‘Wait out here, Petroc. The inn is closed tonight to all but us. If anyone seeks to enter, draw your sword and call out. We will not be long.'
I was left looking at the closed door and wondering why they had chosen me of all people as their bodyguard. Perhaps it was because I had become such a killer, I thought wryly. It was getting very dark now and the torch that burned at the mouth of the alley did nothing but throw weird shadows through the leaves of the vine. It was silent too, although we were in the midst of a swarming city. I curled my hand around the hilt of my sword, leaned casually against the door post and tried to feel brave. Now and again, footsteps would clip up or down the narrow street beyond the vine and I would see a figure pass by the entrance. Despite my mood, I began to wonder who the footsteps belonged to. A workman? A lady, or a nun? Now and then there were flurries of activity and the street would be full of passers-by. Then, for long minutes, no one at all.
It was during one of these lulls that I heard another set of footfalls approaching. They were hard and confident: a soldier for certain, I thought, but now they softened. A lawyer, perhaps? I had no idea, of course, whether a lawyer walked any differently from a costermonger, but I liked the idea and was amusing myself idly thus when the footsteps stopped. I looked up, surprised, and thought I saw a figure under the torch. As I watched, it stepped across the alley and seemed to press itself into the wall. I strained my eyes and thought I could see a shadow there. Perhaps there was someone watching me, perhaps there was no one. I carefully loosened my sword in its sheath. The more I stared the less I could see, and the more convinced I became that eyes were on me. Finally, when I could see nothing at all, I took a step into the alley.
Immediately there was a flickering in the shadows and someone took off up the street. The footsteps faded and I let go of the hilt of my sword. My hand came away damp with sweat. I wondered for the hundredth time what was happening behind me. Over my head the wooden ravens creaked on their iron perch.
It was some time after that when the door opened and Will stepped out. He wiped greasy lips and treated me to a spectacular belch. "You are wanted inside,' he informed me, and indeed the Captain leaned through the doorway and beckoned me inside. Will took my place in the alley. I left him picking his teeth and stepped gratefully into firelight and the smell of good roast meat. I was in a big, square room with ochre walls and a ceiling of painted rafters. There were two long tables, and at one of them sat the Captain. A plump, long-haired man was busy taking a suckling pig from a spit and he beamed at me and beckoned. In no time I had a trencher full of steaming pig-meat and a full beaker of wine and was seated opposite the Captain, who was cleaning his own plate with a hunk of bread.
'Someone was watching from the street,' I told him.
'Did you see them?'
'Not really, but I heard him.' And I told him of the lawyerish footsteps. He laughed, but looked serious.
They didn't sound like the footsteps of English mercenaries, then, I take it?'
'Not at all.' I paused and grinned. 'Genteel feet.'
'Hmm. Excuse me for a moment.' He went over and opened the door, leaned out and whispered something to Will. Then he returned.
You should be full of questions,' he said, cocking his head at me.
I was, full to brimming, and after being alone with my thoughts for so long the floodgates were opening.
'I've been talking to Will, but you have spent the most time with her of late: does Anna hate me?' I blurted.
The Captain looked genuinely surprised, then threw back his head and laughed long and hard. He took a gulp of wine that trickled into his beard and chuckled some more. Finally he lifted his chin and regarded me down the length of his eagle's nose.
'No,' he said.
'No? Are you sure?'
'No, she does not hate you. What other questions do you have?'
Why is she ignoring me, then?'
The Captain seemed to be having a hard time swallowing back more laughter.
'I can assure you that the Vassileia Anna does not hate you. She . . . she is very fond of you, Petroc. But she is having difficulties of her own.'
'Like what?'
'She is finding it hard to be herself again - to be a great lady on a ship of fools such as we are. And other things that I have surmised but would not tell you even if I knew them to be true. Now for God's sake, Petroc, ask me something else.'
I picked up my pig bone and gnawed, almost melting into the bench with relief. Then I remembered where I was.
'If you will allow me to guess, I would say we are here to meet the man you missed in Bordeaux.'
"You are right.'
And he is here in Pisa?'
