Oathbreaker (The King's Hounds series)

by Martin Jensen

  “But they were certainly not in agreement with the others,” Winston said.

  And who would have expected them to be? Apparently this time the argument was about what to do with the church.

  They all agreed that it had been desecrated. But while Turold and the local monks preferred to leave Godfrid lying in front of the altar—they wanted to dress him in his grave clothes and lay him on a bier there—and not reconsecrate the church until after his funeral, Edmund demanded that the body be removed and a messenger sent to the bishop immediately. Edmund wanted the bishop to come as soon as possible so the church could be purified and reconsecrated.

  “So he’s still trying to act as if he’s in charge here?” I asked.

  “And he kept going and going, even when the good Turold all but shouted at him.”

  “So how did it end?”

  “How should I know?” Winston said. “I had my fill and left. As far as I know they’re still in there arguing.”

  I remembered something from the church. “If they dress him in grave clothes, they would have to remove his own clothing first, right?”

  “Of course,” Winston said, looking at me with curiosity. “Why? What are you thinking?”

  “His belt.” Winston didn’t follow, so I continued: “That was no ordinary hemp belt holding his cowl closed.”

  “It was leather,” Winston remembered. “You’re right. Let’s go take a look at that.”

  The guards at the church door snapped to attention at the sight of us but let us in without hesitation. As it approached noon, the interior of the church shimmered in the daylight, which shone through the windows and made the dust dance. The altar candles still burned, and Godfrid’s body lay where we’d left it, with his head turned toward the altar, his hands folded on his chest—well, his wrist and his hand and then his other hand—and those glazed eyes closed.

  Halfway down the nave, Winston turned around and walked back to the door. He asked the guards if anyone had tried to come in to where the body was after we’d left this morning. The answer was a clear no.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You can go now.”

  “There’s no reason to keep it guarded anymore,” he explained to me as we walked toward the altar together. “And we can also do Turold the courtesy of having the guards bring their spears back outside the palisade.”

  I wondered aloud that the abbot hadn’t brought up this breach of the monastery’s rules when we talked to him.

  “He didn’t know about it, did he?” Winston said with a wink.

  “Yet Turold walked right by the guards twice.”

  “Once,” Winston corrected, trying to hide his supercilious smile. “They didn’t start guarding the door until after Ælfgar was fetched. And when Turold left, he had his hood up around his face.”

  To keep the evils of the world out, I thought. But it had probably also obstructed his view.

  Winston kneeled down beside Godfrid’s body. He undid the belt we had tied that morning and passed it to me while he arranged the cowl so it looked like it was still being held shut.

  I examined the strip of leather carefully. It had been skillfully tanned and treated. Ox hide, I thought—but soft and supple, hardly as wide as three of my fingers.

  I stepped over to the altar and studied the belt more closely in the gleam from the candle. There was no sign that it had ever carried any weight, confirming my earlier conclusion that it wasn’t a sword belt.

  It didn’t have any stampings or other decorations, and yet something wasn’t right. I studied the ends. They were worn, which wasn’t odd since they’d been twisted together where Godfrid tied the belt, and one end had a tear where the holes for the buckle’s prong were punched.

  I noticed Winston watching me and was about to hand him the leather when I realized what was wrong.

  “The buckle is missing.”

  Winston held out his hand and I placed the belt in it. Once he’d studied it as well, he nodded.

  “It’s an expensive belt,” he noted. “The kind worn by a nobleman in his own home, where he has no fear of enemies and can walk around without his weapon. And you’re right, you would expect a buckle.”

  “So where is it?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  The door opened, and we turned to see whose footsteps were coming through the church.

  The top of Brother Edgar’s head shone, and if possible his tonsure was even more disheveled than on the previous evening. But his footsteps were firm and his eyes bright.

  “Abbot Turold would like to know if we can prepare Brother Godfrid’s body for the funeral.”

