Company of Liars

  ‘I think what Pleasance meant,’ I said, ‘was that it is a good deed which is blessed regardless of the merit of the person for whom the deed is performed. There’d be no good deeds performed in this world at all if they were only performed for the sinless, isn’t that so, Pleasance?’

  She raised her head just briefly enough to give me a weak smile and then lowered it again, as if she would have gladly crawled back into the cave of demons again rather than answer Zophiel.

  Zophiel turned on me as I hoped he would. ‘A fascinating idea, Camelot. So, if a demon appeared to you and –’

  He broke off as for the third time the wolf’s howl rang through the inn. It was closer this time, still a way off, but much closer. We fell silent, listening for another howl, aware of the crackling of the fire and the rasping breathing of the old widow. Outside the wind dashed rain against the walls, whining like a dog pleading to come in. The fire burned low and the rushes burned still lower, finally sputtering out in a thin, stinking trail of smoke, but no one stirred themselves to light new ones. We sat stupefied in the hot, stuffy room, staring into the embers of the fire. Zophiel alone was alert, his head bent close to the door, waiting for another howl. He was tense and agitated, much as he had been that night in the cave. I wondered if he too had his own wolf story. If he did, it was one that had unnerved him far more than those we had told.

  It was only when we heard the dogs scratching and barking at the door that the rest of us stirred out of our lethargy. Zophiel made no move to open the door, but the widow pushed him aside and unfastened it. Her boys bounded in, pausing only to shake themselves vigorously in the centre of the room, liberally spraying us all with mud, water and blood. The widow wailed, clapping her hand to her gummy mouth, until she realized that the blood was not that of the dogs. Though they were both soaked and covered in mud, there was no sign of any wounds on them. But they both held something furry and bleeding in their mouths which they laid happily in the old woman’s lap, clearly expecting praise. Adela covered her eyes and shuddered.

  ‘What is it? Is it the wolf?’

  The old widow laughed, the first time she had done so since we arrived.

  ‘Saints preserve us. It’d be a pretty miserable runt of a wolf if it were. It’s a hare. My boys have been hunting and caught me a hare for my breakfast. There’s my clever boys!’

  She held aloft the two ripped halves of hare in triumph, like an executioner displaying a severed head for the crowd, while the dogs leaped up at her to catch the drops of blood that dripped from the gory remains.

  We left the old woman to the skinning of her hare and made our way back to the barn. She hardly seemed to notice us leaving. She was too busy rubbing the dogs dry and telling them over and over what good boys they were.

  Rain was lashing down outside and though we hurried to the barn, we still got thoroughly drenched. There was no sign of Jofre when we entered and I saw an expression of panic cross Rodrigo’s face as he caught sight of the empty bed. Looking around, I noticed that the ladder to the hayloft was not where I had left it, and glancing up, I saw it had been pulled up into the loft. I tugged his sleeve and silently pointed. As he directed the light of the lantern upwards I could just make out Jofre’s form curled up on the pile of hay that I had earlier earmarked for myself. He was asleep or pretending to be. Perhaps he too had heard the wolf and had climbed up into the loft just in case it found its way in or, more likely, he wanted to make sure he spent the night alone where he could nurse his stripes unobserved. I didn’t grudge him the hay. His need was greater than mine for a soft place to lie that night, and even with the hay under him I doubted he was going to get a comfortable night’s sleep.

  Zophiel rushed to check his boxes as soon as the barn door was safely barred behind us. Thankfully, for all our sakes, they were intact and undisturbed, or so we concluded from his relieved expression, for he said nothing. He stripped off his wet clothes as rapidly as he could, slipping naked and shivering under his blanket on the bed-boards closest to his boxes, but I noticed that for all his haste, he did not neglect to slide his long knife under the covers where it would lie ready if it should be needed.

  Narigorm sat in the corner of one of the beds, her knees pulled up to her chin and her skinny white arms wrapped tightly around her legs. In the dim light from the lantern, her hair glowed like a fall of new snow. She was watching Cygnus as he struggled with one hand to peel the wet hose from his goose-pimpled legs. Her doll lay beside her.

