Company of Liars

by Karen Maitland

  ‘King Oriant was heartbroken that his wife had left him, but it was not long before his advisers persuaded him to remarry and he took a new bride. But though his young wife was lovely, she was mortal, and how can human beauty compare to the beauty of a sylph? Each time the King looked at his sons, with their eyes the colour of the midnight sky and their hair the colour of moonlight, he sighed. His new wife grew jealous and looked for a way to destroy his sons, for she knew that as long as he looked on them, he would never forget his swan bride. So she began to spy on them and soon discovered the secret of the chains. One night when the young men had transformed themselves into swans she stole the necklaces from their room, all save one, that belonging to the eldest son, Helyas, for he had hidden his chain in a mousehole and a spider had woven a web across it, so that she could not find it. Before dawn the swans returned and flew into the room. Helyas at once resumed his human form, but the others could not find their chains and as dawn broke they were forced to fly away.

  ‘For seven years Helyas searched the castle looking for the chains and for seven years the swans returned each night and flew away each dawn. Then on the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year, Helyas at last found the chains. He hurried out to greet his brothers and as each swan landed on the water, he threw the chain around his neck and each brother resumed his human form. But in his joy Helyas did not notice that the chain of the youngest swan was broken, and when Helyas threw it, the chain fell from the swan’s neck to the bottom of the deep lake and the youngest brother remained a swan for ever, bound to serve his brothers in that form.

  ‘Many miles away the Emperor Otto was holding court at Nimwegen. The Duchess of Bouillon pleaded with him for justice against the Saxon Duke Renier who accused her of having committed adultery when her late husband was alive. As brother to her husband, he declared that her lands should therefore be forfeit to him. Adultery in a woman so highborn was a grave charge and the Emperor ordered her to prove her innocence in trial by combat. If her champion lost the fight she would be put to death and her lands given to Renier. But so fierce a warrior was Renier, so skilled with the sword and so merciless to those who opposed him, that no champion would come forward to stand for her.

  ‘After three days of searching, still no champion could be found and the Emperor ordered his soldiers to seize the Duchess and put her to death. But just as they laid hands upon the weeping woman, a cry rang out from the river and people turned to see an unknown knight gliding down the river towards them in a boat pulled by a swan. Helyas, eldest of the swan brothers, stepped ashore and offered himself as champion against Renier. The battle was long and bloody, both men were skilled and courageous, but right was on the side of the innocent Duchess, so Helyas was able to slay Renier.

  ‘As a reward for his services the Duchess offered the hand of her beautiful daughter, Beatrix, in marriage, bestowing all her lands and wealth on the couple. Helyas agreed on one condition, that neither Beatrix nor her mother should ever ask him his name or his lineage. They both readily agreed and so the wedding took place.

  ‘Seven joyful and prosperous years Helyas and Beatrix spent together and their union was blessed with a beautiful daughter, Ida, who had her father’s dark eyes. Each day at dawn and at sunset, Helyas went down to the river to talk to his brother the swan, and each time she saw him feeding the bird with his own hand, Beatrix wondered about her mysterious knight, but she kept her vow and did not ask him who he was.

  ‘But many other nobles in the land were jealous of the wealth and happiness of Helyas and Beatrix. “Who is this knight?” they asked. “Why would a man of noble birth wish to hide his lineage, unless he had disgraced his family’s name?” The rumours reached Beatrix’s ears. Even her own serving maids whispered among themselves that perhaps this swan knight she had married was no knight at all, that he was of common birth, ignoble birth even. Finally Beatrix could bear the whispering no longer and one night when Helyas returned from the lake she asked him that question which she had sworn she would never ask.

  ‘Helyas was a knight and the law of chivalry demanded that he answer her truthfully. But as soon as he had spoken the truth, he saw his brother swan appear in the river, drawing the little boat. Helyas stepped into the boat and sailed away.

  ‘Their dark-eyed daughter, Ida, grew up to marry Eustace, Count of Boulogne, and Ida’s son, Godfrey de Bouillon, became the great knight commander of the First Crusade, Defender of the Holy Sepulchre, who some now title the first King of Jerusalem.

