The north had paid a hundred times over for rebelling against he who called himself king, and that debt was still being gathered.
The body was relatively fresh. A man, stripped of clothing and hanged from his neck, which was stretched thin and torn, head blackened and tilted to one side. His swollen tongue protruded from his mouth like a final scream.
Winfrid muttered some prayers and tried to unsee the signs of scavenging. He had witnessed them on several bodies over the past few days, and rumors of cannibalism were muttered in the darker parts of his mind. Prayers would not hide them away.
The man’s legs were mostly stripped of flesh, bones plainly visible in several places, knife marks obvious. His cock and balls were gone, his stomach slack and drooping, and his sticklike fingers seemed unnaturally long.
Winfrid’s prayers froze when he heard a sound. It might have been a song being sung in the distance or a whisper from much closer. He stared up at the dead man’s face and saw no movement there, but still he hurried on, pleased when the trees and snow finally hid the grotesque sight from view.
“Just the wind,” he said. His voice was muffled in the landscape, the white silence of snow and woodland showing only scattered signs of life. Birds pecked ineffectually here and there. Rabbits scampered from shadow to shadow. He saw prints that might have belonged to a fox but then found larger marks that were undoubtedly those of a wolf. Winfrid had heard that wolves had ventured north and east from the borderlands between England and Wales, but he was surprised that they had come this far. The slaughters in the north would have left little for them to eat.
He would have to be careful. Hungry wolves had been known to take down a grown man, and with the snows falling later this year, a pack might become desperate.
He heard the sound again, from ahead and above, drifting down the hillside and twisting between the trees. Perhaps it was the wind, but it had a haunting quality that stopped him in his path. It lured him in and scared him at the same time. I believed I was away from the horror, he thought, but perhaps he never could be. The body hanging from the tree was yet another sign of that, and he had no way of knowing just how far King William’s fury might extend.
The wind, the voice, suddenly ceased, and the silent snowscape surrounded him once again. Frightening though the sound was, in a way the silence was worse. He moved on, listening for more sounds and keeping alert for movement.
It was difficult. He was cold and tired, and a man in his fifth decade was not meant to be wandering the landscape, especially one as harsh as this. He had spent his younger years spreading the Word, and now in his old age he should have been comfortable in the monastery, waking early to pray, tending the gardens, brewing mead, and waiting for that approaching hour when God would call him home. But instead the monastery had been sacked, riches plundered, and the monks turned out to fend for themselves. Never a material man, even so he had cried at the sight of French knights and their horses trampling the fields he had toiled in for so long.
Winfrid started a low, soft prayer, the whispered words calming and comforting. It reminded him of friends and peace, and right then he would have given anything for either.
“Did you hear her?”
The voice shocked him and he started upright, staggering into a young tree. The impact shook dead leaves and snow from a fork in its branches, and he saw the man through a haze of falling leaves and ice.
“You. Did you hear her?” The man seemed frantic, head jerking left and right like a chicken’s. He had one hand cupped behind his ear.
“Did I hear who?” Winfrid asked.
“My Lina. My sweet girl Lina, singing so that we can find her, though we never can, we never can!”
“Who’s there?” a woman’s voice called. Winfrid saw them both more clearly now that the falling leaves had settled. The man was twenty steps away, the woman close behind him, and he had seen healthier-looking people dead by the trail. How they could still be alive he did not know.
“My name is Winfrid,” the monk said. He offered them a prayer in Latin, aware that they would not understand yet eager to ensure they knew who he was. They looked hungry. And Winfrid could neither forget nor unsee the signs of cannibalism he had seen.
“So you did hear her,” the woman said.
“No, I—”
“You’re praying to bring her back to us. So keep praying. Tell God to give her back!”
“I can’t tell God to do anything,” Winfrid said.
The man and woman stared at him for a while, the snow floating between them doing little to soften their skeletal forms. Then the man began to cry. They were dry tears, but his shoulders shook, and his chest emitted a click-click like bone tapping against bone.
