The Enchanter's Forest

by Alys Clare

  The world to which she and her daughter would soon be returning. The world where, no matter how much he loved Joanna and Meggie and they him, Josse could not follow.

  No wonder he had turned away from her.

  Struggling to control the grief that rose up in her, Joanna tried to relax into sleep.

  Out in the dense forest at the foot of the low hill, the tall man waited. He had kept his distance today for he had sensed that the child felt his presence. It was strange, because she displayed no fear, but all the same he had seen her brown eyes with the dancing golden lights turning his way more than once and he knew he must not risk following the little party too closely.

  He had the strong sense that they were now near to the forest fringes. Tomorrow, perhaps quite early in the day, they would emerge into the world of well-used tracks, small hamlets, villages and, eventually, towns. It would then be much easier, if he made some mistake, for a man on the run to melt into the crowd.

  He had no real fear that he would make a mistake, for he knew what he must do and the task held no terror for him. He must take life, yes, but then he served a stern and uncompromising master and he had been given his orders. It was not for him to question what he was instructed to do. The deaths, he had been firmly instructed, would be marked down on his master’s account and not his own.

  He would strike tonight. Then, if anything did go wrong – again he reminded himself that he did not believe it would – he could readily and swiftly escape into the world beyond the forest. Yes. It was good to have an emergency plan, even if he was not going to need it.

  Time passed. Dawn was not far off but for now it was fully dark and he had known there would be but a sliver of moon tonight; he had been watching the steady waning for these past few nights. Scarcely a moon and no light save the bright starlight; conditions were perfect.

  He drew his long knife. Its blade was honed to razor sharpness; it was not his intention to cause his victims unnecessary suffering and when he struck it would be with a sure, strong hand. They would die quickly; perhaps even before they woke.

  For a killer, he was a merciful man.

  Stealthily he crept out from under the hazel bush where he had hidden himself. One step, two, three, his feet falling so softly on the springy forest floor that even the most acute ears would not have heard a sound. Onward and upward, beginning now to climb the base of the hill where his prey had made their camp.

  A sound from his left. He froze, as still as the tree trunks on either side of him. He listened, ears straining.

  Nothing.

  He crept on. The slope was steeper now and he went more slowly. Fit as he was, even he might pant for breath if he attacked the hill too fast. In any case, the snail’s pace was better because he was less likely to put a foot where it ought not to go. Such as on to a twig, which might snap under his weight. A small sound in the daytime, when the forest was alive with noise, but now, in the silence of the night, it would be like a man shouting in an empty church.

  On, on, up the slope. He could see them now. The man and the woman lay close, her head resting on his shoulder. It was a position that spoke eloquently of trust and tenderness but the tall man was unmoved. He had trained himself long ago to remain aloof from human emotions. The child lay curled up beside her mother, tightly wrapped in a blanket. That was good, he thought dispassionately, for it would be a simple matter to tie her up in the bedding, cover her face and take her with him when he fled the scene.

  He moved closer. Earlier they had made a fire – he had seen its flames – and now he could feel the heat from its still-glowing embers. By its light he saw that they lay on the far side of the makeshift hearth.

  He studied them. The man had settled half on his back, face up to the stars, neck exposed. The woman was on her right side. The tall man stood lost in careful thought; soon his mind was made up. He would step around the fire and strike swiftly, first at the throat of the man, then through the ribs on the woman’s left side and straight into her heart. It would be just as he had hoped: they would not even wake up.

  Then he would swiftly pick up the child and set off out of the forest, running as fast as he could until, coming to the first hamlet or outlying cottage, he would check for the signs that the place was inhabited and then leave his small burden on the doorstep.

  Then he would go home.

  He drew his knife. The metal made a tiny, harsh little hiss as it emerged from its scabbard. He pulled it clear and weighed it in his hand, letting it settle until it felt like an extension of himself.

  Then he struck.

