No, if any among us had cause to kill Zophiel now it was Cygnus. Vengeance smoulders a long time in a man who is repeatedly humiliated and builds a great heat in him, so that if he does turn on a bully, the attack will be savage. Had all the blood on his hand and clothes come from the sheep? And there was still the shadow of the deaths of Pleasance and the little girl hanging over him. Juries had convicted men on much less. But whatever the evidence, I could not believe that gentle Cygnus had murdered them or Zophiel.
It was the wolf who had killed Zophiel, I was certain of that and, as if to confirm it, the sound we most dreaded shattered the night again – the long-drawn-out howl of the wolf. Cygnus started and stared wildly at the grave. He scrambled to his feet with such haste that he fell back against the wall behind him. The four candles had burnt low. They were guttering and smoking in pools of wax, but it was not those flames which held Cygnus’s horrified gaze. A small blue ball of flame hovered above the centre of the grave.
‘A… corpse-light,’ Cygnus, stammered. ‘Zophiel… his spirit.’
He ran to the door and as he opened it, the light vanished and the four candles were extinguished as a blast of cold air rushed into the room.
Something made me turn to look at Narigorm. I could just make out her white skin by the light of the moon shining in through the open door. She was crouching, staring at the spot where the light had been. She held her hand out towards the grave, palm out, fingers spread wide as if she was trying to grasp the light. It was the same gesture I had seen her make that night near the healer’s cottage when we heard the howl of the wolf.
The journey across the heath track was not an easy one. We were used to tramping through mud, but slush is worse, colder for a start and more treacherous. Cygnus was leading Xanthus, and although the mare was used to Cygnus feeding, grooming and harnessing her, she knew at once that something was wrong. Zophiel had always led her when she pulled the wagon. She laid back her ears, rolled her eyes, and dug her heels in. Cygnus tried to coax her but to no avail. After the sleepless night he’d had, Cygnus’s nerves were already stretched to breaking point, and Xanthus’s refusal to move reduced him to tears. He was not angry with the horse. On the contrary, he seemed distraught that Xanthus was missing Zophiel. He had taken far more care of her than Zophiel had ever done and yet it was Zophiel the horse wanted.
You can pull a lady’s palfrey forward by the bridle, but when a horse as big as Xanthus refuses to budge, no amount of pulling has the slightest effect. In the end Osmond was forced to do what Cygnus would not and use the whip on her. Xanthus finally walked on, but she kept tossing her head furiously, trying to yank the bridle out of Cygnus’s hand. He had to keep a tight hold to stop her biting him and anyone else who came within range of her teeth.
Zophiel’s boxes were still in the wagon. The wolf had not yet claimed his prize. Perhaps, as Zophiel had said, he wouldn’t risk leaving tracks in the snow. The others wanted to leave the boxes behind in the hut. Believe me, I too wanted to leave them, but I knew we couldn’t. There was no cover near the hut where the wolf could hide, so he must have moved some distance away before daybreak. If a drover or a traveller found boxes full of church artefacts in the hut before the wolf got to them, they would know at once they were stolen. It was not like finding a few coins you could slip into your pocket and say nothing. Word would soon get out and our friend at the standing stones would surely remember whom he’d seen with a wagon capable of carrying a stack of boxes. There was nothing for it but to take them with us, knowing the wolf would follow, and leave them where only he would find them.
At intervals the track branched off in the direction of distant hamlets, but we didn’t take these paths. We hurried by as fast as Xanthus would permit, for few of the cottages had smoke rising from them. The farm strips around the hamlets were untended. Once in the distance we saw a child crouching by a door, knees drawn up and his face buried in his arms, but if he heard the wagon he did not raise his head – perhaps he would never raise his head again.
You can tell who’s died of hunger and who of the pestilence before you even approach the body, which is a good trick to learn if you want to stay alive. The secret is to watch the birds. You’ll see them gathering over a corpse that has starved to death, long before you reach it. The ravens come in first, bouncing to the ground and ambling over like monks, eyeing the corpse sideways, then coming in for the first stab. Above them the kites wheel and wait, their feathers gleaming like ox-blood in the sun. Once the ravens have opened up the corpse, they fly in, closing their wings at the last minute to turn sideways, snatching a piece of flesh in their claws before soaring back up to devour it on the wing.
