In Pursuit of the Green Lion (49 page)

“Catching up? Hugo? Do you honestly think I can ride in this state? It’s like sitting on a boil. Besides, I’m monstrously tired.”

“Sir Hugo, you can’t move a woman in this condition. She’ll bleed too heavily.”

“We’ll all bleed too heavily if we don’t catch up. But I’ll leave her until tomorrow. We’ll post a watch and camp here without a fire. But tomorrow she’s sitting a horse, whatever condition she’s in.” I hardly cared. Tomorrow was a long way away. I fell asleep with the baby in my arms, and never even knew who lifted me onto a bed of boughs in the night. Sometime in the dark, I woke to hear the baby stirring, and fed him again as I looked at the stars. I thought I heard something in the distance. A din. Something bad. But it could have been just imagining.

In the morning, we were ready to move by dawn. A debris-filled well had yielded enough water for washing up most of the mess of the night before, and I saw that a wet cloak hung behind Gregory’s saddle as he lifted me onto the little mare and handed up Peregrine. I was too exhausted and sore even to care about the shameful state of my dress, as we rode silently to rejoin the road at the riverbank. But there, at the river’s edge, a horrible sight met our eyes. The blazing ruin of one of the barges that had gone ahead of us was drifting downriver with the current. Caught in the eddies, it hung for a brief moment on an outcropping of rock and then slid beyond view. But in that moment, we had all seen more than anyone ought to see. Hacked-up bits of stripped bodies, arranged in obscene ways I won’t even bother to tell you about, could be glimpsed in the charred wreckage. And on the prow of the barge, a severed head had been placed as a kind of hideous travesty of a figurehead. The features were unrecognizable. It was decorated with a sort of imitation of a bishop’s mitre fashioned of parchment. Splashed with water, it had somehow escaped catching fire, but the ink had run in great black trickles down the man’s face. A seal dangled like a blood clot against the temple of the ghastly head. The papal ambassador. If not for Peregrine, it would have been us drifting unburied in the rushing green waters.

“Ordinarily, I’d think it was English forces,” Gregory remarked calmly to his brother.

“You’re right. This one, we didn’t do. Our people would never waste a barge like that. It’s not Hawkwood or the Gascons: they wouldn’t have set up the hat.”

“And none of them would have sacrificed the ransom of a man as high ranking as a papal ambassador.”

“They’re probably still drunk, celebrating upstream,” said Hugo, as unperturbed as if he were discussing fishing.

And that is how we learned that the Archpriest, with an army of three thousand mercenary adventurers, had begun his march down the Rhône valley toward the richest prize in Christendom: the papal city of Avignon.

I
WILL NOT WRITE
of the days that followed, for they are all mixed up in my mind as if they were one day or a hundred—I really can’t remember, though afterward they told me it was seven days’ march. We left the banks of the river and wandered far into the shattered countryside, evading the forces of the dreadful army of brigands. We did not see them, except once we spied a column of smoke in the distance. But we saw their handiwork everywhere: burned orchards slashed to the ground, or the blasted ruins of convents, villages, and churches. In this dead land, there was nothing, nothing at all. When one of the horses grew lame, the men were so hungry that after they had cut its throat they stripped the flesh from it and ate it raw, for fear of making a fire. When my arms grew weak, I strapped the baby to me. And when I could no longer sit, they tied me in the saddle. But always beside me rode Gregory, silent and straight, leading the mare. It was now that I borrowed the will from him to go on; my husband, my strength and my shield.

At night he slept beside us, the little pilgrim and I, with his sword drawn. We learned to talk without words, then, for what I thought, he thought, and what he thought, I thought, and we could act together without a single sound passing between us. One night I woke at the sound of a brief, strangled cry to find myself alone in our blankets. Gregory had surprised a straggler from the Archpriest’s army, and, circling around behind him as he crept toward our camp, lopped off his head before his brother had even drawn his sword. The loot the man was laden with was enough to buy a knight’s freedom, but the man had babies’ hands on a string, which they buried quickly in hopes of keeping it from me. But, of course, nothing went on that I didn’t know about sooner or later, for unseen to them, the Weeping Lady was still with us, much depleted, drifting formlessly nearby. Every so often I’d hear her whispering in the darkness, offering her opinions and commenting on what she’d seen. But she wasn’t much use; she had even less idea of where we were than anyone else.

