Michael Jecks - The Outlaws of Ennor

‘It is all very calm today,’ William commented.

Isok grunted, but Baldwin felt the urge to make comment. ‘It reminds me of the Mediterranean.’

‘You were out there?’ William asked.

‘I sailed to the Holy Land to protect Acre, but not successfully.’

‘It was a terrible battle, so they say.’

‘It was,’ Baldwin said. There was no sadness now. The events of so long ago had dwindled and even the nightmares of those last days had faded.

‘That was many years ago,’ Isok said with a glower.

‘I was only some seventeen years old,’ Baldwin admitted, ‘so it was a good two and thirty years ago.’

Instantly Baldwin felt Isok’s eyes upon him. ‘You are that old?’ he asked, and there was some astonishment in his voice, mixed with what sounded almost like relief.

‘I am, I fear. I was an enthusiastic young squire in 1291, and now I am only an enthusiast.’

‘And a devout one,’ William said. ‘Only the devout went to Acre.’

‘There were some with less honourable intentions,’ Baldwin said, recalling faces from his past. ‘Some were keen simply to make money, others were there because they had been offered forgiveness for past evils. There were many men who should never have been permitted to take up arms in God’s name. Men who were spending their free time in the brothels or who appeared to have suddenly won great wealth.’ All the way to the Holy Land Baldwin had seen them.

‘The fact that they went there meant that they deserved praise,’ William said firmly.

‘I do not think so,’ Baldwin said. ‘A man who is a criminal should seek forgiveness on his knees, begging God to forgive him, not seeking another country to kill other men.’

‘They were seeking Moors,’ William pointed out. ‘Better that they should kill those heretics than stay here pleading for God’s mercy.’

‘Even a Moor can be a good man,’ Baldwin said. ‘Saladin was a Moor, but he was an honourable, chivalrous knight.’

‘As far as he could be, within the restrictions of his faith,’ William said shortly.

‘I am afraid that I consider a man who has lived honourably and chivalrously is as deserving of God’s compassion as a Christian who has committed a great sin and begs forgiveness.’

William smiled cynically. ‘I don’t think you should let the Bishop hear you talk like that.’

Baldwin smiled and shrugged, but he was silent. From the old priest’s tone he was quite sure that William was one of the Church’s firebrands. The newer, younger men were often created in a different mould. More commonly, they would look with sympathy upon men who were from different faiths, considering them to have been misled or perhaps not led at all, and that their lack of education or direction was the cause of their belief in heretical ideas. William was plainly one of those who saw all foreign ideas as alien to his own God. It was not a line which Baldwin could accept. ‘You remember the story of the Good Samaritan?’

‘Of course.’

‘Sometimes a man who is not of the same belief can still be a good man.’

‘Perhaps. Yet a man who believes in God may enter Heaven, whereas a man who has no belief may not.’

‘Perhaps God is more tolerant?’ Baldwin enquired mischievously.

William shot him a look, but did not deign to respond.

Soon Baldwin saw that they were approaching land. Compared with Ennor, or the great mass of St Nicholas, this was a tiny island. It curved like a large ‘C’, with the eastern, concave section containing a broad swathe of bright sand, up to which the waves rolled softly. Isok aimed the boat at the beach and soon they were scraping the boat’s bottom along the sands as he furled the sail and neatly stowed the ropes. He sprang out, indicating that Baldwin and William should do the same, and then dragged the vessel up the sand a little, until she could not be pulled away by the waves. He picked up the anchor rope with its heavy stone and, walking away from the boat, he paid it out as he went until he reached a large formation of rocks. He wedged the anchor in among them.

‘Where did you find the man?’ Baldwin asked.

Isok walked him to a point on the sand where there were some few timbers. ‘Here.’

This was a spot towards the middle of the island. ‘Here’ was about the narrowest point on the place, with a scant eighty yards from the eastern shore to the western. From north to south the place was little more than a half mile long, stretching roughly north to south, although with the degree of curvature, Baldwin was sure that it was longer in reality.

It was impossible to detect any sign of footprints. The sea had washed up and over this point, and any marks of blood or prints from the body or a possible killer had long since been laved away.

‘This is a fool’s errand,’ William said, grimly staring about him. ‘There’s no chance of learning anything from this remote spot.’

Sadly, Baldwin had to agree. ‘We do not know that he died here, of course. It is possible that he died somewhere else and was brought here.’

‘In which case our journey is still more of a fool’s errand,’ William grunted. He had not enjoyed their discussion on the way.

Baldwin could see the spars and bits of small wood. ‘What are they from?’

‘A small boat,’ Isok muttered.

‘What are they doing here?’ Baldwin wondered.

‘Someone must have been out in a vessel which foundered here, or perhaps on the rocks.’

‘Could it have been Luke himself?’ Baldwin asked.

‘Could have been anyone.’ Isok shrugged.

‘I don’t think Luke would have stabbed himself prior to climbing into a boat,’ William said.

‘He died quickly, I should think,’ Baldwin agreed. ‘Which means that either someone was in the boat with him, stabbed him and left him in the boat, which then came here and crashed, or he was killed and then put in the boat, which came here.’

‘He was killed first, then,’ Isok said.

‘Why?’

Isok kicked at a stray piece of wood. ‘A larger boat would have used better timber. We don’t have trees here, so we have to use as little as possible in our boats — whatever we can rescue from the sea. This was a tiny boat. No space for a second man.’

‘So we can assume that he was murdered and set loose in a boat,’ Baldwin guessed. ‘What would the purpose of that be? Presumably to hide the murder. The killer decided to kill him and then conceal the crime, hoping that the man would be taken away, drifting on the waters.’

William nodded, and then, Baldwin noticed, shot a suspicious look at Isok. ‘He might have hoped that the poor fellow’s body would have been washed out to sea and lost. Even if Luke was found later, the fact of being in the sea would mean that his wounds would become hidden as fishes ate his flesh.’

‘Who could have done this? Who in these islands would be cruel enough to send a man’s body out to be devoured by the creatures of the sea?’

Baldwin’s question was rhetorical, but he was shocked, when he looked up, to see how pale Isok had become; from the expression on William’s face, he could see that the priest was already convinced that he knew the murderer’s identity.

Simon left Sir Charles with a feeling of despondency. It seemed as though the pleasantly reassuring words that Thomas had given him were not the same as the ones Sir Charles was hearing. He looked like a man who was in danger of his life — or a man who believed that his life was in danger. That was why at first Simon was pleased to meet Hamo as he walked along the road from the castle. That feeling was soon to pass.

‘Bailiff, I have to talk to you.’

‘Not now, lad. I have other things to-’