The Fool's Mirror Read online

  In a spacious chamber, Melisande’s charge lay facedown on the coverlet, her body wracked with great sobs. Her pretty face was red-splotched with crying, and Melisande’s heart melted at the sight of such misery. She hurried to set down the tisane and sat lightly on the edge of the wide bed, soothing long, white-blond tresses with gentle hands. The sobbing subsided gradually as the girl turned large soulful eyes to her and hiccoughed a breathy sob. Melisande plumped feather pillows and helped her to sit, bidding her sip the tisane.

  “My life is a tragedy!” the girl cried bitterly. “You tell me that women can be equals in a world of men but how can you keep torturing me with such pretence? This curse of Eve is ever with us. My duty is to produce a son. How can I possibly feel equal to anything when my body reminds me time and time again that I am a barren failure? My heart is broken! What man has ever had to endure half so much?” and she burst into renewed tears.

  Melisande stroked her hair away from damp cheeks and kissed her mouth gently. “There is no curse. There are just natural rhythms. You are young. There will be a new moon and other chances,” she smoothed pragmatically.

  Ross Middlemore had been a widower for many years. He had watched his sons grow into strong young bulls and then known the pain of watching them culled by war. The younger had been spitted upon a sharp lance in an unmemorable skirmish. His elder son, Walter, once Melisande’s husband, had fallen to his untimely death from a parapet. Ross felt the loss deeply. They were insignificant, inglorious deaths so unbefitting for the heirs of Middlemore.

  Ross had distilled his gall with each passing year, lashing out in his pain like the great wounded animal he was. Melisande had borne the brunt of it, putting herself between Ross and those otherwise too weak to defend themselves; until Ross had found Phillice. A fragile blossom, nurtured in the queen’s court, she gave him renewed hope, and he was avowed to replenish his dynasty. However, for every long month since their wedding in the previous year, Phillice had failed to conceive.

  Melisande had begun with the best of intentions, concerned for an innocence too readily sacrificed. Ross’s new bride had been very shocked with the harsh reality of her northern home. As Melisande was her sole female companion, Phillice had confided the most intimate details of her marital relations, and Melisande had willingly used her herbal knowledge to concoct remedies to encourage her courses and dull Ross’s urges. With a twinge of conscience, Melisande privately admitted that her cure was also effective enough to prevent conception. Duplicitously, she was the very cause of Phillice’s current unhappiness.

  Melisande was in two minds as to whether to try to intercede on Phillice’s behalf. On the one hand, she wanted to protect Phillice, but on the other, she didn’t want to get in the way of Ross. The man was tup-heidit, like a stubborn ram desperate to breed. Perhaps it was time to leave Phillice to her own devices and let nature take its course. The girl had to become the Castle mistress sometime. Melisande just couldn’t imagine her checking the grain stores for weevils, or compounding lye and lavender to make soap, or in fact, doing anything that was at all practical. Phillice had shown no inclination to learn or take on chores. She was very decorative though. Maybe Ross would find her so distracting that he would be content with just an old mutton bone to gnaw on.

  Phillice had cried herself out and was sleeping. She really did look like an angel, with her corona of bright hair splayed on the pillow, long lashes brushing high pink cheeks above the curving bow of her mouth. What would such a seventeen-year-old know of broken hearts and tragedy? Melisande sighed and kissed her gently on the forehead, as any mother would.

  Carlisle Castle was an outpost wedged in a crevice between disputed territories at the end of the old Roman Empire. Small wonder that Phillice felt she was alone, exiled in a harsh landscape populated by the inhospitable and the suspicious. Melisande had once been in the same situation, worrying that there would never be a genuine welcome for her in these cold northern lands, where families who had been here for four generations were disparagingly described as ‘incomers’.

  Melisande stood out and consequently, she was condemned always to stand alone. She was foreign, exotic and different. In other places, at other times in her life, it hadn’t mattered. As a younger woman at court, it had never been significant; everyone had been vibrant, dazzling and revelled in the unusual, the new. Life back then was lived solely for pleasure and enjoyment. A life lost now.

  Tears pinched at her eyes. She brushed them away, angry at her indulgence, remembering an ancient family motto: use what you have, do what you must. Words to live by.

