The Raven's Head (40 page)

A fierce wind has sprung up, shaking and rattling every byre and tree, like a wilful child. Unfastened doors and shutters slam themselves to splinters. Branches, made rotten by frost and winter’s rain, come crashing down. The few birds that venture from their roosts to battle through the grey skies are tossed about like leaves.

Gisa stares fearfully at the heavy grey sky. Will it rain? Will the water streaming from roofs and paving slabs come gushing out of that hole, sweeping a chill flood over that narrow ledge? Peter’s strength is ebbing from him as each day and night passes. Gisa cannot coax him to move and, indeed, she can see he has barely the energy to lift his head. The syrup she made in her uncle’s shop has eased the ache of his fever, but not broken it. There must be something that will heal him, make him strong enough to search for another way out, but though she read the herbals half the night until her eyes burned, nothing in her uncle’s books told her what she needs to know.

Inside the manor grounds, the high walls give some shelter, but the apple and cherry blossom has been ripped from the trees and covers the grass in drifts of pink snow. Gisa pauses, as she always does, staring up at the forbidding tower. But today Father Arthmael is waiting for her. Better the devil you know, they say, and she knows not this priest.

As she struggles to close the heavy tower door against the wind, she cannot help glancing at the bottom of the stairs. The trapdoor to the cellar is closed and she can’t even see where it opened, but that does not erase the memory of what’s down there. The swollen, purple face of the hanged man floats before her. It’s a face she knows, she is sure, but whose?

As her head emerges through the trapdoor into the store room, she sees a man in long white robes standing with his back to her. Though Odo warned her yesterday that the abbot would be instructing her, the sight still unnerves her. What had the White Canons done to little Peter to make the child so afraid? Had Father Arthmael inflicted those wounds? Did he know?

The abbot stares down at her head, which is level with his sandalled feet. His toes are long, twisted over each other, like gnarled tree roots. The joints of his big toes are swollen and shiny, the skin on the others rough and calloused, where the leather has rubbed them for years. He does not extend a hand to help her up, but watches her mount the steps, his expression a mixture of impatience and curiosity.

He’s taller than Sylvain, much thinner. His eyes are sunk deep in the sockets and his skin is drawn tight over the bones, as if even as an infant his body lacked flesh. His glance when he meets her eyes is covert, sly, as if he believes that to look at a woman is a sin yet a sin he is compelled to commit. She makes a small obeisance and he seems to be waiting for this, for he finally speaks.

‘Your master is spending the day in meditation and rest, preparing himself. But there is something he needs you to make for him. This will be your task for today, after which you may leave. Somewhere in this room is the skull of a human child. You will find it.’ He waves his hand carelessly around the shelves, as if he has asked her to fetch something as commonplace as dried yarrow or a candle.

‘You will heat it in the crucible until it is brittle enough to be crushed into powder. When you have ground the skull to a fine powder, you will empty the powder into this bag, taking great care not to lose a single grain of it. Fold the top over three times and sew it shut, using the hair in that box for thread.’

He hands her a scrap of parchment on which a five-pointed star has been hastily drawn. ‘You must also stitch this sign upon the bag. It need only be very small, each line just a single hair, just so long as the pattern is complete with not the smallest gap between the lines of it.’

He points to the things he has laid out on the table behind him – a white bag made of fine linen, two bone needles and a wooden box. He flicks open the top of the box. Inside is a clump of curly golden-brown hair. She wonders what animal it has been clipped from for it is too thick and coarse to have been taken from a human head. A dog, perhaps?

‘The hairs are too short to sew with,’ she protests.

‘You will sew one stitch at a time, as when you stitch a wound.’ He slams the box shut, before the wind, forcing its way through the slit window, can snatch the hair away. ‘When the task is complete, you may leave the bag here next to the box and return as usual tomorrow. I have lit the fire in the chamber above in readiness for you to heat the crucible. Do you have all that you need?’

She nods. She wants him gone.

