Son of the Morning (89 page)

It wasn’t too far and, if he lashed the banner to a horse, it should survive unharmed. The Drago was blessed by God and had withstood dragon fire in the hands of St George. A little water wouldn’t hurt it.

Into the shining water, the horses hesitant. Bardi was no great horseman, but eventually he bullied the animals across, heavy on the whip, then heavy on the reins as his horse panicked and thrashed so much that Bardi feared he would be unseated. The lake was deep at first but a submerged sandbank half way across allowed them rest and to walk for sixty or seventy of the five hundred paces. They made the little beach just in front of where the villa had been, the horse he’d been riding hacking its lungs up as it staggered ashore like a newborn foal. Bardi too gasped, but not with exhaustion. Everything about him had been burned as he moved inland. There were no bright pines, no blaze of green grass just desolation everywhere – the trees all burned to stumps, the sand black with ash. The sky itself was a pale dirty yellow and the air was thick with smoke. A verse of the Bible came to him: ‘The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder. It will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.’

What sacrileges had taken place here? He looked back behind him to the lake. He could not see the shore. It was as if a mist lay upon the water. On the island there was still one flash of colour. A ruined and blasted chapel from which spilled roses, bright as blood. The roses had survived whatever had happened here. Perhaps they were holy and there was some value in them.

Bardi took his knife from his pack. Then he put it back and took his wood axe instead. He returned to the pack and took the knife as well. He still felt insecure and wished he had a third weapon to hold in his teeth – or, better still, Orsino to protect him.

He made his way up an ash black shore, looking around him all the time. No birds, no insect noises, no voices. The ground was hot beneath his feet, almost uncomfortably so. He walked towards the chapel. There was some sort of plinth there, he saw through the shattered wall.

The roses fell from the plinth, engulfing the ruins of the church. That gave him the shivers – it was never natural. Roses should burn as well as any plant, and there had been a mighty burning on this island. He climbed over the rubble of the chapel. He peered over the remains of a wall. Great, there were two dead angels ensnared in the roses. Hmm. No one had thought to strip them for relics. What kind of stupid bastard was Orsino? Bardi hardly had any bottles of any sort on him but he’d a cup and he’d balance that back to where he could get a bottle for the blood if he had to. Beneath the tumble of flowers, on the plinth, he could see the body of a man. The king? It had to be. God, he hoped he was already dead and he wouldn’t have to kill him himself. He would, of course kill him if he still lived, largely because he still had hope of calling in Edward’s debts after a bit of legal wrangling, but he still feared for his immortal soul. Murder was work for intermediaries.

He put his hand on the wall to climb over and the roses hissed and moved, snapping tendrils towards him. He recoiled. Oh God, were those roses trouble? Would he end up trapped by them if he tried to dig the angels or the king out?

‘Is that you in there, your majesty?’

No reply. What to do, what to do?

He watched for a long time. Night fell, a starless black, and he went down to sleep by the shore. In the morning he came back, buoyed by the fact of his survival, braver. He found a way around the flowers into the church and approached the plinth. Yes, it was the king in there, just as he’d seen him in the last days of his court. And he was on top of a long chest. That had to hold the banner.

‘Not so handsome now,’ he said out loud. The king was very pale, his skin terribly pierced. ‘You’re a king, yet I’m better off than you,’ said Bardi. He enjoyed these little victories. He tried the knife on the briars. Immediately they curled around his hand and he had to withdraw, his skin lacerated.

‘Great, brilliant,’ he declared. This was the kind of trick God had in for him – his whole financial salvation right in front of him but untouchable.

Bardi had nothing to burn or he would have burned it to see if he could set fire to the roses. Orsino had taken his crossbow and that was now doubtless part of the blackened body that lay in the chapel – he recognised the Florentine’s boots, or what was left of them.

‘Well, your majesty, I’d kill you but I can’t think of a way right now.’

The horses? He could ride one at the plinth and stab down at the king that way. But that could be painful because the briars might ensnare his legs. On the other hand, they might just consume the horse and give him a free crack at the king. Could he guarantee that he’d be able to cut free the angels and the chest afterwards? Clearly not. He resolved to sleep on the problem for one more night.

