The Nameless Day
Sara Douglass

The Crucible: Book One

In memory of my most devoted fan,

MICHAEL GODWIN

10th September 1981 – 16th March 1998

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Author’s Note

Prologue

ROME

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

GERMANY

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

FRANCE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

ENGLAND

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

Epilogue

Glossary

A JIGGE (FOR MARGRETT)

A JIGGE (FOR MARGRETT) (MODERNISED VERSION)

About the Author

Also by Sara Douglass

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

Time travel is not only theoretically possible, travel into our future has already been achieved (albeit on a tiny scale of a few seconds or minutes). Travel into our past is more problematic. How would interfering with our past affect our present? Some physicists argue that sending someone into the past creates a “parallel universe”—the mere presence of someone in a past time alters that world’s future to such an extent that a different future is necessarily created: a parallel universe (or world) to the one we live in.

The three books of “The Crucible” are set, not in the medieval Europe of our past, but in the medieval Europe of a parallel universe: the insertion of even one fictional character amongst a host of historical characters necessarily creates that parallel world. Thus, while there are many similarities between our past and the world of “The Crucible”, there are also many differences. The entire period of the Hundred Years War, for example, has been compressed so that the Battle of Poitiers is fought at a later date than in our past, and Joan of Arc appears at an earlier date.

Although some dates and “facts” have altered, the spirit of “The Crucible” remains identical to that of our medieval Europe. Something strange happened in the fourteenth century…something very, very odd. The fourteenth century was an age of unprecedented catastrophe for western Europe: widespread famine due to climate change, economic collapse, uncontrollable heresies, social upheaval, endemic war and, to compound the misery, the physical and psychological devastation of the Black Death. In all of recorded history there has never been before or since a period of such utter disaster: one half of Europe’s population died due to the effects of famine, war and the Black Death. As a result, Europeans emerged from the fourteenth century profoundly—and frighteningly—changed. Medieval Europe had been an intensely spiritual society: the salvation of the soul was paramount. Post-fourteenth century Europe abandoned spirituality for secularism, materialism and worldliness. Its peoples embraced technology and science, and developed the most aggressively invasive mentality of world history. Why this profound shift from the internal quest for spiritual salvation to a craving for world domination? Was it just the end result of over a hundred years of catastrophe…or was there another reason?

“The Crucible” presents an explanation couched in a medieval understanding of the world rather than in terms more familiar to our modern sensibilities. Medieval Europe was a world of evil incarnate, a world where demons and angels walked the same fields as men and women; a world where the armies of God and of Satan arrayed themselves for the final battle…we now live in the aftermath of that battle, but are we sure who won?

Sara Douglass

Bendigo, 2000

Prologue

The Friday within the Octave of All Saints

to the Nameless Day

In the twenty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(7th November to Tuesday 23rd December 1348)

—St Angelo’s Friary, Rome—

“Brother Wynkyn? Brother Wynkyn? Sweet Jesu, Brother, you’re not going to leave us now?”

Brother Wynkyn de Worde slapped shut the weighty manuscript book before him and turned to face Prior Bertrand. “I have no choice, Bertrand. I must leave.”

Bertrand took a deep breath. Sweet Saviour, how could he possibly dissuade Brother Wynkyn?

“My friend,” he said, earning himself a sarcastic glance from Wynkyn. “Brother Wynkyn…the pestilence rages across Christendom. If you leave the safety of Saint Angelo’s—”

“What safety? Of the seventeen brothers who prayed here five weeks ago, now there is only you and me and two others left. Besides, if I choose to hide within these ‘safe’ walls a far worse pestilence will ravage Christendom than that which currently rages. I must go. Get out of my way.”

“Brother, the roads are choked with the dying and the brigands who pick their pockets and pluck the rings from their fingers.” Prior Bertrand moderated his voice, trying to reason with the old man. Brother Wynkyn had ever been difficult. Bertrand knew that Wynkyn had even shouted down the Holy Father once, and Bertrand realised there was no circumstance in which he could hope for respect from someone who was powerful enough to cow a pope. “How can you possibly overcome all the difficulties and the dangers roaming the roads between here and Nuremberg? Stay, I beg you.”

“I would condemn the earth to a slow descent into insanity if I stayed here.” Wynkyn lowered the book—he needed both arms to lift it—and several loose pages of closely-written script into a flat-lidded oaken casket bound with brass. It was only just large enough to take the book and the pages. Once he had shut the casket, Wynkyn locked it with a key that hung from a chain on his belt.

Bertrand watched wordlessly for some minutes, and then tried again. “And if you die on the road?”

Wynkyn shot his prior an angry glance. “I will not die on the road! God and the angels protect me and my purpose.”

“As they have protected all the other innocent souls who have died in the past weeks and months? Wynkyn, nothing protects mankind against the evil of this pestilence!”

Wynkyn carefully checked the casket to ensure its security. He turned his back to Bertrand.

“Rome is dying,” Bertrand said, his voice now soft. “Corpses lie six deep in the streets, and the black, bubbling pestilence seeks new victims on every breath of wind. God has shown us the face of wrath for our sins, and the angels have fled. If you leave the friary now you will surely die.”

Still Wynkyn did not answer.

“Brother,” Bertrand said, desperation now filling his voice. “Why must you leave? What is of such importance that you must risk almost certain death?”

Wynkyn turned about and locked eyes with the prior. “Because if I don’t leave, then it is almost certain death for Christendom,” he said. “Either get out of my way, Bertrand, or aid me to carry this casket to my mule.”

Bertrand’s eyes filled with tears. He made a hopeless gesture with his hand, but Wynkyn’s gaze did not waver.

“Well?” Wynkyn said.

Bertrand took a deep, sobbing breath, and then grasped a handle of the casket. “I wish peace walk with you, Wynkyn.”

“Peace has never walked with me,” Wynkyn said as he grabbed the other handle. “And it never will.”

Wynkyn de Worde had undertaken the journey between Rome and Nuremberg over one hundred times in the past fifty or so years, but never had he done so before with such a heavy heart. He had been twenty-three in 1296 when the then pope, the great Boniface VIII, had sent him north for the first time.

Twenty-three, and entrusted with a secret so horrifying, that it, and the nightmarish responsibility it carried with it, would have killed most other men. But Wynkyn was a special man, strong and dedicated, sure of the right of God, and with a faith so unshakeable that Boniface understood why the angels had selected him as the man fit to oversee the Cleft.

“Reveal this secret to any other man,” Boniface had told the young Dominican, “and you can be sure that the angels themselves will ensure your death.”

Already privy to the ghastly secret, Wynkyn knew truth when he heard it.

Boniface had leaned back in his chair, satisfied. Since the beginnings of the office of the pope in the Dark Ages, its incumbents kept the secret of the Cleft, entrusting it only to the single priest the angels had said was strong enough to endure. As this priest approached the end of his life, the angels gave the pope the name of a new priest, young and strong, and this young priest would accompany the older priest on the man’s final few journeys to the Cleft. From the older, dying priest the younger one learned the incantations that he would need…and he also learned the true meaning of courage, for without it he would not endure.

These priests, the Select, spent their lives teetering on the edge of hell.

In 1298 Boniface informed Wynkyn de Worde that he was the angels’ choice as the new Select. Then, having learned from his predecessor, Wynkyn performed his duty willingly and without mishap for five years. He thought his life would take the same path as the scores of priests who had preceded him…but he, like the angels, had underestimated the power and cunning of pure evil.

Who could have thought the papacy could fail so badly? Wynkyn had not anticipated it; the angels certainly had not. In 1303 the great and revered Pope Boniface VIII died, and Wynkyn had no way of knowing that the forces of darkness and disorder would seize this opportunity to throw the papacy into chaos. In the subsequent papal election a man called Clement V took the papal throne. Outwardly pious, it quickly became apparent to Wynkyn, as to everyone else, that Clement was the puppet of the French king, Philip IV. The new pope moved the papacy to the French-controlled town of Avignon, allowing Philip to dictate the papacy’s activities and edicts. There, successive popes lived in luxury and corruption, mouthing the orders of French kings instead of the will of God.

When a new pope was enthroned, either the first among archangels, St Michael, or the current Select revealed to him the secret of the Cleft, but neither St Michael nor Wynkyn approached Clement. How could they allow the fearful secrets of the angels to fall into the hands of the French monarchy? Sweet Jesu, Wynkyn had thought as he spent sleepless nights wondering what to do, a French king could seize control of the world had he this knowledge in hand! He could command an army so vile that even the angels of God would quail before it.

So both Wynkyn and the angels kept the secret against the day that the popes rediscovered God and moved themselves and the papacy back to Rome. After all, surely it could not be long? Could it?

But the seductiveness of evil was stronger than Wynkyn and the angels had anticipated. When Clement V died, the pope who succeeded him also preferred the French monarch’s bribes and the sweet air of Avignon to the word of God and the best interests of His Church on earth. And so also the pope after that one…

Every year Wynkyn travelled north to the Cleft in time for the summer and winter solstices, and then travelled back to Rome to await his next journey; he could not bear to live his entire life at the Cleft, although he knew some of his predecessors, stronger men than he, had done so.

He received income enough from what Boniface had left at his disposal to continue his work, and the prior and brothers of his friary, St Angelo’s, were too in awe of him to inquire closely into his movements and activities.

Brother Wynkyn de Worde also had the angels to assist his work. As they should, for their lusts had necessitated the Cleft.

But now here Wynkyn was, an ancient man in his mid-seventies, and it seemed that the popes would never return to Rome. God’s wrath had boiled over, showering Europe with a pestilence such as it had never previously endured. Wynkyn had always travelled north with a heavy heart—his mission could engender no less in any man—but this night, as he carefully led his mule through the dead and dying littering the streets of Rome, he felt his soul shudder under the weight of his despair.

He was deeply afraid, not only for what he knew he would find awaiting him at the Cleft, but because he did fear he might die…and then who would follow him? Who would there be to tend the Cleft?

“I should have told,” he muttered. But who was there to tell? Who to confide in? The popes were dissolute and corrupt, and there was no one else. No one.

Who else was there?

God and the angels had relied on the papacy, and now the popes had betrayed God Himself for a chest full of gold coin from the French king.

Damn the angels! If it wasn’t for their sins in the first instance…

It took Wynkyn almost seven weeks to reach Nuremberg; that he even reached the city at all he thanked God’s benevolence.

Every town, every hamlet, every cottage he’d passed had been in the grip of the black pestilence. Hands reached out from windows, doorways and gutters, begging the passing friar for succour, for prayers, or, at the least, for the last rites, but Wynkyn had ignored them.

They were all sinners, for why else had God’s wrath struck them, and Wynkyn was consumed by his need to get north as fast as he could.

Far worse than the outstretched hands of the dying were the grasping hands of the bandits and outlaws who thronged the roadways and passes. But Wynkyn was sly—God’s good gift—and whenever the bandits saw that Wynkyn clasped a cloth to his mouth, and heard the desperate racking of his cough, they backed away, making the sign of the cross.

Yet even Wynkyn could not remain immune to the grasping fingers of the pestilence forever. Not at his age.

On Ember Saturday Wynkyn de Worde had approached a small village two days from Nuremberg. By the roadside lay a huddle of men and women, dying from the plague. One of them, a woman—God’s curse to earth!—had risen to her feet and stumbled towards the friar riding by, but as she leaned on his mule’s shoulder, begging for aid, Wynkyn kicked her roughly away.

It was too late. Unbeknown to the friar, as he extended his hand to ward her off the deadly kiss of the pestilence sprang from her mouth to his hand during the virulence of her pleas. He planted his foot in the hateful woman’s chest, and when he raised his hand to his face to make the sign of the cross the pestilence leaped unseen from his hand to his mouth.

The deed was done, and there was nothing the angels could do but moan.

The peal of mourning bells covered Nuremberg in a melancholy pall; even this great northern trading city had not escaped the ravages of the pestilence. The only reason Wynkyn managed access through the gates was that the town desperately needed men licensed by God to administer the last rites to the mass of dying. But Wynkyn did not pause to administer the last rites to anyone. He made his way to the Dominican friary in the eastern quarter of the city, his mule stumbling with weakness from his journey, and demanded audience with the prior.

The friary had been struck as badly by the pestilence as had Nuremberg itself, and the brother who met Wynkyn at the friary gate informed him that the prior had died these three nights past.

“Brother Guillaume now speaks with the prior’s voice,” the brother said.

Wynkyn showed no emotion—death no longer surprised nor distressed him—and requested that the friar take him to Brother Guillaume. “And help me carry this casket, brother, for I am passing weary.”

The brother nodded. He knew Wynkyn well.

Brother Guillaume greeted Wynkyn with ill-disguised distaste and impatience. He had never liked this autocratic friar from Rome, and neither he nor any other friar in his disease-ridden community could spare the time to attend Wynkyn’s demands.

“A meal only,” Wynkyn said, noting Guillaume’s reaction, “and a request.”

“And that is?”

Wynkyn nodded towards the casket. “I leave in the morning for the forest north of the city. If I should not return within a week, I request that you send that casket—unopened—to my home friary.”

Guillaume raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Your home friary? But, Brother Wynkyn, that would surely be impossible!”

“Easily enough accomplished!” Wynkyn snapped, and Guillaume flinched at the brother’s sudden anger. “There are sufficient merchant bands travelling through Nuremberg who could take the casket on for a suitable price.”

Wynkyn reached inside his habit and pulled out a small purse he had bound about his waist. “Take these gold pieces. It will be enough and more to pay for the casket’s journey.”

“But…but this pestilence has stopped all traffic, and—”

“For the love of God, Guillaume, do as I say!”

Guillaume stared, shaken by Wynkyn’s distress.

“Surely the pestilence will pass eventually, and when it does, the merchants will resume their trade, as they always do. Please, do as I ask.”

“Very well then.” Guillaume indicated a stool, and Wynkyn sat down. “But surely you will return. You have always done so before.”

Wynkyn sighed, and rubbed his face with a trembling hand. “Perhaps.”

And perhaps not, Guillaume thought, as he recognised the feverish glint in the old brother’s eyes, and the unhealthy glow in his cheeks.

Guillaume backed away a few steps. “I will send a brother with food and ale,” he said, and scurried for the door.

“Thank you,” Wynkyn said to the empty air.

That night Wynkyn sat in a cold cell by the open casket, his hand on the closed book on his lap. Because there was no one else, Wynkyn carefully explained to the book the disaster that had befallen mankind generally, and the Keeper of the Cleft specifically. The popes had abandoned the directions of God and the angels for the directions of the French king. They did not know the secrets and mysteries of the Cleft or of the book itself, for neither angels nor Wynkyn dared reveal it to them. Through his ignorance, the current pope—Clement VI—had not selected the man to follow Wynkyn.

And a woman—a woman!—had passed the pestilence to Wynkyn!

In the past few hours, as he sat in his icy cell shaking with fever, Wynkyn had refused to come to terms with the fact that he was dying. There was no one to follow him; thus how could he die?

How could he die, when that would mean the demons would run free?

In his decades of service to God and the angels, Wynkyn had never come this close to despair: not when he had first heard of his mission; not even when he had seen what awaited him at the Cleft.

Not even when the first demon he encountered had turned and spoken his name and pleaded for its life.

But now…now, this silent misery in a cold and comfortless friary cell…this was despair.

Wynkyn lowered his head and wept, a hand still on the closed book, his shoulders shaking with both his grief and his fever.

Peace.

At first Wynkyn did not respond, then, when the heavenly voice repeated itself, he slowly raised his face.

Two arm spans away the far wall of the cell glowed. Most of the light was concentrated in the centre of the wall in the vague form of a winged man, his arms outstretched.

As Wynkyn watched, round-eyed with wonder, the archangel, still only a vague glowing outline, stepped from the wall and placed his hands about Wynkyn’s upturned face.

Peace, Brother Wynkyn.

“Blessed Saint Michael!” Wynkyn would have fallen to his knees, but the pressure of the archangel’s hands kept him in his seat.

The archangel very slightly increased the pressure of his hands, and love and joy flowed into Wynkyn’s being.

“Blessed Saint Michael,” Wynkyn whispered, his eyes watering from the archangel’s glow. He blinked his tears away. “I am dying—”

For an instant, an instant so fleeting he knew he must have imagined it, Wynkyn thought he felt rage sweep through the archangel.

But then it was gone, as if it had never been.

“—and there is none to follow me. Saint Michael, what can we do?”

There is not one named, Wynkyn, but that does not mean one can never be. We shall have to make one, you and I and the full majesty of my brothers.

“Saint Michael?”

Take up that book you hold, and fold back the pages to the final leaf.

Slowly, Wynkyn did as the archangel asked.

He gasped. The book revealed an incantation he had never seen before…and how many years had he spent examining every scratch within its pages?

With our heavenly power and your voice, we can between us forge your successor.

Wynkyn quickly scanned the incantation. He frowned a little as its meaning sank in. “But it will take years, and in the meantime—”

Trust. Are you ready?

Wynkyn took a deep breath, fighting back the urge to cough as he did so. “Aye, my lord. I am ready.”

The glow increased about the archangel, and as it did, Wynkyn saw with the angel’s eyes.

Images flooded chaotically before him: bodies writhing and plunging, lost in the evils of lust, the thoughts of the flesh triumphing over the meditations of the soul.

Horrible sinners all! Where are they who do not sin…ah! There! There!

Wynkyn blinked. There a man who lowered himself reluctantly to his wife’s body, and his wife, most blessed of women, who turned her face aside in abhorrence and who closed her eyes against the repugnant thrusting of her husband. This was not an act of lust, but of duty. This was a husband and a wife who endured the unbearable for only one reason: the engendering of a child.

God’s child indeed. Speak, Wynkyn, speak the incantation now!

He hesitated, because as St Michael voiced his command, Wynkyn realised that the cell—impossibly—was crowded with all the angels of heaven. About the friar thronged a myriad glowing forms, their faces intense and raging and their eyes so full of furious power that Wynkyn wondered that the walls of the friary did not explode in fear.

Speak! St Michael commanded, and the cell filled with the celestial cry of the angels: Speak! Speak! Speak!

Wynkyn spoke, his feverish tongue fumbling over some of the words, but that did not matter, because even as he fumbled, he felt the power of the incantation and the power of all the angels flood creation.

St Michael lifted his hands from Wynkyn’s face and shrieked, and with him shrieked the heavenly host.

The man shrieked also, his movements now most horrid and vile. His wife screamed and tried desperately to push away her husband.

But it was too late.

Far, far too late.

Wynkyn’s successor had been conceived.

The friar blinked. The archangel and his companions had gone, as had the incantation on the page before him.

He was alone again in his cell, and all that was left was to die.

Or, perhaps, to try and perform his duty one last time.

Wynkyn set out the next morning just after Matins, shivering in the cold, dawn air. It lacked but a few days until the Nativity of the Lord Jesus Christ—although Wynkyn doubted there would be much joy and celebration this year—and winter had central Europe in a tight grip.

He coughed and spat out a wad of pus- and blood-stained phlegm.

“I will live yet,” Wynkyn murmured. “Just a few more days.”

And he grasped his staff the tighter and shuffled onto the almost deserted road beyond the city’s northern gate.

It had not been shut the previous night. No doubt the gatekeeper’s corpse lay swelling with the gases of putrefaction somewhere within the gatehouse.

The wind was bitter beyond the shelter of the streets and walls, and Wynkyn had to wrap his cloak tightly about himself. Even so, he could not escape the bone-chilling cold, and he shivered violently as he forced one foot after the other on the deserted road.

“Pray to God I have the time,” he whispered, and for the next several hours, until the sun was well above the horizon, he muttered prayer after prayer, using them not only for protection against the devilry in the air, but also as an aid in his journey.

If he concentrated on the prayers, then he might not notice the crippling cold.

Even the sun rising towards noon did not warm the air, nor impart any cheer to the surrounding countryside.

The fields were deserted, ploughs standing bogged in frozen earth, and the doors of abandoned hovels creaked to and fro in the wind.

There was no evidence of life at all: no men, no women, no dogs, no birds.

Just a barren and dead landscape.

“Devilry, devilry,” Wynkyn muttered between prayers. “Devilry, devilry!”

By mid-afternoon Wynkyn was aching in every joint, and shaking with fatigue. His cough had worsened, and pain hammered with insistent and cruel fists behind his forehead.

“I am so old,” he whispered, halting for a rest beneath a twisted tree stripped bare of all its leaves. “Too old for this. Too old.”

A fit of coughing made the friar double over in agony, and when Wynkyn raised himself and wiped bleary tears from his eyes, he only stared in resignation at what he saw glistening on the ground between his feet.

No phlegm at all now. Just blood…and thick yellow pus.

An hour before dusk, almost frozen yet still shaking with fever, Wynkyn turned onto an all but hidden small track that led north-east. Stands of shadowed trees had sprung up to either side of the road in the last mile, and the track led deeper into the woods.

The trees had been stripped of leaves by the winter cold, and moisture and fungus crept along their black branches and hung down from knobbly twigs. Boulders reared out of the moss-covered ground, tilting trees on sharp angles. Cold air eddied between trees and boulders, carrying with it a thin fog that tangled among the treetops.

No one ever ventured into these forbidding woods. Not only was their very appearance more than dismal, but legend had it that demons and sprites lingered among the trees, as did goblins among the rocks, all more than ready to snatch any foolish souls who ventured into their domain.

Wynkyn would have chuckled if he had had the energy. For hundreds of years the Church had cautioned people away from these woods with their tales of red-eyed demons. Red-eyed demons there were none, but Wynkyn knew the reality was worse than the stories.

These woods nurtured the Cleft.

He struggled along the track, stopping every ten or twelve steps to lean against the trunk of a tree and cough.

Wynkyn knew he was dying, and now the only question left in his mind was whether or not he could open the Cleft and dispose of this year’s crop of horror before he commended his soul to God.

After another mile the ground began to rise to either side of the path. Yet another half mile and Wynkyn, his legs so weak he had to lean heavily on a staff to keep upright, found himself at the mouth of a gorge. The hills to either side were not over tall—perhaps some six or seven hundred feet—but the gorge floor dropped down into…well, into hell itself.

This was the Cleft, the earth’s vile equivalent of the suppurating cleft that lay between the legs of every daughter of Eve.

Wynkyn began to laugh, a harsh yet whispery sound. As loathsomeness would be sunk into the cleft of every one of the daughters of Eve, so he, Wynkyn de Worde, would see to it that loathsomeness would be sunk into this Cleft.

Every cleft led to hell, one way or the other.

Wynkyn’s laughter turned into an agonising, wet, bubbling cough, and he sank to his knees and would have fallen completely had it not been for his grip on his staff. The pestilence had run riot in his lungs, and now Wynkyn was very close to drowning in his own pus and blood.

Time was passing too fast. He did not have long.

Praise God he knew the incantations by heart!

Wynkyn forced himself to raise his head. He spat out an amount of pus, hawked, spat again, then wiped his mouth with a shaking arm.

It was time.

Slowly he spoke the words, his eyes fixed on the Cleft.

When he finished, it first appeared that nothing had changed. The gorge spread before him in the twilight, a twisted wasteland of boulders and shadows and the hunched shapes of low, scrubby bushes.

