The Plague Charmer

by Karen Maitland

  I ran into the cottage, snatching up empty sacks and a pot. When I came out the boy and beast had vanished. They must have taken the other track that led straight down into the village. I hurried towards the sea. I’d not walked more than a few yards before sweat was running down my back and my legs were trembling with tiredness. Before the pestilence came, I could’ve run all the way from the sea up to my cottage. Now I was breathless even walking down. But I couldn’t afford to rest, else all the grain would be gone.

  Goda needed bread if her milk was to keep flowing, and when Luke and Hob returned, they’d be starving, they always were, and I must have food to give them. At least, that was what I told myself, but truth was, I had such hunger myself for bread or beans or any solid mouthful, I’d have waded through a bay of stinging jellyfish to get it.

  Cecily came hurrying hard on my heels and that bitterweed, Matilda. News had plainly spread that a widgebeast was coming into the village, for a small crowd was beginning to gather in the square before Sybil’s bake-house. Katharine hovered in the shadow of one of the cottages. Cecily, catching sight of her, spat at her and the rest turned their backs, but Katharine didn’t retreat. I don’t know why she lingered. She must surely have realised that no one would let her have so much as a single grain, even if it fell in the dirt. They’d not forgiven her for hiding her husband’s sickness and brazenly walking about the village when she knew there was pestilence in her house.

  Isobel, Cador’s wife, bustled along from her cottage, shouting orders before she’d even reached us. ‘It’s no use you all crowding round. As his wife, the bailiff would want me to take charge. I’ll inspect what he has sent and decide what measure each goodwife can buy.’

  Sybil folded her great meaty arms. ‘If it’s flour or grain then it should all come to me to bake. I know better than any here how to stretch it and I’ll see bread’s shared out fairly.’

  ‘If there’s grain to be had, then it’s good strong ale we should be brewing with it,’ Abel grumbled. ‘Half the village has got flux from drinking nowt but water.’

  ‘All the more reason to put solid bread in your belly,’ Sybil retorted.

  ‘Only way bread’ll cure it is if I shove it up—’ He broke off, a look of fear spreading across his wrinkled face.

  Alarmed, I turned to see what he was staring at. The shaggy widgebeast was ambling round the side of the cottage, led not by a boy but by the grinning dwarf. But it was not who was guiding the horse that caused the cries and gasps, but the load it was carrying. Slung over the beast’s low back, his arms and feet almost grazing the ground, was the body of a man. Flies buzzed over a large rusty stain where his tunic covered his thigh.

  Isobel gave a shriek and stood swaying back and forth for a moment, before she rushed forward to lift the man’s head. The features were swollen and dark, but we all recognised them.

  ‘Cador . . . Cador,’ Isobel sobbed, trying to cradle his face.

  ‘Don’t just stand there!’ Sybil shouted. ‘Get him down.’

  But no one in the small crowd seemed able to move. The dwarf pulled a knife from his belt and, trying to hold the beast still with one hand, attempted to saw through the straw rope that bound Cador’s body to the wooden cradle on the horse’s back. Alarmed by Isobel’s wailing, the horse tried to pull away. It kicked out, catching the dwarf on his shin, making him drop both rope and knife. Only Isobel, her arms still wrapped about her husband’s dangling head, prevented the horse from bolting and the corpse became a macabre prize in a tug-of-war between woman and beast. Sybil and I rushed forward to catch the animal and cut Cador’s body down.

  It wasn’t until Cador was slumped on the ground, being rocked in Isobel’s arms, and the widgebeast was safely tethered some distance away, that a babble of angry questions started flying. Bald John came hurrying up and pushed his way through the women, staring in disbelief at the body lying across Isobel’s lap. ‘What happened?’ he demanded. ‘Where was he found?’

  Everyone started talking and yelling at once.

  The dwarf, who was sitting on the ground, rubbing his bruised shin, clambered awkwardly to his feet. ‘Now hold fast. I’ll tell you what I can if you’ll whip your tongues back into their kennels.’ With that queer rocking motion, he waddled a few paces to an upturned boat and clambered on to the top, sitting there, grinning, like he was a bishop on his throne.

