Company of Liars

by Karen Maitland

  I had the feeling we were being watched, and turned. I thought I saw something dart into the shadows of a byre, but when I looked hard at the place I could see nothing. Rodrigo and Osmond kept turning their heads as if they too could sense something. The unnatural silence in the village was unnerving. It was almost a relief when a scrawny dog leaped out from behind one of the cottages and began to snarl and bark, still defending its toft for its owners long since dead. Osmond threw stones at it until it retreated, but it continued to bark its defiance.

  As we passed one of the boarded-up cottages I noticed that the corner of the door had been chipped away from the inside as though someone had been still alive when the door was nailed shut and had tried desperately to escape. Whoever it was had not succeeded, for the planks on the outside of the door remained firmly nailed in place. I shuddered to think of the horror of their final hours. Had they succumbed to the sickness of the dead entombed with them, or had they cruelly starved to death?

  The church was locked. Doubtless the priest had taken that precaution before he left. If the villagers could not pay their tithes they should have no access to God, or perhaps he thought they’d strip the place bare in his absence.

  The churchyard had not been scythed and long, wet grass grew up over the little wooden markers. There were several stone tombs where the wealthier and more worthy had been buried, but a fox had dug its den beneath one of them and yellow bones and pieces of skull lay scattered about it. I reminded myself to collect them before we left – better for their owner that his bones be miraculously translated into relics than scattered by scavengers. We found a spot close to the wall where if there were any markers they had long since rotted away, and Osmond and Rodrigo took turns to dig. They soon unearthed old bones, but laid them carefully aside to be replaced in the hole when they filled it.

  I dug a grave for the baby mermaid a few yards away between two rotting wooden crosses. My grave did not need to be wide or long; there was only a tiny body to fit into it. Then I carefully unwrapped the cage and the familiar smell of myrrh and aloes mingled with dried seaweed overwhelmed me. In burying her, it was almost like burying my brother a second time. I remembered standing at the tomb in the church when they opened it to lay his head inside, the cold, damp smell of decay rushing out, not masked by the incense and the candles which burned around us. I remember my mother’s sobs and my father’s set jaw, but I did not cry. I had cried that day my father had uttered those words, ‘I’d rather my son came home on a shield than as a coward.’ I had known that day he would not come home alive and I had cried then until I had no more tears left to shed. The day we finally buried his severed head my eyes were so dry that my eyelids rasped against them. It was all I could feel.

  I tried to break the lock off the mermaid’s cage with a sharp piece of stone. It took several attempts, but at last I opened the door and reached in. The little body was stiff, like a leather doll. I wondered how long she had been dead – months, years? I had forgotten to bring anything to wrap her in, so I laid her straight into the cold earth. Beside her I placed her little mermaid doll.

  Then I picked up the little silver hand-mirror, intending to put that in the grave with the mermaid child. I rubbed the tarnished silver surface. It’s many years since I looked into a mirror and I almost dropped it in the shock of seeing the face that peered out at me. They say mirrors cannot lie, but they speak a cruel and spiteful truth. It was as if I was looking back at a demon trapped in the mirror. Though I passed my fingers across my lumpy scar and empty eye socket many times a day, I had forgotten the horror of the sight of it. Now it came back to me as sharply as the day I had ordered that they bring me a mirror. They had begged me not to look, but I had insisted, and then I knew why the servants avoided looking at me when they spoke, why my sons stared and quickly looked away. Who could blame them?

  Yet, even after all these years, inside my head I am still unscarred, unmarked. I am still as I was when I was young. Now I had to face the fact that not only was I scarred, I was old. My face had withered like the faces of the crab-apple dolls they make for children. My hair was silver, the blue of my good eye had faded to the grey of a winter’s sky. My lips that had once kissed with such passion were thin and pale, and my wrinkled skin that had once been pale and smooth was now tanned almost as dark as the mermaid’s by the wind and sun. They say when you look into a mirror you see your soul and my soul was monstrous and ancient.

