The Bone Thief (31 page)

The moon was low in the west now, occluded with dirty rags of cloud. With that, and with the chill and exhaustion that had come over them all, there was no going further until they had a few hours’ sleep.

‘We should be safe enough,’ Ronan said out of the darkness. ‘Safe till dawn, at least. We should sleep out here, though, where the first light will wake us.’

Wulfgar shivered at the mere thought of sleeping in the hut;
Garmund’s
men could catch them there like cornered rats. He sat down heavily next to his sacks of earth and bone. Ednoth sat down next to him and yawned luxuriously.

‘I should clean my sword,’ he said. There was a note of intense satisfaction in the boy’s voice.

Four men dead back there, Wulfgar thought, and one here, and I’m the only one who seems to care. He put out a hand to grasp the rough, damp, lumpy bulk of the sack beside him. Thorvald died for these trophies, he thought. Are they conceivably worth that sacrifice? He put his head in his hands. He couldn’t resolve these riddles.

‘Wulfgar?’

He looked up. The dim bulk looming over him had to be Ronan.

‘Wuffa,’ the priest said, ‘I’m sorry to ask anything more of you. If we can, we should sort out the bones now. We can rest until first light but then we have to be on our way at once. We can’t load these sacks onto the horses, not as they are.’

Ronan was right. The sacks were sodden and the sacking itself was beginning to give way. Wulfgar squatted down beside the priest, only a few feet from Thorvald’s body, and they started work once more. Wulfgar plunged in his hands, scooped up fistfuls of the dirt, rubbed his fingers through it, over and over again. He was reminded, in a strange, sideways fashion, of his mother making pastry. The repetitive action was deeply soothing.

‘Do you remember?’ he said to Ronan. ‘Bede writes that the very soil from the spot where Oswald fell could cure the sick.’

Ronan paused for a moment, sitting back on his heels and knuckling his lower back.

‘Faith, I do indeed,’ he said, ‘but Thorvald’s not sick, lad. He’s dead. Very, very dead.’

Leoba came out of the hut with a fresh sack, and when Wulfgar found any bones, however tiny, he put them into the new one. It seemed that none of them could sleep, but Gunnvor.

Ednoth, too, came to help. He didn’t say anything but Wulfgar found some comfort in the way that he settled down to work at his side.

‘We did well back there,’ Ronan said. ‘They weren’t expecting us to be so well-armed, maybe. And they had surprise on their side. But I shouldn’t have let that man get by me.’

‘I killed a man,’ Wulfgar said. It was all he could think about.

‘You were trying to save Thorvald. But you know that, lad.’ Ronan sat back on his heels and looked at him. ‘I’ll hear your confession when we get time.’

Wulfgar nodded his gratitude. The lump in his throat stopped him speaking.

Those bits of spongy carved wood went into the sack as well, and something else, a little plaque that felt like metal, that must have been scooped up with the coffin. There was some kind of embossed design on it and Wulfgar wanted to have a closer look but the night was too dark, the moon wrapped in ragged clouds and no paling yet in the eastern sky. They worked as fast as they could by starlight, using their fingers as much as their eyes.

‘That’s it.’ Wulfgar stood and stretched. Ednoth picked up the sack and weighed it at arm’s length.

‘Much better,’ he said.

‘Can Fallow manage it?’ Wulfgar asked him. ‘I – I would like her to carry the bones, if she can.’

‘She’ll have to,’ Ednoth said, and then, ‘I’ll put your other saddlebags up on Starlight, with mine, if you want. Spread the load a bit.’

It felt like a truce, and Wulfgar was glad.

The longest day of my life is over, he thought. I must go to sleep.

But his mind was racing, his thoughts a chaotic jumble of impressions and anxieties. He still couldn’t really believe Garmund was here at Bardney. Even though Leoba had warned them. Even after Garmund’s men had attacked them.

Offchurch, he thought. Now that might have been your own idea, Garmund Polecat. But not this. No, not Bardney. Not St Oswald. He could sense the long arm of King Edward in this.

