Relics

Chapter Sixteen

I brushed shoulders with Will as I emerged, blinking like Lazarus, from the Captain's lair. Gilles had him by the arm and was leading him through the door. He had time to wink at me, for all the world as if he were going for a tutorial with some fat old Latin master. The door clicked shut ominously behind them. Out here the sun was quite high, and the Cormaran was slipping down the Gironde, Bordeaux dropping away behind. The kites were already wheeling above the towers. It looked a lovely place today, warm and golden in the sunlight, and it was strange to think corpses lay in its alleys, black clots fouling the stones. Anna was nowhere to be seen, and I guessed she had taken refuge below. My innards were not right and my skin prickled with a nasty, hot sweat. I hauled up a bucket of river water and set to work scouring the blood from my hands and arms. Then I stripped and found that even my breechclout was bloody. I scrubbed every inch of naked skin and put on my old sailing clothes. My beautiful silk tunic, all stiff with dried gore, I gathered into a ball and dropped overboard. No doubt Dimitri could resurrect it once again but too much had soaked into its beautiful threads, first my blood and now a man's whole life. It unravelled and found its shape again on the surface, bleeding a dark stain that gathered around it like a thundercloud. As I watched it drift away, I heard a breath behind me.

It was Anna. She was still in her finery, but she had thrown her cloak about her and held it close, although the day was growing hot. Her face was ashen. Great shadows wreathed her eyes, and her lips were dry and pale. I had a great desire to take her in my arms, but I imagined – imagined more than felt -the eyes of the crew upon me and so instead I attempted to look respectful, like the humble sailor I was, greeted by a great lady. I believe that Anna would have been quick to shake me from my stupidity had she not been somewhat stupefied herself by all that had happened, but instead she drew back a little.

'How does it go with you, Patch?' she asked, shyly: a voice I had not heard before.

'It goes better. Better, now that I have scoured every speck, every mote of last night from me,' I said, without thinking. 'Every trace of last night?'

'Everything,' I said passionately. It was true: I had been desperate to free myself from the blood that had drenched me, dry and flaking where it had dried on my face and hands, still horribly wet where it had run under my arms and even between my legs. Its salty fetor had kept me on the verge of retching as I sat before the Captain. Now all I could smell was the familiar mustiness of long-worn clothes and my own clean skin. But Anna had hung her head a little, and her eyes seemed to follow something across the deck at our feet.

'I took sand and rubbed myself raw,' I blabbed on. 'Mother of God! I feel clean, at least, but…' I trailed off, thinking yet again of the swordsman's last breath. 'I doubt I shall ever feel pure again.'

'Petroc, look at me!' Her voice was tight, almost desperate. Her cloak had fallen open and there was the blue tunic and red surcoat she had put on in the church. The sunlight glimmered over the magical complexities of the silk and picked out where the cloth was stiff and lifeless. Blood had stained it in gouts from neck to hem, and there was a black smear on the skin of her throat.

'Please help me, Patch.' She was pleading. 'I do not want to touch these clothes,' she whispered, and reached out for my arm. Her hand was bloody to the wrist. I flinched, meaning no more than to keep the gore from my skin, but she snatched her hand back and held it to herself as if it burned. Before I could reach for her in turn she whirled away from me and hurried off across the deck to the hatch, where Pavlos happened to be standing. He began to help her down the ladder. I shrugged, not at all sure what had just occurred. I was going to help her. I wanted more than anything to talk, to take both her hands in mine and hold my cheek against hers. But the ghastly sheen of the crimson silk and those dark clots in the fine hair of her arm had unbalanced me for a moment. I thought I remembered that her eyes had widened with shock, almost terror, in the instant before she had turned from me. All at once everything – every taste, pleasure, pain, sound, sight and smell – from the past day and night came back to me, whirling about my head like rooks around a ruined tower, and I barely groped for the rail before I was sicker than I had ever been. I emptied myself into the river until my throat bled. I had no thought of Anna, and whether she watched me before ducking down into the peaceful gloom of the hold I do not know.

When I was done I picked my way aft and pissed into the wake, watching the city blend into the haze. Although there was no wind and the river was flat as a counter-pane I nearly lost my footing and found myself hugging a rope, forehead rasping on the bristly hemp. I realised that, on top of the bane afflicting my soul, I had a ghastly hangover made worse by a sleepless night. So I staggered off in search of Isaac, who gave me a revolting tincture thoughtfully diluted in a little cup of wine. The wine, at least, helped, and in a little while I was dipping into a pot of beans and pork fat that Dimitri had thrown together for all who had returned from last night's bloody carouse.

Mirko was there, pallid and drained, his arm in a splint. By the slow, stunned look on his face I guessed that Isaac's poppy was working in him, for he did not seem in pain. The same was not true for Hanno, who had a ragged cut down one thigh and was cursing hot enough to boil the river beneath us. Others were bruised from other, less ominous brawls, the kind that can kill a man any night of any week with no reason or meaning at all. We all were sick from drink and sleeplessness, and Dimitri fussed over us like a great ugly hen, giving us swigs from a goatskin full of harsh wine laced with some bitter herb and feeding Mirko with a horn spoon as tenderly as any nursemaid. I had no chores and no watch for a while and so, soon enough, my belly full of beans and warmed by the wine, I curled up behind a coil of rope and fell asleep.

Time passed, measured by the slow rocking of the deck. I slept, drifting in soft, empty darkness, until a foot prodded me awake and I looked up blearily from my tar-scented nest. Will peered down at me. 'I was worried about you,' I croaked.

