The Saxon Shore cc-4

by Jack Whyte

  Sighing, but relieved of the fear of having to enter, I turned away and swept my eyes around the grassy bowl that formed the common ground. Nothing. And then I saw the pot, the new one we had brought from Camulod on our first visit. It sat where I had seen it last, amid the long-dead ashes of the cooking fire, and it was scaled with rust, accumulated over months. Rufio spoke from behind me.

  "How sick were these people, Merlyn?"

  "Very sick, some more than others. Why do you ask?" I looked up at him, to see him staring off along the far side of the longhouse. He nodded in the direction of his gaze and I moved to where I could see what he was looking at.

  "There's still a lot of snow piled up in there, out of the sun," he said. "They must have had it even worse than us these past few months. Some of them must have died."

  "Aye, that's a fair assumption." I was eyeing the pile of snow uneasily, wondering what might lie beneath it.

  "Then where are they?" Rufio asked, reinforcing my dismay. "There's no bodies lying around. The ground would be as hard here as it was in Camulod."

  "You think they're there, under the snow?"

  Rufio shrugged as I turned back to him. "They could be. They must be somewhere. And some must have survived and moved away, otherwise there would be at least one corpse lying around. The last one to die. No one would have dragged him anywhere."

  "Aye, you're right, Rufio." Feeling immensely relieved at that realisation, I went directly along the side of the longhouse to the piled up snow, looking for some means of shovelling it aside, closing my mind resolutely against the fear of what might lie concealed therein. An old, broken shovel leaned against the wall and I seized it quickly, using it to scrape the surface snow aside and then digging carefully until I reached bare soil. There were no corpses there. I rejoined the others and swung myself up into my saddle.

  "Nothing there at all, but you're right, they must be somewhere. Stay here, I'm going to look around."

  I found nothing but the long-dead body of the horse we had left the lepers, but Rufio had ignored my order to stay where he was, and it was he who found the burial place. I heard his voice calling me from the woods opposite the longhouse, and arrived there to find him still astride his horse, a handful of his cloak held to his mouth. The pity of the scene was as overwhelming as the stench of it. A row of bodies lay arranged alongside each other, thirteen of them, each laid out in a semblance of decency and good order. Close by them someone, Mordechai, I had no doubt, had attempted to dig a pit large enough to inter them. It was wide and long, but less than a short-sword's length in depth, and its bottom yet retained the chipped, hard-broken look of frozen ground.

  "Mordechai," I said. "He must have gone in search of help."

  "Aye, but not long ago. Look at that one." The last body in the line closest to the unfinished pit looked different. We moved closer.

  "This one's new dead, Merlyn," Rufio said, his eyes sharper than mine. "He's still fresh. Look, the skin's not even livid." I looked and it was true. This corpse could have been no more than eight or ten hours old, which meant that Mordechai could not be far away, since it must have been he who dragged the body here. As I sat there, feeling my heart accelerate, we heard Shelagh calling to us and kicked our horses to a trot, making directly for the sound of her voice. She was in front of the longhouse, in the act of swinging herself up into the saddle when we broke from the trees, and her excitement was clearly evident.

  "Someone was here until this morning," she called as we approached. "Could it have been your friend Mordechai? I smelled fresh smoke inside the house, and sure enough, the ashes of the fire there are still warm. Whoever was here might still be close by, unless he had a horse."

  "No, the only horse they had is dead," I answered her. "I found it over there, in the brush. It must have frozen in the storm. If this is Mordechai— and I would guess it is, for he's not among the dead—he'll be on foot, and probably extremely weak, since he'll be starving. Damnation! Where should we even begin to look?"

  "That way and this." Shelagh swept her arm from left to right, indicating a faint, but clearly worn path that crossed the clearing in front of the long- house, disappearing into the woods on either side. "We know he didn't go towards Glevum or we would have seen him, and this path seems to be the only one leaving here. It has clearly been well used, if we split up and go both ways, one of us should find him."

