The mystic rose

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

'In Anjou before the snow,' muttered Renaud de Bracineaux thickly as he stared at the muddy track before him; white-topped mountains in the distance seemed to be holding up a sky like rumpled grey wool. 'Winter at your estate-that is what you said.' He spat into a puddle.

'I blame the emperor,' the baron replied indifferently. 'If we had not been made to lavish attendance on his silly cow of a niece, we would have been there and back by now.'

De Bracineaux continued as if he had not heard, 'Not to mention the priest disappearing.'

'Ho, now! I will not have that laid at my feet,' d'Anjou objected. 'Anything might have happened to him. Wild animals might have got him for all we know.'

'God's teeth,' snarled the Templar, 'it was that damnable woman! And that is another thing you were wrong about.' He regarded the man on the horse beside him with rank disgust. 'I am curious. Tell me, d'Anjou, have you ever been right about anything in your life?'

Sergeant Gislebert reined up just then. 'The company is ready, commander.'

De Bracineaux cast a glance at the long double rank of troops and pack animals and wagons. The knights sat hump-shouldered on their mounts; hooded, their once-white surcoats now brown with mud, they looked like the ruined remnant of a vanquished army. Turning away abruptly, the commander looked again at the low, sullen sky as rain began to spatter on the mud-slick road. 'Let us make a start,' he said. 'God knows we will not get far today.' Raising a hand, he signalled the columns to move forward, and they rode on into another day of drizzle and cold.

At midday, they stopped at the ford of a swift-running stream to rest and water the horses. While there, the scouts who had been sent out the previous day returned. The commander met them as they rode in. 'Well?' he said, impatience making him sharp.

'We have found something, my lord,' said one of the Templars. 'We think you should take a look.'

'What is it?'

'Remains of a camp,' said the second knight.

'How far?'

'Not far. We can be there by nightfall.'

De Bracineaux accepted this estimate without comment. He turned to Gislebert. 'Get fresh mounts for these men,' he ordered. 'And have one of the cooks prepare them something to eat. I want to be ready to move on as soon as the horses are watered.'

Until now, the trail had not been difficult to follow. The abbot of Logrono reported having spoken to a foreign knight, and having attempted to dissuade him and his party from continuing their journey. At Milagro and Carcastillo, the villagers told them that yes, of course, a party of knights passed through; they stopped and worked in exchange for bacon, flour, oats, and such. Yes, they said, there were women with them, and a priest. They stayed a few days and then departed, heading north and east along the river.

The Templars followed the river, too, and when the settlements grew so far apart and so far off the trail to be dependable sources of information, de Bracineaux took to sending out scouts. The trail was old, but the scouts were expert trackers, so the Templars slowly followed their quarry further and further into Aragon's high, empty hills.

With the approach of winter, the wind and rain and occasional frost had begun making the thieves' trail increasingly difficult to raise. For the last two days, they had journeyed on without clear indication that they were still in productive pursuit. Now, however, the scouts had turned up another clue to help them continue the search a little longer.

Even so, de Bracineaux knew not to allow himself to become too overjoyed by this development. Winter was coming to the high country, and if he did not discover where the priest was leading his band of thieves before it fell, he might never find them. The thought that they might yet escape his grasp filled him with an icy and implacable rage that drove him on.

By the time they reached the place the scouts had marked, the day had ended in a damp gloom which descended over the rain-soaked track like a curtain. 'We can see nothing now,' said de Bracineaux. 'Set up camp down there,' he pointed back down the trail to where the troops were waiting. 'If there is anything to see, I do not want it trampled into the mud. We will give the place a thorough inspection as soon as it is light.'

The tents were raised and the evening meal prepared in the rain and dark-five tents with four men each for the knights, one for the commander, and one for the baron. When space permitted, they clustered the tents around two or three large campfires which both warmed them and dried their sodden clothes. This night, however, because of the trees and thick underbrush they strung them in a line along the track, and had to rely on small campfires before each tent; there was little warmth, and no one went to sleep in a dry cloak or boots.

The next morning dawned clear and, while the sergeant oversaw the troops as they prepared to resume the journey, de Bracineaux, d'Anjou, and the two scouts rode up to the abandoned campsite. Dismounting a few score paces away, de Bracineaux walked to where the fire had burned. He squatted down and looked at the ground inside the fire ring. The ashes had been washed away by numerous rains; all that remained was a milky-grey puddle and a few unburned ends of branches, with a small pile of sticks stacked beside the ring of stone.

Rising, he turned and looked across the clearing towards the trees. A large branch lay on the ground before a rock outcropping between two trees. He went to it, lifted it, and examined the end. The cut was ragged; it looked as though the branch had been half-chopped, half-yanked from the tree. He stood fingering the cut and looking around.

'Lord commander, have you found something?' asked one of the Templar scouts.

'I cannot say,' he replied. 'I think there was some trouble here.

You there,' de Bracineaux called to the other scout, 'search in those trees. And you -' he said to the other, 'we know they had a wagon; see if you can find any tracks.'

While the scouts carried out their orders, the commander walked back and forth slowly over the clearing. Although it was difficult to tell for certain, it did appear as if the turf was broken and churned up in several places-more than it would be by a company of travellers stopping for a night or two.

'Here, d'Anjou,' called de Bracineaux, 'look at this and tell me what you think.'

The baron leaned low in the saddle, holding his head to one side then the other. 'I think it is too wet and too damnably cold to be searching for weevils in the porridge.'

'The ground, damn you,' barked de Bracineaux. 'Look at the ground.' He paused for a moment, then demanded, 'Well?'

'It looks as though they have had a falling out. A fight among thieves perhaps?'