'Indeed. The suffering is plain to see in your face. Now move over.' He dropped down next to me and we sat, leaning on the rope and each other, watching the gulls. We shared the silence of old friends, and for a brief while it seemed as if it might at least be possible that the horrors and wonders of the past few months had never happened, and that we were two careless students stealing an afternoon away from our books. But then Will stretched out a lazy hand, pointing something out to me on shore, and I saw the blood staining his fingernails. There was no escape, then. Time could not be made to retreat, the shadows chased backwards around the dial until we regained our innocence. I sighed and wished for another swallow of Dimitri's wine. 'So what did you make of the Captain?' I said at last.

Will stared at the distant riverbank. After a long silence, he said, 'It would be a foolish man who tried to hide anything from him.' "What do you mean?'

He paused again, then laughed a little hollowly. 'I only meant that he is like a great owl and you are a rat scuttling across the floor of his bam. Does it not seem as if he sees where you are, where you have been and where you will go?' He shook his head. 'I… I like him, I think. He scared my guts near out of my breech, but I like him very much.' 'Is that the right word? "Like?"'

Well, "fear" would be another word. And, I think, "trust". Do you trust him, Patch?' 'I have done. I do. With my life.' 'And I have done the same, gladly.' 'He had your story from you, then?' 'He did.' 'Then so will I – and you will have mine in return.'

'Done. But does that great ugly man yonder not have a wineskin about him? I am feeling quite in need, now that you have reminded me of my audience with the owl.'

Dimitri was happy to make Will's acquaintance and to share his wine. There were some scrapings of fatty stew left and he doled them out, searching my friend's face with approval.

You are a fighter, eh? Good, good. One is lost – poor Jens, may he find peace – and another is found.'

What is in this wine, friend Dimitri? It is tanning my throat as it goes down,' Will enquired through a mouthful of beans.

Yarrow, melissa, rue, dandelion, and-' he made some harsh sound in his own tongue, '-for to thicken up the blood. Drink more. It will make you piss like a warhorse, boy, and carry off the bad spirits.'

And indeed we spent a good part of the afternoon hanging off the stern, voiding our bad spirits into the Gironde. But I told Will all that had happened since Sir Hugh de Kervezey had ambushed us that quiet morning. My flight from the abbey, the fight on the wharves of Dartmouth and Greenland, and Anna's rescue: I ran through it all as quickly as I could, far more eager to hear Will's adventures than to retell my own, although he was forever stopping me to hear something in greater detail, and those details were not what I wished to linger upon. But after my jaw ached with talking, and we had found ajar of wine free of herbs, I placed my finger firmly on his breastbone.

'That is my sorry life, up to this very instant. You have had it all, every last drop. Very gruesome, is it not?'

'No! Not at all. You have lived, man. Christ! But you have left out everything important: the lady Anna. How… Patch, have you…'

I held up a too-hasty hand. 'The Vassileia Anna is under the protection of Captain de Montalhac, and – could we, please, not talk about her just now? She is the niece of the Emperor of Byzantium, for God's sake!'

'Brother, I feel I have tumbled into quite a different world. My old friend Patch, the great Captain and an imperial princess! But what were you doing in the dead hours of the night with her in the city, eh?' His eyes were twinkling. I shook my head grimly. The last thing I wished to do was besmirch Anna's name any more than it surely was already.

'Nothing. Escorting her back to the ship. I don't know. For fuck's sake, Will, tell me your story, or must I beg you?'

I knew him well, and he was desperate with curiosity. But he saw my unease and rolled his eyes. Tou wish to hear it so badly? You will find it very thin gruel in comparison to yours,' he said, resignedly. 'I doubt that, brother.'

'But I swear it!' He held up both hands in his old familiar protest of innocence. It had always made him seem more roguish and guilty, and it did now. I told him so. But he shook his head. 'Truly, Patch. You will see.' He took a long swig from the jar and cleared his throat like a mountebank at a village fair.

'Kervezey's flail – it was Kervezey, wasn't it? I have never been completely certain…' I nodded. 'The flail caught me a good whack-' 'I thought I heard your skull shatter,' I put in. He winced.

'Not quite, brother. It caught me high on the shoulders, in the main, although it laid me open from here to here.' He leaned forward and parted his hair to show a tangle of thick scars like pink twine that ran at a slant from his left shoulder-blade up his neck and almost to the crown of his head. 'You heard bone break, sure enough, but that was my shoulder. I lay like a dead man in the mud, and it was the mud that stopped the bleeding, I think. When I woke up there was no one to be seen. You were gone, and I remember a horse in the water, thrashing. I dragged myself into the hedge and left the world again for a while. I heard people pass by, and I think they were searching, but they did not find me. I would hear things from a long way off, then the world would be dark again. I may have slept for days, I don't know. When I finally came to myself, though, I was as hungry as a wolf and every inch of me burned or ached or stung. I had been raked over by a fever, it seems, as my clothes were salty with old sweat and – Christ's stones! – I stank. There was nothing for it but to set out up the road, although I found myself to be quite safe, for everyone I chanced to meet could not so much as glance at me, foul and stinking as I was. To make things worse I could not move my head or neck – for weeks, in fact, which made me seem even more lunatic, I suppose. Finally, towards night, as I was staggering along all giddy with pain and starvation, some fine church-prince on a grey horse came up with his companions and saw fit to throw me a fistful of coin to demonstrate his Christianity. Very Christian it was to take his amusement as I grovelled, all crippled, in the dust for his charity, but no matter. I bought food and drink at the next village, stole some clothes, cleaned myself as best as I could in the river, and set out for London a new man – a man without the use of his neck, true enough, but at least there was a head still upon it, brother!' 'Indeed. And next?' I said, all impatience. 'Next I thieved my way to London, found my father's business acquaintances, and set off to Flanders, where I took up with a mercenary company. It was the plan I made for you, Patch, do you remember? But I knew that it would not be safe to go home, and I am afraid I did not relish explaining matters to my old papa. It was the right choice, though, was it not? The path that should have been yours led me back to you!' He shook his head in wonder. 'You are not done, brother,' I said, exasperated.