  I shuddered and quickly turned the mirror over. It was much thicker and heavier than I anticipated. Something had been inserted into the round frame on the back of the mirror, a polished piece of crystal, surrounded by a broad ring of silver, inscribed with symbols and studded with pearls. Beneath the crystal, and magnified by it, was a tiny fragment of bone. It was a relic, and a valuable one too, judging by the mount. I must have cried out in surprise for Osmond came across to find out the cause.

  ‘A reliquary,’ I said, holding it out so that he could see. ‘It was there all along in the mermaid’s cage.’

  Osmond peered at it. ‘I thought it was just a mirror.’

  ‘It always lay mirror side up, the back was hidden.’

  What had the blind healer said? – the best place to hide something is often in plain view.

  ‘Whose relic is it?’ Osmond asked.

  I turned the reliquary around, examining the symbols carved around the frame.

  ‘A broken chalice and a serpent. If this bird is meant to be a raven then this may be a relic of St Benedict. They say a jealous priest once poisoned the holy wine and bread and gave it to St Benedict. The serpent in the chalice represents the poison and when Benedict blessed the poisoned chalice, the chalice shattered. Then he called up a raven to carry off the poisoned host. The crosier is the symbol of authority as abbot, and can you see that, a book? That might represent the rule he wrote for monks and nuns.’

  ‘And that? What is that, a plant of some kind?’

  ‘A thorn bush. He used to hurl himself into thorns and nettles to mortify his flesh and keep him from the sin of lust. And this symbol, I think, is the rod of discipline he wielded to wipe out corruption and licentiousness.’

  ‘No wonder Zophiel had such a relic then. I’m surprised he didn’t have the actual rod.’

  ‘Pearls for chastity and purity, yes, I’m sure this is a relic of St Benedict. Whichever church had this taken from them has suffered a great loss. He’s the saint to whom many pray for a happy and peaceful death, so this relic must have attracted many pilgrims.’

  ‘Then this is something else Zophiel stole from Lincoln.’

  ‘There’s no doubt it’s stolen. No one would conceal a holy relic in a mermaid’s cage if they weren’t trying to smuggle it away from its rightful owners. But whether Zophiel stole it is a different matter. It depends on whether he preserved the mermaid and put her in the cage himself, or if he bought the whole thing complete from someone else. Three abbeys in France argue over which of them has the bones of St Benedict and whichever has them, they stole them from the abbey at Monte Cassino. If Zophiel bought this locked cage with the mermaid already in it from a merchant or a knight returning from France, he might not have realized what was behind the mirror any more than we did. We didn’t find keys to any of the boxes on Zophiel’s body. We don’t know that he had a key to this, unless it was concealed somewhere on the wagon.’

  Osmond frowned. ‘They call the Virgin Mary, “the mirror without stain”. I suppose Benedict might have approved of his bone being in a mirror.’

  ‘And the mirror absorbs and preserves the holiness of the relic and reflects evil back on to demons who look into it.’ I winced as I said this, thinking of my own reflection.

  ‘But Zophiel would never put a holy relic in a mermaid’s hand; that would have been the ultimate blasphemy to him,’ Osmond protested.

  ‘He may not have seen it that way. There was a mermaid who became a saint: St Murgen, a mortal woman given the body of a salmon to save her from drownin
g. St Comgall at Bangor baptized her because he wanted to be buried in the same coffin with her. They say there were so many miracles attributed to her after her death that she is counted as one of the Holy Virgins. Zophiel might have considered it the perfect hiding place for the relic of a man who was so insistent on chastity. It could have been Zophiel’s ultimate conjuring trick, the object in plain sight, but no one seeing it, because their attention was distracted by the mermaid.’

  Osmond looked down at the body. ‘So if Zophiel did steal the relic from Lincoln he would have hidden it in the mermaid’s cage, thinking that if the wolf took the other items back from him, he wouldn’t bother with the mermaid and Zophiel would get away with this relic even if he lost the rest.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘this may have been the one sleight of hand that fooled even poor Zophiel. He may have been carrying his most valuable treasure with him all this time and didn’t even realize he had it.’

  ‘Poor Zophiel,’ said Osmond indignantly. ‘You actually pity that wretch?’

