Our men stood there in silence. Nobody had complained too much about the punishment: Jehan had been stupid and the consensus was that the punishment, while brutal, was not unfair. We had all been warned about gambling; Jehan had ignored that warning and then, much worse, had tried to welsh. The men hated a welsher. Besides, although we knew him, he was not truly one of us; just a Provençal sailor, hired in Marseilles to crew the ship.
I was standing on the harbour wall, chewing on a chicken leg, with William beside me, and thinking about Nur. At my feet was a yellow cur, a foul limping street dog from the stews of Messina; half its fur had been eaten away by mange, exposing scabbed pink skin; its ears were no more than ragged tatters after many a ferocious canine battle and it had but one yellow eye. But the hideous dog seemed to be strangely attracted to me. It had followed me all the way from the monastery as I walked down to the harbour and I could not seem to shake it no matter how many times I kicked at it or shooed it away. It was a bitch, I noticed, and she just stared up at me from her position at my feet on the rough stone of the harbour with her pathetic yellow eye, quietly loving me. It occurred to me that she looked at me in exactly the same way that I looked at Nur.
‘Gi-gi-give her your chicken bone,’ said William. ‘That’s a-a-all she wants, give her the bone and perhaps she will go-go-go away.’ William was always a kindly fellow, and I thought that his plan might work, so I tossed the chicken bone to the smelly yellow mongrel at my feet. The dog snatched the bone out of the air with an amazing swiftness and darted away through our legs.
Well,
I thought to myself with a smile, so much for love!
On the Santa Maria, Jehan had been picked up, head and feet, by two of his fellow sailors, with two more holding the ropes. With very little ceremony, they threw the man over the prow and with one man holding the rope attached to his feet and another on the rope attached to his arms they began to walk quickly along the two gunwales of the ship, dragging their ropes behind them.
‘Stop!’ a deep voice boomed from the stem of the ship. ‘Stop, you vermin, in the name of the King!’ It was Sir Richard Malbête. He had been given a new role by Richard - he was now the knight responsible for discipline and punishment in the whole army. It was an office that fitted his black soul like a glove. But it troubled me to see the Beast getting close to King Richard and being given responsibilities by him.
At Malbête’s command, the two sailors pulling their unfortunate fellow under the ship stopped dead. I could only imagine what the poor victim was feeling, unmoving, bleeding from a hundred cuts and slowly drowning under the keel of the
Santa Maria.
‘You go too fast,’ rumbled Malbête. And summoning two of his men-at-arms, he had them draw swords and stand in front of the rope-bearing sailors, walking backwards along either side of the deck, only allowing the men dragging the victim to advance at a very slow walking pace unless they wished to impale themselves on the swords. Finally they reached the stem and, sheathing his sword, Sir Richard Malbête indicated, at last, that the sailors might pull up their colleague.
The victim was a mass of oozing cuts from his forehead to his shins; he had lost one eye, his nose was split and squashed against his face, and there were deep cuts across his belly and chest where the barnacles had sliced deeply. He looked as if he had been scraped repeatedly and deeply across his body with a particularly sharp rake. But he lived. He vomited what seemed like a gallon of seawater on to the deck, and while his friends among the crew swabbed gently at his wounds and tried to bind them, he coughed and flopped on the wooden deck, leaking gore like a gutted mackerel.
‘Tomorrow at noon he goes again,’ said Malbête. One of the sailors looked fearfully up at the Beast. ‘Begging your pardon, sir, but he’ll not survive another ‘hauling,’ he said in a respectful tone. The tall knight shrugged. ‘Tomorrow at noon,’ he said again and easily swung himself down into a skiff to be rowed the few yards ashore.
The sailor was right. The poor man did not survive the second keelhauling, and was dragged, bloody but quite dead, from the water at a little past noon the next day. I did not see it, for I was tending to my master. And feeding the yellow dog, who because of her skinned and battered appearance had been nicknamed Keelhaul, or Keelie, for short.
Keelie had not deserted me, as I had assumed - she reappeared as William and I were leaving the harbour after watching the punishment, and she followed us all the way back to the monastery. She had a pleading look in her eye, clearly wishing for another chicken bone, and though I shouted at her and even threw a half-hearted stone, she would not abandon me. So I decided to poison her. Well, not quite poison her but to feed her a small portion of everything that Robin ate. She would become his canine food-taster.