  ‘But as for Beatrix, she never laid eyes on her beloved husband again. The Swan Knight had vanished. She searched for him for the rest of her life, but she never found him, and when at last she knew she never would, she died of guilt and grief, for she had betrayed the most gallant knight in Christendom. She had learned the truth, but the truth had destroyed them both.’

  There was silence as Cygnus finished his story. Then Adela gave a great sigh of satisfaction and touched Cygnus’s arm. ‘That was beautiful, Cygnus.’

  But he was not looking at her. Instead he was looking intently at Rodrigo. For a long time they stared at each other, comprehension dawning in Rodrigo’s face. He looked horrified, then he turned away and buried his face in his hands. Finally he raised his head again and opened his mouth as if he was about speak, but Cygnus shook his head.

  ‘No, Rodrigo, don’t say it. The guilt is mine. I am a coward. Zophiel was right; I am neither man nor bird. I have neither an immortal soul in the next life nor purpose in this one. I had nothing to lose. It should have been me who did it. Forgive me, Rodrigo, forgive me.’

  He adjusted the heavy purple cloak around his shoulders and strode rapidly away into the darkness. Overhead we heard a singing in the air, three swans flying towards the river. Spreading their strong white wings, they glided down and disappeared from sight.

  25. The Mermaid and the Mirror

  We searched for Cygnus most of the night and found him just after dawn, about half a mile downstream. His body was floating face down in the river. His shirt sleeve had caught on the sharp broken ends of a clump of reeds and had held him against the bank, otherwise he would have been swept away. The purple cloak had floated out to cover his head. We knew from the way the body drifted lifelessly in the current that there was no hope, but Rodrigo plunged in recklessly as if he thought he could still save him, if only he could get to him quickly enough. Osmond and I helped Rodrigo to haul the body out. As soon as he had clambered out himself, Rodrigo fell on Cygnus’s body, pushing and pressing him as if, by shaking him, he could get him to breathe. Finally, Osmond had to restrain him.

  ‘It’s no use, Rodrigo. He’s gone. He’s been dead for hours. He must have fallen in last night and the cloak pulled him under.’

  Rodrigo pulled Cygnus towards him and sat cradling him in his arms, as if he was a sleeping child.

  ‘What I can’t understand is why we didn’t hear a splash or a cry,’ Osmond continued. ‘Unless he had already walked too far from the camp.’

  Rodrigo looked up at us, his face haggard. ‘He did not want us to hear.’

  Osmond’s eyes opened wide. ‘You’re not saying he deliberately went into the river to… to drown himself? But he was sitting here last night with all of us, calmly telling us a story. Why would a man do that and then go out and kill himself? Why would he do that to us? We were his friends. None of us ever said anything cruel to him. The only one who tormented him was Zophiel and he’s dead.’

  I thought of what Osmond had said to Cygnus when he failed to return with a midwife for Adela. How quickly we forget our own cruelty.

  ‘He did it because Zophiel is dead.’ Tears were now rolling down Rodrigo’s cheeks.

  ‘What do you mean because Zophiel is dead?’

  ‘I think Rodrigo means he… he drowned himself out of guilt,’ I said.

  Osmond sank on to the grass, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘So are you telling me that Narigorm was right all along, that it wasn’t the wol
f that killed Zophiel, it was Cygnus…? Not that I blame him. But why kill himself? Did he think we would turn him in?’

  ‘No!’ Rodrigo shouted. ‘No, he did not murder Zophiel. Il sangue di Dio! Did you not hear what he said last night, the last thing he said? He said it should have been him. He thought he had forced me to become a murderer, because he was too cowardly to do it himself. Zophiel accused him of not even being able to defend himself and he thought I believed that too.’

  Osmond’s expression was growing more bewildered by the minute.

  I crouched down and put an arm round Rodrigo’s wet shoulders. ‘But Cygnus was mistaken, wasn’t he? You didn’t kill Zophiel. It was the wolf.’ I wanted desperately to believe that.

  Rodrigo looked down at Cygnus’s body. The eyes were closed, the face peaceful and smooth, all the anxiety of the last few weeks washed away. ‘I killed him.’

