The Plague Charmer

by Karen Maitland

  They weren’t listening, too busy boasting and taunting each other with tales of dead bodies and ghosts.

  A lock of Aldith’s sandy hair had escaped its binding and was snaking over her freckled brow. She pulled off the cloth wrapping her head and flipped her long hair forward, so that she could rewind it. The locks brushed the boy’s leg and I wondered if he’d watched his own mother binding her hair. Where was she now? A slave on some stinking ship? Drowned? Maybe she was grieving in a cottage just like mine, not knowing what had befallen her chillern, who’d simply walked out of her door one day and vanished. I hoped she hadn’t seen them die. I prayed she hadn’t. It must be the hardest thing in the whole world to watch your boy dying and be powerless to snatch him back to life. There is no name for such a grief.

  Aldith tucked the end of the bleached cloth under the twist about her head. ‘Best get these clothes off them while we’re waiting for the water.’ She drew her knife. ‘May as well cut them off.’ She grimaced. ‘If it were a drowned man’s clothes I’d save them, but murdered chillern . . . I’d not see any living child put in those. A dead child always takes a living one to play with. Doesn’t do to tempt the ninth wave.’

  She’d no need to explain. As soon as we could both toddle, every mam and granddam in the village had warned us to beware the ninth wave. That’s how we’d learned to count, by watching the waves. Eight waves will gently break, the ninth wave will take you. The spirits of dead children rode on that wave. The ninth wave was a child stealer and it had surely stolen these little ones.

  Aldith began to slit the girl’s sodden kirtle, motioning me to unbutton the boy’s short tunic. But the cord fastenings had swelled in the water, and wouldn’t slide over the horn buttons, so I, too, drew out my knife and began to cut. Aldith worked deftly, slicing up the girl’s sleeve, as I swept the pieces of the boy’s tunic on to the bracken on the floor.

  Aldith shrieked, dropping the knife with a clatter on to the table. For a moment, I thought she must have sliced her finger, then an evil stench, worse even than rotting fish or foul meat, burst into the room. Aldith was staring down at the point of her knife, which was covered with a thick yellowish black ooze. Giving me a stricken glance, she pushed me aside and ran round the table until she was standing behind the girl. Grasping the child’s bruised wrist between a trembling finger and thumb, she lifted the arm so that the light from the door fell on it. There, under the armpit, was a dark swelling, as big as a hen’s egg. Thick pus and blackened blood oozed from the boil where the tip of Aldith’s knife had nicked the skin.

  Aldith let the child’s arm fall with a thud on to the table. Grabbing me, she pulled me out into the sunshine and sank on to the bench outside, pale and shaking, her forehead beaded with sweat.

  Bile rose in my throat and it was all I could do not to vomit. How many nights in the past thirteen years had I woken shaking with terror, that smell filling my nostrils? How many times had I relived the burning shame of turning from my mam, of pulling my fingers from her hot sticky hand, of running from that cottage, running from that terrible, nauseating stench? When I’d finally steeled myself to return, it was too late. She was dead. She had died alone. Her last thought, that I had fled from her.

  A chatter of shrill voices made me look up. Luke, Hob and Col were straggling back up the path towards us, bent sideways to balance the pails of water. In a daze I watched them come closer and closer. Then I was on my feet, running towards them, shouting and waving my arms.

  ‘Get away! Get away! Don’t come any closer. Go!’

  The boys stopped and stared at me in alarm. Little Hob dropped his pail so suddenly the cold water drenched his legs. His face crumpled and, letting out a wail, he tried to run to my arms. But I backed away, screaming at Luke to take his brother down to their father. Hob, sobbing with fright, fought his brother to get to me, but Luke dragged him down the track, clearly convinced that I had gone mad.

  ‘Mam?’ Col stood a few yards off, gazing uncertainly at his mother. She lifted her head as if she had only just realised he was there. ‘Set the water down carefully, boy,’ she said. ‘You go find your father. Tell him . . . tell him to get those graves dug quick, but deep. Deep as he can.’ Her tone was flat and dead, and that seemed to frighten Col more than my shouting. For once he asked no questions, but ran.

