The Plague Charmer

by Karen Maitland

  ‘What if your husband’s ship returns while you’re gone?’ Cecily said. ‘I wouldn’t leave any man of mine alone in this village with a slut like Aldith prowling the streets, especially when he’d been months at sea.’ She threw such a furious look at her own husband, it would have felled an oak tree. ‘It’s that sister-in-law of yours you want to be taking on this goose-brained journey, Sara. Get her away from decent women’s menfolk.’

  They all thought the trip was a foolish notion.

  ‘Might as well put a worm on a line and fish for red herring,’ Old Abel said.

  Deep down, I knew it, too. I’d not planned to go looking for the woman from the sea. I don’t know what made me say it, but when I saw how many faces were missing from that square, how exhausted the women were, I felt as helpless as that goat of mine shut up in the byre watching me walk towards her with the knife. Even so, I don’t think I’d have gone, if Bald John hadn’t riled me so. Won’t allow it, indeed!

  Maybe Janiveer was the excuse I needed to go searching for my sons. I’d been to every place I thought they might be hiding near the village, every den they’d built under the trees, every secret cave. Chillern always believe they’re first to find a hiding place, only to discover when they’re grown that their fathers once played there when they were boys. Always I went looking with that mixture of hope and dread, hope that I’d find them, dread that I’d find them too late. But now I was sure they’d wandered much further than anywhere they’d been before, whether alone or together, I didn’t know.

  I’d never been right out of the village, save for a short way into the edge of the forest to collect herbs or wood or fodder for the goats. I’d not even trudged up on to the moors like Elis. ’Twas him who’d fetched anything we needed from Porlock or the other villages. What cause did I have to go anywhere, and what time was there for such journeys when beans wanted hoeing, goats milking and pottage cooking? That morning we set out my belly was churning, and not just from the flux.

  It was cool under the trees, and a relief to be away from the stench of the grave. As long as we stayed on the fringe of the forest, following the path I knew, I felt almost peaceful. The path was lined with hart’s tongues waving in the sea breeze, as if they were lapping up the air. The branches of the trees, shaggy with leaves, nodded in the wind, sending sunlight and shadows darting across the ground, like shoals of little fish. Long strands of silver-grey lichen and ferns, like tiny forests themselves, hung down from twisted trunks, and hillocks of pea-green moss covered the roots.

  But as the path led us deeper in among the trees, further than I had ventured before, I became uneasy. It was darker here: the trees grew closer together. I kept thinking there were evil little faces peering out from holes in the banks. I’d glimpse a flash of movement as if spiteful eyes had been staring down at me and had whisked out of sight, as I turned. I felt trapped among all those trunks, only able to snatch glimpses of the sky between the branches or a flash of blue sea far below. You can’t see what danger you’re walking into in a forest, not like on the shore, and you can’t see what’s stalking you from behind. If I’d been alone, I’d have picked up my skirts and run back to the village. But I couldn’t shame myself in front of young Harold: he looked more afeared than me.

  ‘You’re not reckoning to climb up there, are you?’ Will said, frowning, as we came to a halt on the bank of a rocky stream bed.

  It was odd to see someone frown and grin at the same time. Him pulling his queer face into such shapes almost made me laugh, in spite of myself.

  A scratch of a track led up the side of the stream towards the top of the steep hill, but it was hard to say if it was a way for travellers or just a trail that animals had made. There was no sign of the path we’d been following continuing on the opposite bank. If there was one, it was covered with last year’s leaves and the summer’s undergrowth, which had sprung up wherever a shaft of light pierced the dense canopy above. The two widgebeasts, strung one behind the other, immediately started to nibble the grass.

  I stared upwards. ‘By the look of it, that path goes right over the top of the hill to the moors. Takes us too high up. My Elis said Kitnor was down in a valley, hidden till you’re right on it. He used to point to the kites flying way off above the forest, reckoned they always circled over Kitnor.’ I glanced up. But if there were any kites flying, we couldn’t see them for the trees.

  ‘I heard it can vanish,’ Harold said. ‘The sorcerers who lived there put the whole village under a spell so no strangers could find their way in or out. There’s no path. Proves it doesn’t want to be found. We may as well turn back,’ he added hopefully.

