Company of Liars

by Karen Maitland

  Abel glared back at him. He wore the same habitual frown as his father. ‘Well, that just proves you’re talking out of your arse as usual, you old pisspot, because there aren’t any Jews in England. Not been for nigh on sixty years since the King’s grandfather banished them. I bet you’ve never even seen a Jew, you old fool.’

  Zophiel’s drawl broke in on the argument. ‘Actually, your father may well have seen a Jew or two in his time.’

  ‘There, see, I told you.’ The old man triumphantly slapped his thigh. ‘He’s been around, haven’t you, sir? He knows a thing or two.’

  Abel flushed, furious at being contradicted. ‘Aye, well, he may have seen Jews in France or some such place, but you’ve not been further than our field strips in your life. If you’ve seen them, they must’ve been lurking in the ditch along with the boggarts and goblins you always reckon you’ve seen on your way home from the ale house.’

  Zophiel smiled his cold, humourless smile. ‘The ditches and gutters are certainly where they deserve to be, but I’m afraid they are far too cunning for that. King Edward, though he did well to banish them, made a grave mistake by not killing the vermin outright. A dead Jew is visible, but I fear a living one is not, and they have a way of wriggling in among the God-fearing Christians, like mice in a tithe barn, and breeding there until the time comes for them to strike. They didn’t all flee England; some chose to convert and stay. But their conversions were false, for how can a Christ-killer who’s damned before birth ever become a true Christian? They practised their religion in secret, spitting on the host and making a mockery of the sacraments.’

  The young man was still anxious to defend himself. ‘That’s as may be, but so what if a few did remain? Those who are still alive must be older than this old fool and he’s so old he can’t even piss straight, never mind brew a deadly poison and put it down a well without anyone seeing. There’s no proof they’ve poisoned anybody.’

  Zophiel looked triumphant. ‘Ah, but there is, my young friend; many a Jew in France has been brought to trial and found guilty of causing the pestilence by poisoning the wells. They’ve freely admitted their guilt under torture and –’

  ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury would claim his own mother was a black cockerel and he was in league with the devil if the question was put to him under torture, as would we all,’ I said.

  But Zophiel continued as if I had not spoken. ‘And have been justly executed for their heinous crimes. So, if the pestilence is proved to be their doing in France, how can the same malady have a different cause in England? No, the cause is plain enough, but here it will be harder to root them out and bring them to the bonfires. We must all be vigilant and on our guard for any who might be hiding amongst us.’

  Adela, looking thoroughly alarmed, shrank against Osmond and buried her face in his shoulder. The gesture pleased him, for it seemed to signal that the quarrel of the night before was finally forgotten. He seized the opportunity to show her he was on her side.

  ‘As usual, Zophiel, you’ve succeeded in upsetting Adela. When will you learn to keep your malicious thoughts to yourself?’

  Zophiel looked anything but repentant. ‘I merely point out the facts. If you have married a woman whose mind is so weak that she has to be constantly shielded from reality, that’s your problem, but you really cannot expect the rest of us to tiptoe around her pretending that the clouds are made of cream, in case we upset her. Or is she afraid that someone might take her for a Jew?’

  At that, even old Walter looked startled. ‘She’s no Jew. Jews have got dark hair and hooked noses. I’ve seen them in the paintings on the church walls. Shifty-looking creatures they are, you’d spot them a mile off. She’s a lovely lass, look at her, fair as our Lord himself.’

  Adela smiled wanly at him as he leaned towards her, giving her a big lecherous wink, but she was still visibly trembling and Osmond, as usual, seemed torn between comforting her and wanting to punch Zophiel.

  I tried to put an end to the bickering. ‘Pleasance, have you some of that poppy syrup that you gave Adela before, the potion that helps her to sleep?’

  But Pleasance didn’t appear to have heard me. She was staring wide-eyed at Zophiel, looking as terrified as Adela. I heaved myself up and on the pretext of handing Pleasance her pack, drew her away from the fire.

