by Alys Clare
Now he turned on the full force of his glamour, and I felt it descend on me like a glittering cloak. ‘You shall come with me,’ he said – it was more like a chant – ‘and we shall go to my house on the island, and I shall destroy the causeway so that we are for ever alone, my Soror Mystica and I, and we shall unite our bodies and our different essences – our very souls – into the ultimate.’
He raised his hand, began to back away, and I followed.
But our route to the door was blocked. Somebody stood in the passage.
Hrype said calmly and firmly, ‘She will not go with you, Mercure.’
Mercure spun round and, again, I had that glimpse of something terrible beneath the disguising robes.
But his voice was still sweet and so seductive.
‘Oh, I think she will,’ he said.
He moved so quickly. He lowered his right arm, seemed to reach deep within his voluminous garments, then raised it again.
It was no longer a human arm.
The forelimb was bright, shining silver, and the hand was the paw of a savage animal, with long downward-curving claws that glittered sharp as blades.
One of those dread claws had a small chip on the tip.
He made an inarticulate, bestial sound and lunged at Hrype. He swung the clawed limb, and I heard the whistle as it descended down through the air.
Hrype stepped aside.
Mercure, his own momentum forcing him on past Hrype, turned and tried again. But just as the raised claw was about to home in on Hrype’s throat, a hand caught it from behind.
Twisted it, bent it, caused Mercure to roar with pain as his shoulder dislocated.
He looked wildly around, and his dark presence seemed to fill the narrow passage so that I could not see who had stopped his murderous attack. Then he gave a great cry, and, the pain making him retch, he drove his claw of an arm up towards his own throat and tore it out.
He must have died almost instantly. Released, all the strength – his strength – left me and I fell to the ground. I felt arms around me, and Gurdyman’s voice in my ear whispered words of comfort, reassurance.
I looked up. Hrype stood over us, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face. He seemed different, but I did not know what had changed.
But there had been someone else …
Mercure had had the ascendancy, for Gurdyman and I were already under his spell and Hrype surely could not have held out for long. Another’s hand had grabbed Mercure’s wrist, and that action had saved us all.
My eyes flew past Hrype, trying to look everywhere at once, searching, searching.
And then I saw him.
Behind Hrype, leaning against the stone wall of the passage, stood Rollo.
It felt like much later, but only a short time could have elapsed, for although the body of the Night Wanderer had been removed by some of Sheriff Picot’s men, his blood was still wet on the floor of the passage.
Gurdyman and Hrype had disappeared down to the crypt. Rollo and I sat in the inner court, and the sun shone on us.
He had told me how he’d been watching me for days. How he’d gone out to Aelf Fen and overheard what I’d said to Sibert about being safe with Jack. Guarded my footsteps as I returned to the town, aware that there was a grave threat and wanting to keep me from harm.
Watched me with Jack.
Seen me as I cradled his head in my lap, taken in every detail of my expression as Jack’s life blood soaked into my skirts.
He didn’t actually phrase it like that, but I knew what he must have seen.
‘Do you love him?’ he asked me now.
‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’
Rollo smiled briefly. ‘That covers every possibility,’ he remarked.
I truly had no idea what I felt. I was numb with shock, for I had just been under the spell of an exceptionally powerful man who had bent me to his will as easily as if I’d been a blade of grass. I’d seen him take his own life, right before my eyes. On top of that, as if it wasn’t enough, I was exhausted and I wanted to be with Jack because I knew he was in grave pain and perhaps he was dying, and here I was, half a mile or more away from him, and it hurt so much I couldn’t bear it.
I took a deep breath. Rollo had every right to ask me to explain, and I must do my best.
‘I love you too,’ I said. ‘As well as Jack, I mean.’ Normally I love you too is the response when someone has just declared their love for you, and I had no idea how Rollo felt about me now. ‘When you went away, I had no idea when I’d see you again, although you promised you’d come back and I believed you.’ I paused. He didn’t interrupt – for which I was very grateful – and after a moment I went on. ‘I’d had every intention of waiting for you, and it wasn’t too bad, really. But then I met him – Jack – and I liked him, because he’s a good man doing a hard job in a town that’s dirty with corruption, and—’
Of all things, an image of Jack’s geese floated into my head. Those guard geese, that he kept because he lived all alone and there were a lot of men who would rather he was dead because he spoke up for honesty and decency and the weak and the helpless, and he was never going to accept the right of powerful men to override all those things just because it made them rich.
That attitude, in a town where the law was corrupt and weaker men chose the easy path over the tough one, created a lot of enemies.
My hands in my lap were wet and I realized I was crying.
‘Rollo, he’s so very lonely.’
