The Vault of bones

PART ONE
London
Chapter One

Late December 1236

We came to London on Childermass Day, blown up the Thames by a snow-filled squall out of the Low Countries. It was an ill-omened day, to be sure: Herod massacring the innocents, best forgotten; or perhaps worth remembering after the heedless roistering of Christmas. But despite the nasty weather I was all aquiver with the excitement of seeing London for the first time. It is the heart of England, and every Englishman feels its pull, even the meanest villain who has never ventured further than the edge of his masters land. So to finally behold the great city… I admit that, like a child, I ran about the ship, getting in everyone's way, and at last volunteered to climb the mast and keep look-out. I had not seen England since that day, two years and more ago, when I had been taken aboard the Cormaran, a wretched, wounded fugitive. And so now, when the wet snowflakes stung me I did not care, and when the first houses came in sight around the great bend of Stepney Marsh, although they were but mean eel-fishers' hovels, I thrilled at the sight. And when the dark, spiked bulk of the Tower resolved itself out of the grey distance I all but fell off my perch to the deck below.

Anna, meanwhile, was snug in the cabin, wrapped in furs, reading. She cared not one whit about London, so she said, and she had been teasing me gently about my boyish anticipation since we had set sail from Bruges. She did not come on deck at my cry, although many of the crew rushed to the prow, as London was reckoned a good landfall by all sailing men, and these ones had been promised a long shore-leave. And she did not emerge as we slipped through the open gates of London Bridge. Only when we were safely tied up at Queenhithe Wharf did she deign to step forth, sniff the air and wrinkle her nose, and give me her hand.

'Oh dear’ was all she said, as she looked up at the sooty buildings that rose around the basin of the wharf, itself fairly muddy and stinking, for it was here that all the fish sold in the city came ashore; and as I later discovered, it served as a public privy, a great jakes for any Londoner to use. So Anna's royal nose had reason to object, but despite the stink and the snow I was all afire and bustled her up the water-steps. It was a half-mile to our lodgings at the Blue Falcon in Cheapside so a litter was found, and as the two footmen – under the cold eye of Pavlos the Greek, once a bodyguard of Roman despots, now devoted heart, soul and sinew to his vassikia, his princess – jolted Anna through the teeming streets I jogged alongside, chattering, while she swatted flakes of wet snow from her face. I was an outlaw in this country, but I gave it little thought, for my face had come into the lines of manhood and my skin was burned dark from the sun, and indeed I was as like the terrified, lost little monk who had fled these shores as the butterfly is to the crawling worm.

That first day was a flurry of organising, greeting, paying calls, and it was not until the next morning that we could take our ease, if only for a short hour, in the big, faded private chambers that we were to share with Captain de Montalhac, his lieutenant, Gilles de Peyrolles and Pavlos, who, as well as her bodyguard, was also Anna's devoted, self-appointed manservant.

The others having left to call on some important merchant or other, Anna and I sat in the Blue Falcon's not-quite-comfortable chairs and broke our fast on fresh bread, smoked fish, gulls' eggs, sweet butter, warm goats' milk and cold, bitter ale. Being still full of a good night's sleep and so somewhat heavy and contented, I watched as my love ate and drank. Her night-black hair was loose and hung about her shoulders and back. Her face was brown, with a constellation of darker freckles scattered across her cheeks. When I had first laid eyes on her, high on a lonely island hilltop, she had been pallid from years in the ghastly climate of Greenland and several weeks in the pitch-black hold of the Cormaran, on to which she had been smuggled in a load of whalebone. But the sunlight had quickly given her back the complexion of her people, and the only reminder of those grim days was the space in her mouth where the scorbutus, the sickness which had blighted us all as we crossed the endless Sea of Darkness, had stolen one of her teeth. Her front teeth had a little gap between them as well, in which she liked to work the tip of her tongue when she was thinking hard about something. Her eyebrows were black ink-strokes above her brown, almond-shaped eyes, in which the mercurial tumult of her humours played like the reflection of the sky in still water.

