[Sir Richard Straccan 02] - Pendragon Banner

by Sylvian Hamilton

  She breathed a soft sigh of relief. He was well, he was safe — but then he raised his face to the candlelit Christ and she saw the tears on his face.

  Through the chapel window at Trevel the moon’s indifferent eye watched, for a time, a man kneeling before the altar. Unable to sleep or endure Wace’s wuffling snores, Straccan had crept down to the chapel, a tiny curtained closet in the thickness of the wall. No one was there, thank God. There was a faint sweet scent of honey from the candles burning on the altar before the veiled cross. He stared at the shrouded shape of the life-sized Christ, marking where the bowed head and bulges of ribs and knees moulded the linen covering. Presently he reached up and gently tugged the heavy samite away.

  Candlelight cast a shifting glow upwards, illuminating the tormented face, the jutting nose and staring eyes of Christ. A great iron spike transpierced the feet of the image with shocking realism.

  Not daring to touch the carved feet Straccan grasped the nail instead and prayed as he had never prayed before: that Gilla be unharmed, that Janiva be safe and that — if it was God’s will — he should find the Pendragon Banner and end this nightmare of uncertainty and fear. How long he clung to the nail, like a drowning man clutching at a rope, he didn’t know, but when at last he tried to let go his fingers were stiff and cold, and left blood on the spike.

  He sank to his knees on the altar step and wept, great tearing sobs that tore at his chest and throat. When at last he was quiet the moon had slipped away uncaring and the candle had burned well down. It must be long past midnight but he had no wish to return to the perfumed room above. Shivering, he wrapped himself in the pall from the crucifix. Huddled, exhausted, on the floor before the altar he even slept briefly, with fleeting dreams of shipwrecks, of a treasure chest guarded by a dragon, of children playing with a ball and of a dying woman whispering, ‘Tell him, Guinevere.’

  Waking, cramped and chilled through, he thought. Tell who, tell him what? Something so urgent that with her last few breaths a dying woman had striven to pass it on.

  ‘Tell him, you must tell him, Guinevere.’ He stayed there, praying, until dawn.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Waking to darkness, for a disorienting moment Janiva had no idea where she was until the smell of sheep brought her to reality. She was in the old undercroft lying on bales of unwashed wool. Gingerly she touched the side of her head where dried blood matted her hair. The scabbed lump was still tender but didn’t feel as large as it had been, and the blinding headache and swooping dizziness, intensified by the darkness, that had followed her fall seemed at last to have gone.

  The key rattled in the lock, the door squealed open and a flood of daylight dazzled her. She squeezed her eyes shut against it as a stab of pain knifed through her head, and heard the now familiar sounds as her guard set down a jug of water and a platter of broken bread, and picked up yesterday’s empty jug and dish.

  With her eyes watering and half closed against the blinding light, she could only see the man’s black tear-blurred shape in the doorway. ‘What day is it?’ she called, but without a word he slammed the door, and the darkness enveloped her again.

  It was a fine dry day with a warm breeze, a perfect day to air the bedding and clean the great chamber, burning the old rushes, and sweeping and scrubbing the floor before bringing in armloads of fresh sweet rushes and strewing-herbs, with plenty of fleabane. All morning Sybilla had been overseeing the serving-women as they stripped the beds, took sheets to the wash house, spread blankets and coverlids on the hedges, and dragged mattresses and pillows downstairs to beat, and air in the sun. She had laid on food and ale for everyone, and when the heavy work was finally done the field workers came to share the meal, and they all sat in the meadow eating and drinking. It was an annual event, always lively with talk and laughter, while the children made daisy chains, young girls danced barefoot in the grass and older women gossiped and complained. But this year there was no dancing; the children played as usual but the grown-ups’ voices were subdued, their eyes anxious, all aware of Father Osric’s illness and the prisoner in the undercroft.

