The Plague Charmer

by Karen Maitland

  The Holy Hag’s eyes widened as she caught sight of the figure. Then, to my surprise, a pleased, almost cunning, expression crossed her withered face. Shoving me aside, she scuttled towards Goda, hauling her roughly to her feet. She bent close, muttering in Goda’s ear. Whatever she was telling the girl, Goda plainly did not want to do it, for she looked terrified and tried to back away. But the hag shook her and gestured towards the burning ship. Goda stared at the flames. Matilda shoved her towards the path. I watched Goda walk up the beach towards the rise. Several times she glanced back at the ship, and each time it seemed to strengthen her resolve for she quickened her pace. She was not crying now, but her face was pale, her lips pressed tightly together.

  As she reached the path, the wind changed direction and a cloud of thick, choking smoke billowed over me. God’s blood, it stung the eyes worse than the smoke from a spit-roasted pig. I hurried back a few paces to get out of its way. When I looked again, Goda was running up the rise towards Janiveer. The woman either didn’t see her, or was ignoring her, for she was still gazing seaward. I saw Goda pull something from her side and, in the same instance, I glimpsed the flash of steel. I heard Sara yell a warning, as Goda raised the knife.

  I don’t know if Janiveer heard her cry or merely caught sight of the blade. Goda lunged at her, lashing out wildly as if she was going to slash Janiveer’s face wide open, but at the last moment, Janiveer stepped sideways, and seizing Goda’s upraised arm, she jerked her forward, then pushed her backwards. The blade spun out of Goda’s grasp. Girl and knife tumbled over and over, down the grassy bank on to the path below.

  The Holy Hag, screaming in fury, ran across, snatching up the knife that had landed a few yards away on the edge of the pebbles. From the way she was brandishing the weapon, I thought she was going to stab Goda. But she dragged the girl to her knees, standing over her. Matilda’s face was scarlet with rage, her eyes bulging.

  ‘You goose-brained whore, I should have killed you when I killed George.’

  Goda’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘Jory! You killed my Jory? No . . . no, my Jory’s at sea.’

  ‘Your Jory,’ Matilda said savagely, ‘was my George, my husband, mine! Did you really think I didn’t know where he went to when I was in the chapel, whose arms he crept into when he thought I was asleep in bed? Sinners and fornicators must be punished! My George never went back to sea. Those ship’s carpentry tools he kept sharpening and polishing every day he was ashore, he never once used them to mend anything in my cottage. But I put them to good use in the end.’

  Goda scrambled to her feet, her face contorted. ‘My Jory’s alive and he’s coming back for me and his babby. You’ll see.’

  ‘He’s never coming back,’ the hag spat. ‘He’s dead, you numbskull. Those candles you’ve been making were moulded in his back bones. Those needles you’ve been stitching with are splinters of his ribs. That bone goblet I gave you to drink from was made from his skull. He was always bone idle, but now at least his bones are working for me. And if you are wondering what I did with the flesh I stripped from his bones, I fattened my pigs on it! Now his little whore will be punished too!’

  She swung the knife high, aiming the blade at Goda’s neck. I knew I’d never be able to grab her arm, so I bent my head and charged at her, butting her as hard as I could and knocking her to the ground. She gave a sharp cry. Struggling to push herself upright, she stared at her left arm in disbelief. As she had fallen, the force had pushed it across the blade held in her right hand. Blood was oozing out, but it wasn’t a deep cut. She’d live, more’s the pity.

  Goda was standing on the path, shaking violently, silent tears streaming down her face. ‘Jory can’t be dead . . . he can’t. I loved him. He hated her. She made his life miserable. He couldn’t wait to go back to sea and be away from her. That’s where he is . . . at sea. That’s not his skull . . . it’s not! I couldn’t have drunk . . .’ She ran across the beach, collapsing on to her knees and retching violently. I had to admit, I was close to doing the same thing myself. I’d eaten those piglets.