I loved her for all this: for all that lay on the outside, the flesh that clothed her, the scent that was hers alone, the way her hair shimmered like the nape of a jackdaw's neck. But most of all I loved her for what lay within, for like a great city Anna held within her a powerful complexity – a tumult, as I said – that had its cause, in part, in the way her life story had skipped like a stone just above the dark waters of disaster. But the other part was Anna’s own self, for – to me, at least – she was a creation without peer. The blood of emperors, of old Romans, flowed hot and furious in her veins, and I believe she felt her ancestors' presence very keenly. Certainly they would appear to me in flashes of anger or joy, the face of some long-dead queen or warrior usurping her own features to glare out at a strange world before vanishing back into the past.

The days passed pleasantly enough. The weather improved, indeed it became quite warm, and the stench from the filthy kennels that ran down the middle of every street made itself known to us. What time I had that was not spent in affairs of business I spent with Anna, and we explored high and low, from the vast, ugly hulk of Saint Paul's Cathedral to the Tower perched upon its mound. We squinted at the heads displayed on London Bridge, marvelled at the goods on display at the markets, and lost ourselves in the roistering crowds at Smithfield. Anna grudgingly admitted that London was worthy of at least a little admiration. She was always grudging with praise for anything Frankish, as she called everything outside her homeland of Greece. Franks were barbarians, boors, bloody-handed primitives. She made an exception for me, thank God, and for most of the Cormaran’s crew, but on the whole she resented the fate that had decreed she must pass her time in Frankish lands, and dreamed – every night, so she said – of the day that she would return to her home in Nicea and even, perhaps, see the greatest city of them all, lodestone of her heart: Constantine's city, Byzantium.

We had passed a week in this manner when the captain asked that I make a journey down the Thames to Deptford to buy a new anchor for the Cormaran. I would be gone a day, no more, and I bade Anna farewell with a kiss and a fierce embrace, knowing full well I would be back in those arms by nightfall. I took a wherry downriver, enjoying the boatman's skill as he manoeuvred us through the water traffic and shot the foaming race under London Bridge. It was a sunny day, and I stepped on to the bank at Deptford at around the noon hour. I took a mug of ale and a hot pie at a tavern, sought out the ironworks and paid for a fine anchor. The ironmaster was a voluble Kentishman, and before any money had changed hands a big flagon of cider appeared and we passed it between us in the blazing heat of the forge. Kentish cider is no match for that of Devon, and I told him so in good humour. That set him talking all the more, and before long we were in his cider store, eating great lumps of hard cows' cheese from the downlands of Sussex and sampling the contents of various barrels and tuns. My head well and truly fuddled, I at last conceded that a thick, mouth-puckering scrumpy from the Weald would not be laughed out of the fine county of Devonshire, hugged the man like a brother, and staggered off to find a wherry bound for London.

But there was no wherry. I had spent far too much time at the ironworks. Now it was dark, it was snowing again, and the tide had turned. Cursing, I made my way to the inn, an ancient pile of wattle and daub that the breath of the river had all but dissolved, and enquired after a boat, but there were none to be had until the morrow. And so I reluctantly took a room – there were plenty free – and hoped that Anna would not take my absence amiss. The place was pleasant enough, in truth: there was a hearty fire that hissed and crackled with the jolly song of burning flotsam, good ale and hot wine to chase off the cider hangover I was already suffering. I took myself off early to bed, where I had to curl up tight against the creeping damp of the linen, feeling a little sorry for myself, but not overmuch: for I was playing truant, as it were, and that is a pleasure all to itself.

The pot-boy woke me some time before the fourth hour, while the mist was still thick on the face of the Thames. There were stars in the sky, and marsh birds shrieked and piped out in the foggy desolation. There was a wherryman up and about, said the boy, and when I had jogged through the mist to the edge of the river, I found an ill-tempered man, a boat and a favourable tide. As the bells of the city were chiming the eighth hour, I was whistling up Garlick Hill on my way to the Blue Falcon.

I crossed the threshold of the inn expecting a ghastly tongue-lashing from Anna, but when I found her in the parlour, perched upon a settle by the window, she greeted me with a soft, distracted smile. I sat down warily opposite her and poured out the apology I had been constructing since my wherry had passed the Isle of Dogs.