But neither ravens nor kites will go near a pestilence corpse. No animal will approach it, however hungry they are. The corpse lies unmauled and rots without the help of any scavenger. Its bones lie unscattered where it died and will continue to lie there until sun, rain and winter storms give it the dignity of a burial. That’s why you have to be on your guard. Keep your eyes on the ground, probe the drifts of snow, search the mud carefully, for otherwise you can stumble straight into them.
Perhaps it’s the stench which warns birds and animals to stay away, as if the body had rotted away inside before the victim had even stopped walking. But that had ceased to be a warning to us, for the stench hung in the air everywhere we went. It carried for miles, filling our nostrils until even the food we ate tasted of its foulness. The stench was no warning any more. All England was rotting.
That night we camped out in the open, near a tumbledown round tower, a spot chosen for Xanthus more than us. She’d had little to eat since the snow first fell and we needed her to remain strong. The snow had melted around the tower and the grass and herbs grew lush among the fallen stones and hollows. Adela, Osmond and Carwyn slept in the wagon again and the rest of us slept beneath it. It was to be the last time we used our little ark for shelter. For it was there, the following morning, that we left the wagon for the wolf to find, concealed from the track behind the tower. We knew he’d find it. He had found us. We had heard his howl again in the night, letting us know that he was still with us. Even in open land he still had the power to follow us unseen. And he was not giving up.
Osmond was all for unloading the boxes and taking the wagon on with us, but I wanted to be sure that the wolf knew we had left all behind. There was a chance that if he saw the wagon tracks rolling on, he might think we still carried the boxes and follow us, instead of looking for the hidden boxes. Besides, without the wagon we could take to the smaller tracks, the little paths that did not pass through towns or villages but led to the remoter places where the pestilence might not yet have reached. Without the wagon we could finally turn to the north, for we would not need a road if we were on foot.
But we didn’t leave Xanthus. How the wolf was to move his bounty was his affair. He might be on horseback for all we knew, probably was, but we would not surrender Xanthus to him.
There was something else I would not leave – the mermaid. Zophiel could not have stolen her from the church. If we left her for the wolf, she would be thrown away or else sold to be exhibited to another gawping crowd, if there ever was another crowd or another fair again. The rest of the company thought I was mad to insist on taking such a useless and cumbersome object, and I could not explain to them why I could not leave her. But each time I smelt the myrrh and aloes I thought of my brother’s head in my father’s hands. I thought of his body lying somewhere in Acre, hacked to pieces, his head severed by a Saracen’s sword and stuck on a pike for the crowds to stare at. I thought of his servant risking his life to take it down in the night and bring it home across mountains and seas: the only piece of my brother he could bring back to us, the only piece we could lay to rest. In the end it was Rodrigo who gently took the box from me and strapped it to Xanthus’s back. He alone did not ask why.
We strapped our packs to Xanthus and set off again, praying that this time the wolf would not follow
. It was easier for us to travel without the wagon, except for Adela who now had to walk. But now that she was no longer pregnant, she seemed to relish the freedom. She tied Carwyn on her back and tried her best to keep a steady pace, though she was still weak. We had to make frequent stops to allow her to rest, for she tired easily, but we were all grateful for those, especially Xanthus who ate everything she could reach each time we halted, as if she thought she might never see another blade of grass again.
Narigorm was obliged to walk too. She had walked alongside the wagon before, but mostly when she had chosen to do so. Although she could easily keep pace with Osmond when they went hunting, now, deprived of her little rat’s nest in the well of the wagon, she trailed a few paces behind us, watching, listening, but rarely saying a word, her face revealing nothing of her thoughts.
