by Alis Hawkins
I have no weapons save my knife and nobody to keep watch with me. I am alone.
I long to speak with poor, dead William Orford. To ask him what I should do, to hear his advice. But, most of all, I want him to give me absolution.
I have sinned and wished my father dead for my own advantage.
His countenance would turn solemn, I know, for he told me, oftentimes, that the sins of the spirit are more condemnable than the sins of the flesh.
You must do penance, Martin. A heartfelt and costly penance.
I know I must go to Salster, that it is what Master William would have approved, that it is what my father would have wanted. A heartfelt and costly penance that would mend my soul and save his from the fires of hell.
For my father’s sake and my own, I devoutly hope that I shall find his little saint’s shrine in the woods outside the city of Salster, just as the peddler said. For I must prostrate myself before that shrine and pray that, as she healed me, so she will save my father’s soul.
My thoughts turn, for the ten dozenth time, to the beautiful statue of the saint that appeared at our well and then disappeared as suddenly as it had come. I went back to the shrine again and again before I left the forest, only to find it empty each time.
The wind shoves at me impatiently, a shoulder in the back, pushing me forward.
I glance at the cart. It is a good deal lighter than when my father left the village with me, all but dead, in the bed of it. All that I will not need on my pilgrimage, I have left in our hut but I am still worried that the load will prove too much for the light-built cart and for the poor mare who must pull it all the way across England.
I look into her docile eye. ‘Come on, then.’ And I cluck her forward on to the bridge.
As the nail-studded wheels rattle on the cobbles I wonder whether they are in a fit state to take me all the way to Salster. They were not made for such a journey and, for their preservation, as for so much else, I am relying on the protection and blessing of Saint Cynryth.
Once, when I was a small boy, just coming to understand that the world did not begin and end with our village fields, I boldly asked a visiting carrier how he had known the way to Lysington. The man — newly arrived with a half-empty cart and a package of spices from Widow Gage’s adventuring son — looked at me, man to man, his lower lip jutting in thought. ‘It’s journey and ask, son, journey and ask.’ But his advice was given when England was well and full of folk who would speak to strangers.
Just after Gloucester, a Severn boatman tells me the way I must go but either his directions are at fault or my following of them is for, by nightfall, I have not reached the village he directed me to.
As dusk gathers me in with its shadows, I feel my old fear of the dark growing inside me once more. If I am lost so soon, how will I ever reach Salster?
That night the demons come for me. Every time I close my eyes to sleep, they creep over me, sliding up the nape of my neck and into my hair on cold dread like a slug on its own slime. They whisper profanities and I push my fingers into my ears. They slither round my fingertips, over my nails, hissing threats and maledictions.
Your father is in Hell.
We will lead you into a marsh and drown you.
We will kill you in the night, while you sleep.
We will pluck your soul as you die.
You will be eaten by foxes and badgers and nothing shall remain for the angel to gather on the Last Day.
You will scream in Hell for ever.
Driven almost to madness by my fear, I throw the blankets off and scrabble out from under the cart, my stomach hollow with terror, my scalp prickling as if each hair has been pulled by its own demon, a taste like the memory of blood in my mouth. I stare around me in desperation at the familiar things of this world — the turf-banked fire with my little stool next to it, the mare, hobbled and head-hung in sleep. I put a hand on the cart’s wicker side, feeling the solid knit of the hazel-whip weave.
The canvas flaps in a small, chill breeze. The back ties must be loose. Was I careless, or has something untied them?
My blood freezes and I stare into the dark where the end of the cart is, my eyes straining. Is there something — somebody — under the canvas? Though I look till my eyes burn, I see no movement under the heavy covering. But I cannot not turn my back on it and sit down again at the fire.
Taking my knife from its sheath and mustering my courage, I pull the side ties free and fling back the canvas. In the dim light of the cloud-scattered moon, everything in the cart seems just as I left it. On one side, the flour-chest, on the other, the press. Cordwood stacked on top of the trestle-board between them. At the back of the cart is the space where I will stack the pallet and blankets in the morning, along with the cooking pot, stool and ember-basket.
I put my knife back on my belt and take hold of the canvas to pull it over the cart once more but my eyes are drawn back to the press. The lid is not quite shut.
My heart bumping in my chest, I stand on the cart’s wheel and peer over the side. My legs almost give way.
Fingers. I see fingers thrust into the dark gap between lid and press.
‘Mother of God —’ I jerk back, fall from the wheel on to my arse, scramble backwards on palms and heels.
Fingers. A hand.
The ground is cold and damp beneath me and I stand, gasping for breath as terror presses in on me.
Dear God, who is in there?
Slowly, I rein my terror in and master it. The press is not large enough for anybody but a small child to hide in.
A small child or a shape-shifting fairy.
I swallow. No. A fairy would have sat by the banked-down fire, watching and waiting for me to wake. He would have spoken to me, lured me, led me away. Fairies do not hide, they appear in plain sight to charm and deceive you.
I force myself to go back to the cart. My knife in my teeth, I pull myself up on to the wheel and look down.
The hand is not curled around the side of the press as if to pull its owner out, it is thrust, stiff and straight, into the air. As if its owner is already dead.
