by Alis Hawkins
Ha-ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha.
I long for a wind to blow the magpies and their laughter away. Far away. But there is no wind. The air is stilled to a muffled hush, as if the land is holding its breath, waiting. Waiting for the snow.
I look up at the sky’s goose-grey evenness. Will it be a light fall or will it set in and leave us calf-deep by nightfall? Even an inch could hide the track and send me awry. I pull the mare up and look back the way I have come. As hard as I strain my eyes, narrowing them until my whole face feels folded into their sockets, I can see nothing. But something is out there watching me, following me. I know it. I feel it. The magpies know it, too. That is why they laugh at me.
Whatever it is that dogs my steps, if the weather forces me to stop, I will be at its mercy.
On the northern side of the track, a line of trees marks the beginning of wooded land. Woods. Shelter.
The mare shakes her head, snorts. She dislikes my indecision. But is it better to stop here, shelter in the woods and face whatever pursues me, or to keep on and hope to reach the town by nightfall? Pestilence or not, at Cricklade somebody will tell me which way to go, where to point my nose next.
The first flakes start to fall. My decision is made for me.
The wood is not coppiced and neither ditch nor wall hampers our passage. But the cart still makes slow progress — the ground is negligently kept, with thick underbrush on either side of the track. Does nobody have rights here? Certainly there has been no clearing of fallen limbs for many months past.
Still, the state of the wood suits me; I scarcely have to walk a hundred paces to gather enough firewood for a day and a night’s burning. With that and the cordwood still on the cart, if I have to wait out the weather I will neither freeze nor starve.
The air is thick with snow by the time I have built my fire and soft, furred flakes fall into the new flames.
Within an hour, a hand’s breadth lies on the ground and the blanket I have draped over me is weighted with it. The mare stands, head low, the snow on her shaggy back making a pied creature of her.
I build up the fire and prepare for dark but the daylight lingers unexpectedly as the emptied clouds thin and the rays of the sinking sun set the snow aglitter. The hissing and shifting of the fire is the only sound in the snowy silence and I gaze about me at a world of gold and black and frozen white.
The mare mumbles the snow with her soft lips and I remember that she has had no water since this morning. I get up and shiver to the back of the cart.
There is a movement. A flick of green in the corner of my eye.
I turn, a rush of fear cold in my belly. ‘Who’s there? Come out!’
My voice sounds high in the snow-muffled silence, afraid.
I move towards the flicker of green but a sound of alarm comes from the mare and I stumble back towards her. Head high, nostrils flared, she is frightened.
‘Steady, mare.’
With a hand on her neck, I stare into the dark spaces between the trees. Nothing. Nothing I can see, at any rate.
The sun drops below the skyline and the snow’s golden-white fades, all at once, to grey. Beyond the quiet hiss of the fire, everything is silent. Fear stiffens my limbs more than the cold. Somebody is here in the wood but I cannot see them.
Almost afraid to take a breath lest the sound should bring about some change in the air, I turn, slowly, to see what might be behind me.
Nothing.
Keeping my back to the cart, I reach down to the woodpile and grab a solid, wind-broken length. The weight of it reassures me. Darkness is creeping in, a patch here, a shadow there. Is that the shape of a man on the ground, or the dark underside of a snow-covered log?
I stare until my eyes are dry but the shape does not move.
There is a sound behind me. A stagger and an oath, as if a foot has found a hole under the snow. I turn, my eyes screwed tight to see.
Where is he?
The breath pent up in my chest, I look behind me. I cannot see him but I know he is there. I have heard him now. I do not call out again. If he wanted to make himself known, he would have done so. Whoever he is, he means to come upon me unawares.
Two nights and a day I wait for him, in snow and dark and fear.
I have barely slept since the snow started but my craft has trained me to night watches. A charcoal pit must be tended every minute of the five days it takes to char wood into coal. Night and day collyers oversee their stacked and earthed-up pits; night and day the smoke they give off is watched as it changes colour and temper. When a pit of cordwood is first fired and capped off, the smoke that pours out through the thatch of bracken and riddled earth is thick and greyish-brown, the colour of a tabby’s underfur. But, as the wood within chars through, the smoke from the top-most vent holes, where the layers of cordwood are lightest, clears and thins to a blue haze, scarcely more substantial than a wavering, high-summer heat. Then those holes must be sealed and new ones made, a foot or so lower.