  “Ah, so the abbot won his argument with Prior Edmund,” Winston said, his eyebrows raised.

  Edgar snorted and said, “If all the saints stepped forward in a row to tell Prior Edmund that he was wrong, he would refuse to listen to them. No, Winston the Illuminator, no one won that argument, as Father Turold refused to repeat himself more than three times—which shows that he should be considered for sainthood solely on the basis of patience. Edmund refused to budge from his position, so finally a few of us escorted him and his subprior out of the chapter house.”

  I would have liked to have seen that. I felt quite sorry that we hadn’t gone to the chapter house.

  “So now the good Benedictines are cursing us to the blackest hell, but peace be to them. We do as we please in our own monastery.” Edgar gave us a wolfish smile. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed already. But that brings me back to my question.”

  Winston nodded.

  “Go ahead and prepare the deceased. Brother Godfrid has nothing more to tell us.”

  Edgar looked afraid for a moment that we had somehow managed to speak to the dead using sorcery. Then he realized what Winston had meant.

  Winston continued: “But please ask the good abbot to be patient and hold off on the actual burial for a day or two until I’m sure the deceased is going to remain mute for eternity. If Turold hasn’t heard from me by the day after tomorrow, he can proceed with the burial. And now, before you leave, I have a couple of questions.”

  Edgar nodded obligingly.

  “Do the monks here have a private place to store personal items? A designated shelf or maybe just a box of mementos from one’s former life?”

  “Of course,” Edgar responded. “We each have a box of our own possessions. We serve the Lord, but we don’t deny our pasts.”

  “Could you show us Godfrid’s box? Or tell us what it contains?” Winston asked, giving Edgar a look of encouragement. Edgar, however, seemed offended or irritated by the request.

  “No, I most certainly cannot,” he said. “Our shared life does not extend to our past. That is private, not shared communally. I could, however, show you to the dormitory.”

  “Oh, Edgar, one other thing,” I said. “What is that addition built around the apse?”

  Winston looked at me in surprise, and I hurried to tell him that I’d noticed it earlier.

  “The ambulatory,” Edgar replied, still seeming angry. “I’ll show you.”

  He gestured for us to follow him and walked back to the chancel but then stopped and turned left toward a low door I hadn’t noticed until now.

  “Watch your heads,” Edgar said, disappearing through the doorway. Winston and I followed.

  We went down some stairs and then entered a narrow hallway that bent in an arc around the perimeter of the apse, just as I’d seen that low wall doing from the outside. The hallway was wide enough for a man to move through, but too narrow to allow two people to walk shoulder to shoulder.

  When we reached what would be the top of the arc, Edgar stopped and knelt in front of a hole in the stone wall. I reached him a moment before Winston. We both knelt and when Edgar moved aside, we saw an illuminated box inside the wall.

  “Saint Winfrith’s holy bone,” Edgar said, standing back up. “The saint’s relic rests here beneath his church. Abbot Turold had this ambulatory built several years ago
so pilgrims could come and be close to the sacred man.”

  It was a good arrangement for both the pilgrims and the monastery: for the pilgrims because their piety would be rewarded by being so close to a saint, for the monastery because those same pilgrims would no doubt generously remember themselves to the church in general and the monastery in specific.

  Then another thought struck me. I apologized to Winston and Edgar and returned to the church, where I found one of the torches from the morning and lit it using one of the candles from the altar.

  By the time I returned, Winston had guessed what I was planning, and we both crawled through the hallway together while Edgar watched us, wondering what in the world we were doing. The torch scattered the darkness, and we moved through the hallway in its light inch by inch. We could hear monks’ sandals sliding across the floor above us, the narrow hallway somehow amplifying the sound.

  When we stepped out the door on the other side of the altar, we were both sure: There were no traces or marks in the dust. No murderer had lurked in the ambulatory last night.

  “Unfortunately,” as Winston put it. “Because that would have explained how the murderer was able to surprise Godfrid.”

