The Mayan Codex

3

Amauri de Bale, Count of Hyeres, spent the next sixteen years of his life in involuntary exile from the Court.

The Queen Mother, Blanche de Castile, had never forgiven him for what she saw as the encouragement of her son, the King, to commit an act whose folly was only outweighed by its pointlessness. The fact that de Bale had saved the young King’s life at considerable risk to his own counted for little in the Queen’s estimation – although it had undoubtedly protected de Bale from a regicide’s agonizing death by quartering.

The King had been forbidden by his mother ever to communicate with de Bale again, and he had acceded to this request out of duty and affection for his mother, whilst stopping just short of agreeing to the actual administration of a formal oath.

But the King was a profoundly pious man, and renowned throughout Europe for his sense of fair play. Over the years of their enforced separation he had become increasingly convinced that Amauri de Bale had been marked out by God to save him from the machinations of the Devil. And furthermore that the great St Benedict boar, far from assuming the guise of one of the very symbols of Christ, had in fact been Lucifer himself.

In the late summer of 1244, and following a near mortal illness, King Louis, to his mother’s horror, had unilaterally declared his intention to take the crusader’s vow. After considerable soul-searching, and with the guidance of his confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and of his chaplain, William of Chartres, it was decided that it would be impossible for the King to take the cross without first acknowledging God’s part in his decision. And this, in turn, could not be done without recognition of some sort for the man who had clearly been chosen by God Himself to protect the King from the Devil.

The problem was further aggravated by the fact that a number of the King’s squires – many of whom, sixteen years on, were now holders of important Offices of State – had clearly heard the King, that morning back in 1228, explaining to Count Amauri de Bale that he, Louis, Rex Francorum and Rex Christianissimus, Lieutenant of God on Earth, Lord High Protector of France (the Eldest daughter of the Church), had been personally instructed by God that if he ever wished to secure the permanent annexation of Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem to the Holy Mother Church, he must first go out and kill a wild boar with his axe.

Thanks to his ever more profound understanding of the scriptures, the King – and via the King, his counsellors – now understood that God had had a further and less obvious motive in mind that day. And that this motive involved the selection of Count Amauri de Bale to be the King’s sole champion. To act for him and on behalf of him, in other words, in the gratification of God’s wishes.

As a direct consequence of this fact, and in the teeth of the Queen Mother’s vigorous disapproval, the King issued a formal summons to de Bale to present himself at the Basilica of St Denis, next to the tombs of the King’s father, Louis VIII, and of his grandfather, Philip II Augustus, on the exact day, and at the exact moment, of the sixteen-year anniversary of his God-driven intervention.