The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (64 page)

Even as he waited for the chimes to open the City's posterns, he had known that it was a bad idea, that he should have stayed in St Olave's and waited for a suitable ship to take him away from these shores.

Yet the pretence of being a lowly painter was a strain, while the skin-crawling horror of knowing that a Scotchman was on his trail like a relentless gazehound was more than his nerves could stand; he should never have revealed himself to Kirkpatrick and Bruce and that Herdmanston lord at all, he knew now – but the chance of revenge had been too sweet a taste to resist.

The bell rang an hour before sunrise and the City's wicket gates opened to the basket-carrying hucksters, the labourers, the journeymen, the beggars – Lamprecht hidden among them – and all the rest who lived in the stinking shadows of the City. And the shadow in the shadows, who trailed him, a presence like the crawl of cold sweat down Lamprecht's spine, which sent his neck straining side to side in a desperate attempt to pick him out of the crowd.

El malvogio, ki se voet te tout, a nou se voet – the evil one, who is seen by all and is not seen.

At which point, he was seen having seen. Suddenly, across the chafering throng of Ironmonger Lane there was only himself and the dark hole in the raised hood where he knew the eyes were; he fancied he could see through the cloak to the shining bar of steel hidden beneath.

So he ran.

Slow-worm blind at first, skidding through the muddied slime and the throngs until, like a dash of cold water, he caught the shocked, suspicious faces and brought himself to a halt; a running man in a crowded street was a thief or worse.

The lane was a maze that led to the sudden, broadening rush of the Cheap, already thick with stalls and people. He forced himself to walk, hurried but not fast and tried not to look constantly over his shoulder.

There were two of them now, he was sure. He stopped at a cheese stall, peering through the great wheels; yes, two of them. Perhaps more … in his mind, every man suddenly became a sinister hunter.

‘Is there a lover's face in that?'

The voice, rasping sarcasm, cut into his panic and, strangely, quelled it; the cheesemonger glared at Lamprecht.

‘You will wear a hole in that fine cheese with such staring – do you buy, or just look?'

Lamprecht offered a wan smile and moved away, half-fell over a large dog and was forced to jump it, colliding with something huge and soft, which staggered a little then cursed him. He looked up into the baleful glare of a fishwife, scales glinting on her folded forearms and a wicked gutting knife in one fist.

‘
Perdonar
,' he said, with an apologetic smile, but it was the foreign tongue that deepened the suspicious frown – and gave Lamprecht his idea.

‘
El malvogio. Lo baraterro. Se per li capelli prendoto come ti voler conciare
.'

Rosia Denyz was a pillar of Cheap, a hard-mouthed matron who had dealt with every attempt to rob, coerce and cozen her for twenty years, so that few now treated her with anything but respect. She did not understand foreign tongues, but she knew curses when she heard them. When the ugly little man grabbed up one of her own fish and struck her in the face with it, she was so astonished that he had gained ten yards before she found her voice.

‘Thief,' she bellowed, even though the fish was at her feet, giving the lie to it.

Across the other side of the market, Kirkpatrick saw the crowd boil like a feeding frenzy of shark, cursed the daring cunning of the little pardoner and headed after him.

Briefly he was balked by a string of horses coming from Smoothfield and beginning to get skittish at the crowd baying after an unseen thief – then he caught sight of Lamprecht, sprinting back up Ironmonger Lane.

He made a move past the flicking tail and shifting hindquarters of the last horse and slammed into a figure, the pair of them reeling back. Cursing, Kirkpatrick made to go round him, then drew up short, staring into the equally astounded face of Malise Bellejambe.

It took Malise a droop-mouthed moment to recognize Kirkpatrick through the grime and the dirt, the tunic that was more stain than cloth and a hooded cloak that was more sack than wool. When he did, he squealed, only later feeling a wash of shame for it, and ducked behind the man at his elbow.

Kirkpatrick saw this one, bemused, half turn to see Malise scuttling away in pursuit of Lamprecht, then turned back into the half-crouched figure of Kirkpatrick, who now realized that the man was with Malise. No henchman thug, he thought, a
serjeant
no less, wealthy enough to own a decent set of clothes – and a sword, which he hauled out just as the crowd jostled up, the cry of ‘thief, thief' thundering joyously out.