Without the wagon, the gap where Zophiel used to be had disappeared. It was possible to walk for an hour or two without seeing him lying in the bloodstained snow and without thinking of the wolf. And the mood of Rodrigo, Cygnus, Osmond and Adela seemed to grow lighter the further we walked from that tower. Without the heavy wagon to push and pull through the slippery mud, they realized they could go anywhere, whether there was a track or not. It was as though like the trickster, Sisyphus, they had been rolling a great boulder up a mountain and now they were unchained. The wolf had got all he wanted and they were free of him too.
As if to emphasize our liberation, that afternoon we came to a broad, fast-flowing river. The bridge had been washed away, so we turned aside from the track and followed the river downstream, letting its meandering guide us, until dusk began to close in. We camped a few yards from the river, in the shelter of a small thicket of birch and willow scrub. Osmond and Narigorm had caught some ducks which bubbled in the pot over the fire and we gathered hungrily around the fire as dusk began to settle, tucking into the stew of birds as fast as Adela ladled out the bowls.
The edge of hunger blunted, I paused and looked round at the others. Everyone, except Narigorm, seemed unnaturally buoyant, like boys released early from the schoolroom. They were convinced that our troubles now lay behind us. But perversely, the further we had walked from the wagon, the more panic-struck I had become. I was the one who had argued we should leave the wagon behind, but without realizing it, I had come to treat it as home, the place to return to each night, the one solid and constant thing in this world that was collapsing around us. Now, strangely, after all those years travelling alone on the road, with the wagon gone I suddenly felt cast adrift, naked and exposed as if I was about to be swept away and there was nothing to cling to.
Ever since the flood waters had turned us east we had not been in control of our direction and that frightened me. Like an animal that senses a trap it cannot see, I sensed we were being driven by something that I could only glimpse as a shadow. Three of us had died violently since we had turned east. There was no connection that I could make sense of and yet a shadow, though it has no substance of its own, is always cast by something that has.
I glanced over at Narigorm. She was sitting a little way off, absorbed in her meal, tearing strips of flesh from a duck’s leg. Not this time, she would not get her own way this time. I would not let the runes drive us any more. We had to take control of our destiny again. This time we would make for the north and I would not let her runes stop us. It was the only direction that might yet take us away from the pestilence. It was a slender hope, I knew, but better than the certainty of walking into death. I edged closer to the others and kept my voice low enough for Narigorm not to hear.
‘Now that the wolf is off our backs, we need to make some decisions. We’re going to need to find food, fuel and shelter. It’s not so cold tonight, but it’s only the beginning of February so we can’t hope it’ll last; there may be more snow to come. None of us knows how long this pestilence will continue. We should turn north again, try to find an isolated place untouched by it, a place where we can settle and fend for ourselves, well away from villages or highways, until the worst is over.’
Osmond looked up, his spoon half-way to his mouth. ‘But why not continue to the sea? At the coast we’d be able to catch fish as well as birds. They say some people live off what the sea provides and the sea can’t be affected by the pestilence.’
‘But the ports and the fishing villages will be, they more than most, and there are too many villages along the coast. If we go north and inland we can outstrip –’
‘No, no, you cannot use that,’ Rodrigo’s voice cut in sharply.
Narigorm had wandered back to the pot on the fire and had speared a piece of duck flesh with a knife. She turned and looked at him.
‘That is Zophiel’s knife,’ he said. ‘What are you doing with it?’
‘I found it. He doesn’t need it any more and it’s sharper than mine.’
‘Throw it away.’
‘Why should I? It’s a good knife.’ She dipped it once more into the pot.
‘No, throw it away!’ Rodrigo shouted. ‘It has Zophiel’s blood on it.’
Narigorm, with an exaggerated gesture, plunged the knife back into the pottage. ‘I cleaned it. There’s no blood on it now.’
Cygnus rose and in one deft movement took the knife from Narigorm’s hand. ‘Rodrigo’s right,’ he said quietly. ‘You shouldn’t be using it.’
He threw the knife in a wide arc over the scrub towards the river and we heard a splash. For a long moment Cygnus stared at Rodrigo, then he turned away, gazing out into the darkness towards the river.
Adela came bustling across and took the pot off the fire. There was little left in it, but she tipped the remains out into the bushes, wiping her hands on her skirt.
