by Marilyn Todd
'I suppose cheating is out of the question?'
Gurdo's laugh gargled in the back of his throat. 'Might have known you'd think of dirty tricks straight away, but these little lovelies are raised on a diet of kindness and honesty. Something you don't know much about, that's for sure.'
'I am this tempted to cut off that ponytail and feed it to you via your nostrils.'
'What are you going to cut it off with? Your tongue?' He crossed his arms over his chest as he puffed it up. 'Now about this competition. Are you backing Vanessia or the girl with the widow's peak?'
'Why any contest?' she asked. 'The Hundred-Handed don't strike me as the competitive type.'
'Stick around, Lofty Legs, and you'll see rivalry on every issue great, small and infinitesimal, you wouldn't believe what goes on inside that precinct. But this, this is to see who's learned the best lesson about how dew forms and where. An exam, if you prefer.'
'In which case, the answer's Vanessia.'
He clapped his hands and jumped up and down in another ridiculous parody. 'I knew you'd say that!' He planted a loud smack of a kiss on the pendant. 'You're mine, little beauty, all mine.'
'If you're lucky, I'll let you kiss it goodbye too,' Claudia told him. 'But dawn's a way off, so while we're waiting, why don't you tell me what other special dispensations you Sacred Guardians have.'
'Who says we have any?'
'Well, for one thing, you have free access to the precinct.'
'Only because I'm a dwarf and like I said, lady, we ain't real men.'
'Yet they trust you enough not to enslave you, to leave you in charge of the cave and give you your own private accommodation, just as Swarbric is in charge of security at the gate and has his own hut, too. Not to mention seemingly endless amounts of free time.'
Tree? Funny word considering Swarbric's a slave, but if you're talking about leisure time, then the same can be said for any of the men.' He swiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ' You can budget for time like you can budget for anything else, Lofty Legs. It just needs planning, that's all.'
'Which Swarbric is good at?'
Gurdo cast a sideways glance at the mop of grey hair and wide disarming grin busily charming two initiates and a priestess at the same time. 'What isn't that slimy bastard good at,' he snarled from the corner of his mouth. 'He could smarm Chastity into lifting her skirts, him.'
'I'm sure he speaks equally highly of you,' she chirped back. 'What's between him and Mavor?'
'Who says there's anything between those two?' Green eyes narrowed in suspicion.
Claudia thought of the expression on the redhead's face as she'd scurried back to the Dining Hall the evening before from the direction of Swarbric's hut. Remembered the flush on her cheeks - from anger? alarm? - and the way she'd taken pains to rectify any dishevelment before going in to join the others. No, no, something was definitely cooking in that particular kitchen, and yet there was no denying the dismissive manner in which she'd ruled Swarbric out as a lover while massaging Claudia's neck. But though Gurdo didn't deny that there was something between the Bird Priestess and the German, even if it was not of a sexual nature, she knew that Gurdo had brought the shutters down on that particular issue. To prove it, he jabbed a finger towards the dais.
'Look, the girls are back with the midsummer dew.' He tutted. 'Beyond me how they can collect anything on a muggy morning like this.'
'Just proves that studying trees for three hundred years really does pay off in the end.'
His chuckle wasn't entirely due to her quip. Rocking back and forth on his heels, he was rubbing the necklace with his thumb while the Oak Priestess solemnly measured the droplets.
'Oh and dear me, if Vanessia hasn't won the competition,'
Claudia said, and it was worth winning just to see his scowl when she hung the pendant back round her neck.
'Fluke,' he grumbled, turning round and stomping off. 'That's what it was. A damned fluke.'
As the sky changed from dark grey to light grey and Vanessia accepted the crown of oak leaves from Dora, revellers, priestesses and male slaves alike prepared to snuggle down to sleep before the next round of festivities. All, that is, except a tall, dark patrician standing beside the roasting spit, who was watching her carefully from across the field.
'Sorry to disappoint you, Gurdo.' Claudia patted the amber with affection as she matched the dwarf's stride. 'But you see, the girl with the widow's peak might be a year older than Vanessia, but what you have to remember is that a bright girl like Blondie will always want to compensate for her adventurous streak by learning her lessons twice as carefully as her peers.'