The sight of the sword balked them, spilled them round the man who held it like a stream round a rock. People yelled at him to watch what he did with that blade – then the shriekers at the back, unable to see anyone who looked like their prey, spotted the wink of a drawn blade and decided that this was enough to mark their man.

The
serjeant
, surrounded, slashed wildly and sealed his fate with the first spill of blood; the baying mob, ignoring the flailing sticks of the bailiffs and the wild hornblowing of red-faced beadles, seemed to surge on him like a tide.

Kirkpatrick slid away, moving fast but not running; ahead he could see the bobbing head of Malise. Keep him in sight, Kirkpatrick muttered to himself, a litany that kept the curses damped; he had not spent all this time living like a beggar to lose Lamprecht now. Keep Malise in sight and, let him lead on like an unleashed rache.

Malise felt Kirkpatrick at his back like the heat of an unseen flame, but did not dare turn to look for fear of losing sight of the fleeing Lamprecht, beetling along the Lane. He slammed into a Crutched Friar, stammered apology and had back a less than holy spit of viper venom – when he turned back, Lamprecht was gone.

Lamprecht, sweating and gibbering to himself like a madman, knew only that he was pursued by everyone and that, if he started to sprint like a frantic hare he was a dead man. He fought the urge, sidled round a stall laden with red slabs of meat, collared with succulent yellow fat and only briefly flicked his eyes to them where before he would have stood and drooled.

He should have left London ages since, but was, in a bitter irony that did not escape him, the richest pauper in the country, his bag full of unsellable bounty and his purse full of nothing but wind. He had to get away.

Now he was pursued – he half-turned at a stall full of cabbage and celery and saw Malise, knew the man at once and was transfixed by fear. Him too? Christ's Wounds – the Comyn had determined to hunt him out as well …

Lamprecht found himself staring at the shambles, realized he was at the place where offal was sold and the stalls were rich and ripe and dripping with heart and tripe, sweetbreads and kidney, pale white, blue-veined collops in strings and folds. Flies hummed like the murmur of chanting priests and the entrail piles on the stalls slithered over each other like glistening, mating snakes.

When Kirkpatrick came up on the place a moment later Lamprecht was huddled in the lee of an oxcart, mere feet away. If Kirkpatrick turned, he could not fail to see him …

Kirkpatrick felt it more than he saw it, a chill on the side of his neck and he whirled in time to see Malise launch at him, all snarl and feral scything with a blade that seemed to whine through the air, so that Kirkpatrick had all he could do to avoid it.

‘Ye hoor's slip,' Malise bellowed. Seeing Kirkpatrick hauling out his own blade, those nearest shied away, shouting, and a butcher called out to his companions that there was trouble.

‘Ye bloody-handed, cat-wittit crawdoun …'

It was a roaring invective to put fire in his belly; Kirkpatrick knew it as the sparks flew from their clashed knives and they circled in a slow-stepping half-crouched dance.

‘Here, here,' said one of the fleshers indignantly and made the foolish move of stepping forward with one hand out to separate the combatants – then he reeled back, shrieking and holding his hand, the blood welling up where Malise had cut him.

‘Murder, murder …'

The cry went up just as the ones of ‘thief' were fading into the distance and it was enough to fan the old embers into fresh flames; the baying horde surged out of Cheap, a wave that tossed aside a ragged, bloodied corpse that had once been a
serjeant
and left the gasping, weary, flustered beadles and bailiffs in its wake, washed up like flotsam.

Lamprecht could not believe his fortune when Malise attacked Kirkpatrick and kept those black eyes from him. He slithered right under the oxcart, jammed his fingers up between the boards and lifted his feet up in an awkward, splay-kneed stance, on to the axle. In a second they were moving and he almost laughed aloud at his cleverness, for he had realized in an instant that the oxcart owner would want beast and vehicle well clear of damage from a riot and men fighting with naked blades.

The cart lurched away from the shouting butchers and their shrieking customers, away along the lane, swaying and ponderous but fast enough for Lamprecht, who clung on underneath, like a barnacle to a hull.

He did not see the crush which spilled over a butcher's stall, the flood of contents like a glistening shoal of fresh-caught eels. He did not see Kirkpatrick, leaping back from another wild Malise swing, collide with someone's back, slip on the coiled guts and offal and disappear into the mass of it. He did not see Malise flung away from Kirkpatrick, losing his knife but slithering out of the fray and up an alley.