After that, they decided that we must leave all sight of the river, and go into the mountains, following the sun and stars north. Malachi made it sound easy, since he said he’d followed the route before, and it was a positive shortcut to Paris, and Hugo laughed and slapped him on the back, which was the last laughing anyone did for quite a while. But when we found inhabited villages, the sullen folk in them would give no directions worth having, and I began to fear we were hopelessly lost. But Malachi said he knew exactly where he was, and acted so confident that we forded rivers and clambered through rocky passes at his direction without ever a question being asked. But through all these trials, by day and by night, the Holy Virgin sustained me so that my milk did not dry up, and the little wanderer continued to live.

When at length we emerged from the mountains and saw a rich, cultivated valley spread before us, we knew we were beyond the path of the madman. At a bend of the green, rushing river that wound through the valley we could see the walls and towers of a prosperous city. No—it was not a city. As we followed the sound of bells rolling across the fields, we spied above the walls the spires and domes of an immense monastery, looking as welcome as the Holy City itself. We rode through the little village and halted at the great gate, all filthy and tattered as we were, and Hugo, in battered and blackened armor, leaned from the saddle to bang on the grille and announce our presence. The grille opened, and part of a suspicious-looking face peered out.

“Who are you?” a voice asked in French. It was heavily accented, but the
langue d’oil.
Surely, I thought, we must have come a long way, all the way to the north again.

“We are from the party of the papal ambassador that was destroyed on the way to Paris by the Archpriest. In the name of God, we beg your mercy.” From behind the gate, voices conferred in Latin. I thought I could hear the words
Norman
—
English
or something very like them, before the first voice called through the grille.

“You must vow to disarm before you enter our holy precincts.” Once agreed, we entered and dismounted in the outer courtyard, in the shadow of the immense wall, where Gregory pulled me and the baby from the blood-drenched saddle before surrendering his weapon with the others. Even the eating knives were taken. Monks could afford to take no chances in these perilous times, even with their hospitality. As the horses were taken to the stables, lay Brothers showed us to a low stone house huddled just within the outer walls in the shadow of the gatehouse. It had a decidedly humble look, this pilgrims’ guesthouse, with its thatched roof and narrow, unshuttered windows. So did the people lounging about it in the sunny dust at the doorway: an old soldier with a leg gone, gossiping with a pair of ancient fellows whose only pilgrimage was probably from free lodging to free lodging.

“I say, what’s this? Beggars’ quarters? See here, my men, you have mistaken my quality. Where is your house for noble guests?” Hugo’s voice had risen with indignation. When he turned to spy a velvet-clad lord with long-toed shoes delicately picking his way from the stables to an elegant-looking guesthouse near the church, you could see the veins in his neck throbbing.

The Brothers escorting us looked at the guesthouse for the nobility. Then they looked up and down at Hugo. Their noses wrinkled the way Frenchmen’s do when the sauce is too salty or the wine is full of cork bits. “Your quality?” said one of them, in a tone too close to sarcasm to mistake. Unshaven and grimy in the padded, rust-stained tunic that had underlain his breastplate, Hugo looked like nothing better than a cobbler’s son turned mercenary. He’d lost weight, too, and the tunic fitted him as if he had taken it off a corpse. The rest of us were, if anything, worse.

“Hugo, don’t rile them,” Gregory hissed between his teeth, but Hugo was beyond caution.

“My quality, you base-blooded French psalm-singer! You insult a lord, the heir of Brokesford!” His face turned red and swelled up, and he grabbed for the place his sword hilt should have been. Gregory and Malachi grabbed his arms to restrain him, but he puffed up like a wrathful gander, and their pleas to calm himself only made him louder.

As the commotion increased a number of other Brothers arrived on the scene to confer. Suddenly, at a gesture from one of them who looked to be important, the two lay Brothers with the group broke away to show us to our quarters. The building was divided by an interior wall into two large bare-looking halls, each with a separate door. Evidently one hall was for women, the other for men. As Hilde and I stood in the low stone doorway, surveying the plain, whitewashed walls of the hall, furnished only with a bench, a row of straw beds, and an old blind woman humming and rocking like a bundle in the corner, we could hear Hugo still shouting on the other side of the building.

