Son of the Morning (83 page)

Something strange was in the air – it smelled very sweet, like pine but with an intoxicating feeling to it. Fireflies bobbed on invisible currents and the woods were full of birdsong.

Orsino crossed himself and opened his pack. Swift and practised, he put his sword and shield on the floor and put on his angel’s hauberk. He picked up his crossbow from where the ympes had dropped it and, without saying a word, was ready to go. Dow could see Orsino’d been shaken to travel in that way but he was now a soldier on a mission. It wasn’t the time to express surprise or exchange impressions of the journey.

Dow, who had now put on his threadbare mail, put his helmet on his head and took up his weapons and shield. Orsino gestured with his eyes towards the chapel. He nodded and the men picked their way carefully through the trees.

Now Dow began to doubt – two of them against however many? Two mortals against however many angels. He put it from his head. Doubt was not useful to him – it would not change his course of action, only make him hesitate. This is your purpose, this your choice. Honour it.

The wood being pine was less dense on the ground than it had seemed from the air. They had agreed – Orsino would take the villa, Dow the chapel. Orsino could hold off any attack from the rear while Dow went for the banner. Could he face down angels, if they were in there? The question was pointless. Free Hell had set him the task and he was going to attempt it. His pack was heavy enough already without putting doubt in it.

Still, he was scared, no point denying it.

Orsino moved right, Dow following him. The plan was that they’d observe the villa at close quarters and then Dow would sneak on to the chapel if it looked as though Orsino was capable of handling the garrison on his own. Dow glanced at his companion. In his angel mail, with the shield of the Sacred Heart on his arm, the angelic helm on his head, he looked as if he was capable of handling an army. They’d estimated six men on the island, to judge by the supplies that were going over. Where were they?

They descended the slope. The chill of the mountains had gone here and a pleasantly warm breeze drifted in off the waters. It was when Dow looked up that he realised something was amiss. The constellations he’d seen since he was a boy were not there – no hunter, no pan, no crab. The sky was shot with billions of stars but he recognised not one.

Movement in the chapel. Lights playing on the inside of the windows, just visible through the carpet of roses.

‘An angel?’ said Orsino, crossing himself.

Dow didn’t reply, he just crept down the hill, towards the dancing lights.

4

When the deal was done, when Edward had offered the Luciferians what he had already promised in secret to the demon, that they would have their piece of France, they let Montagu go.

Montagu was surprised the heretics didn’t know they had been offered something they already had. Why had the demons not told their own followers? Now he saw it was simply practical. It was one thing to deal with heretics, another to deal with demons. Free Hell had not announced its deal because if Edward was known to have struck a deal with demons, his knights might have rebelled and refused to fight for him, making a victory and a new Eden for Free Hell on earth less likely. No honour anywhere any more. Just brutal realities.

Edward had sent a troop of knights and men-at-arms to fetch Montagu from Southwark. He’d been kept in the country nearby because the Luciferians had been outlawed from London and its surrounding villages. Edward might have promised France but he reserved the right to keep England under God. Edwin remained as the king’s captive until Montagu was returned.

Southwark was a like a country under occupation. Devils stalked the narrow streets – whips cracking, pitchforks jabbing. The sniffing devils were the worst – great eyeless hounds, slobbering and straining at the leash to scent God’s enemies’ blood and draw the constables of Hell to them. They could smell disbelief in all its shades – rebellion, doubt, apathy. All were caught and all were punished.

He was there a year, and all that time the people went about their business under curfew and assault. Church attendance had increased out of all proportion – in terms of bodies. People’s souls, it was said, stayed elsewhere. Every time a spider-headed inquisitor bit into a poor man’s flesh, it won another soul for Lucifer, and the slum was emptying fast.

Old habits die hard and Greatbelly had looked to Montagu for guidance. ‘Will Edward play us false or true?’ The lord had given it honestly. He saw how these people lived, how they were armed, and couldn’t account them a threat to Edward and his armies.

