Plaint for Provence Read online

  When they were hungry, they found a copse, tied their horses to a tree and sat on the grass together, as they had when Estela was a motherless little girl and Gilles her only protector in a cold household. She broke the cheese and gave him half. He sliced the bread and the dried sausage with his knife. They shared the wineskin. It was the best meal Estela could remember eating in days and she spoke with her mouth full of goat cheese. ‘This,’ she mumbled, ‘this is what Dragonetz is fighting for. And it’s worth it!’

  After lunching, they lay in the shade, pleasantly sleepy with wine and full stomachs, a long way from court formalities. Stretched out in a most unladylike way, eyes shut and idly masticating a dry grass blade, Estela murmured, ‘Do you remember teaching me how to choose a dagger.’

  ‘Mmm. Your brother never did understand. But you, quick as a fox with a rabbit.’

  ‘I still get it wrong,’ she confessed. ‘Petronilla. She’s not a pretty one. But she’s strong and true.’

  ‘Ay, a man’s eyes can never be trusted. But the second lesson is the more difficult, once you’ve learned the first.’

  Estela sighed. ‘Pretty can be strong and true. Like Talharcant. And Dragonetz.’

  ‘And you, my Lady. Beware men’s eyes, especially those who’ve not learned the second lesson. ’

  Estela instinctively felt her side, the leather sheath a hard lump beneath her kirtle. ‘Don’t worry. You taught me to look after myself. And I have you. And Nici.’ The dog opened one eye at his name but saw no reason to get excited and drooped back into his sprawling doze.

  ‘Maybe one day I will have my own lands and fiefs,’ Estela mused aloud. ‘I will oversee the harvests, protect my people, heal the ailing and help the women birth their babies. I will supervise the accounts and ensure that the coin is spent for the good of all. Our land will have the best markets in the whole world. I will hire the goat girl and we will have the best cheeses! Musca will grow to be a man in the sunshine of his people’s love. And of his parents’ love for him and each other.’

  ‘You would like that, my Lady.’

  ‘I would like that. Yes, I would like that very much.’

  After lazing an hour or two in this manner, they pursued a circular route that would take them back through the plain, with its fields and vineyards, to the narrow canyon that took them back to Les Baux. At the point where fields changed to rock, a bizarre figure set Nici barking.

  ‘A scarecrow?’ Estela wondered aloud but no scarecrow stood straight beside a stone wall, then bent over, walked a few steps with the aid of a stick, and repeated the movement. The creature was swathed from top to toe in what looked to be a bundle of random cloths, all brightly coloured. The human inside was well hidden and as the riders approached, they could see that the face too was covered, but with mesh, like fishing net. As they grew closer and recognised the clouds of insects making angry protest round the invader, the figure’s purpose was clear. Six niches in the stone wall each contained a wicker basket.

  ‘A beekeeper! Gilles, take Nici further on and I’ll get us some honey.’

  ‘My Lady, you’ll get stung!’ was spoken with the resignation of a man who expected to be ignored and Gilles was already leading horse and dog into the canyon when Estela called out to the worker. ‘Good man. Do you have honey I could buy?’

  She thought the man hadn’t heard her as there was no change in his rhythm. He put the lid back on the basket beside him, waved the smoking torch along the wall. Estela was close enough to hear the enraged buzzing change to mere irritation and she stored the sounds in her song of the day, along with the stream bubbling nearby and the man’s strange chant in a foreign tongue. Then she realised from the voice that this was no man.

  The female beekeeper walked slowly and steadily, towards Estela, leaning on her stick, lumbering and anonymous in her protective clothing.

  ‘I have been waiting for you, my Lady,’ she said. ‘Please, be my guest. I have comb in my shelter. Follow me. You may bring your man and hound. They will come to no harm.’ She remained veiled and Estela followed her own curiosity and the strange woman, into the canyon, where Gilles and Nici accepted their mistress’ madness, and followed too.

  Chapter 13

  The honey bee (apis) is from the heat of the sun… For anyone… who has had some limb moved from its place, or who has any crushed limbs, take bees that are not alive, but which have died, in a metallic jar. Put a sufficient amount on a linen cloth, and sew it up. Soak this cloth within, in olive oil, and place it over the ailing limb. Do this often, and he will be better.

