Divine Sacrifice, The

by Hays, Anthony

  Arthur ran his stubby fingers through his beard. “I agree, but what shall I do with this Francesco, this envoy from Rome?”

  And that gave me pause, until I remembered a certain female of my acquaintance. “Fetch Guinevere.”

  The Rigotamos looked at me as if I were crazy. His eyes flashed at me, and I thought for a second he would draw his sword.

  “Fetch Guinevere,” I repeated, unmoved by his anger.

  Those thick eyebrows of his knitted closely together and his frown was one of epic proportions. He jerked his head at one of his troopers, standing just beyond the door. The soldier nodded and disappeared. Torches had already been lit around the chamber. Though our days were growing longer, the prospect of dusk was yet upon us. I could see little that I had accomplished on this day—indeed, my tasks had multiplied—but that would not keep it from coming to an end.

  I thought for a moment. “Patrick’s death may be traced to his youth, when he killed a girl. A horrible event that has given him great trouble in years past.”

  “How could that be part of this affair?” Bedevere asked. ’Twas a logical question. A murder years and miles away seemed a poor candidate to hold the key to our current maze.

  “Patrick’s enemies were becoming concerned at his growing prestige and were dredging up the old tales to discredit him and strip him of his bishopric. Two men who played critical roles in those long-ago events died but hours apart. I need little more than that to suggest that there are things from many years ago that someone wishes hidden. The deaths of Elafius and Patrick lie not in the here and now, not in the aspirations and ambition of a young lord, but in the long-past days of their youths. Quite frankly, my lord, I have no other path to follow. It seems the only place to find a connection.”

  I paused. “The Rigotamos can handle Lauhiir and this new episcopus. I must travel farther afield.” With that I began to strip off my crimson tunic.

  “What’s this?” Arthur asked.

  “Divesting myself of this tunic,” I said. “Returning to the garb of Mad Malgwyn for a time. I have places to go and people to question who would be too cautious if confronted by a king’s counselor. Mad Malgwyn is more likely to attract their confidence.”

  “And you hope to find what?”

  I shook my head. “Allow me a few secrets, my lord. Should my excursion prove successful, I will have at least some of my questions answered.”

  “The coast?”

  “Bannaventa.”

  “Patrick’s home?”

  “Patrick’s home.” I nodded. “It may be that Patrick’s death was determined long ago in his old home. Francesco could not know that he is dead. The old man’s murder has another cause.”

  “And of Elafius?” Ider asked.

  “I cannot fathom that. It seems unrelated, but it must be connected. Perhaps when I resolve Patrick’s death, I will understand why Elafius was killed.”

  Arthur rose to his full height, his broad shoulders strong and thick. “Do not be gone long, my friend. I shall need you, I fear.”

  “I’ll return as quickly as I can. But Bedevere will serve you much better than I. Now, bring me Guinevere.”

  An hour later, as I prepared for my journey, a knock came to the door. My cousin, dressed in a plain gown, her hair held back with beautiful bone pins, slipped inside and kissed my cheek. “You sent for me, Malgwyn?”

  “Cousin! I need your help. Do you still keep company with the women in the community?”

  She cocked an eye and looked at me suspiciously. “What evil are you intending?”

  “Guinevere!” I said with mock surprise. “I need a woman.”

  “Malgwyn!”

  “Not for me. I need an attractive woman who has a way with men, one who is not afraid of her own shadow and can wrap a man around her finger.”

  She pursed her lips and looked at me intently. “Who must she seduce?”

  “A newly named bishop of Rome, one Francesco . . .”

  Dressed as “Mad Malgwyn,” I attracted little notice as I slipped quietly from the abbey on foot and headed down the trail to Bannaventa, a journey of twenty miles toward the coast. It was there that Patrick had been taken as a servi by Scotti raiders. And if, as I believed, the answer to his and Elafius’s deaths was tied to their long-past youth, that is where that answer would be.