'Nothing else to tell. I found Sir Andrew Hardie's company, the Black Boar, in Antwerp, and they took a shine to me – I could move my head again by then, which was a help. I… truly, nothing has happened since then, Patch. The soldier's lot I have found to be an exceedingly dull one. We lazed about in Flanders, growing fat and poxy; we made our slow and easy way south at the first sniff of war, and we have been lolling around Bordeaux for a good month, doing nothing but eat, drink and feel fat French rumps.' He sighed and looked at his hands. 'These soft things are about to get a shock, by the looks of it,' he said wistfully. 'I understand I may be required to do what they call-' he made a ridiculously foppish motion and twisted his face into a mockery of noble horror,'-work!

'Oh aye, work you shall, boy! Work you shall!' I grabbed the wine from him. 'No more of this, for a start.' We grappled for it as I tried to drain it dry, choking and coughing wine all over the deck and myself, then we were laughing until the tears came. As we were drying our eyes I had a thought and asked: 'But hold up, brother. You know how to fight well enough. You skewered that man's eyeball like a matron threading a darning-needle. You didn't learn that in Balecester. I never knew you to carry a blade.'

Well, they taught me. And they found I had a natural… aptitude. The thing about mercenaries is that they fight for money. And they fight over money. There are all sorts of little wars, Patch, flaring up like grass fires anywhere that mercenaries come together. The Black Boar had it out with a band of Catalans who had been thrown out of Greece and thought we'd slighted them over some contract or other. It… it wasn't like Balecester, right enough. No drunken scholars dodging fat watchmen. My company wanted me blooded. They started a fight at a little Flemish market fair and pushed me into the thick of it. My choice was kill or be a corpse, and here I am. It happened again, more than once. I have been blooded, all right. But you know what it is like, too. I am…' He looked at me and smiled: rueful, bitter, the most honest look he had given me all day. 'I am good at it, Patch. I do not enjoy the killing. I enjoy the fight, but to kill…' he shook his head. 'More wine, if you please. Last night, brother – that was the first time for you?'

For a ghastly moment I did not know what he meant. How could he possibly know about the bawdy-house? Then I realised.

'Not my first fight, but the first…' I put my hands to my temples. 'I never killed a man before last night. I wish with all my heart I had not done it. I wish he lived and it was I lying dead…'

'But you live. You are here drinking wine under the great blue roof of heaven. And is it not sweet? Kill, Patch, or be a corpse. I would rather be alive, brother. And from the many rough miles you have travelled, I think you would, too.' 'It cannot be as simple as you put it.'

'But it is, brother. It truly is.' And he put his arms behind his head, lay back and closed his eyes. The sun shone down on us both, but as I too stretched out to bask in its warmth a chill whispered through me, although the day held no shadows. I went on watch at five bells and Dimitri put Will to cleaning the blades that had found so much work on shore. There was still no sign of Anna, but there was plenty to be done as the Cormaran sailed out of the Gironde and into a perfect sea, and I was glad to empty my mind of anything but the wind and the ropes. We rounded the Pointe de Grave and turned south, gliding past the long dune of Arcachon towards Bayonne. The sun fell slowly towards the forests away to the west and at last, as the brazier was lit to heat our dinner, Anna appeared on deck. We were about to put the ship about, and I could not leave my station, but she saw me and raised her hand. She wore a simple tunic of some dark, rich-looking stuff, and her black hair was pulled back and hidden under a simple white coif. She looked both pure and alluring and my blood began to whisper softly in my ears. That is your woman,' it said. I shook my head in happy disbelief, then as the sail cracked and bellied there was a minute of wild activity, and when I made fast my rope and turned to her again, she was stepping into the cabin and did not look back. Gilles followed and closed the door behind them. It was no more than I had expected. Mikal had eaten with the crew, but the Princess Anna Doukaina Komnena could hardly be expected to squat around a cauldron and bandy words with the likes of us, although I knew she would probably prefer to. But all the same my dark humours crept over me again, and when someone tapped me on the shoulder to relieve me of the watch I could hardly bring myself to make the few paces over to the brazier.

Tonight there were stories to be told and I did not want to tell mine, but knew it would be dragged from me anyway. I took no pleasure in the memory of what I had done, but I obliged when my turn came, and discovered, as the demijohns of good Bordeaux wine went around, why soldiers tell their war stories. The telling and retelling began to ease some hurt deep within me. I am not one of those men to whom each killing is a mark of pride, and in truth I believe I carry each cut I have inflicted on others in some scarred quarter of my soul. That night, though, as we danced every murderous step again, I became part of the Cormaran for good. I had fought and I had killed, and tonight I brought currency of my own to the circle of men, and as I stood and showed for the third time how I had stuck my knife up under a man's ribs and held him until he breathed his soul into my face I found I was among friends, and home at last.

