The Lazarus Vault

XXVI

The next two months are the happiest of my life.

We head south, towards the lands of the King of France. Nowhere’s safe for us, but at least that’ll be dangerous for Guy’s men too. After two days we sell our horses. It’s a wrench, surrendering my status so soon after I won it, but they’re too easily recognised and we attract too many looks. We might just pass as a knight and his lady, but people will wonder where our servants and baggage have gone. They’ll remember us.

On foot, we’re almost invisible. As spring turns to summer, the people of Christendom pour on to the roads in their thousands. You could travel from Canterbury to Compostela and never be alone. After the first week, when every bump in the road has me looking over my shoulder for the dust of galloping hooves, the crowds start to relax me. The more people who see us, the fewer who’ll notice.

You can see the change in both of us. I grow my hair long, and let my beard grow out. Ada’s beauty’s harder to disguise, but after two months her skin is harder and darker. We present ourselves as husband and wife, and live accordingly. After so long lurking in shadows, it’s a joy to have it out in the open. It feels right, honest. I can almost forget that Ada has a real husband.

She never talks about him, but there’s a look she has whenever we pass a church, a quietness, that reminds me she took a vow before God. It still binds her, however much I wish it away.

For a time, when we stop being children, we wish the world could be other than it is — that wounds could heal without scars, that every love could be a first love, that past sins could be undone with a single confession. I learned the truth when I was young: we can never shed our sins and regrets, only accumulate more, a burden that we grow and carry until our deaths. The best we can do is learn to live with ourselves, to accommodate our pasts.

At the shrine of Our Lady of Tours, I give Ada a wooden brooch, two birds drinking from a cup. I can’t marry her, but I get down on my knees and promise her, ‘I’ll always love you, I’ll always protect you.’

But summer fades. One day, I realise the road isn’t as busy as it was the week before. It’s easier to find space at the pilgrim hostels and almshouses; the queues at the town gates aren’t as long. Travellers have begun to return home for the harvest, to wipe the dust off their shoes and lay up stores for winter. The questions that I’ve kept firmly over the horizon now seem urgent. When everyone goes home, where will we go? How will we support ourselves? We’ve stretched the money from the horses as far as we could, but it’s almost gone. On the road, it’s easy to pretend to be a glovemaker and his wife from London, but that won’t feed us through the winter. Ada can sew and weave, but so can every woman. The only trade I know is fighting.

It’s late August when the answer comes to me. We’re in Burgundy, near Dijon; dusk is falling, earlier and earlier these days. We arrive at an inn. Usually we avoid them because of the cost, but it’s been raining all day and we slept under a hedge last night. Passing the door, I notice a tall blue shield painted with a golden star leaned against the wall. When I’ve haggled with the innkeeper for a bed and some food, I ask him about it.

‘Etienne de Luz.’ He jerks his thumb to the back room, where I can hear laughter and singing from behind a curtained door. ‘The Count of Dijon is holding a tourney in three days at La Roche.’

The innkeeper slouches off to attend to something. Ada grabs my wrist. She can see what I’m thinking.

‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘No one will recognise me. We’re a long way from Normandy.’

That’s not what she means. ‘Men die in the tourney all the time.’

I know she’s right. There are no blunted edges and filed-down points in the tourney. When lances shatter, splinters fill the air like swarms of arrows. But next morning, after a long night arguing with Ada, I’m standing in the stableyard when Etienne de Luz comes to get his mount.

It’s obvious at once that he’s no warrior. For a start, he’s fully armed: a real fighter would save his strength for combat. His gleaming hauberk and jewelled scabbard can’t hide the fact that his mail coat only has a single layer of rings, and his sword would probably snap in a strong wind. But the men who trail out of the tavern behind him look useful enough.

I step in front of him. ‘I hear you’re taking a company to the tournament at La Roche.’

He looks me up and down, then turns to his seneschal. He wants a second opinion. He’s vain, but he knows his limitations.

The seneschal sees enough to be interested. ‘What can you do?’

I look around the yard. My eye alights on a dove, perched on the edge of the roof, pecking grubs out of the thatch.

‘Give me a spear.’

The seneschal obliges. I heft it in my hand, testing the weight, finding the balance. It doesn’t have the poise of a Welsh javelin, but it will have to do.

I crouch, take a half-step back, and let fly. The javelin strikes the dove clean in the breast and goes through, burying itself in the thatch. Blood stains the white feathers. Etienne and his seneschal look impressed.

Guy would say it’s hardly a knightly skill. But on the tournament field, all that matters is how many bodies you bring in.

‘Can you do that on horseback?’

I don’t tell him how the dove got there — that I snared her last night in the stables and tethered her to the roof-beam with a loop of thread; that I’ve paced out the distance exactly. The storyteller doesn’t have to tell his audience everything.

‘Give me a horse, and I’ll show you what I can do.’