by Terry Jones
During this internal storm, Tom had become a crumpled heap on the ground, sobbing and crying and shaking – an inconsolable cornucopia of grief. The Frenchman watched him for some time, and then he reached out a hand and touched him gently.
‘There,’ he said. It was all he could say.
And then another image of Ann blew up over Tom’s mental horizon, and obliterated everything else. It was the image of Ann looking up into the face of Peter de Bury. For an instant Tom thought the image would also wipe away his grief and allow him to return to the world of the living, but instead the grief instantly multiplied like a virus and, taking hold of Tom’s body, shook him in such violent spasms that Jean the Frenchman could only put his arms around the youth and hold him – as if to keep his soul and body together.
*
Sometime later, the sun rose up above the surrounding hills, dispersing the clouds and mist, and found Tom and Jean the Frenchman breakfasting outside a small house that belonged to one of the women who had been fetching water.
‘I can’t just leave her,’ Tom was saying. ‘I have to find where he buried her.’
‘If he did . . .’ replied Jean the Frenchman.
‘Surely he would’ve buried her!’
‘There was a pile of unburied bodies round the back of the barn,’ pointed out the Frenchman.
‘Maybe that’s where she is!’ Tom was on his feet and would have been halfway to the door if Jean hadn’t pulled him back.
‘You can’t go back there!’ he said. ‘They’ll still be there – they’ve got no horses and they won’t leave until they’ve drunk all the wine and eaten all the food . . .’
‘But what if she’s lying on that pile of bodies and she’s still alive!’ exclaimed Tom. A whole chain of impossibilities were now chasing through his mind disguised as plausibilities.
‘A moment ago nothing I could say could persuade you that she wasn’t dead,’ Jean pointed out.
‘But . . . I have to make sure!’ Tom was trying to pull himself away from the Frenchman’s grasp.
‘Listen! If you go back there you’re a dead man!’ said Jean.
‘I don’t care!’ replied Tom, and he wrenched himself free and was making for his horse Bruce.
‘Well, I’m not staying around to save you,’ said Jean.
‘I’ll be ok!’ shouted Tom, and he wheeled Bucephalus around and headed back the way they’d just come.
All was quiet when Tom arrived back at Le Saut du Loup; the routiers must have been sleeping off their celebrations of the night before, thought Tom as he crept across to the back of the barn where he and Jean had seen the pile of bodies. He reached the far end and paused to draw a deep breath. Could he really go ahead with this? When he’d been speaking to Jean, he had hardly thought of the implications . . . but now that he was about to come face-to-face with real corpses of real people the whole thing felt very scary.
And what if Ann’s body were amongst them? That, he told himself is precisely why he had to go through with this. He felt the blood pounding in his ears, as he cautiously peered around the corner.
There they were.
Tom could feel his stomach rising and his feet suddenly became too heavy to lift off the ground.
‘Now come on,’ he told himself. ‘It’s just a pile of dead bodies . . .’
‘What!’ screamed another voice inside him. ‘Dead bodies! Get me out of here! And in a pile? You must be joking! You’ll never get me to walk over there!’
He shut his eyes for a moment and then forced his feet to move forwards . . . but after a few steps they came to a halt.
He opened his eyes and stared at the heap of corpses. It was strange how they didn’t look how he had imagined . . . the limbs stuck out at odd angles, with here a leg protruding sideways and there an arm crooked into an impossibly painful posture.
And they were all quite, quite still. Tom knew it was obvious that they should be still, but at the same time the stillness surprised him . . . astonished him . . . it was inconceivable that creatures that had recently possessed the ability to move about in freedom and think whatever they liked could have become so rigid.
And that was the moment when he saw her.
‘Ann . . .’ his lips formed the word but his voice had no power to make itself heard. He closed his eyes again and waited. Perhaps the image would have changed when he next opened them. But, when he did, there was no mistaking it: her blue tunic was just visible at the bottom of the heap, and he could see her leg in its brown hose, crooked at an unlikely angle to the body . . .