  Chapter 4: A Dangerous Stretch

  The Solway Coast

  The reivers rode in companionable silence, marking the outer edges of the estuary where the Eden finally petered out into the mud flats. The river was too lazy to be bothered to meet the sea and preferred to wait rather for the sea to come to it. Raw-boned women with pinched faces tucked their skirts immodestly high and stood ankle deep in mud, feeling with their toes for the flat fish lurking in the quickening sands. They paid no heed as the men rode by; sensibly keeping their heads down like dabbling ducks. Beyond the salt-marshes, the air was spitefully sharp, whipping their faces with bitter sea spittle. A curlew overhead cried out, mournful in its solitude, but Heughan liked the desolation and emptiness.

  They rode to the edge of the spit, where the sand-coarsened grass was finally smothered by a fine powder that heaved itself up into towering dunes. There was only the thinnest demarcation between sea and sky now. Heughan couldn’t look at it for any length of time without feeling dizzy. He was never certain if it was the brightness of light on the edge or the lack of any movement but the vastness of it, the suggestion of limitless possibilities, made him disorientated and anxious. He hated to admit the feeling to himself, would admit it to no other. He wondered if it was true that the earth was flat and what would happen if he were to sail to the very edge and fall off into the inky void of the star-scattered heavens.

  Rodrigues had shown him his collection of maps of other realms, and he had marvelled at the insignificance of the shapes which were meant to represent the land, compared to the water all around. At the edges, there was always one lonely ship and the same droll admonition written with a flourish, ‘Here be monsters’.

  As a young boy, Heughan had spent many hours poring over the maps, memorising the details and scaring himself, bravely defying the monsters which lurked in the corners. He had placed his hands carefully to cover the map edges so that he wouldn’t have to be tormented by the demons with bared fangs and rolling eyes.

  Gradual curiosity had usually got the better of him, and then he would tentatively open out his fingers, splaying them wide until he caught sight of those terrible eyes again and closed his hand quickly before they looked back at him. The cartographer had been possessed of a fevered imagination and had drawn a Leviathan which sucked at the water’s edge and threatened to consume the sea and everything in it, wiping it clean from the page. Heughan had wondered what would have happened next. Having devoured the vast waves, would the great beast then have been left flapping about on dry, sandy emptiness, the instrument of its own destruction, or would it have vomited back a bowling inundation to swamp the land and sink the ships?

  Heughan shivered. The Solway tide had turned back and was rolling towards the land, bringing cloying dampness with it.

  Once they had made the shelter of the dunes, they had lit a clandestine fire. There was no likelihood that anyone would see their flames and mistake them for a danger signal, setting off a chain of flares across the whole country, causing patriotic men to leap from their beds and armour themselves against invasion. This was a smuggler’s landfall and deliberately covert. There were prepared for the long wait ahead.

  The men were relaxed around the fire. Mad Desmond had a flask of his firewater usqueabach, which would strip the throat from a man and leave him retching for breath. The men bantered with each other as they swigged and gasped eage
rly in turn. Heughan joined in with good humour, though it made his eyes water, and he coughed and choked more than the rest. They laughed all the louder at him, slapping him on the back and applauding his efforts.

  Rodrigues kept a little way off. He had unbuckled his armour and wrapped himself in a rabbit-trimmed wool over-gown against the cold. Reclining on one side, he watched the stars appear through the encroaching mist. Heughan sat down beside him. He wrapped his arms around his legs, hugging his knees and waited; watching the sea in front of him, watching askance the man beside him. For a long while he said nothing, listened to the hiss of surf on sand and the sea sucking back. He stared at the rolling deep and speculated that the monsters were staring back at him.

  Strange phosphorescence bobbed at the water’s margin. There were tales here too of will o’ the wisps who would lure a ship into the sinking sands of the marsh, where the fish-tailed faeries then devoured the crew without a trace. A man needed to be on his guard against evil in all its forms.

  “Melisande, Roddy? Is there a story that you’re not telling me?”

  Rodrigues smiled to himself. He had half-expected the question but until the moment of asking, had not been able to frame an answer. He inhaled deeply and began a tale that he knew would delight the young Heughan; a tale of dream people in faraway places, tattooed men with veiled blue faces, who watched by their own campfires in the cold night sand and fancied themselves desired by exotic women writhing around them with their sinewy bodies like succubae.

