The Way Between the Worlds

by Alys Clare

  I looked up at Gurdyman. He had put down the leather braid and was now handling the ropes that were wound around the man’s wrists and ankles, running his fingers delicately along them as he spoke, turning them over and over in his hands. ‘That is very interesting,’ he said softly.

  ‘What’s interesting?’

  He looked up at me. ‘The rope is made of fibres from the honeysuckle plant.’

  I knew from his expression that this was significant, but I did not know why. I was about to ask when he put the ropes down and once more stepped up close to the body. He put one hand on the lower jaw and, holding the head steady with the other, forced the mouth open. He peered inside – the man, I saw, had had good teeth – and looked carefully at the tongue and around the gums. ‘Hmm,’ he said again. He had something on the end of his forefinger, and it looked a little like the small, pale, empty skin of a berry.

  ‘What’s that?’ I demanded.

  ‘I am not sure,’ he admitted. Then, as if it were something we did together every day, he said matter-of-factly, ‘I need to see what is in his stomach. We shall have to cut him open.’

  My apprenticeship as a healer had not prepared me for anything like this. Hoping I would not disgrace myself by fainting or being sick, I steeled myself, took a deep breath and went to stand at my mentor’s side. He told me to find a bowl of some sort, and I went to the shelves behind the table and selected a pottery dish. Gurdyman nodded his approval. ‘I shall remove the stomach in its entirety,’ he announced, ‘and we shall open it on the workbench over there.’ He indicated a bench beneath the shelves.

  I watched as he cut a long slit from the corpse’s breast to its navel. Then he reached inside and extracted the bag of the stomach. I had half expected blood, and Gurdyman must have seen my expression. ‘He had a cut in his neck, and he has been in the water,’ he said. ‘The blood will have long ago left his body.’

  That reminded me of something I had meant to ask. To take my mind off the fact that my companion was holding a human stomach in his hands and was just about to slice into it, I said, ‘How long has he been dead?’

  Gurdyman frowned. ‘I cannot be sure, for peat is a natural preservative and sometimes bodies that look to have been only recently put into the ground were placed there hundreds of years ago.’

  ‘Hundreds of years? Can a body last that long?’

  ‘Yes, child.’ He smiled at me. ‘Your own ancestors, you say, lived in the fens long, long ago. They might have treated their dead in this way, slipping the corpse into the peat so that it would be preserved for ever.’

  He seemed to be implying that the ancient people had deliberately buried their dead in order to preserve them, but I just couldn’t believe it. ‘Did they—’ I began, but just then he pushed the point of his sharp knife into the stomach and cut it open, and I was so busy trying not to vomit that there was no room for anything else.

  Edild told me once that the best way to overcome revulsion at some perfectly natural aspect of the human body is to concentrate hard on what it is teaching you. I did my best, making myself stare in wonder at what the inside of a stomach looked like, and after a few moments I felt I had won my private battle.

  Gurdyman had poured the contents of the stomach into the pottery bowl. Using the end of his knife, he separated several tiny objects. Some looked like seeds, some like fruit of some sort. Those pale berries again.

  ‘Fetch some water, please, Lassair,’ Gurdyman said. I did as he asked and watched as, very carefully, he rinsed the seeds and the fruit fragments, washing off the tacky, viscous, smelly matter in which they were immersed. He placed them on the edge of the table on which the body lay. ‘Hmm,’ he said again. He beckoned me closer. ‘Look,’ he said. With the end of his knife he indicated a single seed. ‘Rye, I think.’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded my agreement. ‘There are lots of them.’ I pointed to a piece of berry skin. ‘And the remains of lots of berries too.’ I tried to think of an edible berry that was white in colour, and all I came up with was an unripe mulberry or strawberry, and the fragments in the stomach did not resemble either. ‘What are they?’

  Gurdyman looked up at me. ‘Mistletoe berries.’

  ‘But they are poisonous,’ I protested. ‘We use the plant, but only the young stems and the leaves, never the berries.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Gurdyman remarked. ‘What do you use them for?’

