Divine Sacrifice, The (6 page)

His manner gave me pause. “You truly think some violence has been done to Elafius?” I had imagined that Coroticus was just being cautious, or devious, for some reason of his own.
Either was possible.

Coroticus ignored my question and turned his attention back to Arthur. “I thought, my lord, that you and I could meet while Malgwyn took care of that affair. And with Patrick here . .
.” The abbot’s voice drifted off.

“Patrick?” Arthur whirled around to me. “Patrick is here?”

“You did not know?” Coroticus did not hide his surprise well.

I put on my most practiced innocent look and shrugged. “This is news to me.” In truth, I assumed that Patrick posed a bigger problem for Arthur than for me.

Coroticus dropped his head and shook it. “’Tis a long story, my lord. Perhaps it would be better if I explained it all to you while Malgwyn works, as I suggested.”

“No. What concerns you enough to bring Malgwyn also concerns me. Take us to the corpse.”

Arthur’s demand took me by surprise. I thought it would be as Coroticus suggested. They would begin their meeting while I looked into the death of Elafius. Though, from all I knew and had
been told, it was almost certainly a normal death, if death can be called that.

“Of course, my lord. I will take you there myself.”

Coroticus and his assistants spun about and led us across the grounds, between the old church and the cells for the brothers, to a building I had visited before. The last time, I had gone to see
the remains of the boy, the one murdered by Brother Aneirin.

Coroticus had just become abbot. I had been at the abbey for a few weeks, long enough to have met and assessed the brothers, yet not long enough for the great wound that was my arm’s stump
to completely heal. A scream tore me from my bed one night, and I arose to find that a young boy, a new initiate, had been killed in his hut. All fingers pointed to a little thief named Gareth.
Something in Aneirin’s eyes in earlier days and his insistence on Gareth as the culprit made me study the puzzle more closely. One night later, the little thief had escaped and Brother
Aneirin was found dangling from a beam.

Though publicly Coroticus blamed Gareth, privately all about whispered that it might have been Aneirin. I had no need to speculate. I knew. I sighed. ’Twas always sad for me to see death
in so young a body, especially when it was by violence. It had been that incident, more than anything else, that had set me on my current path in life.

This building was longer and deeper than the cells. It served as a preparation house for the dead, before they were laid in their graves in the cemetery. Only a wooden table stood in its center.
Little else marked it save some clean linen for wrapping the body and some dried flowers and herbs. The building was not often in use. The poor folk could not afford the fee for a service, so only
the nobles and wealthy merchants made use of it.

In our world, most nobles and merchants, indeed most high-ranking clergy, were the sons and grandsons of men who had prospered under the Romans and held civil or church office, as
decurions
or
presbyters
. In truth, even Patrick’s father was said to have been a
decurion
. But Patrick’s case was a little different; his kidnapping as a boy
stole him away from the luxuries his father’s station could provide.

A
monachus,
a boy really, stood in the doorway. He was of the nervous sort, constantly wringing his hands, his eyes flitting about. “Abbot, I have watched carefully. No one has
passed.”

Coroticus patted the boy on his arm. “Be at peace, son.”

Lying on the table was the naked body of an ancient man, his bones poking through his age-bleached, wrinkled skin. I had known Elafius well during my days at the abbey. We were not particular
friends, but I respected his knowledge of herbs and their uses. He had charge of the herbarium and often visited me with extracts of willow bark and other medicines.

Inspecting his body, I saw no real marks, though there was little light in the cell. Where his body touched the table was dark, very dark. I had seen it before and guessed it to be the settling
of his blood after he breathed his last.

“Why am I here, Coroticus?” I asked. Nothing obvious sang of foul play. He was just an old man whose time had come.

The abbot pulled his robe from about his neck nervously. “When he retired last night to his cell, Malgwyn, he was fine. He showed no sign of distress, save aggravation with the new
abbess.”

“I did not know that she had been around long enough to cause aggravation.”

Coroticus waved a hand in dismissal. “It was nothing to cause concern.”

“I still see naught to cause you to send for me.”

“His cell, abbot.” The young boy found his voice.

“What of his cell?” I asked.

“You should see it before you judge my reasons for summoning you.”

“Why did you not take me there first? This was a waste of time!” My fury was more the result of the long trip in the mud than anger with Coroticus.

“No, I wanted you to see first that he had no marks of violence. Then you will understand better what you see in his cell.” Despite my glare and that of Arthur’s, Coroticus was
firm.

Arthur turned to the young
monachus
. “See that our horses are stabled. In a few hours, Illtud will be arriving with a larger escort for me. Arrange for them to be fed.”

“Now,” I said, turning to Coroticus, “take us to Elafius’s cell.”

Saxon raiders. That is who seemed to have swooped down upon Elafius’s cell. Though the
monachi
were forbidden to have personal possessions, the old man’s
hut was cluttered with manuscripts and herbs, tossed about carelessly. A chair was knocked over, lying across the bedding. It looked as if the room had been searched, perhaps. “Where was
Elafius found?”

Coroticus pointed to a place on the hard-packed earthen floor. “Here, slumped on the floor. He looked as if he had collapsed.”

