The Raven's Head (54 page)

‘I’m famished and we need to find a safe place to build a fire and hide the cart for the night. I don’t want outlaws stumbling into us. We’ll search for your family again tomorrow, Regulus. But try to think this time. You must remember something about the place other than trees.’

The boy glanced anxiously at Gisa, gnawing on his finger.

‘Well,’ I demand in exasperation, ‘can’t you remember anything about the route you took to the abbey that night?’

‘I . . .’ he squirmed ‘. . . don’t want to.’

‘What do you mean you don’t want to?’

‘Don’t want to go back to the forest. I’m not Wilky any more. They won’t want me.’ He touched the cast on his broken leg.

‘Course they’ll want you.’ I tried to sound convincing. But would they? He’d told us his parents had given him to the canons. Perhaps they wouldn’t welcome another mouth to feed, especially if that leg didn’t heal straight. No one had wanted me as a brat until I’d learned to make myself useful. But we couldn’t very well leave him here.

‘Look,’ I said firmly, ‘it’s either your family or back to the abbey. You can’t fend for yourself. I had to at your age and I wouldn’t recommend it even with two sound legs. Who’s going to feed you or build a fire to keep you warm until your leg mends? Have you thought of that?’

‘Gisa could,’ he said sullenly.

I snorted. ‘We can’t take care of you on the road.’

If he thought I was going to saddle myself with a crippled brat, he was gravely mistaken. He wasn’t my responsibility. Besides, I suddenly realised that, for some strange reason, I wanted to be alone with Gisa.

‘
We
,’ Gisa said coldly. ‘What makes you think I’ll be travelling with you? I only came this far with you to see the boy home. Tomorrow I go my own way.’

I was crushed and not a little hurt. I’d assumed Gisa would beg me to take her along. Of course I wasn’t in love with the girl. I’d resolved never to fall in love with any woman after the treacherous Amée, but I’d thought Gisa had taken a fancy to me and regarded me as her protector.

‘You’ve never lived on the road,’ I told her. ‘You haven’t the faintest notion how hard it is, especially for a woman. You’ll starve within a week, if you don’t get murdered first. You’ve no idea how many rogues and cut-throats there are out there – and don’t imagine they’ll spare you because of your sex. They’ll see you as easy prey.’

‘I’ve hardly lived my life so far without danger,’ she said coolly. ‘Given what my own grandfather tried to do to me, I rather think I’d be safer taking care of myself. I have skills enough to earn my bread and I must get used to being alone. My blood is tainted, remember. Whether the traitor was my father or grandfather scarcely matters, I am still attainted.’

She jerked her chin up as if the thought pleased her and she could spit her defiance in the face of the whole world.

‘I’ll take care of myself, too,’ Regulus said fiercely. ‘Not going back to the forest and I’m not going to the abbey! If Felix was here we’d take care of each other. We wouldn’t need no one. We swore . . .’ Tears as fat as slugs began to slide down his face. ‘Why didn’t Felix jump with me? Even if he got broken too, I would have looked after him. I would have fetched him food.’

Regulus gazed up at Gisa as if he thought she could set a cast around his grief and mend it. ‘Father Arthmael said if I killed the man in the black robe he could make the people who are dead alive again. My – my brothers in the forest and Mighel and Peter, they’d all have come alive again if I’d killed the wizard. I should have killed him. I should have . . . It’s my fault Felix is dead! I’ll kill every man in the world to make him alive again. I will. I will!’

He covered his head with his hands and howled. Gisa, folding him in her arms, cradled his face to her chest, rocking him back and forward. ‘It isn’t your fault,’ she murmured. ‘Killing Sylvain wouldn’t have made the dead live. Sylvain has been killed, and the dead have not come to life. But we will find a way one day. The answer is in there, I know it. We will make the dead live again.’

Regulus raised his tear-stained face. ‘Together?’

Gisa nodded gravely.

‘
We?
’ I asked, a trifle sarcastically.