‘I am glad you had a nice time’ she said, stopping me with a hand to my lips. 'But now I have a puzzle for you. Can you make head or tail of this? It came just after you left’ And she handed me a letter, a neatly folded square of vellum sealed with an anonymous, blank blob of wax. The seal was broken, and I unfolded the vellum and scanned the neatly written words within. To Her Majesty the Vassileia Anna Doukaina Komnena, respectful greetings.

I humbly ask that you will receive a petitioner who will make none but the briefest imposition upon your day. If you would care to hear words from a place that perhaps is still dear to your heart, please receive this humblest of supplicants, who shall call upon you at the hour before noon, tomorrow. The letter trailed off into florid politenesses that tried but failed to disguise the fact that the writer had not signed his name. Who brought this?' I asked. Anna shook her head.

'A tall man’ she said. 'So the pot-boy says. When pressed, he claimed the fellow was not a poor man, to judge by his clothes. That is all’

I read the letter again. It was in French, which gave no clue, although I thought perhaps it might be the French of Paris, and not London French.

'Not a Greek, then?' I puzzled. ‘I mean, this would seem to be from a Greek, would it not? "A place dear to your heart?" Nicea, I suppose’

'That is what… oh, Mother of God, Patch, I can't go on being this calm! Who knows my name, outside our good shipmates? No one! And all this about my heart! Of course it is someone from… someone sent by my uncle’ she finished, her voice sinking into an involuntary whisper.

‘I doubt that’ I said, soothingly. 'Are there Greeks in London?' 'There are’ said Anna. 'Of course there are.' Well, then’

'He was not a Greek’ said Anna. 'I asked. I said, "Did he look foreign?" Apparently he did not. This is Frankish writing, and a Frankish choice of words’ She plucked the letter from me and dropped it on to the settle between us.

'Did you tell the Captain?' I asked, searching her face. Her brows were furrowed and her mouth was drawn into a tight line. She shook her head. 'No. I do not wish to.'

'I think you should.' She shook her head again and gave me a look in which nasty weather was brewing.

'I do not wish to trouble him. He suffers my presence in his company very prettily, and in return I shall not pester him with annoying flea-bites such as this.' She pinned the letter down with her downturned thumb and gave me a look that said the matter was closed. I knew her well enough by now, though, to judge that it was not. But I let it lie, for my love was no mean judge of the world, and prowled around its snares and ambuscades as deftly as any cat.

Well, what shall we do today, then?' I asked, happy to change the subject.

It was early yet, before nine bells, but Anna had heard of a spice merchant in a street nearby who promised the freshest and strangest oddities from Ind and Cathay, and then perhaps a visit to a silk-seller. They were not really shopping trips, these excursions, but rather Anna’s way to justify long and rambling explorations, a passion I shared with her. Whenever the Cormaran brought us to an interesting landfall we would lose ourselves in streets and alleys, twisting and turning, chatting to townsfolk in cookshops and taverns, until we thought we had found the heart of the place. London was our greatest challenge so far, and so far we had only dipped our toes in its roiling, limitless waters. So we set out, and quickly found the spice merchant, whose wares were as withered and overpriced as we had expected. Finding ourselves near the Hospital of Saint Bartholomew, we strolled out beyond the walls to the great, stinking plain of Smooth Field, where the kingdom's farmers bring their animals for slaughter and butchering. There were no cows today, merely a churned-up expanse of muddy grass rank with dung and old blood, and a small town of rude huts and some grander houses of wattle and brick, peopled, so it seemed, by filthy children whose play was blows and vile oaths, and by men and women crippled either by drink or the drip. Driven back inside the walls by a reeking host of beggars, we wandered some more, past ancient churches and grand houses, hopelessly entwined in the tangled net of streets. Or so I supposed, until, turning a corner, I found that we had come back to Cheapside, and that our lodgings were only a little way away, across the teeming street.

'How did you manage that?' I asked Anna, amazed. She said nothing, but looked smug and tapped her head wisely with a finger. Then I realised. It is almost noon, is it not?' I said.

'I could not resist’ she said. You do not mind, do you? If I do not find out who this fellow is, it will drive me mad.' 'But.. ‘I began to protest.

