The Raven's Head (22 page)

‘“There’s not enough meat on that scrawny beast to keep me fat this winter.”

‘He went off chuckling to himself. And your father began to wonder – was it his neighbours who’d been taking the cow each year and laughing at him behind his back? Determined not to be taken for a fool any longer, he turned and led the cow home.

‘Though he was sure it was his neighbours who were making off with the cows, still your father lay awake all night worrying just in case the legend might be true. But come dawn, the mill was still standing and the river was as calm as a nun at prayer. Your father rubbed his hands in satisfaction. He had been right all along. The legend was no more than a silly tale to frighten children and he’d waste not a single cow more on it.

‘All was well for several years. You grew up and when your father died you became the miller. You fell in love with a pretty maid and were overjoyed when she consented to become your wife. She was a beautiful bride and you couldn’t wait for the wedding feast to end and the wedding night to begin. But no sooner were the two of you alone in your cottage than you heard a great roaring as if a huge wave was rolling down the river. You ran out into the darkness to check the mill wheel, but it was undamaged and the river was no higher than before. It must have been rocks falling up in the hills that you’d heard. But you wasted little time pondering about that, for it was your wedding night and your adorable bride was waiting. You hurried back to the cottage.

‘Your bride had extinguished the candle, but by the dim glow of the damped-down fire you could just make out the outline of her head on the pillow and her arms stretched out to receive her new husband. You ran to the bed and jumped in, but the arms that embraced you were wet and cold, her leg rubbing against your bare thigh felt as if it was covered with thick slimy scales, and when she pressed her icy lips upon yours it was as if she was sucking the breath from your body.

‘Alarmed, you sprang from the bed and in your haste you trod on something warm and sticky lying on the floor. With trembling fingers you lit a candle and saw that what you had stepped on was a blood-soaked hand, bitten off at the wrist. To your horror, you saw a ring on that dead hand, the very one that, only that afternoon, you had slipped onto your wife’s finger. The hand was all that remained of your beautiful bride. Aghast, you stared at the bed and saw a naked woman resting against the pillows, with skin as translucent and gleaming as a river-pearl, while beneath the blankets something slithered and coiled. The woman held out her arms to you.

‘“Come to your new bride, my husband. I’ve been waiting for you.”

‘As her lips parted in speech, you saw the three rows of dagger-sharp teeth and they were crimson with fresh blood.

‘You fled to the door, but you couldn’t move as fast as that serpent’s tail. It lashed across the room, twisted you in its coils and dragged you back into her cold wet bed.

‘And ever since then, each year on the anniversary of your wedding night, the naiad slithers from her icy river, creeps into your cottage and into your bed. Neither bolt nor bar can keep her out for she is far stronger than any of them and you are forced again and again to spend the long dark night in her dreadful embrace.’

My companion was now green in the face and staring at me in horror, as if he thought the creature might actually be waiting for him in his bed when he got home that night.

I patted his arm bracingly. ‘There, you see? Now, all you have to do is tell the old widow that if you were to marry her, the same dreadful fate would befall her as your first wife and you love her far too much ever to allow that. Furthermore, the naiad has told you that if you should try to leave your cottage, and escape her, she will cause such a terrible wave to surge down the river that it will not only sweep away your mill but flood the whole valley, destroying everything in its path. So you’re forced to carry on living in the cottage alone and suffer this yearly torment to save the village. You’ll need to groan and look distraught. Sob, too, if you can, and I guarantee the old widow will feel so sorry for you she’ll cancel the debt on the spot and never mention marriage again.’

He gazed at me for a moment, visibly shaken, dropped a few coins on the table to pay for his meal, and tottered from the tavern. I scooped up the coins before the tavern-girl could lay her hands on them, then bought myself another flagon of wine and a bed for the night in their barn.

But I had learned three things from that encounter. First, negotiate a good price before you tell them the tale or they just toss you a coin as if you were a storyteller at a fair. Second, don’t tell a story that gives your customers nightmares. And third, Philippe, Le Comte de Lingones, was not the only man in the world badly in need of a good tale to rid himself of a pressing problem. The world abounded in such men and it seemed to me that a sharp-witted lad might make a passable living by giving them exactly what they needed, even if they didn’t yet know it.

