She smiled deeply and genuinely as the barge approached him. He wanted to deny her a great welcome, she knew, but he could not. The people loved her and he had to be seen to love her too. Their cheers burst over her like the crashing of surf.
The child called from behind her. ‘Shall I see the angel, mama?’
She didn’t turn to face him but she replied. ‘Yes, my Charles, you shall. And it will see you, the true king. Then we’ll discover what favours Heaven will bestow. And whom the Lord God will curse.’
Dowzabel would not show his fear, though he was terrified before those great men in that desolate place. He had only once before been outside the moors of Cornwall and this city, with its close packed houses, its church and its stink, seemed very strange to him indeed. It reminded him of Plymouth and what had happened to him there, so long before. He would never forget the night the priest came for him and took him there, the night his nan had sung to him for the last time.
The magistrate had said he was too young to hang, so the church had cut his tongue for his heresies. Though it was seven years ago, the fear he felt in the ruined church brought the memory back sharp. The shears, the priest grinning as he cut. He’d crawled back to the moor and found the bandits again, the Devil’s Men as the people of the moor called them. His tongue had mended but his heart had grown cold with desire for revenge. His childhood had been a torment to him from then on. He wanted to be a man, a killer of priests.
He thought he was around thirteen when he’d been caught stealing from a church, been given a damn good hiding and sentenced to hang. The Florentines had come with their money and their swords and the priest had given him to them, after branding him.
They took him past Exeter on the day of the summer fair. He had never seen so many people, the roads pulsing like a river full of eels, but what eels! Men dressed in clothes of so many colours, women in dresses that seemed cut from the cloth of the sun, they seemed so bright, fine horses, wagons stuffed with food and wine.
But none of that now. Just these faces in the torchlight, these men whose scorn he could taste in his mouth, bitter as nettles. His chest was agony where they’d branded him, his jaw hurt – but he wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t beg. His captors were of Îthekter, the horror, the three-faced usurper who trod down the poor, whose followers built grand churches while their fellows starved. He had expected nothing but cruelty from them and that was what he had got. But big Abbadon would come for him soon, he was sure – Abbadon and the others of the Devil’s Men, not the ragged band who had tried to steal him back from the Florentines and paid with their lives. They’d take him back to his home on the moor, to freedom from pain and from lords.
The priest took the rope and tugged him to the centre of the church, forcing him to hop. His right leg was useless because of his ankle. The ash and grit dug into his foot, and the mud of the rain-heavy floor numbed his toes.
The priest said something in English. He got the gist of it. ‘My devil shows this boy to be useful.’ Dowzabel had learned English from some men in his band and, though he struggled to speak it, he could understand it well enough.
The fat one in the coat decorated with ferrets pointed at the one he’d heard called Bardi. He was angry and cursed in a language that was not English but contained some English words.
All Dowzabel could understand was ‘Not right!’ The other one, the dark one who spoke like Orsino and Arigo, his captors, said something in the same language, followed by one word in English. ‘Money’. Then the fat one was quiet.
The church’s roof had been thatch and, though timbers had fallen in when it had burned, it was still possible to move through the interior quite freely. Orsino checked the king’s entourage were all gone from around the church and came back in with a ‘clear’. So reassured, the thin priest took the rope that secured Dow while the kidnapper Arigo swept the floor with a broom. Then the priest took out a spade and began digging into the cracked earth. It took him a long time to make a hole about knee depth and one and a half man heights across. Near the top of the circle, Arigo and Orsino sank a charred black stake into the ground.
The thin priest then, strangely, started shovelling earth back into the pit. In a short while he had put back enough to satisfy him and he jumped into the pit and began to work the earth, using the ashes and charred timbers to make the shape of a man.
When he was done it looked as though a body, encased in cinders, lay in the bottom of the pit. The priest used the spade to take embers from the brazier. He sprinkled them all over the form, so it sparked and hissed as the hot coals met the cold wet earth. The priest took something from a pouch and laid it on the chest of the mud man. It was a small key, worked in fine bone. He put a ring where the figure’s mouth would be, placed a vessel of oil at its feet and at its head a clay tablet with four crosses on it.
