The Owl Killers

by Karen Maitland

  Mam’s mouth was pinched tight. I knew it wasn’t Father she was mad at, but the Owl Masters. They’d taken a whole cake of salt in payment for sweeping the burning branch from the midsummer fire round our cottage to drive out the hungry ghosts. Mam said the salt was worth twice as much as the dried fish and grain they’d taken from others in the road. And the ghosts were still gobbling up our food.

  Mam tipped some of the crumbled bread into her own bowl and pressed it down in the broth to soften it. She pointed her spoon at us. “And don’t either of you go taking any bread off Lettice. She’s a kind old biddy, give you the last bite from her pot if you asked her, but she makes moon bread from poppy and hemp seeds, sometimes darnel too when she’s nothing else. And I don’t want you eating it, hear?”

  “Bet it tastes better than this,” William whispered to me behind his hand.

  “So it might.” Mam’s hearing was as sharp as a cat’s. “But it’ll drive you mad. There’s grown men who’ve run out into the marsh thinking it solid ground after they’d eaten it. My own mam’s cousin threw herself off the church tower saying she could fly. Though she went a touch fey anyway after her man was drowned at sea, it was the moon bread that turned her, so you take heed.”

  She scraped the last of the broth and bread crumbs into her mouth and set down her bowl. “Right, my lass, William and I are off to the haymaking. Bailiff wants to start at first light while this dry weather holds. Make sure you fetch the water and wood for supper, and put a new rush candle out ready and trimmed for dark, because we’ll not be back till light’s gone. Then you get yourself out and get to work, do you hear me?”

  I didn’t want to go purefinding. It wasn’t fair. William didn’t have to. A day spent in the warm hay meadow was a lot nicer than picking up pieces of dog shit all day in the hot sun.

  “Why can’t I come haymaking with you?” I wailed.

  “You know as well as I do that the bailiff won’t pay you because you’re not tall enough to toss hay into the wain. You’d be working for nothing.” Mam was winding a long band of cloth around her hair to keep it from the dust. “At least working the road you’ll earn something, and make sure you only take your pail to the tanner when it’s completely full, otherwise he’ll find an excuse not to pay you.”

  “But, Mam …”

  “You heard! Are you finished, William? Then out the door with you.”

  The cottage was silent. As if she knew Mam had gone, a small brown hen came wandering in through the open door and fluttered up onto the table. Bryde, she was my favourite. She had a white flash in her wing where a cat had once clawed out her feathers. When the feathers grew back, they grew back white just like a scar.

  Mam said I shouldn’t give the hens names because if I did, I’d cry when their necks were wrung. But I wouldn’t ever let them wring Bryde’s neck. She was special. I brushed some crumbs of pea bread from the wooden trencher into my hand. Bryde stared at my hand sideways, her bright black eye blinked, and then she took a peck at the crumbs. She made a kind of gurgling in her throat, like she always did when she was happy.

  I held my hand very still for Bryde in the long thin stream of light that was just starting to creep in through the window. My fingers were ugly. I now knew they were. I’d never thought about them much before the tumblers came. The tumbler’s girl had long beautiful fingers that curled around the pole and, when she lifted her arms to balance, her fingers spread out wide in the air, like flowers opening. And her hands were both exactly the same. Mine were different.

  The two middle fingers on my right hand were stuck together, webbed, like Mam’s and Father’s. Nearly everyone in the village had got one hand different from the other. Not the D’Acasters, but Father said they were outlanders generations back, so they didn’t count, but most of the villagers had a web. Father said it was so you could tell your left hand from your right in the dark.

  Mam said it showed you belonged to the village. Once she told me about her uncle who was a sailor. He sailed all the way to France and he was supping in an inn there and this stranger came up to him and said, “You’re from Ulewic. I reckon we’re cousins.” He could tell, you see, from my uncle’s hand. Mam said, no matter where you went, you never really left Ulewic as long as you’d got the web, for it always drew you back, like a charm.

