Chapter Two

 

 

Inn of the Sparrow

 

 

Jolted into action, Tristan ran to him and quickly turned him over, scooping his shoulders into his arms. “Domingo!” he cried. “What hap…?”

“G-get to Handel!” Domingo gasped, his eyes rolling about in their sockets like eggs cast into a bowl. He clutched at his abdomen with blood-crusted fingers and wheezed, desperate to breathe. “L-LeDoux was supposed to help him assassinate the Byzantine, but LeDoux’s been killed in the Square! Th-they caught us together!”

“The Byzantine?” cried Tristan, knowing that Domingo’s time was short.

“Y-yes, Handel’s confirmed that the spy we’re hunting is a… Byzantine from Contantino…”

At this Domingo’s eyes bugged and his mouth gaped open, then closed. His palms turned up, fingers slack, and his face grew bloodless and vacant. Then his face slipped sideways and Tristan felt Domingo’s torso shudder three times as his throat issued the slow rattle of death.

And at that moment, just as he looked up to utter a prayer, he saw the two Byzantine dockmen approaching from the piers. They had spotted Domingo staggering toward the docks, and Tristan could tell from the damnation in their eyes and their accelerated pace that they were coming for him. They had by now surmised that he was connected to Domingo.

Rising, Tristan fled down the avenue, shoving his way through the evening throngs on their way home from their workplaces. He could hear the two men giving chase behind him, yelling at him to stop, exhorting others to block his path. “Thief!” they shouted. “Stop him, he’s a pickpocket!”

After twisting his way around four or five corners, Tristan ducked into a vendor’s booth and quickly slithered beneath a huge mound of picking baskets, quickly dragging several over his frame to cover himself. Moments later the two dockmen then appeared just paces from where he lay prostrate and motionless, barely daring to breathe. The two men stood there a while, peering here and there into the darkness and exchanging suppositions; all of this within three or four seconds. Then Tristan felt one of the men kick at the pile of baskets. At this Tristan sagged, dispirited, certain that he was about to be discovered. He then braced himself, certain also that once these men got their hands around him, they would kill him. Wincing, Tristan thought back on Domingo’s bloody end, and determined that a life of prayer cloistered behind monastery walls might have, indeed, been a wiser choice of vocations than spying on the enemies of the true Church. He heard the shuffle of feet and the dissipation of footsteps; the men had left.

He waited a full minute or so more, then shoved the baskets aside. Remembering Domingo’s last words, he moved briskly toward Saint Peter’s Basilica, which was not far away from the piers, to seek the Inn of the Sparrow. Moments later he located it, two blocks west of the Basilica of Saint Peter just as Domingo had instructed. Pausing to scan the streets to ensure that he was not being followed or watched, Tristan then entered the inn.

Despite a good number of candles and several crude horn lanterns hanging from the rafters, the interior of the inn was dim and shadowy. The crowd within was sparse and comprised of a handful of guests sitting about engaged in conversation and spirits. In the far corner sat a solitary monk, his form stooped, his face obscured by his cowl. Through the dim light Tristan could ascertain that the monk’s habit was made of the white serge characteristic of the Carthusian Order of France. The monk’s scapular, worn over the shoulders of the Carthusian robe, was joined by bands at the side and had the hood attached to it, unlike the black robe of the Benedictines whose habits were of single fabrication. Tristan took a seat at the monk’s table, his back to the door, and strained to see his face. “Handel?” he whispered. “Is that you?”

No reply.

“Handel? It’s Tristan. I’m here in place of LeDoux.”

Recognizing Tristan’s voice, the monk nodded without raising his head. “Tristan?” he whispered. “What are you doing here? Where the hell’s LeDoux?”

“Dead. Stabbed in the square just a short while ago. Domingo’s been killed, too, but he managed to get to me in time to warn you. You may be in danger. We best leave quickly!”

