high up on a castle wall?

  In a pocket of her anorak she found a pencil and a scrap of paper and began carefully copying down the inscription: ‘Savies que la pucelle …’

  Chapter 9

  Merlin insisted on dressing the gash in Jay’s hand. Only after he had repacked the first aid case, would he let her show him what he called: ‘This crazy poem you found.’

  He squinted at the sheet of paper and passed it back. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing to me. The words look like French, but I can’t recognise more than a couple of them.’

  ‘It isn’t modern French,’ she explained. ‘It’s the old southern tongue called Langue d’Oc.’

  ‘How come you can understand all this stuff? ‘

  ‘The Chinon Ensemble, remember? I told you we play Early Music. Many of the songs we pe
rform are in Langue d’Oc.’

  ‘So you can read it just like I read the New York Times?’

  ‘More or less,’ she agreed. ‘It helps that I was bilingual in French to start with. My family comes from France, way back. Refugees from the Terror. Hence our surname.’

  ‘Scarlet Pimpernel stuff. This I gotta hear.’ Merlin fixed his deep brown eyes on Jay.

  Once again he made it easy to talk. Jay found herself telling him about family holidays in St Denis, her father’s obsession with genealogy, and the research she had done with him on the family tree which stretched back to the Plantagenet period and – give or take a few guesses – to the royal line itself.

  When she had finished, Merlin took the paper in his hand again. ‘Where did you say this was carved?’

  She pointed. ‘Up there, to the right of the meutrière where the fatal bolt was fired from.’

  ‘And how d’you know that’s the right arrow-slit?’

  She waved the green booklet. ‘According to Michelin …’

  Merlin shielded his eyes against the light but could make out nothing apart from a patch of lighter coloured stone where the ivy had kept the weather at bay. ‘There’s nothing visible from the ground,’ he commented. ‘So tell me what would be the point of carving an inscription up there. Who’s going to see it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jay stared at the words on the paper. They had the familiar look of a well known quotation or a verse of a song learnt in childhood. Merlin, she saw, had dozed off again in the warm sunshine. It took her an hour’s work to make a proper translation, sitting in the shade on the step of the camper.

  ‘Listen to this,’ she called. ‘Know that the maid with green eyes bold / and the great seer from Arthur’s court / from beneath waters all unsought / shall find why King Peter did not grow old/ as light and dark unearth the lion’s bait / which through the centuries doth wait.’

  ‘Clever,’ he commented.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘To translate it as verse. Isn’t that difficult?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Jay admitted, ‘I spend a month working on the words of a song. This came out very easily in comparison.’

  ‘The rhyme’s odd,’ he said, chewing a blade of grass.

  ‘It’s a sirventès.’

  ‘What’s that?’ He had both eyes open now.

  ‘A form of medieval verse.’ Jay knelt in front of him on the grass and turned the paper over to show him the side copied from the original. ‘See? It rhymes ABBACC. That’s a sirventès. I kept the rhyming pattern in English to try and give it the same feel.’

  ‘Sounds like one of Nostradamus’ quatrains,’ he commented. ‘You know, those sixteenth century prophecies that some people believe have predicted the rise of Napoleon, the death of Hitler, the Gulf War and so on.’

  Jay looked at the paper in her hand. ‘If it’s a prophecy,’ she said playfully, ‘then that line about the great seer at Arthur’s court has to mean Merlin.’

  ‘Reading Nostradamus’ verses is like doing crossword puzzles.’ He took the paper from her. ‘You get a knack for it and it’s easy. Now here … The maid with green eyes bold is you, but who the hell’s King Peter?’

  Jay racked her memory. ‘I never heard of a King Peter, French or English.’

  Merlin lay back on the lounger, studying her notebook. ‘That’s what happens with Nostradamus: just when you’re getting somewhere, you meet a brick wall.’ He paused. ‘You know the most uncanny line of all?’

  ‘The one about the seer at King Arthur’s court? ‘

  He grunted. ‘Actually it’s the next one. “From beneath waters all unsought” could mean in plain speech: from Atlantis.’

  ‘It probably does. In the Middle Ages they were preoccupied with the legend of the land beneath the sea.’

  ‘Remember the song Marching Through Georgia?’ Merlin asked. ‘Well, I was born in Fair Oaks. It’s a piece of nowhere just across the Chattahoochee River from the city of Atlanta.’

  ‘And line five,’ said Jay banteringly. ‘That fits too. I’m blonde and your hair is dark.’

  Merlin yawned and handed back the notebook. ‘You see how these things work on people who want to believe? It’s like fortune telling. You talk the facts into fitting the wording.’

  ‘In line six,’ Jay continued, “Unearth the lion’s bait” must mean digging up the treasure that lured Richard the Lionheart here to his death.’

