The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  Outside, there was a tang of wood-smoke in the damp air as Eleanor left the hovel in which the king had just died and gathered her cloak around her against the frost. The routiers had set fire to everything combustible in the village, preparatory to their withdrawal next morning. Several of the hovels in the village were still smouldering, an occasional shower of sparks erupting between roofless walls. There was a sound of drunken singing and a girl’s scream.

  Along the muddy track between the houses, Eleanor hurried, a cloaked and hooded figure. Ahead of her – for the moon was not yet up – a man dressed as a knight carried a sputtering pine resin torch to light the way. A group of drunken looters, carrying a heavy oak chest between them, staggered across their path. The queen’s escort lowered the torch so that they could see the arms he bore on the linen surcoat worn over the hauberk of mail. William the Marshal’s reputation as the greatest knight of his time cut a path through the drunken men more quickly than his sword would have done.

  Outside Mercadier’s headquarters, two of the routiers were taunting with a flaming torch a terrified peasant girl with dishevelled clothing and blood on her legs. Around her neck was a halter which one of the men was holding. William brushed them aside and stood back to let the queen enter first.

  She confronted Mercadier like a whirlwind. ‘This is the boy, Pierre Basile?’

  ‘And if it is?’ His brain was slow from the wine he had drunk.

  ‘I command you to deliver him to me.’

  ‘He’s mine, so long as he lives,’ Mercadier growled.

  ‘And that won’t be long,’ laughed one of the drunken men. ‘Look at the candle. It’s nearly gone.’

  ‘Leave us,’ the queen ordered the men without looking at them.

  ‘Stay,’ said Mercadier.

  Behind them, the tortured youth swayed back and forth on the iron bar. The queen’s escort thrust his torch into a metal bracket on the wall in order to have both hands free. Manoeuvring to make sure that no one stood behind him, William loosed his sword in its sheath.

  ‘I command you, Mercadier.’ The queen thrust in front of his eyes her right hand, to show him the signet ring she had taken from the dead king’s finger. On it the three lions, which Richard had chosen as the arms of England, defied Mercadier to continue. ‘By this ring I command you to leave our presence,’ she repeated. ‘And take your men with you.’

  Mercadier hesitated. There was a hiss of steel on steel as William the Marshal half drew his sword. With ill grace, Mercadier kissed the ring and ordered his men out of the room.

  The boy was unconscious, recovering to find his entire body a network of pain on different wavelengths. First came the great slow waves that seemed to tear his chest and belly apart with each agonizing breath. Then the deeper stabs of pain from his twisted, broken arms and the sharp pulsation of damaged nerves in his skull from where the teeth had been torn out, one by one. His swollen jaw was broken in two places. He groaned and found his head lifted gently, a sponge soaked in water squeezed tenderly against his bruised and cut lips. Even that slight pressure hurt. A spasm of agony forced another groan from his lips. At a second touch of the sponge he opened his eyes to see a knight supporting his head and offering him the sponge again and, behind the knight, a lady, dressed in such finery as the boy had never seen.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ Queen Eleanor asked in a clear voice.

  Pierre Basile’s pain-filled eyes rested briefly on her and he shook his head imperceptibly.

  She lifted her hand with the ring that had forced Mercadier’s obedience. The boy recognised it as the one he had kissed on Richard’s finger.

  ‘The king,’ he mumbled pathetically, ‘pardoned me.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said, speaking slowly and clearly. ‘And I know also that you swore an oath that you would never divulge your secret knowledge. How I know such things is my affair. Now listen, boy. I am Queen Eleanor, mother of the king, and for the moment your lawful monarch. By this ring I do absolve you from your oath.’

  Still he looked at her, wavering between consciousness and oblivion. The power of her eyes held him.

  ‘Tell me. And then I bring you peace,’ she promised.

