The Raven's Head

by Karen Maitland

  He jerks, staring upwards as another scream rings out above his head. The edge of the book knocks against the brass brazier in the chamber, tipping it over. It rolls across the wooden boards, spilling a trail of glowing charcoal across the floor, but Felix barely registers this as he clambers back up the ladder, clasping the book to his chest, and scrambles across to the blazing beacon. He holds the book as close to the flames as his fingers can stand.

  ‘Let him go!’ he demands fiercely. ‘Let Regulus go or I’ll drop this in the fire.’

  Father Arthmael gapes at him. ‘Felix! What are you . . . How dare you come . . .’ he splutters, almost speechless with shock and indignation. He struggles to regain control. ‘Give the book to me and return to the abbey. I will speak with you in the morning.’

  ‘Not leaving without Regulus. Let him go, else I’ll burn this, I swear!’

  ‘Stop him!’ Sylvain shouts.

  ‘Felix!’ Father Arthmael bellows. ‘Do as I order! These are matters you cannot begin to understand.’

  The cold rage in Father Arthmael’s tone would make any man or boy in the abbey blanch in fear, but Felix suddenly realises he no longer cares. Arthmael can’t threaten him because he’s never going back to the abbey. Arthmael is not his master any more. The realisation almost brings a grin to his face, but they could still hurt Regulus. He braces himself against the heat and edges the book closer to the flames.

  ‘I’ll do it. I’ll burn it unless you let Regulus go.’

  Sylvain, his arms growing weary from holding the struggling boy, is forced to set him back on the roof, but holds him tighter than ever. Regulus is sobbing, but is too frightened and weak to resist.

  ‘I will count to ten,’ Sylvain says quietly, ‘and if you do not take the book away from the fire, I will throw the boy over the edge.’

  ‘You pick him up again and I’ll throw the book straight on the fire,’ Felix says, holding it higher, so that the light glints on the gilded sun, making its halo of flames dance as if the book is already ablaze.

  Father Arthmael seems to make up his mind and suddenly lunges at Felix, trying to catch the back of his robe and haul him back from the beacon. Felix twists and dodges away. Father Arthmael raises the sickle, swinging his arm back to strike, but stumbles sideways as a huge bang shakes the flags beneath them. Blue and scarlet flames leap up through the trapdoor.

  Father Madron rushes to the hole, trying to peer down, but is forced back by the heat. Sylvain has let go of Regulus. The men scatter, running to the parapets, but on every side smoke and flames are licking upwards through the slit windows below. From beneath comes the crash of objects falling from burning shelves and small explosions as glass vessels shatter in the heat.

  Regulus runs to Felix, clinging to him. ‘Down! Want to go down!’

  He rubs his tear-stained face against the flap of red cloth on his shoulder, leaving a trail of silver snot and soot. Felix grips the boy’s hand, staring at the smoke and flames roaring up out of the trapdoor. They can’t go down, not that way, and what other way is there? It’s all his fault. He knocked over the brazier. He didn’t mean to. He should have stamped the charcoal out. Why hadn’t he? Why?

  He stares down at the pale face of the boy looking fearfully up at him. Those blue eyes are brimming with fear, but also trust. Felix knows Regulus expects him to find a way out, expects him to make everything all right. He believes Felix can do anything. But he can’t. He couldn’t save Mighel and he can’t save Regulus. He is useless. He can’t help anyone.

  Felix pulls the boy over to the parapet. Maybe there is a ladder, a rope, a twist of ivy which they can climb down, but there is nothing. Not even a cat could climb these walls. Below he sees three figures lit by the glow of the fire, shouting and waving their arms. They vanish and reappear as the smoke and flames from the room billow up from below. Felix’s eyes are stinging. He rubs the tears away with the back of his hand, but that only makes them hurt more. He thinks the people below are urging them to jump. But they can’t. It’s too far down.

  The heat from the beacon and from the flames below is suffocating. The flagstones beneath his bare feet are growing unbearably hot. They are going to roast alive. Regulus is shrinking into him, shrieking and trying to lift one foot at a time, and Felix sees his feet are also bare. The boy is crying in pain.

