By These Ten Bones (11 page)

The people in the town woke up at the same instant and held their breath at the same time. They listened to the short, sharp, frantic screams, becoming ragged with pain and terror. A gap of silence followed, more terrible than the sounds. Then another scream rose into the night.

Chilling, menacing, sharper than knives, the scream shivered on the quiet air. It hung over the houses for a long moment, holding every listener spellbound. No one who had heard it before could ever possibly forget it, and every one of them had heard it before.

“Maddie, what do we do?” sobbed Bess, the straw rustling as she sat up, but Maddie caught her cousin in a tight grip.

“Don't make a sound,” she breathed in Bess's ear, and she put her hand over her cousin's mouth.

Some distance away, the girls heard their priest by his cottage, speaking words in the sacred tongue. “Black Ewan, Colin, James,” he shouted next, “there's someone needing our help.”

“Someone beyond our help, I'm thinking.” That was the smith's voice, coming from his house.

“Daddy,” whimpered Bess, pushing the hand away. “Maddie, let's go.”

But Maddie heard something else, something that only she had heard before: a snuffling, bubbling sound. It was circling the houses, coming toward the barn. Bess stirred in surprise, turning toward Maddie, but Maddie clapped her hand over her cousin's mouth again before Bess could ask what it was.

The air grew frigid as the creature approached, slobbering as it came. “
Blood, blood
,” it was bubbling softly to itself in a singsong chant of glee. Then it stopped outside the barn's woven door, and its song changed to a growl. “
Warm blood
,” it snarled. The wickerwork snapped in a splintering crash.

The two girls huddled in the straw and prayed without making a sound. A confident note rang out in the darkness. A cock was greeting the dawn. The unnatural thing heard it, and it stopped in mid-snarl.

“
Morning
,” whispered that thick voice. “
Morning, morning.
” And the girls heard it loping off toward the castle.

“Daddy!” Bess was sobbing. “I want out of here.” But Maddie still held her tightly.

“Wait,” she whispered. “Wait till dawn comes, till we know it won't be back.”

“What was it?” sobbed her cousin. “It was the Water Horse, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” lied Maddie.

She crept to the broken lattice and looked out, but she could barely see a thing. Thick fog wrapped the township. She could see a white glow some distance away and hear the sound of the men's voices. Paul had come back, and someone was dead. Maybe her own parents. Someone else would be dead soon, burned in a roaring fire.

After a few minutes, the cock crowed again, cheerful and heedless. Maddie looked out at the fog. Not so dark as before. The dawn had finally come.

“Bess, run home,” she ordered, pushing open the splintered panel, and her cousin disappeared into the fog. But Maddie didn't run home. If her parents were dead, they were dead. Someone else wasn't. Not yet.

She stood hesitating, listening to the shouts of the men, trying to find her way. A torch made a wide red glow in the dimness, coming straight at her. Maddie turned and ran into the formless gray wall of fog toward the invisible castle.

The dark hump of a cottage rose to her right and disappeared into the mist behind her. Beaten-down hillocks of grass appeared at her feet. The thin trunk of a birch tree reeled out of the darkness and almost collided with her.

Clumps of wet grass and uncertain footing. Maddie had reached the bog. She stopped and closed her eyes. I'm taking Lady Mary her breakfast, she told herself, just like I have thousands of times before. My feet know this land, they know the way to the path. She took careful steps, squelching through soft ground, and her feet found the welcome shape of a stepping-stone beneath them.

She opened her eyes. The world was ghostly, brightening into a foggy autumn morning. The path through the bog lay underfoot. She ran down it, and the bulk of the castle loomed before her, solid in the swirling gray.

Maddie found Paul lying face-up just inside the castle doorway, and the fine belted shirt that her mother had made for him was soaked black with blood. If the men found him like that, they would kill him before he even opened his eyes. How much time did she have? How thoroughly would they search?

Her heart pounding with dread, she unfastened Paul's belt, yanked it from beneath him, and looped it around his ankles. She dragged with all her strength at the free end of the belt, wrapping the leather around her wrists to grip it. As she backed into the darkness of the castle's lowest floor, Paul's insensible body slid after her, his arms flopping helplessly, and the beltless, bloody shirt rolling up, leaving only those English breeches to cover him. On his naked chest, smudged and splashed with blood, Maddie could see the long scars of that other full-moon night.

She dragged him into the far corner, stumbling over planks and shifting trestles and other odd junk out of the way. She worked the bloody shirt over his head and off his arms and then tried to clean away the dark stains, dabbing in the dim light at his wet hands and wiping the stains off his chest. Even his face was splashed with blood, she thought, her breath tight in her throat. Maybe it was her parents' blood. Maybe her mother's.

