The Templar's Penance: (Knights Templar 15) (6 page)

About his neck was a small skin filled with water, and he took a swallow now as he made his way through the crowds, darting between pilgrims and wanting to curse as one stood on his foot, another bumped into him and a third pushed him aside on the way to a pie-seller. If these people had any respect, they would surely make way for him. He was rich, damn them all!

Not so rich now, of course.

It was so unfair that he should have been made to pay. In his eyes, the killing – he refused to call it murder – was completely justified. Hellin van Coye had deserved death, and Parceval had dealt it out. The whole town had supported his action, and although he had been forced to pay compensation to the widow – who was grateful to him for making her a widow and ending her living hell – and must complete this penitential pilgrimage to Compostela, that didn’t change his basic belief that he was innocent of any crime. Even now the thought of Hellin’s crime made him feel faint. Hellin, the man who had killed Parceval’s soul. He could feel the sickness wash through him, as though it was washing through his soul, polluting him still. Please, God, he begged silently, forgive me when I have completed this pilgrimage. Don’t forsake me when I need Your help so badly!

He felt the bitterness bubble up again, and tried to force it down. There was no point in anger now. He had done what he needed to do, and that was that. He was here to show his remorse – ha! Remorse for the death of that devil’s spawn? With a cynical shake of his head, he told himself that when he returned to Ypres, that would be enough to earn him rewards from people who would assume him to be still more decent a man with whom to do business, because he had made this journey (a notably expensive trip, after all). And if some refused to deal with him because of his ‘crime’, others would come to him
because he was known to be someone who would stand up for his rights and his property, surely a notable citizen.

The tears were back. Him
notable
, after all his crimes?

He brushed the tears away and took a deep breath. There was no reason for him to feel guilt. Guilt was for the guilty. He was here to show that he was accepted as an innocent not only by the city’s ruling élite, but even by Saint James himself. He had not
meant
to do anything wrong. It was the fault of beer – and of Hellin van Coye.

Pleased with this conclusion, he squared his shoulders. Just then, gazing ahead, he caught a glimpse of
her
– the Doña Stefanía – and his heart began to beat a little faster. He could remember every curve of that delectable body from the time they had met. Beautiful. The memory hadn’t dimmed. Christ alive, no! If anything it was thoughts of her which kept him awake in the early hours.

‘Doña Stefanía,’ he murmured to himself. She wouldn’t have forgotten him; she couldn’t have. No, so why not renew their acquaintance? Forgetting entirely the attack in which he could so easily have been killed, Parceval began to forge his way through the crowds, but even as he thrust himself onwards, he realised that he would never be able to reach her before she got to the Cathedral’s doorway. There were simply too many people here in the square.

Cursing under his breath, he was bemoaning his bad luck when he saw the lady start to climb the stairs that led to the great doors. All there were slipping their hands into the niches about the main column, atop of which Saint James himself sat gazing down with a welcoming expression on his stone face. While Parceval watched, he saw a man arrive at Doña Stefanía’s side, a stolid, slightly hunched man, with a curious way of holding his head, as thought it was too massy on the left side to be supported.

‘Get away from her, you bloody bastard!’ he muttered.

On arriving at the great column, Simon and Baldwin knelt and reached in with their hands, in the ritual of holy greeting to the Saint, Baldwin gazing up at the Saint with a murmured prayer, soon after repeating the
paternoster
.

Simon was bemused to see his friend so overcome.

Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, as he well knew, had been a Templar, and Simon also knew that his friend was deeply embittered by the destruction of his Order. It wasn’t the kind of act that could ever be forgiven: Baldwin had been a driven man since the end of the Templars. Before that, Simon reckoned, Baldwin must have been focused on the ruin of the Moors who had evicted the Christians from their most holy city and forced them from the Crusader kingdoms in 1291 when they kicked the last of the garrison of Acre from the Holy Land. Baldwin was deeply religious, though he detested the Pope and eyed the Church askance, and Simon reckoned he must have been a ferocious enemy of the Moors.