  ‘Take no notice, Pleasance. There are neither Jews nor vampires lurking here. People are frightened. They can’t fight a miasma, so they create an enemy to fight. It makes them feel less helpless. Though in Zophiel’s case, I don’t think he believes a word of it; he just says it because he enjoys an argument. Why don’t you find Adela that poppy syrup, see if we can’t calm her down a bit before Osmond takes it into his head to start a fist-fight with Zophiel?’

  Pleasance gave a weak smile and bent over her pack, but her hands were trembling as she struggled to undo the leather fastenings. She pushed the pack away and fled to the door.

  ‘I left the syrup in the wagon,’ she mumbled, and ran out of the door without even pausing to shut it behind her.

  Narigorm stared after her, a curious expression on her face, as if she had just remembered something. Then she folded her arms and began rocking on her bottom, like a small child hugging a great secret.

  ‘Born in a barn, was she?’ Abel grumbled, getting up to close the door, but before he reached it we heard a scream outside the cottage. Snatching up a stout staff, Abel bounded through the door, followed closely by Rodrigo and more slowly by Osmond who had first to prise Adela’s hand from his arm.

  There was the sound of a scuffle and a cry of, ‘Oh, no, you don’t, my lad.’ Then Abel and Rodrigo returned, dragging a struggling figure between them, immobilized by a cloak which had been wound tightly over his head and arms. Osmond followed hard on their heels, his arm supporting Pleasance, who was clearly shaken. Abel slammed the door and swung the heavy brace across it before turning to face the figure under the cloak, still firmly in the grip of Rodrigo.

  ‘Now, my lad, let’s be having a look at you.’ He stepped forward to pull the cloak away, but I knew who it was before the face was unmasked. There was no mistaking the purple of that cloak.

  10. Cygnus

  ‘So we’ve caught a murderer,’ Zophiel said triumphantly. ‘You’ll hang, boy, or worse, when the sheriff gets hold of you, and he will, make no mistake about that, for there’ll be a price on your head which will come in very handy for us all in these hard times.’

  ‘If anyone’s going to claim the bounty for him, it’ll be me and him.’ Abel indicated Rodrigo with a jerk of his head. ‘We’re the ones who caught him. You sat on your arse by the fire, too scared to come outside in case there was any real fighting.’ Abel had not forgiven Zophiel for contradicting him.

  ‘I’m no murderer,’ the swan-boy interrupted desperately. ‘I never touched that child. I never laid eyes on her again after I spoke to her in the market place.’

  ‘So if you are as innocent as you claim, why run away?’ Zophiel said, ignoring Abel.

  ‘Be fair, Zophiel,’ I said. ‘Running away is no proof of guilt. You saw that mob; their blood was up. Do you think they’d have taken him off for a fair trial? By the time they’d handed him over to the sheriff there wouldn’t have been a lot left of him to hang, guilty or innocent. If I’d been in his shoes, I’d have run too.’

  The swan-boy nodded vigorously. ‘He’s right. I was scared, and with good reason. I think I may have seen the man who killed the child and he knows I saw him. I think it was him who said he’d seen me with the child to cover his own tracks.’

  ‘We all saw you with the child,’ Zophiel snapped. ‘As did half the town.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. I saw a man leaving that warehouse about the time the little girl went missing. He was looking up and down the street as if he wanted to make sure it was empty. I was standing in a doorway sheltering from the rain. He wouldn’t have seen me at first. I only noticed him because there was a little dog jumping up at him, barki
ng. He kicked it away really viciously. That made me angry. I thought the dog looked familiar, but it wasn’t until after the child was found I realized… I had no reason to think at the time…’

  ‘Then why not tell your story to the authorities?’ Zophiel demanded. ‘You saw his face, I take it. You could describe him.’

  ‘I saw his face all right; he walked past the door where I was standing. He saw me too when he drew level and looked none too happy about it either.’

  ‘Then I repeat my question.’

  ‘Because I saw something else, an emblem on his cloak. If it was his cloak, he was Master of the Guild of Cord-wainers. Do you think the townspeople would take the word of an itinerant storyteller against a fellow townsman, especially one who’s the master of such a wealthy guild?’