  The rotten grass and muddy earth left a fetid smell in the air along the path. In my short time among the Rigotamos’s counselors, I had forgotten the smell of the paupers’ sweat and soil. My nose revealed my distaste. An ancient beggar laughed at me. “Best get used to it, friend. You’ll smell just like it soon enough.”

  The journey to Bannaventa took some six hours. In dry weather, on good roads, a man fresh and strong could cover four or five miles in an hour. But the roads were muddy and crowded; I often felt as if I were swimming against the current in a mighty river. Hundreds of people had flooded the roads leading to Ynys-witrin.

  “Why come to Ynys-witrin, old man?”

  One traveler responded to my query. “Are you daft? The great episcopus Patrick is there, and he is granting blessings and healing the lame.”

  This man was dressed well, with a linen camisia showing beneath his tunic. “Good sir,” I began. “Please do not take my words as insult, but you are not lame, and you seem to already be blessed with the finer things of life. What need have you of Patrick’s blessings?”

  The fellow smiled at me, encouraged by my tone. “We come to seek his blessings for our welfare. Armed soldiers have begun raiding villages to the west and north of here.”

  “Soldiers of Lord Liguessac? Scotti? Pirates?”

  He looked around suspiciously and then shoved me to the side of the road. Leaning in, he sniffed of me and eyed me in disbelief. “Who are you? You look like a beggar, but you smell of rose water. And you seem uncommonly familiar with the human hazards of these lands.”

  This was a clever man. “Be at thy ease, master. I serve the Rigotamos, though my garb would say otherwise. Speak to me.”

  His plump, ruddy face relaxed. “We do not know whose soldiers they are, but they are not common pirates or even the Scotti. They are disciplined. Please take this word to the Rigotamos.”

  I patted his arm. “I will. For now,” I said, “there is a greater hazard to the west. But I will not forget this.”

  He quickly rejoined the river of humanity pushing the road to the flooding stage. I frowned. More complications, I did not need. But I stowed the complaint into a pouch in the corner of my mind and plunged back into my journey as dark, gray clouds seemed to boil up from the horizon. Great winds were pushing them, I knew, and such boded ill for the day ahead.

  All along the western road to Bannaventa, I encountered groups of travelers, some alone, some in families with ox-drawn carts. Such a flood of people I had only seen in advance of the Saxon armies pushing into our lands. They were fleeing as if they were a retreating army, dragging the possessions they could carry in bundles and bags, or strapped onto carts with leather ties.

  A shift came in the flow after I passed a certain point in my journey. Rather than heading east, toward Ynys-witrin, the current began heading west, toward Bannaventa. The danger, I perceived, lay to the north. I had no time to scout that region, but perhaps on my return I would. Arthur’s patrols would certainly become aware of this soon.

  The gray clouds turned to deep purple, and thunder rumbled from them as the sky lit up. As I rounded a turn in the lane, drops of rain fell from the sky, but I realized that I had finally reached the edge of Bannaventa. An old round stone house sat wedged into a bend of the road. The first two or three courses were stone, surmounted by wattle and daub. A child, a little boy, peered from the door. As I made to approach him, he disappeared inside and a great, burly man replaced him. “Your business here?”

  “I seek the family of Patrick, the episcopus in the land of the Scotti. Can you direct me to them?”

  His eyes narrowed a bit. “Who seeks them?”r />
  “I am called Malgwyn, a friend of the bishop. I promised him I would call on his people if I chanced in this direction.”

  He relaxed then, and I noticed his hand slip away from the dagger at his belt. “You came for naught then. They are all gone. Only the old villa is left, but it stands in ruins now. Strange that he would not know this.”

  “He has long been abroad. None of his people are left?”

  “Dead mostly. Or moved on.”

  I thought for a moment. “I need an old man with a long memory then. Someone who has spent his life in these lands.”

  “You have great needs for a man paying a friendly visit,” he pointed out, and rightly so.

  I reached into my pouch and pulled a silver denarius out. Tossing it to him, I drew my own dagger as he moved to catch the coin. “That’s yours to pocket if you’ll help me.”