  Cygnus caught sight of it and chuckled. ‘What have you done to your poor baby, Narigorm? I hope you don’t intend to treat your children that way when you become a mother.’

  I followed his gaze. Narigorm had swaddled her doll in strips of cloth, as Adela had taught her, except that the swaddling bands had been wound not only the length of the doll’s body, but up over the face, so it now looked more like a corpse prepared for burial than a swaddled baby. The same thought seemed to have struck Cygnus for he suddenly looked serious and lowered his voice.

  ‘I know you’re only playing, Narigorm, but uncover the doll’s face now, there’s a good girl. If Adela sees it, it might upset her in her condition.’

  Narigorm tilted her head to one side. ‘Why do you still keep your wing tied down?’ she said, in a clear, piping voice.

  ‘Camelot said I should, in case my wing was remembered.’

  ‘But there’s no one to see it here except us.’

  Adela, her attention attracted by Narigorm’s raised voice, glanced over. ‘She’s right. It must be uncomfortable bound so tightly like that. Don’t you get cramp in it?’

  ‘A little, but I don’t mind. It’s safer to keep it bound. Safer for all of us if I do.’

  Adela waddled towards him in her shift, reaching out her hands to the bindings. ‘At least let me take it off for you tonight, so you can stretch it. We can rebind it in the morning if you want.’

  ‘Maybe the feather’s regrown,’ said Narigorm. ‘You said it would.’

  Cygnus smiled. ‘Maybe. It has been itching.’

  He submitted to Adela’s deft fingers as she unwound the bindings. Then, as soon as she had peeled the bindings off, he sighed with relief and stretched out the great white wing. We saw at once that there was still a gap where Narigorm had pulled out the feather. But as he lifted his wing, three more long feathers fell from it. They spiralled slowly round and round until they lay starkly white against the beaten earth of the floor. Cygnus stared at the feathers, aghast. Without lifting her gaze from the feathers on the ground, Narigorm began slowly and deliberately to wind another strip of cloth across her doll’s face.

  14. The Glassblower

  Even after all that I have witnessed, I can still remember the day we first heard those bells. Many of the villages and towns are one now in my memory, but not this one. You never forget that sound, like your first kiss or the birth of your first child, or your first encounter with death.

  It was early December, the feast of St Barbara to be exact. In my line of work, you have to remember these things. In the days leading up to a saint’s feast day a fragment from that saint is worth twice what it is at any other time of the year. And the demand for relics grew ever greater, so desperate were people for hope.

  The rains still fell, the water continued to rise in hollows and lakes. There were no flash floods in this part of the country for there were no steep-sided hills or rocky valleys to funnel the water. Much of the land was flat and marshy, with numerous streams and ditches to carry the rain away. But the forests, meadows and marshes absorbed the rain until the ground oozed water like a weeping sore. Ditches overflowed, streams became rivers and ponds became lakes. Those whose homes lay low down in the hollows watched helplessly as the water rose higher and higher until it crept up to the thresholds of their byres and cottages.

  We had to retrace our footsteps several times, returning to a crossroads and trying a different route as we encountered tracks washed out and rivers impassable. Although
at every opportunity I tried to turn our company once again towards the north and the safety of the shrines at York, the way was constantly barred. We were herded along by the water snarling at our heels, forced upwards on to the higher tracks, no longer in command of our own direction.

  Up till then we had passed few travellers on the road. Save for villagers walking between home and fields, the tracks had been almost deserted, as they usually are in winter. But now, several times a day, we passed huddles of wet, starving families trudging along, women and children carrying bundles on their backs, men harnessed by ropes to small carts which they struggled to drag through the thick mud. The carts were piled high with bits of old furniture and cooking pots. They carried all they could salvage from their sodden cottages, though where they were going to find another home was impossible to say. Most likely they’d spend the winter on the roadside, burning their precious furniture to keep warm.