There's no time for this, Maddie told herself as her eyes stung with tears. Later, after he's safe or dead, then I can cry. She piled the trestles and planks back up, hiding him as well as she could. Then she found the bloody shirt again and stood thinking what to do.

Salt draws out stains. She ran to the salt barrel near the door, scooping out the precious substance with a reckless abandon that would have shocked her mother. She rubbed it into the bloodstains, watching the crystals turn moist and pink as the stains lightened and spread evenly through the cloth. Now to soak it in cold water, she thought, stepping out of the castle doorway.

The fog was already beginning to rise and float away. Maddie's heart almost stopped. Paul's sheepskin blanket lay like a white banner on the dark ground near the path. Had the men looked this way yet? Had anyone seen it? She raced out to grab it and ran back into the darkness, tripping over boards and barking her shin against a block of stone. She pushed aside the junk and laid the sheepskin over the silent carver. He was already burning up with fever.

Maddie grabbed the wadded shirt and hurried out again. She had to soak the shirt and get rid of it, too, before anyone came looking. She ran down the path away from the town until she came to the rotten stump. Then she knelt down on the gravel shore of the loch.

“Cold water for blood,” she murmured, plunging the shirt into the icy lake. She rolled a large stone onto it to hold it against the current, smashing her fingers in the process. The loose folds of the trapped shirt billowed underwater like a drowning man struggling for air. Maddie snatched up her own blanket and dried her wet arms. Then she flew up the path through the tatters of mist toward her home and parents.

Fair Sarah was standing by the hearth when Maddie burst in, and she caught her daughter in her arms. “Child, you're like ice!” she exclaimed. “What's this? Blood?” Maddie looked down at the rust-brown smudges across the front of her skirt. She should have been more careful.

James Weaver stood behind Maddie in the doorway, but he didn't come in. His hands were bloody, and the front of his blanket had rust-brown smudges, too. He stared at his wife and daughter without really seeing them, his eyes empty and strange.

“Jamie!” gasped his wife. “Jamie, what's wrong?”

“That was Black Ewan screaming,” he muttered. “It caught him between our house and the old barn. He's dead, Sarah. But it's worse than that. It's so much worse than that.”

The men buried Black Ewan beside the stone church while the women keened and mourned. Who now would protect the widows from the specter of hunger? Who would defend the orphans from the enemy's sword? They stood in the dripping weeds as the rain-soaked clouds scudded overhead. Maddie thought, looking around, that the whole world had turned to gray iron.

Normally the men would have watched with the body and made a proper coffin, but they had to bury the farmer in the big dung creel, the great basket that they wheeled about on a barrow. Colin the Smith, James Weaver, and Horse carried the heavy creel to the muddy edge of the grave.

“That short thing can't be for Black Ewan,” muttered Bess in Maddie's ear, “and him such a great big man.”

Maddie didn't answer. She knew how such a big man had come to fit into such a short creel. The men had worked for a long time near her house that morning, moving the creel here and there. She had watched them from the doorway as they dropped in one bloody shred after another.

Now the men who carried this grisly burden held it gingerly, as if they wished they could stand farther away from it. They began shoveling mud over it as soon as Father Mac finished the prayers, hiding that terrible secret away beneath the earth.

Black Ewan had died in her place, thought Maddie with an aching heart. He had gone out with his battle-ax to protect his people and found that shadow on its way to her parents' door. He shouldn't have killed Ned, she thought, furious and miserable. With Ned there, the shadow wouldn't have escaped.

“In all the fuss, I can't recall which man I saw first this morning,” reflected Bess unhappily. “I think it might have been Horse. I hope it wasn't. What about you, Maddie? Who did you see first?”

Maddie thought about Paul lying outside the castle, covered with another man's blood. “I can't remember,” she lied to her cousin. “I told you it was nonsense.”

The funeral over, the men began a cairn where Black Ewan had fallen, bringing large stones to make a mound and swilling the bloodstained earth with water. The women stood by and watched the work, silent and wretched. A bellow rose from the farmer's house, where the cattle still stood patiently in their stalls.

“It's Mad Angus,” sighed Janet. “We've forgotten the poor man. Horse, do you go let him out.”

The big farmhand reluctantly picked up the key, remembering the blood that had been on it, but Janet's son Lachlan stepped forward and held out his hand.

“I'll do it,” he said, and there was no boyish delight in his eyes this time as he took possession of the key. He went into the stable and unlocked the madman from his ring. Then he locked the shackles together.

“Come, old friend,” he said gravely to Angus, just as Black Ewan always had done. And after an instant's puzzled hesitation, the giant got up and followed the boy.

