A Gathering of Ghosts

by Karen Maitland

  ‘Perhaps so, but when the knights have ridden back to safety at Buckland, where do you think the tinners will come to vent their fury? If you bring men-at-arms from Buckland to this place, all you will succeed in doing is starting a war between this priory and the tinners, and if they are the wild dogs you claim them to be, our cross and our veil will be no protection. You will not send to Buckland, Brother Nicholas, not as long as I remain prioress here.’

  ‘And how long will you remain prioress, Mistress, with no livestock and no lands to support you? You had best ensure that no more plagues beset your holy well, for you will need every bent pin those pilgrims throw into it.’

  Chapter 24

  Sorrel

  ‘Listen!’ Morwen said, tilting her head towards the rocks towering above her on the top of the tor.

  But I was panting so hard the only thing I could hear was the river of blood thundering deep within my ears. I was used to working all day on an empty belly, bred to it, you might say, like the donkey which walks round and round, day after day, turning the grinding stone. I’d spent my life hauling water from the village well, hefting firewood, pummelling the washing and wrestling with our own small patch of stony land, but though that makes your back and belly as strong as a blacksmith’s, it doesn’t prepare your aching legs for climbing up a steep tor with a spiteful wind snatching the air from your mouth before you can even take gulp of it.

  It was all very well for Morwen. Like all those who were born on the moors, every step she’d taken in her life must have been either up a hill or down, and she could bound up a steep slope like a cat up the thatch on a roof. But by the time I’d staggered to where Morwen was crouched at the top of the tor, sweat was crawling down my face, and I’d such a burning pain beneath my ribs all I could do was flop down on the wet grass and lie there. Great grey clouds rose up, one behind another, like walls of stone, but a beam of dazzling sunlight, thin and straight as a golden arrow, slipped between them, striking the twisted branches of a thorn bush that grew out of a crack in the rock above my head, catching the raindrops that clung to the leaves and turning them into a shoal of sparkling rainbow fish.

  I pointed. ‘Beautiful,’ I gasped.

  Morwen lay down beside me, her head nearly touching mine as we stared up at the rainbow fish darting among the waterweed of thorn.

  ‘Some nights,’ Morwen murmured, ‘the moon turns all the rocks to silver. The sky’s as dark and soft as a mole’s pelt, full of great frosted stars. When the summer is dying, the hills burst into yellow and orange flames. The bracken burns red as a fox, and rowan berries glow like hot embers. And when Brigid brings the sun back in the spring, the black moor pools are so still and calm you can see the clouds in them as if the skies were below your feet ’stead of above your head. When I was little, I’d watch the birds in the sky drifting in the pool, as if they were flying through water. I thought if I jumped in I’d find a whole new world down there. Tried it once, but all I found was mud.’ She sat up, frowning. ‘’Tis all mud now. The moor is hurting. Nothing’s right.’

  She rolled over and tugged at me like a fretful bairn till I sat up. ‘But listen,’ she repeated.

  I couldn’t hear anything on that high peak, save the roar of the wind as it flattened the tawny grasses, but as my heart stopped thudding from the climb, I began to hear another sound burrowing out beneath the wind’s shriek, a hollow knocking, as if a corpse was beating against the stone walls of his tomb with his own bones. And voices too, but they were murmuring to each other so low that I couldn’t make out the words, or maybe they were speaking in a strange tongue, for I could no more catch the meaning than grasp that shaft of sunlight in my fist.

  Morwen was watching me intently, her flame-red hair gusting in the breeze, her great green-grey eyes hungry as those of a stray cat. I felt like a beast with a plump bird clamped between my jaws and she was judging how best to snatch it. I knew she wanted me to tell her something, but I didn’t know what.

  She shook her head impatiently. ‘You hear them?’

  ‘Who’s in there? Your mam and sisters?’

  Morwen grinned, showing a missing front tooth. ‘Ma only comes here at night when there’s a certain moon she needs for her charms. That’s why I brought you here in daylight, ’cause I knew it’d be safe then.’

  The voices inside the cave grew louder, though their song was so mournful it hurt like a fist reaching into your chest and twisting your heart. I ached with misery at the sound, as if I was watching someone I loved weeping at a graveside. I wanted to take away their pain, but I couldn’t.

