Then he pushed on south to Cheapside, where the farmyard bleats were drowned out by the clank of metal on anvil and the pounding of nails into wood or leather, as the blacksmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, tanners, dyers and potters all laboured, and the cowshed stink was replaced by the stench of the fullers’ urine jars. Cheapside was a magnificent, unending festival of trade. You could buy anything you wanted here, from a hot veal pie to a flagon of beer, from a Flemish-style hat to Italian-style shoes, from imports like French linen and Spanish silk to eastern spices and Scandinavian walrus ivory - from the words of an apocalyptic preacher that would fire your soul, to the moist quim of a girl to soothe your body. For Harry this was a wonderful place to be, for all the stinks and the filth and the crowding, and the beggars that swarmed like crows pleading for spare farthings.
Harry was Oxford born and bred, but he was a merchant, and England’s capital of business felt like a second home to him. And in Cheapside industry and commerce pulsed as nowhere else in England.
But today Harry was not here for trade.
He pushed further south still, past the walls of Saint Paul’s, and through narrowing streets lined with warehouses. Their walls were plastered with posters bearing apocalyptic pronouncements from the Bible. He looked at the posters curiously, for they were printed, a novelty still rare in Oxford.
He came at last to the river bank. He could just make out the brown, filthy water through a forest of cranes and ships’ masts and furled sails, and he could hear the cursing of the stevedores in a dozen languages. He was near the old bridge, the only span over the river to the south bank. To his left there was the ugly pile of the Tower, to his right the great palace of Westminster with the abbey beyond, in their suburb around the bend of the river. He turned right and walked perhaps a quarter of a mile along the bank. When he came to the ancient dock road called the Strand he cut north, heading inland past more warehouses and factories.
And here he found, just where the monk’s letter had described, a small, gloomy parish church, its roughly cut stone stained black by city soot. Chantries clustered around the church, chapels devoted to the souls of the long-dead rich. A stone tablet told him that the church was dedicated to Saint Agnes, a virginal martyr of Rome, and his sister’s patron saint.
He felt a deep reluctance to enter. But it was to here that he had been summoned.
The letter from the monk had arrived in a pile of business correspondence. At his home in Oxford, Harry Wooler had read the letter, from a Carthusian called Geoffrey Cotesford, with a sinking heart, for it concerned a matter of conscience. Harry didn’t regard himself as a sinful man, but he preferred to stick to commerce, and leave the affairs of the soul to others. But he could scarcely ignore this summons, for it had concerned his sister, Agnes, lost since Harry was a boy.
The church’s heavy wooden door was open. Harry stepped inside. The church was cold, its heavy stone walls sucking out the heat, and the air was thick with incense. A man swept the floor with a cane broom, a portly fellow in a loose black robe, but otherwise the church was empty. Harry knelt at a pew, crossed himself, and uttered brief prayers. Then he walked up the church’s central aisle to the altar.
He paused by an elaborate tomb that had been set against one wall, cut from some black stone. It was on two levels. Above rested the figure of a man of about fifty, handsome in life, well-dressed in a robe like a Roman toga, with his hands clasped in prayer. But on the level below lay the same man given up to decay, his clothes rotted to rags, his skin peeled back to reveal a cage of ribs, those praying fingers reduced to bone.
Harry didn’t like transi tombs. The hideously realistic corpses always reminded him of his own father’s death, and his final morbid mutterings.
But Harry was twenty-five now. He was a merchant, as his father had been before him, and his grandfather too - his family as far back as anybody cared to mention. As their name implied, the Woolers sold prime wool from the heart of England to the continent. Trade was what interested Harry - trade, and stories of exploration, of Prince Henry and his school of navigation in Portugal, of new routes to India and China and perhaps even to countries nobody had even heard of yet. Harry didn’t like transi tombs and chantries. He didn’t even much like churches, he admitted. Give him Cheapside any day, rather than this!
‘You don’t seem comfortable.’
The man who had been sweeping was resting on his broom, studying Harry. Harry saw that he had a crucifix on a chain around his neck, and that his black robe looked like a habit.