The oxcart driver wanted to see it; Lamprecht felt the cart stop, heard the man climb laboriously up into it, swing over and drop – then the world exploded in howling pain as the driver's thick-soled wood and leather clogs ground Lamprecht's plank-clutching fingers to pulp.

He shrieked, which made the driver move to the side to find the screamer beneath him, allowing Lamprecht to tear his fingers free and fall to the cobbles. He scrambled out, whimpering and stumbled away, ignoring the shouts of the driver, nursing his broken fingers and blinded by pain – by sheer animal instinct he headed for the one refuge he had known for some time now.

Malise, wiping his mouth and aware that he was covered in blood and guts and shit, sidled out of the alley and along the fringes of the howling maelstrom that was now Ironmonger Lane; somewhere in there, he thought to himself with a grim, hot glow of malevolent satisfaction, was Kirkpatrick – another second and I would have had him, liver and lights.

Reminded of his lost dagger, he instinctively looked down and round for it – then caught sight of a familiar figure.

Lamprecht, hands tucked under each armpit. Headed for Old Jewry, Malise thought. The little shit, putting him to all this trouble.

Kirkpatrick was still on Lamprecht's trail. He had not drowned in the writhing, sodden spill of animal entrails, but fought out from it with his dagger still in his fist, surfacing like a breaching whale into the rat-eyed stare of a thief stuffing offal in his jerkin before darting off.

Kirkpatrick hid the dagger, skated his way across the slip-sliding cobbles between the struggling, bellowing fighters. He ducked a swung fist, half-skidded on the slimed cobbles past a shrieking harridan and was out of the struggle, moving swiftly along the side of buildings, then up an alley in the wake of the hurrying Malise. Old Jewry, he thought. They are headed for Old Jewry.

Old Jewry was a sinister place, abandoned a decade before when Longshanks had expelled the Hebrews from England, immediately plundered and now left to the rats and the rain and the wind. Houses, boarded up when their owners fled, had been ripped open like treasure kists, though they found precious little of worth left from a people too used to fleeing in a hurry with all that was worth taking.

A few folk had moved in, the desperate poor who preferred to shiver from fear of what heathen devilry still lurked in the shells of Jew houses than from the cold and wet of no shelter at all.

At the end closest to the lane, where the houses huddled round St Olave's like children round a mother's skirts, a few Lombard goldsmiths had moved in. They were the unlucky spill of Longshanks' generous invite, who came too late to reap the benefits of the fine houses along the Street of Lombards and were now trying to raise the status of Old Jewry by donating generously to St Olave's.

The old church had been there forever, Kirkpatrick knew, a refuge for Norwegians who came to the City – he knew this because the Bruce's relations used it. He frowned, for the tall ragstoned edifice was where Malise was headed, sure as a night ship to a beacon.

Old Jewry in daylight was bad enough, Kirkpatrick thought as he crabbed up the overgrown street, with the gaping doorways leering at him and the half-splintered window shutters seeming to glare balefully, like injured eyes. At night, it would be a place of horrors, real and imagined, and he was glad to reach the sanctuary of St Olave's, sliding through the open doorway into the dim and cool illusion of safety, all balm to his sweating fear.

Voices. He paused, feeling the sweat slide down his back, but he forced himself to speak when he saw the owners of the voices – a priest in black habit and scapular, tall, gaunt and angular, arguing with a white-haired, red-faced man in paint-stained tunic and hose which an apron, as riotously daubed as Joseph's Coat, had failed to protect.

‘Ho,' Kirkpatrick hoarsed out and both men whirled, startled.

‘Is this some alehouse?' The red-faced man thundered, staring accusingly at Kirkpatrick, ‘where folk can rush in and out as they please?'

‘There is a riot in Ironmonger Lane,' the priest said gently, adding woefully, ‘again.'

‘Have folk come in here?' Kirkpatrick demanded in a rasp even he did not like. ‘A scuttling little man followed by another, black and spider-like?'

The priest looked him over and Kirkpatrick felt a spasm of irritation at how he must look; it had been bad enough when he was disguised as a beggar, in sackcloth hood and torn old clothes which stank of the cabbage smell you get from marinading in your own farts. Now he was slathered with fluids and watery blood and grease, so he realized he was unlikely to get reasonable treatment – the red-faced man confirmed it.