He could not say what time he was disturbed, though the night was a very deep dark.

A glow was in the chapel, someone cried out. He crept forward and peered over the crumbled walls, only the pearly light from inside the chapel to see by.

Montagu! Around his shoulders was a glowing cloak of angel feathers and in his hand that famous sword. He was stricken, terribly stricken, lying on the floor unable to move.

Bardi ran to him. ‘My lord!’

‘Bardi, you traitorous dog. Is there no loyalty you would not betray? Usurer, gilded ape, individual, acting only for yourself!’

‘The same, my lord.’

Montagu coughed and hacked, a great spume of saliva and snot coming from his nose and lips.

‘This will be to your profit. In my tunic. A vial. Open it and put it to my lips.’

Bardi reached inside and took out the tiny, stoppered bottle. He opened it and put it up to the lord’s mouth. Montagu swallowed the contents. Was it Montagu? He looked younger. The lord coughed, breathed in heavily and stood. He seemed instantly refreshed. Angel’s blood, Bardi guessed.

‘I never thought I could commit such sacrilege,’ said Montagu. ‘But I have and now I stand, whole and healthy.’

‘Did you get that from the angel you killed?’

‘You are an evil man, Bardi, though I am glad of you. I had thought I would have the strength to open the bottle without you. Have you killed him?’

‘Edward? No. My lord, I have care for my soul.’

‘Really?’ said Montagu. ‘That’s the most surprising thing I’ve heard since someone told me the king still lived.’

‘Everyone has care for their immortal self, sir.’

‘Do they?’ said Montagu.

He weighed Arondight in his hand. ‘I once did. Not now,’ he said.

He wrapped the angel feather cloak around him and leapt over the briars, floating up to land on the plinth above the king. The tendrils snaked up to engulf him but Montagu would not be denied, he hacked and slashed with the holy sword tearing the briars away from him. Twice he was dragged down but cut himself free to stand again, terribly wounded, his face bloody, his mail torn, his gambeson in shreds. Only the angel feathers afforded him any protection.

‘You have lived beyond your time. God claim your soul and the devil mine!’

He plunged down the sword into Edward’s chest. The king kicked, spat, retched and died. Montagu worked the sword up under his ribs, cutting and pushing, his knee on the king’s belly. He plunged his hand into the gaping wound, tearing out the heart and holding it up to inspect as a man might inspect a root he had pulled from the earth. The briars shook and rattled, shrivelled, blackened and died all over the plinth and ruined church. Bardi repeatedly crossed himself, flinching and cowering as if it was he who had been engulfed in thorns.

Montagu limped down to the dead angels, his leggings in tatters, his legs bloody. He took out a knife and two vials, worked the knife into an angel’s side and bled it into the vials. He stoppered them, put them beneath his coat of plates, picked up the heart and pointed Arondight at Bardi.

‘I had thought to kill you, banker,’ he said. ‘But you have done me and England a service, which I said would be to your profit. Come to Queen Isabella for your reward.’

And then Bardi saw something he thought he would never see in his life. An English baron, William Montagu, or Montacute, of the purest Norman blood in England, the foundation stone of God’s England, put up three fingers in the sign of Lucifer.

Montagu wound the angel feather cloak about him, taking the bloody heart underneath it. ‘Isabella,’ he said. A white streak like a comet leaving the earth, shot up into the heavens leaving Bardi alone.

The banker crossed himself. Angel cloaks, enchanted briars, devils walking the earth he could deal with. But Montagu a Luciferian? He simply could not believe it.

‘Truly these are the last days,’ he said. But, as his father had always told him, in any disaster or crisis, there’s money to be made. The end of the world might just be an investment opportunity, should he find something with which to invest. He scrambled up to examine the chest.

10

Another child had been taken. Free Hell had claimed little Maude, the child revealed missing from her crib with the morning light, the flame demon visiting to urge him to action. Philippa’s howls filled the palace and Edward had smashed everything about him. Vases, chairs, windows, tables, all took the brunt of his useless wrath. No good. They had his daughter. Edward was a sentimental man, so he mourned his bonny little Maude – but at least it was not a son.