She shrugged. ‘If I’m to take the boy, I’ll need the cart, so I suppose all three of us will have to travel together.’ Then, seeing my grin, she added, ‘But just until he’s fit enough to walk. Not a day longer.’

My grin only deepened. I was certain I would have persuaded her long before then that she needed me.

A sudden
pruk-pruk-pruk
reverberated through the trees above us. The boy glanced up, as if he expected to see a living raven perched in the branches above us. I knew that cry came from no bird of flesh and feathers. But it was not coming from my pack.

Gisa was staring at her own sack. The cry came again, insistent, triumphant. Her brow creased in puzzlement. She dragged the bundle towards her and began to empty it, pulling out a blanket, flint and steel for making fire and some of the meagre supplies of food she had taken from the manor. She half drew out an object wrapped in cloth that looked as if it might have been a book. I should know: I’d seen more of those in my short life than most men see in a dozen generations. She flushed, hastily thrusting it back into the sack as if she didn’t want me to see it. But before I had time to ask her what it was, something rolled out into her lap. The setting sun caught the shining metal, turning it blood red.

I stared at it, aghast. ‘You swore to me you would take nothing from your grandfather’s house, save food. And that . . . that is the most dangerous thing you could have chosen. I told you to leave it in the charnel house. It’s cursed, possessed. Don’t you realise that this is what led me to your grandfather’s house and nearly got us both killed?’

She stared. ‘But I didn’t touch it. Don’t you remember? You dragged me out of there with you. How could I have picked it up?’

‘Then I don’t know how it got there, but I do know one thing. You have to throw it away. Now! Hurl it as far into those trees as you can and then we’re getting out of here.’

Gisa lifted her head and gazed straight at me. When I’d first met her I’d thought her eyes were grey, almost colourless, but now in this witch-light I suddenly saw that they were the same vivid green as her grandfather’s. She lifted the silver head high into the last glittering rays of the setting sun. For one brief moment I stupidly thought she was going to do as I had told her and toss the thing into the dark mass of trees. Then I caught the expression on her face.

‘“Though a man be already crossing from this life to the next, though he lies buried in his grave . . .”’ she murmured. She threw back her head and laughed. ‘We shall succeed, Regulus. I know it. My grandfather failed, but we shall not!’

And as Gisa caressed the smooth, curved beak of the raven’s head, I swear it winked at me.

In 1215, the English barons rebelled against the unpopular King John and invited Crown Prince Louis (later Louis VIII) of France, son of King Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, to seize the English throne with their support. Philip and Louis had frequently fought the Angevins, and two years previously had defeated King John when he had attempted to retake Normandy.

On 21 May 1216 Louis, known as the Lion, landed on the Isle of Thanet, entered London and was proclaimed king by the English barons, though he was never actually crowned. A few weeks later, he took Winchester and soon had half of England under his rule. But in October 1216, before Louis could secure the throne, King John died and many of the English barons abandoned the Lion’s cause to support the claim of John’s nine-year-old son, Henry III. The regent, William Marshal, rallied support for the boy-king, beating the French army at Lincoln on 20 May 1217. Louis’s ships were then defeated in battle off Sandwich on 24 August 1217, by the British fleet, led by Eustace the Monk. Louis was forced to renounce his claim to the English throne in exchange for ten thousand marks.

Louis finally acceded to the French throne on 14 June 1223, but reigned only for three years. He continued to wage war on the Angevins and wrested Poitou and Saintonge from them. He constantly quarrelled with his own nobles, such as the powerful Count of Champagne, over issues such as prohibiting Jews from moneylending, which had provided a good income to the count through the imposition of taxes. Louis, like King John, always feared treachery among his nobles and with good reason. But in the end, he died from dysentery on 8 November 1226.

Supernatural Tales
–
Some readers may find it hard to believe that people would invent or believe a supernatural story that explained a family’s history, but it was not uncommon in the Middle Ages. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, rumours circulated from time to time that several of the noble houses of Europe, including that of Godfrey of Bouillon, Knight Commander of Jerusalem, were of rather dubious lineage. Godfrey was extremely wealthy: he had gained many spoils from his conquest of the Holy Land and had been lavishly rewarded with lands and riches by the Pope and other crowned heads of Europe for having recovered the Holy City for Christendom. He was held up as a shining example of all knightly virtues, for only a man of noble birth could exhibit such valour and courage. The only trouble was, it was rumoured that Godfrey was not, in fact, of noble birth.