But in an instant all altered. Flames licked out from behind boulders, and vegetation burst into fire. There was a roaring, rending sound, and clouds of sulphuric effluvium billowed into the air.

Wails and screams, and even the thin, white, despairing arms of those trapped within, rose and fell from the gate to hell.

Wynkyn chuckled. The Cleft had opened.

But his work was not yet done. He turned slightly so that he could see the path behind him.

“Come,” he said, and clicked his fingers. “Come.”

There was a momentary stillness, then from the forest lining the path walked forth children, perhaps some thirty or thirty-five, all between the ages of two and six.

Not one of them was human and all were horribly deformed; the twistings of their bodies reflecting the twistings of their souls.

Wynkyn bared his teeth. They were abominable! Devilish! And to the Devil they must be sent.

He lifted his hand, trying to control its shaking, and began to speak the incantation that would force them down into—

A convulsion racked his body, and his voice wavered and stilled.

Another convulsion swept over him, and Wynkyn de Worde collapsed to the ground.

One of the children, a boy of about six, stepped forth to within a few paces of the friar.

Wynkyn rolled over slightly, his face contorted, and began to whisper again.

The boy smiled.

Wynkyn’s voice bubbled to a close. He lifted a hand trying desperately to conjure words out of air, but nothing came of it, and his hand fell back to the ground, failing him as badly as his voice.

“You’re dying,” said the boy, his voice a mixture of relief and joy.

He turned and looked at the crowd of his fellows. “The Keeper dies!” he said.

Behind him Wynkyn writhed and twisted, fighting uselessly against his illness. He tried to breathe, but could not…he could not…the fluids in his lungs had bubbled to his very throat and…

The boy turned back to Wynkyn as the friar made an horrific gurgling. The old man was trembling, and odorous fluids were running from his mouth and nose.

His eyes were wide and staring…and very, very afraid.

“If I had the strength,” the boy said in a voice surprisingly mature for his age, “I would throw you into the Cleft myself.”

But he could not, and so the boy stood there, his fellows now ranged behind him in a curious and joyful semicircle, and watched as Wynkyn de Worde struggled into death.

They waited for some time after his last breath. Making sure.

They waited until the Cleft closed of its own accord, tired of waiting for the incantation that would have fed it.

They waited until the boy at their head leaned down and retrieved the key that hung from the dead friar’s belt.

They waited until the curse of the Nameless Day was past.

“Hail our freedom!” he cried, and then burst into laughter. “We are freed of the angels’ curse. Freed into life!”

And he thrust the key nightward in an obscene gesture towards Heaven.

It was a cold night.

Worse, it was the most feared time of year, for all knew that during the winter solstice the worlds of mankind and demon touched and a passage between them became possible. In ancient times the people had called this day and night period the Nameless Day, for to name it would only have been to give it power. Even though the people now had the word of God to comfort them, they remembered the beliefs of their ancestors, and each year feared that this Nameless Day might witness the escape of Satan’s imps into their world.

The villagers of Asterladen—those the pestilence had spared—huddled about a roaring fire inside the church. It was the only stone building in the village, and the only building with stout doors which the villagers could lock securely.

It was the safest place they could find, and the only sound which could comfort them was the murmured prayers of their parish priest.

Rainard, his wife Aude, and their infant daughter were particularly unlucky. That afternoon they had remained behind in the fields when the other villagers left, trying to discover the brooch that Aude had dropped in the mud.

It was her only piece of finery, a simple brooch made of worn bronze which had been passed down through her family for generations, and Aude was singularly proud of it. Normally she would not have worn it out to the fields, but there was to be a field dance that afternoon, and the lord had promised ale, and Aude wanted to look her best. Despite her age and her many years spent childbearing, Aude was a vain creature and proud of her looks. But between the dancing and the ale, the brooch had somehow slipped from her breast to be trodden down into the earth. She and Rainard—he berating her the entire time for her foolishness in wearing her only piece of jewellery into the field even for a Yuletide dance—had searched for hours, but the brooch was nowhere to be found.

Too late they realised the onset of dusk, and the absence of every other soul.

They hurried back to the village, breathless and fearful, and had beaten on the doors of the church until their fists were bruised and bloody.

But the priest had called them demons, and the villagers safe inside the church had screamed and refused to believe that the voices of their well-known friends were human at all.

So Rainard and Aude and their infant daughter, whom Aude had left swaddled and safe in their cottage while they were out in the fields, had to survive the night on their own.

Rainard built up a good fire in the central hearth of their cottage, and he and his wife huddled as close to it as they could, listening all the while to the moans and cries in the wind outside.

“There’ll be no harm,” Aude muttered, convincing neither her husband nor herself. She threw a concerned glance to her daughter, lying asleep in her cradle.

“We would be safe if not for your cursed trinket,” Rainard said.

Aude bared her yellowing teeth, but said nothing. She grieved deeply for her lost brooch, and wondered if somehow Rainard had been involved in its loss.

What if he had seized it in order to sell it next market day in Nuremberg? Like as not he would squander her money on a new couplet of pigs, or some such! Yes, perhaps he had it even now, tucked away in some—

There was a sudden noise on the wind, the sound of a distant door being forced open, and then of feet scuffling past the back wall of their cottage.

Some of the feet clicked, as if they were clawed.

“Rainard!” Aude squeaked, and leapt into her husband’s arms.

He shoved her to one side, and seized an axe he had to the ready.

More feet scampered past, bolder now, and the couple thought they heard the sound of three or four more doors in neighbouring cottages being forced open.

“Rainard!” Aude screamed, grabbing at his arm.

And then the door of their hovel squeaked and fell open.

Rainard and Aude stared, not believing their eyes.

A child, a boy, stood there. He was weeping, and covered with dirt and abrasions.

Nonetheless, he was the most beautiful child the peasants had ever seen.

“Who are you?” Rainard said, wondering how the child had escaped the prowling demons.

The boy gulped, and began to cry. “I’m lost,” he eventually said.

Rainard and Aude looked at each other. They’d heard tales of these waifs, orphaned by the pestilence, turned out of their homes by neighbours who thought the children harboured pestilence themselves.

But although this boy was cold and dirty, he was also obviously healthy. His eyes shone clear and bright, and his skin, if dirty, was not feverish.

“What is your name?” Aude said.

“I have no name,” the boy said.

“Then where are your parents?” Rainard said.

“My mam is dead, and my father deserted us years ago,” the boy said. “Before I was born. I know not where he is. Please, I am hungry. Will you feed me?”

There was a shuffling behind him, and two girls, perhaps three and four respectively, silently joined the boy.

“How many of you are there?” Rainard asked.

“Us, and two more, both girls,” said the boy. “Please, we have all lost our parents, and are hungry. Will you feed us?”

Rainard and Aude shared a look. They were poor and had barely enough to feed themselves, but they also had souls, and cared deeply for children. God knew there were few enough left in this time of pestilence.

“We’ll take you,” Rainard said, pointing to the boy, “and one of the girls. The others can find homes soon enough with some of the other families.”

The boy smiled, his face almost angelic. “I do thank you,” he said.

He moved over to the cradle, and both Rainard and Aude stiffened.

But the boy did nothing more than reach in and gently touch the sleeping girl’s forehead. “She will lead a charmed life,” he said.

Over that night and the next two days twelve villages in the region north of Nuremberg found themselves sheltering hungry orphans. No one was particularly puzzled by the appearance of the children: communication between villages was poor, and there was no one to learn of the somewhat surprising number of hungry, soulful-looking children who appeared at doors asking for shelter in the time of the Nativity in the year of the black pestilence.

This was a time of unheard-of disease and death, and there must surely be orphaned children wandering about all over the land.

All the children were taken in and nourished, and loved, and raised. None of these children bit the hands that fed them; to these work-worn hands they gave back love and gratefulness and good works.

All of these children eventually left their adopted homes to lead particularly bounteous lives.

ROME

“Margrett, my sweetest Margrett! I must goe!

most dere to mee that neuer may be soo;

as Fortune willes, I cannott itt deny.”

“then know thy loue, thy Margrett, shee must dye.”

A Jigge (for Margrett)

Medieval English ballad

I

The Friday after Plough Monday

In the forty-ninth year of the reign of Edward III

(16th January 1377)

A dribble of red wine ran down Gerardo’s stubbled chin, and he reluctantly—and somewhat unsteadily—rose from his sheltered spot behind the brazier.

It was time to close the gates.

Gerardo had been the gatekeeper at the northern gate of Rome, the Porta del Popolo, for nine years, and in all of his nine years he’d never had a day like this one. In his time he’d closed the gates against raiders, Jewish and Saracen merchants, tardy pilgrims and starving mobs come to the Holy City to beg for morsels and to rob the wealthy. He’d opened the gates to dawns, Holy Roman armies, traders and yet more pilgrims.

Today, he had opened the gate at dawn to discover a pope waiting.

Gerardo had just stood, bleary eyes blinking, mouth hanging open, one hand absently scratching at the reddened and itching lice tracks under his coarse woollen robe. He hadn’t instantly recognised the man or his vestments, nor the banners carried by the considerable entourage stretching out behind the pope. And why should he? No pope had made Rome his home for the past seventy years, and only one had made a cursory visit—and that years before Gerardo had taken on responsibility for the Porta del Popolo.

So he had stood there and stared, blinking like an addle-headed child, until one of the soldiers of the entourage shouted out to make way for His Holiness Pope Gregory XI. Still sleep-befuddled, Gerardo had obligingly shuffled out of the way, and then stood and watched as the pope, fifteen or sixteen cardinals, some sundry officials of the papal curia, soldiers, mercenaries, priests, monks, friars, general hangers-on, eight horse-drawn wagons and several score of laden mules entered Rome to the accompaniment of murmured prayers, chants, heavy incense and the flash of weighty folds of crimson and purple silks in the dawn light.

None among this, the most richest of cavalcades, thought to offer the gatekeeper a coin, and Gerardo was so fuddled he never thought to ask for one.

Instead, he stood, one hand still on the gate, and watched the pageant disappear down the street.

Within the hour Rome was in uproar.

The pope was home! Back from the terrible Babylonian Captivity in Avignon where the traitor French kings had kept successive popes for seventy years. The pope was home!

Mobs roared onto streets and swept over the Ponte St Angelo into the Leonine City and up the street leading to St Peter’s Basilica. There Pope Gregory, a little travel weary but strong of voice, addressed the mob in true papal style, admonishing them for their sins and pleading for their true repentance…as also for the taxes and tithes they had managed to avoid these past seventy years.

The mob was having none of it. They wanted assurance the pope wasn’t going to sally back out the gate the instant they all went back to home and work. They roared the louder, and leaned forward ominously, fists waving in the air, threats of violence rising above their upturned faces. This pope was going to remain in Rome where he belonged.

The pope acquiesced (his train of cardinals had long since fled into the bolted safety of St Peter’s). He promised to remain, and vowed that the papacy had returned to Rome.

The mob quietened, lowered their fists and cheered. Within the hour they’d trickled back to their residences and workshops, not to begin their daily labour, but to indulge in a day of celebration.

Now Gerardo sighed, and shuffled closer to the gate. He had drunk too much of that damn rough Corsican red this day—as had most of the Roman mob, some of whom were still roaming the streets or standing outside the walls of the Leonine City (the gates to that had been shut many hours since)—and he couldn’t wait to close these cursed gates and head back to his warm bed and comfortable wife.

He grabbed hold of the edge of one of the gates, and pulled it slowly across the opening until he could throw home its bolts into the bed of the roadway. He was about to turn for the other gate when a movement in the dusk caught his eye. Gerardo stared, then slowly cursed.

Some fifty or sixty paces down the road was a man riding a mule. Gerardo would have slammed the gates in the man’s face but for the fact that the man wore the distinctive black hooded cloak over the white robe of a Dominican friar, and if there was one group of clergy Gerardo was more than reluctant to annoy it was the Dominicans.

Too many of the damn Dominicans were Father Inquisitors (and those that were not had ambitions to be), and Gerardo didn’t fancy a slow death roasting over coals for irritating one of the bastards.

Worse, Gerardo couldn’t charge the friar the usual coin for passage through the gate. Clergy thought themselves above such trivialities as paying gatekeepers for their labours.

So he stood there, hopping from foot to foot in the deepening dusk and chill air, running foul curses through his mind, and waited for the friar to pass.

The poor bastard looked cold, Gerardo had to give him that. Dominicans affected simple dress, and while the cloak over the robe might keep the man’s body warm enough, his feet were clad in sandals that left them open to the winter’s rigour. As the friar drew closer, Gerardo could see that his hands were white and shaking as they gripped the rope of the mule’s halter, and his face was pinched and blue under the hood of his black cloak.

Gerardo bowed his head respectfully.

“Welcome, brother,” he murmured as the friar drew level with him. I bet the sanctimonious bastard won’t be slow in downing the wine this night, he thought.

The friar pulled his mule to a halt, and Gerardo looked up.

“Can you give me directions to the Saint Angelo friary?” the friar asked in exquisite Latin.

The friar’s accent was strange, and Gerardo frowned, trying to place it. Not Roman, nor the thick German of so many merchants and bankers who passed through his gate. And certainly not the high piping tones of those French pricks. He peered at the man’s face more closely. The friar was about twenty-eight or nine, and his face was that of the soldier rather than the priest: hard and angled planes to cheek and forehead, short black hair curling out from beneath the rim of the hood, a hooked nose, and penetrating light brown eyes over a traveller’s stubble of dark beard.

Sweet St Catherine, perhaps he was a Father Inquisitor!

“Follow the westerly bend of the Tiber,” said Gerardo in much rougher Latin, “until you come to the bridge that crosses over to the Castel Saint Angelo—but do not cross. The Saint Angelo friary lies tucked to one side of the bridge this side of the river. You cannot mistake it.” He bowed deeply.

The friar nodded. “I thank you, good man.” One hand rummaged in the pouch at his waist, and the next moment he tossed a coin at Gerardo. “For your aid,” he said, and kicked his mule forward.

Gerardo grabbed the coin and gasped, revising his opinion of the man as he stared at him disappearing into the twilight.

The friar hunched under his cloak as his exhausted mule stumbled deeper into Rome. For years he had hungered to visit this most holy of cities, yet now he couldn’t even summon a flicker of interest in the buildings rising above him, in the laughter and voices spilling out from open doorways, in the distant rush and tumble of the Tiber, or in the twinkling lights of the Leonine City rising to his right.

He didn’t even scan the horizon for the silhouette of St Peter’s Basilica.

Instead, all he could think of was the pain in his hands and feet. The cold had eaten its terrible way so deep into his flesh and joints that he thought he would limp for the rest of his life.

But of what use were feet to a man who wanted only to spend his life in contemplation of God? And, of course, in penitence for his foul sin—a sin so loathsome that he did not think he’d ever be able to atone for it enough to achieve salvation.

Alice! Alice! How could he ever have condemned her to the death he had?

He should welcome the pain, because it would focus his mind on God, as on his sinful soul. The flesh was nothing; it meant nothing, just as this world meant nothing. On the other hand, his soul was everything, as was contemplation of God and of eternity. Flesh was corrupt, spirit was pure.

The friar sighed and forced himself to throw his cloak away from hands and feet. Comfort was sin, and he should not indulge in it.

He sighed again, ragged and deep, and envied the life of the gatekeeper. Rough, honest work spent in the city of the Holy Father. Service to God.

What man could possibly desire anything else?

Prior Bertrand was half sunk to his arthritic knees before the cross in his cell, when there came a soft tap at the door.

Bertrand closed his eyes in annoyance, then painfully raised himself, grabbing a bench for support as he did so. “Come.”

A young boy of some twelve or thirteen years entered, dressed in the robes of a novice.

He bowed his head and crossed his hands before him. “Brother Thomas Neville has arrived,” he said.

Bertrand raised his eyebrows. The man had made good time! And to arrive the same day as Pope Gregory…well, a day of many surprises then.

“Does he need rest and food before I speak with him, Daniel?” Bertrand asked.

“No,” said another voice, and the newcomer stepped out from the shadows of the ill-lit passageway. He was limping badly. “I would prefer to speak with you now.”

Bertrand bit down an unbrotherly retort at the man’s presumptuous tone, then gestured Brother Thomas inside.

“Thank you, Daniel,” Bertrand said to the novice. “Perhaps you could bring some bread and cheese from the kitchens for Brother Thomas.”

Bertrand glanced at the state of the friar’s hands and feet. “And ask Brother Arno to prepare a poultice.”

“I don’t need—” Brother Thomas began.

“Yes,” Bertrand said, “you do need attention to your hands and feet…your feet especially. If you were not a cripple before you entered service, then God does not demand that you become one now.” He looked back at the novice. “Go.”

The novice bowed again, and closed the door behind him.

“You have surprised me, brother,” Bertrand said, turning to face his visitor, who had hobbled into the centre of the sparsely furnished cell. “I did not expect you for some weeks yet.”

Bertrand glanced over the man’s face and head; he’d travelled so fast he’d not had the time to scrape clean his chin or tonsure. That would be the next thing to be attended to, after his extremities.

“I made good time, Brother Prior,” Thomas said. “A group of obliging merchants let me share their vessel down the French and Tuscany coasts.”

A courageous man, thought Bertrand, to brave the uncertain waters of the Mediterranean. But that is as befits his background. “Will you sit?” he said, and indicated the cell’s only stool, which stood to one side of the bed.

Thomas sat down, not allowing any expression of relief to mark his face, and Bertrand lowered himself to the bed. “You have arrived on an auspicious day, Brother Thomas,” he said.

Thomas raised his eyebrows.

Bertrand stared briefly at the man’s striking face before he responded. There was an arrogance and pride there that deeply disturbed the prior. “Aye, an auspicious day indeed. At dawn Gregory disembarked himself, most of his cardinals, and the entire papal curia, from his barges on the Tiber and entered the city.”

“The pope has returned?”

Bertrand bowed his head in assent.

Brother Thomas muttered something under his breath that to Bertrand’s aged ears sounded very much like a curse.

“Brother Thomas!”

The man’s cheeks reddened slightly. “I beg forgiveness, Brother Prior. I only wish I had pushed my poor mule the faster so I might have been here for the event. Tell me, has he arrived to stay?”

“Well,” Bertrand slid his hands inside the voluminous sleeves of his robe. “I would hear about your journey first, Brother Thomas. And then, perhaps, I can relate our news to you.”

Best to put this autocratic brother in his place as soon as possible, Bertrand thought. I will not let him direct the conversation.

Thomas made as if to object, then bowed his head in acquiescence. “I left Dover on the Feast of Saint Benedict, and crossed to Harfleur on the French coast. From there…”

Bertrand listened with only a portion of his attention as Thomas continued his tale of his journey, nodding now and then with encouragement. But the tale interested him not. It was this man before him who commanded his thoughts.

Brother Thomas was a man of some interest, with an unusual background for a friar, although not for more worldly men. The Prior General of England, Richard Thorseby, had been extremely reluctant to admit Thomas Neville into the Order of Preachers—the Dominicans—and had examined Thomas at great length before finally, and most unwillingly, allowing him to take his vows.

Men like Thomas were usually trouble.

On the other hand, Thomas could be extremely useful to the advancement of the Dominicans—if he was handled correctly.

Bertrand smiled politely as Thomas told an amusing anecdote about ship life with the rowdy merchants, but let his train of thought continue.

Why had Thomas chosen the Dominicans? The mendicant orders, of which the Dominicans were the most powerful, were orders which took their vows of chastity, poverty and obedience very seriously. Indeed, “mendicant” was the ancient Latin word meaning “to beg”. Friars remained poor all their lives, were not allowed to own property or live luxurious lives…unlike many of the higher clergy within the Roman Church.

If Thomas had chosen to join the more regular orders of the Church, Bertrand thought, he could have been a bishop within two years, a cardinal in ten, and could have aspired to be pope within twenty. Yet he chose poverty and humbleness above power and riches. Why?

Piety?

From one of the Nevilles?

From what he knew of the Nevilles, Bertrand could not believe that one of their family would have chosen piety above power, but then one never knew the wondrous workings of the Lord.

“And so now you hope to continue your studies here,” Bertrand said as Thomas’ tale drew to a close.

“My colleagues at Oxford— ”

Bertrand nodded. Thomas had spent two of the past five years teaching as a Master at one of the Oxford colleges.

“—spoke of nothing else but the wonders of your library. Some say,” and Thomas spread his hands almost apologetically, as if he did not truly believe what some had said, “that Saint Angelo’s library is more extensive than that administered by the clergy of Saint Peter’s itself.”

“Nevertheless, you are here, Brother Thomas. You must have believed some of what you had heard.” Bertrand shifted slightly on the hard bed. His hips and shoulders ached in the chill air of his cell, and he berated himself for wishing this young man would leave so he could crawl beneath the blanket.

“But it is true,” Bertrand continued. “We do have a fine library. For many generations our friary has been well funded by successive popes—” Bertrand did not explain why, and Thomas did not ask, “—and much of this benevolent patronage has been put to building one of the finest libraries in Rome and, I dare say, within Christendom itself. You are welcome, Brother Thomas, to use our facilities as you wish.”

Thomas bowed his head again, and smiled. “You are weary, Brother Prior, and I have taken up too much of your time. Perhaps we can talk again in the morning?”

Bertrand nodded. “We break our fast after Prime prayers, Brother Thomas. You may speak with me then. Do you wish Daniel to show you your cell now?”

“I thank you,” Thomas said, “but Daniel has already pointed out its location to me, and there is something else I wish to do before I retire.”

“Yes?”

Thomas took a deep breath, and from the expression on his face Bertrand suddenly realised that it was piety that had impelled Thomas to take holy orders.

“I would pray before the altar of Saint Peter’s, Brother Prior. To prostrate myself to God’s will before the bones of the great Apostle has always been one of my dearest desires.”

“Then for the Virgin’s sake, brother, let Arno see to your feet before you go. I’ll not have the pope say that it was one of my brothers who left blood smeared all over the sacred floor of Saint Peter’s!”

After the celebrations of the day, Rome had darkened and quieted, and the streets were deserted. Thomas walked from the friary over the bridge crossing the Tiber—more comfortably now that Arno had daubed herbs on his ice-bitten feet, and wrapped them in thick, soft bandages inside his sandals—then halted on the far side, staring at the huge rounded shape of the Castel St Angelo from which the friary took its name. Thomas had heard that it was once the tomb of one of the great pagan Roman emperors, but the archangel Michael had appeared one day on its roof and from then on the monument had been converted to a more holy and Christian purpose: a fort, guarding the entrance to the domain of the popes in Rome, the Leonine City.

Thomas turned his head and stared west towards St Peter’s Basilica built into the hill of the Leonine City, and surrounded by lesser buildings and palaces housing, once again, the papal curia and the person of the Holy Father himself. Lights glinted in many of the windows in the papal palace, but even the excitement of a once-again resident pope could not diminish Thomas’ wonder at seeing the great structure of St Peter’s Basilica rising into the night.

Thomas’ eyes flickered once more to the Castel St Angelo. Legend had it that a long-dead pope had caused a tunnel to be built from the papal palace next to St Peter’s into the basements of the fort; an escape route into a well-fortified hidey-hole, should the Roman mobs ever get too unruly. Given the widespread reputation of the Romans for spontaneous and catastrophic violence, Thomas wondered if the first chore Gregory had undertaken once ensconced in his apartments was to personally dust away the spider webs and rats’ nests from the tunnel entrance.

