Relics (35 page)

We had to leave him lying there. He had not moved again, and his breathing had grown fainter until with one deep gasp he had come to his end. The innkeeper had brought candles, and Adric set one at his head and one at his foot. I stood and stared into his face. His lips had drawn back a little from his teeth, and I wiped the blood away. I told myself it was a smile, but it was not. Thin slivers of white shone beneath his eyelids. I would not leave until at last Gilles and the Captain prised my hand loose.

We must be gone before sunrise, Petroc,' said the Captain gently.

'I won't leave him,' I rasped. I had not cried. Instead I seemed to have dried up from the inside out. My eyes stung and my mouth was parched.

'The master of the inn will take care of him. He will get a proper burial. I wish we could take him back to the ship ... to his home. But we cannot. If we do not leave now we are all dead men, and he would not wish that.'

And Adric?' I said finally.

Adric is fine,' said the librarian. 'My wounds are not worth dwelling upon, now,' and he crossed himself with a glance at Will. 'He must have been a good man, Petroc, for he made a good death.' He shivered, and drew his cloak about him. And he died with the blessing of friendship. Now, my friend the Captain is right: we must leave here this instant, and I am coming with you.'

They pulled me to my feet and out of the taverna, and dragged me until I started running with them. The others feared meeting the Watch, but there was no one much about, although the streets near the Taverna were still full of the stench of burning. We did not stop until the Campo, and when we had crossed it we ran again. The jarring of the cobbles beneath my feet helped keep my head empty, but as soon as we were back on the
Cormaran
I could not escape and stumbled away to crouch against the rail, hugging my knees, stupefied with grief. Adric was sent to he down in the cabin. The Captain was giving orders and the ship was springing to life, another shore leave cancelled, angry men taking out their frustrations on rope and wood. When everything was to his satisfaction he beckoned Adric from the cabin, and the two men came and knelt down next to me.

'He was a good man - I had so little time to get to know him, but he had his own ... his own honour, and it was very strong,' the Captain said. 'You called each other brother, but that is truly what he was to you, I think? It is hard to see a brother die.' He paused. 'That I do know.' He passed his hands across his face. 'Now forgive us — this is the last time we will invade your sorrow — but we must make you understand one more thing about last night.'

Adric nodded. 'Do you remember Saint Elfsige of Frome?' he asked, and I looked up in surprise. 'Quite a story that made.'

'But you were working for me that day,' continued the Captain. 'Elfsige ended up as someone else entirely, you know. He made a Flemish abbot very happy. I have known of you since you went to Buckfast, Petroc. But you will wonder, one day if not sooner, whether Adric meant for you to ... to end up in this life. I can assure you that he did not. His heart was quite broken by your troubles.'

'But they were not of your making, Adric,' I said quietly.

'Not directly,' said the librarian, 'But you were chosen by Balecester and his son because you were my student. That alone has filled me with guilt.' He studied my face. 'But you are alive. And now, it seems, we are of the same company.' He stood up leaned on the rail.- 'Now we must end this, must we not?'

"We must,' said the Captain. He took me by the shoulders. 'Your brother Will would want us to claim the prize. And that we shall do. We are putting out this minute for the Ionian.'

I felt as cold and lonely as the great ice-fields of Greenland. I hardly cared what these two had been saying to me. At that moment, what cared I for Adric's guilt, or the Captain's sympathy? But, like an iceberg bobbing alone on the Sea of Darkness, a thought formed itself in my mind.

'It was Kervezey, wasn't it?' I said.

'That is my guess.'

There was nothing more to say. Adric limped off to the cabin. The Captain went back to directing the crew: a fight had broken out on the deck and the mutterings were getting louder. There would be many promises made and ruffled feathers smoothed before the men were happy again. I wanted no part of it. Feeling utterly alone, I went and stood in the bow as the
Cormaran
drifted out into the main channel and began to slip away down the Arno to the sea. The lights of Pisa were dimming behind us when I felt an arm slip through mine. It was Anna, and we stood like that, silent, until the sun rose and the flying fishes came out to dance back and forth across our path.

