The Days of Miracles and Wonders
An Epic of the New World Disorder.
Somerville House, Toronto, Canada; Canongate, Edinburgh, U.K. 1997
Canongate paperback 1998. Interlink Books USA, 1999 (paperback).
Home, home! Remembering that endless post-crusade
journey: The long trek through the enemy zone of Germany, incognito,
with none but my most trusted lieutenants, disguised as pilgrims, with
our tattered scrip, our faded staffs of poverty. But a king cannot
be hid under rags. Discovery, capture, imprisonment in the dark castle
overlooking the Danube. Hostage-dom and the long bargaining and raising
of ransom. Ironic to know one's price: 100,000 marks (And what might
that be in current coinage, dollars, ecus, francs?)... While throughout
the kingdoms and dukedoms of Europe armies moved on like pawns on chessboards...
One year, six weeks and three days. And then, the old wargames again - England,
Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine... the criss cross paths of intrigue. Castles besieged,
walls breached, the crushing of heads and arms, the courage of yeomen, the cowardice
of kings, a brother's perfidy, all the usual slings and arrows... One tries so
hard, one gallops so far, rushing from point to point, shoring up the weak elements,
hardening the crumbling foundations, lifting dejected spirits, striking fear
in the unworthy, blessing one's friends, damning one's enemies... When will it
ever end?
Chalus-Chabrol: The crossbowman's arrow. The sawbones came, and hacked about
my shoulder. Hack hack hack, cut cut cut. Pain. I wished I had kept with me some
of that potion the hashasheen used to glimpse paradise. Instead I just lay there,
dying. I forgave the crossbowman who shot me, and commended him on his initiative
and marksmanship. I tried my luck with some of the lusty Limousin wenches. My
doctors cried that I was only hastening the end. I said: Better a sweet end than
a dry. The wound turned rotten, suppurating. I smelled the stench of my decay.
My mother came and sat by my deathbed. She brought me priests, to whom I confessed
my sins. That seemed to go on for ever. Enough of all that. I closed my eyes.
I saw my coronation, felt the anointing oil on my bare breast. Not all the water
from the rough rude sea, can wash the balm from an anointed king...
The three strange men were still following. I paused, at the top of the hill.
The sprawling bulk of the old Abbey complex. The restored monasteries, the great
church's apse and belfry, the cloisters, quad-rangles and chapter house, the
rebuilt Romanesque kitchen, its pungent memories and echoes... Six hundred years
of Tradition, Faith and Power. In 1561, the Huegenots attacked and desecrated
the Abbey, but it was not until 1792 Anno Domini that the chain was snapped when
the Revolution suppressed the entire Order, scattering the monks and transforming
the entire edifice into a prison for les malheureux de ressource. The Convent
of Saint Madeleine become a smoke belching factory and a workshop where the inmates
toiled to pay for the New Order killing and ravaging to survive outside the walls...
One can read all about it a brochure one picks up at the Abbey entrance, a neat
package of recycled tumult, discord and disarray...
Death, the old man on the clapped out nag... The seer hermit of Calabria. The
three ages - the Father, the Son, the Spirit. The Age of Love and Freedom, when
God will be revealed to every human heart. But they cut out my heart, and my
entrails, and put them in jars, and scattered them about France. They made sure
I would never be whole again. God's Will, the severed Hand of Glory. But you
can't keep a good man down...
Ebb and flow. Sturm und drang. The light and the dark. They could have at least
told me the future but instead I have to read about it in Le Monde. Fontevraud
remained a prison for almost two hundred years, until 1963 - one year after Algerian
Independence, the country exhausted from a decade of colonial wars, incipient
military rebellion, terrorism and dissension. New voices and images. Being and
Nothingness. Nausea. Hiroshima Mon Amour... A new/old spectre haunting Europe,
crowds marching up and down the great grid of Paris, filling its alleyways, armed
with its cobblestones... New Holy Grails, just out of reach...
"CE N'EST QU'UN DEBUT, CONTINUON LE COMBAT!"
But all this, too, will pass...
I stepped back into the main church transept, but the three men still followed
me inside. I paced along its hundred foot length towards the glassed off crypt,
in which a dozen archaeology students crouched, busy scraping, in their youthful
vigour, the gravel floor with trowels.I stopped before the glass cases holding
the Plantagenet Tombs, which, alas, merit only one star in Michelin. The recumbent
effigy of my father, Henry II, clutching his rod of office. My mother, Eleanor
of Aquitaine, Queen of France and England, Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess
of Poitou and many other properties, holding, as if she had just fallen asleep
under a bedside lamp, an open book made of stone. And my own tomb, the rod of
office pointing from the stone beard to the groin. I read my epitaph:
Charoux, in Poitiers, her Duke's entrails guards,
His body, Fontevraud in marble shrines.
The Normans boast the King's unconquered heart.
Three countries thus the glorious ashes share
Of a King too great to rest in one alone.
No bless, oblige. A very pretty sentiment. Does one believe in the resurrection
of either the body or the spirit? Does one burn at the stake for nothing? Should
crucifictions be routine? Is there death after life? Ashes are only ashes,
after all. Bones are only bones. Blood only blood. Intestines and sinews dry
and fade, even if preserved in vinegar. Memories, too, fail and warp and bend
and malform down the faltering, twisting, misread, falsifying and forgotten
paths of history...
Can the idea be consumed?
The short stocky man stood at my side, his two obvious bodyguards holding back
about twenty feet behind us, out of earshot. He had a thin, carefully clipped
moustache and dark brown eyes, the long lashed lids continuously blinking.
We both stood and looked into my grave.
"Richard the Lion Heart?" he said, in French. "My name is Aziz
Khamash, of Lebanon. I think we have a great deal to discuss..."
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