  Merlin laughed. ‘It’s a good game, isn’t it? We solved all the clues. Now we’ve got the whole crossword filled in, except for nine down …’ He put on a spooky voice, ‘Whereabouts of treasure map marked Dig Here.’

  Jay closed the notebook and lay down on the second lounger. She still felt drowsy despite falling asleep in the castle. Merlin was right: the meal had been wonderful but heavy and they had drunk quite a bit of wine with it. ‘All the same,’ she said, closing her eyes, ‘it’s weird how many possible references there are to you and me in a sirventès which was carved up there very soon after the siege that cost Richard his life.’

  ‘How can you be so sure of the date?’ Merlin leaned across the gap between the loungers and shook her. ‘The date. How can you be so sure?’

  She pushed sleep aside with difficulty. ‘The sirventès died out soon after. But Richard and his mother, Queen Eleanor, used to exchange whole letters rhyming ABBACC.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A sort of code. In those days you could never tell who would intercept a messenger, so they wrote to each other in cryptic poems full of allusions that would mean little or nothing to strangers.’

  ‘That figures,’ he commented.

  ‘King Richard was both a poet and a composer.’

  Merlin nodded, not looking at her. ‘There’s that story of his minstrel singing outside Dürnstein castle in Austria a song which only the king would know because he had written it.’

  ‘It was a tenso. A two part song. The whole point was that only Richard knew the descant to sing to Blondel’s melody.’

  ‘Positive identification. Clever.’

  Through half closed lids, Jay saw Merlin pick her notebook off the ground and study it.

  ‘Dürnstein,’ he said. ‘Where Blondel sang outside the castle. I just remembered.’ Another memory tugged at his consciousness, just out of reach. He stood up and stretched. ‘I need some exercise. Why don’t we both climb up there, so I can take a look at this carving for myself?’

  They climbed in silence. As the going became difficult on the crumbling top of the wall, Merlin drew further and further ahead.

  ‘Wait for me,’ Jay called. ‘I’m stuck.’

  He turned, balanced on the narrow stone ridge at the top. ‘You’re doing fine. Just keep coming straight towards me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I get vertigo.’

  Merlin clambered back and saw that her eyes were closed.

  ‘You’re okay now.’ He sounded sympathetic. ‘Here, grab my hand.’ He pulled Jay up to the ledge behind the arrow slit where she sat as close to the wall as possible, refusing to look down. ‘If you’re as bad as that,’ he asked, ‘how did you manage to get up here before, all on your own?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Dutch courage from all that vino at lunch?’ he grinned.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I don’t see any carving,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’

  Jay forced herself not to think about the height. ‘You have to wedge yourself into the arrow slit and swing out in front of the wall to read it.’

  He shot her a doubtful look. ‘So it can only be read by the angels? That really makes sense.’ Merlin squeezed through the eroded slit and thrust himself into space, causing Jay to scream at him, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘It’s okay.’ His face reappeared outside the slit, looking puzzled.

  ‘How are you holding on out there?’

  ‘A hand-jam. Relax! You shove your hand into a slit in the rock and clench your fist. Bingo! Safe as if there w
as a handle to hold on to. But I can’t make out this mysterious carving of yours.’

  ‘You’re too close to the wall to see it. Lean out further,’ she instructed. ‘You’ve got to be at the correct angle to see the lettering.’

  Merlin hung for a couple of minutes over the sheer drop before he swung himself back through the slit.

  ‘Well?’ asked Jay, when he was safe.

  He looked sceptical. ‘I couldn’t make out more than a word or two. It looks like there was some carving there once, but it could just be the way the stone has weathered.’

  Puzzled, Jay pushed herself through the narrow slit and leaned out as far as she dared. It was true. The sun had moved more than she had realised since the first time she had climbed the tower. Instead of throwing the carved words into sharp relief, the different lighting now revealed only the faint trace of a few Gothic letters, and even those would not be clear to an untrained eye that did not know what it was looking for.

  As Merlin helped her back to safety, she shuddered. ‘You think I made the whole thing up.’

  They climbed down in silence, Merlin helping Jay until they were nearly at the bottom. With a sigh of relief, she sat down on a pile of tumbled stones. Her legs were still trembling.

  Then he said: ‘No, I don’t think you made it up. Tell me about this medieval poetry and the songs you sing.’

  Jay wondered if he was listening; his mind seemed far away. She was in the middle of telling him something when he snapped his fingers and said: ‘Got it! Whilst we were climbing up there I was trying to recall the name of an SS officer I interviewed years ago. It was no big deal – in fact the piece got spiked – but I remember the guy made no secret of the fact that he had served in the Das Reich division. For all I know he was at Oradour. And he lives … guess where?’