It soon became apparent that the track led to the stones and nowhere else. After all that effort we had been following a dead end, but it was too late to turn back before nightfall so we continued pushing the wagon towards the ring of stones.
The stones in the circle were about the height of a man and twelve in number. A taller rock, like an ancient warrior queen, stood a little way outside the ring and, between this and the circle, several smaller stones lay fallen in two rows as if prostrating themselves before her. Even close up it was an eerie place, but there was comfort in it too for the stones had withstood centuries of storms, invasions and disasters and had survived unchanged and unchanging.
At the base of the queen rock we found a deep, curved stone basin, like an oyster shell, but large enough for a man to sit in. It was placed so that any rain which fell on the rock would trickle down its surface and drip into the basin beneath. The stone surface of the basin was green with slime, but once we had broken through the thin layer of ice, the water beneath was clean and clear. At least we had water enough for Xanthus to drink and for us to cook with.
The sun was sinking rapidly and almost before it was gone, the first stars appeared, bringing with them an ice-sharp edge to the wind. We finished preparing the supper. Zophiel had laid out the poisoned bait again, some distance from our camp, but I don’t think any of the rest of us believed it would work. Perhaps he didn’t either. It was an amulet, a talisman, something to ward off disaster when you are powerless to prevent it. Despite what he said, Zophiel needed hope as much as the rest of us. As the skies darkened, he began pacing restlessly, peering out from between the stones in all directions, but he did not step outside their protective circle.
‘Don’t you want to eat, Narigorm?’ Adela called over her shoulder, as she ladled mutton into my bowl.
Narigorm crouched in the shadow of one of the stones. She was hunched over, peering at something on the ground in front of her which lay within the light cast by the fire. My chest tightened into a dull ache as I watched her hands hovering in that familiar way over the ground.
‘Narigorm, did you hear what Adela said? Come and eat now!’
Adela looked round in surprise at the sharpness in my voice, but Narigorm didn’t move.
‘I didn’t realize,’ Adela said in an anxious voice. ‘It’s best not to disturb her, Camelot, not when she’s reading runes. It might… bring bad luck. I’ll save her supper for her.’
The ancient stones loomed taller in the darkness. Strange shapes danced across them in the light cast by the flames, as if a host of people circled us just beyond our sight and we glimpsed only their shadows.
I took a bowl of mutton and walked across to Narigorm, deliberately standing between her and the fire to block the light. I held out the bowl, hoping the rich, hot steam rising from it would make her realize she was hungry.
‘Please, Narigorm,’ I said weakly, ‘why don’t you leave that and come and eat? No runes tonight, there’s a good girl, not in this place.’
‘What harm can it do?’ Osmond said. ‘Maybe she’ll be able to tell us how to get rid of this wolf. If we even knew why it’s following us, I’d feel better.’
What harm can it do? I’d never told him or any of the company what Narigorm had read in the runes the night Carwyn was born and Jofre died. I had tried to convince myself that her words had meant nothing. We’d all been worried for Adela and the baby that night. Narigorm had only said aloud what we all privately feared. The death of Jofre had been a coincidence, nothing more. You can read anything into a fortune-teller’s predictions; they deliberately make them vague enough so they always seem to come true. Perhaps she’d not really learnt of Pleasance’s death in the runes either. She could have followed her and seen her hanging. Nothing mystical about that, at least that’s what I tried to tell myself.
Narigorm picked up a rune and held it up in the firelight. The symbol on it resembled a pot on its side.
‘Peorth reversed.’
Osmond glanced at the symbol, then quickly averted his eyes. ‘Is that to do with the wolf?’
‘Peorth means a secret someone has not told.’
He laughed uneasily. ‘We all have those. Let me think. When I was a boy I was madly in love with my mother’s serving maid, but I was too shy ever to tell her. There, is that the secret?’
Narigorm shook her head. ‘When peorth is reversed it means a dark secret, a dark secret that will soon be exposed.’
