The Pope's Assassin Read online

  ‘Who do you think they are?’ I questioned my companion. Unconsciously, I dropped my voice for there was something foreboding about the scene.

  ‘We’ll find out at the next town.’

  The cavalcade came closer and I counted at least forty riders. The drum, three or four feet across, was carried on a small two-wheel cart at the head of the procession. The drummer, standing upright on the cart, was striking a deep booming note, a signal to clear the way. In the centre of the column, and flanked by riders, rolled a great waggon, a massive vehicle drawn by a team of six draught horses harnessed in pairs. Four stout poles at each corner of waggon held up a canopy striped in red and green. On the flatbed of the waggon was a single item, a boxy shape draped with red and green sheeting. The same colours were repeated on the riders’ saddle cloths and on the pennants of their lances.

  We waited for fully half an hour until the procession had gone passed, and the drum beat had receded into the distance. Only then did Beorthric untie our horses and we descended the hill and continued on our journey.

  The next settlement was a modest halting place where the trickle of a roadside stream had been diverted to fill an enormous hollowed-out log to make a watering trough for animals. There was a tavern, various outbuildings and sheds, and a stall with a display of serviceable-looking clothes and hats. A cobbler was seated on a stool outside the tavern door, stitching the sole back on a riding boot. A man-at-arms, the owner of the boot, was standing waiting, a wooden tankard in hand, one foot bare.

  While Beorthric went to find if there were oats for sale, I stood holding our horses and watching the cobbler at his work. The man at arms nodded to me in a friendly sort of way, and I took the chance to ask if he knew anything about the procession we had seen passing.

  ‘That was my lord, Margrave Gerold. He’s going home,’ he replied.

  I felt a quick flash of irritation. Beorthric’s caution in making us leave the road meant that we would now have to turn back and catch up with the margrave if we were to deliver Arno’s letter.

  ‘The margrave still commands the Avarian March, doesn’t he?’ I asked.

  The man-at-arms wiped road dust from his face with a scarf. Its faded colours were red and green.

  ‘No longer,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked him, trying not to let my disappointment show. It had occurred to me that, unknown to Archbishop Arno, the king had replaced his brother-in-law in his post as governor of the Avarian frontier province. If that was the case, Beorthric and I would have to return to the archbishop in Paderborn and get a letter to the new office holder, whoever he might be.

  The man-at-arms was giving me a strange look. ‘Because my lord is dead. That procession takes his body back to Vinzgau.’

  I stared at him in dismay.

  ‘What happened?’ Beorthric had walked up and overheard the last sentence.

  The man-at-arms flicked a glance in his direction and must have recognized a fellow soldier, for he said, ‘The usual: a last-minute cock-up on the battlefield.’

  Beorthric’s mouth set in a grim line. ‘Not like the margrave to make mistakes. He was a veteran.’

  ‘There’s no defence against outright treachery,’ observed the soldier sourly.

  ‘Go on,’ murmured Beorthric. For the first time, I detected a note of sympathy in his voice.

  ‘A big raiding force of wild Avars came across the border,’ the soldier continued. ‘The margrave called out the levies and put together a decent-sized response, enough to see them off.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the cobbler’s needle had slowed. He was listening.

  ‘The margrave picked nice, level ground where we could take advantage of our heavier horses in the charge. He had brought his personal guard with him and a couple of squadrons of tame Avar cavalry.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was such a thing as a tame Avar,’ interrupted Beorthric drily.

  ‘That’s what we found out to our cost,’ said the solider. ‘But they’re some of the best horse soldiers in the world, and their job was to pursue the raiders once we had broken up their main force. The margrave made the mistake of thinking it was better to have them on our side, than against us.’

  ‘So what happened next?’ said Beorthric.

