The two executioners, for the first time, seemed uncertain, as if they had not been briefed for this eventuality, or as if they had forgotten the briefing.
“We get deacon,” said the first eventually. “You. You stay here.”
The humor of the remark struck him as he turned away, and he repeated it to his mate with a second roar of laughter. Richier stood on the stool, trying to keep his legs from fainting under him, in the dark, in the stinking shed. By the time the light came back, and he saw the implacable face of the little deacon staring up into his own, even the deacon could see that his nerve had cracked for ever.
“Lift him down,” ordered Erkenbert. “Give him water. Now, you. Tell me at once what you know.”
The story babbled out. Location. Need for a guide, a guide, himself, if he were dead they would never find it. How he had rescued the precious thing. The one-eyed man they thought a new Messiah. His falsity, his treachery. Erkenbert let it all pour out, confident that a man so broken would never try to go back on his ignoble bargain. At the end Richier risked a word that was not relevant.
“The men you killed here,” he husked. “Some were of us, some were not. Will you not answer to your God—to the true God—for the Catholics you have killed?”
Erkenbert looked at him strangely. “What can it matter?” he asked. “God granted it to them to die in His service, and their reward is sure. Do you think God will not know His own?”
Chapter Twenty-six
Erkenbert looked with doubt and suspicion at the aged wood held out to him. He had seen many relics: the bones of Saint Wilfrid and Saint Guthlac, of Saint Cuthbert and of the Venerable Bede, even, once, a fragment of the True Cross itself when it was exposed for adoration. He had never seen one entirely unadorned. This looked like something a peasant had left behind his wood-stack for twenty years, and never got round to burning. It was old, he conceded. It looked exactly like the device the one-eyed pagan wore round his neck.
“Are you sure this is it?” he demanded.
Richier the traitor began to babble pleas of assurance.
“Not you. You, Sieghart. Is this the holy thing itself that the Emperor seeks?”
“It was well-hidden,” said Sieghart stolidly. “Deep inside the mountain, traps all the way. Ambushes too. Lost a few men. But I kept the rat here on his leash, and had plenty of torches burning. We found it in the end. Strange place. Lot of burnt bones.”
“Answer my question!”
Sieghart screwed his face up with the effort of decision. “Yes, I think it is. I think they think it is, anyway. We found a lot of other stuff with it.”
He jerked a thumb and four men came forward. At another gesture they opened their sacks, tipped the contents on to the mud floor of the hovel Erkenbert had made his base. He drew in his breath at the sight of the gold plate, the cups, the incense burners, objects that he could see were there for divine service. No, service of idols, he corrected himself. But it was no secular hoard, not even a king’s hoard. An idea began to stir. As it did so his eye caught unexpected objects amid the loot. Books. Two of them.
He picked one up, opened it. “What is this?” he demanded of the despairing Richier.
“They are the holy books of our—of the heretic faith. There are only two copies of them.” Richier had meant to say “two copies left,” but some mistaken instinct of self-preservation warned him.
“And what is holy about them?”
“They tell the story—they claim to tell the story of what happened after… after Christ was taken down from the Cross.”
“But that story is in the Gospel of Nicodemus. Not a work that the Church has admitted into the canon of the Bible, but a work worthy of reverence. There are many copies of it in the libraries of Christendom.”
“This tells a different story,” whispered Richier. He did not dare even to hint at what the story might be.