“Will you eat with us?” the woman asked. She held out her hand even though they were twenty steps apart.
Winfrid’s stomach rumbled. He could not recall the last time he had eaten anything resembling good food, and as if bidden by her invitation, he caught the scent of cooking meat on the air. They’ll attract wolves, he thought. Or Frenchmen might still be close, looking for survivors to kill for fun.
“Eat what?” he asked.
“Rabbit,” the woman said past her husband’s shuddering, shriveling form.
It was through hunger that Winfrid let himself believe her.
They had a weak fire burning on a small, rocky plateau shielded by a steep hillside. Several sticks spanned the fire, with chunks of speared meat spitting fat into the flames. Snowflakes hissed into oblivion in the smoke. Burning logs jumped, settled, coughed ash.
Winfrid’s mouth watered at the smell. “There are wolves. I’ve seen their tracks.”
“We’ll die if we don’t eat,” the woman said. They stood round the fire. It was too cold and wet to sit down. The man was a shaking statue, staring at his shoes and dribbling from his mouth. Even with thick clothing, he was barely there. His wife was just as thin, but she seemed stronger. More present, less close to death.
“And with Lina still out there, we can’t just go on,” she said. “We lost our other children. Our three boys, two girls, dead and gone . . .” She stared into flames.
“The French?” Winfrid asked.
“Some of them.” She stretched her hands out to be warmed. “The things I’ve seen . . .”
And the things I have seen, Winfrid thought. The murders and rapes, the fury and wretchedness, the inhumanity. And sometimes the pity and love. That kept him going. God’s love, always, but even more affecting was the love he saw between people. Not everyone was given over to violence. It provided hope.
He prayed that this sad couple might also give him hope.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We were leaving our village,” she said. “Four weeks ago.”
“More,” the man said. Winfrid had not even thought he was aware, but now he saw that the man’s shivering had lessened, and he leaned against his wife, still looking down at his feet. “Six weeks, maybe seven. Forever.”
“Maybe,” she said. “They were burning the village. The cattle had been slaughtered. The knights had killed anyone with a weapon or farming tool in their hands, and their blood was up. They wanted more. Some of them stayed . . . in the background. Just killing things. But one of them, the one in charge, he was bigger than them all.”
“Bigger than any man,” her husband said.
“It just seemed that way,” she whispered. “He was taking the girls and raping them. I ran with Lina, crawling through a muddy field, and Eadric here met us a day later on the other side of the woods.”
“I saw what else they did,” Eadric said. He stared into the weak flames, then knelt and ripped a chunk of meat from one stick. He handed it to his wife, then tore off a scrap for himself. They both started eating, noisily, slurping at running fat and grunting in satisfaction as the hot, chewed meat slipped down their gullets.
Winfrid’s hunger turned from pang to pain, and he swayed where he stood. A fat snowflake land
ed on his nose and remained there, as if he gave off no heat. As if he were dead.
“Ten days, it took, to get this far,” the woman said, chewing and swallowing as she spoke. “Meat?”
“Yes, I . . . ,” Winfrid said. He leaned forward and fell to his knees. Coldness ate through his clothes and surrounded his legs. Heat stretched the skin of his face, and as he reached forward, his hands tingled, burned. He touched the hot meat on one stick, then drew his hand back again.
“Where did she go?” he asked. Their daughter Lina kept them here, and suddenly he wondered how. The singing he might have heard could have been the wind, or perhaps it was this woman’s own madness. Or this man’s. Neither seemed all there.
“The shadows,” the woman said. Her eyes went wide and she stopped chewing, staring off past the fire into the shady woods. Snow continued to fall, dulling any sound, making even the crackling flames sound weak and distant. “She walked into them and never came back.”
“She got lost in the woods?”