‘Carry out the task with diligence. Add nothing more than I have instructed, take nothing away. Men’s lives and, more importantly, their souls depend upon your work.’ He stares out across the garden towards the manor, then murmurs softly, ‘There is a book that your master consults. Perhaps you have seen it – emblazoned on the front is a golden sun.’

She can see from the tension in his frame that the question is far from casual.

‘Lord Sylvain has many books,’ she says, keeping her expression blank.

‘There is some detail I wish to check. Is that book here, in this tower?’

‘Perhaps if you asked Lord Sylvain . . .’

The abbot spins round furiously. ‘Sylvain cannot be disturbed. Why else do you imagine I am wasting my valuable time instructing you?’

His gaze fastens on her swan brooch. ‘Sylvain walks a dangerous road. But for the moment it is one we must all walk with him until we reach that place where the road will divide in two. He is willing to kill the soul to protect the body, but Christ teaches us to slay the body to save the soul. Do not trust your master, child. Obey him, for the work you begin here will be used for God’s glory in the end. I will make certain of that. Obey, but do not trust. I will pray for you, child. I will pray that God will save your soul at least.’ He makes the sign of the cross over her. ‘
Perfectum concedat nobis Dominus mortis.
God grant us the perfect death.’

Gisa shivers. She needs no warning not to trust Sylvain. But she does not trust Father Arthmael either. As soon as she sees him walking away across the grass towards the hall, she runs downs the stairs to check if he has locked her in. To her relief, she finds the door unfastened. She regrets coming down for now she will have to remount the stairs, walking over the steps she knows to be hollow, walking over the dungeon in which the winged creature unfurls its bat-wings in the darkness.

She tries to focus only on the task as she lifts the little boy’s skull from the box in which she found it on the day she arrived. It is so very small, so very white and new. The baby teeth are still in the mouth, but his adult teeth will never grow now. The skull itself holds no terrors for her, but the tender age of its owner distresses her, for it might have been little Peter’s.

As soon as the skull is baking in the crucible, Gisa turns her attention to the room. She has been waiting for this chance and there may never be another. She must find the book. Sylvain said it contained the knowledge to heal any infirmity, even if that person was already in the arms of death. She can heal Peter, she knows it, and once he is strong they
will
find a way out.

She guesses that Father Arthmael has already searched the tower, but she convinces herself she can find what he has missed. She looks in and behind every box, lifts every covering, but there is no book. The vessels, which are normally bubbling away, are cold and empty. All the braziers, save the small furnace she is using, have been extinguished. Things are being made ready, but for what? She searches again, going over the places she has already examined, as if the book will suddenly appear because she wills it, but it does not.

Gisa crosses to the window that faces the main house and stares at the blank wall of the turret where she guesses the hidden chamber to be. What reason does Sylvain have for detaining Laurent here? And she has the uneasy feeling that that is exactly what he is doing, even though he does not like strangers. Something slithers through the back of her mind, something Peter said, but it will not lie still long enough for her to name it.

She hugs herself against the cold wind blasting though the windows. She is desperate to escape, but the heating of the skull cannot be rushed. Years seem to pass as she watches the fire, but finally she judges the skull is ready. She slips her hands into thick sheepskin bags to protect them from the heat and lifts it out, setting the brittle skull in the wind from the slit window to cool it.

Then she carefully carries it down to her own workshop. She gently cracks the bone into pieces and begins to grind. The teeth lie like white pearls among the grey powder. She hesitates. If this was a suicide’s skull she was preparing for her uncle, she would remove them, for the powder would be made into a potion to be swallowed against the falling sickness and the teeth would cause harm. But this bag, sewn up with hair, must be some kind of amulet and Father Arthmael said all must be collected, so she empties the tiny teeth into the bag with the ground bone.

Teasing out one of the golden-brown strands of hair from the wooden box, she stretches the curl to thread the bone needle. The hair is surprisingly strong and just long enough to pull through the lips of the fine-linen bag. But she has fashioned only a few stitches when she hears the wooden stairs below her creaking and soft footsteps ascending. Pushing the bag aside, she backs away from the trapdoor, her skin crawling with fear. Someone or something is rising from that dungeon. She fumbles behind her and seizes the first weapon she can find, raising the iron pestle high above her head.

