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By Root 1283 0

stones, all gave him an uneasy feeling that there must be more to life than a bow, an arrow, and the muscles to use them. He did not know what that something was, but the knowledge of it had started in London when an old man, an archer, had spoken to him and when the voice had sounded in his head. One day, feeling awkward, he knelt before a statue of the Virgin Mary and he asked her forgiveness for what he had failed to do in London. He gazed up at her slightly sad face and he thought her eyes, made bright with blue and white paint, were fixed on him and in those eyes he saw reproof. Talk to me, he prayed, but there was no voice in his head. No forgiveness for Sarah’s death, he thought. He had failed God. He was cursed.

“Think she can help you?” a sour voice interrupted his prayers. Hook turned and saw John Wilkinson.

“If she can’t,” Hook asked, “who can?”

“Her son?” Wilkinson suggested caustically. The old man looked furtively around him. There were a half-dozen priests saying masses at side altars, but otherwise the only other folk in the cathedral were nuns who were hurrying across the wide nave, shepherded and guarded by priests. “Poor girls,” Wilkinson said.

“Poor?”

“You think they want to be nuns? Their parents put them here to keep them from trouble. They’re bastards of the rich, boy, locked away so they can’t have bastards of their own. Come here, I want to show you something.” He did not wait for a response, but stumped toward the cathedral’s high altar that reared golden bright beneath the astonishing arches that stood, row above row, in a semicircle at the building’s eastern end. Wilkinson knelt beside the altar and dropped his head reverently. “Take a look in the boxes, boy,” he ordered Hook.

Hook climbed to the altar where silver and gold boxes stood on either side of a gold crucifix. Most of the boxes had crystal faces and, through those distorting windows, Hook saw scraps of leather. “What are they?” he asked.

“Shoes, boy,” Wilkinson said, his head still bowed and his voice muffled.

“Shoes?”

“You put them on your feet, young Hook, to keep the mud from getting between your toes.”

The leather looked old, dark and shrunken. One reliquary held a shriveled shoe so small that Hook decided it had to be a piece of child’s footwear. “Why shoes?” he asked.

“You’ve heard of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian?”

“No.”

“Patron saints of cobblers, boy, and of leather-workers. They made those shoes, or so we’re told, and they lived here and were probably killed here. Martyred, boy, like that old man you burned in London.”

“He was a…”

“Heretic, I know. You said. But every martyr was killed because someone stronger disagreed with what he believed. Or what she believed. Christ on His cross, boy, Jesus Himself was crucified for heresy! Why the hell else do you think they nailed Him up? Did you kill women too?”

“I didn’t,” Hook said uncomfortably.

“But there were women?” Wilkinson asked, looking at Hook. He saw the answer in Hook’s face and grimaced. “Oh, I’m sure God was delighted with that day’s work!” The old man shook his head in disgust before reaching into a purse hanging from his belt. He took out a handful of what Hook presumed were coins and dropped them into the huge copper jar that stood by the altar to receive the tribute of pilgrims. A priest had been watching the two English archers suspiciously, but visibly relaxed when he heard the sound of metal falling onto metal in the big jar. “Arrowheads,” Wilkinson explained with a grin. “Old rusted broadheads that are no good any more. Now why don’t you kneel and say a prayer to Crispin and Crispinian?”

Hook hesitated. God, he was sure, would have seen Wilkinson drop valueless arrowheads into the jar instead of coins, and the threat of hell’s fires suddenly seemed very close and so Hook hurriedly took a coin from his own pouch and dropped it into the copper jar. “Good lad,” Wilkinson said, “the bishop will be right glad of that. It’ll pay for a sup of his ale, won’t it?”

“Why pray to Crispin and Crispinian?” Hook asked Wilkinson.

“Because they’re the