  The bodies of those too weak and hungry to walk lay dead beside the tracks. For food which had been scarce for months was daily growing harder to find and those who had it were charging a king’s ransom for a handful of mildewed grain or some fragments of weevily dried fish that once they would not have thought fit for pigs.

  Once, half-submerged in a sodden field, we saw the statue of St Florian, his millstone tied around his neck. Since their saint was unable to protect them from the rains, the parishioners had stripped his statue of his scarlet cloak and golden halo, beaten him and cast him out to face the elements. Many of the cottagers were no longer begging God for mercy, they were angry with him. They felt betrayed, and with good reason.

  We kept travelling, eking our way through the days with the birds we caught for the pot and whatever we could find to buy in the villages with the few coins we earned. Pleasance, Narigorm and I were now the only ones in our company who had earned any money for several weeks, for no one had money to waste on music or mermaids. But though the villagers’ purses were as empty as our own, they would still somehow manage to find a coin so that Pleasance could tend the suppurating sores on their feet, or barter a necklace with me for a relic which might change their luck. They could also find a coin to have the runes read for them, even if it meant going hungry for another day. Strange how desperate people are to know the future, even if they know they cannot change it. We each crave our little fragment of St Barbara – may she preserve us from an unexpected death.

  And so it was that on St Barbara’s Day we found ourselves on another nameless track, making for another nameless village in which to spend the night. The track led over a treeless plateau of short, springy grass. Xanthus kept turning her head sideways away from the wind, much to Zophiel’s irritation as she dragged the cart continually to one side. But I didn’t blame the poor creature; the wind stung our faces like a wet rag flicked hard against bare skin. Then in the distance we heard the bells. We didn’t take any notice at first, for all we could hear were snatches of ringing carried on the wind. The village lay in the fold of the plateau. It was not a deep valley, but the curve of the slope as we approached concealed all but the wooden steeple of the church and the smoke of the hearth fires.

  As we drew close the sound reached us more clearly. It was not the single sonorous tolling of a bell that signified a death, nor the regular pattern of the church bells calling the faithful to mass, but a random jumble of noise, as if those who were ringing no longer cared if the bells tolled in unison or not. There were other sounds too, hollow, metallic sounds as if people were striking iron pots with metal bars.

  Zophiel pulled on Xanthus’s bridle and we all stopped, looking at one another for answers.

  ‘Are those warning bells?’ Adela called out from her perch in the front of the wagon. ‘What if it’s a fire?’

  ‘Have some sense, woman,’ retorted Zophiel. ‘How likely is it to be a fire after all this rain?’

  Adela’s belly was now so swollen with child that it took the combined efforts of both Rodrigo and Osmond to get her on to the wagon and just as long for them both to heave her off again. This, together with her increasingly frequent need to dismount to pass water, was doing nothing to temper Zophiel’s antagonism towards her.

  ‘They could be raising the hue and cry,’ Osmond suggested. ‘Perhaps there’s been a murder.’

  None of us could help glancing over at Cygnus, who bit his lip. Over the weeks even Zophiel had ceased to treat Cygnus as a fugitive, though we were still careful not to let his wing be seen in the villages, nor let him work as a storyteller just in case someone’s memory should be jogged. But the rest of the time it was easy to forget he might still have a price on his head.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like a watchman’s alarm,’ I said. ‘The watchman’s bell sounds just long enough to summon help and in the daytime how long could it take to assemble some men? Perhaps this is some local custom celebrating St Barbara. Maybe the noise signifies the lightning and thunder which struck her executioner down. If it’s a feast, there’ll be food, and they may be in need of Rodrigo and Jofre to play for their dancing.’

  Rodrigo chuckled. ‘If that is the best they can do for music, then they need us.’ He slapped Zophiel on the back. ‘Come, a feast, I like the sound of that. Warm fire, good food, maybe even some wine, what do you say, Zophiel?’

  I couldn’t help smiling at Rodrigo’s grin. The others, faces brightened too and we set our shoulders to the wagon with a will to get it rolling again.