You will protect me’ she said, smiling. 'And we will spy, only that. Peer at the fellow from behind a door. Do not worry: if there is trouble, I will tell the Captain, I promise. And, you well know, if trouble is coming, it will find us anyway’

I could not argue with that, so I huffed peevishly and set off after her. I knew her well enough to know that if her mind was made up, nothing I could say or do would change it, short of binding her hand and foot. Cheapside was crowded – it was always crowded, but at the middle of the day it seemed as if all the people in the world were hurrying along it, on foot, in carts or on horseback. Anna was hurrying along, heading for the place where a stepping stone had been laid in the kennel, for that foul and stinking runnel of shit and night-water was almost too wide to jump over. She stopped and waited for a haywain to pass, and when it had creaked by, she darted out, shouldering her way past a stout countrywoman shuffling along with a yoke and two baskets of dead geese, heads lolling, thick pink tongues jutting from their open beaks. Looking past her towards the Blue Falcon, my eye was caught by a man who had paused at the door, and who seemed to be looking in our direction.

He was quite tall, and crop-headed like a soldier, and even from this distance I could tell that his face had suffered in battle, for the thin winter sun caught the silver trail of an old scar as the man turned his head. But if he recognised Anna, he made no sign, and kept his place at the door. Still I hurried to catch up with her, for now we could not go into the inn through the front, if we went in at all. I had almost caught her when she stepped neatly around two fat burghers talking loudly about money and skipped up on to the stepping stone. Now I was blocked by a man with a barrow, who swore at me absently, the quick-tongued foul geniality of London. I was about to curse him back when the words seized in my throat, for a beast was screaming, high and sharp, and a woman's voice had joined it. I shoved the barrow-man aside with my shoulder in time to see Anna, in the street beyond the kennel, raise her arms high over her head as if to grasp the great hooves that flailed there, for a great piebald horse loomed above her, dwarfing her, and then all at once her slim shape was for an instant caged in the living bars of its legs before it reared up again and came down upon her with both hooves, dashing her to the mud. The rider seemed to be grappling with the reins and let out a despairing cry as the horse came up again, seemed to walk for an instant like a man upon its hind legs, before plunging forward and setting off down the street, rider clinging to its back like a ragdoll.

Anna was lying crooked in the mud, pressed into the paste of earth and dung, one arm beneath her, the other flung back behind her head. Her hair was across her face and trampled into the filth like a dead crow. I knelt, babbling, cooing wordlessly to her in my panic, and brushed the hair away. She turned and looked at me, and I gasped with relief, for our eyes met and her lips parted, to tell me it was all right, it hurt a little bit here, and here. The world stilled, I reached for her, told her not to move, for her leg was broken; slid a hand beneath her head, bent my own head to catch her words.

Then her good leg gave a kick and her neck shuddered beneath my fingers. Her eyes fixed on mine for a moment longer and then slid away, seeming to flutter across the hedge of muddy legs that surrounded us. No words came, only a throttled, rattling hiss. I pulled her from the mud and tried to cradle her head in my lap, and found that my hands were wet with blood. I could feel it, flooding hotly across my legs. Her leg kicked again, like a snared beast, and the world started its heedless dance once more, and the London sun trickled down upon us, pale as piss, while an apple bobbed past down the kennel.

She was alive when we carried her into the Blue Falcon, myself and a page, an egg-seller and the barrow-pusher, and laid her on the bed she and I had awoken in two mornings ago. Captain de Montalhac burst in with Gilles, just that moment returned from some business out in the city, and a doctor was sent for. I relate these things as if I were aware of them, and I was, though only as a reader is aware of the tiny painted figures crawling about the margins of a book. For Anna did not move, though a woman came and sponged the blood from her face and chafed her wrists, and I whispered in her ear and stroked her cold forehead. She was still, save for the rise and fall of her chest, and silent, but for her breath, which hissed and creaked and held not the slightest hint of her voice.

The doctor came, a grey old monk from that same Hospital of Saint Bartholomew we had passed just an hour or two ago. He came to the bedside and ran his hands gently, over Anna's head. She did not stir, nor did her breathing change its timbre. He peered into her ears, put his ear to her chest, and lifted her eyelids with a careful thumb. Then he looked up and met my desperate gaze. He patted my hand where it lay upon Anna's collarbone, and sighed.