  ‘I knew it. I knew they’d speak to you.’ Morwen breathed the words softly, as if she feared to disturb them. ‘Come on.’

  She edged sideways through the crevice, though she was so slender I reckoned she could have walked in face on. Then she stuck her hand back out between the rocks, groping for mine. Our fingers interlaced and she threaded me through the gap till we stood hand in hand, listening to the voices swirling in the darkness. Our breathing slowed and, without meaning to, I found I was drawing in breath with her and letting it go as she did, so that it felt as if the damp, earthy air was entering me through Morwen’s body. We had melded into one creature.

  A cold, hoary light trickled through the crevice, like dawn breaking after a winter’s night, and I saw we were standing in an oblong cave. The floor sloped down towards the entrance and was bare but for the ashes of a fire set about by blackened stones and a few sticks of scorched wood.

  Morwen let go of my hand, crouched and carefully heaped fresh tinder on the little nest of feather-soft ashes. She struck a flint and iron together several times until a bright flash of sparks caught the pile of twigs and a fragile flame guttered along its edge. She blew down a hollow reed, until the tinder was ablaze, then added some of the charred sticks.

  ‘Ma’ll not see the glow in daylight, but we’d best keep it small.’

  The firelight flickered over the far end of the cave, which before had been in darkness. A slab of stone was covered with a white woollen cloth, but it wasn’t lying flat. It concealed something beneath.

  ‘What’s under that?’ I was curious, itching to raise it and look, but I didn’t want to offend Morwen by prying.

  As she glanced up, I jerked my chin towards the slab. That gesture would have made my old mam give one of her fond, sad smiles – she said I started pointing with my chin long before I could walk: if my good hand was grasping a crust of sucked bread or a shiny pebble, I had no other hand to point with. Mam said it broke her heart to watch me, for she could see even then that I longed to seize the world with both hands. But I reckoned one hand is more than big enough to catch life by the tail, if you can make that fist strong.

  Morwen’s gaze sidled towards the cloth, but she didn’t look at me when she answered. ‘I’ll show you one day, but not yet.’

  There was something under there that bothered her. I could sense it. I glanced back at the cloth and shivered, as if Morwen’s unease had jumped across the space between us.

  She made me sit facing her on the other side of the fire, the way I’d faced Kendra across the smoke. ‘Look,’ she commanded. ‘Look into the fire, then you’ll see. And you must say the will worth, like I told you down at the pool. You must ask the woman who called you in your dreams to speak again and show you her face. You must want it so much that you feel like you’ll break.’

  While my mam still lived, I used to stare into the flames every evening, but it seemed now that that was centuries ago, far back in the embers of my childhood. When had there last been time to sit still of an evening without falling asleep from exhaustion? But now I felt myself shrink down into that little bairn again, when I’d watched fiery boars thunder through charcoal-black forests of towering trees, and golden salmon leap over ruby waterfalls, and great black and amber birds hover over the bloody corpses of the slain. Those things were as familiar as my own cottage back in my village. But what I saw in the flames in that cave were
not those creatures. This was an alien fire.

  Gnarled and twisted oaks, wizened and shrunken, old as the tors and their spirits as dark. But they are not trees at all. They’re wrinkles and veins, nostrils and eyebrows. They’re the face of a man, an ancient man, with great cavernous sockets for eyes. A black hound leaps from one of the sockets, his coat aflame and crackling with bright ruby sparks. A second dog bounds out and . . .

  I turn my head. A woman is sitting before the fire. I see only her back, only her outline dark against the leaping flames. She is weaving cloth on a loom of silver birch poles. She has spun the warp threads from soft rushes, green as spring, but as she picks the weft thread in and out of the warp, it shimmers and dances, crimson as rowan berries, golden as sunbeams. And I see it is not thread at all but living flames. She is weaving a cloak of fire.

  Something darts across the cave. I catch it on the very edge of my vision. But I know if I turn to look at it, it will dissolve. I glimpse it again. It shines as though it has been cast from moonlight, yet it has a shadow at its core, a deep blackness.