Later I slept like a thing of stone, to be awakened at dawn by the tossing of the ship beneath me. We had run into a storm off San Sebastian, and it chased us down to the Pillars of Hercules, green water a never-ending torrent across the decks and lightning playing about the mast-top. Will, whom the crew had taken to with a vengeance, did his best to learn sail-craft in between hours spent puking off the stern. He was wan company at best but it gave me a simple, boyish pleasure to teach what I knew of this strange new world to my friend. He must have found my ease and enthusiasm a little wearing, and began to tire of my assurances that the sickness would soon pass, I who had never suffered it. But unlike many I have known, who have begged to be put ashore, or even weakly tried to put an end to themselves, Will tottered about his work doggedly, and the crew, and I, loved him all the more.

The Pillars were a gateway indeed, and sailing through we left the dismal weather behind. I must have made a fool of myself, running from one side of the ship to the other, straining my eyes this time towards Spain and the great bulwark of the Gibr-al-Tariq, this time over to the distant brown shores of Africa. We were in a different world entirely, it seemed, a place of hot breezes and warm nights. Will's sea-legs found him at last, and we marvelled at how lean he had grown. 'I have puked my old life away,' he said in wonder. For the first time in my life I went about shirtless and my skin turned from its waxen English white to livid, smarting red and then to a deep brown. Even my teeth were feeling better. The only thing missing was Anna.

Since revealing herself to the crew she had kept her distance. I understood why, of course. She could not throw on her sailcloth tunic and go back to being Mikal, and I knew that when she had first come aboard she had feared the men – not without reason, although she had won over most hearts, I believed. She would be safe amongst them, though perhaps no longer comfortable. But it was me she was taking pains to avoid, and fool that I was I could not fathom the reason for it. She spent her days with the Captain and with Gilles, or with Nizam up on the steering deck, my own favourite place on the Cormaran, which I no longer had time to visit. Even Will, whose roguish spark had well and truly kindled itself again, would find time to lean on the rail and tell her things that made her laugh. When we did talk she was distant or distracted, and the one night when we shared the Captain's table she barely said a word to me. I missed her horribly, although she was there before my eyes every day. Then I began to worry, and worry tumbled with guilt and confusion until I had convinced myself that everything was my fault. She had never wanted to share my bed: I had forced her. Then I had led her fecklessly into danger and forced her to kill. Now she undoubtedly hated me as much as I was beginning to hate myself.

These were becoming black days, despite the glory of the weather and the friendly sea, and we were no more than two days' sail from the Pillars when I began my rapid fall into a despair deeper than I had ever imagined man could suffer in this life. The humours of melancholy filled me as smoke from a guttering candle fills and blackens a closed lantern. The fight returned to me again and again, sometimes as a blur, sometimes in horrible detail, far clearer than it had been at the time. I felt again and again the resistance and then the give of the man's innards against my knife. I remembered that I had smelled shit as he died, and that his bowels must have let go. And then the face of Deacon Jean would return to me full of terrified outrage at what was happening to him. I heard, again and again, the hot splash of his blood on the floor of the cathedral, and it mingled with the screams of the mad hermit of the island after I had wounded him. So much death, so much pain; and all at my hand, all on my account. And Anna… Perhaps because our night together had been so violently changed from love to bloody riot, I could hardly think of what we had done together without it seeming a defilement, and I the defiler. I began to have dismal, churning dreams, and then sleep itself came less and less often, which was a blessing. I took to avoiding company – even that of Will – when I was not needed; and would sit behind a water butt, my arms clutching my knees, silent and still as the hours passed by.

I had all but forgotten the miraculous chance that had bought Will back, so much so that sometimes, as my afflicted conscience gnawed me, I would see him struck down by Sir Hugh's flail and add his death to my burden of guilt, even though he walked the deck a few yards away. Mostly I took his presence for granted, and he had the good sense to leave me to myself. He seemed to know when the shadows were not so thick around me, and then we would be easy with each other once more. One night, after the sun had set with its usual magnificence behind the hills of Spain, the stars had appeared and the Cormaran’s wake glowed and sparkled faintly, I felt so overwhelmed by the beauty of it all that I felt a sudden need to blot out this lovely world on which I was but a stain. So I sought out a full wineskin and set about emptying it into myself. Had the ocean been wine I would have gladly jumped overboard with mouth open, but although no wineskin could hold enough to dull my torment I found myself, at some later point in the evening – the intervening parts having vanished from memory – leaning heavily on the forward rail and regarding the blade of the new moon which was sinking, yellow as a sheaf of ripe corn, below the invisible horizon.

The stars blazed here in the south, as bright as a winter's night in Devon. With the fixation, the false clarity of mind that comes with drink, I tried to fathom the unimaginable distances between my little self bobbing on the sea and the moon, set in its crystal sphere, and beyond it past the planetary spheres to the sphere upon which the stars were fixed, and even further, to the Primum Mobile itself. Brother Adric had given me Ptolemy's Almagest to read at the Abbey, and, although I had understood what was written therein as an ant understands a pachyderm, the vast machinery of equants and deferants, the wonderful, logical complexity of it all had never ceased to fill me with joy and wonder. Tonight, however, I was thinking of distances, endless tracts of emptiness and the lonely music of the spheres as they turned in their immutable orbits. The moon was waxing and there was the faintest hint of the old moon caught in the calliper-grasp of her arms.

Will came to lean beside me and we passed a wineskin back and forth and watched the strange glow of the wake. I wanted to be alone and so said nothing, but after a while he cleared his throat.

'I am intruding on your… solitude, Patch,' he said. I shrugged and kept silent, but he went on.

'I know what melancholy feels like, brother,' he murmured. I turned to him in surprise despite myself. ‘You?'