Rubedo: the Red Death – He who has dyed the poison of the sages with the sun and its shadow hath attained to the greatest secret.

As I poked my head cautiously through the open trapdoor, there was a piercing shriek. It startled me so much I almost knocked myself out on the edge of the frame. It took me a moment or two to realise the cry had come from Gisa.

‘Gisa! It’s only me . . . Laurent,’ I whispered, as I waved a hand above the opening.

I was afraid to stick my head back through in case she cracked my skull open with the pestle she was brandishing like some deranged Viking. I heard her footsteps crossing the boards and I cautiously peered over the edge of the trapdoor again.

‘I thought you were . . . You shouldn’t creep up on people,’ she whispered angrily. ‘I might have had something hot in my hands.’

‘Instead of a lethal weapon,’ I said sarcastically, as I stepped up into the small chamber. ‘Look, I didn’t mean to startle you, but I thought I’d best tread quietly. Odo said yesterday that Sylvain wouldn’t be coming to the tower, but Father Arthmael would.’

Once again, thanks to the lack of windows in my chamber, I had woken unsure if it was still night or midday. A meal had been left for me, but cold meat and bread were hardly much of a clue. It had been placed outside my door this time and I wondered if Odo had reported Pipkin to his master, and he’d been ordered not to speak to me again.

‘The abbot has gone,’ Gisa said. ‘But you shouldn’t be here – not even Odo comes in – and if you were seen by one of the servants, they’ll tell Sylvain. He might even be watching the tower himself. He sees everything.’

She pointed up to a silver ball that hung over the trapdoor above our heads. As if that thought reminded her she should be working, she pulled a strand of something from a box, squinting as she tried to wiggle the thread through the eye of a needle.

‘You’d do better with a longer thread,’ I told her. ‘And you want to try wetting that with your tongue.’ I’d been forced to repair the stitching of a book a few times, not to mention my own holed hose, and that always worked for me.

‘It isn’t thread,’ she said. ‘It’s some kind of hair. Father Arthmael gave it to me. I think it’s intended as an amulet.’

Curiously, I peered more closely. Didn’t look like any sheep I’d seen. Horse’s mane? It was too short and curly for that. I prodded the mat of coarse hairs. I snatched my hand back. The hair felt familiar and it certainly looked it. A slow, hot blush spread up over my face. In disbelief I watched Gisa innocently stretching the springy hair with her fingers, pulling it into place before tying it off. God’s arse, I’d just told her to lick it!

Too mortified even to look her in the eye, I ran up the steps to the chamber above, hoping that the cold air rushing through the slit windows would cool my skin. A furnace was burning in the chamber, which didn’t help, but I was far too embarrassed to face her yet. What was Sylvain up to? I’d told him the townsfolk were muttering
sorcery
. I hadn’t actually believed it, but now I wondered if was true after all.

Gisa was whispering agitatedly below me, urging me to come down and to leave the tower at once. But my embarrassment had turned to fury. How dare he steal my hair,
that
hair, while I slept and use it for a charm or whatever the girl was making? I would not go down. I would stay right there and find out exactly what use Sylvain intended to make of my body parts. I had a right to know.

It occurred to me that witches and sorcerers used their victim’s hair to cast a spell on them, putting it in jars with urine and pins then boiling it until the victim was seized with violent cramps and searing pains. There were certainly enough glass flasks lying around to keep a whole coven of witches occupied in mischief for a year. I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my leg. It was a very sharp needle that Gisa was threading with my hair.

But did she know what she was sewing? I’d believed her to be an innocent, forced against her will to work for Sylvain. But suppose she was his apprentice in the dark arts, or even the sorceress herself. After all, he’d been dragged out of the tower half dead, while she had sauntered out after him unscathed. She might have enchanted him. It might have been her who’d shaved my hair and she was down there now, stitching a spell with it to kill me. No wonder she was so eager to have me leave the tower.