'A kick from a horse, was it?' he said. 'There is little to be done. Perhaps…' and he paused, and raised his hands. I thought he was about to pray, and my heart shrank within me, but instead he interlaced his fingers. The bones of the skull are fitted together thus, like the vaulting of a stone roof. The lady… her skull is shattered in one place, and the vault is collapsing in upon her brain, which is inflamed and has started to swell. There have been seizures?' I told him of her kicking leg. 'They will worsen, until…'

'Is there truly nothing to be done?' I croaked, searching his grey eyes and finding nothing there save resignation.

'I could attempt to remove the pieces of bone, which might relieve the pressure upon her brain.' Then do it, for God's sake! Do not hesitate!'

‘I do not have the instruments with me, my child,' he said gently. 'And I fear that if we try to bring her to the hospital, the motion…' He looked at the faces gathered around the bed. ‘I will fetch my tools, but I fear that this poor child will not live even until I return.'

I saw the Captain's face go grey. 'Go, sir,' he said. 'Maybe she is stronger than you think. Fetch your instruments, we… the company begs you.'

The doctor nodded gravely. He patted my hand again and took his leave. After he had gone, the room was silent save for Anna's laboured breathing. I had laid my forehead on the cool linens to calm my battering thoughts, when Pavlos gasped. Anna's eyes had opened. At once I bent over her, and tried to meet her gaze, but to my dismay I saw that it wandered, now slowly, now flickering aimlessly across the ceiling beams. But here, surely, was a sign, for she had awoken! Where was the surgeon and his cursed instruments?

I whispered in her ear and held tightly to her hand, but still her eyes searched calmly amongst the cobwebs. Somewhere nearby, a bell rang the quarter-hour. A serving-girl looked in at the door and, seeing our stricken faces, hastily withdrew. As the latch snicked, Anna's left leg gave a twitch and then a kick. Her fingers began to flutter and pluck at the sheet, and then her spine arched and a terrible gasp burst from her. Her eyes were still and wide, and were looking straight into mine. Then both legs began to thrash madly, and I threw myself across them. Pavlos choked out a prayer and took her shoulders, pressing them into the mattress. Gilles knelt beside me and took Anna's right hand, and the Captain grasped her left. She gave another gasp and thrashed again. There was a terrible strength in her legs, but it was not willed, was not Anna's. I called out to her and fumbled my hand under the Captain's, reaching for her fingers. They twitched and shuddered, her nails scrabbling at my palm, and then they were still.

One of her eyes was open. It bulged through the bruised lids like a blood-streaked pearl, lustrous but not alive. Blood had burst from her ears and her nose, and a red froth clung to her mouth. But all the blood had left the skin of her face, and a livid red mark curved from her smashed right ear to the corner of her mouth, and under the skin the contours, all the lines and declivities that I had mapped out upon my own heart, were wrong. I beheld a ruined country, and there was no map for it. I lay there for an infinity, one hand in Anna's, the other cupped around her chin, that grew cold even as I held it. I pressed my face into the muddy silk of her dress, her scent already fading, the clumsy vapours of death gathering. When at last I lifted my head, strong hands grasped me and helped me stand. The Captain stood there, and he drew me to him in an embrace that all but squeezed the air from my lungs. Then he took my face in both his hands and kissed me hard on the forehead.

'She is dead’ he said, his hands still on my face. You must leave her, just for a little while, for she must be attended to’ I searched his eyes, but they were black and hard as coal. So I stepped away from him and turned to where the flat white glare of the London winter was lighting up the dingy room.

'An apoplexy’ I heard the doctor say wearily behind me. 'The brain swelled and burst its vault of bone. Thus the eye was forced.. ‘

Words I had not spoken in long years, words from a life that might have belonged to another man, welled up in me: Deus, in adiutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina. Gloria Patri, et Filioy et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen. Alleluia. The prayer at Vespers: 'O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me’ But I had abandoned such help. 'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end’ The world had destroyed my love, turned her fiery beauty into a mask of ruin. That terrible, blind and staring eye would never close again, world without end. Without end. Amen.