  ‘I was up in the forest—’

  ‘Hunting boar, was you?’ Abel said. ‘What do you do? Run under their bellies and swing on their cods?’

  ‘I heard a horse whinnying, and crashing about,’ the dwarf continued. ‘I thought it might be caught in a snare or a bush. So I followed the sound.’

  ‘Thought you might steal the horse, more likely, just like you stole the precious reliquary,’ Matilda snarled. ‘On your way to sell it, were you, dwarf?’

  We all stared at her. I could see from the other women’s expressions they’d no more notion of what she was chuntering about than I had, but we’d more to concern ourselves with than her ravings.

  ‘If you keep interrupting him, woman, he’ll never get his story told,’ Bald John said. ‘Out with it, runt. What happened?’

  ‘I found Cador lying face down on the ground, the lead rein of the packhorse still tied to his belt. That was why the horse was fighting. She must have dragged him a few yards, judging by the marks in the leaf litter, but the body had caught behind a tree and she’d tangled the rein around the trunk trying to break free. I couldn’t see any sign of the other horses.’

  ‘But that doesn’t explain what killed him,’ Bald John said gruffly.

  The dwarf reached into a sack tied over his shoulder. ‘I found this lying where he must have fallen, before the horse dragged him.’

  It was a knife, set into a white bone handle, the kind any man, woman or child would carry to cut their meat at table or for a dozen different tasks in the fields, though most blades in those parts were set in wood. That was the one thing we had aplenty. The rusty-red stain on the blade and smears on the handle left little doubt that the last time it had been used was to cut the flesh of some creature, but whether man or beast, it was impossible to tell.

  Bald John took it from the dwarf and, holding it gingerly by the end of the handle, crouched beside Isobel.

  ‘No, don’t touch him.’ She jerked Cador’s head closer, flinging her other arm out protectively over his back as if he was still living and she feared Bald John meant to stab him. All her fury at her husband over Aldith had dissolved in her grief.

  ‘Whist, woman, nothing can hurt him now. I just want to see if the blade fits.’

  He pulled up the bloodstained tunic, ripped the hole in the hose wider, then laid the blade flat against the livid wound beneath.

  ‘Wound’s a mite wider than the knife, but if the blade was pulled out at an angle that’d make sense. I reckon this is what he were stabbed with, right enough.’

  He lifted Cador’s right hand and turned it, examining the horny palm. ‘Blood. Probably dragged the knife out himself. But that wound couldn’t have killed him, unless . . .’

  Dropping the stained knife, he pulled out his own from his belt and cut through the laces holding up the dun-coloured hose, peeling it down till the hairy thigh was exposed. The skin was blue-black, the flesh so swollen round the wound that it seemed the slightest touch might burst it.

  ‘Pestilence,’ Cecily shrieked. ‘He died of the pestilence.’

  ‘Tried to burst the swelling with his own knife to ease the pain,’ Abel said.

  Everyone backed away, but Bald John shook his head. ‘There’s no stench and no pus in that wound. It wasn’t the pestilence that killed him.’

  Meryn hopped forward on his crutches, dragging his withered leg. Balancing awkwardly he peered at the wound on Cador’s thigh. ‘That there flesh looks same as my foot, day I stepped on a viperfish out there in the bay. Whole leg swelled up. Pain were worse than fires of hell. ’Tis useless now.’ He rapped his lame leg with
one of his crutches.

  A woman nodded. ‘That’s viperfish, right enough, seen it many a time, but Cador didn’t go stepping on no fish, not up there in the forest.’

  Bald John picked up the bone-handled knife once again, holding the handle gingerly between thumb and forefinger. ‘But he got a knife stuck in him right enough, so I reckon as someone must have coated this blade with poison.’

  Chapter 34

  Will

  Riddle me this: Which craftsman builds the house that will stand the longest?

  There are some words you can be certain will unleash a hail of arrows just as surely as the order to ‘loose’ on a battlefield. Poison is one of those. Toss that single word into the air and it will be answered by a volley of accusations flying thick and fast. Before I could slide off the upturned boat, I was surrounded by a crowd of women screaming like gulls that I was the murderer. The most vehement of my accusers was, of course, the Holy Hag.

