Yeeeoooooww!
Oh! Oh God, this is bad! My knees! My backside!
‘Take it slowly,’ says the priest. ‘That’s it . . .’
‘Ow!’
‘Hold onto me.’
I can’t believe how stiff I am. I can’t even move properly. And someone’s laughing, over there by the gate. Laughing at me. When he’s the one with a face like a fresh cowpat!
‘Hold on, I said.’ The priest is reaching out to help. ‘You’ll fall . . .’
Get off! Don’t touch me! I can—
Whoops!
Down off the horse, and he catches me just in time. Ow! My knees!
‘Are you all right?’ he wants to know. If he wasn’t holding me up, I’d be flat on my face. ‘Don’t fret, you’ll find that it gets easier. Your muscles will adapt.’
Well I certainly hope so. Help! Every step is agony.
‘Can you walk on your own?’ he asks. ‘I have to take the horses.’
‘I’m fine.’ Gruffly, so that I sound like a boy. (There are too many people listening. We ought to get out of here.) ‘Where are we going, anyway?’
The priest glances around. He seems hesitant, and I don’t blame him: so far, Muret doesn’t strike me as a very desirable destination. I remember passing it last year, and thinking how impressive it looked from a distance, with its walls rearing up out of the marshy plains. At close quarters, however, you can see that it hasn’t worn well. Though it’s been fifteen years since the battle of Muret, a lot of scars remain: lopped towers, patched woodwork, gaps in the battlements. Everything has a dirty, run-down appearance—at least compared to Toulouse. The region around the East Gate is all soggy straw and lounging militia and discarded nutshells. You can hardly see the cobbles for the manure.
Wouldn’t you think that they’d pick up their dead dogs, occasionally?
‘Those friars suggested the priory of St Gemer,’ the priest says in a low voice. ‘They mentioned that it’s near the Toulouse Gate somewhere.’
The priory of St Gemer! ‘We’re not going there.’ Thank you very much. ‘Bishop Fulk stayed there, during the siege.’
‘Bab—I mean, Benoit—’
‘It was pounded by the Toulousain mangonel. Pounded. With huge boulders.’
‘Oh.’ The priest frowns, and I know exactly what he’s thinking. He’s thinking about leaky roofs and crumbling walls. ‘St Sernin, then. It’s supposed to be near the citadel.’
‘Wait.’ By tugging at his sleeve, I can make him stoop until his eyes are nearly level with mine. ‘Must we stay in a cloister?’ (Quietly.) ‘Can’t we go to an inn?’
He shakes his head. ‘There would be more questions about me at an inn than there would be about you in a cloister,’ he murmurs. ‘There is also more privacy in a canons’ guest house than in the loft of an inn. Only look—we’re attracting attention already.’
It’s true. We are. (I blame the horses, which will always attract a crowd in an out-of-the-way place like this. If you have a horse in Muret, you must be important.)
I can see the beggars converging.
‘We’ll go to St Sernin,’ the priest decides. ‘It’s more likely to have decent stables.’
Very well, then. If you say so. When we start to move, we’re only just in time—because someone empties a bucket of slops from the parapet of the city wall. If we’d lingered, it would have hit us.
Someone else (that man in the green cloak, who looks like an interesting collection of unwashed root vegetables) laughs noisily. He scowls at my response.
‘Benoit!’ gasps the priest. ‘Where did you learn that gesture?’
‘You mean the sign of the pike up the—’
‘Shh! Behave yourself.’
He sets a course through the Chatelet, weaving between heaps of flyblown dung, turning right and right again until we reach the next gate. And here we are in the marketplace, which is long and narrow and set directly under the eastern wall of the city. At this time of day, there’s nothing much in it. Except for the squashed grapes and pig-mess and urchins with sticks.
The urchins all stop what they’re doing to gawk at us.
‘This is such a one-church town.’ Look at them all. No one in Toulouse stares at strangers like that; we might as well be in Laurac. ‘You’d think we had udders growing out of our ears.’
‘Shh!’ says the priest.
Ahead lies an inner wall with a gate—rather like the Portaria in Toulouse, only smaller. Even the garrison militia on the battlements are staring down at us. You can tell that they aren’t real soldiers. They must be bakers and cutlers and wool carders and rope makers, doing their garrison duty in borrowed leather and horn. Real soldiers wouldn’t take their eyes off the city approaches for an instant.
One of them spits, and his spittle lands suspiciously close as we plod past house after house with big cracks in their walls.
‘St Sernin might not be a wealthy foundation,’ the priest remarks softly, and it’s obvious that he’s looking at the cracks too. ‘I’ll ask for cells to sleep in, but there may only be dormitories.’ He glances down at me, and in a dry voice adds, ‘I’ll say that I must have my own quarters, because I spend all night in prayer and self-mortification, and will keep you awake if we share a room.’