‘I am trying,’ he said on his knees in the Windsor chapel. ‘God, give me strength. I will honour my vow to your enemy and then I will crush them.’

Philippa was pregnant again. He could not lose another child. Another, harder push would need to be made. France must fall. The war was proving utterly ruinous. How ruinous? France was finding it expensive, the richest country in the world. Edward could pile up his IOUs to the sky. He was indebted to virtually every landowner in England, and still he needed more for his expedition. The devils had helped there. Lord Sloth was uncommonly good at extracting money from people, his violence and aggression yielded even better results than Montagu had achieved with his charm.

Montagu. Still the name made him boil. He’d told Edwin the Luciferian priest that he wanted him delivered up, but Edwin said he couldn’t find him. Edwin was no longer really a prisoner, more of a leader of the bowmen who travelled in promise of their Eden in France.

Montagu had lain with his mother. His mother! Isabella had by letter suggested burning his manor house and imprisoning his wife to flush him out, if he was not captive, and to provide a lesson to others even if he was. Had he admitted her to his presence, no doubt she would have got her way. As it was, Philippa had begged mercy for Lady Montagu, and his wife’s tears prevailed.

So many years of fighting, so much destruction, all to come to this. Edward knelt in the chapel, his coat of plates on his back, his son Edward beside him, nearly a man now, he too in full armour, taller even than his tall father.

Little Edward, as his family still called him, wore a green and white caparison over his harness decorated with the royal leopards. Would the boy fight? Of course he would. He had held a sword as soon as he’d been removed from his mother’s breast. At a tournament he gave the best knights in the land a run for their money. Little Edward would become just Edward when they brought the French to battle.

The king thought back over the years of truce – years in which the fighting had hardly ceased. Brittany had been burned black, half held by the pretender to the Dukedom, John De Montfort and his more able wife, half lost again. He remembered the walls of Quimper, the devils howling over the battlements, no need for siege engines or ladders. ‘There’s a reason the fortress at Dis has smooth walls a mile high,’ Lord Sloth had said. ‘These little defences are no more than country stiles to the legions of Hell.’ Some stile Quimper had proved to be. The giant who claimed to be Hugh Despenser had marshalled his forces there. Lion fought spider, the boarheads of Dis fought the waspheads of Agana while the Luciferians with their bows blackened the air with arrows blessed by the priest Edwin – blessed in the name of Lucifer. Edward had tried to insist they have their arrows blessed by God’s priests but this they would not do – promised land or no promised land. Without the blessing, the arrows were useless against the devils, so Edward, a man who had swallowed so much of his pride it was surprising he had not grown fat on it, had to swallow some more.

What a coalition. What a mess. But the French king still had not put his angels in the field and his reliance on Despenser was encouragement that he could not.

No angels from France, no angels from England. Some said the age of angels was over. It was
not
over. Spies at Reims had seen the angel sparkling above the cathedral, at Chartres and Notre Dame too. Some said the archangel Michael had come to France’s aid and sat in a great throne above Montmartre.

The English needed all the help they could get. Devils could fight the devils, the men the men but without angels, without angels! The Holy Roman Emperor had taken his back, unsatisfied with his rates of pay. Charles of Navarre was known to have coaxed his from the shrine in Pamplona. Which way would that odd fellow and his mother jump? They’d had enough meetings with Navarrese representatives and nothing solid had ever come out of it.

The south, the Agenais and Aquitaine had been at constant war – cities lost, cities gained, Bordeaux falling, recaptured, falling again. And yet the main truce – in truth a series of truces – had held, while Edward’s children were threatened by fiends.

Now it was over and the ships ready to sail. Edward crossed himself.

‘King.’ A voice hung above him, like the sound of a deep bell.

Edward looked up. Around him the light cut rainbows in the air, a curtain of diamonds seemed to drop from the ceiling of the chapel, falling soundlessly to the floor, not settling. A strange elation filled him and his head swam. He recognised the feeling immediately – he’d had it when his father had introduced him to the angel at Walsingham as a boy.