Changeling (30 page)

‘I beg your pardon, sir, but it’s thought that my first son was taken by the beast. I’d like to see an end to it. I’d like to be able to tell my wife that the beast is dead,’ Ralph Fairley, the shepherd boy’s father, volunteered to Luca. ‘If Sara knew that the beast was dead then she might feel that our son Tomas can take the sheep out to pasture without fear. She might sleep through the night again. Seven years she has wakened with nightmares. I want her to be at peace. If the werewolf was dead, she might forgive herself.’

‘You can come at midnight,’ Luca decided. ‘If it is going to change into a wolf then it will do so then. And if we see a change, then I shall be the judge of whether it has become a wolf. Only I shall make that judgement, and only I will rule on its execution.’

‘Should I advise?’ Mr Miller asked hopefully. ‘As a man of experience, of position in the community? Should I consult with you? Help you come to your decision?’

‘No.’ Luca crushed him. ‘This is not going to be a matter of the village turning against a suspect and killing him out of their fear and rage. This is going to be a weighing of the evidence and justice. I am the inquirer. I shall decide.’

‘But who is going to fire the arrow?’ Mr Miller asked. ‘We have an old bow which Mrs Louisa found in her loft, and we have restrung it, but there’s nobody in the village who is trained to use a longbow. When we’re called up to war we go as infantry with billhooks. We haven’t had an archer in this village for ten years.’

There was a brief silence as they considered the difficulty. Then: ‘I can shoot a longbow,’ Ishraq volunteered.

Luca hesitated. ‘It’s a powerful weapon,’ he said. He leaned towards her. ‘Very heavy to bend,’ he said. ‘It’s not like a lady’s bow. You might be skilled in archery, ladies’ sports, but I doubt you could bend a longbow. It’s a very different thing from shooting at the butts.’

Freize’s head appeared over the stable door to listen, but he said nothing.

In answer, she extended her left hand to Luca. On the knuckle of the middle finger was the hard callous, the absolute mark of an archer that identified him like a tattoo. It was an old blister, worn hard by drawing the arrow shaft across the guiding finger. Only someone who had shot arrow after arrow would have his hand marked by it.

‘I can shoot,’ she said. ‘A longbow. Not a lady’s bow.’

‘However did you learn?’ Luca asked, his hand withdrawing from her warm fingers. ‘And why do you practise all the time?’

‘Isolde’s father wanted me to have the skills of the women of my people, even though I was raised far from them,’ she said. ‘We are a fighting people – the women can fight as well as the men. We are a hard people, living in the desert, travelling all the time. We can ride all day. We can find water by smell. We can find game by the turn of the wind. We live by hunting, falconry and archery. You will learn that if I say I can shoot, I can shoot.’

‘If she says she can, she probably can,’ Freize commented from inside the stable. ‘I, for one, can attest that she can fight like a barbarian. She could well be a time-served archer. Certainly, she is no lady.’

Luca glanced from Freize’s offended face, looming over the stable door, to Ishraq. ‘If you can do it, then I shall appoint you executioner and give you the silver arrow. It’s not a skill that I have. There was no call for it in the monastery. And I understand that no-one else here can do it.’

She nodded. ‘I could hit the beast, though it is only a little beast, from the wall of the arena, shooting across to where it cowers, at the far side.’

‘You’re sure?’

She nodded with quiet confidence. ‘Without fail.’

Luca turned to the headman and the two others. ‘I will watch the beast through the day and as the moon rises,’ he said. ‘If I see it transform into a full wolf I will call you, and in any case you can come at midnight. If I judge that it is a wolf in shape as well as nature then this young woman here will serve as executioner. You will bring the silver arrow and we will kill it at midnight, and you can bury it as you see fit.’

‘Agreed,’ the headman said. He turned to go and then he suddenly paused. ‘But what happens if it does not turn? If it does not become wolf? What if it remains as it is now, wolfish but small and savage?’

‘Then we will have to judge what sort of beast it is and what might be done with it,’ Luca said. ‘If it is a natural beast, an innocent animal ordained by God to run free, then I may order it to be released in the wild.’

‘We should try it with tortures,’ someone volunteered.

‘I will try it with the Word,’ Luca said. ‘That is my inquiry, that I am appointed to do. I will take evidence and study the scriptures and decide what it is. Besides, I want to know for my own satisfaction what sort of beast it is. But you can be assured: I will not leave you with a werewolf at your doors. Justice will be done; your children will be safe.’

Ishraq glanced to the stable, expecting Freize to say that it was a speaking beast, but the look he showed her over the stable door was that of the dumbest servant who knows nothing and never speaks out of turn.

At midday the bishop of the region arrived after a day’s journey from the cathedral town of Pescara, accompanied by four attending priests, five scholars, and some servants. Luca greeted him on the doorstep of the inn and welcomed him with as good a grace as he could muster. He could not help but feel that he was completely outclassed by a fully-fledged bishop, dressed all in purple and riding a white mule. He could not help but feel diminished by a man of fifty who had with him nine advisors and what seemed like endless servants.

Freize tried to cheer the cook by explaining that it would all be over one way or another by tonight and that she would have to provide only one great dinner for this unique assembly of great men.