  Chapter 11

  Matilda

  St Antony the Abbot is the patron saint of gravediggers, for he walled himself up in a desert tomb and struggled with the afflictions with which the devil tormented him – slothfulness, boredom and the ghosts of women.

  As soon as I approached Sara’s cottage I knew that I had been vindicated. God had written His warning across the heavens for all to see, and now, as closely as a shadow follows a man, His curse had fallen upon the village. Sara and Aldith sat on the bench outside. Sara had always been a small, slight woman, but she seemed to have shrunk even smaller in the hour since I’d last seen her. Her beechnut hair was half tumbled from its cap, and the crescent scar on her cheek where a widgebeast had kicked her seemed to stand out white as bone against her wind-tanned skin.

  The two women scarcely lifted their heads as I approached. Sara murmured a warning, but I could smell and see all I needed the moment I glanced through the open doorway. I pulled the door firmly closed – had they no understanding of what must be done? – and hurried several paces away, lifting my head into the breeze from the sea and trying to rid my lungs of the poisonous miasma.

  ‘I warned this village. God is not mocked. The stench of wickedness rises up to the throne of Heaven itself and He has come to cleanse it.’

  Aldith heaved herself from the bench. ‘Satisfied are you now, you bitter old hag? Suppose you want me to tell that foreigner, Janiveer, she was right too.’

  I saw again Janiveer turning that glittering white stone on the path, around and around, against the sun. It must have been just at the moment those drowned children were discovered in the fish trap. Had she summoned their corpses here? Drawn them towards her through the waves by some invisible thread? Had she infested their bodies with this sickness? God permits witches and demons to succeed in their wickedness to punish sinners. If they had allowed me to fetch Father Cuthbert perhaps even then God would have stayed His hand, but they took no more notice of that saintly man than they did of me.

  Aldith was pulling at the winding sheets I had tucked under my arm. ‘Since you’re so set on them having a decent burial let’s get on with it. Sooner we get those bodies wrapped and in the ground, the safer we’ll all be.’

  ‘Safer!’ I hissed. ‘Do you not know that stench? Do you not understand what lies inside? All your family may carry the contagion now. You may all die!’

  ‘No!’ Sara stumbled to the door and stood against it as if she meant to keep death out, like a beggar that could be driven from her threshold. ‘My chillern’ve not been near the bodies. They’ll not fall sick.’

  Aldith glanced sharply at her, frowning. Sara flushed slightly and lowered her head.

  ‘But you both have,’ I said, ‘and her husband.’

  Aldith snatched the winding sheets from my arm. ‘Give me those, ’less you’re offering to wrap the bodies yourself. Good mind to wind you in these. Keep your poisonous tongue still.’ She nodded at Sara. ‘You stay out here. I’ll do it. No sense in both of us . . .’

  Sara lifted her chin like a defiant child, glaring at me as if this was my fault. ‘It’s my cottage they’re in. My table they’re laid on.’ She flung the door open with a crash.

  The stench of rotting flesh rolled out again. They both recoiled, gagging, and stood swaying for a moment. Then, taking a deep gulp of air, Aldith followed Sara inside.

  Chapter 12

  Will

  Riddle me this: How may a man discern a cow in a flock of sheep?

  I reckon the whole of the village was gathered outside Sybil’s brew-and bake-house that afternoon. Those who arrived first were perched on kegs or upturned boats. Others leaned a
gainst walls or even on the mud-horses they used as sledges to cross the bay at low tide. The only families who weren’t present were Elis’s and Daveth’s.

  When people get scared they huddle up like sheep, bleating for any scrap of news. Me? Well, the villagers might call me skiddy-arse, but I feel fear just as keenly as any longshanks. And if I was going to have to flee that village at least I wanted to be sure I was running away from danger and not straight back into its jaws. Believe me, I had every intention of going, if the rumours turned out to be true. I’d no family or home or trade to leave behind. The only thing that had kept me in Porlock Weir so long was sheer idleness. But the threat of death is a surer cure for that vice than any priest’s sermon.