  ‘Porlock Weir vanishes whenever a sea fret rolls in,’ I said. ‘No mystery in that.’

  ‘Haven’t any of you been there?’ Will asked impatiently. ‘It’s only the next village along.’

  Matilda gestured to the tangle of twisted trees and ferns ahead. ‘Does it look as if anyone goes that way? I tell you there’s nothing there but ruins.’

  ‘There’s ghosts,’ Harold said. ‘Ghosts of the madmen and sorcerers who were banished there long ago, and perished there too.’

  ‘You are in Holy Orders,’ Matilda snapped. ‘Such spirits should hold no fears for you.’

  Harold, scowling, muttered something none of us could quite catch, but I’m sure it wasn’t a prayer.

  Will sat on the bank and eased himself down on to the dry stones of the riverbed. He cupped his hands in the thread of water that still trickled through the pebbles in the centre. He slurped the water and rubbed his wet hands over his beard and face. Then something on the far bank seemed to capture his attention. He cocked his head to one side, like a puzzled hound, stood up, then crouched again, before scrambling over the far bank and heading towards one of the moss-covered hillocks beneath the trees.

  He peered at it, then glanced back at us. ‘Someone’s been this way. Look at this!’

  ‘I see nothing except mossy boulders,’ Matilda said.

  ‘I didn’t see it either till I was crouched low. Then that shaft of light picks it out. It’s an ancient marker. I’d wager a kestrel that if there ever was an old track to Kitnor this is it.’

  ‘Do you expect us to go traipsing through trees and undergrowth?’ Matilda snapped. ‘Those trees could hide anything. We could plunge to our deaths in a ravine or walk straight into a pack of wild boar. We should take the path that runs up the hill alongside the stream.’

  ‘That’s nothing but a goat trail,’ Katharine said. ‘Like Sara says, it more than likely leads up to the moors. I think we should take whichever path Sara wants to follow.’ She gave a defiant little tilt of her chin, then glanced at me with a timid smile.

  Seeing Matilda bridling like an indignant hen, I snatched up the leading rein of the widgebeasts and tugged them towards the parched riverbed. I wasn’t going to be told which way to walk by that bitterweed.

  The banks were not steep, and the horses scrambled up the other side more easily than the dwarf had done. The others followed, even Matilda, though she was still grumbling. Pity, I’d hoped she might refuse and take herself home. We all crowded round the dwarf. It wasn’t until I got up close that I saw the mossy stone was different from the surrounding rocks. It was flatter, taller and sticking upright out of the clump of ferns. But near the top someone had rubbed away the old moss to reveal a deep carving beneath. It was a simple thing – a circle with a cross over it. Two arms of the cross were longer than the others, one pointing straight down into the ground, like the cross on the chapel in Porlock Weir, the other sticking out over the edge of the circle, pointing directly away from the stream.

  Katharine reached out, but drew her hand back before she touched it. ‘My granddam had a holed stone with that sign carved on it. The sun, she said it was. Always hung over the door in her cottage to keep evil from entering. On her stone all the arms of the cross were the same length.’

  ‘But it shows someone passed this way in the last few weeks
,’ Will said. ‘I wouldn’t have seen the sign if they hadn’t rubbed the moss off it. They must have been searching for it.’

  Katharine walked around the stone, peering warily as if it was a new grave. Then she suddenly bobbed down behind it. ‘Maybe whoever was here came to meet her lover.’ She held out a withered garland of sweet briar. The roses were brown and most of the leaves had crumbled away, but the thorns still clung, sharp as ever. Thorns never fall.

  At the sight of it, Will let out a startled cry, as if he’d been pricked, though the briar hadn’t touched him. He scuttled round to the back of the stone, searching the ground.

  ‘That mean something to you?’ I asked.

  He straightened up, shaking his misshapen head. ‘No, not a thing, nothing. Why should it? Some foolish maid, prancing around, must have dropped it.’ He stared again at the withered garland in Katharine’s hand. ‘Still, it proves one thing. Someone’s been this way.’

