Revenge of the Rose (50 page)

“A trick,” Marcus echoed weakly.

“A trick, did you say a trick?” Jouglet demanded, shouting and yet barely noticeable to Marcus through his daze. “Sire, did you hear that, it’s a trick! That is not proof of anything!” The minstrel turned to Marcus and shook his shoulders vigorously. “Where did you get the belt from? Let’s prove you didn’t steal it! Speak!”

Marcus tried to remember. “Nicholas,” he gasped and collected himself a little bit. This was some horrible prank that was being played on him— by whom? Perhaps by Alphonse? He did not dare to look around the square in search of that fat wart. Or was this the cardinal punishing his refusal to poison Willem of Dole? “Nicholas brought it to me this morning in a package,” he said hoarsely.

“You lie!” she shouted at him. “You had those things off my own body when you took my innocence!”

“Somebody find Nicholas!” Konrad called out.

“Sire, if you please, he’s been called away,” Erec said apologetically, pushing forward out of the throng and bowing at the foot of the dais. “He was under my hire to go to my home in county Burgundy to check on my ailing mother. He will not be back for ten days or more.”

“Somebody chase after him and call him back!” Marcus demanded.

“He’s very fast,” Jouglet said sadly. Then, anger seeping back onto the freckled brow, the minstrel pointed to the plaintiff woman again and hollered, “Anyhow, she did this, obviously! She’s a witch I’m telling you! Burn her!”

“Jouglet!” Marcus said, horrified. “There are better ways to deal with this, the woman is obviously hysterical.”

“I’m not a witch! I am not hysterical! I am an innocent victim!” she sobbed. “If you have no reasonable explanation for how he comes to wear my property, sire, you must know him to be guilty. Will you excuse him because he is a friend of yours? Is that what justice has come to in the court of the empire? No wonder in Burgundy they prefer the justice of the papal courts.”

“Hear hear!” said Paul from somewhere in the sunbaked, squinting crowd. The Count of Burgundy himself was unreadable, as he was busied with something that appeared to be stuck to the sole of his boot.

“My court is fair in all concerns,” Konrad said hotly.

“Then find him guilty, sire!” Lienor demanded.

“Sire!” Marcus said, again stepping forward— again shadowed by Jouglet. They were now standing apart from the crowd, in the open circle, barely five paces from her. “I swear by my decades of friendship and fidelity to you, this must be some trickery or witchcraft, I have never seen this lady ever in my life, nor have I taken her virginity.”

“A trial!” Jouglet called out, smirking triumphantly at the distraught young woman. “He deserves a trial! And when he’s proven innocent we’ll throw her to the wolves.”

“It is only his word against hers, Jouglet,” Konrad said impatiently.

“A trial by ordeal, sire!”

For a moment, utter silence.

And then a chorus of voices from all around the square, from nobles and commoners alike, in cautious support of this suggestion, as Marcus himself went white again.

“The cathedral is right here!” somebody cried out— somebody who sounded a bit like Erec.

“Yes! And there is a holy well just on the other side!” Jouglet nodded, then turned eagerly to Marcus. “Won’t you agree to that, sir? With God as your judge you know you will be exonerated.”

Marcus hesitated. “What if God is cross with me for other sins?” he asked quietly. “The calling down of divine— “

“That’s not the way it works,” Jouglet insisted briskly. “I beg you, prove your innocence, agree to this— the woman is a witch, or working with some scheming charlatan. Don’t let her get away with this outrageous accusation.”

“Sire,” Marcus said, coughing, and Jouglet stepped out of the way so he could face the king directly. “I swear on the honor of every prince and duke here today, I am innocent of this crime, so innocent I’d stake my life on it. May the emperor allow me to prove myself by ordeal as reward for my years of service. Throw me in the holy well and see what God declares.” He held up his hands. “The emperor may order my hands bound to take me there, but I will go without a fuss. Because I know that I am innocent!” he shouted suddenly, his attention back on her.

Konrad frowned and considered the request, as a rising chorus of voices excitedly begged him to let this happen. Marcus had many friends at court— and many sycophants, who would try to get the king’s attention through him. There was a certain equilibrium that served everyone with Marcus at the king’s ear, and everybody wanted to maintain it.

