By These Ten Bones

by Clare B. Dunkle

  “This is evil work,” said Little Ian. “The mother was bewitched.”

  “It’s unnatural,” agreed Black Ewan, “like that attack on the wood-carver.”

  “The babe won’t live through the day,” Old Peggy announced from the door. A grandmother herself, she was the town’s midwife. “He’s a weak little thing, and his mouth isn’t made right. He can’t nurse.”

  “We’ll have the baptism right away,” rumbled Father Mac, coming out, too. “He has just as much right to heaven as any other little child.” The priest hurried off to the church to gather the things he needed.

  A wave of relief ran through the crowd. These were normal events. Many babies died soon after birth. Four of this newborn’s brothers and sisters already lay in the churchyard. It was good that such an unnatural child would soon be at peace, but that didn’t change the horror of what had happened.

  “There’s someone working evil among us,” declared Black Ewan, heading back to the fields. He spat. “God’s curse on that black soul.”

  “Ay e, he’s right,” sighed Old Peggy. “That poor murdered baby. Come with me, lambs,” she said to the smith’s children. “I’ve a bit of honeycomb for you. Little ones can’t understand these things, and that’s all to the good.” She and Bess herded them away.

  The crowd broke up, heads down and hearts heavy. Maddie picked up her egg basket and started off, but Carver seized her hand. “Wait, Madeleine,” he whispered.

  Maddie stayed behind as her neighbors walked away, trying to reason with herself. She was absurdly pleased to have her hand held, but she could tell the young man didn’t mean anything by it. He was turning her hand nervously between his long fingers as if it were a block of wood he was carving.

  “Do you think that’s true?” he asked when they were alone. “That something evil harmed that baby before he could be born?”

  “They say witches can steal milk without leaving their homes,” she replied. “If a witch can take the milk that’s inside a cow, it could change a baby inside its mother. Who do you think it could be?”

  “I don’t know any witches,” he muttered, “but I know other evil things.” Maddie couldn’t help glancing at his shadow as he spoke. He followed her gaze and realized that he still held her hand. He immediately dropped it.

  “I need to talk to Black Ewan,” he decided. “I need him to let Ned go. It’s time for us to leave.”

  “To leave!” she exclaimed, dismayed. “You don’t need to leave.”

  “I can’t stay,” he muttered, staring at the ground. “There’s harm being done. He has to release Ned. I’ve mended enough of his tools now, he owes me that.”

  So that was why he was working on the farm tools, thought Maddie. She had hoped he was settling into their life, but he was just trying to escape.

  Carver didn’t get a chance to talk to the farmer. Maddie’s uncle Colin the Smith returned from his journey, walking back through the grain fields. Unaware of the tragedy surrounding his dying son, the smith nevertheless had information of his own.

  “The new lord’s wife is dead,” he told those he met, and the men left their tools in the fields and gathered around. The women didn’t go to funerals, not even for one of their own, but if the men weren’t there to help bear the lady’s body, they would earn the new lord’s lasting fury.

  “We’ll set out at once,” declared Black Ewan. “But without you, Colin. Your family needs you. James, Gillies, and Thomas, you come. Little Ian and Horse, you stay with Colin and finish what you can of the harvest. Don’t cut any more grain till you’ve stored what we’ve already cut. And, Horse, look after the red mare’s injured flank.”

  “But the storms!” objected Horse. “The harvest will take too long.” The least gifted of Black Ewan’s farmhands, he was called Horse because he had once lost the one he was riding home during a drunken stupor.

  “No storms are here yet,” replied Black Ewan. “And we’d best hope we’re back before they are.” He turned to his nephew. “Lachlan, take care of your mother and keep an eye on the town. Don’t try to chain Angus and that Englishman up to the stable wall while I’m gone. Just leave them chained together. Angus won’t go anywhere at night with that dead weight to lug around.”

  Lachlan was only twelve, and he still looked like a child. “Yes, Uncle,” he said respectfully. “But hadn’t I better keep the key in case something goes wrong?”

