Pip Vaughan-Hughes - The Vault of bones

‘The moon was very bright, so bright that the feathery leaves and umbels of the water dropwort under which I lay painted my body with crisp, trembling shadows. Spiders were busy looping their silk between blades of iris, and each new strand blazed like the trail of a falling star. I raised my head and breathed in the clean, sweet scent of the plants. Something flopped wetly in the shallows of the river, and my head cleared. The river. It stretched away from me, straight as a blade of damasked steel, towards the dark hump of the city that squatted away to the north. I stood up lazily, only to be startled by a mighty confusion of noise: I had roused a heron, and, screeching, he blundered into the air, clapping his wings hollowly. The river broke into a ferment of colliding ripples.

I had fallen asleep, that was obvious. Had I been fishing? I could not recall, although I must have had something more than water to drink for my thoughts to be so muddled. I would have to dodge the Watch to get back into Balecester, and I had to be back before dawn: Magister Jens began his class promptly after Vespers, and to be late meant a tongue-lashing in his excruciating Swabian-tinged Latin. I looked around for a bag or a fishing-pole, but could see nothing in the flattened greenery. I had left a man-shaped dent in the tall grass. The dew was already settling, and I found I was soaking wet. My head was cold, and I was brushing the dewdrops from my tonsured pate when an awful peal of thunder shook the ground beneath me and the distant, shadowed city burst into a great roil of fire. A fountain of destruction it was, too bright to look at, brighter than burning pitch or the fire of the Greeks, that burns even on water. For a moment the buildings stood out in the heart of the pyre like children's toys: the cathedral, the castle, the bishop's palace, until the flames poured over them like a tide and they were consumed. Scorching air billowed around me, and my clothes, damp and clinging an instant ago, stuck to my flesh like molten lead. The water dropwort was burning and the fronds and flowers turned to white ash before my eyes. I opened my mouth and fiery air rushed in. Flames blossomed in my throat, my chest, my belly. My teeth turned to glowing coals. With my last strength I threw up my arms and screamed forth a gout of fire.

I was choking, and as I had that thought a voice above me said, ‘You are choking him.' I opened my seared eyes and saw a man's face looking down at me. His forearm was across my neck and he was pinning me down to the burned earth, but as I twisted and turned to see what I thought would surround me, I saw not the ashes of the water meadows of Balecester but rumpled bed linen and, further away, the walls of a chamber, lit by rush lights and by the glow of a dying fire. The man was watching me intently. His face was familiar: black arched brows, brown almond-shaped eyes. I could not place him, though, and let my head sink back into what I found was a sweat-soaked bolster. I let my eyelids fall, and for just a few more seconds the river was running once more, and everything was green and still. Sweet fronds of water dropwort bowed and danced. 'Patch. Patch! Do you hear me?' The green fronds became fingers waving inches from my nose. I opened my mouth to protest, but only a strangled croak came forth. 'He wakes. Piero? Please fetch the Captain’ It was not an English voice, nor an English face. I blinked, and it came into focus again. The mouth was smiling.. ‘Patch, can you speak?'

I shook my head. At once, a strong hand was lifting my head, and a cup touched my lips. I let icy water slip across the charred leather of my tongue and down my throat, then gulped until I gagged and spluttered. "Who am I?' I gasped.

Late December 1236

We came to London on Childermass Day, blown up the Thames by a snow-filled squall out of the Low Countries. It was an ill-omened day, to be sure: Herod massacring the innocents, best forgotten; or perhaps worth remembering after the heedless roistering of Christmas. But despite the nasty weather I was all aquiver with the excitement of seeing London for the first time. It is the heart of England, and every Englishman feels its pull, even the meanest villain who has never ventured further than the edge of his masters land. So to finally behold the great city… I admit that, like a child, I ran about the ship, getting in everyone's way, and at last volunteered to climb the mast and keep look-out. I had not seen England since that day, two years and more ago, when I had been taken aboard the Cormaran, a wretched, wounded fugitive. And so now, when the wet snowflakes stung me I did not care, and when the first houses came in sight around the great bend of Stepney Marsh, although they were but mean eel-fishers' hovels, I thrilled at the sight. And when the dark, spiked bulk of the Tower resolved itself out of the grey distance I all but fell off my perch to the deck below.

Anna, meanwhile, was snug in the cabin, wrapped in furs, reading. She cared not one whit about London, so she said, and she had been teasing me gently about my boyish anticipation since we had set sail from Bruges. She did not come on deck at my cry, although many of the crew rushed to the prow, as London was reckoned a good landfall by all sailing men, and these ones had been promised a long shore-leave. And she did not emerge as we slipped through the open gates of London Bridge. Only when we were safely tied up at Queenhithe Wharf did she deign to step forth, sniff the air and wrinkle her nose, and give me her hand.

'Oh dear’ was all she said, as she looked up at the sooty buildings that rose around the basin of the wharf, itself fairly muddy and stinking, for it was here that all the fish sold in the city came ashore; and as I later discovered, it served as a public privy, a great jakes for any Londoner to use. So Anna's royal nose had reason to object, but despite the stink and the snow I was all afire and bustled her up the water-steps. It was a half-mile to our lodgings at the Blue Falcon in Cheapside so a litter was found, and as the two footmen – under the cold eye of Pavlos the Greek, once a bodyguard of Roman despots, now devoted heart, soul and sinew to his vassikia, his princess – jolted Anna through the teeming streets I jogged alongside, chattering, while she swatted flakes of wet snow from her face. I was an outlaw in this country, but I gave it little thought, for my face had come into the lines of manhood and my skin was burned dark from the sun, and indeed I was as like the terrified, lost little monk who had fled these shores as the butterfly is to the crawling worm.

That first day was a flurry of organising, greeting, paying calls, and it was not until the next morning that we could take our ease, if only for a short hour, in the big, faded private chambers that we were to share with Captain de Montalhac, his lieutenant, Gilles de Peyrolles and Pavlos, who, as well as her bodyguard, was also Anna's devoted, self-appointed manservant.

The others having left to call on some important merchant or other, Anna and I sat in the Blue Falcon's not-quite-comfortable chairs and broke our fast on fresh bread, smoked fish, gulls' eggs, sweet butter, warm goats' milk and cold, bitter ale. Being still full of a good night's sleep and so somewhat heavy and contented, I watched as my love ate and drank. Her night-black hair was loose and hung about her shoulders and back. Her face was brown, with a constellation of darker freckles scattered across her cheeks. When I had first laid eyes on her, high on a lonely island hilltop, she had been pallid from years in the ghastly climate of Greenland and several weeks in the pitch-black hold of the Cormaran, on to which she had been smuggled in a load of whalebone. But the sunlight had quickly given her back the complexion of her people, and the only reminder of those grim days was the space in her mouth where the scorbutus, the sickness which had blighted us all as we crossed the endless Sea of Darkness, had stolen one of her teeth. Her front teeth had a little gap between them as well, in which she liked to work the tip of her tongue when she was thinking hard about something. Her eyebrows were black ink-strokes above her brown, almond-shaped eyes, in which the mercurial tumult of her humours played like the reflection of the sky in still water.