Fixing Forcalquier

  FIXING FORCALQUIER

  BY

  EAMONN MURPHY

  (PREVIEW)

  Prologue

  It was a hot day in Haute-Provence. Warren Wise, the man they called the Wizard of Wall Street, ran a forefinger between his neck and the collar of his cotton shirt. It didn't help much. Deciding that he could let himself go a little on vacation he loosened his tie and undid a few of the top buttons; that felt a little better.

  Only nine thirty in the morning and already he was sweating. He had been awakened more than three hours before, just after dawn, by a phone call from the United States; a phone call which made him very angry. When the transatlantic conversation was finished he had stomped out of the hotel, leaving his wife snoring peacefully, and gone for a brisk walk in the countryside. Although they were staying in the very centre of the Provencal town of Forcalquier, the open country was only twenty minutes away on foot.

  The city was once quite special. Back in the thirteenth century, it had been the capital of an independent state, a major trading centre that made alliances and treaties with the powerful Kingdoms of Barcelona and Toulouse. One of its Counts had even succeeded in marrying his daughter to King Henry II of England. The modern world had passed it by, however, major road and rail links just missing it by those few vital kilometres, and it had grown moribund.

  The place was still quite striking though, thought Wise as he reached the top of a hill and turned back to look at it. In the centre of Forcalquier was a rocky pinnacle, rising abruptly from the plateau around. There was a neat little chapel at its peak, on the site from which, in the Middle Ages, the Count's castle had once dominated the town. "Glory days," Warren murmured aloud as he reflected on that past. He had read about it in the local library and museum, for as an international businessman he spoke excellent French, as well as Spanish and German. He stood appreciating the fine spectacle of Forcalquier a few seconds more, a jumble of creamy stone buildings climbing steeply up to the chapel on its peak: then he turned and, facing the other way, was confronted with the equally impressive sight of Lurs, a picturesque village perched atop another green hill. He inhaled the fresh, sage-scented, mountain clean air and suddenly decided to walk there, for his health, for the view, and to calm himself after the shock of that morning's phone call. The ground before him sloped quite sharply, a gravelled surface leading down to a thick forest of oak. He descended with caution.

  Until that irritating transatlantic message, he had managed to forget about work. His Doctor had personally recommended this part of France to him as the best place to get away from it all and relax. "You don't want the Cote D'Azure," that worthy medicine man had declared. "All those bronzed young beauties making your heart beat faster in the hot sun, and noisy nightclubs later. You need to turn off. You need a quiet spot in the countryside, and it so happens I know just the place: sixty kilometres north of Marseille and the same distance east of Avignon; a lovely town called Forcalquier. Unspoiled, lots of pretty villages around it and the Alps on the eastern horizon. You won't even think about the Dow Jones Index."

  This was not quite true. Warren Wise never forgot about the Dow Jones Index. If the eyes really were windows to the soul, as some romantics believe, Warren's would have shown white squares with dollar signs on, like an old-fashioned cash register. Money was his God.

  Like all the sincerest worshippers of that deity he had been born poor and worked hard to get rich; then richer; then richer again, always with that dreadful nagging doubt that if he didn't get enough he might lose it and be poor again. He would rather die.

  He was a solidly built man of medium height with short, grey hair, a square jaw and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. His large nose arched slightly in the middle, like Caesar's he used to say, and his brow was wrinkled due to permanent concentration on matters of high finance. His eyes were not dollar signs but a startling blue. It was the face of an All-American tough guy, like John Wayne or George C. Scott, and he glowed with secret pride whenever he looked in the mirror to shave it.

  When he was young, good-looking and rising rapidly in the world of finance he had married Eve Dixon, who was young, very beautiful, and a rising star in the world of movies. She had quit work shortly after their marriage, bore him two sons and raised them according to the usual middle-class American standards of their time. The second son had become a credit to the family and now occupied a top managerial position in the Wise Group of Companies, well placed to take over when the torch was passed. The eldest son had become a hippie.

  The call Warren had received that morning came from his second son, Thomas, who was currently in charge of closing down a factory in California. The factory, which made televisions, was the main industry in its town, with more than fifty percent of the population working in it directly and the rest depending on it indirectly for their own income: the butchers, the barbers, the bakers and all those others who provided services for the factory workers, and also those who worked in smaller factories to supply it with parts, all would lose their jobs without the Wise Television Company. The town had grown up around the factory and if it closed the town would simply wither away and die.

  That was of no concern to Warren Wise. Workers were cheaper south of the border down Mexico way, and a smaller wage bill meant a bigger profit margin. To him, it was a clear-cut business decision and there was no reasonable argument, that is, commercial argument, against it. However, he did not entirely trust the local management team to efficiently oversee the destruction of their own community so he had sent his son to supervise. Naturally, they had expected a protest from the locals but Thomas had disturbed his holiday because of an unforeseen complication.

  He summed it up briefly that morning:

  "Dad. Frank is here."