  William’s fingers weren’t webbed though. It was the only thing he never teased me about. I think he would like to have had webbed fingers, like Henry and his other friends. I saw him sometimes staring at Father’s webbed hand, then he’d tuck his own hands under his armpits as if he was ashamed of them. I thought William was lucky. I wished my hands were the same, like the tumbler’s girl, then I could run far away and they’d never be able to pull me back by my web.

  GREAT CLOUDS OF FLIES hung over the pail and buzzed round my head. I had to keep my mouth shut tight in case I swallowed one. They crawled over my face, arms, and legs, making me itch until I nearly screamed. Most of the dog dung was inside the village, but the lads always tried to beat me to the best bits. Sometimes they grabbed my pail and emptied it into their own. It was no good telling Mam. “Learn to stand up for yourself” was all she’d say. So I’d walked by myself as far away from the village as I dared, along the road that led to the house of women.

  Mam said I wasn’t to go near it, but I couldn’t go the other way out of the village along the forest road. Mam said I was never to go there either, not without William to mind me, in case I got lost. I shuddered at the thought. Old Lettice said there once was a terrible monster that hunted in the forest. I knew it was still in there, cause sometimes when I was in bed at night, I could hear it shrieking.

  “Would you run an errand for me, child?”

  I spun round, almost knocking over the pail. One of the grey ladies was standing behind me with a basket in her arms. She was fatter than old Lettice. She smelt of honey, roasted pork fat, and spices, like you could eat her.

  “Some of the beguines and all of the children are up there haymaking.” She pointed up to one of the meadows on the side of the hill. “They’ve onions, bread, and cheese with them, but I’m sure it won’t be enough. The children will be starving after all that work. So I’ve made a batch of fresh griddle cakes. Would you be a blessed sweeting and take them up to the meadow? If I went climbing there in this heat, I’d melt like a lump of lard in fire.” She chuckled and under her heavy grey skirts her belly wobbled up and down. Her face was dripping with sweat as if she’d already started to melt.

  I wriggled my toes in the dust. “Have to fill the pail. Mam’ll be as mad as a wasp if I don’t.”

  “How much do you get paid for a pail?”

  “Penny.” I was afraid to look at her face. Old Lettice says you must never look a witch in the eye else she’ll hex you.

  She dug around in a small leather scrip fastened to her waist and held out a coin. “Here’s your penny. And if you make yourself useful and help with the hay when you get there, you’ll earn another. Now off you go and don’t eat all the cakes before you get there.”

  I looked up, before I remembered not to, but she was still smiling; even her eyes were crinkled up in their own grin. “I can eat a cake?” My stomach was growling.

  She opened the basket and thrust one into my hand. It was still warm and oozing with honey. I licked the honey off my fingers so as not to waste one drop, then took a huge bite.

  Mam said to stay away from the house of women, but I hadn’t gone inside, had I? I glanced up and down the empty road. If I didn’t tell, no one’d ever find out.

  beatrice

  cOME ON, LASS, shift your arse,” Pega bellowed.

  Osmanna was gazing down the hill in the direction of the forest. She didn’t seem to realise Pega was talking to her. “I swear I’ll swing for her,” Pega muttered. “It’ll take two trips to get this hay down to the barn and if she doesn’t get a move on we’ll still be here at midnight.”

  “Have patience with the child,” I pleaded. “She’s n
ot used to working the fields.”

  “Aye, well, she’d best get used to it quick. Ulewic folk have carried D’Acasters on their backs for generations. About time one of them D’Acasters learned that bread’s made from sweat and blisters.”

  It was all very well for Pega; she could toss dead sheep onto a hurdle single-handed, but some of us had not been brought up to work the fields.

  The heat was making us all irritable. The air was thick and sultry. Below us the fields were shimmering in the heat haze, so that they looked like some great lake of rippling water. Even up on the hill, not a leaf stirred on the shaggy trees, as though they were too sleepy to move. It was not yet midday, but already my clothes were sticking to my back and my arms were aching.

  I shouldn’t have been working in the fields at all; none of the Marthas were, because they had their own duties. I should have been a Martha myself by now, but Servant Martha had taken against me from the first. She was the one stopping me; I knew that, no matter what the others said. I’ll tell you this: Servant Martha might think she ruled the beguinage, but she didn’t. We all had a say and I wouldn’t be kept down by her. I’d had a lifetime of women like her ordering me about.

