It was late afternoon. We rounded a bend in the road, which had bent itself round an outcrop of rock, and saw our way ahead, straight and clear to the end of a wide valley.
‘Look,’ said Iselda suddenly, reining in. I shielded my eyes. In the far distance there seemed to be a smudge on the road. I squinted and blinked.
‘Horsemen,’ said Iselda. ‘A troop of them.’
‘Your eyes are better than mine,’ I answered ruefully. ‘Who are they?’
‘I’m not an eagle, my friend,’ she told me. ‘But I think they are soldiers. I don’t want to meet them. Do you?’
‘No. Not here.’
‘Right.’ She wheeled her horse and led me back around the crag. Then she patted her horse and steered him off the road and down a steep bank. She seemed to be following a sheep track, and with some misgivings I urged my own horse after her. The bank led down to a little stream, and beyond that the ground sloped steeply up. Iselda was already climbing the stony hillside, bare save for patches of sage and rock roses.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ I called.
‘Yes. There is a shepherd’s hut up here, and then a track into the next valley. I found it last year.’ She spurred her horse on and up, and I followed, my mare’s hooves slipping on the pebbles. It was a long climb, but there was the hut at last, three rough stone walls and a stack of old furze for the roof. Iselda swung out of her saddle and threw the reins over a stone post that jutted out next to the empty doorway.
‘We should eat,’ she said. ‘It is a long ride to the next shelter, and there is rain coming.’
I followed her gaze, and sure enough, the high peaks behind us were wearing caps of heavy grey cloud. I unhooked my saddlebag and joined Iselda where she sat, leaning against a bundle of old kindling. What a strange creature, I was thinking to myself: so beautiful, and she has sung for great lords and ladies, and yet she is quite at home out here – as much as I am myself. We were lovers by then, but in the way that people who have weathered some awful calamity often are: thrown together by need and by the bad dreams they share.
‘Here,’ she said, and held out a heel of bread. At that moment the rain began to fall. A fat drop, an outrider of the squall that was about to swallow us, hit her on the forehead and ran down her nose. I reached out and brushed it off, and our eyes met. She smiled, for the first time that grim day, still holding out the bread. And I felt it inside me: inside my chest. Everything fell away: the grief, the appalling devastation, the dead we carried in our hands and in our heads.
‘Iselda, I love you,’ I said, taking her hand, feeling the bread crackle under our fingers. ‘I love you – do you mind?’
‘Oh God, Patch!’ she said, and I thought I had spoiled everything, but instead she wrapped her other arm around me and pulled us together, as the storm hissed towards us, filling the air with the smell of wet stone. We fell back into the shelter and fed each other pieces of crushed bread as the world dissolved into seething grey, and when the sun came out again I could still feel her smile inside my chest, cupped like a gentle hand around my heart.
‘Iselda,’ I said now, ‘if the pope himself ordered us to be married …’
‘To each other?’
‘Yes, to each other! Would you … ?’ I took her hand, and she looked at me, surprised, unsuspecting. ‘Would you marry me anyway? Because the pope wants to prove we are heretics, and heretics don’t wed. And the emperor wants us free, so we can lend him money. And fuck ’em, every one.’ Still holding her hand, and hoping as I’d never hoped before that the singular expression on Iselda’s face was not horror, I slid off my chair and went down on my knees at her feet. ‘But the thing is, my love, I want to. More than anything. If it had been the other way around, if the pope was going to cut off my head if I married you, I would still be asking: Iselda, will you be my wife?’
‘I’ve been waiting,’ she said, sinking down beside me. ‘You can look at me, Patch: it’s yes. I’m saying yes. I would have waited for ever, you impossible man. To hell with the pope, and to hell with the emperor. I’ll be your wife.’