Tom had known all along that this was how it would be. He had seen it all in his mind’s eye. And he knew what would happen next: his head would swim, and his knees would buckle, and he would collapse to the ground. But that isn’t what happened at all.
Something else took hold of him . . . not despair or grief or even horror. Instead a cold, brutal anger welled up inside him. And, though it was cold and brutal, it didn’t feel wrong – it felt like a clean, pure emotion . . . almost like joy . . . an anger that raised him above his fellow men. It was an anger that gave him a purpose in life: he had to kill Peter de Bury. It was as simple as that.
Moments later Tom was on his horse racing back towards the routiers’ abandoned encampment in the Gorges de l’Alagnon.
The horse seemed to understand his urgency of purpose as the two of them charged back down the road they had travelled together for the first time only the day before. Bucephalus tossed his head neither to left nor right, as if he were focused solely on the journey ahead, and he seemed to need no prompting as he flew over the ground, kicking up a dust cloud behind them that, as far as Tom was concerned, blotted out the future.
It was not long before the country closed in around them and the walls of the gorge concentrated their minds on their ultimate goal. Somewhere, back there where the river broadened and the road became a narrow track, in a tangle of brambles, lay Tom’s sword.
Or so he hoped.
And if he had seemed too puny or too irresolute to wield that blade in the past, now, he was certain, the anger in his soul would give him the cruelty to use that blade as he would have to use it – to kill another living human being.
He shook the thought from his mind, and tried to concentrate on Peter de Bury’s dreadful crime. And the memory of Ann’s pathetic corpse lying at the bottom of that pile of discarded bodies blew all other thoughts from his mind like a hurricane hitting a dandelion puffball.
The next moment, it seemed, they had reached the widest stretch of river, where the flat stone had sheltered the routiers, and Bucephalus seemed to know that this was their destination. The horse turned into the water and started to wade across almost, it seemed, without any guidance from Tom.
And before they had reached the other bank, Tom had jumped off the horse’s back and was running and stumbling through the water to the spot where the vegetation reached down to the shore. And as Bucephalus dragged himself up onto the bank, Tom was tearing at the brambles with his bare hands, almost unaware of the thorns that ripped his flesh.
But the sword had either sunk deep into the briar patch or else someone had removed it, for he couldn’t see it, and the blood from his hands smeared across his face as he wiped his brow.
Where was it? He pulled again at a briar and thought for a moment he saw the glint of steel . . . but it was just some dew catching the sun as it fell from the thorns.
‘Where is it?’ he screamed aloud, in a fury of frustration. And the next minute he was kicking at the brambles and crazily stamping and cursing them until he had cleared a small hole and it was obvious that the sword was not there.
And then the world went mad indeed, for suddenly he heard himself being addressed by name and he turned and saw a figure in a blue jerkin with brown hose, standing on top of the flat stone, holding the sword. And the figure looked and sounded like Ann, and she was speaking words that seemed to make sense and yet didn’t.
‘Tom!’ the a
pparition was saying. ‘I thought you were dead!’
‘I thought you were dead!’ he replied to the apparition.
‘I came back to free you but you weren’t here. Then I found your sword in the bushes. You wouldn’t leave it behind, I thought. So the wolves must have got you!’
The next minute Tom’s head was swimming and his knees were buckling and he suddenly found himself on the ground, and Ann . . . the real live flesh-and-blood Ann . . . was kneeling over him stroking his hair and telling him it was all right.
‘But I saw your body in the pile!’ cried Tom.
‘What pile?’ asked Ann.
‘At Le Saut du Loup! You were under the villagers Peter de Bury’s men had killed!’
‘I never went to Le Saut du Loup,’ Ann replied.
‘But I saw you there! You were running about after the villagers!’ cried Tom.
‘No,’ replied Ann. ‘I went with Peter as far as Lempdes, and then . . .’
She suddenly fell silent.
