Company of Liars Read online

  He hurried out after the boy, pausing to speak to the innkeeper’s wife whose temper had grown, if possible, even more savage since Jofre had spilled her dish. I couldn’t hear what passed between them for the chatter of the other customers, but I could see her scowl melting to a reluctant smile and then to a deep, rosy blush. And when he bowed, kissed her hand and excused himself, she gazed at his retreating back with the cow eyes of a lovesick maid. Rodrigo had learned the art of courtly love well. I wondered how he dealt with jealous husbands. I guessed he was not quite so skilled at winning their admiration or he would not now find himself on the road.

  I settled back to my ale, which was passable, and the pottage, which was not, but it was hot and filling and when you know what an empty belly feels like you learn to be more than grateful for that much. But I was not left to sit in peace for long. An unkempt man, who’d been warming his ample backside at the fire, slid on to the bench vacated by Rodrigo. I’d seen him in these parts before, but had never exchanged more than a gruff ‘G’day’ with him. He studied his tankard of ale in silence for a long time as if he expected to see something new and startling crawling out of it.

  ‘They foreigners?’ he asked suddenly without looking up.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Look like foreigners, talk like ’em too.’

  ‘How many foreigners have you heard talk?’

  He scowled at me. ‘Enough.’

  I’d have been surprised if the man had encountered more than half a dozen in his life. He’d not have known an Icelander from a Moor by his looks, never mind his speech. Thornfalcon did not lie on the main merchants’ road and the nearby priory contained only the relics of a local saint that few outside those parts would trouble to visit. The man’s scowl settled more deeply into the grimy wrinkles of his face.

  ‘You still ain’t answered me. They foreigners?’

  ‘English as you or me. Been minstrels in the court of some lord all their lives. You know what it’s like, around the gentry all day, they start thinking themselves one of them. They dress in their cast-offs and before you know it they start talking like them too.’

  The man gave a non-committal grunt. He’d almost certainly never heard a lord talk either, so that was a safe enough line.

  ‘So long as they’re not foreigners.’ He hacked and spat on to the floor. ‘Fecking foreigners. I’d have ’em run out of England, every man jack of ’em. And if they won’t go…’ He drew a thick stubby finger across his throat. ‘Bringing their filthy diseases here.’

  ‘The pestilence? I heard it was lads from Bristol who carried it aboard their ship.’

  ‘Aye, ’cause they were mixing with fecking foreigners in Guernsey, that’s why. If you go travelling to foreign parts, you deserve all you get.’

  ‘Have you a family?’

  He sighed. ‘Five bairns, no, six it is now.’

  ‘You’ll be worried for them then, if the pestilence spreads.’

  ‘The wife is, mithering about it morning and night. I keep telling her it won’t spread. Told her I’d crack her one if she keeps going on about it. You have to, don’t you, just to knock some sense into ’em.’

  ‘Maybe she’s right to be worried. They say it’s already reached Southampton.’

  ‘Aye, but it’s only spreading along the coast, ’cause that’s where the foreigners are, in the ports. Priest says it’s a judgement on the foreigners, so it stands to reason it won’t come here, ’cause we’ve no foreigners here.’

  And that was pretty much what they all believed those first few weeks after the great pestilence crept in. Away from the south coast, life went on much as it had always done. You might have thought that people would panic, but the truth is they didn’t believe it would touch them. They were suspicious of strangers, violent even, but still they assured themselves that pestilence was a foreign thing. Why, it even had a foreign name – morte bleue. How could any Englishman die of a sickness so plainly marked for foreigners?

  Those towns along the south coast which had already succumbed and were falling one after the other like wheat before the scythe were, if anything, proof of this, for ports, as everyone knew, were teeming with foreigners and it was those foreigners who were dying, proof positive that God had damned the other nations of the world in perpetuity. And if some Englishmen in those ports also died, well then, that was because they had been mixing with those same foreigners, sleeping with the foreign whores and boys. They deserved it. But England, true England, did not. Just as once they had been convinced it could not cross the Channel, now they convinced themselves it would stop at the ports, provided the foreigners were also stopped there.

