The Champion (23 page)
Samson lipped at the back of Alexander’s neck, leaving a kiss of grass-stained spittle. The young man pulled a face and wiped at the slobber.
‘Where is Hervi?’
Lowering his arm, Alexander turned to face Eudo le Boucher. The knight was not wearing his armour, just a tunic of tan-coloured linen, although his sword still hung at his hip. His beard was neatly trimmed, his hair combed, and despite the warravaged face, he looked almost respectable.
‘Away in the town buying a tanned hide,’ Alexander responded with forced civility.
‘Do you know how soon he will be back?’
‘No, I don’t.’
Le Boucher stroked his clipped beard and frowned. Alexander returned to grooming Samson, going over parts that were already burnished to a mirror brightness. He hoped that the knight would go away, but le Boucher displayed no inclination to do so.
‘I understand that Hervi has been named guardian of the girl’s welfare,’ le Boucher said in a tone so deliberately casual that Alexander immediately knew he was after something.
‘What of it?’ he answered coldly, and wondered how le Boucher had the gall to stand here and converse after what had happened yesterday.
‘Why, nothing. I came to let Hervi know that I waive the ransom claim. Let the girl have her father’s horse and armour for her dowry.’
Alexander said nothing because he did not trust himself to speak. He began teasing out Samson’s tail until it rippled like a black waterfall. Le Boucher’s way was to take, not to give. If he was forfeiting Arnaud’s ransom, it was not for reasons of decency or compassion.
‘Tell your brother why I came,’ le Boucher said, and turned on his heel, almost colliding with Monday.
She gasped and sidestepped. He sidestepped with her. ‘My condolences,’ he said. ‘Had I known the state of your father’s mind, I would have drawn my blow.’
Monday faced him, her chin up and her eyes dry. ‘You know what you may do with your condolences,’ she said.
Alexander ceased grooming the horse and looked round, his hand closing around the haft of the hoof-cleaning knife and his heart thumping against his ribs. Few men would have dared to address le Boucher thus. The knight’s fists tightened at his sides and his beard bristled. Monday trembled but held her ground. Alexander took a pace towards them, but before he could intervene, the tension broke as le Boucher shrugged, and once more stepped aside to go on his way.
‘Tell Hervi,’ he repeated over his shoulder. Saluting Monday with an ironic arch of his brow, he disappeared among the sprawl of tents.
‘Tell Hervi what?’ she said, breathing rapidly.
Alexander let the air escape his lungs on an explosive sigh of relief, and dropped the hoof knife from his clammy palm. ‘He came to waive his claim to your father’s horse and armour.’ He glanced at her sidelong. ‘Eudo le Boucher never, ever yields his gains.’
‘So I am supposed to thank him, my father’s murderer?’
Alexander shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not know what he wants, but I am certain his gesture does not stem from compassion.’ He wiped his hand down his tunic. ‘You are fortunate that he did not flatten you with his fist.’
‘Fortunate?’ She approached Samson and stroked his strong, satiny neck. ‘I have sewn my father in his shroud,’ she said bitterly, ‘as before that I sewed my mother. God forbid that if I ever bear a daughter, she should be as fortunate as I.’
A warm spring night lay over the land. On the horizon, the faintest tinge of green showed where the sun had set. The town settled to sleep, the only sounds the occasional wail of a fractious infant, the squall of fighting cats, or the weaving footsteps of a drunk.
Above the houses, its pale stone softly gleaming, the Benedictine nunnery of the Blessed Virgin Mary stood like an icon on a pedestal, drawing the eye to admire, and the hand to piously sign the breast. It had been dedicated more than a hundred years ago, and wore its established place with high pride.
Within the hallowed precincts of its cemetery the soft clink of an iron spade tip cutting soil was interspersed by the distant, ghostly plainchant of the nuns offering devotion in their chapel. The sound of their singing sent a chill down Alexander’s spine. In his mind he sang with them, knowing each word and nuance by heart.
He was surrounded by the graves of dead nuns. Come judgement day, there was going to be outrage when they arose from their dust and discovered a tourney knight in their midst. Given another occasion, he would have been amused at the thought, but now it filled him with unease. He was the instigator, the responsibility his, and here in the dark, with the chanting of the sisters filling the night, he felt its weight.