Yes, why not? It was early in my time with… the company. I was brought very low, low enough to wonder how quick a rope around my neck would get the job done. I didn't get very far, but I thought about it very carefully. Probably thought about it too much, actually, because while I was agonising and debating I began to feel better, and little by little the life came back into me.' 'But why? What made you?'

'There is much I cannot…' he paused, and gave me the most haunted look I had ever seen upon his face. 'I do not know. The shock of being cast out of my familiar world, perhaps. The knock on the head. Many things can stir up the black bile. It is done, though. That's what I wanted to tell you: it passes. Time is as good as any potion, of that I am convinced.'

'I have thought about it too,' I admitted, unwillingly. 'But it seems too easy an escape.'

'And what of the comforts of Mother Church?' he asked. 'It was no help to me, but you…'

'No comfort there, Will.' I told him a little of my epiphany in the cathedral at Gardar.

'There has been a burden on you for a long time, then,' he said. 'Loss of faith… I am no theologian, no Albertus Magnus, God forbid! And I never really had faith like you did, Patch – horrible confession, is it not? Do not tell me that you did not suspect! But when the faithful are stripped of all they believe, they are like a stone house gutted by fire: the walls stand, but all within is gone: rooms, stairs, decorations, beds, tables, everything familiar, gone. If the walls are sound the house may be rebuilt inside – in time. But it will not be familiar, Patch – it will not be home.'

'No Albertus Magnus? You are right there. Hardly even a hedge-scholar, brother!' But Will had found me out. My faith was gone, and although I did not wish to regain it – strange how fast a lifetime's habits of thought can come to seem like childish superstition – the hollow it had left had yet to be filled with anything as sustaining.

'I live like a beast,' I told him. 'I breathe, I eat, sleep, work… I have no purpose other than to remain alive. And I am less and less sure why I bother even to do that.'

'But life itself – what more is there? You have the Cormaran, and the brotherhood of this fine crew of villains, myself included. You have two arms, two legs, two eyes, you are strong… and what of all you have learned? Does that not fill you up?'

I raised my arms hopelessly. 'I am filled, brother: up to the brim with guilt,' I said. WHiat good is it to keep yourself alive if you must do it at the cost of others? I live like a beast, but I am no beast. I am a man, and if God or his son Jesus Christ will not judge me, then I must judge myself.'

'Aha!' cried Will. 'I have found you out! You are like that snake who eats his own tail, the…the…' he snapped his fingers in frustration. 'Ouroboros,' I muttered.

'Exactly. But instead of your tail, you have rammed your head up your own fundament and are gnawing away at your tripes. You are blind to anything but yourself – anyone but yourself. Pull your head out, Patch. It must be very dark up there.' 'It isn't like that,' I whimpered.

'Then how is it? Have you learned nothing since we left home? You must seize hold of life and squeeze it until the juice comes. Patch, you were doing a fine job until I came along. What about Lady Anna? How do you think…'

'I will not talk about the Princess Anna!' I snapped, jumping up in a rage that caught us both by surprise.

'Peace, peace – I meant nothing and you know it. Now sit down and take another drink.'

And so I did, but only stayed for another minute. Then with a civil 'goodnight' I took myself off to my berth. I lay sleepless that whole night until at last my anger melted into self-pity. Who or what I raged against I did not know, for I was no more the master of my moods than a bee caught in a hurricane can choose which way to fly. I longed for someone – it was too hard even to name that someone to myself – to come to me and wash away my sins, as I knew was in her power. But no sacrament would be given that night, and instead the stars were my company, mocking me with their cold distance.

We were hurrying across this beautiful sea. Land lay always to port, but far away: no more than a low purple bruise on the horizon. We were following a course towards the coast of Italy and a rendezvous in the great city of Pisa: that at least I knew from the Captain, but if he confided more I do not remember, so wrapped in misery was I. I say wrapped: it did indeed feel as if I were caught up in a winding-sheet but still walked, my limbs alive, my insides dead. Isaac began to watch me closely and ply me with potions and pills – dill, rue, hyssop, bee-balm and other wonders from his store which I had never heard of but which tasted as bitter as any roadside weed. Under his ministrations the melancholy would ebb sometimes, long enough to marvel at the clever porpoises and dolphins who came to visit the Cormaran, weaving in and out of our wake and racing with us, a race they always won with ease. On such days Will and I would find our old delight in each other's company, although I sensed that he treated me carefully, as if I might break suddenly. One day I saw a shoal of fish leap out of the water all at once and spread wings. Like silver swifts they glided stiffly for a distance, then plunged back into the deeps. Soon this miracle – miracle for me, although the other men hardly paid it any mind – became a commonplace, and when a brace of the magical fish missed their aim and crashed to the deck, I hardly noticed when they were added to the night's meal. I became a zealous fisherman, as it was the best excuse for spending my free hours leaning over the side, staring into the sea. I was not interested in what I caught, but the crew were: strange, lovely and occasionally hideous creatures that all tasted good enough. Once, I think the day after we raised the island of Formentera and were creeping past the mountains of Mallorca, I dropped my line unknowingly into a great shoal of mackerel and, as I hauled them up, frantically tying more and more hooks to my line, every man with a free hand rushed to the side with their own lines and soon the deck was carpeted with a writhing, stranded shoal that gleamed and rippled like living chain-mail. Everyone – even the Captain and Gilles, even Anna – waded in to gather them up, stun them and throw them into one of the salting barrels that Guthlaf had pulled from the hold. It was as I bent to this task that I heard a squeal and saw Anna fending off a mackerel that flapped and jerked in her arms. She flung it away, stooped and picked up another struggling fish which, with a triumphant laugh, she threw at one of the crew. Her aim was good: the mackerel hit Will square on his crooked nose.