I think of the village children I saw, wrapped and stitched, on the funeral cart in Lysington, and of my father, wrapping my tiny sister with my mother, binding them heart to heart in cold linen.
My knife in my right hand, I reach over with my left and fling open the press.
Of all the horrors in the world, none, I think, could surprise me as much as what I see. As great as my dread was, so great is my astonishment now. Inside the press, her hand reaching up under its lid as if begging to be rescued, is the statue of Saint Cynryth.
I lean forward, take the saint by the elbows and raise her until she is eye to eye with me. Her appearance, here, in the middle of nowhere is a miracle. A miracle even more powerful than her healing of me.
Holding her to me, I jump down from the wheel and lay her down, gently, on my pallet under the cart.
The saint has come to me. I might be all alone, I might have missed my way, the demons of the Devil might beset me, but she has come to me and saved me a second time. As she appeared to my father in a vision and claimed our well for her own, so now she has come to me to lay claim to my pilgrimage. My father gave his store of prayers to the saint, garnered over years, for me, for my life. And she has come to ensure that I repay him in kind.
CHAPTER 5
I do not know whether the saint has protected me from harm in keeping me from my fellow men or whether the demons that beset me have guided my feet into false ways but, for four days now, I have travelled through high and windy sheep country without seeing another soul on my path.
By day, loneliness has oppressed me and, by night, the terrors of the devil’s flitting demons have made the dark hours long and full of horror. I have given up lying beneath the cart. Now, I sit with my back to the cartwheel, the saint half-wrapped in a blanket at my side and the unbanked flames of the fire keeping ill-willing spirits at bay.
And,
as I keep the watches of the night, I pray at every one that my father’s soul will be safe in his saint’s keeping until we reach Salster. Once we reach the woods to the north of the city where the peddler’s tale said her shrine is to be found, I will make a present of the miraculous statue to whoever tends it and ask for masses to be said for my father. Surely, his soul will be safe then?
But neither prayer nor plans can wholly calm the fear that I am taking too long about my journey, that — saint or no saint — my father’s soul is in danger every day I am upon the road and I must make better speed if he is not to be damned for all eternity.
Nights of fitful, head-jerking sleep start to tell upon me. As we tramp along, I begin to fall asleep on my feet at the mare’s side. My head fills with fancies and, more than once, it seems to me that my father is walking beside me. But, each time I blink and turn my head, he is gone.
On the fourth day, I finally see the shape of houses on the road ahead and, hailing a boy with a slingshot dangling from his hand, I learn that the pestilence had not yet come to his village.
‘Will they give me water for my mare?’
‘Are you sick?’
‘No.’ I do not tell him that a miracle healed me; I do not think he would believe me.
‘Most likely they will then.’
And they do, though not with overmuch civility.
What news of elsewhere?, they want to know.
What news of elsewhere? We asked the same question of every visitor to Lysington in the days before the Death came upon us. But, knowing how close it was did not make us wise. We should have run away. If my mother had not been with child, we would have stayed in the forest, safe. With the White Maiden.
I swallow down bitter regret and tell the villagers what I know, but it is not the news they have braved my fearful company to hear. They want to hear that the pestilence stays close to the southern shore, that it is ebbing, that those who fall sick do not always die. They want to hear that it is over, that they will be spared, that all will be well.
My water-butt filled, I ask what town I must head for next on my journey east.
There is another village on this same path, soon, they tell me. After that, I will be on the right road for the next town. Cricklade.
At dusk, I make camp in low spirits. Leaving the village was hard; being amongst the living dispelled the demon voices and made me ache for Lysington and for those I have left behind. But these are no times for dallying with strangers and the villagers saw me to my road as quickly as charity allowed.
The weather has beaten me further down — it has been blustery all day, the wind poking at the smallest gap in my clothes, chilling me through every threadbare patch. Bundled in my own tunic and my father’s, his overtunic and mine, still I shivered and bound blankets about me.
As I lay a fire, huffing at the kindling and feeding the tiny flame with splinters and strips of bark, I try to push aside the demon-fingers that tap at my shoulder, the whispers telling me that there is something out there in the darkening dusk, watching me.
It does no good to tell myself that I have heard nothing, seen no living soul since leaving the village earlier. As darkness closes in, the notion grows in me that somebody, or something, is squatting out there in the fading light, waiting.
I water the mare and lead her a little way off from the fire to graze. Her teeth crop at the hollow turf with a muffled, hollow sound, as if there might be something beneath waiting to burst out. I shake my head, trying to dislodge such foolish notions but they refuse to budge and my hands are clammy on the mare’s rein. My hackles prickling, I narrow my eyes into the gloom, trying to make out a figure, a shadow. Better to see what is stalking me and to know it for what it us than to fear a monster. But there is nothing to be seen, only winter grass fading to grey in the dusk, and the distant rise of the land showing dark against the lighter sky.
By the time I have warmed yesterday’s pottage through, I am all a-jitter, my hungry stomach in knots. The pottage is flavoured with a piece of old bacon I was given in the village and I should be savouring it but, after two mouthfuls, my jaw clamps shut.
