Company of Liars

by Karen Maitland

  Like everyone else, we had been packed and ready since first light. Zophiel had insisted on moving out early and had Xanthus harnessed between the shafts of the wagon before dawn. We had pulled out into Fishmongers Row and taken our place in the queue before anyone realized they were not going to open the gates, by which time other wagons had pulled up behind us and it was impossible to return to the inn.

  Zophiel was not in the best of humour. He had sat up all night defending his wagon. A few brave souls had demanded to search it. They were searching all the wagons and carts for the fugitive, but Zophiel was having none of it. He was not going to have his delicate mermaid destroyed by those clumsy oafs. Pulling out his dagger, he threatened that the first man who laid a hand on his wagon would have it cut off. Whether it was this threat or the stream of Latin curses that followed which dissuaded the men was hard to say, but it takes a brave man or a foolish one to risk a curse from a magician and the men were not that brave or foolish.

  Despite his victory, Zophiel was worried that all the wagons might be searched again at the gates. A mob of half-drunken men with no authority he could handle, but soldiers with the sheriff’s backing could not be denied and soldiers did not have a reputation for being great respecters of other people’s property.

  The others in the party, though they didn’t have mermaids to worry about, were in no better humour. Adela, white from lack of sleep, had retched into the gutter several times that morning, sickened by the stench of smoked fish and rotting fish guts in the alley in which we were stuck. Zophiel had coldly told her to be grateful we were not stuck in Tanners Row, and when Pleasance suggested that she might take Adela back on foot to wait in the inn, Zophiel had told them that once the gates opened and the carts started moving, he’d have no choice but to set off immediately with the other carts and it would be up to them to catch up. Given his mood, he’d have likely whipped Xanthus to a gallop once he was clear of the town, and the women knew it. Adela dared not risk leaving the wagon.

  Pleasance helped her to settle next to Narigorm on the driver’s seat of the wagon, solicitously tucking sacking around her shoulders and more across her knees to protect her from the cold and wet. For all that I still had an uneasy feeling about Narigorm travelling with us, there was no denying Pleasance was proving a godsend to Adela.

  Pleasance slipped off the wagon and squeezed round to where I stood. As usual she addressed the puddles, though by now I realized it was not my scar that made her avert her eyes; she kept face turned aside whenever she spoke to anyone, as if she hoped that if she did not look at them, they could not see her.

  ‘I’m going to the apothecary to fetch some syrup of balm and mint for Adela. It will settle her stomach, but I have none left in my pack.’

  ‘But Zophiel said –’

  She nodded impatiently. ‘If I miss you, I can walk fast enough to catch up with you on the road.’

  ‘You’re a kind soul, Pleasance. I’ll try to make Zophiel wait as soon as we are clear of the town.’

  She raised her hand in front of her face, as if warding off the compliment. ‘It is a mitz… an obligation. I’m a healer, it is what I do.’ She pulled her cloak tightly around her. ‘I must go.’

  There was something so final about the way she said go that it alarmed me. I caught her arm as she turned. ‘You are coming back, aren’t you, Pleasance?’

  She recoiled from the touch and glanced swiftly up at me, before staring hard at the metal rim of the cart wheel. ‘I will stay with you as long as I can, but sometimes… sometimes you have to leave. You must never become so attached to places or people that it hurts you to say goodbye.’

  I nodded. ‘Now you are talking like a seasoned traveller.’

  I had made that same resolution once. I’d promised myself I would never again suffer such pain as I’d felt that day I’d left my home. But it is easier said than done. Attachment creeps up on you before you can raise your guard.

  As I watched Pleasance disappear among the throng of people, I wondered what hurt had brought about her own resolution. I had a feeling there was more behind her words than simply a traveller’s itch to move on. But I hoped she’d stay with Adela long enough to bring her through her labour. Pleasance knew just how to massage her back to relieve the ache and which herbs to brew to ease the swelling of her ankles. She’d know how to ease the pain of labour and staunch the bleeding. Pleasance had a skill with herbs that went far beyond those few potions which every woman is taught to brew. Wherever she had acquired that knowledge it was not as a serving wench or villein.