  Physica, Birds

  The beekeeper motioned them to follow her and disappeared into solid rock. When Estela looked more closely, she could see that the fissures gave the illusion of solidity and behind the façade of rock lay an unmagical cave entrance, narrow but tall enough to enter on horseback. Was this where Dragonetz had hidden Barcelone’s treasure? No, surely not. First impressions had been of how spacious the first cavern was overhead but the flickering torch showed that it was small. The roof of the passageway from there into a back cave grazed Estela’s head if she forgot to stoop. The beekeeper’s home was adequate for one person’s basic living conditions but would not have hidden a treasure cart.

  The torch was slotted into a sconce and by its light, Estela saw two further tunnels, narrow and forbidding. Estela felt no compulsion to extend the day’s adventures beyond whatever she might experience within these walls. A mattress and cover, a cushion, a chest that served for table. A pitcher full of water stood beside plate and knife on the chest.

  She rested her hand lightly on her skirt, just where the slit allowed her to reach the hidden dagger. Gilles was rubbing his head where he’d bashed it on the rough ceiling of the tunnel. Nici had refused to enter the cave at all but would no doubt wait for them somewhere round the entrance, peeping in at the horses from time to time.

  ‘Honey,’ Estela said. ‘We would like to buy some of your honey. I think you were collecting it.’ I have been waiting for you, my Lady. What did the woman mean?

  ‘You shall have your honey, my Lady.’ The beekeeper unwound the cloths from her head and the mesh attached to them, revealing an ancient face, skin weathered to walnut, eyes rheumy with age and shadowed in the cave-light. She unbound her hands and removed some of the outer layers but those she revealed were just as bright and ill-assorted, cotton and cambric, fustian and hessian. She reminded Estela of someone but the memory was fickle as torch-light in a cave.

  The woman suffered a coughing fit, doubled over, hacked and spat. Estela could not tell the colour but would not have been surprised if the flux was bloody. Straightening, the beldame addressed Gilles, nodding at the stump where once his right hand had been. ‘Does that hurt?’

  Estela winced at the lack of courtesy but Gilles took no offence. ‘It was well cauterised but sometimes I feel it still,’ he confessed. It had never occurred to Estela that he might feel hurt where there was no longer a member.

  ‘Too late for honey on the burn,’ the woman mused in her strange accent ‘but there will be dead bees aplenty as I smoke them out for harvest. Mustn’t harvest with thunder in the air tho’. Bees turn evil. Kill if they’re poked. Do you want them? Dead bees?’

  Estela jumped at the question, aimed in her direction. She would like dead bees very much! She could add them to the little collection of potions she had stored on a shelf in a cold chamber beside the kitchen.

  ‘Yes, I could use them,’ she replied. ‘And if it might ease Gilles’ dolour, I have a recipe to soothe such with cloth, oil and dead bees.’

  ‘I read only people and lives, not books.’

  There seemed no fit response. A different thought struck Estela. ‘How will you have honey again if the bees die?’

  ‘There are always new bees, my Lady. It is nature’s way. I will catch six more swarms in the tree hollows next spring and bring them to my skeps in the wall.’

  Estela felt a sudden sadness that the bees died
to make her honey. ‘Do they have to die?’

  ‘All creatures serve us, my Lady, each in his own way. As sheep give us meat and wool, so bees give us honey. The bees themselves have order and rank. I have long watched my bees and they have a king, just as we do, his soldiers who do his work and the females who produce young. All have their place in the bee world as we do in this one. Those who give their lives now while I harvest the honey, will be replaced in the spring. There are always more bees.’

  Estela had no option but to accept the woman’s obvious expertise but she thought stubbornly that if she ever kept bees, she would at least try to keep them alive. Maybe honey harvesting could be like getting milk from a sheep, taking only a portion.

  ‘There’s fresh comb for you, my Lady.’ For the second time that day, Estela was given treasure from the terroir of Provence, this time in a pot.

  ‘Gilles, a coin for the beekeeper?’

  ‘Two, my Lady,’ demanded their host.