Rollo’s arms were round me, but there was comfort and kindness in the close hug, and, just then, nothing else. Thankful for his presence, for his strong heart beating against me, I surrendered to all the pain inside me and wept.
He went away.
‘I’m not going far,’ he told me firmly, ‘or, at least, not as far as I went last time.’ He smiled at some private thought. ‘But there’s something I have to do, and now seems a good time.’ He took my hand, holding it in a brief, hard grip. ‘Your man here is hurt, and I don’t think you can think of anything but that at the moment. If you find you love him, you can tell me so when I come back.’
He turned away.
‘I’m sorry that—’ I began, but he stopped me.
‘No recriminations, Lassair,’ he said. ‘I’ve been away a long time, and I sent you no word. If you got lonely, and took comfort in the love of another man, then the responsibility is as much mine as yours.’
He was being very fair. It was nice of him, I reflected, to say responsibility and not blame.
I looked at him, at the blond hair now threaded with strands of grey, at the dark brown eyes with unfamiliar lines around them. Wherever he’d been, it hadn’t been easy. He had suffered, and I read it all through his lithe body.
I loved him; there was no doubt of it.
But all I wanted to do was go to Jack.
So that’s what I did.
Down in the crypt, Hrype and Gurdyman heard the slamming of the door.
‘She has gone back to Jack,’ Gurdyman said.
‘She cannot do anything else,’ Hrype replied. Then, after a brief pause, ‘Do you detect it too?’
Gurdyman nodded. ‘As soon as I saw her.’
‘Does she know?’
‘No.’
The two men fell silent.
Then: ‘The other one has gone too,’ Hrype said. ‘And that is wise of him, since at present she is given over entirely to the care of the injured one.’
‘It is also kind,’ Gurdyman said with a faint note of reproof, ‘since to add to her burden by forcing her to decide between the two of them would be cruel.’
‘You think the Norman is kind?’ Hrype demanded. ‘It is not a word I use when speaking of his sort.’
‘And you are too blinded by your prejudices,’ Gurdyman flashed back. ‘In any case, both men are Normans. Lassair has the ability to look beneath that, and see them for what they really are.’
Hrype opened his mouth to give a stinging retort, but
then he closed it again.
After a while, Gurdyman said, ‘I believe that since both Lassair and Rollo have gone, and their private conversation is therefore over, we may return upstairs.’ He led the way up the steps, Hrype following.
‘Where will you go now?’ he asked as, in the passage, Hrype turned towards the door.
Hrype looked at him for a long moment. ‘I’m going back to my village.’ He laid a slight emphasis on my, and Gurdyman smiled faintly. ‘As I walk along, I shall be thinking of the right way to say what I must say to Froya.’
Now Gurdyman’s smile was wide and delighted. But he spoke with careful restraint, for Hrype was a proud man. ‘I am glad, my friend,’ he said.
As if that short exchange was more than enough, Hrype abruptly changed the subject. ‘What happened to him? Mercure, I mean?’
Gurdyman sighed heavily. ‘I do not know,’ he confessed. ‘I think perhaps it was indeed as he said himself: he tried to work alone, and somehow, in trying to seek out his female side and treat it as a separate entity, he disintegrated his soul and couldn’t put it back together.’ He shook his head. ‘Mercure used powerful substances,’ he said darkly. ‘He was experimenting extensively with cinnabar, that is obvious, and it seems that all three of them – Mercure, Morgana and the young priest – believed that some combination of quicksilver and emerald might yield a deep and awesome result.’ He shook his head. ‘Morgana and the priest, however, appear to have been more cautious and circumspect, but I only begin to suspect some of the poisons Mercure must have ingested. Such potent and frightening substances must be treated with a great deal more respect than he showed them, in his desperate need, for they can have terrible consequences and drive a man deep into madness.’
He paused, a thoughtful expression on his smooth, round face. ‘And yet, despite the terrible and corrupt uses to which he ultimately put his great talent and skills, we must surely admire him. Somehow he perfected the ability to change his appearance, taking on the Night Wanderer guise with dead-white face and holes for eyes, but I fear it must have taken huge amounts of concentration and magical energy to maintain it. He had depleted himself savagely, and the image he presented right at the end’ – he hugged himself, as if feeling the blast of a sudden cold wind – ‘was incomplete. He had begun to shake almost ceaselessly, and bits of his true self appeared through cracks in the facade. As, indeed,’ he added, wrapping his shawl more closely round him, ‘parts of the darkness were appearing through when he tried to present himself as Mercure.’
It seemed to Hrype that, just for a moment, a cloud of blackness floated in the passage. Then it dispersed.
Silence fell.