  The rain splashed down, stirring a witches’ brew of blood, guts and fish eyes in the puddles around the wagon. Housewives, blaming all outlanders for the murder, tipped slops from the upstairs casements, taking malicious pleasure in the bellows of rage from below. The fishmongers cursed as they tried to squeeze baskets of fish through the narrow spaces between the shops and the wagons and we cursed back as they tried to elbow us out of the way. But it made no difference, we were stuck there and so were they.

  Jofre, restless and impatient, was drumming out a rhythm on the wagon which was becoming annoying even to Rodrigo. To distract him, Rodrigo suggested that they go ahead to the gate to see if there was any news. If the gates opened while they were there, they would wait and join us as we passed through.

  Rodrigo glanced at Osmond who was tightening the ropes on the wagon, which he had already tested a dozen times. Osmond’s lips were drawn as tight as the ropes. He had apologized for calling Adela a goose the night before. Adela in turn had protested it was all her fault and she was a goose, but both were avoiding each other’s eyes. Adela was still hurt for all that she denied it, and Osmond knew it, but did not know how to make amends.

  Rodrigo looked over at the wretched Adela and then back at the equally miserable Osmond. ‘Come with us, Osmond. It is better than kicking your heels here.’

  Jofre turned, his smile radiant. ‘Yes, come on. We’ll make those old fools open the gate.’

  Osmond hesitated. ‘I should stay with Adela. She’s not well.’

  ‘She’s never well,’ snarled Zophiel. ‘If she were a chicken, I’d wring her neck and put the dumb creature out of her misery.’

  Osmond wheeled round, his fists clenched, but Rodrigo laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Have a care, Zophiel,’ Rodrigo said. ‘It is not wise to threaten to strangle a woman when they are still hunting the murderer of a strangled girl. What you speak in jest, others might take in earnest.’

  Two patches of angry red appeared on Zophiel’s cheeks and his eyes blazed.

  ‘You go, Osmond,’ Adela broke in quickly.

  Osmond turned away without looking at her and followed Rodrigo, squeezing between the wagons and the fishmongers’ slabs. Jofre brought up the rear.

  ‘Frenzy, filth and lust.’ Narigorm, curled up like a little white rat in the well at the front of the wagon, stared at their retreating backs.

  Pleasance glanced down at her. ‘Did you say something, little one?’

  Narigorm chanted in a sing-song voice, ‘Troll runes I cut and cut three more. Frenzy, filth and lust.’ Then she smiled, a cold little triumphant smile. ‘I cast thurisaz, the troll rune, last night. Twists everything that follows it, the troll rune does. Turns the runes to the dark side of meaning. But I couldn’t tell who the runes were for, not last night.’

  Adela, looking decidedly queasy, rapidly crossed herself. ‘Please don’t sing like that, Narigorm. It frightens me. It sounds like a curse and I know you wouldn’t want to… You were tired last night. I expect the runes fell like that by accident, because you weren’t able to concentrate after…’ she hesitated, ‘after all that nasty talk of the storyteller and that poor child.’

  I expected Narigorm to fly into a rage. She usually did if anyone questioned the truth of her reading. But when I looked at her she was still smiling as if nothing anyone said could wipe that look of satisfaction off her face.

  �
�Oh no, Adela, the runes can never fall by accident. They spoke the truth about someone and it wasn’t the storyteller, but I know who it was now. I know.’

  Finally, sense prevailed and the gates were opened. It took a long time for all the traffic to squeeze out of the town, and Pleasance had returned long before the wagon was able to move, but once we were on the open road we all took in great gulps of clean air and began to relax. The wagons had not been searched again. The townspeople, having decided to let us go, could not wait to get rid of us.

  Xanthus was being surprisingly docile. She had hardly tried to bite anyone in the town, well, not seriously anyway, though many people had pushed past her. She’d not kicked out or reared even in the crush and now on the open road she was ambling along, occasionally snatching at mouthfuls of sodden grass, but allowing herself to be pulled on with only an irritated shake of her head.