Thomas grinned at the thought, then automatically—and silently—castigated himself for such irreverence. He looked at the gate in the wall of the Leonine City. It was closed, but several guards were on duty, and Thomas hoped they’d let him through.

They did. A single Dominican could harm no one, and Thomas’ obvious piety and insistence that he be allowed to pray before St Peter’s shrine impressed them as much as it had Bertrand.

The pressing of a coin into each of their hands dispelled any lingering doubts.

Beyond the gate Thomas walked slowly up the street leading to St Peter’s.

The Basilica was massive. Since the Emperor Constantine had first erected the Basilica in the fourth century, it had been added to, renovated, restored and enlarged, but it was still one of the most sacred sites for any Christian: the monument erected over the tomb of St Peter, first among Christ’s Apostles. Here pilgrims flocked in their tens of thousands every year. Here the penitent begged for their salvation. Here kings and emperors crawled on hands and knees begging forgiveness for their sins.

Here was the heart of functional Christendom now that Jerusalem was lost to the infidels.

Thomas faltered to a halt some hundred paces from the atrium leading to the Basilica, and his eyes filled with tears. For so long he had wanted to worship at St Peter’s shrine. Initially as a child, having watched his beloved parents die from the corruption of a return of the great pestilence; through all the years of his youth—years wasted in blasphemy and anger—and finally, to this man grown into the realisation that his life must be dedicated to God and furthering God’s mission here on earth.

It had been a long, difficult, fraught journey, but here he was at last.

At last.

Thomas resumed his slow walk towards the Basilica. At the end of the street thirty-five wide steps rose towards a marble platform before an irregular huddle of buildings: several huge archways, a tower, and tall brick apartments with colonnaded balconies. These buildings formed a wall to either side of the entrance archways into the vast court that served as the atrium of St Peter’s.

After an instant’s hesitation, Thomas climbed the steps and crossed the platform. Immediately before him were the three archways, the paved atrium stretching beyond them.

Normally, Thomas knew, it would have been full of stalls and traders selling pilgrim badges, relics, genuine holy water, splinters from the true cross and threads from Christ’s robe, but tonight the stalls were empty, their canvas roofs flapping in the breeze. For this day, at least, the pope had ordered the Leonine City emptied of traders, street merchants and hawkers.

The court was even empty of pilgrims, and Thomas’ spirits rose. He would have St Peter’s to himself.

As he approached the entrance into the Basilica he prayed that the pope had retired to his private apartments.

Thomas did not want to share St Peter’s shrine even with the Holy Father himself.

His heart thudding, Thomas entered the building.

It was massive, but what caught Thomas’ eye was its layout, used as he was to western churches constructed in the form of a cross. Constantine had built the Basilica in a roughly rectangular form, modelling it on the Roman halls of justice. The very eastern wall, where stood the altar over St Peter’s tomb, was rounded, but the rest of the Basilica was laid out as an immense hall with four rows of columns supporting the soaring timber roof and dividing the interior into a nave with two aisles to each side.

For long minutes Thomas could not move. His lips moved slowly in prayer, but his mind could not concentrate on the words. His eyes, round and wondrous, roamed the length and height of the Basilica, stopping now and then at a particularly colourful banner or screen, or lingering on the statue of a beloved saint.

Finally, he stared at the altar at the western end of the nave. Even from this distance he could see the exotic twisted columns guarding the altar, covered with a canopy hanging from four of the columns.

Thomas raised a hand, crossed himself, then slowly, and with the utmost reverence, walked down the length of the nave towards the altar. There were a few worshippers within the Basilica kneeling before some of the side shrines, and barely visible in the flickering light of the oil lamps, but there was no one before the altar itself.

Tears slipped down Thomas’ cheeks, and his hand grasped the small cross he wore suspended from his neck.

He had walked all his life towards this moment, and he could now hardly believe such was the munificence of God’s Grace that he was finally here.

Again Thomas’ steps faltered as he reached the altar. He knew that to one side steps led down into a chamber from where he could view through a grille the actual tomb of St Peter, but for now all Thomas wanted to do, all he could do, was to prostrate himself before the altar.

He slumped to his knees, his eyes still raised to the altar, then he dropped his head and hands, and lowered himself until he lay prostrate in a cruciform position before the altar.

It was cold and horribly uncomfortable, but Thomas was filled with such zeal he did not notice.

Holy St Peter, he prayed silently over and over, grant me your humbleness and courage, let my footsteps be guided by yours, let my life be as worthy as yours, let me be of true service to sweet Jesus Christ as you were, let me ignore hunger and pain as you did, let me immerse myself in the true wonder and joy of God. Holy St Peter…

Hours passed unnoticed, and the Basilica emptied of all save the friar stretched before the altar. Thomas’ muscles grew stiff with the cold and the fervour of his thoughts, but he did not notice his discomfort. All Thomas wanted was to be granted St Peter’s grace, to be accepted to serve—

Thomas.

Thomas was lost in prayer. He did not hear.

Thomas.

One of Thomas’ outstretched fingers twitched slightly, otherwise he showed no outward sign of hearing.

Now the voice grew more insistent, more terrible.

Thomas!

Thomas’ entire body jerked, and he rolled onto his back, his eyes blinking in surprise and disorientation.

Thomas!

He jerked again, and rose on one elbow, staring down the nave of the Basilica.

Perhaps a third of the way down, on the left wall of the Basilica, a golden light exuded from one of the side shrines.

Thomas!

Thomas scrambled about until he was on his hands and feet. He lowered his face to the stone floor. “Lord!”

Thomas, come speak with me.

Shaking with fear and wonder, Thomas inched his way across the floor, his breath harsh in his throat, his eyes wide and staring at the stones before him.

Thomas…

Thomas crept to the entrance of the shrine, daring a quick look.

The shrine consisted merely of a niche in the wall, large enough only for a statue of an angel, arms and wings outstretched.

Thomas supposed that the statue was of some alabaster stone, but now it glowed with a brilliance that made his eyes ache. The face of the statue was terrible, full of cruel righteousness and the power of the Lord.

Thomas averted his eyes in dread.

“Lord!” he said again.

No Thomas. Not the Lord our God, but His servant, Michael.

The archangel Michael…

“Blessed saint,” Thomas whispered, his fingers clawing forward very slightly on the floor.

Blessed Thomas, said the archangel, and Thomas felt a brief warmth on the top of his bowed head, as if the angel had laid his hand there in benediction.

Thomas began to cry.

Do not weep, Thomas, but hark to what I say. There are few men or women these days who can be called of brave heart and true soul. You are one of them.

“I would give my life to serve, blessed Saint Michael!”

I do not think you shall have to go that far, Thomas, for you are of the Beloved.

Of the beloved?

“Blessed saint, I am a poor man with a great sin on my soul. There was a woman who I—”

Think you I know not every deed of your life? Think you that I cannot see into every corner of your soul? The woman used you. She was a whore. What you did was right and caused a great rejoicing among my brethren.

A great weight fell from Thomas’ mind. For so long he had laboured under the burden of his sin…and now to hear from St Michael that it was no sin at all…

“I thank you,” he whispered. He had been right to do as he had. Alice was indeed a whore, for she had betrayed her husband to sate her lustful cravings.

All women are vile. Their flesh leads to temptations. Never forget that it was a woman who betrayed Adam.

“I will never forget it, blessed saint.”

You have passed the first test, Thomas. Now comes one much greater.

“Saint Michael?”

Evil roams among your brethren, Thomas.

Thomas shuddered. “Among the fellows of my holy order, Saint Michael?”

It well may, but I speak of the wider community of mankind. For many years now evil incarnate in the form of Satan’s imps have walked unhindered, wreaking havoc and despair. The world is altering, Thomas, and turning away from God. You are Beloved of both the Lord God and my brethren, and it is you who shall head His army of righteous anger.

Thomas felt all the disparate elements of his life fall into place. When he’d been closest to despair, unable to see the meaning and course of his life, the Lord had all the while been guiding and training him. He’d thought his life before entering the Order worthless and empty. Now Thomas knew differently.

Exultation filled his soul. He was to be a soldier of Christ…and the enemy was evil.

“What should I do? I am yours, blessed saint, mind and body and soul!”

Study. Pray. Grow in understanding. In time, and only when the time is right, I will return to give you further guidance.

“But—”

Thomas got no further. Suddenly the glow and warmth was gone, and Thomas found himself alone in St Peter’s Basilica before a lifeless statue, its face once more cold and impassive.

He struggled into a sitting position, tears still streaming down his cheeks, his hands clasped before him, staring at the statue of St Michael.

“I am yours!” he whispered. “Yours!”

Aye, came the faintest of whispers, as if from the summit of heaven itself. You are one of ours indeed.

II

The Saturday within the Octave of the Annunciation

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(27th March 1378)

Thomas told no one of his experience in St Peter’s. If Satan’s imps—demons—roamed among mankind, then who knew which among his brother friars worked for God, and which for evil? So Thomas remained silent, sinking deeper into his devotions and burying himself in his studies within the library of St Angelo’s friary. Here were the ancient books and manuscripts that might cast some light on what the archangel had revealed to him. Here might lie the key to how he could aid the Lord.

He watched and listened, and learned what he could.

His feet healed, and his hands, and somehow that disappointed Thomas, for he would have liked a lingering ache or a stiffness in his joints to remind him of his duty to God, and also, now, to St Michael.

In the year following his ecstatic vision, the archangel did not appear to Thomas again. Thomas was not overly concerned. He knew that the Lord and his captains, the angels, would again approach him when the time was right.

In the meantime, Thomas did all he could to ensure he would be strong and devout enough to serve.

Prior Bertrand observed his new arrival with some concern. He had been instructed by Father Richard Thorseby, the Prior General of the Dominican Order in England, to keep close watch on Brother Thomas Neville. Thorseby, a stern disciplinarian, did not entirely trust Thomas’ motives in joining the Order, and doubted his true piety.

Whatever Thomas’ motives for joining the Order—and Bertrand agreed with Thorseby that they were dreadful enough for Thomas’ fitness for the Order to be suspect—Bertrand could not fault Thomas’ piety. The man appeared obsessed with the need to prove himself before God. Every friar was expected to appear in chapel for each of the seven hours of prayer during the day, beginning with Matins in the cold hours before dawn, and ending late at night with Compline. But the Dominican Order, while encouraging piety, also encouraged its members to spend as much (if not more) time studying as praying, and turned a blind eye if a brother skipped two or three of the hours of prayer each day. Dominicans were devoted to God, but they expressed this devotion by turning themselves into teachers and preachers who would combat heresy—deviation in faith—wherever it appeared.

But Thomas never missed prayers. Not only did he observe each prayer hour, he was first in the chapel and last to leave. Sometimes, on arriving for Matins, Bertrand found Thomas stretched out before the altar in the chapel. Bertrand assumed he had been there all night praying for…well, for whatever it was he needed.

At weekly theological debates held between the brothers of St Angelo’s, sometimes including members of other friaries and colleges within Rome, Thomas was always the most vocal and the most passionate in his views. After the debates had officially ended, when other brothers were engaged in relaxing talk and gossip, or wandering the cloisters enjoying the warmth of the sun and the scent of the herbs that bounded the cloister walks, Thomas would seek out those who had opposed his ideas and beliefs and continue the debate for as long as his prey was disposed to stand there and be berated.

Bertrand admitted to himself that he was frightened by Thomas. There was something about the man which made him deeply uneasy.

On occasions, Thomas reminded him of Wynkyn de Worde. That Bertrand did not like. He had fought long and hard to forget Wynkyn de Worde. The man—as sternly pious as Thomas—had frightened Bertrand even more than Thomas (although in his darker moments Bertrand wondered if Thomas would eventually prove even more disagreeable than Wynkyn).

In the years following the great pestilence (and the Lord be praised that it had passed!), Bertrand had spent the equivalent of many weeks on his knees seeking forgiveness for his deep relief that Wynkyn had never returned from Nuremberg. He’d heard that the brother had reached Nuremberg safely, but had then failed to return from a journey into the forests north of the city.

Brother Guillaume, now the prior of the Nuremberg friary, had reported to Bertrand that Wynkyn had been consumed with the pestilence when he’d left, and Bertrand could only suppose the man had died forgotten and unshriven on a lonely road somewhere.

No doubt he’d given the pestilence to whatever unlucky wolves had tried to gnaw his bones.

Bertrand spent many hours on his knees seeking forgiveness for his uncharitable thoughts regarding Wynkyn de Worde.

He did not know what had happened to Wynkyn’s book and, frankly, Bertrand did not care overmuch. Guillaume had not mentioned it, and Bertrand did not inquire. It was not within his friary’s walls, and that was all that mattered.

So Bertrand continued to watch Thomas, and to send the Prior General in England regular reports.

He supposed they did not ease Thorseby’s mind, and Bertrand did occasionally wonder what would happen to Thomas once the man journeyed back to Oxford to resume a position of Master.

Piety was all very well, but not when taken to obsessive extremes.

Outside the friary, the Romans continued to rejoice in the presence of the pope. Gregory showed no sign of wanting to remove the papal court and curia back to Avignon, and people again were able to attend papal mass within St Peter’s Basilica. Every Sunday and Holy Day citizens packed the great nave of the Basilica, their eyes shining with devotion, their hands clutching precious relics and charms. On ordinary days the same citizens packed the atrium of St Peter’s, as they did the streets leading to the Basilica, selling badges and holy keepsakes to the pilgrims who flooded Rome. The presence of the pope not only sated the Romans’ deep piety, it also filled their purses. Gregory was in his mid-fifties, but appeared hale, and could be expected to live another decade or more. The Romans were ecstatic.

The papacy appeared to be once again safely ensconced in Rome, and many a Roman street worker, walker or sweeper could be seen making the occasional obscene gesture in the general direction of France. At night, the Roman people filled their taverns with triumphant talk about the French King John’s dilemma. When Gregory had removed himself and his retinue from Avignon, John had lost his influence over the most powerful institution in Europe. Rumour said John was rabid with fury, and plotted constantly to regain his influence over the papacy. Everyone in Rome was aware Gregory had “escaped” back to Rome at a critical juncture in John’s war with the English king, Edward III; the French king needed every diplomatic tool in his possession to raise the funds and manpower to repel Edward’s inevitable reinvasion of France.

The Roman mob didn’t give a whore’s tit about the French king’s plight—nor the English king’s, for that matter. They had their pope back, Rome was once more the heart of Christendom (with all the financial benefits that carried), and they damn well weren’t going to let any French prick steal their pope again.

Most of the French cardinals—and they were the vast majority within the College of Cardinals—were vastly irritated by Gregory’s apparent desire to remain in Rome (just as they were vastly irritated by, and terrified of, the Roman mob). Beneath the pope, the cardinals were the most powerful men in the Church, and thus in Christendom. They lived and acted as princes, but to ensure their continuing power they had to remain within the papal court at the side of the pope. Thus they were effectively trapped in Rome, although most of them tried to spend as many months of each year back in the civilised pleasures of Avignon as they could.

When in Rome, the cardinals spent hours carefully watching the pope. Was his face tinged just with the merest touch of grey at yesterday’s mass? Did his fingers tremble, just slightly, when he carved his meat at the banquet held in honour of the Holy Roman Emperor’s son? And how much of his food did he eat, anyway? They bribed the papal physician to learn details of the papal bowel movements and the particular stink of his urine. They frightened the papal chamberlain with threats of eternal damnation to learn if the pope’s sheets were stained with effluent in the mornings and, if so, what kind of effluent?

They spent their hours watching the pope’s health most carefully…and most carefully plotting. When the pope succumbed to his inevitable mortality (and, praise be to God, let it be soon!), the cardinals would elect his successor from among their number.

And when that came to pass, they swore on Christ’s holy foreskin, they would elect a man who would return them to Avignon and the comforts of glorious French civilisation.

Thomas spent most of his time—when not at prayers—within the library of St Angelo’s, as St Michael had instructed. The library was a large stone-vaulted chamber under the chapel; it was cold every day of the year, even during the hot humid Roman summers, but its position and construction meant it was safe from both intruders and fire, and in volatile Rome that was a precious luxury.

Here the records were kept of the Dominican friary stretching back over one hundred years, and before that the records of the Benedictine order that had inhabited the building. The records were kept on great vellum rolls stacked in neat order on racks lining many of the walls.

Desks and shelves stood against the other walls, and in rows across the floor of the chamber. Here sat the several hundred precious books the friary owned: laboriously copied out by hand, the books were wonders of art and of the intellect. Some dated back five hundred years, others were only freshly copied, all were priceless and beloved. They were heavy volumes, an arm’s length in height, and half that across and in depth, and not one of them ever left the chest-level shelf or desk that was its particular home. Instead, the reader travelled to each book in turn, moving slowly around the library over the months and years, from desk to desk, and shelf to shelf, carrying with him his own stool, candle (encased in a brass and glass case, lest the dripping wax should fall on the delicate pages being studied) and parchment and pen and ink for when he wished to copy down some particularly illuminating phrase.

Not all brothers were there to read and study. Some three or four were permanently engaged in recopying particularly fragile volumes, or volumes on loan from other friaries and monasteries within Rome or sometimes from further afield within northern Italy. They worked under the one large window in the library, their ink- and paint-stained hands carefully scratching across the ivory blankness of pages, creating works of art with their capital letters and the illustrations of daily life and devotion they placed in the margins of the pages.

Despite the coldness of the stone vault, and despite the presence of a fireplace, no fire ever burned there. The fear of a conflagration, combined with the lesser fear of the daily damage wrought by an overly smoky fire, meant the grate was never laid, and the fire never lit.

Brothers worked wrapped in blankets and their desire to learn.

The activities of the brothers who worked within the library, whether studying or copying, were supervised by an aged brother librarian who had, nonetheless, a keen vision that could spot the dripping pen or candle, or the careless elbow left to rub across a page, from a distance of twenty paces. His hiss of retribution could carry thirty paces, and brothers were known to have fallen off their stools in fright if they believed they’d earned the librarian’s displeasure.

Not so Thomas.

Thomas worked alone in every sense of that word. He did not speak to any of the other brothers, and he did not appear to notice the constant oppressive presence of the brother librarian.

On the other hand, the librarian had no need to bother Thomas. The man was as rigidly particular about his treatment of the books and records he studied as he was about the attending of his prayers.

Thomas existed within his own shell of piety and obsessiveness, and few people within the friary, or without it for that matter, could penetrate that shell.

Most left him well enough alone.

On the afternoon of the Saturday following the Annunciation, Thomas was, for once, working alone in the library. Most of the other brothers—wide-eyed with curiosity—had accepted an invitation from a neighbouring monastery to view their new statue of St Uncumber, a saint widely worshipped as one who could rid women of their obnoxious husbands. Thomas had not gone. He considered St Uncumber a saint of dubious merits, and believed that marriage was a sanctified union that no woman should seek to dissolve…by whatever saintly intervention. So Thomas, wrapped in righteousness, stayed behind to continue his studies.

Even the brother librarian had gone. Thomas was, after all, utterly trustworthy when it came to the safety of the manuscripts and records.

In the past weeks Thomas had begun a detailed study of the records of St Angelo’s friary. He had been turning over in his mind the archangel’s warning that evil walked unhindered among mankind, and he wondered if perhaps evil had infected some of the brothers within the friary. If so, Thomas hoped that the friary records would cast light on how and when evil had penetrated his fellow brothers. Already Thomas suspected several of his fellows: they were too jovial in refectory, perhaps, or skipped too many prayers, or spoke too wantonly at St Angelo’s weekly debates.

Thomas had just unrolled the records for the year 1334 when Daniel, the friary’s only novice, burst in the door.

The boy cast his eyes about, obviously looking for someone, but when he realised that the someone consisted only of Thomas, he edged back towards the door.

Too late. The commotion of his entrance had attracted Thomas’ attention.

“Daniel! What mean you, creating such noise and distraction within the walls of God’s house?”

Daniel’s mouth opened and closed uselessly, and he looked frantically for rescue.

There was none.

Thomas left his desk and advanced close enough to grab the boy by the arm. “Well?”

Daniel’s eyes were full of tears, but they had been there long before he had burst into the library.

“Brother Thomas…Brother Thomas…”

“Well?”

Daniel swallowed again. “Brother Thomas. The Holy Father…the Holy Father…”

“What is it, boy?”

“The Holy Father is dead!”

Thomas’ face blanched, but, even though Daniel struggled a little, he did not let the boy go.

“Dead?” Thomas whispered, then he stared narrow-eyed at Daniel. “How do you know this? How can you be sure?”

“The Brother Prior had sent me with messages to the Secretary of the Curia within the Leonine City, Brother. While I was with him, a Benedictine burst into the chamber and blurted out the news. Then both the secretary and the Benedictine rushed out, forgetting about me. I didn’t know what to do, so I ran down to the gates to tell Prior Bertrand. Where is he?”

Thomas ignored Daniel’s question, thinking fast. “They let you out the gates of the Leonine City?”

“Yes, although they slammed shut a moment or two after I’d run through. Where is Prior Bertrand, Brother? I must tell him!”

“No,” Thomas murmured, still thinking. What were the cardinals up to? Whether the pope had met a natural or unnatural death was now immaterial. But what the cardinals did would carry the fate of Christendom.

Were they even now meeting in conclave to elect a new and French-loyal pope? Like the Romans, but for different reasons, Thomas despised the French.

Daniel wriggled in Thomas’ grip. “Brother. I must find Prior Bertrand!”

“No. Prior Bertrand can do nothing—but you and I can.”

“Brother?”

“Daniel, the cardinals are even now likely to be meeting to elect another pope, one who will remove the papacy back to Avignon. They have shut the gates of the Leonine City so no word of Gregory’s death can reach the ears of the Roman mob. By the time the people discover the death, a new pope will have been installed, and the Romans will not be able to save their papacy.”

“But—”

“Daniel. Be as quick as you can—run to the lower marketplace and spread the word that Gregory is dead and that even now the cardinals seek to meet in secret. Do it! Now!”

“But—”

“Damn you, boy! Where are your wits? The only means to ensure the cardinals do not deliver the papacy into the French king’s hands again is the street mob. Now, run! Now!”

He let Daniel go, and the boy dashed out the door.

Thomas was directly behind him, urging him forward. Once they’d reached the street, Thomas paused only long enough to make sure that the boy was heading in the direction of the lower market before he ran, robes bunched about his knees, in the direction of the main market square.

“The pope has died! The pope has died!” he yelled whenever he came across a clump of people.

By the time Thomas reached the main square the news had been shouted ahead of him, and the square was already in furious turmoil.

The people of Rome needed no one to point out to them the implications of an immediate and secret papal election.

Within the half hour a mob ten thousand strong, and growing with each minute, besieged the gates of the Leonine City.

The guards, in dread of their lives, wasted no time in opening the gates.

The cardinals, already gathering in the Hall of Conclave, were not quick enough. Before they had even sat to cast their votes, the mob surged in the doors.

Faced with their imminent murder, the cardinals wisely agreed to defer the election until the saintly corpse of Gregory XI had been interred.

