Company of Liars (56 page)

‘With his own knife. I wanted to make it look as if the wolf had punished him for stealing, that is what I told myself, but maybe in my heart I wanted to make him like those people he despised so much.’

I stared at the rushing water, glinting like armour in the early-morning sun. Somewhere in there lay Zophiel's knife.

I spoke without looking at Rodrigo. ‘When Narigorm used Zophiel's knife last night, you told Narigorm the knife had Zophiel's blood on it. But you weren't there when we found the body. So you wouldn't have known Zophiel's own knife had been used on him, unless you'd done it. That's what Cygnus realized last night. That's when he knew you'd killed him and he thought you'd done it for him. Like Beatrix, he learned the truth, and the truth…’

Rodrigo closed his eyes tightly as if he was in terrible pain.

We wrapped Cygnus's body in his cloak and tied him across Xanthus's back. We'd no idea what we were going to do with it. We broke camp and walked on, veering away from the river as soon as we could, for none of us wanted to see or hear it. We didn't discuss where we might be going; it hardly seemed to matter any more. I followed behind with Rodrigo, who walked in a daze without seeming to know where he was or who was around him. Even Xanthus seemed to sense what she was carrying and walked solemnly as Osmond led her. We had let Adela believe it was an accident, but I could see from the expression on Narigorm's face she didn't believe that. She knew Cygnus had killed himself, just as she knew Rodrigo had killed Zophiel, and we had not told her that either.

We saw the man and boy cutting peat on the moor a long way before we reached them. It was a lonely, isolated spot and the man must have been desperate for fuel to cut it half-frozen and wet. Several piles of peat turfs stood around the long trough he had dug out and more had been stacked on a small sledge ready to be dragged off. There was no sign of a dwelling nearby so they must have walked a long way
to the site, but without fuel, a family can die of cold and hunger if they can't cook what little they catch.

The barefooted boy spotted us before his father and gave a warning. Both stood, spades in hand, warily watching us approach. All around them lay great pools of water where men had cut peat for years and the trench where they worked was filling up as fast as they dug. Even if it did not rain again between now and midsummer it would take months for all the water to seep out from the land.

As we drew close, the man's gaze was fixed upon the unmistakable shape of a body lying across Xanthus's back. He crossed himself three times and took several hasty steps backwards, dragging the boy with him. I needed no runes to know what he was thinking. I tried to reassure him.

‘Have no fear, master, he didn't die of contagion. An accident. He drowned.’

The peat-cutter crossed himself again, looking embarrassed. ‘God rest his soul.’ He advanced a couple of steps towards us. ‘The corpse road lies yonder.’ He pointed. ‘You can just see the crosses marking it.’

In the distance were several shapes which I had taken to be bushes, but now I could see they were dark stone crosses. He plainly thought that was where we were making for, not surprisingly since we were carrying a corpse.

‘Then a parish church lies at the end of the road?’

‘St Nicholas at Gasthorpe. But it won't do any good to go there. There's no priest any more that can give you burial.’

‘The pestilence?’

He crossed himself again as if the mere mention of the word might call it down upon himself. ‘Priest left afore that. They'd been having a hard time of it these last years what with the bad harvests and then the sheep sickening. A lot
of families starved. Couldn't grow enough on their bits of land to feed themselves and what they did grow mostly failed these last years. Couldn't pay church-scots or tithes, which didn't please the priest. But if a well's run dry you can threaten it with hell and damnation till Michaelmas and you'll still not get a drop of water from it. That's why the priest took off. No one's seen hide nor hair of him since. Then when the… when it came, that finished the rest of the village off, leastways, those that stayed on their tofts anyway.’ He crossed himself again. Even avoiding uttering the word aloud was not enough to ward off its evil.

He glanced again at Cygnus's body. ‘You'll be lucky to find a priest anywhere in these parts.’ He edged a little closer and lowered his voice, as if afraid, in this vast expanse of nothing, we might be overheard. ‘Someone told me that the Bishop of Norwich said anyone now may shrive a dying man, if there's not a religious to be found to do it, and anyone may bury him too. I buried two of my little 'uns in the churchyard myself. No one to say the words, but at least they were safe in holy ground. There's nothing to stop you doing the same.’ He gave us a confidential wink. ‘After all, who's to know save the others that are already six feet under, and they've no cause to complain, have they?’

