Someone else was stumbling towards him: a robed shape bent over as if burdened with pain. It was a young monk, his tonsure a white circle in the gloom. He splashed to his knees beside the old, eyeless man who lay forgotten on the ground.
“Master,” he sobbed. “Master, they have killed you.” There was a black bar of blood striping the young monk’s face. Corfe joined him, kneeling in the mud like a penitent.
The terrible face on the ground twitched. The mouth moved, and Corfe heard the old man say in a whisper of escaping breath:
“God has forsaken us. We are alone in a darkening land. Sweet Saint, forgive us.”
The monk cradled his master’s head in his lap, weeping. Corfe stared at the pair dull-eyed, still somewhat blasted at finding himself yet living. But there was something here at least—something for him to do.
“Come,” he said, tugging at the monk’s arm. “We’ll find us some shelter, a space out of the rain. I have food I’m willing to share.”
The young man stared at him. His face was swollen grotesquely on one side and Corfe thought there were bones broken there.
“Who are you, that has saved my master’s life?” he asked. “What blessed angel sent you to watch over us?”
“I’m just a soldier,” Corfe told him irritably. “A deserter fleeing west like the rest of the world. No angel sent me.” The young man’s piety soured his humour further. He had seen too many horrors lately to give it credence.
“Well, soldier,” the monk said with absurd formality, “we are in your debt. I am Ribeiro, a novice of the Antillian Order.” He paused, almost as if he were weighing something up in his mind. Then he looked down at the wreck of a man whose savaged head was pillowed on his knees. “And this is His Holiness the High Pontiff of the Five Monarchies, Macrobius the Third.”
T HE rain had stopped with the rising of the moon, and it looked as though the night sky would clear. Already Corfe could see the long curve of Coranada’s scythe twinkling around the North Star.
He threw another piece of wood on the fire, relishing the heat. His back was sodden and cold, but his face was aglow. The saturated leather of his boots was steaming and beginning to split, what with the heat and the rough usage. Mud was dropping in hard scales from his drying garments.
He shook his head testily. The blood pooled in his ear had dried to a black crust, affecting his hearing. He would see about that when dawn came.
He was huddled under an ox-waggon, burning the spokes of its shattered wheels for fuel. Ribeiro was asleep but the old man—Macrobius—was awake. It was somehow awful to see him blink like that, the eyelids sunken and wrinkled over the pits which had once housed his sight. Corfe could see now that he wore the black habit of the Inceptines, and that once the garment had been rich and full. It was a mosaic of mud and blood and broken threads now, and the old man shivered within it despite the warmth of the flames.
“You do not believe us,” the old priest said. “You do not believe that I am who I say I am.”
Corfe stabbed a stick into the fire’s glowing heart and said nothing.
“It is true, though. I am—or was—Macrobius, head of the Ramusian Faith, guardian of the Holy City of Aekir.”
“John Mogen was its guardian, and the men who died there with him,” Corfe said roughly.
“And were you, my son, one of Mogen’s men?”
It was eerie, having a conversation with an eyeless man. Corfe’s glare went unheeded.
“I heard those brigands talk. They called you a Torunnan. Were you one of the garrison?”
“You talk too much, old man.”
For a second the man’s face changed; the saintly look fled and something like a snarl passed over it. That too faded, though, and the old man laughed ruefully.
“I ask your pardon, soldier. I am not much used to blunt speech, even yet. It must be that God is chastising me for my pride. ‘The Proud shall be humbled, and the Meek shall be raised above them.’ ”
“There aren’t many meek folk abroad tonight,” Corfe retorted. “It surprises me that the pair of you got so far without getting your holy throats slit.” As he spoke, he saw again the place where the old man’s eyes had been and cursed himself for his clumsiness.
“I’m sorry,” he grated. “We have all suffered.”
Macrobius’ fingers touched the ragged pits in his face gingerly. “ ‘And those who do not see me, though they have eyes, yet they will be blind,’ ” he whispered. He bent his head, and Corfe thought he would have wept had he been able.
“The Merduks found me cowering in a storeroom in the palace. They gouged out my sight with glass from the windows. They would have slain me, but the building was in flames and they were in haste. They thought me just another priest, and left me for dead as they had left a thousand others. It was Ribeiro who found me.” Macrobius laughed again, the sound more like the croak of a crow. “Even he did not know at first who I was. Perhaps that is my fate now, to become someone else. To atone for what I did and did not do.”
Corfe stared closely at him. He had seen the High Pontiff before, conducting the ritual blessings of the troops and sometimes at High Table when he had been commanding the guard for the night, but it had been at a distance. There was only the vague impression of a grey-haired head, a thin face. How much we need the eyes, he thought, to truly know someone, to give them an identity.
It was true that Mogen had purportedly made the High Pontiff a prisoner in his own palace to keep him from fleeing the city—the Knights Militant in the garrison had almost created an internal war when they had heard—but surely it was impossible that this wreck, this decrepit flotsam of war, was the religious leader of the entire western world?
No. Impossible.
Corfe poked the blackened turnip out of the fire and nudged the old man beside him, who seemed lost in some interior wilderness.
“Here. Eat.”
“Thank you, my son, but I cannot. My stomach is closed. Another penance, perhaps.” He bent over the young monk who was sleeping to one side and shook his shoulder gently.
Ribeiro woke with a start, his eyes brimming with nightmares. His mouth opened and for an instant Corfe thought he would scream, but then he seemed to shiver and, scrubbing at one eye with a grubby knuckle, he sat up. His face was a dark purple bruise, and the cheekbone on one side had swollen out to close the eye and stretch the skin to a shiny drum tightness.
“The soldier has food here, Ribeiro. Eat and keep up your strength,” Macrobius said.
The young monk smiled. “I cannot, Master. I cannot chew. There is nothing left of my teeth but shards. But I am not so hungry anyway. You must have sustenance—you are the important one.”
Corfe stared towards the starlit heaven, stifling his exasperation. The smell of the charred turnip brought the water running round his tongue. He wondered what ridiculous impulse had made him risk his life to save these two pious fools.
But he knew the answer to that. It was the darkest impulse of all.
He almost laughed. A soldier, a monk and a blind lunatic who believed himself Pontiff sitting under an ox-cart arguing over who should eat a burnt turnip, whilst behind them burned the greatest city in the world. It might have been a comedy written by one of the playwrights of Aekir, a sketch to keep the mob happy when bread was scarce.
But then he thought of his wife, his sweet Heria, and the thin, bitter humour ran cold. He sat and stared into the flames of the fire as though they were the conflagration that blazed at the heart of his very soul.
I T took an hour of soaking in the big copper bath for Hawkwood to lose the stink and filth of the catacombs, even with the perfumes he had poured into the water.
He could see them in his mind’s eye: the low arched ceilings of rounded brick, the torches in the hands of the jailers guttering blue with the stench and the lack of air. And the countless figures lying as still as corpses in row on row with heavy irons at their wrists and ankles. A white face would flash as one looked up, but the rest remained prone, or sitting with their backs to the streaming damp of the walls. Hundreds of men and women and even children sprawled together. There was blood here and there where they had fought amongst themselves, and a woman keened softly because of some violation. Hawkwood had been in sties where the pigs were fifty times better looked after. But these, of course, were dead meat already. They were destined for the pyre.