'Right again.'
'And the others from Bordeaux, the Englishmen - they are here too. They followed us.'
'Not exactly. Someone has followed us, though, or rather they have followed our friend. But he is safe. Would you like to meet him? He will be able to answer more of your questions.' And he got up and pointed to a door I had not noticed at the other end of the room.
'Through here,' he said, beckoning with a crooked finger.
He looked almost devilish, with the firelight flickering on his dark face and picking out the sweep of his brows. 'He is waiting for you.'
I felt a sudden reluctance, but picked up my beaker and walked over to the door. The Captain knocked twice and opened it. Gilles must have been standing on the other side, for he slipped out with an unreadable look on his face and, with a gentle hand between my shoulder blades, pushed me inside. I found myself in a smaller room with a smaller fire and one square table, on which stood a wine jug. A tall, stooped figure sat with his back to me, hooded and swathed in a black travelling cloak despite the warmth. I took a step back but the door closed behind me with a soft click. The man at the table reached out and tapped the table opposite him. Starting to shiver a little myself, but not wishing to be rude, I made my way slowly to the high-backed chair and pulled it back.
'Sir, may I sit down?' I croaked. The man rose to his feet, cloak billowing, and threw back his hood. I staggered back and would have fallen into the fire had a long hand not shot out and grabbed my sleeve. We stood, the table between us, and then I had leaped around it and wrapped my arms around him.
'Adric!' I gasped.
'Dear boy!'
He was all bones, hardly more than a skeleton in a black cloak. But he returned my hug, hands fluttering like bats at my back.
'I never thought to see you again,' I said finally, when we were seated by the fire.
'I must confess that I was a little less sure of that,' said Adric.
I sat back and let out a great gasp, as if I had been holding some part of my breath all these months. Speechless and overcome with joy, I raised his fingers to my lips and kissed them. He harrumphed, embarrassed.
'The Captain seems to think you are full of questions,' he said at last. I held up my hands in resignation. Where to begin?' I said.
Well.' He filled our beakers. 'Do you know how we both come to be here?'
Yes, of course. Sir Hugh de Kervezey.' I spat into the flames.
You've learned a sailor's habits, I see. You are right — Kervezey it was who hurled us out into the world. But he, like the rest of us - you, me, the Captain included - are caught up in a game, or rather a maze. And at the centre of the maze is something small and simple, oddly enough.'
He had not changed, despite having wasted away almost to nothing. I waited, knowing from long experience that he expected my query but would answer his own riddle whether or not I spoke. In any case, what could he mean?
What was Kervezey after?' he prodded.
'The hand.'
'Ah. No. Well, not exactly. He was after the Captain. I will tell you why in a moment. And what did that have to do with you? Simply that he had discovered that you had been my -what is the right word? Helper? No, protege, as the French say.'
'And friend, I hope,' I said.
'Alwa
ys that. In any case he had an informant at the abbey from whom he learned of my occasional meetings with the Captain. Purely by accident, I suppose, I happen to be one of the only people in England who knows de Montalhac's true identity and business. No. Actually that is not quite true. I have known him for years, and we have met often. I do not need to be deceitful with you. I do so hate deception in any case, but it has been forced upon me. No, the truth is that I am an associate of Seigneur de Montalhac, as he says.'
'Adric! You work for the Captain? You have always worked for him?'
'In an academic capacity, dear Petroc. I am his bookworm, you might say. I research the esoteric questions he brings me, and hunt on paper what he hunts out here in the world. This, or something like it, Kervezey learned, although I don't think he realised the depth of our connection until much later. Meanwhile I was to be the unwitting snare, and you the bait, that he set for the Captain.'
'But what about the deacon?'
'Aha. He was going to kill the deacon anyway. You just provided a handy scapegoat. Serendipity, I suppose you might say.'
I slumped against the high back of the bench. My head was beginning to buzz with confusion. First my old friend had appeared as if from the dead, and now he felt the need to tell me my own story in a way that made no sense whatsoever.
'Serendipity, Adric? It's hard to think of serendipity involving so much blood.'