  ‘I pity any man who doesn’t realize that what he desperately seeks he already possesses. This would have brought Zophiel everything he wanted – fame, money and respect. With this he could have bought a position of power and authority in any monastery or church he wanted.’

  ‘Maybe that’s exactly what he planned to do in Ireland, after he’d shaken off the wolf.’ Osmond’s frown deepened and he glanced over at Rodrigo who was methodically filling in Cygnus’s grave. ‘And if it is one of the pieces stolen from Lincoln and the wolf discovers it isn’t amongst the treasures he’s recovered, he’ll come after us again, won’t he? The Bishop will have told him exactly what’s been taken.’

  I hesitated, looking down at the crystal beneath which lay the tiny sliver of bone. Bone of the man whose rule had spread across all Christendom and now governed the lives of thousands of monks and nuns in the magnificent abbeys and monasteries built in his name. If this was a true relic, it was the only genuine one I’d ever had in my possession. But could it be genuine? Could it, after all these years, be the real thing?

  People say they feel a power coming out of true relics. Some say it’s like a wave of warm water washing over you, or a hot glow that rises up through your fingers until your whole body tingles. Others say it is a light of many colours that dances in front of your eyes or like the prickling of the skin you get after you’ve brushed against stinging nettles. But then people have claimed as much for the relics I have sold them, because they wanted to believe in them. Did I want to believe in this? Could I have the faith that would let me feel what I had created for others? My finger hovered over the spot where the bone lay, but I drew it back. I did not want to feel – nothing.

  ‘Osmond… I don’t think the Bishop’s wolf was ever following us.’

  He looked startled. ‘We know he didn’t kill Zophiel.’ He glanced apprehensively in Rodrigo’s direction again. ‘But Zophiel was sure he was out there.’

  ‘But as Zophiel himself said, look how hard it would be for a man alone to find food in these times, even with dogs. Why go through all that needless hardship, risking the pestilence, to track Zophiel for so long? Surely he’d have struck much sooner. He could have done it the night Jofre was killed; Zophiel was out alone then too.’

  ‘But you heard the howls, Camelot, we all did. Something has been stalking us and if it wasn’t the Bishop’s wolf, then what? A real wolf?’

  I shook my head. ‘Why would a wolf do that? Even if it was a crossbreed, half-wolf, half-dog, that had attached itself to us, we would surely have seen it slinking round the camp.’

  ‘But if it isn’t a man or an animal, Camelot, what on earth is it?’

  There was a screech behind us and we whipped round. A woman crouched a few yards away by one of the tombs, knees spread apart, her hands clawed in front of her as if she was ready to spring at us. She wasn’t old, maybe in her twenties, but she was naked, her hair matted, her skin so encrusted with dirt it was hard to see what colour it was underneath. Flat pendulous breasts hung over ribs so painfully thin you could count every one, but in contrast to her stick-thin limbs, her belly was swollen and hard. God’s blood, I thought, let that be with worms and not with child.

  She pointed at me. ‘I know you. You’re death come to torment me.’ She slapped the sides of her head viciously as if trying to beat something out of it.

  I hastily stuffed the mirror inside my shirt and hissed to Osmond, ‘Fill in the mermaid’s grave before she sees what’s in there. I’ll deal with her.’

  I took a step towards the woman who scuttled backwards on all fours again.

  ‘I know you. Don’t take me. Don’t take me!’ she shrieked.

  ‘I haven’t come for you,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘Won’t you tell me your name?’

  A sly look came over her. ‘Never give them your name. They have power over you, if they have your name. If death doesn’t know your name, he can’t call you. Always asking me my name, but I don’t tell him. Don’t tell him.’ She pressed her grimy hands over her mouth as if she feared the name might slip out by accident.

  ‘You’ve spoken to death before?’

  The woman raised her head, distracted by a flock of rooks wheeling and cawing overhead. ‘He tries to trick me. He uses different voices, sometimes like birds and sometimes like rain.’

  ‘How big is death?’

  The woman began slapping her head again. Then she suddenly stopped and held up her hands in front of her face, palms out, the thumb and forefinger of each hand touching to make a womb-shaped space through which she peered. ‘Tiny, tiny he is, like a man’s prick.’

