by Dave Duncan
“Defied how, my lady?”
The countess issued a snort that Ruffian might have admired. “He refuses to allow the king’s courts to try clerics. Only the Church can judge them, he says. And it is true that those in holy orders have always been tried by church courts first, and then handed over to the civil law for punishment. In serious cases, that is. But Becket does not allow even that. Church trial is all he will admit, and the worst penalty an ecclesiastical court can impose is degrading to the laity. What is that to a priest who has committed murder?”
“My lady!”
“Oh, it has happened! Priests can be as wicked as other men, even wickeder when you consider the vows they have taken. But Becket just defrocks them and lets them walk free. Hang them, I say!”
“Aye to that,” I muttered, staring along the table to where Elmer the clerk and Galan the secretary were seated together. Both were tonsured, so they had been admitted to minor orders, but they probably had no intention of advancing to the priesthood. The test for a cleric is always that he can read a text handed to him, and there were thousands of such men in England. Even I, if I ever found myself on trial, might claim privilegium clericale. But neither Galan nor Elmer had entered the room where Rolf had died.
The countess was aiming the sword of justice at someone else entirely.
“My lady!” I whispered. “Are you suggesting that a priest might want to murder the king?”
“Why not? A priest fanatically loyal to the Church might want to support Becket that far, for the king is certainly running out of patience with the archbishop. I have it on very good authority that he is now in danger of the royal displeasure.”
“Morðor wile ut!”
“What?”
I had forgotten that Her Ladyship did not understand the old tongue. “Beg pardon . . . an incantation I am planning to try, which may lead me to the killer.”
Her Ladyship smiled in grim approval. “Try hard, young man. Try very hard. Expose the killer priest and I will see that you are well rewarded.”
chapter 26
i had expected that the death of the Colby boy would be announced at dinner, either by the count himself or by someone else, but there were no announcements. Either Colby had not been important enough or the daily obituary had become too macabre. Neither the troubadour nor the fool performed. Dinner in the castle that day was a somber affair, and even the servants’ buzz of conversation seemed quieter than before.
William was waiting outside when I emerged from the stairwell. He looked me over mockingly, then bowed low.
“Much better,” I said. “You’re learning!” I strode by.
He fell into step beside me. “What did you learn, master?”
That the countess suspected the priest and her daughter the master of horse? But those accusations had sounded more based on spite than evidence. That the king’s arrival now seemed much more likely than I had been told before? But William knew nothing of that.
“Oysters. If you’re ever offered one, don’t accept. I thought I would puke all over the table. What did you learn?”
“That the baroness has taken a real fancy to you. I thought she might drag you off to her bedchamber before the end of the meal.”
“She’s just a tease. She was flirting to make me blush.”
“She succeeded.”
“Shut up or I’ll turn you into a woman.”
“You bloomed like a rose!” William chuckled, then dropped the subject. “We going to chant the Morðor now, master?”
“Soon. The count wants us to try the Ubi malum again, but I’d rather see first what we can learn from the goblets and the fleece.”
My assistant nodded happily. “Ubi malum only if I get to beat up some more knights.”
The wheelbarrow and its disgusting load were still where they had been outside the sanctum. Enchanter and cantor settled at the table to finish writing out the Morðor wile ut incantation. Then I had to make sure that William understood the unfamiliar words. We rehearsed it twice backward.
“If this works,” I said, “don’t expect to raze any more knights. But you should reenact the murder for me.”
“One goblet or both?” William asked, eyeing them tensely. Despite his bravado about battering knights, he was showing rare courage in accepting another trance without protest. I had not forgotten how Sage Guy had introduced me to a dozen varied different trance states in a single week—to give me confidence, he had said, but the experience had left me close to gibbering. One thing Squire William Legier never lacked was confidence.
“Both, I think. Often the spirits refuse to answer any incantation a second time, and we don’t know which goblet was Archibald’s and which the killer’s. They’re quite dry, so if you mime drinking from one of them in your trance, you won’t get poisoned.”
“What if both people answer?”
“They won’t, only the victim’s spirit will cry out. The murderer is still alive and doesn’t want anything let out. Ready?”
William nodded grimly. He clasped a goblet in either hand, one on each side of the tablets on which he had written out the responses.
“A murder wants out,” I chanted, “so spirits of the dead attend. Let the veil be raised . . .” This incantation, I realized, was very close to necromancy, and should perhaps be performed in darkness, even at midnight itself, although the grimoire had not mentioned that. The text was much shorter than the Ubi malum’s, invoking no entity by name except the victim, Sage Archibald.
William had the last line. He sang the final response: “Justice! Give me justice, that I may find peace.”
I felt a midwinter chill settle over me. My flesh rose in goose bumps, my scalp prickled. I stared apprehensively at my assistant, who was frowning at the goblet in his left hand as if it felt cold, or hot, or had moved on its own.
William said, “Ugh! Where do you think old Wacian finds this swill?”
But he was not speaking with his own voice. He did not even look like himself. He was still recognizable, but he had aged ten years. His face had lost its youthful freshness, his hair was lanker, his pose on the stool more of a slouch.