  We tried to make our way round the side of the steep hill, but without a path it was slow work. Brambles tore at our clothes, and branches scratched our faces. In places we were forced to trample a path through waist-high ferns and scramble over fallen mossy tree trunks. After what felt like hours of tripping over gnarled tree roots, stumbling over loose stones and falling headlong into holes hidden by drifts of leaves, I was beginning to think Harold was right, that Kitnor was under a sorcerer’s spell and trying every trick it could to stop us finding it.

  I fell and tripped more than most, for I couldn’t help staring around, searching for any sign of my boys. Had they come this way? Had they left that garland? I couldn’t imagine either of them making it, but still I searched for a scrap of torn clothing, the remains of a fire, a snare, anything that might give me hope. Far below I caught glimpses of the dazzle of sunlight glinting on waves. They’d more than likely make for an isolated cove to hide. Luke and Hob would know how to find food on the shore. But if there was a beach beneath us, it was hidden by the curve of the hill. Could they be down there, not knowing I was passing so close to them?

  The leading widgebeast stopped abruptly, jerking its head and nearly snatching the rope from my hand. The ears of both animals were pricked and their lips curled back as if they were tasting the air. I glanced around uneasily. Something was vexing them, but I could hear nothing except the high-pitched mewing of a kite circling somewhere out of sight and the hissing of the sea far below.

  ‘What’s wrong with those creatures?’ Matilda snapped. ‘Are we to stand here all day?’

  ‘I reckon they can smell water,’ Katharine said.

  She stared around, then pointed to a rock face deeper among the trees. It glistened, and at its foot, a patch of ferns and dark green moss showed where the ground was wet. Harold scrambled up the hill towards the rock and tried to cup the ooze running down it in his hands, but when that yielded little he pressed his face to the rock and slurped the water. He drew back, wiping his mouth, then stared at the ground. He gave a low whistle. ‘What kind of beast made that?’ Looking thoroughly alarmed, he stumbled back towards us, his eyes ranging around in every direction as if he expected some monster to spring out of the bushes or hurl itself down on him from the trees.

  The dwarf waddled towards him. ‘What is it, lad? What did you see?’

  ‘A paw print.’ Harold gestured towards the rock. ‘In the wet ground over there.’

  ‘What kind of print, you foolish boy?’ Matilda asked, though she, too, was staring anxiously around. ‘A fox, a wildcat?’

  Harold shook his head. ‘Bigger, much bigger.’ He held out his hands till the gap between them was the width of his own head.

  Matilda clucked in exasperation. ‘Men are incapable of answering a simple question without exaggerating, though a lad in Holy Orders should have learned to speak the truth by now. I dare say it was nothing more than a squirrel or a stoat. Sara, I have no wish to spend the night sleeping under the trees, so will you please make those horses of yours move, before Harold starts whimpering that the kite screeching above us is a monstrous griffin?’

  It took Katharine switching them from behind and me dragging on the rope to make the horses move, though once we were safely past the rock they became calm again and followed me docilely enough. Ahead, I could see Harold creeping along as if he feared attack at any moment, jumping at the slightest sound, from the crack of a broken twig to a rustle in the trees above. Whatever he had seen had really alarmed him and his fear made my belly churn, too, not for myself, but for Luke and Hob. If there was some great beast prowling through the forest, a small boy would be easy prey.

  We found ourselves turning inland round the curve of the hill into a deep gorge, its floor hidden by a thick mass of twisted trees, as if a pit of writhing snakes had been frozen by some spell.

  ‘Down there!’ Will called, stopping so suddenly that Harold almost pitched headfirst over him.

  We all stared down to where the dwarf pointed through the canopy of trees. On a long narrow shelf, squeezed between the steep hills that rose sharply on three sides, a cluster of ruins was scattered around a slightly taller building, which, from its cross and the cock on the sagging roof, I took to be a chapel, though it was even smaller than our own. Here and there sunlight glinted off a stream that ran down the side of the narrow valley, almost hidden beneath a dense covering of reeds and bushes.

