The Medieval Murderers - The Lost Prophecies

But that’s all in the past now. Tonight I have to set about saving my own neck from the noose in connection with another murder. Though neck and noose are not exactly precise references. If I am found guilty of murder, the Tartars whose company I am forced to bear in this snowstorm will either tie me up to two horses and thrash them until they fly in opposite directions, taking pieces of me with them, or, if they deem me sufficiently noble, will wrap me in a carpet and merely trample me to death. The carpet treatment is to prevent my noble blood from despoiling the earth.

I suddenly feel dizzy and take another pull from the skin of kumiss to drive such thoughts from my head. I think of the body lying in the snowdrift outside. When the storm abates, he will be interred, and all traces of his existence under heaven obliterated from his Tartar god, Tengri. But before that happens, the barbarous bastards who claim to be his comrades will make an end of me. Which, if you think about it, is pretty unfair as it must have been one of them who slaughtered him. So, the thing is, I wouldn’t mind so much facing death, but I did not kill the man. Then neither do I have the faintest idea who did. Yet I must find out, or suffer the consequences of being named the murderer myself.

I reluctantly set aside the skin of kumiss and huddle down in the warm goatskins beside the fire in the centre of the stove-house. I stare into the flames as they crackle and pop and rue the reasons that brought me to this pretty pass.

Back in Sudak, the good Friar Alberoni had let me into a secret.

‘I have a book of prophecies made ages ago by a Celtic priest. And if I interpret it correctly, there is a verse or two about the Tartars that guide my mission.’

He rummaged in the bundles that half-filled the floor in his lodgings overlooking the harbour. He seemed to have all sorts of gewgaws for trading with the Tartars – beads and furs mainly. As though they were primitives who could be bought for a few trinkets. I knew better. If the stories I had heard were true, it seemed that they themselves had more treasures than we could imagine. Items of great value like pearls, and precious stones, cloth of gold and silk, as well as strange items like black stones that could be lit and would burn for days. What would they want with beads and trinkets? But the stories were that they were interested in everything the West had to offer and were prepared to trade for the things they couldn’t gain by conquest.

A cold wind ruffled the wave-tops in the harbour, and I stared out over the Ghelan Sea. I fondly imagined that my gaze could stretch through the straits at the sea’s western extremity, across the ancient lands of the Greeks and into the Adriatic and Venice. Where fair Caterina Dolfin awaited my return. Or not, if my deepest, darkest moods were to be believed. Why should she wait for me, when I was as poor as a lagoon fisherman, and a marked man to boot?

‘Here it is.’

I sighed and turned my gaze back to the confines of the room. Alberoni was waving a darkly bound tome at me.

‘This is the Black Book of Brân – prophecies that go back hundreds of years. But still speak truths to us today. Listen.’

He proceeded to recite one of the quatrains, which were all in Latin. Now it may surprise you to know that I knew the Church language myself. It may shock you even more to learn that I know it because I studied once for the priesthood. That was before the jingle of money diverted me on to a more lucrative path and broke my mother’s heart. She had been set on me being a priest. Anyway, the poem, if I recall went something like this:

Though lightning and bare skull his banner bear

And all the world is ’neath a storm confined,

When hands across the sea are joinéd there,

Then righteousness is brought to heathen minds.

This he took for justification for his holy embassy to the pagan Tartars, even when I pointed out that they rode under a banner of nine yak-tails, not a skull.

‘Don’t quibble, Niccolo. They have left enough skulls behind them for it to be true. And the rest fits – the storm of the pagan hordes sweeping across the world. And if the West joins hands – we can bring righteousness to them.’

I sniffed in disdain. ‘You can make any events fit such vague ramblings. Have any of these prophecies actually come true?’

Alberoni’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes, yes. They say that at the end of the last century a rebellion in England was clearly prophesied. If the scribe of the book lived in Ireland in the seventh century, how could he know about such an event?’

A little mouse of doubt began to scurry across my brain. I needed to reassure myself that a book of prophecies written in a far-off land hundreds of years ago was nonsense.

‘Let me see.’

I took the thin but oddly heavy book from his reluctant grasp, flicking carelessly through the pages. Scanning the verses quickly and choosing one at random, I stabbed a finger at a quatrain.

‘Take this one, for example.

“When three popes all murdered lie,

And Christ’s own kingdom desecrated .. .”

‘Three Popes murdered? It’s ridiculous. Or this:

“Tartarus’ hordes irrupt through Alexander’s gate.

Six Christian kingdoms crumble in a breath.

Though Latin traders use long spoons to eat,

It won’t protect them from a demon’s death.” ’

I had intended to pour scorn on the prophecies, but suddenly this quatrain struck a chord, as if my choice had not been random after all but directed by a hidden hand. ‘Tartarus’ for the Tartars? And did the ‘ Latin traders ’ refer to me? Something had made me shudder when I read the last line too. It spoke of a personal foretaste of doom. Outside, a chilly wind whipped across the window opening, and I pretended my shivering was all to do with the plummeting temperature.Then I started to examine the book more closely. I could see straight away that it was not several hundred years old. The pages were relatively crisp and the illuminations bright and clear. I chortled.

‘The book is not ancient at all. No wonder the faker could insert a verse about an event sixty-something years ago. It was already in his past. This is like the letter that some claim to have seen that Prester John wrote to the West. The one that would make him over a hundred and fifty years old.’

Alberoni’s face went red. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, he had good reason to believe in the well-known Prester John myth. It centred on a letter purporting to come from the Far East, where a Christian ruler awaited his call to come and save the West in its hour of most need. To me, it was a neat forgery by an expert who made his money selling hope to the fearful. My mother had told me fairy tales of a similar king hiding under the earth in England. I didn’t believe that either. But lots of people are gullible when it comes to forlorn hopes. And a good con man can make plenty of money pandering to them. This Black Book looked like a similar scam.

Alberoni snatched it back from my disbelieving hands.

‘It’s not the original book. Did I ever say it was? No. It’s a copy made in the west of England by a scribe with a fair hand, which was then taken to Rome to add to the glories of the library at the Vatican. That is where I… found it. Languishing in a dusty corner. Unread and unappreciated.’

‘And they just let you have it?’

I had an inkling that Alberoni had not obtained the book legitimately. He scowled.

‘It was cast aside because there was some tale that the scribe was possessed with evil.’

That was all he would say, and I knew then that he had stolen it from under the nose of the Vatican librarian. His hesitancy over revealing the book’s recent history – when he realized he had gone too far – spoke volumes to me. And that was when I decided to steal this Black Book of Brân from him in my turn. His offer of a long and arduous journey to the ends of the earth, even with the possibility of profitable trade at the end of it, didn’t stack up against a quick buck. I was still recovering from my drunken bingeing over the failure of the long trade. A fast and dirty deal appealed to me more at the time. I knew I could sell it to make some money, and so start trading again. I mean, if it had fooled Friar Alberoni, then it would fool another priest eager for its contents. And how could he object or protest, if he had filched it himself in the first place? So I hope you’re now beginning to understand how I came to be stuck in a Russian stove-house with a drunken Orthodox priest and a dead Tartar.