Company of Liars

by Karen Maitland

  As I neared the furthest pinfold from the hut, I saw something move on the other side of it. I stopped, holding my breath, unable to make out what it was. I could feel my heart thudding against my chest, but then it moved again, and I realized with a rush of anger and relief that it was Narigorm. She had evidently been standing there for some time for her clothes were encrusted with snow. She was staring up into the sky, letting the white flakes fall silently on to her white hair and lashes.

  ‘What on earth are you doing out here, Narigorm?’ I shouted. ‘Have you no sense?’

  She turned, as if she had just been patiently waiting for me to come. Then she pointed at the ground inside the pinfold. The snow there was smooth and white, glittering in the torchlight. But then, near one of the walls, I spotted three dark smudges. I leaned over the wall as far as I could. Dark stones, maybe, sticking out of the drift. I moved the torch and realized it wasn’t something jutting out of the snow; it was the snow itself that was stained.

  I walked round the pinfold wall until I came to the opening. Now that I was inside, I could see there was a shape under the snow. From a distance it looked like a drift, but close up it was unmistakably the blurred form of a body. My heart pounding, I knelt down and scraped away until I found the fabric of a hood. I pulled it back. Zophiel was lying face down on the ground. There was no question that he was dead. I looked down at the three dark red patches staining the snow, melting it slightly. I brushed away the snow with numb fingers.

  A pool of blood had oozed out of a wound between his shoulder blades, the kind of wound a dagger would make if it was thrust in hard and then wrenched out again. Chances were, Zophiel would not even have seen his assassin until he felt the knife plunge in. I brushed the snow from the side where a second, larger patch of dark blood stained the whiteness. My fingers encountered something both spongy and sharp. I had to fight to keep from retching. I swallowed hard and, gritting my teeth, grabbed at the cloth at Zophiel’s shoulder, pulling the body up on one side.

  The killer had not been content to leave it as a simple murder. Zophiel’s arm had been severed between the shoulder and the elbow. From the end of the raw, bloody mess, the bone protruded white and jagged. I guessed by the staining on the other side of the body that the killer had done the same to his other arm. As I turned the body, something fell from it into the snow. Narigorm bent swiftly and picked it up. It was Zophiel’s knife. It was covered with blood. Unless Zophiel had managed to wound his attacker, which seemed unlikely, then whoever had cut off his arms had probably used Zophiel’s own knife to do it. It was sharp enough to slice through flesh, but not bone, that would have had to be snapped.

  So the Bishop’s wolf had caught up with him after all. Zophiel had said that he wouldn’t strike once the snow had lain and risk leaving tracks. But he had forgotten that falling snow quickly covers tracks, even bodies. The wolf had timed it well. He must have struck just as it was beginning to snow and the falling snow had concealed him, his tracks and his deed.

  23. A Corpse Lies Bleeding

  Osmond and Cygnus stood in the pinfold staring down at Zophiel’s body as the snow continued to cover it.

  ‘We should raise the hue and cry,’ Osmond said, his voice trembling.

  ‘And send for the coroner?’ I said. ‘What if he happens to be the same one who attended Jofre’s death? Two violent deaths from among our company in a month – we’d be hard put to explain that. I don’t think that coroner would believe stories of the Bishop’s wolf; we can’t even describe him. And don’t forget we have a stolen sheep in our hut too, in case you were thinking of asking him to stay for supper. No, unless we all want to be hanged, I think we should bury him before anyone else chances on the body.’

  ‘But the ground’s frozen solid,’ Osmond protested. ‘We’d never manage to dig even a shallow grave.’

  ‘The earth floor in the drovers’ hut won’t be frozen,’ I said.

  The torch shook in Osmond’s hand. ‘Are you seriously suggesting we bury him in the hut and then sit on top of his grave and eat our supper?’

  ‘Since the bad harvests, many people have taken to burying their relatives under their thresholds or floors, if they can’t pay the soul-scot.’

  ‘But not when they’ve been murdered and mutilated,’ Cygnus said, glancing down at the body and quickly looking away. ‘It’s not like dying in your own bed. His spirit won’t rest. It’ll seek vengeance.’