He shook his head wonderingly. ‘Who'd have thought it? This time last year you couldn't piss without the blessing of a priest; now any Tom, Dick or Harry, even a woman, can baptize you, marry you, shrive you and bury you. And there's the Bishop saying, go ahead, do it yourselves, you don't need a priest. Makes you wonder why we've been paying all those scots and tithes to the priests all these years, doesn't it?’

The corpse road was hardly a track at all, just a series of small granite crosses set up at intervals to mark the way for
those who had to carry their dead the many miles from the hamlets and villages that had no parish church licensed for burial. We followed them until we saw the outskirts of the village. The peat-cutter was right, it was deserted. The nearest cottages looked as if they had been abandoned for months and the field strips were overgrown with weeds.

Osmond tethered Xanthus to a tree, before turning to us.

‘Adela and Narigorm should stay here with the baby. There may be corpses. We'll go in on foot.’

‘But what about you, Osmond?’ Adela wailed. ‘You can't risk your life.’

Rodrigo began to unfasten Cygnus's body. ‘She is right, Osmond, you stay. I can carry him. I can dig the grave. No one else needs to come.’

‘I need to come,’ Osmond said, flushing slightly. ‘Said things I didn't mean. Never got round to apologizing. That story he told us, the night we found him stowed away in the wagon, about the cordwainer being the one who killed that child, I didn't believe it then, but I do now, have done for a long time, yet I never got round to telling him. I owe him this much, especially after what you both did for Adela and the baby.’

Rodrigo nodded and briefly grasped Osmond's shoulder. I realized bitterly that none of us had ever got round to telling Cygnus we believed him about the child. Osmond found the spade and Rodrigo heaved Cygnus's body across his shoulder.

‘Wait.’ A thought struck me and I started to untie the mermaid's box from Xanthus. ‘We'll bury her in the churchyard too. It's as good a place as any to lay her to rest.’

Osmond stared. ‘You can't, she wasn't human. You can't bury something like that on consecrated ground She was just a…’

‘A freak, a beast? Isn't that what Zophiel used to say of Cygnus?’

He blushed and turned away.

So after weeks of trying to avoid the pestilence villages we finally entered one, not to find food for the living, but burial for the dead. Weeds were beginning to grow along the main street. Some of the cottage doors and shutters lay wide open - doubtless they had been looted for wood or anything usable after the owners abandoned them. More sinister were the ones nailed shut from the outside with large black crosses painted on their doors and windows. I wondered how many dead lay inside them. So near to a parish church, yet there would be no consecrated ground for them to rest in.

I had the feeling we were being watched, and turned. I thought I saw something dart into the shadows of a byre, but when I looked hard at the place I could see nothing. Rodrigo and Osmond kept turning their heads as if they too could sense something. The unnatural silence in the village was unnerving. It was almost a relief when a scrawny dog leaped out from behind one of the cottages and began to snarl and bark, still defending its toft for its owners long since dead. Osmond threw stones at it until it retreated, but it continued to bark its defiance.

As we passed one of the boarded-up cottages I noticed that the corner of the door had been chipped away from the inside as though someone had been still alive when the door was nailed shut and had tried desperately to escape. Whoever it was had not succeeded, for the planks on the outside of the door remained firmly nailed in place. I shuddered to think of the horror of their final hours. Had they succumbed to the sickness of the dead entombed with them, or had they cruelly starved to death?

The church was locked. Doubtless the priest had taken that precaution before he left. If the villagers could not pay their tithes they should have no access to God, or perhaps he thought they'd strip the place bare in his absence.

The churchyard had not been scythed and long, wet grass grew up over the little wooden markers. There were several stone tombs where the wealthier and more worthy had been buried, but a fox had dug its den beneath one of them and yellow bones and pieces of skull lay scattered about it. I reminded myself to collect them before we left - better for their owner that his bones be miraculously translated into relics than scattered by scavengers. We found a spot close to the wall where if there were any markers they had long since rotted away, and Osmond and Rodrigo took turns to dig. They soon unearthed old bones, but laid them carefully aside to be replaced in the hole when they filled it.