Like all those who suffer a surfeit of melancholy I was drawn more and more inside myself, studying as if with an inner eye the sooty and damaged rubric of what I took to be my soul. It is hard to look back on those days with any great sympathy for myself, for the humours made me selfish, sour and unfriendly, and those traits are not easily borne in a community as tight-knit as a ship. It says much for the good nature of the crew that they did not heave me overboard, but it must have been a great temptation for them at times. But I was oblivious to the feelings of others, indeed I barely noticed them, so intent on anatomising my worthlessness had I become. But looking up at that moment to see the look of pure happiness on Anna's face, and finding it mirrored in Will's, brought me to my senses like a whiff of sal ammoniac. While I had brooded – how many days had it been? Weeks, perhaps? – life had been going on without me. Things had been happening under my nose. I had turned my feelings for Anna over and over like meat on a spit, watching them become shrivelled and burnt. Out here in the sunshine, though, Anna was happy and quite unconcerned.

Or so it seemed. Now it is easy to see that I was not looking directly at the world. Instead I was peering into the mirror held up for me by melancholy, which distorted and corrupted all that appeared in it. So I did not see Anna's happiness for what it was: the proof that my fears for her were groundless. Instead I searched the mirror for a more sinister meaning, and it was not long in revealing itself. For there stood Will, my worldly, wicked friend, and the look he was giving Anna was one I had seen a thousand times before in the low houses of Balecester.

The unwholesome epiphany I was granted from Anna and Will's mackerel-fight worked a miraculous cure, as epiphanies are wont to do. From that moment on I found my senses clear and life once again humming within me. I was mistaken, though, if I believed that my melancholy humour had been cast out. It had instead transmuted itself from the base matter of despair to the harder, brighter metal of jealousy. But like any good poison, this one did its work slowly and insidiously, although I would not understand this until it was too late. At that moment, standing bare-chested in the hot sun with my arms full of slimy, writhing fish, I was suddenly feeling something like my old self. Without thinking, I lobbed the mackerel in my hand at Will who, faced with scaly assault from two quarters, ducked behind the mast and aimed another fish at me. It went wide and hit Carlo in the stomach and he, thinking Dimitri behind the wicked deed, launched an attack of his own that signalled out-and-out war on deck. If a flying-fish had chanced to peer over the rail as he glided past he would have been treated to the marine version of hell itself: a writhing bedlam of half-naked men hurling fish, beating one another about the head with fish and treading live fish underfoot, hooting and screeching the while like a legion of Beelzebub's fiends. It had been long months since the men of the Cormaran had been allowed their heads in this way – they had missed a true shore-leave in Dublin and Bordeaux – and the Captain let the melee run its course, even permitting Istvan to belabour him with a fast-disintegrating dog-fish that had thrown in its lot with the wrong shoal.

Once some sort of order had returned to the Cormaran it became clear that we would have to pay for our jollity. In many ways life aboard a ship resembles that of a monastery, and that perhaps was one reason why I felt so at home on the sea. It is a self-sufficient community of men in which a life of labour is regulated by bells. There is always much to be done, but on ship as in monastery, idle hands are the greatest danger to order and work must be found for them. I spent my boyhood scrubbing floors and polishing wood at the abbey, and now I found that my days passed in much the same way. So it was with mounting panic that we stood, fouled with scales and blood, and regarded the chaos we had wrought.

The deck was creamy with the trodden guts and mashed corpses of fish. Many survived to be pickled, and the rest went overboard. Fafner emerged from below, his whiskers fairly trembling with excitement. A cloud of seabirds appeared as if from nowhere to feast on the oily, stinking trail that the Cormaran dragged like a slug across the pristine sea. We set to work sluicing everything down with sea-water, then scouring the deck with sand and stones. It was somewhat purgatorial, as the sun heated everything to the rotting point almost straight away, and we laboured in a rich fetor of putrescence. Black slime had to be scraped from almost every surface. In the end we had to scatter lye, which made our eyes water, and wash ourselves down with sour wine, but it was days before the ship – and its cat – lost its pungency.

Meanwhile, fish had come to feed on the debris in our wake, and greater fish to feed upon the smaller ones. A shout from the steering deck brought me running, grateful for a respite from my scouring-stone. Nizam was pointing down into the water, and Anna, who had wisely taken refuge up here after starting the melee, was bouncing on her bare toes with excitement – or perhaps fear, for when I followed Nizam's finger I saw a strange and wonderful sight. Great silver-grey fish, the size of dolphins, were roiling and thrashing on the surface, seemingly driven mad by the mackerel blood. 'Sharks,' someone beside me said, awe in his voice. Now I understood why sailors fear that beast above all others. I saw little fish disappearing into wide, toothy maws; pointed heads lash at water, at other sharks, even at the seagulls who hovered just overhead. Then Anna let out a scream of real terror and a couple of the crew stepped back abruptly from the rail. A monstrous grey shape had scythed into the churning pack. It seemed as big as two oxen stood nose to tail, and its jaws gaped wide as a door, all studded about with a thicket of curved, needle-pointed teeth. But the monster's eyes were the worst: two black sockets that seemed to open onto night itself. No expression was there, no glimmer, no sign that any spark of life dwelt inside that merciless head. Instead it seemed driven by remorseless hatred for all that moved. It fought briefly with the other sharks, turning the water into a red ferment, and when they had fled or died it turned its appalling eye on us and drove straight for the rudder. There was a thud, the deck shook and Nizam went sprawling. The tiller juddered. Then the monster was gone, sunk to whatever bleak depth it claimed as its kingdom. I turned to find reassurance in a human face, to wipe away the memory of those empty eyes, and saw that Anna, in her fear, had pressed herself close against Will.