Prayer and self-mortification? Oh no. Not another Dulcie.
‘What is it?’ he says. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’
‘You . . .’ (Let’s see. How shall I put it?) ‘You don’t go around beating yourself with a willow switch, do you?’
‘I don’t make a habit of it, no.’
‘Or wearing prickly undergarments?’
The priest regards me for a moment. ‘You disapprove?’ he finally asks.
‘Oh well . . . not really.’ It’s good and pious behaviour, I suppose. ‘I just don’t like washing clothes that have blood all over them.’
‘Ah.’
‘I mean, I’ll have to wash your clothes, won’t I? If I’m your servant?’
He blinks, and raises his eyebrows. ‘I don’t know,’ he says slowly. ‘I hadn’t thought.’
‘Well . . . I wouldn’t worry about it. Not yet. They look pretty clean to me.’ That hem, for instance, can be brushed. ‘You probably won’t need anything washed for another two weeks, if it doesn’t rain.’
‘I see.’
‘Black’s a good colour, too. Not even blood shows up on black.’
‘Oh, there won’t be any blood.’ He clears his throat. ‘You must understand that any reference to self-mortification would be purely a means of gaining you your own private room. Personally, I find that flesh is torment enough without seeping scars. Or scratchy drawers.’
Hear, hear. My own flesh is killing me. But I have to keep walking; I have to hobble through the inner gate, and turn right—because there’s no street leading straight up to St Sernin. Though I can see the church tower over the roofs in front of us, getting to it will be a matter of following the line of the outer defences. Otherwise we’re going to get lost.
There’s a woman (a wet nurse?) sitting on an upturned bucket, suckling a baby in a small patch of late-afternoon sun. She glares at the priest as we go by, and I wonder: is she a believer? Just in case she is, I’d better keep my head down. If she’s a believer, she might have been to Laurac or Castelnaudary. She might know someone who knows someone who knows me.
The priest, for his part, doesn’t notice the woman. Or doesn’t seem to notice her, anyway—perhaps because her big, white breast is exposed to the air. Priests might be lecherous, but they know how to hide it. Mostly they behave as if women don’t exist.
Ah! And here’s a well. I was wondering when we’d reach one. You always find people sitting around a well, and in Muret it’s no different; about ten people watch us trudge past, their chatter dying on their tongues. One or two of them bow slightly to the priest. A bareheaded girl whispers to her friend, who giggles.
Up ahead looms the citadel, throwing long, deep shadows across the square. It’s not a big square. And the church isn’t a big church. You could fit it inside St Etienne, only you wouldn’t want to, because St Sernin is dull, dull, dull. Small windows. Lots of blank walls. Hardly a carving to be seen. The cloisters and chapels attached to it look like afterthoughts—like a collection of pig-pens and fowl-houses tacked onto the back of a shepherd’s hut.
The priest stops.
‘I can’t see any canons around, can you?’ he says. ‘They may be at worship, though I didn’t hear any bells.’
‘You go in.’ Those people by the well are probably listening, so I can’t raise my voice above a murmur. ‘I’ll stay here with the horses while you find someone.’
He hesitates. He’s frowning. I feel so much like snapping at him, but remember the eavesdroppers just in time. ‘I won’t make off with the horses, if that’s what you’re worrying about.’ (Hissing through my teeth.) ‘I’m much too sore.’
To my surprise, he actually smiles. ‘I’m not worried about the horses,’ he says quietly. ‘I’m worried about you. I’m worried about leaving you on your own.’
Hah! A nice little lie, my friend, but you can’t fool me. ‘In a town like this, I’ll be safer on my own than with a priest.’ Or haven’t you noticed? ‘Some of the people here don’t like priests. I can tell. And the rest probably think that you’re an easy target. Ripe for the plucking, I mean.’ He’s gazing down at me with an arrested expression on his face—and I wish he’d stop doing that! ‘What? What is it?’
Another crooked smile. A little shake of the head. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘you’re so much like your father.’
He goes before I can recover my breath, shoving the reins into my hands and hurrying off across the dusty square. Lying priest. I am not like my father! I might look like him (I must, if the priest recognised me) but I don’t resemble him in any other way. I do not.
And what’s this? An audience. Now that the priest’s gone—now that he’s vanished inside the church, like a wolf into its den—all the little scurrying animals can emerge again from their hidey-holes. Here’s one. And there’s another. Rat-faced gutter-creepers. Shaggy-headed street-boys, dressed in rag girdles and scraps of old blanket and bits of discarded sacking.
