Dead Man's Ransom

by Ellis Peters

  “I’ll ride with you, if I can finish my business here,” Cadfael had said. Hugh had asked him nothing then, and did not ask him now. Perhaps because his mind was wholly engrossed in what had to be done to drive the Welsh of Powys back into Caus and beyond. Perhaps because he considered this other matter to be very much Cadfael’s business, and was willing to wait for enlightenment until it was offered, as at the right time it would be.

  Cadfael braced his aching back against the bole of an oak just forming its tight leaf-buds, eased his chafed feet in his boots, and felt his sixty-one years. He felt all the older because all these troubled creatures pulled here and there through this tangle of love and guilt and anguish were so young and vulnerable. All but the victim, Gilbert Prestcote, dead in his helpless weakness—for whom Hugh would, because he must, take vengeance. There could be no clemency, there was no room for it. Hugh’s lord had been done to death, and Hugh would exact payment. In iron duty, he had no choice.

  “Up!” said Hugh, standing over him, smiling the abstracted but affectionate smile that flashed like a reflection from the surface of his mind when his entire concern was elsewhere. “Get your eyes open! We’re off again.” And he reached a hand to grip Cadfael’s wrist and hoist him to his feet, so smoothly and carefully that Cadfael was minded to take offence. He was not so old as all that, nor so stiff! But he forgot his mild grievance when Hugh said: “A shepherd from Pontesbury brought word. They’re up from their night camp and making ready to move.”

  Cadfael was wide awake instantly. “What will you do?”

  “Hit the road between them and Shrewsbury and turn them back. Alan will be up and alert, we may meet him along the way.”

  “Dare they attempt the town?” wondered Cadfael, astonished.

  “Who knows? They’re blown up with success, and I’m thought to be far off. And our man says they’ve avoided Minsterley but brought men round it by night. It seems they may mean a foray into the suburbs, at least, even if they draw off after. Town pickings would please them. But we’ll be faster, we’ll make for Hanwood or thereabouts and be between.”

  Hugh made a gentle joke of hoisting Cadfael into the saddle, but for all that, Cadfael set the pace for the next mile, ruffled at being humoured and considered like an old man. Sixty-one was not old, only perhaps a little past a man’s prime. He had, after all, done a great deal of hard riding these last few days, he had a right to be stiff and sore.

  They came over a hillock into view of the Shrewsbury road, and beheld, thin and languid in the air above the distant trees beyond, a faint column of smoke rising. “From their douted fires,” said Hugh, reining in to gaze. “And I smell older burning than that. Somewhere near the rim of the forest, someone’s barns have gone up in flames.”

  “More than a day old and the smoke gone,” said Cadfael, sniffing the air. “Better make straight for them, while we know where they are, for there’s no telling which way they’ll strike next.”

  Hugh led his party down to the road and across it, where they could deploy in the fringes of woodland, going fast but quietly in thick turf. For a while they kept within view of the road, but saw no sign of the Welsh raiders. It began to seem that their present thrust was not aimed at the town after all, or even the suburbs, and Hugh led his force deeper into the woodland, striking straight at the deserted night camp. Beyond that trampled spot there were traces enough for eyes accustomed to reading the bushes and grass. A considerable number of men had passed through here on foot, and not so long ago, with a few ponies among them to leave droppings and brush off budding twigs from the tender branches. The ashen, blackened ruin of a cottage and its clustering sheds showed where their last victim had lost home, living and all, if not his life, and there was blood dried into the soil where a pig had been slaughtered. They spurred fast along the trail the Welsh had left, sure now where they were bound, for the way led deeper into the northern uplands of the Long Forest, and it could not be two miles now to the cell at Godric’s Ford.

  That ignominious rout at the hands of Sister Magdalen and her rustic army had indeed rankled. The men of Caus were not averse to driving off a few cattle and burning a farm or two by the way, but what they wanted above all, what they had come out to get, was revenge.

  Hugh set spurs to his horse and began to thread the open woodland at a gallop, and after him his company spurred in haste. They had gone perhaps a mile more when they heard before them, distant and elusive, a voice raised high and bellowing defiance.

