The Raven's Head

by Karen Maitland

  ‘Peter,’ she whispers, kneeling down to peer through the gap in the stones.

  She hears a whimper, but he does not answer. She can see his dim outline in the tunnel. He’s lying on the ledge, facing away from her. He moans softly.

  She pushes her fingers through the hole and can just touch the back of his neck. She thinks he must be cold after lying there all night, but his skin is hot. He is burning up.

  ‘Peter! Peter!’ she whispers more urgently, trying to prod him, but her fingertips barely reach him.

  He stirs all the same and struggles to sit up. His eyes, when he stares up at her from the darkness of the tunnel, are unnaturally bright, feverish. A bloated leech hangs from his lower lip. It plops down into the foul green water below. A trickle of watery scarlet blood runs from the bite and meanders down the boy’s neck, but he is too listless to notice.

  Gisa pushes the food, piece by piece, through the hole. He tries to hold it, but his grip is too weak and the cheese drops into the foul water.

  ‘Eat the bread, Peter, you must eat.’

  He seems barely interested in the food, but grabs the neck of a leather bottle when she holds it to the hole, sucking on the small ale it contains with such a fierce, raging thirst, she fears he will choke. Her mind searches through the herbs and physic she knows that will ease a fever. Is it caused by his wounds or the foul vapours from the drain? He cannot survive down here for much longer. But she does not know whom she can trust. Laurent? Even if he would help, he could no more protect the boy from the White Canons than her uncle. The child belongs to the abbey. Only one man has the authority to stand up to them, and him she trusts least of all.

  If she can make little Peter strong enough to move, he can search for another way out. She will bring him candles. They will use a thread, so that he can find his way back to the hole. But he is too weak even to struggle off the ledge.

  Furious with herself at her own helplessness, she drags out a small wooden shovel she has hidden in the sack. Last night as she lay in bed, it came to her that she could dig down into the bank below the hole. The stones at the bottom might be smaller, looser. But even as she scrapes away the weeds and earth, she can see that the stones beneath are much bigger than those above ground. But still she hacks away in frustration, until the wood snaps.

  Peter is still sucking at the leather bottle, whimpering in misery and frustration for it is empty. She drags it away from his mouth and he presses his face to the gap, begging for more, but she has none. The bread and mutton bone lie untouched on the ledge.

  ‘Please eat,’ she urges.

  He bites off a tiny piece of bread, moving it round and round in his mouth, but his throat is too dry and sore to swallow it. ‘Man in the black robes come back . . . Saw him in the dark . . . Don’t tell him. Don’t tell.’ Peter starts to cry, but softly.

  ‘The White Canons, they were searching for you?’ Gisa asks. She glances hastily up at the high wall, afraid their voices might carry.

  ‘Snake man,’ he mumbles. ‘Don’t let him find me. Don’t let him . . . He stings.’

  Gisa gnaws her lip. The child’s wits are wandering. The fever is taking hold. She will have to make up a draught and bring it back tonight. She cannot wait till morning. But what excuse can she make to Aunt Ebba?

  A soft grey moth-light envelops the apothecary’s courtyard. In the shop, the candles have been extinguished. Business is concluded for the day. She can hear her uncle’s footsteps on the boards above and the querulous voice of Aunt Ebba, but she does not go up. She searches in the twilight of the shuttered chamber, trying to remember the order of the herbs on the shelves and praying her uncle has not moved them.

  Evil faces leer down at her. Hairy creatures with many legs sway from the beams, and imps peep at her from the corners of the room. She knows the shelves hold nothing more sinister than jars and dried herbs, bones and boxes, and in daylight that is all she will see and wonder then how she saw them prance and grimace, but tonight they do.

  She opens the small chest in which she keeps her few belongings. The cowslip ball is wilted, shrivelled. Why didn’t she take some of the blossoms to dry and press while they were still fresh? It is too late to preserve them now. But why should she want to anyway? It was never her posy. A pool of misery wells up in her and she aches with a loneliness she has not felt so intensely since they dragged her father away.