The mob, still surly, gradually dissipated once they were sure the cardinals truly meant what they had said.

Rome settled into an uneasy quiet until the conclave due in two weeks’ time. As far as the Romans were concerned, the cardinals either elected a good Italian onto the papal throne…or they died.

III

The Octave of the Annunciation

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(Thursday 1st April 1378)

Rome waited uneasily for the election of the new pope. The Romans remained restive and distrustful: when they had left the Leonine City on the day of Gregory’s death they’d dismantled the gates and carried them away.

No cursed French cardinal was going to lock them out again.

Constantly shifting, murmuring groups of people—peasants in from the surrounding countryside, street traders, prostitutes, foreign pilgrims, elders, out of work mercenaries, lovers, thieves, wives, clerks, washerwomen, schoolmasters and their students—drifted through the precincts of St Peter’s.

The threat wasn’t even implied. The mob shouted it periodically through the windows of the buildings adjoining St Peter’s: elect a Roman pope, a good Italian, or we’ll storm the buildings and kill you.

The cardinals had caused a block and headsman’s axe to be placed in St Peter’s itself, a clear response to the mob: attack us and we’ll destroy you.

There was even a rumour that the cardinals had shifted the treasures of the papal apartments, and of St Peter’s itself, to fortified vaults in the Castel St Angelo. Certainly St Peter’s glittered with less gold and jewels than it once had.

Rome waited uneasily, the cardinals plotted defiantly, and Gregory’s corpse lay stinking before the shrine of St Peter.

Thomas, waiting as anxiously as anyone else, kept himself busy in the library of St Angelo’s friary. Gregory’s funeral mass would be held in a few days, and a few more days after that the cardinals would meet to elect their new master. Thomas imagined late at night when he lay unsleeping on his hard bunk in his cell, that he could hear the clatter of gold and silver coins being passed from hand to hand atop the Vatican hill where sprawled the Leonine City. The noise of the cardinals passing and accepting bribes, the normal procedure before the election of a pope. He even imagined he could hear the fevered rattle of horses’ hooves racing through the night, bearing ambassadors from the kings and emperors of Europe, who themselves bore in tight fists a variety of carefully couched threats and intimidations to ensure that their particular master’s man was elected to the Holy Throne.

A bad business indeed, Thomas thought. The higher clergy should be shining examples of piety and morality to the rest of Christendom. Instead the cardinals had opened their souls to corruption.

Evil?

Were the cardinals the enemy against whom he would lead the soldiers of Christ?

Thomas tossed and turned, but until the papal election—or until the blessed archangel Michael revealed more—there was nothing to do but wait, and listen, and watch.

And, during those daylight hours not spent in prayer, study the registers of St Angelo’s.

St Angelo’s had for generations been the centre of the Dominican effort to train the masters and teachers of the growing European universities, and this mission (the reason Thomas himself had been sent to the friary) was reflected in the registers. Thomas found himself curious as he saw the names of now-aged masters he’d studied under at Oxford, and the names of masters famed for their learning who currently taught, or had taught, at the universities of Paris, Bologna, Ferrara and Padua. They had all come to St Angelo’s, and Thomas traced their comings and goings: their arrival at the friary as young men, their long years spent moving from cell to chapel, to refectory, to library, to chapel and then back to cell again.

Thomas smiled to himself as his finger carefully traced over the black spidery writing in the registers. He could hear their footsteps as they trod the same corridors he trod every day. He could feel their excitement as they pored over the same books he did, and at night he imagined that he lay in the same cell that some learned and pious Master of Paris or Bologna or Oxford had once reposed in many years previously.

The records showed nothing but the same continuous, comforting pattern of piety and learning, and Thomas thought that was as all Christendom should be. Never changing, but keeping to the ancient and tested ways, the comforting rituals, all under the careful guardianship of the Church, the custodian and interpreter of the word of God.

Only thus could evil be kept at bay.

On this cold April day Thomas came back to the library after Vespers to continue his study until the bells rang for Compline. Few other brothers had come back: the library was too cold this late in the evening.

But Thomas was drawn back, not only by his need to continue his study, but by a compulsion he couldn’t name.

There was something in the registers he needed to read. He knew it. St Michael had not actually appeared and told him so, but Thomas knew the archangel was guiding his interest.

Thomas had been reading the registers for the 1330s, and, as he pored over the unwieldy parchment rolls under his sputtering lamp, he suddenly realised what had been making him uncomfortable for the past few days.

There was an inconsistency within the registers.

St Angelo’s brothers moved through the registers in regular patterns: arriving at the friary, staying months or sometimes years to study, and then departing. During their time at the friary their daily routines never varied: prayers, meals, study.

But there was one friar who did not fit the pattern at all. His name ran through the records like a nagging toothache; he was a part of St Angelo’s community, but an unsettling part. For months he would move through the registers as other friars did, not varying his routine from theirs in the slightest manner—although, Thomas noted, he took no part in the weekly debates.

Then, twice a year, he would vanish from the registers for some eight weeks, before his name reappeared within the comfortable routine.

There was no explanation for his absences, and these continuing absences were abnormal. Friars came to St Angelo’s, they stayed awhile, then they left. They didn’t keep coming and going in such a fashion. If they had business elsewhere, then they travelled to that elsewhere and stayed there. They did not spend years using St Angelo’s as some tavern in which to bide their time until they needed to return to their true business.

The first year that Thomas had encountered the friar’s unexplained comings and goings he had simply assumed that the friar had some pressing business to attend to in another friary—something that had reluctantly pulled him away. But then the same pattern was repeated the next year, and then the next, and continued in the years after. The friar’s departures and returns were consistent: he left the friary in late May of each year and returned in late July, then he left again in early December and returned by the end of January.

Why?

Further, there was another inconsistency. If a friar did have to leave the friary, for whatever matter, then he had to seek permission from the prior, and that permission, as the reason for the absence, was recorded. During the 1330s three other brothers had left briefly, and the reasons, along with the prior’s permission, had been recorded in the registers.

Not so for this man.

Troubled, Thomas checked back through the records for the 1320s, trying to find when the friar had first arrived…to his amazement and increasing unease, Thomas discovered that the friar had been moving in and out of St Angelo’s all through the 1320s.

All without apparent permission, and always twice each year at the same time.

In late 1327 the incumbent prior had died, and when, five months after the new prior had been elected, this troubling friar had again departed without explanation, there was a record that the new prior had requested an interview with the friar on his return, no doubt to demand an explanation.

And there, at Lammas in 1328, was the record showing the interview had taken place on the friar’s return. The only comment on the outcome of this interview was, to Thomas’ mind, an outrageous statement that the friar was to be allowed to come and go as he pleased.

No friar came and went as he pleased! His individual interests were always subordinated to those of the Order.

Thomas checked back yet further, scattering rolls of parchment about in such a haphazard manner that, had the brother librarian been present, Thomas surely would have earned an angry hiss.

The friar had arrived at St Angelo’s in late 1295.

Scattering more rolls, Thomas searched forward until he found the last reference to the friar.

1348. The man had presumably died in the pestilence which had swept Christendom that year.

Thomas sat back, thinking over what he’d learned.

For some fifty-three years this friar had come and gone from St Angelo’s twice yearly with no explanation and no permission from his prior.

During those fifty-three years five priors had died, and each incoming prior—the last being Prior Bertrand in 1345—had called the friar into their private cell to ask for explanations and, presumably, to mete out discipline.

In all five cases the results of the interview were much the same: the friar was to be allowed to come and go as he pleased, no matter the inconvenience to the friary.

Thomas wondered what threats had been made in those five meetings.

Eventually, after carefully rolling up the parchments and placing them back in their slots, Thomas went to see Prior Bertrand.

He felt both curious and nauseous in equal degrees, and Thomas knew that he’d stumbled upon something of great import.

Prior Bertrand was again sinking down to his knees before the cross in his cell when the tap sounded at the door.

Sighing, Bertrand rose stiffly, one hand on his bed for support. “Come.”

Brother Thomas entered, bowing slightly as he caught Bertrand’s eye.

“Brother Thomas, what can I do for you this late at night?”

“I have come to ask a favour of you, Brother Prior.”

“Yes?”

“I would like to ask about Brother Wynkyn de Worde.”

Bertrand stared, unable for the moment to act or speak.

Wynkyn de Worde! He’d prayed never to have that name spoken in his hearing again!

In return, Thomas watched the old man before him with narrowed, speculative eyes.

“Brother Prior? Are you well?”

“Yes…yes. Ah, Brother Thomas, perhaps you will sit down.”

Thomas took the stool, as he had on the night of his arrival, and Bertrand again took the bed. “May I ask, Brother Thomas, why you ask about Brother Wynkyn?”

Thomas hesitated and Bertrand shifted uncomfortably.

“I have been reading through Saint Angelo’s registers, Brother Prior, and it appears to me that Brother Wynkyn must have been a considerably disruptive influence to the peace of the friary. I am curious as to why the brother was allowed to continue such behaviour for over fifty years without a single act of discipline from the prior. I—”

“Are you here to examine me, Brother Thomas?”

“Of course not, Brother Prior, but—”

“Are you here to demand explanations of me, Brother Thomas?”

“No! I merely wished to—”

“Do you think that I exist to satisfy your every curiosity, Brother Thomas?”

“Brother Prior, I apologise if I—”

“Your tone carries no nuance of apology or regret, Brother Thomas. I am deeply shocked that you think you have a right to demand explanations! Brother Thomas, you are no longer the man you once were! How dare you bludgeon your way into my—”

“I did not bludgeon!”

“—private devotions to order me to satisfy your curiosity.”

“It is not curiosity, Brother Prior,” Thomas was now leaning forward on his stool, his eyes angry, “but a desire to understand why such an extraordinary breach of discipline was allowed for so long!”

Bertrand paused. “I think Prior General Thorseby was right to be concerned about you, Thomas. Perhaps you are not suited to the rigorous discipline of the Order after all.”

Thomas sat back, shocked and bitter at the threat. About to speak a furious retort, he suddenly caught himself, and bowed his head in contrition.

“I apologise deeply, Brother Prior. My behaviour has been unpardonable. I do beg your forgiveness, and ask of you suitable penance.”

Bertrand watched the man carefully. His contrition did seem genuine—although it was a trifle hasty—and perhaps it was not surprising that such a man as Thomas should still lapse into the habits of his old life from time to time.

“You must learn more discipline, Brother Thomas.”

“Yes, Brother Prior.”

“Blessed Gregory’s funeral mass is in five days’ time. I would that until that day you spend the hours from Prime until Nones in penitential prayer in the chapel. After dinner and until Vespers you will take yourself down to the streets about the marketplace and offer to wash the feet of every whore you can find.”

Thomas’ head flew back up, his brown eyes once more furious.

Bertrand held his stare.

Thomas finally dropped his gaze. “Forgive me, Brother Prior,” he whispered.

“You must learn humility, Brother Thomas.”

“I know it, I know it.”

“Then learn it!”

Thomas’ head and shoulders jerked. “Yes, Brother Prior.”

“You will attend Gregory’s funeral mass with the rest of our community,” the prior continued, “and then you will continue your penance until the day of the conclave.”

Thomas stiffened, but did not speak.

“You may leave, Brother Thomas.”

Thomas nodded. “Thank you, Brother Prior.” He rose, and walked towards the door.

Just as he opened it, Bertrand spoke again. “Brother Thomas?”

Thomas turned back.

“Brother Thomas…it has been many a year since I spoke of Brother Wynkyn. Now I am an old man, and I should hesitate no longer. Once our new Holy Father is elected, and when you have completed your penance—and this penance you must complete—you may seek audience with me, and I will speak to you again. You may go.”

Thomas bowed, and closed the door behind him.

Later in the night, when the brothers were in their cells, either sleeping or praying, Bertrand walked quietly down to the library, lifted out all of the friary’s records from the 1290s until the time of the pestilence, and carried them one by one up to the deserted kitchens.

There, he threw them on the fire.

He stood and watched until they had burned to ash, then he lifted a poker and stirred the coals about, fearful that a single word should have survived.

Finally, bent and tired, he shuffled back to his own bed.

IV

Wednesday in Passion Week

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(7th April 1378)

The hours Thomas spent prone before the altar in chapel were the most blessed he could imagine. The cold of the stone flooring did not perturb him: he did not even notice it. During the set hours of prayer the passing feet of his fellow brothers, as the passing of their eyes, did not bother him: he deserved such humiliation, and he revelled in it. He lay, face pressed against stone, arms extended, and prayed for sweet mercy, for greater humbleness, and for the strength which he would need to be of service to the holy St Michael, messenger of God Himself.

The hours that Thomas spent in the filthy streets of Rome washing the feet of the even filthier whores, were hours spent in hell wiping the stained skin of the Devil’s handmaidens.

He dreaded the tolling of the bells for Nones, and the inevitable hand of Prior Bertrand on his shoulder, silently asking him to rise. He would hobble after the prior, wracked with cramps after so many chill hours prone on the chapel floor, praying for God’s mercy in order to survive the afternoon.

Today would be his last day of penance: Thomas had wept when he felt the prior’s hand on his shoulder, for he would no longer be allowed to spend so long in silent penitential prayer, but his face had gone as chill and stony as the floor he had recently lain on when he thought of the afternoon’s activities before him.

Thomas loathed whores with a vehemence he knew he should probably do penance for. To have to bow before them every afternoon and take their outstretched feet between his hands…

“This will be your last day,” Bertrand said unnecessarily as Thomas rose from the refectory table. “Tomorrow the cardinals will meet in conclave…and the streets will not be safe. Once the election is concluded then I will send for you. You know of what we must speak.”

Thomas nodded, and took his leave. He could not think beyond this afternoon, and he wondered if he would be able to bear it.

In the courtyard he lifted a wooden pail and several cloths from a small alcove, then half filled the pail from a large barrel of rainwater standing to one side. He walked to the gate, hesitated, then opened it and walked into the streets of Rome.

If there was one commodity Rome did not lack, it was whores. They catered for pilgrims, traders and the odd diplomat as well as the large number of young men who had yet to take wives. Of course, many husbands numbered among their clientele as well. Some said there were more whores in Rome than wives and, after his previous days in the streets, Thomas did not doubt it.

And, it seemed to him, they all knew he was coming.

The word had quickly spread that a humble friar had been set to do penance washing their feet, and within moments of Thomas leaving the friary there was a crowd of women about him.

Pressing about him.

They rubbed their bodies against Thomas, their hands seeking entrance under his robe. He pushed them roughly away, but they only laughed…and bared their breasts to him, squeezing them invitingly, and asking if he’d like a taste.

Thomas ignored them.

He walked as far away from the friary as he could, turning two corners, before the crowd became unmanageable, and he stopped.

He lifted his head and looked about him.

It was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do.

“As penance for my sins,” he said softly, “I am to wash the feet of whores until the hour of Vespers. Will one of you step forward, and offer her feet to be washed?”

The women fell silent, as they always did at this point. They were hardened and bitter creatures, used to the abuse and degradation of their profession, and yet this humble friar always rendered them silent with this simple statement.

Not that they had any greater respect for friars than they had for any other men. Too many friars had pushed them up against walls and used them quickly, roughly, for them to think well of any among them.

But this one…this one…

It was his face, they thought. Not the fact that it was so well made, or so strong, or his eyes so compelling, for they had seen and been used by many handsome clerics in the past.

It was because the set of his muscles and the hardness of his eyes told them he was one of them, in the sense that he was as hard and as bitter as they were.

And this always made them falter.

For a moment.

One stepped forward, young, her face still holding traces of appeal.

“Wash my feet!” she said, and lifted her skirts.

Thomas stepped up and squatted down before her; she giggled nervously as he wrung out a cloth in the water.

Then he held out a hand, his face bowed down, and she lifted a foot and let him take it.

“For a coin I would let you hold a great deal more of my flesh,” she said softly, and Thomas whipped up his head and stared at her, his eyes blazing with anger, but at himself, rather than her.

There was a smell about this one, or perhaps it was something in her voice, or the tilt of her cheek, but memories Thomas had long thought forgotten raced out of his past.

Memories from his youth: the laughter and bawdry shared with his two best friends.

The women they had shared, all six sometimes squirming about on the same bed.

The practised moans and squeals from the whores.

Their writhing beneath his body.

Thomas trembled violently, now fighting the rising memory of lust as much as his current anger.

The girl whose foot he still held smiled, and wriggled her hips invitingly. She knew the look in this friar’s eyes and had lost any momentary awe she might have had for him.

She leaned forward, her weight on the foot in Thomas’ hand, and let the neck of her loose tunic fall away so he could see her firm, pointed breasts.

“I know what you want,” she said, watching the direction of his eyes, “and it is yours for the asking.”

Thomas raised his eyes to hers, and she felt the pressure on her foot increase slightly.

Her smiled widened. “I want to feel you inside me,” she whispered hoarsely, her hips wriggling suggestively. “Now!”

“Slut!”

Thomas’ fingers tightened about her foot until she squealed in pain, and then he threw it to one side, twisting her leg badly and causing her to fall heavily in a tangle of swirling skirts.

He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the shouts of the women about him.

Damn all women to the pits of hell!

“Slut!” he spat at her again. “Don’t you know your sins will earn you a place in hell for all time? Don’t you know that the red-hot pokered Devil himself will take his pleasure with you, time after time through eternity, until you scream and beg for mercy, to no avail? Don’t you realise that you and your kind are the slime of Creation? Slime you are and slime you will be, time until end, unless you embrace Christ and beg His forgiveness now. Now! Do you hear me, harlot? Get on your knees and beg Christ’s forgiveness now!”

All the whores about him were now screaming and shouting, but the young woman on the ground motioned the other women back with a quick, vicious action, then got to her knees and then to her feet, stumbling a little on her twisted leg.

“I will beg forgiveness from none of your sort, dog!” She spat at him, and Thomas flinched, but made no move to whip the spittle away from his cheek. He was still enraged, and barely holding himself back from taking her neck between his hands and throttling her.

He knew that if he’d had a sword he would have killed her.

“Dog!” she said again, wrenching the top of her tunic closed. “I curse you, Friar Thomas. One day one of my sisters will seize your soul and condemn you to hell for eternity! I damn you with the curse of the whore, Thomas!”

She stepped forward, and struck him with a surprisingly light tap against his cheek.

He raised a hand to strike her back, but stopped, stunned by the lightness of her blow.

“One day,” she whispered, her eyes staring into his, “and soon, I pray to the Virgin Mary, a whore will steal your soul…Nay! You will offer it to her on a platter! You will offer her your eternal damnation in return for her love!”

Now it was Thomas’ turn to stand silent, as stunned by the whore as the group had previously been by him.

There had been something in her face and in her voice, in her very bearing, that had rung not only with truth, but with an extraordinary nobility.

The women, still mumbling, started to turn away, two helping their younger companion to hobble down the street.

Thomas watched them go, then shook himself.

Cursed woman!

He grabbed at his pail, lying on its side on the cobbles, and looked back down the street.

Several of the whores, still lingering nearby, turned their backs to him.

Thomas sighed, and rubbed his eyes. What had he been thinking of to let go his self-control so easily? Why had he let his past intrude into his present?

What had he done?

The curse could be disregarded—the simple prating of a wretched woman—but Thomas could not disregard his own actions and words.

He had been a fool. Worse, he had been an arrogant fool. That woman had never wronged him, and her words had only been those of God, testing him.

And Thomas had failed, as he had failed so many times.

Refusing to weep, or show any outward sign of his distress, Thomas collected his rags, hefted the pail, and spent the rest of the afternoon in the almshouse washing the inmates’ feet, and speaking to them the words of kindness he should have spoken to the prostitute.

V

Thursday in Passion Week

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(8th April 1378)

On the afternoon of 8th April 1378, the feast day of the blessed Callistus, a former pope, and the Thursday within Passion Week, the cardinals met in conclave to elect their new Holy Father before the celebrations of the coming Holy Week.

It was neither a relaxed nor a certain affair.

The cardinals had been appointed by popes who’d lived in Avignon, and all were either Frenchmen themselves—the vast majority—or men closely allied with the French monarchy.

Most, as much as they may have denied it publicly, owed allegiance to the French king before the office of the pope.

What the cardinals wanted to do was to elect a man who would remove them from the swamp-ridden and disease-infested ruinous city of Rome back to the culture and civilisation of Avignon.

What they felt compelled to do was elect what the murderous Roman mob wanted: a good Italian who would keep the papacy in Rome.

Threats did not sit well with the cardinals. On the other hand, they doubted they could get out of Rome alive if they didn’t do what the mob wanted.

It was left to Jean de la Grange, bishop of Amiens, in Rome for the conclave, to suggest a possible way out of the situation. In the days before the conclave, Bishop Grange moved smoothly from chamber to chamber, dropping time after time to his knee to kiss the cardinal’s ring held out to his lips, then raising his face to talk earnestly to the man before him.

The cardinals liked what they heard.

Thursday in Passion Week dawned cool and fine, although a yellow fog rising from the swamps beyond Rome’s walls lasted until almost Nones when the cardinals were due to meet. Murmuring crowds had thronged the Leonine City since the previous night, sure that if they didn’t stake their place well before the election the cardinals would find some way to shut them out. It seemed to the cardinals, peering nervously from their apartments in the palace adjoining St Peter’s, that the entire population of Rome was crowded into the streets and the courts surrounding the Basilica.

Their mood was not festive.

The election was to be held in the Hall of Conclave, a great stone hall to the north of St Peter’s and adjoining the papal palace. In the hour before Nones, the cardinals moved cautiously through the corridors of the palace towards the hall. They were well guarded with militia, and they wrapped their cardinals’ robes tight about themselves and stalked down the corridors, their faces set resolutely to the front, their eyes darting left and right.

The distant murmur of the crowd seemed to swell through the floor beneath their jewelled slippers as much as it did through the window glass.

The cardinals, sixteen in all, filtered into the Hall of Conclave. With luck, the election would not take long. After all, the conclusion had been hammered out in previous days.

Each cardinal moved silently into a curtained-off partition; the voting would take place in seclusion to give the election the aura of secrecy. Within each partition was a chair and a desk. On each desk lay a single sheet of paper and a pen and inkwell.

Each cardinal took his place and, once all were in place and the curtains across each partition closed, a bell tolled from high in the hall’s tower.

The election was underway.

Pandemonium broke out.

The crowds outside surged against the stone walls of the hall, beating the walls with their fists, with pikes, clubs, axes, pots and pans, and any other instrument they had found within their homes that they thought might prove to be useful to aid the smooth progression of the election of an Italian to the papal throne.

“Give us an Italian or we’ll stick pikes into your well-fed bellies!”

“Give us an Italian or we’ll burn the hall down about your ears!”

The cardinals, isolated from each other, as one picked up their pens with shaking hands, dipped them into their inkwells, then hesitated over the sheet of paper.

“Give us an Italian…”

Scowls twisted the faces of the cardinals. Damn the unruly mobs! Damn Rome to hell! They’d manage their revenge on this city if it was the last thing they did.

Scowls slowly contorted into thin-lipped grins.

The revenge, as the result of the election, was already planned.

“Give us an Italian!”

Yet still the cardinals hesitated.

Outside, a locksmith, who had been working on the doors leading to the vaults beneath the hall, suddenly yelled in triumph.