  Zophiel raised one eyebrow. ‘And do you think that we are more gullible than the townspeople, that we’d believe such a fanciful tale, where they would not? How convenient that you just happened to be hanging around, watching the very warehouse where the child was murdered.’

  ‘But I did see the cordwainer there.’

  ‘If you saw him, I dare say he had gone there to inspect a consignment of leather. What could be more natural at market time? He had a perfectly legitimate reason for being in a warehouse, unlike a vagabond storyteller who could only have been there with nefarious intent. At the very least, you obviously intended to steal. Did the child see you stealing and threaten to tell? Is that why you killed her? Or did you lure the child to the warehouse in order to rape her and murder her?’

  ‘The child was strangled, Zophiel,’ I reminded him. ‘Hard to do that with a wing.’

  ‘He has a hand also. It’s easy enough for a man to throttle a small child with just one hand. The fingers on his hand will be stronger than most, for he has to do everything with that one hand.’

  ‘Can he fly?’ Old Walter suddenly blurted out from his place at the fireside. He’d been rubbing his eyes and staring at the storyteller’s wing ever since the cloak was pulled off, as he if thought that what he was seeing was an illusion brought on by drink.

  ‘’Course he can’t, you daft old pisspot. How do you expect him to fly with only one wing?’ his son snapped, as if winged men regularly made an appearance in his house.

  ‘These folks said he got out of the town when all the gates were closed. So maybe he flew out.’

  Zophiel addressed himself to the swan-boy. ‘He has a point; how exactly did you get out?’

  ‘I stowed away… on your wagon.’

  ‘You did what?’ Zophiel screamed. All the colour seemed to drain from his face. He seized the swan-boy by the front of his shirt, almost lifting him off his feet.

  ‘If you’ve damaged anything, boy, I’ll string you up myself.’

  He pushed the boy aside, who fell heavily to the floor, and rushed to the door, cursing as he swung aside the heavy brace. Rodrigo helped the storyteller to his feet, gripping his shoulder firmly but gently, in case he should make a bolt for the open door, but he made no move to escape.

  ‘Zophiel lives in fear of someone damaging his mermaid and his other precious boxes, though God alone knows what he has in there that is so precious,’ I said by way of explanation, for Abel and his father were staring at the open door as if they thought Zophiel had gone mad.

  The storyteller took a breath as if he was about to say something, but seemed to think better of it and quickly closed his mouth again.

  ‘I hope for your sake nothing is damaged, lad,’ I continued, ‘otherwise you’ll wish you were back with that mob. What do they call you anyway?’

  ‘Cygnus.’

  ‘Well then, Cygnus, there’s a scraping of beans left in that pot, so you may as well settle down and eat. Whatever’s to be done with you, can’t be done till morning. No sense in going hungry while there’s food to be eaten. This is going to be a long night for us all.’

  The door was barred once more and we all settled down around the fire on the beaten earth floor, hunkered down on pieces of old sacking or logs, for the cottager only had a small bench and a single stool to his name. We were packed as tight as eels in a barrel, but grateful for our full bellies and the soporific heat of the spitting fire.

  After careful inspection, Zophiel had been forced to admit that nothing in the wagon had been damaged, but his anger had, if anything, increased. He had unwittingly given shelter to a fugitive by refusing to allow his wagon to be searched and he took that as an insult to his pride. He was determined not to be made a fool of twice and was all for lashing the prisoner to one of the wagon wheels to spend the night outside in the rain, but the rest of us stopped him. Our hosts had no objections to the boy being housed in the cottage; in fact they seemed positively to welcome the idea, fascinated as they were by him. So Zophiel, unable to punish the boy as he would have liked, took to goading him instead.

  ‘Tell us the truth, boy,’ he said, ‘and don’t try your swan-prince or cordwainer tales on us – we are not a bunch of children. That is a false wing, is it not, a trick to get a few more pennies from the townsfolk than they’d pay you for a good tale? I imagine you managed to convince many fools that it’s real, but don’t you try to take me for a fool as well.’

