Generally speaking, commercially successful historical fiction has an element of wish-fulfilment about it. It is difficult to write about this novel without reference to Ariana Franklin's MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH, which it far outshines. When they do come to the end of the road, the conclusion is a shocker. And one by one, they die, though not of the death they flee. A pair of wandering minstrels from Venice a magician named Zophiel, angry, sarcastic, judgmental, but terrified of something and fiercely protective of the smelly mermaid foetus he keeps locked in a case a wise-woman, Pleasance, skilled midwife and healer, but mysteriously on the road the young lovers Osmond, a painter and his pregnant bride Adela and Cygnus, the swan boy with one normal arm and a swan's wing for the other.Įven before the plague, all of these were itinerants and all are concealing something, a secret sin or shame that will be revealed in the course of their travels. They head inland and ever north, escaping contagion largely by avoiding any association with the possibly infectious.

Gradually, as the plague begins its inexorable spread, he becomes the centre of a company of strangers, all, like him, marginal members of society and all seeking to flee from the sickness, la morte bleue. He is missing an eye and bears the scars of a horrific wound that he sometimes claims he received defence of one of his relics.

The narrator is Camelot, a seller of spurious relics, and nowhere near as respectable even as Chaucer's Pardoner. Their two fates will be entwined thereafter. It is also the day that the narrator of this novel first encounters the strange child, Narigorm, fey, almost albino, distinctly strange, teller of fortunes and caster of spells. Midsummer's Day, 1348, 'the day on which humans and beasts alike became the wager in a divine game.' The day, in short, that the Plague came to Melcombe, Dorset, England.

A company of liars