  "There's one more path," Rufio added. "I saw it when I found the bodies. It leads back into the forest, in that direction." He waved his arm towards the trees, at right angles to Shelagh's path. Three paths, three riders.

  "Let's rejoin Liam and talk about this," I said, silently cursing the heavy rain, which seemed to be increasing.

  When we had joined him, I explained the situation and Liam merely nodded and sat silent, waiting for me to tell them what to do.

  "Very well then, we'll split up, one to each path. But let's be sensible in this. None of us needs to spend the night lost in the woods. We are on horseback, Mordechai's afoot. That means on a clear, unblocked path we should be able to move at least three times as fast as he can; probably four times faster. Let's assume he has been gone since early this morning, sometime after daybreak, eight hours or so. I calculate we have four hours or more of daylight left to us. But in two hours, each of us should be able to cover the entire distance he might have made on foot, so be aware of time! Two hours, no more. At the end of that, turn back, no matter what, and let's hope one of us will have found him by then. Liam, you stay here and wait for us. Light a fire if you can, but don't try too hard or too long. Everything will soon be too soaked to burn. Don't drown yourself in the attempt. Let's go. We have no time to waste."

  Rufio took the path that he had found and Shelagh and I went east and west along the main pathway that crossed the clearing. I turned one last time to wave to Liam Twistback, whose eyes were on his daughter's receding form, and as I did so the sky was sundered by a blast of searing blue light, followed by a deafening crack of thunder that brought Germanicus up in a screaming rear of fright. I fought him down grimly, and swung him back onto the path again, letting him feel my spurs as I put him towards the storm-lashed forest.

  XXIV

  The day darkened rapidly as I rode along the narrow, twisting path among tall, close-packed, slender trees that bore delicate, pale leaves too small to impede the falling lancets of rain. The ground sloped upward steadily so that at times the pathway underneath my horse's hooves resembled a brook more than a footpath. About a mile from Mordechai's clearing, however, both the surrounding trees and the nature of the pathway changed for the better, giving way to a broader, drier path of needles carpeting the ground beneath soaring, heavy conifers. My mount responded quickly to the new ground underfoot, and for a time we made much better progress, increasing almost to a full gallop in places before the ground began to level out again and then slope downward. By this time I was riding through a craggy, rock-strewn landscape, where sudden cliffs, rearing up from the ground beneath and girt in places with the thick, gnarled roots of ancient trees, reminded me of the primeval forest we had traversed in Eire.

  As we moved downward now, the slope increased and soon we dropped below the line at which the conifers began, finding ourselves again in a deciduous forest where the previous autumn's dead leaves, slick with the rain, made downward progress arduous and hazardous. At one point, the path became almost precipitous and I was thinking halfheartedly of dismounting and leading my mount down, when he made the choice for me, setting his hooves upon the slippery slope without a sign from me. Accepting that he knew what he was doing, I leaned back in the saddle, letting my reins go loose and trusting him to find his own way down. Avoiding the temptation to lean forward and see for myself where he was stepping, I looked about me instead, and saw the figure of a man hanging from a tree.

  The sight terrified me for a moment, and the first thought that leapt into my mind was that I had found Mordechai. A second glance, however, told me I was
wrong, because whoever the hanged man may have been, he had been swinging from that tree for months. Even in the semi-darkness of the hillside twilight, I could see the pallid glint of bones from where I was. In days, or weeks, now that the spring was here, nature would complete her reclamation and the last remains of this once-human thing would fall apart, dropping into the undergrowth beneath. Idly, and gauging only from the angle of the hillside beneath where he hung, I speculated that he had been bound on the ground beneath the tree, then hoisted into place by several others, higher up the hill. Sure enough, as I drew closer my eye picked out the other length of rope, stretching away beyond the gallows branch to the base of another tree farther up the hill.