‘I’m sorry, brother. I didn’t realise - I would have paid my respects—’
The brother brushed that away. He might have been about forty, a tonsure neatly cut into greying hair. He looked sleek and comfortable, but his brown eyes showed a sharp intelligence. ‘And I should not have crept up on you - not before a tomb like this, at any rate! But I don’t apologise for reading your soul, for it’s written on your face.’
Harry felt resentful. ‘I’m not here to pray but to meet a man.’
‘Geoffrey Cotesford from York?’
‘You know him?’
‘Only too well.’ The friar stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Geoffrey. I am glad to meet you, Harry Wooler.’
Harry shook the hand uncertainly.
‘I was early.’ The friar held up his broom. ‘The door was unlocked - careless, that - and I saw the broom resting against a wall, and I thought I should make myself useful. You have a businesslike look about you - I expected that. I’m here on business myself, in fact.’
‘I thought you Carthusians were contemplative.’
‘Well, we are, some of us. But we have other vocations. I always had too restless a mind to be bothering God with my fragmentary prayers. So I became involved in my house’s business affairs. We Carthusians make a bit of a living from the wool trade too, in fact. And I have always been more interested in the souls of others than in my own, a disadvantage for a contemplative!
Your
soul is as transparently displayed as this poor old fellow’s desiccated heart, Harry.’
‘It’s just so gloomy,’ Harry admitted. ‘Transi tombs and chantries, monks murmuring your name long after you are dead. The priests say we must all long for the afterlife. Fair enough. But why long for
death?’
Geoffrey studied him. ‘Ah, but death sometimes longs for us. You’re a young man, Harry, and like all old fools I envy you your youth. But as you grow older you’ll develop a sense of the past. And our past contains a great calamity, a time when the dead invaded the shore of the living.’
‘You mean the Mortality.’
‘The Great Mortality, yes. The Big Death. My own grandfather told me tales of what
his
grandfather, who lived through it, saw for himself. England used to be crowded, you know! But everybody was stirred around by war, and the cities were brimming with filth... Well. We were ripe for the plague. In London,
half
the population died off in a few years. Think of how it was for the living, Harry, as all those faces around you melted away. The shock left scars in their souls, I think. No wonder they carved these transi tombs, memorials of a world become a vast boneyard.’
Harry was restless, feeling he was being preached at. ‘You wrote to me about Agnes. Where is my sister?’
‘Far from here, I’m afraid. She’s in York. And you must travel to her; she can’t come to you. You’ll see why. But she’s asking for you. Big brother Harry! And, you know, to understand your sister’s situation, you will have to think about history - I mean, your family’s. Your ancestors weren’t always wool traders. You’ll see, you’ll see...’
‘My business - I’ve work to do.’
‘I know,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But you’ll come with me even so, won’t you? A spark of duty is bright under that woollen merchant’s shirt. I see that in you too.’
These words made Harry feel trapped. With a mumbled apology he hurried down the aisle to the door, and drank in the reassuringly foetid air of the Strand.
III
Spain crushed James’s soul.
The mule train plodded across a landscape like a vast dusty table, where nothing grew but scrub grass and rough untended olive trees, nothing moved but skinny sheep, and there was no sound but the raucous singing of the muleteers echoing from ruined battlements, and the thin mewl of patient buzzards. And, James knew, the journey could only end with more strangeness. For he was travelling to Seville, where, it was said, the Anti-Christ was soon to be born.
His companion and employer, Grace Bigod, was not sympathetic. She was a formidable woman in her forties, perhaps twenty years older than James. Her face was beautiful in a strong, stern, proud way; her greying blonde hair was swept back from her brow. And, sharp, bored, she picked on James. ‘What’s the matter, Friar James? All a bit much for you?’
‘Everything’s so strange.’
‘Well, of course it’s strange. We’re a long way from England now.’ Her fine nostrils flared as she sucked in the air. ‘Smell it! That spicy dryness, the wind straight off the flats of the Maghrib. My family have roots in the Outremer, you know.’