  Felix bends down and heaves the child into his arms, as best he can, to raise his feet from the hot stones. He turns back, trying to find someone to help them. A figure is lumbering towards them through the smoke, his arms outstretched. For one joyous moment, Felix believes they are going to be rescued. He staggers forward, but stumbles back as he recognises Sylvain. His face blackened with smoke, the golden sickle swinging menacingly in his hand. Red drops like rubies glisten wetly on the blade and Felix cannot understand why.

  Then as the wind gusts away a billow of smoke he sees something white lying on the flags – a blanket. His stomach lurches. He will be punished because a boy has dropped his blanket and not tidied it away. There is a scarlet stain on the cloth and it is spreading wider and wider. Then he realises it is not a blanket at all, but a man, a man in white robes.

  Father Arthmael lies in a crumpled heap, his hands clutching his throat as blood spurts in a fountain between his fingers. His eyes are bulging, his mouth is open wide, but nothing emerges except a strangled gurgling. Father Madron blunders out of the smoke, his face contorted in horror. He kneels, cradling Father Arthmael’s head, pressing his fingers to the wound as if he can push the blood back into the veins. But he can stutter out no more than a single word of the Absolution before his abbot’s head falls back, and the gash in his throat gapes as wide as a scream.

  Felix is so shocked that Sylvain is upon him before he can move. Sylvain makes a grab for Regulus lying across Felix’s arms. He seizes a handful of the little boy’s red hair and jerks his head backwards. He sweeps the sickle upwards and a shower of scarlet droplets falls on the child’s face. Twin flames burn in Sylvain’s green eyes, as he thunders his triumph into the wind.

  ‘Astaroth, Gressil and Balberith, I give to you the living stone of the boy-king that Isolda may live!’

  The glittering sickle arcs through the darkness down towards Regulus’s bare throat. Felix whips round, twisting the boy sharply away from the blow, trying to shield him. The blade catches Felix on his back, slicing deep into his flesh, but it is so sharp, he scarcely registers the pain of the wound. As Sylvain tries to regain his balance, Felix lunges towards the parapet. Choking from the smoke, his eyes streaming, his lungs searing with pain, he heaves the boy up in his arms.

  ‘Catch him! Catch him!’ he bellows at the figures below.

  With all his remaining strength, he tosses the boy out as far as he can, away from the flames leaping through the window below. He cannot tell if the people below have heard him. The smoke is too thick: he cannot see Regulus fall. But he can hear the boy screaming as he plummets down. As Felix falls to his knees on the burning stones, the blood streaming from his back, Regulus’s scream is almost the last sound he ever hears. The timbers holding up the roof finally give way, and the floor vanishes beneath them, plunging boy and men alike down, down into the blazing furnace below.

  Chapter 59

  Take the old black spirit and destroy and torture with it the bodies until they are changed.

  ‘Which way now, Regulus?’ I asked, swivelling round in the cart. ‘Does any of this look familiar?’

  The boy winced, as he levered himself up to peer over the edge of the cart. Gisa had done her best for his leg, setting it in a comfrey cast. It was a clean break, and she thought it would heal without the leg shortening so he would not have a limp. Provided, of course, he could be persuaded to let it heal properly and not test it too soon. I wasn’t convinced even his mother would be able to keep him still. The brat was already trying to crawl and shuffle to reach what he wanted, too impatient to wait for help.

  I’d caught the boy as he plummeted downwards from
the burning tower, but he’d fallen a long way and we’d both ended up on the ground. He could easily have smashed every bone in his body and, as Gisa said, at least he survived, which is more than can be said for the other poor lad. There was no hope of rescuing any of the men or the boy from that inferno. I only hoped the lad had been killed as the floor gave way. Burning is a horrible death. I wasn’t sure I even wished it on Sylvain.

  None of the servants attempted to fight the blaze. As soon as Odo realised his master had perished in the flames, he drove off with a wagonload of spoils from the house. But I think even before the fire started he believed that Sylvain would not survive the night, for judging by the carefully wrapped boxes and bundles, he must have started packing well before the blaze broke out.