  The snow was still falling hard. I could see the faces of the others were stiff with cold and I could hardly feel my own. ‘For now, let’s cover him with the fallen stones from the wall. That and the snow will conceal him if anyone chances along here. And it will give us time to decide what to do.’

  Even that was not as easy as it sounds. We had to drag the body over to the fallen part of the wall, where a heap of stones would not look out of place. Then we had to lift the stones on to the body with numb and painful fingers. It takes more stones than you might think to cover a man.

  When we returned to the hut we found that Narigorm had already told Adela and Rodrigo about the body, in gory detail no doubt. They sprang up as we returned, searching our faces anxiously to see if it was true. Osmond hugged Adela to him, though I think that was as much to seek comfort for himself as to comfort her, for of the two of them, he was the more shaken. It was hardly surprising, for the sight of that mutilated corpse was enough to make even the strongest stomach heave.

  Rodrigo clutched his head with both hands as if he was trying to keep it from bursting. Finally he said, ‘You left the body where it was?’

  ‘We covered it with stones for the moment,’ I told him. ‘But it can’t stay there. If any shepherd or drover moves the stones to repair the wall, they’ll find it at once. Even if the body has begun to decay by then, with the arms missing, no one finding it is going to think the stones fell by accident and killed him.’

  ‘But with the snow, maybe no one will come.’

  ‘The snow won’t last for ever; they could be driving cattle or sheep this way within weeks, days even. If anyone finds the body and spreads the word, that man at the standing stones is bound to remember he directed us here. He’s hardly likely to forget Zophiel. We have two choices: either we report it ourselves and trust that the coroner will believe the story about the Bishop’s wolf, or we hide the body so it’s not found. I think hiding the body is our only option.’

  He nodded and turned away, crouching down by the fire and staring into the flames.

  ‘What about Zophiel’s boxes?’ Adela asked fearfully. ‘The Bishop’s wolf might come in here to get them tonight.’

  I shook my head. ‘He’s just murdered a man. He won’t take the risk of being seen by all of us. But we should put them back in the wagon. Make it easy for him to take them and at least then we’ll be rid of him. Although it’s too late to help poor Zophiel.’

  ‘Well, I for one am not going to pretend that I’m sorry Zophiel is dead,’ Osmond suddenly burst out, glaring round at us. ‘Look how he treated Cygnus and Adela. You’re not sorry he’s gone, are you, Cygnus? Or you, Rodrigo, not after the way he tormented Jofre?’

  Neither of them looked at him.

  ‘Osmond, don’t,’ Adela pleaded.

  ‘What’s the point of pretending? Why can’t we be honest? He was a spiteful, vindictive, malicious man.’

  ‘Osmond, don’t talk about him,’ Adela wailed, crossing herself. ‘He’s been murdered. He died without being shriven. His ghost will still be here. It’ll hear you.’

  We ate. We hadn’t eaten since dawn, but I don’t think anyone tasted the food, except Narigorm who devoured hers with more than her usual relish. We chewed and swallowed to fill our bellies, but took no pleasure in it. We might as well have been chewing the old turnips as fresh mutton. We moved around one another in an awkward and uncomfortable silence, but I suspect no one’s thoughts wandered far from the mutilated body lying out there in the dark. We covered ourselves with cloaks and blankets and sle
pt, or pretended to, for it was an excuse not to talk.

  None of us was surprised to hear the wolf howl that night. We propped ourselves up on our elbows and listened. The sound came from the direction of the far pinfolds, as if whoever or whatever was calling was standing on the pile of stones and howling his triumph into the night. He had made his kill. Justice was done. Honour was satisfied.

  As the howls died away I became aware of another sound: someone in the hut was crying. I saw Rodrigo get up and go across to Cygnus. He wrapped his own cloak around the boy’s shoulders and held him in his arms, rocking to and fro as if he was comforting a frightened child.

  ‘It is the last time we shall hear it,’ he said. ‘It will leave us alone now. We are safe now that Zophiel is dead. We are all safe.’

  ‘I heard the swans again,’ Cygnus sobbed.

