The Seal (9 page)

‘It is light.’
He began to walk to the shore.

‘When the Order
passes, Etienne, will you know why you live and die?’

The wind
freshened. ‘Do you know why you live and die?’ Etienne gave back.

‘To expand my
trade! Why else?’ The man laughed. ‘I was on my way to Scotland in any case.’

‘Scotland?’
Etienne paused, his mind moving over the words.

‘When the worst
comes we can sail to Foyle from Portugal and from there to my holdings on the
west – but there is the channel to think of; this is King Edward’s sea
all the way to Ireland and beyond it to Scotland, and it crawls with English
galleys warring with Robert Bruce. It would be best to take a wide loop around
the west coast of Ireland to avoid them. It may take longer but we can do it in
good time with a fair breeze at our backs.’ He paused a moment, turning his
head like an intelligent dog.

‘You did not
know?’

Etienne walked
on and let his teeth worry his lip to prevent him from losing his calm. He had
been kept in a dark room that was now lit by a mercenary. It left him feeling
bewildered and disquieted.

Roger came
beside him. ‘You will adjust to it, things move fast in the world.’

He did not look
at the man. ‘In your world, not mine.’

Roger de Flor
gave out a whistle. ‘This is your world now! The world of ordinary men.’ He
held him by the arm. ‘You shall see you are not worth less for living in it,
though you will need to recast yourself anew!’

Etienne shrugged
away his hand. ‘A light metal cannot hold the same value.’

The mercenary
followed. ‘Well then, I admire you for it, Etienne. Leaning on the rule has
shaped you in God’s image.’

Etienne did not
turn around but spoke over his shoulders: ‘I am not the image of God’s because
I lean on the rule, de Flor! I lean on it to stop me from falling over the rim
of the world!’

‘Ahh!’ the
mercenary said, waving it away with a hand full of rings that reflected the
light they gathered. ‘Some of us must live on the rim of the world! But then we
had best lean on gold, it is far more steady than a rule!’

They heard
Marcus call out to them from the beach then, where a rose sun hung over the
water throwing hints of day over the barge that was loaded up and ready to go.

T
he
morning had moved forward and the warmth was fast becoming heat on the backs
and shoulders of the five men upon their horses as they travelled from the
little bay towards the house at Famagusta.

Below eyes
hooded from the harsh light, Iterius observed the seneschal, riding in front on
his Spanish horse. The man was tall and edge-faced with eyes the colour of sky,
framed by dark brows in a head that was well placed on broad shoulders uneven
in height. The arms were long and ended in hands that expressed good breeding
and the clear thoughts of the man who guided them.

The Alexandrian
frowned, narrowing his eyes. It was hot. The sweat dripped along his brow under
his hair and over his nose. He might not be handsome like his lord, Etienne,
but he was quick-witted. Quick-witted men survived whilst handsome ones found
themselves on pyres or at the end of swords.

The seneschal
must have had an instinct, for he turned around and threw Iterius a suspicious
eye. Iterius for his part smiled back and followed as they picked their way
through the flat track bordered by a meagre scattering of dying olive trees.
The beauty of an aquamarine ocean upon which the sun bent its rays winked at
him but it was lost on the Alexandrian,
who
dragged a
hand over his brow to hide from the sun. He did not like Cyprus. It was to his
mind a place hot and damned.

He looked behind
him to the biggest of the Normans, Gideon, who was singing low a song in his
own vulgar language. A little ahead of the seneschal, the younger, whom they
called Aubert, was sweating inside the sleeveless skin he wore for a shirt.
Both men seemed of violent disposition with their twisted beards and jewellery
made of bones and teeth. Iterius shuddered. He would have as little to do with
them as he could. Well ahead of the group the tall dark-skinned Catalan,
Delgado, rode elegantly, adjusting maggots on a wound upon his arm and riding
as he did so, as if the horse were made of his own sinew and muscle. Next to
him rode the beautiful Captain Jourdain, with his hair the colour of wheat and
his long lashes, brown eyes and perfect mouth uttering verses from Plato or
Aristotle. He felt desire rise up and he made it ebb away since he must contrive.