The mob surged forward, pikes gripped in white-knuckled hands.

The cardinals slowly leaned towards their papers, their hands shaking as much with hatred of the mob as with fear.

Then, as they still hesitated, they felt the wooden floor beneath their feet shudder, then, horrifically, spears and pikes burst through the floor in eight of the partitions, splintering the floorboards and making seven of the cardinals yell in fright and horror as the weapons narrowly missed their feet.

One of these seven snarled, and, leaping to his feet, shouted through the now broken floorboards, “We’ll give you your damned Italian, scum, but you have no idea of what you have done this day!”

Then he yelled throughout the hall: “Do it!”

And the cardinals leaned over their papers, each scrawling the same name.

They would see the Romans damned to hell yet!

The mob was almost out of control when the doors of the balcony burst open. A red-robed cardinal strode forth, a paper in his hand.

“Hear this!” he screamed, and the mob growled.

“This day we have elected our most blessed Holy Father—”

The growl deepened.

“The saintly Bartolomo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, is our new Holy Father, Urban VI!”

The mob quietened, urgent voices whispering throughout its mass. Then a great cheer broke out. “An Italian! An Italian!”

Then the former Archbishop Prignano, the new Urban VI, stepped forward to take the crowd’s acclaim. He was a Neopolitan by birth, and enough of an Italian to sate the crowd’s anger and suspicion.

He raised his hands, and blessed the crowd, and then Urban said, “The papacy has returned to Rome, beloved countrymen, and it will never leave again! I swear this to you on the name of our beloved Lord, Jesus Christ, and his mother, the Holy Virgin. I swear to you that the papacy will not leave Rome again!”

Behind Urban, five or six of the cardinals shared concerned glances. Wasn’t Urban taking his pretence a little too seriously?

VI

Wednesday in Holy Week

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(14th April 1378)

Thomas stood against the wall outside the closed door to Prior Bertrand’s cell. His back was straight, his hands clasped humbly before him, his head bowed. His back did not touch the stone.

Bertrand had kept him waiting six days since the election of Urban—claiming the preparations for Easter celebrations as reason enough—and Thomas was barely keeping under restraint an impatience that he knew would earn him another penance if he let it fly.

And that was one thing Thomas did not want. His previous penance had been more than humiliating, and he didn’t want to see what Bertrand could come up with next.

Since the day the whore had cursed him, Thomas had spent his time studying, or praying in the chapel and, during the long dark hours of the night, in his private cell. This prayer time Thomas spent imploring St Peter for the patience and humbleness which that saint had so admirably demonstrated in his struggle to establish Christianity.

Thomas wondered how, if he could not master humbleness, he could hope to fight the evil that St Michael told him walked the lands. But he knew that, doubts notwithstanding, he would have to do his best, so he also prayed to the archangel Michael for guidance, for a sign, for something to show him what to do, how best to fight the evil infiltrating Christendom.

But the archangel had remained silent.

Was it the whore’s fault? Thomas tried hard to forgive her, but it was difficult. All his life he’d regarded whores with contempt (although that contempt had never stopped him using them, whispered the voice of his conscience). After his humiliating penance, and the tongue-lashing by the young one, Thomas now loathed whores beyond all measure.

He prayed, but for once that did not bring peace of mind. Suddenly all he could think about was the young girl’s breasts, so firm and pointed beneath her tunic. He knew what they would feel like in his hands, and he knew how they would taste under his tongue once he had aroused the sweat of passion in her.

Saint Michael, aid me now! God help me, drive thoughts of this woman from my mind!

Thomas squeezed his eyes shut, his hands now trembling violently as he grasped them tightly together, his body rocking slowly back and forth. He struggled for control, knowing that any moment Bertrand was going to open that door and find Thomas lost in a maddened fit of anger and remembered lust.

Thomas knew he was being watched, knew that the Prior General of England wanted an excuse to throw him from the Order…and yet still he couldn’t bring himself under control…still he couldn’t forget the laughter…the breasts bared above his head…still he couldn’t forget his humiliation, and his overweening fury…

“Please…please, Saint Michael,” he whispered between clenched teeth.

Thomas.

Peace flooded Thomas’ being, and he almost wept.

Thomas, do not let the thoughts of women control you.

Thomas opened his eyes a fraction. A warm clear light illuminated the dim corridor. He lifted his head slowly.

Five or six feet from him stood a pillar of fire, the form of a man dimly discernible within it. A stern face stared at Thomas from the top of the pillar.

The fire did not sear Thomas, nor did it cause him any fear. He sank to his knees, and clasped his hands in adoration. The archangel had returned.

Women exist only for one reason, Thomas—to bear children. Otherwise they are to be used and discarded with as little thought as the daily sending of excreta on its journey into the cesspool. Use them, but do not let thoughts of them control your life. And never give your soul to one.

“Saint Michael,” Thomas whispered. “You are so good to me.”

You are a Beloved, Thomas.

“Blessed saint, I have found a name that—”

You have found the name of the man whom you must follow, in body as well as spirit.

“Wynkyn de Worde.”

Yes. He worked on behalf of God and His angels until the evil pestilence swallowed him before he could properly accomplish his task.

“And I must take up where he left off?”

You are his successor, although you will grow to be much greater than he.

Thomas’ heart swelled with pride. “What must I do?”

Learn all you can about him, learn what he did, and why. Discover what his purpose was, then take that purpose into your own hands. Follow your instincts, for they are the instincts of the angels.

“Can you not tell me what I need to know, blessed angel?”

The archangel’s anger seeped across the space towards Thomas.

“Forgive me! I did not think to—”

Learning is nothing unless it is experienced. If I tell you what you need to know then you will not have truly learned. Wynkyn de Worde died before he could train his successor personally, thus the successor, you, had to be bred and must now learn without the aid of the one gone before.

“I will learn, Saint Michael. I give you my oath on it.”

You will learn fast, Thomas. Wynkyn de Worde’s untimely death was a disaster. For thirty years the minions of Satan have mingled among God’s own. Now it is almost too late to prevent the final conflagration.

“Blessed angel, my duties keep me here at the friary. I doubt that—”

The archangel roared, and Thomas cringed in terror.

You work with God’s authority! The Church is crippled and useless! Listen only to God’s authority, Thomas, not the useless babbling of priests!

“Saint Michael—”

You are God’s Beloved, Thomas. You need no other authority than that to work what you must. Already you have allowed Prior Bertrand to deflect you from God’s purpose. Do not allow him to do so again.

Thomas began to speak, the questions bubbling to his lips, but the archangel had gone, and Thomas was once more alone in the corridor.

The door opened and there was the sound of a footstep. “Brother Thomas?”

Prior Bertrand.

Thomas unclasped his hands, then slowly rose from his knees and turned to face the prior.

As on the other times Thomas had come to his cell, Bertrand indicated that Thomas should sit on the stool. The prior stood before him, his arms folded and his hands slipped deep into his sleeves.

“Well, Thomas, have you learned humility?”

Thomas, who had been sitting with his own hands folded in his lap and his eyes cast down, now lifted his face.

“I have learned, Prior Bertrand, that I have a greater calling than that which places me under your discipline.”

“What?” Truly shocked, Bertrand actually forgot himself enough to rock slightly on his feet.

Thomas held the prior’s gaze. “I am Wynkyn de Worde’s successor in God’s and the angels’ eternal fight against evil.”

The prior’s face completely whitened. “By whose authority?” he whispered.

“By God’s authority, and by the authority of the blessed Saint Michael who has blessed me with his presence on several occasions.”

Bertrand jerked his eyes away from Thomas, backing up a step or two. He muttered a prayer under his breath, then shook his head frantically as Thomas rose to his feet.

“Tell me what you know of Wynkyn de Worde!” Thomas said.

Bertrand shook his head more vigorously. “No. De Worde is dead. Gone. I do not have to think of him any more.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“Brother Thomas! You overstep your place! I will not—”

“You will tell me,” Thomas said in a low voice that was, nevertheless, laced with such venom that Bertrand quivered in fear.

Thomas reached out and seized one of Bertrand’s sleeves. The prior flinched, thinking he would be struck, but Thomas only pulled him about and pushed him down on the stool.

“I speak with the archangel Saint Michael’s voice,” Thomas said. “Tell me what you know of Wynkyn de Worde!”

Bertrand, staring up at Thomas, recognised the power and anger that flooded the man’s face. So Wynkyn had also looked when Bertrand had summoned him to an accounting when the prior had first taken his office.

And, as Bertrand had capitulated then, so he capitulated now.

After all, was not St Angelo’s dedicated to the archangel St Michael?

Bertrand suddenly understood that he wanted Thomas out of this friary and out of Rome as soon as possible. He was an old, old man, and he’d had enough.

The prior dropped his eyes, and sighed. St Michael’s will be done. His face was grey now, rather than pale, and the age-wrinkles in his skin had deepened until they resembled wounds.

“I came to this friary as a young man,” Bertrand began, “perhaps thirty or thirty-two—not much older than you are now—in 1345. I assumed the position of prior, although many, Brother Wynkyn among them, thought me too young for such duties.”

Thomas folded his hands and stood straight, regarding Bertrand silently.

Bertrand’s mouth twisted, remembering. “Within weeks of my arrival I realised that Brother Wynkyn was…different. As you have realised, he came and went without asking permission, and he hardly took any part in the life of the friary apart from attending prayers and meals. When he was in the friary he kept to his cell, studying an ancient book he had there.”

“Of what was it concerned?”

“I do not know.”

“But—”

“Listen, damn you, and keep your questions until I am done!”

Thomas bowed his head.

“Some three weeks after my arrival I summoned Brother Wynkyn to my cell. He sat on this stool and I stood before him. I asked him by what right he ignored his duties within the friary, and by what right he came and went as he pleased.

“He smiled, not a pleasant expression, and he drew a letter from one of his sleeves. ‘By this right,’ he said, and handed the letter to me.”

Bertrand stopped, and he crossed himself with a trembling hand. Thomas remained silent, and waited for Bertrand to continue.

“It was a letter from the holy Boniface of blessed memory—”

Thomas nodded. Boniface had been a great pope until his untimely death in 1303.

“—and it directed the reader to give Brother Wynkyn de Worde every assistance and freedom. It said…it said that Wynkyn de Worde was the hand of the archangel Saint Michael on earth, and that he worked the will of the angels. It said further that de Worde knew the face of evil, and if de Worde were not allowed his freedom then evil would roam unfettered.”

“You did not doubt it.”

“No. I could not. All know of Boniface’s piety, and of his judgement. He was a great pope, and I believed his words implicitly.”

Again Thomas understood, although he did not nod this time. Boniface had been dead some thirty years when Wynkyn had shown Bertrand the pope’s letter, but it would have carried the same degree of authority then as it had when it had been newly penned. After Boniface’s death, the French King Philip, whom many accused of Boniface’s murder (the king had tried an unsuccessful kidnap of the pope, which had prompted a fatal heart attack), had seized control of the papacy via his puppet, Pope Clement, and the popes had retired to Avignon to lead lives of corruption and sin.

Boniface had been the last of the true popes as far as much of Christendom was concerned. If Wynkyn had pulled out a letter from one of the Avignon popes, Bertrand would have been likely to throw it in the fire and laugh in the brother’s face.

“And that is all the letter said?” Thomas prompted softly.

“Yes. That was all the letter said. But, combined with the same light in Brother Wynkyn’s face that I now see shining from yours, it was enough.”

Bertrand heaved himself to his feet and paced slowly back and forth in the confined space between his bed and the door. “After that I let Wynkyn de Worde do as he willed. He was quiet enough, and nothing he did disturbed the peace of the friary. The other brothers left him well enough alone.”

“Where did he go when he left the friary?”

“He went to the friary in Nuremberg twice a year for the summer and winter solstices.”

Ah! The timing of de Worde’s departures and arrivals now made sense. The summer solstice occurred on the Vigil of St John the Baptist in late June, the winter on the night before the Vigil of the Nativity of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“What he did there,” Bertrand continued, “I know not, although it had something to do with the evil that was Brother Wynkyn’s purpose.”

“And the significance of the solstices?”

Bertrand merely shrugged.

Thomas lapsed into thought, pacing slowly before Bertrand hunched miserably on his stool.

“What of this ancient book that Brother Wynkyn consulted? What did it contain?”

“I do not know.”

“Does it remain in the friary?”

“No. Wynkyn took it with him on his final journey north.”

“In Advent of the first year of pestilence.”

“Yes.” Bertrand hunched even further on the stool. Why hadn’t he destroyed those records earlier?

“And Wynkyn did not return from Nuremberg?”

“No. I presume he died of the pestilence.”

“And the book?”

“Wynkyn took it with him encased in an oaken casket. I presume it lies wherever Wynkyn bubbled out his last breath. Either that or it has been stolen.”

Thomas stopped his pacing, thinking deeply. In the past hour he’d found a solidity of purpose that had before been only a vague hope and yearning. Now he knew exactly what he had to do.

All thought of whores and naked flesh had fled his mind.

“I must retrace Wynkyn de Worde’s last route north,” Thomas said, and Bertrand blinked as if he were a prisoner suddenly and most unexpectedly given his freedom.

He would rid himself of this troublesome brother once and for all!

“I must find that casket,” Thomas said, “but I will need your aid.”

“Ask what you will,” said Bertrand, silently wishing that Thomas would just leave.

“I seek an audience with the pope.”

“What!”

Thomas looked Bertrand in the eye. “Boniface obviously knew something of what Brother Wynkyn did. What if his secret had also been shared with his successors? I must ask the Holy Father, and perhaps even enlist his aid.”

Thomas was prepared to work without it, but the backing of the pope would open many doors for him.

“Sweet Jesu, brother,” Bertrand said, “an audience with Urban? But—”

“Can it be arranged?”

Bertrand played with the frayed end of his belt, trying to purchase some time. Arrange an audience with the pope? Lord Christ Saviour! It could mean the end of his career!

“Brother Prior?”

Bertrand gave up, spreading his hands helplessly. “It will take some time, Brother Thomas, and even then it might prove impossible. Urban has only sat his throne some five days…and some say he may not sit it much longer.”

“What do you mean?” Thomas had spent so much time in prayer the past week that he’d not had the time or inclination to listen to gossip.

“You have not heard? Two days after the election, thirteen of the sixteen cardinals put themselves back on the road to Avignon.”

“Why?”

“When the cardinals met in conclave they were terrified that if they voted in a non-Roman the mob would slaughter them. Well, we all know that for the truth. But there are rumours of more. They say that the cardinals decided to elect Urban as pope on the clear understanding that he would resign within a month or so when the majority of the cardinals were safely back in Avignon. Once safe, the cardinals will declare the Roman conclave void because of interference from the mob and have a new election.”

Thomas fought the urge to swear. The college of cardinals had long had a law that if a papal election came under undue interference then it could be declared null and void.

And Urban’s election had indisputably come under “undue interference”.

This rumour had the smell of truth.

“That evil walks among us cannot be questioned,” Thomas said, “when the cardinals plot such treachery against the Church of Rome!”

“Do you still seek an audience with Urban?”

Thomas nodded. “It will do no harm.”

Bertrand folded his hands in resignation. “I will do what I can.”

VII

Wednesday in Easter Week

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(21st April 1378)

—i—

During the seventy years that the popes had resided in Avignon, the papal palace adjoining St Peter’s Basilica had fallen into a state of disrepair. Gregory had not done much to restore it in the year he’d spent in Rome before his death—and many said that that was a clear indication he had not meant to remain permanently in Rome at all—and had only made them habitable.

Thus Urban did not meet petitioners in the great audience hall—half demolished over the past fifty years by Romans seeking foundation stones for their homes—but in a large chapel that ran between St Peter’s and the papal palace. It had taken Prior Bertrand a great deal of time and had caused him to call in a great many favours to engineer a place at the Thursday papal audience for himself and Brother Thomas, and even then he did not know if they would get a chance to actually address the pope.

But this was the best he could do, and so, after their noon meal, he and Brother Thomas made their way into the Leonine City.

The gates in the wall by the Castel St Angelo had been restored to their hangings, but were thrown open to the petitioners and pilgrims wending their way towards St Peter’s. The rising spring meant that the pilgrimage ways were reopening after the winter hiatus, and both Bertrand and Thomas had to push their way through the crowds thronging the streets leading to the Basilica.

Their robes granted them no favours. Rome was stacked to the rafters with clerics of all shapes, sizes and degrees, and a pair of Dominican friars were inconsequential compared to the hordes of bishops and archbishops, holy hermits, frenzied prophets of doom and wild-eyed nuns in the grip of some holy possession.

Thomas’ mouth thinned as he shouldered a way through for himself and the prior. Most of these hermits, prophets and hysterical nuns were but pretenders, their palms held open for coin, their voices shrieking that doom awaited if pilgrims weren’t prepared to part with their last groat for a blessing.

“Does the pope not issue orders to rid the streets of such as these?” he muttered as he and Bertrand were momentarily pinned against a brick wall by the pressing throng.

“Rome has always been cursed with such petitioners,” Bertrand replied. “Sometimes worse. When Boniface called the great Jubilee several years before he died, Rome was awash with over a million pilgrims…as with all the charlatans, whores, relic merchants and money lenders the pilgrim trade attracts.”

Thomas stared at Bertrand, forgetting for the moment the crowds about them. “A million pilgrims? Surely not!”

“’Tis true, my son. Some say the number was even greater.”

Thomas shook his head, unable to conceive of a million people. Rome’s population was normally about thirty thousand—and that was extraordinary enough in Christendom, where few towns had more than two thousand people. But a million?

“Jesu,” he whispered, “how was Rome not destroyed amid such a conflagration of people?”

“Rome has survived many things, Thomas. The corruption and madness of Roman emperors, invasions by barbarians and infidels, and the devilish machinations of kings. A squash of pilgrims would not worry it overmuch.”

But such a crowd, thought Thomas, and the sin it must have engendered.

“Come!” Bertrand said, seizing Thomas’ sleeve. “I see a way opening before us!”

They walked as quickly as possible up the steps leading to the entrance into the vast court that lay before St Peter’s: they would have to enter the papal presence via the Basilica itself. The steps were as crowded as the streets, and Thomas was appalled to see that the court itself was packed with the stalls of moneylenders and relic merchants.

“How can the pope allow this?” he said, waving a hand at the frenetic activity. “It is like the scene before the Temple of Jerusalem!”

“Money can make even popes tolerant of many evils,” said Bertrand, and hurried Thomas forward before the man thought to emulate Christ himself and start to overturn tables. Bertrand just wanted to get this over and done with and, whatever the result of the interview, to then hurry Thomas out of Rome with as much speed as he could.

Bertrand cared not that Thomas spoke with the authority of angels. Wynkyn de Worde had as well, and Bertrand had never stopped counting his blessings that the demented man had not returned from Nuremberg.

St Peter’s was relatively quiet after the hustle of the outer court and streets. The nave of the Basilica was crowded with pilgrims and penitents, but it was quiet save for the mumble of prayers, and most knelt in orderly ranks facing the altar of St Peter, or before one of the shrines that lined the aisles.

Bertrand and Thomas genuflected towards St Peter’s shrine, then moved up the right-hand aisle towards a small door two-thirds of the way along the north wall of the Basilica. It was well guarded, but Bertrand whispered his name and that of Thomas, and the guards allowed them through.

They found themselves in a small corridor, blessedly quiet after the turbulence of street and court, and Bertrand indicated a door at its end. “Through there. We’ll find ourselves at the rear of the chapel. Bow towards the pope, although he probably won’t see you, and then come to stand with me to the side. The papal secretaries have your name, and if the pope has time then he will—”

“If he has time?”

“Thomas, you are an unimportant man within the hierarchy of the Church. There will be others, many others, and of far more important rank, before you.”

“But not of more important mission,” Thomas mumbled.

“Do you think yourself Christ?” Bertrand hissed. “Do you think yourself to be announced as the saviour of Christendom?”

“I speak with the voice of—”

“You are still a humble man,” Bertrand said. “Do not forget that!”

The chamber was packed, but with a far more richly clothed and bejewelled crowd than that which thronged the streets.

Bertrand and Thomas entered silently and bowed to the figure of Urban seated—stiff in his robes and jewels—on the papal throne set on a small dais before the altar of the chapel.

He did not notice their entrance.

The two friars whispered their names to a clerk seated just inside the door, who wrote them down and then passed the paper to a messenger boy who took it to two richly-robed secretaries seated at a table to the pope’s left. Bertrand and Thomas then stood with a group of Benedictine monks halfway up the chapel by a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. From this vantage point both men could see and hear well.

There were three cardinals seated on the pope’s right. The remaining three, Thomas realised, and wondered why they had stayed when all the others had departed for Avignon. Urban, a bear-like man in his late fifties who wore his robes of office with obvious discomfort, sat fidgeting impatiently while one of the cardinals whispered earnestly to him.

“Ah! Bah!” Urban suddenly pronounced and, leaning back in his chair, spat a gob of phlegm to one side of his chair.

“I give that for King John’s proposition!” he said, and farted.

The shock in the chapel was palpable. Bodies stiffened and faces blanched.

Grinning, Urban reached for a jewelled goblet of wine on a side table. He downed it in four loud gulps, red wine running down one side of his chin, then slammed the goblet down.

“But, Holy Father,” the cardinal said, “the French king has proposed what is only just—”

“What your partners in intrigue have told him is just,” Urban said. “I doubt the old man could tell the difference between a woman’s breast and a donkey’s teat, let alone between what is just and what is not.”

The cardinal sat back, glancing at the other two. His fingers drummed on the arm of his chair, then stilled.

“No one doubts that our conclave was under undue influence,” he said.

Urban roared and leapt to his feet. “I will not resign!” he yelled.

Bertrand leaned towards Thomas and whispered in his ear: “I fear we have arrived at a most inopportune moment.”

Thomas said nothing, but his face was tight with anger. The cardinals had elected this peasant’s arse as pope?

Urban stepped down from the dais, strode over to a guard, wrenched a spear from the startled man’s grasp and stalked back to the three cardinals.

He threw the spear down at the feet of the cardinal who had been speaking to him.

The man’s face did not change expression.

“Even if the cardinals point a thousand spears at my throat I will not resign!” Urban shouted. “I am rightful pope, and I will not resign!”

“Then we have no choice,” the cardinal said, his face impassive. “The cardinals will meet in conclave in Avignon and they will declare the election held here in Rome to be null and void. They will then elect a rightful pope. You are—”

“Don’t think that you and your companions here,” Urban gestured towards the other two cardinals, “will be joining them. Instead I think you shall spend the next few months in sackcloth in some isolated monastery, living on bread and water and spending the hours of the day in prayer for the salvation of your souls.”

And still the expression on the cardinal’s face did not alter. “Your orders carry no weight. You can force myself and my colleagues into whatever prison you like, but know that you only stain your soul further by doing so. You are only a parody. A jest.”

Urban’s fists clenched, and Thomas could see that he was struggling for control. On the one hand, Thomas was furious that the cardinals had, indeed, been plotting to elect another Frenchman to the papal throne; on the other, he was appalled that God’s cause should be championed by this pig.

“A parody, my lord cardinal. How many of the princes of Europe will believe me a parody? How many would support another puppet of the French king taking the papal throne?”