He nodded. It was well known in James’s house in Buxton that Grace and her family were descended from a woman called Joan, who had fled Jerusalem when it fell to the Saracens more than two centuries ago.
‘Maybe the country of the Outremer is like this - hot, dry, dusty. Maybe there is something in the very air that pulls at my blood. Or maybe it’s the stink of the last Muslims in Spain, holed up in Granada. This is the crucible of the whole world, James! The place where the sword-tip of Christianity meets the scimitar-tip of the Moors, a single point of white heat. What do you think?’
James saw only a landscape wrecked by war and emptied by plague. He turned inward, trying not to see. He longed to be safely enclosed within the reassuring routines of his Franciscan monastery.
But Grace and her forebears were generous supporters of the house, and had been for generations. It was through her family’s influence that the house was committed to its strange and dark project, a secretive work centuries old. It was through Grace’s influence that James, who longed only for a life of scholarship devoted to the peace of Christ, found himself studying terrible weapons of war.
And it was through her influence, her peculiar desire to bring on the end of the world, that he had been dragged from his book-lined cell and been brought all the way across Europe to this desolate, prickly landscape. Her purpose was to sell her Engines of God to the King and Queen of Spain, and she had a copy of the Codex of Aethelmaer, and a summary of two centuries’ worth of its development, tucked in her bags.
James did not want to be here. But there was purpose in all things, he told himself. God would show him the true path through the strange experiences to come. He crossed himself and mumbled a prayer.
Grace watched him, hard-eyed, analytical, and she laughed. She was a vigorous, physical woman. Sometimes she stared at him, as if wondering what shape his body was under his habit. And at night, when they stopped in towns or taverns, she would come close to him, brushing past so he could smell her hair, and see the softness of her skin. James knew she felt not the remotest attraction to him, and that this was all part of her bullying of him. But he was unused to women, and his youthful body’s reaction to her teasing left him tormented. She made him feel crushed, pale and pasty and worthless, less than a man. And she knew it.
It was a relief when the caravan at last reached Seville, and James was able to get away from her company, if only for a short while. But Seville had its own mysteries.
The Guadalquivir reminded him a little of the Thames in London. Navigable from the sea, the river was crowded with ships, and the wharves and jetties were a hive of activity, where sailors and dockers, beggars, whores and urchins worked and laughed, fought and argued in a dozen languages - the usual folk of the river, James thought, just as you would find in London. Trade shaped the city’s communities too; Seville was home to officers and sailors who had participated in Spain’s explorations of the Ocean Sea, and there were Genoese and Florentine bankers and merchants everywhere.
But in other ways Seville was quite unlike London. He walked to the site of a grand cathedral, bristling with scaffolding. It would be the largest in the world, it was said. But it had been built on the site of the city’s Moorish mosque, and a surviving muezzin tower still loomed over it; slim and exquisite, the tower would always draw the eye away from the solid pile of the Christian church.
And just over the plaza from the cathedral was an old Moorish fortress-palace which the Moors called the
al-qasr al-Mubarak,
and the Christians called the Alcazar. James peered curiously through its arched doorways. Though the Moors had been expelled from Seville by the city’s conquerors, later generations of Christian rulers had brought back craftsmen from Granada to work on these buildings, maintaining and even enhancing them.
Seville was not like London, then, where with their forts and cathedrals the conquering Normans had erased any symbol of the old Saxon state. Here the spirit of the Moors lived on in a Christian country.
Perhaps things were going to change, however. Two hundred and thirty years after its conquest Seville was still the southernmost Christian city in Spain. The great tide of Reconquest had stalled. The Christians were distracted by conflicts between their own rival kingdoms, and their vast project to repopulate the occupied country was diluted by the Mortality; where once the Moors had turned the land green, now only Christian sheep grazed. Seville remained a city on the cusp of a great change, James thought. Perhaps it was no wonder that apocalyptic legends had gathered around the place.
But James, in his first walk around this strange, complicated, muddled city, did not see a need for cleansing, but a kind of mixed-up human vitality he rather relished.