Only a collyer who knows his craft can be relied on to tend vent-holes at night. What is a commonplace task by daylight becomes an eerie business at night. Plumes of pale smoke rise, swift and silent, in the moonlight. The charring wood shrinks and settles, the earth-banked bracken shows holes and slips as vivid crimson gashes, fiery glimpses of the charring pit inside, like a vision of hell.
Now, as I sit, weary and wakeful through another night, I fancy that God is like a collyer and this monstrous pestilence his charring fire. For, as cordwood is reduced three- or even four-fold by coaling — shrinking and cracking as it smokes and blackens until it is apt for use in the forge — so, perhaps, God is reducing mankind to a third or a fourth part. A destruction of humanity like Noah’s flood, where only those useful to God’s purposes will be spared.
But, if that is so, then His purposes are strange, for the fire of the pestilence does not take the sinful and leave the virtuous. Those whose sins should condemn them are as frequently spared as the faithful are taken.
Has God fallen asleep, leaving his charring pit to burn and blaze undamped, unchecked? I cannot answer for Him, but, for myself, two nights and days of fitful, wary dozing by the fire have left me stumbling and heavy, longing for sleep.
It is what the watcher has been waiting for.
CHAPTER 7
Sleep nearly kills me. If it were not for the fire-dried sticks I scattered about, my attacker would have been on me before I heard him. He is still a dozen running paces away when I am jerked awake by a single stick-snap.
I grab for the stave at my side. He is almost on me, knife outstretched. I throw myself sideways. His lunge hits the side of the cart with rattling force. He curses and turns. I push myself up again, almost falling backwards as he comes after me. The moonlight shows lips drawn back from teeth, like a fighting dog.
He hurls himself at me. I swing the stave. A glancing blow deflects the knife but fails to disarm him. His snarl turns to a howl as he launches himself again. The blade comes at my belly. Without thought, I throw myself backwards on to the snow and bend my legs in self-defence. He takes a boot in the stomach but keeps his feet.
I scrabble backwards, trying to get away, to stand up. My kick only slowed him and now he is almost on me, knife-arm high, blade ready to stab down. I fall on to my back and kick my legs up again to fend him off.
His full weight comes down on me. My legs buckle, smashing a knee into my nose. As I tense for his knife, footsteps thud. He checks, half-turns and, as he does so, a hammer of a blow lands on his back. He arches backwards with a yell of pain and rage. Before I can move, whatever hit him is swung again, this time at his head.
Freed, I scrabble backwards, desperate to get my feet under me before this new attacker comes for me. The cudgel comes down a third time, though the man on the ground is not moving. The sound of wood hitting bone brings me to myself and, as the cudgel is raised again, I make a grab for it.
‘Stop!’ I wrench the cudgel from its wielder’s grasp and he turns
to me, but the moon is behind him and I cannot see his face. It comes to me that I should have run. Too late. ‘Enough!’
‘He was going to kill you.’
The voice is lower than mine but still has something of the lightness of boyhood. A lad like me, not an older man. I try to speak but, instead of words, my mouth fills with old pottage and bile. I turn away and throw my guts up on to the snow. Again and again, my stomach heaves. My throat stings and the muscles of my belly clench as my terror is cast out. Finally, weak and trembling, I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand and turn to my rescuer. He speaks before I can.
‘I’m sorry. I should have stopped him.’
‘You did.’ My voice is clotted. I put my hand to my throbbing nose. Pain blossoms. I feel his eyes on me as I hang my head and watch nose-blood dripping, black, on to the snow.
‘No. I mean, I should have stopped him coming here. I’ve been trying to keep him away from you. But I fell asleep. I’m sorry.’
