The Prince and the Pilgrim (16 page)

“Prince Theudovald’s father?”

“The same. He held Sigismund for a while, with his wife and family, somewhere near Orleans.”

‘“For a while’?”

At her quick look he nodded. His look was grim. “Yes. You might guess at it. He had them all murdered, horribly, the children too. Marius told me the whole. I shall not burden you with it, but with its consequences I must, and they are evil enough.”

She listened in silence as he told her the rest. It seemed that as soon as the victorious Frankish kings had left the field of battle and gone home each to his own kingdom, the surviving Burgundian ruler, Godomar, had rallied what troops he had left, and marched to reclaim his lands, and to take, in his turn, revenge for his brother’s murder. It was not yet clear what had happened; there were tales of treachery, and it was even rumoured that the eldest of the Frankish kings, the bastard Theuderic, had allied himself with Godomar against his brothers. Whatever the truth, in the ensuing battle Chlodomer was killed, and his
head
stuck up on a spear’s point for all to see. In spite of this, or possibly because of it, the Franks rallied, and after fierce fighting put Godomar utterly to rout, and drove him once again to flight.

“So it is to be hoped that things will soon be settled,” finished the duke. “According to Marius all is well in Tours, though of course since the news of King Chlodomer’s death the folk in Orleans have been anxious, and some have travelled to Tours for refuge, and the town is crowded and full of rumour.”

“Theudovald?” asked Alice, who had hardly heard the last part of this. “What about Theudovald? He’ll be king now, I suppose? Or is he – was he in the fighting?”

“No, he’s safe. He’s in Paris. Queen Clotilda took the three boys north as soon as the news came of Chlodomer’s death. King Childebert will support his nephews. He is planning to declare Theudovald king.”

The islands had sunk out of sight in the ship’s wake. The river had widened again. To either side was the same rich, calm prospect of trees in their spring green, of orderly vines, of water-meadows with their grazing cattle. But this time Alice, leaning with elbows on the ship’s rail, saw none of it. She was remembering the child Theudovald, who was heir to all this, and with it the legacy of violence and treachery that was the inheritance of the long-haired kings.

“So if Queen Clotilda is to stay in Paris till the crowning, we won’t see her or the boys?”

“It seems so. Eventually, of course, she must bring Theudovald south, and there will be more
ceremonial
, but she will be much occupied, and will hardly look for us to stay for it. We can plead her affairs and our own, and leave as soon as we can arrange it. Unless – would you want to stay to see the boy crowned in Orleans?”

“No. No, let’s go home!” She straightened up and turned to face him. “It’s a dreadful story. I liked it when we were here before, but – Father, how can one understand these people? The queen – she seemed so clever and so – so elegant – to start such a war, for such a reason! Is she out of her mind? Or sick?”

“I asked the same question, but rather more tactfully. It seems she has not been well, but nothing serious, some disorder of the stomach, brought on, says Marius, by the queen’s new habits of austerity. It appears she has taken to fasting and very plain living, a sort of penance, it’s said, in honour of the saint. And she wears rough homespun and gives her wealth away to beggars. A changed lady – but quite sane, as far as anyone with such a driving purpose can be judged sane.” The duke’s hand closed once more, reassuringly, over his daughter’s. “Be easy, child. These evil things will not touch us, and please God the boy will win free of them. For ourselves you may be sure that this will be a brief pilgrimage! Once we have prayed at the saint’s tomb, and spoken with the bishop, we will write our excuses to the queen, and set our faces for home.”

The royal castle at Tours was an imposing stronghold. It was stone-built, its walls grafted into the rock at the very edge of the river, which here flowed deep and wide to make a forbidding natural boundary between the kingdoms of Orleans and Paris. The castle was encircled by a moat, the water being let in by sluices from the river. The main gate was approached by a wooden bridge only wide enough for two horsemen riding abreast.