  The following morning the rain fell steadily as it had done the day before and the day before that. Rain drives men inside their own thoughts. No one looks at anyone else in the rain; they walk, heads bent, gaze fixed on the spinning puddles. I was out of the village, toiling along the track, before I noticed Rodrigo and Jofre; even then I probably would have walked right past them had the boy not been making a noise like a cow in labour as he retched repeatedly into a ditch.

  Rodrigo was muttering something to Jofre, which sounded as if he was scolding him, but at the same time was soothingly rubbing his back.

  I stayed on the other side of the road and drew my cloak across my nose and mouth. ‘Is he sick?’

  God’s blood! I was the one who’d persuaded the innkeeper to let them stay. If he had the pestilence…

  Rodrigo glanced up sharply, then gave a tight-lipped smile. ‘No, Camelot, it is not the sickness. His stomach is not used to the wine. It was rougher in the inn than he is accustomed to.’

  The boy heaved again and groaned, holding his head, his eyes bloodshot and his face the colour of sour milk.

  ‘Perhaps it’s not the quality, but the quantity he’s not accustomed to.’

  Rodrigo grimaced, but didn’t contradict. The boy continued to bend over the ditch, though his retching was dry now, unlike the rain.

  ‘You are abroad early, Camelot. You have a long journey ahead of you?’

  I hesitated. I don’t like discussing my business with strangers. Start talking about where you are going and people start asking where you’ve come from. They want to know where you were born and where your home is, insisting you must have one somewhere. Some even think that if you have no roots you are to be pitied. That I chose to rip up those roots is something they could never understand.

  But it was impossible to be rude to a man as courteous as Rodrigo.

  ‘I’m making for St John Shorne’s shrine at North Marston. There’s money to be made there and it’s well to the north of here and inland, far away from the ports.’

  I knew it of old. It was a good place to sit out the autumn rains, the whole winter if need be. I was not so foolish as to think the pestilence would not creep inland, but it couldn’t reach as far as North Marston, not before the winter frosts came. And, like all summer fevers, it would surely die out then. If you could just survive until the weather changed, by Christmas it would all be over, that’s what they said, and even I was foolish enough to comfort myself with that thought.

  ‘And you, where are you bound?’ I asked Rodrigo. Like me, he also hesitated, as if reluctant to reveal the whole truth.

  ‘We go to Maunsel Manor. It is only a few miles from here. We spent time there whenever our master visited the family. The mistress of the house always praised our playing. We will try for a place there.’

  ‘It’ll be a fruitless journey. I heard the household’s gone to their summer estates. They’ll not be back for weeks.’

  Rodrigo looked beaten and helpless. I’d seen that expression before in those who’ve been in service all their lives and suddenly find themselves turned out. They’ve no more idea of how to survive than a lapdog abandoned in a forest.

  ‘You’d be best making for a fair or better still a shrine. Fairs only run for a few days, a week at most, but a shrine never closes. Find one that
’s popular with the pilgrims and make friends with one of the innkeepers. The pilgrims always need entertaining in the evenings. Play a rousing battle song for the men and a love song for the women and you’ll easily earn enough for a dry bed and a hot meal.’

  There was a loud groan from Jofre.

  ‘You may not feel like food now, my lad, but wait till that hangover wears off. You’ll be groaning even harder once you feel the bite of hunger.’

  Jofre glanced up long enough to glower at me before leaning against a tree, his eyes tightly closed.

  ‘But other minstrels will already have found such inns, no?’

  ‘I dare say they will, but he’s a pretty lad. When he’s washed and sober, that is,’ I added, for he looked anything but pretty just then with his puffy face and tightly clenched jaw. ‘If you can persuade him to flirt with the wealthy matrons instead of their daughters, you’ll get your coins. You’ll both stand out from the common rabble of minstrels. Merchants’ wives fancy themselves as highborn ladies and they’ll pay handsomely anyone who knows how to treat them as such. And who can say, you might be lucky enough to find yourselves another livery. Even the highborn make pilgrimages. They more than most, for they have more money to do it and more sins to atone for.’