It was his guess
that the Catalan was more dangerous than the Normans, in the same way that
snakes are more dangerous than bulls.
And Jourdain, while
beautiful to behold and gentle of voice, had been known to cut the face of a
Mameluk in two while reciting something poetic from Virgil.
He grunted.
From the air descended sweet scents and the promise of swollen fruits. It
filled him with romantic notions and he gave a sigh and waited until he could
wait no more.

‘That galley,’
he said to the trees and the heat, ‘it seemed weighed down at the finish of it,
something
heavy in those barrels . . . something very
heavy.’

The seneschal
stared ahead but his mount lagged behind until it was almost level with
Iterius’s horse. ‘Did you not keep your eyes to the road then, Egyptian?’ he
said to him.

The sergeant
ignored this. ‘What could be so heavy, my lord? Not lead as ballast, surely?
Not lead but –’

There was a
sudden sharp movement to his
right,
a blur of images
and Iterius felt himself upon the ground with his long face and nose smelling
dust, and his limbs having fallen into a complicated tangle with a withering
shrub. His head throbbed and from his right ear came the hot sensation of
blood.

Beside that ear
came the sound of Etienne’s voice. ‘You do not observe the rule!’ he whispered.
‘There are ears in the bushes and in the olive trees, ears even in the wind!’

Iterius gasped
and swallowed dirt, something at his back and something else pinning down his
arm. The voice came close to his ear again and made a heat in it. ‘Who sends
you?’

The Egyptian now
observed the plain fact that the voice would have an answer and that even in
his state of discomfort he must do so or risk certain unpleasant consequences.
‘Who?’ he prevaricated.

‘Yes . . . by
all means!’ the voice said.

‘Who has sent
me?’ he said, emitting little gasps. ‘Yes . . . yes . . . I will tell.’ He
opened one eye and saw a snake before his nose going about its business. Snakes
made good poison, he thought; if only he had such a snake in his hand, one bite
could put this nuisance from his back and this voice from his ear. The snake
moved like a flash into the undergrowth and was gone. ‘I will tell, but ... Ah!
I ... am ... short of ... breath . . .’

There was a
sudden relief of pressure that seemed to him twofold: upon his back, what must
have been a knee or an elbow was now released, and in front, upon the dry
earth, where his fingers drew under his sergeant’s cloak to push up with his
hands, there was a hot wetness – urine.

But his lord
Etienne stood over him with his face full of danger. ‘Are we to find menace
upon the road ahead of us?’

The sergeant
pushed himself up onto his knees, attempting to gather his wits. ‘Yes.’

Having somewhat
recovered, he contrived to stand but found himself swaying before the sound of
laughter that came as if from the trees. It was a sound absurd and unsuited to
his circumstances and as he stood, uncertain, he tried to guess if it were
coming from God or man. With one eye then, he saw that the Normans and the
Catalan were off their horses and laughing like anything. Jourdain was standing
next to the seneschal wearing a grin. This joviality filled him, therefore,
with a slight but logical irritation that was moderated by the frowning face of
his superior and the possible
hurts which
awaited him.

He heard Etienne
tell the Normans to get back on their animals whereupon he returned his
attention to Iterius who was curving and bending and swaying. ‘Are you a king’s
spy, or a spy for the Temple bankers?’

‘None of those.’
Iterius was shaking his head and spitting blood from his mouth.

Etienne rubbed
the sweat from his neck and Iterius realised that his superior found this game
of questions peculiarly annoying.

‘What then?’ he
said.

The Egyptian,
his face now patterned in different shades of red, answered, ‘
Myself
. I am come to warn you, of d’Oselier . . .’