He got out of the pit and gestured to Orsino. Dowzabel was shoved forward into the pit and tied to the stake on a short rope, like a lead, which tethered him at the neck.
‘Sorry, kid,’ said Orsino, ‘I don’t like this any more than you. I’m sorry. I’ll do penance for this and I’ll pray for your soul.’
Dow felt like retching. How like the servants of Three Face to torture you, kill you and then pray for your salvation.
‘Denledhiaz!’ Dow could not find the English word for ‘murderer’, so he used the Cornish. The fighting man did not understand him but could not mistake the scorn behind the word.
‘Someone’s filled your head with lies,’ said Orsino. ‘I’ll pray for you whether you like it or not.’
Dowzabel spat at him, hard as he could. Orsino wiped his face. pursed his lips and stepped backward.
The priest took something from a pack. Salt, or some white powder, which he sprinkled in a circle around the hole. He laid parchments around the circle, weighting them down with stones.
‘Dust from the tomb of St Lawrence mixed with salt. The demon will not cross it, that is certain. The names of God on the parchment give added protection,’ he said to the other men.
‘You’re certain it won’t cross the dust and yet you need added protection. Stick to preaching, father – you’d need to improve your patter to make it as a merchant,’ said the fat one.
Dowzabel had no idea what was going on.
‘Why the boy?’ Pole spoke again.
It was Bardi who replied. ‘Our intelligence suggests he can use the key. Both to open and to close the main gate to the first level of Hell.’
‘How many layers does it have?’
‘Four, we think,’ said Bardi.
‘And what do you expect to learn that your devil in London doesn’t tell you?’
Edwin smiled. ‘Tell me, Sir De La Pole. When you go to the Tower of London, if you had a question on affairs of state or philosophy, who would you ask? The gaoler or the noblemen, heretics and rebels imprisoned there?’
‘I don’t go to the Tower of London,’ said Pole.
‘Yet,’ said Bardi.
‘Aye, yet.’
Dowzabel shivered. The wound on his chest hurt, he was afraid, and he thought of his nan.
The priest lit an incense burner. Then he walked slowly around the circle, swinging the burner and intoning a chant in Latin. Had Dowzabel been able to understand it, he would have been glad. The man was summoning demons, helpful demons, the friends of the poor, the enemies of the great.
‘I summon thee, in a friendly and pleasant form. I summon thee, I confuse thee, mixing thy name with that of the most holy angels of Heaven, bringing together that which God has separated, AlasAlazatorel, MichMolochael, SimOrobosial, BalthasarZiminiar, MetatronBelial and LuciRaferphael. I warn thee, thou art surrounded by powerful magics and the names of God which you may not cross. I summon thee to the gate, as I have the key to open it!’
As a man, everyone but Edwin and Dow crossed themselves.
‘I don’t believe this,’ said Orsino. ‘He’s only a kid, a beaten up kid. He can’t do this.’
The chant droned on. The incense was bitter in Dowzabel’s throat, the night grew ever colder. He thought to try to undo the tether, but he saw that would be useless. The men who surrounded him were armed, well fed, grown and strong. He was crippled, his ankle swollen and painful. He wouldn’t have a chance. The coals on the man were dying, losing their light. Now something was wrong with his hearing. The chant seemed muted, as if underwater. The sky was black, full of cloud, no star, no moon visible.
He prayed in his mind. ‘He who is the morning star, he who trusted and was betrayed, he who will rise again when the trumpets sound on the final day, Lucifer, son of the morning, protect me here.’
Nothing happened. The priest kept walking around the circle, the hard eyes of little Bardi upon him. Dow’s feet were numb with cold and with standing for so long. His head swam, he couldn’t feel his hands and a strange taste like metal was in his mouth.
There was a sudden pressure all about him. The priest’s movements seemed unnaturally slow, as if he was wading through water. The clouds raced, as if trying to get away from the moon to shed light on the darkness below.
‘Ahuel! Ahuel!’ The thin, dark priest was shouting at him in Cornish. ‘Key! Key!’