'Not among thieves,' the commander corrected. 'Between thieves.'

'There is a difference?'

'There is every difference, d'Anjou,' replied de Bracineaux. He then declared: 'They were attacked.'

The baron regarded the muddy patch doubtfully. 'A bit of scuffed-up turf is hardly indication of a pitched battle.'

'Scout!' shouted the commander. The nearest Templar came running. 'Fetch the sergeant and four more men. I want a search made of the perimeter.'

The man disappeared on the run and de Bracineaux, fists on hips, head bent down, continued his close scrutiny of the soggy ground. Every now and then, he stopped to examine something that caught his eye, before moving on again.

'Lord commander! Here!' called the remaining scout.

De Bracineaux joined the man at the edge of the clearing. 'What have you found?'

'It appears to be barley meal,' replied the knight, stooping low over a pale heap of sodden matter.

The commander knelt, and removing a glove, picked up some of the soggy stuff. He rubbed it between his fingers, held it under his nose and sniffed. 'I think you are right.'

'There must be a quarter of a barrel spilled there,' the knight pointed out. 'Either someone was very careless -

'Or in a very great hurry,' concluded the Templar commander. 'Too great a hurry to salvage what he had spilled.'

'And there,' said the scout, pointing to four shallow, evenly spaced indentations. 'Those could be from the wagon wheels.'

D'Anjou approached and sat on his horse a little distance away. 'Does anyone smell what I am smelling?' he asked, lifting his beak-like nose into the air. 'Something has given up the ghost.'

De Bracineaux walked to where d'Anjou, head tilted back, was sifting the air for the scent. 'It is somewhere off through there,' he said, pointing across the clearing towards a stand of taller trees.

Sergeant Gislebert and the additional men arrived just then. De Bracineaux met them in the centre of the clearing. 'There is something dead in those trees just there,' he said, pointing to the place d'Anjou indicated. 'Start your search there. Call out if you find anything.'

The Templars hastened off into the wood, and almost immediately the cry came back. 'Commander! There is a grave!'

Baron D'Anjou smiled as he dismounted, '/may never be right, but this nose of mine is rarely wrong.' He followed the commander into the wood and they quickly arrived in another small clearing to find the Templars standing beside a wide rectangle of mounded earth. A crude cross was pressed into the soft dirt, and around it were the spent stubs of burnt branches.

De Bracineaux took one look at the mound and said, 'Dig it up.'

The knights hesitated. One of their number made bold to reply. 'My lord commander,' he said, pointing to the cross, 'Christians are buried here.'

'Unless you wish to join them,' growled the commander, 'do as I say. Dig it up!'

Still the knights hesitated. 'My lord,' said Gislebert, speaking up, 'the shovel is in the wagon back there.'

'Damn the shovel, Gislebert! You have swords, do you not? Hands? Dig!'

Slowly, and with great reluctance, the Templars began to burrow into the soft wet earth with their bare hands. With every handful of dirt they removed, the stink d'Anjou had noticed grew stronger.

Soon the men were holding their noses with one hand and digging half-heartedly with the other as, slowly, five human forms began to emerge.

'Dig, damn you!' cried de Bracineaux, growing impatient. The soil was less damp nearer the bodies, and the stench all the stronger. The Templars continued to scoop away the dirt, one or two with tears streaming down their beards, the rest clutching the edge of their cloaks to their faces. Slowly, individual bodies were revealed. There were five of them; two big men in dark brown cloaks laid out on either side of a slender man in black.

'Hold!' called the commander, bending near. 'What have we here?' He pointed to the one in the centre. 'Pull the hood away from his face.'

The nearest knight did as he was told, and pulled the hood of the corpse's dark robe from his face. The flesh was wan and waxy, but the cold ground had prevented the body from bloating so it still resembled the man that had been. The beard was black against the bloodless pallor of his skin, and the lips held the hint of a smile.

'It looks like a priest,' said the Templar, pulling a small wooden cross from beneath a fold in the robe.

De Bracineaux nodded. 'What about these others?' he said, indicating the corpses either side of the priest. Another knight pulled back a hood covering one of the faces. Here the worms were at work on the eyes; the sudden sight of squirming, half-empty sockets proved too much for the knight, who jerked back his hand as if he had been burned.

'A Spaniard,' observed d'Anjou. 'Judging from their clothing, so are the others.' Indicating the priest, he said, 'Do you think that could be Matthias?'

De Bracineaux nodded. 'Five dead,' he mused. 'If the villagers at the last place were telling the truth, she has only six left.'

'Do you want me to bring the archbishop to see the priest?' asked Gislebert.

'He insists they never laid eyes on one another,' replied d'Anjou.

'Bring him anyway,' the commander ordered, 'for all the good it will do. By the Rood, I wish I had sent him back; the man is a very millstone.' Turning to the knights standing nearby, he said, 'Well? Search the rest of the area, and be quick about it.'

In the end, they found nothing else-save the ragged remains of three human carcasses which had been gnawed by animals. The dead were Moorish, from what they could gather from the remains and scraps of clothing. Of the company that had been attacked, no further signs were found, so Commander de Bracineaux ordered his scouts to begin scouring the area, working out in ever-widening circles from the camp, in the hope of raising the trail again.

The day ended without success, but the next morning one of the scouts found a small heap of rocks beside a nearby stream-and another on the opposite side, pointing the way. 'They passed this way, and marked the place,' the scout told them. 'They seem to be heading into the mountains.'

'Hear that, d'Anjou?' said the commander. 'We have found the trail.' Lifting his eyes to the mountains in the distance showing above the trees, he continued, 'The hind is swift, but the hound is persistent. We will yet run her to ground. And when we do, I will tear her apart.'