Since that terrible year of 1307, Baldwin’s life had utterly changed. He had lost his friends, many of whom were murdered by the French King’s men and the Church’s own ‘Hounds of the Lord’, the Dominicans, who manned the inquisitions and tortured the poor warriors, most of them unlettered, who had been held for so long. Men who had devoted their lives to God and His Holy Land were persecuted by another of the Pope’s own Orders. It was no surprise that Baldwin had been so deeply disgusted, nor that he blamed the avaricious instincts of a corrupt and ignoble King and his lackey, the Pope at Avignon.

And yet Baldwin still trusted and believed in God. Simon wasn’t so sure whether, if he himself had undergone these same
trials, he would have been able to maintain the same faith as his friend. Baldwin seemed convinced that the Pope was responsible, and that had left him untrusting of politics and power, but he still had a strong belief in God and God’s determination to protect His own.

Simon sniffed. If it had been him, he might have renounced his religion entirely and joined the ranks of the Moslems in the face of such dishonour and treachery. Others had, from what he had heard. Poor devils, once they realised that their own faith was turning against them, they bolted and found comfort in the ranks of the Moors. At least there they were respected.

Baldwin had strode on into the nave and Simon withdrew his hand from the hole in the column, cast an apologetic look skywards to where the Saint’s figure now seemed to peer down with a more forbidding expression, and scurried after his friend.

Parceval didn’t recognise the man at Doña Stefanía’s side, but Gregory did, and as he saw the tatty-looking figure bend towards his ex-wife and murmur in her ear, he felt a worm of unease uncoil in his gut. Like the painful ache in his bad shoulder that invariably predicted a change in the weather, this feeling left him convinced that he would soon know more of the man he had seen leading the attack against the pilgrims.

He had thought the man was a mere outlaw, a felon set on stealing the few belongings of the pilgrims on their way to Compostela, and when the attack had failed and the survivors had been routed, he fully expected the leader to have bolted like the cowardly scum he must be, and he had; he had fled the field without standing by his men.

Gregory observed the two as closely as a man some hundred feet away could, and felt sure that the robber glanced about him as though checking that they were unobserved, and then, he thought, they passed their hands together as though touching – a clandestine signal of affection, he assumed at first, but then he looked at the man’s hunched back and twisted neck, and his air of utter misery, and revised his opinion.

As he watched, he saw the foul-looking scoundrel stow something away in his purse. What could it be? A token of her affection?

The idea made him wince. His wife was of noble birth, and was painfully aware of the barriers between serfs and those who were freeborn. She would have looked down upon a squire, from her elevated position, let alone upon a miserable cur like this one. No, it couldn’t be a sign of her love. Perhaps he was her servant … but no. He was not steward to a nunnery, not from the look of him, not unless affairs in Castile had changed greatly since his last visit.

But it could, he reckoned, be a payment.

There was some irony there. It was just his luck that he should have been close to being attacked by one of his ex-wife’s own servants.

But that made no sense! Why should his wife pay a felonious son of a bastard Breton pirate and a Southwark whore money? It made no sense at all.

For Caterina, seeing her brother Domingo was a relief. He was a figure who had always loomed large in her life, up until her marriage, and spotting him in the square with his head held at that curious angle – the result of a fall from a pony when he was very young – made her heart lurch as though this in itself was a sign that her luck was about to change.

‘Domingo! Domingo!’ she called, but he paid her no heed.

That was odd. Domingo, always a man to have a finger thrust up to the knuckle in any pies available, was habitually cautious, always keeping a weather eye open for any officials. It was most strange to see him apparently deaf to her voice. Not like him at all.

Caterina pushed her way through the crowds until she was a great deal nearer, her forcefulness earning her curses and one hack on the ankle. At last she got close to him, just in time to see how he was ordered away by the Lady Prioress.

