The bell continued to ring.
I rode to the tower.
Richard reined in, and then started to back his bay. ‘Are you mad?’ he asked. I want no more of this. They look like they could rise in the dance macabre!’
‘I want a look from the tower,’ I said.
The truth is that the sights of that town are with me yet, but I needed some sense of where I was, and I knew I’d get that in the tower.
I dismounted at the church door and left Goldie with Richard. I’d never seen him so jumpy.
I assumed that the wind was ringing the bell.
Wrong.
It was a young man. At least, I guess he had been a man. Someone had flayed all the skin from one side of his face, very neatly, and it had scabbed over, while the other side of his face sagged.
I think I gave a shout. I may even have shrieked like a maiden.
He put his hands over his head. He had no thumbs. They’d been severed and healed.
He had one eye.
I think you lads are getting the message.
It took me twenty breaths to get over the shock. I’ve never seen a man so disfigured and yet alive, and the wonder of it was that he was so terrifying — he, who could not have hurt a small child. The wreck of a man — why is the wreckage so full of fear? Is it just that we all of us fear death? Christ, I fear that death — unmanned. Made hideous. The Lord be with him.
I was tempted to kill him. Yes, I was.
Instead, I walked around him, as if he might do me harm, and climbed the bell tower.
In the room above the bell pulls, I found a corpse. Not so old. Bloated. A woman. And the thing below me began to bellow like a bull.
I was paying a high price for a look from a church tower, I can tell you. There’s more wounds than those you take from swords. The dead woman — his mother? His sister? — and the monster himself — they people my dreams, some nights.
Who was he?
Who was she?
I climbed.
In the belfry were half a dozen men, strung up in the rafters like sausages being kept for winter.
Richard says I roared my war cry. Bless him, I think he lies. I think I burst into tears, but I truly don’t remember.
I do remember looking out from between the rotting legs of one poor bastard and seeing Paris, and in another direction, the Seine, clear as the shoe’d foot that had fallen away from the corpse by the eastern arch.
I fled. I’d like to say I cut the men down and saw them buried, but I fled. I almost fell down one of the ladders, and I tried not to look at the bloated corpse of the woman, and would have passed the wreck of a man, but he was on his knees.
‘Kill me,’ he said. His lips were ruined and it was difficult to understand him, but he was obvious enough. ‘Why not kill me? Why leave me alive? Kill me!’
I backed away from him.
‘Kill me!’ he shrieked. ‘Was I not good enough to be killed?’
I fled.
I vaulted onto my horse, and Richard and I rode through the streets so fast our horses’ hooves threw sparks, and we didn’t stop until we were in our little rock fall camp.
‘Sam’s awake!’ John called. ‘St Michael, you two look like you’ve seen ghosts.’
We moved north cautiously. The bell was ringing again, but we avoided the town and came down out of the low hills onto the flat by the river. To the east, we could see men — perhaps thousands of men — on the road.
‘Who killed them?’ Richard asked. He was almost grey under his dark skin. ‘Who would do that?
I shrugged. We both knew that any of the bands hunting the Isle de France might have massacred a town — French, Gascon, English.
It had happened six months earlier.
We rode on.
Sam was off his head — awake, but raving, calling out to men who weren’t there — and in the mid-afternoon, John started puking his guts out.
Rob’s armpits had swelling in them. He had a high fever and he fell from his horse, which was the first I knew he was sick.
Christopher spat and backed his horse away from Rob, who was lying in the road where he’d fallen from his horse.
‘Plague,’ he said.
Peter — silent, morose Peter — turned his horse, threw his cloak over his head, and rode away. I could hear the sound of his hoof beats for a long time in the early summer evening. He galloped.
Christopher dismounted under a spreading oak tree that was a thousand years old. ‘I’ll find a camp site and I’ll make a fire, but I won’t tend him and I won’t breathe the same air. The miasma.’
I was already touching the boy. Besides, I’d spent a day with the corpses of my parents, and the Plague, which had hit London again and again, had never troubled me or my sister. We were hardened, like good steel. Or perhaps just pickled.
Richard dismounted. ‘I thought it was that town,’ he said. ‘I’ve had trouble breathing. All. Day.’
Then I became afraid. Plague isn’t an enemy you can fight, and who it touches, it kills. Not five in a hundred walk away.
In a way, I was lucky, because there was so much to do.
Christopher was as good as his word. He found a camp site 200 paces off the road, where four oaks made a clearing by the stream that ran down to the Seine. He got the tents up, saving one for himself, which he set at the top of a small rise, about fifty feet away.
We set to gathering firewood. We only had one axe, but with the peasants cleared out of the surrounding country, there was a staggering amount of good oak just lying on the ground. We collected ten armloads or so, and broke it up in a forked tree — quicker than using an axe. I put our two pots on, full of water.
‘I’ll get some food,’ Christopher said. ‘Listen, cap’n — I want to help. I just don’t want to die.’
I managed a leaderly smile. ‘You didn’t just ride off, and that’s something.’
He nodded at Sam, who was muttering in a tent. ‘He’s got it, too. Bet ya.’
I hadn’t even considered that.
Christopher rode off to forage, and left me alone with three very sick men. I hoped he’d come back. Richard struggled against the sickness for a few hours, then suddenly he was in the heart of it, silent, sweating, with swellings on his groin and armpits as big as eggs. Bibbo was slower, but he was raving. He thrashed, and I considered tying him down. But I got a tisane of herbs into both of them.
I could do nothing with Rob. He was burning hot, dry as a bone, and had trouble swallowing, and before Christopher returned, Rob was dead. I wrapped him in his cloak and carried him a hundred paces or so into the woods.
Believe it or don’t, but tending them was so hard on me that burying Rob was like a rest. I dug — the soil was good, even in the trees. France is so rich — why can’t they govern themselves?
Heh. Mayhap we help with that.
I didn’t put him deep, but I was a good three hours at it. When I came back from the woods, Christopher was kneeling by the fire. He had four hares, each on a separate green stick, and a pot of warmed wine. It was a hot day.
‘The boy’s dead?’ he asked.
‘I buried him,’ I said. With those words, I realized that Richard, Sam, and John were doomed as well.
‘Let’s eat,’ he said. ‘Roads are full of French. No cavalry. I almost got caught — had to lie up.’ He shook his head. ‘This is all fucked up, you know that, right?’ His voice cracked a little.
‘We’ll make it,’ I said.
He looked at me. He was older than me, and for all his carping, he was a steady man. But just then, he needed me to tell him that everything was going to be all right.
‘We have food. There’s two of us, so we can keep watch. We can’t be more than a day from the English garrison at Poissy. Tomorrow I’ll send you-’
He just shook his head. ‘I’m not going back out there alone,’ he said. ‘The roads are covered in men and women. Peasants. Everywhere. I lay up in a little wood a mile north of here, listened to a man give a speech.’ He looked at me. ‘It’s a rebellion. They’re going to kill all the English and all the gentry.’ He shrugged. ‘I think they got Peter. I think they strung him up and opened his guts by the road. But I didn’t stop to be sure.’