The cowl of Handel’s white robe slowly shook no. “Not a chance,” Handel hissed. “I’m waiting on the Byzantine. No damned wonder we’ve had such a foul time uncovering this agent, the Byzantine is…”

At that very moment the door to the inn creaked open and two people walked in: a nun dressed in Eastern Orthodox garb followed by a tall, imposing nobleman who carried both sword and dagger attached to his belt and wore the Byzantine fashion. The two did not appear to be together.

“That’s the target LeDoux and I’ve been trying to root out these last months,” whispered Handel, motioning toward the door.

The nun passed through the room in silence, head bowed, then moved immediately up the stairs. Tristan and Handel followed the sound of her light footfalls, then heard a door creak open and closed as a lock fell into place and she secured herself for the night. As Handel slowly raised his head and appeared as though he was about to make a move, the large nobleman gestured to two men sitting together at the next table and sat down with them.

After only a comment or two, he stood, then himself moved toward the stairs. Tristan and Handel listened to his heavy footsteps tramp down the upper hallway, then heard the groan of rusty hinges opening, then closing.

“Quickly, up the stairs!” said Handel.

Tristan complied, wondering about the sizable man who had just mounted the stairs. He had learned at Monte Cassino that anyone, even an over-sized opponent, could be overcome by using the element of surprise. Failure to be swift and accurate with such a stout target could be fatal. Consequently, as he followed Handel up the stairs, Tristan’s nerve began to dissolve a bit and his stomach began to knot. By coming to the Inn of the Sparrow to warn Handel of the murder of LeDoux and Domingo, Tristan had hoped that Handel would realize the danger and abandon this effort. Proceeding down the hall, Tristan realized that he had actually thrown himself into the position of participating in Handel’s assassination of the enemy spy. His hands tremoring, Tristan reached down and patted the dagger tucked in his boot, even though he had no intention whatsoever of using it. No, he would leave the blade work to Handel, who was practiced in this craft and did not struggle with breaking God’s commandment about killing others.

“Fourth door to the left,” Handel whispered, pulling a dagger from his billowing Carthusian sleeve. “When I kick in the door, move quick or we’re done for. Go high for the arms and cover the face, I’ll go for the belly straightaway and take care of the rest.” When they slipped up to the fourth door, Handel put his finger to his lips, then stepped back and raised his foot to kick the door. “Ready, lad?” he whispered.

Tristan nodded though his heart was full of dread. Then, too, his head was pounding with his blood running so fast and thick that he could feel his temple arteries pulsing. Before he could blink, Handel kicked in the door and rushed the room. Tristan followed; a hammer blow to the head could not have unsettled him more than what he encountered. Standing there within the room was the nun who had entered the inn just minutes before. She was facing the door and had already removed her wimple from her head, chin, and neck. Furthermore, she was disrobing, and at the moment of their forced entry, had just dropped the top of her habit to her waist and was standing there bare-breasted, her eyes agape, staring at the intruders who had burst into her room.

Awkwardly, Tristan halted mid-step, seized by one of those moments of utter confusion that forces one into both mental and physical paralysis. He then muttered something foolish in an attempt to excuse himself and Handel for breaking into the wrong room. Not hesitating, Handel con-tinued his blind charge forward, tackling her about the waist and throwing her back onto the small bed just behind where she stood. This further unhinged Tristan; the scene before his eyes unraveling so quickly that he had no time to deliberate. So he stood there mute and frozen.

As the nun reeled backward onto the bed, furiously thrust there by the full weight of Handel’s charge, she reached below her bare abdomen down into the bottom of her habit and withdrew a dagger. Looking up at that same moment, Handel saw the blade coming at him but was unable to stop its swift arc over his shoulder and into his upper back. “Aiee!” he cried.

Tristan was already backing his way out of the room. He had been expecting the large Byzantine man who had strode into the inn, not a half-naked nun. Furthermore, the sight of Handel’s continued assault despite this error was more than Tristan could reasonably process, and already had him so confounded that he doubted whether what he was seeing was actually real.

“Tristan!” Handel bellowed as the woman stuck him between the shoulder blades a second time.