Caterina had heard much about her, of course. Doña Stefanía de Villamor was spoken of in hushed voices by Caterina’s family,
mainly because she had enjoyed a rather sordid history, being a married woman who gave up the world for a place in the convent. Not everyone liked her. They thought her to be a grasping woman, remote and unfriendly, with her eyes firmly fixed upon whatever pleasures she could win for herself on this earth, rather than the gains she would make in heaven.

That, so far as Caterina was concerned, was fine. She too had lost faith in heaven. All she wanted was a little peace here on earth.

‘Domingo!’ she called again, this time a little more peremptorily as he made to pass by her and go back out into the square.

His face was black with ingrained dirt, sunburn and a kind of grim misery that was so palpable, she felt his look strike her like a blow.

‘Go away, peasant!’ he snarled.

‘Domingo, it’s me – Caterina.’

‘It can’t be,’ he declared, scowling at her closely.

‘You look terrible,’ she said gently. ‘What is the matter?’

‘My son. He’s dead.’

‘Sancho?’ She listened aghast as he told her of the ambush on the pilgrims. ‘But why did you attack them in the first place?’

He wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘It was for a good reason,’ he said evasively. ‘But the bastards cut my poor Sancho down as if he was nothing more than a calf. Just struck him down like a calf.’

She opened her arms to him, and he went to her, his sister, the widow who begged in black in the great square at the foot of the Cathedral. The sister who was dead to him.

When the two men had finished their prayers at the shrine of Saint James, they made their way out through the Cathedral to the northern square.

Simon was mentally drained after visiting the Saint’s shrine and kissing the relics. The incense used had affected him like a strong wine, making him warm and comfortable, yet the rest of the experience had been unsettling. Although the words spoken by the priests were the same Latin ones he knew and expected,
the intonation and accents were strangely different, as though being pronounced by children or untutored priests who were pretending a greater understanding than they truly possessed. To think that they should be guardians of such a magnificent cathedral!

And it
was
truly magnificent. He absorbed as much as he could, walking about the place after they had given their thanks for their safe arrival, drinking in the pictures and symbols all about. At the south portico he saw the Virgin Mary and he stared at her with adoration, admiring the way that the artist had depicted her with her child in Bethlehem, the three kings nearby, offering their gifts, and finally the angel warning them to leave and not return to Herod because of his evil plan.

There were other pictures, too. Simon’s judicial soul rather enjoyed the scene painted near
The Temptation of Christ
. It showed
The Woman Caught in Adultery
. In her hand she held the head of her lover, which her husband had hacked from the body, ordering her to kiss it twice a day if she loved the man so much, even though it was putrid and rotten. Of course he found the punishment repugnant, but Simon privately wondered if there weren’t some women who could benefit from such a salutary lesson in justice. He’d seen some during his lifetime who were little better than whores. With that thought came the reflection that many men deserved the same treatment.

The tomb of Saint James was magnificent, and Simon was intoxicated with the gold and rich crimsons. The altar cloth itself must have been a good nine by twenty or more hands-breadths in size – huge! Surely the patron who gave that must have been rich beyond imagination. The whole place was massive but beautifully proportioned, bright with light and constantly humming with the noise of hundreds of people talking and murmuring prayers.

This was the busiest time of the year, Simon had heard, and as he stared out over the multitude in the square, he acknowledged that he himself had never before seen so many people gathered together in one place. It was two days before the great feast day
of Saint James, and it appeared to him as though the whole of Christendom had gathered here in order to honour the city’s patron saint.

Of course, many of these people were only here to provide services for pilgrims. There were money-changers, people offering lodgings, shoe-sellers, wine-sellers, men selling herbs and spices – and everywhere were the folk hawking cockleshells, real or made of lead or pewter, to celebrate arriving at Saint James’s Cathedral. Some fellows simply loitered around, Simon noticed, and he saw some of them spring up and stride over to a man leading a horse. There was a short discussion, and one lad took the horse away, over the paving slabs, up towards a beautiful well, next to which stood a large trough. Another man brought up a bucket of water and filled the trough for the horse, standing at its side as it drank its fill. This was clearly where riders left their mounts when they were in a hurry, Simon thought.