“She is not lost,” Eadric said, looking up at last. He followed the woman’s gaze. “We are lost.” He started to sob, going to his knees and clasping her clothing all the way, trying to keep himself upright. “We are lost!”
“How do you catch rabbits?” Winfrid asked. “Where are your spears? Your snares?”
“We find them dead,” the woman said. “Hanging from the trees.”
Winfrid stood and backed away from the fire. The remaining meat was blackening beneath the flames, and it would be dry and tough now, hot. Rabbit, that was all, and he had eaten rabbit a thousand times before. But though hunger squirmed in his stomach and writhed in his bones, he no longer had an appetite.
“God help you,” he whispered. Eadric smiled at him then, displaying several teeth and the dark gaps between them, and shreds of meat speckling his tongue. The woman smiled as well. “God help you both, because your daughter is dead, and—”
From somewhere higher up on the hillside, there came singing.
A sweet, light voice rose and fell. Winfrid could not hear the words, but the music they made drove through him like the sharpest blade.
“Lina!” Eadric shouted.
“She sings to us,” the woman said. “Every day she sings, and we go to find her, and we never do . . . but one day we will, one day when the snows end and life returns to the land and Lina sings us closer and closer, we’ll find her, and in the end everything will all be good.”
“Lina!” Eadric shouted again. The singing faded in and out, seeming to shimmer through the falling snow. Flakes danced to the voice.
Eadric ran. There was no warning, no tensing of muscles. One moment he was still clasping his wife’s clothing, the next he leapt past Winfrid and darted across the small clearing. He scrambled up the steep slope and soon disappeared among the trees and falling snow. Winfrid watched him go. He breathed lightly because Eadric had come so close, and he had smelled of death.
When Winfrid turned back to the woman, she was also gone. He searched for her footprints in the snow and then saw movement across the slope as she dashed between trees.
Logs settled on the fire with a shower of sparks. A chunk of meat fell into the flames, spitting and letting off black smoke. The singing drifted in from somewhere far away, and though Winfrid turned left and right, he could not tell which direction it came from. But there was something about the song that terrified him. Though high and light on the surface, it was sung with a mocking humor, and not with the voice of a little girl.
This voice sounded ageless.
In a land like this, with snow falling and cold seeping through his thick habit and woolen undergarments, a fire would be the safest place. But this one no longer felt safe. It poured sick smoke at the sky, and as he turned to flee he tried to summon a prayer, a plea, to help him on his way. He muttered to God and then shouted at Him. It seemed that the more he prayed, the closer the silent surroundings crowded in around him.
He stumbled across the slope toward the west, slipping eventually down a steep hillside toward a valley bottom. The singing had ceased, left behind or faded away. He slipped several times, falling onto his back and escaping injury when his bag broke his fall. Everything he owned was in there, the material things at least. His heart contained his true riches: a knowledge of God, and a soul given over to goodness. I am good, Winfrid kept telling himself, and in that mantra he found courage. A sense of evil hung dense all around him. It hid behind tree trunks, hunkered down beneath rocks tumbled from the heights an endless time before, danced from snowflake to snowflake, daring him to find it. And though he feared this evil—unknown though it was, and more awful because of that—he also felt secure in his beliefs. The worst could happen to him and God would be there on the other side.
At last he reached a place where he thought he could rest. It was gone midday, the smear of sun in the sky already hidden behind the western hills, and his pounding heart had begun to settle.
A stream gurgled merrily along the valley floor, the flat ground on both banks smoothed by virgin snow. Winfrid crouched beside the water and enjoyed the sound. Better than his own heavy breathing, the crunch of his feet through snow and fallen leaves, his grunts as he’d slipped and fallen. Better than the singing.
“God’s voice,” he said as the stream ignored him.
“God does not speak.”
Winfrid fell onto his behind, hands sinking into the snow to find wet, muddy ground beneath. He clasped at the mud, securing himself to the world.