  Sybil, never one to let a sale pass her by, bustled among the villagers with two great flagons of ale in her brawny arms, refilling beakers and dropping the coins into the purse dangling from the belt that was squeezed around her great sow-belly. Crabfish, a simple lad, who lolloped along with a sideways gait, edged closer. Curiosity always drew him to any crowd. He held out his own beaker, grinning eagerly up at Sybil, though he had no coin. She shook her head sternly. Then, glancing round to make sure no one was watching – Sybil would never let any man think she was growing soft – she poured a good measure of ale into Crabfish’s beaker and swiftly moved on.

  After a deal of muttering and murmuring, and no sign of the bailiff Cador being in any hurry to start the meeting, Skiener drained his beaker in a single swallow and thumped on the barrel. ‘We have to make sure news of this doesn’t get out of the village.’

  ‘But it’s my duty to report it,’ Cador protested. ‘I’ll lose my job, my cottage, everything if Sir Nigel discovers the matter. He’s a hard man, not given to mercy.’

  ‘And not given to visiting his manor at Porlock neither,’ Skiener retorted. ‘When have you ever seen him in these parts? Too busy fighting the Black Prince’s battles.’

  ‘I see his steward enough, though. Always nosing around, he is,’ Cador said sullenly. ‘If so much as a rabbit dies in one of his warrens, Master Wallace gets to hear of it and demands a reckoning.’

  ‘Then you’d best make sure he doesn’t hear of this. Else you’ll not be the only one without food in your belly or a roof to sleep under. Once ’tis known abroad, do you think any goodwife’ll buy fish from us, or any merchants pay us to carry ship’s cargoes up over the moors? As it is, not a soul, save us, knows those chillern were ever here, or what killed them. And none outside the village will know, unless folk go whispering and pistering.’

  The Holy Hag, Matilda, stepped forward. I knew she’d never be able to resist having her say. I would have smiled to myself, if my face wasn’t permanently set in a grin.

  ‘But we all know the children were here,’ she said primly. ‘Sara and Aldith stripped the bodies. Those women could already be infested with the contagion . . . them and their families, too.’

  ‘If that’s true, you can tell them to stay away from my hearth,’ Cecily, the blacksmith’s wife, said, wiping the sweat from her nose. ‘I’ll not have them coming here, or any of their kin. My John was living out Exeter way last time the pestilence ran through this land. Saw it with his own eyes – you tell them, John. Priest who was perfectly well that morning went to shrive a woman who was dying, and by the next morning the priest hisself were dead of pestilence and so were a half-dozen other souls he’d met in the street on his way home. Isn’t that right, John?’ Her husband half opened his mouth to reply, but couldn’t squeeze in a single word. ‘If those women go wandering about the village,’ Cecily continued, ‘we’ll all be stricken. Won’t matter then if the other villages don’t trade with us ’cause we’ll all be dead.’

  There was a swelling murmur of agreement. The bailiff held up his hand for silence.

  ‘Then Sara and Aldith must stay inside, till it be proved if they’re sick or not. The two of them can stay in Sara’s. It’s a good step from the other houses in the village. No one’s to cross their threshold or—’

  ‘But there’s no cause to go painting signs on her door for all the world to see,’ Skiener interrupted. ‘We all know which cottage it is to avoid it.’

  ‘It’s not just the women should be shut in,’ Matilda said. ‘Their boys were in that cottage when the mothers were stripping the bodies. Sara tried to deny it, but I saw the look that passed between her and Aldith. I know she was lying.’

  ‘Then the boys will have to be kept in the cottage too,’ Cador said. ‘And the door sealed so none of them can go wandering about.’

  ‘Those chillern of theirs run around the village, like flies round the backside of a sheep,’ his wife, Isobel, added. ‘Locking them in will give us all a few days of peace, sick or not.’ She brushed down her skirts as if the very thought had ruffled her fine feathers.

  ‘All very well saying they’ve to be shut in,’ Bald John said, ‘but how’s it to be done? If there’s one thing that’ll get Elis riled up it’s anyone threatening his family. He’s a big man, handy with his fists too.’ He massaged his jaw. ‘I wouldn’t count on Elis and Daveth standing idly by while we shut up their wives and sons in the cottage. And what’s to stop them letting their kin out the moment we leave?’

  ‘Then we must keep them locked up ’n’ all,’ the bailiff said impatiently. ‘Aldith and Daveth are still sleeping up at the cottage with Elis, aren’t they?’