  I reached down and picked up the cage that had contained the mermaid. ‘Next time he comes, you can catch him in there.’

  The woman put her head on one side, then shuffled closer, still crouching. She wrinkled up her nose, sniffing the unfamiliar odour.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Do you smell that? Death cannot resist that smell, he will creep inside and when he does, you can slam the door shut and keep him from taking you.’

  I put the cage full of shells down in front of me and backed off a few paces to allow the woman to scuttle forward and snatch it. She retreated to a safe distance and sat there crooning over it as if it was a great treasure. I felt a hand on my shoulder and jumped.

  Rodrigo was standing behind me. ‘You should not take the name of death in vain, Camelot, he walks too close to us.’

  ‘The cage will make her feel safer. Surely it’s good to ease the poor woman’s crazed mind.’

  Once he would have smiled at that. I wondered if he would ever smile again.

  We left the woman with her cage in the graveyard and retraced the way we had come. Not talking, but walking as quickly as we could, anxious to be out of this village of death as rapidly as possible.

  As I stared at those blinded windows, at the desolation of that street, where once children had blithely played and laughed, I was seized with a desperate hunger to know if my own children still lived. They would be grown men by now and have children of their own. I could pass them on the road and not even recognize them. Had they survived this? I had given everything I could to keep them from harm. Had that all been futile? I looked at the abandoned cottages and I saw my own house with boards nailed across its windows, a black cross slashed on its door. Was there somewhere a grave with my sons in it, or worse, no grave at all?

  We had reached the last few cottages when the naked woman leaped out again from behind one of the buildings and squatted in front of us in the middle of the street. In her hand she carried something bloody, half a rabbit, the fur still on it. She held it out towards us. ‘Food,’ she offered. She laid it in the dirt in front of us as I had done the cage and backed away a few feet. ‘Food,’ she repeated ‘for death.’

  Osmond grabbed my arm as if he really thought I was going to pick it up.

  I shook my head. ‘Thank you, but we have enough. You eat it.’
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  The woman looked at me slyly through her mane of tangled hair, then she darted forward, picked up the rabbit and ripping back the fur, began to gnaw ravenously on the raw, bloody carcass.

  26. The Place of the Hollows

  Looking back, I know it was Narigorm who led us to the place of the hollows. I had finally turned us north and she had let me do it. I thought I had won, but I should have known better. She knew exactly what we were walking into, I’m sure of that.

  The hollows lay between the trees, broad and shallow, like pools, but without any water. No trees or grass grew in them, nothing except strange spiky plants with red fleshy leaves, so that from a distance they looked like pools of blood. But as you walked across them you became aware of something else; the hollows were littered with the skeletons of small animals, the bleached bones and tiny skulls of rabbits, voles, mice, foxes, even birds. They were so numerous you couldn’t avoid crunching them underfoot. Some were newly dead, the shreds of dried flesh and fur still adhering to them; others were picked clean and whitened by the sun of several summers. In one, the skeletons of a sheep and lamb lay side by side. Among them were hundreds of snail shells, empty, transparent, scattered like petals by the wind. The hollows held a particular fascination for Narigorm. She spent hours sitting on the edge of the copse studying them, doubtless hoping to see something killed there.

  It had been nearly two weeks since we had buried Cygnus and with each passing day, Rodrigo was retreating further into himself. He no longer cared where he was going or what he was doing and it took the combined efforts of Adela, Osmond and me to rouse him to the simplest of tasks. He wouldn’t even look at baby Carwyn now, as if he was afraid to love anyone or anything again in case, by doing so, he destroyed them.

  Something changed inside Osmond too the day we buried Cygnus. He had already made up his mind that our best hope of finding food lay along the coast, but now he was convinced that Zophiel had been right, there would be ships at the coast, a boat that could take us all to the safety of Ireland. We could sell Xanthus, he said, to pay for the voyage and if that was not enough we could work our passage. I tried to tell him that there would be little chance of Ireland escaping pestilence, it had probably already fallen to it, but he wouldn’t listen, for the wolf was on our trail once more and, like Zophiel, Osmond had come to fear the beast even more than the pestilence. He clung to the belief that only the sea could protect us from him.