  Rodrigues’s eyes shone as he described for Heughan places where he had lived as a young man, breathing life into the re-telling of a sad history.

  He told Heughan of jealous popes, who had always guarded control of the ‘one true faith’. Though priests might claim they have God’s ear and do His Divine Will, they are but ambitious men; and ambition can always find a way to subvert will. Old enemies who understood the measure of each other would always be reluctant to take up opposing arms unless they were compelled by fate and urged by action. However, when zealous men were called by God, they answered with righteous fanaticism and would not be turned by mere man’s reason. Rodrigues sighed. If God, anyone’s god, was invoked, some part of humanity was doomed to suffer.

  Rodrigues described for Heughan the spires and minarets of Córdoba, the soaring magnificence of the Alhambra in Granada, strange and slender architecture so unlike the familiar squat pele towers that Heughan knew. Rodrigues painted a vivid picture of the celestial arcs imprisoned as five and six pointed stars, rendered in vibrant jewel colours and lustrous tiled surfaces on the floor of the courts. Heughan imagined himself striding across the heavens.

  Clouds scudded across Rodrigues’s face, and he sighed with deep regret. The past was always painful for him. The reflection that gazed back at him from the looking glass was sorrowfully dark-defined, guardian of his secrets. He, like Heughan, yearned to catch a glimpse of the man he had once been.

  He grasped a hand of the fine sand he lay on. The more he tried to hold, the more it slipped away from him, trickling through his fingers until the inevitable emptiness. He struggled to make sense of it all to himself, to convey some sense of that meaning to the hawkish man who regarded him steadily. Rodrigues had always tried to shape Heughan with responsibility, as a father should, but Heughan, the man, was forged by blood and bielded by his reiver heritage. Rodrigues felt old and that his influence was waning.

  He shook himself mentally and continued his narrative of the storm clouds gathered over Europe, the dark days of war and England’s desperate struggle to break free from the Catholic stranglehold. The Church put a high price on a man’s soul that had cost England’s renegade King Henry dear. Lesser men of lesser means had forfeited their lives.

  This time, Heughan was in a hurry to hear the end of the story. Instinctively, he felt it would give him an insight into the mystery that was Melisande, and he wanted the power that knowledge brought with it. He didn’t understand why a wily rogue like Rodrigues would afford Ross’s woman any respect.

  He scowled as he remembered how she had mocked him. He imagined grabbing her by the hair and bending her over a barrel, kicking her legs apart so that he could plant himself between them, to ride her hard from behind.

  Heughan kicked out at the sand, sending scurrying clouds over the leather of his boots to rid himself of the image. It wasn’t his way; he’d never needed to force himself on a woman. Now he was cross with himself for even imaging it, angrier still with Melisande for poisoning his mind with the imagery. Bloody witch, get out of my head, he thought. He scuffed his boots in the sand some more, driving his heel hard to worry a deep furrow, and dragged his attention back to Rodrigues as the story took a new twist.

  Rodrigues began to speak of an acquaintance called Josef Moriscos, otherwise known as ‘Dark Solomon’, whose wit and intelligence were renowned throughout Granada. He was an alchemist but his especial interest was in the workings of the human body. He was also Alumbrados, a practitioner of a mystic form of Christianity which believed in the separation of the soul from the body. Worse yet, he was rumoured to be a resurrectionist, not averse to dissecting human cadavers, a heresy to make respectable people everywhere shiver.

  Josef hypothesised that sickness was caused by the dis ease of the body and that the application of medicines or herbs, even cutting away rotten flesh, could help the body to heal, become stronger, live longer. The church leaders were appalled at his blasphemy. Illness was God’s judgement, which only God could heal. Josef argued that the apostles had healed in Christ’s name and that therefore, demons or disease, knowing and naming was no different. If one wanted to be rid of something, one first had to identify it, name it and then cast it out. The Catholic Church decided that the name of their particular devil in Granada to be exorcised was Josef Moriscos.