  ‘This shrine you are going to, you think we could get work there?’

  I had a sinking feeling that I knew where this was leading and I cursed myself for ever having mentioned it.

  ‘It’s a good few weeks’ walk from here. I’ll have to work my way there via the fairs and markets along the way. You’ll want to look for something closer.’

  ‘I can’t walk. I’m ill,’ the boy whined.

  ‘I denti di Dio! Whose fault is that?’ Rodrigo snapped and Jofre looked as startled as if he’d been slapped.

  Rodrigo also seemed surprised at his own sharpness for his next words were spoken soothingly, like a mother trying to coax a fretful child. ‘You will feel better for walking and we cannot stay here. We need to earn money. Without food and shelter you will become ill.’ He turned back to me, anxiety etched on his face. ‘You know the way to this shrine? You could help us find work on the way?’

  What could I do? Though I’d little doubt that Rodrigo was capable of holding his own in the subtle intrigue and politics of a court, to send them out alone into the blood and guts of the market place would have been like sending toddlers into a battlefield.

  ‘You’d have to walk at my pace. I’m not as fast as I once was.’

  Rodrigo glanced over at the listless boy. ‘I think a slow pace would suit us well, Camelot.’

  And so it was that the first members of our little company were drawn together, the first but by no means the last. On that wet morning, I thought I was doing them a kindness, saving them from learning the hard way how to survive on the roads. I thought I was sparing them the days of hungry bellies and the nights sleeping cold and friendless; I’d been there myself when I first started out and I knew the misery of it. But now I know it would have been kinder to have passed them by on the road than draw them into what was to come.

  3. Zophiel

  It’s not every day you see a mermaid, though you hear tell of them often. Ask anyone in the fishing villages and they’ll swear some old man in the village once caught a mermaid in his nets or fell overboard and was rescued by a maiden with hair that glistened like a shoal of silver fish in the moonlight and a tail that gleamed like opals under the stars. So when a magician says he has one in his tent, you can be sure there will be no shortage of people willing to hand over their pennies for a glimpse of a real live mermaid.

  Not live exactly, for this one was dead. Dead, because they do die if they cannot return to the sea. They are half fish after all, and how long can a fish live out of water? A mermaid can live longer, but not for ever, not on land, at least that’s what the magician explained.

  The magician called himself Zophiel, ‘God’s spy’. The name fitted him almost too well. Spies have to be on their guard and he was guarded all right, you could tell that from the first time you heard him speak, careful, clever, you might say. He made no promises the crowd could dispute afterwards. If you promise a living beast and it’s dead then word soon gets round. At best no one else will part with their money to see it, and at worst, well, there are no limits to what a drunken mob might do if they feel cheated. Afterwards I realized that Zophiel had not even claimed this to be a mermaid. ‘One of the merpeople,’ was all he’d said. Zophiel was clever all right, sharp as a flayer’s knife.

  The sun never seemed to rise at all in those dark days; it was as if we were living in some eternal twilight pressed down under the weight of the thick grey clouds and the heavy smoke of a thousand smouldering fires. Inside Zophiel’s tent it was even darker, but cold, cloyingly cold. Not a place you’d want to linger in even to escape the rain. The tent was narrow, a kind of lean-to erected at the back of his wagon, room enough for three or four people to crowd in at a time. A viscous yellow light pooled out from a lantern illuminating the small cage balanced on the back of the wagon. The bars on the cage were not there to keep the creature in, it was in no state to run away, but to stop the customers breaking pieces off and carrying them away as they do from the relics at holy shrines. It’s true that a mermaid is no saint, but neither is she of this world, so who knows what a fragment of mermaid might cure? The stench alone was enough to exorcize the most stubborn of demons.

