The Lute Player (46 page)

I turned back to the bed. A change had come over Raife; he had shrunken into the pillows and lay with his eyes closed again, looking very small and pitiable.

‘Here is the water,’ I said, and put the cup to his mouth.

He turned his head a little aside. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘Listen, the King is a great man—and great men have faults in proportion. Little men shouldn’t judge. Do you understand me? You must be tolerant—and kind.’ He opened his eyes and stared at me and I was reminded of the look Father Simplon would turn upon a boy temporarily stupid-seeming though usually of good understanding. Boy, make an effort, understand this, you must, you must, you shall understand! The compelling, would-be eloquent stare bored into my eyes for a moment and then clouded over. I said hastily, ‘Yes, Raife. I understand. I will.’

But he was not satisfied. His cracked, darkened lips moved again but no sound came. Then he struggled feebly in an attempt to rise and I slipped my arm behind his shoulders and lifted him a little from the pillows, at the same time putting my head close to his.

‘I can’t get—any air,’ he whispered. Then there were some other words which I could not catch. I loosed my right hand from its resting place and reached for his; he took it and for a second it seemed as though he were trying by the clasp of his fingers to communicate, to pour something from his mind to mine before death severed all the threads and sealed away all his knowledge forever.

‘Yes,’ I said loudly. ‘I know. I understand. I’ll see to it. I promise.’

He gasped and shuddered. His hands fell away from mine and I knew that I held a dead man.

I laid him down gently, closed his eyes and folded his arms across his breast. Sober, I should have wept a little, prayed a little, indulged in some sombre thoughts. As it was, I fumbled my way through the dusky purple twilight towards my wineskin, thinking wryly that I had done more than fulfil my orders to hold his hands. I had held him in my arm and sped him with a lie. I knew, I understand nothing what he had tried, too late, to tell me.

XVII

Next morning while I was making arrangements for the funeral I heard the explanation of the sound of horses which I had heard overnight. Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, had been murdered as he rode along a street in Tyre and his widow, acting, she said, on his instructions, had come to put herself under Richard’s protection. Despite this fact, by afternoon the whole camp was humming with the rumour that the assassin who struck the blow had been hired by the King of England.

Men seemed to find that very easy to believe. ‘No more than the deserter deserved,’ they said. Or, ‘God help Burgundy, then, riding alongside him to Damascus.’ Nobody stopped to ask why, of all the deserters, Conrad should be singled out. Philip of France was safe in Paris, Leopold of Austria in Vienna; no far-reaching vengeance had overtaken them. Nobody remembered Conrad’s feud with the Old Man of the Mountain or the little threatening cake. Richard’s enemies gladly seized upon this further evidence of his bloody-mindedness and his friends almost as openly rejoiced that the taking of vengeance had begun and so successfully.

A few Burgundians hurried off towards Damascus in order to warn their duke. The English and Aquitainians veered like weathercocks and expressed bald-headed belief in Richard’s innocence and hurried off to prevent the carrying of the calumnious story. They overtook the Burgundians at Chorazin and there the last blows of the doomed campaign were dealt, in the deadliest, bloodiest battle of all, a battle never mentioned by the minstrels, fought to the death among men with the Cross on their shoulders. The vultures did well out of that rumour. They were still busy when Alberic of Saxham and I reached Chorazin.

Alberic of Saxham had landed at Acre at noon of the third day after Raife’s death. He had asked to be directed to the King of England’s tent and, following his instructions, had duly arrived there to find me, its sole occupant, sleeping through the noonday heat. He shook me roughly, demanding to know where he could find the King and I told him what anyone else could have told him, that the King was in Damascus.

‘And where be the Bishop of Salisbury?’

‘With the King,’ I said.

‘And which way do this Damascus be?’ he asked.

By that time I was fully awake and staring. I saw a squat, dishevelled little man, his hair and beard stiff and encrusted with salt, his face scorched and peeling with sunburn. He looked, he spoke, he stood and moved like a pedlar, a tinker or a smith but he was attended and accoutred like a nobleman and he bore credentials and a letter for Richard from no less a person than the Queen Mother. He showed me the letter. ‘Urgent,’ he said. ‘I promised to carry it faster than ever a letter had ever been carried before and so far as I can make out I have made the journey in ten days less than ever it was done before. So now if you’d be so good as to point out the general direction and tell me where I can hire some horses I’ll be gone.’