  Black Ewan looked down at the boy, hesitating. “All right,” he answered, pulling the key from his neck and handing it to Lachlan. The boy hung the large key around his own neck, his eyes shining with pride.

  “You see?” he boasted to his prisoners that night as the pair lay sprawled in the hay of the stall. “I’m the one who has your key now.” But before another day passed, he had reason to regret it.

  “Lachlan won’t let Ned go,” worried Carver the next morning as he and Maddie stacked peats by the houses. He was so distracted that he was more of a hindrance than a help. He stacked one block, walked away, and then came back to stack another. “He has to let him go, he has to,” he said, taking down the part she had just finished and restacking it himself. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Did you think he would?” Maddie asked, taking advantage of his walking away again to fix the mess he was making of the stack. “Lachlan knows good and well that his uncle will thrash him if he lets Ned loose.”

  “No, he said he wasn’t afraid of a beating,” contradicted the wood-carver, coming back to dismantle the peats again. Maddie stood up and watched him with a sigh. “He has to let Ned go. Just for a couple of days. Ned will be back before Black Ewan comes home.”

  “Do you think Lachlan would believe that?” she asked.

  “Believe what?” demanded Carver, standing up to look at her, surrounded by mounds of peats. “Madeleine, please,” he begged, his eyes very tired. “Just for a couple of days.”

  The girl frowned and stepped up close to lay her hand on his cheek. “Your fever’s back,” she announced. “I might have known. It’s back, and it’s high.”

  “I know that,” he muttered. “No, wait—” But she was already calling her mother.

  “I never should have let him do all that work!” exclaimed Fair Sarah, and she soon had the young man under piles of blankets again, ignoring his protests. “I’d better stay with him,” she told Maddie. “He might wander off in this state, and he’ll not listen to you. Bring me the baskets and shuttles, and I’ll wind yarn for your father till he sleeps.”

  But Carver wasn’t the only one bent on obtaining the Traveler’s release. Ned was brooding in the cow pasture, fingering the padlock at his ankle. Lachlan came past, heading toward the workers singing in the grain fields, and he grinned at the sight.

  “Stick your thumb in the keyhole and turn it to the left,” he jeered. Ned looked up quickly.

  “Lachlan, golden-haired boy,” he wheedled. “Pity on an old man, and let me out. I’ll give my blessing on you.”

  The boy came over to stand before his prisoners. Mad Angus was gazing blankly up at the clouds, but the Englishman’s faded eyes were fixed on him. “Your blessing!” He laughed. “A drunkard’s blessing. What good’s that?”

  “It’s you I think of,” whined the Traveler. “Take pity.”

  Lachlan’s eyes were bright, and he looked at his prized key thoughtfully. “Beg me,” he proposed. “On your knees.”

  The old man rolled onto his knees. “I do beg. Use the key.”

  The boy stood over him, chest puffed out, glorying in the moment. “No,” he said at last. He made a rude face and turned away.

  Ned seized a large branch that he had found in his trips around the pastures and gave the boy a sharp blow to the side of the head. He chuckled as Lachlan slid into a heap at his feet, and he jerked the key from the boy’s neck.

  “I use the key, then,” he told the huddled form, “and I keep my blessing.”

  But just as Ned bent to unlock the padlock, Mad Angus spot
ted a calf that needed chasing, and he was off with a bellow. Ned hopped after him, cursing, the key swinging uselessly from his hands. Then Horse came over the turf dyke and spotted his master’s injured boy. He charged at the old man, fists flying, and soon another body lay still on the ground.

  Horse retrieved the key, spat on that greasy gray hair, and carried Lachlan off toward the houses. Mad Angus stood in confusion for a minute, tugging on the chain and looking down at the crumpled form. Then he picked up the Traveler’s limp body and slung it over his shoulder. Problem solved, he took off after the cows again.

  All the women who weren’t in the fields came running when Horse brought in Lachlan. His mother had him laid in the box bed, and Father Mac studied the mark of the cudgel.

  “Pour wine into the wound,” he suggested and fetched some of his own stock for the purpose. They burned feathers under the boy’s nose, but Lachlan wouldn’t wake up.

