While he wept I sat in silence, cold and still, my eyes closed as a numb feeling spread through my body, working its way through my limbs and into my very bones. In a way I would have preferred it had my first suspicions been right and Berengar were the one responsible. To be betrayed by a hated rival was one thing, but to be given away by one I considered my friend was a far harder thing to swallow. Still, it would have been easy to lose my temper, to curse the Englishman and say that he shouldn’t have let himself fall into their hands. But what was the use in that? Nothing could undo what had already been done. We were here in this dank shit-hole, and somehow I had to think of a way that we might escape. That was all that mattered. Otherwise I would soon meet my fate at the hands of the man I had once sworn to kill. The same man who had murdered my lord and whose face had haunted my dreams for a year and more. I had no desire to see that happen.
Nor, if I were being truthful, could I lay any blame upon Byrhtwald for talking. A man will say and do anything if it means he might keep his life, and what he had suffered at their hands I couldn’t begin to imagine. Never in the short while I’d known him had he given anything away cheaply, whether goods or knowledge. To have got so much from him they must have worked him hard.
How long it was before either of us spoke again, I had no way of knowing. It might have been as much as an hour, and possibly more.
In the end it was Byrhtwald who broke the silence. ‘If only I hadn’t sold you that pendant. Perhaps if I hadn’t done that, the saint’s favour would still shine upon me and none of this would have happened.’ He gave a hollow laugh that quickly descended into a choke. ‘Do you still have it, lord?’
‘They took it from me,’ I said bitterly. ‘Bleddyn has it now, for all the good it will do him. St Ignatius never helped me.’
When I most needed his protection, where had he been?
The pedlar was quiet for a moment before saying, ‘I might as well tell you now, lord. Perhaps I should have spoken of it earlier, but I was ashamed . . .’
‘Tell me what?’
‘My other sin. Those were never any sacred relics. What I sold you was nothing more than pig’s bone, the protection not of a saint but of an old sow. For that misdeed God now punishes me, by delivering me to my enemies.’
Pig’s bone. I’d long suspected the truth would be something like that, and still I’d fallen for the lie. Such a fool I had been. Yet even in the darkness, in the cold and the damp and the putrid stink that surrounded us, I laughed.
After a while spent feeling my way on my knees I found a patch of floor next to one of the walls that was a little firmer and drier, wide enough that a man could lie down. There I rested, or tried to at least. Every so often Byrhtwald would erupt into a series of coughs, waking me, and each time he sounded worse.
Eventually tiredness must have caught up with me, for I fell into a deep and dreamful sleep, finding myself back in the monastery at Dinant where I had spent so much of my youth, although somehow it was a different place to the one I had fled. A thick fog had settled everywhere, lending everything a grey and ghostly appearance. The ancient oak tree had gone and the walls were higher and somehow more forbidding, the cloister filled with looming shadows that, when I got closer, turned into the dark habits of monks, who gathered around, their cold gazes passing judgment upon me as if I were guilty of something, though what that might be I struggled to recall. I turned, hoping to escape, only to find the prior standing over me. In his hands he held a rod of birch.
‘For leaving us,’ he said. ‘For shirking your duties and turning your back upon the Lord our God.’
I wanted to protest, to tell him I had shirked no duties, that although the contemplative life was not for me, I had always remained a loyal servant of God. For some reason the words would not form and my tongue lay as if frozen in my head. The prior’s face was dark and drawn, lined with the marks of old age. From thin lips were issued two words, which he repeated over and over like an incantation while he lifted the rod: Deus vult. God wills it. Gradually the same chant was taken up by the rest of the brothers, whispered at first but steadily growing louder as they pressed so close that I could not move, until the words were ringing in my ears—
I woke to the sound of voices and the creak of hinges as the trapdoor opened. Daylight flooded in, so bright after hours spent in full darkness that I had to squint and raise a hand to shield my eyes while they adjusted. I was still trying to remember where this place was and how I had come to be here when men descended the steps. I was hauled to my feet once more and dragged, blinking, out into the open. Behind me I could hear Byrhtwald spluttering as they struggled to lift his limp form up the steps.
‘He needs water,’ I said to the guards flanking me. ‘Have some mercy; let him drink.’