  ‘Both armies were facing one another, ready to go at it, when my lord decided to ride out in front of our line and make a speech to encourage us. It was the usual sort of blather that you can barely hear through the ear flaps of your helmet.’ The man-at-arms shook his head in wonder. ‘He finished his speech, turned towards the enemy and raised his arm, about to signal the attack, when a couple of our so-called tame Avars broke ranks. They came galloping out from our line and loosed off a couple of arrows at him and a couple of officers with him. They were good shots, that I’ll grant you. The margrave took an arrow between the shoulders and was pitched out of the saddle.’

  ‘What happened to the two Avars?’ asked Beorthric.

  ‘They bolted straight past the margrave lying on the ground, and joined their cousins who were facing us.’ He turned and spat. ‘That’s what you get for recruiting the enemy into your ranks.’

  Beside me I felt Beorthric go tense. Now I knew for sure that he was a Saxon turncoat.

  ‘And the battle itself? How did that go?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Oh, we won all right,’ came the answer. ‘We were mad for revenge. The margrave had been good to us. We smashed right through the Avar centre. Drove them off the field; lots of corpses. They won’t come raiding again, not for a long time.’

  He turned to ask the cobbler if he had finished the mend, and I took the chance to draw Beorthric to one side.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked. ‘Do we abandon the mission and return to Paderborn?’

  The Saxon was dismissive of any such idea. ‘You can turn back if you want to. But I go on. That’s what I’m paid for.’

  I glanced over towards the man-at-arms and made sure that I was not overheard. ‘Arno’s letter is addressed to the margrave, no one else. You said that we need an escort if we are to enter Avar territory.’

  ‘You heard the man. The Avars have just been thrashed. They won’t trouble us if we move quickly.’

  I hesitated. I did not fancy appearing before Archbishop Arno and telling him that I had come back empty handed though Beorthric had gone ahead with our mission.

  There was insolence as well as contempt in the way that the big Saxon was looking at me, and this irritated me. ‘Very well,’ I snapped. ‘We both continue. But let us try to persuade whoever is now in charge of the frontier to provide us with some soldiers.’

  ‘If it makes you feel easier,’ was Beorthric’s caustic response and it held more than a trace of condescension.

  My hand went to Arno’s letter that I had been keeping, safely tucked inside the front of my tunic. I pulled it out and, without taking my eyes off Beorthric, I tore it into shreds in front of him. It was a gesture, partly to show my determination and partly done out of bravado. I saw no need to tell the Saxon that, whatever Arno had written in the letter, I was certain that it would be dangerous for us if anyone but Margrave Gerold knew its contents.

  *

  So we rode on, day after day at the same strenuous pace, the yellowish brown flood of the river on our left. The further we progressed, the more signs we saw that the land had been recently fought over. Farmhouses were wrecked, their roofs collapsed or reduced to charred ruins. Cattle sheds and barns lay empty, their doors ripped off, their contents plundered. Hedges and fences beside the road were neglected. All that remained of the fruit orchards were stumps where the trees had been cut down for firewood. There were long stretches of wasteland. Not long after encountering the margrave’s funeral cortege, we met another column of men coming along the road towards us. This time they were on foot, unhappy-looking wretches with loads on their backs, shambling along under armed guard. As they drew level with us, Beorthric identified them as prisoners of war
. When they had delivered their burdens, he said bluntly, they would be sold into slavery.

  On the tenth day, we reached the furthest limit of Carolus’s rule. Here a quarter turma of mounted troopers, some twenty men, occupied what must have been a posting station long ago. The sergeant in charge was a beefy, pock-marked veteran who spoke broken Frankish with such a thick accent that I had difficulty in understanding him. I guessed that he and his soldiers were left-over auxiliaries from Carolus’s army who had volunteered to stay on as a frontier force and settle the newly won lands, taking local wives. Their mud-brick guardhouse was the centre for a cluster of huts and cottages for their families. Judging by the number of toddlers playing in the dust in the afternoon sunshine and the babies on the hips of their mothers, Carolus’s policy of resettlement was a success.