Chapter Eighteen

K

oskino was a mountain, a slab of white rock thrust straight up out of the sea. Lush lower down, the trees thinned as the slopes became cliffs, with here and there a slash of dark green where a company of cypresses had taken hold, and then the island ended in an abrupt, stark line, seemingly flat as a table on top. It was getting dark as we drew near, and the clouds had formed out of a clear sky and were rolling slowly over the top of the cliff wall. It had seemed tiny from a distance, this place, another speck among specks in the ruffled, inky sea. We were sailing into its shadow now, and the day's heat reached us, a parching breath, along with the mad choir of insects.

Anna was with me in the bow. We were friends again, although we had not spoken of what it was that had come between us since leaving Bordeaux. Indeed I did not want to dwell on it, for it seemed a time of sickness, as if I had been suffering from a long fever and a wandering of the mind and now was well again. That is a strange thing to say, perhaps, by one who had just seen his greatest friend suffer a bloody and untimely death. But now what troubled me most was not the manner of Will's passing - for that was pure pain and could be treated almost like a wound - but the knowledge that his life had been poisoned by Sir Hugh de Kervezey, long before Kervezey - and I did not doubt it had been his hand on the trigger - had put an end to it. The sense that Will's life had been doomed long before our last night in Balecester, in fact from the moment we had met, came back to haunt me. I found

I could not even remember our first meeting - the refectory at the cathedral school, perhaps? - and this troubled me even more. Kervezey had cursed us - not just in the trials we had suffered in our flesh, but in our souls, for whatever else I believe about the soul, I know it is there that love, and friendship, grow like bright flowers. Kervezey had blighted us, both outside and in.

And now the anger that had so afflicted me while my friend was at my side returned in earnest. But this time, with a potent fuel, it burned like a pyre. It is strange how rage can drive away sadness, but it was as if my tears were dried up inside me by the heat of my anger. Sometimes it burned hot, like a fistful of coals aglow within my belly, and at other times it was utterly cold, and my soul felt enveloped in hoarfrost. But although I was full up to the brim with this anger, so that I feared I might at any moment vomit live cinders onto the deck, in my outward self I was calm. My mind was clear, and indeed I seemed to see everything with a clarity and a brightness that would probably have frightened me at any other time. I saw that there had been no chance in our reunion and took an obscure comfort from it. The thought that everything might have been arbitrary, that we had met and been torn apart again by some heartless, random coincidence, was more frightening than the knowledge that we had both been struggling in the same net. It is a habit of men, that we search for meaning in the deaths of those we love, and here was meaning aplenty, however cruel.

That first morning, Anna had stood with me, silently - for hours, perhaps. The sun had risen in earnest when she reached out a cool, careful finger and touched me, feather-like, below one eye, then another.

'They are dry,' she said, puzzled.

'There is nothing there,' I answered, my voice raspy. 'Nothing. But ... I loved him, you know.'

'I know,' she said. We stood quiet again. Then she said, 'May I weep for him, then?'

I took her in my arms and let her offer up her tears. My own face grew wet with them, and I thought, how strange that I must have a surrogate to mourn Will for me.

'He made a good end,' I told her after a while, when we were both sitting on the deck, our backs to the rail. How insufficient my words had become. 'He was clear in his mind, and he went with love . . . with love in his heart,' I finished, which was true in its way.

'Did he suffer?' asked Anna, tremulously. I winced, and took her hand.

'If I told you no, would you believe me?' She searched my face with her salt-red eyes, then shook her head, a tiny shiver. 'No,' she whispered.

Yes, he suffered very much, but less towards the end. He was brave and strong, and death had to wait his turn. We talked of many things, of . . .'I paused. I found I did not wish to tell Anna how I had sworn to Will that I would never let her go. Perhaps I worried she would be horrified, to be bound by an oath made to a dead man. But in truth that oath was the last thing that tied me to my friend, a secret shared with no one but him and so an invisible thread that connected us, stretching from the land of the living to wherever Will now dwelt. It had its beginning deep within my heart, and there was a tension in it, a thrum of motion sent through this lonely, fragile thread across empty worlds where the winds of loss blow coldly and without cease, that told of some presence holding fast to the other end. I felt it then, and it brought me solace. I feel it now.

'Do you still not weep?' she persisted.

Will would not have approved,' I said, gruffly. 'Not of me blubbering, in any case. You, however . . . Besides, I wept a veritable Nile for the man, in error, while he still lived.'