But to call upon God to step into the affairs of humans so directly— that was not an easy call to make, especially for an emperor determined to curtail the church’s power. Konrad rather preferred that God remain comfortably in heaven and leave the emperor himself to mete out earthly judgments.

“Brother,” called out Paul, who did not care one way or the other what happened to Marcus now, but who was very prompt about public displays of orthodox piety. “Brother you
must
not do this! I forbid it on the pope’s authority!”

That settled the matter for Konrad.

“We will do it!” he declared.

There was a roar of approval. Marcus offered himself up to the enormous guard for custody, so that he could not be accused of trying to escape in the hubbub as the crowd, bubbling with perverse anticipation, crossed past the cemetery below the cathedral. Boidon threw the trembling accuser’s mantle back around her shoulders and led her by the arm down the brief, narrow lane, muttering to her on the way that if she were found false for accusing his friend, she might just accidentally find herself falling headfirst into a tanner’s vat. Everybody else in the crowd stared at her, pointed, called her names. She kept her head high and ignored them.

They reassembled at the pool with their backs to the sun, facing the church. The crowd had been large before, but politics are not nearly as riveting as a public trial by ordeal, and now more townspeople joined the throng, coming from the Cherry Garden, from the Street of the Emperor, pouring out of Cemetery Lane into the lozenge-shaped square.

The rosy-brown cathedral towered magnificently before them in the sun. The double-arched windows high up on the dome, through which only God could look directly, were shadowed slightly at the top by their own exterior casement, but the sun was beating down on nearly everyone without relief.

To the other side of the well, across from the cathedral, was a dignified linden, and Konrad stood in its shade. He refused the heavy wooden chair that was trundled hastily from the sacristy. The plaintiff was placed to the king’s right and the defendant to his left, with Marcus’s righteously concerned friend Jouglet standing beside him as he was shackled to a narrow log.

“I think there are stones in the hollows of the logs, to make sure you go down,” Jouglet whispered comfortingly.

“I can’t swim,” Marcus whispered back, not comforted, as two men attached his wrists and heels. At this point, he would have welcomed death, except he could not abandon Imogen that way.

The archbishop was called out of his private devotions with a wealthy spinster, and ordered to oversee the process. At first he did not want to, and Paul heartily endorsed his obstinacy. The church was coming to discourage trials by ordeal; there was talk of banning the practice altogether for being hubristic and immoral. (This of course made it much more exciting to the crowd.) The archbishop himself did not care for it. But neither did he care for an angry mob overrunning his cathedral, so despite Paul’s protests, he stood over the pool and blessed it, then addressed the crowd with the formal terms of the ordeal. “Marcus of Aachen, a royal ministerial, is shackled to this wood,” he said. “He shall be thrown into the holy pool, which does not accept the flesh of sinners. If he floats, if he is rejected by the sacred water, it is proof by God that he is guilty. If he sinks to the bottom, that is evidence that God has found him pure, and he is innocent.”

“And he is drowned,” Konrad amended, suddenly looking dubious about the idea.

“He is attached to a rope,” the priest corrected reassuringly. “He is drawn up again at once. Steward Marcus of Aachen, will you abide by the judgment of the Lord?”

Marcus nodded shakily. He was lifted by Konrad’s two burly guards up and over the sacred pool, a large stone well of greyish water that was four strides across and three times the depth of a tall man. It was in the middle of the green market, and there were doubts about its purity (it smelled slightly of cabbage), but nobody felt compelled to bring that up now— except Paul, who was ignored. The archbishop called for silence, and then the men released Marcus.

Marcus hit the greasy water with a loud splash, and people hovering too near pulled away.

He sank to the bottom, straight as an arrow, and stayed there.

There was a cheer from around the pool, as cornets brought over by Konrad’s heralds sounded brightly. Konrad sighed loudly with relief. The pretty young accuser’s face was unreadable. Jouglet laughed at her derisively; she ignored it.

“Pull him up, for the love of God!” Konrad shouted out over the noise, and the two who had dunked Marcus pulled up on the ropes, hauling him back to the world of air. They trundled him out, and he lay beside the pool, bound to the log and retching water.

There was more and louder cheering, as he recovered his breath and was unshackled. Then he stood, slowly, gasping for breath, black tunic sodden, black hair disheveled, fury blazing in his dark eyes. The crowd silenced itself with delighted, nasty expectation. “You!” he coughed, pointing to the young woman in the cleavage-exposing green tunic. “You,
ha
! I am innocent! Will you admit it now? I have never laid a hand on you. In the name of God, I have never even laid my eyes on you before this morning!”