  ‘What’s your business?’ demanded the sergeant gruffly. He had summoned us into an unswept and grimy room in the run-down building. The bare walls lacked plaster, the one small window had no shutters, and the sergeant’s chair and battered desk were the only items of furniture. The place smelled of disuse and neglect. The door had been left open because it was too warped to shut properly.

  I took it on myself to be spokesman. ‘My colleague and I are travelling on the orders of Archbishop Arno of Salzburg.’

  From the blank look on the sergeant’s face it seemed he had never heard of the archbishop. He leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve had no word of this.’

  ‘On the archbishop’s authority we are to be provided with an escort of soldiers for the next stage of our journey,’ I continued. Briefly, I regretted destroying the archbishop’s letter to the margrave. The bishop’s seal might have impressed the sergeant.

  ‘Where to?’ he grunted.

  ‘To the place known as “the Ring”,’ I told him.

  His eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘And why do you want to go to that God-forsaken hole?’ he demanded.

  ‘I am not at liberty to say,’ I told him. I hoped my reply sounded official and important.

  He looked me up and down with open disbelief. ‘Nobody goes there. It’s too close to Avar territory.’

  ‘I understand that Margrave Gerold recently won a great victory, and the Avars have been pacified.’

  He gave a coarse laugh. ‘The Avars are never pacified. As the margrave found out to his cost.’ He glared past me towards a couple of his troopers who were loitering outside the door, listening in. ‘Clear off, you two,’ he growled.

  They slunk away and the sergeant turned his attention back to me. ‘The Avars may have been given a bloody nose, but I’m not sparing any men to go with you, not without a direct order from my superiors.’

  I sighed to myself, regretting even more the death of Margrave Gerold. There was a discreet touch on my arm and Beorthric said quietly. ‘Sigwulf, you should show the order from the Master of Horse. It must be in your saddlebag.’

  Before I could react, the big Saxon was steering me out of the room, my elbow in his grip. I had the good sense not to say anything until we were well outside the guardhouse.

  Keeping my voice low, I asked, ‘What’s all this pretence about the Master of Horse and his written order?’

  ‘I’m sure you can produce something to impress the sergeant. He no more knows how to read than I do,’ answered the Saxon blandly. He did not break his stride as he ushered me towards the stable where we had left our horses and baggage.

  ‘He’ll notice if the ink is new,’ I told Beorthric, ‘but I should be able to find something that might suit.’

  We reached the stable and from my saddlebag I pulled the package of writing materials the clerks in the chancery in Paderborn had supplied me with. New parchment was expensive and many of the sheets had been used previously. Most of the writing had already been scraped off, and I had a stock of chalk so that I could prepare the surfaces when I was ready to write on them. I remembered that an occasional sheet still carried official-looking lines of script. It did not take me long to find one.

  Beorthric stepped up close, right beside me, blocking out the light.

  ‘Why don’t you also offer a little of whatever it is you’re wearing around your waist,’ he said.

  Taken aback, I stared at him. He made no effort to move away. Just for a moment I thought he was threatening me.

  ‘You don’t think I hadn’t noticed,’ he added with a touch of exasperation. ‘It shouldn’t take much.’

  Eventually I found my tongue. ‘What I am carrying is for making a copy of the missing flagon, if we find a suitable Avar goldsmith.’ I feared that I sounded rather pompous.

  He shrugged. ‘You’re not likely to get near any goldsmith if you don’t provide the sergeant with a sweetener.’

  I realized he had deliberately placed himself so that no one could see into the stable if I chose to get at my money belt, and there seemed little point in rejecting what seemed a sensible suggestion.

  ‘Lend me that little knife you wear around your neck,’ I told him. I lifted the hem of my shirt and without removing the belt, used the tip of the blade to unpick a couple of stitches in the soft leather. The slit was just wide enough to squeeze out three gold solidi, each no bigger than a fingernail. I smoothed down my shirt to cover the belt again and returned the knife to the Saxon.

  With the coins folded inside the parchment sheet, we made our way back to see the sergeant. He was waiting for us in the same bare room, idly picking his teeth with a dirty fingernail.

