Pip Vaughan-Hughes - Relics

"We must,' said the Captain. He took me by the shoulders. 'Your brother Will would want us to claim the prize. And that we shall do. We are putting out this minute for the Ionian.'

I felt as cold and lonely as the great ice-fields of Greenland. I hardly cared what these two had been saying to me. At that moment, what cared I for Adric's guilt, or the Captain's sympathy? But, like an iceberg bobbing alone on the Sea of Darkness, a thought formed itself in my mind. 'It was Kervezey, wasn't it?' I said. 'That is my guess.'

There was nothing more to say. Adric limped off to the cabin. The Captain went back to directing the crew: a fight had broken out on the deck and the mutterings were getting louder. There would be many promises made and ruffled feathers smoothed before the men were happy again. I wanted no part of it. Feeling utterly alone, I went and stood in the bow as the Cormaran drifted out into the main channel and began to slip away down the Arno to the sea. The lights of Pisa were dimming behind us when I felt an arm slip through mine. It was Anna, and we stood like that, silent, until the sun rose and the flying fishes came out to dance back and forth across our path.

Koskino was a mountain, a slab of white rock thrust straight up out of the sea. Lush lower down, the trees thinned as the slopes became cliffs, with here and there a slash of dark green where a company of cypresses had taken hold, and then the island ended in an abrupt, stark line, seemingly flat as a table on top. It was getting dark as we drew near, and the clouds had formed out of a clear sky and were rolling slowly over the top of the cliff wall. It had seemed tiny from a distance, this place, another speck among specks in the ruffled, inky sea. We were sailing into its shadow now, and the day's heat reached us, a parching breath, along with the mad choir of insects.

Anna was with me in the bow. We were friends again, although we had not spoken of what it was that had come between us since leaving Bordeaux. Indeed I did not want to dwell on it, for it seemed a time of sickness, as if I had been suffering from a long fever and a wandering of the mind and now was well again. That is a strange thing to say, perhaps, by one who had just seen his greatest friend suffer a bloody and untimely death. But now what troubled me most was not the manner of Will's passing – for that was pure pain and could be treated almost like a wound – but the knowledge that his life had been poisoned by Sir Hugh de Kervezey, long before Kervezey – and I did not doubt it had been his hand on the trigger – had put an end to it. The sense that Will's life had been doomed long before our last night in Balecester, in fact from the moment we had met, came back to haunt me. I found I could not even remember our first meeting – the refectory at the cathedral school, perhaps? – and this troubled me even more. Kervezey had cursed us – not just in the trials we had suffered in our flesh, but in our souls, for whatever else I believe about the soul, I know it is there that love, and friendship, grow like bright flowers. Kervezey had blighted us, both outside and in.

And now the anger that had so afflicted me while my friend was at my side returned in earnest. But this time, with a potent fuel, it burned like a pyre. It is strange how rage can drive away sadness, but it was as if my tears were dried up inside me by the heat of my anger. Sometimes it burned hot, like a fistful of coals aglow within my belly, and at other times it was utterly cold, and my soul felt enveloped in hoarfrost. But although I was full up to the brim with this anger, so that I feared I might at any moment vomit live cinders onto the deck, in my outward self I was calm. My mind was clear, and indeed I seemed to see everything with a clarity and a brightness that would probably have frightened me at any other time. I saw that there had been no chance in our reunion and took an obscure comfort from it. The thought that everything might have been arbitrary, that we had met and been torn apart again by some heartless, random coincidence, was more frightening than the knowledge that we had both been struggling in the same net. It is a habit of men, that we search for meaning in the deaths of those we love, and here was meaning aplenty, however cruel.

That first morning, Anna had stood with me, silently – for hours, perhaps. The sun had risen in earnest when she reached out a cool, careful finger and touched me, feather-like, below one eye, then another. 'They are dry,' she said, puzzled.

'There is nothing there,' I answered, my voice raspy. 'Nothing. But… I loved him, you know.'

'I know,' she said. We stood quiet again. Then she said, 'May I weep for him, then?'

I took her in my arms and let her offer up her tears. My own face grew wet with them, and I thought, how strange that I must have a surrogate to mourn Will for me.

'He made a good end,' I told her after a while, when we were both sitting on the deck, our backs to the rail. How insufficient my words had become. 'He was clear in his mind, and he went with love… with love in his heart,' I finished, which was true in its way.

'Did he suffer?' asked Anna, tremulously. I winced, and took her hand. 'If I told you no, would you believe me?' She searched my face with her salt-red eyes, then shook her head, a tiny shiver. 'No,' she whispered.

Yes, he suffered very much, but less towards the end. He was brave and strong, and death had to wait his turn. We talked of many things, of…'I paused. I found I did not wish to tell Anna how I had sworn to Will that I would never let her go. Perhaps I worried she would be horrified, to be bound by an oath made to a dead man. But in truth that oath was the last thing that tied me to my friend, a secret shared with no one but him and so an invisible thread that connected us, stretching from the land of the living to wherever Will now dwelt. It had its beginning deep within my heart, and there was a tension in it, a thrum of motion sent through this lonely, fragile thread across empty worlds where the winds of loss blow coldly and without cease, that told of some presence holding fast to the other end. I felt it then, and it brought me solace. I feel it now. 'Do you still not weep?' she persisted.

Will would not have approved,' I said, gruffly. 'Not of me blubbering, in any case. You, however… Besides, I wept a veritable Nile for the man, in error, while he still lived.' 'Oh! My God, Patch, you are a miser of grief.'

I shook my head and took her hands between both of mine. 'I was wrong to grieve then: I should have raged! Well, now I shall. There will be no tears, my love, not one tear until…' My voice began to shake, and I pressed Anna's fingers to my lips until I had mastered myself. 'Sir Hugh de Kervezey…' I grimaced at the name, bitter as gall. 'I will have that man's life, I swear it. That will be the Mass I say for my brother. When I have stopped his breath, then I shall weep.' 'Patch, I…'

'No, my love. I am burning up like a barrel of pitch! I must let the fire burn, and so must you.' I would have added, if I had known what words to use, that it was too wild a fire for me to control, although I knew that, as it burned through, I would see its form and know, from the embers, what my course would be.

Soon, too soon, it was time for Adric to take his leave. With him, at least, we did not have to conceal our feelings with great care. The old man had never been one to bother himself with how others lived, so long as nothing interrupted his gathering of knowledge, but I was a little surprised how his cadaverous features took on a certain glow after first making Anna's acquaintance. He became positively courtly, although Anna assured me that he was only interested in the manuscripts that lay in her uncle's library.