  It was Bane’s habit — it had saved his life more than once — to spy out the land before riding openly into any place. Finding the burned remains of Janiva’s cottage he had retreated and sought a vantage point from which to observe the village. It seemed normal enough, field work going on as usual and the house servants busy with blankets and mattresses and bundles of rushes in an orgy of cleaning. When at last everyone stopped work to rest and eat in the meadow, Bane slipped past the deserted cottages, through the orchard and round behind the hall to the mew. The door was open and the falconer absent, the premises occupied only by seedy moulting birds and two coffins, one lead, the other wooden. The wooden coffin was much smaller than the other. Bane’s throat tightened with sudden fear. Please, God, not Janival Someone was crossing the yard. Bane melted back into the shadows of the shuttered mew.

  On her way to the brewhouse to refill the jugs, Sybilla nearly dropped them when she heard her name called. The voice came from the mew, which should be deserted this afternoon; she had seen Alfred the falconer with the others in the meadow.

  ‘Mistress Sybilla!’

  The door stood ajar; she could see the dark shape of someone just inside. She set the jugs down carefully and loosened her eating knife in its sheath at her belt.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Mistress Sybilla, do you remember me? I’m Hawkan Bane.’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  As luck would have it, while Havloc was saddling their horses in the morning to ride to Stigan’s village, the man himself arrived unsummoned at the watchtower, crutching along in a cloud of homely stink behind a dozen solid bristly pigs.

  ‘Fine beasts,’ said Havloc, flattening himself out of harm’s way against the stable wall.

  ‘They was Sister Eg’s.’ Stigan lunged smartly with his crutch to foil a porky escapist’s break for freedom. ‘No you don’t, you bugger! These’re all that’s left. They run off in the raid,’ he explained. ‘Them devils speared the others, just for the fun of it, and they’re still lyin there.’

  Fresh pork, no matter the method of its dispatch, was valuable, and as soon as the cook heard about it a cart was readied and two hefty fellows assigned to fetch the carcasses to the garrison kitchen.

  Emerging from the kitchen, frowning over a few fourthings in his palm, Stigan found Straccan and Wace waiting. He stopped, scowling. Them again. What now? ‘I got things to do,’ he said.

  ‘Oh? Well, never mind. I can see you’re a wealthy man this morning. A whole silver penny won’t interest you.’ Straccan turned away.

  ‘I dint say that, did I?’ said Stigan indignantly. ‘A penny? What for?’

  ‘Pay him, Master Wace.’ With a tsk of annoyance Wace dug into his purse. ‘Where did you find the wreck? Can you see the place from here?’

  Below them the wide mud-brown river seemed sluggish and harmless. Two small boys were squabbling on the bank, one had a toy boat, a hollowed piece of wood, and the other was trying to take it. His cry of ‘Give it to me!’ caught Straccan’s attention for a moment, reminding him of something he couldn’t quite remember.

  ‘Twas five, six mile from here,’ Stigan was saying. ‘Down by the saint’s island.’

  ‘Saint? What saint?’ Wace asked.

  Stigan looked surprised at their ignorance. ‘Our saint, our holy man. Everyone knows about him.’

  ‘A hermit?’

  Stigan nodded. ‘Always been a holy man on Saint Winnoc’s island. Used to be an old watch tower long ago. He’s snug enough; when it floods he just moves up to the top. We look after him, turnabout; take food and stuff. That’s why we was down there, me an brother, that morning when we found the wreck.’

  Wace started to say something but Straccan’s sudden painful grip on his arm stopped him.

  ‘We was all soaked through,’ Stigan remembered with a faraway look. ‘He give us soup.’

&n
bsp; Straccan’s heart slammed against his ribs. ‘You went to the island before you took the girls to the priory?’

  Stigan nodded again.

  ‘What happened? You must remember!’

  Of course he did! Memory swamped him afresh as he stared down at the river, not seeing it, seeing instead the broken-backed ship, the chest, the girls, gulls diving and screaming around them; hearing even the sobs of the dark-haired girl weeping over the body of her dead companion.

  He had jumped ashore to make the boat fast and turned back to pick up the sack with the hermit’s supplies.

  ‘I’ll tell the saint,’ he said, but God had already done that for the old man came clambering over the high bank of seaweed as nimbly as a boy.