  Frank was the eldest son. On hearing this news Warren cursed mentally and gripped the phone tighter; he said nothing, not trusting himself to speak, and the voice from California continued:

  "There's trouble. He's joined in with the local protesters, practically taken charge of them in fact, and the papers have found out who he is. Hell, he told them. It's making all the front pages now as a "human interest" story. Bad publicity. "What do you think we should do?"

  "Close that factory down!" Warren had thundered.

  "Take it easy, Dad. Remember the old ticker. I phoned because some of the other Directors have been on the line grumbling at me, and Frank is playing the media game for all it’s...."

  "To Hell with Frank," Warren interrupted, "and to Hell with the other Directors too. It's my company and I'm in charge. I gave you a job to do Thomas Wise. Get on with it. Good-bye." He slammed the phone back into its receiver, furious not with Thomas, never with Thomas, but with his errant offspring - Frank.

  Warren eased himself gently down a gravelled slope, one that was far steeper than he had anticipated, and contemplated this parental failure. It was no consolation that several of his friends had suffered similar experiences with their own children, especially, it often seemed, the first-born. Raised to be sound Republican moneymen, with three-piece suits on their exteriors and the Protestant work ethic within, they often went in the opposite direction. It was most mysterious. Warren had often wondered, and demanded of his friends, whether if the sons had been raised as communist hippies they would have rebelled and become businessmen. He had even tried to cajole younger managers with new-born sons into bringing up their children that way, as an experiment, but none of them was willing.

  He began to realise that he had taken a bad route to Lurs. The gentle slope had become steeper until it was almost like a cliff, and the ground underfoot was loose scree - not the best footing for an ageing city dweller. Wise contemplated going back but d
ecided that it might be even more difficult than going on. He muttered insults at himself for being such a damn fool as to get into this situation and shuffled forward again.

  Suddenly he slipped. His left foot slid forward on the gravel. He instinctively shifted his weight to the right foot and that slipped too. His arms pinwheeled uselessly and he fell sideways then began to roll down the steep hill, completely out of control. His expensive Gucci shoes scrabbled but failed to find a hold; his keys fell from his trouser pocket; as he tumbled he picked up a coating of fine dust, like a doughnut being rolled in sugar. Sky and earth alternated in an almost stroboscopic rush. He tucked his head into his arms for protection.

  Then, incredibly, he was in free fall, nothing at all underneath him. In a panic, he flung his arms out and stared wildly about. He saw blackness; nothingness. He shouted, and when he tried to suck in his breath after the shout there was no air. Blackness and silence and he couldn't even scream.

  Suddenly there was air again, and light, and hard earth and blue sky rotating crazily around him and sharp stones digging alternately into his front and back. He managed to stop himself by sticking out an arm and a leg, banging his knee and elbow in the process. Halted at last he lay flat on his belly, gasping like an asthmatic and listening to the pounding of his heart. He looked at the pale green grass beneath his hands as the scent of sage and thyme filled his nostrils: the scent of Provence. He breathed it in deeply, glad to be alive, and waited for his heart to slow to a normal pace.

  Something sharp prodded at his back. Since he was face down, and in a state of some confusion, it took three sharp jabs, each one harder than the last, to make him aware of the process. When he realised what was happening he rolled over, more than a little irritated, and looked around for the source of his discomfort.

  He was in a small clearing surrounded by thick forest, at the bottom of the steep slope down which he had fallen. There was a stream not too far distant because he heard the waters chuckling over rocks and gurgling through and the sky was that extraordinary pale blue which attracts painters and tourists to the south of France and the air seemed almost to shimmer with heat. He perceived a dark dot circling far overhead; it might have been a hawk, or perhaps a falcon. The ground was a carpet of pale, dry grass - summer grass - with clumps of wildflowers here and there around which bees lazily buzzed. A gentle breeze shook the leaves on the trees, producing a faint rustling, which harmonised nicely with the sound of the water.

  All this and more he perceived in an instant because his senses came fully, wildly, intensely alert at the sight before him when he rolled over.

  There were four men on horseback and two more on foot. The two pedestrians carried a long pole between them with a wild boar hanging from it, still bleeding from a wound in its side. They wore simple knee-length black tunics, belted with a rough cord. Their arms and legs were bare and they had short boots on their feet. Wise hardly noticed them, however, because the horsemen towered over him in a distinctly menacing manner.

  The nearest one carried a long spear and it was with this that he had been prodded. Its metal point was bloody, presumably from the unfortunate beast on the stick, Wise decided. The horseman wore a similar tunic to his carriers but his belt was good quality leather, wide, with a very ornate gold buckle; his boots also looked to be of superior quality. Although he appeared huge at that moment because of Warren's worm's eye view, he was only of medium height and build, but well-muscled and very fit looking. His long, straight black hair was parted neatly down the centre and his short black beard and moustache were artfully trimmed. The firm line of his mouth showed strength of character. His brown eyes had that indefinable something that betokens intelligence.

  The three men behind him were mostly blocked from Wise's view by the bulk of the hefty stallion on which he sat, but they appeared to be dressed in much the same fashion. Two of them also carried long spears and they all had swords hanging from their belts.