I heard a sharp intake of breath from somewhere behind me, then Osmond said quietly, ‘Camelot is right. You should eat now.’
But Narigorm held up a second rune inscribed with two V shapes carved into it, interlocking and opposite.
‘Jara. The time of harvest. The time to reap.’ In the firelight her white hair writhed with red and orange flames. She gazed up at Osmond. ‘When jara lies with peorth, it means someone will reap the punishment for their dark secret soon.’
A look of utter panic crossed Osmond’s face and he glanced at Adela who was staring equally wide-eyed, her ladle arrested in mid-air, spilling its contents on to the grass.
‘That’s enough now, Narigorm,’ I said sharply.
I intended to say more, but Zophiel spoke from the shadows.
His voice sounded curiously strained, almost pleading. ‘The runes only show what might be. We have the power to change the outcome. The runes are only a warning about what will happen if we do nothing to prevent it.’
Narigorm lifted her head and stared at him. The light from the flames twisted across her pale face, as if vipers writhed across her skin. Then, without answering, she picked up a third rune and held it up. This one was like an angled cross.
‘Nyd,’ she said. ‘It’s the fate rune. It means there’s nothing that can be done to change the other two. The fate written in them cannot be changed. The dark secret will be revealed and it will be punished.’
In the silence that followed, no one moved. The only sounds were the crackling of the fire and the high-pitched keening of the wind as it funnelled between the stones.
Finally it was Rodrigo who broke the silence. ‘Who are these warnings for, Narigorm? Do you know that?’
She reached down and picked something else from the ground in front of her and held it up in the firelight. It was not a rune this time, but a tiny ball of black marble.
‘Whoever dropped this,’ she said.
We looked from one to the other, perplexed, then Adela blurted out, ‘Zophiel, isn’t that the ball you used in the cup trick on Christ…?’
She broke off. Zophiel was standing pressed flat against one of the stones, his eyes wide and horrified. Even in the dim light of the fire we could see he was trembling violently. He drew his hands up over his face and slowly, like a man who has been stabbed, he slid down the stone until he was crouching on the ground.
‘You have to help me… you have to stop him… you can’t let him kill me…’
No one moved. We were all too stunned. We had seen Zophiel scared before, but then he had been angry, bellowing orders. To see him reduced to a quivering wreck was far more horrifying. I crossed over to him and laid my hand on his arm. He flinched, but didn’t shake it off.
‘Zophiel,’ I said as gently as I could, ‘who are you talking about? Who’s going to kill you?’
‘The wolf,’ he whispered.
‘Come on now, Zophiel, this howling night after night is tormenting all of us. I know it is not natural for a wolf to be following us like this, but these are strange times; men and beasts alike are hungry. But if you’re thinking of what happened to Jofre, he was alone, and anyway it’s far more likely he was killed by a pack of dogs deliberately set on him. As long as we stay close together a lone wolf will not attack us.’
Zophiel moaned, his face still buried in his hands.
‘Have you been attacked by a wolf before, is that why you’ve always…?’
He shook his head, but still did not raise it to look at me.
Th
en a sudden thought struck me. ‘Zophiel, when we were in the cave, the night we first heard a wolf howl, you said that if the wolf was a beast, the fire would frighten it off, but if it was a human wolf then the fire would attract it. Is that what you think is out there, some kind of human wolf?’
He flinched.
‘Zophiel,’ I said urgently, ‘if you know what this creature is you have to tell us. We have to be aware of what we’re up against.’
There was a hiss as Osmond thrust a glowing stick into a beaker. He walked across to where Zophiel crouched.
‘Hot wine,’ he said awkwardly, thrusting the beaker at Zophiel. His face wore an expression of both embarrassment and pity.
Zophiel took the beaker, though his hands were shaking so much I finally had to help him hold it. He winced as the warm wine made contact with his cut lip, but he gulped the contents of the beaker down greedily.
I handed the empty beaker back to Osmond. He stood looking down at the trembling figure hunched against the stone.