“You thickheaded numskulls, you have no idea how a man of great blood should be treated! You deserve nothing better than to have this whole place burned down around you! I deserve a special place, I tell you, and not this hovel!”

“A special place?” I heard them answer as the shouting subsided. “Yes, my lord, you are right. We’ve made a mistake. You’ll have a special place. Let us escort you there, most noble guests.”

But I was so tired that even a straw bed in a bare hall looked good. It was not until we awoke hours later that we found that the door had been sealed from the outside.

“B
ROTHER
, I
AM SORRY,”
said Gregory. The chains rattled as he stretched out his long legs on the stone floor of the Abbot’s prison. A thread of light found its way through the narrow slit above them and made a long streak of light on the heavy studded door. Gregory was feeling very gloomy. He’d been listening to the Latin outside the door, and it did not bode well. What he’d overheard was a discussion of how the Abbot couldn’t decide whether to flay them alive or merely behead them before he hung them from the walls as a warning to other mercenaries. So this was where it all ended. It seemed altogether depressing. Still, Hugo was happy. So why spoil his last minutes on earth by telling him? He owed him that much, at least.

“Nonsense, nonsense,” Hugo said cheerfully. “It’s all a mistake. It’ll soon be settled. I’ll just talk to the Abbot here and get it cleared up. That’s all. I probably set them off by insulting their rather shabby hospitality. You know these foreign monks. Touchy, all of them. It will be set right in a trice, as soon as I apologize. We deserved better places, and we’ll get them as soon as he hears. After all, we were traveling under a papal safe-conduct. He owes us consideration.”

“Hugo, the papal safe-conduct is floating downstream on the ambassador’s head. You can’t prove a thing; we can’t even prove we’re not mercenaries. There’s not a chance, without the paper.”

“Gloom and doom, Gilbert. You’re still sick, that’s what. I’ve got better ways to occupy my time. I think I’ll make a prison song. They’re all the rage now; it may very well make my reputation. Let’s see—a noble soul’s too great for walls of stone—that’s me, of course. And then there should be birds flying free. That’s the symbolism. I took three lessons on symbolism, did I tell you? The trick is to get the symbols to rhyme. I should have stayed for a few more lessons, I think. Did I tell you he’d sat at the feet of Petrarch?”

“Several times, Hugo.” Grief was giving way to profound irritation. Hugo, eternally Hugo, to the end.

“Let’s see—tumpty, tumpty—ta—hmm. First I must get my meter. Have I told you that poems need meter?” Gregory ground his teeth.

“Brother, I am trying to clear my soul of a lifetime of sin by confessing to you. Can’t the poem wait?”

“Confession? Whatever for? You’re acting like a condemned man. Let’s see—what rhymes with
oiseau?”

The listeners at the aperture leaned forward. Almost invisible, the narrow air shaft penetrated the cell so that every word a prisoner spoke could be heard in the tiny room beyond.

“Hst! He’s about to confess!”

“But do we have to take down the poem?”

“The Abbot said put them together after the first questioning, and then take down everything. He has to be sure. You take the poem, I’ll take the confession.”

“You always do this to me—the poem is dreadful.”

“That’s not my fault, now, is it?” And two styluses hovered above wax tablets as Hugo, having switched
oiseau
for
hirondelle
, tried again.

“Brother, I envied you for being first. I crave your forgiveness.” Gregory’s voice was grave. He’d agonized a whole month over this point, and examined the sin of it in several different ways, all of them theologically interesting.

“First? Of course you envied me. Why not? It’s only proper. I get the title, you get nothing. That’s how it is. That’s how it always will be. You never did know how to accept the obvious. I, on the other hand, learned to do it long ago, and put envy aside.”

“Envy? You, envious?” Gregory’s gloom shifted to shock.

“Of course. I envied you your freedom. Do you think it’s a pleasure, playing handmaid to a stingy old tyrant like Father? And when you got all that money without even going to war for it, I went absolutely crazy with it. Luckily, it passed like a disease. And now, of course, I’ve found the Muse—which muse did you say poetry was?”