  ‘Bring em in,’ he gasped as he reached them. ‘I’ve soup on the fire and there’s dry blankets to wrap em up in.’

  ‘This one’s dead,’ mourned Peter.

  The old man leaned over to look and touched the fair-haired girl’s blue-white icy cheek. ‘No she ain’t,’ he said.

  The dead girl — and she was dead, Stigan had pulled enough drowned bodies from the river in his time to know dead from barely living — coughed up a lot of water and opened her eyes.

  He remembered all right. You didn’t forget something like that.

  ‘Where can I borrow a boat?’ Straccan asked.

  ‘I’ll row you,’ offered Stigan. He wouldn’t miss this for a month of Sundays, but in case his sudden helpfulness made them suspicious, he added ‘It’ll cost you, mind!’

  The islet, a seaweedy carbuncle surrounded by low-tide mud, lay closer to the Welsh shore than the English and was very small, barely an acre of ground. Gulls strutted over the seaweed, stabbing their cruel beaks into the smelly fly-swarming masses in search of shellfish. Here and there along the banks of weed Straccan could see the remains of a stone wall which must at one time have encircled the islet. The only sounds were the slap of water and the non-stop screaming of the seabirds, and there was an all-pervading reek of decaying fish. Straccan could not imagine a more wretched place. Anyone who chose to dwell alone here, in order to feel closer to God, must indeed be a holy man.

  The receding tide had exposed a rotting wooden jetty and several posts. Stigan tossed the mooring rope over one.

  A louder screech from the bank above startled the gulls to noisy flight. There atop the bank was a wild hairy vision, a shapeless bundle of sackcloth and tatters atop two skinny legs, very like a ragged stork.

  ‘How nice! The saint has come to greet us,’ said Wace. Raising his voice he called, ‘Good morrow to you, hermit! God be with you.’

  ‘Piss off!’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Ludlow, small though it was and young as towns go, was a flourishing borough. The castle, built by a forgotten de Lacy more than a century before, loomed protectively over the town, backed by meadows and orchards and warded by a broad stretch of the River Teme. The wide streets were kept in good repair, and all around the town the sheep-dotted hills were richly green.

  There was prosperity: busy shops and stalls, and a lively market that brought buyers from far afield. Although the burgesses resented, on principle, the imposition of the mercenary captain Cigony as constable instead of William de Breos — better the devil you know — they could not in truth complain that he interfered with their liberties or squeezed more in taxes, fines and fees out of them than they could manage to pay. In fact, as he was a foreigner and a stranger to their ways, they were sometimes able to put one over on him. Lord William might yet make his peace with the king and return but in the meantime the folk of Ludlow cheerfully took advantage of every opportunity to swindle the new lord.

  To his credit, Cigony had certainly tackled the outlaw problem with enthusiasm: never a week went by without a clutch of outlaws dangling from the town’s gallows. Ludlow folk were pleased. It was relatively safe to travel the roads again, as long as one kept out of Wales, and that brought more business to the town. Whenever Cigony and his troop rode down Castle Street people waved, and when the hunters returned with a few more wretched prisoners, cheered. Things could be a lot worse.

  Shadows were long in the Shropshire greenwood by the time Cigony blew his horn to call the stragglers in. The prey had run well, but out of breath and out of luck had gone to ground at last in a blackthorn thicket where, with nothing to lose, they defended themselves with knives, killing two of the harriers to the fury and grief of their handlers. Now the dogs were held back and someone would have to go in and flush the buggers out.

  Panting and red with exertion, Cigony waited. A tremor shook his body as he tried to suppress a sneeze, and failed. Aratcha! As one, the hounds’ heads swung round to eye him reproachfully.

  Protected by their stout leathers the dog-handlers thrust their way through tangles of savage barbs and dragged the prey out: two breathless, bleeding, shuddering creatures. Two men.

