‘Give me the cup,’ Geoffroi said quietly.
‘No! It’s mine, I just bought it!’
‘Let me test it,’ Geoffroi insisted. ‘It may-’
The Burgundian paled. ‘You think they try to poison us? The bastards, wait till I-’
Geoffroi grabbed at him. ‘Wait,’ he repeated.
Then, turning away from his comrades, he took the Eye from the secret place under his shirt where he kept it safe, unfolded the leather cover and held the jewel over the wooden cup.
Nothing happened.
Then he gently lowered the sapphire in its gold coin into the milk.
And, after an instant, there came a sort of fizzing sound. A wisp of yellowish smoke floated up from the surface of the liquid. Hastily Geoffroi withdrew the Eye.
Turning back to the Burgundian, he said, ‘It’s poison. Don’t touch it.’
The Burgundian glared at him. ‘You are sure?’
‘I am.’
The Burgundian took back the cup, dashed it and its contents to the ground, then drew his sword and, in the blink of an eye, one after the other cut off the heads of the two herdsmen.
Geoffroi, horrified, stared at the headless bodies, their blood at first fountaining and then seeping into the dusty ground. Looking up, he met the Burgundian’s eyes.
He was wiping his sword prior to returning it to its sheath. With a faint lift of his shoulders, he said, ‘It was them or us. Would you have me leave them alive to poison more poor, thirsty knights?’
Geoffroi made no reply.
He tested one of the Eye’s other claimed virtues a month later when the Lombardy knight went down with a fever. Hardly crediting what he did — his friend was raving, sweating profusely and thrashing about in his makeshift, insubstantial bed — Geoffroi heated some water, cooled it and then, again ensuring that he was unobserved, lowered the Eye into it and stirred it a few times around in the cup. Then, supporting the Lombard’s head, he trickled a few drops on the cracked lips. The Lombard ran his tongue over his mouth, taking in the liquid. Geoffroi repeated the exercise, then again. On the fourth attempt, the Lombard sucked up and swallowed two decent mouthfuls.
His fever broke that night.
In the morning, he was weak but fully conscious. Two days later, they were able to resume their journey.
It was the water itself that restored him, Geoffroi told himself. Everyone knew that fevers dried a man out, and that water was the way to make him better again. So, the Lombard had drunk, and he had recovered.
That had to be the way of it.
The alternative — that Geoffroi truly did have in his possession a miracle-working jewel — was almost too awesome to contemplate.
Protective jewel or not, Geoffroi’s luck appeared to desert him in the spring of the following year. Their progress over the winter months had been very slow; some days, the weather had been so foul that it had seemed the safer option to remain in whatever meagre shelter they had found for the night.
With their food supplies all but non-existent and their funds running dangerously low, the four knights — Geoffroi, the Lombard, the Burgundian and the latter’s kinsman — were ambushed in a mountain pass. The Burgundian was killed outright by a rock dislodged from the mountainside as the assailants charged down from the heights. The remaining three knights, penned into a narrow file whose width made the use of a broadsword difficult, if not impossible, were swiftly overcome.
There were enough men in the band of assailants for some to pin down the knights while others went through their garments and their belongings. Geoffroi, fully believing his end had come, silently mourned his home and his kinfolk, neither of which he would ever see again.
The band of thieves attended to the Lombard and the Burgundian first. Then, just as they leapt up and prepared to approach Geoffroi, there was a shout from somewhere up above and a horn was blown three times in quick succession. To a man, the marauders stood up, jumped nimbly over the knights and ran off, scrambling back up the steep side of the gorge as if it were a flight of steps.
Geoffroi’s initial huge relief quickly evaporated. He had retained his weapons, his small parcel of food and what little money he had left, yes. But, unless he now abandoned his companions and went on alone — which was unwise as well as ungallant — he faced the prospect of supporting the three of them on his own rapidly-dwindling supplies.
It was hopeless.
They ran out of food two days later. Starving, seriously dehydrated, ragged and filthy, they presented themselves at a reasonably prosperous-looking farm and threw themselves on the farmer’s mercy. When their crusader’s crosses failed to impress, they offered their labour. Finally, when a promise had been extracted from them to work until the harvest was gathered in exchange for food and water, they were given a meal. Not much of a meal, but it was the best food Geoffroi had ever tasted.
They set out on the last leg of the long road home in the late autumn of 1149. Again, misfortune struck; they were at the foot of an Alpine pass when a life-threatening snowfall occurred. They had food enough now, and there was nothing for it but to descend down the pass, find shelter and camp until the weather relented.
They finally came down on the northern side of the mountains at the beginning of March. They had been snowbound, they had got lost, and the Burgundian’s kinsman had taken a bad fall. But they were alive.
As they rode on, Geoffroi constantly expected that the Lombard would announce he was leaving them; his home must now lie to the west, and the direction in which the trio was travelling was north-west. But the Lombard said nothing.
Finally, Geoffroi asked him.
With a rueful glance at him, the Lombard said, ‘My friend, I would, if I may, travel on with you.’
Amazed, Geoffroi said, ‘Haven’t you had enough of travelling? As God is my witness, I have!’
The Lombard smiled. ‘Ah, Geoffroi, but you probably do not have a young woman waiting for you at home, whose formidable mother will insist becomes my wife the moment I have got my boots off.’
‘You are promised in marriage?’
‘Yes. Oh, she is fair, and I dare say will make me a splendid wife. But not just yet. I wish to spend a little more time free and single before I am forced to settle down and chained to the house for ever more. I would dearly love to travel the road home with you, if you will have me.’
Moved by his friend’s honesty, and flattered by the fact that he obviously enjoyed Geoffroi’s company sufficiently to desire some more of it, Geoffroi agreed.
They bid farewell to the Burgundian’s kinsman on the road from Beaune to Veezelay. Then, hearts high and singing as they went, they marched on north and, in the fine spring weather of 1150, they came at last to Acquin.
PART THREE
9
As Geoffroi led the way along the Aa valley towards home, the Lombard held back.
Turning to him, believing his sudden slowness to be due to fatigue, Geoffroi said encouragingly, ‘Have heart, my friend! We are almost home!’
‘Yes, so I suspected,’ the Lombard replied. With a grin, he added, ‘You have been increasing your pace steadily all morning. I reasoned that, like a weary horse at last come close to his stable, the scent of home is hastening your steps.’
‘I hadn’t realised.’ Geoffroi grinned back. ‘Will you not step out beside me so that we may march along together?’
‘No.’ Now the Lombard came to stand by him, resting a hand on Geoffroi’s shoulder. ‘My friend, you should go in to your kin alone. They may still have faith that you will return safe to them, they may have given you up for lost. Either way, your homecoming will be an emotional time, and best for family eyes alone, not witnessed by a stranger.’
Geoffroi regarded him with affection. ‘Not a stranger to me,’ he said quietly.