Maddie had been afraid that the men would get the dogs and begin hunting the killer, but they huddled by their hearths that afternoon as if they had taken sick. Bess showed everyone the splintered wickerwork on the barn and told the horrifying story of their escape.

“It was the Water Horse,” she said. “It almost got Maddie and me. We heard it run away to the loch at the cock crow and splash into the water.”

Long after her parents fell asleep, Maddie lay awake. Finally, she dug an ember out of the banked fire and sneaked out into the darkness. The white moon rose in an almost clear sky, and the night was growing bitterly cold. Wrapping her blanket around her, she hurried to the castle.

Paul lay on the bare stone, hot and cold all at once, his teeth chattering and his arms clasped tightly around him. Maddie couldn't take him anywhere warmer. The castle was the safest place. Since Lady Mary's escape and Ned's death, the people avoided the grim building when they could.

But someone might need salt or one of the other odd items stored down in the bottom of the castle and come in and discover Paul by accident. Maddie decided that Lady Mary's floor would be safer. She hoisted Paul up, holding one of his limp arms around her neck, and a sense of self-preservation came alive in the delirious man. He staggered up the stairs, first on his feet and then on his knees, following in some vague way the guidance of her tugs and proddings.

They came up the stone spiral. Echoing darkness and narrow slices of moonlight. Maddie hadn't been in the big hall since the old lady had left it. She retrieved her glowing ember in its little cup and studied the room. A sparse scattering of junk littered the floor, most of it useless, but Maddie seized a fallen tapestry and folded it to make a bed. She half-dragged, half-led the feverish carver to it and laid his blanket over him. But what if he tried to leave? After a short deliberation, she fetched his leather belt and tied his ankles together. That would keep him from walking about in his fever like Mad Angus, and when he came to himself, she hoped it would act as a warning to stay where he was.

Hurrying out into the bitter cold, she went in quest of his shirt. It billowed and shook in the current, its white form eerie in the frosty night. Arms plunged deep into the icy water, Maddie rolled away the rock and retrieved it. I look like the banshee, she thought to herself, like the ghost woman who washes the clothes of the dead, and she imagined how her own relatives would run in horror if they caught the barest sight of her. But her efforts had been rewarded. The shirt was clean. The dark patterns of Black Ewan's blood were gone.

Shivering in the night wind, Maddie hurried back to the castle and laid the shirt out on the floor near the wood-carver. Even under his blanket, the sick young man shook and chattered with the cold, and he gave a low cry at the touch of her chilly hand. Maddie wrapped her own blanket around him and hurried home. She huddled close to her sleeping mother for a long time before she began to get warm.

The next morning, Maddie didn't go to Mass. She stayed inside all day by the fire and spun wool into yarn. She didn't have to wonder anymore where Paul was. He was safe from the weather and from dangerous crowds, and she was looking after him. And she was going to keep looking after him, too, somehow or other.

Late in the night, she set out again with a basket and an ember, creeping among the humps of houses while all good folk slept. It's me they should hang for a witch, she thought grimly as she went her silent way, but her neighbors were finished hunting witches.

Paul was awake, sitting huddled under her blanket beneath Lady Mary's narrow window. “Who's there?” he called in a low voice as she came up the stairs.

Maddie coaxed the little ember out of its bed of ashes. It lit up their faces and the bits of trash that lay about the hall, the belongings of a wealthy woman turned to broken rubbish. Maddie picked up one torn playing card from the floor beside her. The King of Swords.
They'd come at me if they could. The cards know things.

“Madeleine, what am I doing here?” Paul asked her. “What did I do?” He took the card away in his shaking hand to make her look at him. He had found his clean shirt, she realized, and had belted it on again. There was no sign on it or on him anymore to tell the tale of what had happened.

“They mustn't find you,” she warned him. “There's a man dead.”

“I killed a man,” he gasped. “Who did I kill?”

“Black Ewan is dead,” she answered and watched him bury his face in his hands. “It was a judgment on him, Paul,” she said. “For what he did to the others.”

“I've killed a man,” he moaned. “I've never killed a man before.”

“It wasn't you that did it, it was God's will,” she retorted. “It was God's judgment on him for his wickedness.”

But Paul was rocking back and forth, sobbing and running his fingers through his hair, just as Ned's son had before him. Maddie flew at him and grasped his hands, pulling them away.

“It's over and done,” she exclaimed, shaking him. “Done, and I'm not sorry. Paul, you've no time to take on, you have to listen to me now. I've brought you some food. Get away from here tonight, go back to fetch your stuff and your tools.”

Paul looked up at the mention of his tools and began to pay attention. “I was so far away from here!” he whispered numbly, wiping the tears from his cheeks. “You'd never think I could have walked it in one night.”

“Then walk it again,” she directed. “Find your things and come back when you have them. It'll be days from now, and you'll not be sick, so no one will ever know.”