  He paused and looked round the assembled villagers. With a nod and a flick of his hand, he picked out a half-dozen or so of the brawnier men. ‘You meet me back here soon as it’s good and dark. Rest of you keep to your homes tonight. You’ve heard naught. You say naught and you do naught.’

  There are times in a dwarf’s life when he might almost be grateful to the god or man who fashioned him into a bandy-legged runt. At least we’re not called upon to wall up children alive with the angel of death. But fear was already lapping around the cottages, trickling in beneath each closed door. You could see the cold tide of it rising in the eyes of every man and woman who was old enough to remember. With it came the savage instinct to lash out, drive off, even kill if they were cornered. And, believe me, there is no cruelty a man will shrink from inflicting on others to protect his own flesh and blood.

  Chapter 13

  Sara

  A fresh fish and poor friend soon grow ill-favoured.

  I’d never have said, of course, but truth was I couldn’t wait for Aldith’s cottage to dry out so they could return to their own home. With all those bodies crowded into mine, I couldn’t breathe. I felt as if they were all piled on top of me, like stones over a grave. Goda was so near her time she needed to be off the cold earth floor, but she couldn’t climb up the ladder into the hayloft, so Elis gave up his space in our bed, leaving me to share it with her. Aldith, with her two youngest and my little Hob, slept up in the loft, while Elis, Daveth, Luke and Col bedded down on the bracken on the floor. From the snores and snuffles, it sounded as if the whole pack of them was fast asleep, save me. I couldn’t rest.

  We’d thrown the drowned chillern’s clothes on the fire outside, stirring up the embers and piling dried seaweed on top till they caught ablaze in spite of being sodden. We opened the door wide, burned sprigs of wild thyme and scrubbed the table with kneeholly and sand. Aldith and the menfolk said the stench had been driven out, but I could still smell it. And I could still see the face of that little girl, her eyes staring up at me, her mouth open as if she was crying out to me. I wanted to comfort her, soothe her to sleep. Wrapping the winding sheet over her face felt like smothering my own child.

  No one but Daveth, Aldith and I had gone to mourn those nameless pieces of flotsam, for word of what they carried had flashed around the village faster than a lightning ball. There were no words spoken. Skiener never came. As I watched clods of earth falling on to the cloth, saw the dint where they landed, I winced as if the flesh beneath could still feel them and be bruised. I urged Daveth to cover them quickly and I carried the rocks to pile over the
grave to seal that foul black cloud down in the pit, but it was all I could do to stop myself digging through the earth with my bare hands to rescue those little ones.

  The day they had laid my mam in that long trench next to all the others, faceless, nameless beneath their winding sheets, I’d known the guilt of wanting that foul corpse hidden away quickly, yet the pain of wanting to drag Mam out. A voice kept crying out in my head telling me that if I could rip the smothering cloth away from her face, she would look up at me from clear blue eyes and smile as if she’d woken from a sleep. In the end, they’d had to drag me from her grave.

  I shivered, pulling the blanket tighter around me, but Goda, in her sleep, tugged it back, whimpering like a babby. The ladder to the hayloft creaked. Hob clambered down and stumbled to the door, ignoring the groans of protest as he tripped over the bodies of the men and his brother on the way. Even though it was dark, he refused to use the pisspot, for his cousin Col teased him mercilessly about his ‘little worm’, as he dubbed it, and though I told him it would grow in time, Hob had taken to hiding himself away from Luke and Col whenever he pissed.

  Hob dragged on the cord to lift the wooden latch. I wondered if he would remember to close it behind him, to keep the mice out. But he pulled it shut. I lay tense listening for his return, but there were so many snores, snuffles, creaks and rustles from those sleeping all around, it was hard to make out any sounds outside but the wind in the trees and the distant roar of the sea.

  A sharp cry made me sit up. A bird? A vixen? Goda mumbled in her sleep pulling the blanket closer. Packs of foxes had come out of the forest to savage children, that was what Janiveer had said, but I hadn’t really believed it, thought it was just a tale. But the pestilence had come to the village, like she said. A cold sweat drenched me. Hob was out there alone in the dark. The foxes, their green eyes glowing, were creeping towards him between the twisted tree trunks. I could hear their paws on the path, their snarls, their snapping teeth.