Tom waited for what she was going to say, but she seemed to have drifted off into some private chapel of thought.
‘What happened in Lempdes?’
‘Oh . . . it had happened before then . . .’
‘What had?’
‘The moment I saw him threatening you with his knife . . .’
‘You saw?’
‘Yes. He pretended he was going to cut you free, but I had already seen what was going on . . .’
‘What happened?’
‘I knew then that Peter de Bury was dead.’
‘What?’
‘I knew that the Peter that I had first met in Oxford and had been thinking about and longing for all these years no longer existed. It was like an eclipse of the sun. Something that I was so sure about and had taken for granted, like the sunlight, suddenly was no longer there.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tom.
‘What happened to him?’ asked Ann. ‘Or did he never exist? Was the Peter de Bury I loved simply a construction in my own mind?’
Tom was at a loss to know.
‘At first I tried to make excuses for him, but then when we got to Lempdes . . .’ And here the words ceased to come. Ann collapsed onto the ground and great sobs escaped from her throat, like the gasps of a man drowning in sorrow. It was Tom’s turn to put his arms round his friend and try if he could to comfort her.
‘Was it Peter and Emily?’ he asked nervously. Ann could not reply. But she nodded, and suddenly – whatever it was that had gone on – Tom did not want to know.
‘Whatever happened,’ said Tom. ‘I love you, Ann.’
And he squeezed her hand, and Ann squeezed his back.
Chapter 35
Lombardy 1385
‘What happened then?’ asked Squire John. He and Sir Thomas were hiding in a convenient wood that stood beside the road from Milan to Lodi. They had decided to wait for daylight before they tried to re-enter the city to find the Lady Beatrice, natural daughter of the Lord of Milan. And as they sat there in the dawn of a May morning, with the unstoppable chatter of birds filling the branches and sky above them, Tom had found himself joining in the general hubbub by recounting the story of all those years ago, about Ann, Emily and himself.
‘What happened then?’ Tom repeated John’s question as if it were the only memory he had. He turned over onto his back and placed his hands behind his head, and gazed up through the young leaves at the sky that was now transforming itself into a blue vault above them. ‘Emily rescued her brother and would have married Peter de Bury too, but she never got the chance. I suppose you could say he met a fitting end.’
‘You killed him!’
‘No,’ replied Tom. ‘I didn’t kill him. All that anger went out of me the moment I saw Ann alive. I couldn’t have killed Peter de Bury once I knew she was unhurt.’
‘So what happened to him? I suppose he got killed by the king’s men?’ asked Squire John.
‘No, as a matter of fact, not. He was – ironically – murdered by bandits like himself. He got back to England with Emily all right, and she lodged in the king’s palace at Eltham. He was on his way there to meet her, riding across the Black Heath that lies to the south of London, when he was attacked at a place called the Foul Oak. It was notorious for robbers. It’s a mystery why he was riding alone and at night across such a place. You would have thought, as a bandit himself, he would have known better. Maybe he really was in love with Emily by then and thought it a risk worth taking. Who knows? Emily married some duke or other and I hear she bore him six children.’
‘But what happened to Ann . . . and you?’ asked Squire John. ‘You’d told her you loved her . . .’
Tom picked up a stick and threw it across the glade.
‘Ann . . . Ann . . .’ he murmured, and stopped as if his thoughts had come up against an impenetrable wall, higher than the city wall of Milan, stronger than the walls of Jericho. He glanced across at his squire and said: ‘And the Lady Beatrice? Have you told her you love her?’
‘Yes! Of course! I’ve told her a thousand times!’ cried John, delighted to be talking about her.
‘But she doesn’t know that you are risking your life – and mine – to find her! I must be crazy to even talk about going back in there!’ exclaimed Tom.
‘I promised I would never leave her behind, and I swore that if I ever escaped I’d return for her.’
‘But will she actually come with us?’ asked Tom, suddenly serious. ‘You know we might go to all this risk and she’ll just say she doesn’t want to leave her father!’