How in the name of Heaven had they heard about the relics in Winchester?

Ale-house gossip, he guessed wearily. Like that mocking, red-headed trader who had drunk with them in the Wave-Serpent. He couldn’t remember the man’s name.

Garmund’s never going to give up, he thought, even if he doesn’t know it’s me who’s beaten him to the prize. Yet. Doesn’t know yet.

If he learned
that
… Wulfgar shivered and pulled his cloak more closely around his shoulders, rolling down a long slope into sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

WHEN HE WOKE,
after a brief and fitful doze, everyone else was asleep. The stars were fading and the waning moon was dropping in the west.
Uht
, he thought, like
Uhtsang
, the light before the true light. Like St John the Baptist … the light that shows the way to the sunrise … Where am I? Still half-asleep, he stretched, head aching, face stiff and every muscle protesting, and looked around, wondering what had woken him. Birdsong, perhaps.

Ednoth lay face down, his head on his arms and his arms on his scabbard. Leoba was curled around her children like a cat with kittens, her face grubby with old tear-stains. And last night’s events came rushing back to him on a flood-tide of grief.

Father Ronan looked as if he had tried to keep watch through the night: he had sat up with his back against the wall of the hut but he, too, had nodded off. Wulfgar shook his head. The priest would have a stiff neck when he woke, in this damp breeze. He was covered, face and hands and tunic, in dried blood.

Wulfgar looked down at his own tunic then and shuddered in
horror
. And the tightness on his face was more blood, caked and crumbly. He picked at his stubbly cheek and looked at his fingers in revulsion. Thorvald’s blood on his hands, and the blood of the man he himself had killed, engrained in every faint crease and whorl of his hands. That none of it was his own proved small consolation.

Gunnvor, now – where
was
Gunnvor? It was quite light enough to see that there was no sign of her. And, as he looked around, he saw that the sack of bones, which had been by his head as he slept, had also vanished.

The shock hit like a drench of icy water. Aghast, he shot to his feet. Then he saw that her grey mare was still hobbled with the other horses. Gunnvor wouldn’t have left her horse, surely. At the very least she couldn’t have got far on foot. But – that must mean she had headed back through the marsh, back towards Bardney.

Some pre-arranged interview with horrible Eirik?

Were they even now haggling over the market price of the saint?

Finding it hard to breathe, he picked his way back down towards the fen-edge, trying to retrace their steps of the night before. The water was screened by thickets of gold-dusted goat-willow dotted about with rowan and alder, and there were wreaths of white mist rising from the reeds. A dauntless wren bobbed and sang on a willow branch, so close that he could see the lining of its beak, all pink and gold.

And there she was, crouched at the water’s edge.

His panic subsided but he still felt an unreasoning anger as he walked down towards her. He wasn’t stalking her on purpose but his footsteps must have been soundless because she didn’t hear him, though the wren flew off. It was a chilly morning, but Gunnvor didn’t look as though she was bothered by the cold.
She’d
taken off her over-dresses, leaving them in a gaudy pile on the bank, and she was hunkered down at the water’s edge wearing only her open-necked linen under-shift, kilted up to her thighs, with the sleeves pushed high above her elbows. She did the same thing over and over, twisting to reach for something, leaning forward to her hands in the water, then putting whatever she had been holding down to her right. Wulfgar frowned. There was something pale and gleaming in her hand. He could hear her singing under her breath.

The hairs rose on the back of his neck. Seeing her like that had a dream-like quality, but he had never dreamed in this kind of detail. Her forearms and throat were stained by the sun, but her upper arms and her thighs were white as ivory, her breasts round as apples, white as the flesh of the sour-sweet apples from his father’s orchard …

He put a shaking hand to his forehead to find the skin damp. He felt dizzy, hot and confused in a way he’d long told himself he’d outgrown, that belonged to the muddle of adolescence. But she moved him so profoundly, this forthright, unpredictable woman.