  ‘Cador should have taken him straight to Porlock to be hanged when he was caught with my piglets. Now he’s stolen the reliquary from the chapel. With Father Cuthbert being away I dare say he thought he could sell it before anyone noticed it was gone. The bailiff probably caught him with it, that’s why the dwarf killed him.’

  ‘He’s a proved thief,’ Isobel screeched, ‘and he knew my Cador was taking money to buy grain. Lay in wait to rob him. Why else would a dwarf be lurking around in the forest?’

  ‘Cador locked him up, so this is his revenge.’

  ‘The wound’s just at the height where a dwarf would strike. A proper man would stab his victim in the heart.’

  ‘Knew he couldn’t reach the heart so he used poison.’

  ‘Just the kind of evil trick you’d expect from a dwarf. Must have been planning it all along.’

  ‘Dwarfs are supposed to dance, aren’t they? Let’s see him dance on a rope. No sense waiting. We all know he’s guilty.’

  Several hands grabbed my arms and legs. I fought, kicking and struggling, but a rope halter was thrown over my shoulders, pinning my arms to my sides. Another loop was twisted round my ankles. I knew the next one would be round my neck. A surge of panic engulfed me. Ever since I can remember I’ve been terrified of being tied up, unable to move. I suppose it was all those years strapped inside that box. Somehow finding my arms trapped was a greater terror than the death I knew was coming. I couldn’t breathe. They started to drag me by the rope about my feet, my back scraping against the sharp stones. All I could see was the filthy skirts of the women and the yellowed soles of their feet as they pranced inches from my face. I was choking in a cloud of dust and dried dung. The rope went slack.

  ‘Which way up shall we hang him, by the neck or heels?’

  ‘Heels is what he deserves. Die slower then. Could take hours.’

  ‘Days more like.’

  The rope jerked upwards, crushing my ankle bones as they slowly hauled me up. My head cracked against a stone as I was swung into the air. A searing pain shot through my back and legs. The rope twisted and swayed, creaking over the beam above. I closed my eyes, trying not to vomit.

  ‘Hold hard!’ Bald John called. ‘There’s naught in the dwarf’s sack but a few snares. And Cador’s purse is still on his own belt. If the little runt killed Cador to steal from him, why didn’t he take the money? And there’s summat else don’t make sense. If you’d killed a man, you’d not go to the trouble of fetching his body back. You’d get as far away as you could before the corpse was discovered. Could have been days, weeks even, before we realised anything was amiss and went looking for Cador, that’s if we ever did. Why would the runt come back here and draw attention to murder, specially if he’d stolen summat from the chapel?’

  My head felt as if it was going to burst open. ‘I didn’t kill him! I swear by every saint in Christendom.’

  ‘Well, if he didn’t, who did?’ someone asked. ‘You just said it couldn’t have been robbers who attacked him ’cause the money is still there.’

  Everyone began arguing again.

  Blood pounded in my ears. My legs felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. I was so sick and dizzy, I daren’t open my eyes. ‘Let me down!’ I yelled.

  I felt a blade sawing at the rope and I plummeted down on to the hard stones with a crash that drove the breath from my body. I gasped and coughed, trying to get the air back into my lungs, waiting for the waves of pain and sickness to pass.

  But no one took any notice of me. They were all too busy blaming each other, Isobel yelling that we’d all heard that harlot, Aldith, threaten to kill Cador, Sara shouting that Isobel had murdered her own husband in a rage because he’d lain with Aldith. Others pointed out that as bailiff Cador had been in charge of collecting taxes and fines so anyone in the village might have harboured a grudge against him.

  I struggled to pull myself into a sitting position. The rope around my chest and arms had shifted upwards while I was being dragged, so with some effort I was able to wriggle out of it and free my ankles from the loop wrapped around them. Grazed and bruised, I staggered to my feet, wincing against the sharp pains that were shooting up my crooked spine.

  ‘What’s the use of arguing? Cador’s dead,’ Sara shouted. ‘And we’ll all be following him unless we find a way to stop this sickness.’

  Everyone fell silent, turning to look at her.

