A Gathering of Ghosts

by Karen Maitland

  ‘You bang your head?’

  I knew that voice.

  Morwen vaulted like a cat over the boulder from which I’d clumsily fallen and crouched beside me, holding me up till I could drag air back into my lungs.

  ‘Thirsty,’ I gasped. I needed water so badly now that I couldn’t think of anything else. Morwen hauled me to my feet and steadied me, as if I was a babe learning to stand, as we climbed over the rocks and roots to the river. The sky was lightening all the time, but the mist clung chill and damp to my face. We both knelt by the stream. Morwen cupped her hands in the icy water, tipping them towards my mouth, but she dribbled much of it down the front of my kirtle. I pushed her hands aside and bent forward cupping the water to my mouth, with my good hand, while Morwen grasped the back of my gown to stop me falling in. There wasn’t enough water in the whole river to extinguish the fire of my thirst, much less fill my belly, but finally I dragged myself away and sat up.

  Morwen reached into the front of her own ragged kirtle and pulled out a small piece of stringy meat, which she placed in my lap. I didn’t stop to ask what it was, I sank my teeth into it. My belly was so empty, I couldn’t stop myself gulping it down in lumps, which stuck in my raw throat for I’d barely chewed it in my haste.

  I nodded at her, still sucking the last fragments from my fingertips. ‘Can’t remember when I last ate anything solid.’

  ‘’Bain’t much. Taegan gave it me. Ma’s been keeping me hungry after Ryana told her I’d taken you into Fire Tor.’

  Shame and guilt burned my cheeks. ‘I thought you’d saved . . . I’m sorry.’

  I was aghast at my selfishness. No one had food to spare unless they took it from their own mouths. But the truth was, I’d been so eaten up by hunger I hadn’t thought about where it had come from.

  Morwen grinned. ‘I like watching you eat. You came last night, close by the cottage.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Saw you when I was journeying. Found your mark when I got free.’ She dug into her kirtle once more and held up the stone still bound with my hair. ‘It fetched me here.’

  ‘Got free?’

  Morwen grunted. ‘Ma and Ryana tethered me in the pen. Ma used to tie us up in there when we were chillern, if we’d vexed her. Tell us the wisht hounds would come for us. She’s not done it for a good long time – doesn’t have the strength now unless that cat Ryana helps her.’

  Morwen massaged her neck and, in the growing light, I could see the red ring about her throat. She’d been chained up like a dog. I glimpsed other marks too, a purple welt just showing above the top of her kirtle, and from the way she flinched as she moved, I guessed there were more on her back. Kendra and Ryana had done more than tie her up in a kennel.

  ‘It’s my fault, I shouldn’t—’

  She laughed. ‘Never met such a one as you. I reckon if the stars came tumbling to earth, you’d be saying it was your fault for bumping into them.’

  She listened without saying a word, while I told her all that happened in the tinners’ valley. ‘And I can’t ever go back,’ I finished.

  She looked at me as if I was mad. ‘Why would you want to? Brigid called you to her. She brought you here. She’s been biding her time, waiting till you learned what you needed.’

  ‘She spoke to me again.’

  Resentment flashed across Morwen’s face, though she struggled to push it away. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Protect the boy. That’s what she said. But I don’t understand. What boy? You always seem to know what these things mean.’

  A slow smile lifted the corners of Morwen’s mouth, as if something she had been fretting over suddenly made sense to her.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’ I said. ‘You know who the boy is.’

  Still giving me that strange look, she shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she said softly, ‘but I reckon I will. Tell me what Brigid showed you, what you saw when she told you to protect the boy.’

  She listened patiently to the tale of the child atop the great pyre on the tor and her smile widened into a gap-toothed grin. ‘Ma was wrong. I was sure she’d not looked at that smoke right, like I was sure that blood charm she gave you had no power. I know who he is now. I know his name!’ Grabbing my hands, she dragged me to my feet, dancing around me in delight.

  ‘I reckon it’s almost time. The three sisters are come into their power.’ She glanced up as a skein of geese flew honking towards the rose-pink dawn. ‘But we’ll have to find a place to hide till the hour comes. That Gleedy might decide to have another go at tracking you in daylight.’