I made a sudden and, as it proved, momentous decision.

‘If you like,’ I said, ‘I will ride with you and show you the way. I’ve never been to Damascus but I’ve mapped it often enough to know. And I doubt very much if we shall find horses.’ Richard and the other lords had taken the pick of the mounts in camp, the Burgundian knights had taken sixty more and the following force had actually ridden out knowing themselves outnumbered but with every horse that could be mustered. ‘We might get mules,’ I said.

‘All’s one to me.’ He turned his shaggy head and looked contemptuously at his little train, two squires and four pages.

‘Let you and me go by ourselves, young man,’ he said. ‘They’re all bone-weary; there’s been times when, what with their being sick and being tired and always wanting regular food, I’ve been ashamed they should bear my coat of arms.’ That made me look a little curiously at the sign emblazoned on the pages’ bright orange backs; it showed a bulging pedlar’s pack bristling with knights’ lances, very original and peculiar.

‘I’ll go and hire the mules,’ I said, ‘while you take some refreshment. But—I shall need some money.’

‘I don’t need no refreshment, no more than I carry with me. Young man, I’m ready to move.’

A very precipitate little man, most suitable messenger between Plantagenet mother and son.

Within half an hour, mounted on mules, we were trotting along the road to Damascus.

I was very glad to get out of Acre. Ever since Raife’s death, with no bounden duty to hold me in the camp, I had been subject to temptation to go into town, to stroll past the white palace, to linger and stare at its doorways, its open, vine-shrouded verandahs. Now and again the temptation would assume a very reasonable face and I would think that I ought to visit the Lady Anna, who had always written to me kindly and faithfully. Fortified by much wine, my determination had held for three days but they had been long days. And when Conrad’s widow had come riding in haste from Tyre in order to obey the Marquis’s last wish and to put herself under Richard’s protection, and every idle curious man in the camp had gone to stare at the palace in the hope of catching a glimpse of her, I had almost gone too; it would have been so easy to stand in the packed, anonymous crowd…

Now I was safe with the mule’s nimble hooves putting distance between me and the source of temptation. And presently something almost forgotten began to nag at my mind, a welcome distraction. We were on the road to Damascus; the road to Damascus. Why had that such a familiar and significant sound? I picked over the thought. It was the road to Emmaus where the risen Christ had walked with two of his disciples all through the day and their eyes were holden so that they did not recognise him. Emmaus, not Damascus. And yet the road to Damascus seemed to mean soomething more than a mere matter of direction.

Alberic of Saxham rode thoughtfully, too, and I was a little startled when he said abruptly:

‘I must he getting old; there’s things I disremember.’

‘I’m flogging my mind at this moment to remember something,’ I said. ‘With me I’m afraid drunkenness, not age, is to blame.’

‘No; you’re still young, ain’t you, despite all that white hair? That’s what’s bothering—By God’s footstool!’ he said, and slapped his thigh so that his mule, out of hard experience of threatening noises, leapt forward frantically. And I thought, Light has broken for him! Which thought immediately prodded my memory and I knew what had been nagging in me. It was on this road, the road to Damascus, that St. Paul had been blinded by a great light and known conversion. It might have been, I thought with a little chill and thrill of the blood, this identical spot.

When my mule caught up with Alberic’s I thought he looked at me very queerly but he said nothing. Outside Chorazin the darkness which here, even in summer, came suddenly fell on us and we halted as soon as we found water. The Lord of Saxham shared with me the bread and cheese he carried in his pouch, chiding me for lack of foresight in coming on a journey without provisions. ‘Never count on nothing that ain’t in your very hand; that’s my motto,’ he said.

‘If you substituted “pack” for “hand” and put it into Latin,’ I said, ‘it would go well with your coat of arms.’ I spoke jestingly but he took it seriously.

‘So it would. That’d look well and do credit to an unlettered man like me. I’ll get it set out.’

‘I’ll set it out now,’ I said, and amused myself for the last moment or two before sleep came by shaping and reshaping the motto. When I had reduced it to “Count only certainties” I was content and slept.

Next morning in Chorazin we managed to buy flat meal cakes and fresh fruit and I said, ‘Certainties are good but sometimes the unexpected has more flavour.’

He laughed, only half in agreement. ‘Unexpected. That’s me with Saxham Manor and carrying messages for royalty. And along of you, of all people.’ He gave me another queer look.

