The Vault of Bones (3 page)

I whispered in her ear and held tightly to her hand, but still her eyes searched calmly amongst the cobwebs. Somewhere nearby, a bell rang the quarter-hour. A serving-girl looked in at the door and, seeing our stricken faces, hastily withdrew. As the latch snicked, Anna's left leg gave a twitch and then a kick. Her fingers began to flutter and pluck at the sheet, and then her spine arched and a terrible gasp burst from her. Her eyes were still and wide, and were looking straight into mine. Then both legs began to thrash madly, and I threw myself across them. Pavlos choked out a prayer and took her shoulders, pressing them into the mattress. Gilles knelt beside me and took Anna's right hand, and the Captain grasped her left. She gave another gasp and thrashed again. There was a terrible strength in her legs, but it was not willed, was not Anna's. I called out to her and fumbled my hand under the Captain's, reaching for her fingers. They twitched and shuddered, her nails scrabbling at my palm, and then they were still.

One of her eyes was open. It bulged through the bruised lids like a blood-streaked pearl, lustrous but not alive. Blood had burst from her ears and her nose, and a red froth clung to her mouth. But all the blood had left the skin of her face, and a livid red mark curved from her smashed right ear to the corner of her mouth, and under the skin the contours, all the lines and declivities that I had mapped out upon my own heart, were wrong. I beheld a ruined country, and there was no map for it.

I lay there for an infinity, one hand in Anna's, the other cupped around her chin, that grew cold even as I held it. I pressed my face into the muddy silk of her dress, her scent already fading, the clumsy vapours of death gathering. When at last I lifted my head, strong hands grasped me and helped me stand. The Captain stood there, and he drew me to him in an embrace that all but squeezed the air from my lungs.

Then he took my face in both his hands and kissed me hard on the forehead.

'She is dead’ he said, his hands still on my face. You must leave her, just for a little while, for she must be attended to’ I searched his eyes, but they were black and hard as coal. So I stepped away from him and turned to where the flat white glare of the London winter was lighting up the dingy room.

'An apoplexy’ I heard the doctor say wearily behind me. 'The brain swelled and burst its vault of bone. Thus the eye was forced .. ‘

Words I had not spoken in long years, words from a life that might have belonged to another man, welled up in me:
Deus, in adiutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina. Gloria Patri, et Filioy et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen. Alleluia.
The prayer at Vespers: 'O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me’ But I had abandoned such help. 'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end’ The world had destroyed my love, turned her fiery beauty into a mask of ruin. That terrible, blind and staring eye would never close again, world without end. Without end. Amen.

Gilles and someone else helped me to an outer chamber and sat me down, brought me wine, took a wet towel and wiped Anna’s blood from me. They talked to me as men talk to animals, soothing, empty words, and I did not listen, but stared at the plaster of the walls while my thoughts thrashed like a rabbit flayed alive. Horst came in, and Zianni, and many others of the
Cormaran,
some angry, some weeping, some merely dumb.

'It must have been a destrier’ said Horst to Gilles. 'A war-horse. Patch said it took her with its forelegs - no untrained beast would do such a thing! Well, have
you
ever heard of it? I know: I have ridden those creatures into battle. An ill-tempered riding horse will kick out with its hind legs, yes, but ... Christ. Some knight's battle-shy mount, I'd guess. Those creatures should never be taken out in the common street. I'd like to find the fool..

There was a man’ I started to say, but I trailed off, for the fellow with the scar had not been looking at Anna, not been waiting for us at all, and in truth I had all but forgotten why we had even returned to the Blue Falcon, for now I felt night falling upon me. Except it was not dark, it was a silvery, cold oblivion, drowning me like quicksilver. When at last the Captain came for me I rose like a man in heavy iron mail and plodded after him, each footfall a labour.

Anna lay there on the bed we had warmed for each other just yesterday, dressed in white linen. Tall candles burned at each corner, the flames invisible in the sunlight. Her face was covered with a square of white muslin, and her brown hands were folded on her belly and held a golden cross. Pavlos the guardsman knelt at her feet, his face buried in the coverlet. He was weeping, and I saw he had torn his clothing. Like a man drugged with henbane I walked, infinitely slowly, through the empty light, until I could see the outline of the face beneath the cloth. With numb fingers I tugged it away.

