Stronghold (5 page)

He smiled thinly. "Not enough."

At first Countess Madalyn thought she'd misheard. Only in fables and folklore had such a reward been offered.

"Not nearly enough," he added.

"You ask me to beggar myself?"

"I ask nothing of the kind. You can keep your earthly goods, if they mean so much to you."

"In God's name, what do you want?"

He pursed his lips, which, now that she was close to him, looked redder than blood. "No more, countess, and no less than an equal share in the power your victory will bring."

"Power? I seek only the return of my daughter."

"And the destruction of an English marcher lord."

"I only ask that because I know I'll have no choice."

"Countess Madalyn, you will have no choice come what may. If Earl Corotocus dies they'll send someone else, and you'll need to destroy him as well. And the one after that. And the one after that."

"What are you asking... that I start a full-scale war?"

"How many more of your villages must they burn? How many people must they hang? Full-scale war is already upon you."

"The uprising has been crushed with horrendous loss of life. If I were to start another now, it would mean an apocalypse for Wales and its people."

"Your people need only a leader - a proper leader. Someone fearless and respected. You could fill that role, countess. Just as Boudicca did twelve centuries ago. The difference is that, unlike Boudicca, you will have me - and I will ensure that the apocalypse falls on England."

"How?" she asked.

"Allow me to show you."

CHAPTER FIVE

Doctor Zacharius was born the younger son of a wealthy merchant in Bristol.

Initially, he did not promise much, though this only lasted a short time. Despite an indolent youth and an alarming lack of interest in the family shipwright business, he soon showed an aptitude for learning. In response to this, his father sent him to a monastery, so that he could train for the priesthood. But, in various ways, Zacharius blotted his copybook with the holy fathers, and, after much soul-searching, his father took him out of the Lord's care and paid for him to attend the medical school of St. Gridewilde's at Oxford University.

The beneficiary of a generous stipend, Zacharius here became a renowned frequenter of taverns and brothels, but at the same time embarked, at last, on a serious course of study. He was fortunate in that his personal tutor, a Franciscan friar, who had once been a devoted student of Canon Grosseteste, taught medicine without mysticism and introduced Zacharius to a Latin translation of the Kitab al-Tasrif, an Islamic treatise dedicated to the science of surgery, an in-depth analysis of which, though he didn't realise it at the time, would raise the young medical student far above the level of the common garden barber-surgeons, whose butcher-shop clumsiness had given the surgical arts so bad a name for so many decades. Zacharius was so inspired by this venerable tome that, on completion of his studies, he paid from his own pocket to have a personal copy made.

His first position after graduation was with the Premonstratensian abbey-hospital at Titchfield, in Hampshire, where, though he was regarded as an all-round skilled practitioner, he particularly excelled with the surgeon's knife. When a novice at the abbey - a nephew of the abbot no less - was brought in from the fields with a severely broken leg, Zacharius, taking his cue from the Kitab al-Tasrif, performed a delicate invasive operation, opening the damaged limb cleanly, repairing the shattered bone, then sewing the wound up and applying splints, and all while the casualty was insensible through a herbal-induced anaesthesia. Within a few months, the novice had completely recovered, with almost no ill effects.

The abbot was so impressed that he spread the word, until it reached the ear of his cousin, Earl Corotocus of Clun, who was in search of a medical expert of his own. When Earl Corotocus offered him a post, Zacharius at first resisted. His cell at Titchfield Abbey was different from those of the monks, who were given to asceticism - he had a carpet, a divan, a roaring fire, tapestries on his walls, shelves lined with books. Compared with this luxury, life in a military environment was not so attractive. But, of course, there were still certain things that Zacharius could not have at Titchfield, which Earl Corotocus could provide in abundance, primarily wine, women and song.

For these reasons alone, and no others, he finally joined the earl's household. Of course, not everybody approved.

"Why are you preparing your infirmary in the open air?" Father Benan wondered.

On Zacharius's instruction, servants had now helped Henri move barrels of water and sacks of grain from several outhouses in the central courtyard in order to make space for beds, though these outhouses were little more than straw-thatched shelters with neither walls nor doors to keep out drafts.