  ‘As a heart tonic and to treat water bloating. Oh, and as a sedative.’ Briefly, I struggled with my pride. I won. ‘Actually, it’s only my aunt who administers mistletoe. She says it’s too powerful a plant for me to use unsupervised.’

  Gurdyman nodded. ‘You learn by watching her, and soon she will trust you to work alone, even with potentially lethal plants,’ he said.

  That was just how Edild would have phrased it. For a wonderful moment she felt very close, and silently I sent her my love.

  ‘And now to the rye seeds,’ he went on, carefully picking one up on the tip of his knife. Then he selected another seed which, as I looked more closely, I could see was subtly different. It was darker in colour, and the shape of the seed was slightly distorted. I felt that I recognized it, and mentally I ran my eye along the top shelf in Edild’s room, where she keeps the more dangerous items.

  Then I knew what it was. Perhaps my aunt’s spirit was still close by and she had prompted me. I sent her my thanks, just in case.

  ‘It’s ergot,’ I said. ‘It’s a fungus that grows on rye and, like mistletoe, is potentially lethal.’ Edild had warned me gravely about what ergot could do, and I thought the effects – hallucinations, agonizing, burning pains all over the body and, eventually, flesh rot in the extremities – sounded ghastly.

  ‘You and your aunt use it?’ Gurdyman asked.

  ‘Yes. Edild prescribes it in tiny doses to help in childbirth, when the afterbirth is reluctant to detach and come cleanly away. Also, she sometimes puts it in headache remedies, although only for the terrible half-head afflictions that make people see dizzying visions and occasionally lose a part of their sight.’

  Gurdyman’s expression indicated his interest. ‘You are lucky in your teacher,’ he observed. ‘Your aunt has a rare skill.’

  Grateful on Edild’s behalf, I gave him a beaming smile. Before I could thank him, he returned his attention to the tiny objects laid out before us. ‘So, we have mistletoe berries and rye grains, many of which are affected with ergot,’ he said, ‘in a medium that looks like gruel or soup. What are your conclusions?’

  I had been so busy congratulating myself on identifying the ergot that I’d lost sight of why it was important. Now my mind began to race, putting the picture together. Very soon I had the answer.

  ‘Someone poisoned him,’ I said. I thought of his wounds, the stab in the neck and the garrotte. Now we knew that he’d been made to consume a poisoned soup as well. ‘Maybe his assailant gave him the gruel to make him unconscious, so that they could kill him at their leisure,’ I suggested. ‘If he did not suspect what was about to happen, then it would have been easier for the killer to invite him to share his gruel than to leap on him and stab him in the throat, or wind that garrotte round his neck.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Gurdyman agreed. ‘In any case, we know the poisoned food came first, because a man cannot eat once he is dead.’

  I felt myself flush. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Gurdyman must have seen my embarrassment. He reached out and lightly touched my hand. ‘Do not be hard on yourself,’ he murmured. ‘You think creatively, which is the first essential in work such as this.’

  His remark comforted me. I watched him as, already immersed once more in the mysterious body, he bent down over it.

  The silence extended for what felt like a very long time. I stood there beside Gurdyman, trying not to shuffle my feet; Edild complains if I fidget while she’s trying to concentrate. When at long last he came back to himself – I knew from his face and his demeanour that he had been far away – I knew I had succeed
ed, because he gave a sort of a start and said, ‘Lassair! I’d forgotten all about you, child.’

  There was a new light in his eyes, and it seemed as if brightness was welling up out of him. Wherever he had been, whatever spirits he had been in communication with, his mind voyage had achieved the desired end. He grasped my hand and drew me back to the body.

  He looked at the wound he had made in the belly, then glanced at the stomach, separate now from its shelter within the body. ‘We must put him together and sew him up,’ Gurdyman murmured. ‘Can you do that, Lassair?’

  ‘I—’ If you did not try new things you did not learn. Besides, I had stitched the living, and surely it must be far easier to stitch the dead. ‘Yes,’ I said decisively. ‘Er – if you will make sure I place the stomach correctly?’

  ‘I will indeed,’ he said with a smile. ‘Then we must see about getting him buried,’ he added, his face falling into sombre lines.

  ‘We do not know who he is,’ I pointed out.