  He was aware only of her green eyes, and of a miracle. There was no pain. As long as he looked into her eyes, he knew she would hold the pain at bay by her will. As long as he clung to them, the pain would hover but not strike, like wolves keeping their distance at night from a fire.

  ‘There will be no more pain,’ she said, reading his mind. ‘You have that on a queen’s honour.’

  Eleanor leaned forward to catch the words that could have saved the boy so much suffering, and listened intently. ‘Do you swear to that?’ she asked, raising to his cracked and swollen lips a crucifix worn on a cord around her neck. ‘Do you swear it by Christ’s passion on the Cross?’

  ‘I do,’ he said thickly, knowing they were his last words.

  ‘Here, lad, your time is come.’ William the Marshall spoke compassionately. With no more emotion that a butcher skinning a rabbit, he slipped the steel of his poignard between the exposed ribs and thrust straight and true to the heart. And Pierre Basile died, gazing into the eyes of a queen.

  ‘The boy?’ asked Mercadier anxiously as Eleanor left. His bloodshot eyes took in the bright red stain on William’s surcoat. The marshal’s sword was in his right hand and a bloody poignard in the left, ready for combat. The knight who had served both Henry and Richard Plantagenet would not hesitate to take on a dozen of the routiers.

  ‘The boy’s all yours, Mercadier,’ the queen said unemotionally. ‘Do with him what you will.’

  *

  Groggily Jay recognised Leila’s face peering in through the small window above the sink. She shivered. The fire had gone out hours before, leaving her stiff and cold after spending the whole night in the uncomfortable chair. She was surprised, on opening the door, to find that it was already late morning.

  ‘Booze!’ Leila accused her. ‘I do that sometimes – fall asleep in a chair with a bottle of wine. You feel terrible the next day. Serves you right.’

  Jay passed a hand over her eyes. ‘The light’s too bright.’

  ‘Never,’ Leila disagreed. ‘Not for an artist. But since you’re obviously not in the market for conversation, I’ll deliver my message and be on my way.’

  ‘Don’t go.’ Jay clutched her; she did not want to be left alone.

  ‘You’re lucky.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I sold a picture and paid the telephone bill yesterday.’

  ‘That makes me lucky?’

  ‘Merlin called me last night.’

  ‘He did?’ Jay groped for a switch and plugged in the coffee maker.

  Leila nibbled a biscuit and spat it out. ‘Yugh! These are mouldy. He said he’d tried calling this number several times before giving up and trying me.’

  She picked up the telephone on the kitchen table and listened to the dialling tone. ‘Sounds okay now. Anyway, Merlin said he’d spoken to you earlier in the evening, but when he tried to ring you and say goodnight, he couldn’t get through. He asked me to come round and make sure you were all right. Now why would he do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Leila grinned. ‘Sounds like love to me. Were you out, or just didn’t want to answer the phone?’

  Jay yawned. ‘I was asleep.’

  ‘Must have been the sleep of the dead,’ said Leila.

  ‘I feel like death.’

  ‘Maybe you caught that ’flu bug I had.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well, the conversation’s great. I’ll be off.’ Leila waved a handful of bank notes from her shoulder bag. ‘I have money. A rich man of impeccable taste has fallen in love with my paintings or my body. I don’t know which as yet. I am going to share my good fortune by paying some of my creditors. It’s a good day for the shopkeepers of St Denis.’

  ‘Stay and have some coffee,’ begged Jay.

  ‘Lovely
idea,’ Leila laughed. ‘But you forgot to put either water or coffee into the machine. Byeee.’

  Jay went round the house throwing open the shutters to let daylight into every room. There was a faint glow of red in the embers of the fire, but when she knelt down to re-light it, a wave of revulsion pushed her back from the open fire-place with the black fire-irons swinging from the bar of the spit and creaking slightly in the draught.

  The coffee did not help. Jay sat on a chair in the sun-filled garden, nursing the cup but lacking the energy to do anything. This isn’t like me, she thought. Twice in less than a week I’ve slept till nearly midday. And instead of feeling good afterwards, I feel a hundred and twenty years old.

