Son of the Morning (64 page)

‘And they have everything.’

‘My fall is a delight to them. They owe me money but they will never pay.’

‘Then take heart. Across the world, the poor are rising. The man of perdition is here and seeks to open the gates of Hell. A new paradise will come to earth when all men will be equal.’

The idea of equality had never much appealed to Bardi before. It had seemed something unnatural, advocated by the heretic poor. It wasn’t so much sinful as unrealistic: men would always strive to outdo each other. Equality, Bardi reflected, would have definitely decreased his riches substantially. Now, however, it might represent a mild upturn.

‘Will there be bread for all?’ said Bardi.

‘Yes, bread for all. And meat and shelter and warmth. We would throw down the high men.’

‘I am starving,’ said Bardi.

‘Wait.’

The little ympe flew off into the night. When it returned it flew low, a lurching, bouncing flight. It was hanging on to a dead rabbit. Bardi had to stop himself from rending it apart and eating it at the roadside there and then. He kindled a fire, the ympe striking sparks from a stone with her spear, and was soon tearing into the delicious flesh.

Bardi thought hard. Could he ever regain his former position? No. All trust was broken, all credit withdrawn. He could never regain those exalted heights, unless  …  Edwin had spoken of this Drago. Find that and he could sell it to the highest bidder: France, England, Navarre – they would come queuing. Or perhaps, if he found where old Edward was being held, he could work to free the old king, to restore him to his former glory. There might be a way back to riches that way. The Hospitallers were holding him, it was said. Well, there was a real opportunity. He could serve them – they were bankers and would welcome a man of his skills working behind the scenes. And once you see the accounts, once you see where the money flows, you can see where a king lives. The keep of a royal does not come cheap. But Bardi would need help. His man Orsino.

‘Tell me, do you know a boy called Dowzabel?’

‘Every ympe of the air knows him.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘I will ask the clouds.’

‘The clouds?’

‘Many of us have been released, and I am the largest. We swarm in the upper airs, carrying whispers from fellow to fellow across mountain and sea. I can find Murmur, his ympe.’

‘I would overthrow the masters,’ Bardi said, nibbling the last of the meat off a leg bone. ‘I would see all men equal. But first I would find Dowzabel and those with him. I will not survive without help.’

‘I will help you,’ said the demon. ‘My name is Catspaw.’

‘And I am Bardi.’

The little figure flew away from him, spiralling up like a leaf caught in a whirlwind. Bardi saw a great mass of black in the sky, like so many starlings, whirling and turning on the wing. As he lost sight of the tiny woman against the wheeling cloud he heard a murmur. It was as if a wave had shot across the sky like a ripple caused by a stone.

Bardi realised the whole sky was thick with tiny demons, long trails of them streaming like clouds across the sunset. He watched them disappear in the night, and return the next evening, a great smudge against the sky. Something fell from the horde. Catspaw.

She alighted on his arm.

‘Milan,’ she said. ‘I will lead you there, so you may find the man of perdition and help him spread the word.’

Bardi smiled. He would go to the Hospitallers in Milan. He could bring expertise with finance. He could bring warning of demons. He could connect with his servants. The Hospitallers would have him, he would have his banner and be back on his way to influence and money.

‘Lead on,’ he said.

28

The France Dow and Orsino were now travelling almost seemed a different country. There were no burning fields here, no corpses in the ditches or hollow-eyed children staring out from the ruins of their homes. To Dow it seemed a paradise, the harvest coming in, every village, every town overflowing with things to eat.

The way was easy and direct. They took the road to Troyes and there Orsino offered his services to a group of pilgrims heading for Rome. There were eighty of them and they had already hired three guards, but Orsino with his fine shield and sword was welcomed to join them – his pay: food and wine for him and Dow for the duration of the trip.

The pilgrims headed east on rough sun-baked tracks until they met the Via Agrippa going south. Progress was even quicker then, dropping down to Besançon – a jumblous collection of red-roofed houses tied in a bag of land made by a looping river.

