The Raven's Head (32 page)

I hauled my leg up on the bench so that the apothecary could examine it.

He flexed my toes and prodded the wound in the ball of my foot, ignoring my gasps of pain and keeping a firm grip on my ankle as my foot jerked at each touch.

‘I should send you to the physician. Master Alfred objects to me treating his patients.’ He shrugged. ‘I cannot blame him. I’m depriving him of a living, but even a king would blanch at the fees he charges – and as for his treatments! Sometimes I think he is still living in the days of the Saxons, like his namesake.’

‘I’m not Master Alfred’s patient,’ I said. ‘I arrived in Langley today and I’ll not be staying long. I swear he’ll never know you treated me.’

The apothecary smiled wearily. ‘All the same, we’d best close the shop. You never know who might peer in.’

He bustled outside into the street, lifting the counter up so that it fitted over the open window as a shutter, then returned and refastened the door. Lighting a candle at the fire burning in the hearth, he collected a wicked-looking iron implement shaped like a small spear, with a long glass tube that opened out at one end into a small glass sphere.

‘Perhaps I should see the physician after all,’ I said hastily. ‘I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble.’ I tried to thrust my swollen foot back into my shoe.

He pressed me firmly back onto the bench. ‘Have faith, young man.’

Faith had never been a particular virtue of mine: I preferred always to trust what I could see, and seeing the apothecary advance towards my exceedingly tender foot with that sharp little spear was not helping to turn me into a believer.

‘I will make the tiniest of incisions so quickly you will feel nothing but relief. Then I will draw a little of the poisoned blood.’

He straddled the end of the bench, clamping my foot between his knees. He was right. The sharp prick as the blade pierced the swollen flesh was almost at once followed by an immediate easing as the warm, sticky fluid oozed out.

He held a snip of cloth to the candle flame till it caught fire, dropped it inside the glass sphere and quickly pressed the end of the long glass neck over the incision. The mouth of the glass tightened hard against my skin and I felt a strong, sucking sensation. He’d neglected to warn me that that part would hurt. I yelped as he slid a finger against the edge of the glass and levered it off. It came away from my skin with a pop, and as he held the glass up in the light of the candle, I saw the sphere now contained watery blood and yellow pus.

‘Does your foot feel easier now?’ he asked.

To my surprise, I found it did, though it was still tender.

‘I’ll dress it with an ointment that will draw out any remaining foulness. You must apply it morning and night for three days. After that you should return here, so that I may look at it again. It would be foolish to walk any distance on that wound. It will only inflame it the more. Stay in Langley till it is healed.’

‘Are there any passable inns in the town?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘I have no use for them myself. Better ask in the market.’

He smeared a thick layer of some dark green ointment on my foot. It smelt of fat and bitter herbs, but didn’t smart. In fact, it was soothing.

‘I was thinking of visiting a certain baron who I’m told lives in these parts,’ I said casually. ‘A friend asked me to call and enquire how he does. He goes by the name of Sylvain. Does he live far from here?’

The apothecary’s hand paused in mid-air and a great gob of the sticky ointment plopped onto the bench. ‘You know Lord Sylvain?’

‘I know of him only through a friend and it’s been many years since they met. Is he in good health?’

The apothecary rose abruptly and went to a shelf, pulling down a box containing strips of linen. ‘I do not discuss the health of my customers.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of asking you to break any confidences. I only meant that my friend hopes he is well. I trust he prospers? I believe my friend said he was newly wed,’ I added, in the hope that he would be drawn into correcting me.

The apothecary did not meet my eye, seemingly absorbed in the all-engrossing task of bandaging my foot. ‘Is that why you came to my shop, to learn of Lord Sylvain?’

‘Hardly – you’ve seen my foot. It was relief from the pain that I wanted.’

His fingers worked deftly, but his lips remained firmly pressed together.