  His eyes grew wide at the sight of the dagger and wider still at the denarius. He pursed his lips. “I know of no man, but of a woman. Aye, she had some connection to old Calpornius, a servi, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps?” The way he so quickly avoided my glance told me he knew more than he revealed.

  “Some call her a witch, but . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “You believe it or not?”

  “She is but an odd old woman,” he said, looking at me finally.

  “Just tell me where to find her and I’ll be on my way.” Quickly, as the thunder ushered in the rain in sheets, he directed me to the old woman’s house.

  Half an hour later, I stood before a creaky, wind-snatched wattle-and-daub house built against the wall of an old Roman villa. An old ragged cloth covered the doorway, fluttering now in the wind. I did not bother to announce myself, because of the rain, and I ducked my head to enter the house. ’Twas good that I did, for the song of a dagger split the air where my head had been and drove its point into the wooden beam framing the doorway.

  Crouching, I ducked left and then right in the darkened room.

  “Who are you? What do you want here?” The voice was aged beyond any I had heard, crackling and hissing like a fire doused with water.

  The room was as black as night, and I marveled that she had come so close to pinning my throat to her door with the dagger.

  “I am a friend. I mean you no harm.”

  “Since when did any friend enter an old woman’s house without permission? What’s your name?”

  “I am Malgwyn of the River Cam.”

  She sniffed from the darkness of her corner. “You are Malgwyn ap Cuneglas, the one-armed scribe of Arthur, the Rigotamos.”

  Searching the blackened corner, I could just dimly make out her figure, seated with her legs crossed beneath her and a fur piled about her.

  “Do I know you, woman? Or are you a witch?”

  “Neither.” She laughed, though it was more of a cackle. “I caught a whiff of rose water when you entered. Only a noble or his servant would use such. When you ducked the dagger, I heard only the sound of one set of fingers balancing you. A two-armed man would have used both. Who in the western lands has not heard the songs being sung of ‘Smiling Malgwyn,’ who could kill Saxons with his grin and who can look at a man and ferret out the evil deeds in his heart?”

  I felt my face go red. “You have the advantage, woman. You can see me but you sit in darkness.”

  Another laugh and the sound of a flint, a spark and a flame brightened the room.

  I had never seen a woman, or anyone, so old. Her wrinkles were deeper than the River Brue. And with a shock, I realized that her milky blue eyes were as dead as my lost arm. She was blind.

  A bit later, I had gathered more firewood for her and was heating a measure of mead. I settled in opposite her and poured a beaker for us both.

  “Why have you traveled so far, Malgwyn, to talk to an old blind woman?” Myndora, for that was her name, asked.

  “I seek information from the past. A man up the road said that you had been a servant to the family of Patrick, he who is now episcopus to the Scotti.”

  “A servant? No, I was no servant, but I knew them all well. Calpornius, Patrick, even old Potitus, the decurion.”

  Finally, I thought. Answers. “Did you know Patrick’s friends, Tremayne and Elafius?”

  She grinned again and sipped her mead from a battered beaker. I saw she had no teeth but two upper ones and those were worn to the nub. “Know them? Yes, I knew them well. Until Patrick was taken by the pirates, that is. That spoiled everything for us. That was a bad year. Little Addiena was ravaged and killed. Patrick taken. Nothing was the same after that.”

  “Aye.” I nodded. “I know of Addiena’s death.”

  She pulled back. “Your voice and your deeds make you too young to know aught of this. How come you to know of Addiena?”

  “Patrick told me.”

  Myndora looked away then with those sightless eyes. “And did he tell you that he killed her?”

  Then it was my turn to be shocked. “How came you to know this? Patrick said he only told one other soul!”

  Myndora nodded and grinned. “Aye, Tremayne. My brother.

  “ ’Tis so long ago now,” she began. I sipped my own warmed mead and listened as I had to Patrick. Some stories are worth waiting for. I felt, rather than knew, that this was one.

  I was in love with Patrick, though he never knew it. He was strong and tall and handsome. Patrick was confident, not like Elafius; he could not shut up.