  ‘I want to kill him,’ I said. My jaw clenched so hard I could barely get the words out.

  Morwen laughed. ‘Brigid will take revenge on him, never you fear. When Brigid’s cubs are harmed, the great mother’s more savage than a she-wolf. When her anger grows, there’s nothing and no one can stand against her. You wait and see. When I went journeying, I saw—’

  She broke off and tilted her head as if she was trying to see around something that was blocking her vision. ‘The river’s crying, can you hear it?’

  ‘I thought it was a spirit, like in Fire Tor.’

  ‘No, that’s her, that’s the river,’ Morwen said urgently. ‘It’s her warning. When she cries like that it means death. It’s beginning.’

  Chapter 44

  Hospitallers’ Priory of St Mary

  Although darkness had descended over the priory, fires were still blazing in the courtyard and the steam from boiling goats’ heads mingled unpleasantly with the smoke from the wood and peats. The flames beneath the great iron pots and the torches burning on the walls lit up the yard with a demonic red glow, and the figures of servants and sisters emerged and vanished again into the eye-stinging fog like wraiths on All Hallows’ Eve.

  Brother Nicholas picked his way across the yard, slippery with mud, blood and the evil-smelling green sludge from the goats’ stomachs. Although he was coughing violently, he was almost grateful for the dense smoke: it hid the stack of skinned goats’ heads that had been heaped by the kitchen door, their sightless black eyes staring out at their kin already drowning in the bubbling grey water of the cauldrons.

  For once, the smell of cooking meat was not making Nicholas hungry, quite the reverse, for the stench of blood and dung was equally powerful and he could not stop seeing those beasts lying scattered across the pinfold, their heads almost ripped from their bodies and their guts spilling out into the mud.

  An image of another pile of heads flashed unbidden into his mind, human heads, chopped from their bodies while their owners were still screaming for mercy, or muttering fervent prayers, which were severed long before they were finished. The ransom demanded had not been paid. Saracen prisoners were executed in the full sight of their friends, wives and children as the spotless sun blazed down and the azure sea sparkled behind them. Whatever men might boast by the firesides in England, there were some orders they were forced to carry out in war that were neither honourable nor glorious. Nicholas chided himself. He was growing soft here in this cold, grey land, or maybe it was old age creeping up on him. But he didn’t want to admit that.

  Through the smoke, he caught flashes of steel turned ruby in the firelight, heard the rapid chopping of an axe blade smashing through bone. Three or four servants were working on a trestle table erected in the courtyard, skinning and dismembering the carcasses, cutting away the chewed flesh the dogs had mauled and tossing what could be saved into the wooden tubs behind them. They would most likely be chopping, boiling, pressing and salting meat till dawn. With the flesh so mutilated by bird and hound, it had to be preserved within hours else it would turn foul.

  At least with the coming of darkness, the birds had finally departed. Not even the smoke and fires had discouraged them. Every roof ridge and post in the priory had been black with squabbling ravens and crows, while dozens of kites circled and screamed overhead, constantly swooping to snatch meat from the table or peck at the pile of heads. T
he birds even clawed and stabbed the servants’ hands and arms, trying to steal the raw meat they were holding. They had spent more time shouting and lashing out to drive the feathered thieves away than they had skinning and cutting. But even as a maid fought off one bird, three more would be stealing from the barrels behind her. Now cooks, scullions and even the stable lad sweated, chopped and sliced at a feverish pace to make up for the time they’d lost.

  Nicholas reached his chamber and barged in, slamming the door quickly before the smoke and stench could follow him. He didn’t bother to light a candle before dragging off his boots. He was so tired he knew he’d probably fall asleep before he could snuff it out. From the tail of his eye he caught a glimpse of movement on Alban’s bed. That idle bastard was already slumbering, no doubt with a well-stuffed belly.