  There were large parts of the previous day for which she could not account: blank hours which she could not fill in. And in their place were flash memories of scenes and events that belonged in someone else’s mind: blood, pain and murder.

  Am I going mad? she wondered. She thought of getting the car out of the barn and going after Leila, to have someone to talk to, but could not summon the energy. And even if she found Leila, what could she say to her?

  Part III

  Chapter 1

  Midday was chiming on an ornate Baroque clock in the main square of Dürnstein when Merlin drove into a parking lot outside the ancient ramparts of the little town. He chose a place between a Saab with an S plate and an English registered Volvo, remembering from his in-flight reading that the town had been sacked in 1645 by the Swedes. By the look of the town, he thought, the latter day Vikings had not done a very thorough job on it, although little now remained of the massive fortress that had once dominated this stretch of the Danube valley. Above the car park, a ribbon of masonry straggled up the hill towards the remains of the castle where Richard the Lionheart had been held for ransom on his way home from the abortive Third Crusade in 1193.

  Merlin locked the rental car and stretched. Why, he asked himself, had it seemed so imperative the previous day to say goodbye to Jay and rush off to the other end of Europe? For once there was no editor littering the world with cables, no deadline to set up the parabolic antenna for a transmission on the other side of the globe, no telephone messages waiting everywhere he arrived: ‘Will Mr Freeman please call …’

  So why the hustle for a story that was eight centuries old? There was no logical answer, just a gut feeling that could not be put into words.

  And why hadn’t he put more energy into persuading Jay to come along? It would have made the trip a whole lot more fun. The answer to that was easy: he’d been wary of appearing too pushy after the first evening when she had shown a hint of the toughness that had made her a top performer. But maybe he should have been more assertive, not less than usual? The problem was, he reflected, that he did not want to risk making a wrong move with Jay.

  There was an hour to kill before the appointment with Baron Kempfer. To get some fresh air, Merlin decided to climb up to the castle ruins and take in what Baedecker recommended as a magnificent view worthy of one asterisk. At the top he sat on a section of wall reduced by the Swedes nearly to ground level and studied the town with the wide, slow-moving Danube River beyond. Swollen with winter rains, it was brownish grey rather than blue. A burst of spring sunshine lit up a string of barges ploughing their way upriver.

  To the east, the Danube wound down the valley towards Vienna which showed as a smudge of pollution on the horizon – and westwards to Linz, which would have been the capital of the world if everything had worked out according to Hitler’s plans and those of the SS Division Das Reich. By habit, Merlin undid his camera case and took several shots on different lenses, despite the haze. He strolled around what remained of the castle walls, wondering what Jay would make of them. Had these stones really echoed to Blondel’s voice singing the two-part song of which only King Richard knew the descant? It was more likely, Merlin thought, that such a romantic story had been cooked up by the Lionheart’s PR man, as a clever way of diverting attention from the fact that the king’s release was going to be an expensive pleasure for his subjects on both sides of the Channel. The ransom of a million silver marks was worth in modern terms several million dollars.

  Ruins were not Merlin’s scene; he knew almost nothing of medieval history and wished Jay were with him to make the place come alive, as she had at Châlus. He recalled her sitting on a pile of stones below the ruined keep and singing a song, which she said had been written by Richard during his captivity at Dürnstein. ‘Ja nus hons pris ne dira sa raison / adroitement, se dolantement non …’

  She had translated the words for Merlin: ‘What prisoner can ever argue his own case? He can however write a poem to comfort himself.’

  Strange words for a song, thought Merlin. Whoever wrote the song, whether Richard or the PR guy, certainly knew what it was like to be locked up in prison.