  But no one else was paying any attention to Goda. The women had finally reached the beach and came staggering up to us. They stared down at Matilda. She was lying on the path grasping her arm, writhing in agony, and moaning that it was burning like the fires of Hell. The limb was swelling like a pig’s bladder till it seemed the skin would burst. Matilda gasped for breath, her eyes bulging. Sara tried to help her to sit up, but she was as stiff as a wooden doll, unable to move. There was a ghastly rattle in her throat and then silence. Her face froze in a rictus of pain.

  Sara stared up at us in shock. ‘She’s dead.’

  She tried to close the lids over those terrible bulging eyes, but they were as unyielding as the rest of her.

  ‘But . . . how could she be?’ I said, utterly stunned. ‘It was only a gash.’

  ‘Aye, like the wound on Cador’s thigh,’ Sybil said. ‘That blade was poisoned just the same as the one that killed him. Viperfish, that’s what she used, and plenty of it. If Cador was murdered by any in this village, I wager it was her that did it, with that self-same poison.’

  ‘I asked for a life to save the village.’ Janiveer’s voice rang out from above us. ‘Matilda has given hers by her own hand. With her death, the curse will be lifted.’

  Chapter 63

  Sara

  Sea anemones are called herring-shine, for they are transformed into shoals of herring.

  What was to be done with Matilda’s corpse? If that bitterweed had caused strife while she was alive, she certainly had a way of causing even more when she was dead. Isobel was for chopping her into pieces and scattering them in the forest for the beasts to eat: she was certain that Sybil was right, and Matilda had murdered her husband to punish him for fornicating. But Sybil said it wasn’t right to kill dumb beasts with a poisoned corpse when they’d done no harm. None wanted her laid in the graveyard along with their own kin, for fear she’d torment them and, besides, it wasn’t right to lay a murderer in consecrated ground.

  But there were other matters to be attended to first. Goda, half mad with grief at the thought of her Jory being dead, was howling for her baby left up in Matilda’s cottage. But even when we took her up there and she could hear the poor mite wailing inside, she was too afeared to fetch her out, for the candles moulded in poor Jory’s bones still stood around the saints and she near fainted at the thought of seeing them.

  I brought out the babby, then Will and I searched the cottage, gathering up everything we could find made of bone – the needles, awl, candle-holders and that wicked-looking skull goblet, which I couldn’t even bring myself to touch. We took them to the chapel along with the statues of the saints and the church linens. Harold laid poor Jory’s bones in the linen chest on the holy cloths and dragged it up beside the altar, so he could rest till a priest could be found to bury his bones decently and say a Mass for his soul.

  The villagers gathered outside Matilda’s cottage as Will carried out the rest of her possessions. The bed, stool, plates, cooking pots, beakers and table all vanished at once. Some muttered that they should be burned, but in the end no one could afford to waste such things, though they did burn her clothes. None would have dared to dress themselves in those.

  But no villager touched that barrel of pickled pork. When I’d woken that morning, if anyone had offered me so much as a single bite of good solid meat, I’d have sold my last pot for it, but when Will opened the barrel and told us to take our share, everyone shook their heads and turned away. Even the dwarf seemed to have lost his appetite for stolen pig.

  Will cleared out the cottage from the cobwebs in the rafters to the mouse droppings on the floor, but even with every rag and scrap of furniture removed, there was still no sign of the hand of St Cadeyrn. Although we now reckoned we could guess whose hand the old hag had given us.

  As for Matilda’s corpse, what was to be done with it? She’d tormented the village when she was alive and no one believed
she’d change her ways now that she was dead. Her corpse would walk, most were certain of that, and with a strength and malice that were a hundred times worse than when she’d lived, for she had taken her hatred with her into death.

  All the villagers looked to Harold, for he was the only cleric we had and he was an exorcist, as the old hag had kept reminding him. But the lad refused even to look at her body, much less wrestle with her evil spirit, and who could blame him?

  But while we were all arguing an icy voice cut through the heat of our babble. ‘It was the evil of her thoughts and words that poisoned the village. It was her foul stench that was the sickness, her corruption that brought putrefaction. If you want to cleanse this village of the Great Pestilence, you must cleanse the village of all that remains of her.’

  Janiveer was standing behind us. No one had noticed her arrive and uneasy glances passed between the villagers, though none dared walk away.

