not tell one Henry Sientcler from another.
A shape slid into the seat opposite and offered a brown smile. Lamprecht; Malise regarded the little man with a mixture of awe and distaste, not knowing whether he really did have Christian relics of power, not liking him because he was a snail who left a trail behind him as he moved.
‘My ripeness, my mouse,’ Lamprecht lisped in what he fondly believed was the way of the court in France. ‘I have my bargain fulfilled. D’argent, certes. Bezzef d’argent, tu donnara.’
It had been God’s Own Hand, Malise had thought, that brought him to the side of Lamprecht, a man he had used in small ways once or twice before. Useful, he had thought at the time – now he looked at the pardoner with distaste, seeing how he might have been handsome once, though all his years had played hop-frog with each other and landed on an ugly heap on his face, which was venal and pouched. He had once had long, clean hair, but it had been too fine to last and was now plastered in a few greasy wisps on his skull, which he covered, when he was not wringing it in his hands, with a soft, broad-brimmed hat lauded with a pilgrim’s shell.
‘I know what you want,’ Malise spat moodily, ‘and you are as far from it as always. Sir Henry Sientcler of Herdmanston, I said. You bring me Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin.’
Lamprecht’s eyes never warmed to the smile he gave.
Non andar bonu,’ he began, then laboriously turned out the thick-accented English of it. ‘It is not going well. This is no fault of mine. Henry Sientcler you demand. Henry Sientcler you receive. Please to pay me, as agreed.’
He saw the aloes look he had back and realised he was not going to get his money. It was not, he thought to himself crossly, his fault that he had been sent to fetch a named man from a place where all the people, it seemed, were called the same. Now this man with a face like a kicked arse was scowling at him and denying him fair payment; not for the first time, he wished he had never met Malise Bellejambe.
He was no stranger to abuse, all the same; everyone seemed to believe they could gull, con or spit upon the likes of him, for all his pilgrim’s badge. You would think folk would honour someone wearing the shell that told of a trip all the way to the Holy Land and, to be fair, most of the simple folk did. The ones with some money and a little power always assumed he was a liar and had never been to the Holy Land at all, but had stolen the shell badge.
Which was not true, he thought indignantly to himself. He had traded for it – a tooth of the Serpent from Eden, no less, only slightly chipped but a fine specimen. Not as fine as the other three he had, admittedly, but a fair exchange for the shell of a pilgrim. And, if he had not been to the Holy Land exactly, he had been to the Sicilies – which still had paynim influences everywhere – and to Leon in Spain, which was the next room to the heathen Moors.
‘Dio grande, he said with weary bitterness to Malise. ‘God is great. I carry out my task and this is my reward. A esas palabras respondieron los ignorantos con decirle infinitas injurias como ellos acostumbran, llamdndole perro, cane, judio, cornudo, y otros semejantes…’
‘Speak English,’ Malise finally spat, irritated beyond measure, and Lamprecht shrugged, as if the man was a fool for not comprehending either the Lingua, or decent Castilian, tongues understood by every traveller around the eastern Middle Sea.
‘The ignorant,’ he said haughtily, ‘reply by uttering numerous insults as they are accustomed to do, calling me hound, dog, Jew, cuckold, and similar epithets. Mundo cosi – such is the world.’
‘Give me no airs, you purveyor of St Pintle the Apostle’s ball hairs,’ snarled Malise, angry now. ‘I have known you for a time – long enough to know that you would steal the contents of a dog’s arse and put it in a pie if you had found someone with a taste for such a thing and had a handy bag.’
He glared at Lamprecht.
‘You would sell the stolen skull of an infant and claim it to be Jesus when he was a baby,’ he added viciously and saw that he had stung Lamprecht, who did not like his wares denigrated.