  ‘No,’ Gurdyman agreed. ‘Although we may be able to supply an identity and a name, in due course . . .’ The absent look returned to his face, but quickly he came out of his reverie. His bright blue eyes firmly on mine, he said, ‘This man was killed by a sorcerer. A man or a woman of considerable skill and power sacrificed him and gave his body to the fen.’

  Too shocked to speak for a moment, I tried to absorb what he had just said. I swallowed and whispered, ‘How do you know? And a sacrifice? People don’t do that any more!’ Still he watched me, his expression unreadable. ‘Do they?’

  ‘In answer to your first question, I surmise that he was a sacrificial victim because of the manner of his death: poison, the cut in the blood vessel that feeds the head and the garrotte round his throat that broke his neck.’ I must have looked puzzled; I certainly felt it. ‘Count,’ he commanded.

  One, the poison. Two, the cut. Three, the garrotte. From somewhere in my memory, I recalled my Granny Cordeilla speaking of something called the Threefold Death, used for ritual sacrifice when the victim went as a willing – or not so willing – offering to the gods, either to appease, to beg a request or in humble thanks for a prayer answered. But Granny had been speaking of a custom from generations past, long ago in the history of our people . . .

  Something occurred to me. ‘Is this – do you believe this man was killed hundreds of years ago?’ I asked. ‘The peat preserves, and—’

  ‘No, child. It would be comforting to conclude that, wouldn’t it? It would be easier to believe that this body has lain undisturbed since ancient times.’ Gurdyman shook his head. ‘But it is not so. He was, I believe, put into the fen within the last year, and probably more recently than that. See, these woven stems are still quite fresh, and certainly not more than a twelvemonth old.’ He reached out and picked up a length of the fibrous rope that had been twisted around the man’s wrists and ankles.

  ‘Honeysuckle fibres,’ I murmured.

  He nodded absently. Then, looking closely at the rope around the man’s right ankle, he carefully extracted a short length of wood that was trapped in the loop at the far end. ‘And a hazel stake,’ he said.

  Honeysuckle and hazel. Two of the sacred plants; hazel is full of magic and is the diviner’s and the dowser’s wood of choice. It has a close affinity with water. Honeysuckle – which we also call woodbine – is a friend both to the healer and, so Granny used to say, to the magician. Edild and I use it a lot, to ease constriction in breathing, for problems with urination and for labouring women. It was honoured of old in binding charms, and Granny told me that children used to wear bracelets made of woven honeysuckle to bind them to their homes and keep them from straying into danger.

  I tried to put the qualities of both woods together. Something to bind, something to carry a message down into the water. If Gurdyman was right, this man had been staked out in the fen and given to the water. To appease, to ask for something, to give thanks for something given.

  I stared down at the dead man. His face was peaceful; I found myself hoping that he had not suffered. He had been . . . used, was the only word I could think of. Someone – a sorcerer, Gurdyman believed – had needed to make a sacrifice, and this man had been his chosen victim. Why? What had been special about him?

  I looked up from the dead man and found Gurdyman still watching me. He made a small sound of assent, murmuring, ‘I see that you agree with my conclusion.’

  Did I? I wasn’t sure. I realized I was very cold, and I had a vivid sense that forces far too strong for me were whirling and circling in the small room. Before they grew too powerful and overcame me, I had to act.

  ‘The first thing we must do is try to find out who he was,’ I said. To my amazement, two things happened simultaneously: the spell, if that was what it was, broke. And Gurdyman burst out laughing.

  ‘Well done, Lassair,’ he said when he had stopped. ‘You were quite right; the magic was growing too strong, and you and I needed to be brought back.’ Had I done that? I was both surprised and secretly pleased. ‘Now, we must find the sheriff, and then I think we shall return home and decide what to do next.’

  NINE

  Gurdyman summoned one of the sheriff’s men and told him we were done, and the guard instantly hurried away to fetch his master. ‘You need not stay, child,’ Gurdyman said softly to me. ‘Go on home and wait for me there. One of us will suffice to pass on our findings.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell him about the mistletoe and the Threefold Death, are you?’ Something in me was rebelling furiously at the very thought.