  Chapter 39

  Take a white tree surrounded by dew, build around it a round, dark house, put in it a man stricken in years, a hundred years old, lock him in so that neither wind nor dust shall penetrate, and when he eats of the fruit he will become a youth again.

  When I woke, I thought I’d been struck blind. I tried to lift my right hand to my eyes, but I found I couldn’t raise my arm more than an inch or two, as if it was chained. My left hand seemed normal, though. I felt my eyes. Several layers of thick linen strips had been bound about my head, like a blindfold. God’s blood, had he actually done it? Had that bastard really blinded me? I fumbled at the folds of the linen, trying to peel them back, but a strong hand gripped my arm, dragging it away from my face.

  ‘Don’t try to move. You’re hurt. You must lie still.’ It wasn’t a voice I recognised.

  ‘What happened? Where am I?’

  I was struggling to piece together little fragments of images. Something black . . . black sleeve . . . the flash of a blade . . . a two-headed man. God’s arse, was I in Hell?

  I fought to sit up, but again the hand pushed me down. I heard the rustle of a straw mattress beneath me. But only as my body moved against a linen sheet did I realise I was naked. There was nothing unusual about being naked in bed, but when you are blindfolded and there is a strange man sitting next to you, you feel as vulnerable as a live chicken stretched out on a butcher’s block. I clutched the sheet that covered me, clamping it firmly under my armpits.

  I heard the creak of a chair as the man shifted his position. ‘You’re in the house of Lord Sylvain. You stumbled and fell. Your right arm is broken, but it has been bound in cloth and covered with a paste of grated comfrey root, egg white, flour and fat. It has set hard and will hold the broken bone in place, but you must try not to move it. If you accidentally strike it on something, the cast will shatter and the broken bone will move. That will be painful,’ the man added unnecessarily.

  I had no intention of waving my arm around, but I was rather more concerned about my eyes.

  ‘Am I blind? Tell me!’

  ‘Your head struck the edge of the table when you slipped. Blood has gathered in your eyes. They have been bathed in green coriander mixed with a woman’s breast milk. But you must keep them closed and covered. If you look upon so much as a candle flame while they are so inflamed, it will indeed blind you permanently. And I am sure you do not wish for that. You must try to lie completely still and not sit up or make any sudden movements of the head until you are healed. A servant will come to attend to all your needs presently.’

  ‘Aren’t you a servant?’ I asked.

  He laughed as if I was an idiot. ‘I’m a servant of God, but I am most assuredly not a servant of Sylvain.’

  I was affronted. How was I supposed to tell? I couldn’t see him. ‘A monk, then? An infirmarer? Did you set my arm?’

  ‘I do not set bones,’ he said coldly. ‘I am the abbot of Langley. We are an order of Premonstratensians. Some call us the White Canons. I had business to conduct with the baron and, learning of your accident, I thought I should visit you before I left and offer my prayers for your recovery. Sylvain tended your arm. He is a skilled bone-setter, which is fortunate for you. Those who fall into the hands of the unskilled have been known to lose limbs and, indeed, their lives when a bone has been badly set.’

  I heard the wood of a chair groan and guessed that he was levering himself to his feet. He intoned a Latin blessing and reminded me again to lie perfectly still. His sandals padded softly across the boards. It was only as the latch on the door clicked shut b
ehind him that I realised there were a hundred things I hadn’t asked, like where exactly I was in the manor and was it night or day and just how long had I been there? I called out, but he didn’t return and neither did the promised servant appear.

  The abbot might be a servant of God, but either he had lied to me or the baron had lied to him about what had transpired in the hall. I hadn’t stumbled, Sylvain had punched me, and if I hadn’t blacked out, he would have knifed me too. Maybe he had! I was sure I’d struck the table with the side of my head, not across the front. God’s arse, Sylvain had stabbed me in the eyes! Gingerly I touched them through the bandages. Both eyeballs seemed to be intact and they didn’t hurt when I pressed them. Come to think of it, neither did my broken arm. Was I drugged?

  Panic seized me, blind panic in every sense. Only the insane fear that if I pulled off the bandages my eyeballs would roll out onto the floor stopped me doing just that. Then I heard a familiar gurgling croak. Lugh! I reached down to where the leather scrip should be, but it was gone. Hardly surprising, since I’d been stripped of all my clothes.