  The creature lay on its back in the cage on a nest of sea-smoothed pebbles, shells, dead crabs, sea urchins, starfish and strands of dried seaweed. The smell of the seashore, of brine and fish, was powerful enough to convince anyone that this creature had its origins in the sea; powerful enough too to mask the fragrance of myrrh, incense, musk and aloes that lurked beneath it, unless you knew the smell of old.

  Few in these times would have recognized that heady, bitter fragrance. It was a perfume I hadn’t smelt for many years, but once you have smelt it, you never forget it. After all these years it still has the power to make the stomach tighten and tears well up in long-dry eyes. It is the smell of the embalmed corpses of knights returned from Acre. Returning as they swore they would, but not at the head of a retinue laden with treasure and pardoned of all past and future sins. No, these returned home in caskets, escorted by ghost-eyed brothers and emaciated servants, to be buried too young in the cold crypts beneath their families’ crests. Myrrh does not come cheap. It is the rare perfume of a delicate craft. We learned many things from the Saracens, not least how to preserve our slaughtered dead. Had Zophiel acquired the art, or had he bought the creature from another? Whichever it was, someone had paid a pretty penny for her.

  The mermaid, if maid it was, was no bigger than an infant. Its face was wizened, shrunken in on itself so that the eyes were mere slits, but slanted upwards at the corners. The head was covered with a fine straw-coloured fluff that stood up straight from the skin or perhaps the skin had shrunk away from the hair. Eyebrows and lashes were startlingly blonde against the tanned flesh, though it was hard to tell whether this was its natural colour or some artifice of the preservation of the body. The creature’s chest was as smooth and sexless as a child’s. The arms were human enough. One tiny fist grasped a hand-mirror of polished silver; the other was clenched around a doll carved from whalebone. The doll was in the form of a mermaid, the kind you might see among the grotesques on a church, with swollen hips, pendulous breasts and a long serpent’s tail.

  But what was below the waist of this little creature? Now that’s what we’d really come to see. It did not have legs, certainly. Instead there was a single long piece of flesh that tapered down from the waist to two curious projections at the end, resembling the hind flippers of a seal. Like the rest of the body, the tail, if tail it could be called, was brown and wrinkled, but naked, devoid of either scales or fur.

  ‘That’s no mermaid,’ sneered the man standing near me. ‘That’s a…’ He trailed off, at a loss to find any name for the creature. He was sw
eating onions and the stench of his breath threatened to overpower even that of the creature’s corpse.

  ‘I heard,’ his friend said, ‘that some charlatans sew the body of a human to the tail of a fish to make it look like a mermaid.’

  The sweating man peered closer. ‘That’s no fish’s tail. It’s not got scales.’

  ‘It’ll be a seal, then. They’ve joined a human babe to a seal.’

  ‘It’s got no fur neither,’ he said impatiently ‘and there’s no join. If anyone could see a stitched-on tail, I could; after all, I’ve been stitching cloth since I were a babe myself.’

  ‘So what is it, then?’

  They asked the same question of Zophiel outside, loudly, with the aggression that comes from uncertainty.

  Zophiel looked down his pale thin nose at them, as if the question had been asked by a simpleton. ‘As I told you, it’s one of the merpeople, a merchild.’

  Onion-breath gave a mirthless guffaw as if he had been told such things many times before and didn’t believe a word of it. ‘So how come it’s got no scales on its tail?’ He glanced round at the small crowd with a smirk that said, answer that one, if you can. He was spurred on by many encouraging nods and winks. Townspeople are always eager to have a stranger confounded.

  ‘You admit it has a tail, then?’ Zophiel asked coolly.

  The smile on Onion-breath’s face waned. ‘But not a scaly tail, and it’s got no hair on its head neither. I thought mermaids were supposed to have hair, yards of it.’

  ‘Do you have any children, my friend?’

  The man hesitated, uncertain where this line of argument was leading. ‘I do, for my sins, three fine lads and a bonny little lass.’

  ‘So, my friend, was your daughter born with hair?’

  ‘When she were a mite she were as bald as her grandfather is now.’