All about the chapel men were turning to their neighbours and whispering furiously.

“Lord Christ Saviour!” Bertrand said softly. “If neither backs down, then both Urban and the rogue cardinals are going to turn this into a European war!”

The impassive cardinal suddenly lost all control. He stood up and made a foul gesture towards Urban.

“There!” he shouted, his face now red. “That’s the only kind of language you understand, isn’t it, you Italian rustic. Let me go or imprison me, I don’t care, but your day is over!”

He stared one breath longer in the pope’s face, then stalked away.

His two colleagues joined him, their faces stiff with affront.

Urban let them go.

He sat back on his throne and regarded the audience. “Those traitors will tear Europe apart,” he said, “and damn their own souls in the doing. I am the true elected pope. A Roman pope. If they go ahead with their devil-inspired election, then few but the French will support them.”

His face worked, and his hands clenched and unclenched about the armrests of his throne. “Christendom will have two popes,” he said, his voice now a near whisper. “What have we done to so earn God’s displeasure? What evil stalks among us?”

Thomas stared at the pope, trying to reconcile his disgust at the man’s revolting habits with the thought that he might be a true ally he could rely upon. Any pope elected in Avignon would be a tool of the French king…and that left only Urban who might swing the forces of the Church behind the effort to battle the forces of evil which were even now—

“Ah! Enough of them,” Urban said. “What do we have next?”

One of his secretaries handed him a piece of paper.

“What?” Urban yelled as he read. “Some half-crazed friar thinks he speaks for archangel Saint Michael? Heaven aid us all from such dimwitted asses! Where is he? Where? Lord God above, why must I be pestered with such fools! If I were to believe every man, woman and child who solemnly swears they’ve been granted an audience with this saint, or that angel, I’d have to believe half of Christendom sits down to dinner with the Virgin herself!”

Urban crumpled the paper and threw it to one side. “Lord Christ, save me from the addled,” he said. “I’ve too much to do without being bothered with the deranged as well.”

Thomas and Bertrand backed unobtrusively away, Thomas cold with anger, Bertrand with shock.

“I had no thought the man would be so…so…so…” Bertrand said as they finally gained the bustling court outside St Peter’s.

“So repellent,” Thomas finished for him. “He is unworthy to replace the meanest parish priest, let alone act as God’s mouthpiece on earth! And yet he is the rightfully elected pope.”

“That’s your English blood talking,” Bertrand said. “All the Frenchmen, Spaniards and Scots in this crowd would agree with the cardinals. Now, let us see if we can return to the friary in one piece.”

“No.” Thomas pulled away from him. “I shall not return yet. I need to consider what to do.”

“Thomas—”

But Thomas was gone, and Bertrand was left to seethe in solitude.

Lord Christ Saviour, but he would be gladdened when he could rid himself of this arrogant priest!

VIII

Wednesday in Easter Week

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(21st April 1378)

—ii—

Thomas wandered aimlessly through the crowds, pushed this way and that, trying to sort out his thoughts.

He had taken holy orders because he had wanted to be part of the Church, part of the great institution which spoke with Christ’s voice and guided man’s footsteps towards salvation.

In doing so, Thomas had hoped to atone for the sins of his past and achieve his own salvation.

But what he’d just witnessed dismayed him, although it confirmed what St Michael had said regarding the Church. How could the Church, as represented by Urban, rally to ward off the evil which the archangel told him walked freely among mankind? And what if the cardinals in Avignon went ahead and elected a new pope? Would Urban resign? No, of course not. He was too ambitious to do that.

That would leave Christendom headed by two popes. Thomas shuddered as he thought through the consequences. Two rival popes, two rival Church organisations, two sets of Church courts, two hierarchies of clerics…Sweet Jesu! The Church would be torn in two!

It would become the laughing stock of Europe.

If evil walked the world, then, by all the saints, it had surely taken a stroll through the papal palace in the past few weeks.

Well, there was nothing for it but to proceed without the papal blessing, and without the papal aid and information that he had sought.

“Saint Michael,” Thomas whispered into the crowd, “guide my steps, I pray you!”

A hand grabbed his sleeve, and Thomas almost fell over.

He swore—instantly regretting the lapse—and twisted around amid the throng of close-pressed bodies to stare at the man who still had his sleeve in a tight clasp.

“Sweet Jesu, Tom, is that you?”

A man of about thirty-five or six stared at Thomas. He had a deeply lined and tanned face, a knife-scarred chin, bright blue eyes crowded by sun-wrinkles, and fine sandy hair that fell over his forehead.

“Tom? I can hardly tell your face without its black beard.”

Thomas gaped at the man. Was this a guide that Saint Michael had sent?

“Tom, speak to me…or are you too proud to pass the time of day with your old friends now?”

“Wat,” Thomas finally said. “Wat Tyler.”

“Aye, Wat Tyler it is. Lord Jesus, this is no place to talk—a man couldn’t even piss in a crowd this thick! Come…there’s a place that I’ve found…”

And Thomas found himself being dragged through the crowd and into a side street close to the market—Jesu! Had he wandered out of the Leonine City and back into the heart of Rome without knowing it?

Wat pulled Thomas into a small one-roomed tavern, ill-lit and kept, and almost as crowded as the outside streets. A heavily pregnant and slatternly woman carrying several mugs of ale squeezed her way through the trestle tables and benches, ignoring the obscene remarks and leers that followed her.

“Wat—” Thomas began.

“It’s no cathedral, I grant you,” Wat said, and pushed Thomas down onto the end of a bench at a crowded table, “but it’s the best we can do for the present…unless you want to invite me back to dine at your friary.”

The men about the table gave the priest and his companion only a cursory glance before returning to their drinking and arguing.

Wat squeezed down on to the very end of the bench, forcing Thomas to shuffle along until he was, in turn, squeezed against a sweaty and fat labourer who shot Thomas a sour look before turning back to his companions.

“I am not going to talk to you here,” Thomas said.

“Nowhere else,” Wat said. “Christ above, Tom. How many years is it since we’ve seen each other? And,” he lowered his voice slightly, “from what I remember, there was a time you’d have felt at home in a drinking den like this, eh?”

Thomas’ mouth tightened, but Wat ignored it, and called to the woman for a couple of ales. She grunted, and disappeared towards a back room.

Wat turned back to Thomas. “But now I see that this warm and companionable room is not good enough. Not for this fine priest. And perhaps I am not good enough, either.”

Thomas briefly closed his eyes, and sighed. “Rome is the last place I’d expect to see you. What do you do here?”

There was a time, Wat thought, carefully examining the subtle changes to Thomas’ face since he’d last seen it, when Rome was the last place I’d have thought to meet you, too.

“I’m here as sergeant of the escort to King Edward’s envoy.”

Wat finally caught Thomas’ interest. “Edward has sent an envoy to Rome? To Urban?”

Wat flipped a coin to the woman who slopped two overfull mugs on the stained table top before them.

“Aye.” He grinned, and swallowed a mouthful of the ale. “Edward is skittering about his throne with joy that his rival has lost the papacy back to Rome. He’s sent the Archbishop of Canterbury to extend to Urban England’s good wishes.”

“Edward may not be so joyous for much longer,” Thomas said.

“Eh? Why?”

Thomas told Wat about the fear and intimidations that had surrounded Urban’s election, the subsequent rogue cardinals’ departure for Avignon, and their demand that Urban resign. He relaxed as he talked, falling back into the warmth and trust of a friendship that extended back many years and through many shared dangers.

“I fear,” he finally said, turning his untasted mug of ale around in endless damp circles, “that there will be a pope in Avignon, and a pope in Rome…and a divided Christendom.”

Wat shrugged. “It’s divided anyway.”

“Curse you, Wat! This will mean war!”

Wat looked Thomas directly in the eye. “There will be war in any case. The archbishop is here not only to extend Edward’s warm congratulations to Urban, but also to ask Urban’s blessing for Edward’s new—”

“Sweet Jesu! Edward’s going to re-invade France?”

Wat grinned. “Will have re-invaded by this time.”

Thomas sat back, the mug now still between his hands. Wat looked at him carefully, wondering what memories were scurrying through Thomas’ head. Was there regret that he had swapped sword for cross?

“Edward’s an old man,” Thomas said.

“Edward has stayed at home. You know who would lead such an expedition, Tom.”

“Aye,” Thomas whispered, his eyes blank, his thoughts a thousand miles away. “The Black Prince.”

“And Lancaster.”

Thomas’ eyes refocused on Wat. “The Duke of Lancaster as well?”

“As all of Lancaster’s friends and allies.”

Thomas visibly shuddered. “The war can do no good. Edward should accept that he has lost the right to the French throne.”

“The war can do no good? You have changed, Tom.”

Again Thomas’ face tightened. “As I said, Wat, Edward is an old man. He should look to the health of his soul, rather than try to win more glory and riches for himself and his sons.”

“And I suppose the Black Prince and Lancaster should scurry back home as well, and spend their remaining years on their knees before some altar!”

“Penitence does no one harm, Wat. You should look to the health of your own soul. Evil walks abroad.”

“And that I cannot disagree with,” Wat mumbled, looking away, “for evil has surely stolen your soul!”

Furious, Thomas swivelled about on the bench—causing his fat neighbour to curse at the disturbance—and grabbed Wat’s shoulder. “I have repented for my sins, Wat, and the Lord God has been merciful enough to grant me forgiveness. Has he done the same for you?”

“Don’t preach to me, Tom! Not you! You have sold your soul to Rome—”

“I have sold my soul to no one—”

“—when you should remember that you are an Englishman born and bred! What if Edward asked you for allegiance and service…would you give it to him?”

“I owe my allegiance to no one but God!” Thomas hissed. “I serve a higher Lord than Edward and his pitiful worldly ambitions—”

“I’d give a year’s pay to hear you say that to Edward’s face,” Wat mumbled, the hint of a smile about his face, but Thomas carried on without pause.

“—and any who ride with Edward’s captains risk their soul on an unholy cause!”

“You are adept at cloaking yourself in holiness, Thomas, but you cannot forget who and what you once were.”

“It is obvious that you cannot forget who and what I once was, Wat. How is it you sit here and dare speak to me with such familiarity?”

Now Wat’s face was tight with fury. “I forget my place, my lord. Forgive me.”

Thomas held his stare, then looked away.

Wat took a deep breath, and spoke more moderately, trying to deflect the anger of the past minutes.

“There is a new spiritual adviser at Lancaster’s court, Tom. An old friend of yours.”

“Yes?”

Wat downed the last of his ale. “Master Wycliffe.”

“Wycliffe? But…”

“Much has happened since you’ve been gone. Your colleague at Oxford—”

“I hardly knew him. We did not agree on many matters.”

And you would agree even less now, Wat thought. “—now has the ear of the Duke of Lancaster and, through him, his father, Edward. Wycliffe says,” Wat waved his empty mug to the woman, “that the Church should content itself only with spiritual matters, and not the worldly.”

Thomas rubbed his forehead, and did not reply. He and Wycliffe had spent many hours arguing when Thomas had been studying at Oxford, and he did not want to deepen his argument with Wat now over the despicable man.

“Further,” Wat continued, “Wycliffe has publicly stated that men who exist in a state of sin should not hold riches or property—”

“The old man has finally said something sensible?”

“—and, of all men who exist in sin, Wycliffe holds that the bishops, archbishops and cardinals of the Holy Church are the worst of all.”

Thomas raised his eyebrows, not sure that he could disagree with that, either.

“Consequently,” Wat continued serenely, handing another coin to the woman who’d brought him more ale, “Master Wycliffe argues that the Church should relinquish most of the worldly riches and land that it holds. After all, is not the Holy Church spiritual rather than worldly? Shouldn’t priests be more concerned with the salvation of souls rather than the accumulation of riches?”

Wat grinned wryly at the expression on Tom’s face. No doubt the man thought this was all heresy. Well, Wycliffe had many admirers, and many of those among the nobility themselves, who thought that what he said was nothing but sense. If the Church was forced to give up land…then who but the nobles would benefit?

“And can you imagine what Wycliffe has also said?” Wat said, leaning a little closer to Tom. “Why, he claims that all the masses and the sacraments and the fripperies of the Holy Church are but nothing in the quest for salvation. Instead, so Master Wycliffe claims, salvation can be gleaned from a careful study of the Scriptures without the need for the mediation of a priest. Who needs priests?”

Thomas was so shocked he could do nothing but stare. To point out the corruptions of the Church was one thing, but to suggest no one needed a Church or a priesthood in order to gain salvation was a heresy so vile it must have been promulgated by the whisperings of Satan’s demons. And here was Wat mouthing such vileness in the very heart of Christendom itself.

“After all,” Wat said, wiping away the foam left about his mouth from his draught of ale, “the Church makes itself so rich from the tithes and taxes it takes from the good folk that it would be the last to stand up and say, ‘You can do it yourself, if only you could read the Scriptures.’ I’ve heard tell that Wycliffe has his followers translating the Bible from Latin into the King’s own English, so as all us plain folk can read it.”

Put God into the plain man’s hand? “He talks filth! He attacks what God Himself has ordained!”

“And yet have you not just told me about the possibility of your beloved Church being headed by two popes? Are you trying to argue that we leave our salvation in the hands of such idiots?”

Thomas was silent.

“Beyond anything else,” Wat said softly, intently, “I am an Englishman. I owe allegiance to Edward and his sons before I owe allegiance to a corrupt foreign power that masquerades as the guardian of our souls. I like what Wycliffe says. It makes sense…his reasoning puts the common man’s destiny back into his hands rather than leave it in the hands of—”

“You are an unlearned man,” Thomas said, and, rising to his feet, stepped over the bench, “but you should know better than to spread the words of a heretic. By doing so you assure yourself a place in hell.”

“And you are a self-righteous idiot,” Wat said, looking away, “and my place in hell is far from assured.”

Thomas stared, then a muscle in his cheek twitched, and he turned and strode out the tavern.

Wat turned his head to watch him go. He snorted. “You may clothe yourself in the robes of a humble friar, m’lad,” he said to no one in particular, “but you still walk with the arrogance of a prince!”

Then he laughed shortly. “There may be a space awaiting me in hell,” he murmured, “but I have no intention of ever filling it.”

After a moment Wat returned to his ale.

“Prior Bertrand. You realise that I must leave.”

It was evening, and Thomas had waylaid Bertrand as the brothers filed out after Vespers prayers.

Finally, thought Bertrand, finally he goes! He resolved to say a special prayer of thanksgiving to St Michael that evening at Compline. Thomas should have asked permission, but Bertrand was not going to quibble about that small lack of procedure right now.

“You follow Brother Wynkyn’s steps?”

“Yes. North to Nuremberg. And then…then where the archangel Saint Michael’s steps guide me.”

Bertrand nodded. “I will write a letter of introduction for you.” Best to ensure Thomas had all help available in order to speed his steps away from St Angelo’s.

Thomas inclined his head. “I thank you, Prior Bertrand.”

Bertrand opened his mouth, hesitated, then spoke. “It is said that beneath his rustic exterior, the Holy Father has only the good of the Church at heart.”

“Perhaps.”

“Thomas…do not judge any you meet too harshly. We are all only men and women, and are faulted by the burdens of our sins.”

Thomas inclined his head again, but did not reply.

Some of us may only be men and women, he thought, but some of us are otherwise.

Later, when he was alone in his cell, Bertrand sat at his writing desk in stillness a long, long time.

When the wick in his oil lamp flickered and threatened to go out Bertrand reached for a piece of parchment and, while the lamp lasted, wrote an account of events, and of Thomas’ part in them, to the Prior General of England, Richard Thorseby. True, Bertrand was gladdened that Thomas was leaving, but it was best to ensure Thomas never came back at all, and Thorseby would be just the man for that. After all, Thomas hadn’t exactly asked for permission to leave the friary, had he? Such disobedience against the rules of the order called for stern disciplinary measures…

“And I pray to God that I be with You in heaven,” Bertrand mumbled as he blotted the ink, “before another emissary of Saint Michael’s decides to stay awhile at Saint Angelo’s.”

IX

Ember Friday in Whitsuntide

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(11th June 1378)

Thomas spent the weeks on the road north from Rome in a state of troublesome melancholy, wondering at the future of the word of God in a world which seemed to be slipping ever closer to the blandishments of the Devil. These had been grey weeks of travel. He had been harassed by beggars, pilgrims and wandering pedlars who thought a lone traveller easy prey (even his obvious poverty had not lessened their threatening entreaties), while constant rain and a sweeping chill wind had added physical misery to the spiritual anguish of Thomas’ soul. Doubt had consumed him: how could he follow a trail thirty years dead? How could he, one man, rally the forces of God to destroy the evil that spread unhindered throughout Christendom?

Even worse were memories which had ridden untamed through his mind whenever he thought on Wat’s news that the Black Prince and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, were again leading an invasion force into France.

The surge of battle, the scream of horses, and the ring of steel. The feel of the blade as it arced through the air, seeking that weakness in his opponent’s armour, and then the joy as he felt it crush through bone and sinew, and the expression of shock, almost wonder, on a man’s face as he felt cold death slide deep into his belly.

The glimpse of a sweaty comrade’s face, his expression half of fear, half of fierce joy, across the tangled gleam of armour and wild-eyed horses of the battlefield.

The same comrade later that night, lifting a goblet to toast victory.

The brotherhood of arms and of battle.

John of Gaunt—Lancaster—was returning to France, his friends and allies at his back.

Who was with Lancaster? Who? Memories rode not far behind Lancaster’s banner.

Thomas cursed Wat daily. Not only had the man spoken heretical words which had disturbed Thomas’ soul, the man’s very appearance had recalled to Thomas a life and passions he had thought to have forgotten years before. He served God and St Michael now, not the whims of some petty prince, or the dictates of a power-hungry sovereign.

He served God, not the brotherhood he’d left behind.

Man’s cause no longer interested him.

On this morning, as Thomas approached Florence, any doubts he may have had vanished along with the cloud and wind. Just after Sext he turned a corner of the road to find Florence lay spread out before him like a saviour.

Thomas halted his mule and stared.

Warm sunshine washed over him, and to either side of the road richly-scented summer flowers bloomed in waving cornfields. But none of this registered in Thomas’ mind. He could only stare at the walled metropolis below him. A gleaming city of God, surely, for nothing else could have given it such an aura of light and strength.

He had never seen a city so beautiful. Even Rome paled into insignificance before it. Not only was it larger—Florence was the largest city in the western world—but it was infinitely more colourful, more splendidly built, more alive.

Innumerable burnished domes of church and guildhall glittered in the noon sunshine; pale stone towers topped by red terracotta roofs soared from the dark narrow streets towards the light of both sun and God; colourful banners and pennants whipped from windows and parapets; bridges arched gracefully over the winding Arno—the river silver in this light. The tops of fruit trees and the waving tendrils of vines reached from the courtyards of villas and tenement blocks.

Thomas’ overwhelming impression was of majesty and light, where his memory of Rome was of decay and chaos and violence.

Surely God was here, where He had been absent in Rome?

Gently Thomas nudged the flanks of his mule, and the patient beast began the descent into the richest and most beautiful municipality in Christendom.

Thomas had thought that his initial impression of Florence might be shattered when he entered the crowded streets, but it was not so.

Where the crowds in Rome had been oppressive, often threatening, here they were lively and inviting.

Where the faces that turned his way in Rome had been surly or suspicious, here they were open and welcoming.

Where the doors of Rome had been closed to strangers and to the always expected violence, here they were open to friend and stranger alike. And it seemed that from every second window, and every third doorway, hung the tapestries and cloths for which Florence was famous—a waterfall of ever-changing colour that rippled and glittered down every street.

Above the voices and footsteps of the streets cascaded a clarion of bells: guild bells, church bells, the bells of the standing watches on the walls and the marching watches on the streets…the bells of God.

A tear slipped down Thomas’ cheek.

When Thomas rode into the city, he did not immediately seek the friary he knew would give him shelter. It was still high morning, and he could spend the next few hours more profitably seeking out that which he needed than passing platitudes with his brothers in the Order.

Thomas understood now that God needed him on his feet, not his knees.

So Thomas rode his mule slowly through the streets towards the market square. The past weeks on the road from Rome had taught him a valuable lesson: he would travel the quicker if he travelled in a well-escorted train. A lone traveller had to travel slowly and carefully, and not only to avoid the menacements of beggars, for Thomas had heard that the northern Italian roads were troubled by bandits who regularly dispossessed people of their valuables and, if the valuables proved insufficient, often their lives as well.

So Thomas needed to find a well-escorted group which would be travelling in his direction: through the Brenner Pass in the Alps, then north through Innsbruck and Augsberg to Nuremberg. There was only one group likely to be rich enough to afford the escort to travel quickly and safely, and only one group that would be likely to take that route, and Thomas had a good idea of where he’d find it.

Thomas dismounted from his mule and led it the final few hundred yards towards the market square, finally tying the beast to a post beside a wool store that bordered the square itself. The mule was a sorry beast, and Thomas thought that no one would be likely to steal it.

He patted the mule on the shoulder—sorry beast it might be, but it had also been faithful and of good service—and turned to the square. It was large, and lined with some of the most magnificent buildings Thomas had ever seen. There were churches, a cathedral, palaces of the nobles and of prelates and several prominent guildhalls. Colourful stalls had been set up about the square, selling every sort of goods from cloth to nubile Moorish slave girls, and in the centre of the square wove acrobats and jugglers, and a bear-handler with his abject and chained source of income.

The bear-handler was tying his charge to a stake and inviting passers-by to set their dogs to the creature, and to bet on the outcome.

Already a crowd was gathering around him.

Thomas ignored all the activity and set off for the largest of the guildhalls, that of the cloth merchants.

He paused inside the doors, his eyes narrowing. This was worldliness gone rampant! The guildhall rivalled any of the cathedrals Thomas had seen, save that of St Peter’s itself: supported by ornamented hammerbeams, its roof soared several hundred feet above his head. Its walls were painted over with scenes from the Scriptures, rich with gilding and studded with gems. Its furnishings were ornate and luxurious.

And Wat thought the Church too wealthy?

“Brother?” said a soft voice at his shoulder. “May I be of some assistance?”

Thomas turned around. A middle-aged and grey-haired man dressed in velvets and silks stood there, his well-fed face set into an expression of enquiry.

“Perhaps,” Thomas said. “I need to travel north, and fast. I seek any of your number who might be leaving within the next few days.”

“You want to travel with a merchant train?”

Thomas wondered if his fixed smile looked too false to this man. “That is what I said.”

The man spread his hands. “Surely the Church can afford to share some of the burden of finding a suitable escort for you, brother, if your mission be of such importance?”

“I travel alone, and I need to travel fast. I am sure any of your brothers within the guild would be happy to accept me into their company.”

The man raised his eyebrows.

“I would reward them well for their troubles,” Thomas said.

“With coin, good brother?”

“With prayers, good man.”

The man’s face split in a cynical grin. “You shall have to take your proposition to the merchants concerned, brother. It will be their choice or not…and I am not sure if they are so low on prayers they need to haul along the burden of a friar.”

“I will not be a burden!” Thomas snapped, and the man’s grin widened.