It wasn't a question of having something to prove. It was a case of having something to lose.
'What do you want?' Gurdo scowled as he clambered over a fallen log on what was obviously a shortcut back to the cave. 'Gold?'
'Information,' she said, clambering with him. 'Tell me everything you know about Clytie.'
'Bugger off.'
'With pleasure. In fact, I think I'll bugger straight off to Beth and tell her about your game with the healing springs. How you make the sick and needy cross your miser's palm with silver before you allow them the water the HundredHanded give out for free. How much have you got stashed away, anyway?'
'A man in my position needs to plan for his old age. Beth'll understand that.'
'You're a sore loser, Gurdo, but you still owe me.'
'All right, all right. I've got this nice little torque inlaid with coral—'
'Clytie.'
' - or a twist of gold rope that will really suit your long neck—'
'Clytie:
' - or how about a bracelet engraved with panthers and bears that have been inlaid with jet? Take it or leave it, that's my stake.'
'Fine. I'll take it.' She waited until triumph lit the green of his eyes. 'I'll take it straight to Beth and explain how you exploit vulnerable women, bedding them simply because they've been cured by the sacred spring.'
'Eh, eh, not so fast.' He made a placating gesture with his hands. 'What is it you want to know?'
She told him.
'You're a nosy cow, you know that? From the minute you arrived, you've been poking that snout of yours into places that don't concern you - and trust me, lady, the dead here don't concern you.'
'That's where our opinions differ, because Clytie is my business, Gurdo, and if you think I'm making life miserable for you now, imagine what it will be like if you don't tell me the truth, the whole truth and no lies by omission, either.'
'I'm not surprised you've got a pain in the neck, you're bloody contagious,' he retorted, but the puff had gone out of him. And, as they crossed a glade ringed by fruit trees and nuts, where a goldfinch trilled from the top of a conifer and a family of blue tits squabbled for grubs, Gurdo described how Pod had found Clytie laid out on the grass next to the stream.
The night of the spring equinox had passed in much the same way as the night Claudia herself had just passed, he explained, pausing as he relived the memory. Gorse had decked the dais and its brilliant yellow was the colour of the novices' robes. As usual, a bonfire had been lit to celebrate the balance between darkness and light, good and evil, cold and warmth, and, just like midsummer, flames from the fire were carried in bowls by the novices for Fearn to pass over her sacred gorse to purify it.
But there was one significant difference. As King of the Forest, the oak took the shortest night of the year, and with his wood turned night into day with a massive bonfire that would burn right through until noon, when fifty blazing arrows from its dying flames would be fired into the sun's
zenith. On the dawn of the spring equinox, however, the fire was extinguished, signalling the end of the revelries, and instead of sleeping in huddles round the field, the weary celebrants would be wending their way home.
'Just like Pod was,' Gurdo said grimly. 'Me, I'd hung back to take a platter of beef back - what? You want me to starve, just because I'm not as tall a
s you, Lofty Legs?'
'You're a hoarder and a miser, and you'll never starve, you little green monster. I'll bet those ox bones were white by the time you picked them clean.'
'Can I help it if I hate waste? The point is, by the time I reached the cave, my lad was a wreck. White, shuddering, he was in a right old state and I can't say I blame him. There was more blood on that rock than you've seen in an abattoir, and what with the kid laid out in her nightdress with kohl round her eyes and rouge on her cheeks and her skin the colour of—' Gurdo shook his head. 'I don't know what colour. I've never seen that shade before in my life - here, are you all right?'
'I'm—' Deep breath. 'Fine.' And again. Breathe. Now once more, and concentrate on the child, not your mother -'What did you do next?'
'What any decent self-respecting person would do,' he snapped back. 'I washed the rock clean, and I tell you that wasn't easy. The gore had congealed, it stank to high heaven, look are you sure you're all right? Maybe the beef tonight was a bit off?'
Claudia clenched her fists until her nails bit deep into the palms of her hands.
