Company of Liars

by Karen Maitland

  ‘On the night I was born, my mother’s husband lay sleeping in the bed beside her. When the pains came upon her, my mother betrayed them to no one. Without a word she rose and left the cottage. It was a clear night, still and cold, the ground covered in frost that sparkled blue in the moonlight. My mother slipped silently between the shadows of silver birches, until she reached the dark waters of the lake. There, among the rushes, she made a nest for herself. She was alone, yet not lonely, for watching over her was the Swan that swims upon the River of Heaven some call the Milky Way. And so beneath the Swan stars I was born. And for that constellation I was named. She wrapped me in down to keep me warm and sang to me as the silver waters of the lake lapped softly at her feet.

  ‘When at dawn she returned to the cottage, my mother’s husband took one look at me and said I was a useless mouth to feed. He said my mother should take me back to the lake and drown me. But my mother kept me safe from him. He stayed for a few months, but as soon as I began to try to crawl, as soon as my stump could no longer be concealed beneath swaddling bands, he left to set up home with an alewife at the other end of the village. We saw him most days, but he chose not to see us.

  ‘My mother worked. She worked as hard as ten women. She was a dairymaid by day and at night she spun wool and wove cloth to sell. She was so accustomed to spinning and weaving she could do it in the dark. The little light that filtered in from the torches in the yard was all she needed, so we didn’t waste rushlights. And every night as she spun, she sang me to sleep with songs of the lake.

  ‘For as long as she could, she kept me by her side and away from the other children. When I began to walk she kept me tethered to a post inside the byre, so that I wouldn’t stray outside, but eventually I learned to untie myself even with my one hand. I started to explore and found other children. It wasn’t long before I realized that I wasn’t like them. Even had I not worked that out for myself, they wasted no time in telling me. One day my mother found me in a corner of the byre, beating my little stump with a stick and sobbing. It was then that she told me the story of my wonderful birth and explained that my little buds would soon sprout feathers and grow into a beautiful white wing, just like a swan’s.

  ‘I was delighted that I was to grow a wing of shining feathers, that to me seemed better than any arm and I couldn’t wait to tell the other children. But when I told them, they just laughed and teased me all the more. From then on, they grabbed hold of me every day, pulling up my shirt to see if my feathers had grown yet and mocking and kicking me when they saw my stump was as bare as ever. But when I ran home crying to my mother she said, have faith, little swan, the feathers will come, if you want them enough, they will come. But however hard I wished for feathers, the skin remained pink and naked, like a newborn rat’s.

  ‘I used to set myself tests. If I see seven magpies today, then in the morning the wing will have begun to grow. If I eat only herbs for a week… if it rains for three days, if… if… And every day, when there was no sign of feathers, the children laughed more and I cried harder. At last my mother could bear it no longer. She went to the lake where she had birthed me and begged the swans for some of their feathers for their little brother and out of them she made me a wing and fastened it to my stump so that I could see what I would become. She said, if I could feel it, then I would believe it and have faith enough in it to make it happen. And so I did, for once I began to wear the wing, I knew what it felt like to have a wing. And so my buds sprouted into feathers and my stump grew into a wing, just as she said it would.’

  Adela clapped her hands in delight. ‘So it really did grow in the end. When did it happen?’

  ‘When I became so accustomed to my wing that I believed it was my wing, then I found that it was. There was my wing as if it had always been, just as my arm has always been my arm.’

  ‘But didn’t the other children torment you more when you had a wing?’ Jofre asked. ‘Because you were…’ he hesitated, ‘different from them.’

  ‘I was proud to be different from them. I had something they never could. I was not an ordinary boy.’

  ‘And you could bear that? Bear to be different?’ Jofre leaned forward, a strange urgency in his voice ‘You weren’t… ashamed?’

  Cygnus smiled and for an answer unfurled his wing, beating it in the air, sending the smoke from the fire billowing round the room, until Abel snapped, ‘Stop that, you’ll have us ablaze.’

  ‘A pretty trick,’ Zophiel said. ‘But you can’t fly, so what use is one wing?’

  Adela turned angrily. ‘Leave him alone, can’t you? Why do you have to spoil everything? The wing is beautiful. May I touch it?’