Hearing Handel’s scream and fathoming that the nun was stabbing him, reality finally registered in Tristan’s brain and he gathered his senses. Charging forward, he propelled himself onto Handel’s back, which drove Handel down hard onto the nun, knocking his forehead into hers. Tristan then scrambled to secure her flailing arm, pinning it and the knife to the bed. “I’ve got her!” he cried.

“Kill her, dammit!” Handel howled, stuck between Tristan and the nun, blood now seeping profusely through the white serge of his Carthusian robe.

The nun was struggling with such ferocity against Tristan’s grip that he was afraid to let go of her arm lest she stab Handel yet again, or himself.

“Goddammit!” Handel swore. “Your dagger, you fool!”

Tristan forced her knife arm down with one hand and fumbled down into his boot with the other, trying to retrieve his dagger. He felt their intertwined bodies heave and roll to the side, and in that instant Handel was able to free his own hand. He came over his shoulder with the blade of his own dagger and plunged it straight down into the nun’s throat. Tristan heard the sickening puncture of steel into flesh, then the deep gurgle of blood bubbling from the nun’s throat as she gasped for air. Then everything grew still, until he began to vomit.

“G-get off me, dammit!” howled Handel, grabbing at his shoulder. “And get me the hell out of here!”

Tristan swiped vomit from his lips with a brush of his sleeve and pushed himself off Handel. Reaching down, he pulled Handel off the murdered nun, his hands trembling uncontrollably. He couldn’t find his voice. The nun’s dead eyes were staring directly at him from her tomb there on the bed, as though accusing him of the most ungodly of crimes. Struggling, Handel stuck his hand over his shoulder, placing pressure on his wounds to close the hemorrhaging. “I- I’ll live if I can stop this goddamn bleeding!” he said. “Come on, let’s go!”

A large shadow filled the doorway. It was the Byzantine nobleman, rousted from his room across the hall from all the commotion. He stood there, sword in hand. “What in God’s Hell’s going on in here!” he thundered, a look of confusion washing over his face as he tried to assess what he had witnessed. Then, flicking his sword back and forth at knee level, he cried, “My God, you bastards have just murdered a bride of Christ!”

Tristan tried to object, but only managed to utter a series of unintelligible sounds. Handel, sensing that escape was blocked, slowly backed toward the dead nun, never taking his eyes off the Byzantine. Stealing a hand behind him, he fumbled about blindly for the handle of his dagger. Then, pulling it from the nun’s gullet, in one swift under-handed sling he fired it across the room straight into the Byzantine’s heart. Unaware that he had been struck, the man’s eyes frogged shut and open with a single blink, and his jaw dropped. Confused, he looked down and saw the hilt of the dagger handle protruding from his chest. In that moment, he glanced up at Tristan with a singular focus and shrugged, as if to ask… why? Then his knees dissolved and he collapsed to the floor in a heap.

Tristan needed no instructions at this point. He quickly grabbed Handel by the shoulders and an arm and led him out of the room and down the stairs. The people downstairs had also heard the ruckus. Spotting the blood-soaked back of Handel’s white monk’s robe, they shrank back, not daring to rise or interfere. Accepting this, Tristan and Handel managed to hobble out of the Inn of the Sparrow and hasten their way down the street, then disappear into the darkness.

Handel’s hide-away was just five blocks from the inn, but his condition made the short journey arduous and required that they stop every thirty paces or so. Finally arriving there, Handel flung himself belly-down covering his lone table. “W-water’s in the basin,” he stammered. “Get me bandaged up before I bleed to death!”

His nerves still jangling, Tristan hurriedly tended to Handel’s wounds which, fortunately, proved not deep enough to be crippling. Though the nun had managed two strikes, she hadn’t been able to apply full leverage because of her awk-ward position on the bed with Handel’s weight restraining her from above. “I... I’m sorry, Handel,” Tristan stammered. “I went into a panic back there. It’s just that, I was expecting a man in that room! You know, the Byzantine you killed in the doorway!”