  The road wended its way through the trees, gradually ascending, with painful slowness, to the top of the hill. Xanthus pulled with more will than usual, but the laden wagon, long incline and thick mud were more than a match for the horse and we all had to lend a hand at pushing the wagon except Adela, who clung fearfully to her seat as Xanthus’s hooves slipped in the mud. The wagon felt even heavier than usual thanks to Adela and Pleasance having loaded it up with as much food and ale as they could cram on board between Zophiel’s boxes, and despite the chill of the rain we were all sweating by the time we reached the top. There we paused to catch our breath and pass round a skin of ale. The trees were thick and tall, obscuring the view, but as the branches swayed in the wind we glimpsed the occasional silver flash of what appeared to be a lake in the valley below.

  The rain dripped from the leaves and trickled in little rivulets round the stones on the track ahead. The leaves had turned to gold, bronze and copper on the trees and had begun to fall, lying in thick slippery drifts on the track. It was going to be even harder going down than up. But if what we were glimpsing was a large lake, with luck there’d be a few villages dotted about the edges, which was a cheering prospect, for by the time we got down there, we’d all be in need of a good fire and a hot meal.

  It was a hazardous business getting the wagon down the hill. Zophiel had tied sacking over Xanthus’s hooves to help her to grip in the mud, but the laden wagon kept slewing sideways on the slippery track, threatening to pull the horse down with it. Zophiel and I held Xanthus’s head to keep her calm, while Jofre, Osmond and Rodrigo walked alongside the wagon, using their shoulders and thick poles to block the wheels whenever it seemed in danger of slipping.

  Dusk was gathering quickly under the heavy canopy of the trees and we were so intent on keeping ourselves and the wagon upright that at first we didn’t notice the dull roar above the constant rustling of the wind in the trees. Then as we rounded the bend the noise hit us as if a thousand knights were galloping past in a full battle charge. Zophiel pulled Xanthus up so sharply that for the first time that day she reared and tried to back in the shafts, rolling her eyes in fright. I knew just how she felt.

  The glints of silver we had glimpsed below were not from any lake. The valley was flooded. Just a few yards ahead of us, the track had been swallowed up by a rushing torrent of thick brown water. Whole trees tumbled past like twigs thrown into a stream by a giant’s child. Something blue, a piece of cloth maybe or a woman’s kirtle, surfaced briefly, then was whisked out of sight and snatched away by the flood. Other half-familiar objects bobbed up, only to be sucked under again before we could comprehend what they were. As far as we could see through the rain and dusk of that evening, there was nothing solid left between us and the distant hills, only the rage of water.

  You might think that with all those weeks and months of rain, England would have drowned weeks before. In Noah’s day it took just forty days to wipe the face of the earth clean. And in my lifetime, which though long does not yet match the nine hundred and fifty years of Noah’s life, I’ve seen rivers burst their banks and villages swept away after just a few hours of violent rains on to dry land. But the rain which had fallen since Midsummer’s Day was neither violent nor sudden; it was steady and continuous as if the sky was a cracked bowl that was slowly leaking, dripping its contents down on to the earth below. And the earth soaked the water up, like a thick trencher of bread soaks up the juices of the meat. Rivers were swollen and dangerously fast, ditches full, water meadows turned to shallow lakes, but still it rained and still the land continued to absorb it. There comes a point, though, when even a trencher of stale bread can soak up no more. The land had taken all it could.

  There was no way of knowing if the water was still rising, but we could not afford to take the chance. We couldn’t risk making camp beside those flood waters. Late though it was, there was nothing for it but to turn and make our way slowly and achingly back up the hill again. Our way north was now well and truly barred. Our only hope was to slip sideways and try to work our way round by higher ground, or trust that the flood waters would eventually recede, but as long as it continued to rain there seemed little hope of that happening. Even if it did, the road and any bridges that crossed the rivers would be washed away, making it impossible to move the wagon by that route.

  ‘East or west, Camelot?’