  Above the desolate grey ruins, four or five scavenging kites circled high in the blinding blue-white sky, the sunlight turning their feathers to flame as they spiralled higher and higher, without so much as a beat of their wings. Nothing else stirred, save the leaves on the twisted branches.

  ‘Only ghosts down there,’ Harold whispered.

  ‘Then clearly Janiveer is not here,’ Matilda said. ‘We should retrace our steps and take the path by the stream, as I advised from the beginning.’

  ‘Mistress Matilda walks on the sand, but sees no footprints behind her,’ the dwarf sang out. ‘Tell me, fair mistress, how can such a thing be?’

  Harold gave a nervous giggle.

  Will made a great flourish of a bow. ‘Because Mistress Matilda is walking backwards.’

  Harold and I both laughed and even Katharine smiled.

  ‘Stop babbling nonsense,’ Matilda snapped.

  ‘Ah, but you see I must, mistress, for I am a fool, but not so foolish as to try to find someone who is ahead of us by wasting time going back. If that stone marked a path that once led to the village, perhaps there is a track going out of it.’ Without another word, the dwarf waddled a few paces round the bend of the hill and vanished.

  With a whistling scream, one of the kites dived, catching a rock dove on the wing as it foolishly emerged from the roof of the chapel ruins. It flapped upwards with its prey, plunging its sharp beak into the downy breast and tearing at the dove’s flesh as it flew.

  Katharine stared down at the forbidding grey ruins. ‘They say if the living wander into a nest of vengeful ghosts, the ghosts keep them trapped there till they become of them. They can’t ever find their way out, for the path keeps leading them back.’

  I didn’t trust myself to speak. I knew if I stopped to think, if I even hesitated, I’d turn back. I grasped the rein more tightly and dragged the two widgebeasts forward, into the village of ghosts.

  Chapter 38

  Will

  Riddle me this: If you say my name, I vanish.

  ‘Be off with ye!’ a man’s voice screeched. ‘Mine, this is all mine.’

  Katharine almost fell headlong over a heap of rubble in her haste to scramble through the briars and weeds to reach Sara and cowered behind her as if she was a child clinging to her mother’s skirts. I stared about, trying to find the owner of the voice, but there was no sign of any living person among the ruins of the village.

  All that remained of Kitnor was a scatter of half-ruined circular stone dwellings, shaped like large bee skeps. They clung to the steep sides of the hills, and ranged down the narrow sloping shelf that hung over the low
er valley, keeping their distance from each other, as if those who had once occupied them were deeply suspicious of their neighbours.

  Trees had grown up between the ruins. Saplings butted through the domed roofs. Poison-green ferns snaked out of the window slits, and brambles slithered over the rough stone walls. Peas that had once, no doubt, been carefully tended, had turned feral, their tendrils twisting around the throats of golden buttercups and throttling the white cow parsley. The tiny church stood apart, like a condemned heretic, while the green flames of ivy licked up its sides, trying to pull it down into dust and ashes.

  It was a lonely place, all right, hidden from land and sea, as if it was a lost island set adrift from the world. A dozen kings might rise and fall and no one who lived in that place would have known of it. I tell you, if any banished to Kitnor had been sane when they’d gone there, they’d be as mad as the dog star before the year was out. And a man might drag out his existence there for centuries: even the angel of death would forget where to find him.

  I caught a glimpse of movement in the small casement of the church and edged towards the door. A squirrel darted out of the window, scrambled over the sagging roof and vanished with an impudent flash of its rusty tail.

  ‘Go away! Get!’ the voice shrieked again.

  There was a loud clatter, like the noise of a crow scarer. Then a figure appeared in the doorway of the church, half concealed in the shadows, save for a hand that was thrust out into the sunshine vigorously shaking a clapper made from two pieces of bone, such as lepers use to warn of their approach. From what little I could see, though, he did not appear to be wearing leper’s garb and the skin of his hand was as brown as a beechnut, without any of the tell-tale white spots.

  ‘I command you to depart, foul creatures,’ he called, shaking the bones even harder.

  ‘What can he see? Evil spirits?’ Matilda demanded. She glanced anxiously behind her. ‘Where’s that wretched boy? If there are demons here, he should be defending us.’