Zacharius glanced up from where he'd laid out a central table and was in the process of arraying his instruments. "My dear Benan, the rooms in this fortress are noisome and stuffy..."

"It's Father Benan," the priest interrupted.

Zacharius smiled to himself. "If any patients are admitted to my infirmary while we're here, Father Benan, the best thing they can have is fresh air."

"But it's only March. And it's cold."

"In which case we bed them with warm blankets and place braziers filled with hot coals alongside them."

Benan chewed his lip uncertainly. He was a youngish man, but plump, with a pink face and, despite his shaved cranial tonsure, long, white-blonde hair cut square across the fringe. Though he mistrusted scientists in general, and Zacharius in particular, he secretly shared the doctor's penchant for foppery and good living. Even now, in the midst of a war, he wore white silk gloves adorned with his rings of office, and a white silk tabard over his hooded black robe.

"You don't intend to open a hospital for local sick people?" he asked.

Zacharius laughed. He well knew Benan's 'High Church' views on this sort of thing - namely that it was important to alleviate suffering wherever possible, but that pestilence was God's punishment for sinfulness, and that to combat it could be seen as a form of heresy. On previous campaigns, in an effort to win the hearts and minds of a local populace, Earl Corotocus had thrown Zacharius's service open to local peasants and villagers, at his own expense - much to Father Benan's chagrin.

"My question was a genuine one," the priest said.

"So was my response," the doctor replied. "You think after what we've done in this land, anyone would come here? Even if their bowels were riddled with worms, their limbs rotted with leprosy?"

Benan chewed his lip. There was no riposte to so valid a point. He eyed Zacharius's surgical instruments. Apparently the doctor had commissioned their manufacture himself, again paying out of his own private funds. They included forceps, a scalpel, a bone-saw, a curette, a retractor, and a curved needle. To Benan's eye, they looked less like instruments of medicine and more like implements of torture. Of course, in his heart of hearts, he knew that Zacharius meant well, despite his lecherous proclivities, and that these menacing items had no more to do with the Devil and heresy than the swords and spears wielded by the earl and his soldiers, but these were confusing times to be a priest.

"I hope you have cause to treat no-one while we are posted in this castle," he finally said.

Zacharius shrugged. "So do I. But for different reasons than you, I think."

Benan was affronted. "My concern for the welfare of men's souls is more important than your concern for the welfare of their bodies."

"That is a higher philosophy, Father Benan, that many of your fellow clerics no longer share." Zacharius fixed him with a frank stare. "First of all, the Church itself educated me in these arts. The Franciscans at Oxford encouraged me all the way. At Titchfield it was the same. But even among those few who objected, it's amazing how quickly a man's principles can be put aside when he himself comes down with a sickness."

As always, Father Benan left Zacharius's company frustrated rather than irked, nervous rather than righteous. He returned to the castle chapel, which was located beneath the kitchen, and sandwiched between the barrack house and the Great Hall. As befitted a functional military outpost, it was little more than a subterranean chamber, built from bare, grey stone and austere in that typical Norman style. The altar table itself was a slab of granite. The pews were stiff, wooden things, embellished neither with carving nor cushion. There was no presbytery here, not even a sleeping compartment containing bedding. He'd seen no altar cloths, no silver candlesticks, no precious vessels of any sort; no doubt, if there had been some they were now in the grasp of the Bretons or the Welsh.

The contrast between this place and his sumptuous residence at the earl's great castle on the River Severn near Shrewsbury could not have been more marked. There, he had had a huge four-poster bed with blankets of feather down, servants at his beck and call, good food, good wine, silver plates to dine off if he wished. The chapel there was lined with white plaster and inlaid with frescoes telling tales from the Bible. There were statues on pedestals, holy inscriptions in the footways. The thuribles and chalices were of white gold; the altar was bathed daily in the reflection of a huge stained glass window, which depicted the Saviour ascending to a deep blue heaven, his noble brow crowned with roses.

