Company of Liars

by Karen Maitland

  Every sense was telling me that I should break away from the company and travel by myself. But I could not bring myself to leave Rodrigo, not in the state he was in, and in truth I was afraid to be alone. But at least I persuaded Osmond to turn north and make for the coast higher up. And I foolishly comforted myself with that.

  But we never reached the sea. Between land and sea, beneath wide grey skies, lay a great expanse of marshland, the fens that guard the Wash. Pools and waterways meandered among the mudflats and reeds, glinting in the winter sun. There was no crossing the marsh unless you had a boat and even then you would have to be born here to fathom your way through it, for it was a maze of watery branches, most leading nowhere except to certain death in the oozing mud. Here and there in the distance we could see small islands raised a few feet above the surrounding marshes, some big enough to support a small village of cottages and byres, others just a few sheep. The sharp smell of salt weed, mud and rich vegetation pervaded the air, pungent and cleansing after the stench of rotting corpses.

  We skirted the edge of the marsh, keeping to the higher ground, until we emerged from the trees to see a spur of hard ground jutting out into the marshland. The spur was almost an island, save for a narrow strip linking it to the mainland. Stunted trees covered much of it and at the far end lay a deserted hermit’s dwelling built of stone and shaped like a beehive. Beyond that, at the tip of the spur, was a roughly hewn stone cross jutting up between the dwelling and the marsh as if to ward off whatever creatures swarmed and bred in the dark depths of the sucking, belching slime. We decided we would camp on this almost-island for a night or two, then we would continue our journey around the marsh, for it must surely come to an end and we’d find a way to the sea.

  The spur was defendable. That was why we chose it and that was what we needed, a stronghold where we could defend ourselves from the wolf. We’d heard him the night we buried Cygnus and every night of our journey since. Adela had grown more terrified as, night after night, she clutched Carwyn to her while the howls reverberated through the darkness. She was not alone; we were all so exhausted and on edge that we fumbled tasks we had been skilled at since our infancy and stumbled over our own feet as we walked.

  Despite what I had said in the churchyard, Osmond was still adamant it was the Bishop’s wolf who was stalking us to retrieve the relic of St Benedict. He needed desperately to believe that. A man, however powerful, is mortal. He has weaknesses. You can fight a man. And as Osmond stubbornly demanded again and again, if it was not a man and not an animal, then what, in God’s name, was it?

  But even Osmond agreed that there was no point in simply abandoning the relic. If the Bishop’s wolf didn’t realize we had done so, he would continue to follow us and we’d be in a worse state if we had nothing with which to appease him. The best course, he said, was to take the reliquary to a church in a village not affected by the pestilence and make a public show of giving it to the priest so that it would come to the attention of the wolf. Then let him steal it back, if he would, from them. But we had not found a village without the pestilence. Those few we came across lay deserted or dying, and the peat-cutter had been right, there was not a priest left among them.

  In any case, I had no intention of surrendering the relic. It had become my talisman, our protection against whatever it was that was out there. You may laugh that after all those years I had finally come to put my faith in a fragment of bone. It’s easy to mock such things when the sun is shining, but when the sun begins to sink and shadows ooze towards you from the trees and you sit shivering in the darkness, waiting, then believe me, you will cling to anything to defend you against the thing you most dread.

  That first night on the spur, as the moon rose, the mist crept low over the marshes, streaming out in white ribbons over the pools and waterways, until it seemed we were an island floating on a sea of cloud in the dark sky. The sounds were magnified in the still night, the sucking and gurgling of the water, the croaking of the frogs, the cries of night birds and the shrill screams of prey fighting for its life. Osmond built fires and set torches across the narrowest part of the spur. He knew that would not keep the wolf out, but he reasoned the wolf couldn’t cross without being seen in the light of the flames.

  Rodrigo was on watch when the howling began. The rest of us, exhausted, were already asleep, but the howl woke us, that and the cry of fear from Rodrigo. Osmond was on his feet faster than I was, but I told him to stay with Adela and hurried forward. Rodrigo was kneeling, staring at something up in the woods on the mainland. I put my hand on his shoulder and he jumped violently.

  ‘The wolf, have you seen him?’

  He pointed. I peered into the dark mass of trees. A flickering light appeared and disappeared among the trunks. It shimmered ghost-white in the darkness, too white for any torch or lantern.

  ‘Corpse-light,’ he whispered. He stood up and started forward as if he was about to follow it, but I grabbed his arm.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Rodrigo. Whatever or whoever that is, you can’t tackle it in the dark.’

  He stared down at me like a man who is drunk and can’t recall where he is. ‘He wants me to follow. He is beckoning to me.’

  ‘The light’s flickering, that’s all. How long has it been there?’

  He ran his hand distractedly through his hair, but before he could answer, another howl from the wolf rang out over the marsh. It seemed to come from the trees, but it was hard to tell. The howl swirled around us like the mist. I could feel Rodrigo trembling.

  Osmond came hurrying up, his stave grasped firmly in both hands.

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘Only that light.’ I pointed, but when I looked, there was nothing there.