  The track sloped gently upwards, continuing to hide the village from view, but as soon as we reached the top of the curve, we not only saw it, we smelt it. Every street and village in England has its own smell. You can sniff out the butchers’ streets and the fishmongers’ alleys, the tanners, the dyers and the woodworkers with your eyes shut, and for those living there, however foul the stench, it is the familiar smell of home. But this rotten-eggs stink was not the smell of home in this or any other town. It was the choking stench of burning sulphur.

  Across the field strips a thick pall of smoke rose up from a patch of common land. A haywain was pulled up there and a group of four or five men were busy lifting sacks from it. A large hole had been dug in the field and fires built all round it. Thick smoke from the smouldering wood and wet leaves rolled out across the land and the men appeared and disappeared, like ghosts, as the wind gusted it across them. For one sickening moment it looked as if the men had no faces; then I realized each wore a sack over his head with slits cut it in for eyes, the sacking tucked well down into their shirts.

  At that distance and with all the smoke, it was hard to make out what they were doing. They worked swiftly, moving back and forth from the haywain to the pit. At first I thought they were moving sacks of grain, then the bile rose up in my throat as I realized the sacks contained not grain, but bodies. They carried the bodies over to the pit, swung them and threw them down inside. It took two men to carry each adult body, but then I saw one man with two small sacks in his hands swinging like dead rabbits as he walked, and I knew they must be little children. He tossed those in on top of the rest.

  I turned to look again at the village. The ringing of bells and the clanging of metal continued unabated. Most of the smoke was coming not from hearth fires in the cottages, but from small braziers in the streets which sent up billows of thick yellow smoke into the darkening sky. A man walked rapidly down the street. He too had his face covered and held a burning torch up in front of him though it wasn’t yet dark enough to need such a light to see by. As he passed a shuttered cottage, the light from his torch illuminated the door just long enough to show that a mark had been daubed on it. It was a black cross.

  The others in the company simply stared at the scene before them without a word. I hurried to Zophiel’s side. ‘We’d best get moving. Go as rapidly as you can, till we’re clear of the village.’

  But he didn’t move. He stood, staring at the field of smoke and the ghost figures moving around in the heart of it. ‘So this is it then. It has overtaken us.’

&
nbsp; Jofre crouched down by the wheels of the wagon and retched. Rodrigo wordlessly crouched down beside him, his hand automatically rubbing the boy’s back as I had seen him do that day I first saw them on the road.

  Adela wrapped her arms around her swollen belly and began rocking back and forth, sobbing uncontrollably with the dry animal wail of a woman keening for her children, as if the bodies being thrown into the pits were her own loved ones. Osmond clambered up on the wagon and tried to take her in his arms, but she struggled from him, beating her fists against his chest, screaming at him to get away from her as though he had the contagion himself.

  I could see despair setting in on everyone’s faces and felt it clutching at my own heart. ‘Come on now, let’s get moving, get away from this stinking smoke.’

  ‘Where, Camelot, where exactly are we to go now?’ Zophiel demanded. ‘The pestilence is in front of us and behind us. There is nowhere left to go. Osmond, if you don’t stop your stupid wife screaming, I will.’ He whirled round on Narigorm. ‘You, girl, you’re supposed to be the soothsayer. Your runes led us here. You got us into this mess. Suppose you tell us where to go now. Up? Shall we all grow wings like Cygnus and fly up, because that is the only place left to go?’

  Any other child would have shrunk from his anger, but Narigorm did not. She looked him squarely in the face, meeting his eyes unblinkingly. ‘East,’ she said simply. ‘I told you already, we will go east.’

  For a moment I wondered if she actually understood what she was witnessing, that the sacks being thrown into the pit contained human bodies, but Narigorm was no ordinary child. Something in those pale, expressionless eyes chilled me more than anything I was witnessing.

  ‘No, not east, north,’ I blurted out. ‘We must go north. If the pestilence is in the east and west we have to go north, it is the only way clear now.’