  Cygnus glanced nervously round the group. ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere and neither are you, boy,’ Zophiel said grimly.

  Adela smiled at Cygnus encouragingly and with a scared glance at Zophiel, he addressed himself to her.

  ‘I was born with one good arm and one… one that was not an arm. It was a stump just a few inches long, with six tiny projections from it spread out in a line at its base, like the buds of pinion feathers. It was as well that my mother gave birth alone for if a goodwife had been present and had seen what my mother had birthed she’d have never allowed me to draw my first breath. My mother said she’s known many do that, for they know a crippled child brings nothing but trouble to a family.’

  Zophiel snapped, ‘Only God can say if a child should live or die. Such women should be brought to a gallows. If I had my way no woman would be permitted to attend a birth.’ He glared across at Pleasance who shrank further into her corner.

  ‘They’re not heartless women,’ Cygnus protested. ‘They don’t want a child to live in suffering or its mother to be blamed. I’ve seen mothers hounded from the village or worse still tried as witches, accused of fornicating with a demon. There’s no mercy shown to either mother or child then; baby and mother hanged together.’

  ‘And such women should be tried as witches, for how else would such a monster be conceived? Not through them lying with their God-given husbands, that’s for sure,’ Zophiel snapped.

  ‘You just said a baby was innocent. But now you want to hang the baby with its mother,’ Adela said, her face flushed, though whether from indignation or the heat of the stuffy room was hard to tell.

  ‘I said nothing of innocence, Adela.’ Zophiel’s tone, as ever, grew quieter and colder as others become more heated. ‘What I said was that God would decide if the brat lived or died. If the mother is guilty, then the child is a demon and must die. Surely not even you would be foolish enough to plead for a demon to be spared the gallows, however seemingly innocent its form? But if the mother is not guilty her trial will prove her so. God will protect the innocent and save them from death.’

  ‘Like he saves them from the pestilence?’ Jofre said savagely.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Osmond crossed himself. No one looked at anyone else. It was the question that was in everyone’s mind, the one question no one could bring themselves to answer.

  I nudged Cygnus with my staff. ‘You were telling us about your birth. How is it that your mother gave birth alone with no one to attend her?’

  There was a collective release of breath as if we had all momentarily looked over the edge of a cliff and had now drawn back to safer ground.

  ‘My mother,’ his eyes flicked nervously in the direction of Z
ophiel, ‘my mother knew that I would be special.’

  Zophiel snorted. ‘How did she know? Did an angel appear to her?’

  Cygnus seemed to wilt under his sarcastic tongue. ‘Not an angel,’ he muttered.

  ‘A dream, then,’ Adela suggested eagerly.

  ‘She saw… she thought that a swan came to her, by night. The night before she was married…’

  ‘I’ve heard that if you see something frightening you can often give birth to a mon…’ Adela corrected herself hastily, ‘to an unusual child. There was a woman in our town that was frightened by a bear when she was carrying and when the baby was born it was covered from head to foot in thick black hair.’

  ‘I didn’t mean my mother was frightened by a swan, she –’

  Zophiel was staring at him, comprehension dawning and horror with it. Zophiel was hostile enough to the boy already without believing that he was the product of some bestial encounter between a bird and virgin. That would be all Zophiel needed to pronounce him guilty – a beast who murders little children. What else would be born from such a union?

  I leaped in quickly. ‘So because of the strange dream she had, your mother thought you would be special? Is that why she chose to give birth alone?’

  Cygnus grimaced. ‘She knew I would be different, but she wanted me. She always told me that.’

  I glanced at Osmond; his expression was strained. I guessed he was not thinking of Cygnus, but of his own unborn child.

  ‘It is a wonderful thing to grow up knowing you are wanted,’ I said, and for the first time that evening Cygnus smiled, staring into the middle of the fire as if he could see his mother’s face gazing lovingly back at him from the flames. Finally, after a long pause, he resumed his tale.