Then he smiled, slack-lipped, at the empty space beside my right shoulder. “But I need it after all that. You do inspire a man to keep trying, my dear. Bottoms up, as they say. Ah, I forgot that you prefer bottom down.” He laughed, then raised the goblet to his mouth and swallowed several times, as if draining it.
He was speaking like a Londoner, an accent familiar to me from hearing Friar Pious in the Pipewell Abbey. Kendryck had said that Archibald spoke that way, so I had no doubt who was speaking through William.
“Well, let’s hope so, this time. But your efforts to fake ecstasy weren’t very convincing, my dear. You made the problem with pleasure and only with pleasure can you be rid of it. Until you can achieve that, the spell likely won’t work. If you haven’t dropped your burden by tomorrow, we’ll have to try again.” He scowled for a moment, as if disliking what he was hearing. “Then keep your little secret. You must say this for bastards, they come out in their own good time. You sure you don’t want that wine? Mustn’t let it go to waste . . .” William raised the right hand goblet and quaffed the imaginary wine in that.
For a moment he fell silent, his face twitching through a series of expressions. Then he screamed. Goblets and stool went flying as he surged to his feet, screaming again and again. I leaped up and lurched around the table to him, leaning on it for balance. I wanted to grab William in a hug, treat him as one would a terrified child, but I was too conscious of what had happened to Sir Kendryck. Instead I swung a hand and smacked him across the face as hard as I could.
I had half expected my next experience to be coming around on the floor, flat on my back. But that didn’t happen. Instead William, suddenly silent, staggered backward, eyes coming into focus. He regained his balance and buried his face in his hands. “Oh, Jesus!”
Now I did hug him. “It’s all right. You’re back. You�
�re alive.”
“Where was I?”
Probably in Hell. “It doesn’t matter. You’re here now, in Barton. Sit down.” I lifted the stool upright and pushed William down on it.
“What happened?”
“You—Archibald—drained the second goblet, and that must have been enough to make a fatal dose. He didn’t die here, but that second draft doomed him.” So the unknown companion had made some excuse to avoid drinking the wine? Dwale berries had a sweetish taste. “You—he—were talking to a woman, but her name wasn’t mentioned.”
I knew of one woman in the castle anxious to miscarry, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be two. And if the whole bottle had been poisoned—as now seemed possible—that might have been done by an earlier visitor, not necessarily a woman.
William sat for a while with his eyes closed, hunched over and hugging himself, shivering as if cold. Then he looked up ruefully. “So you didn’t learn anything?”
“I learned that my hypothesis was correct: he was poisoned here, in the sanctum, by drinking from those goblets, both of them. He was entertaining a woman who was consulting him to procure a miscarriage. He had blackmailed her into having sex with him and probably not for the first time. If his soul is in Hell, that doesn’t seem too unjust.”
William squared his shoulders. “Then we’d better try the fleece next.”
“All right, but this time you take the versicles and I’ll do the responses.”
“No!” my assistant barked. “I’m the cantor. I’ll do it.” He headed for the door. William was truly a glutton for duty.
I found my staff, gathered up our notes, and followed. William had already lifted the handles and was trying to turn the wheelbarrow toward the door. The alley wasn’t wide enough.
Despite its size, the fleece might well have come from the sanctum, for the bare wooden bench there cried out for a covering. Archibald couldn’t have treated all his patients in bed.
“Leave it there,” I said. “We don’t want the stinking thing inside. We can chant here. No one will interrupt us, I’m sure.” The pitchfork was still leaning against the wall; I moved it some distance along the alley, just to be on the safe side. People in trances were unpredictable.
“You sure you don’t want to exchange song sheets?”
“I am not scared!” Glowering, William took hold of one edge of the fleece. He held out his other hand for the tablets. “Begin . . . master!”
I began. I almost hoped that the incantation would not work this time. Indeed I thought it probably couldn’t work, unless Colby had been murdered right on the fleece. If he had been killed elsewhere and then wrapped up in it later, then it was merely a shroud, not part of the murder.
But it did work, and the reenactment began just as fast as it had the last time. Releasing both fleece and tablet, William staggered back against the wall of the house opposite me and then slid to the ground, where he could struggle with both hands and feet against an unseen oppressor on top of him. He made choking sounds, twisted his head free for a moment to utter a few muffled sounds in a shrill boyish treble, and then fell silent while his face began to turn purple. His struggles slackened.
“William!” I roared. I dropped to my knees and slapped the squire’s face again, although not as hard as I had last time. “William, William! Come back! You’re all right. You’re—”
He sucked in a huge gasp of air and blew it out in a wail. Then he went limp, but his eyes opened. He lay there, panting and staring up at me.
“I was choking.”
I nodded. “He forced you down on the bed and smothered you, using an edge of the fleece itself, I expect. You put up quite a struggle, I think.”
William pulled a face. “You didn’t learn anything?” After all that?
I let him puff for a few moments more before helping him up. He was in disgusting shape, and I not much better.
“I learned that we’re both going to need clean clothes.”
“So he didn’t name the man who was killing him?”
“Not by name, no. But there’s something else this fleece can tell us. Fetch the pitchfork.”