  ‘So what’s to be done? Burn her like the ship?’ Sybil said gruffly, though she wouldn’t look at Janiveer, not directly.

  ‘Her spirit must be sent away from this place where it can do no harm. If you burn the body, her spirit will linger.’

  I shivered, not at the thought of Matilda, but those corpses who’d burned on the ship, and that living man, blackened, screaming in agony, his very skin ablaze as if he was a flaming branch falling from a bonfire. Would his spirit haunt our bay and the lost souls of all those men on that ship?

  Janiveer pointed in the direction of Kitnor and the forested cliff top that jutted into the sea. ‘We lay her up there, between earth and sky.’

  And since no one could think of a better place, that was what we did.

  It took the best part of the following day to carry her up on a bier, for it was a steep climb, not made easier by the dense mass of trees and bushes. Janiveer led the way, though she did not help to carry the body. She had a large sack slung across her shoulder. It seemed heavy, from the way she kept shifting its position on her back, but no one asked her what was in it. I hoped it was spades to dig a grave, for we’d brought none with us.

  When we finally reached the cliff edge, we laid the bier down, rubbing our aching backs and arms. Far below us the waves crashed against the rocks, and across the water, the land they call Wales looked so clear and close that I thought if I just took a single step I could reach it. Was a woman standing over there on that shore, staring back at me, or had the pestilence taken them all?

  Sybil crouched and, picking up a bit of stick, scraped away at the leaves and dry grass. ‘You’ll not be able to dig a grave up here deep enough to bury a squashed eel,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s naught but stones and tree roots. We should sling the old hag’s corpse into the sea and let her wash up wherever it takes her. The current’ll drag the corpse away from us.’

  ‘The body must be laid on the earth,’ Janiveer said, so firmly that not even Sybil dared argue with her, though she gave her a real sour look.

  We tore at the grass and scrubby bushes until we’d exposed the bare ground. Then we lifted the old hag on to it. Her flesh was soft now, the body limp, but the arm blackened and still swollen as if it had been cursed by some terrible spell. We’d not washed her or prepared the body. She did not deserve that. We laid her down in the clothes in which she’d died, her leather pouch still hanging at her waist, the shoes on her feet, even the marriage ring on her finger, for none dared touch it.

  Janiveer reached into the sack she’d been carrying and pulled out a round black stone, so smooth and polished you could see your face in it. She dragged Matilda’s jaws apart and wedged the stone inside, holding down the dead woman’s tongue. Taking a yew bough from the sack, she drew a circle three times with the sun around Matilda’s body, muttering words in some foreign tongue, then laid the yew branch on the corpse’s chest, folding her arms across it and binding them fast with a length of scarlet wool. ‘The yew will lead her spirit away from this world into the realms of the dead. It will keep her from coming back to do evil,’ she said. She pointed to a rock as big as a man’s head, covered with moss. ‘Will, fetch that and place it on her chest over the branch to hold her corpse in this place so it cannot walk.’

  The dwarf is a tough little fellow, stronger than most men twice his height, but even so, I thought the veins in his neck would burst as he struggled to heave the boulder over to the corpse. He tried to lower it slowly, but it was too heavy and crashed down the last few inches. I saw him wince as we heard Matilda’s bones crack.

  Janiveer crouched at the edge of the cliff, her long hair flapping behind her, like the ragged wings of a bird. She opened her sack once more and dragged out a small wooden box bound in metal. It looked familiar, with its rusty iron bindings and tracks where the shipworm had bored into it.

  I took a step closer. ‘That’s my Luke’s box, the one he took from the sea the day the sun turned black. Where did you get that?’

  She glanced up at me. ‘It should not have been taken, Sara, you knew that much. It must be given back to the sea, before she reclaims it and much else besides.’

  She flung open the lid. The box was lined with lead, but as far as I could see, it was empty save for a small glass flask filled with a jumble of red woollen thread and pale fragments that might have been parchment or pieces of bone. The top of the flask was sealed with wax and a twig had been bound to it with more red thread.