  Men. Well, yes, technically they were, but nobody thought of them as men. These were outlaws, rybauds, wolf-heads. Thieves, rapists, killers or all three, and as good as dead anyway; most when caught were strung up there and then from the nearest strong branch. Indeed Alun the verderer was already unhooking the coil of rope from his saddle and had his eye on a suitable tree. But a few would be taken back to Ludlow alive for the townsfolk’s entertainment and satisfaction at watching them kicking at a rope’s end on the morrow.

  The hunters jeered.

  ‘That all there was?’

  ‘Not worth stuffin!’

  ‘Throw em back!’

  From his commanding height on horseback Cigony looked down on the repulsive creatures lying where the berners had flung them. One had met justice before, and more than once, for he lacked both his ears as well as a hand and had been branded between the eyes.

  ‘Not a lot of him left to hang,’ the constable observed cheerfully. ‘Never mind.’ He sneezed again, less explosively, and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. ‘String him up.’ He glanced at the other wolf-head, small, bald, and bloody where thorns had torn his flesh. About to condemn him too, Cigony paused and looked again, harder.

  Pallid dirty flesh showed through rents in his shirt, but his padded sleeveless coat, though torn and filthy, had — surely… yes! — a touch of blue, a touch of red, a touch of yellow.

  ‘Patches!’ said the constable with satisfaction. ‘As I live and breathe, a coat of patches! Strip him!’

  The outlaw squealed as coat and shirt were torn from his scrawny carcass. On a thong round his neck hung a soiled doeskin pouch no bigger than a child’s fist. Cigony nodded to a squire who drew his dagger and leaned from the saddle. The prisoner, arms pinioned behind him by one of the berners, uttered a whistly shriek of terror, shut his eyes, dropped to his knees — nearly pulling his captor off balance — and began to pray.

  With a grin the squire cut the thong and handed the pouch to his master.

  ‘Well, well, well.’ Something small, gleaming and unmistakably gold slid onto Cigony’s broad palm. What have we here?’

  ‘Looks like a cup, my lord,’ the squire said helpfully.

  ‘Bit small,’ said Cigony. He turned it about, tracing the crude lettering with a calloused forefinger. ‘Not much more than a mouthful in that, eh?’ He put it back in the pouch and put that in his saddlebag. ‘Right. Take him back with the rest. Hang them, but put him in the thieves’ hole. I don’t want him hanged yet.’ Aratcha!

  Two oxen drew the cart, a plain farm wagon with a strong iron cage big enough for a dozen wolf-heads bolted to the floor and sides. All in together, the living and the hanged, they jolted the seven or eight miles back to Ludlow. There the castle’s accommodating dungeon swallowed the live ones until tomorrow’s gallows and the dead were identified — enriching Cigony by a shilling apiece — ticked off the ‘Wanted’ list and shovelled without ceremony into the town ditch.

  The bald thief was slung into the thieves’ hole, a nasty pit with a grating over the top and about four inches of indescrib
able sludge at the bottom. Past caring, Tom hunkered down in one corner, perfectly capable of sleep in such a place and attitude. At least he wasn’t getting rained on and perhaps, now they’d taken his cup, that bloody ghost would leave him alone at last.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  With one foot in the mud and the other still in the boat, Straccan stood dumbstruck, staring at the apparition on the bank above. The biblical scarecrow clutched a long knotty staff in both hands and looked as if he knew how to use it and was itching for the chance.

  ‘You can’t land here! Bugger off!’

  Straccan heard a muffled snort of mirth from Stigan and swore to himself. Another dead end! The old man's mad.

  Wace got to his feet, making the little boat rock. ‘You give a sorry welcome, for a holy man,’ he shouted.

  ‘Nothing holy about me. I scratch and fart like any other man. Clear off!’

  ‘We’ve come a long way. Won’t you give us your blessing?’

  ‘Fat lot of good that’d do you. I’m a sinner like you.’

  ‘Then welcome us as fellow-sinners,’ Wace called. ‘Give us your sinner’s blessing, and we’ll give you ours.’ He smiled slyly. ‘After all, you may be entertaining angels unawares. D’you want to risk it?’ The hermit spat, turned his back and started descending the bank on the far side, disappearing from their sight. His cracked voice floated back. ‘Are you coming, or what?’