‘Warn me?’
Etienne pushed the Egyptian with a finger and sent him into a dance of balance
that ended once more in a humbling fall. ‘When were you to warn me? After the
arrow had found my back?’

Iterius raised
his head a little, seeing two seneschals of the Order observing his familiarity
with the ground. ‘He is against you,’ he managed to say, ‘he rallies men to his
side . . .’

His lord seemed
to be teetering on the brink of sending his face once more into that dirt and
Iterius cowered.

‘How comes to
you this intrigue?’

Iterius closed
an eye in his wounded face in order to see one seneschal. ‘I am not alone who
knows it, but I am alone in who comes to warn you of the slaughter that awaits
you upon this road . . . on the orders of d’Oselier.’

The seneschal
frowned. ‘I think you a self-seeker, whose ears are pressed to doors for your
own designs.’

Iterius wore a
look of
amazement which
he cleared by shaking his
head. ‘I am a loyal dog, who will stop at nothing to save his master.’
Whereupon he smiled a bloody smile and let his head fall back into the wet
dirt. Looking upward to the dome of the sky he felt a confidence, despite his hurts,
in his brilliant deceit.

In a sudden, he
heard a grunt and found that it came from him since he was being grabbed by the
middle and thrown upon the horse like a sack of dung. By the time his eyes came
together the seneschal and Jourdain were already upon their Arabians.

‘Where is the
snare?’ Etienne asked, pulling up his horse.

The Egyptian
swayed. ‘At the hillock near Ayios Memnon, at the ruined church.’

The seneschal
turned his back without further conversation and urged his animal forward.

Disconcerted,
Iterius, who had been left to his devices, called out after the Templar and the
mercenaries, ‘Will you not turn around, Lord Etienne? Take another way?’

‘No,’ Etienne
said without looking back. ‘We run out of time. We shall face them, warned as
we are and ready, and you shall be at the head.’

A
s
promised, Etienne and his men travelled the road that followed the sea with
Iterius at the head. When they neared the place where the Templars were said to
be lying in wait, the men tethered their horses to low-grown bushes before a
loop in the road and made their way up the sandy incline on their bellies.
Etienne was first to gaze over the rise. There he saw the familiar ruins of the
old church with its cavernous mouth jutting out from behind twisted, withered
trees and beyond to the wider view of the barren plains of the peninsula.

Sun daggers
sliced his back and worried their way under his dark attire. Sweat trickled
over his eyes and dripped wet onto the dirt, hot as an oven beneath him. He
felt awkward and heavy, out of breath. His body, caught between youth and old
age, clung to muscles and sinews strapped over worn-down bones. He got his
breath back and looked beside him to Jourdain. The young captain was flushed
and full of life. He had all his life ahead of him, such as it might be, and
Etienne felt pity for the boy, seeing himself in that face. Twenty years of
this would wear out his soul and his body would follow, so that he too would
some day come to feel sadness when gazing into a youthful face. All that would
come to him if he did not die before.

Etienne gave a
look to the Normans who were lying upon the earth with their swords beneath
them, the Catalan who lay on his back relaxed, holding his axe as if it were a
fine, light thing. Then he looked back at Iterius who stood behind them,
trembling. His ignoble countenance was staring upwards to the cloud-free sky in
a caricature, or so it looked to Etienne, of prayer.

A sound took
away Etienne’s attention and he returned his gaze to the church, whereupon he
saw a man dressed not in coif and mail but in ordinary dress come out of the
ruin. The man looked around, arching his
back
, and
took to the bushes nearby. He then proceeded to pull down his breeches in order
to attend to the ministry of his intestinal needs.

Etienne thought
this a fine piece of luck and made a signal for the Normans to move with
stealth behind the body of the church. Gideon took it upon himself to come upon
the man by surprise and after that Aubert found a position on one side of the
church door while the Catalan moved to the other. Etienne then signalled
Jourdain, who understood his intentions and went to fetch the horses.