  I agreed, but after contemplating whether the murderer could have waited in the ambulatory, I commented that of course it couldn’t have happened that way either.

  “Because,” I continued when Winston raised one eyebrow, “if that were the case, the murderer would have had to have arrived in the church before Godfrid. But no one could have known that Godfrid was going to be ordered to come.”

  Winston nodded hesitantly.

  “And we can dismiss the other idea?”

  What other idea? I wondered.

  “That Godfrid was not specifically targeted.” Winston said. “Maybe the killing was random? Maybe the murderer just wanted to kill someone but didn’t really care who?”

  Edgar cleared his throat, and Winston gave him a look of encouragement while I put the torch out in the sandbox next to the wall.

  “The murderer might have known that the Benedictines would observe the canonical hours,” Edgar pointed out.

  “That would mean Godfrid was murdered because he was mistaken for Edmund or Simon,” I said skeptically. I didn’t believe that. Apparently Winston didn’t either.

  “The candles were lit,” Winston said. “The murderer would have seen who was before the altar. And finally there’s one thing that tells us that Godfrid was killed intentionally.”

  Edgar shook his head blankly, so I filled him in: “The severed hand. That was a message. If not to us, then to Godfrid’s family or maybe his friends.”

  Chapter 19

  Am I the only one who’s starving?” I asked, stopping Winston outside the church.

  “No, but let’s go take a look at Godfrid’s box first,” he said.

  “Don’t you monks eat lunch?” I asked Edgar.

  Edgar shook his head and said, “We eat our breakfast and then maybe have a slice of bread in the middle of the day. Otherwise we wait until dinner.”

  So I supposed there was no hurry to get to the chapter house for lunch, but after we checked out the deceased’s personal property, I was definitely going to eat.

  The monks’ dormitory was next to the guesthouse, behind the great hall. It did not have beds, as the monks slept right on the floorboards. Rushes and ferns covered the floorboards, and though the plants were dry, they were also soft and fragrant.

  Carefully rolled-up blankets sat throughout the room, marking the sleeping spots, and although woven from thick wool, I could vividly imagine how ineffective they’d be against the cold winters.

  “Why don’t you use beds, so you can get up off the cold floor and away from the drafts?” I asked.

  “I’ve never thought about that,” Edgar said, looking as if my question were incomprehensible. “This is how we sleep.”

  He led us through the room, and I noticed boxes and small chests along the wall next to almost all the sleeping spots, but a few of the monks apparently wanted to forget their pasts so much that they hadn’t kept anything from their former lives.

  Edgar stopped in front of an unadorned alderwood box held together with dowels.

  “This is an inexpensive box for a man we believe was a nobleman before becoming a monk,” Winston said.

  “He didn’t bring anything with him when he arrived that he couldn’t keep in a small bag,” Edgar said, turning his back. “Abbot Turold had the cobbler who makes our wooden shoes make him this box.”

  Winston and I exchanged glances. The nobleman wanted to bury his past, and yet he still accepted a box in which to keep mementos. Curious.

  Edgar was already walking away when Winston’s voice stopped him. “Doesn’t Abbot Turold need to know if we remove anything?”

  “No,” Edgar said, shaking his head. “Brother Godfrid left his past behind when he came here. It is not our place—any of us, his brothers—to nose around in it.”

  Winston had one more question. “What did Godfrid call himself when he arrived?”

  “Godfrid was the name he gave us.”

  The door closed behind Edgar.

  Winston nodded to me, and I raised the lid of the box. A quick glance at the closest boxes and chests showed me that none of them bore locks.

  “The monks trust that their secrets will be respected,” I commented.

  “And surely not without reason,” Winston said, and peered down into the box, which still smelled faintly of wood. My eyes followed his.

  There was one item in the box: a small bundle. I reached down and picked it up, unwound the cloth, and stood there holding two metal objects in my hand.