  Osmond drove the end of his stave into the ground in exasperation. ‘God’s blood, I can’t take much more of this. He wants the reliquary. We have to find a way to give it to him. Why did you have to open that cage, Camelot? Why couldn’t you have left the infernal thing alone?’

  Rodrigo was in no state to continue the watch, so I sent him back with Osmond and stayed myself. In any case, all desire for sleep had long passed.

  The marsh is a place unlike any other. It calls to you night and day. By day its voice is the cry of birds screeching and sobbing on the wind, by night the whispering reeds call forth a great slithering and hissing as though huge serpents were crawling through the mud towards you. When the moon breaks through the clouds you see them heaving and writhing, the starlight glinting off their scales. Pale lights glide across the marshes in the darkness as if unseen people were walking across the mud where you know by day it is impossible for any human to walk, elf-fire leading men to their deaths. The marsh is always hungry and it has a thousand ways to lure you into its maw. It’s not a place where your thoughts are led to God, but to the monstrous creatures that inhabit this twilight world which is neither sea nor land, water nor earth.

  The cold, damp mist began to creep in around me, until I was cut off from the sight and sound of any living creature. I could no longer hear the reeds whispering. A smothering silence had rolled in, heavy and palpable, like the silence that had followed the wolf howls that night in the gully. Shapes gathered out of the mist, but dissolved before I could reach them. I had never felt so alone. I was in the deadlands, the limbo where souls wander nameless and formless, unable to speak or to touch. And in that blind silence I knew it was not the nature of death that frightened me, it was what lay beyond; not heaven, not hell, but spirit without a form, without a place to be. I would be nowhere. I would be nothing.

  The day that I left my home, I had prayed that my children would forget me. I wanted to spare them the pain of remembering. But that night, as I crouched in the white mist, waiting, I knew more than anything that I wanted them to remember. I wanted to go on living in someone’s memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived.

  I had told Rodrigo once that we are all exiles from the past. I thought
I had no need of a past. I thought if you cut away your past you could create yourself anew. But to sever yourself from the past is to cut away the only rope that anchors you to this world and to your being. When you cut away your past, you cut away yourself. What had I become?

  Dawn came at last and as the sun burned away the mist, the morning sounds crackled back into life – Carwyn wailing, Osmond swearing as he stubbed his toe, and Adela stoking the fire to a blaze and calling to Narigorm and Rodrigo to come and eat. They were just the ordinary sounds of people beginning their day, raucous, discordant, but they were the most beautiful sounds on earth, the sounds of living people.

  Later that morning, as I tended the cooking fire near the stone cross, I heard the sound of splashing and saw a coracle being paddled towards the spur. Osmond had taken Rodrigo fowling. I’d sent Narigorm back to a stream in the trees on the mainland to fetch water and Adela sat nursing the baby in the shelter of the hermit’s dwelling. So I alone hailed the man who sat a little way off watching me.

  ‘Any sick?’ he called out. It was by now the common greeting.

  When I reassured him, he paddled closer.

  He held up three long fat wriggling eels. ‘Want them?’

  I nodded gratefully. We bartered back and forth until he finally agreed to take a belt and a cloak pin belonging to Cygnus. He tied the eels in a bit of sacking and held them out to me on the end of the paddle and I returned the belt and pin the same way.

  ‘Two men netting. Fair and dark. They with you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘They want to stick to the heights, treacherous bastard this marsh. Many a man’s put his foot on something that looks solid and found himself up to his waist before he can yell. Once he’s in there’s no man can get him out.’ He spat a great glob of yellow phlegm into the water. ‘Outlanders see fen folk out there, think there’s no harm, but fen folk know where to walk and even they get taken when the mists come up.’

  ‘Do you come from one of the fens?’ I glanced towards the island villages behind him.

  He spat again by way of denial. ‘Height man. Village beyond the trees.’ He jerked with his chin in a direction north of the spur.

  ‘Has your village escaped the pestilence?’

  He shook his head. ‘Came a week or two before All Hallows. Lost near enough half the village, but there’s been no more gone sick since St Thomas Eve now. Reckon it’s moved on to find some other poor bastards. You seen –’

  He suddenly froze, staring over my shoulder, a look of panic on his face. I whirled round, alarmed at what might be behind me, but saw only Narigorm coming towards us, pails of water in her hand.

  The man fumbled for something in his shirt and pulled out a hazel twig which he thrust out in front of him as if he was warding her off.

  ‘That’s only Narigorm, a child who travels with us,’ I reassured him.

  He looked relieved and sheepishly lowered his twig, but he didn’t take his eyes off her. ‘Thought she was a nixie or ghost, she’s so pale. It’s not natural.’

  He continued to stare and Narigorm, aware she was being watched, returned his gaze unblinking. He quickly averted his eyes and picking up his paddle, deftly swung the coracle into the channel again.

  Without looking back he called out, ‘Make sure she doesn’t comb her hair while she’s in these parts. She’ll comb up the white hair on the back of the waves and whip up a storm. We’ve seen enough death round here.’

  As I watched him paddle away I hoped for Narigorm’s sake there would be no storm. If there was, I had a feeling he’d be back and he would not be alone.

