Overtime. Part 6

'Good man,' said the Anti-Pope. 'Good Lord, is that the time? I must fly.'

'Um,' said Guy, as casually as he could. 'Who was that?'

'Sorry?' De Nesle was grinning.

'That, urn, lady,' said Guy, 'who just came in.'

'Oh, that,' de Nesle replied. 'That was my sister, Isoud. Right, shall we be getting along?'

'Yes, yes, thank you,' said Guy, not moving. 'Your sister,' he repeated.

De Nesle sat down on the edge of the desk and picked up the coffee cup. He took a sip and grimaced. 'She's put sugar in it again,' he said. 'Yes, very much my sister. Makes a profoundly horrible cup of coffee, bless her, but otherwise she's better than having malaria. I take it you don't want to go home now.'

Guy lifted his head sharply, and saw that there was little point in lying. He nodded.

'You would prefer,' said de Nesle, with a certain degree of amus.e.m.e.nt in his voice, 'to spend the rest of your life as a knight of La Beale Isoud, doing deeds of note in her name and striving to be worthy of her?'

'Well,' said Guy, and then he nodded again. 'The thought had crossed my mind, yes.'

De Nesle smiled. 'There's one born every minute,' he said, 'or at the outside, every ninety seconds. My sister has enough knights strewn across history to re-enact Agincourt. You may remember,' he added softly, 'what happened to the knights at Agincourt.'

'Oh.'

'Isoud,' de Nesle continued, 'is the plain one. My sister Mahaud, at the last count, had more admirers than there are Elks. Mahaud, by the way, isn't the pretty one. My sister Ysabel, she's the pretty one.'

'Um...'

'Fortunately,' de Nesle went on, 'Mahaud and Ysabel are both happily married and living back in time. Furthermore, they're both putting on weight. They do that. Not that Isoud's a slouch when it comes to putting away the carbohydrates; she may look like she'd get blown away by the downdraught from a closing door, but put her in front of a dish of roast pullets and you'll begin to believe what they say about how thin the dividing line is between humanity and the lower animals. The sight of Isoud eating corn on the cob ... Sorry, I seem to have lost my thread.'

'I...'.

De Nesle rested his chin on his hand and looked at Guy for a moment. 'When there's just one of them it's not so bad; it's when you've got three of them cluttering up the place that you've got problems. They gang up on you. They throw out shirts without telling you. They repaint bathrooms while you're out. Worse still, they repaint a third of the bathroom, get bored and leave the rest for you to do when you get back. They make funny remarks about you to visitors. They decide that they can't bear to live with the tapestries in the hail for another day, drag you round the fair looking at tapestries, moan at you for not taking an interest, and then sulk at you when you express an opinion. In my opinion, the idea of anyone wanting to fight knights and kill dragons just to prove themselves worthy of somebody's sister is so absurd as to be ludicrous.'

De Nesle finished his coffee and put the cup down. 'Anyway,' he said, 'that's all beside the point, isn't it? I take it that all my well-chosen words have been entirely wasted?'

Guy nearly said something but nodded instead. De Nesle shrugged.

'In that case,' he said, 'I suppose we'd better get down to business.'

Guy started. 'Business?' he said.

'Business.' De Nesle put a businesslike expression on his face. 'Terms and the like.'

'Terms?'

'Terms. I'd be only too glad for you to take La Beale Isoud off my hands - it wouldn't be losing a sister so much as gaining five hundred cubic metres of wardrobe s.p.a.ce - but a man in my position has to make full use of all the resources at his disposal. So, terms.'

Guy swallowed. 'You mean,' he said, 'money?'

De Nesle scowled briefly, and then, as if remembering something, smiled again. 'Certainly not,' he said. 'My fault, should have made myself clear instead of trying to be delicate. Not money. Help.'

'Help?'

'Look,' de Nesle said, 'imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery and all that, but I wonder if you'd mind not repeating every single word I say? It makes one so self-conscious. Perhaps I'd better explain.'

'Yes,' said Guy.

'Right.' De Nesle stood up, walked round the room, and then sat down again. 'Yes,' he said. 'Cards on the table, and all that.'

Guy leaned forward slightly, to demonstrate attentiveness. This seemed to disconcert de Nesle somewhat, for he got up again and walked round the room the other way. Finally he sat down, scratched the back of his head and started making a chain out of paperclips.

'You see ...' he said. 'Yes?'

'Oh never mind,' de Nesle exclaimed. 'It's like this ...'

Once upon a time (said de Nesle) in a province of Greater France called England, there was a king; and his name was Richard. This king was so brave that people called him Richard the Lion-Heart; and at a time when most kings went down to posterity with names such as Charles the Bald and Louis the Fat, this must be taken as evidence that he was at least reasonably popular.