  Pipkin, too, was busily collecting his own plunder. He was only loading a pack horse, but he was determined to get as much onto it as the poor beast could carry. ‘Owes me that in wages,’ he said, ‘after all the years I’ve put in for him. ’Sides, the carrion crows from the town’ll be flocking out here to pick over this place long before the sheriff’s men arrive to secure it. Suppose it’ll be up to the king to decide which of his men is to be favoured with the manor, seeing as the master had no son.’ One of his eyes was peering at Gisa. ‘And you’ll be given to the lucky bastard along with it, I reckon, seeing as you were his kin.’

  A spasm of revulsion crossed her face and I knew she, too, would be leaving long before the sheriff’s men arrived.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You knew Gisa was Sylvain’s granddaughter. Did he tell you as much?’

  Pipkin grinned. ‘Told me nothing, but I’ve ears and eyes and I’m not as thick as pottage, whatever some may think. Master sent Odo to hide the letters to the French in her father’s house. There were suspicions someone in these parts was sending information to the French king. I reckoned it were the master himself, but if it was, he knew it would only be a matter of time afore sheriff came a-calling on him. So, the master told sheriff where to look, to shift suspicion from himself and settle a score with Master Hamon into the bargain. Had him arrested and tried for a traitor. Hanged him, they did, in the market square, gibbeted him after. There was a plague of mice that year, and they swarmed all over the corpse, ate the flesh right off the bones almost afore he was cold.’

  He turned to Gisa, who was standing rigid, her eyes wide with horror and pain. ‘Made you watch the hanging, they did, poor little mite. I reckon you was too young to remember it, which is a mercy, but they put you right in front, so as your tears’d be the last thing your father saw and he’d die knowing that he’d left you to starve or worse. Sylvain was cock of the dung-heap that day. Got his revenge on your father for running off with his daughter and proved his loyalty to the king in one stroke.’

  Pipkin nodded to himself in satisfaction. ‘If you was to ask me, I reckon the master got just what he deserved up in that tower.’ He patted one of the well-stuffed saddle packs, as if every looted item was another blow against Sylvain.

  I watched Pipkin lead the packhorse out across the drawbridge and down the track, vanishing into the darkness. I noticed he’d set out in the opposite direction to Odo. He was clearly anxious not to find himself in the same town as his fellow servant again, and I didn’t blame him for that.

  The wind was stronger than ever and blue flashes of lightning forked across the heavy clouds, between great rumbles of thunder. I glanced anxiously at the tower where flames were still blazing into the sky. In the darkness it seemed far too close to the house. If the wind carried the fragments of burning wood, the whole manor could go up. Maybe it would be wise to leave now, but I didn’t fancy spending the night out in the open if the storm broke.

  I returned to the Great Hall, where I found the boy wrapped in skins, fast asleep, his head cradled in Gisa’s lap. Her face was pale and she was so exhausted, she could barely sit up.

  ‘Your father . . . what Pipkin told you . . . I’m sorry,’ I said awkwardly.

  ‘I’m not,’ she murmured. ‘At least I know he was the good man I’d always believed. But Pipkin was wrong about one thing. I do remember seeing him hang and I remember the mice too. Down there, beneath the tower, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I thought it was demons or ghosts, but I think now I was seeing the memories and nightmares that haunted Sylvain. Maybe that is what Hell is, being trapped for ever in your own nightmares and never being able to wake.’

  I shuddered and tried to cast round for something to divert her. A red glow flickered through the shutters and from time to time came a distant crash or rumble as more stones and timbers fell from the tower. I could hardly forget that inside lay the remains of four bodies still burning and guessed Gisa couldn’t either.

  ‘Where will you go?’ I asked her. ‘Back to the shop?’

  ‘Never,’ she said emphatically. ‘Better if my uncle . . . better if Master Thomas believes I died in the fire. Then I can go somewhere no one has ever heard of Sylvain or my father. But I have to do something first. I’m too tired even to think now, but if I can sleep just for an hour . . . I will get him out . . . Now the abbot is dead . . . must let me take him . . .’