  Warren rose, dusting himself off as best he could with his hands, and faced the men. The point of the spear hovered near his chest and the bearded man spoke to him in French. It was a peculiar dialect of that language, but, luckily, Wise managed to comprehend the gist of what was said:

  "Tell me why I should not kill you, trespasser." The point of the spear twitched significantly as Wise struggled to think of a good answer.

  Somehow, instinctively, he knew that this was not a charade, that his life really was in peril. Perhaps it was the way the men controlled the horses, carried the weapons and wore the clothes; easily, casually, with no trace of self-consciousness, as if they did it every day of their lives. These people were not larking about in fancy dress. Perhaps it was the strangeness of his fall, that inexplicable plunge through a dark vacuum; perhaps it was some subtle change in the very atmosphere around him. Whatever it was he knew, knew in his bones before he knew it consciously, that he was in some strange, mediaeval world, a different, dangerous world, and that his situation was real and potentially fatal.

  The spear touched his chest. "Well?"

  Wise was a tough, practical man. The appalling long-term implications of his plight - the loss of his loved ones, his business, and his entire world - he put firmly out of his mind. If he even thought about such things he would, he knew, break down irretrievably. He had to take one step at a time, concentrate on immediate problems and deal with them as they arose. Any other course could only lead to insanity.

  The immediate problem here was the spear pointing at his chest. Summoning every ounce of self-control in his possession he looked confidently into the other man's shrewd brown eyes. Wherever he was, in whatever mad world, he was sure always of one thing.

  "Don't kill me," he said. "I can make you rich."

  #

  A few minutes later Wise was walking sedately along behind the horsemen, with the servants who carried the boar following and watching lest he should try to escape. There was not much chance of that. He was still in shock from his recent experience and almost unaware of his surroundings. Slowly the facts sank into his mind: he was in mediaeval Provence, in a time of serfs and swords, lances and lords; he had no money, no position or status, and no friends. By eavesdropping, he had discovered that his captor was called Phiord - Baron Phiord. He was Lord of a village named La Brillane, and of the lands around it including this patch of forest where it pleased him to hunt. This information, while better than nothing, did not seem much of an asset with which to shape a future in a strange new world. Wise planned to keep his eyes and ears open and learn more. As the party passed through the cool shade of the forest, now and then traversing a brilliantly lit clearing, small animals could be heard moving in the thick undergrowth, disturbed by the voices, the clip-clop of horses hooves and the gentle clink of their assorted ironmongery. There was, the American noted idly, an incredible abundance of wildlife. Man had not yet achieved that mastery of science which would later enable him to proliferate hugely and completely conquer nature. The pre-industrial air was wonderfully clean, even cleaner than that of twentieth-century Haute-Provence.

  The servants behind Wise pointed at him and chattered about his odd clothes, and about the strange way he had appeared. They had seen him rolling down the last few feet of the hill but had not, perhaps fortunately for their sanity, seen him appear out of thin air. The horsemen, obviously the people who mattered, ignored the American, content to deal with him later. Suddenly there was an incredible noise behind them: a loud roar, as from the throat of some great beast. It lasted almost thirty seconds and was so powerful, so loud, that it seemed to shake the very trees. The horses whinnied in panic and tried to bolt but expert hands quickly reined them in, albeit with some difficulty. The pedestrian serfs had dropped their cargo at the sound and darted into the forest, seeking shelter there with a kind of blind instinct. When the roar died away there was a profound silence throughout the area. The small animals did not move; the birds did not sing; the very insect
s seemed to have ceased their buzzing.

  Phiord barked a command at the serfs and they sheepishly returned to pick up their burden. He turned his horse and rode back down the forest trail a few yards, for the noise seemed to have come from that area they had just recently quit. He frowned at the silence.

  Wise said: "What in the name of God was that?"

  Phiord turned his horse and rode back to join the group. "I don't know, but I don't intend going back to find out."

  With far greater urgency than before the four horsemen rode up the trail towards their home village, the serfs and Wise following as best they could, coughing in the cloud of dust stirred up by the horses hooves for it was midway through a long dry summer and the ground was as dry as dead men's bones.

  When the dust had settled slowly back to earth and the last fading echoes of the horses’ hooves had disappeared a tall, commanding figure in black robes stepped out of the gloomy shadows of the trees and on to the lighted path. There was the slightest of smiles on his face as if he was laughing inwardly at some private jest, or satisfied with a job well done.

  The great roaring noise filled the forest again, farther away this time. The tall figure cocked his head, listening as he watched the dust settle. He smiled again, rubbed his hands in glee, looked up at the sky and spoke:

  "My players are on the board, Fixer, and will soon be making chaos. I await the advance of your Knights."

  He stood still for a moment looking up, as if the sky might answer, then turned and with a slow, purposeful tread vanished back into the shadows of the forest.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was the year 1207A.D. King John ruled in England, King Philip II ruled in France and Innocent III, who was not particularly innocent, was Pope in Rome. Otto IV of Brunswick was the Holy Roman Emperor. Genghis Khan ravaged the east. In Assisi, Francesco Bernadone preached poverty, humility and respect for animals. A few years earlier, the bubonic plague had put an end to the Fourth Crusade.