'Closer to five weeks,' Gilles corrected. 'By that time your body -
the
body - is completely pickled. The natron has the power to draw every drop of moisture from whatever it touches — we had Kervezey down in the hold with natron on him while we sailed, in case you wondered. If he had started to rot, it would not have worked. You need a fresh corpse . . .' I waved at him to stop. 'My apologies, Petroc. In any case, Herodotos -we learned of this method from him - says seventy-odd days, but that is unnecessary and the old Greek is a horrible exaggerator.'
'And then what?' said Anna. She was free of any squeamish-ness, I knew: if anything, she found the whole thing delightfully fascinating.
At the end of the month, or five weeks, or whenever the corpse is ready, it is, as I said, completely pickled. But it looks like wax, as you saw, like the skin of a salted prosciutto. That is what it is, really - cured ham. So you need to make it look old. The ancients bandaged their dead and poured tars and resins over them to preserve them that way. We don't have time for that. Think of hams again, Patch. Do you see? We smoke our corpse over pine and various other things - frankincense, myrrh, spices - that darken it and give it that nice smell: the odour of sanctity, yes? We give our clients what they want, you know. And so: a perfect relic'
'Do you do this a lot?' I asked. I was finding it hard to digest this information, and I hoped I would be able to eat ham again.
'Only in an emergency. Occasionally for other reasons,' said the Captain. 'The reason now is that we need a Saint Exuperius, and, if you remember, no such fellow ever lived.'
We do not have Cordula,' said Gilles, seeing my bafflement. 'So we need Exuperius. And because we could rifle every grave in Christendom and never find him, we are at liberty to conjure him into existence.'
'And he is going to smell lovely,' Anna said, and raised her cup towards the hut where the natron was going about its slow, careful work.
It took thirty-three days in the natron before Exuperius was hung, with little ceremony, from the rafters of the hut. The table was carried out and the natron, all 600 pounds of it, dumped into the sea. Then Gilles sealed the window and lit a fire in the stone trough. He fussed over it until it burned with a low smoulder and then arranged the green pine wood and a scattering of the aromatics. One of those I recognised: the grey-leaved plant with pink flowers that had broken my fall to the beach on Koskino. It was myrrh.
Then we watched as the white smoke began to seep, and then billow, through the holes in the roof. A week went by, and we all smelled of the fragrant smoke before the fire was allowed to die and the body carried out, as black as the ancient corpses of Egypt. Gilles rinsed the soot away with retsina, and I took one end of the stretcher that carried our new saint aboard the
Cormaran.
We were ready to sail, and Nizam had plotted our course: we would postpone Venice, and head back across the warm Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules and further, past the Bay of Biscay, past Bordeaux and up to the misty Channel, where one day I would see Start Point rear out of the furrowed green ocean and know it pointed the way to my home. Perhaps I would even see the gentle rounded shoulders of the moor, fading to blue in the far distance. And for a while longer, Anna would be by my side.
Before the relic was wrapped in old, stained muslin and packed into the hold, Anna arranged the stiff bronze hair and carefully slipped a Roman ring onto one shrivelled finger. I knelt beside her and stared at the hand that had once thrown gold coins at the feet of a young monk. The face of Sir Hugh de Kervezey did not belong to him any longer. It was old now, older than the knight would ever have been. It had a sheen of sanctity, of power imagined by vanished armies of the loving, credulous faithful.
'He looks like a saint at last,' I said.
"Yes,' said Anna, smoothing down a brittle curl with a spit-moistened finger. 'His own father wouldn't know him now.'
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