Into The Fire (24 page)

Brother Tomas settles on a fallen trunk to watch. The morning’s mist rises from the river in great, flat plates. At this distance, she could be sailing on top of them, horse and mist are woven so tightly together.

As the sun dries out all it glances on, she becomes more distinct, a lean whip of a girl, riding a lean greyhound of a horse, both of them so intent on their work that Tomas thinks they have not seen him, and today’s implementation of his plan will fall apart because of it.

He waits. He is good at waiting.

The sun warms his back. Blackbirds thrill the steady air. Doves roll and burble. Dew blooms fat on the grass at his feet, hangs in great pregnant pearls from a thousand morning cobwebs. He watches her reflection in one, the sway of white and black, the rhythm of hoof-beats, falling to stillness, and looks up, and she is there, a lance-length away. She has no lance.

‘Brother Tomas.’ She blesses him with recognition. He does not have to counterfeit the flush of pleasure.

He says, ‘My lady … you ride well.’ This does not do justice to her skill. There should be another word for it. He considers perform, or display or fly. None of them fits.

She makes a small bow. The horse, he fancies, drops its head. It is that kind of morning. She frowns a little, as if coming back from some far dream. ‘Did you need me for something?’

‘No. I just … needed some quiet, and you were not disturbing it.’

‘So then we are alike.’ She smiles a little, awkwardly stiff.

He nods but does not rise, jerks his elbow back at the path. ‘I’ll follow you in.’

She hesitates, and he sees for the first time that not only does she behave like a knight, she thinks she
is
a knight. She cannot go ahead of him; a knight would not take the path ahead of a priest. She is nailed to the meadow as surely as Christ to the cross.

The old king taught you this. He believed in chivalry. It was the undoing of the French, because Henry really didn’t. Not at war, anyway.

The moment threatens to slip through his fingers. The words come out unthought, so fast that he must trust to their trajectory.

‘Please, my lady. I would have some time alone with God’s silence and my own. I beg of you, please, to go ahead.’

She cannot argue with that. Released from obligation, she nods, brighter, and sets the horse at a long rein on to the hard, flaking mud path.

There’s half a mile before the town. He makes a slow count to fifty, does not let himself hurry the last few, and sets off after her. He can stride, when he has to, almost as fast as an ambling, cooling horse.

The path widens. Cottages grow out of the grass, with turf roofs and walls in need of whitewash that grow green mould, so that they are part of the landscape. Their inhabitants are already gone into town, to scrub or brush or tan or weave or whatever they do to keep body and soul from parting.

Ahead, the Maid’s horse is a white blur set against the backdrop of brick and whitewash and small, red tiles.

The cottages become more frequent; they lean inward, shading the path against the sun. He feels the threat of violence now. The effort it takes to walk on, not to reach for his knife, to run, to call out.

Not yet. Not yet …

Now!

Two shadows. Two men. A butcher and his son. They are armed only with clubs, because it matters that Tomas not die. How much have they been paid? Is it enough? Is it ever?

They converge on him from both sides, hauling him into the gap between two cottages. He screams, and it’s as well this is part of the planning, because he couldn’t avoid screaming if he wanted to.

‘Help! Heeeeelp!
Hel—aaa—oof!
’

He takes a club to the gut, right up high, at his diaphragm, that leaves him crumpled and fighting to breathe. He wants to know if it was père or fils, and can’t see. He kicks out, feebly, rolls over, protects his head with his arms as the clubs bounce down on to his ribs, his legs, his protective, shielding arms, his
elbow
, dear God in heaven, his elbow. Not that hard, you bastards! A snap like a cracked whip breaks near his ear. He feels the sting up his left arm and thinks they have brought blades after all, then a shattering numbness, which leaves his arm limp as a landed fish.

He finds he can howl in a breath, and give it out again, in a harsh, crippled whisper that barely reaches past his ears. Still, he tries.

‘Stop! God damn you, stop! It isn’t worki—’

‘Back! Back or you’re dead! Back, both of you.’ A woman’s voice. At last! What took you so long? He hasn’t heard the horse, has no idea how she got here, but he knows the tone of her command.