  ‘No, no, ragazzo, it was the wolf you heard, but it is the last time.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear the swans? Didn’t you hear their wings as they flew over? The feathers big and white, falling down, smothering everything. I couldn’t breathe. It was so cold and their wings beating down… the sound of their wings. You must have heard them.’

  ‘There are no swans. There is no water here. It was the snow that made you think of white feathers.’

  He sat with Cygnus, stroking his hair, waiting until his breathing became steady again. Then, his arm still across the boy, he lay down, but I don’t think he slept.

  The following morning I went out early. It had stopped snowing, though the sky was heavy and it was bitterly cold. The boxes were still in the wagon where we had left them. I walked towards the pinfold where Zophiel’s body lay. The ground was covered in a fresh layer of snow which had smoothed over our trampling footsteps, covering too the bloodstained grass where Zophiel’s body had lain. There was no sign of any tracks, either human or animal. If the wolf had stood on that pile of stones howling the news of his kill into the night, the snow had covered all traces of it.

  I glanced uneasily around me. Was he out there watching us still? Zophiel had been right; the Bishop’s wolf was a man who took pleasure in murder and revenge. Death alone had not been enough to satisfy him. The severing of the hands was a common punishment for a thief, but why not simply cut off the hands at the wrists? It would have been easier than slicing through an upper arm. Had the wolf taken the arms as proof that he had brought his fugitive to justice or so that Zophiel’s punishment would pursue him into the afterlife, for if Zophiel could not find his limbs on Judgment Day he’d face an eternity without them? I thought of the mutilation of Jofre’s body. Had the wolf been responsible for that too? I knew with a sickening jolt that none of us would be safe from a man like that until he had taken what he sought.

  The freeze continued throughout the next day and night. We mostly kept to the hut, eating the stolen mutton and waiting for the weather to change. Then, on the third day, we woke to clear skies and a bright sun and by mid-morning the snow was beginning to drip from the roof and melt in our footsteps. If this thaw kept up, we could travel in the morning, but so could others.

  We could no longer avoid the question that none of us had been ready to face. What was to be done with Zophiel’s body? Did we take it with us and hope to find a burial place, as we had with Pleasance, or leave it behind? There was no real choice. It had been hard digging in the forest even with the ground softened by months of rain. But after such a spell of cold weather, even once the snow melted, the ground was likely to remain frozen for several days. And the open heath was no place to spend hours digging a grave in frozen ground, not if you wanted to do it unobserved.

  Rodrigo, Osmond and I took it in turns to dig in the darkest corner of the hut where we hoped the disturbed earth would be least noticeable. Fortunately, because it was only intended as an overnight shelter, the builders had not troubled to mix the earth with straw and clay to make it hard, though it had been compressed by the many feet of those who had used the hut. We worked in silence. Adela kept her face averted and cradled Carwyn tightly in her arms as if she feared the grave might swallow him.

  It took as long to remove the stones from Zophiel’s body as it had that first night to lay them. The corpse was frozen and stiff. We rolled him in a blanket and carried him back to the hut where we laid him, still covered, in the centre of the floor.

  ‘We should pray,’ said Adela awkwardly. ‘He was a priest.’

  ‘If he was a priest he could have said the prayers over Jofre. He could have given him a Christian burial,’ Rodrigo said bitterly.

  I put my hand on his arm. ‘Jofre was given a good burial, better than Zophiel will have. Jofre lies under an altar and the image of the Virgin watches over him.’

  ‘Zophiel could have anointed his corpse.’

  ‘Friends who loved him washed him and laid him to rest; that is all the anointing he needed.’

  In the end we stood around the covered body and muttered what we could remember of the Placebo and the Dirige, the vespers and matins for the dead. With no priest to lead us we got no further than the first few verses of the psalms, but it was a service of a kind and perhaps it would shorten his days in purgatory.

  Osmond and Rodrigo bent to pick up the roll of blanket containing the body, but I stopped them.