It was a plan that proved popular with Keelie. We tethered her with a rope around her skinny neck in a corner of Robin’s chamber and fed her choice portions from Robin’s bowl. It was William’s duty to take her, on her rope leash, out into the monastery garden morning and night and, after a few mistakes, when she soiled the floor of Robin’s chamber, she soon learnt where she was to go about her natural functions.
Regular feeding did wonders for Keelie. She quickly put on flesh and her fur began to grow back over the awful, naked pink skin. Her pathetic eye began to look brighter and, after a week or so, she developed a spring in her step that resembled that of a normal, healthy young dog. She looked well.
The same could not be said of Robin. Three days before the keelhauling he had eaten a piece of candied fruit peel from a bowl on the table in his chamber and he had become very ill immediately. No one could remember when the bowl had appeared on the table. The cooks and servants of the monastery had denied all knowledge of it, and there were dozens of candied-fruit sellers in the old town of Messina. The fruit could have been bought by almost anyone and, when Robin was not in his chamber, the room was not guarded so any man or woman in the monastery could have slipped in and placed the bowl of poisoned fruit there.
Immediately after eating the sugar-coated slivers of fruit peel, Robin experienced a tingling feeling, and then numbness on his mouth and tongue. He managed to tell Reuben, who had been summoned once again in his role as Robin’s physician. The numbness of the mouth was followed, Robin whispered to his Jewish friend, by nausea, vomiting and the flux, and a burning pain in his stomach. When Reuben had examined him he found that his pulse was dangerously slow, the heart struggling to beat. And Robin lay, grey, eyes closed and unmoving as his body valiantly struggled to rid him of the evil humours in his system.
Reuben could not immediately identify the poison, but he also seemed distracted as if his mind lay elsewhere; the King sent Robin a golden drinking cup which was set with four emeralds, and a message that he had been informed by the finest doctors in Sicily that the emeralds would serve to purify any poisons in wine. ‘A unicorn’s horn works just as well,’ muttered Reuben when he saw the cup. I did not know if he was being serious or not but he allowed Robin to use the cup to take large quantities of well-watered wine, brought to him by William. Father Simon came and filled the room with the sound of his mumbled Latin prayers and the smoke of costly incense to purify it of any harmful airs, and once again I smelled the pungent fragrance I had smelled in Reuben’s house so long ago in York.
‘What is that churchy smell?’ I asked Reuben when Father Simon had finished his endless beseeching of God for Robin’s deliverance from the Devil’s grip.
‘It is frankincense,’ said Reuben, not quite meeting my eye. ‘Do you not know it? It is burnt in every great church in Christendom. I would have thought you Christians would be entirely familiar with it.’
‘I know its scent, I was just not familiar with the name.’ I said with a touch of hauteur. I hated it when my low-born ignorance was unearthed. ‘So, frankincense, then,’ I said tasting the word as if it were a fine wine. ‘Does it come then from France?’
Once again Reuben gave me a slightly strange look. ‘Have you been talking to him about this?’ he asked, nodding at the sleeping form of my master on the bed - who but for the very slight movement of his chest looked as if he were dead.
‘No, we’ve never mentioned it. So does it come from France; is it the incense of the Franks?’
‘No.’ Reuben said nothing more. I stayed silent, too, and just stared at my friend, willing him to go on.
‘Oh, well, if you must know everything,’ said Reuben grumpily, ‘it is called frankincense because it is the ‘true’ or ‘pure’ incense. It is worth more than its weight in gold, far more, and it comes from my homeland Al-Yaman, in the far south, beyond the great deserts of Arabia.’ Then he turned back to his patient and ignored me. I sat down on a stool and thought for a while about frankincense. Was it truly worth more than its weight in gold? And every great church in the whole of Christendom was burning it at every holy service? Somebody was making a lot of money from this ‘pure’ incense. I realised that I had been staring at Robin’s battle standard, which was hanging on the wall of his chamber, for some time: the image of a snarling wolf’s head in black on a white background that always seemed to be leaping out of the cloth towards me.