The blows diminish, and then, of a sudden, stop. Relief leaves him weakly panting, staring up through closing eyes at a heaven gone red and black and purple, tear-blurred. He can hear the clash of arms, though, which isn’t right; the butcher and his son were supposed to run when she came back.

‘Run, God damn you. Run or she’ll—’

He hears a breath that is not human, and the sickening strike of plundered tissue, a dissolution of bone and flesh, sinew and rushing blood. Rolling over, he forces his right eye wide enough to look through and sees her, a dark strip against the light, her Crusader sword a dart in shadow.

She is one against two; they have not run. In fact they can’t run. The devil-horse is snaking its head left and right, ducking, weaving, snapping to either side of the path like a hound before a bull. The Maid has dropped the reins and is leaning over, blade in one hand, axe in the other, vengeance made manifest.

He thinks he ought to rise and help … help someone. He cannot just now think whom he would help and in any case it’s academic. He cannot rise.

He is experimenting with which arm works, and whether he can even lever himself up to sitting, when something falls on him, hard and hot, spraying scalding water across his face.

His mouth is blocked. He can’t scream. He flails and rolls and struggles free and squirms back to find that he is lying beside butcher père, and the hot water is blood from a throat laid open to the glistening backbone. Blank eyes stare whitely, round pebbles punched into the dead man’s face.

The Maid is still fighting the son, who is by far the more dangerous. Using the father as a counterweight, Tomas drags himself to kneeling. His eyes are swelling closed again, and his hearing isn’t right; a river-flood-thunder rushes through his head, but if he concentrates, he thinks the Maid is calling for help.

Sensible girl. Whom is she calling to? Whom does she trust? Bertrand? D’Alençon? De Belleville? He should listen to the rest of this, but he can’t. He can barely stand upright. And when the butcher’s son falls beside him with a cratered axe wound splitting his skull from crown to left eye, he stops trying.

The earth rises to receive him, briskly, and is still. Her voice reaches into him. ‘Brother Tomas, do not die. God does not need your company yet, and we do.’ He wants to answer her, but the distance is too far, and the pain too great and the blackness too inviting.

TOMAS WAS NOT
aware, until now, of the sweep of the Maid’s lashes, their length, their contrast with the white of her skin. He had thought her sun-washed, brown as any man of war, and he was wrong. She is alabaster and ebony, except, tantalizingly, at the curve of her neck, below her ear on the right, where is a small red strawberry-shaped mark. He thinks for a while that it might be a mark of desire, a transient imprint of a night’s passion, but it remains unchanging over the days of his convalescence until he comes to know it for a God-mark, set at birth.

He feels privileged to have seen it. Until now, it has been covered by her armour. Here, in this place of comfort and care, she wears velvet gowns in crimson and marine blue, with the Fleur de Lys of France in gold damask, with her hair swept up into just-visible confections of silk and wire that add to her height and reveal a neck he could hold in the curve of one hand, if he were well enough. If she let him.

Her hands are fine-fingered and tender. She ministers to him, takes away the pain, washes him clean, changes the linen beneath him when he vomits, applies compresses and creams to his contusions, a sling to his arm. She prays aloud a great deal, with a fervour he has not heard from her before; not real, not like this. There is a clarity to her, a lucidity of soul that he has never before encountered. He feels blessed in her presence.

His mind is not clear, he knows this. He thinks himself indoors and yet she ministers to him beneath an infinite blue sky. Beneath it, sand spreads from left to right, and on this fight many men. Charlemagne is there, and Roland, of whom the song was written. The Maid fights with them against the Saracen, but she fights also in France. He knows this because from time to time he hears voices, not far away, that say so; two men talking together.

—Guerite says he will live. She cares for him, I know not why.

—She sees things we don’t see.

—Always has done.

A reflective pause, a silence, measured by the tread of feet on sand; a steady tread, men assured of their own worth. And then:

—Paris next?

—Compiègne, I think. The king is with the army. He must give permission for the assault on Paris.

Tomas cannot remember why this matters. Or what he is supposed to be doing about it. He knows only that it does, and there is something.

The Maid’s cool voice tugs him back. ‘Does your arm hurt?’