  ‘I’m not stirring from this chamber till noon tomorrow,’ Nicholas announced. ‘My bones are colder than a witch’s dugs and my back’s as stiff as the devil’s prick. Christ curse this foul land and all those thieving villagers. I’d hang every last one of them by their heels till their eyeballs bled.’

  It was only as he flung himself down on his own protesting bed that he remembered Alban should not be there. He was supposed to be well on his way to Clerkenwell by now. Had that witch somehow stopped him leaving?

  ‘Alban? What in the name of Beelzebub and all his flies are you doing back here?’

  Nicholas flung his boot towards the dim outline of Alban’s bed. There was an explosion of squeaks and scrabbling claws as a horde of mice leaped off and bounded across the floor and up the walls. A plague of frogs, then flies, now these vermin! What next? Locusts? he thought savagely.

  He’d told the prioress that the frogs were a curse sent by God, a sign of heresy, and now that he had discovered the marks of the Inquisition on that man’s body, he felt vindicated. Alban was even now on his way to deliver a report informing the Lord Prior of England that Johanne was harbouring a heretic. But just who was the man? A Cathar, a Waldensian? Or was it possible the pathetic creature who lay twisted in that infirmary was the remnant of a Templar knight, a foul sodomite, whose brethren had caused men to turn against not only the Templars but the Hospitallers as well. Nicholas had urged Lord William to send a group of men-at-arms without delay to seize Johanne and Sebastian and drag them both to Clerkenwell for questioning. They would soon discover the man’s identity and the heinous sins to which he had confessed.

  If Sebastian proved to be a fugitive Templar, Lord William would be aghast at the thought that he had been given shelter in one of the Hospitallers’ own priories and profoundly grateful that Nicholas had uncovered the secret before anyone outside the order had stumbled upon him. It would certainly divert the Lord Prior and Commander John from Nicholas’s failure to produce any definite proof that money was going missing.

  Yet a persistent thought was buzzing at the back of Nicholas’s head. One he had not even wanted to contemplate. There was another to whom Prioress Johanne had stubbornly given shelter, one accused of killing a priest. Ice water ran through Nicholas’s guts as he again felt the boy’s arm writhing, like a serpent, in his hand, the skin turning to scales beneath his fingers.

  He had refused even to think about what had happened in that chapel, pushing it fiercely from his mind each time it edged towards him. He told himself that the boy had somehow witched his mind. He’d seen ebony-skinned magicians on Rhodes cast their staves upon the ground and watched the rods transform into serpents and wriggle away before the eyes of an awestruck crowd. Those men could make your very eyes deceive you, as if you had drunk far too much strong wine.

  But seeing is one thing, touching is another, and what he had felt in his hand was no trick of the eye. It was nothing less than a demon, its foul form concealed beneath a child’s soft skin, like a cankerous worm lying coiled in the heart of a peach. But he had not confronted that fiend, not sent it howling back to Hell. Instead, he had run away from the creature, like a stable boy fleeing the field of battle.

  Nicholas knew he could not make any mention of that encounter in the report that Alban was even now carrying to the Lord Prior of England, not if he hoped to be returned to the Citramer again, as Commander of the English Tongue there. A holy knight of St John, who admitted he could not even confront evil in the form of a small child, would be fortunate to find himself in charge of a midden heap.

  From beyond the walls of the guest chamber he heard a yelp of pain and a stream of oaths from one man, answered by raucous laughter from the others. Someone had probably slipped on their backside in the filth of the courtyard.

  But something else troubled him now. The night that Sebastian had tried to stab himself, when the heretic had shrieked and raged, sending all the other patients and sisters backing away in alarm, the boy had sat motionless on his bed, like a puppet that had been laid aside and would not move again until his master took him up. Had the boy been hag-riding Sebastian, driving him into fits of terror as he had the old priest? But why would a demon torment a heretic? They were both the devil’s servants. And there could be no doubt that Sebastian was a proven heretic: the Inquisition did not permit anyone to live who had not fully admitted their guilt. But the prioress herself had told him that Sebastian had been tormented by these fits of madness long before the boy had arrived. So, if the boy was not controlling the man, then . . .