Chapter Eight
A bird was trapped high in the arching void above the altar, fluttering panicked wings across the gold mosaic, the bearded saints with their pale, blandly offended faces. Dust drifted down in slow, shimmering cascades onto the mitre of the archbishop and the tonsured scalp of the deacon. It found its way up the nose of an altar boy, who was trying to stifle a sneeze. It speckled the Tyrian purple velvet of Iselda’s sleeve and she brushed it away distractedly with the back of her hand. And as she did, the gold ring on her third finger caught a spark of light from a candle. The slow, dry rain fell past rising columns of incense and through the words of ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’. A single shaft of the flat glare of Venice angled down and picked out the shoulder of Saint Clement.
I stole a sideways look at my wife. She was staring up and a little to the left, no expression on her face, her chin lifted ever so slightly. I followed her gaze but it led to nothing except the tracery of the rood screen. Behind us in the body of the basilica, people were shuffling their feet and clearing their throats apologetically. The archbishop was telling us about the wedding at Cana. I rubbed the sole of my shoe softly against the smooth marble of the floor, and a shard of stone embedded in the leather scraped, scraped. Time seeped past us. But we were married.
I had slipped the ring onto Iselda’s hand less than an hour earlier, on the steps of Saint Mark’s Basilica, before a crowd of cheering people we barely knew. Pigeons, annoyed by the fuss, wheeled through the gilded spikes of the cathedral. We had thought to get married, Iselda de Rozers and I, somewhere quiet and private, with only a priest – for even the godless require a priest to wed, such is the jesting nature of the world – but peace and quiet was not, from the beginning, to be our fate. And fate sent us, not a priest, but an archbishop and a personal message from Pope Innocent himself, delivered by a genuine Roman cardinal. But after all, we were two of the wealthiest folk in Venice and perhaps in all the lands that paid tithes to Rome, and privacy is hard to come by for people such as we had become. Waiting for us at home were gifts from a king, several princes, a whole conclave of cardinals and merchants too numerous to count. The Doge himself was waiting for us inside the basilica. As we stood there in our finery, enclosed in a fog of scent from the flowers that surrounded us, our only consolation was that we had spent our lives gnawing at the foundations of the very authority which was, at that moment, pronouncing us man and wife.
‘Well, I don’t feel any different,’ said Iselda much later that day, when we were finally alone in our chamber. ‘Do you?’
‘Ach, it’s worse than I thought it would be,’ I laughed, picking at the gilding on a goblet, the gift of a Bavarian prelate. The gold was thick and genuine, more genuine than the apostle’s head that Iselda’s father had sold him. ‘Not our being married,’ I added quickly, ‘but’ – I threw the goblet onto the bed and picked up a candlestick – ‘the rest of it.’
‘Michel would …’ Iselda paused. She was struggling with the lacing of her sleeves, picking at a stubborn knot with her nails. ‘What would my father have made of it all?’ she said, thoughtfully.
‘Michel de Montalhac would have loathed it silently; Jean de Sol would have played the part to the very hilts and beyond,’ I said. ‘What, by the by, do you think the archbishop would have said if we’d told him we were brother and sister?’
‘You vile thing!’ laughed my wife.
‘Well, it’s true,’ I insisted. ‘I am your brother – ask a lawyer! But … wait, come here.’ I pulled her to me and started to pick apart another troublesome knot while she perched on my knee. ‘He would be delighted. He made me promise something, at the end. I have wondered what exactly it was that I promised for a long time, but, my love, I think I’ve fulfilled it at last.’ I kissed her. Then I raised her left hand and kissed the new gold of her wedding band. She took a gentle handful of my hair and rested her forehead agai
nst mine.
‘After such a traditional day,’ she sighed, ‘isn’t there one more tradition we need to …’
‘To observe? I believe there is, at that.’
Alas, a few laces were torn from sleeves, necks and hose, but suddenly we were in a hurry to discover if things felt different now that we were man and wife. ‘We should get married more often,’ I murmured, drawing the gown from her shoulders. The prelate’s goblet was digging into my bum and I shoved it onto the floor.