Dowzabel was certainly not going to do anything that man asked of him. But then another voice was in his head, low and resonant like the booming of the sea.
‘I am at the gate. Release me. Touch the key.’
What are you?
The thought came unbidden.
‘A son of the light.’
Dowzabel saw the little key on the mud man’s forehead. The voice seemed so persuasive, so kind. Dow had suffered horrid abuses of beatings and branding – no one had talked to him kindly since he’d left Cornwall. He reached forward and touched the key with his bound hands. The pressure in his head released, he fell forward, held by the rope, bleeding at the nose. There was a sound like the tinkling of bells, another like the crying of a child and still a third like the call of a crow. Then another noise, a great scraping, like an enormous door, swollen on its hinges, being forced to open. Dowzabel fell to the floor, pressing one ear into the mud, pushing the back of his hand against the other to block out the sound. All the men outside the circle put their hands over their ears and the fat merchant dropped to his knees. The embers on the mud figure sparked into life, features formed on its head – a broad mouth glowing with coals, two burning eyes. The grating noise stopped and the thing stirred and moved, first an arm raising from the mud with a hiss.
He heard a cry from the men outside the circle. The fat one made the sign of the cross and shouted out some words. He shouted them again and again until the dark little man actually put his hand across his mouth.
The creature sat up, its body adorned in glowing coals like rubies and said clearly, in words Dowzabel could understand.
‘I am ashes, born of light.’
‘Oh God, not the poetry. Please not the poetry.’ On the barge the Queen of Navarre crossed herself, which the assembled people took for a demonstration of piety.
Prince John came forward on the bank high above her. He was a tall, good-looking young man in the blonde Valois way, but his expression managed to capture a mixture of brutishness and naivety which the Queen found deeply unappealing. She knew him well from her time at the court and despised the strain of mawkish sentimentality in his character that went hand in hand with his viciousness.
He bowed and gestured to his ape-masked minstrel who bowed himself and struck up a tune on a harp. Then the prince began to intone the poem, half-singing it in a high nasal voice.
‘Of all the fruits and all the flowers
My garden holds a solitary rose:
The rest lies ruined, every bower,
To this the sweetest bloom.’
The queen continued to smile and wave at the crowd, paying the prince very little attention. John looked somewhat nonplussed.
‘It is to you that the poem refers, dear Queen of Navarre.’ John was at least two men’s height above Joan, so she had to raise her voice considerably to reply.
‘Yes, I got that,’ said the queen, ‘very nice. Lovely that the Troubadour style is still preserved here in Paris, I haven’t heard it for years at home. Shall we get in before this river poisons us or one of us develops a sore throat from shouting? I’m sure it wasn’t so filthy in my day.’
‘You should watch your manners, lady, you’re not in Navarre now,’ said John, his face darkening.
‘John! We are observed,’ said the French queen. ‘You are welcome, sister.’ She and King Philip looked down on the Queen of Navarre from the quay. She clapped her hands.
‘The music and formal greetings.’
The musicians struck up and lists of titles were read out for all those present as Joan stood on the boat as if stuffed.
When the reading finished Queen Joan bowed, though those on the shore might have been forgiven for thinking she was simply rocking with the movement of the boat.
She whispered into the ear of Count Ramon who shouted out, ‘You honour us deeply!’
‘Though her bow is shallow,’ said the king.
Joan suddenly found her voice. ‘You must forgive me, brother, I am not as young as I was and my legs grow stiff.’ Ramon jumped ashore and offered her his hand to help her up the steps, but the queen ignored it and fairly sprang from the boat.
The count jumped after her and took her hand to escort her up the sloping jetty, the ladies-in-waiting, courtiers and servants rushing to catch up.
At the top of the slope she faced the king and queen, and they all turned together to wave to the people on either side of the bank.
‘We will proceed directly to the homage,’ said Philip. ‘I have erected a stage for the people to see you bow your knee and kiss my hands.’
‘My lord, I am a woman, as you have so consistently pointed out. What does my homage mean? You should take it from my son. Though I fear he is not a clever boy and is going through a phase of biting. Is it good for the dignity of kings to be bitten?’