  ‘If we fast and pray,’ Matilda said primly, ‘God will spare those who deserve to live.’

  ‘My Elis deserved to live,’ Sara snapped. ‘He was a good man. But God didn’t spare him. Or those innocent chillern that lie up there.’

  ‘Rest their souls,’ old Abel muttered. ‘But what’s to be done, save wait for the pestilence to pass over, like it did afore?’

  ‘We can’t wait for it to pass!’ Sara said. ‘Some of us’ll escape the sickness, but by then we’ll be dead of starvation. Look around you. Half the working men are dead. Weirs are beginning to break. Land’s not been tilled or nets mended because we can’t do our work and theirs. It’s all we can do to care for the old folk and the sick and the chillern that still live. What we planted in the spring has died for lack of water. So there’ll be no harvest, nothing to see us through the winter, save fish. And we’ll not even have fish when the weirs breach in the next storm. Most of us are as weak as whey already from the flux, so we’ll not have strength to repair them.’

  ‘You think we don’t know that,’ Sybil barked. ‘But road to Porlock’s sealed. Cador was to fetch grain from the moor villages, but see how that’s ended. Waste of time anyway. If any village still has grain, they’d have more sense than to sell it to outlanders knowing they’ll have need of it themselves afore the year is out. I reckon Cador knew it was hopeless and he had no intention of coming back to this village or to her.’ She gestured towards Isobel, who was still sitting on the ground.

  Cador’s widow let out a howl of misery and outrage. Cecily patted her shoulder, glowering at her own husband, Bald John, as if to warn him not even to think about doing the same.

  ‘When the men get back from the sea, they’ll know what to do,’ one old woman said timidly. ‘My son and Matilda’s husband, too, they’ll be back and a half-dozen more from this village. Ship could sail round that point tomorrow.’

  ‘And it could be weeks or months more,’ Sara said. ‘That’s if they come at all. For all we know the ship could be lost or stricken with the pestilence itself, like the ship that brought those chillern.’

  Several of the women wailed, spitting on their fingers and crossing themselves feverishly to stop Sara’s words coming true. Though I noticed the Holy Hag wasn’t among them. Maybe she wasn’t in any hurry to see her husband return. And I wouldn’t have blamed George if he stayed away for another year. If I’d been married to Matilda I’d have asked the captain to put me ashore a hundred leagues away.

  ‘Crying won’t stop it,’ Sara said. ‘I should know – I’ve shed enough tears – but there’s one who could. She knew the pestilence was
coming. She swore she could end it too.’

  The Holy Hag snorted. ‘She knew because it was her who summoned it. Janiveer cursed this village. I saw her do it on the track to Kitnor. That very same hour those dead children were dragged out of the weir and carried into the heart of this village by your own brother-in-law.’

  ‘All the more reason to find her,’ Sara said. ‘Make her lift the curse. If she can work such dark magic as call death to this village, then it stands to reason she’s the skill and power to banish it too. And if it was her curse that’s done this to us, the pestilence’ll not pass like last time. It’ll not end till every man, woman and child in Porlock Weir lies dead and rotting in that pit.’

  ‘But Janiveer has long gone,’ Matilda protested. ‘You’ll never find her.’

  ‘Can’t see why not.’ I waddled forward, coughing to make them look down, not that I had to fake that, my lungs were still choked with dust and dung. ‘You just told us she took the path to Kitnor so we know which way she went. Isn’t there a village deep in the forest where they used to send the mad? I remember there was some talk of it when I was in my lord’s employ. Sir Nigel joked about sending his elderly aunt there.’

  ‘The village is deserted,’ Matilda snapped, glaring down at me as if she’d gladly string me up again.

  ‘But they reckon the ghosts of the madmen and sorcerers who were banished there still howl among its ruins,’ Cecily said.

  Old Abel nodded gravely. ‘One terrible bad winter when I were a lad, my brother and me, we went foraging for firewood in the forest. Mam warned us to be home afore dark, but we didn’t pay her no mind. Wandered too far, see, and it grew dark. We heard shrieks and cries coming from deep in the forest, like souls in the torment of Hell, they were. Took to our heels and ran, we did. Didn’t stop till we were safe by our hearth.’