  I feel a tingle on my back. The skin on my shoulder-blades stretches and bubbles, as if maggots are burrowing out. They burst the skin, emerge quivering. They’re attached to my body like my wizened arm, yet while that lies limp, they’re uncrumpling, unfolding, blood is pumping through them, my blood. They’re swelling, fluttering, and I can no more make them lie still than I can make the fingers of my left hand move. Shadows are gathering around me, drifting closer, like shoals of curious fishes. If I turn my head, they dart away, only to swarm close again when I stare back into the flames.

  ‘Fire and water wait for you. The time is now.’

  It’s her voice. The one that called to me in my dreams and from the river.

  ‘Come deeper into the fire, come. It will not harm you. It is cold fire, a fire of ice. It is my fire, come.’

  Something lies beneath those twisted oaks, deep at the heart of that fiery core, a fox, a black fox. It doesn’t look at me, yet I know if I walk towards it it will rise and run before me, deeper.

  ‘Deeper.’

  The whispers around me grow deafening, as if I’m being sucked into the roar and crackle of the fire. The creatures of the shadows are flying at me now. Their damp grave-breath drifts against my face, their dead icy hands stroke my hair, and I know that if I let go I will float away with them through that sea of cold black flames.

  ‘Let go. Come deeper. Come to me!’

  My head jerks up and, with every last grain of will I possess, I push a single word into my throat and force it out between my lips. ‘NO!’

  The shadows rise, swirling around me, like a clamour of rooks. The whispers slither back through the cracks in the rock.

  ‘What did you do that fer?’ Morwen’s voice held all the bitter frustration of old Kendra’s.

  But the green eyes that stared at me through the veil of smoke were filled with betrayal, like those of a child who’d had a juicy plum snatched from her hand before she’d taken a bite.

  ‘Did you see . . .’ I began, but I’d no words for what I’d seen or heard, so the question drifted down to the trampled earth.

  Morwen glowered at me. ‘What? What did you see? Tell me!’

  I tried, but it was like trying to make a shattered pot whole again. The more I spoke, the less sense it made. Nothing was joined together, nothing I had seen had an ending. I was sinking down in nameless dread, knowing only that if I had taken one more step I would never have been able to return. It was as if I was gazing down into my grave – no, worse than that: I was staring through it into whatever living darkness lay beyond.

  All the time I was trying to tell her what I’d seen and heard, Morwen sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms wrapped round them, fists clenched. Her gaze was fixed upon the fire. She didn’t glance at me once.

  ‘Brigid. That’s who’s been calling you,’ she said dully, after a long silence.

  ‘Saint Brigid?’

  ‘No!’ she snapped. ‘Our Brigid. Her whose well the black crows have stolen. Mother Brigid of the fires and the sacred springs. That’s who you saw. She made these moors with her own hands, sang the wells out of the earth and called the rivers to run to the pools. It was her you saw at her loom. She was weaving her mantle. She returns at Imbolc and spreads her mantle over the earth to protect the land and drive away the last snows of winter.’

  Brigid, the old goddess. Some memory fluttered to life deep inside me. Mam used to spill a little milk for old Brigid sometimes, if the butter was stubborn and wouldn’t come in the churn. The parish priest used to rail against such things in his sermons, but Mam said the old mother belonged to the women and was no concern of any man.

  I’d not thought of it since I was a bairn, but now a picture came into my head of Mam tying a strip of cloth on a bush outside our cottage at sunset. It must have been winter then, for I remember the puddles were frozen and Mam’s fingers were so blue with cold she had to keep blowing on them as she tied the knot. I’d thought it a strange thing to be doing – Mam was always careful to gather in before nightfall any clothes she’d put out to dry for fear they’d blow away or be ruined by beasts.

  ‘’Tis Brigid’s mantle,’ Mam told me, though I could see it wasn’t even big enough to make a cloak for my wooden doll. ‘This night Brigid rides through the village to bless the mantles of those who do her honour, and it’ll bring good fortune to our home if she blesses it.’

  Mam promised that next year she’d show me how to hang the cloth, but she never did, for by then she was dead.

