Liars and Thieves (A Company of Liars short story)

by Karen Maitland

  ‘Dye’ll see to your wound,’ he muttered. ‘She’s a rare talent for healing . . . If we let you live long enough for her to work her magic.’

  The woman threw the plucked woodcock into the cooking pot. Then she rose and ducked down into one of the bothies. She emerged with a wad of cloth and a clay jar. She dipped the cloth into the jar, coating it thickly with some green unguent. Dye tossed it to the third man in the group, a small, hunched wretch with weeping sores round his mouth and nose, and one scaly hand knotted into a useless claw, which looked as if it had been withered from birth.

  ‘Here, Weasel, get him to press on that. It’ll stop the bleeding.’

  Weasel ambled over. He ripped the hole in my shirt wider over the wound and stuffed the wad of cloth through the hole. I felt the unguent growing hot against my skin, as if the tongue of an animal was probing into the wound.

  ‘Something’s not right here,’ Pecker said, frowning. ‘You got a horse, a fine-looking beast ’n’ all, compared to most we get in these parts. It’d be worth a fair bit. See, I’d have thought that if you was as poor as you claim, you’d have sold that horse or eaten it by now.’

  Pecker crouched down and peered menacingly into my face. ‘That man and his woman, what’re they to you? She your daughter, is she? ’Cause he don’t look like any pedlar.’

  Holy Jack squinted over at Zophiel. ‘Swear, I’ve seen him somewhere before and he wasn’t with any woman then. He wasn’t dressed like that neither.’ Jack scratched his head thoughtfully with the point of his dagger.

  ‘There, see,’ said Pecker. ‘You’d best give us the truth. Holy Jack here can sniff out a liar better than a dog can scent a rabbit.’

  It took me a few moments to realise that he assumed Adela was Zophiel’s wife or mistress. In any other circumstances I’d have laughed, imagining the look of disgust on Zophiel’s face at the mere thought of touching Adela, never mind being the father of her baby. I glanced at Zophiel, but he still hadn’t moved.

  All eyes were turned on me and none of them were friendly. It occurred to me that this might just be a trick. What if Adela had already told them that her husband and the others were out there in the forest somewhere, or if they’d realised the man she was shouting for was not the man they had tied to a tree? If they even suspected a lie, the dagger Jack was playing with would slice through my throat. And that’s if I was lucky. I’d heard that some outlaws amused themselves by torturing men before they killed them, thinking up novel ways to make their ends as drawn out and painful as possible, just to while away the hours. I stared at Adela, willing her to give me some sort of sign, but all I could see were fear and panic in her eyes.

  ‘I told you, Holy Jack isn’t a patient man,’ Pecker growled. ‘You don’t want to—’

  He stiffened, staring into the trees, listening. My heart began to race. Our companions must have discovered we’d been taken. They were out there somewhere, creeping towards us, trying to rescue us. Desperate not to give them away, I stared fixedly at the ground as if I’d heard nothing, but I was straining to listen as intently as Pecker. There was a sudden flapping of wings, as if birds had been disturbed from a roost, maybe by our little band moving through the undergrowth. The outlaws scrambled to their feet.

  ‘More plump pigeons heading this way,’ Pecker announced.

  Before I could even turn my head, the outlaws had vanished into the forest. Somewhere a horse screamed. The caltrops had claimed another victim.

  We huddled close to the outlaws’ fire pit in the ruined building, digging into the common pot with spoons made of sheep’s bones to fish out pieces of hare and the flesh of several different birds, but I was gobbling so fast I barely had time to taste it. I hadn’t realised how ravenous I was. Zophiel had at last regained consciousness, though he seemed to have little appetite. There was a streak of blood on his forehead and he looked even paler and more gaunt than usual. Adela was picking listlessly at the leg of the woodcock Dye had shoved in her hand. Like Zophiel, she was barely eating.

  The night was a dark one, without so much as the glimmer of a star, and the glow of the fire lit up the faces of the outlaws from below, the scarlet flames reflected in their eyes, dancing like imps from hell. Pecker had unwound the tail of his hood from his face to eat, and I saw the reason for the strange whistling when he breathed. His nose had been sliced in two straight down the middle so that he had a dark hole in the middle of his face, with two puckered lumps of flesh hanging on either side. Looking at his tight cap, I suspected his ears had been lopped off too. He’d been mutilated in the pillory. What for? Coin clipping? Sodomy? It was certainly not a question I was about to ask. I always took great care to conceal my own past. The present is all you can truly know of any man, and even of that you can glimpse only a fragment, however long you remain in his company.