But once inside, the rather threatening approach could be forgotten. Alice and her father were housed in pleasant chambers facing south, and the furnishings were comfortable, even, in Alice’s room, pretty. The sun was warm on the stone of the window-sill, and the place was full of light. Swallows, here already from the south, skimmed and twittered outside in the bright air.

From this height the little town, clustered beyond the moat, looked clean and peaceful and toylike, with its red clay roofs and its melon-patches and flowering trees crowding right up to the walls of the great basilica which had been built a hundred years or so ago to shelter the shrine of the saint. It seemed a peaceful scene, no hint of
threats
to come, no sense that this was a border town of a suddenly weakened kingdom. The gates in the town walls were open, and people, beasts, carts bound for market, tiny in the distance, were moving through them.

But Alice, sitting by the window as Mariamne brushed out her hair, thought without regret that what should have been a pleasant and comfortable pilgrimage must be cut short. A day or two of rest, and her father’s devotions paid, and they would begin the long journey home. They had been assured by Marius that the
Merwing
would be at their disposal whenever they needed her.

She sighed. “Thank you, Mariamne. My gown now. No, not the blue, I mayn’t get the chance to wear that, but see to the skirt, will you? I knew that stuff would crush. Get me the fawn with the russet overdress, and the brown cloak with the hood. I think my father wants to go straight to the shrine now. We’d better hurry.”

“Yes, madam. The fawn and the brown cloak. Here they are, and they’ve travelled well. Don’t worry about the blue dress; I’ll get the creases out easily enough. Such a pity the queen’s not here, isn’t it? I was looking forward to seeing you in the blue.”

“It hardly matters, all things considered.” Alice, watching the maid as she smoothed the clothes laid out on the bed, saw that her eyes looked red, as if she had been crying. “What is it, Mariamne? It’s all very dreadful, but there’s nothing for us to be afraid of –”

“I’m not afraid. It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

“It’s nothing, madam.”

Alice suddenly understood. When she had told Mariamne that their place of pilgrimage would be Tours rather than Jerusalem, she had been surprised at the girl’s apparent pleasure, but the answer had been simple.

“Of course!” she said. “You were looking forward to meeting your fellow-countryman Jeshua again, weren’t you? Well, you couldn’t expect him to be here in the king’s castle, but I’ll see that we make time to go to the queen’s palace, never fear! Do you know if he’s still in her service?”

“Yes, madam, he is. I asked. But he’s not in Tours. He’s gone to Paris with the queen. He’s
domesticus
now, manages the whole household, a grand job, very important, they say. He would have to go with her. I suppose he’ll be in charge of all the fine doings when the young prince is crowned, but we won’t still be here then, will we?”

“I’m afraid not. I’m sorry.”

“It can’t be helped.” Mariamne, with a little shrug, turned to her work again. “And if all tales be true, the sooner we’re back home the better! If you’ll just sit for a moment, my lady, and let me fix your veil for you … There, that’s it. How long do you think my lord your father will want to stay here?”

“Not long, I think. Is that Berin at the door? I mustn’t keep my father waiting.”

Mariamne knelt to smooth the russet folds and settle the girdle at her mistress’s waist.

“Do you want me with you?”

Alice shook her head. She knew that Mariamne,
whom
she had always allowed to wait outside the Christian places of worship her mistress attended, had found the courts of St Martin’s basilica distressing, with their throngs of beggars, diseased, crippled and starving, fighting one another for the alms thrown to them by the godly, and crowding with threats and curses round anyone obliged to go there unattended. “No need. We’re to be escorted. There. Do I look sober and chaste, Mariamne?”

Mariamne privately thought that her mistress looked pretty enough to turn a thousand heads, even in church, but she merely smiled and curtseyed, opening the chamber door for Alice to pass through.