Gilles and someone else helped me to an outer chamber and sat me down, brought me wine, took a wet towel and wiped Anna’s blood from me. They talked to me as men talk to animals, soothing, empty words, and I did not listen, but stared at the plaster of the walls while my thoughts thrashed like a rabbit flayed alive. Horst came in, and Zianni, and many others of the Cormaran, some angry, some weeping, some merely dumb.

'It must have been a destrier’ said Horst to Gilles. 'A war-horse. Patch said it took her with its forelegs – no untrained beast would do such a thing! Well, have you ever heard of it? I know: I have ridden those creatures into battle. An ill-tempered riding horse will kick out with its hind legs, yes, but… Christ. Some knight's battle-shy mount, I'd guess. Those creatures should never be taken out in the common street. I'd like to find the fool..

There was a man’ I started to say, but I trailed off, for the fellow with the scar had not been looking at Anna, not been waiting for us at all, and in truth I had all but forgotten why we had even returned to the Blue Falcon, for now I felt night falling upon me. Except it was not dark, it was a silvery, cold oblivion, drowning me like quicksilver. When at last the Captain came for me I rose like a man in heavy iron mail and plodded after him, each footfall a labour.

Anna lay there on the bed we had warmed for each other just yesterday, dressed in white linen. Tall candles burned at each corner, the flames invisible in the sunlight. Her face was covered with a square of white muslin, and her brown hands were folded on her belly and held a golden cross. Pavlos the guardsman knelt at her feet, his face buried in the coverlet. He was weeping, and I saw he had torn his clothing. Like a man drugged with henbane I walked, infinitely slowly, through the empty light, until I could see the outline of the face beneath the cloth. With numb fingers I tugged it away.

One eye was still open. It jutted from its distended socket, an obscene thing, an abomination. The terrible bruise on her cheek and temple had turned a dark, turgid red. Tendrils of black hair pushed from beneath the white strip of cloth that bound her jaw and clamped her mouth into a disapproving line. Gently I placed my fingers upon her cold lips and tried to form something I recognised, some illusion of Anna, of her smile, but they sullenly reset themselves. I bent and kissed them anyway, eyes closed to block out the terrible white orb. The Captain was pressing something into my hand. I looked down: it was a thick plait of black hair, tied with thread of gold, no bigger than my thumb. But it glistened with the oily sheen, the crow-shine, the dark light that always hung around Anna: her own stormy nimbus.

I tried to pull the cloth back over her face but one of my fingers brushed her eye, and at the touch of it I came undone. I tried to gather her rigid form into my arms but whether I did, and what I did after I cannot tell, for I do not remember. There is a memory of a terrible sound that perhaps tore itself from me, and a confusion, as comes with a dreadful, racking fever, and then nothing. I will relate what came to pass in the days that followed, but it will be a cold telling, for I was not really present. Everything had become a grey blur. Anna’s strange letter was put away with her things and I forgot that it had ever existed. I walked and talked, but my soul had followed Anna down through whatever appalling drift had engulfed her and I had no more life in me than does a revenant.

We buried her in the Church of Saint Faith Under Saint Paul's. Cormaran gold bought the services of a reluctant, hand-wringing priest, for only the communion of money could induce the Church to treat the mortal remains of an unwed, schismatic woman with any sort of deference. The only mourners were the Cormaran’s crew, but even so the little church, which stands in the shadow of the great, ugly cathedral, was full. The Greeks could not teach our poor priest how to bury Anna in her own faith, but every man kissed her farewell, and Pavlos stood and chanted in his tongue some spoken hymn, words I do not recall that rose and fell like the waves of the sea, or starlings wheeling and flocking at sunset. Anna lay in state before the altar dedicated to the service of a faith she despised, and was laid to sleep in a stone tomb in the heart of a land she felt nothing for, surrounded by the bones of reviled Franks. But she has a fine slab carved with Greek letters in the custom of her people, and there she will rest for all time.

Whatever business we had in London was concluded, I presume, and days later, or perhaps weeks afterward, the Cormaran slipped down the Thames, past the brown marshes, the desert of hissing reeds, the frost-painted meadows grazed by sheep, the towns where folk were living and dying; and out into the bleak oblivion, the cold comfort of the sea.