‘Questo non star vero,’ he protested, then shook his head with exasperation and translated it into English. ‘That is not true. Que servir tutto questo? You should not say such things, even in anger, for God is watching. Dio grande. Besides, se mi star al logo de ti, mi cunciar… bastardo. If I was in your place, I would wait. The other Sir Henry will come, certes, to see after his amico, and here you hold him. Dunque bisogno il Henri querir pace. Se non querir morir. So the Henry will want peace. If he does not wish to die. CapirY
Malise understood and Lamprecht saw it. He yawned ostentatiously.
‘ Mi tenir premura,’ he said. ‘I am in a hurry. Let me dip my beak a little, then I go. Mi andar in casa Pauperes Commilitones.’
Lamprecht did not need to translate the latter, for he saw Malise had understood perfectly. The Pauperes Commilitones – the Poor Brother-Knights – was a name he calculated would make Malise think twice about keeping him here.
Malise knew what Lamprecht was up to, knew also that the pardoner was headed to Balantrodoch purely in the hope of persuading the Order knights there to add their seal to the provenancies of the relics he carried; the Templars made part of their fabled wealth from selling relics.
Malise glanced to where his scrip sat carelessly on a bench, the Templar writ snugged in it. He marvelled at how a piece of parchment with some seals and words could be worth the astonishing amount of 150 merks of silver.
The money, he knew, had been deposited at Balantrodoch and Malise wrestled dimly with the concept of how you could take the parchment to any Templar Commanderie, present it – and be given the money, as if it had magically transported itself there while folk slept. He shivered; from what he had heard of the Templars, such a thing was not beyond them.
No matter – if Lamprecht had the divine favour and miracles of the Pope himself, it would serve him no better.
‘You remain,’ Malise declared curtly and Lamprecht managed an insouciant shrug and a smile, while inwardly seething. He had been doing well recently in a land turmoiled by war and the rumour of it, for people were eager for quatrefoil amulets of St Thomas and St Anthony, the former proof against just about everything, the latter particular to ague and fever.
These were just enough to afford him vittles, but not enough for the finer things. Lamprecht had a box filled with plenary indulgences, pinches of the ashes of Saints Martin and Eulalia of Barcelona, Emilianus The Deacon and Jeremiah The Martyr. He still had a tooth of the Serpent – actually, he had several such teeth – a portion of the robe of Saint Batholomew The Apostle, a pinch of the earth on which the Lord Himself had stood, plus many others.
He had his finest cache, which he hoped the Templars would buy – three fingernails of St Elizabeth of Thuringia, only raised to sainthood thirty-odd years ago, so her relics were powerfully potent.
He was no fool, as Malise had declared – though Lamprecht had to admit that trying to sell the likes of Malise the thong of Moses’ sandal had been a bad error – but no-one who could afford it wanted plenary indulgences, or a thorn from Christ’s Crown these days. They preferred earthly necessities, like food and fuel for fires. As usual, the poorest were the ones who sickened first and they could barely afford the lead quatrefoil amulets.
So he smiled, though the purse he had been promised seemed to fade slowly away and he knew that his best chance of salvaging anything from this was to remove himself, in secret, far from the coming wrath of this wrong Sir Henry’s friends.
Outside, it rained on the dark of a Berwick glazed with a few pallid worms of light, the rat-eyed red wink of the castle braziers squirming through the rain as the garrison kept watch. It wasn’t the Scots they feared so much as the wrath of Longshanks if they lost the fortress.
For all the rain and dark, Hal thought, you could find Berwick easily enough by the smell, a heady mix of smoke, clot and rot that sifted out a long way, like the snake-hair of Medusa, barely shifted by a wind that was little more than a damp nudge.
They splashed across the ford with the old ruins of the bridge to their right, troll shadows in the dark. No-one challenged them and they came up through the repaired defences of wooden stockade, ditch and wall, under a gate that should have been guarded but was not – Bruce had predicted as much and garnered silent admiration from the others in the small cavalcade.
They climbed off the wet, mud-spattered garrons and led them up the sliding cobbles, ankle deep in fishbones and the old spill of dogs, pressed closer and closer by the leaning walls of the poorer houses, where the strewn rushes were never cleared and stank with the humours that brought on liver-rot, worms, palsy, abscess, wheezing