But then, King Richard wasn't like most of his fellow kings. For instance, when two peasants disagreed over who owned a particular pig and brought the matter to the King's court of justice for a ruling, Richard would usually end up giving the losing party a pig from the royal pigsties by way of a consolation prize. This was partly because Richard was not always fully capable of following the complexities of a fiercely contested legal argument, and so hedged his bets somewhat to avoid injustice. On the other hand, his royal cousin King Philip Augustus of France, who was rather better at law, tended to resolve all such disputes by finding technical irregularities in the pleadings of both parties, dismissing the case and eating the pig.

What King Richard was best at was fighting; in fact, he was the finest swordsman and horseman of his age. The trouble was that he didn't enjoy it. War bothered him. It was, he felt, morally questionable, and if he had his way he would quietly phase it Out and replace it with something rather less destructive, such as tennis or community singing (for Richard was extremely musical). Unfortunately, the times he lived in were primitive, to say the least, and warfare was in fact one of the milder and least hazardous pastimes available; besides, as the greatest knight in Christendom, Richard had appearances to keep up. If he suddenly turned pacifist and went about the place sniffing flowers, his adoring people would in all probability change his name to Richard the Fairy and burn him at the stake.

It was then that King Richard came up with a quite brilliant solution. He would organise a Crusade.

There had already been a Crusade, about a hundred years earlier. It was basically a joint-stock, limited-liability Crusade, organised by two astute French n.o.blemen, and after deductions it paid a twenty-seven per cent dividend on capital invested, and was accordingly a success. It also recaptured Jerusalem, but the overheads proved unrealistic after a couple of years, and following a period of restructuring the Crusaders rationalised Jerusalem to the Saracens. Jerusalem, when all was said and done, hadn't really been the point.

Nor was it the point as far as King Richard was concerned. What interested him was the idea that he might, with a little low cunning and a great deal of luck, be able to induce the King of France, the Emperor of Byzantium and the Holy Roman Emperor, the triple pillars of Christendom, to stop beating the pulp out of each other for a while and direct their royal energies towards a common purpose. It troubled him that the common purpose, at least initially, would have to be beating the pulp out of Saladin; but Richard was a realist as well as a dreamer, and knew that there always has to be a loser somewhere. Besides, he had it on excellent authority that Saladin and his subjects were incurably bellicose and warlike, and as such were a serious obstacle in the way of world peace.

It was what would happen after Jerusalem was recaptured that Richard was most concerned about; for it occurred to him that the triple pillars, flushed with success and self-satisfaction after liberating the Holy Land, would be in a very good mood, and might be persuaded to sit round a table and discuss freedom, justice, tolerance, the pursuit of happiness and other such matters - particularly if Richard threatened to smack them round the head if they refused.

If there was one thing that Richard Coeur de Lion had, it was personality, and one by one the potentates of Christendom agreed to take part in the great adventure. Money to finance the project started pouring in - where from, Richard wasn't exactly sure; but there seemed to be plenty of it, which was all that mattered - and soon the preparations were complete. Amid unparalleled scenes of jubilation, the great expedition set off for the long journey to the Holy Land; and if the main cause of the jubilation was the relief of the peasants of Europe at having got so many incorrigibly warlike knights out from under their feet, then that was yet another beneficial side-effect of the great venture.

And then Richard disappeared.

He was last seen, according to most reliable accounts, sitting under an olive tree on a beach in Cyprus with a footstool, a jug of mead and a book - Aristotle, or some such frivolous holiday reading. His fellow crusaders searched high and low for him, but found nothing apart from a footstool, an empty jug and an odd sock.

Not long afterwards, ugly rumours began to circulate. The French said that King Richard had been abducted by the Germans and was being held to ransom in a castle in Bavaria. The Germans declared that he had been imprisoned by the French king, who was demanding Aquitaine and ten million gold livres for his safe return. The Byzantines, who were a frivolous nation, suggested that the book, which Richard had borrowed from the world-famous library of the Abbey of Cluny, was three months overdue and the Abbot was holding Richard's person as security for unpaid fines. At any rate, the Crusade broke up, France and Germany declared war on Byzantium and burnt the Great Library of Constantinople, presumably by way of revenge for the Byzantine's tasteless remarks, and life in Christendom gradually returned to normal. After King Richard had been missing for a number of years he was declared officially dead and his brother John acceded to his throne. History, in its impartial and eclectic way, made a selection from the leading rumours to account for what had happened, and the world snuggled down to wait for the Black Death.

'Yes,' said Guy, 'that's really very interesting. Are you sure all this is -?'

'Yes,' said de Nesle.

'Ah,' Guy replied.

As already noted, de Nesle continued, King Richard was intensely musical, and one of his closest friends had been a French duke, Jean II de Nesle, known as Blondel -'Relative of yours?' Guy asked.