How could it not when the elbow is broken? He pulls a wry face and is rewarded with a smile that opens some gateway of his mind so that memory crashes over him, a small deluge of isolated episodes: the raining of clubs, a blade, sharp as lightning in shadow, a girl putting a horse through its paces. Bedford. His promise. His Englishness.

He seeks refuge in darkness, and leaves her.

Sometime later he asks, ‘Where are we?’

She looks pleased that he can speak. ‘Rheims.’

He frowns. ‘You have come back from Soissons to care for me?’ It’s a day’s ride, even on her devil-horse.

She tilts her head, purses her lips. He does not remember them curved like this. ‘I am not the Maid.’

‘My lady …’ He struggles to rise. Pain defeats him; his left arm is a lance of fire, of acid, of lye, poured on living flesh.

‘Be still.’ Her hands press him back. He screws up his eyes, tries to focus. Black hair, black eyes, black brows. A mouth like a bow. Skin fine as alabaster.

‘Who are you?’

Her gaze flickers a moment upwards, to heaven. He thinks she is seeking permission to answer him. If so, it is granted. She says, ‘By God’s grace, they call me Marguerite de Valois.’

Ah. The king’s sister. The angel. The godly one who loves priests. His plan, after all, has worked better than he intended. He is here, in her care, and Claudine – poor Claudine – was right. She
is
beautiful.

The voices wash over him, in memory.

—Guerite says he will live. She cares for him, I know not why.

‘You are Guerite?’

She frowns at him. The bow of her lips flattens. He wants to reach for her, to kiss her to bruising, make her his own. At length, she says, ‘It was my father’s idea. It means—’

‘Little war …’

Her father being the late, mad King of France, nobody cared to tell him that naming your angel-princess ‘little war’ is not conducive to maidenly comportment. She has not, for fortune, grown up manly; quite its opposite. She is a Marguerite, lovely as a flower; impossible to think of her otherwise. And she cares for him. They said so, the voices beneath the window.

He lies back, grinning foolishly. She lifts him with an arm about his shoulder, tilts his head, gives him dwale to drink, the bitter drench made of boar’s bile and henbane, juice of lettuce, poppy milk and bryony root. He knows the taste, learned of it from his father’s priests, part of his two-colour childhood: a French life of sun and blue sky and archery and watercourses; an English one of drear and monasteries and his only escape the herb garden and, later, war.

She departs, leaving him marooned beneath the Saracen sky. He hears the Song of Roland sung in different keys by nightingales and crows. A hundred times, Roland blows his oliphant and dies on the blood-blackened sand.

Wet. Drizzling past his ears to chill the nape of his neck.

He opens his eyes. The angel is leaning over him, close enough to kiss. Guerite, whose father was mad. Looking at her alabaster profile, he decides that the royalty of France manifests better in its women than its men.

She is watching him. She says, ‘You speak English when you are in fever.’

He laughs, rolls his eyes. ‘Scots. Same words, different accent. Some words the same, anyway.’ He remembers something that makes him smile. ‘The Scots who are a certain antidote to the English.’

‘As the pope said.’ She touches her rosary and mouths an Ave Maria. Her skin has the translucence of frequent fasting. He has forgotten what it is like to be in the presence of the truly holy. It is possible he has never known.

He sleeps. It comes on him suddenly, discomfitingly, and when he wakes a new day has dawned and she is spinning, so that he lies listening to the whick and whirl of the drop bobbin and drawing in the light scent of new wool. Shearing has not long since passed. He can’t remember how the sheep looked when last he rode past them.

He stares up at the ceiling. The painting has grown flat of a sudden. He can see the brush marks if he tries. Amazing that it ever seemed to him alive.

‘Where are we?’

‘You asked that already.’ Whick. Whick. Whick. ‘We are at Rheims.’

‘You told me that already, lady. Where in Rheims?’

‘At the lodgings of my betrothed, the lord of Belleville.’

How had he forgotten she was promised to de Belleville? He fastens on something else, looks around the room. It is big, with wide windows and carved shutters. The ceiling is high. The fire roars. Tapestries stripe the walls, of kings and saints and knights in bright, new colours: madder and saffron, onion-juice yellow, gold and silver. Lodgings? Really? Who owns this place?