They’re both quite young. They don’t have beards yet.
‘Can I hold your horse?’ says the smaller one, who’s still a lot bigger than I am. I’ll just ignore him. (Hold my horse? He must think that my brains are boiled!)
‘Where are you from?’ asks the larger one, who’s got a wart on his cheek the size of a fortified farm. If I let drop a mouthful of nonsense, they might believe that I’m a foreigner speaking a foreign tongue, and shut the hell up.
‘Oodle-pargabarranturnis.’
Sure enough, it works. They start talking to each other loudly, as if I’m not even here.
‘I told you,’ says Wart-face. ‘I told you he was foreign. See how dark he is.’
‘There are saddlebags,’ his friend replies. ‘On the grey palfrey.’
Wart-face nods, and sidles away in a suspicious manner. His gap-toothed friend flashes me a big grin, and strokes my horse’s nose. ‘You—Catalan?’ he asks, pointing at me. ‘You—Lombard?’
What’s Wart-face doing back there? Stay away from those books, you leprous little horse-fly!
Gap-tooth is still in my face. Trying to distract my attention. Trying to make me forget his friend. ‘You— blackamoor?’ (Both of my hands are full of reins; I can’t let go of either horse. One horse on each side, like towers on a gate, and what am I going to do? I’m anchored.) ‘You—Infidel?’ Meanwhile, Wart-face is behind me, fumbling in a saddlebag.
Time to fight, or they’ll strip the horses clean.
My feet are my only defence. A quick kick in the groin, and Gap-tooth’s on his knees, yelping. Wart-face nearly bolts with a book, but—whoops! He’s too slow to turn. Not like me. The grey mare’s reins come in handy; they slip over his head like a hangman’s noose. One quick jerk and his feet fly out from under him.
He falls backwards, almost onto my feet. His head hits the cobbles. The horses don’t like it; they’re skittish, and toss their own heads. Gap-tooth is on his feet again, behind me, bent almost double. Wart-face is rolling about on the ground, shielding his face from dancing hoofs.
He’s dropped the book, God curse it.
If that book gets trampled, I’m dead. The priest will kill me. I can’t afford to mess around.
Gap-tooth has to go. He’s still bent double, so—whack—my knee slams up into his forehead. Ow! That’s done him. I might be limping, but he’s out of the fight. As for the other one, he’s crawling away. A boot up the backside might get rid of him sooner.
‘Gaagh!’ he cries, as my kick makes contact. Over by the well, someone says something—and the tone sounds very unfriendly.
Never mind. With a horse on each side of me, I’m practically indestructible.
‘Benoit?’
It’s the priest. He’s calling from the church door. There are two men behind him, one of them another priest in a white robe.
Gap-tooth begins to reel away on knees made of carded wool. Wart-face staggers to his feet and runs. I must try to keep the horses away from that book.
‘Guilabert Sagnator!’ shouts the priest in white, shaking his fist at Gap-tooth’s retreating figure. ‘You stay away, do you hear me?’ Turning to my priest— Isidore, the Doctor—he lowers his voice and says something that I can’t quite hear from a distance.
I don’t know if Isidore heard it, either. He’s already striding towards me, his black robes billowing out behind him like a crow’s wings. The priest in white (who’s small and fat) has to run to keep up.
‘Your book!’ It comes out as a squeak before I can help myself. Lower your voice, Babylonne! ‘They tried to take your book . . .’
Isidore puts a finger to his lips. He scoops up the book and tucks it back into his saddlebag.
‘Ah, it is a great shame to us!’ The priest in white catches up, coughing pitifully and holding his sides. ‘They would steal the (cough-cough) hair from a (cough-cough) dead man’s head.’
‘Did they hurt you, Benoit?’ Isidore wants to know. He doesn’t seem the least bit worried about his book. (After all the trouble I took to protect it!) ‘Did they attack you? No? But you’re limping. You’ve injured your knee.’
Before I can respond, the priest in white interrupts again.
‘Bring him inside with us. Bruno (cough-cough) will take the horses. Bruno!’ He barks at the third man, who must be a servant of some sort, to judge from the clothes he’s wearing. They look as if they’ve spent several weeks in a goat’s stomach. ‘Bruno, take the horses in. Go on! Give them some oats.’
Bruno moves, but I can move faster. Those saddlebags aren’t going with Bruno, not if they have books in them. I wouldn’t trust Bruno as far as I could spew a bad mushroom.
‘It’s all right, Benoit.’ Isidore reaches out and peels my fingers off the leather stitching. ‘Leave them. You mustn’t worry.’
‘But—’
‘Trust me,’ he says.
And I’ll have to, I suppose.
No matter how foolhardy it may seem.
