Pip Vaughan-Hughes - Relics

'Now you are dead,' he told me, smiling icily. And for the better part of an hour he showed me the many ways I could expect to die in the short moments between drawing my blade and deciding what on earth I should do with it next. It was not a cheering experience, but the next day I was a little quicker, and the day after that, faced with Dimitri – who had already tripped me three times and pretended to skewer my cods with his knife – I felt myself vanish – that is to say, the bumbling, anxious, flinching Petroc vanished – and when I came to my senses again, Dimitri was howling with laughter as blood poured in a torrent from his nose. "Yes, yes! Magnificent, O Petroc! You have it! Again!'

This time I did not lose myself, but it was as if the scared, inept Petroc was trapped in the same skin as a man who could act on nothing more than brute instinct. In time I would lose this sense of division and realise that I was simply allowing myself to be free, to use my body as freely as I had when I was a child. But at first, although I learned fast and faster still, I was uneasy, and worried, for a while, that I was being posessed by some maleficent, violent spirit.

Off the mouth of the Liffey the Captain ordered the Cormaran hove to. He took Gilles off in the gig, and the little boat went bobbing off over an agitated grey sea. It was late in the day when they returned, and several large bundles wrapped in well-greased hides followed them on board. To our surprise we were ordered to make sail on a southerly course. We would not be stopping in Dublin after all. The crew muttered darkly but stuck, white-lipped, to their work.

On a muggy, grey morning a week later, we entered the mouth of the Gironde and, after a pleasant enough sail upstream past low hills stitched with the coarse green lines of vineyards, drew near to the wharves of Bordeaux. It had been an uneventful passage, save for a hail-filled squall that lashed at us as we coasted past the He d'Oleron. Now the walls and spires of the city danced against the sky, which had cleared as if in welcome.

The port was full. Ships of all shapes and sizes jostled against one another all along the great length of the quay and at anchorages further out into the river, and we drifted past them under a wisp of sail. Big cogs bumped tarry hulls with fishing smacks and barges. Pilot boats and gigs bustled to and fro, ferrying people and goods from ship to shore. Many vessels flew warlike pennants and gonfalons, and bright shields hung on their sides. Between the swaying masts, the quayside was swarming, not just with the loading, unloading and portering of trade but with groups of armed men standing, sitting of running about with no seeming purpose. Pikes and halberds bristled in clumps, and the sound of drums and shouting came over the water.

I stood beside the Captain on the bridge. The crew, those who were not handling the sail, lined the sides and the forecastle. They saw the soldiers on the quay, and like hounds they scented blood. I glanced at the Captain, and saw that a wolfish look had settled there as well. "What is happening over there?' I asked Gilles.

He shrugged. 'The English King and the French King, going at it like scorpions. When has it been different? But-' he paused, and I saw a look of sour disdain pass over his face, '-the English scorpion seems to be annoyed. An army is landing – a real one. It'll be battles this time, not skirmishes.'

Nizam wove us through the tangle of ships and anchor-lines until, at a signal from de Montalhac, the sail dropped and we weighed our own anchor between two fat-bellied cobs that bobbed and rolled like huge pitch-caulked barrels. Soon the gig was pulling away towards the wharf, the Captain sitting alert in the prow. I watched the men ply their oars, and wished myself among them. Here was life again as I knew it: the smell of real food drifting from good stone houses, bells chiming from proud steeples, the yelling and bantering of Englishmen. Anna had slipped to my side and was gripping the rail tightly as she gazed hungrily at the shore. She was quivering like a hound on a leash.

'If I could swim, I would be on dry land by now,' she muttered.

'I can swim,' I told her, 'and I would gladly pull you along, Mikal. But much as I would love a mug of beer and some good red meat, our balls would shrivel and drop off in that water.'

"Well, I agree we wouldn't want anything to happen to those balls of yours,' she breathed, leaning in close. I felt a familiar quickening below. 'But it is summer, you oaf – the water is warm. They have beds over there, you know,' she added. And doors. With locks.' I cleared my throat somewhat dramatically. 'Well, what do you say, brother?' she added loudly in her croaky man-voice. Will we see what trouble there is to find? I fancy a fight, a fuck and…' she waved her hand, as if to pluck words from the seagull-loud air, '… and a fried… a fried fowl,' she finished, and glanced at me, pleased with herself.

'Don't overdo it, brother,' I hissed. Nizam was chatting to Dimitri right behind us, after all. But they seemed unaware of our presence.

In truth, this might be Mikal's last day on earth. Mikal the luckless Basque boy would disappear into the stews of Bordeaux. The crew would think he had slipped away homewards, or that his purse and gizzard had been cut and his body flung into the harbour. Sad, but such things happened. Either way he would be gone, and soon afterwards I would introduce Anna Doukaina, mysterious adventurer in need of our protection. The masquerade would be over, and not before time. Anna had been wearing her Mikal disguise ever lighter, and I had begun to feel a constant knot of anxiety lest she give herself away.

I felt her frustration, of course. It came off her in waves, like heat from coals. Her bound breasts were a constant torment. She was in a state of permanent fury about the fuss involved in a simple thing like pissing – having to wait until no one was looking, so that the crew would not notice how hard it was for her to make water standing up with her back to the boat like the rest of us. Neither of us could believe that Mikal's secret had not come to light, but, I believe now, that was due to the intense focus of a long sea journey, when everyone's world shrinks, through boredom or discomfort, to the task in hand, and to one's own tormented body. Although I would not have dared to think such a thing then, I suspect that, if Anna had climbed the mast and stripped stark naked, as she had often threatened to do, not one of the scorbutic, half-starved, salt-burned wretches below her on the deck would have turned so much as an eyelash. They would have spit a little more blood over the side and gone back, grumbling, to their mindless work. But that picture – Anna standing bare amidst a snarl of wild-eyed men, her skin glimmering white through the half-light of an approaching squall – floated through my dreams and woke me more than once as we made our way south from Scotland.

The Captain had urgent business ashore. There were deliveries to be made, and cargo taken on, as in every port. But further, there was a man in Bordeaux who had availed himself of de Montalhac's special services, and who, the Captain assured me, was waiting most anxiously for the Cormaran's arrival. A prince of the Church, a man of power. No seedy, passed-over failure like the Bishop of Gardar, but a person of rank and wealth, who was expecting an item that befitted that rank. The Captain was happy to oblige, as ever, but this was not the matter, I was sure, that had stirred him up and lit the eerie foxfire which had been nickering in his eyes since we left Dublin. It was not just war he had scented as we made our way up the great water-road of the Gironde. I had no proof, but something about his mood had put me in mind of the night we had passed in Greenland.