I hear his words and open my mouth to reply but my throat is stopped up, thick with relief and rage. As I straighten up, he steps back a pace or two, holds up his palms as if to calm me or fend me off. I shuffle past him and stand, looking down at the man who came to kill me. He is lying on the snow like a shrugged-off cloak. His knife is lying next to him. I bend to pick it up but find my hand hesitating over it, as if the knife itself could wish me ill.
I hear a sound behind me. I spin around but the cudgel-wielder simply stoops to roll the crumpled man on to his back.
‘Is he dead?’ I ask.
He reaches out and lays a hand on my attacker’s chest. ‘Can’t tell.’
I squat next to him. Careful of my broken nose, I lick the back of my hand and thrust it at the fallen man’s face. I count heartbeats. One, two. Nothing. Three, four. A faint coolness spreads over my spit-wet skin. Breath.
‘He’s alive.’ I stand. ‘What are we going to do with him?’
‘That’s up to you.’
‘What?’
He shrugs. ‘You’re the one who shouted stop.’
‘He’s your friend.’
‘No friend to me. We just fell into company.’ He nudges the senseless body with the toe of his boot. ‘Should’ve let me finish him. He came at you like a mad dog.’
I remember the bared teeth, the scream, and a finger from the grave runs down my backbone. I am sweating and cold at the same time.
‘You couldn’t just kill him.’
‘Why not? He was going to kill you.’
I feel myself begin to shiver. Legs unsteady, I move towards the cart and sit against the wheel. My hands are shaking as I lean over and put more wood on the fire.
He squats a few paces away. Then, when I say nothing, he pulls a few staves from my woodpile, puts them neatly on the ground to keep him off the snow and sits. A sudden rage rises in me. How can he just sit there, as if nothing has happened? ‘Bring him over here. He’ll die in the snow.’
‘You want to keep him alive?’
I stare at him, feeling my limbs tremble with cold and fear and the effort of fighting for my life. He makes it sound so easy — as if it is nothing to decide whether a man shall live or die. As if this life is mine to decide.
My mind is fogged but I know that leaving him to die would be a sin. ‘Bring him over here,’ I say again.
He drags the senseless man over to the fire then straightens up. ‘I need to go back to our camp to fetch some things.’
‘No!’
‘He’s not going to wake up this side of tomorrow — if he ever does. And I won’t be long.’ He holds a hand out, palm up, to catch the soft rain that has begun to fall. ‘If this keeps up, the snow’ll be gone by dawn.’ Suddenly, he grins. ‘Look at us. We’ve done everything arse-about-face. We’ve all but killed a man, between us, without so much as knowing each other’s name.’ He makes a small bow. ‘They call me Hob.’
CHAPTER 8
Hob is proved right. By first light, the snow is all but gone. The trees drip slow, heavy drops, and, in place of frozen silence, the wood is filled with the sound of seeping, trickling water.
Roused from a wary fireside doze by his return, I stretch, stiff and sore from the attack. My face itches. I scoop snow-melt from the canvas and, careful of my nose, scrub the dried blood off.
‘Be glad your beard’s not come in much yet,’ Hob says. ‘It’s the devil getting blood out.’
I turn around to look at him and a pulse of pure ice runs through my veins when I see that he is standing over the insensible man, knife in hand. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just seeing whether he’s still alive.’ Hob holds the knife up for me to see. ‘Whether his breath clouds the blade.’ He leans forward over the body. ‘Breathing but senseless as ever.’ He proffers his blade but the tiny droplets I see might as easily be drizzle as evidence of breath. ‘So what do you want to do with him?’
In the sober light of day, I know the answer. ‘We should take him to the nearest town. Find the keepers of the peace and hand him over.’
Hob shrugs. ‘Sounds like trouble to me. I’d as soon leave him here.’
‘What — to be eaten by vermin? Have his eyes pecked out while he’s still alive?’
Hob folds his arms over his chest. ‘You’re very careful of him considering he’d’ve gutted you and left you for dead.’
‘And you’re very keen to see him dead, considering you’ve been living alongside him!’
‘I know what he’s like. He’d kill you as soon as look at you.’