“Of course not. Well, ’tis not for me to say aye or nay. Take yourself to the Via Ricasoli. There is an inn there, you cannot miss it, and ask for Master Etienne Marcel. He is a Frenchman, a good cloth merchant, and he is leading a party north through the Brenner in two days’ time. Perchance he may feel the need of your prayers.”

Thomas nodded, and turned away,

“And perchance not,” the man added, and Thomas strode out of the guildhall and into the sunshine, the warmth of the day ruined.

He found the inn easily enough—it was the only one on the street—and asked of the innkeeper for Master Etienne Marcel.

The man inclined his head, and motioned Thomas to follow him.

They walked through the unoccupied front room, set out with several trestle tables and benches before a great fireplace, into a narrow hallway leading to a stairwell winding up to a darkened second level. Halfway up Thomas dimly heard laughter, and the clink of pewter—or coin—on a table.

There was only one door at the head of the stairs, and the innkeeper tapped on it gently.

It opened a fraction. The innkeeper spoke softly, briefly, then stood aside and indicated Thomas.

Thomas stared at the dark crack revealed by the open door, but could discern nothing.

The door closed, and he heard fragments of a conversation.

Then the door opened wide, and a well, but not overdressed young man, with a friendly grin, bright blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white, stood there, a hand held out in welcome.

“A friar!” he said in poor Latin, “and with a request. Well, brother, enter, if you don’t mind our den of sin.”

A rebuke sounded behind the young man and he flushed, and moderated the width of his smile. “Well, good brother. Not quite a ‘den of sin’, perhaps, but a worldly enough place for such as you. Please, enter, with our welcome.”

Thomas stepped past the innkeeper, nodding his thanks as he did so, and took the hand the young man still extended. “Brother Thomas Neville,” he said, “and I thank you for your welcome.”

And then he startled the young man by flashing him a rakish grin before assuming a more sober face as he entered the room.

The young man closed the door behind him.

It was a large and well-lit apartment occupying the entire second storey. Obviously the inn’s best. Three glassed windows—this was a rich inn—ran along the eastern wall, chests and benches underneath them. At the rear were two curtained-off beds, the curtains tied back to let the day’s air and sun dapple across the bed coverings. Travelling caskets and panniers sat at the sides and feet of the beds.

On the wall opposite the windows was an enormous fireplace; room enough for not only the fire, but benches to either side of it. A tripod with a steaming kettle hanging from a chain stood to one side.

But it was the centre of the room which caught Thomas’ attention, and which had its attention entirely focused on him. There was a massive table—a proper table rather than a trestle affair—with chairs pulled up about it.

Seated in these chairs were four men, and the young man who had let Thomas in moved past him and sat down to make the number of men five.

All five stared silently at Thomas.

At the head of the table, directly facing him, was a man only a few years older than Thomas, but considerably more careworn. As with the younger man who had met Thomas at the door, he was well, but not ostentatiously dressed: dark green wool tunic and leggings, and a fine linen shirt. There were several gold and garnet rings on his fingers. He had close-cropped greying brown hair, an open face, and dark brown eyes that were lively with intelligence…and a wariness that Thomas thought was habitual rather than a momentary concern at the unexpected visitor.

“Good friar,” the man said. “How may we aid you?”

He spoke in a well-modulated voice, and his Latin was that of an educated man.

Thomas not only inclined his head, he bowed from the waist as well. “Master Marcel. I do thank you for your hospitality in granting me an audience.”

For an unknown reason, Thomas felt an instant empathy with the man. This was, indeed, a God-fearing man, and worthy of both trust and respect.

God, or his archangel, Michael, had led him to this city, to this room and to this man.

Marcel nodded, then indicated the other men about the table. “We are a group of merchants, and,” he smiled gently at a dark-haired man in his thirties, “one banker, Giulio Marcoaldi, of a most distinguished Florentine family.”

Thomas inclined his head at the banker. “Master Marcoaldi.”

Marcoaldi similarly inclined his head, but did not speak.

“To my right,” Marcel said, indicating an ascetic-looking man of similar age to himself, and as well dressed, “is William Karle, a merchant of Paris.”

“Master Karle,” Thomas said.

“And beside him is Christoffel Bierman, a wool merchant of Flanders. His son, Johan, is the one who greeted you at the door.”

Thomas smiled and greeted the Biermans; the father was an older replica of his fair-haired and cheerful son.

“And I,” Marcel said, “am Etienne Marcel, as you have realised. I am a cloth merchant, travelling home to Paris by way of the Nuremberg markets.”

“More than a ‘cloth merchant’,” Bierman said in heavily accented Latin, “for Marcel is also the Provost of Merchants of Paris.”

Thomas blinked in surprise. No wonder the man had such an air of authority about him. The Provost of Merchants of Paris was a comparable position to the Lord Mayor of London. A powerful and influential man, indeed.

And so far from home…Thomas wondered why he travelled so far afield. Surely his duties as Provost should have kept him in Paris?

“I am Thomas Neville,” he said, “and I do thank you for your hospitality.”

“Which is not in any manner done with yet,” Marcel said. “Will you sit with us? And ease your hunger and thirst?”

Thomas nodded, and sat in the chair Marcel offered. He grasped the mug of ale that Johan handed him, took a mouthful—it was thick and creamy, and of very good quality—and then set it down again.

“You must wonder why I have so imposed myself on you,” he said.

Marcel crooked his eyebrows, but said nothing.

“I am travelling north,” Thomas continued, “to Nuremberg, where I understand you also travel. I need to get there as fast as I may, and thought to find a group of merchants travelling to Nuremberg as well. I know that the last thing you need is—”

“From where do you come?” Marcoaldi said. “You are not of the Florentine order of Dominicans.”

“I have travelled from Rome. Although,” Thomas smiled as disarmingly as he could, feeling the weight of Marcel’s nationality deeply, “perhaps you can tell by the inflections of my voice that I am—”

“English,” said Marcel in a tighter voice than he’d yet used. His eyes narrowed slightly, and he looked intently at Thomas. “Although I did not need to hear your voice to know that. The Neville name is well known throughout many parts of France. Your family’s reputation precedes you, friar.”

“I am of the family of Christ now,” Thomas said softly, holding Marcel’s gaze, “not of any worldly family.”

Marcel softened his stare, and a corner of his mouth crooked. “Then I would advise you to repeat that as often as you may, Brother Thomas, if you move anywhere near my home country. I hear it rumoured that the English are preparing another invasion into France.”

Now his grin widened. “A completely futile exercise, of course. I have no doubt that within weeks King John will send your…ah…the English army scurrying home with its tail between its legs. So,” he slapped his hands on the table, “you want to move north with us?”

“If I may, Master Marcel. I have little money with which to reward you for—”

“Ah,” Marcel waved a hand. “If you come from Rome, then you have much news you can tell us. That will be reward enough for your passage. I hear tell there is trouble in the papal palace.”

Thomas’ grim face was confirmation enough. “Aye. It will take a while in the telling, though.”

“Well, then…” Marcel turned to look at each of his companions in turn. “Shall we allow this English dog of a friar—” a grin across his face took all insult out of his words “—to travel north with us, then? Eh? Giulio? William? Christoffel? And no need to ask Johan. The boy is agog for a new face to talk to.”

At the nods from the other men, Marcel looked back to Thomas. “It is settled! You travel north with us. We leave before dawn in the morning, and we will travel fast. You have a horse?”

“I have a mule which—”

“A mule?” Johan said. “A mule! Good friar, cannot your Order afford even a patient mare to horse you?”

“We are a humble Order, Johan. We have no need of flashy steeds. A mule will do me well enough.”

“But it will not do us well enough,” Marcel said. “You may leave your mule with the Order’s friary here in Florence, Brother Thomas, and we will horse you with one of our spares.”

“I—”

“I will not accept your protests. I cannot afford to be held back by a stumbling mule. Especially not now,” he continued in a lower voice, “that an invasion threatens. I must get back to Paris as fast as I can. I must…”

“You will take the horse, Brother Thomas,” said Marcoaldi, his dark brown eyes studying him intently.

Thomas gave in. “As you wish. I thank you for your assistance.”

“Good,” Marcel said. “Your mule is outside? Well, I will send one of my men to take it to the friary. It is a goodly walk from here, and perhaps you might better spend the time with us. Johan, tell Pietro to fetch the friar’s belongings up here—I doubt he has overmuch with him—then to take the mule to the friary.”

“Of course.” Johan stood up and left the room.

“And now,” Marcel said, “if perhaps you could lead us in prayer, friar?”

Thomas slipped quickly into sleep, warmed by the thick coverlets and drapes of the bed and by the bodies of the two Biermans he shared it with. This was luxury indeed; it had been many years since he’d slept in such comfort.

He sighed and turned over, and slid deeper into his sleep.

He dreamed.

He twisted, and awoke, startled.

Faces surrounded the bed—the Biermans had disappeared—and they were the faces of evil. There were six, perhaps seven, of them: horned, bearded, pig-snouted, and cat-eyed.

And yet, strangely beautiful.

They stared at him, their eyes widening as they realised he was awake.

“Thomas,” one said, its voice deep and melodic, “Thomas?”

“Begone!” Thomas cried, wrenching himself into a sitting position, and making the sign of the cross before them. “Begone!”

They did not cringe, nor cry out. Instead their faces grinned slyly.

“We hear you’re off to find our Keeper,” said one, and it was a female, for her voice was curiously woman-like. “We do wish you good seeking.”

“Thomas,” said another, male this time. “Beware of what you think is evil and what you think is good.”

“And do beware,” said yet another, “of who you think is the hunted, and who the hunter.”

They laughed, the sound as soft and as melodic as their voices, and then they reached for him…

Thomas jerked up from the bed, wide-eyed and sweating, his breath rattling harshly through his throat.

There was nothing untoward in the chamber: the Biermans lay to one side of him, deep in sleep.

In the other bed, Marcel, Karle and Marcoaldi lay still, their breathing slow and deep.

Thomas looked at the window. It was tightly shuttered. He turned his gaze to the door. It was closed, and the fire still burned bright in the hearth, casting enough light around the chamber to show that it was empty apart from himself and his travelling companions.

He swallowed and managed to bring his breathing under control. He lifted a hand, clenched it briefly to stop its trembling, and crossed himself, then sat and bowed his head in prayer for a few minutes, appealing to St Michael and Christ for protection.

He did not close his eyes, but kept them roving about the room, lest the…the demons should leap out from a shadowed recess.

Finally, after almost an hour of prayer, Thomas lay down. He stared at the ceiling. He did not sleep again that night.

Even though the room appeared empty of all save its legitimate occupiers, Thomas knew that, somehow, he was still being watched.

Somewhere, eyes still gleamed.

GERMANY

“The King comands, and I must to the warres.”

“thers others more enow to end those cares.”

“but I am one appointed for to goe,

And I dare not for my liffe once say noe.”

“O marry me, and you may stay att home!

Full 30 wekes you know that I am gone.”

“theres time enough; another Father take;

heele loue thee well, and not thy child forsake.”

A Jigge (for Margrett)

Medieval English ballad

I

The Vigil of the Feast of St John the Baptist

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(Wednesday 23rd June 1378)

—Midsummer’s Eve—

Thomas wrapped his cloak tightly about his body, and pulled his hood forward so it cut out as much of the chill wind as possible. It was high summer—Midsummer’s Eve—but this far up in the Alps it meant nothing save that the road was not waist-high in snow. He lifted his head and squinted into the mountains.

They were massive, higher than anything Thomas had ever seen. Great craggy peaks, still snow-covered, reared into the afternoon sky, tendrils of mist swirling about their tops.

He shivered. Folklore maintained that mountains and deep forests were the haunt of demons, sprites and unkind elves, and looking at these horrific crags, Thomas could well believe it himself.

And tomorrow, he would have to dare them.

The alpine passes were legendary, and most grown men had been reared on the stories of old men who claimed to have bested them. The great chain of Alps cut Italy, with all her great trading ports and industrial cities, off from northern Europe. Apart from the uncertainties of sea carriage, the only way to get expensive spices and silks from the Far East into northern Europe was via the alpine passes: the Brenner Pass in the western Alps, used by travellers to central and eastern Europe, and the St Gothard and Great St Bernard Pass in the eastern Alps for movement into the west of Europe.

And any who desired travel between the Italian city states and northern Europe also had to use the passes unless, as Thomas had on his journey to Rome, they possessed the courage, or the inclination, to dare the perilous sea voyage.

There were only two periods in the year when the passes were open: high summer and deep winter. Spring and autumn were too dangerous—these were the times of greatest risk from avalanche, when the snow melted, or was only newly laid. In high summer most of the snow had gone; in deep winter it was largely frozen in place.

Now it was high summer, and the passes were safe.

Relatively.

Thomas was under no illusions as to the hazards he and his companions would face in the next few days.

They’d travelled rapidly from Florence—Thomas atop a hefty but swift brown gelding, and desperately trying not to enjoy riding a horse again. Marcel, Karle and Bierman had between them a large consignment of cloths, both Florentine wools and Far Eastern silks and tapestries, to sell in the northern European markets, but they had entrusted most of this cargo to the trusty, though ugly and slow, cog ships that plied the trading route between Venice and the northern cities of the Hanseatic League. The banker Marcoaldi travelled with nothing but a pair of well-braced, locked chests on a packhorse. He never let the chests out of his sight, and had them guarded by six heavily-weaponed and armoured men.

Thomas recognised them instantly as Swiss mercenaries, and thought that Marcoaldi must be wealthy indeed to be able to afford such expensive guards.

Wealthy…or extremely anxious.

Apart from Marcoaldi’s packhorse and mercenaries, Thomas and the merchants, the train consisted of eight packhorses laden with the merchants’ personal effects and small packages of spices to sell in Nuremberg, as well as gifts for their families, and twelve rather rough but apparently reasonably professional German mercenaries who acted as guards for the entire train. The Swiss mercenaries kept themselves to themselves, as Swiss soldiers tended to do, but the Germans were congenial, some fairly well educated, and those not on guard joined Thomas and his companions about the campfire at night when they camped out.

Generally, the merchants and Marcoaldi preferred to find an inn or a monastery guest house to stay in for the night; camping out was all very well, but they vastly favoured the comforts of a mattress above the chill and inflexible comforts of the ground.

And so they had this night. There was a Benedictine monastery at the foot of the Brenner Pass, catering for all manner of travellers, whether traders and merchants, pilgrims, footloose mercenaries, or noble diplomats moving between the Italian cities and the court of the Holy Roman Emperor. The accommodation was better than most monastic houses—Thomas assumed this was because the monastery had been made rich from centuries of patronage by noble pilgrims—and Marcel and his companions were currently enjoying a glass of German wine and sweetmeats in the guest house refectory with their host, the hosteller.

Thomas shook his head, thinking of the accommodation: not only did every guest have his own straw mattress, every guest had his own latrine!

Wealth, indeed.

“Thinking of the difficulties of the Brenner, my friend?” said a soft voice behind him.

Thomas turned around, and grinned. “No, Johan. I was thinking only of the wealth of the monastery below us.”

“Aha!” Johan laughed. “I believe you are regretting joining the Dominicans instead of the Benedictines!”

They turned to silently study the mountains soaring before them. Johan and Thomas had become good friends in their journey north through Ferrara to Venice—at which place Marcel, Karle and Bierman had overseen the shipping of their consignments, clucking over its packing and storage in the deep holds of the cogs like mother hens—and then Verona, and from there onto the northern road to the foot of the Alps.

Johan was a likeable lad, a bit too irreligious for Thomas’ taste—but then hadn’t he been so at the same age?—but well meaning and behaved, traits which Thomas thought had obviously been taught Johan by his serious and moralistic father. Also, Thomas admitted to himself, he was flattered by Johan’s attention. The young man admired Thomas’ experience in the world, as his deep commitment to the Church, and was slightly in awe of Thomas’ family name, which, truth to tell, very occasionally annoyed Thomas.

The Nevilles he had left behind a long, long time ago.

Both Johan and his older companions constantly questioned Thomas about what was going on in Rome; about what he knew of the English plans to invade France.

Thomas was glad to hear that the Frenchmen among the group, Marcel and Karle, were just as concerned to see the papacy remain in Rome as were the others. All were appalled at the idea that the rogue cardinals had returned to Avignon and, for all anyone knew, might have elected a rival pope by this stage.

There were considerably mixed feelings about renewed war between the French and the English. The war, fought because Edward felt he was the rightful claimant to the French throne, had been going on since Edward was eighteen or nineteen. Now he was an old man. Both countries had suffered because of the hostilities, but France had suffered the more. This was a war fought entirely on French soil, although French pirates made life as difficult as possible for villagers who lived along the English south-eastern coast, and the losses of French peasants had been horrendous. Tens of thousands had been killed, and many more were unable to return to lands burned and ravaged by the roving English armies.

There had been a hiatus in hostilities over the past few years, partly because both sides were exhausted, physically and emotionally, and partly because both Edward and the French king, John, had been trying to hammer out a truce.

Evidently, Edward had become impatient and, just as evidently, had managed to raise funds from somewhere for a renewed foreign campaign.

“Not from any of my colleagues, I hope,” Marcoaldi had remarked darkly one evening when the war was being discussed over their evening meal. When he was a young man, Edward had obtained the funds for his first French campaign by raising a massive loan from the Florentine bankers Bardi and Peruzzi. When it came time to repay the debt, Edward declared he had no intention of ever doing so. Not only were the Bardi and Peruzzi families ruined, so also were many other Florentine families who relied on them.

Edward had not won himself many Italian or banking friends with that action.

Marcoaldi may have been concerned about the financial aspects of a renewed English campaign, but Marcel and Karle were horrified at the thought of what deprivations might await the French people this time.

“And Paris…Paris!” Marcel had remarked. “No doubt the English will again lay siege to it! Thomas, do you have any idea what—”

Thomas had interrupted him at that point, again declaring his allegiance to God rather than to the English king, or even his own family. “I take no part in the war,” he said.

And yet…yet…hadn’t he once been a part of those marauding English armies? Hadn’t he himself set the torch time after time to the thatched roofs of peasant homes?

Hadn’t he taken sword to husbands…before wrenching their wives to the ground for his own pleasure?

Thomas stared at the mountains, and wondered if he would ever be able to atone for his sins. The last campaign he had taken part in had been the worst, and the blood and pain and misery caused had, finally, made him pause for thought.

And yet how he still lusted for those days: the fellowship of the battle, the warm companionship of his brothers-in-arms.

“Thomas? Thomas? What’s wrong?”

“Ah, I was lost in memories. Forgive me. Johan…tell me, have you ever been through the Brenner before?”

“Yes. Three times—and once during spring! I swear to God—”

“Johan!”

“Forgive me. I mean, um, I mean it was more dangerous than you can imagine! The last day such a great gust of snow threatened to fall on us that I swear that—sorry—that my father was in fear for his life. You should have been with us then, Thomas, for my father cried out desperately for a priest to take his last confession.”

“Well,” Thomas said mildly, “I shall with be you on the morrow, should the need arise.”

For a moment or two they remained silent, watching the sun set behind one of the taller peaks.

“They are so wondrous,” Johan eventually said.

Thomas looked at him, puzzled. “Wondrous? What?”

“The mountains…their beauty…their danger…”

Thomas stared at the mountains, then turned back to Johan.

“That is not ‘beauty’, Johan. The Alps are vile things, useless accumulations of rock that serve no useful purpose to mankind. Indeed, they hinder mankind’s effort to tame this world and make it serve him, as was God’s commandment to Adam.”

Johan turned an earnest face to Thomas. “But don’t they call to you, Thomas? Don’t you feel their pull in your blood?”

“Call?”

“Sometimes,” Johan said in a low voice, “when I gaze at them, or travel through their passes, I am overcome with an inexpressible yearning.”

“A yearning for what, Johan?” Thomas was watching the younger man’s face very carefully. Were demons calling to him? Was he in the grip of the evil that St Michael had warned him about?

Johan sighed. “It is so difficult to explain, to put into mere words what I feel. The sight of these majestic peaks—”

Majestic?

“—makes me yearn to leave behind my life as a merchant, and to take to the seas as a roving captain, to explore and discover the world that waits out there,” he flung an arm wide, “beyond the known waters and continents—”

“Johan, why feel this way? We have all we need within Christendom, there is no need—and surely no desire—to explore the lands of infidels.” Thomas laid a firm hand on Johan’s chest, forcing the man to meet his eyes. “Johan, better to explore your own soul to ensure your eventual salvation. It is the next world which holds all importance, not this one. This is but a wasteland full of evil, here to tempt us away from our true journey, that of the spirit towards salvation in the next life.”

Johan flushed at the reprimand. “I know that, Brother Thomas. Do forgive me. It’s just…it’s just that…” he turned his face back to the mountains, and Thomas could see their peaks reflected in his eyes, “it is just that one day…one day I wish I could summon the skill and the courage to climb to their very pinnacles and survey the entire world.”

Johan looked back to Thomas, and now there was no contrition in his face at all. “Imagine, Thomas, finding the courage within yourself to be able to conquer the greatest peaks in the world.”

And with that, he turned and walked back down the road towards the monastery, leaving Thomas to stare, disturbed, after him.

On his own return to the monastery, Thomas was even more disturbed to find that, to a man, the German mercenaries were nowhere to be found. When he inquired as to their whereabouts, Marcel had shrugged, and looked a little nonplussed.

“’Tis Midsummer’s Eve, brother. The Germans have gone to join the revels of the villagers in that little hamlet we passed through a mile before the monastery.”

At that, Thomas’ mouth thinned. Peasants made far too much of the midsummer solstice, believing that if they didn’t mark it with fire festivals and dances, then the sun would not recover from its long slide towards its winter nadir. The Church had long tried to halt the festivals, but with little success. All across Christendom, people walked up hills and to the tops of cliffs, and there rolled down the slopes burning wheels of hay and straw to mark the solstice.

Marcel watched Thomas’ face carefully, then said: “Do not judge them too harshly, Thomas. A little colour in their lives, a little fun, is hardly harmful.”

“What is harm, Marcel, is when they engage in un-Christian rites that allow demons a stronger hold among us.”

“Well,” Marcel said slowly, “the older and wiser among us are still here, and I have planned a small gathering tonight to give thanks for our continued freedom from the entrapments of evil. I,” he hesitated, “and mine always mark Midsummer in this fashion. I will be delighted and grateful if you would lead us in prayer tonight. Come, Thomas, what do you say?”

Thomas sighed, and nodded. “Of course I will. I am sorry, Marcel. Sometimes I think that mankind should all be perfect, and, of course, they are hardly so.”

“But there are many good men working within society, brother, trying day by day to bring order to chaos. You must trust in them.”

“Yes. You are right.”

That night, safe in his clean bed, Thomas dreamed of the mountains overrun with demons scampering across their peaks. He shivered, fearing, then he rejoiced, for behind the mountains appeared the glowing form of the archangel Michael. But, just as he thought St Michael would smite the demons from the mountains, the archangel put a hand to his face, as if afraid, and fled.

Thomas woke screaming, bringing the hosteller, as also Marcel and Karle, running to his side.

The next morning, early, they set out for the Brenner Pass.

II

The Feast of St John the Baptist

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(Thursday 24th June 1378)

—Midsummer’s Day—

The ascent for the final few miles to the opening of the pass was a sombre one. It was still dark, and cold this high up, but that was not the reason. Thomas was distant and silent, and sat hunched in his saddle as if he thought all the imps of hell were about to descend upon him.