  But the gurgling croak sounded again, harsher this time. Lugh was still here somewhere close by my head. Where was he? Where was I, come to that?

  Take deep breaths, calm yourself.

  ‘It’s all very well for you to prattle on about calm, Lugh. You can see where you are!’

  Hardly. I am in a box, remember. Think! What did you hear?

  ‘I’m thinking! Creaking floorboards, so we’re probably not in a cellar. An upper room, a small chamber, because it didn’t take the abbot many steps to reach the door. So I’m locked up in that tower of his. He’s going to keep me locked up and starve me to death, like his daughter’s suitors! He’s already blinded me, like them.’

  You invented that story yourself, remember? Shouldn’t go believing your own tales. You also said he castrated them. Not done that yet, has he? But if I were you, I wouldn’t mention chopping anyone’s cods off again – it might give him ideas. But why would he bother to set your arm if he meant you to die? He’d just toss you down on the bare boards and leave you to your agonies.

  ‘Maybe he is afraid I’ll scream and be heard outside. Then the townsfolk really will storm the manor.’

  He could have gagged you and tied . . .

  The raven fell silent and, moments later, I heard the latch lift on the door and someone entered the chamber. He lumbered towards me. I found myself holding my left arm up to defend myself, though it would have been of little use. The fragrant smell of cooked meat and herbs drifted over my nose, closely followed by rancid fat and raw blood.

  ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’ I called out in panic.

  ‘Pipkin they call me, just old Pipkin. Course, it used to be young Pipkin when they firstly called me that, on account of me being the smallest scullion in the kitchen and always needing to be stuffed with food. Now look at me, size of an ale barrel. Firkin, that’s what they ought to call me, but Pipkin it is and always will be, I reckon, till they plant me in the ground.’

  I heard the thump of wood close by my head as he set something down. The smell of meat and herbs was stronger now, but so was the stench of stale, raw blood.

  ‘I’ve a drop of good beef broth here,’ Pipkin said. ‘Master says you’re not to move. So you open your mouth and I’ll spoon it into you, as if you was an old gammer.’

  The smell had suddenly made me ravenously hungry. When had I last eaten?

  ‘How long have I been here?’

  ‘Don’t rightly know. Master sent for me this morning. Told me you was here and what I was to cook you to help you mend. Don’t ask questions of the master, we don’t. He can’t abide it. And good positions are hard to find at my age, so I does what I’m told and says nowt. Open your mouth.’

  I did as I was told and allowed him to trickle the broth into my mouth. Although it was already barely warm, he blew wetly onto each spoonful in case it burned me. I couldn’t even recall being fed as an infant. I think as soon as I was weaned I must have learned to grab whatever food was lying around else I would have starved. It was hard trying to swallow, lying flat with my head raised only an inch or two on the pillow, and Pipkin wasn’t exactly fitted to be a nursemaid, so between the two of us, half the broth ended up running down my neck and soaking into the pillow.

  Pipkin grunted as he ineffectually dabbed at me with a cloth that stank of raw onion. ‘Tell you what, I’ll fetch a bit of hollow horn with me next time. Then you can suck it down like a babe.’ His fat, calloused fingers fumbled with my left hand and I jerked it away indignantly, wondering what on earth he was doing. ‘Here, take this.’ He was trying to force whatever it was into my hand again. ‘It’s a leg of chicken. I reckon you can gnaw on that without sitting up. Only don’t tell the master. He said you was just to have broth, but what you’ve got down you wouldn’t keep a fly fed.’

  There was no more to be got out of Pipkin, for either he didn’t know or wouldn’t tell. I learned only that I was being housed in a small chamber that had once been a private chapel in the manor, which, he told me, with a long-suffering sigh, was a good way from the kitchens and up a steep flight of stairs too.