'No, no, you don't see it. Well, how could you? But it was so. The hand was a lucky accident for him, which he exploited. I think he was hoping that making you a fugitive would send you back to Devon and the abbey, and give him some advantage over me.'
"Wait, wait. He tried to kill me by the river. He did kill my best friend.' I could see Will spinning away, his head lost in a cloud of blood. 'He wanted me dead then.'
'No, that was an accident, I think. Or rather he meant to kill your friend but not you. He wanted you alone and frightened so he could drive you. He miscalculated you, boy, and he lost you for a while. I am afraid I took a dreadful risk sending you to Dartmouth - risked both your safety and the Captain's — but it was the only path I could see. But you did escape with the hand, and that was a wonderful development, the perfect bait for a relic merchant. Anyway, Kervezey couldn't approach me in person, as he'd already done so and I had seen through his scheme . . .'
'Stop, Adric, for God's sake!' I raised both hands. 'Kervezey had already been to Buckfast? Why, when'
Adric sighed. 'I am getting ahead of my tale. Let me start at the beginning. Have you heard of Saint Cordula?'
Now my head was spinning in earnest. I pressed my fingers to my temples and mouthed a 'no'.
'But Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins? Every schoolboy knows Ursula.' He waited for my baffled nod. 'Good. For a start, there were eleven virgins, not eleven thousand: Sencia, Saturia, Saturnina - tricky — Saula, Rabacia, Palladia, Pinnosa, Martha, Britula and Gregoria.'
'That's ten virgins, Adric.' I took a long gulp of wine.
'Exactly so. Cordula was hiding on her boat.' He beamed.
What bloody boat?' My teeth were beginning to grind together.
'The boat that brought Ursula and virgins to Cologne, where they were massacred by Attila. Pay attention, Patch. Cordula sensibly didn't want to be massacred, so she hid on the boat, only to be winkled out by her conscience the next morning, when the Huns sent her off to join Ursula and her friends. Thus making up the eleven. Or, if we assume that Ursula was herself a virgin, which we must, the twelve. She missed out on sainthood for a century or two, but she made it onto the heavenly roster in the end, which is the important part to us.'
'In what possible way could she be important to us?' 'Because she's turned up.'
'But surely most learned people don't believe any part of the Ursula story. I've always heard that the Holy See has been trying to get rid of her for years.'
'Most learned people, yes. And what a tiny number that is, I don't have to tell you. To the rest of humanity she's as real as this wine jug — pass it over, would you?'
What I meant was that, if Ursula is a myth, how can one of her companions' bodies exist?'
'How indeed? But it seems that Cordula, at least, was real.'
'Saint Cordula has turned up. And how about the other ten - excuse, me Adric, eleven virgins? That, I will admit, is a powerful lot of virgins, dead or not.'
'Oh, come on, Petroc. You used to like nosing around after old bones - remember? And remember what business the Captain - and you, nowadays - are in. I say again: the body of Saint Cordula has been found, or its whereabouts learned. A long-dead girl forgotten on an island - that is the centre of our maze.'
Adric paused again, and I grinned. He had me, as he always did in the end.
Well then, dear friend, please tell me about poor Cordula and her part in our downfall.'
He grinned in turn, and Elfsige of Frame's bony visage flashed in my mind. Waving for more wine, he settled down to tell his tale.
'In a land far away - England, dear boy - there was a bishop whose luck it was to land a rich, fat diocese in a city full of scholars. He had a palace, soldiers, servants and, best of all, a great cathedral, many years in the building and newly finished. What more could he want?
'But this was a greedy man. He saw that his fine cathedral, although it gloried God with every stone and crumb of mortar, was not bringing enough glory to him. Or money. For although it had many wonders, it lacked one important thing: a relic powerful enough to draw pilgrims. Its saint, a local martyr, had local affection but no draw outside the county. The Bishop looked towards Chartres and Canterbury and felt nothing but the grimmest envy.
'The Bishop had a right-hand man, a crusader knight returned from Outremer who was a little headstrong but willing and able to do whatever the Bishop needed doing, in return for money and, better, power over others. The Bishop enlisted this man in his quest for a great relic. This had to be small but important - an apostle's finger, a tooth of the Baptist - or less important but big: enough to fill a coffin, enough to parade through the streets.