Sitting up, Handel shook his head with agitation. “Dammit, you nearly got us killed,” he winced. “You said Domingo told you to come to the Inn of the Sparrow, that I’d uncovered the anti-pope’s agent. Didn’t he tell you his spy was a Byzantine nun?”

Tristan shook his head. “No, he was dying and just said a Byzantine. And when that big fellow walked through the inn, I thought it was him.”

“No, you didn’t think, you assumed! And when we busted in the door, you assumed again, that we had the wrong room. Then when I attacked the nun, you assumed yet again, this time that I’d lost my mind for attacking a nun. Finally, when the big Byzantine showed up at the door, I guess you just assumed that old Handel here would save our asses! You just stood there like a goddamn stump!”

“I’m sorry, Brother Handel,” said Tristan. “I just …”

Handel looked at him with irritation. Appreciating Tristan’s remorse, he softened a measure. “Some lessons to learn here, lad,” he grunted. “First, never pity anyone who chooses this line of work, eh? That bitch tonight was the cause of three dead Benedictines. She only “turned them in,” but she may as well have dropped the ax on their necks herself. Second, don’t ever think the anti-pope’s people won’t use women. Hell, they’ve even put children in the field! Christ, think about it. Didn’t Abbot Hugh and Cardinal Odo use you a time or two as a damn boy to gather information before the war broke out?”

Tristan nodded.

“Third,” Handel continued, “you better get over this hesitation shit, lad, or you’ll be dead before the month’s over, and you’ll end up taking some of us with you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Tristan said, feeling Handel’s callous years of experience as an underground agent beating at him.

“And fourth, you better wake up. That nun came into the Inn of the Sparrow and had her own room. Think about it. When have you ever heard of a nun staying at a goddamn inn? Christ, lad, what Christian order in this world allows that? Especially alone! She was dressed as a Greek Orthodox nun, and even though the Byzantine Catholics follow a different rite than we Roman Catholics, they are nevertheless still Catholic and their nuns follow the same practices as ours.”

“My God, we killed a nun,” said Tristan, his voice trailing off, fathoming the horror of what had actually transpired at the Inn of the Sparrow. “The thought of killing a nun gives me the horrors, even if she is the enemy, and that man that walked in on us, he did nothing to deserve death!”

“No, nothing! Only show up with a sword in his damned hand which might have ended up in our bellies! Hell, that conscience of yours is going to get you skewered,” Handel sighed. “As for the woman, don’t ever think for one second that nuns don’t work the shadows just like us. Christ, all you have to do is take one look at Brother Muehler’s goddamn face! Remember that Norman bitch that tracked him in Paris and had him arrested after he came ashore in England?”

“Yes,” Tristan replied, “a certain Madame Madeleine.”

“Ha! Madame, my ass! We’ve since learned she’s the abbess of the Convent of Rouen in Normandy, in the immediate employ of William the Bastard! So let that be a lesson to you. Dieter Muehler’s my best friend on this earth and now he can’t even bare his face since it gives people the frights. A nun did that. Listen, you better think long and hard about tonight. If you’re going to let your conscience get you killed, then maybe you better get yourself back to Cluny, eh? And I don’t say that to throw mud, lad. I just wouldn’t want to see you get hurt. Besides, you’re just too damn valuable to the Black Monks to be led to the slaughter by your own hands.”

At this Tristan dropped his forehead into his palm as defeat began to etch itself over his face. After a long silence his face filled with resolve and he looked at Handel. “Handel, forgive me,” he said. “I’ll do better next time out.”

Tristan did not sleep well that night. When it finally did come, it was furtive, troubled, suspending him somewhere between consciousness and the nether world; in that place where one is forced to return to the pillories of self-flagellation and atonement for violating the laws of both man and God… in this case, murder. But when Tristan awoke that next morning, though he did not suspect it, he was no longer the same person. In the Inn of the Sparrow night before, he’d passed through the decisive hour of his destiny.