I could not get the memory of it out of my head. All the rest of that long day I scrubbed the deck like a madman, until my hands were numb with the constant grating. But my mind was anything but numbed. So recently dead within my skull, it had awakened and was buzzing like a nest of wasps, yellow as the gall of jealousy I could all but taste upon my tongue. Had I troubled to consult Isaac, he could have told me that the melancholic black bile that had devilled me had been driven out by an excess of yellow bile – so out of balance had my body become that I had begun to swing, like a pendulum, from one extremity to another – and this choleric humour was now driving me helplessly before it. I think he saw us all as a collection of vessels more or less full of foul or fair liquids, to be topped up or drained at his discretion. But foolishly I did not seek him out, and instead allowed the image that had painted clear upon my inner eye – Anna leaning into Will's side – to grow and grow until it became first a glowing Veronica, then a gigantic thing that filled my world as. if it were painted on the sail itself. In truth, what had I seen? Nothing more than the simplest urge for protection against an all-devouring fear, and had I not felt the same thing myself? But the grand Veronica of my jealous fancy was my work and mine alone, and like any painter I began to add details: had Anna's hand reached for Will's? In my mind's eye it had. Anna's face: had she turned it to Will, helpless, beseeching? Certainly. Had a look passed between them, secret, complicit? Yes, hell's shark-toothed mouth swallow them both, yes.

I laboured through another white-hot day, then another, and dreamed bitter dreams each night. Finally I woke to cooler weather with a steady wind out of the west, and caught my first sight of Corsica to starboard. As we drew closer, the island seemed a great wall of stone topped by a head of white cloud. By midday it had resolved itself into a jagged collection of mountain peaks, among which the vaporous clouds seethed and twined. Towns lay under those peaks, apparently, although the thought of living in such a forbidding place made me shudder. Nizam pointed out Calvi and the Red Isle, and with some difficulty we turned our course north-north-east.

'The wind is fickle in this sea,' Zianni told me. Like many of the crew, Zianni had lived the life of a pirate before chance brought him aboard the Cormaran. He came from a noble Venetian family but had killed a magistrate in a brawl and had fled from the Doge's executioner. He had robbed his way up and down the Italian coast with a gang of Istrian corsairs, fought with the Catalan mercenaries in the islands we had sailed past a few days before and cast in his lot with the Cormaran after dabbling with honesty in Valencia had reduced him to beggardom.

'The wind at our backs is the libeccio,' he said now. 'It blows through here like a bastard this time of year. See those clouds over the island? We'll have thunder tonight, for certain, and then enough wind to blow us to Pisa and half-way over the mountains beyond.'

He was right. As we coasted up towards Cap Corse, the sea grew darker and the clouds seemed to boil over and fill the whole sky. It was after midnight when we rounded the cape, the whole crew on deck, and a few minutes later the sky caught fire. I had never seen such lightning. It spun across the sky like the spokes of an infernal cartwheel and stabbed the sea all around us. I felt the thunder from the soles of my feet to the teeth that rattled in my head. The wind hit us so hard that the Cormaran heeled over to starboard, and those who did not have a tight hold on rope or spar were sent flying into the bilges. We scrambled in the deep darkness – lit every few seconds by light that seemed brighter and fiercer than the sun – to reef the sail, and soon we were flying on a broad reach across the seething waters. The lightning flailed above us, bursts of light freezing us in the midst of our frenzied work, branding fleeting impressions onto my eyes so that, whether they were open or closed, I saw wild faces, pale madmen bathed in blazing quicksilver.

There was no sleep that night, nor the next morning. We had only twenty or so leagues to cover from Cap Corse to the mouth of the Arno, and again Zianni's prediction came true. On our broad reach, the libeccio screeching onto our port side, we raised the Italian coast soon after ten bells. But soon after that, the wind dropped and the storm pulled its rags from the sky. By this time we were near enough to land to see the reedy mouths of the Arno and, beyond it, the distant outline of the city itself. We were not alone on the sea: ships of all description were plying in and out of the river, and I could not help noticing a new, tense vigilance in the faces of the Captain and Gilles. I was just wondering if I could snatch a few minutes of sleep when Gilles beckoned me to his side on the steering deck.

'Do you wish to see Pisa? Good, for you are coming ashore with us,' he said, leaving me no time to protest. 'Find your friend and make the gig ready.' He must have caught sight of something in my eyes, for he went on: Tour friend Will. He will be coming as well.'

I did not care whether I saw Pisa or no, but I keenly did not want Will's company. Nevertheless I gritted my teeth and dragged myself over to where he sat, helping Dimitri in his endless task of keeping the salt sea from devouring our weapons. It did not improve my mood to see the look of almost doggy pleasure he gave me at the news.

'Let's get to it, then,' I said briskly, in case he tried to talk to me. Turning on my heel I stalked off aft climbing up on the rail to skirt the stern castle. The gig would be full of water from the storm and heavy, I thought, angrily. I already had hold of the painter and was pulling at it, watching the gig bob happily in the Cormaran's wake and noting that it was, indeed, much heavier than usual, when Will dropped down beside me and clapped his hands over mine. We gave an experimental heave. 'She's a heavy one,' said Will brightly.

'How surprising,' I returned, so coldly I wondered I could not see my breath.

'So lay on, Patch!' he chattered. 'Lay on! It is a beautiful day – God's nails, that storm! – and we are going ashore in sinful Pisa. Is Pisa sinful? I hope so. All cities are sinful, somewhat, eh, Patch?'

