1356. Bernard Cornwell
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had no idea what this old picture meant. ‘Aren’t you painters supposed to know all these symbols?’
‘What symbols?’
‘The sword, the keys, the snow, the man in the window!’
‘The sword is Peter’s sword, the keys are the keys of heaven! You need teaching how to suck at your mother’s tit?’
‘And the snow?’
Giacomo scowled, plainly uncomfortable with the question. ‘The idiot couldn’t paint grass,’ he finally decided, ‘so he slapped on some cheap limewash! It has no meaning! Tomorrow we chip it off and put something pretty there.’
Yet whoever had painted the scene had taken the trouble to clear that patch of snow from around the kneeling man, and he had painted the grass cleverly enough, scattering it with small yellow and blue flowers. So the cleared snow had a meaning, as did the presence of the second monk looking fearfully from the cottage window. ‘Do you have charcoal?’ Thomas asked.
‘Of course I have charcoal!’ Giacomo gestured to the table where his pigments stood.
Thomas went to the door and looked out into the great audience chamber. There was no sign of Cardinal Bessières or of the green-eyed priest, and so he picked up a lump of charcoal and went to the strange painting. He wrote on it.
‘What are you doing?’ Giacomo asked.
‘I want the cardinal to see that,’ Thomas said.
He had scrawled Calix Meus Inebrians in great black letters across the snow. ‘My cup makes me drunk?’ Giacomo asked, puzzled.
‘It’s from a psalm of David,’ Thomas said.
‘But what does it mean?’
‘The cardinal will know,’ Thomas said.
Giacomo frowned. ‘Sweet Christ,’ he said, ‘but you play dangerously.’
‘Thanks for letting me piss here,’ Thomas said. The painter was right, this was dangerous, but if he could not track down Father Calade in this city of his enemies, then he would invite Father Calade to follow him, and Thomas suspected that Father Calade would turn out to be the priest with very green eyes.
And the priest with the green eyes was interested in an old, badly painted picture of two monks and Saint Peter, but the centre of the painting had not been the kneeling monk, nor even the gowned figure of Saint Peter himself, but the sword.
And Thomas, though he could not be certain, was suddenly convinced that the sword had a name: la Malice.
And that day, long before the None prayers, and before anyone could find him and put him to the church’s torture, Thomas and his company left Avignon.
The warm weather came. It was campaigning weather, and all across France men sharpened weapons, exercised horses and waited for the summons to serve the king. The English were sending reinforcements to Brittany and to Gascony and men thought that surely King Jean would raise a great army to crush them, but instead he took a smaller army to the edges of Navarre, to the castle of Breteuil, and there, facing the stronghold’s gaunt walls, his men constructed a siege tower.
It was a monstrous thing, taller than a church’s spire, a scaffold of three floors perched on two iron axles joined to four massive wheels of solid elm. The front and sides of the tower were sheathed in oak planks to prevent the castle’s garrison from riddling the platforms with crossbow bolts, and now, in a cold dawn, men were nailing stiff leather hides to that wooden armour. They worked a mere four hundred paces from the castle and once in a while a defender would shoot a crossbow bolt, but the range was too long and the bolts always fell short. Four flags flew from the tower’s summit, two with the French fleur-de-lys and two showing an axe, the symbol of France’s patron saint, the martyred Saint Denis. The flags stretched and twisted in the wind. There had been a gale in the night and the wind still blew strong from the west.
‘One shower of rain,’ the Lord of Douglas said, ‘and this damn thing will be useless. They’ll never move it! It’ll bog down in mud.’
‘God is on our side,’ his young companion said placidly.
‘God,’ the Lord of Douglas said disgustedly.
‘Watches over us,’ the young man said. He was tall and slender, scarce more than twenty or twenty-one years old, with a strikingly handsome face. He had fair hair that was brushed back from a high forehead, blue eyes that were calm, and a mouth that seemed constantly hovering on the edge of a smile. He was from Gascony, where he owned a fief that had been sequestered by the English, leaving him without the income of his lands, which loss should have rendered him poor, but the Sire Roland de Verrec was renowned as the greatest of France’s tournament fighters. Some had claimed that Joscelyn of Berat was the better man, but at Auxerre, Roland had defeated Joscelyn three times, then tormented the brutal champion, Walther of Siegenthaler, with quicksilver swordplay. At Limoges he had been the only man standing at the end of a vicious melee, while in Paris the women had sighed as he destroyed two hardened knights who had twice his years and many times his experience. Roland de Verrec earned the fees of a champion because he was lethal.
And a virgin.
His black shield bore the symbol of the white rose, the rose without thorns, the flower of the Virgin Mary and a proud display of his own purity. The men he so constantly defeated in the lists thought he was mad, the women who watched him thought he was wasted, but Roland de Verrec had devoted his life to chivalry, to sanctity and to goodness. He was famous for his virginity; he was also mocked for it, though never to his face and never within reach of his quick sword. He was also admired for his purity, even envied, because it was said that he had been commanded to a life of sanctity by a vision of the Virgin Mary herself. She had appeared to him when he was just fourteen, she had touched him and she had told him he would be blessed above all men if he kept himself chaste as she was chaste. ‘You will marry,’ she had told him, ‘but till then you are mine.’ And so he was.
Men might mock Roland, but women sighed over him. One woman had been driven to tell Roland de Verrec that he was beautiful. She had reached out and touched his cheek, ‘All that fighting and not one scar!’ she had said, and he had drawn back from her as if her finger burned, then said that all beauty was but a reflection of God’s grace. ‘If I believed otherwise,’ he had told her, ‘I would be tempted to vanity,’ and perhaps he did suffer from that temptation because he dressed with inordinate care and always wore his armour blanched: scrubbed with sand, vinegar and wire until it reflected the sun with dazzling brilliance. Though not on this day because the sky above Breteuil was low, grey and dark.
‘It’s going to rain,’ the Lord of Douglas growled, ‘and this damned tower will go nowhere.’
‘It will bring us victory,’ Roland de Verrec said, sounding quietly confident. ‘The Bishop of Châlons blessed it last night; it will not fail.’
‘It shouldn’t even be here,’ Douglas snarled. The Scottish knights had been summoned by King Jean to join this attack on Breteuil, but the defenders were not Englishmen, they were other Frenchmen. ‘I didn’t come here to kill Frenchmen,’ Douglas said, ‘I came here to kill the English.’
‘They’re Navarrese,’ Roland de Verrec said, ‘the enemies of France, and our king wants them defeated.’
‘Breteuil is a goddamned pimple!’ the Lord of Douglas protested. ‘For Christ’s sake, what importance does it have? There are no bloody Englishmen inside!’
Roland smiled. ‘Whoever is inside, my lord,’ he said quietly, ‘I do my king’s bidding.’
The King of France, ignoring the Englishmen in Calais, in Gascony and in Brittany, had instead chosen to march against the Kingdom of Navarre on the edge of Normandy. The quarrel was obscure and the campaign a waste of scarce resources, for Navarre could not threaten France, yet King Jean had chosen to fight. It was evidently a family quarrel, one the Lord of Douglas did not comprehend. ‘Let them rot here,’ he said, ‘while we march