  Fortunately for all of us, the next few days were calm though cold. We were glad of the hermit’s hut to shelter Adela and her baby. The floor of the hut had been dug deep below ground level, so that inside it was high enough for a man to stand upright, but not wide enough for anyone to stretch full length when they lay down. The rest of us mostly slept outside around the fire pit. At least on the marshes there was fuel and food too if you could catch it. For those who dared risk their lives, there were birds to be netted, fish to be caught and eels to be speared. We caught few birds ourselves from the heights. Osmond was so punch-drunk with exhaustion from the sleepless nights that he could no longer hit a bird with his sling and netting was best done on the water, but as the eel-man had said, it was too dangerous to venture into the marsh, so we traded what goods we could for fish and fowl from the men in coracles who paddled across to us. They came as much out of curiosity as a desire to trade, but they kept us fed, though we cast envious eyes on the distant islands where sheep grazed. Salt mutton is said to be the best in the land, but no farmer slaughters his sheep before lambing and if anyone, like us, was tempted to steal one, they were far out of our reach, safe on their islands.

  We should have moved on after a day or two. We knew we would have to go soon, for we were running out of things to trade and we needed to be somewhere we could feed ourselves. But the truth was we were afraid to leave the safety of the spur. Osmond was convinced that if the wolf came, he would come by way of the heights, not the marsh, and at least we could watch the entrance to the spur. And though I was certain the wolf was not human, like the others, I had no desire to sleep out there in the woods with nothing to protect my back. Whatever it was, at least on the spur we would see it coming. The marsh might be lethal but, like the sheep on their islands, its very danger was our protection.

  But the marsh could not protect us from the howling. Every night we lit the fires and torches across the entrance and waited with mounting tension until we heard the wolf’s howl and then we strained into the darkness frantically searching for any glimmer, any sign of movement. Even though we took it in turns to watch, those who were not on watch did little more than nap, constantly alert for any new sound. Of all of us, it was Rodrigo whom it affected the most. He hardly slept at all at night and we couldn’t let him take the watch for he was so tense we feared he’d rush out into the marsh, if he thought that was where the howling was coming from. Without us realizing, the spur had become our prison. We fooled ourselves that we were keeping the wolf out, but in truth he was keeping us in.

  Finally, late one afternoon as we sat round the fire, matters came to a head. Carwyn was fretful and Adela, exhausted by sleeplessness and tension, burst into tears and began screaming that she could not take another night of howling.

  ‘I’d rather take Carwyn and walk into the marsh with him, at least it would be over,’ she sobbed.

  Osmond rounded on me. ‘This is all your fault, Camelot. If you had left that accursed mermaid with the other boxes in the wagon, the Bishop’s wolf would have left us alone weeks ago. We have to leave the reliquary out for him tonight. He knows we’re here. He knows we have the reliquary. He’s never going to leave us in peace until he has it.’

  ‘But we don’t know that it was among the things Zophiel stole. And I’ve told you, I don’t believe that the Bishop’s wolf is following us or ever was.’

  ‘Are you deaf as well as blind? Haven’t you heard the howls? God in heaven, Camelot, see sense, you know something is following us. What else can it be?’

  ‘Please, Camelot,’ Adela begged, ‘we have to give it up to him.’

  ‘We agreed we would find a church –’

  Osmond’s fists were clenched. ‘No, Camelot, we will do it now. You heard Adela, she can’t take another night of this. None of us can.’ He took a deep breath, trying to regain control of himself. ‘We will leave the reliquary where the spit joins the mainland, mark it with something that will show up in the dark, white cloth or stones, the Bishop’s wolf will find it. Then it will be finished.’

  Adela looked at me beseechingly. ‘Please, Camelot. If the wolf gets tired of waiting and comes into our camp one night, he could cut our throats or even take little Carwyn in revenge. He came into the chantry without us hearing, remember.’

  ‘Zophiel only thought he had,’ I said without thinking.

  Rodrigo flinche
d, and I wished I had bitten my tongue off, for if the Bishop’s wolf hadn’t taken the chalice, then in all probability Jofre had.

  I had no choice. Osmond was close to breaking himself. I knew he’d take the relic by force if I didn’t agree and I was no match for him. At least if the relic was still there in the morning, it might finally convince him that what was stalking us was not human. I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘You’re right, of course you are. I’ll do it now.’ I struggled to my feet.

  ‘The wolf does not want the relic.’

  I glanced round. Narigorm was crouching on the ground studying the runes spread out before her. There was a moment’s silence as we digested this.

  ‘Then… then why is he still following us?’ Osmond asked.

  ‘The wolf wants death,’ Narigorm said without emotion.

  Adela buried her face in her hands and moaned.

  ‘That’s enough, Narigorm,’ I said sharply. My bowels felt as if they had been turned to icy water, but I tried not to show it. ‘If it’s my death he wants, the wolf needn’t trouble himself. At my great age he only has to wait a while and he’ll get his wish without lifting a finger.’

  Narigorm held up a rune shaped like a V on its side. ‘Kaunaz, some say means a blazing torch, others say it means a boil, a place of death.’

  Adela looked horrified. ‘A boil! You mean the pestilence?’