  *

  It was almost the hour of High Mass when Alan Herbard got his muster moving out of the castle wards. He was hampered by having no clear lead as to which way the raiders planned to move, and there was small gain in careering aimlessly about the western border hunting for them. For want of knowledge he had to stake on his reasoning. When the company rode out of the town they aimed towards Pontesbury itself, prepared to swerve either northward, to cut across between the raiders and Shrewsbury, or south-west towards Godric’s Ford, according as they got word on the way from scouts sent out before daylight. And this first mile they took at speed, until a breathless countryman started out of the bushes to arrest their passage, when they were scarcely past the hamlet of Beistan.

  “My lord, they’ve turned away from the road. From Pontesbury they’re making eastward into the forest towards the high commons. They’ve turned their backs on the town for other game. Bear south at the fork.”

  “How many?” demanded Herbard, already wheeling his horse in haste.

  “A hundred at least. They’re holding all together, no rogue stragglers left loose behind. They expect a fight.”

  “They shall have one!” promised Herbard and led his men south down the track, at a gallop wherever the going was fairly open.

  Eliud rode among the foremost, and found even that pace too slow. He had in full all the marks of suspicion and shame he had invited, the rope to hang him coiled about his neck for all to see, the archer to shoot him down if he attempted escape close at his back, but also he had a borrowed sword at his hip, a horse under him and was on the move. He fretted and burned, even in the chill of the March morning. Here Elis had at least the advantage of having ridden these paths and penetrated these woodlands once before. Eliud had never been south of Shrewsbury, and though the speed they were making seemed to his anxious heart miserably inadequate, he could gain nothing by breaking away, for he did not know exactly where Godric’s Ford lay. The archer who followed him, however good a shot he might be, was no very great horseman, it might be possible to put on speed, make a dash for it and elude him, but what good would it do? Whatever time he saved he would inevitably waste by losing himself in these woods. He had no choice but to let them bring him there, or at least near enough to the place to judge his direction by ear or eye. There would be signs. He strained for any betraying sound as he rode, but there was nothing but the swaying and cracking of brushed branches, and the thudding rumble of their hooves in the deep turf, and now and again the call of a bird, undisturbed by this rough invasion, and startlingly clear.

  The distance could not be far now. They were threading rolling uplands of heath, to drop lower again into thick woodland and moist glades. All this way Elis must have run afoot in the night hours, splashing through these hollows of stagnant green and breasting the sudden rises of heather and scrub and outcrop rock.

  Herbard checked abruptly in open heath, waving them all to stillness. “Listen! Ahead on our right—men on the move.”

  They sat straining their ears and holding their breath. Only the softest and most continuous whisper of sounds, compounded of the swishing and brushing of twigs, the rustle of last autumn’s leaves under many feet, the snap of a dead stick, the brief and soft exchange of voices, a startled bird rising from underfoot in shrill alarm and indignation. Signs enough of a large body of men moving through woods almost stealthily, without noise or haste.

  “Across the brook and very near the ford,” said Herbard sharply. And he shook his br
idle, spurred and was away, his men hard on his heels. Before them a narrow ride opened between well-grown trees, a long vista with a glimpse of low timber buildings, weathered dark brown, distant at the end of it, and a sudden lacework of daylight beyond, between the trees, where the channel of the brook crossed.

  They were halfway down the ride when the boiling murmur of excited men breaking out of cover eddied up from the invisible waterside, and then, soaring loudly above, a single voice shouting defiance, and even more strangely, an instant’s absolute hush after the sound.

  The challenge had meant nothing to Herbard. It meant everything to Eliud. For the words were Welsh, and the voice was the voice of Elis, high and imperious, honed sharp by desperation, bidding his fellow-countrymen: “Stand and turn! For shame on your fathers, to come whetting your teeth on holy women! Go back where you came from and find a fight that does you some credit!” And higher and more peremptorily: “The first man ashore I spit on this pikel, Welsh or no, he’s no kinsman of mine!”

