Pip Vaughan-Hughes - Relics

'Exquisite, are they not?' said the Captain. I managed a nod. 'Look in the other parcel,' he murmured.

It was about the size of my fist and bound tightly. I untied the soft leather, cords and unwrapped the oil-cloth. Inside was another bundle of deep crimson silk. I found an end and began unwinding. Three feet of silk later, I was holding a simple wooden box, plain and unadorned and yet giving off a feeling of great age. I swallowed and opened it.

Instead of the obscenity I had been expecting, I gazed down at a black, wrinkled lump. 'It's a prune,' I blurted in relief.

'Show some deference, boy!' the Captain barked. I flinched in surprise. You hold the only true heart of St Cosmas in your impious hands.' Holy Mother! I dropped the relic onto the table as if it were a piece of white-hot iron. 'I beg your pardon,' I gibbered. 'I had no idea that…'

The Captain's laughter drowned my words. At last I dared to look at him. Rich red wine was dribbling down his chin and neck. He thumped the table, and the carven beast with two backs jumped and clacked.

'I am truly sorry, Petroc,' he croaked, when the breath had returned to his body. 'But I could not resist… Pick it up again. Pick up the heart.'

I hesitated, then remembered my feelings earlier in the cathedral, my Saviour as so much tortured meat hung up for my adoration. What was this poor man's heart to me except meat, dry meat? I picked up the box, and felt nothing: no tingle, no flicker of the Other such as I had received from the hand of St Euphemia. I looked closer. The thing did indeed resemble a very large prune, although as I examined it, coal also came to my mind. I glanced at the Captain, who had just pulled a second wine flask from his satchel. 'How does this come to be here?' I asked.

He tapped his nose with a long finger, refilled our cups and raised his in a toast. I did the same, if only because I suddenly needed to feel strong liquor in my veins.

'To heart's ease,' said the Captain, and drank deeply. I followed suit.

'How did you come by St Cosmas' heart?' I asked again, the strong wine making me bolder. 'Did you steal it?'

He regarded me gravely, his eyes unreadable, almost blank. Reaching between us, he picked up the wizened heart and held it up to his face, turning it with his fingertips like a usurer examining a precious bauble. 'Steal it?' he echoed. 'Steal it?' His eyes flicked back to mine, and held them. And what do you think it is?'

The heart of St Cosmas,' I said, stupidly. The Captain just stared. 'So it is not the Saint's heart?' I ventured. He gave his head a minute shake. 'But it is a heart, and it is very old,' I ploughed on. Whose is it, then?'

'It is very old – older than St Cosmas, whoever he really was,' said the Captain. Suddenly he was holding the thing an inch from my face. 'Smell it,' he said. With infinite reluctance I sniffed, and smelt dust – dust, and something else: the faintest suggestion of something astringent, spicy. Then the Captain was slipping the grisly lump back inside its silken wrappings. 'I found it in Egypt,' he said. "While this is indubitably not a portion of St Cosmas, it is a heart, the heart of, I believe, a woman from the time of Pharaoh, or one of the pharaohs, as the Egyptians say that there were many. The ancient ones used unguents and spices to preserve their dead, which is what you might have scented.' 'Egypt!' I marvelled.

'Perhaps we will go there together,' the Captain said. 'I make it a point to stop there as often as I can. The markets of Cairo are rich hunting grounds for me. And now I see you require some explanations.' He refilled our cups, threw another log onto the fire, and began.

'I once told you that we were traders. Insightful as you are, you guessed that we are really smugglers. The truth is a little of both, but stranger yet than either. Yes, we trade. We trade in the strange, the odd, the difficult, the dangerous and, as you saw just now, the holy and the sinful. We bring sheepskins and wine to these sad Greenlanders, which we trade for white bear skins and walrus ivory that will find an eager market in Germany and further south. We have even brought back Gyrfalcons – great white hawks – that many a prince would knife his best friend to possess. From the land of the Skrae-lings we bring beaver, fox and sable pelts. We will sell Baltic amber to the Saracens, and Saracen rosewater to the dignitaries of Hamburg. Because we are fierce and strong we pay no heed to charters or customs. So in that way we are smugglers, and that is no great thing. But our true calling, Petroc, is deeper. We procure items for those who desire them – powerful patrons with tastes broadened by experience and, perhaps, happy or malign humours. Such a man is the Bishop of Gardar. You wonder how a man could find himself exiled to such a place as this. The answer to that lies in those ivory toys you admired so well – at home in Denmark he played with living mannequins, of course, but here he must content himself with make-believe. He asks me to find him trinkets and books to keep his weak flame alight, and I am happy to oblige. That toy, by the by, I found in Cairo. It is Chinese – do you even know where China is? East from India; further, even, than the lands of Prester John. Judging by their works, the people of China and India are positively roiling in what the Bishop knows as sin. I have promised that I will find out for myself one day. In any case, there are things in our hold that would have made Mary Magdalene blush.

'But that was not all that the good Bishop requested of me. He has his cathedral, but it is lacking in a crucial respect -there is no important relic. A cathedral needs relics, as you know, like a fire needs wood: something for the faithful to warm their hands against. In Gardar they have a few wisps of cloth from the habit of some nun no one has heard of, and an old nail from St Andrew's cross that no one believes in – quite rightly so, as it probably came from some unlucky fishing boat. The Bishop wanted a relic, and so he entrusted the search to me. For that is my trade, my true calling. I deal in relics. I sell them to any man, woman, abbot, bishop, king or queen who can pay for them. I find relics. When I cannot buy them, I steal them. What cannot be stolen, I make myself. The Bishop of Gardar is paying me much of what lies in the cathedral's muniments room for a true relic of the oldest ages of man, although instead of a saint's heart he will be enshrining part of a woman who worshipped animal-headed demons and had as much inkling of divine grace as the shores of Greenland have of date-palms. He will never know – how can a holy relic be verified? The spices of Egypt provide the requisite odour of sanctity, the thing is as old as the hills, and he has my word on the matter. And besides, I know he has paid for the other trifle – and other less pretty ones – with the hard-won pennies of these pitiful Greenlanders, so he will be very, very careful not to annoy me. As far as my usual business goes, this will be an easy transaction.

Think of the hand of St Euphemia that you bore in so much terror. A poor old shrivelled thing it was, was it not, inside its precious glove? But you believed, Petroc, and for all I know you believe still. I can tell you this: it was a human hand, all right, but St Euphemia? Perhaps. I know that a corpse lying around in a damp place like Balecester will moulder and rot, and I'd lay my fortune that Euphemia herself has been dust for a thousand years. The precious claw was bought or made – I said human, but I would not have been surprised to find the paw of an ape. Credulity and greed will blind most men – that is the truth that keeps the Cormaran afloat. I can show you much, my good friend, but I fear it will tear the guts from your faith and trample them into the mud. It was easy for me – I never had any faith, at least not in the way you understand it. But for you… think for a while.'