It was a stately little procession that set out across the narrow bridge spanning the moat. As well as the duke and his attendants and Alice’s waiting-women, there were four fully armed guards, and at the rear of the party walked two robed and cowled figures, Father Anselm the duke’s chaplain, and one of the queen’s priests, Brother John, their heads bent and their hands folded decorously out of sight in the heavy sleeves. The streets were crowded, but the presence of the men-at-arms, and possibly of the priests, kept the beggars and touts at bay, and most people went busily about their own affairs; but at the street corners there were gatherings, heads together, and anxious looks. Tours was safe, though the tide of war had not yet withdrawn; peace was not yet here in
people’s
minds. But nowhere did there seem to be the distress that might have been expected for the death – the hideous death – of the people’s king. A few loaded waggons were heading out of the gates, this time eastwards – the fugitives from Orleans thankfully returning home. One king dead, another to come; as long as their homes were safe what did it matter? Alice reached the church with a prayer for young Theudovald already in her heart.

The beauty of the chanting, the familiar comfort of the ritual, served both to soothe and smooth away the thoughts of death and the strange and violent future awaiting the boy she had known. She lost herself, as she had always loved to do, in the effort of prayer and in her own kind of communication with a God with whom she had always been on familiar terms. At one point in the service she stole a hand out to touch her father’s sleeve, and his hand came quickly over hers for a moment. The last pilgrimage together. After this – for him, his long dream of peace; for her, marriage, and whatever came with it …

Forget it. The future was God’s; this was now, her father beside her, and a ship waiting to take them both home.

They stayed for eight days.

The duke would have left sooner, but Alice could see that the long journey had tired him, so she persuaded him to rest, and, for the first two or three days, to make their visits to the shrine as brief as was acceptable. He was the more easily persuaded because he found that Bishop Ommatius was away for some days in Orleans, presumably over matters connected with the coming crowning of Theudovald. Ansirus and the bishop had met several times on the previous pilgrimage, and liked one another; since that time they had once or twice exchanged letters, and before his departure for Orleans the bishop had left a message begging Ansirus not to leave Tours before he himself could return.

Though the town was humming with rumour like an overturned bee-skep, the pilgrims were obviously in no danger. The men-at-arms who had accompanied them on the
Merwing
escorted them daily to the shrine, and (as Mariamne, awed, informed her mistress) kept guard over their rooms at night. In the absence of host or hostess, no use was made of the royal apartments or the great hall of the castle; their meals were served in
a
pleasant gallery overlooking the town and the southern slopes of the valley, and the major domo himself, an elderly man with a permanently worried expression, oversaw the men and women who served them. Their only company, apart from the duke’s own priest, Father Anselm, was Brother John, who (to his obvious regret) had been left to his duties at home when the queen and the young princes travelled to Paris. Brother John was young enough, and human enough, to find Alice’s presence something of a consolation, and for her part, since he was witty and easy-mannered, she enjoyed his company at table. But she could not help thinking that this last pilgrimage, in spite of the promise – threat, even – of excitement, seemed likely to be as lonely for her as Jerusalem.

They had been in Tours for six days when Bishop Ommatius returned from Orleans, and an invitation came for the duke to visit him the next day and remain to dine. Since their stay had so far been uneventful, Ansirus was easily persuaded to let Alice spend the day as she pleased, shopping for her silks and riding out, guarded as usual, to see the countryside. The impending festivities in Orleans had made sure that the mercers’ shops were piled high with rich stuffs, and Alice soon found what she wanted; then, with Mariamne and the men-at-arms in due attendance, she rode out of the town gates and along the track to the queen’s palace.

It was as she remembered it, but rather smaller. The pigs still grunted in their sties; cattle lifted incurious heads from their grazing; sheep and goats crowded the riders’ horses in the narrow
lane
, and a gipsy-looking child was herding geese across the courtyard where Alice and Theudovald had run to escape their guardians. But there were changes. Though the servants’ quarters were still busy, there were no soldiers there, and in the deserted armoury there was no stock of weapons. Nor – what they were mainly looking for – was there any sign of Jeshua. It was obvious, from Mariamne’s downcast expression, that she had hoped at least for news of him, but all they got was the assurance (from one of the stewards remaining there) that he was still with the queen in Paris, and was likely to go straight to Orleans with her when she travelled south with the new king.