All eyes turned to her. Looking still pale, but composed, she said simply, “You will swear that before all these people?”

“Yes!” he snapped back. “I just did! I just
proved
it!” Realizing he was safe now, he let himself feel the fear as outrage. “The Lord Himself has just proved it! Lady, I do not even know who you are!” he said with a triumphant laugh.

She drew herself up very straight. “I am Lienor, sister to Willem of Dole,” she said.

B
efore
sunset she was an empress.

It happened with such chaotic swiftness that nobody could prove who was responsible for what parts of the breathtaking turn of events, although really everybody guessed it was all due to Jouglet.

Konrad had looked like he’d been speared through several vital organs, staring in horror at his oldest friend. There was no need to ask Marcus’s response; his bloodless face revealed his guilt, and he sank to his wet knees on the cobblestones, his hands held up as much in prayer as surrender.

He was condemned to hang the next morning.

Konrad issued the sentence, but he would not watch the jeering mile-long procession through the huddle of town squares, in which Marcus, stripped to his shirt, was forced to carry a heavy saddle to let onlookers know he was a criminal. People spat at him, threw rotten fruit, waggled their fingers in their ears, and bit their thumbs at him, many without knowing what his crime was. The humiliating ordeal ended at the western gate, where he was locked into a corner of the city prison. The emperor avoided witnessing any of this by shutting himself into his private chapel in the cathedral, sobbing with rage and loss.

By the time he emerged, pale from exhaustion, a chant had broken out among the milling outdoor crowd that he should marry this clever and beautiful young lady after all. In fact, the conventional wisdom held quite loudly, it should happen at once. “Why not now?” cried somebody, who again sounded suspiciously like Erec. “We are at the church, we have a priest! An archbishop! We even have a cardinal!”

Konrad, seeing how apoplectic this made his brother, revived enough to announce he would like to do nothing better. He and Lienor, each in their own state of minor shock, hardly aware of the other’s presence, managed to exchange vows before the cathedral door. The wedding was blessed by the archbishop of Mainz as well as a scowling Cardinal Paul. To processional marching from tabors and pipes, they were furnished with horses for the brief, ceremonial cross back behind the cathedral and the market square into the high-walled palace of the archbishop.

The dais in the palace hall had been supplemented with a second chair. It took a good part of the afternoon to receive all the lords, during which time Konrad and Lienor hardly had a moment to glance directly at each other, much less speak. When the last and least of the lords, perhaps half a dozen, were still at the base of the dais, the entire hall was distracted by footsteps running, pounding, from the outside main gate that kept the rabble out, through the courtyard and toward the hall. The guards sprang at once to block the door against whoever was intruding, but the large young man in his best red and yellow dress tunic and hurriedly polished boots knocked both of the men to the floor with his bare hands.

Willem stood panting in the doorway, pale in the dusky light. He saw Lienor, with a gold crown flashing gemstones, seated beside the emperor, and voiced a strange sound of disbelief, relief, and confusion all at once. “It’s true,” he breathed. The room quieted, and all attention turned toward him. Unaware of that, he ran across the hall and threw himself skidding to his knees at the base of the dais. “My lord and master,” he said to Konrad’s cordovan boots. “You must forgive me for ever doubting the lady’s goodness.”

“Oh, Willem, for heaven’s sake,” Lienor said sweetly, and slipped out of her chair to throw her arms around her brother. The crowd cheered.

And then trestle tables were erected in rows within the hall, and the wedding feast began, the entire week’s rations for the Assembly of Lords served at once: bear, boar, cranes, geese, venison, fatted calves and suckling pigs, wines both dark and light, peacocks that appeared to have been cooked in their own feathers; one course was literally mythological, a cook’s surgical invention of an animal that appeared to be swan above and swine below. There were elaborate dishes of the finest aphrodisiacs: sparrows, sparrow eggs, and pears. For most of a lifetime, Konrad had assumed Marcus would carve and test the meat for him at his wedding feast. Instead this station was divided between the three who’d made the evening possible: Willem, Jouglet, and Erec. No mere minstrel had ever received such an honor; even Jouglet was briefly flabbergasted.