  Was the prioress not only harbouring a heretic but also a sorcerer? She was seen to have private, whispered conversations with Sebastian, to go to him when he was seized by the visions of the torments of Hell that awaited him or the evil spirits that surrounded him. Had Johanne forced Sebastian to conjure a demon to serve her in the form of the child? Was that why she had given the man shelter? Was this the payment she was demanding from him?

  The boy had appeared as if by magic, the very night he and Alban had ridden in, and he had tormented the blind priest to death before Nicholas had had a chance to question him. It was the hosteller, Sister Melisene, who had first accused the boy of murdering the old priest, and she seemed a practical creature, well used to dealing with all manner of men. Was it possible that Prioress Johanne herself had commanded this demon child to kill the old priest to stop Nicholas discovering the truth?

  Words and phrases swept through his head, carried on a swelling tide of fear, but the only one he could snatch out of the flood was malum – evil. Evil! Put a sword in his hand and he would gladly have fought a dozen armed Saracens singlehanded. He had been trained all his life to face such enemies without flinching, but demons, sorcerers, he had no weapons to fight those. And that terrified him.

  The light from the fires outside filled his chamber with a dull red glow and shadows slithered across the wall so that it seemed no longer to be solid, but rippling, dissolving in front of him. Smoke mingled with blood, and the sickly smell of boiling flesh pushed its way in through every crack and crevice. The clatter of bones being hurled into the pails, the chatter of the servants and chopping of knives and axes grew ever louder until he could hear nothing else. He could see the servants transforming into creatures with monstrous birds’ heads and lizards’ tails, the great open mouths in their bellies snapping at the mangled goats. And they were laughing . . . laughing at him.

  Chapter 45

  Prioress Johanne

  ‘Vinegar for pickling has almost gone, Prioress,’ Sibyl said, rolling her eyes balefully in the direction of Sister Clarice, leaving no doubt as to whom she blamed. ‘And the salt’s finished too. Ground up the last cat of it an hour since, and that was one I rescued from the floor of the pigeon cote. Had to scrape the bird shit and feathers off it afore I could crush it. Couldn’t salvage any more than a pound or so fit for use. I suppose it’s a mercy the cote is almost empty and birds won’t be needing salt. But what am I to do with these? I can’t even set them on the drying racks in this weather.’

  She gestured towards several wooden tubs that stood against the courtyard wall. They’d been covered with planks that had
had to be weighted with rocks to stop the ravens and kites, which were already massing in the early-morning light, finding a way in. Our cook’s hair was straggling down beneath the cloth that bound it. Her face, hands and sacking apron were streaked with dung and rusted with dried blood. She, like the other servants, looked exhausted, but she was still chivvying and scolding any scullion she caught snatching a few minutes’ rest. They had worked until dawn, and now that the last goat had been butchered, the yawning servants were scrubbing the blood from the trestle tables and tossing gory axes and knives into a tub ready to be cleaned and sharpened, just as soon as they’d filled their bellies.

  ‘And those,’ Sibyl pointed through the dark doorway into the cavernous kitchen where skinned goats’ legs lay piled on the long table, ‘I can build smoking stacks in the courtyard if we can get enough dry wood or peats, but what use is smoking the meat if I’ve no salt? And before you say honey, Sister Clarice, there’s not enough of that left after the pickling to sweeten the temper of a toad. We should’ve had more salt in the stores.’ She glared reproachfully at Clarice.

  Seeing my steward’s eyes flash dangerously, I hurriedly stepped between them. ‘None of us could have known we’d have to salt down almost our entire herd of goats, Goodwife Sibyl.’

  ‘And those salt cats don’t sprout out of the ground like turnips,’ Clarice said tartly. ‘Have you any idea of the price those thieving merchants are asking for them? The panners can’t dry salt in the rain any more than you can dry meat. You’ll just have to—’ She broke off, giving me a sharp jab in the ribs. ‘You might want to make yourself scarce. Brother Nicholas is coming this way and he doesn’t look happy!’

  The warning came too late. I tried to step swiftly into the kitchen, but my direct route was blocked by a table in the yard and I found myself trapped.