Paul Doherty - Satan's Fire

Corbett put his face into his hands and said softly, ‘I spoke to him just before I left for York, I visited him in the library. He showed me his chronicle; I could see how proud he was of it.’ Corbett gazed at the others. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘How could it happen?’

‘We don’t know,’ Branquier retorted. ‘We don’t bloody know, Corbett: that’s why we’re waiting for you. You are the king’s clerk.’ He jabbed a finger at him. ‘You were sent here to find out. So, find out!’

‘It’s not as easy as that.’ Legrave leaned forward. ‘How can Sir Hugh deal with this? Brother Odo went fishing, everything was calm and serene. For the love of God, the boat was in the centre of the lake! Nobody swam out. Nobody else was with him. Yet both he and the craft were consumed by a fire which not even the water of the lake could extinguish.’

‘What remains have been found?’ Ranulf asked abruptly.

The Templars looked at him with disdain.

Corbett spoke up. ‘My friend’s question is an important one.’

‘Very little,’ De Molay replied. ‘Brother Odo’s corpse was charred beyond recognition. A few burnt planks of the boat but that’s all.’

‘Nothing else?’ Corbett asked.

‘Nothing,’ de Molay replied. ‘Just floating, charred remains. It was difficult to tell one thing from the other.’

‘And who pulled these out?’ Corbett asked.

‘Well,’ Branquier replied, ‘the Templar serjeant could do nothing. He raised the alarm and we all hurried down to the lakeside. Another boat, moored some distance away, was used: by then the flames were beginning to die down. Brother Odo’s remains have already been sheeted and coffined, he’ll be buried tonight. What we want to know, Sir Hugh, is why this happened? And how can it be stopped?’

Corbett gazed across the room: the tun of wine he’d brought as a gift from the king stood broached on a side-table, the red wax seal of the vintner now hanging down like a huge blob of blood. He sighed and pushed back his chair.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Though I tell you this: forget the tittle-tattle and gossip about fires from hell.’

Corbett then told them what he had found on the Botham Bar road. De Molay sat up, his eyes bright with excitement.

‘So you know the name of the victim and how he died?’

‘Yes. I also believe someone was in that wood, using a strange form of fire. Now, when I listened to Brother Odo’s account of the fall of Acre the evening before last, he talked of the Turks throwing fire into the city.’

‘But that was nothing,’ Branquier intervened. ‘Just bundles of wood faggots, soaked in tar, lit, then thrown as a fire ball by a catapult or mangonel.’

‘Are you saying the same thing is happening here?’ Symmes asked.

Corbett saw movement beneath the knight’s gown and realised the Templar still had his pet weasel with him.

‘But that’s impossible,’ Baddlesmere scoffed before Corbett could reply. ‘Such fires are clumsy. Nothing more than heaps of burning material. How can that explain the death of Reverchien at the centre of a maze? Nobody else was there. Or Peterkin in the kitchen? And, as for Brother Odo. .’

‘What about a fire arrow?’ Corbett interrupted. ‘Covered in tar and pitch.’ He shrugged. ‘I know, before you answer, if a fire arrow had been loosed into Brother Odo’s craft, he would have tried to put it out and, if that failed, just jumped into the water and swam for shore.’ He paused. ‘Grand Master, may I ask one favour?’

De Molay spread his hands.

‘Permission,’ Corbett continued, ‘to go round this manor, to question whom I like, to poke my long nose — as others put it — into your affairs.’

‘Granted,’ de Molay replied. ‘On one condition, Sir Hugh. The chambers I showed you yesterday? You must stay well away from those. As for the rest, we are in your hands.’

Corbett thanked him and left.

‘Did you really believe that?’ Ranulf hissed as they walked back to the guesthouse.

‘Corbett stopped. ‘Believe what, Ranulf?’

‘Fire arrows!’

‘What else could I say? Here we have a man fishing in the centre of a lake. Within minutes, nay, seconds even, both he and the boat are consumed by fire. What else could have caused it?’ Corbett shrugged. ‘It’s a wild guess but the best I can do.’ He plucked Ranulf by the sleeve and drew him into a window embrasure. ‘Whatever we discover,’ he whispered, ‘we keep silent about it. I believe the assassin was in that room.’

‘What about the masked rider in the woods?’ Ranulf asked.

‘I don’t know, but he wasn’t in that kitchen when Peterkin died. Now the assassin, this Sagittarius, could be de Molay, or one of the other four, or any combination of them working together. I don’t know why the assassin strikes and 1 don’t know how but, whoever it is, he now realises, thanks to our discovery on the Botham Bar road, that we have glimpsed some of the truth.’

‘In which case he may try to shut our mouths.’

‘He’s tried that already,’ Corbett retorted, ‘but yes, he may try it again. In doing so, though, he might make a mistake.’

Corbett poked his head out and looked down the empty passageway. ‘I said that we would stay together, but now we’ll have to work separately. You and Maltote are to scour this manor. Examine the smithy, go out into the fields and copses. Look for any trace of fire or scorch-marks and, if possible, some secret forge.’

‘And you, Master?’

‘I am going to the library. Brother Odo may have died not because he lived in this manor but also because he discovered something. The assassin must have seen me visit him. I believe the truth, or some of it, lies amongst Brother Odo’s papers.’

Ranulf went back to the guesthouse to collect Maltote whilst Corbett, taking directions from one of the guards, traced his steps back to the library. The door was open. He went inside and stared round the long, shadow-filled room.

‘God rest you, Brother Odo,’ he whispered. ‘And God forgive me if I was responsible for your death.’

He walked down the library to Brother Odo’s carrel; the table was littered with scraps of paper and the great roll of vellum containing Odo’s chronicle. Corbett laid this out flat: he turned over the squares of vellum, following the dramatic history of the fall of Acre. Corbett searched this carefully, wondering if the manuscript contained some reference to the secret fire. However, although Odo’s drawings contained mangonels throwing flaming bundles of tar, there was nothing significant. Corbett closed it with a sigh and picked up the scraps of parchment. Some were old scribblings but one caught Corbett’s eye. Apparently done on the day he died, Odo had drawn the picture of a long-nosed clerk and beside it a rough drawing of a crow. Corbett smiled at the pun on his own name, ‘ le Corbeil ’, the French word for ‘crow’. The rest of the jottings, however, were in some form of shorthand. Corbett remembered Brother Odo’s description of Anglo-Saxon runes. There were the same markings, done time and time again, all with question marks beside them. A few he could decipher, though he found it impossible to make sense of them all. He went back along the library, searching amongst the shelves until he found what he was looking for: a thick, yellow-leaved ‘ Codex Grammaticus ’, bound in calf-skin and kept together by a huge clasp. Corbett pulled this from the shelf and took it back to the carrel. He opened it and began to leaf through: the codex contained references to Greek and Hebrew and, in a well-thumbed appendix at the end, all the letters of the alphabet with the Anglo-Saxon runes beside them. Corbett seized a quill, took Odo’s scrap of paper and tried to decipher the dead librarian’s scrawls. At first he could make no sense, the runes formed words which did not exist, then Corbett remembered that Odo had used Latin in his chronicle. He tried again and the words were deciphered: ‘ Ignis Diaboli ’, ‘Devil Fire’; ‘ Liber Ignium ’, ‘The Book of Fires’, and, finally a phrase repeated time and again, ‘Bacon’s Mystery’.