  Tremayne cautioned me about Patrick, who was older than me. He said that though he loved Patrick as a brother, there was yet something dark and sad about him. Tremayne was very protective of me and would as lief I not play with them.

  And then all in our village were shocked and crazed by the killing of Addiena. I remember the men searching the forest and the coast. I remember poor Elafius so stricken by grief that he would not leave her body except to choke down a little food.

  But once, during one of those times, Tremayne slipped me into the hut where she lay, and he pulled the wrap from her throat to show me where Patrick’s hands had bruised her. “You see, do you not? That could be you! I saw him choke her until her eyes bulged and they began to turn red with blood!” I refused to believe it. I shook Tremayne’s hands off and flew like the wind into the fields and the forests. Tremayne found me there, hiding behind a huge yew tree.

  I protested again, and that is when Tremayne told me. “I watched him do it, Myndora! I watched from afar. And later, Patrick confessed it to me, and swore me to secrecy.”

  “But you must tell!” I scolded him. “No,” he answered. “I do love Patrick and I know it was an accident. I break my promise only to show you that there is truly something dark and cruel in him.”

  I stopped her then. Many things she said created questions in my mind. “These are the words he spoke to you? Are you certain?”

  “I will never forget those words, if I live another lifetime.”

  “If Patrick told no one but Tremayne, then how did the church find out about Patrick’s crime, for they are calling him to account even now?”

  “Oh, that.” She chuckled and hid her toothless smile behind a hand. “Years later when my brother was battling the church, he blurted it out in haste to Germanus’s pet sacerdote, Severus, to prove that the church is not infallible in its judgment of men or theology. Severus was taken captive in the east before he could look into the matter further.”

  “But why would Tremayne argue with Severus?”

  “Oh, well, he was not called Tremayne by then. Like many who enter the service of the Christ, he took a new name. Then, he was called Agricola.”

  I felt the breath leave my chest and my knees grow weak. “Patrick’s boyhood friend was the Pelagian Agricola?”

  “Certainly. And do you think that Patrick was the only true believer of the Christ from Bannaventa?”

  “But Agricola fled after Germanus’s visit. Everyone knows this.”

  “My brother left, it is true, but he did not d
o so to honor that blowhard Germanus. He went to Gaul to fight yet another day. Once there, he took another name and served the Christ for many years there.”

  “Then he is dead.” A statement, not a question. A sudden sadness came over me as I realized that all three boyhood friends, who had all dedicated their lives to the Christ, were gone.

  “No! No!” Myndora protested. “My brother is not dead. He is in these lands now. He came to see me not a full moon past.”

  “Agricola? Here?” My heart beat faster as I suddenly realized that at least one of the answers I sought had been before me all of the time.

  “Of course,” said Myndora happily. “Only now his name is Gwilym and he is a monachus at Ynys-witrin.”

  “Gwilym,” I repeated, more in a mumble than not. And I took a huge gulp of the now cool mead.

  “Yes, and he brought his daughter along, a lively, headstrong girl named Rhiannon.”

  And then I drained my beaker and nearly collapsed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Gwilym was Agricola! And not only that but he was Patrick’s friend Tremayne! And Rhiannon was his daughter! My poor old head would never be the same. Yet it made sense. It was not uncommon for men to change their names when joining the church. And Agricola could hardly use his own name when returning to his homeland.

  So much was clear now. So many puzzling things fell into place. Gwilym hid from Patrick because he knew that Patrick would recognize him as both Tremayne and Agricola. Poor old Elafius did well just to remember his own name. A part of me smiled. Gwilym must have enjoyed baiting his forgetful old playmate.

  I wondered if Coroticus knew who he was sheltering, or had he taken Gwilym in to better his chances of bedding Rhiannon? Something told me that he did know at least part of it. That Gwilym knew Patrick may not have been a secret the abbot kept, but I would have bet a pot of solidi that he knew he harbored the great Pelagian Agricola.

  Poor Coroticus! The murky stew of complications he had cooked up might cost him his post after all. Outside the storm had risen to great heights, battering the old walls of the house and ripping at the cloth door. And then ripping it away with a horrendous screech.