  This to a war-band roused and happy and geared for killing!

  “Elis!” cried Eliud in a great howl of anger and dismay, and he lay forward over his horse’s neck and drove in his heels, shaking the bridle wild. He heard the archer at his back shout an order to halt, heard and felt the quivering thrum of the shaft as it skimmed his right shoulder, tore away a shred of cloth, and buried itself vibrating in the turf beyond. He paid no heed, but plunged madly ahead, down the steep green ride and out on to the bank of the brook.

  *

  They had come by way of the thicker cover a little downstream, to come at the grange and the ford before they were detected, and leave aimless and out of range any defenders who might be stationed at the mill, where there was a better field for archery. The little footbridge had not yet been repaired, but with a stream so fallen from its winter spate there was no need of a bridge. From stone to stone the water could be leaped in two or three places, but the attackers favoured the ford, because so many could cross there shoulder to shoulder and bring a battering-ram of lances in one sweep to drive along the near bank. The forest bowmen lay in reeds and bushes, dispersed along the brink, but such a spearhead, with men and weight enough behind it, could cleave through and past them and be into the precinct within moments.

  They were deceived if they thought the forest men had not detected their approach, but there was no sign of movement as the attackers threaded their way quietly between the trees to mass and sweep across the brook. Perhaps twenty cottars, woodsmen and hewers of laborious assarts from the forests lay in cover against more than a hundred Welsh, and every man of the twenty braced himself, and knew only too well how great a threat he faced. They knew how to keep still until the proper moment to move. But as the lurkers in the trees signalled along their half, seen ranks and closed all together in a sudden surge into the open at the edge of the ford, one man rose out of the bushes opposite and bestrode the grassy shelf of the shore, brandishing a long, two-tined pikel lashed to a six-foot pole, and sweeping the ford with it at breast-height.

  That was enough to give them an instant’s pause out of sheer surprise. But what stopped them in mid-stride and set them back on their heels was the indignant Welsh trumpet blaring: “Stand and turn! For shame on your fathers, to come whetting your teeth on holy women!”

  He had not done, there was more, rolling off the inspired tongue in dread of a pause, or in such flight as to be unable to pause. “Cowards of Powys, afraid to come north and meddle with men! They’ll sing you in Gwynedd for this noble venture, how you jumped a brook and showed yourselves heroes against women older than your mothers, and a world more honest. Even your drabs of dams will disown you for this. You and your mongrel pedigrees shall be known for ever by the songs we’ll make…”

  They had begun to stir out of their astonishment, to scowl and to grin. And still the hidden bowmen in the bushes held their hands, willing to wait the event, though their shafts were fitted and their bows partly drawn, ready to brace and loose. If by some miracle this peril might dissolve in withdrawal and conciliation, why lose arrows or blunt blades?

  “You, is it?” shouted a Welshman scornfully. “Cynan’s pup, that we left spewing water and being pumped dry by the nuns. He, to halt us! A lickspit of the English now!”

  “A match for you and better!” flashed Elis, and swung the pikel towards the voice. “And with grace enough to let the sisters here alone, and to be grateful to them, too, for a life they could as well have let go down the stream, for all they owed me. What are you looking for here? What plunder is there, here among the willing poor? And for God’s sake and your Welsh fathers’ sake, what glory?”

  He had done all he could, perhaps provided a few minutes of time, but he could do little more, and it was not enough. He knew it. He even saw the archer in the fringe of the trees opposite fit his shaft without haste, and draw very steadily and deliberately. He saw it out of the corner of his eye, while he continued to confront the lances levelled against him, but there was nothing he could do to deflect or elude, he was forced to stand and hold them as long as he could, shifting neither foot nor eye.