'Yes,' she said. 'The beef. That was it.' She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. 'So what did you do after you washed the' - she almost said evidence - 'blood away?'
'Sent Pod to break the bad news to Beth.' He tugged at his ponytail. 'Well, I could hardly leave him with her in the state he was in, could I? And someone had to stay with the poor cow.'
A hot sticky breeze began to play with the leaves, but Claudia didn't notice. 'How well did you know her?'
'Clytie?' His lip curled. 'As well as anyone knew that selfrighteous little prig, I suppose.'
Memories of her mother's waxy corpse faded. 'You didn't like her?'
'Did anyone?' he asked, clomping through a gap in the trees.
'I don't know ... I assumed ... Gurdo, the girl was twelve years old, for heaven's sake! How can anyone not like a child?'
'Listen, lady, there's no law that says a person has to reach a certain age before becoming a pain in the arse.'
'Which Clytie was?'
'Here, if you want to go around bad-mouthing the dead, you go right ahead, but me, I like to show some respect— Holy Dis, what the bloody hell's that?'
Beneath the bole of an oak, a young man was clutching something bloodied and limp to his breast as he rocked back and forth on his knees.
It took a moment before Claudia realized that the young man was Pod.
And that the mangled mess in his arms was a woman.
Sarra.
Eighteen
Eyes that were normally blue had rolled upwards to white.
Skin that was normally fair was now grey.
Green grass and white roses ran red with blood ...
The pair faltered, but only for a moment. Because even as Claudia's horrified eyes met Gurdo's, the same thought passed through their minds. Pod had been first on the scene at Clytie's murder, now he was first on the scene at Sarra's. Neither Claudia nor Gurdo believed in coincidence.
'Take him to the cave,' she hissed. 'A preparation of hemlock should do the trick.' God knew, the stuff grew rampant enough in these parts. 'You do know the dosage?' she added sharply, remembering the trug brimming with hellebores, hedge hyssop and monkshood that she'd seen over his arm, each a deadly poison in its own right.
'If you're asking, will I make it too strong so it does a Socrates on him, save your breath,' Gurdo retorted, 'I want my boy calm, not bloody paralysed. I'll use black hellebores. They'll put him in a deep sleep.'
But the sting to his words belied the fear in his eyes. This time it was the Guardian of the Spring who was looking for miracles.
'Stay with him while I tell Beth,' he said, and Croesus almighty, it was taking every ounce of their combined strength to prise Pod off the corpse.
'I'll go,' Claudia insisted, as they finally dragged him away. 'If ever a boy needed his father, Gurdo, it's now.'
That was a lie. As savage and shocking as this murder was, Claudia was more concerned with Beth's reaction when confronted with this second tragedy.
'Just make sure the pair of you are gone by the time I get back,' she called over her shoulder.
Gurdo nodded grimly, gratitude showing despite the rigid jaw and blenched skin, but his gratitude was misplaced. This wasn't just about Pod's potential shunning. All right, if even one sniff of his relationship with Sarra got back to the Hundred-Handed, he'd be banished on the instant and that the girl was dead - murdered - counted for nothing. He'd breached sacred rules against which there was no appeal, but Claudia wasn't doing this for Pod or for Gurdo. She was doing this for Sarra, and Clytie before her ...
Me mother? No more than wind at the door. Pod's words flooded back as she raced down the path to the Field of Celebration. Seven summers old, I was, there or abouts, and what with me having no memories of me own—
Why no memories, though, that was the worry. Ducking the overhanging willows as she ran, she recalled numerous cases where death had visited a child's life so violently that the very horror of it had wiped clean memories of the event.
That little girl they found wandering the Capitol, for example. Her entire family had been butchered by a next-door neighbour acting on the orders of Almighty Jupiter himself, who'd told him these people were fiends in human form and that only by chopping off their heads would mortal man be free of demons. Mother, father, grandmother, eight-year-old son, six-year-old daughter and baby still in its crib were all slaughtered, except for the four-year-old, who'd been playing under the bed when the monster broke in. In his axe-wielding frenzy, he'd not noticed the child and though she escaped with her life and the memory of that terror had been blissfully erased, the girl had nevertheless grown up troubled and difficult, striking out at nothing, hurting relatives and friends for no reason. In the end, and aged only sixteen, she took her own life. But then tragedy always rolls on and on.