So, talking of this and that, we jogged along and presently saw in the distance a haze of sun-gilded dust. The leaders of the dead crusade were returning to Acre.

They made a splendid sight in the clear hot sunshine for they had put on all their finery for their visit to Saladin and as they bore down upon us they looked like a glittering, many-coloured wave coming up to engulf us. And we, to them, looked like two shabby travellers, mule-mounted, blocking the way. True, Alberic of Saxham had clothes which, closely inspected, hinted at rank but they were soiled and dusty and creased from being slept in and I was exactly as I had risen from half-drunken stupor the previous noonday, save that I had wound a length of cloth about my head to shield it from the sun.

One or two of the young attendant knights rode straight at us, shouting and indicating by gestures that we should make way for our betters. But Alberic pulled his mule broadside across the narrow way and raised his arm, and then his by no means negligible voice, and announced that he had a letter for His Majesty of England. The first riders of the cavalcade parted company and edged their horses past us and then there was Richard, surly and grim-faced, staring down as he reined in and asked, ‘Who called for me?’ And a man in full armour—I never saw his face or knew his name—pushed his horse forward, saying, ‘Beware, sire. Remember what I told you.’ But by that time Richard had recognised me. His face lightened.

‘Why, Blondel,’ he said, ‘did you also come to bring me warning?’

Before I could speak Alberic of Saxham said in his blunt way:

‘No, my liege, he came to show me the way. I bring you a letter from your mother.’ Most oddly his voice reduced everything to bare essentials; Eleanor’s long lineage, great heritage, two kingdoms and all the rest were eclipsed by the fact that at one time she had, in the common way of female, conceived and borne a son. “Your mother” said all that. And he dug in his pouch and produced the letter which was, I saw with all a scribe’s horror, no little soiled by its close contact with the cheese.

Richard eased his horse round to the side of the track and with a movement of his finger waved on those whom his halting had checked. As Hubert Walter drew level, he called to him, ‘Walter, news from England.’ And my lord of Salisbury reined in and the man in armour pulled his horse into line on Richard’s other side.

Richard took off his pearl-encrusted gloves and carefully broke the seal of the letter, peeled off its outer covering with the greasy marks on it and read—dourly at first, frowning, biting his lip. Then suddenly he laughed as he had not laughed since that evening in Bethany.

‘Read that, Walter! My little brother is so anxious to take up my leavings that he even proposes to marry the French princess!’

Hubert Walter, for all his soldierly demeanour, was a scholar. His eyes ran over the letter quickly.

‘My lord,’ he said as he reached the end, ‘this is grave news, indeed.’ He lifted his eyes and looked at his master, his stunned look shot through with commiseration.

‘Grave news,’ Richard agreed. But nobody but a fool could help seeing that the news had already restored and re-invigorated him.

‘Most fortunately,’ said Walter, pursuing the obvious line of thought, ‘we are about to go home.’ He looked at Richard again and then quickly away. I saw the white shadow of fury creep about his lips. ‘I never coveted the papal throne till this moment,’ he said vehemently; ‘I’d like to excommunicate them both!’

Richard gave his great hearty barking laugh again.

‘That would hurt Philip! Not John—he excommunicated himself years ago. But never mind.’ The laughter left his face. He brooded, urged his horse foward and rode for a while in silence. ‘Listen, Walter,’ he said at last, ‘since the moment I landed and Baldwin died you have been my right hand, my right eye. On all matters save the most trivial we have been in accord. Do you now as I bid you without question or argument. Embark all the men and every bit of gear that can possibly be carried and bring them to Dover. Give my Queen and my sister again into Stephen de Turnham’s charge. Garrison Acre and on your way home call in on Guy of Cyprus. Talk to him, tell him everything, make him feel that though he may
seem
abandoned, a last outpost—you know, Walter, brace him, link him with Acre and the pilgrim road. And, Walter, Jonathan of Adana owes me forty crowns which I lent him at Jaffa. Collect that and then pay Algenais what I borrowed from him.’ He smiled, lifting his face and blinking the dust out of his eyes. ‘I can think of nothing else to bother you with, Walter, my good friend. If I could make you Pope, by Christ’s Cross I would, but I do here and now appoint you in Baldwin’s place. My lord of Canterbury, will you graciously perform the petty duties I am compelled to leave to your care?’