  It was impossible to tell if he was talking about Cygnus or Zophiel.

  ‘No, Rodrigo, listen to me. You didn’t kill anyone. You’re not to blame for either of their deaths.’

  Rodrigo spoke in a low monotone, his gaze fixed on Cygnus’s face. ‘When Zophiel left the drovers’ hut, I went after him. I begged him to leave Cygnus alone before he drove him to his death as he had driven Pleasance and Jofre to theirs. He said they had brought their own deaths upon themselves. It was nothing to do with him, he said. Sodomites like Jofre, he said, are condemned in this life and the next. His death was God’s judgment for his perversion. Then he turned his back and walked away. I threw the knife as he walked away from me.’

  Suddenly, I remembered the two lepers on the road in the gorge who had beaten the traveller to death, how they had turned on Osmond. A picture flashed into my mind of Rodrigo throwing his knife, of the leper’s screaming, then falling dead. With a sickening jolt, I knew he was telling the truth. Rodrigo had murdered Zophiel.

  ‘And the arms?’ Osmond asked shakily. ‘You… cut off the arms?’

  ‘With his own knife. I wanted to make it look as if the wolf had punished him for stealing, that is what I told myself, but maybe in my heart I wanted to make him like those people he despised so much.’

  I stared at the rushing water, glinting like armour in the early-morning sun. Somewhere in there lay Zophiel’s knife.

  I spoke without looking at Rodrigo. ‘When Narigorm used Zophiel’s knife last night, you told Narigorm the knife had Zophiel’s blood on it. But you weren’t there when we found the body. So you wouldn’t have known Zophiel’s own knife had been used on him, unless you’d done it. That’s what Cygnus realized last night. That’s when he knew you’d killed him and he thought you’d done it for him. Like Beatrix, he learned the truth, and the truth…’

  Rodrigo closed his eyes tightly as if he was in terrible pain.

  We wrapped Cygnus’s body in his cloak and tied him across Xanthus’s back. We’d no idea what we were going to do with it. We broke camp and walked on, veering away from the river as soon as we could, for none of us wanted to see or hear it. We didn’t discuss where we might be going; it hardly seemed to matter any more. I followed behind with Rodrigo, who walked in a daze without seeming to know where he was or who was around him. Even Xanthus seemed to sense what she was carrying and walked solemnly as Osmond led her. We had let Adela believe it was an accident, but I could see from the expression on Narigorm’s face she didn’t believe that. She knew Cygnus had killed himself, just as she knew Rodrigo had killed Zophiel, and we had not told her that either.

  We saw the man and boy cutting peat on the moor a long way before we reached them. It was a lonely, isolated spot and the man must have been desperate for fuel to cut it half-frozen and wet. Several piles of peat turfs stood around the long trough he had dug out and more had been stacked on a small sledge ready to be dragged off. There was no sign of a dwelling nearby so they must have walked a long way to the site, but without fuel, a family can die of cold and hunger if they can’t cook what little they catch.

  The barefooted boy spotted us before his father and gave a warning. Both stood, spades in hand, warily watching us approach. All around them lay great pools of water where men had cut peat for years and the trench where they worked was filling up as fast as they dug. Even if it did not rain again between now and midsummer it would take months for all the water to seep out from the land.

  As we drew close, the man’s gaze was fixed upon the unmistakable shape of a body lying across Xanthus’s back. He crossed himself three times and took several hasty steps backwards, dragging the boy with him. I needed no runes to know what he was thinking. I tried to reassure him.

  ‘Have no fear, master, he didn’t die of contagion. An accident. He drowned.’

  The peat-cutter crossed himself again, looking embarrassed. ‘God rest his soul.’ He advanced a couple of steps towards us. ‘The corpse road lies yonder.’ He pointed. ‘You can just see the crosses marking it.’

  In the distance were several shapes which I had taken to be bushes, but now I could see they were dark stone crosses. He plainly thought that was where we were making for, not surprisingly since we were carrying a corpse.

  ‘Then a parish church lies at the end of the road?’

