by Leda Swann
The man on horseback had stopped one more time, looking around him as if he knew he had lost his way, and wheeled his horse around to retrace his steps. In that moment, the six men set upon him with a ferocity all the more fearful because of its silence.
The man drew his sword and tried to beat them back again. “Help, murder, thieves,” he yelled at the top of his voice, but there was none to hear him. None but Miriame, and she could not help him even if she would.
He was no match for his six burly attackers. One of them hung on to his sword arm so he could not raise it, another held his horse by the bridle so he could not spur away, and the other four dragged him off his horse.
He landed on the cobbles with a nasty crunch and lay still, his furious cries of protest suddenly stilled.
Miriame crept forward, her senses in high alert, watching for the gold or silver gleam of any stray coins that may roll her way, or for the opportunity to grab some loot while their attention was distracted. Her fingers itched to snatch whatever crumbs she could, and her legs trembled with their readiness to sprint off into the darkness to get away with her booty.
“Is he dead already?” one of them asked in a hoarse whisper. He sounded eerily disappointed, as if half the fun of the robbery was in killing the victim.
Mere robbery, however, was not on the minds of the ruffians. As Miriame watched every move they made, in a fever of impatience to steal enough to get the boots she craved, one of the six drew a knife. The blade gleamed wickedly in the moonlight as it plunged down into the chest of the stranger lying still on the cobbles.
The man with the knife spat on his blade and wiped it clean on his jerkin before sliding it back into the sheath at his belt. “He will be now.”
She stifled a gasp and crept back into the shadows. Murder was a far greater crime than robbery was. You’d hang for simple robbery, sure enough, but for murder? By the time the King’s executioner had finished with you down in the dungeons, you’d be begging for death – if you even had a tongue left with which to beg.
She shuddered, hoping that the six would not find out they had a witness to their crime. If they found her now, she wouldn’t bet so much as a sou for her chance of living till the dawn.
“Are you sure he is dead?” she heard one of them ask in a guttural whisper. The accent was cultured and pure as if he came from the court of the King rather than from the slums where hired murderers were more often to be found.
Miriame gave a start, her blood freezing in her heart. She knew that voice, she was sure of it. She had last heard it on the day that Rebecca had died, laughing over her poor dead sister’s body. She made herself as small as a mouse, hoping none of them would think of checking the shadows that surrounded them. If they found her, she would soon be as dead as the man they had just knifed. Heaven help her if they discovered she was a woman before they killed her. She would rather kill herself now – a nice, clean, quick death - and be done with it.
The man with the knife nodded. “As near as makes no difference. He’ll be dead before dawn.”
One of the others reached towards the rings on the man’s hands. Even from this distance, Miriame could see the gleam of avarice on his face.
The man with the cultured voice cuffed him viciously around the head. “Leave them be.” His voice, even in a whisper, had the ring of authority – the tone of a man who expected instant obedience. If Miriame had had a knife in her pocket, he would be wearing it in his chest at that instant. She hated him with a deep abiding hatred that went deeper than her instinct to save her own life, deeper than her very soul. One day, she promised herself, keeping her fear in check with her fantasies, one day he would find death at her hands. She owed Rebecca his life.
“But the rings alone must be worth---”
He didn’t finish his sentence. The leader drew his knife and pressed it into the man’s side. “Are you arguing with me?”
The man shook his head sullenly and sidled away from the knife. “No.”
“Good. Because if you are I shall slit your throat as easily as your comrade knifed that fellow on the ground.” He gave the body a contemptuous kick. Miriame shut her eyes for a moment, willing herself not to see the body of her sister in the man’s place. “Our orders were clear. Nothing was to be taken from him but his papers.”