  A peal of giggles rang out across the meadow. At least the children were happy, bless them. They loved gathering up the bundles of sweet warm hay, though more got scattered than collected as they tossed it over one another. It wasn’t work for them, for they were delighted by any opportunity to abandon their lessons. Only little Margery hung back shyly. She stood behind us sucking her thumb and staring down the hill towards the river, glinting in the pale sun.

  “Where does the river come from, Pega?” she asked.

  “River comes from a stream and the stream comes from a drindle and the drindle comes from Anu’s pool miles away in the great hills. That’s where they all begin.”

  “What’s Anu’s pool?” Margery asked.

  “It’s where Black Anu lives. She gives birth to the river. It runs out from between her legs. Haven’t you heard tell of Black Anu?”

  Margery shook her head, smiling expectantly.

  “She’s one of the fay folk—half of her is a woman, but she has the legs of a goat, except no one ever sees those for she hides them under her robes. She sleeps deep in the black pool while it’s day, but at witch-light she rises in robes green as pond weed, glowing in the dark with her silver hair trailing behind her. She’s so beautiful any man who glimpses her can’t take his eyes off her. But that’s just her witchery, for inside she’s really a withered old crone with a heart as black as a marsh pool. If any man should dare to tread near her lair, Anu lures him to dance with her till he’s all tangled up in her hair, then she drags him down into the pool and drowns him. And then …” Pega stretched out her long arms, grabbed Margery and hissed into her ear, “she sinks her teeth into him and drinks his blood.” She nipped Margery on the neck and the child ran off screaming in horrified delight.

  “Osmanna,” Pega yelled again. “Bring that hay sledge here—now!”

  The poor girl started violently and turned towards us, her hands clenched as if she was about to leap into a fistfight. Osmanna always looked wary and guarded. Even when you spoke to her, her gaze was somewhere else, as if she constantly feared an ambush.

  Pega shook her head in disgust as Catherine, always eager to help, ran over to help Osmanna drag the sledge higher up the slope. There was no getting a haywain up to these small meadows on the hillside; you had to use sledges.

  I was glad that Catherine had at last found a friend. When Osmanna first arrived, Catherine dragged her round the beguinage introducing her to everyone as if she were presenting her at court. Catherine was so eager to show her every inch of the beguinage. But Osmanna’s face wore a perpetually frozen expression as if she was afraid to take pleasure in anything. Poor Catherine did her best. She even tried the story of the well on Osmanna.

  “It sprang miraculously from the ground; Servant Martha prayed and then said ‘dig here’ and the men did, though they didn’t believe her, and at once the water came gushing out. The men were so awestruck they fell on their knees in front of her.”

  That wasn’t quite how I remembered it. Servant Martha was certainly no saint and I couldn’t imagine anyone in the village kneeling to any of us, not even if the well had flowed with wine instead of water, but I didn’t interrupt Catherine’s tale.

  “And the water springs up fresh and clear every day. Isn’t it the sweetest water you’ve ever tasted?” Catherine said eagerly.

  But Osmanna shuddered and turned away, her arms wrapped tightly round herself, like an abandoned child. I tried to hug her as you would any motherless waif, but she recoiled as if she thought I was going to strike her.

  Pega lifted a thick swathe of cut hay and rubbed some of the stalks through her fingers. She grimaced. “It’ll be the Devil’s own job to get this dry, but we’re late haymaking as it is, for it was such a piss-poor spring. We daren’t leave it any longer. This heat’s near to breaking.”

  The sky was hazy, the sun a pale primrose disc, as if a veil of gauze had been drawn over it. You need either a good scorching sun or a stiff breeze for drying; we had neither, just this suffocating steamy wash-tub heat.

  “Let’s hope it’s not a hard winter,” I said. “If the hay goes mouldy, we’ll start to lose beasts this winter, especially if it’s a hard one.”

  Pega shook her head. “It’ll be wet, not cold, by my reckoning. Wet winters always follow a bad hay crop. But that’ll be a blessing, because I reckon it’ll be a bad harvest all round again.”