I knew these men wouldn’t all fall into my lap as easily as the miller had done. Like Philippe, most men hide their shameful secrets. The trick was to discover what a man, or woman, come to that, was afraid of losing most in this world and what they needed to conceal. I had to ferret out their dirty little secrets as I had done with Philippe, then, like an angel stretching down from Heaven, drag them up out of the flames of Hell. It had all gone wrong with Philippe, but that was because I’d come to him as a lowly servant, a gullible boy. I would not make that mistake again. A man of substance is not to be so lightly dismissed and that is what I would become, just as soon as I reached England and sold the silver raven.

The rain was lashing down harder than ever and even though we were still hugging the French coast the ship was bucking and tossing, like a maddened bull. Most of the passengers were regretting ever having eaten supper. It was going to be a miserable voyage, but I comforted myself with the thought that luck was still on my side. I had eluded Philippe and escaped the gallows. I’d talked my way into being given free passage on the ship and as soon as I sold the raven I would have more money in my purse than even I had dreamed of. As I told you, Fortune favours those who help themselves. I was the proof of that.

I swallowed hard, trying to fight down the first wave of nausea that rose in my gullet as the ship bucked ever more wildly, but as I pulled the blanket over my head, I thought I heard the rapid
pruk-pruk-pruk
alarm of a raven calling above the creaking sails and crashing waves. But whoever heard of a raven flying over the sea? I reached for the wooden box and held it tight against my chest. I could have sworn it was trembling, almost as if the box was an egg and the creature inside it was beginning to hatch.

A chicken egg decays and from it is born a live chicken, thus the living animal comes forth from the decay of the whole.

Regulus darts along in the shadow of the wall, the wet blanket in his arms. He means to wash the tell-tale patch in the stream that runs through the small vegetable garden, before Felix or Father John discovers it.

The last time he had wet the bed he had tried to hide the blanket in the middle of the others, but that had led only to more trouble, more humiliation, greater punishment – sitting, hungry, in the corner of the dorter, watching the others eat, the piss-soaked blanket on his head, before finally being sent to wash not only his blanket but all the others he had contaminated. He had been permitted nothing to eat or drink for the rest of the day.

‘Wetting the bed is not just filthy and disgusting, but a wicked waste of urine,’ Father John had thundered. ‘Even animals do not soil their own nests. You are lazy, boy, too idle to get out of a warm bed and use the pot.’

I’m not lazy
, Regulus had wanted to tell him. It happens in his dreams, his nightmares. He cannot help himself. By the time he wakes it is too late. But he had said nothing: no words would burst through a throat closed tight with tears.

The boy stops suddenly, as he sees two of the white-robed canons standing yards from him in the early-morning light. He quickly crouches down. They are talking with their backs to him. They haven’t seen him, but they are standing between him and the little stream.

Keeping low he edges back along the wall, desperately searching for some other route. He sees the door in the wall, stretches up to turn the iron ring-handle with one hand. It moves a little, but not much. He drops the wet blanket on the ground and uses both hands to turn the stiff ring. It isn’t locked. Cautiously he pushes the door open, just a crack, and squints through the gap.

He is still not certain which places are forbidden and which are not, but he has another reason to be wary. He remembers the first night he came being taken through a door, a door that led down into a chamber deep below the earth where flasks bubbled and a magpie flew at him. At least he thinks he remembers that, but he has had such strange, wild dreams, he can no longer be sure if it happened in his sleep or his waking. He dreams he is pissing and wakes to find that he has. Are dreams real, then? But, real or nightmare, he is afraid of what lies behind these identical doors now, afraid that the next one he opens will lead back to that place, to that cell in which they shut him up all alone.

But through the narrow gap he glimpses not a dark chamber, but grass and branches and wrinkled trunks. The place beyond the door is full of trees. His face breaks into a grin and he has to stop himself shrieking in delight. He has found the way out, the way back to the forest. Dragging the blanket behind him, he slips through the door as swiftly as a mouse darts into its hole and pulls it shut behind him.