It is not a movement in the shadows that fills me with fear but a sudden doubt: Lent. Are we in Lent? Am I eating forbidden flesh? A pilgrimage is marred if the church’s fasts are broken and I have extra care to take as my pilgrimage is not for my own soul but for my father’s.
Quickly, I calculate. My new sister was less than a day old when we got back to Lysington on Candlemas eve — the first day of February. Three days later, she and my mother were dead. We stayed in the village for their week-mind. I was ready for a fight with my father but, when I told him that we should not think of returning to the forest before their memorial mass, he nodded like a cowed wife. By the sixth day I was fevered and coughing.
Two weeks have passed since then. Straining my wits to recall anything from before the pestilence, I am almost sure that Master William had told me Lent would begin on the last Wednesday of February.
The bacon is not a sin. I have a day’s grace and tomorrow is Ash Wednesday.
Later, when it is fully dark, I sit at the fire, feeding the leaping flames with cordwood to keep the darkness away. I hear my father’s voice in my head, chiding me for such waste.
Bank the fire and go to sleep, boy! That’s good wood you’re frittering away.
I how that I should not be using the wood on the cart — every ell I spend on the fire is time I must pay back in finding firewood — but I cannot bear the dark and the terrors that come with it. Besides, I am my own man now, making my own decisions. My father cannot tell me what to do any more. Cannot stop me burning wood and cannot stop me using his money to buy my way into a college when I get to Salster. He can no longer stop me becoming a priest.
No, he can’t stop you. But that’s because he’s dead. You buried him in the forest. Alone. There he lies, unconfessed, unabsolved.
Abruptly, my head snaps round. I heard a sound. A movement, somewhere in the dark.
His soul is unquiet, a demon’s voice whispers, he is following you.
Fear stabs my guts and I strain my eyes into the darkness.
Nothing.
I press fervent thumb-crosses to forehead, lips and heart. Christ, keep me safe!
A log shifts in the fire, falls in a shower of sparks. Startled, I fling out a hand and cry aloud when it touches something soft and warm.
The mare throws her head up, shying at the unexpected cuff.
‘Sweet Mary —’
You left the forest, left him there. And now he follows you.
No! The saint keeps him safe! His body is quiet in his grave and his soul is being purged!
And yet ... perhaps he is not in Purgatory.
A terrible vision gathers in the dark around me — my father rising from his grave as one of the walking dead, lumbering after me, limbs plucked and goaded on by demons. I feel cold hands about my neck, the cold breath of a dead man on my face, and terror drives me to my feet.
Snatching a log from the pile next to the fire, I stare out into the darkness. A chill breeze raises gooseflesh on me. Terror almost stops my voice but I force myself to challenge the dark. ‘Are you there?’
Silence consumes my shout.
Terror overcomes me and I fall to my knees before the saint. ‘Save me, Lady! Save me. Save me. Save me!’
CHAPTER 6
The next day, I do not hide the saint. Instead, I prop her at the front of the cart, like Our Lady in a festival procession. Her speedwell eyes fasten on the far horizon and her hand seems to reach out to pull me all the way to Salster.
All morning, my mind picks at fears of what will happen when I reach Cricklade. If the pestilence is there, there will be no succour. I might not even be let in through the gates, just pointed onwards.
The thought makes my spirits sink further for I am in sore need of human companionship and tears come to my eyes at the mere thought of a night out of the wind, away from the constan
t fear of being followed. But soon, my thoughts turn from comfort to the weather. The wind, blustery the last few days, has been dropping all morning. Now, it has stilled, the air silent as snow gathers in the clouds overhead.
I do not want to stop. Not if I might reach Cricklade before the snowfall begins. Before night and the demons come. I cluck the mare into a faster walk.
Ha ha, ha ha, ha ha.
The cry is like a blow from behind.
Magpies.
I turn my head and there they are. A straggle of them, their black and white livery as vivid as a slap against the dun ground.
Quickly, I count them and the rhyme beats like blood in my ears.
One for sorrow, two for mirth
Three for a wedding, four for a birth
Five for heaven, six for hell
Seven —
There are seven. Seven for the devil.
They stare at me, heads cocked, hard little eyes clever and pitiless. Seven. The Devil himself is near.
I begin to run, dragging the mare into a trot, desperate to leave them behind.
Most do not even turn their heads to watch us go but two follow, hopping and flapping after us, rising into the air. Watching them climb the air, I slow my pace, thinking they are done with me. But no. They come to rest, once more, on the ground ahead and stand there, heads turning this way and that, waiting.
Two of them. Two for mirth. But there is nothing of joy in these birds. As I get closer their hoarse chatter-laugh comes, mocking me.
Ha-ha ha-ha, ha-ha ha-ha.
Look at him. Lost-alone. Lost-alone.
I pretend they are not there, stride on, the mare’s bridle clutched in cold fingers, forcing her to walk faster than she wants to.
The magpies keep pace, hopping along on those three-toed feet of theirs. Three-pronged, like the devil’s fork. I look away, fix my eyes on the track. But I know they are there. They stay in the corner of my eye. Do the demons bring them? Or do Old Nick’s minions just know to come when they hear that rattling laugh?