If these rumours had taken hold, they would have undermined the whole of the feudal system, since feudalism was based on the idea that only those of noble birth could become rulers and leaders. At the pinnacle of the nobility was the king, who was divinely appointed and ruled by virtue of his royal bloodline. Serf or noble, God Himself had ordained your place in society. If the common people had grasped the idea that anyone could rise up through the ranks, they might have started to rebel. These wealthy families realised that the social consequences would be disastrous for them if it was proved they were not of noble birth. They stood to lose their power, wealth and, not least, their positions in the royal courts, so several such families, including Godfrey’s, whose ancestry was in doubt, employed troubadours or scribes to invent a story that told of a mysterious event or supernatural ancestor to explain why their noble line could not be traced through the heraldic records.

In Godfrey’s case, the story was invented that he was the grandson of the mysterious Swan Knight. It proved so successful that several other families claimed this tale as a means of explaining away their lack of lineage. Another supernatural ancestor who appears in several noble family histories is Melusina, the beautiful bride, who in secret would change into a terrifying mermaid or water sprite with a serpent’s tail, and whose image appears in their heraldic devices.

A glance at some of today’s tabloid newspapers, ‘true life’ or gossip magazines may remind us that even in the twenty-first century we are still willing to believe the most far-fetched and outrageous things about people, especially celebrities, who are, after all, our modern nobility.

Alchemy –
Alchemy, known as the
royal art
, dates back at least as far as the fourth century BCE when it was developed in Egypt by the ancient Greeks. The European alchemists of the Middle Ages inherited their traditions from the writings of the ancient Greeks, which had been translated into Arabic, then brought into Spain and southern Italy.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the practice and teaching of alchemy spread throughout Europe as Christians learned more about Muslim science, which was far more advanced than that of the West. Christian and Islamic students studied together at universities such as Pamplona, Palermo, Toledo, Barcelona and Segovia; great influential works of philosophy and alchemy were translated for the Church in the 1100s by scholars such as Adelard of Bath, Robert of Chester and Gerard of Cremona.

This brought about the first major flourishing of Western medieval alchemy, led by scholars such as Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), Roger Bacon (1214–92) and Raymond Lully (1235–1316), who were all devout Catholics. A number of the prominent alchemists were also highly skilled hypnotists, among them Michael Scot, a court astrologer for the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II. He is believed to have learned the art of hypnotism from the Sufis.

Later, famous alchemists include Sir Walter Raleigh, Queen Christina of Sweden, King Charles II of England and Sir Isaac Newton.

The Western medieval alchemists combined Christian theology and the philosophy of Aristotle, who believed in
prima materia
, the chaos or primal material from which everything was created and to which everything ultimately returned when it decayed.

They also believed that the four elements,
earth
,
fire
,
air
and
water
, each possessed two of the four qualities:
hot
or
cold
and
fluid
or
dry
.
Fire
is
hot
and
dry
, while
air
is
hot
and
fluid
. One quality predominates in each element, so in
fire
it is
heat
, while in
air
it is
fluidity
. One element can be transmuted into the other through the medium of the quality they both share. So
fire
can become
air
through the medium of
heat
, but
fire
can also become
earth
through the medium of
dryness
, because
earth
is
cold
and
dry
. Also, by taking the quality of
heat
from the element
fire
and
fluidity
from the element
water
, you can combine these two elements to produce a third element, which is
air
–
hot
and
fluid
.

Since the alchemists believed that everything in the world, animate and inanimate, was composed of the four elements, they thought that if the proportions of the elements in a substance could be changed through the various processes of
burning
,
calcination
,
solution
,
evaporation
,
distillation
,
sublimation
and
crystallisation
, it would be possible to produce a different substance. Thus lead could be transmuted into gold.