Hervi had taken the task of digging Arnaud’s grave, for he possessed the sheer muscular strength required. His breath was ragged in his throat now, and in the dim glow of the horn lantern they had brought to shed light on their endeavours, his brow shone with sweat. He paused for a moment, leaning on the handle of the spade, and the singing washed over them in poignant eerie waves.
‘How much longer?’ Alexander asked with a glance at the dark hole, and then at Monday where she sat on the grass beside her father’s shrouded corpse, her face composed and blank.
‘Another half candle notch,’ Hervi panted. ‘Here, take a turn.’ He handed the spade across, stepped out of the trench and went to sit with Monday, curving an avuncular arm across her shoulders. ‘Are you all right, lass?’
She nodded and gave him a wan half-smile.
‘Alex is right. It is better here than at a crossroads. Once the turf is stamped back over, no one will know but us. Listen, he even has a choir to sing for him, as you wished.’
Once more she nodded, without words, and reached out to stroke the cold bleached linen of the shroud.
Hervi frowned, and shifted position as if uncomfortable. ‘I promise I will do my very best for you,’ he said gruffly and squeezed her shoulder. ‘Treat you as if you were my own daughter.’
Monday bit her lip and looked away. With a heavy sigh, Hervi released her and went to take the spade from Alexander. The soil had literally flown from the young man’s exertions, and he was almost sobbing with the effort he was putting into each thrust and pull.
‘Steady, steady,’ Hervi rumbled. ‘You would not last two minutes on the tourney field if you paced yourself like that.’
Alexander stepped out of the hole and rubbed his hands down his tunic. ‘For Christ’s sake, Hervi, let’s just get finished and leave.’ He glanced around nervously.
‘It was your idea,’ Hervi said as he jammed the spade into the soil.
‘I know it was, and a good one, the best we could do for him, but these places turn me cold. If you had been whipped for some monk’s lust and thrown into a pitch-black cell with your wrists tied, you would feel the same.’
‘That was more than two years ago,’ Hervi grunted.
‘It seems like yesterday.’ Alexander pushed his wet hair off his forehead and stood watching his brother for a moment. He both envied and resented Hervi’s pragmatic outlook on life. Hervi had dreams, never nightmares, and those dreams were of nothing more ambitious than a good fire, an accommodating woman, and a flagon of the best wine. People might despair of his brother, but the despair was all theirs, never Hervi’s.
The chanting had ceased. A scented quietness settled over the night and the laying to rest of Arnaud de Cerizay. They had brought him into the town at compline, before the closing of the gates, the shroud wrapped in a dark blanket and borne across Hervi’s packhorse. Now they used that blanket as a sling to lower him into the grave they had dug.
Alexander produced his gold and amethyst cross and murmured prayers, first in Latin, then in French. ‘Do you want a moment alone with him?’ he asked Monday, and tried not to sound as if he was in haste to be away from the place.
Monday shook her head. ‘I have had my time to say farewell while you have been preparing his grave, and before that whilst I was sewing him in his shroud.’ She stooped to take a fistful of the moist earth from beside the hole, and scattered it over the swathed body. ‘Sleep in God’s peace, Papa,’ she said, her eyes dry and burning. Then she turned and walked a little distance away, so that she could have a moment alone with herself.
The night was completely black by the time Hervi and Alexander had finished replacing the turf and tamping it down. The horn lantern was beginning to sizzle and gutter. Hervi wrapped the spade in the blanket and tied it to the packhorse, and Alexander went ahead to check that the way was clear. They had to find a place to lie up until the town gates opened at dawn. Two nights since, Alexander had bribed a member of the watch to let him out, but on that occasion he had been a young man alone, obviously returning from an
assignation d’amour
. The guard would be unlikely to let three individuals and a packhorse go through unsearched.
There was an orchard running along the convent’s boundary wall – a sizeable sprawl of apple, pear and cherry trees interspersed with bee skeps, and it was towards this that Alexander moved on cat-light feet. Monday walked silently beside him. He could hear her quiet breathing, the gentle pressure of her footfalls. Behind them, Hervi led the packhorse, its hooves muffled in cloth overshoes.
All would have been well had it not been such a mild night at the end of spring, for it meant that they were not the only folk abroad. The nun’s orchard was a favourite trysting place for young couples. It was also somewhere that the town whores brought their clients for a little privacy. The abbess had recently complained, and two members of the watch had been dispatched to patrol the area.