What did Benan have for a window here?

A cruciform slit high in the east wall, through which sunlight might occasionally find its way, though only via a series of connecting shafts. Even during daytime it provided almost no illumination.

The dour environment matched the priest's mood. Yet again, he knelt at the altar and prayed for guidance, though he was increasingly worried that this was a vain hope. Earl Corotocus, though a valued member of the royal court and a steadfast defender of the faith, was a cruel and violent man. He kept a great house and ran orderly estates, he undertook the most dangerous missions in the name of his king, but there was nothing Christian in the way he conducted his campaigns - they lacked both chivalry and magnanimity; he was rarely generous to those he defeated. Not only that, he employed a man like Zacharius, whose sins were deemed tolerable because of his uses, and yet whose uses were also of questionable virtue. And, of course, Benan himself was no saint, no martyr. He hung his head in shame as he prayed. He never spoke out against the earl's excesses. He rarely questioned Zacharius any more for fear that the doctor's glib tongue would tie him in intellectual knots.

The earl's army was in a poor moral state right now, Benan reflected. They had crushed the Welsh easily, without losing a single man, without incurring so much as a minor flesh wound. That had seemed very unlikely given the initial circumstances of this uprising. A number of English-held castles had been besieged or, in the cases of Hawarden, Ruthin, Denbigh and Grogen, captured. The town of Caerphilly had been burnt to the ground. To have then entered the fray and triumphed so easily, it was tempting to say that God was on the side of Earl Corotocus. But deep down inside, Benan had a nagging fear - based as much on common sense as on clerical instinct - that the exact opposite was true. And that God would very soon prove this.

CHAPTER SIX

"Countess Madalyn, what do you know of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain?"

At first the countess was too distracted to respond. They had emerged onto a barren hillside. After the green fog of the cave, she was disoriented by the glaring daylight. There was also a stiff, raw breeze. It wasn't as bitingly cold as it had been earlier, but her body ached with fatigue and she hunched under her fleece.

"Thirteen Treasures?" she said. "Artefacts... artefacts from myth?"

"Not myth, my lady... history." Gwyddon strode on. "Wondrous weapons of war gathered by the founder of my order, Myrlyn, as protection for Britain after Rome's legions were withdrawn. Yet, one by one, in the darkness and chaos of those strife-torn ages, all of them were lost. All except one. This one."

He came to a halt. Countess Madalyn halted alongside him.

In front of them, a large circular vat made from something like beaten copper was sitting on a pile of burning logs. Two younger priests used poles to stir the concoction bubbling inside it. There was a noxious smell - it was sickening, reminiscent of burning dung. Foul, brackish smoke rose from the vat in a turgid column. When the countess came closer, she saw a brown, soup-like liquid, all manner of vile things swimming around inside it. At this proximity, its hot, rank fumes were almost overpowering.

"This effluent?" she said. "This filth...?"

"Not the filth," Gwyddon replied. "The thing that contains it."

"A cauldron?"

"Not just any cauldron. You've heard of Cymedai?"

She looked sharply round at him.

He smiled. "I see that you have."

"This is the Cauldron of Regeneration? But that is only a legend."

"Certain details concerning its origins are legend. Not all."

She appraised the cauldron again. There were no eldritch carvings around its rim, as she might have expected, no images or inscriptions on its tarnished sides. It looked ordinary, in fact less than that. It might have been something she'd find covered in cobwebs in a cellar or the cluttered corner of an apothecary's shop.

"It was never the property of two ogres living in a bottomless lake," Gwyddon said. "Its creators were never roasted alive in an iron building that was actually a giant oven. But there is some truth in the story. It was brought here from Ireland to keep it from the Irish king Matholwch, who sought it for his own. Once in Britain, it was given to the care of Bendigeidfran, who was slain resisting the Irish invaders. It was, as the bards tell us, broken in that fight, but it was later repaired and hidden again. For centuries its whereabouts remained a mystery, until Myrlyn located it. Since then, it has passed from one generation of our order to the next, always in safekeeping."