Across the stream, in a spread of snow unmarred by footprints, stood a little girl. She wore a simple dress made of rough, gray material, poorly fitting across her shoulders and dropping almost to her ankles. It was thin and holed. She did not appear cold. Not her body, at least.
But her eyes were ice. Their glimmer was frozen as if at the moment of death, and her pale skin was mottled blue.
“God speaks through me,” Winfrid said, and the little girl laughed. It animated her face and shook through her body but gave her no semblance of true life. Lina, he thought. This must be Lina the singer, and her voice is even more terrible than her song.
“Your pride pulsates within you,” she said. “You take your vow and assume too much.”
Winfrid pushed himself to his feet. The mud was wet and slick between his fingers. “And you speak well for a farmer’s little girl.”
“I’m not little anymore.” Her laughter had ceased, but the smile remained. Like a slash in dead flesh.
“Then what are you?”
The girl tilted her head to one side, a wolf observing its prey.
“Your parents mourn you.”
She looked him up and down. He felt her gaze upon him, rough beneath his clothing. Wherever she looked, he was colder than ever.
“I’ll return to them soon.”
“Did they hurt you? Whoever took you, did they . . . do things to you?” he asked, already knowing this was wrong. The French had had no hand in this.
“You don’t even know who they are.”
“Then tell me.”
She ignored him, finishing her assessment and then turning to walk away.
“Wait!”
Across the other side of the stream, Lina strode toward the trees. Winfrid could have gone after her. But that would have meant splashing through the icy waters, and if he did that, he would risk freezing if he did not stop to dry his clothes. He had seen plenty of weak, sick people dead from the cold, and he had no desire to lie with snow filling his glazed eyes.
Besides, he could do nothing for her. The way she moved, the disregard, her calmness in this cold, brutal landscape, all seemed so unnatural. So unholy. He went to call her again, but then the singing recommenced, and he had the disconcerting sense that it did not come only from her.
Just before she disappeared into the forest, the girl paused and looked back at him. Squinting through the flitting snow, he just made out her mouth moving. It did not seem to match the strange words
of the haunting song.
Then she was gone, and the thick mud between Winfrid’s fingers was starting to dry and grow hard. It showed that he exuded the heat of life, at least.
Where Lina had stood, there were no marks in the snow.
He believed he was fleeing the song. There was nothing Winfrid wanted more than to lose himself to any place where that monstrous girl was not, and as he struggled through the snow, he craved his simple room in the monastery. Away from there, he was lost. Until recently, life at the monastery had been peaceful, calm, and safe, and Winfrid had rarely considered traveling farther than the next village. Now, with so much destruction and murder in the land, with hopelessness almost manifest in the marsh mists and the silent landscapes of snow, he had no idea what dark things were abroad.
Such a time might attract horrendous things.
The snow fell heavier. Any hint of the sun was obscured in the uniform gray. Perhaps it was late afternoon, but he could not be sure. The heavy gloom seemed intent on confusing him. The landscape, too. One patch of woodland looked the same as another, and when a breeze blew up, whisking snow into the air and driving it in drifts against trees and rocks, he lost his way completely. He might have been traveling in circles, but drifting snow covered his tracks.
I should have stayed with her, tried to help her! The child was lost and alone, terrified by her ordeal, and he had probably scared her more than anything. But though guilt inspired such thoughts, truth shoved them aside with a sneer that might have suited the girl’s own face. He could not fool himself. The realization that she was something unnatural assuaged the guilt, but in its place was his own harsh, growing fear.
So he hurried on, hoping that he would see no place he recognized, praying that he would not hear that song again. He was leaving Eadric and his wife to some unknown fate, but he could do nothing for them. Even if he knew what their girl had become, he was useless. God does not speak, the girl had said, and the memory of her voice caused him to shiver, his vision growing hazy and unsure. He leaned against a tree and closed his eyes, but in memory there was only her.
Seize the Night Page 24