‘Camelot’s right. You must tell us. We need to be prepared.’
Zophiel pressed his hand over his swollen lip and stared at the ground, then finally he nodded.
‘A wolf story,’ he said with a shaky laugh. ‘We’ve heard Camelot’s and Pleasance’s, now you want mine. Why not? If the runes are to be believed, you’ll find out soon enough. At least if I tell you, it will be the truth, not the lies others will tell of me.’
For a long time Zophiel remained silent, then he began, his voice still trembling, but gradually regaining its usual control.
‘There once was a boy from a poor family, isn’t that how you begin a story, Cygnus? He was one of five brothers, but this boy was different from his brothers, quick to learn and clever. He was pious too and his brothers hated him for that. They teased and bullied him, but that only made him more devout. The local priest urged his father to enter the boy into minor orders at just seven years old, so that he could attend a school for charity boys. His education there was sound and hard. They taught them thoroughly and they beat them thoroughly too, never letting them forget they were there on charity. But discipline strengthens the resolve and purifies the soul. The boy rose to acolyte and emerged from his education knowing that he was fit to serve God and naively believing that God would see the earnestness of his heart and reward him for that faithful service.
‘He entered major orders as a sub-deacon, rising eventually to priest, but it is not easy for a young man with no wealthy patron to find a benefice. He served rectors who were illiterate fools and whose knowledge of Latin was so poor that they gabbled the mass by rote, not knowing what they were saying. Often they didn’t bother to turn up for services for months at a time, leaving the young priest to the care of the souls.
‘Finally the young man did at last succeed in gaining a living in the city of Lincoln, but though that great city is wealthy, his parish was not. It lay in the poorest part of the town. No wealthy guilds endowed the church with chantries or silver chalices or even enough to mend the leaking roof. The church didn’t lie on the pilgrims’ route to the shrines of St Hugh or Little Hugh in the great Cathedral. It lay at the bottom of the hill by the stinking quayside. Only the poorest people, dock rats, drunks, whores and common sailors, came there. The rich merchants and ships’ captains worshipped in the more prestigious churches.
‘Still, the priest worked hard and went daily to the Cathedral to get himself noticed, hoping for a better procurement. He ceaselessly rooted out sin wherever he found it, ministering to the stinking poor on their deathbeds and remonstrating with drunks and whores, without thought to his own health. He still had faith then, our young priest, faith that if he was zealous in his duties, God and the Bishop would reward him with a parish where his learning and talents could be better appreciated.’
Zophiel started as if he had heard something. He stared out into the darkness, pressing his back into the hard granite of the stone, drawing the shadow of it over him like a blanket as if he could disappear into it, vanish, like a ball in one of his own conjuring tricks. But however dark a place a man finds to hide, the smallest glimmer of light will pick out the whites of his eyes, and we saw them now, wide with fear, gleaming like bleached bones in the moonlight.
Osmond fetched him another beaker of wine and he took a large gulp before resuming his tale.
‘Then one day a miracle happened. It was the middle of winter, there had been a heavy fall of snow, and the boats had to break a channel through the ice as they came to the quayside. The priest was saying the third office of the day. There was a handful of people in church, mostly the old or beggars come in to keep out of the cold, not that the church was much warmer than the street. Suddenly the door burst open and a woman came staggering in, carrying a little boy who lay limp and still in her arms. He’d been playing on the ice and slipped through. They’d fished him out, but it was too late, the boy was dead. The mother begged the priest to pray for him. There was nothing that could be done, but the woman was so distressed that the priest took the boy from her and carried him through into the sacristy, but in his haste he stumbled and fell on top of the child. The jolt of the fall or the weight of the priest must have pushed the water out of the boy’s lungs, for when the priest stooped to pick him up, the child coughed and began to draw breath. He carried the child back out into the church and his mother was overjoyed to discover the boy was alive. No one had seen the priest drop him, and before he had a chance to explain, everyone was talking about how the priest had prayed over a dead child and brought him back to life.