He reached into the man’s jacket pocket and withdrew a bunch of papers. Blood dripped down from them onto the cobbles. He gave a grunt of satisfaction. “That’s what we came for, lads. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
He turned to face the man who had tried to steal the stranger’s rings. “I would counsel you not to return to rob the body. It will be death for anyone caught with his possessions, and you will be tortured first to tell all you know of his death. I am not willing to risk my life on your silence in the hands of the torturers. If I so much as suspect you of robbing him of even a single sou, I will kill you myself. Do you understand?”
They shuffled their feet uncomfortably and the man who had tried to steal the rings backed away into the darkness towards where Miriame crouched in her hiding place. She shut her eyes and willed him not to come any closer, or to turn around and see her hiding there.
“Now that we have what we came for, let some other poor bastard come along and rob him. Someone else can hang for his death, not you or I.”
All five of them nodded, and without another word being spoken, they melted away into the dark again, leaving the street bare and empty.
Miriame breathed a sigh of relief. By a miracle, she had escaped with her life. She waited in her hole in the shadows for some minutes, but nothing stirred. Her fear and hatred for the man she had just seen warred with her desire for a pair of boots, and eventually the boots won.
As silent as a ghost she crept out again, carefully balancing her weight on the balls of her feet so she could take off running if the leader was still lurking around, waiting to make sure that his instructions were followed.
Not a sound reached her ears but the rustling of the wind and the bark of a lone fox in the distance.
She reached open ground and knelt carefully beside the body. His rings were indeed very fine. She did not wonder at the killer risking a knife blade in his side to get his hands on them. She herself would risk death for them twice over. She pulled them off his fingers and stowed them away in her rags. She’d have a pair of stout new boots before the week was out.
Carefully she felt in his pockets in his greatcoat, dragging out his wallet. It was heavy with gold pieces. She looked inside, and her eyes opened wide. Never in her life had she seen so much wealth. How foolish they had been to leave the money here. One man’s gold piece looked the same as any other. They could never pin aught on a man just for a purse full of gold. Her heart hammering, she tucked that away next to her skin.
A rustle of papers caught her ear. She patted his greatcoat and his jacket, finding no pocket.
They must be sewn inside his lining. She felt around on the ground around her until her fingers found a sharp stone. With the tip of the stone she ripped the lining of his jacket, put her hands inside, and drew out a packet of papers tied with ribbon and a couple of loose sheets.
He had been murdered for his papers. They must be even more valuable than the money she had tucked away. She pulled out all the papers she could find and transferred them from his coat to her own.
Just then, the body gave a feeble groan and stirred slightly. Miriame gave a start. She’d thought he was dead and gone already.
She bent her head towards his chest and felt a faint stirring of his chest as he labored to draw his last breaths. He was still alive. Not very alive, and not likely to live for long, but still alive for now.
“Can you hear me?” she said into his ear? “Can you understand what I am saying?”
He gave the tiniest nod, so small she didn’t know whether or not she was imagining it. His eyes flickered open for a brief moment, and then shut again, and he groaned again. He was definitely alive.
She sat back on her heels wondering what to do. She’d had no qualms about robbing a corpse – she was just taking things that were of no use to their owner any more. But to rob a dying man and leave him to breath his last in the mud of the roadway? Living on the streets as she did, she couldn’t afford many morals, but somehow that didn’t sit quite right with her.
Besides, the man she hated from the very depths of her soul wanted the man dead. That was reason enough for her to want to save his life.
She touched her hand lightly to the wound on his chest and drew it away again sticky with blood. With a grunt she tore a strip of wool from one of the rags she wore and bound it tightly around his chest to stop the bleeding. She had taken enough wealth from him to replace her garments with better ones twenty times over, but even so she sacrificed it with some unwillingness. She hadn’t survived on the street for this long by giving her clothes to strangers.
“What the hell,” she muttered to herself, as she heaved him to his feet with all the muscles in her strong, wiry body. “You’ve done me a good turn by donating me your wallet. The least I can do is help you to die in your bed, not die a dog in the gutter.”