  ‘Here’s the written order from the Master of Horse,’ I said, proffering the folded page. Something in my voice must have alerted him, for he took the parchment carefully and glanced towards the open door. His men were nowhere to be seen. The sergeant half turned away from us as he unfolded the page.

  There was silence. ‘When my companion and I get back from the Ring, there will be further instructions from the Master of Horse,’ I said softly.

  The sergeant carefully refolded the parchment and slipped it into his pocket. ‘I’ll hold on to this, as it’s an official document, in case it’s required by my superiors.’ He treated us to a sly look, full of greedy calculation. ‘I can spare two men. They’ll ride with you as far as the Ring, and no further.’

  ‘I was hoping for a larger escort—’ I began.

  He cut me short. ‘They’ll have orders to return here in five days’ time. If you haven’t finished by then whatever it is you want to do, it’s your look-out.’

  He strode out of the room and a moment later was shouting out orders. I paid little attention. I was trying to recall where Beorthric could have spotted that I was wearing a money belt. The only occasion I could think of was when he told me about his run-in with his Avar woman. That evening we had stayed overnight in a tavern, and I remembered the itchy straw mattress. The following morning I had stripped off and washed myself in a tub of cold water, trying to get rid of the rash on my skin. If that was when Beorthric had seen my money belt, he had never spoken of it nor – and that was more to the point – had he attempted to rob me. He was a turncoat, of that I was sure, and a man for hire, and the contents of the money belt were worth far, far more than anything he was being paid as a mercenary. It would have been easy for him to take it and vanish back to his own people. I found myself wondering if I had misjudged my colleague. Now that we were about to embark on the dangerous part of our mission, perhaps it was the moment that I should begin to trust him.

  Chapter Nine

  AVAR TERRITORY – SEPTEMBER

  The two troopers selected to escort us were the dregs of the turma. One was so badly overweight and paunchy that he overflowed his saddle. The other had a wheezing cough repeated every few minutes that quickly became irritating. Neither of them spoke more than basic army Frankish, enough to understand and follow orders, so there was no need for conversation as we set out from the guardhouse the following morning and made our way to the riverbank. We left our pack horse behind as we were expecting a trip of only a few days. The Donau marked
the boundary of the Avarian March and, beyond it, according to the sergeant, the Avars had abandoned a swathe of their former territory as a buffer zone, and their khagan had established a new capital much further away, its location unknown. So when a flat-bottomed boat deposited the four of us and our horses on the further shore, we were stepping into no-man’s-land.

  Nevertheless, our two troopers were uneasy, looking about them nervously as if expecting an ambush at any moment. It was obvious that this was the first time they had crossed the river. By contrast, Beorthric led the way with his usual confidence. He kicked his horse into a trot and soon we were heading along an ill-defined but broad track away from the river and towards a distant line of hills.

  ‘Have you been this way before?’ I asked.

  ‘I scouted it for the Duke of Friuli.’

  I looked about me. Open grassland was dotted here and there with a few low bushes. The terrain was far from level as there were a number of low rounded hills where the higher ground supported clumps of forest. What struck me immediately was the absence of any evidence of human activity. The countryside had a feeling unlike anything we had travelled previously – a wild emptiness. The tall, pale yellow grasses should have made good pasture for herds of cattle or sheep, even at this late season, and the woods could have provided ample building timber for houses and villages. Yet I could see nothing, not even a column of smoke rising from a village hidden in a dip in the land.

  ‘Where are the people?’ I demanded of Beorthric.

  He looked at me, his pale-blue eyes cold, waiting for me to remember the grim sight of a column of slave-porters.

  ‘Surely not everyone was carried off as prisoners,’ I said.

  ‘Not everyone. Many were killed.’

  ‘What about those who fled? There must be some who returned to their homes and rebuilt their lives once Carolus’s troops had withdrawn.’

  ‘The Avars don’t think of hearth and home, as we do.’