Michael Jecks - The Templar

Simon was not keen to experience this in the pitch dark, and he turned his mind to other matters in an attempt to forget the growing urges.

The dead woman had been murdered in a particularly brutal manner. It was possible that her lover could have done this. Ramon was her lover: it could have been him. Then there was the knight Don Ruy, who had followed her from the city. He could have been jealous because the girl shared her favours with Ramon and not with him. Or it could have been a passer-by, who had seen Joana there and decided to force himself on her.

Lost in thought, Simon yawned lengthily. Soon his breathing calmed and he slept once more.

In a large communal guestroom in the Cathedral’s precinct, Dona Stefania lay wide awake.

She was in a big, comfortable bed with a soft, plump mattress, trying to ignore the snoring coming from the far side. Her bedfellow was a whuffling, snuffling heavy breather, whose periodic snivels were an atrocious interruption to a lady who was used to the privacy of her own room. Dona Stefania was tempted to heave a shoe at her.

Still, before long she would be able to return home to the convent at Vigo. That was the thought that consoled her through the long hours of darkness. At least when she got there, she would be able to set up the new chapel, with the Bishop’s help, and display the relic.

It was all up to the Bishop. He might be reluctant. It had been known before. Sometimes a churchman was not happy to thieve another’s relic. Not often though, she reminded herself. A man would be a fool to thwart the Saint’s own will. In fact, no man would dare. She wasn’t sure, but the Dona had the impression that the Bishop of Compostela was not the sort to worry himself about that argument. He would reason that if he decided that the relic was not for Vigo, the Saint was making his opinion felt. However, it would be a big feather in his cap, were he to retain the thing. If it added to Dona Stefania’s prestige, it likewise added to his own.

She was content with that. The thing must remain with her, at all costs. It was the only way to ensure that her convent survived.

A particularly loud snuffle made her bite back a caustic response. If only Joana was still here! She could have taken up one of the spaces in the bed, and the two of them together would have been intimidating enough to drive off another, unwanted companion.

Poor Joana. All this was her plan, and now she would never see it come to fruition. She had been so keen for it to happen. Yet all had started to go wrong when she met Ramon. From that day on, Joana had grown more peevish and difficult — perhaps because of something he knew about her?

The thought was worth considering. He certainly seemed to have some sort of hold over her. Perhaps that was the matter: he was a difficult, jealous lover. Perhaps he wanted more than she was prepared to give him, or had decided to take more than she wanted to give. What if she had gone to the meeting with Ruy, and Ramon saw her return? Would he not be enraged to think that his woman could have gone secretly consorting with another knight? It was eminently possible.

But if that was the case, then where, she wondered, returning to the main point, where was all her money? Someone had taken it.

But who ?

Simon was suddenly wide awake again, his belly rumbling urgently. It was almost pitch black outside, with no more than a faint luminescence to indicate the roofs and yards. As he reluctantly climbed to his feet, he could feel the beginning of a griping pain in his belly; there was no doubt that his bowels were out of order.

It was an unwholesome prospect. There was something about illnesses of the belly that always alarmed him. He had a morbid fear of them, which was exacerbated by the distance from home, as though any such disease must be more virulent, the farther he travelled from Devon. It was not an irrational phobia, for diarrhoea could kill an adult as easily as a child, when the balance of the humours was disturbed. Some years before, Simon had witnessed the death of his own son, Peterkin, and the horror of that gradual fading away would never entirely leave him.

Here, in the middle of the night, he was struck by a sharp sadness. For perhaps the first time in his life, he actually pictured his own death. He could imagine Meg, his wife, hearing of it from Baldwin, he could see her weeping, his daughter Edith sobbing uncontrollably, his servant Hugh stoically sniffing, a fixed scowl twisting his features. He might easily die here, over the next few days, and never see any of them again. The thought was hideous. He had to put the idea away from him! He wasn’t going to die here, he would return home to see his wife and daughter, and he would be fine again.

Naked, Simon pulled a jack on against the cool night air, and then had to step carefully over the seven or eight prone figures who littered his path on the way to the rear wall. Before he was halfway, he could see nothing. There was only a deeper blackness before him than that which lay behind.

The door to the noisome little room was a thick blanket suspended by rings hanging from a pole. Simon had to feel his way along the wall, stumbling against one of the massive racks which supported the casks, and then his finger, fumbling, felt the edge of a length of cloth. He pulled at it and walked cautiously forward, but as he moved, his foot snagged on a plank and he tripped forward, cracking his head painfully on a projecting stone.

After a few moments which were filled with an awfully pregnant silence, all the obscenities which sprang to his mind appearing woefully inadequate, Simon took a deep breath and reached forward. This time he carefully felt around the area and found where the planks lay in which the holes had been cut. Finding one, he turned, reversed into position, and sat thankfully.

From here, suddenly the room looked as though it was filled with a silver light. The open doorway was a bright rectangle, and as he felt the boards settling underneath him, he wondered fleetingly whether he would plummet to earth sitting here.

Thankfully, he and the boards survived and he made it back to his sleeping space without mishap, but even then he didn’t fall asleep immediately. He lay wrapped in his robe on a bench, hands behind his head, and stared out into the night, thinking mostly of the dead body, but also of the devastated face of Frey Ramon. He had said he last saw Joana in the square.

Could the man have been lying? Was he capable of murdering his own woman — and if so, why?

The next morning there was the sort of dawn Baldwin remembered from his service in the Templars. Small, thin clouds floated high overhead; the sky was a perfect, silken blue, impossibly beautiful. It made the limewashed buildings shine as though they had been deliberately created to make the eyes ache.

For once, Simon woke before Baldwin, and was out in the yard sluicing water over his head and shoulders when a mangy cur entered their room, cocked a leg over Baldwin’s baggage, then went on to sniff and dribble over Baldwin’s head.

Waking, the knight always thought, was a reinvigoration. It was a process by which the body stirred itself from near-death back to life; however, being woken by a flea-bitten mutt which had just pissed over his clothing was less invigorating than he would have liked. Roaring at the little creature, which folded back its ears and streaked from the room like a dog catching a speeding arrow, Baldwin sprang from his makeshift bed and surveyed his clothing. The dog had not had a good life, and the yellow spray stood out on his linen shirt. It stank.

‘Good morning!’ Simon called.

‘And a nice joke that is, I am sure,’ Baldwin retorted grumpily.

‘What joke?’

‘Saying it’s a good morning. What’s good about it?’