  ‘We should strip the body and put it in the grave without a covering. The earth will absorb the fluids and he will decay faster. There will be less of a stench coming up through the ground. And if he is dug up, there’s less chance he can be identified. Someone who saw him up by the standing stones might recognize his clothes. We’ll bury the mutton bones with him too,’ I added, carefully avoiding meeting Cygnus’s eyes. ‘If he’s found, they may think stockmen caught him stealing sheep and took matters into their own hands. No one will blame them for that in these times and it may stop them looking further.’

  No one moved. I knew none of them wanted to touch the body. I felt bile rising in my throat at the thought of it, but since I had suggested it, I had no choice.

  Osmond put his arms round Adela and turned her away.

  I peeled back the blanket. Zophiel’s face stared up at me. The skin was blanched and waxy, but the nose was almost black. His eyes were open and the lips drawn back so that he looked as if he was in the act of making some sneering comment.

  I worked as quickly as I could, trying not to look down at the arms. Though the skin was beginning to thaw and soften in the warmth of the hut, he was still too frozen for me to be able to move the limbs. So I cut away the clothes with my knife, piece by piece. They would have to be burned in any case. When he was finally naked, I had no choice but to ask the others to help me lift him.

  Cygnus and I each grasped an ankle. Rodrigo stood behind the head and slid his fingers under Zophiel’s shoulders, while Osmond, gritting his teeth, eased his hands under the cold naked buttocks, but we had not raised the body more than a few inches when there was a sudden cry from Narigorm that made us drop the body with a thump on to the hard earth.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing. ‘The wounds are bleeding again.’

  A watery red liquid was dripping from the ends of his severed arms. Osmond stepped sharply backwards, crashing into the wall behind him.

  Narigorm took a pace nearer. ‘When a murderer touches their victim’s corpse the wounds open and bleed again to show everyone who the murderer is. That means,’ she added triumphantly, ‘that one of you must have murdered him, doesn’t it?’

  We stared at one another. Horror was written on every face except Narigorm’s. No one moved or spoke and at our feet, the severed stumps continued to drip their accusing blood.

  24. The Swan Knight

  We left the drovers’ hut as dawn was inching over the horizon. Patches of green were appearing all over the heath and the bushes dripped in the early-morning sunshine. Drifts of snow still lay against the walls of the pinfolds and the hut, but the track was rapidly turning to a thick, muddy slush, which the wheels and Xanthus’s hooves sprayed over
us as we trudged along beside the wagon. Every traveller knows it is madness to journey in a thaw. The mud makes the pace slow and the snow conceals rocks and potholes which could easily break a limb or a wheel shaft, but none of us wanted to spend another hour in that hut.

  The night before, Osmond had taken Adela and Carwyn to sleep in the wagon, for she had become terrified that Zophiel’s vengeful spirit would enter the hut where his body now lay buried beneath the floor. They say that infants should never sleep in the same room as a corpse, for spirits who are torn violently from their own bodies can enter the open mouths of babies while they sleep and possess them.

  Rodrigo, Cygnus, Narigorm and I stayed in the hut. We had sprinkled the grave with salt, placed four candles around it and sat up to keep watch all night. We had taken the excavated earth that would not fit back in the grave and spread it across the rest of the floor, trampling it down hard so that the colour in the corner would look no different from the rest of the floor. Now, if we were lucky, no one would ever know they were lying down to sleep on top of a corpse. Perhaps we sleep on corpses every night and do not know it.

  All through that long night we did not talk and we dared not sleep. We stole glances at one another in the candlelight. Could he have murdered Zophiel? Or him? But it was impossible to believe that anyone other than the Bishop’s wolf could have done it.

  Osmond had threatened to kill Zophiel and was hotheaded enough to have punched him, maybe even stabbed him in a fight, but Osmond would have fought face to face. He would never have stabbed Zophiel in the back or mutilated the body in such a terrible manner.

  As for Rodrigo, it was unthinkable. Of all of them I knew and trusted him the most. True, he had twice attacked Zophiel, and I had seen the day he whipped Jofre that once he made up his mind to do something he saw it through with an iron resolve, but why do it now? If he really believed Zophiel had murdered Jofre as Cygnus had suggested, he would have taken revenge long before this; he’d had countless opportunities.