  I had reached the bottom of the descent safely and was riding on, eyeing the ghastly sight and idly wondering who the fellow could have been, when something else caught my eye. I could easily have missed it, gazing as I was at the rags and bones above, but that my horse shied and sidled, snorting nervously. I looked down and saw a tattered blanket lying on the path. Dismounting quickly, I gathered it up, saw it had been ripped apart and then saw bloodstains in the wool and the watery remnants of spilled blood beside where it had lain on the stony ground. Glancing backward, up along the slippery path we had just descended, I could now clearly see the marks where someone had fallen and slid down. Mordechai must be close by, I knew. Like me, he must have seen the hanging man and, distracted, had missed his footing and fallen, injuring himself.

  I cupped my hands to my mouth and called his name several times, listening hard each time for a response, but I heard nothing other than the wind and rain. And then I saw fresh leaves and twigs in the mud, and beside them a deep mark gouged in the ground, and beyond that another, then another. It was plain that Mordechai had injured himself badly enough to have cut himself a crutch and padded the end with a piece of this torn blanket. I mounted quickly and set out to follow the marks he had left behind. Two hundred paces farther along, I came to a steep bank, which Mordechai had faced and failed to climb. His crutch marks, numerous and deep at the bottom of this clayey bank and deeply graven in the slick slope's surface, told the story eloquently. From there, accepting failure, he had veered aside and off the path, the marks of his crutch disappearing so steeply downward into the forest itself that I could not ride after him. Dismounting, I caught my horse's bridle and set out on foot, leading him, but quickly led him back up to the path again and tethered him. It would have been impossible to take him down into that wilderness and maintain anything approaching speed, and I knew that speed was vital. I knew, deep in my heart, that Mordechai was in deadly peril.

  I found him a short time later, literally almost falling on top of him. The hillside was free of trees in this area; I had passed through the last of them some way above. The bushes that carpeted the hillside here, however, were so thick as to be almost impenetrable, and their very density permitted me to see where he had forced his way through them. And where he had gone I followed, almost to the end. I was saved from sharing his fate only by the fact that he, in falling, had grasped at a clump of shrubs on the edge of the abyss that had entrapped him, and from their condition it appeared that they had held him for some time, but he had been too weakened to pull himself back up and so had fallen. Using extreme caution, and aware of my heart thumping at my ribs from my close escape, I crept forward and peered over the edge.

  Mordechai lay below me, much too far away for me to reach him, in the narrow, rubble-strewn bottom of a stark cleft in the hillside. The smooth rock face opposite me, at the foot of which he lay, seemed polished, stained with seepage and falling rain, and he lay sprawled at the foot of it, on his back, by the side of a strangely opaque, reflectionless pool that lay directly beneath my face as I peered down. His face was turned towards me and his crutch, identifiable by its padded end, lay lodged beneath his body. His left leg was obviously broken very badly, white bone splinters protruding from the shin, but I could see little blood. He was motionless, but I chose not to believe that he was dead. I called to him, but to no effect. Quickly I scanned the sides of the drop beneath me and saw that it, too, was sheer, like the other side, as though the rock had been cloven by a thunderbolt.

  It was then, as I looked back towards him, that he moved, convulsing in a way that brought his right arm sweeping to hit a large splinter of stone that lay beside the edge of the dark pool I had noticed earlier. His arm hit the stone with sufficient strength to dislodge it and send it tumbling into the pool. My flesh crawled with horror, because I saw it fall and watched it disappear and there was no splash, no sound of any kind. What I had taken for a pool was a deep, black, bottomless hole in the floor of the crevice.

  I rolled onto my back and sat upright, bracing myself on my straight arms and cursing the rain and my heavy armour. Mordechai needed help immediately, but I had no way of reaching him. He lay at least four times my own height beneath me, and even had I been able to climb down to where he lay, I could never climb up again, carrying him. My mind was filled with all the things I knew I could not do. I could not ride back for Rufio. By my reckoning, I had been riding for no more than an hour. One more hour to ride back would take me there just as the others were abandoning their search, with two hours yet to elapse before they won back to their starting point. By the time they arrived back it would be growing dark and we would still be one full hour away from here. Even were he still alive by then, it was clear to me that Mordechai would not survive the night, down in that hole in the cold and the rain. Even Liam Twistback was of no use to me. The path that lay between us was far too narrow, steep and dangerous for his large wagon. And then I remembered the rope from which the dead man hung, less than a mile away.