‘You’re still alive.’
‘Because I’d got nothing he wanted.’
‘Well, I’m not leaving him here.’ I move to the back of the cart and pull up the canvas.
Hob whistles. ‘Are you delivering all that or is it yours?’
I grit my teeth. What he means is, where did you steal all that?
‘It’s all mine.’
I lay the pallet in the empty space between the flour-chest and the press; the cordwood from our charcoal hearth is all gone, consumed by my night-time fires. I turn to Hob, chin point at the still-senseless man. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Edgar.’
‘Right. Let’s put him in the cart.’
The ground is cold and waterlogged, it sucks at the cart’s wheels and Hob is obliged to set shoulder to woodwork as I urge the mare into the pull. Even when we have broken free and the wheels are turning, movement is sluggish, mare and cart both stiff with inactivity.
The clouds hang low and sodden in the sky and, by the time we clear the wood, rain is coming down heavily. Hob ducks around to the back of the cart and I watch, warily, as he pulls something from his pack. A cloak, nothing more deadly. As he shrugs his shoulders into it, I can see from the yellow-gold hang of it that the weave is thick and well-filled.
He grins over the mare’s withers at me and runs a hand over the cloth. ‘Looks like it cost a pretty penny, doesn’t it? Took it from Edgar’s bundle.’ He shakes the folds out. ‘Wouldn’t want to say where he got it.’
We set off again in silence. The rain patters, light-fingered, at our hoods and the sound keeps our thoughts inside our heads. The mare plods, muzzle low, rain dripping from her mane and eyelashes.
As I trudge, my boots squelching and my father’s overtunic heavy with rain, I fix my thoughts on finding a town and its keepers of the peace. My skin itches with the need to be rid of Edgar.
But my new companion’s thoughts are otherwise. As the rain falls steadily, he turns to me, the edge of his hood sodden and dripping. ‘Are you set on taking him to the watch?’ I meet his gaze over the mare’s neck. ‘Only, I’ve been dodging the pestilence the last six months. I reckon I’m alive because I’ve stayed away from towns and villages.’
‘Don’t you want to be rid of him?’
‘Yes. But I’d just as soon not exchange him for the pestilence. And besides…’ He shakes the water from his hood to stop it dripping on to his face. ‘Think about it,’ he says, looki
ng across at me. ‘We get to the town. We take him to the keepers of the peace —’
‘Yes?’
‘Then what? They’re not just going to thank us and wave us off, are they? They’ll make us stay until he dies or wakes up. And, if he dies, they’ll most likely hang us for killing him.’
‘Hang us? It was him who tried to kill me!’
‘But they won’t know that, will they? Far as they’re concerned we’re two strangers who’ve turned up with a next-to-dead body that then goes and dies on them. They’ll have to call the coroner. And he’ll want to know how this stranger comes to be in their town, dead. He’ll think the tidiest idea is to keep us handy.’
I pull the mare up and face him. ‘But he attacked me!’
Hob looks at me from beneath his hood. ‘I know that. But can you prove it? Come to that, can you prove this is your cart? Who’s to say it’s not his? That we haven’t attacked him to rob him of it?’
Cold hackles rise on the back of my head and down my neck as I realise that, far from all who know me, I am at the mercy of any man’s false claim.
We slog on. The rain seeps from the hem of my overtunic on to my hose and they begin to cling to my shins. I envy Hob his long cloak.
I do not know what to do. I cannot forget the moment when Hob’s thudding blow landed on Edgar’s back, when I knew that his knife would not find my flesh. Hob saved my life. But I was reared on forest stories of strange meetings, of men and beasts who are not what they seem. Stories that tell us not to trust too easily those we do not know.
When you meet a man on the road, count his fingers.
Still, Hob’s warning words have taken root and I see that, even without Edgar, a welcome is scarcely to be expected. Cricklade may have shut its gates. Cities have. Gloucester kept out every last foreigner from the time the pestilence took Bristol; for all the good it did them.
I shake the heaviness of the downpour from my hood as I turn to look at Hob. ‘Have you really been wandering all these months?’