  He nodded, and Adela reached out and stroked it as gently as she would have done if it had been the wing of some tiny fragile creature, shivering with delight as she did so. Osmond grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back.

  ‘Remember your own child,’ he said sharply.

  I glanced at Cygnus and saw a momentary look of pain pass across his face. It was Adela herself who had said that a pregnant woman who looked upon a bear gave birth to a monster. I’d seen men shield their pregnant wives from the sight of me before. Jofre was right; it is a fearful thing to be different.

  Cygnus suddenly yelped in pain. Looking down, I saw that Narigorm had wriggled forward to his side and was sitting there holding a long white feather in her hand. Cygnus stretched out his wing and we could all plainly see the gap where a single feather had been pulled out.

  Adela frowned. ‘That was cruel, Narigorm, you mustn’t pull feathers out from a living creature. You’ve hurt him.’

  Cygnus reached down and stroked Narigorm’s soft white hair. ‘She didn’t mean to, I’m sure. Children are often rough without meaning to be, like kittens at play.’

  Narigorm gazed innocently at him. ‘Another will soon grow in its place, won’t it, Cygnus? It does on real swans. When one falls out a new one grows in its place. When your feather grows back that’ll prove your wing is real, won’t it?’

  She turned and looked across at Zophiel. He stared at her for a moment, then suddenly he laughed.

  Come first light we were again on the road, leaving old Walter and his son Abel with enough to argue about for many a long winter’s evening whenever they recalled their night spent in our strange company. Although Abel had told Zophiel, the night before, that he had a claim on any bounty that might be offered for capturing the fugitive, in the cold light of dawn he seemed reluctant to pursue the matter. The only way of claiming a reward was to take Cygnus back to Northampton and hand him over to the authorities, but Abel, it transpired, didn’t hold with towns – nasty, crowded places, full of thieves and cutpurses, and with things being as they were with the pestilence and such, nothing would induce him to set foot in one until the fever was past.

  Old Walter didn’t hold with towns or authorities either for, as he said, ‘There’s many an innocent man goes to do their duty and help them-as-is-in-charge only to find himself arrested for having broken some law he knew nowt about.’ He coughed and spat copiously on the floor. ‘Miller in the village fished a bloated corpse out of his mill pond where the river had carried it. Raised the hue and cry and sent for the coroner, all right and proper, but the coroner was that many days in coming the miller had to bury the corpse. The stench was making his wife and young ’uns sick and was starting to get into the flour. He’d have had no customers left if he hadn’t buried the rotting body. And when the coroner did finally shift his arse and bother to turn up, instead of thanking the miller for doing his duty, the coroner recorded him in his Roll for not preserving the body and the miller was fined a tidy sum when he came before the justices. That’s what you get for doing your duty. He should have buried the body quietly, soon as he fished it out, and said nowt about it. If you ask me, the coroner delayed coming on purpose, just so he could raise some fines.’ Old Walter coughed and spat again. ‘Lesson to us all, that is; let sleeping dogs lie; don’t go bothering them unle
ss they come bothering you.’

  And so Cygnus’s fate was placed firmly in our hands. None of our company, except for Zophiel, wanted to return to the town we’d left the day before. And even Zophiel was eventually forced to agree that returning was not a good idea, after Rodrigo pointed out that some of the townspeople might well remember that he had refused to let them search his wagon. Zophiel could find himself on trial for aiding and abetting the escape of a wanted man, a crime which carried no less of a penalty than that of the murder itself. Zophiel could not deny the truth of what Rodrigo said, but it did nothing to sweeten his temper.

  Cygnus continued to protest his innocence, but his guilt or innocence, as Osmond said, was irrelevant; the point was he was a fugitive, wanted for a capital offence, and if we let him loose and he was caught, they’d force him to tell them how he’d escaped. Once that was known, they’d certainly come after us. It was just possible that the justices might believe we had unwittingly carried him out of town, but if they learned that we had apprehended him and then let him go, that was something no court would pardon. The only safe course was to take Cygnus with us and hand him over when we came across a bailiff or a King’s man who could take him off our hands.