'For fuck's sake stop your prating and pull the sodding rope!' I snapped. What's wrong with you?'

'Nothing's wrong. We need to shut up and work. I don't want to do this, so let us get it over with.'

'No, wait, Patch. You have been acting like a basket of bad eggs since we came through the Pillars. What is going on?'

Will had both hands on my shoulders. I cringed, and loosened my hold on the rope. It shot through my hand, burning it, before I snatched it away with a curse and turned back to my torturer.

'I do not understand why you had to come back at all,' I yelled at him, spittle forming on my lips. Why did you? You have… you have pushed me aside!'

'How? How have I pushed you aside, Patch, and from what, pray?'

'From the life I had made for myself here. From my friends. I feel like a corpse – no, no, I feel like your bloody shadow, you bastard!' 'Shadow be fucked. I ask again: pushed you aside from what? No, let us rather say, from whom?' 'From the Captain,' I muttered. 'No, that is not it. Try again.' 'I don't know. Gilles. Dimitri. My friends – everyone!' 'Everyone? Is there anyone in particular whom you feel I have…'

I slammed my hand down on the rail, and turned to him, teeth clenched in fury. 'Look, Will, you know who I mean. You certainly know. Don't make me fucking say it!' 'I'll say it for you. Anna.'

I believe my hand would have gone to Thorn at that moment, but Will knew my mind better than I knew it myself, and laid his hand gently over mine on the rail. If I had expected to see triumph in his face I was disappointed. He was watching me soberly, carefully. Then he held up a finger and kept it there between our two faces.

'Anna – yes? I am right, and please don't say anything. You think too much, brother. You always did. Back at college you were always thinking, while I was out fucking or brawling. You envied me, and I confess I envied you somewhat too. Patch, we both should have fucked and thought in equal measure, but we did not, alas: look where it's got us. And yes, you know my ways and suspect the worst. But you are wrong. Wenches… wenches like me because, mostly, they don't do too much thinking and they like a lad who tends to put his dick before his brains. And that's always served me well. But I am not the fool you imagine me to be. Not quite. Your Princess Anna… I like her very well, boy. But she is not, Brother Petroc, what I would call a wench. She thinks all the time! And although she likes me well enough – I make her laugh, fiddlededee! I make her blush, for shame! – it is something of a sisterly affection.'

He laughed with no trace of humour. We were staring into each other's eyes like two tomcats ill-met on a roof. Still his finger did not waver before my face. 'Do you understand what I am telling you?' he said, finally.

'She won't let you fuck her,' I answered, every word soaked in livid yellow bile. Will took a deep breath and bit his lip.

'She doesn't want me to fuck her, you little shit. She wants-' and suddenly his finger was stabbing into me below my breastbone. You. She wants you. Is that clear enough?'

'She doesn't! She does not!' I heard my voice rise to an unpleasant shout. 'She dodges me like a leper! I might as well be ringing a fucking bell! But you, she's all over you, isn't she?'

Yes, and do you know what she talks to me about? Day in, day out? You. Bloody Patch this, that and the fucking other. I am so happy that you are miserable, brother, for I am just as miserable as you, and Anna, sweet Anna, is more miserable than the two of us put together. I am going off my head, Patch! My life… I am living under a great grey rain cloud that drenches me day in, day out with its pitiful bloody sorrow.'

My head was spinning, and I could feel the wine I had drunk and how it was weighing me down. I did not want to listen to Will any more. I could not bear to listen to what he was telling me. For if he was right, then my own actions… I tried to clear my head. Will's face came into focus as if for the first time in weeks. He looked dreadfully tired and old. I felt ancient myself. All at once the bitter humours that had been choking me drained away like vinegar leaving a broken keg. I was myself again, feeling my skin like a long-abandoned set of clothes. I felt a bit sick, and worse, much worse, I knew I had made a complete, unforgivable and unredeemable idiot of myself. My burnt hand stung, but I grabbed the painter and tugged at it feebly. I could not bring myself to look at Will, so instead I began to mumble, watching the gig merrily defy me.

'She can't possibly want me, brother,' I began. 'But thank you for saying she does. It… anyway, a noble attempt, and I am in your debt for it.'

Will sighed heavily. He leaned far out over the rail so that I was forced to meet his eyes again.

'Listen to me,' he said. 'I do not know – much less care, you understand – what has passed between you two sour creatures. But I do know women a little, and it is plain that there has been a misunderstanding. Or rather more than that, I'll grant you. The truth of it is, she does not hate you, but she is certain – deathly certain – that you loath her, and that is the canker that gnaws at her. How fitting that it should gnaw you as well.' 'Oh, Christ,' I moaned.

‘You have been cold towards her since the fight in Bordeaux.'

'No, no, she has been cold to me! Since she came to me, all bloody when I was trying to wash myself…' Suddenly everything was horribly clear. I beat the rail with both fists, and the gig sped backwards through the wake yet again. 'Ah, ha. She disgusted you.' 'No!'

'Understandable, all stinking and covered with blood like that. But that-' and he was smiling now, '-that is the only thing that I do understand. She is… she's a fucking princess, Patch, and she is arse over tit in love with you, you worthless Dartmoor sheep-shagger. That, my brother, is the greatest mystery of all.'

I fear I overwhelmed Will with the force of my embrace and the hot tears that soaked into his tunic, but he was good enough not to say anything, except to stifle my litany of contrition. I believe it was then that he truly returned to life for me, and as we finally mastered the gig and made it fast alongside the Cormaran we were both cackling and chattering like tannery sparrows.