I dug a grave for the baby mermaid a few yards away between two rotting wooden crosses. My grave did not need to be wide or long; there was only a tiny body to fit into it. Then I carefully unwrapped the cage and the familiar smell of myrrh and aloes mingled with dried seaweed overwhelmed me. In burying her, it was almost like burying my brother a second time. I remembered standing at the tomb in the church when they opened it to lay his head inside, the cold, damp smell of decay rushing out, not masked by the incense and the candles which burned around us. I remember my mother's sobs and my father's set jaw, but I did not cry. I had cried that day my father had uttered those words, ‘I'd rather my son came home on a shield than as a coward.’ I had known that day he would not come home alive and I had cried then until I had no more tears left to shed. The day we finally buried his severed head my
eyes were so dry that my eyelids rasped against them. It was all I could feel.

I tried to break the lock off the mermaid's cage with a sharp piece of stone. It took several attempts, but at last I opened the door and reached in. The little body was stiff, like a leather doll. I wondered how long she had been dead – months, years? I had forgotten to bring anything to wrap her in, so I laid her straight into the cold earth. Beside her I placed her little mermaid doll.

Then I picked up the little silver hand-mirror, intending to put that in the grave with the mermaid child. I rubbed the tarnished silver surface. It's many years since I looked into a mirror and I almost dropped it in the shock of seeing the face that peered out at me. They say mirrors cannot lie, but they speak a cruel and spiteful truth. It was as if I was looking back at a demon trapped in the mirror. Though I passed my fingers across my lumpy scar and empty eye socket many times a day, I had forgotten the horror of the sight of it. Now it came back to me as sharply as the day I had ordered that they bring me a mirror. They had begged me not to look, but I had insisted, and then I knew why the servants avoided looking at me when they spoke, why my sons stared and quickly looked away. Who could blame them?

Yet, even after all these years, inside my head I am still unscarred, unmarked. I am still as I was when I was young. Now I had to face the fact that not only was I scarred, I was old. My face had withered like the faces of the crab-apple dolls they make for children. My hair was silver, the blue of my good eye had faded to the grey of a winter's sky. My lips that had once kissed with such passion were thin and pale, and my wrinkled skin that had once been pale and smooth
was now tanned almost as dark as the mermaid's by the wind and sun. They say when you look into a mirror you see your soul and my soul was monstrous and ancient.

I shuddered and quickly turned the mirror over. It was much thicker and heavier than I anticipated. Something had been inserted into the round frame on the back of the mirror, a polished piece of crystal, surrounded by a broad ring of silver, inscribed with symbols and studded with pearls. Beneath the crystal, and magnified by it, was a tiny fragment of bone. It was a relic, and a valuable one too, judging by the mount. I must have cried out in surprise for Osmond came across to find out the cause.

‘A reliquary,’ I said, holding it out so that he could see. ‘It was there all along in the mermaid's cage.’

Osmond peered at it. ‘I thought it was just a mirror.’

‘It always lay mirror side up, the back was hidden.’

What had the blind healer said? – the best place to hide something is often in plain view.

‘Whose relic is it?’ Osmond asked.

I turned the reliquary around, examining the symbols carved around the frame.

‘A broken chalice and a serpent. If this bird is meant to be a raven then this may be a relic of St Benedict. They say a jealous priest once poisoned the holy wine and bread and gave it to St Benedict. The serpent in the chalice represents the poison and when Benedict blessed the poisoned chalice, the chalice shattered. Then he called up a raven to carry off the poisoned host. The crosier is the symbol of authority as abbot, and can you see that, a book? That might represent the rule he wrote for monks and nuns.’

‘And that? What is that, a plant of some kind?’

‘A thorn bush. He used to hurl himself into thorns and
nettles to mortify his flesh and keep him from the sin of lust. And this symbol, I think, is the rod of discipline he wielded to wipe out corruption and licentiousness.’