  Cygnus looked terrified, his eyes darting in mute appeal around the company. He finally turned to me, fear and desperation straining every inch of his frame.

  ‘You said yourself, Camelot, that I couldn’t have strangled the child with just one hand. Let me go and I promise they’ll not catch me, and if they do I’ll not breathe one word about you or your company. I swear it on my mother’s life.’

  ‘If it were just me, I wouldn’t hesitate,’ I told him. ‘But there are the others to consider, a pregnant woman… the child…’ I didn’t add that despite his best resolution, he might do or say anything before his trial was ended. I’d seen stronger men than him broken, and he was no warrior.

  He wilted, all the fight suddenly going out of him, and stared hopelessly at a water-filled rut at his feet. ‘I’d not endanger them. Forgive me.’

  Rodrigo, his expression grim, patted his shoulder. ‘You will get a fair trial, ragazzo. We will see to that.’

  Zophiel insisted that Cygnus should be tethered to the back of the wagon and forced to walk behind it like a prisoner; in that way there could be no doubting our intent if any of those searching for him caught up with us on the road. If he walked freely with us then he would be seen as one of our company and we would all surely be arrested as his accomplices. Adela protested bitterly, but the rest of us saw the sense in it, though I suspected that Zophiel had suggested it as much to punish the boy as to safeguard ourselves. Zophiel bound his good arm behind his back and tethered him waist and neck to the wagon, in such a way that if the boy tried to move his hand to free it, it would only tighten the rope about his neck.

  ‘If he slips in the mud and is dragged behind the wagon, that rope will break his neck,’ Rodrigo growled angrily, pushing Zophiel aside and working the knots loose.

  ‘He told us himself how he learned to undo his mother’s rope with one hand when he was a small child. I intend to ensure he can’t escape from these bonds.’

  ‘You think he is going to escape with the eight of us watching him?’ Rodrigo retied Cygnus to the back of the wagon, but by his wrist only. ‘Take a man prisoner, this I will do, but I will not murder him.’

  Zophiel, still glowering, took his customary place by Xanthus, jerking her head savagely forward as he grasped her bridle, an action she repaid by taking a step sideways and treading down hard on his foot. Zophiel howled and cursed her roundly as he clung to the wagon, massaging his bruised foot, while Xanthus calmly resumed nibbling the grass as if nothing had happened. I was beginning to like that horse.

  We were to spend several days on the road before we slept under a roof again. It was not a well-trodden track and the only other travellers we saw were local people passing with wood for their fires or moving their livestock from field to byre and back again. When anyone approached us on the road we drew our cloaks across our noses and mouths, searching their faces anxiously for any sign of sickness, as they did ours, but we saw only hunger in their eyes. They stared at us from a dull curiosity, sometimes returning our greetings, most often not. Who could blame them? Start talking to a company of strangers on the road and the next thing you know you’ll find yourself having to offer them hospitality at your fireside. By the looks of them, most were having a hard time filling their own bellies, never mind someone else’s.

  The crops were ruined. You didn’t need to be a farmer to see that. There’s a stink that rotting roots give off that hangs over the countryside for miles around. There was no hope of salvaging grain or beans and while herbs flourish in the rain, they do not fill bellies in the cold of winter. Even autumn fruit needs a little sun to ripen.

  We were more fortunate than the cottagers. We at least had been able to buy some dried beans, salted mutton and dried fish at Northampton, though a year ago I’d have called any merchant a rogue and a swindler who had charged such extortionate prices, but when food is scarce those that have it can name their price. The stores would not last long, however, with so many in our company, so whenever we came across a patch of sorrel or a hazelnut tree on common land we halted and gathered what we could to stretch out our provisions for the day.

  Hunting for game was far too risky in those early months. Even to be caught with a bow or a deer trap was dangerous; no one wants to lose his ears or his hands, but birds fly free and Osmond, it turned out, was a fair mark with the slingshot and Jofre was learning fast. As dusk drew in, the birds would wing their way towards their roosts in the bare branches of the trees and as we set up camp for the night, Osmond and Jofre would set off to see what they could bring down. They’d return an hour or so later with a handful of assorted birds, mostly starlings, blackbirds and pigeons, but once a brace of woodcock. There was little meat upon them, especially the starlings, but they added welcome flavour to the pot and even a mouthful of meat can seem like a feast when you are cold and hungry.