  “Maddie, run for Lady Mary,” said Fair Sarah, and Maddie hurried off to the gray castle. There sat the old woman with last year’s embroidery work, pulling out the fragile threads for her new design because she had run out of colors.

  “I found a mistake in this,” she lied, and she hastily rolled up the canvas. Maddie realized with a shock that now no one would send her more thread. No one would pay her more visits.

  “There’s news,” she said guiltily, watching the proud woman.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” sniffed Lady Mary.

  “The new lord’s wife is dead. The men left to bear the body.”

  Lady Mary sat for a little while without moving. Then she set aside the roll of cloth and climbed to her feet.

  “Is that what you came to say?” she demanded, walking over to stare out her little window. “You hurried up here to tell me, didn’t you? Bad news can’t wait.”

  Maddie remembered her errand. She explained about the Traveler’s hitting Lachlan and stealing the key, and she told how Horse had discovered the theft in progress and brought the unconscious boy home.

  “So he thought one good blow was enough to set him free,” muttered the old woman. “It takes more than that.”

  “Please, do you come,” urged Maddie. “Lachlan won’t wake up, and his mother’s anxious.”

  “I’ll not set foot in that house!” declared Lady Mary angrily. “Do you think I don’t know what Black Ewan says about me? Do you think I don’t know what they all say?” She turned from the window, her face fallen into seams and wrinkles, and her eyes were sick with despair. “You all think it, I know,” she challenged. “Every last one of you.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Maddie, and she meant it. There was something terribly pitiful about the lonely, rich old woman.

  “Ah, you’re a good girl,” sighed Lady Mary, going back to her chair. She sat down and bowed her head. “Tell them to leave him quiet, and he’ll likely wake up in the end. There’s nothing I can do for a rapped skull.”

  Maddie delivered her message to the assembly of women and went to her own house. Carver was lying there staring up through the hazy smoke and picking dead grass stems from the wall.

  “What’s happened now?” he whispered. “Your mother left, and I can hear everyone coming and going.”

  Maddie sat down by him on her mother’s stool and began winding the abandoned yarn. “It’s your old Ned that’s done it this time,” she said. “He’s likely killed a boy.” She told him about the theft. He listened without speaking, his eyes bright with the fever and his fingers turning and fidgeting as if they held his carving tools.

  “Madeleine, go talk to Ned for me,” he said at last. “Go ask him what I’m supposed to do.”

  “That criminal? Why do you need his advice? What do you mean, what you’re supposed to do?”

  “He’ll know,” he whispered. “Promise me you’ll do it.” So Maddie sighed and went.

  She made her way out to the cow pasture to the two companions in chains. They were looking more and more like they belonged together. With his new black eye and the blood crusted in the stubbly growth of his beard, the Englishman looked simply ghastly.

  “You’ve likely murdered Lachlan,” she informed him in answer to his cheerful greeting.

  “Ah, he ain’t dead,” grunted the battered old man peaceably. “That brat needed learning.”

  “Carver sent me,” she explained. “He says you have to tell him what to do. He wants to leave, but his fever’s back, so I say you should tell him to rest for a while.”

  Ned swatted the midges away from his bruised face and gazed thoughtfully up at the sky. “You’re fond of him,” he considered. “In love of him. The lad’s caught your fancy.”

  “He has,” admitted the forthright Maddie, who saw no reason to lie.

  “But what sort are you?” he asked, fixing her with a surprisingly keen stare. “Some featherbrain chick with no guts? Faint and scream and run to her folks with every little trouble?”

  “I am not,” declared Maddie firmly. “I can face my share of trouble.”

  “More than your share?” he demanded. “Can you keep your head in bad times? Can you keep a secret?”

  “He’s in trouble, isn’t he?” breathed the girl. “I knew it! I’ll help, and I won’t ever tell.”

  “You’d be just the one,” muttered the Traveler with a bloody, pink-toothed grin. “I can see that clear enough. You think you’re the one he needs—oh, yes, you’re better for him than I be. Swear on your soul you won’t give him over. Swear to stand by him if I tell.”

  “I swear,” said Maddie, and she made the sign of the cross. “May I lose heaven if I fail.”