  Josef and his family were forced to appear in front of the commission and prove themselves good and proper Christians. Their very name was against them; Moriscos being the hereditary name for Moors, who had converted, willingly or otherwise. Being Alumbrados compounded their original sin. The Inquisition declared Josef an arrogant imposter, a magician such as the biblical Simon Magus, who had set himself against God. They demanded that he should purge himself of his heresy by burning all his books.

  Unreasonably, Josef refused.

  The Inquisition issued a proclamation: Josef would burn the books or burn in hell. He laughed at that. Finally, the Inquisition decided that hell could use a hastening hand. They issued the ultimatum that on an appointed day, Josef would present his books for consignment to the bonfire or he would go into the flames instead.

  Rodrigues faltered in his tale as wavering lights appeared at the edges of the marsh. Heughan sat spell-bound, afraid to speak, unsure if they were the lanterns of Excise men or the corpse-candles of faeries, and uncertain as to which was a bigger threat. As Heughan watched, the luminous spheres hovered over the rush tips before fading into nothingness. The wind lowed a warning through the reedy grass, sounding a vibrating requiem for lost souls.

  “There were no books,” said Rodrigues, breaking the silence.

  Josef had given them all to the many friends and travellers who had crossed his path, spirited away and scattered across the continents. Except one, the ‘Key of Solomon’, Josef’s own study of his alchemy and anatomy. The Inquisition declared it a necronomicon, a book of shadows and spells, the mere possession of which was punishable by death. However, in spite of all their hunting, the book never surfaced.

  Confused, Heughan asked, “Was there ever really a book? What was in it?”

  Rodrigues shrugged. “The secret of how to make gold from the elements or perhaps, as Josef hinted, how to live forever. Too many secrets and dangerous knowledge. It was always rumoured that Josef had entrusted it to his best student, but if he did, their identity was never known, the whereabouts of the book a mystery.”

  The maps that Heughan loved so much had been Josef’s penultimate gift to his fri
end Rodrigues. His final gift had been his daughter, a young woman whom he placed into his care as ward: Melisande.

  Heughan was dumbstruck. Questions skipped across his mind like stones skimming water, but Rodrigues quelled them before he ever even opened his mouth to begin to ask. He rapidly explained to Heughan that he had taken Melisande only as far as relations in Languedoc and there, absolved himself of both responsibility and temptation.

  After that, their lives had taken different directions, and their earlier story had been forgotten. Years later, they had met again as strangers in the Borders, where they found a new friendship.

  “You recognised her? Did she not recognise you?” Heughan asked.

  Rodrigues simply smiled. “I am much changed. We have all made different lives for ourselves, and I have no wish to remind Melisande of a past which must contain much pain for her. No, what’s gone is best forgotten. You will not speak of this to Melisande. She knows me only as Don Rodrigues, one-time Master of the Horse, sometime soldier of fortune and Merchant Adventurer; Roddy to my friends.”

  Heughan had been lost in his own train of thought and had failed to notice that Rodrigues had stopped speaking and was staring out to sea. He followed his line of sight but couldn’t pick anything out over the pitch and yaw of the dark waves.

  A sudden guffaw of laughter pulled his attention back to the fire. Mad Desmond had had too much to drink and had stripped himself naked to frolic through the dunes in a lopsided dance. He skipped along the breaking waves as they rolled across the shingle, his bare arse broadly visible against the dark line of the shore, giggling wildly to himself about píseogs and the lights of the little people.

  Heughan loped back to the fire and squatted down beside another of the men. “Can’t you ever keep Des under control, Jack? What is it that sets him off?”

  Jack was guarded in his response. He trailed a finger in the sand, drawing spiral patterns that wound in on themselves, snakes devouring their own tails. He shrugged a reply. “Fey,” he drawled in his soft, lazy accent. “Touched by the faeries. He says custom demands they need a song if you see them…” Jack paused and indicated his friend, who had stopped to sit cross-legged in the sand in front of the incoming tide. Des started to sing, a sad lament for erstwhile drunken men to be merry afore they died. Jack threw his own boots at him and told him to ‘shut up’. He shook his head. “He’s a mad git. The only songs he knows are bleeding miserable, and he’s only sane when he’s fighting. God love him but you know what they say, Heughan, Ná déan nós is ná bris nós.” He shook his head again and went to pull Desmond out of the water.