There was a trade-off to using the Roman road – the going was quicker but the roads had been built to connect cities, not, in the modern way, abbeys. So the pilgrims often slept out in the open country rather than taking guest rooms at a monastery. It should have been no hardship to Dow. The nights were warmer than those he had known on the moor. But the night was a black nest, full of hungry eyes. Devils, he sensed it.

‘I fear to sleep,’ he told Orsino as they rested at the foot of the Grand St Bernard pass, the summer moon a clipped penny in the cold blue mountain sky. They were in light woods and the track stretched on along the side of a steep hill, though it climbed only gently.

‘Some of those things still follow us,’ said Orsino. ‘I can see their eyes in the darkness. They shine like those of dogs – but dogs don’t climb trees.’ He carved at some wood with his knife. Since Paris, he had not met Dow’s eye. He had talked only of his guilt in leaving Sariel’s body and how he should have ensured she received a Christian burial. Now, the threat of violence brought him out of his reverie.

‘What can we do?’ said Dow.

‘We must keep watch and trust to our fellows.’

‘Do they see them too?’

‘They must.’

Dow sat by the fire, his hand on his knife. Murmur snuggled at his chest beneath his tunic.

‘Will you fly to see them?’ Dow asked the demon.

‘I will fly.’

The demon flitted across the firelight, rising like a cinder blown up by the flames.

A young woman came to Dow, smiled and offered him a sweetened nut from a pouch. He returned her smile and took it.

‘Je m’appelle Marie,’ she said, touching her hand to her neck.

‘Dow,’ he said, ‘pleased to meet you, Marie.’ She was pretty, he thought.

He was surprised by the generosity of the ordinary pilgrims. He had thought of these people as servants of Îthekter, always putting themselves above other men. But they were not like that. He knew enough French from Edwin to understand a little of what they said. They referred to themselves as sheep and their God, Christ, as the shepherd. Dow remembered the priests of the West Country, their anger and their bile. More dragons than sheep, he thought.

There was an undeniable gentleness to some of these people. They didn’t seem cast down by their grovelling prayers but lifted up by them.

Marie said something quickly and gestured to her eyes. Dow couldn’t understand a word. There were all sorts of nationalities on the pilgrimage and he had only poor French, bad Latin, good English and what remained of his Cornish to communicate in.

She swept her arm up into the hillside, pointed to her eyes. She was saying she had seen eyes there.

‘They won’t harm you while I’m here,’ he said.

She said something again. Dow heard the French word for ‘what?’.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He shrugged to demonstrate. ‘But …’ He tapped his dagger and then pointed to Orsino. ‘Safe,’ he said, ‘safe.’

Orsino came back to him. ‘I will take the first watch,’ he said. ‘You should get some sleep.’ He made his way to the edge of the camp, looking out into the falling dusk.

The girl watched him, then smiled at Dow. ‘Votre papa?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said, ‘enemy.’

The girl pursed her lips. ‘N’entendu pas,’ she said.

‘I didn’t intend it,’ said Dow, mistaking what she said. ‘Friend. I don’t know. He needs to change and welcome Lucifer as a friend. Lucifer forgives.’

Dow wished he could ask her to lie with him, but he knew her people would never allow it. He felt everything a young man of his age feels towards a good-looking girl, and he feared his desire would show on his face and scare her away. But it was more than the prospect of sex that enticed him. It had been a long time since he had been snug in anyone’s arms.

Dow slept and it seemed to him that he dreamed. He was back on the moor again, lying in the peaty smell of his nan’s dress. Then his nan was gone and he wondered where. He got up to look for her.

‘Dow.’ The girl was at his shoulder.

He said nothing, just looked into her face. The moon was a sliver and the night was dark but she almost seemed to glow, her face beautiful in the silver light.

She took his hand and led him into the trees. Dow looked into the darkness of the woods. No eyes, no teeth. He had his knife and the heedless desire of a man dragged on by a stiff cock. They made their way through the fragrant wood, up a slope and to a grassy bank. Dow desperately wanted to kiss her, to touch her, she seemed a glorious thing to him, a gift of the moonlit night.