‘News of the miracle spread and people began to flock to the priest for help, the poor at first, but then the wealthy who left money and fine gifts at the church. They sent for him to come to their homes to lay hands on their sick and they were generous in their gratitude.’
‘The priest cured others?’ Adela interrupted.
Zophiel laughed bitterly. ‘Miracles are like murders; after the first one, each becomes easier than the last for, with each success, the miracle-worker’s certainty in himself becomes stronger. But curing the sick and raising the dead is not enough. People want drama. They want the grand gesture, just as at the mass the ignorant populace must have the pageant and the spectacle to appreciate the power and the glory of God. Offer them a quiet prayer and a simple laying-on of hands and they think nothing important has happened. So they must be given sweat and blood. Pass your hands over a man’s head, wrestle and groan and pull out a stone and tell him this is what has been causing his headache. Cry aloud in an agony of words, let them see the effort it costs, then hold up a bloody lump of gristle saying, “This I wrested from your belly.”’
Rodrigo shook his head disgustedly. ‘You called Camelot a liar for selling people relics and now you tell us this.’
‘I was not selling them the fake bones of saints and telling them to put their faith in lies. Don’t you understand? I was actually curing them. I only showed them the stones to make them appreciate what I was doing for them, but it was my hands that were healing them. I had the power to heal. God was working through me. He showed me that when I brought that child back from the dead. He chose me because my soul was pure, because I had worked to make it so.’ Zophiel was breathing hard, trying to regain control of himself.
‘So what went wrong, Zophiel?’ I asked quietly.
‘A girl. A stupid little whore and her mother. She was the youngest daughter of wealthy parents, a girl of about fourteen. She was overindulged and spoilt. She wouldn’t eat and when she was coaxed to, she would make herself vomit what she had eaten. She would lie for days sometimes, not speaking, just staring up at the ceiling. There were fits too, convulsions, not frequent, but enough to make her parents worry for her marriage prospects. The physicians couldn’t help her so they summoned me, as so many did in those days. I laid hands on her and pronounced her cured, but that very night she had another convulsion, worse this time than before.
‘Since she refused to a
ccept that she was cured I knew that she was persisting in some grievous sin. I examined her alone and finally she admitted that she was touching herself in her private places, arousing herself. I ordered her to stop, but though she swore that she had, I knew she had not, for her sickness continued. After that I saw her alone daily to hear her confession. I gave her penances, but still she persisted in her sickness. I stripped her and whipped her with a birch to help her cast out her lust. But she was so steeped in depravity that her wanton lust reached out to me. I began to dream of her naked body. When I tried to say mass she invaded my prayers. I knew she was trying to bewitch me. I whipped her harder and I whipped myself harder still. I whipped myself until I was bloody. I punished my own flesh in every way imaginable, by fasting, by denying myself sleep, by wearing iron spikes on a belt which dug into my flesh, but nothing prevailed against her.
‘As her sickness persisted, rumours began to creep round the town that I had lost my healing powers. Other clergy who were jealous of my miracles said that I had lost my power to heal because of some grievous sin. And then the girl’s mother came to my church. She flew at me, accusing me of having lain with her daughter, said her daughter had told her as much. Said she was going to tell her husband.’
Zophiel’s hand, the knuckles gleaming white in the moonlight, emerged from the darkness of his cloak and in the moonlight I saw the glint of silver from the knife he gripped.
‘I swear by God’s holy blood I did not have carnal knowledge of the girl. However much she had tempted me, I was true to my vows. I had kept myself pure. But that day as her mother stood screaming at me in my own church, I knew God had abandoned me and I could not defend myself against her lies. I knew what would happen. There would be the humiliation of an arrest, and even though I could claim trial in an ecclesiastical court, a charge of raping the young daughter of a wealthy and powerful man would not be treated lightly. It was my word against the girl’s and the punishment would be severe. I cursed myself for ever being alone with her.
Company of Liars Page 37