  ‘St Nicholas at Gasthorpe. But it won’t do any good to go there. There’s no priest any more that can give you burial.’

  ‘The pestilence?’

  He crossed himself again as if the mere mention of the word might call it down upon himself. ‘Priest left afore that. They’d been having a hard time of it these last years what with the bad harvests and then the sheep sickening. A lot of families starved. Couldn’t grow enough on their bits of land to feed themselves and what they did grow mostly failed these last years. Couldn’t pay church-scots or tithes, which didn’t please the priest. But if a well’s run dry you can threaten it with hell and damnation till Michaelmas and you’ll still not get a drop of water from it. That’s why the priest took off. No one’s seen hide nor hair of him since. Then when the… when it came, that finished the rest of the village off, leastways, those that stayed on their tofts anyway.’ He crossed himself again. Even avoiding uttering the word aloud was not enough to ward off its evil.

  He glanced again at Cygnus’s body. ‘You’ll be lucky to find a priest anywhere in these parts.’ He edged a little closer and lowered his voice, as if afraid, in this vast expanse of nothing, we might be overheard. ‘Someone told me that the Bishop of Norwich said anyone now may shrive a dying man, if there’s not a religious to be found to do it, and anyone may bury him too. I buried two of my little ’uns in the churchyard myself. No one to say the words, but at least they were safe in holy ground. There’s nothing to stop you doing the same.’ He gave us a confidential wink. ‘After all, who’s to know save the others that are already six feet under, and they’ve no cause to complain, have they?’

  He shook his head wonderingly. ‘Who’d have thought it? This time last year you couldn’t piss without the blessing of a priest; now any Tom, Dick or Harry, even a woman, can baptize you, marry you, shrive you and bury you. And there’s the Bishop saying, go ahead, do it yourselves, you don’t need a priest. Makes you wonder why we’ve been paying all those scots and tithes to the priests all these years, doesn’t it?’

  The corpse road was hardly a track at all, just a series of small granite crosses set up at intervals to mark the way for those who had to carry their dead the many miles from the hamlets and villages that had no parish church licensed for burial. We followed them until we saw the outskirts of the village. The peat-cutter was right, it was deserted. The nearest cottages looked as if they had been abandoned for months and the field strips were overgrown with weeds.

  Osmond tethered Xanthus to a tree, before turning to us.

  ‘Adela and Narigorm should stay here with the baby. There may be corpses. We’ll go in on foot.’

  ‘But what about you, Osmond?’ Adela wailed. ‘You can’t risk your life.’

  Rodrigo began to unfasten Cygnus’
s body. ‘She is right, Osmond, you stay. I can carry him. I can dig the grave. No one else needs to come.’

  ‘I need to come,’ Osmond said, flushing slightly. ‘Said things I didn’t mean. Never got round to apologizing. That story he told us, the night we found him stowed away in the wagon, about the cordwainer being the one who killed that child, I didn’t believe it then, but I do now, have done for a long time, yet I never got round to telling him. I owe him this much, especially after what you both did for Adela and the baby.’

  Rodrigo nodded and briefly grasped Osmond’s shoulder. I realized bitterly that none of us had ever got round to telling Cygnus we believed him about the child. Osmond found the spade and Rodrigo heaved Cygnus’s body across his shoulder.

  ‘Wait.’ A thought struck me and I started to untie the mermaid’s box from Xanthus. ‘We’ll bury her in the churchyard too. It’s as good a place as any to lay her to rest.’

  Osmond stared. ‘You can’t, she wasn’t human. You can’t bury something like that on consecrated ground She was just a…’

  ‘A freak, a beast? Isn’t that what Zophiel used to say of Cygnus?’

  He blushed and turned away.

  So after weeks of trying to avoid the pestilence villages we finally entered one, not to find food for the living, but burial for the dead. Weeds were beginning to grow along the main street. Some of the cottage doors and shutters lay wide open – doubtless they had been looted for wood or anything usable after the owners abandoned them. More sinister were the ones nailed shut from the outside with large black crosses painted on their doors and windows. I wondered how many dead lay inside them. So near to a parish church, yet there would be no consecrated ground for them to rest in.