She turned to him and he took both her hands. He went to kiss her but she drew back. He kissed her anyway, just a peck on the lips. She stiffened and parted her lips, gave a little cough. He looked down at her hands. They were blackened, like some root dug from the earth. She coughed again and her head burst open like a puffball mushroom. She did not fall but stood with her arms stiff in his. They were wood and her ruptured skull showed not blood or brain but a pale and fungoid flesh, a mist of spores floating away from it.

Dow staggered backward, looking up around him. In the trees was a monstrous spider, legs thin as wires with a translucent body as big as a mastiff’s.

He heard voices around him. ‘He who would defy God.’

‘A spirit unconfined.’

‘What tortures await him?’

‘What punishment could ever fit the crime?’

Everywhere were eyes and teeth – in one tree a great grinning cat-headed man looked down; an enormous toad carrying a spear dropped to the floor from another.

Dow coughed out the spores, wiped his mouth.

The toad threw the spear and Dow watched it with a frozen fascination as it flew towards him. A clang and a cry, a scream. Orsino was there: he’d leapt in front of the spear with his shield, knocking it aside and, in the same movement, advanced on the toad.

The creature leapt to one side and the spider and cat man dropped from the trees. Orsino’s angelic sword was free, burning with the light of sun on water. The spider wrapped its threadlike limbs around him and drove its teeth into his body but Orsino’s sword slashed through the spider’s legs like a scythe through barley.

The cat man ran towards Dow – he had a large spiked mace in his hand. Dow jumped behind a tree to avoid its swipe. He had his knife free. The cat man swung again, his whiskered face leering at Dow through the gloom. Dow stepped back, his instinct honed by long training in the garden of the rectory of St Olave’s. Once the forehand swipe of the mace had missed him, he stepped in, deflecting the cat man’s backhand with his left hand to stop him striking again and stabbing down into the side of his neck with the devil’s knife.

With a cry the cat man died, but Dow was driven to the floor by the charge of the onrushing toad.

A ‘hey!’ and Orsino was there, the angel sword flashing.

The toad jumped back into the wood, gave an enormous croak, kicked up its legs and was gone.

Orsino examined Dow. He was covered in white powder.

‘Go to the river and get washed,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you. Whatever that thing has put on you, you want it off as soon as you can.’ For the first time since the death of the angel, Orsino was something like his old self, energised by the battle. The pilgrims from the camp came running, the two guards with spears before them.

There was a squabble and shouting mainly in French. Orsino said something and an old man, the pilgrims’ leader, spat. Dow saw Marie peering anxiously from behind her father. Bolder souls went to investigate the bodies of the cat man and the spider.

Orsino shooed them away from the broken figure of the fungus-headed girl, saying over and over again, ‘Dangereux’. Whether they all understood or not, they didn’t go near the thing.

Dow went to the river and waded in. It was cold, though the current was not too strong. He submerged himself and stood up again, shivering. He did it again, wanting to clean off whatever that thing had put on him. What had it been? A devil, or a device of devils?

He went back to the bank, coughed and a taste of blood came into his mouth. The Florentine came to him. ‘You look well enough,’ said Orsino.

‘There will be more of them,’ said Dow.

‘The fact they try to oppose us shows we are doing God’s work.’

‘They are God’s servants.’

‘That is not so. God’s servants are beautiful.’

Dow recalled what Sariel had said to him, to understand this man.

‘Beautiful or ugly, you kill them both.’

‘I will atone,’ said Orsino. ‘The pardoner was right. There is a way back to God.’

‘What atonement can there be for what we,
you
, did?’ Dow realised he had echoed what the devils had whispered to him in the trees.

‘I can claim your soul for Christ,’ said Orsino. ‘When you accept His light in your heart, perhaps I will have given God what He asks for. You are the Antichrist, they say. I don’t believe that. But if you are, what better way for me back to God than to achieve your redemption.’

‘Orsino,’ said Dow.

‘Yes.’

‘You are saved.’

‘How so?’

‘You are good man. You think more of your friends than you do yourself. Lucifer will see that.’

Orsino smiled. ‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t find that comforting. You’ll take the second watch, and stay in the camp this time. You were saved because I wanted a piss.’

‘Thank you for saving me,’ said Dow.

‘Atone. Atone. If I can bring you to Christ, I might be saved too.’ He ruffled the boy’s hair.