  She was falling asleep even as she spoke. I’d no idea what she was babbling about, but I’d heard someone else say I will in the same vehement tone as he looked down at the dead body of his daughter. I wasn’t about to tell Gisa so, but at that moment I saw Sylvain’s eyes burning through hers, and her mouth set in the same expression of deter-mination and obsession as his when he’d announced we were going to die. Whatever he believed, Gisa had Sylvain’s blood throbbing in her veins. For the world’s sake, I hoped she had a little of her father’s blood, too.

  I don’t know how long I dozed, but a violent clap of thunder jerked me from sleep. I lay there for a few moments, unable to think where I was, and was suddenly aware of a roaring, rushing sound above me. My stomach lurched. Fire! Was the roof of the manor ablaze? I stumbled to the casement, dragged open one of the shutters and peered out into the darkness. I gave a great sigh of relief. It wasn’t fire at all, but torrential rain. The storm, which had been threatening all evening, had finally broken. A few wisps of smoke rose from the smouldering ruins of the tower and at the bottom I could still see a faint red glow, but the rain had extinguished the worst of the blaze. At least we could sleep soundly for the remainder of the night without fear of the manor catching fire.

  Gisa groaned, and sat up, rubbing her neck. ‘What is it?’ she mumbled. ‘Someone out there?’

  ‘No, it’s raining – coming down like a waterfall. It’s almost extinguished the fire in the tower, so at least we needn’t worry about it spreading to this place.’

  It seemed an innocent enough remark to me and I was quite unprepared for the effect it had on Gisa.

  ‘Raining! How long? How LONG? Why didn’t you wake me?’ She scrambled to her feet and fled to the door.

  ‘Gisa, wait . . . It’s only rain. The roof is sound enough and the manor is hardly likely to . . .’ I was about to say flood. But the door was already banging behind her.

  Chapter 60

  Two fishes swim in our sea, with neither flesh nor bones. Cook them in their own water and they will become a vast sea, which no man will be able to describe.

  Gisa is soaked to the marrow before she has run even a few yards. Icy water streams from her hair, blinding her. A flash of lightning hangs for a moment in the black sky, lighting up the trees that bend over the track, their branches flailing inches from her face. She holds her wet skirts up about her waist to keep them from twisting round her legs. She slips in the mud, sending a spasm of pain jolting through her back, but she does not slow her pace. She daren’t. Her heart is racing faster than her legs. Hold on, Peter, I’m coming. I’m coming!

  Great puddles fill every rut and hollow. She can hear the water rushing in the ditches on either side. Another lightning flash, and she sees silvery water running down the trunks of the trees, bright rivulets bubbling along the edge of the g
rass, the tiny streams merging into torrents of water that soak her feet as she wades through.

  Let him be alive, Blessed Virgin, let him be alive. She will hammer on the door of the abbey. She will demand they bring pickaxes, hammers, iron crows, smash the stone, stop the water flowing, drag him out. Let me get him out. I can heal him. I can heal him if I can only get him out.

  Neither Laurent nor Pipkin had seen the book fall from the tower – they were too intent on the boy – but Gisa was watching, waiting. She had known Sylvain would sooner throw himself into the flames than let that book burn. She had watched him hurl it to safety, had seen the glitter of the golden sun as it arced through the smoke, stretched out her arms as it fell to the blackened earth. She had caught it. It is safe, hidden. Though a man be already crossing from this life to the next, what is written here will restore him to such perfect life and health as even the angels have never known.

  Her foot slides from under her and she crashes to the ground, banging her elbow on a stone. The pain makes her vomit. It is several moments before the numbness in her arm wears off and she can clamber up. She must not fall again. If she breaks her leg and cannot walk . . . If she breaks her leg she will drag herself to the boy on her arms.

  She realises she has no idea how far she has come. Suppose she has already run past the place. She peers up and down the track. Are the abbey walls behind her or ahead? It’s as dark as the grave, and the rain falls in curtains, obliterating everything. She begs for another lightning flash, just one, and it comes as an answer to a prayer. The wall is ahead of her. A few more yards is all.

  She counts the paces from the corner, she learned the number days ago, in case she was delayed coming to Peter and it was too dark to see. She counts and she calls.

  ‘I’m coming, Peter . . . Peter!’