  Estela was so taken aback by the effrontery, she merely repeated, ‘Two?!’

  ‘You don’t recognise me, my Lady, do you.’

  ‘Should I?’ Estela managed a haughty tone but her heart was pounding, acknowledging something. Where? When?

  ‘One coin for the honey and that’s generous of you, my Lady. But Dame Fairnette needs her palm crossed for a true reading and that’s what you’re here for, lovely. You just don’t know it yet.’

  ‘What trickery -’ Gilles began, drawing his sword.

  ‘The Gyptian!’ Estela realised, remembering a late-night escapade in Narbonne, Jewish mystics and a Romani fortune-teller. What had she been promised? Or rather threatened. Something about a man’s death. She took the coins from Gilles. ‘Leave us,’ she told him. ‘I know this woman. I will come to no harm with her and I wish to hear what she has to say.’

  ‘Then you can hear it with me stood here,’ declared Gilles, sheathing his sword but not his frown. ‘You shouldn’t meddle with dark arts, my Lady.’

  ‘But she already has, hasn’t she, my pretty.’ Dame Fairnette’s sing-song voice addressed both her hearers and neither. ‘For all your fierce words, I see love in you, fierce man.’

  Gilles snorted but maintained his guardsman stance, feet apart and firmly planted on the hard earth. ‘Not just for my pretty Lady, no, that takes no second sight. No, the love in your heart for another is what I can see.’

  Estela couldn’t see Gilles’ face in the cave’s wavering light but she could feel the slight hiccup in his breathing, the tell-tale stillness in the atmosphere. Silence did not keep secrets, not in this cave. The voice chanted, ‘Be bold, Gilles Lack-hand, and she will turn to you in her need. She sees you now whereas before she could not look. You will find each other.’

  Rather than risk being dismissed again and having to obey, Gilles kept firmly silent but his relief was apparent when the fortune-teller turned her attention to Estela.

  ‘Remember now, my lovely? The red-headed Queen is moving ever closer to her tower prison; the golden ruler of Narbonne is about to meet her troubadour. The cards cannot lie. And I recognized you straight away. You were Nobody, remember?’ She cackled at her own joke.

  Estela did remember when she was nobody. She frowned and spoke sarcastically, even as she accepted the invitation to sit on the rough bed-cover while Dame Fairnett sat cross-legged on the cavern floor, drawing a pack of cards from one of the floral fabrics around her hips. ‘The ‘golden ruler of Narbonne’ had already met her troubadour, so you are mistaken.’

  The Gyptian shuffled the cards while replying. ‘But that wasn’t her troubadour, was it, my pretty. That troubadour was the one in your cards, wasn’t he. And when I told you someone would not survive the knowing of you, I was right, wasn’t I. Oh yes, she knows I was right, doesn’t she.’

  Estela was glad of the dim light that hid her flushed face and sore conscience. She took refuge in a counter-attack. ‘Why are you all alone?’ she demanded. ‘I remember you were with a band of your people. You had some holy mission to a place by the sea. Why are you living in a cave near Les Baux? Did they cast you out?’

  Dame Fairnette hissed through her teeth. ‘She remembers now, does she, but she’s got it all wrong. The Gyptian mother is always on a mission for her people. They’re by the great salt wash, waiting for the Maries and Black Sarah but I had to leave them because of you.’ The direct address was like a slap. ‘You and your Lord Dragonetz. Not even the Saint Maries are safe from what you great lords do in Les Baux. So I am here and so are your cards.’ The cards waited on the table, promise and threat, neutral. The patterns on them reminded Estela of the mosque in Jerusalem.

  ‘Where did you get those cards?’ Estela asked. ‘I have never seen their like.’

  ‘A Mameluke gave them to me, in the days when I could dance a man’s blood to madness, before the trek over land and seas to shape our people’s future. The cards talk to me but no-one else hears them. Goys see the four suits, and the number of cups or coins on a card, but they don’t know the Malik from the Na’in and Thani Na’ib.’ She moved three cards around as she named them and Estela could see that each belonged by its symbols to one of the four suits but had a different, distinct design.