One eye was still open. It jutted from its distended socket, an obscene thing, an abomination. The terrible bruise on her cheek and temple had turned a dark, turgid red. Tendrils of black hair pushed from beneath the white strip of cloth that bound her jaw and clamped her mouth into a disapproving line. Gently I placed my fingers upon her cold lips and tried to form something I recognised, some illusion of Anna, of her smile, but they sullenly reset themselves. I bent and kissed them anyway, eyes closed to block out the terrible white orb.

The Captain was pressing something into my hand. I looked down: it was a thick plait of black hair, tied with thread of gold, no bigger than my thumb. But it glistened with the oily sheen, the crow-shine, the dark light that always hung around Anna: her own stormy nimbus.

I tried to pull the cloth back over her face but one of my fingers brushed her eye, and at the touch of it I came undone. I tried to gather her rigid form into my arms but whether I did, and what I did after I cannot tell, for I do not remember. There is a memory of a terrible sound that perhaps tore itself from me, and a confusion, as comes with a dreadful, racking fever, and then nothing. I will relate what came to pass in the days that followed, but it will be a cold telling, for I was not really present. Everything had become a grey blur. Anna’s strange letter was put away with her things and I forgot that it had ever existed. I walked and talked, but my soul had followed Anna down through whatever appalling drift had engulfed her and I had no more life in me than does a revenant.

We buried her in the Church of Saint Faith Under Saint Paul's.
Cormaran
gold bought the services of a reluctant, hand-wringing priest, for only the communion of money could induce the Church to treat the mortal remains of an unwed, schismatic woman with any sort of deference. The only mourners were the
Cormaran’s
crew, but even so the little church, which stands in the shadow of the great, ugly cathedral, was full. The Greeks could not teach our poor priest how to bury Anna in her own faith, but every man kissed her farewell, and Pavlos stood and chanted in his tongue some spoken hymn, words I do not recall that rose and fell like the waves of the sea, or starlings wheeling and flocking at sunset. Anna lay in state before the altar dedicated to the service of a faith she despised, and was laid to sleep in a stone tomb in the heart of a land she felt nothing for, surrounded by the bones of reviled Franks. But she has a fine slab carved with Greek letters in the custom of her people, and there she will rest for all time.

Whatever business we had in London was concluded, I presume, and days later, or perhaps weeks afterward, the
Cormaran
slipped down the Thames, past the brown marshes, the desert of hissing reeds, the frost-painted meadows grazed by sheep, the towns where folk were living and dying; and out into the bleak oblivion, the cold comfort of the sea.

PART TWO

Rome

Chapter Two

Rome, April 1237

‘Do you not mean
"Where
am I?" or perhaps "Who are
you?"?
asked the man. I shook my head. Thoughts were whirling around my skull like flying ants around a summer lantern. I took another draught of water. One by one my thoughts began to take hold of one another. Faster and faster they spun until they were one thought, and at that instant my reason returned to me.

‘You are Isaac’ I told him. I am .. My mind throbbed. I thought of the city of Balecester, that was destroyed. No, not destroyed: that had been a dream. But I had been in those water meadows, once. I had washed up there, after a madman had killed my best friend - or so I had believed - and knocked me senseless into the river. Balecester was lost to me, sure enough, as certainly as if it had indeed been consumed by fire. I had stolen a holy relic and been accused of murdering a priest. Then I knew myself. I was Petroc of Auneford, monk of the Abbey of Buckfast in Devon, erstwhile scholar, fugitive, outcast. My home was a ship called the
Cormaran,
and for two years I had known no other.

‘I know who I am’ I said. And we ... but this is not London, is it?' My last memories were of that great, stinking town, of rummaging through a market with the Lady Anna Doukaina at my side.

The man put down the cup and clapped his hands, then raised them, palms up, towards the ceiling. 'God be praised!' he laughed. 'Praised indeed! I did not know if it was the fever that had broken, or your spirit. No, we are not in London. We are in Rome.'

