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notable relic. It was therefore all the more of a shock when suddenly he heard a rustle in the undergrowth at the side of the track, and before he could turn he was grabbed from behind and violently thrust to the ground. He had a quick glimpse of two ragged figures tearing at the straps of his pack, before he managed to swing his staff and strike one of them on the shoulder. With a bellow of pain, the ruffian raised a club made from a twisted branch and struck Blundus on the head. Cursing, he repeated the blows, and when the pedlar had fallen senseless, gave him some heavy kicks in the ribs and belly for good measure. Pulling the large pack free and rifling the pouch on his belt, the two footpads made off into the trees, leaving the injured man unconscious on the verge.
    Perhaps somewhere in Heaven–or maybe Hell–the spirit of Barzak the Mohammedan was content that his curse was still as potent as ever.
     
     
    High up in the narrow gatehouse tower of Exeter’s Rougemont castle, the county coroner was sitting in his cramped and draughty chamber, painfully mouthing the Latin words that his bony forefinger was slowly tracing out on a sheet of parchment. Sir John de Wolfe was learning to read, and at the age of forty was finding it a tedious process. His clerk, former priest Thomas de Peyne, sat at the end of the rough trestle table that, with two stools, was the only furniture in the room that the sheriff had grudgingly allotted them. Thomas watched covertly as his master laboriously mispronounced the words, wishing that he could help him, in place of the stupid vicar who was ineptly teaching the coroner. The clerk, once a tutor in the cathedral school of Winchester, was a fluent reader and a gifted calligrapher–it pained him to see the slow progress that Sir John was making, but he knew the coroner’s pride prevented him from asking for help.
    On a window sill opposite the table sat a giant of a man, staring out through the unglazed slit through which moaned a cold wind. He had wild red hair like a storm-tossed hayrick, and a huge drooping moustache of the same ruddy tint. Gwyn, a Cornishman from Polruan, had been de Wolfe’s squire and companion for almost twenty years, in campaigns stretching from Ireland to the Holy Land. When the Crusader had finally sheathed his sword a couple of years ago, Gwyn had remained as his bodyguard and coroner’s officer. He lowered the hunk of bread and cheese that he was chewing and focused his bright blue eyes on the road that came up from the High Street to the gatehouse drawbridge below.
    ‘There’s a fellow riding up Castle Street as if the Devil himself is on his heels,’ he announced, speaking in the Cornish Celtic that he used with the coroner, who had a Welsh mother from whose knee he had learned a similar language.
    ‘Why can’t you speak in a civilized fashion, not that barbaric lingo!’ whined the clerk in English. He was a runt of a fellow, his excellent brain betrayed by a poor body. He was small, had a humped shoulder, a lame leg and his thin, pinched face had a long pointed nose and a receding chin. The fact that he had been unfrocked as a priest over an alleged indecent assault on a girl pupil in Winchester made him not the most eligible of men. Gwyn ignored him and, wiping the breadcrumbs from his moustache with the back of his hand, addressed himself again to John de Wolfe.
    ‘I know that man, he’s the manor-reeve from Clyst St Mary. I’ll wager he’s coming up here.’
    The coroner pushed his parchment aside in disgust, glad for some excuse to give up his lesson.
    ‘We’ve had nothing from that area for weeks,’ he growled. As the first coroner for Devon, appointed less than three months earlier, he was responsible for looking into sudden deaths, murders, accidents, serious assaults, rapes, fires, treasure trove, catches of royal fish and a host of other legal situations. This was mostly with the object of drumming up revenue for King Richard, to help