‘Is that rabble downstairs expecting to see a sheet with blood on it?’ wondered Iselda, throwing a damp leg across my thighs. The Ca’ Kanzir was still full, by the sound of it, with wedding guests draining our wine butts dry. The ancient place had not had so many people inside it since the First Crusade. But few if any of the well-heeled folk peering into our dusty corners were friends. Dimitri, last of the captain’s old crew was there, no doubt terrifying the other guests. But the throng, whose babble was ringing in the stairwell outside our door like a cage full of geese, meant as much to us as had the endless marriage service we had lately endured. Business associates mainly – traders and merchants, bankers, more than a few higher functionaries from the Doge’s Palace, a papal envoy and the French ambassador, who had brought gifts and a personal message of congratulations from the King of France himself.
‘Here. This is my gift to you,’ I said, remembering something. I padded over to the chest in the corner of the room and brought back a little twist of soft red leather. ‘I wanted to give it to you earlier.’
She took it from me and shook the leather until it unravelled and dropped a slender golden shape onto the bed.
‘Oh! It’s beautiful,’ she murmured, picking it up and letting it hang between us.
I had found it among her father’s things when we had first come back to the Ca’ Kanzir. It was a little stag wrought of pure, pale gold. The creature had antlers that spread along its back like the branches of an oak tree, and it reared up, one front leg tucked beneath it, its body twisting and flowing like water or flame. It had come from a tomb in the land of the Kumans, beyond the Black Sea, or so I guessed, for I had seen other things like it, from some journey the captain had made long before I had known him. I had hung it on a silken cord, and now I took it and slipped it over her head. The stag seemed to lie back against her skin, at rest.
Taking her in my arms again, I turned my face into the crook of Iselda’s neck and inhaled the heat rising from her skin. ‘And I’m glad we did it,’ I breathed. Indeed, what was there to regret? Iselda was mine, I was hers, and now we did not have to pretend otherwise. I let myself sink into the soft bed, into gentle calm. Was this ours, now? Would our lives be spent cupped in this gentle safety?
‘Now we’re married,’ said Iselda, slowly undoing her long, heavy tresses, ‘does that mean … ?’ She slid a bare foot under my bum and wiggled her toes.
‘Mean what?’
‘That it isn’t a sin any more.’
I turned to her. She had shaken out the last cord of plaited hair, and dark wisps were clinging to her face and lips. I smoothed them away.
‘You know the way we don’t ever do it? The boring way?’
‘Me counting the cracks in the ceiling, you mean?’
‘Um hmm. Well, that’s the only way that isn’t a sin, even now. Even though we’re man and wife.’
‘No. Really?’
‘Really. I used to be a monk, don’t forget. I know all about it.’
‘Then you’d better show me.’
Downstairs, the party was livening up. The good wine would be all gone by now, and our guests would be guzzling the bad vintage from Treviso. Iselda wrapped a leg around my waist and pulled me down onto the bed.
‘Isn’t it nice,’ she said, before I quieted her mouth with my own, ‘that this is still a sin, even though we’ve gone respectable?’
Chapter Nine
Nothing changed. After all the soul-searching and all the unasked-for pageantry of our wedding, everything was the same between Iselda and I. We did not love each other more, so far as we could tell. We certainly did not love each other less. At first I was surprised. ‘Men are children’: I have heard that more than once in my life, usually from women I was trying to impress. But like a child I found that I had been expecting magic. Everyone knows the story of Tristram and Iseult, how they drink the love potion meant for King Mark, and how their magically engendered love ends up destroying them both. Apparently I had expected something of the same from the archbishop’s incantations, the choir, all that money …
But then again, perhaps something had changed. Down in Florence, Blasius was so capable that we found we could leave him to his own devices. All the things I had seen in him – efficiency, forward-thinking and a sort of veiled bloody-mindedness – were having an excellent effect on business, so much so that I diverted some of the less important Venetian clients to Florence. That left us with time to spend on matters that interested us, though they were not as lucrative as the bank: we had a small fleet of trading ships that went back and forth from the Levant and Alexandria, bringing cargoes of silk, pepper, ginger and cloves; and though we were not in the relics trade any more, if some puffed-up cardinal wanted something special, who was I to refuse? It was dabbling, really, but for the first time in years, Iselda and I were beginning to enjoy ourselves. The apocalypse that Michael Scotus had predicted seemed to be less threatening. Frederick von Hohenstaufen did not bother us, and neither did the Church. I knew what was happening in the world of polity, that there was a truce of sorts between pope and emperor, and I found it all too easy to see the dangers of the past year fading into memory. I had not forgotten Isaac. But I had learned, from my adopted father, that revenge can wait, if need be, for a long time.