  “You think a wet winter’s a blessing?” I asked in surprise.

  “You’d rather a cold one?” Pega bound a swathe of hay deftly and dropped it for Osmanna to collect, before walking on to the next. “A freeze may be nothing when you’re tucked up in some cosy town in Flanders, but you don’t want to try it here with a sea wind cutting you in half.

  “One year when I was a bairn, the river froze solid. Marshes too, even the edge of the sea. Freeze went on for weeks. We were living then at the forest end of Ulewic. Wolves came out of the trees right up to the edge of the village. Biting and scratching at the door they were, made your blood run cold to hear them. Mam clattered a stick against some pots to drive them off. Not long after, we heard screams like a girl was being murdered, though none of us dared go out to see. In the morning there was blood and hair all over the snow, with great paw prints trampled all round, and one of the Manor’s goats gone missing. Wolves had got her.”

  “Thanks be to God it was only a goat,” I said, crossing myself.

  “You might think that, but my brother was goatherd to the Manor then. He was only a bairn, no match for a pack of wolves.” Pega raised her voice and looked over her shoulder to see if Osmanna was listening, but she didn’t look up. “The bailiff tied my brother to the byre near the forest and gave him a right good thrashing. Then he left him tied there all night—D’Acaster’s orders. Next morning I sneaked along as soon as it was light to take him a bite to eat. I found him fainted clear away. He was near dead with the cold and terrified that the wolves might come back. Poor little reckling.”

  She glowered at Osmanna as if she held her personally responsible, but Osmanna continued collecting the swathes of hay, and refused to look at Pega, though she must have heard her.

  I wandered over to Osmanna, saying loudly, “Pack the swathes well down. If you just toss them on they’ll start sliding off as we take them down.” Then I added more softly, “Take no notice of Pega. She’s got a tongue as tart as lemon, but a good heart. She doesn’t really blame you.”

  Osmanna stared at me, her face expressionless as if she didn’t understand what I was saying. Then she bent and wedged the swathe down in place. “Like that?” she asked.

  I nodded and, defeated, turned away.

  “Thank you, Beatrice.” The whisper behind me was so soft I thought I might have imagined it, for when I turned round again, Osmanna was stoop
ing over the hay giving no sign she had spoken at all. I smiled to myself.

  Pega took a long deep swig from a skin of ale before handing it to me. Then she picked the big basket of griddle cakes that Kitchen Martha had instructed a scrawny little village child to bring up to us. Grain was running low in our barns, but Kitchen Martha still continued to bake undaunted.

  “Here.” Pega thrust the basket at Osmanna. “Make yourself useful, lass, take these to the bairns.”

  Catherine and Osmanna wandered off after the children. Pega gazed after them, an expression of disgust on her face.

  “Osmanna’s her father’s daughter all right. You’ll not get more than half a dozen words out of her and those as cold as a beggar’s arse in winter.”

  “Healing Martha says she’s shy.”

  “Healing Martha wouldn’t hear a bad word said about the Horned One himself. But I say if a fish is stinking, it does no good to pretend not to smell it, else it’ll poison the whole stew. Osmanna’s no fool. She deliberately makes a cowpat out of anything she doesn’t want to do so that she’s not asked to do it again. Yet, she’ll happily sit all day with her books, and Servant Martha only encourages her.”

  She flashed another look of loathing at Osmanna. She was well out of earshot, but she was still watching us as if she knew we were discussing her.

  “Just look at her.” Pega scowled. “She looks like she’s got the stink of the midden under her nose. Not that she’s got any cause to look down on the rest of us. I heard tell that her father turned her out of his gate for whoring. I could almost kiss the little cat, if it was true, but I don’t believe it. She’d freeze the cock off any man who tried to bed her.”

  Pega had an easy way of talking about the couplings of men and women that I could never match. She’d known all breeds of men. I saw it in her face when she spoke of this man or that, vicious men who hurt her and gentle ones whose memory brought a look of mother softness to her eyes. And then there was the one who even after all these years still brought a sleep-smile to her mouth and a soft escape of breath. Once I asked his name, but she shook her head and turned away. “They don’t have names, nor faces neither.”