  Gurdyman chuckled. ‘Of course not. I shall say as little as I can get away with. Our sheriff,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘is not a man blessed with a lively imagination, so I think that a simple account of some unknown, unidentifiable victim who died by drowning, and just happened to get caught up in a rope trailing from a passing boat, will be sufficient.’

  I hoped he was right. ‘Won’t he notice that the body’s been cut open and sewed up again?’ I whispered nervously. I was, I discovered, morbidly curious about that aspect of Gurdyman’s inspection. How had he known what to do? Was he even allowed to do such a thing to a corpse? I wanted to find out, but now was not the moment.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Gurdyman replied. ‘If he does, I’ll say we found several wounds on the dead man – that we conclude were caused by being dragged through the water – and dealt with the worst of them.’

  ‘But—’

  He put a hand on my shoulder, his touch firm. ‘Enough,’ he said. As if he knew full well what I was burning to ask, he added softly, ‘We will speak later.’ He smiled at me, and I saw the bright intelligence sparkling in his eyes. I wondered what on earth I had been worrying about, for I realized then that the sheriff was no match for Gurdyman. Whatever awkward questions might be posed, my teacher would answer them as easily as if he himself had put them in the sheriff’s mind.

  I did as Gurdyman bade me and set off for his house. As I strode along, it suddenly occurred to me that the way our man in the fen had died was uncannily similar to the way in which poor little Herleva had met her death: both had been poisoned, both had suffered a blow to the head, both had a cut to the throat. I was well on the way to deciding that our dead man and the chatty little nun had both been sacrificial victims when I made myself stop and think about it properly, and very quickly I realized I was wrong.

  The dead man had been put in the water. He had been offered to the crossing place, that strange zone that is neither land nor water but some potent amalgam of the two. Such places hold their own magic. Like dawn and twilight, like a ford over a stream, they are where two different elements meet and part. Day and night; earth and water.

  I knew that Herleva’s body had been found in no such place. I thought hard and brought to mind my sister’s words: she was found behind the stables. There was nothing remotely magical about the stable block of a place like Chatteris Abbey; quite the opposite, I imagined, for surely a stable
was a place of animal sounds and smells, redolent with the stench of dung, horse sweat and hard human toil. No man intent on making an offering to the powers of the dark fen would leave his victim behind an abbey’s stable block.

  It must, I concluded as I hurried through the shadowy alleyways to Gurdyman’s house, be after all no more than a gruesome coincidence that Herleva and the man in the fen had died in the same manner. There were only so many ways of killing a person. Slitting the throat and strangulation could hardly be uncommon, and I was left with the miserable, discouraging and decidedly worrying thought that not one but two killers were on the loose.

  I had not been home for long when Gurdyman arrived. I thought this probably indicated that the sheriff had accepted the shortened version of Gurdyman’s findings concerning the dead man, and so it proved to be.

  ‘What will happen now?’ I asked. ‘Will they bury him?’

  Gurdyman shook his head. ‘No, not immediately. Enquiries will be pursued around the place where the boatmen think the body became caught up with their craft, to determine if anyone answering the dead man’s description has been reported missing. Nobody likes burying a man with no name,’ he added softly, ‘and even our sheriff seems to be no exception.’

  I gathered from Gurdyman’s expression that this unexpectedly decent aspect of the sheriff’s character came as quite a surprise. ‘They’ll keep the body somewhere cool in the meantime?’ I said. The weather was mild for spring, and bodies quickly begin to decompose in all but the coldest seasons. The thought of that stomach I’d held in my hands, and its steadily rotting contents, brought on a wave of nausea, but I managed to control it.

  Which was just as well, because with his next breath Gurdyman remarked in amazement that it was long past noon and high time I fetched us something to eat. We do not keep much in the way of supplies in the house – Gurdyman claims he has no idea how to cook, and, beyond a basic ability, it is not in truth among my skills either – but we have the good fortune to live close to a busy market square where people bustle about every day, not just on market days, many of them from out of town. Where there are hungry people, you always find food stalls eager to relieve them of their money, and not a hundred paces from Gurdyman’s front door there is a stall whose proprietor sells the tastiest pies in Cambridge.