And now that we were respectable, Venice wanted us. Invitations to parties and palaces came almost every day, and most we refused, not caring for the artificial world of fawning and being fawned upon. That seemed to make us more desirable, and so we ate with Dandolos, Zenos and Zorzis; and even Doge Tiepolo, who had nearly had me executed a long while ago, requested our presence at the great palace on the Molo.
But it couldn’t last, and in June a letter arrived from our agent in Lyon. It told me that King Louis was due to be there, passing through on his way to the coast, for he was finally ready to go on his great crusade, and as the Banco di Corvo Marino was loaning him perhaps the greater part of the money for it, he wanted to settle some matters before he left. Could I meet with the king in person? It seemed reasonable. After all, there was a perfectly good chance that he might not come back from the Holy Land, and I wanted to know who was going to settle the bills if he didn’t. Iselda sighed and said I must go, and then avoided me for the rest of that day.
‘You could come too,’ I said, after I had cornered her in the kitchens, examining some over-hung pheasants with the cook. To my astonishment, she dropped the smelly bird she had been prodding and shrugged her shoulders.
‘All right,’ she said. I almost fell over with surprise, and she laughed. ‘The look on your face!’ she went on, and led me downstairs to the storerooms.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she continued, leaning against a fragrant sack of ginger. ‘I hate this life, Patch. Let’s be done with it.’
‘With life?’ I reached out and held her gently at arm’s length, examining her face.
‘No, no. But with this bloody … this bloody bank. And figures, and watery-blooded clerks with dewdrops hanging off their noses, and ledgers …’ I pulled her to me again and held her as tightly as I dared, feeling the fineness of her bones within my own crude strength. She seemed as light as dandelion fluff, and yet in her arms, as always, I felt like a half-drowned sailor who, in the midst of storm and darkness, has miraculously laid hold of solid ground.
‘If we’re going to give it all up, why not start now? We’ll go to Lyon, just the two of us. And then …’ She smiled mysteriously. ‘We’ll go somewhere else. You can show me Englan
d – take me to that Devon you’re always talking about.’
‘I’m thunderstruck,’ I said.
‘So I see. Good! Now listen. I wish we could just take to the roads. I know this is supposed to be one of the centres of the world, but that just makes it stifling. I want to be out there!’ She pointed towards the window, which faced east. ‘And so do you. You are always muttering about the Cormaran, and all the things that happened to you in the mountains or in Constantinople.’
‘I’m too old!’ I protested, smiling as if I didn’t mean it, but the truth was that I did, a little. Iselda was right: I wished for nothing more than to be out on the roads with her, in summer, riding across the hills above Spoleto or through the water meadows of France. Or over the high moors of my home, to where the land flattened into a soft plain of brown and blue, up past Aune Steps and Ryder’s Hill, with only the sheep and the ravens for company. But what would Iselda make of Dartmoor? I had taken Letice Londeneyse there, and she had loathed it. And how could I tell this woman, whom I adored so deeply, that in order to truly please me she must love a great, empty, damp upland and make her life upon its slopes?
‘I think you’d like the Moor if you saw it,’ I said feebly. ‘And all that land! It would be income enough for us to live as well as ever we wished, for the rest of our lives. It’s true, though. We’ll become a pair of mushrooms if we stay here.’
‘Or moss,’ she said, one eyebrow raised, exploring the idea. ‘But be honest: Devon? From what you have told me – and you never really shut up about it, actually – it rains all the time there. At least we have summer here.’
The Fools’ Crusade Page 10