  The gloomy train of thought led to memories of the months he had been locked in the dark cellar during the siege of Beirut. Some days he had not even been given food or water but cowered foetus-like round the clock on a filthy, bug-ridden blanket, twitching and whimpering with each near impact as artillery pounded the buildings above. He had done everything the psychologists recommended a hostage should do, endeavouring to make contact with his hooded and masked captors by begging and arguing with them. He had told them about himself, his wife, his family … and ended up by talking to the walls and the rats and bugs, which were friendlier.

  And since his escape he had thought a million times about it. The random shell breaching a prison and sparing the prisoner – that was permissible chance, okay. But there was no way of explaining away the veiled woman who had led him to safety. He had seen her several times since that day. The first time had been a week or so after his release. It was at midnight, in the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel. Merlin had sat on one of the high stools, getting drunk, surrounded by the flushed faces of the press gang, who were noisily trying to drown the war outside in alcohol. Absent friends, some of whom had vanished with a bang above ground and some with a whimper in rat-infested cellars, were traditionally remembered over drinks late at night when their favourite jokes were retold as a requiem. Their memory was saluted by drunken, ribald laughs and hash-high giggles instead of a bugle playing the Last Post.

  Merlin listened to the jokes but they didn’t connect; no cathartic mirth came to release him. He had become an outsider, unable to drink and smoke his way into the old feeling of belonging to the noisy, boozy, risk-taking, live-for-the-moment fraternity in the bar. So he downed drink after useless drink and sat surrounded by an invisible curtain, cut off from the strangers with whom he had worked for years.

  It did not surprise him to see the veiled woman standing at the end of the bar. That night she seemed more real than his flesh and blood companions.

  A woman reporter from Italian television – universally loathed for stealing other people’s stories – was congratulating Merlin on his escape. As she kissed him on the lips, Merlin saw the other woman watching. Next day the news came in that the Italian camera team had driven over a mine on the road to Tyre. All were dead. Two days later, despatching some film at the airport, he bumped into a French newspaper photographer he had known for years. Again the veiled woman was watching. Less than a month after the Frenchman had been buried, Merlin saw her again just after talking on the telephone to his mother on the day before she died in a car crash.

  After the funeral, he resigned. The reaction from the New York office had been a raise in salary. After a three-month break, Merlin went back to work – not for the money but because it was the job he knew best. And as the months passed, he became used to grieving twice: once when he saw the veiled woman and again when Death rolled the dice. Merlin knew that his own number would not come up. On the contrary, he developed an uncanny ability to stay one step away from danger which, among the cynics of his profession, earned him the nickname of Merlin the Magician. In his own mind he thought of himself not as a magician, but rath
er as a modern counterpart of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, condemned to sail the seas of life with a burden of unassuageable guilt.

  He stood on the razed mound of the castle overlooking the misty Danube valley, breathing in deep lungfuls of the cold spring air. Through a gap in the ruined walls he caught a glimpse of a woman with blonde hair. Her voice reminded him of Jay. He accelerated his pace and turned the corner fast, almost colliding with a couple of pale- skinned blond-haired Swedish tourists. They were carrying folding chairs and a picnic box, looking for somewhere out of the wind to eat their lunch. Merlin nodded politely to them and sauntered on, killing time.

  Chapter 2

  Baron Kempfer’s villa stood on a knoll overlooking the Danube. The driveway led through a well kept garden of lawns and flower beds just emerging from their winter wraps. There were two gardeners raking the grass and sprinkling moss-killer as Merlin drove in. A maid kept him waiting in a room with picture windows on two walls which gave views both onto the river and the town. The furnishings were comfortable and tasteful, not ostentatious. It was the house of a successful provincial industrialist; in Krems, the nearest big town, the factory of Kempfer Chimie AG was a major employer.

  To make the appointment Merlin had used an old journalist’s trick: ‘I have a lot more evidence but I don’t want to talk on the telephone.’ Since then the baron had had time to regain confidence. He limped into the room, an old and rather bent man, leaning heavily on a thick stick, who sat without shaking Merlin’s hand.