Michael JECKS - The Templar's Penance

The bag in her hand was heavy and she stared at it wondering how he could carry it away without it being noticed. But then she reflected that he would have his own leather satchels to transfer the money to. A man who was used to travelling, he was bound to be accustomed to concealing money so that others wouldn’t notice it. Anyway, he was a knight. He must be used to fighting and protecting what was his. Heaven help the footpad who tried to pick his pocket!

Joana took a deep breath and sighed. Her heart was pounding. Strange to tell, she was petrified. This was a new experience for her. After all, he wasn’t going to hurt her; she had the money, and that was a guarantee of her future. Yet she still felt nervous, in case her confederate, when he arrived, would be enraged.

Doña Stefanía would be on tenterhooks by now. She would have drunk at least her first cup of wine, if not more. Suddenly Joana wished she was there, with her mistress. She could have killed for a taste of good wine, for a crust or two of bread dipped in olive oil. Her belly felt empty, as though she hadn’t eaten for a week, and yet she was well enough. Still, when she looked at her hand, she could see it was shaking.

‘So, my lady!’

The hand on her shoulder made her squeak in alarm, but then the hand gripped her hair roughly, and she felt her head being pulled back and upwards until she was staring into his face, saw the fiercely smouldering eyes gazing down into hers.

That was when she knew she was lost.

Simon was first to hear the scream.

It exploded into his mind and shattered his dream of lying in bed with Meg, his wife. He wasn’t in his bed, he was lying in the shade on a grassy riverbank in a foreign country. Shocked into full wakefulness, he shot upwards like a startled lark and stared about him.

Baldwin stirred beside him, and Simon prodded him with an ungentle foot as he listened, utterly absorbed. Flies hummed near, a large black one aiming for his face, and he waved it away, frowning with concentration, his other hand hovering near his sword.

They had been here for at least an hour, from the look of the sun’s shadows, sitting and eating their bread and cheese in quiet contemplation, drinking wine chilled by the river, the skin left dangling by a thong in the waters. Once they were done, both men lay back and chatted desultorily until they submitted to the warmth of the afternoon sun and fell fast asleep.

‘What is it?’ Baldwin grumbled.

Simon was almost sure that the scream had come from farther upriver. ‘A cry – up there somewhere.’

‘Nothing now,’ Baldwin yawned.

‘Wait!’

Shrill and terrified, the cry came again and again, shuddering on the still air like the call of a strange bird.

Baldwin was on his feet, hand on his sword, already sprinting towards the sound.

Simon hurried along behind him, his sword out, the blade flashing as it caught the sun. The blade had been so well-used over so many years, that there was nothing left of the high polish which it had once possessed, in stark contrast to Baldwin’s newer one. That flashed with a wicked intensity whenever the sun caught it, the carefully tempered, peacock-blue metal glinting like a well-cut and polished jewel.

Their path took them through lank, straggling grasses, wild flowers of white and yellow, under great trees and through drying puddles, and although it was not a great distance, Simon soon found his heart was pounding more vigorously than he had ever known it do before. He put it down to the strength of the wine, and perhaps the fact that he had eaten too much cheese, but he was sweltering in his rough tunic and cloak and would have felt no damper had he thrown himself into the river.

But all thoughts of his comfort disappeared as they ran through a small grove, past a donkey braying wildly, and some skinny chickens which fled, squawking, and found the two girls.

Neither was more than fourteen, Simon guessed as he leaned down, both fists on his thighs as he tried to catch his breath. Both were plainly petrified, but as Simon began to find his wind, he realised that a large part of their terror might stem from the fact that two foreigners had suddenly burst through the trees and materialised in front of them with drawn swords. He tried a soothing smile, but was rewarded with a fresh screech of panic.

It was Baldwin who calmed matters. He carefully thrust his sword back into its scabbard, motioning to Simon to copy his example, and then stared about him, ignoring the two girls. After a moment, they pointed and, to Simon’s mind, jabbered incomprehensibly. Baldwin appeared to understand, and strode off in the direction which they had indicated.

The place was apparently the spot where some of the local women would come to wash their clothes. There was a broad sweep of the river in a loop, and because it was upstream from Compostela itself, the waters were clean and not befouled by the ordure thrown in by the thousands of inhabitants and pilgrims. The well-trodden path led down a grassy little bank to the water’s edge. There, some large flat grey rocks provided scrubbing boards while the branches overhanging the place gave drying facilities. From the look of the shards of pottery, many women came here, did their laundry and then supped wine while they waited for their washing to dry overhead. It must have been one of the few relaxing times of the day for them, Baldwin thought to himself.

All this he took in with one glance, but then he smelled the foul odour of death. There was a loud buzzing, and he saw a small cloud of flies. He only had to go a short distance, a matter of ten yards. There he stood among some longer rushes and grasses, and Simon saw him stop and stare sadly down at his feet. For once, he didn’t instantly crouch and touch the body. This time he stood stock still before silently beckoning Simon to join him.

Reluctantly, knowing from Baldwin’s stillness as much as from the obvious fear of the two girls that this must be a murder victim, Simon went to join him. He never could understand the knight’s objective approach to bodies. Baldwin was always, so he said, keen to learn as much as he could from a corpse, and after his experiences during a siege when he was a mere youth, he had picked up much about human bodies when sudden violent death was visited upon them. He had told Simon before that if an intelligent man could observe a body correctly, that body could speak of the murderer. There was more to be learned from a corpse than the mere number of wounds or their depth.

When Simon reached his side, he saw that Baldwin was contemplating the body of a young woman with the figure of a Madonna lying at his feet, head nearest him, body pointing to the river. From her hands and trim figure, she had been well-born. Certainly her hands had not seen much hard work. The flesh was clean and pale olive, like a wealthy lady’s, with few calluses. Her dress was a blue tunic, very well cut, with expensive-looking embroidery at the neck, wrists and hem, but blood had soaked into it, turning it into a reeking, blackened mass.

She lay in some long grasses a short way from the river itself. Her arms were at her side; the back of her right hand was scraped, as though it had been rasped with a rock. A nail was torn away. Her head was turned towards the right shoulder, and a thick puddle of blood surrounded her dark hair, in which the first strands of white showed at the temples even through the thick gobbets of gore. Her legs were spread in the unmistakable posture of lovemaking, the skirts thrown up and over her belly revealing the dark triangle at the junction of her thighs. Simon glanced down and saw the marks of blood on the soft inner flesh. He swallowed hard.

This poor woman had not merely been raped; she had been bludgeoned to death, as though her attacker was enraged by her, as though he wanted to remove every sign of her. Her shoulders, hands and face were a mass of ruined flesh, as though the killer wanted to destroy her utterly.