‘I don’t know,’ said Montagu. It was the truth. ‘Though I should approach your dealings with the king with the greatest care. He hates you, and a king’s hate is a terrible thing.’

‘But we have his promise.’

‘He will honour that,’ said Montagu. ‘But he will honour it to the letter. Take your bowmen and your demons away from him as soon as you can. Go to France but expect no favours from the French king. There are enmities within France. Exploit those if you can. Normandy is endlessly disputed even by the French. Some lord may need your bowmen and, for that, offer you brief protection.’

Greatbelly shook her great jowls. ‘I wish my Edwin was here,’ she said. ‘And Know-Much. They could advise and tell me if you’re telling me lies.’

The woman talked a great deal about this demon Know-Much and while there he did see some of the little whispering demons. Apparently they were trying to carry messages to the king’s court – unsuccessfully – as it was guarded by men with the wings of flies who tore the demons from the air if they saw them.

Montagu hadn’t enjoyed his time with the poor. Unsophisticated, their manners wanting, they lacked leaders though had great need of them. They had even debated the morality of keeping Montagu prisoner. Lucifer made all men free, they said. How could they then abuse the perfection of his creation by locking men up. No wonder these people were popular with rogues and thieves.

Still, he felt some care for these people. He had been raised to believe that he – as a nobleman – stood in the relation of a father to them, as the king stood as a father to his nobles. Like a father with errant children, he feared for them, he prayed for them and he could not hate them.

When they released him, they let him take his cloak and his sword. They were his personal possessions and therefore no man’s to steal. His lands and his money, however, were another matter. They returned one of his coins and kept the rest to buy bread for the poor.

‘Good luck spending them,’ Montagu thought. Gold écus d’or of the French realm would be like a pennant to the devils, drawing them from miles around.

So, as he waited at the edge of the woods on Streatham common for the king’s men to pick him up, he was resigned to his fate. Though not quite. He felt he would see
her
again before he died. In the dungeons where he had been shut, in the battles he had fought and the hardships he had endured, her face had always been in his mind. Isabella. He feared to die because of her and he hated himself for that. Had he given Greatbelly the cloak expecting to be kidnapped? He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t, though he hadn’t even had the guts to face his desire honestly and use it himself.

No, he had betrayed everything, his wife, his king, his God. Death was a luxury; God’s mercy unfathomable. He deserved to be damned and would put himself beyond redemption. He walked north at first. He would not use the cloak because of the sickness it brought, and had hidden it in a sack he’d taken from Greatbelly. The poor were generous, though they had little. If you consider nineteen gold coins for a sack a bargain.

His clothes were truly rags now and he could not identify himself to get into London. The city was far from Edward’s camp but some spy or ambitious sneak there would have reported his movements to the king. Officially there was a reward for information on his whereabouts so he might be rescued. He did not want to be rescued; he wanted to be damned and knew just where to go to secure that fate.

So he skirted the town, around the marshes. He couldn’t spend his coin, so he had no change to pay a ferryman. He headed west on the Tyburn Road. He reflected wryly that he was walking away from Tyburn, rather than towards it – as Edward might still command. He mourned his lost friendship, remembered those times they’d travelled together on various mad missions to courts across Europe. Once they’d gone disguised as merchants to avoid the attention of their enemies – and to save a few quid, Edward had pointed out. Low men didn’t need to put on a show when they travelled.

Montagu walked out to the bridge at Staines and pared the coin there. He sold the shavings to a money changer and finally had enough to buy an aged horse and a pair of decent boots. He took in the market at Oxford as he travelled north and bought some second hand clothes that, while far from fine, were not filthy. Watling Street was broad and green, then he took the Icknield Way – overshooting towards Lincoln before some pilgrims redirected him. The roads were busy, though he attached himself to no group of merchants, no pilgrims, no band of players. He placed himself in God’s hands. Half of him hoped he’d be attacked and killed before Nottingham. The going, however, was pleasant, and the nearest he came to assault was a couple of insistent hedgerow whores near Leicester. He had no intention of doing business with them – having spent much of the last year locked in what amounted to a brothel without having been tempted. The lack of money had helped, that and
her
memory. Isabella. Before whom all women’s beauty was simple prettiness – gaudy and commonplace as a woodbine.