He’d not explained his nightmare of the previous night—even though Marcel and the hosteller had sat by his side until it was time to rise—and in fact had hardly spoken, apart from a few grudging monosyllabic replies, since they’d begun their ride towards the pass.

Thomas was afraid, deeply afraid. If the archangel himself fled before the evil, then what hope had he?

He did not doubt that what he had seen in his dream had been, if not perfect fact, then an accurate representation of the way things lay. All knew that dreams were a window between the world of man and the world of spirits, and dreams were the perfect vehicle by which demons and imps could invade the world of mankind. It was why no woman should ever sleep in a chamber alone, because, faulted with the weakness of Eve, lone women were ever likely to succumb to the blandishments of imps and demons.

In past years Thomas had seen three babies, hideously deformed, that were the obvious results of women who’d allowed (perhaps even begged) the minions of hell to seduce them.

The babies had been killed, the women burned.

But this nightmare was not so easily disposed of. It lingered on the edges of Thomas’ mind, making him jump at every shadow, and wince at every glimpse of a looming mountain peak. He could feel the eyes of his companions upon him, and he knew they thought he was scared of the dangerous passage ahead.

True, but not for the reasons they believed. The danger of a footslip on a narrow path did not concern him so much as the thought that the Brenner Pass might hold more evil than he could possibly deal with.

Saint Michael aid me, Saint Michael aid me, he prayed over and over in a silent litany.

But the dream had planted the seeds of doubt in Thomas’ mind, and he feared that St Michael might not be strong enough to aid him.

And if the great archangel was afraid and impotent against the evil, then what chance had he?

“Thomas?”

Etienne Marcel, riding close to his side.

“Thomas, do not fear too greatly—”

“You cannot know of what I fear!”

“Thomas.” Marcel leaned over and placed a hand on Thomas’ arm. “I do know. It is not the heights and the depths and the treacherous ice paths awaiting us which fret at you, but the unknowns. This is ungodly territory, and you and I both know it. Be strong, Thomas. We will prevail.”

Thomas looked up, stunned by Marcel’s perception…and equally stunned by the degree of comfort the man had imparted with his words and touch.

Thomas gave a small nod, and briefly laid his own hand over Marcel’s. “I thank you. You are truly a man of God.”

Marcel’s mouth gave a peculiar twist, and then he smiled, lifting his hand away. “I am sent to give you comfort and courage, Thomas. Do not doubt.”

Thomas stared at him. God had led him to this man. Was Marcel an angel or saint in disguise, sent to guide his steps? Thomas knew better than to question. Better to have faith, and to believe.

He took a deep breath, and threw his hood back. “Shall we chase back the demons of fear between us, Marcel?”

Marcel laughed, glad to see Thomas more himself. “Between us, my friend, we shall make the world a place of our own.”

And he kicked his horse forward, leaving Thomas to stare puzzled after him.

They rode until an hour after dawn, when they entered a small encampment at the foot of the pass. There were several wooden huts, and a long building that was obviously a barn. Several team of oxen were waiting outside, yoked to surprisingly narrow carts.

Marcel waved them to dismount. “From here we will go on foot,” he said.

Thomas slid to the ground, giving his gelding a grateful rub on his neck, and turned to Johan. “We don’t ride?”

Johan shook his head, and tossed the reins of his horse to a rough-dressed and as equally rough-bearded man who’d come up to them. He motioned Thomas to do the same.

“We walk,” he said. “It is too dangerous to ride. No, wait. It will be easier for you to see than for me to explain. The guides will blindfold the riding and packhorses and lead them through.”

The horses had to be blindfolded? Sweet Jesu, how fearsome was this pass?

Johan walked over to join Marcel, who was haggling with three of the men who were to be their guides through the pass. Thomas looked about him. The elder Bierman had hunched himself into his cloak, staring at the cliffs rising to either side of the opening of the pass; Marcoaldi was standing to one side of Bierman, his hands clenching nervously at his side.

As Thomas watched, Marcoaldi turned and saw him. He almost flinched, then gathered himself and walked over.

His face was death grey, and Thomas reached out, concerned. “Master Marcoaldi, we shall surely be safe. Is this…is this your first time through the pass?”

Marcoaldi gave a jerky shake of his head. “I’ve been through once before. Some years ago.” He tried to smile, but failed badly, and gave up any pretence of nonchalance. “I went through with my elder brother, Guiseppi. He was my mentor. He taught me all I know about banking. He was also my friend, and my rock through this often frightful existence.”

Even more concerned—he’d never seen Marcoaldi demonstrate even the slightest degree of hesitancy—Thomas tightened his hand on the banker’s arm reassuringly. “He’s dead?”

Marcoaldi did not immediately reply. His eyes had taken on a peculiar look, as if he was staring back into the depths of his soul.

“He died in this pass, Brother Thomas.” Marcoaldi drew in a deep, shaky breath. “He slipped on the treacherous footing, and tumbled down a ravine. Thomas,” Marcoaldi lifted his eyes to gaze directly into Thomas’, “he was terribly injured by the fall, but not killed. We…we stood at the top of the cliff and listened to him call for hours, until night fell, and the ice moved in. He died alone in that ravine, Thomas. Alone. I could not reach him, and I could not aid or comfort him. He died alone.”

“Giulio, he died unshriven? Unconfessed? There was no priest with you?”

Marcoaldi did not reply, but his expression hardened from pain into bitterness.

Thomas shook his head slightly, appalled that Marcoaldi’s brother had died unconfessed.

“He must surely have gone to purgatory,” Thomas said quietly, almost to himself, then he spoke up. “But do not fear, my friend. Eventually the prayers of you and your family will ensure that he—”

Marcoaldi jerked his arm away from Thomas’ hand. “I do not want your pious babbling, priest! Guiseppi died screaming for me, and for his wife. He died alone. Alone! None of his family were with him! I care not that he went to the next life priestless, only that he died without those who loved him and could have comforted him!”

“But you should be concerned that—”

“I know my brother does not linger in your purgatory, brother. Guiseppi was a loving husband, father and brother. He dealt kindly and generously with all he met. He has gone to a far better place than your cursed purgatory!”

And with that Marcoaldi was gone, striding across to where the guides readied the oxen teams.

Thomas watched, grieving. Marcoaldi was lost himself if he did not pay more attention to his spiritual welfare, and if he persisted in his disbelief in purgatory. He was a lost soul, indeed, if he did not take more care.

Perhaps his brother Guiseppi had gone straight to hell if he had not confessed or made suitable penance for a lifetime of luxuriating in the sin of usury. Ah…these bankers…

Thomas sighed, and walked away. If a person filled his life with good works, penance for his inevitable sins, and confessed on his death bed, then death should be a joyous affair, and family members should rejoice that their loved one had passed from the vale of pain into an eternity spent with God and his saints.

A death like Guiseppi’s, alone, unconfessed, and probably, if he was like his younger brother, unrepentant, was the most miserable imaginable. Thomas hoped that eventually Marcoaldi would see the error of his ways, and spend what time was left to him in repentance and the practice of good works to negate the burden of his sins.

Thomas knew he would have to talk to Marcoaldi again…but best to leave it until they left the painful memories, and the harsh fears, of the Brenner Pass.

At mid-morning they set off in a single file, led by two of the guides, each leading a team of two oxen yoked to a cart.

Christoffel Bierman and Giulio Marcoaldi sat in the second of the carts, their faces resolutely looking back the way they had come, refusing to look at the chasm that fell away on the left of the trail. One of the guides had offered Thomas a ride in the cart as well, but he had refused, and the guide had walked away, a knowing smirk on his face.

Behind the carts walked Etienne Marcel, Johan Bierman, who had also refused to ride the carts, and Thomas himself. Behind them came more guides walking the blindfolded horses—Thomas could hear them snorting nervously, and occasionally heard the rattle of hooves on the trail as a horse misplaced a step and fought for its footing—and behind them came the guards, grouped in front of and behind Marcoaldi’s preciously laden packhorse, and then yet more blindfolded horses and their handlers.

For the first hour the way was not particularly treacherous, nor frightening. The trail wound about the eastern side of the pass, black rock rearing skyward into the cloud-shrouded mountaintops on each man’s right hand, and sliding into precipitous, misty depths on his left. There were small patches of snow-melt on the trail itself, but the footing was generally secure, and as long as he kept his eyes ahead, Thomas found he had no trouble.

Save for the black ill-temper of Marcoaldi’s gaze as it met his every so often.

Johan kept up a constant chatter, largely to tell Thomas just how difficult and frightening the way would become later in the day.

“And tomorrow,” he enthused at one point, “for we must spend tonight camped in the pass, you realise, a man must confront his worst fears, and conquer them, if he is to survive.”

“Then I admit I find myself more than slightly puzzled by your cheerfulness, Johan. Surely you regard the approaching dangers with dread?”

“Well, yes, but also with anticipation.” Johan threw a hand toward the mountains now emerging from the early morning mist and cloud. “I enjoy the thrill of danger, the race of my blood, and the rush of pride each time I manage to best my fear.”

Thomas was about to observe that Johan would be better served if he used this time of mortal danger to look to the health of his soul, but just at that moment he happened to lock eyes with Marcoaldi, and he closed his mouth.

Should he have better spent his time consoling the man’s lingering grief at the loss of his brother rather than preaching to him about the dangers of dying unconfessed?

And how could he castigate Johan when he had himself screamed with the joy and thrill of danger in the midst of battle?

But he was not that man now. He was Brother Thomas, and one of his duties in life was to guide the souls of the weak towards—

“Thomas,” Marcel said, clapping a hand on his shoulder, “you are looking far too grim. There are dangers ahead, certainly, but there is also time enough for a smile and a jest occasionally. Hmm?”

And so Thomas wondered if he was too grim, but then he thought about the mission the archangel Michael had entrusted to him, and that made him even grimmer, and after a moment or two Marcel and Johan left him alone, and they walked forward silently into the pass.

By late morning Thomas was concentrating far more on keeping his footing than on introspection about the sins of his companions, or his doubts about his own ability to fight evil incarnate. The way had slowly, so imperceptibly that Thomas was hardly aware of it, become so treacherous that he now understood why the passage through the Brenner was regarded with so much fear by most travellers.

The path that clung to the cliff face not only became much narrower, scarcely more than an arm’s width—the carts ahead seemed to spend more time with their left wheels hanging over the precipice than on the trail—but it also began to tilt on a frightening angle towards the precipice. Thomas found himself clinging to the rock wall on his right with one hand, while keeping his left splayed out to aid his balance.

Small rivulets of ice-melt running down the cliff face made the going deadly—they not only made the footing slippery, but they had gouged out weaknesses in the path, so that rocks, and occasionally, large sections of footing, suddenly slid away, making men cry out with fear and hug the rock face, pleading to God and whatever saints they could remember to save them.

The horses, even blindfolded, were terrified. Thomas could hear their snorting and whinnies above his own harsh breathing; underlaying the sounds of the horses’ fear were the murmured reassurances of the guides. Thomas had wondered previously why the mountain guides had bothered themselves with leading the horses when the task could have been given to the guards in Marcel’s train. Now he knew. These rough mountain men were extraordinarily skilled in their manner of reassuring the horses and, without them, most of the animals would surely have been lost.

Thomas could also understand why Bierman and Marcoaldi had chosen to ride in the ox carts. The oxen appeared totally unperturbed by the abyss falling away to their left—at one point where the path had turned right following the line of the cliff face, Thomas had seen the faces of the stolid animals, placidly chewing their cud as if they were strolling through lowland meadow rather than mountain-death trail. The ox carts would surely be as safe—safer—than trusting to one’s own security of footing.

Johan appeared hardly concerned, and Thomas wondered at his words that the morrow would be worse than today.

Sweet Jesu! It got worse than this?

As if Johan had guessed his thoughts, the young man turned slightly as he clambered over a deep crack in the path, and grinned at Thomas.

“Brother Thomas! Have you seen that crag to our left?”

Johan turned enough so he could point to it. “I have been studying it this past hour. If a man was strong enough, he could surely climb that south-western face, don’t you think? Imagine the view from the top! All of Creation stretched out below—”

Now even Marcel had heard enough. “Silence, Johan! We need all our concentration to keep our feet here, not on some fanciful and totally profitless expedition to the top of a piece of rock!”

Johan flinched as if he’d been struck, and he mumbled something inaudible to which Marcel replied equally inaudibly, and the group continued to struggle onwards.

And so, inch by inch, harsh breath by harsh breath, and sweaty hand clinging to rock after rock, they moved forwards through the day, and through the Brenner Pass.

There was no relief, save for brief rest periods, until mid-afternoon, and by that time Thomas thought his muscles would never manage to unclench themselves from their knots of fear and effort. He had believed himself a relatively courageous man, but this trail…

He, as everyone else, let out a sigh of deeply felt relief as the lead ox cart suddenly moved forward far more confidently into a small plateau carved into the side of the cliff.

“We will halt here,” Marcel said. “It is the only place where we can camp safely before the end of the pass.”

“We don’t push on through this evening?” Thomas said.

Marcel gave him an exasperated look. “And you think that you could push through another eight or nine hours of what we’ve just endured?”

Thomas’ mouth twisted in a wry grin, and he shook his head. “I thank God I have made it safe this far. You must have needed to travel very fast very badly to dare this pass.”

Marcel glanced at Marcoaldi and Bierman climbing unsteadily out of the cart. “We all had pressing business, my friend.”

He moved off and Thomas sank down in a relatively dry spot. He leaned his back against the rock of the cliff face and tried to relax his cramped muscles.

Lord God, Wynkyn had done this four times a year? May Saint Michael grant me such courage.

Then he sighed and let his thoughts drift, and, as the guides helped the guards unpack provisions and firewood from the lead cart, drifted into a grateful doze.

They ate about the roaring campfire, talked, ate some more, and then Thomas led the entire group in evening prayers before they retired for as much sleep as they could get on the cold, hard ground. The older men slept in the carts, but Thomas took the blanket offered by one of the guides, and rolled himself up in it, lying down close to the fire. He lay awake a while, cold and uncomfortable, but very gradually he felt himself drifting into sleep, and his last conscious sight was of one of the guards moving among the horses, making sure their hobbles and tethers were secure.

He woke sometime so deep in the night that the fire had burned down into glowing coals. There was complete stillness in the camp—not even the horses moved or snuffled.

He blinked, not otherwise moving, and wondered if this was a dream. The night had such an ethereal quality…

Something moved to one side, and Thomas lazily turned his head.

And then stared wildly as a shadow leaped out from under the rock face and thudded down on his body.

Thomas opened his mouth, although he was so winded—and so agonised—by the weight of the creature atop him that he did not think he could—

“Make a sound, you black-robed abomination, and I will gut you here and now!”

Thomas stilled, his mouth still open, and stared at the face only a few handspans above his.

It was incomparably vile, if only because the creature had thought to assume the face of an angel, but had been unable to accomplish the unearthly beauty of one of the heavenly creatures. The face was vaguely manlike, although the eyes were much larger and were such a pale blue they almost glowed in the fading firelight. Its chin was more pointed than a man’s, and its forehead far broader and higher. Its skin was perfection: pale, creamy, flawless.

But there the beauty ended. At the hairline, among the tight silvery curls, curled the horns of a mountain goat, and when the creature smiled, it revealed tiny, pointed teeth.

“You see only what you want to see,” it hissed, and then shifted its weight slightly. Thomas groaned, for one of the creature’s—the demon’s!—clawed feet was digging into his belly, and another cut through both blanket and robes and pinned his right upper arm so agonisingly to the rocky ground that Thomas thought it might be broken.

“Uncomfortable, friar?” the demon said, and laughed softly. “Waiting for an angel to save you? Well, where is your blessed archangel now, priest? Where?”

“Get you gone, you hound from hell!” Thomas whispered, and the creature lifted its head and tilted its face to the moon, shaking with silent laughter.

As it did so, its features blurred slightly, as if the demon only wore a pretty mask to tease Thomas.

Thomas realised that something truly frightful writhed under that facade.

Suddenly the demon dropped its head so close that its lips touched Thomas’ forehead. “Your God and all your bright collection of saints and angels will not help you now, priest. It is just you and I—”

Thomas fought back equal amounts of nausea and fear, and managed to speak. “In the name of the Father, and the—”

The demon lifted the clawed hand holding down Thomas’ right arm and slammed it over Thomas’ throat, making him gag mid-sentence. He twisted his head from side to side, desperately trying to breathe.

“I ordered you not to speak!” the demon said.

Thomas managed to lift his right arm—Lord God, the pain!—and grabbed at the clawed fingers over his throat, but the demon was the size and weight of a pony, and he could not shift it. Instead, he felt the demon shift its weight so that more of it bore down on the leg on Thomas’ belly, and he almost passed out from the torment.

The demon snarled, and shifted its weight again, easing the pressure on both Thomas’ neck and belly.

“I know what you are doing,” the demon said. “We all know! You think to take Wynkyn’s burden on your shoulders, you think to take his place. You pitiful creature! We have been free too long now to submit again to the seductive songs of the Keeper—”

“Who are you?” Thomas croaked. “Who?”

“Who? Who?” The demon hissed with laughter again. “I, as mine, are your future, Thomas. One day you will embrace us, and throw your God—” he spoke the word as the most foulest of curses “—onto the dungheap that He deserves!”

“I will never betray my God!”

The demon’s mouth slid open in a wide grin. “Ah, Thomas, but will you be able to recognise the manner of temptation we will place in your way?”

“I will never betray my God!”

“You think to hunt us down, Thomas,” the demon said, very softly now, “but one day…one day…you will embrace us.”

Suddenly the demon lifted its head, and stared across the rock plateau as if something, or someone, had caught its attention.

It blinked, and cocked its head, its horns catching a shimmer of moonlight.

Then it looked back at Thomas. “You think to lead the armies of righteousness against us, Thomas. You think to be God’s General. Well, one day, one wicked black day, you will crucify righteousness for the sake of evil!”

Then the fingers still about Thomas’ neck tightened to impossible cruelties, and Thomas blacked out.

“Thomas? Thomas? Good brother, only a friar used to the hard couches of his priesthood could possibly sleep so well on this stony ground!”

Thomas opened his eyes, felt the hand on his shoulder, then jerked up into a sitting position, making Marcel reel backwards onto his haunches.

“My God, brother, do you always wake this anxious? It must be the shock of hearing the bells for Matins in the middle of every night!”

Marcel was trying to make a jest of Thomas’ reaction, but Thomas was in no mood for jests. He got to his feet, wincing at the pain in his arm and belly, his eyes skittering about the campsite.

“Thomas?” Marcel half reached out a hand, then thought better of it.

Some of the others, including the two Biermans and several of the German guards had stopped what they were doing to watch Thomas.

Everything seemed usual; there was nothing to indicate what had happened to him last night.

Thomas looked back to Marcel, who was staring at him with a concerned face.

“Thomas…Thomas, what is wrong?”

Thomas took a deep breath and calmed himself. “A demon haunted this camp last night, Marcel.”

“What?”

“It taunted me with failure, and told me I would betray my God.”

“Lord Christ Saviour, Thomas! Are you certain? This was not a dream?”

Thomas tore back his right sleeve and exposed his upper arm. “Is this a dream?”

Marcel looked at Thomas’ arm, then gasped in shock. It was covered in blue and black bruises, etched here and there with deep abrasions.

He crossed himself. “A demon? Lord Christ save me! Save me!”

He closed his eyes, steadied himself, then hesitantly took Thomas’ hand. “You beat him off with the strength of your faith. This is ungodly territory, but you were strong, and you prevailed. You are a good man, Thomas. A good man.”

Thomas let Marcel’s words and touch comfort him, but he knew that the demon had been in no danger from Thomas. It had left of its own accord, or obeying whatever had called to it, rather than being beaten back by the strength of Thomas’ will…but, as Marcel’s grip tightened slightly, Thomas persuaded himself that the demon had known its cause was hopeless, and so left him alone.

“And your neck,” Marcel said softly. “You have been ill-used indeed, brother. Come, one of the guides has some skill in healing, and has some pouches of salves that ease the worst of rock sprains and bruises.”

Thomas smiled slightly to thank Marcel for his concern. “And let us hope that they ease demon strains and burns, my friend.”

Marcel took Thomas over to one of the guards, leaving him sitting on a rock as the guard rummaged about in a pack for his salves.

Thomas saw Marcel walk over to his companions, and lean down to speak to Marcoaldi who was still wrapped up in his blankets on the ground. Unheard words passed between them, and then Thomas saw Marcel harangue Marcoaldi angrily. Thomas frowned, wondering what the banker had done to earn Marcel’s ire, when the guide drew back his sleeve to inspect the abrasions and bruises.

The man laughed, his tongue running about his thick lips, and he looked slyly at Thomas. “I hope she was worth the sport,” he said, and made an obscene gesture with one of his hands “and that your loving left her unable to walk for the next three days.”

He roared with laughter, and Thomas, furious, pulled himself out of the man’s grip and stalked away.

Peasant!

Marcel kept close to him for the day’s nightmare journey through the last part of the pass. The trail was not appreciably narrower or steeper, but what made this section so dangerous were the constant waterfalls that roared down the cliff making the footing so treacherous that the guides insisted that everyone be roped together. It saved Thomas’ life on three occasions.

Once he fell so badly he slipped entirely over the edge of the path, leaving Marcel and one of the guides to haul him back to safety.

When he finally stood on his feet again, shivering with terror, he looked up to see Marcoaldi staring at him with eyes filled with bitterness and grief, and perhaps a little regret that Thomas had not also fallen to a lonely and unshriven death. The banker seemed unwell, as if he had caught an ague from his night spent on the cold ground.

But perhaps he was only discomforted because Marcel had so berated him for some unknown misdeed.

When Thomas finally began to move along the trail again, his hands and legs uncomfortably wobbly, he forced himself to look over the edge.

The precipice fell away with no slope at all, but occasionally a rock or two jutted out from the rock face; on these rocks hung bleached bones, sometimes held together by a strip of skin or tendon.

Thomas leaned back, shut his eyes briefly, and fought to forget what he’d seen.

All the men made it safely through the pass, but four of the horses had, in that final horrific stretch, fallen screaming to their deaths. Gratefully, Thomas’ own mount was safe, but he found himself hoping ungraciously that one of the doomed horses had been the pack animal carrying Marcoaldi’s precious chests. But it was not so, and once on relatively flat ground the banker was reunited with his chests and also, it appeared, with his good temper, for he greeted Thomas cheerfully as the friar walked past.

“And now,” Marcel said as they bid the guides farewell and remounted their horses, “Nuremberg.”

III

Vigil of the Feast of St Swithin

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(Wednesday 14th July 1378)

For over two weeks they rode north from the Brenner Pass, making the best speed they could. The mood of the group had changed since the passage through the Brenner. Outwardly as cheerful as it had been previously, there was nevertheless a sombre undertone to the banter of the day’s rides and the evening discussions about the campfire or tavern table. Marcel and Karle appeared preoccupied with their need to travel as fast as possible. While this suited Thomas, it nevertheless added a degree of tenseness to both travel and relations within the group.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.