‘You know it’s bad luck to use a dead man’s knife,’ she scolded. ‘Don’t you think we’ve had enough misfortune already, without bringing down any more?’
She pushed Narigorm back towards her place with an impatient little slap on her bottom as if she was a naughty toddler. Narigorm sat down, but she didn’t look sulky or resentful, as I expected; she looked almost pleased with herself and for reasons I couldn’t explain that bothered me.
As the evening wore on we all drew closer to the fire. The trees and reeds along the river rustled in the breeze and dark water slapped against the banks. Occasionally the squeak or cry of some bird or animal, killing or being killed, reached our ears, but otherwise it was quiet. A covering of clouds obscured the stars. It was dark, much darker than any night since Christmas. Only the light of the fire crackling in the fire pit illuminated our faces. Even though we told ourselves the wolf wouldn’t trouble us again, with the coming of darkness the old tension returned and we sat listening for something out there in the night, something that did not belong here.
‘Rodrigo, can’t you play or sing for us?’ Osmond finally burst out. ‘It is going to be a long night. At least let’s have something to while away the evening.’
‘I will tell a story, if you like,’ Cygnus said.
We looked at him in surprise; he had not told a tale since Christmas. It was a good sign. Perhaps now that Zophiel had gone and he no longer had to face the constant taunts about his arm, his misery would lift.
‘Just so long as it isn’t about wolves,’ Osmond said, with an attempt at a laugh.
‘No wolves, just swans.’
‘Not swans,’ I said quickly. ‘You shouldn’t dwell –’
He smiled. ‘These are not my swans, Camelot. This is the tale of the Swan Knight, grandfather to the great Godfrey de Bouillon, knight of the Crusades. It comes from a song the minstrels sing, a courtly tale. Perhaps Rodrigo will know it.’
Rodrigo frowned, but didn’t answer. Cygnus drew his cloak more tightly around him and began.
‘King Oriant of Lillefort was a handsome young man, skilled in all the noble arts, but his chief delight was the bow and arrow and often when he was restless, he would go out at night to hunt by moonlight. One winter’s night when he was hunting alone down by the lake, he hea
rd the singing of feathers in the frosted air. Looking up, he saw a swan, stretched out across the darkening sky. She glided through the cobalt night on wings as strong as freedom and came to rest upon the silvered waters of the lake. She was a magnificent creature and King Oriant wanted to take her more than he had wanted any other beast or bird he had hunted. He drew back on his bowstring and aimed, but just as he was about to loose the arrow, she cried out in a human voice, and when he looked again, he saw walking out of the water towards him not a swan, but a beautiful woman with eyes as dark as the midnight sky and hair the colour of moonlight. And tangled in her hair was a single white swan’s feather. The King fell instantly in love with her. He caught her in his arms and kissed her and as he did so, he pulled the feather from her hair. Feeling her feather gone, she begged him to return it for without it she would have to remain in human form, but the King refused, saying he would only return the feather if she became his wife.
‘King Oriant carried his swan bride back to the castle. He hid the feather in a chest, in a tower, in a forest, on an island where she would never find it. And when on their wedding night she begged him for the feather, he refused her, saying he would return it to her only when she bore him a son. So the sylph was forced to remain with him and she bore him five sons. Each time a son was born she begged the King to return the feather and each time he refused, saying, “when you have given me another son, then I will return it to you.”
‘But the children of a king and a sylph are not mortal children and unknown to their father, each son, like his mother, could change himself into the form of a swan. Their mother placed around their necks golden chains, from which hung silver moons. As long as they wore the chains they remained in human form, but at night they laid aside their chains, transformed themselves into swans and flew out into the starry sky. Their mother warned them never to lose the golden chains, for if they lost them, they would remain as swans for ever. Then she begged her sons to transform into swans and search for her feather and after much searching they found the island, and on the island they found the forest, and in the forest they found the tower, and in the tower they found the chest, and in the chest they found their mother’s feather. They brought it to their mother who slipped it into her hair, kissed her sons and flew away for ever.