John shook his head.
‘She loves me,’ he said. ‘She promised to follow me wherever I went.’
And he held out his hand for Sir Thomas to see. In the palm lay a ring that sparked with the intensifying light. Tom took it and held it up: a blue ring against a blue sky.
‘All right!’ he said. ‘We’ll need to get hold of another couple of horses and some documents, and . . . sh! Listen!’
Beyond the now almost deafening chorus of birdsong something else could be heard some distance away. It was another kind of singing, not of birds but of humans.
Tom and Squire John broke the cover of the wood and looked down the road that led to the castle of Binasco and beyond that to Pavia. In the distance they could see a troop of pilgrims on horseback. There must have been a hundred of them, and as they drew nearer, Tom and John could see that the majority were carrying olive branches, which they were waving in time as they sang.
At their head rode a slight figure with a neat beard and a bob of dark hair cut short to just above his ears. He was dressed in a blue surcoat embroidered with gold and he wore his olive spray in his hat. He was surrounded by a dozen armed guards.
‘Gian Galeazzo!’ said Tom. ‘What on earth is he doing here?’
‘There was word in Bernabò’s court that his nephew was going on pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain at Varese,’ whispered John.
‘I didn’t know that!’ muttered Tom. ‘Not much of a spy, am I? Sitting in prison in Milan, you knew more about what’s happening in Pavia than I did! No wonder the Lady Donnina wanted to get more information out of me.’
‘Does he always travel with that many men?’ asked John.
‘Often three times as many,’ said Tom. ‘Let’s get out of here! I don’t want to have to start explaining what I’m doing.’
But it was too late. One of the guards had split away from the main group and was now riding hard towards them.
‘Damn!’ muttered Tom.
‘He’ll never catch us once we disappear in the wood,’ said John.
‘No, we’ll hold tight. He won’t know who we are anyway.’
‘Sir Thomas Englishman!’ shouted the guard as he drew nearer.
‘Well, another theory bites the dust!’ mumbled Tom.
‘My Lord Gian Galeazzo requests you join his company.’
To tell the truth Tom was more than a little put out – after all he was meant t
o be in disguise. He’d shaved all his hair off and he was still dressed as a minstrel, and yet the Lord of Pavia had recognised him at a distance of several hundred yards.
‘I don’t think I’m going to take up spying full time just yet,’ he muttered in English to John, as he bowed to the messenger and nudged his horse to follow the fellow back to the main party. Squire John ran along beside him.
‘Sir Thomas Englishman!’ exclaimed Gian Galeazzo. ‘You will join us on our pilgrimage to Varese?’
‘I am honoured to do so, your lordship,’ said Tom with as low a bow as he could manage on horseback.
‘Ride beside me, Sir Thomas. So . . . you were returning to Pavia? Then you must have accomplished your mission astonishingly quickly!’ Gian Galeazzo had dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘You have scarcely been in Milan two days. How did you learn of my uncle’s plans so easily?’
Tom felt as if his bluff had been called.
‘Alas! Your lordship,’ he replied, ‘I have not been successful. I was forced to escape from Milan in order to save the life of my squire, John.’
Gian Galeazzo nodded at Squire John. ‘You are lucky,’ he said. ‘It is not many who escape once they are in the grip of my uncle’s cruelty.’
‘But in the short time that I was there I did not hear of any plans by the Lord Bernabò against your lordship,’ whispered Tom.
Gian Galeazzo clucked his tongue.
‘Such news is worthless, my friend. It is like a blind man saying there is no difference between night and day. You know very well I cannot sleep for fear of my uncle! Even on this holy journey I dare not set foot in my own city – for do not forget that I am co-ruler of Milan with my uncle! I have been forced to agree to meet him outside the city wall. Do you understand how humiliating that is? He treats me with contempt and . . .’
Gian Galeazzo suddenly checked himself – aware that his voice had risen enough to be heard by others. He smiled at Tom.