  In the same instant Joanna shot up screaming like a vixen and Josse, already on his knees and rapidly pushing himself on to his feet, grasped his sword and his dagger from where he had hidden them beneath the blankets.

  Even as Josse’s fighter’s brain coolly sent instructions to his limbs, he found the time for a swift prayer: Thank God for Joanna’s acute sensitivity, so that she knew danger was approaching and gave us the time to be prepared. Without that forewarning, he would now be lying there with his throat cut.

  He was trying to get an idea of their assailant, peering, eyes straining, in the dim light of the fire’s last embers. A man, tall, strong, lean and smelling of the outdoors. Knife in his right hand; left hand empty. Dark, deep eyes, no expression.

  And so very dangerous; in those first few seconds, Josse realised he was facing an opponent who was at least his equal.

  He tried to thrust with his sword; his great advantage was that his main weapon was longer by far than his enemy’s knife. But the tall man had realised this too and he leapt nimbly out of Josse’s reach, coming down from his jump and in the same movement switching his knife to the other hand and bringing it down on Josse’s sword arm. Josse felt the sudden sharp pain as the blade dug into his flesh, then adrenalin took over and, howling, he straightened his left arm like a spear and aimed the knife at the man’s throat.

  The man jerked to one side and Josse’s blade caught his shoulder; the difficulty that he had in withdrawing it told him that the wound was deep. Joanna, seeing that their attacker was hurt, leapt on his back and tried to cut into his neck with her own knife, slicing off half of his right ear; with a cry of pain he flung her off. She fell heavily, her head thumping loudly against the ground, and lay still.

  There was no time to go to her. Instead Josse lunged again at the tall man, who took his hand away from his ear – pouring blood – and struck out at Josse; neither Josse’s nor Joanna’s onslaught had managed to dislodge the deadly knife from his hand. Josse kicked out with his right foot, feeling his boot make contact with something soft in the man’s crotch. Again, the assailant cried out in pain, abruptly crouching over and in on himself, cradling his genitals in his free hand.

  Josse bent to retrieve his sword, taking it in his left hand. A right-hander, still he was efficient with his left; strong enough, he prayed, to deal with a man wounded in shoulder and crotch and bleeding profusely from his ear. He launched himself on the tall man but at the last moment the man ducked down under the swinging sword and, half-crouching, ran off down the hill.

  Josse hesitated. What should he do? Pursue the attacker or follow his heart and his every instinct and go to Joanna?

  But if she is still alive, he reasoned – she is, she is! cried his heart – then my duty is to slay our assailant, for if he is allowed to get away he may strike again. Making himself turn his back on both Joanna and Meggie, who was now awake and rubbing her sleepy eyes, little face creased with fear and sobbing her distress, Josse plunged away down into the forest.

  He thought he could hear the tall man ahead of him. He could hear something . . .

  He made himself stop.

  But what he could hear was not the right sort of noise. It just did not sound like a badly wounded man fleeing for his life.

  It sounded . . . Josse’s eyes widened in alarm. It sounded like a very large animal quietly moving through the undergrowth.

  H
ad whatever creature it was been attracted by the smell of blood? It was quite possible, for the deep wound that Joanna had inflicted must be pumping it out. What creature could it be? A carnivore, surely, for otherwise it would not follow the trail that promised fresh meat.

  A very large carnivore.

  A wolf? Bigger than that. A bear? Were there bears here? He knew the creatures were to be found down in the Pyrenees, that desolate mountain wilderness far to the south. But here in Brittany? Josse did not know.

  He moved on along the faintly marked track, trying to calm his alarmed heartbeat, seeking to keep himself concealed as best he could. The animal, if there is an animal, will go for the easier prey, he told himself. I am quite safe.

  He did his best to believe it.

  He crept forward.

  He clutched his sword in his left hand, the lighter dagger in his right; that arm, now that the white-hot heat of the fight had passed, was beginning to hurt so badly that it was all he could do not to moan with the pain. You keep quiet, he ordered himself.