William frowned and went to obey, displaying his mud-soaked back. “Now what?” he said as he returned, fork in hand.
“Sir Hugh said there were a thousand fleeces in the castle. That’s clearly an exaggeration, but I saw at least a dozen in the hall alone, and they all must be cleaned sometimes, or they’d all be stiff with vermin.”
“So?”
“And they can’t all be the same size or quality, right? So they must be marked somehow, to make sure that they go back to their rightful owners. How would you mark a fleece?”
“On the back!” William said, lighting up. “With a branding iron.”
He grabbed the pitchfork with both hands, dug the prongs into the fleece, and dragged it out of the barrow, spreading it on the ground, wool side down. It filled the width of the alley, which was narrower than almost any bed, and its smooth side was almost more revolting than the weed-and-mud covered side we had seen so far. William scraped the dead worms and other muck away with the side of the prongs, and in one corner he exposed a clear mark, a cross.
He looked around at me in horror. “The priest’s?”
And I had to nod. “The little vestry beside the church has a plank bed in it, which suggests he must overnight there sometimes. I saw a bed, but no mattress, no pallet, no fleece. Does he strike you as the sort of ascetic who would sleep on planks as a matter of course?”
William just shook his head.
“And I said that Colby’s spirit spoke no name through your mouth. But I did make out a title. He said Na, Fæder, na! at least twice. And also Miltsung!’ which means ‘Mercy!’ He was begging the priest to have mercy.”
“But, master, you said that Sage Archibald was talking with a woman!”
“I did,” I said, “although she never spoke, so I could be wrong about that. I don’t think I am, though. Either we have two murderers, or the whole bottle had been poisoned beforehand by an earlier visitor—who needn’t have been a woman, just a social friend. Killing anyone is a vicious act, but leaving whole flasks of poison around where anyone may drink from them is as ruthless as you can get. That was what happened in Rolf ’s case, too.”
Only one person I had spoken with had admitted to finding Archibald an amusing companion.
chapter 27
“now what? Ubi malum again?”
I shook my head. “You’ve been entranced more than enough for today. Besides, I don’t want you beating up on Father Randolf. First, you and I both need to visit the laundry and the bathhouse. Can you lift that horrible thing back into the barrow?”
William pitted all his strength against the weight of the fleece, now soaked with even more mud and mire, but he had barely raised half of it when the pitchfork tines began to bend under the load. They had been designed to lift hay, after all. So enchanter and cantor had to join forces and haul it up by hand, thus coating us both in even more filth than before.
“To the laundry!” I commanded. “And bring the barrow.”
My assistant looked at me in disbelief. “Why?”
“Because the exercise will do you good, sonny. And also,” I added in case he took my humor at face value and proceeded to devalue my face, “because I need the laundresses to confirm that the horrible thing belongs to the person we think it does.” I set off along the alley, and soon heard the wheelbarrow squeaking along behind me, being dragged backward by William, until he found a place wide enough to turn it.
Clean body, clean clothes, but what was I going to do next?
No sheriff was ever going to put much weight on what I claimed that my cantor had said while supposedly in a trance. It was doubly hearsay. A more experienced—and qualified— enchanter would no doubt have arranged for other witnesses to be present. I had not done so because I had not trusted my own abilities. That had been a beginner’s mistake, but it might have cost me my only ch
ance of bringing the killer to justice.
Father Randolf ’s anger outside the infirmary when I literally claimed the fleece off the corpse’s back now seemed deeply suspicious, so either Sir Hugh or the count must be warned that the priest was at least implicated in Colby’s death. Randolf had also been one of those present when the poison was placed at Rolf ’s bedside. There seemed to be no way to tie him to Archibald’s death except the common use of poison and the fact that they had arrived at the great hall together, both of which facts were merely suggestive and far from proof of guilt.
A priest might know, or just assume on faith, that the Lord’s Prayer would de-fang the sanctum door. Every priest was educated to some extent, as most laymen were not, so he could read the names on bottles and vials, and might know which were notorious poisons. Whoever had stolen the aconite to kill Rolf could have stolen dwale to doctor the wine that had killed Archibald. I might not have enough evidence to hang a man, but in my eyes it was quite enough suspicion to justify keeping Father Randolf well away from the king.
The goblets’ evidence was not admissible, and that particular trance was not repeatable: according to a marginal note, the murder reenactment would only work once. It seemed impossible that the scraps of conversation I had heard had been Archibald talking to another man. If Randolf had poisoned the sage’s wine bottle earlier, before the woman arrived, then why had the priest and sage arrived at dinner together? The evidence did not add up, and the venerable Aristotle himself would have been hard-pressed to apply logic to it.
It was twenty years since the First Lateran Council had forbidden priests to marry, and the Second had reaffirmed that ban only five years ago. Yet the Church might as well forbid the rain to fall as forbid men, whether ordained or not, to father children. A desire to conceal a forbidden conception seemed an absurdly inadequate motive for three murders, even for an ambitious priest. Many bishops had “nieces” and “nephews” they were especially fond of. But a plot to kill the king would be high treason, and must be kept secret at any cost. That was still a more believable motive.