'All familiar enough so far? Good. Now, the problem with relics is that entire saints are hard to come by - most of them are in little bits and pieces these days. There are holy corpses by the bushel in the East, but here in the Holy See, those schismatic Greek saints aren't worth more than the price of their winding cloths, and then only to the oakum man. The really big prizes went centuries ago - you'll know all about Saint Mark.
'But then all of a sudden, a scholar in Germany - a pupil of Albert of Cologne, in fact, Albertus Magnus, a charming fellow I had the good fortune to meet a few weeks ago . . . your pardon, Petroc. This scholar - who happened to be an Englishman studying abroad - while working on the life of Saint Ursula, discovered a clue buried far down in the archives of a monastery outside Cologne - that the body of Cordula had been carried away from the place of execution by a mercenary of the Huns, a Greek soldier who saw the martyrdom and saved the remains from the barbarians, who seem to have disposed very efficiently of most of the other eleven virgins - or perhaps the eleven thousand. This soldier made his way back to his home on an island in Greece, where he set up a church in Cordula's honour. As I'm sure you know, the Greeks have always done things very differently to us, and in their Schismatic way they made Cordula a Greek saint. I would imagine that, on a small island, the local folk forgot her origins very quickly and made her a daughter of the village. Her name was lost in a foreign tongue, and so she disappeared for perhaps a thousand years.'
'But she is not very important, is she, Adric? A very minor saint, surely?'
'Ah - there you have it - the small, simple thing at the centre of it all: a long-dead girl. You would seem to be right. But Ursula's cult is not minor in the least. It brings a great deal of gold to Cologne - virgins come from all over Christendom to seek her protection. She has her own order of nuns. And around a century ago someone conveniently turned up a great cache of bones - apparently those of the virgin army
- which Cologne has been busily selling off ever since. No, a complete virgin of Ursula would be a find indeed. There are always virgins in need of protection, dear boy . . .' And he shot me a look.
'So I've heard,' I answered carefully.
'Quite.' He coughed discreetly into his fist. And then this fellow found Cordula, or at least picked up her trail. Our world - the scholarly world - is very, very small, Petroc, and word gets around. It reached the Bishop of Cologne, and very soon your very own Bishop of Balecester was hatching schemes. With all those scholars at his beck and call, he started some research himself, and dug up some facts, so called, of his own. Most people know that Ursula came from Britain, and so did her virgins. But imagine his surprised delight - so very surprised he was, Petroc, and delighted - when his scholars uncovered the name of Cordula in the Balecester city records! Imagine . . . Pure serendipity. Ours is a tale of serendipity, is it not?
'Now the Bishop must have Cordula for himself. But he doesn't know exactly where she is. The Cologne trail goes cold in the Ionian Islands - a small enough area, but a lot of islands, and many, many churches and saints. For in Greece, so I've been told, a village may have a church to Saint John, but it won't necessarily honour the Baptist. More likely it is some local man, a holy Yanni who performed some small miracle or renounced the world and lived in an olive tree or some such. It doesn't take an army of virgins to impress a Greek peasant.
'There is one man in the world who can find a lost saint, and the Bishop needs him. The legendary dealer in holy relics, known to some as Jean de Sol, to many as the Frenchman, and to a very few as Captain de Montalhac. The problem is that this man is almost as mythical as the relics he procures - did I say mythical? I meant elusive. He appears when needed, and is invisible otherwise. The princes and church-lords who are his customers never question his integrity - they need his wares too badly. He has the gratitude of kings and popes and, it is whispered, the ear of the Stupor Mundi, wonder of the world, the Emperor Frederick. The Bishop is no fool. He knows that Cordula will be in demand, and that the Frenchman is most probably on her trail on someone else's - without a doubt, the Bishop of Cologne's - behalf. But Sir Hugh believes he can find him and by fair means or foul, lay hands on Cordula for Balecester cathedral.'
Relics Page 27