  The first object was an attractive, and old, belt buckle. The buckle plate was made of gilded silver, inlaid with garnets and framed with gold leaf. An inlaid pattern graced the middle of it, and the hoop and the prong were of silver.

  I turned the buckle over and showed Winston the runes engraved on the back: ERIK.

  A Viking name so common that in some parts of the Danelaw you couldn’t spit without hitting an Erik on the back of the head. I pointed that out.

  “True,” Winston said, “but don’t forget, both Turold and Edgar mentioned that the good Godfrid spoke like a Viking who’d learned Mercian English.”

  In other words, possibly the first hint that we were getting at the murdered man’s past.

  Winston nodded at my hand, and I handed him the other object, a pewter plate.

  It wasn’t ostentatious and bore no gold foil or semiprecious stones. It was simple and slightly bent.

  I carefully flattened it out. One side was glossy, and two words were engraved on the other side. The runes were deep, as if the person who’d used the stylus had pressed hard out of anger: ERIK NITHING.

  “Well,” Winston said, signaling to me with a nod that I could put the things back, “now we will eat and talk.”

  By the time we finally found our way to the kitchen at the south end of the hall, it was empty apart from one young brother who was busy scrubbing a solid worktable with sand.

  When we asked about food, he shook his head and said the scullery and larder were closed.

  I tried in vain to convince him, and just before I hit the guy, Winston grabbed my arm and started pulling.

  “Let’s go try the village,” he suggested.

  It was well past midday by the time we walked out the gate. I turned to the right down toward the path I’d explored earlier, followed by Winston, who hadn’t said a word since we’d left the sanding monk.

  The rabble that had followed Edmund’s procession north had settled down to our left. A quick glance showed that most of the tradesmen had moved on, more interested in reaching marketplaces to the north than worried about traveling without protection.

  Unlike all the poor slobs who were left. They were clustered together on the patch of the village square they’d been allotted, far too fearful to stray farther from the soldiers’ protection,
and lacking the peddlers’ keen focus on the profits awaiting at the marketplace.

  I had no idea where I was going, just that I was willing to pay quite a bit to get some food into me. It felt like it had been days since we’d enjoyed ham and bread in the abbot’s chamber.

  We passed Elvina’s farm—with no sign of either the jaunty lass or her mother—and turned onto the lane between it and the neighboring farm. We just barely managed to avoid being hit by a bucket of kitchen slop that a plump woman was tossing into a small fenced area—we hadn’t seen her where she’d been hidden, in the shadows between two building wings. Myriad chickens, ducks, and geese instantly descended on the scraps with a tremendous clucking, quacking, and honking.

  The woman glanced at us and was about to go back inside when I stopped her to ask if we might get a hunk of bread and a bit of ale.

  Her response was a condescending look from eyes that were half-hidden beneath rolls of fat. Warily, she outstretched her hand, and Winston quickly gave her a coin.

  With a rusty sounding “Wait here,” the large woman disappeared through the carriage gate. The instant she stepped into the chipstone-covered yard, she started yelling for someone named Gudrun.

  We waited patiently and were rewarded with rye bread that smelled of sourdough and a small cask, handed to us by a filthy woman with no front teeth, presumably Gudrun. She silently handed us the goods, then instantly turned on her heel and disappeared back into the farmhouse.

  I took the bread under my arm while Winston carried the cask and led the way down to the path and the thicket where I’d met Elvina. Soon we sat comfortably in a spot with a view of the road between the hills—the same road where Ælfgar had held his meeting.

  The autumn sun shone down on us as we sat in the lee of the hill. No hint of moisture filled the air. The bread was filling, the ale refreshing, and we ate and drank in silence.

  Eventually Winston wiped his mouth with the back of his right hand, burped, and said, “Well, I suppose we’d better talk, too.”

  “I presume we agree that his name was Erik?” Winston asked.