Pip Vaughan-Hughes - The Vault of bones

'His name is Iblis,' said Horst, sidestepping the usual niceties and shoving the reins at me. I took them, gingerly. 'He is a Saracen horse, very beautiful. Aren't you?' he enquired of the horse, who nodded and bared massive teeth. 'Fit for a prince, Patch, so do not disappoint him. He is smaller than our Frankish war-mounts, but he is a warrior nonetheless. You will ride him with pride.' It was a command, delivered with Pomeranian finality.

'Iblis… What, pray, does his name signify?' I asked, patting the beast experimentally on the muzzle, which was soft and slightly moist. Then it nodded again, and I snatched my hand away. ‘I believe it is what the Mussulmen call the Devil,' said Horst, absently. 'Don't do that, Patch. He'll bite you.' What, don't pat him? But you were…'

'No! No, do not treat him as if he were a lion, or red-hot, or whatever ridiculous fancy you have concocted. He is a horse, a kindly, gentle beast who wishes to be your friend. Think of him as a dog, if you like.' 'A gurt dog’ I muttered. What?'

'Nothing. So now must I clamber up on his back, for God's sake?'

'Not here. I do not want you falling on cobbles.' And with that hopeful remark he set off down the street and I followed, leading the horse. He was undeniably cooperative, although I suspected he was saving his energy for some appalling savagery later on.

We left the Borgo and ascended the Janiculum hill past the crumbling remains of the ancient wall and into an area of gardens and meadows – meadows in the Roman sense of a wide expanse of sun-killed grass, thistles, dust and stones, haunted by feral goats – where we halted, and my riding lesson commenced.

I will draw a veil over these proceedings, and those that came after, for the sake of brevity and to preserve that which I laughably call my dignity. For the arse-bruised, thistle-pricked and, if memory serves, goat-nibbled fool who limped back to his quarters that evening was as broken in spirit as any newly mastered horse. It was with dread that I greeted Horst's implacable summons the next morning and the morning after that, and on and on for an entire week of torment. I fell, more than once. I sobbed into the beast's rough and pungent mane. I was ignored, and then obeyed far too vigorously. He stepped on my foot and ate a fistful of my hair. Finally, late on the seventh day, as I guided Iblis around an improvised course of boulders and dead olive branches, Horst clapped his hands loudly. Iblis started and reared, and instead of flying off and landing on some unsuspecting goat I dug in my knees, shortened the reins and told him, in no uncertain terms, to settle himself down at once. Then I trotted over to where Horst stood, grinning.

What the fuck, Herr von Tantow, was that?' I enquired. I had had enough: of Iblis, of goats and the hard and thistly Roman ground, and above all of the unbending, tyrannical Horst.

'That was you finally learning how to ride a fucking horse’ he told me. 'Now let us go and get very drunk’

'Amen’ I breathed. And so Horst von Tantow walked at my side as I rode Iblis, the Devil's horse, back down the Janiculum and through the Borgo to the stable, where we left him to his oats and barley mash. Horst knew a drinking-house run by a Saxon who brewed fine beer, and so we took ourselves off to it and dived headlong into the beer.

We had supped a brace of mugs apiece when Horst, wiping the foam from his lips, said, almost absently, 'Does it pain you to ride Iblis?'

'Do you mean my ballocks?' I asked. Yes, but it has got better’ 'No, no! I meant… after London’

You mean Anna.. ‘ I paused, considering. 'Perhaps at first, but I do not fear Iblis very much now, and… and what happened to Anna could have happened to anybody’

'Hmm. This has been troubling me since that day, Patch. Do you remember, this afternoon, how I made Iblis rear up?' I was about to give him a friendly cursing for it, but he shook his head. 'Listen. If I had been under his hooves he would not have come down upon me. He would have thrown himself sideways, or… the point is, he is a trained riding horse. If you were lying upon the ground and I galloped at you, he would jump or swerve. Riding horses will not hurt a man if they can avoid it.'

What are you saying?' I asked, for I could not make him out at all.

'I am saying that a horse that rears up, strikes a human being and does it again is either a wild animal, in which case it could not be ridden out in the street, or it is a destrier, a warhorse. Such a beast is a weapon, as much as a sword or a lance.'

'Then it was a knight's horse, my friend,' I told him, growing impatient, for his words were beginning to trouble me.

'But such a horse will not strike unless his rider tells him to. Once, perhaps, but he will not go on until he has… Listen, Patch: forgive me. I should not have dragged this out. But I used to ride such horses, and I know them well…'

'It was an accident,' I said, for my friend had clearly been torturing himself. 'It was fate.' And although I did not believe in fate I said it eagerly, desperately, willing it to be so.

'Oh well, you may be right,' said Horst gently, although he had turned quite pale and seemed to be searching for something in my face as he snapped his fingers for more beer.

It came, and kept coming, and I sucked it down to wash away the thoughts that my friend had seeded in my mind. We supped so freely that only the haziest memory of that evening remains: Horst, deep in his cups, telling of a battle fought against the idol-worshipping Letts on the borders of his country. And of that, all I have is an image: of fresh bright blood flung across snow. It haunted my sodden dreams that night, the snow turning to London mud streaked with black hair, and I woke up the next morning wrapped tight in my bed linens, although the day was already sweltering.

When I awoke the next day and made to rise, I found that while I slept I had been bludgeoned by a great fatigue which clung to my limbs like leaden chain mail. I felt as if I had walked a hundred miles, and I had neither the strength nor the will to get out of bed. My landlady, a widow endowed with a kindlier heart than most boarding-house owners, decided that I had caught a cold, and took it upon herself to keep me fed after Isaac the physician had called around that first day and found me fretting and foul of temper. So I lay, looking at the cracks in the ceiling, drinking the widow's excellent soup, which tasted no better than Tiber water to me, and trying to predict the movements of the little sticky-footed lizards who roamed the walls in search of flies. Finally Isaac thought to bring me something to read, to whit, extracts from Pliny the Elder and the same map that we had pored over that day back at the Palazzo Frangipani. Tliny is for your amusement, but he will teach you about the country you will be riding through’ he told me. 'But this – and he waved the map – 'is work. The Cormaran is leaving Ostia tomorrow, and you should think of leaving for Venice as soon as you have got your strength back.' 'Has Baldwin returned?' I asked, weakly. 'He was not there this morning’ said Isaac. 'But he may be now. Why don't you see for yourself?' I sat up. In truth I did not feel particularly ill, but my strength, as Isaac had noticed, had ebbed a little more than my sickness merited. I thought it was the lingering effect of my fall, but Isaac shook his head and tutted. You are still pining, my friend’ he said gently. 'I am not! I am ill’ I protested.

'Nonsense’ he said, kindly. 'I can see it in your eyes’ I snorted. 'No, no’ he went on. 'I can tell if it is the body or the soul which suffers. In your case it is the latter, far more than the former’

I muttered churlishly but, as ever, he had struck home. I had been following the cracks in the ceiling, as I have said, but every one of them had become a road that led to Anna, wherever she might be. I could think of her a little these days, and they were happy thoughts, at least until the spectre of her ruined eye rose, as it always did, like a moon whose light turned everything in my heart to ice. Now I remembered her as she had been in London, in the inn where we had lodged. I had never tired of exploring that face, although I knew it better than the landscape of my home. So that last morning I had no need to search it so carefully, but had I known I was taking my final leave I would have taken note of every tiny hair, every freckle.