But as soon as he is on the other side of the door, his smile vanishes. In that fleeting moment between him peering through the crack and stepping through the door, it seems to him that great high walls have sprung up all around the small patch of trees. And the trees are barely trees at all, not the great towering oaks and swaying elms of the forest, but stunted, gnarled and bent as old men, like the apple tree near their cottage at home.

The heavy cloud of disappointment that has enveloped him lifts briefly. He is a good climber. He can climb any tree in the forest – at least, he can in his head. He could easily climb up any of these twisted trunks and scramble over the wall. But even as he stares around, searching for a likely tree, he can see the branches are too low, too far away from the walls. He knows, without trying, he’d never be able to reach.

There is a pool, though. The water in the stream that feeds it runs in under a low gap at the bottom of the wall. A frog could come and go as it pleased, but not a boy, not even one as small as Regulus.

He wanders to the pool and dips the damp patch of his blanket in the cold water. If it doesn’t smell of piss, maybe no one will notice. It is only as he tries to wring the water out that he glimpses someone moving at the far end of the orchard. Not a white-robed man, but a boy, a boy he knows. Felix is searching for something on the ground, walking back and forth across the grass, like a hound quartering in search of a slain bird. Regulus tries to bundle up the blanket and conceal it behind his back, but it is too big and heavy and just as he tries to edge back towards the door, Felix raises his head.

For a moment neither of them moves. Then the blanket slips from Regulus’s hands and tumbles onto the grass. He is still trying to gather it again when he feels Felix tugging on the other side of it. Regulus cowers, afraid that Felix will start yelling, will call Father John – everyone – to come and look at the evidence of his sin.

But Felix does not call out. Instead he takes the blanket from the boy and he wrings the wet patch out. His long fingers are far more adept at the task than Regulus’s. In silence they watch the grey drops splash onto the grass. They sparkle in the sun, before they are pulled down into the earth.

‘Shouldn’t be in here,’ Felix says.

Regulus guesses that means him.

‘Bury them here under the grass . . . the White Canons,’ Felix says, but as Regulus continues to stare blankly at him, he adds helpfully, ‘When they die . . . When Father John dies, he’ll be buried here too, all the brothers will. It’s what makes the trees give lots of fruit, see. Roots burrow into their corpses, suck up all the juices.’ He jerks his head towards the trees. ‘You’ll see come autumn. Trees’ll be thick with apples, pears, too. We help to pick them. There’s loads. Best you ever tasted.’

He chuckles. ‘My father used to say corpses are food for worms, but he was wrong. The White Canons are food for us. Next time Father John punishes you, tell yourself,
One day I’ll be eating you. Everyone’ll think I’m just biting into a nice juicy apple, but really it’ll be your bones I’ll be crunching.
That’s what I think when he locks me up. Then I don’t mind what he does to me.’ Felix grins and lifts his chin defiantly, as if trying to convince himself he really doesn’t care.

The idea of eating Father John doesn’t make Regulus laugh. In fact, the very thought of eating an apple now makes him feel sick. He stares at the ground, picturing all those men lying beneath the grass. He wonders if he walked over someone’s body as he crossed the grass. He’s suddenly afraid to take another step in case a dead hand thrusts itself up through the earth and grabs his leg, angry at being trodden on.

He shudders. ‘Is that what you were looking for, a dead body?’

Felix looks surprised. ‘How did you know?’

‘Saw you searching the grass over there.’ The boy points to the far side of the orchard.

Felix grunts. ‘Thought maybe there’d be a fresh grave. Guessed this is where they’d bury Mighel, if he was dead.’

‘He’s not dead. His mam came for him and took him home,’ Regulus reminds him, convinced Felix must have forgotten. ‘Father John said.’

‘But they didn’t ’cause Mighel doesn’t have any parents. Father got killed by pirates and his mam’s dead too. That’s why the priest in the village brought him here, he told me so, ’cause there was no one else to look out for him. And you heard old Crabby – he said Mighel wasn’t sick, so he’s not been taken to the infirmary.’