Hrype said after a while, ‘He began his killings with the slaughter of the rat, the cat and the dog, I imagine, in order to introduce the belief that he was indeed the Night Wanderer, returned to haunt the town and embark on the same sort of terror that he had carried out before.’ He paused, frowning. ‘I understand why he had to kill Morgana and Cat and the young priest, for they were working towards the same ends, and I imagine he wanted no competition.’
‘I believe that is so,’ Gurdyman agreed cautiously, ‘although it is hard to say, when someone is so far gone into insanity.’
‘But what of the others?’ Hrype went on.
‘The first victim brought into the town the rare and costly substance that the great work required, and the apothecary’s widow sold it in her shop. Mercure was simply stopping anybody else getting their hands on it.’
‘And the little whore?’
Gurdyman frowned his disapproval at the word. ‘Gerda was Osmund’s sister. If we could question Mercure as to his motive in killing her, I believe you would find that he thought Osmund was about to recruit her as his mystic sister; force her to adopt that role as well as being his blood sister.’
Hrype was shaking his head, a wry smile on his face. ‘How can you possibly know they were brother and sister?’
Gurdyman shrugged. ‘Margery told me. We are old friends, and I have known her for years.’
Rollo strode out of the town to the stables where he had left his horse. He found the sturdy mare turned out in a field, where she stood nose to tail with an intelligent-looking grey gelding which stared with interest at Rollo.
‘Sorry, but I’m taking your new friend away,’ he said to the gelding, gently pushing aside its questing nose.
He tacked up his mare, paid the proprietor what he owed and set off on the road south.
He couldn’t think about Lassair.
He planned to go back across the Channel, make his way to the court of Duke Robert of Normandy and sell, again, what he had learned at such cost in Constantinople and beyond. If he couldn’t have what he wanted – and how much more he wanted it, now that it appeared he couldn’t have it – he might as well use his time profitably and earn some more money.
He thought of the humble little dwelling of the wounded man, out in the empty village that would once have thrummed with life while the Conqueror’s workforce built his castle. He thought of the palatial house he intended to build for himself one day, when he had finally got travel, adventure and risk out of his blood and was ready to settle down.
He realized that, of late, he had been planning his house with Lassair in mind. How foolish that had been, when she wasn’t the sort of woman whose heart could be won by riches.
Despite his firm intentions, he was thinking about her.
Ruthlessly he shut off the images and began a mental list of everything he had ever heard concerning King William’s brother.
By evening, Jack seemed just about strong enough to risk moving him, although the process worried me deeply. But the little room off the tavern was no place for a badly wounded man. With the death of the Night Wanderer, the town was rapidly returning to normal – normal coloured by vast relief, joy at the end of the terrible anxiety, quite a lot of revelry and a great deal of drinking – and the tavern-keeper and his wife, understandably, wanted to encourage trade and not turn it away because the place had to be kept quiet so Jack could rest.
They liked and admired him, but business was business, and everyone had a living to earn.
Walter, Ginger, Fat Gerald and young Henry carried Jack on a makeshift bier, along the quay, over the Great Bridge, down the path beside the castle and through the deserted village to his house at the end of the track. For the first part of the walk, we’d had to dodge revellers spilling out of the taverns, determined to make the most of the lifting of the curfew and many of them clutching mugs of ale and already well on the way to insensibility.
It was a great relief to reach Jack’s house. Once the geese had set up their terrible racket and stopped again, it was quiet out there.
The four men gently lowered the bier and together, with me helping, we moved Jack on to the bed. He was half-conscious and he cried out in pain. Henry shot a swift look at me, and his eyes said accusingly, Can’t you do something?
Fat Gerald was already making a fire and Ginger had gone for water. I opened my satchel and took out my packets of herbs – they wouldn’t last long, I’d have to go out for more very soon – and mixed the right ones in a mug. I met Henry’s anxious gaze. ‘As soon as the water boils,’ I promised, ‘I’ll make the medicine.’
I would mix it strong. Jack needed sleep – it was probably the only thing that would mend him – and I would make quite sure he got it.
The men stayed long enough to check that the fire was going well, the water was coming to the boil, that I was adequately supplied with food and firewood and had everything else I needed. Finally they left. Walter, pausing to turn in the doorway, said quietly, ‘Don’t let him die.’
I felt something lurch inside me. Die. Oh, don’t even say the word …
I met Walter’s steady eyes. ‘I will do my best.’
He grinned, very briefly. ‘Reckon that’ll have to do, then.’
I went outside on to the track and watched them walk away.
&nbs
p; Then I went back to my patient.
Footnotes
Chapter One
1 See Blood of the South.
Chapter Six
1 See Blood of the South.
Chapter Sixteen
1 See Mist over the Water.