An idea suddenly struck me, like a bolt of lightning. ‘Reuben,’ I said, ‘could ... could it possibly it be wolfsbane that is poisoning him?’
Reuben, jerked his head round and stared at me. ‘Oh my God, I’ve been a fool,’ he said. ‘An utter fool. I was thinking of more exotic Sicilian poisons. Or something subtle and Persian...’
Suddenly he seemed to come to a decision - he turned back to Robin and very gently began slapping his face.
‘Robert, Robert, wake up; I need to see your eyes,’ said the Jew. As Robin struggled up from the depths of sleep, Reuben peered into his eyes. He seemed satisfied by what he saw and turned to me.
‘He has been poisoned with aconite; as you correctly guessed, what we would ordinarily call wolfsbane. So I need you to find some foxglove,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing that I know can cure him. And don’t let him have any more wine. Just boiled water from now on.’
I looked at Reuben doubtfully. Foxglove was a known poison; why would he want to give a man who had already been poisoned more poison? And where on earth was I to find an English flower in Sicily?
Reuben must have seen my indecision. ‘Go to the herbalist in the old town, the shop next to the butcher’s in the main street. Mention my name, he is a good fellow and we have met several times to discuss medicinal matters; tell him that I need an ounce of powdered digitalis leaves. You will remember the Latin name?
Digitalis —
like fingers. Hurry boy, your master is dying.’ And so I went.
I found the herbalist easily, and procured the powder. But it was with some misgivings that I gave the little packet to Reuben, and watched him brew up a concoction of boiling water, honey, sage and the digitalis powder. He saw me watching suspiciously and gave me a hard stare. ‘Leave us, boy,’ he said. ‘Let your master have some peace to get well.’
I left, but I could not shake the dark thoughts that were gathering in my mind about Reuben. Could he be the one who was trying to kill Robin? It was impossible, surely. Robin had saved Reuben at York. But then, the dark side of my mind argued, Robin had also been indirectly responsible for the death of his beloved daughter Ruth.
Until that moment, I’d half-assumed that the poisoning had been accomplished by some wretch in the pay of Malbête. He had directly threatened Robin, and me, on the night Messina was sacked and I found Nur. I could easily imagine the Beast suborning a man-at-arms with money and the promise of a good position in his service, slipping him a box of poisoned candied fruit, and laughing into his wine at the reports that Robin was at death’s door. But a dark maggot was eating away at my trust; could it have been Reuben? No, never - Reuben was loyal to Robin. He would never stoop to poisoning his friend. If he had a problem with Robin he would either leave him or, if it was a serious matter of honour, challenge him to fight. But poison? Never.
But, argued my distrustful maggot, he knew about poisons and medicine - did he not just admit that he discussed such matters with the herbalist in Messina - and he didn’t recognise that the poison was common wolfsbane, which was odd ... unless he
did
know that it was wolfsbane because he had given it to Robin himself, and now he was giving him another poison - foxglove! I was on the point of rushing back into Robin’s chamber and confronting Reuben with an open accusation when reason was restored to its throne and the maggot banished to its fetid hole. Reuben was loyal; Reuben was a true friend. Besides, there was nothing I could do. I had no proof. If I accused Reuben, he might take offence and stop treating Robin, who might then die. For all I knew, foxglove might well be a miracle cure ...
In the end, I did nothing but prayed hard for Robin’s speedy recovery in the cathedral and vowed to visit my master regularly to check his health. If he sank any lower, perhaps I would consult the King’s personal physician. If he died, I would take bloody revenge on the Jew.
In the event, Robin began to recover. Slowly, at first, his pulse became stronger and more regular. His colour improved and within three days he was able to sit up in bed and sip the hot concoctions that Reuben prepared for him. I was terribly relieved and happy: Reuben was not the poisoner and, thanks to his care, Robin would live. But I had another reason to be filled with great soul-filling joy: Nur and I had become one.
One evening I came late to my cell, after sitting with Robin for several hours, to find William looking worried. He was waiting for me outside the door of the little chamber.
‘I, I, I think there is so-something wr-wrong with Nur,’ he said as he saw me walking up the corridor towards him. ‘She’s cr-crying her eyes out but I can’t understand what the pe-pe-problem is.’