Whether trauma of that kind had crossed Pod's path, Claudia had no idea, but by drugging him, at least his stupor would slow everything down. It would give her time to grieve for a girl she'd barely known, yet who had been butchered with a savagery she would never forget. And it would give her time to think this whole thing through,
because even as she first saw Pod, face blank in grief as he clutched Sarra to his breast, darker thoughts had run through her mind.
That his grief was genuine went without saying, but that four-year-old wandering the Capitol had triggered other memories. Like the cloak-maker's daughter who strangled her cousin ('I didn't know death meant for ever'). The cobbler's son, who started with kittens before slicing up his baby brother. And especially, yes especially, the poulterer's boy. Claudia remembered the story so vividly—
His father coming in from the back yard to find the boy kneeling over his mother, her chest so badly mangled there was hardly room for his blade. He kept stabbing and stabbing, as though he was an automaton, not recognizing his father, he couldn't say his own name and later, could remember nothing about it ...
She pictured Pod as she'd left him, ashen and trembling, with only animal sounds coming from his mouth as he clutched a mangled spray of white rosebuds to his breast. The fact that there was no knife found at either murder scene didn't mean he hadn't thrown it into the undergrowth, while the fact that he had blackouts didn't mean he hadn't killed those two girls. And the fact that he'd killed Clytie and Sarra certainly didn't mean Pod wasn't sorry—
Claudia's footsteps echoed over the footbridge.
Two young girls, two crucial dates in the Hundred-Handed's calendar, copious amounts of blood. And yet ... And yet ...
As she ran up the steps onto the dais to wake Beth and break the bad news, there was only one thought tumbling around in her head. Assuming Sarra's arms had been spread out at her sides - and there was nothing to suggest they had been - her cheeks hadn't been reddened with rouge, her eyes hadn't been painted with kohl.
'Sarra?' Ailm barked, her voice still rough from sleep. 'I
was only talking to the girl an hour or two back!'
Her face drained from shock, Beth couldn't speak. Dora, rising beside her, blinked rapidly.
'Are you sure she's dead and not pretending?' Luisa asked. 'Some of those novices are terrible practical jokers.'
'I'm so sorry, but there's no mistake.'
With a voice cracked with emotion, Claudia reported the multiple stab wounds that left Sarra's pink robe shredded in an attack that was almost orgiastic in its frenzy.
'If it helps,' she added, as finger signals flashed back and forth between the five women, 'Sarra put up one hell of a fight.'
The cuts in her hands stood proof to that. Her palms had been cut to ribbons.
'We have decided,' Beth said, and the calmness of her voice belied the shaking of her limbs. 'For once it is unanimous - ' she cast a glance at both Dora and Ailm - 'but it is our opinion that nothing of this must be broadcast to the outside world. It will achieve nothing while engendering panic'
Four heads nodded firmly in unison.
'I shall ask some of the sisterhood to take Sarra away to be prepared for the Journey, of course. But the pentagram will remain, the ceremony will continue, we will fire fifty blazing arrows into the sun's zenith as though nothing has happened.'
Like it did with Clytie, Claudia was tempted to snap, but then remembered that these women had just received a terrible shock. Arousing their animosity would gain nothing.
'You can't simply ignore it,' she pointed out calmly.
'Indeed, no,' Beth said kindly, holding up three bent fingers with the ghost of a smile. 'See? Swarbric has already been sent for.'
'So if you'll excuse us?' Ailm made no attempt to hide the hostility in her voice. 'We wish to mourn in private, if you don't mind.'
'Of course,' she replied, 'I understand perfectly,' and all things considered, was it any wonder they wanted her gone? Closing ranks was the one thing the Hundred-Handed did best. That, and covering up murder.
I suspect you meant to call me an angel, but you've just labelled me an old bat! The fairy's soft laugh rippled through the leaves in the forest. This is the cipher for angel