  Movement ahead, sudden, unexpected: a dark shape coming in fast from the right, in the darkness nothing more than an impression of great speed and huge bulk.

  Dear God, Josse prayed, what in heaven’s name is that?

  He stood quite still, eyes hurting as he strained to see. In the faint starlight he could make out little but an impression of a darker shadow against the gloom; a black shape with the terrible power to strike paralysing fear into all who saw it.

  Then why, Josse thought wonderingly, am I not afraid?

  The whirlwind of emotions and the pain of his wound were making him dizzy. It was with quickly fading vision that he saw the final act.

  In his confusion he must have been unaware that he had gone on moving steadily onwards. But suddenly the tall man was only a few paces ahead, standing quite still with his back to Josse and his eyes on something that slowly rose up on the faint and twisting track before him.

  Something made of the darkness that grew and grew, upwards and outwards like a great cloud of black smoke that expands as it rises.

  Josse stepped back, but his fascinated, horrified eyes were incapable of looking away.

  The tall man had both hands up to shield his face; he stood as if nailed to the spot, perhaps transfixed by some power emanating from the thing that rose up high over his head. Then there was a glimmer as the light from the heavens briefly shone on something that flashed down through the air and struck at the tall man, once, twice, a third time.

  There was a heart-stopping shriek that quickly degenerated into a gurgling sob.

  Then there was nothing.

  The tall man slumped to the ground and lay crumpled like a pile of rags. Tearing his eyes away, Josse looked fearfully up at the black shape.

  It had gone.

  Somehow, in the brief moment that Josse had looked down at the tall man lying on the deep leaf litter of the forest floor, the thing had slipped away.

  It must have . . . Josse tried to think. But something, some strange force that hummed in the air all around him, arrested the thought so that he couldn’t remember what had been in his mind.

  Another thought smoothly slid into its place.

  Joanna!

  With a cry, Josse spun round and, making himself ignore his pain, raced back the way he had come, along the narrow animal track and up the hill. Then, gasping, blood pouring down his arm and dripping off his hand, he burst into the dell beneath the birch grove.

  Chapter 14

  In the small room at the end of the cloister at Hawkenlye Abbey, Helewise’s mind was distracted from her duties by one persistent and overriding thought: who killed Florian of Southfrith?

  Sorely missing Josse’s stimulating presence, she tried to think how the two of them would approach this question were they together and working side by side on the problem, as they had so often done in similar cases in the past. After some thought, she decided that the first thing to attack was why he had been killed. Drawing an old scrap of vellum towards her across her table and picking up her stylus, she dipped it in the ink horn and wrote Why was Florian killed?

  Florian had discovered bones that he claimed were Merlin’s. The tomb, which might or might not be genuine, had already made Florian a very rich man and therefore the first reason for his death must surely be robbery. She wrote down the word, putting in brackets horse and bags of money. Both horse and money were, according to Florian’s mother-in-law Melusine, missing. It was perfectly reasonable to assume that both were now in the possession of whoever had slain Florian.

  What other possibilities were there? Helewise gnawed at the end of her stylus. If robbery were not the motive, who else might want to see the back of Florian?

  A thought occurred to her. She was reluctant to accept it but then, in the absence of both Josse and Gervase, it was for the moment up to her to work on this problem on her own. Filling her stylus with ink, she wrote The Forest Folk, underlining it and then adding They are disturbed by the Tomb of Merlin.

  If the Domina’s people resented the presence of a commercial and probably fraudulent enterprise so close to the forest lands which they held sacred, Helewise thought, then might not one of their number take matters into his or her own hands and quietly dispatch the man behind it? The forest people had been known to kill when something or someone treated their holy places with contempt, as Helewise well knew, for she had once discovered a body with a flint-tipped spear in its back. The dead man had disturbed something that he should have left alone and seen something that he was not supposed to see; the forest people had not allowed him to live to tell the tale.