I’ve always claimed the Lady has all my devotion, he thought. But, oh, Queen of Heaven, I’m coming to see that my love for her is hardly different from my dedication to You.

He swallowed painfully. Loving the Lady was so familiar, so safe, so hopeless. Here and now, by contrast, every beat of his thudding heart said
danger
. But he couldn’t tear his eyes away. He had no idea how long he had been standing there. She was so very beautiful.

He realised with a sudden uprush of shame that he was spying on her. He pulled back. But she stood now, turning, bending
forward
. Her already diaphanous linen was splashed with water to distracting effect. Had she seen him, heard him breathing? She reached for the protection of her long green tunic, still singing softly in her throat. He pressed himself back into the scrubby goat-willows. The trees were barely coming into leaf, and she’d see him if she bothered to look through the reeds. But she was covered now, and, relieved and emboldened, he moved out into full view.

‘Wuffa!’ She didn’t sound startled. Glad, if anything.

He stepped forward.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ he asked. ‘You’re all wet. You’ll catch cold.’

‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Let me wash your face.’

Still hardly knowing what he was doing, he went down to join her, and she dipped the cuff of her tunic in the water and scrubbed hard at his face. He could feel her breath on his cheek. When the dried blood got wet it smelled fresh again, and a wave of nausea heaved over him, making for an uneasy mixture of queasiness and desire. He asked again

‘What have you been doing?’ he asked again.

‘Sorting your bones.’

‘
What
?’

She looked very pleased with herself, almost girlish, and, for once, unguarded. She knelt again now, rinsing the blood out of her sleeve, but she turned her face up to him.

‘Look. We must have found the right grave. There are two different people here.’ She moved to one side and gestured at two piles of bones.

Frowning and fascinated, Wulfgar came closer to kneel at her side and have a better look.

‘See? This person,
já
?’ It was the pile topped by the skull. ‘He
didn’t
die so very long ago. Thirty years, did you say? That could be right. The joints even have some sinews still attached. And the bones are quite light in colour.’ She offered him a femur.

He nodded, tight-lipped, but didn’t touch it.

‘Now these –’ she moved on to the second pile and found the matching bone ‘–
these
are old. See? And the bones are dark brown, very smooth.’

‘Polished,’ Wulfgar said, his voice cracking as he reached for it. ‘Venerated. Where did you learn so much about bones?’ He thought of devoted hands for over two hundred years, caressing these bones, bearing them in procession, wrapping them in eastern silks; of the lips of pilgrims, abbots and kings, pressed to them, murmuring in prayer, whispering to them all their hopes and dreams and fears. If he hadn’t already been kneeling he would have knelt then.

St Oswald, he thought, you are here, you are really here, in my hands. He felt the tears rising as he pressed his lips to the silky brown bone. Oh, my dear, dear Lord and Saint. Pray for the Lady, pray for all Mercia, oh, pray for us.

It hadn’t taken a miracle to know the saint when they met him, only common sense. Gunnvor’s common sense. The practical abilities of a woman, a heathen and a Dane. But perhaps that was the miracle.

Trying to mask his emotion, he asked, ‘What about the fragments of the reliquary?’

‘Those bits of old wood? Here. I didn’t want them to get wet. They’re so fragile already.’

Wulfgar nodded.

‘We’d better get back. The others will be wondering where we are.’ He started pulling bones from both piles with the aim of getting them into Gunnvor’s sack. His hands were still shaking.

‘You’re taking the other one too?’ she asked in surprise.

Wulfgar nodded again. ‘He’s guarded the saint for us for thirty years. The least we can do is thank him. I’ll see he’s reburied with all ceremony when we get him home.’

‘I have more sacks,’ she said. ‘Keep them separate?’

They started sorting and packing. Gleaming ribs, the strange, flanged discs of vertebrae – so many ribs! so many vertebrae! – a pair of shapes like angel’s wings that Wulfgar puzzled over until he realised they were the saint’s hip-bones. The little lumpy bones that had made up his feet. It was a profoundly intimate process.