Michael JECKS - The Devil's Acolyte

There was no obvious justification in posting a sentry to watch Hal, but Rudolf was a practical man, and when he saw strangers about, he wanted to know that they weren’t the precursors of an attack.

Rudolf was in his little tent when Welf, his son, returned. He was a sturdy young fellow, with broad shoulders and thick dark hair. He was trying to grow a beard, and the other men ribbed him about the fine fluff that was all he could manage, but never Rudolf. He believed that a man was no less a man just for the lack of hair on his face. A man was measured by other things, like physical strength and courage.

‘ So? Was macht er ? What is he doing?’

Welf sat by the brazier that glowed with coals and held his hand to the warmth before answering in German. ‘He stayed there all day with the body. Last night he settled down and remained near it. I went closer and watched until almost dawn. He was asleep by then, and that was when I returned to the cross and waited to see what happened when he awoke. He washed, then went down to the bog and threw in the morning star.’

‘And now someone else is up there on the hill?’

‘Yes. Brother Peter the Almoner from the Abbey.’

‘Good. You have done well. Eat and sleep.’ Rudolf sat a while longer, frowning at the fire.

They had travelled all the way here from an urge to see what the world was like. Rudolf was a pewterer by trade, and in his home lands in the mountains his work was prized, even among the nobles. Glancing about him, he couldn’t help but curl his lip. This land was ever wet and depressing. There were bogs all over the moors, and the mountains were mere bumps in the soil, not at all like the crags among which his home nestled. There, men had to avoid the high passes, because they were populated by dragons and other monsters. No, people lived in the broad valleys and farmed peacefully.

Or they had. Rudolf’s life had suddenly changed for ever at Morgarten. Until then, he had lived comfortably in his native Canton of Schwyz, but the Swiss lands were growing more important. When the Saint-Gotthard Pass opened, there was an easier, shorter road between parts of the Holy Roman Empire, from Italy to the Rhine, and the murderous Leopold of Habsburg decided to enforce his authority among the peasants who lived there.

It was a farce. Rudolf was no coward; he wanted peace, for men don’t buy plate and pewter in wartime, they hoard their money and seek to store foods, but Rudolf felt he had a simple choice, make pewter or fight: sit back like a coward or resist and hope for freedom for his sons. It was an easy decision. If Leopold’s armies won through to the towns, they would slaughter everyone. He chose to fight, to protect his lands and his people, and he was there at Morgarten when Leopold’s army was crushed.

But Rudolf was not convinced that the free Cantons could survive. The Habsburgs were wealthy nobles, they could afford to buy up armies and crush resistance from tiny states like Schwyz, and Rudolf was not prepared to risk the life of his son and his wife. Instead he brought them out of the country, and worked his way from one town to another until they crossed over from France to England. He went to London, where he heard of the tin mines of Devon, and he decided to come here and see for himself where the English stocks of tin came from.

His household was small. Himself, his wife Anna, Welf, and a few others. Ten men all told, and seven women. Together they had crossed Europe, and here, Rudolf felt, they had hit the bottom. In his home, the sun always shone in the summer, while here it was always raining, or about to begin. Homesick, he longed for the meadows and pastures of his own land, high in the free mountains.

But he was here and while he was here, he had a duty to protect his household. He stood and pulled a strong leather jack over his shirt, then made his way along the path Welf had used.

From here all was fine grassland. A few rocks were dotted here and there, but it was still good land for sheep or cattle, with scarcely a stunted tree showing itself. However, Rudolf knew that there was one advantage to land like this, and that was that an enemy would find it very difficult to conceal himself. In the same way, it was not easy to move without being seen. That was why, as he reached the first of the crosses, he began to bend his back, his eyes staring ahead, making sure he couldn’t see the man waiting at the side of the corpse.

There was another cross at the summit of the hill, to which he walked bent almost double, but when he reached it, he couldn’t help but stare at it once more. The bloody imprint was still there, a foul mark that almost seemed to tempt the devil. Not that the devil would need tempting to come to a place like this, Rudolf thought. It was his own hell, this land. With a shudder that was more a convulsion of his entire body than a shiver down his back, Rudolf averted his gaze and continued. At Morgarten, he had hurled rocks and tree-trunks with his comrades at the Duke’s knights below them, pitching the screaming, petrified men and horses into the waters of the Ägerisee, and he had not flinched. Yet that smudge of a dead man’s blood made him feel sickened. Perhaps because the fool of a miner hadn’t stood a chance. Rudolf had been angry, and now the man was dead.

The pewterer had work to do. He was past the stone cross, and crawled the few yards over the other side, peering ahead with a frown. ‘Where is he, Henry?’

‘There. He’s sitting on that rock.’

Rudolf gave a short chuckle. ‘I think your young eyes are better than my old ones. I can see nothing.’

‘Can you see the other man?’

‘Which other?’ Rudolf demanded, his fears about an ambush reawakened.

‘There. A man coming from the north. He looks short and heavy. Like a miner.’

Rudolf breathed a quiet sigh. ‘Then he must be coming to relieve the first man, just as you relieved Welf. Has he done nothing else?’

‘Not since I got here.’

Rudolf stared in the direction of the man, towards the body. ‘Well, wait here for now, but I shall send someone to fetch you soon.’

‘We are leaving?’

‘You think we would do best to stay here?’ Rudolf asked.

‘It was him who tried to attack you, Rudolf. Self-defence is no crime.’

Rudolf spat, turning to stare back at the cross. ‘The cretin tried to stab me and I put a stop to it. Yes, but the first time, in the alley, when I took his pewter – how many people saw us? Be ready to pack. I won’t wait for them to come with a posse.’

Unbidden, the memory of a tall, cowled man in a habit sprang into his mind. ‘When they want to find the murderer, they can seek another, not me!’

After giving pensions to the lepers, Peter the Almoner and Gerard made their way back through the streets of Tavistock to the Abbey. Once there, Peter ushered Gerard inside, but he himself walked back along the main street towards the town’s shops.

His jaw hurt. It often did when the weather looked like changing. The day before yesterday it had been a constant ache, as though all the teeth which should have been there were simultaneously erupting with rottenness. He had to set his hand at his jaw and hold it. The action provided little relief, but it was comforting in the same way that a woman’s caress could give some solace from the worst of a wound’s pain.

The pain was not the sharp, stabbing agony that he had once known, in the weeks after the attack. No, it was just a constant part of him, a never-failing anguish, or at best a dull ache. It was worst at night, of course. When he wanted to turn his mind to pleasing, soporific thoughts, when he wanted to drift away, that was when the wound seemed to strike at him with renewed force. That was when he wept silently, so as not to waken his neighbour in the dorter – when he felt the hideous emptiness that was his life now. No love, only horror or curiosity.