“I wish you had not removed him before I arrived.”

“He had to be prepared for burial, Malgwyn.”

“But you have not yet prepared him, merely stripped him of his robes and laid him out on a table.”

“It is a beginning. You arrived sooner than I thought.”

“And you want me to study his death and find if there were some evil in it, yet you deny me those things I need? Never mind.” I turned to Arthur. “My lord, I suggest that you
go and take your meal with the abbot. I shall stay here. Later, when Elafius’s cell has told me all it can, I will join you.”

At that, they left me to my chores. I eyed the cell once more. It was as if a whirlwind from the gods had struck. The simple table and chair allowed in each cell were both turned over. Some
small vials lay broken and scattered on the floor, their contents staining the earthen floor black. The furs of his bedding were shoved into one corner.

I stood where Coroticus indicated they had found Elafius. Slowly, carefully, I turned in a circle, my arm extended outward. The cell was small, but not so small that I could reach across from
wall to wall.

If a man became seized of some illness suddenly, how would he act? It was a question of some interest. Would he flail about? Would he simply fall quickly and quietly to the ground? Would he
collapse in some kind of spiraling heap? And if he did, could he have created the kind of destruction I found there? I did not see how. To create the havoc I saw, he would have to have suffered
some horrible pain, thrashing about helplessly, not stricken suddenly unconscious and falling in a heap.

The documents lay spread across the cell, in no identifiable pattern, I thought. Then I noticed something odd. The documents all lay face up, with none covering another, at least not much. The
writing was visible on each. That such a circumstance could happen by accident seemed unlikely.

I righted a stool and sat on it, studying carefully the carnage before me. But was it carnage? Something about the scene disturbed me.

Carefully, I got to my knees and studied the documents. They made little sense to me, writings on metallurgy and other technical subjects. Many were the subjects covered by the documents copied
by the brothers. While most were religious, some touched on other matters, plants, herbs, cooking, farming. I had, myself, copied a treatise on the stars by a woman named Hypatia of Alexandria.
Coroticus had me do it because the work was considered blasphemy by the bishop, and he wanted none of the
monachi
to know that he possessed a copy. He said that Hypatia was a learned woman
of Alexandria, but also a pagan beauty that bewitched men and made them worship her. Christians had stoned her to death and torn the limbs from her body. Coroticus spoke of Christian charity,
removing her from the miserable existence that was her fate, but I always thought this incident an odd form of charity.

What puzzled me most was that the sheets were all faced up, as if someone had been reading them. Studying the scene, I noticed that Elafius’s bedding, his furs, were crammed into a corner,
as if purposely jammed there, not accidentally tossed there by the thrashing of a dying man.

I realized then that someone had searched the dead man’s cell. But I saw no method of telling if it happened before Elafius died or after. Logic told me afterward, but did the same man who
searched the cell kill Elafius as well? Or, perhaps, Elafius caught the intruder searching and paid with his life. I could not make that judgment. Indeed, it could have been Coroticus himself who
had searched, looking for some reason for the old man’s death.

But then I saw an empty vial partially hidden beneath one of the parchments.

I
snatched the vial up. Empty but for a few drops of a dark liquid, it was of the small sort, suited for holding extracts of herbs or leaves. My
eyes roved the hard-packed dirt floor, but I saw nothing that could have been stored in the vial. But then, under the edge of a parchment leaf, I saw a partially smashed red berry. And not just any
berry. A yew berry, from those trees we used to make our hunting bows. A few yew needles were also sprinkled across the floor. I sniffed the residue in the vial.

Quickly, I searched the floor, but other than two or three more berries, there were no other signs. I did not like this, not at all. My mind was suddenly fogged by a mass of thoughts, like to
that of snowflakes riding the wind. Yew berries, at least the seed, are poisonous to man and beast as are the needles. Indeed, many horses and cattle fell to them. An extract of yew berries and
needles was equally deadly. And the poison strikes quickly, fatally. No one knew what it did to a man. No one had survived a dose of them. Some said the extract of the seeds and needles had other
uses, but of that I knew little.

But poison was a woman’s weapon, or so it was believed, and this was a community of men. And, besides, Elafius was a doddering old man, unlikely to have fallen afoul of a woman.

My heart was racing and the snowflakes of thoughts pounded my skull in a blizzard. Did Coroticus know of the yew? Is that why he called for me? Yet Elafius worked in the herbarium. It would be
normal for him to have them, perhaps. Or would it? Who had searched the cell? For I was certain that was how it happened. I began to realize that regardless of what Coroticus knew or did not know,
his actions in summoning me were at least grounded in reason. And many, many questions were yet to be asked.

I rose and backed into the corner where Elafius’s furs were bunched to study the cell from yet another angle. As my feet shoved the furs yet farther into the corner, I caught a glint of
something shiny and silver. In amazement, I bent over and plucked a silver
denarius
of Valentinian from the ground. This was the most amazing find of all.
Monachi
were forbidden
to possess coins. And I had never seen a coin of Valentinian quite like this one. It was inscribed “I promise to serve five years” in Latin. An odd inscription for a coin, I thought.
Why did Elafius have this coin? Or had his murderer dropped it?