  Narigorm was always hungry. Though she received a share of food equal to any of the adults in the company, her appetite was never satisfied. She took to setting tiny snares among the trees at night for small foraging animals. She would listen for the squeal in the darkness that told her something had been caught, then swiftly follow the sound. After a long time, too long, we would hear the squeals die away and she would return holding some limp creature carefully in both hands. Sometimes it would be edible, a squirrel or a hedgehog. Often it was a shrew or a weasel that had to be thrown away. But always it would be dead.

  Osmond offered to go with her to show her how to dispatch the creatures more swiftly, but she stubbornly refused, saying she knew how to kill them. And although the prolonged shrieks of the little animals made us all uncomfortable, especially Adela, as Zophiel said, the child had to learn and she should not be discouraged from helping to find food. He was right, we needed every scrap we could get.

  We were permanently wet and cold, and spending the nights camping in the woods meant that we woke stiff and still tired after a fitful night’s sleep. But the cold was not the only thing disturbing my sleep. Several times I had woken convinced I had heard a howl in the night. It was too faint at first for me to be sure I’d heard it at all, and I might have dismissed it as no more than the wind in the trees, except that I saw Zophiel sitting up, tense in the darkness, as if he too was straining to listen. I told myself it was just the baying of a distant farm dog, but as the nights passed, the howl grew stronger and more distinct. It wasn’t the howl of a dog. I’d have sworn it was a wolf, except that I knew it couldn’t be a wolf, not in those parts. Your mind plays strange tricks when you are weary.

  And Cygnus was more exhausted than any of us. Being tied to a wagon, splattered with mud from the wheels and unable to pick your own course through the ruts and puddles, would sap even the strongest man. You must constantly match your stride to the pac
e of the wagon. One slip and you find yourself being dragged along the ground. Rodrigo usually walked at the back of the wagon with him, trying to cheer him up with tales of courtly life. As Cygnus began to tire, Rodrigo would wrap his arm around the lad, holding him upright as he stumbled. Often he would call a halt on the pretext of needing to adjust the rags he had wrapped around Cygnus’s wrist where it rubbed raw against the rope, taking his time, until Cygnus had recovered his breath enough to walk on. When we stopped to make camp for the night Zophiel insisted that Cygnus should be bound to a tree or the wheel of the cart, so his nights were even more uncomfortable than ours, but one of us always managed to slacken his bonds a little while Zophiel was occupied with his boxes, so that Cygnus could at least change his position once in a while.

  But for all the misery Cygnus had to endure, he was still managing to keep more cheerful than Jofre. Whether it was Rodrigo’s attention to Cygnus, stultifying boredom or simply being wet and cold that made Jofre increasingly morose was hard to tell, but only the evening hunt for birds seem to lift his mood and then for no more than an hour or two. Jofre was aglow after these hunts, his faced flushed, his eyes dancing with excitement. I suppose it was the most amusement he got all day, hard for a young man used to life in a lord’s service where his days were filled with music, sport and the intrigue of gossip. But once we were all hunkered down around the fire, a black depression seemed to settle on Jofre, like flies on a corpse, and for the rest of the evening he would sit staring listlessly into the flames or else watch Adela and Osmond as they dozed together.

  Jofre couldn’t even practise on his instruments for the rain would have ruined them. Rodrigo tried to insist that he practise his singing, but Jofre always had some excuse, which inevitably generated a long lecture from Rodrigo and that only increased the lad’s defiance. Zophiel didn’t help, openly sneering at Rodrigo for not being able to control his pupil, saying that any master worthy of the name would take a stick to the boy and that would soon make him sing out, but neither Zophiel’s sneers, Rodrigo’s nagging nor Adela’s coaxing had any good effect on Jofre. With his cheeks burning, he’d storm off to the shelter of a tree, well away from the company, with a flagon of ale or cider grasped tightly in his hand. It was always empty come morning and Jofre’s mood would be blacker than ever.