I glanced along the shelves, noticing the array of poisons sufficient to lay waste an entire army. At the very least this apothecary was usurping the physician’s role behind his back, which Master Alfred would not take kindly to if he discovered it. I briefly contemplated reminding the apothecary of that and maybe hinting about the poisons too, but I thought better of it. I couldn’t afford to upset him. I needed his services to heal my foot far more than I needed his money. If the wound turned foul, Sylvain would be the least of my concerns. Besides, I could probably learn all I needed from the well-oiled tongues in the local inn: judging by that woman in the marketplace the whole town was gossiping about the baron.

I treated the apothecary to one of my most carefree smiles and prattled on about the wars in France, the rowdy behaviour of the foreign pilgrims, the late spring and anything else I could think of that would make it appear my enquiries about Sylvain were nothing more than inconsequential chatter to pass the time.

All the while, however, my mind was working feverishly. A missing wife, a wealthy man who shut himself away with only men for company and who was now brewing up Heaven knew what with the help of a young girl. If there wasn’t a scandal here already, one was crying out to be invented and a great big juicy one at that. The question was, how best to get close to this Sylvain long enough to convince him he badly needed my help?

He was plainly not a man to frequent the inns or stewhouses. And I guessed from what little the woman had said that a stranger, even one bearing a message, was unlikely to be admitted to his house, never mind be granted a private audience. But perhaps the message might be carried another way. Yes, the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I’d been shown exactly how to get inside the baron’s deep and well-lined purse.

He who wants to enter the divine realm, must first enter his mother’s body and die therein.

Lord Sylvain is watching her again. She can feel it. When Gisa can hear neither his feet shuffling on the boards above her nor the clink of the glass vessels, she is afraid. In the silence, in the stillness, she knows he watches.

He has arranged two silver mirrors at angles in her store room beneath his chamber and hung a great silver ball in his own chamber above the trapdoor. He says they are to reflect the light, to help her work. But whenever she is in his chamber, she stares into the silver ball and knows that it captures the reflections of the mirrors in her room below, imprisons them, so that he can watch her chamber as if it is land floating in air. He can see the bench where she grinds the herbs and the stairs she climbs. These objects are distorted. Things she knows to be small appear monstrous. Straight lines are bent into graceful curves. She knows she, too, must be grotesquely twisted inside that silver ball. But why does he watch? Is he afraid she will steal from him?

Her face flushes hot with guilt, for she has stolen and she means to do so again as soon as she can, a little fragment of dragon’s blood, some myrrh, galbanum and opanax to make the
unguentum apostolorum
, which she has been reading about in his books. She needs it for the trapped boy.

Gisa has found a plank to bridge the ditch and reach the hole where the boy lies beneath the wall. She conceals the plank among the trees. It must not be seen. For the past three nights, as soon as she can slip away from Aunt Ebba, she has brought stolen food and small ale to the boy, blankets thin enough to feed through the hole and a shirt of her uncle’s, to cover his naked body. She took the iron crow from the blacksmith while his back was turned, and worked until her hands were blistered, but not one of the great stones would move or even splinter. But she will free him.

He lies on a narrow ledge inside the tunnel, just inches above the oozing mud and water. The labyrinth of channels is the bowel of the abbey, carrying away the filth draining from its latrines, wash houses and middens. But Gisa has seen the dried refuse and green slime covering the ledge on which the boy lies. If it rains hard or the river bursts its banks, the tunnels will fill to the top. And there will be no way out for Peter. Every day she glances anxiously at the sky.

But the boy may not survive long enough to drown. He is weak and growing weaker from loss of blood and the cold. Raised red lumps, and scarlet Y-shaped marks cover what she can see of his face and arms where the midges and leeches have fed on him, and the mice that scuttle along the ledges have nibbled his hair. Yet, tormented though he is by the creatures that infest the tunnels, he is far more terrified that the White Canons will find him again. Every day he begs her to tell no one he is here.

Jumbled fragments of nightmares tumble from his mouth as he gobbles the stolen food –
blood and magpies, furnaces that burn and floors that turn to water
. Yet, if she asks him to tell her more, so that she can try to make sense of it, he presses his hand to his mouth.

‘Mustn’t talk. Mustn’t tell . . . He’ll know . . .’

