For these reasons alone, and no others, he finally joined the earl's household. Of course, not everybody approved.
"Why are you preparing your infirmary in the open air?" Father Benan wondered.
On Zacharius's instruction, servants had now helped Henri move barrels of water and sacks of grain from several outhouses in the central courtyard in order to make space for beds, though these outhouses were little more than straw-thatched shelters with neither walls nor doors to keep out drafts.
Zacharius glanced up from where he'd laid out a central table and was in the process of arraying his instruments. "My dear Benan, the rooms in this fortress are noisome and stuffy…"
"It's Father Benan," the priest interrupted.
Zacharius smiled to himself. "If any patients are admitted to my infirmary while we're here, Father Benan, the best thing they can have is fresh air."
"But it's only March. And it's cold."
"In which case we bed them with warm blankets and place braziers filled with hot coals alongside them."
Benan chewed his lip uncertainly. He was a youngish man, but plump, with a pink face and, despite his shaved cranial tonsure, long, white-blonde hair cut square across the fringe. Though he mistrusted scientists in general, and Zacharius in particular, he secretly shared the doctor's penchant for foppery and good living. Even now, in the midst of a war, he wore white silk gloves adorned with his rings of office, and a white silk tabard over his hooded black robe.
"You don't intend to open a hospital for local sick people?" he asked.
Zacharius laughed. He well knew Benan's 'High Church' views on this sort of thing — namely that it was important to alleviate suffering wherever possible, but that pestilence was God's punishment for sinfulness, and that to combat it could be seen as a form of heresy. On previous campaigns, in an effort to win the hearts and minds of a local populace, Earl Corotocus had thrown Zacharius's service open to local peasants and villagers, at his own expense — much to Father Benan's chagrin.
"My question was a genuine one," the priest said.
"So was my response," the doctor replied. "You think after what we've done in this land, anyone would come here? Even if their bowels were riddled with worms, their limbs rotted with leprosy?"
Benan chewed his lip. There was no riposte to so valid a point. He eyed Zacharius's surgical instruments. Apparently the doctor had commissioned their manufacture himself, again paying out of his own private funds. They included forceps, a scalpel, a bone-saw, a curette, a retractor, and a curved needle. To Benan's eye, they looked less like instruments of medicine and more like implements of torture. Of course, in his heart of hearts, he knew that Zacharius meant well, despite his lecherous proclivities, and that these menacing items had no more to do with the Devil and heresy than the swords and spears wielded by the earl and his soldiers, but these were confusing times to be a priest.
"I hope you have cause to treat no-one while we are posted in this castle," he finally said.
Zacharius shrugged. "So do I. But for different reasons than you, I think."
Benan was affronted. "My concern for the welfare of men's souls is more important than your concern for the welfare of their bodies."
"That is a higher philosophy, Father Benan, that many of your fellow clerics no longer share." Zacharius fixed him with a frank stare. "First of all, the Church itself educated me in these arts. The Franciscans at Oxford encouraged me all the way. At Titchfield it was the same. But even among those few who objected, it's amazing how quickly a man's principles can be put aside when he himself comes down with a sickness."
As always, Father Benan left Zacharius's company frustrated rather than irked, nervous rather than righteous. He returned to the castle chapel, which was located beneath the kitchen, and sandwiched between the barrack house and the Great Hall. As befitted a functional military outpost, it was little more than a subterranean chamber, built from bare, grey stone and austere in that typical Norman style. The altar table itself was a slab of granite. The pews were stiff, wooden things, embellished neither with carving nor cushion. There was no presbytery here, not even a sleeping compartment containing bedding. He'd seen no altar cloths, no silver candlesticks, no precious vessels of any sort; no doubt, if there had been some they were now in the grasp of the Bretons or the Welsh.
The contrast between this place and his sumptuous residence at the earl's great castle on the River Severn near Shrewsbury could not have been more marked. There, he had had a huge four-poster bed with blankets of feather down, servants at his beck and call, good food, good wine, silver plates to dine off if he wished. The chapel there was lined with white plaster and inlaid with frescoes telling tales from the Bible. There were statues on pedestals, holy inscriptions in the footways. The thuribles and chalices were of white gold; the altar was bathed daily in the reflection of a huge stained glass window, which depicted the Saviour ascending to a deep blue heaven, his noble brow crowned with roses.
What did Benan have for a window here?
A cruciform slit high in the east wall, through which sunlight might occasionally find its way, though only via a series of connecting shafts. Even during daytime it provided almost no illumination.
The dour environment matched the priest's mood. Yet again, he knelt at the altar and prayed for guidance, though he was increasingly worried that this was a vain hope. Earl Corotocus, though a valued member of the royal court and a steadfast defender of the faith, was a cruel and violent man. He kept a great house and ran orderly estates, he undertook the most dangerous missions in the name of his king, but there was nothing Christian in the way he conducted his campaigns — they lacked both chivalry and magnanimity; he was rarely generous to those he defeated. Not only that, he employed a man like Zacharius, whose sins were deemed tolerable because of his uses, and yet whose uses were also of questionable virtue. And, of course, Benan himself was no saint, no martyr. He hung his head in shame as he prayed. He never spoke out against the earl's excesses. He rarely questioned Zacharius any more for fear that the doctor's glib tongue would tie him in intellectual knots.
The earl's army was in a poor moral state right now, Benan reflected. They had crushed the Welsh easily, without losing a single man, without incurring so much as a minor flesh wound. That had seemed very unlikely given the initial circumstances of this uprising. A number of English-held castles had been besieged or, in the cases of Hawarden, Ruthin, Denbigh and Grogen, captured. The town of Caerphilly had been burnt to the ground. To have then entered the fray and triumphed so easily, it was tempting to say that God was on the side of Earl Corotocus. But deep down inside, Benan had a nagging fear — based as much on common sense as on clerical instinct — that the exact opposite was true. And that God would very soon prove this.
CHAPTER SIX
"Countess Madalyn, what do you know of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain?"
At first the countess was too distracted to respond. They had emerged onto a barren hillside. After the green fog of the cave, she was disoriented by the glaring daylight. There was also a stiff, raw breeze. It wasn't as bitingly cold as it had been earlier, but her body ached with fatigue and she hunched under her fleece.
"Thirteen Treasures?" she said. "Artefacts… artefacts from myth?"
"Not myth, my lady… history." Gwyddon strode on. "Wondrous weapons of war gathered by the founder of my order, Myrlyn, as protection for Britain after Rome's legions were withdrawn. Yet, one by one, in the darkness and chaos of those strife-torn ages, all of them were lost. All except one. This one."