  I gnawed gratefully on the chicken leg after he’d lumbered out of the room. The pillow was unpleasantly wet, and cold, fatty broth does nothing to enhance the smell of sodden feathers, but that was the least of my concerns. I had plainly been here one night, maybe more, for it had been late afternoon when I’d spoken to Sylvain. The question was, how long would I remain and what exactly was Sylvain going to do with me when I was well, assuming that I did recover? But I soon gave up trying to think about it. Although I had not long been awake I found a great drowsiness creeping over me, a numbness that seemed to spread up from my feet. Before I could even begin to fight it, I had sunk into sleep again.

  This was to be the pattern over the next few days, or was it weeks? I had no idea. I would wake to find that my bed linen or bandages had been changed, but had no recollection of it, save for vague snatches of distant voices, which might have been dreams. From time to time Pipkin arrived to feed me more broth, which I was managing to swallow without too much mess now that we had mastered the art of using the hollowed horn. I’d ask him questions, but his answers were so vague and rambling I could make nothing of them. Even Lugh was silent. Had they stolen him?

  It was only when Pipkin was feeding me that I was convinced I was awake at all. Most of the time I was floating in some dark warm lake, or running through trees with flocks of ravens screaming after me, or wandering lost through a town, opening door after door only to find half-naked women with men’s heads growing from their bellies trying to pull me in.

  Then one day, I don’t know how long after, I woke and for the first time there was nothing pressing on my eyes. I blinked and realised I could see light. Cautiously I moved my head. It took a while for my eyes to focus, but when they did I could see I was in a tiny circular chamber. There were no windows, and the only furniture was the bed on which I lay, a chair and a small table. A candle burned on what must have once been a stone altar of the chapel and by its light I could dimly make out a sun, moon and stars decorating the domed ceiling. The rest of the chamber had been painted white, though clearly not for some time: there was a patch of black mould at the bottom of the wall.

  After gingerly touching my eyeballs several times to ensure they were firmly fixed in their sockets, I sat up. I regretted it at once, for I felt as if I was back on board the ship in a violent storm. The floor and walls were lurching up and down so violently, I thought I would vomit.

  As I eased myself down, I realised I was using my right hand. The cast was gone. There was no pain. Lying on my back I lifted it up to examine it. For one terrible moment I thought someone had cut off my own arm and sewn on the arm of some old man or even a dragon. The skin was scaly, disgusting. I almost tried to fling it away from me, as if it was some dead thing, but the fingers were moving and it was suddenly terribly itchy.
/>   ‘The skin is thin. I advise you not to scratch it.’

  The voice, coming out of nowhere, startled me so much I almost tumbled from the bed.

  The latch on the door lifted and Sylvain entered.

  ‘I will give you a soothing oil to rub on the arm. In a few days the skin will recover.’

  I shrank back, pulling the blankets over my naked chest. How had he known what I was doing? Could he see through walls? It occurred to me that Sylvain could have been in many times while I was sleeping. He probably had been, if he’d removed the bandages and cast.

  He handed me a beaker. ‘Sip this slowly. You’re doubtless thirsty and you look a little dizzy. It’s only to be expected, after you’ve been lying here for so long.’

  ‘How long have I been here? I haven’t been able to tell day from night with my eyes covered.’

  ‘Nor could you anyway, in here. There are no windows and the walls are so thick you cannot hear the church bells. It was built so that the one who prayed here would not be aware of the passage of time or of the world outside. When we reach into the higher planes, we pass beyond time. Only the body is governed by time, but that, too, I will change.’

  I could tell that I wasn’t going to get a straight answer from him. But in any case how long I’d been in the chamber hardly mattered. The only thing that concerned me now was how quickly I could get out of there.

  ‘Are you going to let me . . . am I free to leave?’

  Sylvain walked slowly to the chair, drew it a little way from the bed and sat down before he answered.

  ‘Why should I wish to detain you? I didn’t ask you to come here. You came to me, Master Laurent, with a proposition. You wanted to construct a story that would satisfy the town’s curiosity about me. So, when you have recovered your strength, I suggest you begin. There is only one condition – that you reside in my house as my guest until your task is completed. You have a habit of talking in your sleep, Master Laurent, and I suspect you are over-fond of good wine. Oh, don’t worry, you will have all that you could wish to drink and eat, but in this way, if you begin to babble indiscreetly, it will be of no consequence.’