The stall, he read, still existed. Nigel Loring had been one of the charter members of the Order of the Garter. The chapel was St. George's Chapel, in the English palace of Windsor. The existing chapel now, he learned, was not, however, the original chapel. The original chapel had been built by Edward the Third and its rebuilding was begun by Edward IV and probably finished in the reign of Henry VIII. Work had gone on at night with many hundreds of candles burning at the time in order to get it ready at Henry's express order for one of his marriages.
For a moment the terrace and its happenings were forgotten. The actual historical Nigel Loring and Doyle's fictional character slid together in Hal's mind. It seemed to him that he reached across time to touch the actual human being who had been Nigel Loring. For a moment it was possible to believe that all the people in the books he had read might have been as alive and touchable as any real person, if only he knew where and how to reach out for them. Fascinated, he pulled another character out of his mind almost at random, and spoke to the Encyclopedia.
"Tell me," he asked, "was the character Bellarion, in the novel Bellarion by Raphael Sabatini also inspired by a real historical person of the same name?"
"No," answered the Final Encyclopedia.
Hal sighed, his imagination brought back to the practical Earth. It would have been too good to be true to have had Bellarion also an actual character in history.
"… however," the Encyclopedia went on, "Sabatini's Bellarion draws strongly upon the military genius of the actual fourteenth century condottiere, Sir John Hawkwood, from whom Conan Doyle also drew to some extent in the writing of the books that contain the character of Sir Nigel. It is generally accepted that John Hawkwood was in part a model for both fictional characters. Would you like excerpts of the critical writings reaching this conclusion?"
"Yes - NO!" Hal shouted aloud. He sat back, nearly quivering with excitement.
John Hawkwood was someone about whom he knew. Hawkwood had caught his imagination early, not only from what Hal had read about him, but because Malachi Nasuno had spoken of him, referring to him as the first modern general. Cletus Graeme also had cited Hawkwood's campaigns a number of times in Cletus's multi-volumed work on strategy and tactics - that same Cletus Graeme who had been the great-grandfather of Donal Graeme of whom Ajela had spoken. Donal Graeme had ended up enforcing a peace on all the fourteen worlds. In Hal's mind, suddenly, a line led obviously from Donal to Cletus Graeme and back through the warrior elements of western history to Hawkwood.
Hawkwood had come out from the village of Sible Hedingham in the rural England of the early fourteenth century, had fought his way up through the beginnings of the Hundred Years War in France and ended as Captain General of Florence, Italy. He had died at last in his bed at a probable age of over eighty, after a life of frequent hand-to-hand armed combat. He had been called "the first of the modern generals" by others before Malachi; and he had introduced longbowmen from England into the Italian warfare of the fourteenth century with remarkable results.
Hal had been fascinated by him on first discovery. Not merely because of the clangor and color of Hawkwood's life, as seen from nearly a thousand years later, but because in the Englishman's lifetime, going from Sible Hedingham in his youth to Florence in his later years, he had effectively travelled from the society of the deep Middle Ages into the beginnings of the modern era. The flag that had been flying over Hal's terrace, and that Walter InTeacher had lowered to warn him, the flag of a hawk flying out of a wood, had been made by Hal himself with a device put of his imagination after a thorough search through the books in the library of the estate had failed to have any information on Hawkwood's coat of arms - on sudden impulse Hal spoke again to the Encyclopedia.
"What was the coat of arms borne by Sir John Hawkwood?"
There was a brief pause.
"Sir John Hawkwood's arms were: argent, on a chevron sable three escallops of the field."
The screen showed a shield with a silver background, crossed by a thick v-shaped black band, called a "chevron," point upwards in the middle of the ground, and with three silver cockle shells spaced out upon the black chevron.
Why the cockles? Hal wondered. The only connection he could think of to cockle shells was St. James of Compostela, in Spain. Could Hawkwood at the time have been in Compostela? Or might the cockles in the arms mean something else? He queried the Final Encyclopedia.
"The cockle shells are common to many coats of arms," answered the Encyclopedia, "I can furnish you with details if you like. They appear, for example, on some of the oldest arms, such as those of the Graemes, and on the arms borne by many of the septs of the Graeme family, such as the well known arms of Dundee and Dunbar. Do you wish details, a full report on cockles as a device on coats of arms during past centuries?"
"No," said Hal.
He sat back, thinking. Something in the deepest depths of his mind had been triggered by this discovery that the real Hawkwood lay in some manner behind the fictional characters of Doyle's Nigel Loring and Sabatini's Bellarion, something that continued backward to tie into this business of the cockle shells and Hawkwood. The cockle shells and Hawkwood somehow fitted together; they linked and evoked something. He could feel the mental chemistry of their interaction like a stirring in his unconscious, it was a sensation which he knew, it was the sort of deep excitement that came on just before he began to envision a poem. The chain of logic that ran from these things to whatever was now building in his creative unconscious was not one his conscious mind could see or follow, but experience had taught him the futility of trying. He felt its workings there, now, as someone might feel conflicting winds blowing upon him in the absolute darkness of night. It was a pressure, a fever, an imperative. Something about this search and discovery had touched on a thing that was infinitely more compelling, was much larger, than what he had sat down here with the expectation of discovering, as an ocean is larger than a grain of sand on one of its shores. It reached out to touch him like a call, like a trumpet note reaching out, reaching all the way through him to summon him to a thing more important than anything he had felt in all his sixteen years before.
The sensation was powerful. It was almost with relief that he found the lines of a poem beginning to stir in his head, forming out of the mists of his discovery, strange, archaic sounding lines… His fingers groped automatically for the keypad that was on the arm of his chair, not to summon the Encyclopedia back for another question or command but simply to resolve the poetic images forming inside him into words. Those words, as he pressed the keys, began to take visible shape, glowing like golden fire against the starscape before him.
À OUTRANCE
Within the ruined chapel, the full knight
Woke from the coffin of his last-night's bed;
And clashing mailed feet on the broken stones -
His fingers paused on the keys. A chill, damp wind seemed suddenly to blow clear through him. He shook off the momentary paralysis and wrote on…
Strode to the shattered lintel and looked out.
A fog lay holding all the empty land
A cloak of cloudy and uncertainness,
That hid the earth; in that enfoliate mist
Moved voices wandered from a dream of death.
It was a wind of Time itself, the thought came to him unexpectedly, that he felt now blowing through him, blowing through flesh and bones alike. It was the sound of that wind he heard and was now rendering into verse. He wrote…