The horse threw up its head. Its nostrils flared.
The knight came alert. He stopped, his hand on his sword hilt. The animal planted its feet, drinking frantically at the uneasy wind, staring at the curve ahead where the road disappeared into deep woods.
There was only silence, and the breeze.
"The Lord God is with us," Isabelle said loudly.
Nothing answered. No arrow flew, no foe came rushing upon them from ambush.
"Get ye after the hind-bow." The knight shoved his helmet down on his head and threw the reins over the horse's ears. As Isabelle floundered out of his way over the cantle, he mounted. She flung her arms about his waist. With his sword drawn he drove his spurs into the nervous stallion, sending it into a sprint with a war cry that resounded in volleys from the trees. The horse cannoned along the road with water flying from its hooves, sweeping round the curve at the howling height of the knight's battle shout.
The sight that met them was no more than a flicker of red mud and slaughter as the horse cleared the first body in a great leap. The animal tried to bolt, but the knight dragged it to a dancing halt amid the stillness.
He said nothing, turning and turning the horse in an agitated circle. The butchered bodies of their former companions wheeled past beneath his gaze, around and around, white dead faces and crimson that ran fresher than the rain.
Isabelle clung to him. "God spared us," she said, with a breathless tone. "Swear now, before Jesus Our Saviour, that thou wilt liven chaste!"
He reined the horse hastily among the bodies, leaning down to look for signs of life as the animal pranced in uneasy rhythm, its hooves squelching wet grass and gore. The looters had done thorough work. "God's blood—they been slain but a moment." His voice was tight as he scanned the dark encroaching forest. "The brigands be scarce flown." He turned the stallion away, but at the edge of the clearing he doubled the horse back on the grisly scene again, as if he had not looked upon it long enough to believe.
"Unshriven they died," Isabelle whispered, and murmured a prayer. She had never let go of her grip on his arm, not even to cross herself. "Swear thee now, in thanks for God's mercy and deliverance—thou wilt be chaste evermore."
He was breathing hard, pushing air through his teeth as he looked at what was left of Mistress Parke.
"I swear," he said.
He yanked the horse around and spurred it away down the road in a gallop for their lives.
Avignon intimidated and disgusted him. In the murky, baking streets below the palace of the Pope, he stood stoically as Isabelle prayed aloud before a splinter of the True Cross. Behind her back a whore with bad skin beckoned to him, striking licentious poses in the doorway, folding her hands in mockery, running her tongue about her dark lips while Isabelle knelt weeping in the unswept dirt. His wife had barely warmed to her devotions, he knew from experience, when the toothless purveyor of the holy relic grew impatient and demanded in crudely descriptive English that she buy it or take herself off. The whore laughed at Isabelle's look of shock; Ruck scowled back and put his hand on his wife's shoulder more gently than he might have.
"Bide ye nought with these hypocrites," he said. "Come."
She stumbled to her feet and stayed near him, uncharacteristically quiet as they made their way through the crowds.
The shadow of the palace fell over them, a massive wall rising sheer above the narrow cobbled street, pocked with arrow slits styled in the shapes of crosses, the fortifications crowned by defensive crenels. Isabelle's body pressed against him. He put his arm about her, shoving back at a stout friar who tried to elbow her aside in passing.
She felt cool and soft under his hand. He was blistering hot in his chain mail and fustian, but dared not leave the armor off and untended as they moved from shrine to shrine, kissing saints' bones and kneeling before images of the Virgin, with Isabelle's tears and cries echoing around the sepulchers. Now this new shrinking, her snugging against him, fitting into the circle of his arm as she'd been used to do made piety even more difficult to maintain.
He tried to subdue his lustful thoughts. He prayed as they joined the stream of supplicants forging up the slope to the palace gate, but he was not such a hand at it as Isabelle. She'd always been a chatterer—it was her voice that had first caught his attention in the Coventry market, a pretty voice and a pretty burgher's daughter, with a giddy laugh and a smile that made his knees weak—he'd felt amazed to win her with nothing to offer but the plans and dreams he lived on as if they were meat and bread.
But there had been only a few sweet weeks of kissing and bedding, with Isabelle as loving and eager for it as himself, before the king's army had called him to France. When he'd come back, knighted on the field at Poitiers, full of the future, triumphant and appalled and eager to bury himself and the bloodshed in the clean tender arms of his wife—he'd come back, and found that God had turned her dizzy prattle into prophecy.
For a sevennight he'd had his way with her, in spite of the weeping, in spite of the praying and begging, in spite of the scolds, but when she'd taken to screaming, he'd found it more than he could endure. He'd thought he ought to beat her; that was her father's advice, and sure it was that Ruck would gladly beat her or mayhap even strangle her when she was in the full flow of pious exhortations—but instead she'd beseeched him to take her on pilgrimage across the heap of war-torn ruins that was France. And here he was, not certain if it was God's will or a girl's, certain only that his heart was full of lechery and his body seethed with need.
They entered the palace through an arch beneath two great conical towers, passing under them to an immense courtyard, larger than any castle he'd ever seen, teeming with beggars and clergy and hooded travelers. The clerics and finer folk seemed to know where to go; the plain pilgrims like themselves wandered with aimless bafflement, or joined a procession that ran twice around the perimeter and ended at a knot of priests and clerks.
Isabelle began to tremble in his arms. He felt her bones dissolve; she sank from his grip to the pavement, with a hundred pairs of feet scuffing busily past. As her wail rose above the noise, people began to pause.
Ruck was growing inured to it. He even began to see the advantages—not a quarter hour elapsed before they had a church official escorting them past the more mundane supplicants and into a great columned and vaulted chamber full of people.
The echoing roar of discourse stopped his ears. The ceiling arched above, studded with brilliant golden stars on a blue field and painted with figures bearing scrolls. He recognized Saint John and the Twenty Prophets. His eyes kept sliding upward, drawn by the gilded radiance, the vivid color—abruptly the clerk pushed him, and he collapsed onto a bench. Isabelle looked back over her shoulder at him with her hand outstretched and her mouth open as she and her escort were engulfed by the crowd.
"Isabelle!" Ruck jumped to his feet. He shoved after them. She had been named heretic for her sermoning more than once. He had to stay near her, explain her to the wary and suspicious. He floundered into a clearing and found himself in the midst of a circle of priests in rich vestments. The robed and tonsured scribe looked up from the lectern with a scowl, the plaintiff ceased his petition and turned, still kneeling before the podium.
Ruck backed out of the gathered court, bowing hastily. He turned and strained to his full height, a head taller than most, looking out over the massed assembly, but Isabelle was gone. A guard stopped him at a side door and pretended not to understand Ruck's French, gesturing insolently at the benches. He glared back, repeating himself, raising his voice to a shout. The guard made an obscene gesture with his finger and jerked his chin again toward the benches.