  I scrambled back up the slope, mounted my horse and made my way back along the path to where I could climb up and cut the rope at the base of the tree that anchored it. The corpse fell to the hillside below me, disintegrating as it hit the ground, so that I had no worries about freeing the other end, and I began to coil the rope immediately, inspecting it as I brought it in. It appeared slightly worn at the point where it had lain across the tree limb for so long, but otherwise it seemed strong enough to do what I required of it. Another thunderclap rumbled away above as I finished the coils, satisfied with the weight and thickness of the rope. Looping it across my chest, I scrambled back down to my horse and made my way back to where Mordechai had left the track. There, remembering that there were few large trees below this point, I used my sword to chop down some strong saplings and cut them into lengths to use as splints. That done, I tore the remnants of his blanket into strips to bind the splints, then unrolled my saddle pack and removed my own thick, springy, waxed-wool blanket, wadding it tightly and securing it beneath my cloak where it would remain at least partially dry. I piled the remainder of my saddle pack's contents beside the path, and then removed my cloak again and divested myself of sword, helmet, shield and cuirass. They would be safe enough, I estimated, and I had no need of either their protection or their weight where I was going. I refastened the dry blanket against my ribs, secured my swordbelt, which now held only my dagger, and shrugged back into my heavy, wet cloak. Already the pleasure I had felt in freeing my head from my heavy helmet had gone, leaving me aware only of the runnels of icy rain trickling down my neck. Once I was certain I had everything that I might need, I slung the coils of rope across the saddle bow and led my patient horse once more into the wilderness of underbrush.

  Mordechai had not moved, as far as I could tell, and was still unconscious. Wasting no time, I unloaded the coiled rope, the bundle of splints and the binding strips of blanket, then I went to tether my horse, looping his reins around a low-growing bush. Only then did I realize the true folly of what I was about. My horse, I knew, would remain where I tied him, no matter how loosely tethered. That was his training. But the rope by which I had thought to climb down to Mordechai required an anchor far stronger than a clump of low-lying shrubs, and I was already aware that there were no trees on th
is slope. The association, however, had escaped me until now! A hasty search revealed the full extent of my stupidity. There was nothing, not even an outcrop of rock that I could use as an anchor, and the rope was far too short to stretch uphill to the nearest tree. I was leaning against my saddle in despair, feeling the urge to weep with frustration, my face pressed against the leather, when my horse turned his head and nudged me with his muzzle. When I ignored him, he repeated the movement, this time nudging harder, pushing me. I stepped back and looked at him. "What? What is it?" He gazed at me and then tossed his head, whickering, as though trying to tell me something. Suddenly, and despite the seriousness of my situation, I felt the urge to laugh. Here I was, Caius Merlyn Britannicus, Legate Commander of the Forces of Camulod, talking with my horse, while a dreadfully injured man lay at the bottom of a hole in dire need of my help. And as I reflected on this, my gaze fastened on the pommel of my saddle and the horse whickered again, triumphantly, as though to say, "Finally! You see what I mean!"

  My heart thudding now with excitement, I untethered him and led him slowly closer to the edge of the abyss, where I refastened his reins to another shrub. Then, carefully, I secured one end of the rope to the saddle horn, testing it firmly to make sure the knot would not slip. When I was sure it was trustworthy, I threw the end with the noose over the cliff, where it landed, with length to spare, close by Mordechai. I threw the splints and bindings after it, then turned to speak to my horse, calling him by his given name, a thing I did not often do, and one which he had come to know bespoke some special need.