Alexander stopped short and touched Monday’s arm, warning her to silence as they heard the approach of masculine voices in easy conversation and saw the horn watch-lantern swinging on its pole. Gesturing Monday to go back, Alexander extinguished their own lantern so that it would not give them away. A soldier’s instinct kept Hervi from speaking out to ask what was wrong. He turned the horse and started back the way he had come. But if Hervi had the sense not to make a sound, the pack animal was not so burdened, and snorted loudly.
Hervi cursed beneath his breath and belatedly cupped his hand over the beast’s nostrils. Alexander and Monday froze in mid-step.
The easy conversation ceased abruptly. ‘Who’s there?’ came the wary challenge, accompanied by the scrape of a drawn weapon. ‘Come forth, let yourself be seen!’
‘Not a chance,’ Alexander muttered through his teeth, and broke into a run, dragging Monday with him. Hervi vaulted on to the packhorse and rode after them, uncaring how much noise he made, the element of silence now a farce.
Down the hill from the convent they pelted and into the dark alleyways of the streets beyond. Although their eyes had adjusted to the night and gave them a certain amount of vision, they still splashed through noisome gutters and tripped and stumbled over lumps and ruts in the narrow thoroughfares. Alexander’s wits raced with the speed of his feet. The town gates would be closed until dawn, and the guards from whom they were fleeing would quickly raise the hue and cry. It was only a matter of time before they were caught, and he knew that if they flung him into a cell, he would go utterly mad.
Dogs barked, lights flared in dwellings; doors and shutters were opened. It was as if a stick had been poked vigorously into a nest of sleeping ants.
‘We can’t keep on running!’ Monday wasted breath to pant. ‘For God’s love, stop, before we make it ten times worse for ourselves!’
But Alexander refused to be beaten. He cut down a side alley that was so narrow there was barely room for the packhorse to pass.
‘You go on with Monday, get her away!’ Hervi cried. ‘There’s no need for us all to be captured!’
‘There is no need for anyone to be captured,’ Alexander replied between hard gasps for breath. ‘I know another hiding place.’
‘Where?’
‘Just a little further.’
Hervi shook his head and looked over his shoulder. There were voices in the distance, urgent and excited, and the bobbing of several lanterns. ‘Then be quick about finding it,’ he snapped.
They hurried on through the dark, evil-smelling alley which grew even narrower yet. Just when it seemed it would trap them in a dead end, it flared like a fashionable hanging sleeve, and brought them out into the town’s merchant quarter.
Alexander sprinted past the first three houses to the right of the alley and skidded to a halt at the fourth, a handsome whitewashed dwelling with its gable facing on to the street. Stooping, he picked up several small pebbles and threw them at the closed shutters of the gable window.
‘Have you lost your wits?’ Hervi whispered, his eyes almost starting from his head.
‘You had best hope I have not!’ Alexander retorted, and threw another stone. ‘Sara, Sara, open up!’
After a moment in which Hervi came closer to the verge of hysteria, and Alexander wondered if he had disastrously misjudged the character of his inamorata of two nights ago, the shutters opened and a young woman looked out, her long blonde hair hanging over the sill like a bell rope.
‘Sara, thank Christ; there’s no time to explain,’ Alexander called up. ‘We’re being chased, we need a place to hide. Let us in.’
The head disappeared and the shutters snapped together.
Hervi cursed beneath his breath. ‘This is the wealthy part of the town,’ he said. ‘They will hang us higher than the man in the moon. You truly are mad!’ His gaze darted round the as yet empty street, knowing that it was only moments away from being full of zealous pursuers.
There came the sound of a stout bar being raised, and then the grating of a key in the lock. The door swung open and the blonde young woman studied her visitors, a cresset lamp in one hand, her eyes bright with excitement. ‘Come in,’ she beckoned. ‘Hurry, yes, the horse as well.’
As soon as Hervi had led the pack animal over the threshold, Sara closed the door, locked and barred it. The key was one of several on an iron hoop in her hand. She wore a loose robe over her chemise in a style that returning crusaders had begun to make fashionable, the fabric a silky, delicate blue woven with a floral pattern in the same shade, and there were soft kidskin slippers on her feet. Alexander wondered for whom she was waiting this time – or perhaps she always slept like that.