  “You’ll lose more than that,” muttered Ned. “You do just what I say, just like I say, or you’ll be dead in two days. And if you tell the secret to anyone, your lad will be dead in that same hour.”

  7

  Maddie made her way back to the house and gave Carver his instructions.

  “You!” gasped the young man, sitting up. “Madeleine, not you!”

  “Yes, me,” affirmed Maddie. “There’s no one else you can trust.”

  “But I didn’t want it to be you!” he cried, looking wild.

  “Well, it is,” she replied sensibly. “The Englishman told me what to do, and it doesn’t sound very hard. He says you’re to leave today so no one will suspect. I’ll leave before sundown tomorrow evening, and you can meet me at the rotten stump that’s just out of sight of the castle. Go now, while Ma’s out, or you won’t have another chance till night.”

  She took down some dried fish for him and cut out a firm square of the morning’s cold porridge. He pushed off the blankets and climbed to his feet, watching her work.

  “And you’ll be there well before dark,” he cautioned. “Twilight is too late.”

  “I know all about it,” she replied with confidence. He hesitated, eyeing her doubtfully. “Be off, then,” she said, handing him the food.

  Fair Sarah was very upset when she returned and found her sick boy gone. “The night is cold,” she worried to Maddie. “He’ll take a bad turn, just like Angus did. I never should have left him. It’s little enough I could do to help. Lachlan hasn’t stirred.”

  Maddie rehearsed her speech the next day as she went about her work. At noon, she took food to her mother and the other women working in the fields.

  “Lady Mar y is upset about the death of the new lord’s wife,” she said, sitting by her mother as she ate. “She told me at breakfast she wants me to stay with her in the castle tonight.”

  “Poor woman,” sighed Fair Sarah. “Do that for her, Maddie. It’s a work of mercy, I’d say.” And the girl walked off, consumed with guilt. She had never lied to her mother before.

  Late that afternoon, Maddie took supper to Lady Mary and paused, looking out the castle doorway. No one was nearby. They were in the fields or at Black Ewan’s house, sitting with Lachlan’s mother over her unconscious child. Maddie took the path beside the loch that led away from the castle and the houses.
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  The wood-carver emerged from the forest by the rotten stump, and they walked down the path together. Maddie told him the news about Lachlan and the work in the fields, but he didn’t make any comment. The fever seemed to be working on him. His face was deadly pale. The loch sparkled, and the pine trees were dark green, shading the path now and again with their thick boughs. But the sun already sat on the rim of the high, bare hills across the water.

  “This is the Place of the Hands,” noted Maddie as the path crossed marshy land beside the loch. “It used to be that folk who walked through this place at dusk would see hands carrying a light down the path before them. Then, in Old Dad’s time, the pig-man and his wife were cutting their peats in the bog yonder, and they found a pair of severed hands in the peat, still roped together. They brought them back and buried them in the churchyard under a stone that just says ‘Hands,’ and no one ever saw the light on the path again.”

  “We need to hurry,” muttered the young man, glancing at the sinking sun.

  In another few minutes, Carver left the path and walked a few feet into the bracken, approaching the rocky face of the steep hill that climbed into the sky beside them. Maddie followed him to a narrow crack in the rock wall, just wide enough for a man to slip through. He knelt to retrieve a lighted lantern from the shelter of the narrow cave. Holes pierced in the metal sides let in air, and one side was covered by a thin panel of horn. The light shone through it and into the crack in the cliff, illuminating it with a dusky tan glow.

  “I know this place,” announced Maddie with satisfaction. “It’s the Cave of the Arrows. Look, someone’s made the opening bigger.”

  She ran her finger along one edge of the crack. Large chunks and flakes of rock had been chiseled from its sides and littered the ground at their feet. The young man stopped to look at them, picking up a big fragment. Then he tossed it aside.

  “There’s no time,” he said and stepped into the narrow opening, holding up the light. The pierced sides of the lantern made crazy patterns on the rough, seamed rock as they hurried along, climbing over fallen boulders and avoiding the mossy faces of wet walls.