‘Never have I had so many lords in the house at any one time,’ she fretted. ‘I will have to send out for chickens and Jonas will have to let me have the pig that he killed last week.’

‘I’ll serve the dinner, and help you in the kitchen too,’ Freize promised her. ‘I’ll take the dishes up and put them before the gentry. I’ll announce each course and make it sound tremendous.’

‘The Lord knows that all you do is eat, and steal food for that animal in the yard. It’s causing more trouble to me out there than ever it did in the forest.’

‘Should we let it go, d’you think?’ Freize asked playfully.

She crossed herself. ‘Saints save us, no! Not after it took poor Mrs Fairley’s own child and she never recovered from the grief. And last week a lamb, and the week before that a hen right out of the yard. No, the sooner it’s dead the better. And your master had better order it killed or there will be a riot here. You can tell him that, from me. There are men coming into the village, shepherds from the highest farms, who won’t take kindly to a stranger who comes here and says that our werewolf should be spared. Your master should know that there can only be one ending here: the beast must die.’

‘Can I take that ham bone for it?’ Freize asked.

‘Isn’t that the very thing that was going to make soup for the bishop’s dinner?’

‘There’s nothing on it,’ Freize urged her. ‘Give it to me for the beast. You’ll get another bone anyway when Jonas butchers the pig.’

‘Take it, take it,’ she said impatiently. ‘And leave me to get on.’

‘I shall come and help as soon as I have fed the beast,’ Freize promised her.

She waved him out of the kitchen door into the yard and Freize climbed the platform and looked over the arena wall. The beast was lying down, but when it saw Freize it raised its head and watched him.

Freize vaulted to the top of the wall, swung his long legs over, and sat in comfort there, his legs dangling into the bear pit. ‘Now then,’ he said gently. ‘Good morning to you, beast. I hope you are well this morning?’

The beast came a little closer, to the very centre of the pit, and looked up at Freize. Freize leaned into the pit, holding tightly on to the wall with one hand, leaned down so far that the ham bone was dangling just below his feet. ‘Come,’ he said gently. ‘Come and get this. You have no idea what trouble it cost me to get it for you, but I saw the ham carved off it last night and I set my heart on it for you.’

The beast turned its head a little one way and then the other, as if trying to understand the string of words. Clearly, it understood the gentle tone of voice, as it yearned upwards to the silhouette of Freize, on the wall of the bear pit. ‘Come on,’ said Freize. ‘It’s good.’

Cautious as a cat, the beast approached on all fours. It came to the wall of the arena and sat directly under Freize’s feet. Freize stretched down to it and slowly the beast uncurled, put its front paws on the walls of the arena and reached up. It stood tall, perhaps more than four feet. Freize fought the temptation to shrink back from it, imagining it would sense his fear; but also he was driven on to see if he could feed this animal by hand, to see if he could bridge the divide between this beast and man. And he was driven, as always, by his own love of the dumb, the vulnerable, the hurt. He stretched down a little lower and the beast stretched up its shaggy head and gently took the ham bone in its mouth, as if it had been fed by a loving hand, all its life.

The moment it had the meat in its strong jaws, it sprang back from Freize, dropped to all fours and scuttled to the other side of the bear pit. Freize straightened up – and found Ishraq’s dark eyes on him.

‘Why feed it if I am to shoot it tonight?’ she asked quietly. ‘Why be kind to it, if it is nothing but a dead beast waiting for the arrow?’

‘Perhaps you won’t have to shoot it tonight,’ Freize answered. ‘Perhaps the little lord will find that it’s a beast we don’t know, or some poor creature that was lost from a fair. Perhaps he will rule that it’s an oddity, but not a limb of Satan. Perhaps he will say it is a changeling, put among us by strange people. Surely it is more like an ape than a wolf? What sort of a beast is it? Have you, in all your travels, in all your study, seen such a beast before?’

She looked uncertain. ‘No, never. The bishop is talking with your lord now. They are going through all sorts of books and papers to judge what should be done, how it should be tried and tested, how it should be killed, and how it should be buried. The bishop has brought in all sorts of scholars with him who say they know what should be done.’ She paused. ‘If it can speak like a Christian, then that alters everything. Your lord, Luca Vero, should be told.’

Freize’s glance never wavered. ‘Why would you think it could speak?’ he said.

She met his gaze without coquetry. ‘You’re not the only one who takes an interest in it,’ she said.

All day Luca was closeted with the bishop, his priests, and his scholars, the dining table spread with papers which recorded judgements against werewolves and the histories of wolves going back to the very earliest times: records from the Greek philosophers’ accounts, translated by the Arabs into Arabic and then translated back again into Latin. ‘So God knows what they were saying in the first place,’ Luca confided in Brother Peter. ‘There are a dozen prejudices that the words have to get through, there are half a dozen scholars for every single account, and they all have a different opinion.’

‘We have to have a clear ruling for our inquiry,’ Brother Peter said, worried. ‘It’s not enough to have a history of anything that anyone thinks they have seen, going back hundreds of years. We are supposed to examine the facts here, and you are supposed to establish the truth. We don’t want antique gossip – we want evidence, and then a judgement.’