  She knew enough Arabic to understand that her friend’s name also meant ‘king’ and the other two titles, lesser courtiers. Their designs of intersecting circles and triangles could be taken by a fanciful observer for a child’s drawing of a person, and each suit had its three courtiers. ‘The Malik of Les Baux must come to me himself if he would know his origins,’ muttered the Gyptian, retiring the card she named, one painted with stick symbols. ‘The cards will tell you what they want you to know my pretty.’ She placed the Thani Na’ib of the cup suit, on its own, face up and held out her hand, waiting.

  Mute, Estela passed the silver coin three times over the out-stretched palm and watched it disappear into a fold of skirt. Then the fortune-teller laid out three rows for the reading, as she had done the last time.

  ‘No nasty Pathfinder blocking this time.’ Estela had indeed left her runic brooch back in her clothes chest, needing no clasp or extra weight in the heat. ‘There you be, dark lady.’ She placed one card alone. ‘Pathfinder lies still, watching your path tied to another’s. Choices… there are always choices… but so faint this time. The road runs straight. If you be yourself, you’ll choose the straight road.’ Lost in trance, real or feigned, the woman frowned, studying a card.

  ‘That can’t be,’ she complained, ‘that has already been.’ She fixed an angry gaze on Estela as if blaming her subject for the impossible card. ‘But the reading is clear. Someone will not survive the knowing of you.’

  ‘Dragonetz,’ breathed Estela.

  ‘No. I see his path, the one you’re tied to, the Oath-breaker’

  Estela jumped to her feet, enraged. ‘He is no oath-breaker! He is a true knight’

  ‘So you say, my Lady, but the seven cups is beside the Na’in of swords, your Dragonetz.’ She pointed to them ‘I see a man despised, a man who’s broken the promise that makes him knight. Sit, if you would hear more. Or go. The cards don’t care.’

  Estela sat and the voice continued. ‘And I see a different man, his path a shadow bound to yours. It will happen again. A man. Flesh of your flesh and dead because of it.’

  Estela felt sick and felt for the reassurance of her dagger. ‘I would kill any man who tried!’ she said ‘so there might well be dead men but not… the rest. It’s not possible. What else?’

  ‘A straight path,’ Dame Fairnette repeated, ‘until you cross the sea.’ She pointed at a card picturing six swords. ‘Inversed,’ the fortune-teller murmured, ‘so not into calmer waters but into more troubles. Seas or troubles… real water, I feel it. Then you will use Pathfinder to help make your choice. I see gold… no, not for you directly. Your lord should beware gold.’ Her eyes focused and her voice snapped back to the present. ‘Enough. I’m tired.’ She added as an afterthought, ‘my Lady.’


  Estela made light of the prophecies, ‘What, no handsome husband? Not even sons like you promised Queen Aliénor?’

  ‘The cards do not lie, my pretty one.’ Estela could see white whiskers on the woman’s chin and she longed to pull one out.

  ‘So that means I won’t have a handsome husband and lots of children,’ Estela persisted, with brittle flippancy.

  Dame Fairnette cackled. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you. But the cards don’t care what you’d like. They don’t say all that is, they don’t say all that isn’t.’

  Estela breathed out heavily, controlling her diaphragm as she’d been taught, modulating her voice. ‘Well you won’t make much silver that way, Dame Fairnette. You must be getting old and have mixed up our fortunes. Here’s Gilles all set for romance and me for exploring the world Oltra mar. My days on a boat are over!’ She rose, smooth and graceful. ‘Thank you for the honey and I will let Lady Etiennette know that you are harvesting.’

  With the help of her stick, the Romani also got to her feet, muttering to herself again. ‘Honey for the castle, happy to oblige the lords, happy to live in the caves with the guardian beast, keep the treasure from the wrong hands. If my Lady comes to the Val d’Enfer at night, she won’t like that, no she won’t.’

  Gilles shook his head. He was right. Whatever sense there had been in Dame Fairnette was losing the battle. Estela clutched her jar of honey and followed Gilles into the tunnel’s darkness, then towards the light of the outer cavern, to the horses. Nici patrolled outside, noted they were back and bounded off.

  ‘She is going crazy.’ Estela stated. ‘She never used to talk to herself like that, or about us as if we weren’t there.’