“Come back!” he cried. “Do you think I can really come back here?”

“You have to,” said Maddie. “Ma's so unhappy, she worries so about you, she cries whenever the wind blows.” But the young carver just shook his head and buried his face in his hands again.

“I can never come back here,” he groaned. “Not after I've killed a man.”

“But you will come back!” cried Maddie, and her voice was high and thin. “Just you think what I've done for you, Paul Carver! I've hid you, and I've lied for you, I've walked nights when I should be in bed, I've washed a man's blood out of your shirt just like the banshee woman. I've looked after you like I promised to, and I've saved your life. And you'll come back to me, Paul, you will!”

Paul looked at her. “I'll come back to you, Madeleine,” he said.

“Promise!” she demanded fiercely. “You promise me! Swear by your life.”

“I swear by my life,” he said dully. Maddie thought about that. Ned's son had murdered, too, and he hadn't wanted his life anymore.

“You don't care about your life,” she accused. “Promise me by something else, by something you do care about. Swear by your ten bones,” and she grasped him by the hands. “Swear by your fingers to come back.”

Paul looked down at his fingers. The ten bones that carved, that earned his living. The ten bones that had killed a man. Faint smears of blood still stained his fingers. He knew that they always would.

“I swear by my ten bones,” he said, and he held up the hands before her. “I'll come back to you, Madeleine. I promise.”

Later, as she lay curled up in the box bed, Maddie thought about Paul. She had saved his life, but hers would never be the same. He was no farmhand like Gillies who could build a house nearby and keep her parents and children fed. He was a vicious killer even if he didn't mean to be, and she knew that he could never stay there. She loved him, and she loved her family, but she couldn't have them both. Maddie sobbed into her blanket in the black of the night and beat her fists against her knees.

The next morning, Maddie decided to check the castle to make sure Paul had left. She passed Little Ian on his way to do some hunting with his dog and his bow.

“I told you true about that Traveler's head,” he remarked seriously. “The old man was warning us his time as Churchyard Watcher was up. He didn't tap Black Ewan because of the bad blood between them, but he must have known it would be him, and that's why he was looking so pleased.”

Maddie shivered, remembering the sight of that grinning head, and gazed up at the beam of the castle. No head hung there now. Old Ned was gone at last. She hurried up the stairs. Paul had gotten away. She felt the emptiness of his absence and wondered where he might be.

She headed back toward the houses, feeling cold and unwell. Her throat hurt, and her head ached. The late nights and worry were telling on her. As she walked by Paul's favorite boulder, staring dejectedly at her feet, a familiar shadow fell across her path.

“Paul!” cried Maddie happily. She looked up at the boulder, but no one was there. On the ground was the shadow of the carver, turning and shaping something. Above it was nothing at all.

Maddie felt a chill run through her, watching the shadow on the grass. It darkened to an inky blackness and grew in size. It wasn't Paul, and it wasn't holding carving tools, either. Its fingers, turning and flexing, ended in ten long, thin knives.

This time when the girl ran shrieking through town, they bundled her into bed, and the women sat down to keep an eye on her. The townspeople agreed that she was feverish and delirious, just like that carver boy had been. She demanded to see Father Mac, but when he came, she couldn't make any sense.

“Pardon my sins, Father,” she begged. “Give me absolution. I helped a shadow to do a murder, and now it's walking around loose!”

“A loose shadow?” inquired the puzzled priest.

“I thought it needed flesh and bones, but it doesn't anymore,” she sobbed. “I didn't mean to help it, but I let it get away because he didn't want to do it, it's just his bones that did it, his ten bones with knives at the end. And he'd have died for it, Father, but he shouldn't die; it's not his fault, it's his bones!”

The priest raised his eyebrows at her parents, and Maddie sensed that he didn't believe her. “Father, it's an evil thing I did,” she assured him desperately. “Please pardon me my sins.”

“Your fever's talking,” the priest consoled her. “You've done nothing wrong.”

“But I did, I let the shadow go. I hid it where no one could find it. I didn't want him dead, but I didn't think about the bones all over the town in little pieces, and the graves all dug up. That's why I shouldn't have done it, because of the bones—the bones, and the blood at the castle. But even now, Father, I don't think I could do anything different.” She held the priest's big hand. “I just can't do it, I can't see him burn up,” she said tearfully. “I'm sorry if it's wrong.”

“It's all right,” said Father Mac soothingly. “I'm sure we wouldn't want that, either. Try to rest, child. Your mother's worried.”

“Absolution,” she whispered, clinging to his hand. “Pardon my sins.”

The priest considered for a minute. “Is that all you've done?” he rumbled. “You hid a shadow so it wouldn't burn up?”