His brief moment of lucidity had not lasted for long. He was quite insensible now, flopping against her shoulder as weak and spineless as the rag doll her mother had once made for her, long, long ago when times had not been so bad. He did not even groan when she accidentally knocked against the wound in his chest, making it bleed anew.
The stranger’s horse was still standing nearby, nosing around the cobblestones in the vain hope of a blade of grass. Miriame nickered softly to it. “Come on my pretty girl, come over here a moment,” she called, and it ambled over in her direction.
Somehow she managed to wrestle the stranger on to his horse’s back, until he was lying face down over the saddle. His face bumped against the horse’s flanks on one side, while his knees bumped against the other side. He could hardly be very comfortable, but they only had a short way to go. She knew of an inn not far away where he would be well-looked after. The landlady there was kind enough and more honest than most. She’d take good enough care of him if she were paid well to do so. She’d not take his money and throw him out on the streets again to die, as some others she knew of would.
More worryingly, the wound in his chest had begun to seep blood again. The horse flared its nostrils and sidestepped uncomfortably down the street with its strange burden, but Miriame held tight to its reins and forced it to follow along behind her. “Come on now,” she murmured to the horse, “easy does it.” The horse snorted uneasily, but did not panic or throw off its burden.
The dark of the night was starting to lighten slowly into the gray of a new day when the lights of the inn flickered in front of her. Miriame banged on the door and a sleepy-eyed scullery maid opened it a crack. Her eyes went wide when she saw the horse with its burden, and she opened her mouth to scream.
Miriame had no patience for her hysterics. “He’s alive, you fool,” she said shortly, “but he won’t be for much longer if you don’t get a move on. Fetch your mistress, and right smartly too, or it’ll be the worse for you.”
The girl stuffed her apron in her mouth to stifle her sobs and scurried away as if the devil was after her.
The landlady came down the stairs shortly afterwards, a clean apron stretched over her ample hips and her mouth stretched in a yawn. She cursed loudly when she saw Miriame in her rags, but there was no malice in her words. “What do you think you’re on about, waking me out of my bed at this ungodly hour, you young scamp,” she grumbled. “Go on, be off with you or I’ll give you a clip around the ear to learn you better manners.”
Miriame hushed her and gestured to the horse and its grisly burden. “We need a room.”
The landlady stopped in mid tirade. She waddled over the threshold of the inn and looked more closely at the stranger. “He’s dressed fine enough. What’s the matter with him? Drunk or sick?”
“Not drunk anyways. Someone tried to murder him in the street. He needs nursing.”
The landlady’s eyes narrowed. “And who’ll pay for that? I’m no charity, to be paying out for the nursing of murdered strangers who pass by my door in the middle of the night.”
Miriame sighed at the thought of parting with any of her new-found wealth. “We can pay you well enough.”
She still looked suspicious. “So you say. Until you’ve eaten my food and slept in my bed and had the best nursing there is until your master there breathes his last, and then you claim you’ve been robbed and don’t have a sou to pay your debts. Aye, I know all your tricks.”
Miriame drew a small coin from the bag hidden in her shirt and handed it over. “Does this look like a trick to you?”
The landlady grabbed it eagerly, sniffed at it, gave it a bite with one of the few teeth she had left, and now satisfied that it was genuine enough, tucked it into her large bosom. “Well, mebbe you’re one of the honest ones,” she admitted grudgingly. “But you can’t blame a poor woman for looking after her own.” She turned back towards the inn and raised her voice into a bellow. “Luc, Mathieu, come shift your lazy carcasses out here and give me a hand to get this young gentleman up to bed.”
The two men who appeared at her call lifted the stranger as if he were a featherweight. Miriame took the saddlebags off the horse, gave it into the hands of a stableboy for a feed and a brush, and then followed the men up the stairs and into a chamber with a large bed in it.
The landlady drew back the counterpane and spread out some old rags on top of the sheet. The men deposited their burden roughly on top of the rags and shouldered their way out of the room again.