Nottingham Castle could be seen looming above the city from five miles away. On this bright blue day women were washing their clothes in the river and hanging them like the flags of an army on trees for miles about. The town was under devil control now, and gargoyles flapped their stony wings above the castle, surveying the land. She’d be watching from up there. She loved to look out from high towers, owning the land like an eagle.

He’d approached this way before, by night, armed, sneaking. That too had been a mission of love – for his king – but she had been there.

He wept, for his stupidity, for his neglect of his wife. Catherine was better neglected by a man like him.

He gave the horse to the ferryman on the Trent. The man was surprised at his passenger’s generosity but Montagu just waved his hand and said nothing. Crossing the Styx, the old Greeks gave Charon the only coin they had to convey them to the land of the dead. No thought of return. He’d done the same.

The tunnel was how he remembered it – filled in with boulders, impassable. He pulled off an angel’s feather and pointed it to the rock. The stone shimmered, jellied, became as glass. And then it wasn’t there.

He climbed, clearing his way with the feather. The sack was an encumbrance now and he cast it aside, putting on the angel feather cloak he had got back from the Luciferians. He would not use it to travel but it would armour him against devils, he was sure.

He emerged on the stair. This time a spider devil, not a man, was on guard. Its legs were as thick as a man’s arm, straddling the corridor. It leapt for him, but Arondight struck true, piercing the great body, the dripping jaws snapping uselessly, a span from Montagu’s face.

He kept climbing to the master solar. Now a stoneskin gargoyle bore down on him, its spear singing over Montagu’s head. The sword made sure it was the last song that spear would ever sing as the creature ground its teeth and died. Three terrible figures – men, their limbs impossibly elongated with their hands full of cruel knives, descended. They stood between him and her and were as straws blown away in the wind. His rage, his love, could tear any enemy down.

Finally he was at that door, the one he’d been at so long ago to kill a tyrant and to let his friend reign as the true king Montagu had imagined him to be.

He opened it. She had her back to him, looking out of the window again. At her side was a little devil – a beautiful child with the wings of a gigantic bat sprouting from its back. It wore a long white shift and was playing a pipe for her.

‘Hello William. I see you’ve been consorting with your old friend death again.’

‘I did not choose.’ He was panting with the exertion of the fight.

‘What?’

‘Any of it. Nothing. My whole life. You have enchanted me and I am here.’

She turned to him, her blonde hair like spun gold in the candlelight. He felt a lurch inside him, like a push in the back, drawing him forward.

‘No William. I never did.’

‘You are a sorceress. A she-wolf.’

‘A wolf doesn’t bite everyone it sees. I chanted no names for you, William, I drew no circles nor took a lock of your hair to seal in a bottle that I might call your soul my own.’

‘You are a liar. You add that to your many crimes.’

‘I’m not a woman to waste effort, William. I could not gain anything by working my magical arts to enchant you. I’m afraid you were already enchanted. God wishes you to love her who hates you. He must hate you too.’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘You presume I want anything at all.’

The bat-winged child smiled sweetly at Montagu, its teeth a row of jagged spikes.

Montagu sank to his knees.

Isabella now smiled too. ‘If you’re expecting me to cut off your head, lord, you’re going to be disappointed.’

She went past him and closed the door. ‘Better take precautions against any of my devils leaping to my help,’ she said. ‘You know that I hate you,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘So I ask you your own question. What do you want from me? What can you want from me?’

‘To be your servant.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of what I am,’ he said. ‘For you I have betrayed my best friend and my king. For you I am here on my knees like a servant when I should be leading England’s armies in war. For you I have betrayed my wife and my children, turned my back on a happiness that would satisfy a thousand men. I deserve to be damned, lady, and I can think of no surer way of achieving that goal than by offering myself to you to do your vile work.’