'But that is ... oh.' I tried to sit up, and found my backbone as weak as a poppy-stalk. 'How long have I been ...'

'Ten days. There was a storm off Oran, and you fell from the mast. You landed on your head - a hard head, to be sure, as it did not break. But you fell into a deathly sleep. My dear friend, I feared we would be burying you in the blue water.'

'Ten days? From a knock on the head?'

Isaac shrugged. You developed a brain fever.' I shuddered. A brain fever had carried off both my parents when I was very young. 'That I could treat, and the lump on your pate. But there was something else working in you, I think. You really remember nothing?'

'No,' I said impatiently. Then I did recall the ghost of a memory, Is Anna nearby?'

Even in my addled state I saw that Isaac's smile had frozen on his face. He grimaced, and feigned an itch alongside his nose. I jerked upright, and my head swum horribly. But I seized him by the sleeve and feebly shook his arm. Isaac said nothing, but looked grave, the way doctors do when they must tell you that your running nose will kill you within the day. He gently eased his arm from my grasp and, going over to a table in the corner of the chamber, poured a dark liquid into a goblet. To this he added something from a small vial. When he held it to my mouth I found it was wine, with something bitter and sharp mixed in. But the wine was strong and gave me some warmth, so I drank down half of it. To my surprise, Isaac drained the goblet himself and sank down on to the pallet next to me with a sigh.

The wine was closing in on my reason like thick ivy around an old ruin, and I felt my eyes grow heavy, although I desperately willed them to stay open. Perhaps I had not heard Isaac properly. I opened my mouth to speak, but he placed his palm on my forehead, and his fingers pressed gently into my temples.

'Sleep a little, and then things may be a little more clear,' he murmured.

I tried to protest, but a deep, soft darkness was engulfing me. It was the friendliest oblivion, and I gave up struggling against it. But just as the last spark of light went out in my skull I glimpsed an image. It was Anna, a dark cloak about her shoulders, tears painting streaks of kohl down her cheeks. She turned from me. Turned away, and stepped through a great stone doorway into shadow. Darkness swallowed her, and then it swallowed me.

When I woke next, it was morning. At least, I supposed it was morning, for the light was coming in through the window at a sharp angle and lighting up the walls of my room. Without thinking I swung myself out of bed, only to find that I had no strength in my legs. I slumped on to the bedcovers, and then managed to haul myself upright. Leaning against the wall, I shuffled over to the window. The sunlight was strong, and blinded me for a moment. I blinked, and saw, stretching away below me, a field of tumbled stones and ruined walls. My heart gave a lurch as I remembered how I had seen Balecester destroyed. Had it really happened? Then I blinked and saw goats clambering over the stones, and the silver-green of olive trees. I rested my elbows on the cold stone of the windowsill. Tears started to prick my dry eyes, and then I heard a noise behind me. I turned and found that I had not been alone. Captain de Montalhac was seated in a narrow chair, his long legs thrust out before him. He had been sleeping, I supposed, for now he yawned and rubbed his hands through his greying hair.

'Good morrow, young Patch’ he said thickly. 'I suppose it is the morrow? I believe you had a better slumber than me.'

'I did not see ... How long have you been there, sir?'

'Since Isaac put you out with his finest sleeping draught. And that was a little after sunset yesterday’

'Isaac took a little of his own medicine’ I said absently.

'And well he might’ said the Captain, standing up and stretching. 'He had not left your side for nearly two days and nights. We thought we were losing you, boy. Your life was smouldering like wet peat, and Isaac tended you without pause.'

'When I awoke then, I could remember nothing’ I whispered. 'But now ... everything is pain.' You nearly died’ said the Captain.

Would that I had!' I cried. 'I understand nothing, and yet she is dead, which I seem to know, and I... I am alive? Dear God, how has it come to this?'

'Pain is to be expected. But Isaac told me that your pain might be beyond the reach of his skills. Indeed we both wondered whether your body was sick at all, for it seemed that, even though you were hurt from your fall, you grew far more sick than your injury merited. Isaac wondered if you had lost your will to live.'