  Without rising, Janiveer shuffled on her knees back to the corpse. Pulling out her knife, she cut off a lock of the old woman’s grey hair and then, to my horror, lifted Matilda’s blackened hand and sawed off her forefinger at the base, slicing through skin and putrid flesh until we could see the shiny white cup of the joint. You’d think after all the dead bodies I’d seen these past months, nothing could turn my stomach any more, but the sight of her slicing the last strip of skin that held the finger to the hand made me retch.

  Janiveer bound the lock of Matilda’s hair and her blackened finger to a twig and then to a sprig of meadowsweet before laying them in the box next to the flask. Throwing back her head, she began to sing in a strange tongue that made your skin crawl to hear it. Then she closed the box, reached for the last time into her sack and pulled out three iron horseshoe nails. Using a stone as a hammer, she drove them through the lid into the sides of the box, sealing it.

  She turned to Sybil. ‘You wanted to cast her body into the sea. Help me throw this in and the Great Pestilence shall leave the village this very hour.’

  Sybil hesitated. You could see she was loath to touch it, but in the end she grasped one end of the box while Janiveer picked up the other. They stood together on the edge of the cliff and swung the box, back and forwards.

  ‘Now!’ Janiveer called.

  We watched the box fly out in an arc and tumble towards the waves. As it plunged into the blue-green water, a great plume of white foam shot up around it. The sea closed over the place and in the blink of an eye there was nothing to mark where the box had vanished. Far below us, the waves continued to hurl themselves at the base of the cliff, as if they would shake us all off into the deep, dark depths.

  Janiveer, turning back from the sea, bade us collect all the rocks we could find and heap them over the corpse till it was covered. Matilda was a small woman, but even so, it took a long time to bury her under the heap of stones.

  But finally, as the sun was setting, Janiveer announced, ‘It is finished. Warn the villagers, warn travellers, warn your children that any man, woman or child who passes this way must add another stone to the murderer’s cairn, else misfortune will follow them on their journey.’

  All the grief, all the fear and misery of the past weeks suddenly welled up in me. I rounded on her in a fury. ‘And what of my chillern, my sons, Janiveer? Shall they ever set a stone here? You promised you would bring them back, even if it is only for me to bury them.’

  ‘Your sons are beneath the earth.’

  I moaned, clamping my hand across my mouth to stop myself screaming. They we
re dead – the seer at Kitnor had told me so. Now she had said it too. I knew they were dead, but still a part of me refused to let go of hope. Until I saw their bodies, until I kissed their cold faces, I knew I would never be able to stop hoping. They say despair is a terrible thing, but hope is worse: it keeps you shackled for ever, like a dog in a wheel, always running, but never able to go anywhere, save round and round.

  ‘Where are they buried, Janiveer?’ I pleaded. ‘You know! You can find them. If I could only see their graves . . . I’ll ask nothing more. Twice now I’ve saved your life and you swore—’

  ‘I made no such oath,’ Janiveer said coldly. ‘But I make it now. When I have the bones of my forefather, you shall have the bones of your sons.’

  Chapter 64

  Will

  Riddle me this: What I catch, I throw away; what I don’t catch, I keep.

  The day they unblocked the road from Porlock Weir was the day I set off for the manor, determined that nothing and no one, not even Janiveer, would stop me taking Christina and my son away from that place. I couldn’t afford to wait any longer. If the pestilence had ended in the rest of England too, then Randel might soon return to claim his bride. Worse still, if Eda had succeeded in getting word to Lady Aliena or to Sir Nigel, an assassin might already be on his way to the manor to ensure that Christina and my son were lying in their graves before they could bring disgrace to the family. They could all too easily claim that she had been another victim of the pestilence and no one of any consequence would question it.

  I had still to work out the minor details, such as how I would smuggle Christina out without Wallace seeing us, but I was a dwarf, wasn’t I? I had fooled Mistress Luck into helping me most of my life; all I asked was a last favour from her.

  One thing I had decided, though: I was not going to wriggle in through that stinking sewer again. On the other hand, I could hardly march up to the gate and demand entrance. But it occurred to me that Master Wallace would be anxious to bring in fresh supplies of food and fodder after so long a siege, so the gate might be opened many times before nightfall. Surely I could manage to slip in.