  Morwen’s head whipped round, fury blazing in her eyes. ‘You don’t even know who Brigid is, do you? So why did she call you? I have the gift. Why not me? Why can’t I see her?’

  I could feel her hurt, but I didn’t know what to say. I wished it had been her. I didn’t want this. ‘What does she need from me?’ I asked, hoping that Morwen’s pride would be soothed a little if she could teach me again as she had down by the black pool.

  But my question seemed only to bait her anger. ‘Why ask me? You should have asked her. She wanted to tell you. Why did you refuse to listen? I would have gone to her when she called. I wouldn’t have run away like a – a – a sheep with a tick up its arse. You have to look into the fire again. And this time you must do what I told you. You have to want her to answer.’

  ‘I’ll not be told what I must do,’ I said, as furious as she was now.

  I scrambled to my feet and stalked towards the narrow cleft that led out of the cave. ‘And I’ll not conjure those creatures again.’ I shuddered, still fearing their grave-cold fingers against my neck. ‘If you’ve the gift, like you say, then you look into that fire. And while you’re about it, you can tell this Brigid of yours to leave me be!’

  Chapter 25

  Hospitallers’ Priory of St Mary

  Brother Nicholas, striding across the courtyard, caught sight of the chapel door and stopped abruptly. Smoke! The chapel was on fire! He started to shout a warning, but realised even as the word escaped his lips that it wasn’t smoke but steam. The sun had broken through the clouds, and a shaft of light shone full upon the door of the chapel. The wet wood steamed in the unexpected warmth. Nicholas tried to ignore the curious stares of the servants who’d been startled by his bellow and were watching his progress with undisguised curiosity, as if they thought he might start capering like a court jester.

  It was hardly any wonder he couldn’t recognise sunlight when he saw it, Nicholas thought morosely. It was as rare as cocks’ eggs on this blasted moor. In Rhodes, the heat would be shimmering off the stones and the golden sun sparkling on a clear azure sea. Grapes would burst sweet on his tongue, and a girl whose silken hair smelt of damask roses and jasmine would be smiling at him as she poured his wine.

  Mud squelched out beneath the sacking that had been laid in front of the chapel threshold, covering his boots with a stinking ooze of stagnant water and goose dung. He cursed vehemently, sta
rtling the servants a second time. The Lord Prior must send him back to the Citramer. He’d rot from the feet up if he was forced to spend another winter in this miserable realm.

  But Lord William would send him nowhere if he couldn’t even prove that the accounts drawn up by some aged crone were flawed, either through ignorance or, as he was beginning to suspect, by deliberate manipulation. But every time that suspicion crept back into his head, he found himself stamping on it. It was one thing to believe that women were fools and easily gulled, but that they would be clever enough to cheat the order was quite another, especially to do it so skilfully that neither he nor the procurator at Clerkenwell was able to uncover it. That was simply not possible.

  Nicholas grasped the iron ring on the chapel door, hesitating before he turned it. Frogs and flies, bolts that would yield only to a woman’s touch, what new plagues was that well about to spew forth? He was starting to think it was possessed of a malice all of its own. He pushed the door. The bright pool of sunlight outside made the chapel seem darker than usual and, for a moment, it appeared deserted. Nicholas was annoyed. He’d been sure he’d find her in here and, equally importantly, find her alone. He was about to stalk out again, when he glimpsed a movement in the dark shadows.

  Sister Fina was emerging from the well door on the far side of the chapel. She halted when she caught sight of him and he thought she might dart back down, like the lizards on Rhodes, which scuttled under rocks if they caught sight of a man approaching. But instead she stood in the archway, as if, once again, she intended to prevent him or indeed anyone from entering.

  ‘The . . . the well is open again, Brother Nicholas. The pilgrims will come today.’ Her tone was wooden, rigid as her body.

  ‘I was informed that it was to be reopened.’

  Actually, he hadn’t been told anything. But Alban had seen lights moving in the chapel after dark and had alerted him. From the shadows, he’d watched the prioress and her sisters spend half the night carrying a stinking soup of rotten frogs, maggots, dead flies and slime in relays of buckets up the steps to a pit outside the priory walls, there to be buried with lime, and all under cover of darkness. Darkness covers many sins.