  But the Domina had, after consultation with Helewise, agreed on a very different and far less violent method of stopping Florian’s activities. In the midst of her preoccupation, Helewise paused to send some thoughts Josse’s way, wondering how he was getting on over there in Brittany and praying – without very much hope, she admitted to herself – that he would not even now be storing up great sorrow for himself when the time came, as it inevitably would, for him and Joanna to part.

  Making herself return to her notes, she thought, but this killing might have been done without either the Domina’s knowledge or consent. There must surely be other powerful figures among the forest people; might not one of them have decided that this business of going across to Brittany to view and verify the true Merlin’s Tomb was taking altogether too long? And in any case there was no guarantee that Josse and Joanna’s mission would be successful. Joanna might not succeed in finding the place, or Josse might not actually be able to convince himself that Merlin was buried there any more than he was in the forest near Hadfeld.

  The bones. Those giant bones . . . Her mind slipped away and she found herself imagining them, wishing she had yielded to the temptation to go and have a look while she had been at the tomb. If they were not Merlin’s, then whose were they?

  They give off a force, Josse had said. He told her he had felt he was in the presence of a great power that he did not understand.

  Were they the bones of a saint? Helewise wondered. It was unlikely that a saint would have been buried out in the forest, but then Josse believed Florian had found the bones elsewhere and reburied them at the tomb site. Had he robbed a churchyard? Broken into a reliquary? But no – if some church was missing its valuable relic – and she had never heard of a whole skeleton, only a finger bone or perhaps a couple of ribs; in rare cases, a skull – then surely word would have spread of the outrage?

  Perhaps the bones were those of some holy man whom the church had not recognised but who nevertheless had power . . . But that was sacrilege, she told herself firmly, for to worship bones – or anything else for that matter – without official sanction surely must amount to raising false idols.

  A giant. Josse said the man would have been taller than him by a third of his own height.

  Do I believe in giants? Helewise asked herself. Again she wished she had seen the bones with her own e
yes, for she was struck with the idea that the huge skeleton might be nothing but a clever fraud; Florian might have cobbled together the bones of more than one man, perhaps also including animal bones.

  She flung down her stylus in frustration; she was getting absolutely nowhere.

  She made herself set out on a different approach. What other facts did she know of Florian of Southfrith?

  She made a new heading – the dead young man’s name – and then wrote down all that she could recall of the facts told to her by Melusine. He was the youngest of three with two elder sisters, one a nun somewhere in north Kent, one well married and living in France; Angers, wasn’t it? No – Poitiers. She wrote it down. He had been married to Melusine’s daughter Primevère – her only daughter – for two years. He had boasted of wealth in order to win the young lady’s hand in the face of stiff opposition; his means later proved to have been exaggerated and he had further impoverished himself by hurrying to give his contribution towards King Richard’s ransom before he was even asked. Primevère was an heiress – Helewise heard in her mind Melusine’s haughty tones as she said My late husband was Theobald of Canterbury; I am from Angers and I am an heiress in my own right. So Primevère would never have been a pauper, even had Florian not come up with his great money-spinning scheme, for the doting and wealthy mother would have swooped down and rescued her precious child long before Florian spent the last of his pennies on her.

  The vague idea that had been growing in Helewise’s mind – to do with the possibility that Primevère, on her mother’s own admission bored with her new husband, might have had him killed in order to enjoy his money without having to endure him – faded away and died. It just did not work for, if Primevère had in truth been ready to leave her husband, she could have gone to her mother, explained simply that she was tired of Florian and the two of them could have moved away and set up home together elsewhere. Not being in need of her husband’s money, why on earth would Primevère want him dead? And anyway Helewise only had Melusine’s word for it that Primevère no longer loved her husband; to Helewise, the young woman’s grief had seemed only too real.