  Behind him there was a rush of hooves, stamping deep into the turf, and someone flung himself sobbing out of the saddle in one vaulting bound, and along the shelf of grass above the water, just as the forest bowmen drew and loosed their first shafts, every man for himself, and the archer on the opposite shore completed his easy draw, and loosed full at Elis’s breast, Welsh of Powys striking coldly at Welsh of Gwynedd. Eliud vented a scream of anger and defiance, and hurled himself between, embracing Elis breast to breast and covering him with his own body, sending them both reeling a pace backwards into the turf, to crash against a corner of the sisters” garden fence. The pikel with its long handle was jerked out of Elis’s hand, and slashed into the stream in a great fan of water. The Welshman’s arrow jutted from under Eliud’s right shoulder-blade, transfixing his body and piercing through the under-flesh of Elis’s upper arm, pinning the two together inseparably. They slid down the fence and lay in the grass locked in each other’s arms, and their blood mingled and made one, closer even than fostering.

  And then the Welsh were over and ashore, floundering in the pits of the ford, ripped on the stakes among the reeds, trampling the two fallen bodies, and battle was joined along the banks of the brook.

  Almost at the same moment, Alan Herbard deployed his men along the eastern bank and waded into the fighting, and Hugh Beringar swept through the trees on the western bank, and drove the Welsh outposts into the churned and muddied ford.

  *

  The clang of hammer on anvil, with themselves cracked between, demoralised the Welsh of Powys, and the battle of Godric’s Ford did not last long. The din and fury was out of proportion to the damage done, when once they had leisure to assess it. The Welsh were ashore when their enemies struck from both sides, and had to fight viciously and hard to get out of the trap and melt away man by man into cover, like the small forest predators whose kinship with the earth and close understanding of it they shared. Beringar, once he had shattered the rear of the raiders, herded them like sheep but held his hand from unnecessary killing as soon as they fled into cover and made for home. Alan Herbard, younger and less experienced, gritted his teeth and thrust in with all his weight, absolute to make a success of his first command, and perhaps did more execution than was heedful out of pure anxiety.

  However it was, within half an hour it was over.

  What Brother Cadfael most keenly remembered, out of all that clash, was the apparition of a tall girl surging out of the fenced enclosure of the grange, her black habit kilted in both hands, the wimple torn from her head and her fair hair streaming silvery in sudden sunlight, a long, fighting scream of defiance trailing like a bannerole from her drawn-back lips, as she evaded a greedy Welsh hand grasping at her. and flung herself on her knees beside the trampled, bruised, bleeding bodies of Elis and Eliud, still clamped in each other’s arms against the bloodied
fence.

  Chapter 14

  IT WAS DONE, they were gone, vanishing very rapidly and quietly, leaving only the rustling of bushes behind them on the near side of the brook, to make for some distant place where they could cross unseen and unpursued. On the further side, where the bulk of their numbers fled, the din of their flight subsided gradually into the depths of the neglected coppices, seeking thicker cover into which they could scatter and be lost. Hugh was in no haste, he let them salvage their wounded and hustle them away with them, several among them who might, indeed, be dead. There would be cuts and grazes and wounds enough among the defenders, by all means let the Welsh tend their own and bury their own. But he deployed his men, and a dozen or so of Herbard’s party, like beaters after game, to herd the Welshmen back methodically into their own country. He had no wish to start a determined blood-feud with Madog ap Meredith, provided this lesson was duly learned.

  The defenders of the grange came out of hiding, and the nuns out of their chapel, all a little dazed, as much by the sudden hush as by the violence that had gone before. Those who had escaped hurt dropped their bows and forks and axes, and turned to help those who were wounded. And Brother Cadfael turned his back on the muddy ford and the bloodied stakes, and knelt beside Melicent in the grass.

  “I was in the bell-turret,” she said in a dry whisper. “I saw how splendid… He for us and his friend for him. They will live, they must live, both… we can’t lose them. Tell me what I must do.”

  She had done well already, no tears, no shaking, no outcry after that first scream that had carried her through the ranks of the Welsh like the passage of a lance. She had slid an arm carefully under Elis’s shoulders to raise him, and prevent the weight of the two of them from falling on the head of the arrow that had pinned them together. That spared them at least the worst agony and aggravated damage of being impaled. And she had wrapped the linen of her wimple round the shaft beneath Elis’s arm to stem the bleeding as best she could.