And through the long days and longer nights, the child is alone in the tunnel, his mouth pressed desperately to the wind that blows across that pitiful square of light, while she lies awake in her narrow bed, tunnelling through the weight of her thoughts, searching for a way – any way – to release him.

The sun moves round the slits in the chamber of Sylvain’s tower, piercing each in turn and sending a thin blade of gold to touch the wall opposite. When the sun shines through the fourth slit, the bell on the door at the bottom of the tower will clang. Gisa hastens down the wooden stairs where Odo has left their midday meal in a basket covered with fresh white linen. She carries it up to Lord Sylvain. He washes his hands in the laver with perfumed soap and gestures for her to do the same.

Then they eat – roasted plovers, snipe, egret and curlew, re-dressed in their coats of feathers as if they were about to take wing. Eggs boiled in herbs and spices until they are scarlet or green. Roast larks’ tongues arranged around glistening beads of rosehip jelly, like the petals of strange flowers. Fruits preserved in honey, nuts dipped in spices. On fast days they eat scarlet lobsters, sea-swine and coffins of lampreys, washed down with purple wine.

Sylvain chooses what Gisa will eat, offering the morsels to her on the point of his knife, studying her face as she takes the first bite of a new dish, waiting until she has swallowed before he selects something for himself, as if he must be satisfied she has consumed it all . . . as if he knows she really wants to steal it for the boy.

Today there is a whole round cheese among the roasted birds. Sylvain breaks it open. The stench chokes her for inside the cheese is rotten, almost liquid, and wriggling with tiny white worms.

‘See, the maggots are generated by the corruption and decay of the cheese. This is their womb and it will be their tomb.’

He scoops a dollop of liquid cheese and wriggling worms up in his fingers and pops it into his mouth. A white worm escapes from between his lips and jumps to the floor. He digs his fingers into the maggoty cheese again, pushing the wriggling mass towards Gisa’s mouth and laughs when she recoils. But, for once, he does not make her eat it.

‘You know that all things are composed of four elements. Tell me their qualities,’ he orders, his smile suddenly vanished.

‘Fire is hot and dry. Air is hot and moist. Water cold and moist. Earth cold and dry.’

It is a question a mere child could answer, or at least a child who has grown up in an apothecary’s shop, for every cure depends upon knowing which illness has arisen from heat and may be cured by herbs that are cold, which decoction has dry properties and which moist.

He nods. ‘Then what is the ultimate desire of the human spirit?’

She falters.
Then
implies a connection and she can see none.

He is waiting. He plucks the flesh from a heron’s breast and stabs it with his knife. It hangs there, impaled. She senses his impatience, fears his anger.

A phrase from her Psalter pops into her mouth. ‘Body and soul together shall rise from death and be with God and have joy that lasts for ever.’ Does he think her ignorant of the holy faith?

Sylvain frowns, and she knows she has not given him the answer he wants. ‘The elements – think of the elements, Gisa, fire and air. What is the body but earth and water? Earth and water cannot rise. The body must be purified through fire and entwined with the spirit, which is air. Only then does it cease to be moist and formless and may rise up through each of the four elements. Purified, it may ascend through the seven planets, through the realm of the unborn souls, through the nine choirs of angels, through the pure spirits. It must rise beyond all the realms until the dry soul is reunited with the fire that is the Divine, which is far beyond this God, this creature with a human face that priests like Arthmael have fashioned. Do you understand? There is not one death, but four. There is not one resurrection, but four.’

She stares at the boards beneath her feet. She has never heard Father Roland talk of these four resurrections. Would he declare this heresy? Yet how can she refuse to listen? Lord Sylvain is her master.

Sylvain reaches out and takes her hand, which she has left carelessly within his reach.

‘Soon you will see the first death, Gisa, you will watch it. You will feel the power of it and then you will understand.’

She pulls her hand away, afraid of the fire that burns too brightly in his eyes. Her father is dead. She does not want to see death.

Sylvain carries each dish in turn to one of the windows and begins to push the remains of the food out through the slit. Birds appear as if they have been waiting. Gulls and ravens, jays and jackdaws swoop down, hopping across the grass, snatching greedily at the flesh that once flew like them.