“No sense in getting the sheets all bloody,” the landlady remarked to no one in particular, as she lighted a tallow candle and bent to her work, stripping off the stranger’s boots and breeches, and baring the wound in his chest. She poured a bowl of water from the pitcher on the washstand and began to sponge off the blood around the edges of the cut.
For the first time that night Miriame got a good look at the man she had rescued from the streets. He was young enough by his looks – barely two or three and twenty she would guess. His cheeks were pale from loss of blood and his face was drawn with pain, but even this could not hide the beauty of his features. His eyes were framed with long eyelashes, dark brown to the very tip. His mouth was full and red, despite the paleness of his face, and his teeth, when he grimaced slightly in pain, were white and straight. His hair, once they had got his hat off, fell across the bolster in brown-blond ringlets, streaked golden with the sun.
The landlady seemed equally struck by his handsome features. “He’s a right looker, isn’t he?” she said, as she wiped a lock off hair off his face with a clean corner of her washcloth.
“Prettiest face I’ve seen in a long time,” Miriame agreed. It wasn’t just his face, either, that held her attention. His legs in his silk stockings were long and straight and his thighs and calves firm with muscle.
Slowly she raised her eyes from his legs again. His belly was flat and his chest as broad as any woman could want, but his chest was disfigured with a nasty wound. A pity. She doubted that he would live long with such a gaping cut.
Even half-dead as he was, she couldn’t help but stare at him. No wonder a gang of thugs had set on him in the street – no doubt some slighted lover had ordered them to get rid of his rival. He was as beautiful as an angel – enough to inspire desire in any woman, or murderous jealousy in any man.
The landlady was looking curiously at her, and she snapped her mouth shut again. She had been caught gawping at him like any girl. The women would be suspecting her disguise, or suspecting her of worse than that, if she were not more careful about where her eyes wandered.
“Shall I make a pallet up on the floor for you?” the landlady asked, satisfied that she had done what she could for now. “You can watch over your master until the doctor comes. I’ll send a boy for him as soon as it gets ligh
t.”
Miriame shook her head vehemently. No way was she staying around a man with a death warrant marked on his very face. She was only too used to be blamed for anything that went wrong, whether it was her fault or no. Still, if the landlady thought she was the stranger’s servant, her robbery would be all the easier. “I gotta get away,” she muttered. “He give me a job to do afore the thugs got him. Says I gotta do it for him or he’ll feed me liver to his pet stoat, so he will.”
“I can’t stay with him till the doctor gets here,” the landlady grumbled. “It’s not yet dawn and I’ve got other guests besides him to look after.”
“I’ll stay with him till then,” Miriame offered with some reluctance. She was itching to get clean away with her loot. Besides, she had little intention of staying long. Let her just satisfy herself that she had taken everything she could, and she would be off. The poor stranger was going to die for sure, whether she waited and wept over his soul or no.
“I’ll leave you with him then,” the landlady said as she backed out of the door, the basin of bloody water in her hands. “I’ll send the doctor up when he comes.” She nudged the door shut with the back of her shoulder and Miriame could hear her plodding down the stairs to the kitchen once again.
Saddlebags first, Miriame thought as soon as she was alone with the stranger again. If the stuff in it was worth stealing, she would take it gladly. If not, the heavy bags would only slow her down and she would leave them behind and have to content herself just with the more portable bit of the loot.
She thrust her hand in the first one and drew out a large packet of food wrapped in a coarse cloth. She wouldn’t bother to take that with her – she’d eat it there and then. The bread was white and sweet and still soft, the cheese was ripe and moist, and the meat was thickly sliced. She wolfed it all down in less than a minute and finished it off with a sweet, wizened apple. She sat back and patted her stomach with satisfaction. She hadn’t fed so well in a long time. Her robbery was going well so far.
Apart from the food, that saddlebag was empty. She thrust her hand around it to make sure that she wasn’t missing anything, but there was nothing else there.