'Oh! My God, Patch, you are a miser of grief.'

I shook my head and took her hands between both of mine. 'I was wrong to grieve then: I should have raged! Well, now I shall. There will be no tears, my love, not one tear until . . .' My voice began to shake, and I pressed Anna's fingers to my lips until I had mastered myself. 'Sir Hugh de Kervezey . . .' I grimaced at the name, bitter as gall. 'I will have that man's life, I swear it. That will be the Mass I say for my brother. When I have stopped his breath, then I shall weep.'

'Patch, I . . .'

'No, my love. I am burning up like a barrel of pitch! I must let the fire burn, and so must you.' I would have added, if I had known what words to use, that it was too wild a fire for me to control, although I knew that, as it burned through, I would see its form and know, from the embers, what my course would be.

Soon, too soon, it was time for Adric to take his leave. With him, at least, we did not have to conceal our feelings with great care. The old man had never been one to bother himself with how others lived, so long as nothing interrupted his gathering of knowledge, but I was a little surprised how his cadaverous features took on a certain glow after first making Anna's acquaintance. He became positively courtly, although Anna assured me that he was only interested in the manuscripts that lay in her uncle's library.

With me he seemed almost frightened, until I sat him down in the bows and convinced him that I did not blame him for Will's murder, for my flight from England or for any of the other dolorous strands of the web that held us both. After that we were as we had always been, although we both knew that nothing was really the same. I was no longer his pupil but a blooded outlaw, and he was no longer an abbey librarian with an appetite for esoteric wonders but an intriguer at large in a world that did not appear to frighten him in the slightest. I had never really thought of Adric as a brave man, only heedless of his safety in the way that eccentric people sometimes are. But after the events in Pisa, and remembering our adventure in Vennor long ago, I realised that not only was he fearless but that he was in possession of a very cool head indeed. We spent a happy two days running down the coast to Ostia. He was going back to Rome after all and there was no concealing his excitement.

'I have unfinished business in the Vatican libraries,' he said dreamily, and I knew that he was understating the case more than a little. Had Adric the nine lives of a cat - indeed, had he the gift of life eternal, his business with libraries would never be done.

What are you digging for this time?' I asked.

'Hmm.' He treated me to an inscrutable look. 'A small investigation here, a few loose ends tied there. I will tell you everything when we meet again.'

'Do you think there's a chance of that, Adric?'

'A chance? My dear boy, I believe we now serve under the same captain,' he said. 'There's every chance that we shall be heartily sick at the sight of one another before too long. No, no - you go to Koskino, and I to Rome, and we shall all meet up before the winter's here . . . Venice, perhaps? I rather wish I were coming with you, of course.'

That cheered me, as I had feared this would be our last parting. So while I was terribly sorry to see him clamber, in his long, spidery fashion, down into the fishing barque that would take him up the Tiber to Rome, I drew some comfort from the knowledge that he would be the happiest man in that city as he burrowed ever deeper into its endless libraries. We will see each other soon, then,' I had said as I helped him over the side, and although he only nodded in reply, his mind on the shaky rope-ladder and the waiting books, I felt it might be true, and when he struggled upright in the fishing boat - to the evident concern of the fishermen — and waved back to the
Cormaran,
I understood that if Adric said we would meet again, we likely would.

In the days that followed it was almost impossible to be alone with Anna, and so we made do with hasty caresses and now and then a kiss, separated by long spans of time in which the blue waters sped by, mile after mile, beneath the hull. Although the knowledge that, sooner or later, she would be put ashore in Venice cast a faint shadow, we chose, I think, to put it from our minds, there being much else - and worse - near at hand about which to fret. But one night Anna had woken me from a deep sleep and led me through a maze of slumbering men to her lair in the hold. We had spent an hour of agony and pleasure there in the dark, brazenly alive to every fingertip, every touch of skin upon hot skin, while keeping as silent as the dead. It was torture, but exquisite. By some miracle we were not discovered, and afterwards we sat together on deck, watching the stars. Anna's head was on my shoulder, and she traced a slow circle with her fingernail on the back of my hand. I heard her sigh, then she turned and spoke softly in my ear: 'I never did tell you about my time in the Norse lands, did I?'