  We stood at the crossroads. Rodrigo, Jofre and Osmond all favoured west, for whereas the road east appeared level and straight for as far as we could see, the road west climbed still higher and they were in favour of any direction that took them up away from the valleys. Adela shyly backed her husband.

  But Zophiel, much to my surprise, wanted to go east. ‘The news in Northampton was that the pestilence has only reached as far as London on the east side and we are well to the north of that. Towns may have closed on the west, but they’ll still be open to the east.’

  Osmond eyed him suspiciously. ‘By towns, do you mean ports? You’re not still hoping to find a ship, are you? Is that why you want to drag us all east? What is this business you have in Ireland anyway? The Irish won’t have any more money than the English to waste on mermaids, not if they’re cursed with this same rain.’

  ‘Do you have the faintest understanding of what the pestilence is, Osmond? It is a sentence of death, and not a merciful one. Do you want to watch your wife screaming in agony as she dies? Because that is what will happen if we go west.’

  Adela covered her face in her hands. I glanced at Jofre. He was trembling and looked as if he was about to be sick. I knew he was thinking of his mother.

  Osmond took an angry pace towards Zophiel, but I pushed between them and held up my hands.

  ‘Zophiel may lack tact, but what he says about the pestilence is right; we stand more chance of outstripping it on the eastern side. And besides, the flood waters were flowing west. We’ll walk straight into them again if we take the track west. I’m forced to agree with Zophiel, east is safest course on both counts, just until we can find another road north to the shrines at York and Knaresborough. Pleasance, what do you say?’

  By way of an answer, Pleasance pointed at Narigorm who crouched on her haunches in the centre of the crossroads. Three runes lay in front of her. Her hand hovered briefly above them, then she scooped them up and thrust them back into her pouch.

  ‘We go east,’ she said simply, as if she was a queen ordering her troops to march.

  ‘Do you hear that, Adela?’ Zophiel said. ‘The runes direct us east.’

  Though Zophiel had hitherto dismissed Narigorm’s readings, like my relics, as nothing more than chicanery to fleece the gullible of their money, he was not above using them to support his argument when they worked in his favour.

  ‘And I think we can take it that Pleasance will go wherever her little mistress commands. So since there are eight of us, we are evenly split. Therefore we –’

  ‘There are nine,’ Narigorm cut in, her tone as matter of fact as before. ‘We are complete. There are nine, so now we go east.’

  Zophiel looked slightly taken aback by this interruption,
then laughed. ‘I take it the child counts Xanthus as one of us. Well, why not, since she has to pull us whichever way we go.’ He let go of the horse’s head and taking a step back, gave her a mocking bow. ‘Xanthus, you shall decide. Which way?’

  The horse, as if she understood what was being asked of her, stepped sideways and began to turn the wagon on to the eastern path.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re gabbing about, you great lummox.’ The old man scowled at his son and shuffled closer to the fire, crouching on the edge of the low wooden stool.

  Old Walter and his son Abel had been welcoming enough, sharing their hearth with us, glad of the food that we offered them in exchange. Theirs was a simple cottage, but warm and dry, with a thin wattle partition dividing the family’s living quarters from the warm, steaming bodies of their cattle who shared the dwelling. A ladder led to a platform up in the rafters where the hay was stored and the women and children had once slept. The old man’s wife was long dead and his daughters were married and gone to their husbands’ families, so son and father were all that remained and, like a long-married couple, they got along by bickering. It was an old and comforting habit, and even the presence of strangers did not change it.

  ‘Vampires aren’t spreading the pestilence,’ Old Walter continued. ‘For vampires to go around biting everyone, there’d have to be as many vampires as there are midges and if there were swarms of bloody great vampires flying round the towns and villages, someone would have seen them by now. It’s not vampires, it’s Jews, everyone knows that. They’re in league with the Saracens, the Jews, always have been. The Lionheart said as much when he was king. They want to murder us all. They’re poisoning the wells. You get a whole street of people fall sick on one night, stands to reason it’s got to be the water from their well that poisoned them.’