  The dead branches of the trees clattered in the cold, damp breeze. At least the rain had stopped, but judging by the thick clouds, it would not be for long. Were Rodrigo and Osmond and the others looking for us? They must surely have realised something was wrong by now. I only prayed they would not try to follow our steps along the track. In the dark it would be only too easy to stumble on to more of the caltrops. I had managed to warn Adela and Zophiel to say nothing about the rest of our company. Our only hope of escaping without any of us being killed was if the outlaws were unaware that someone was out there searching for us.

  I shuffled closer to the warmth of the fire. The wound on my shoulder had stiffened, but Dye’s ointment had stopped the bleeding and the pain had eased a good deal. I shivered and Dye tossed another lump of wood on the fire.

  I nodded gratefully, holding my hands out over the blaze.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid the fire’ll be seen?’

  ‘Not out here. Besides, who’d be travelling through the forest at night? They’d not dare. Be too afeared of outlaws cutting their throats,’ Dye said.

  Pecker and Weasel chuckled. Adela flinched and, shuddering, glanced behind her. I knew only too well why she and Zophiel had lost their appetites. For just a few yards away, the bloodstained bodies of two monks lay heaped one on top of the other, their habits pulled up to their waists as if they’d been killed in the act of making love. It had amused Holy Jack to arrange them so.

  Their throats had been sliced across just as soon as they’d been dragged into the camp. As Pecker casually explained, they never let monks go free. They’d be squealing robbery the moment they reached the nearest town. He had considered blinding them and cutting out their tongues, but everyone knew monks were used to signing to obtain whatever they wanted during their periods of silence, and, he said, it’d be plain cruel to cut off their hands as well. Kinder to dispatch them at once, like putting a wounded dog out of its misery.

  Pecker dragged a snail out of the edge of the fire, where it had been roasting in the embers, and, digging the point of his blade into the shell, hooked out the body and popped it in his mouth.

  ‘Don’t you mind them monks. There’s a gullet1 over yonder. Deep it is, would swallow a church. Men dug it years back when they was mining the ironstone. Fair drop of water there is at the bottom now. Lads’ll throw the monks down there when they’ve had their supper. Gullet’s so big, you could drop a whole army of corpses down there and not fill it.’

  ‘Just as well, considering how many we’ve sent down there,’ Weasel chuckled. ‘Not all of them dead either. But sides are too steep, can’t clamber out, you see. Have to hand it to ’em, mind. Some give it a fair go, even though we’ve broken their arms and legs for ’em. Can hear ’em shrieking for days after, but death always quietens them down in the end. But ’cause of all this rain, they drown now. Don’t last an hour,’ he added glumly, as if the rain had spoiled all their fun.

  I caught the grin on Pecker’s face and briefly wondered if this was just a tale to frighten us into submission. But it was plain from the casual swiftness of the murders that this was by no means the first time Jack and Pecker had kille
d. I glanced back at the naked buttocks of the monks, smeared with bloody streaks from Holy Jack’s fingers. Just how many bodies lay rotting in that quarry?

  The night was growing colder, and Adela’s gown was soaked from the rain. In spite of the fire, her teeth began to chatter. Dye shrugged off the ancient sheepskin cloak in which she’d wrapped herself. She wandered over and crouched behind Adela, wrapping the skin tightly about Adela’s shoulders and rubbing her arms briskly with it.

  ‘You don’t want to be catching a chill, not with the bairn.’ She laid her hand on Adela’s swollen belly. ‘Carried one myself once, but that were a long time ago. Boy, it was.’

  ‘Did he grow into a fine man?’ Adela asked.

  A spasm of pain creased Dye’s face. ‘Never drew breath, poor mite. My husband’s fist saw to that when it was still in my belly. At least the babe never learned what it means to be afeared.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Adela whispered.

  ‘Whatever for?’ Dye heaved herself to her feet. ‘Fine mam I’d have made. Probably woken up some morning to find I was trying to feed its arse ’stead of its face.’ She laughed and the outlaws chuckled with her.

  But I saw tears in Adela’s eyes as she watched Dye walk back to the fire.

  Now that everyone had either eaten their fill or given up trying, Dye added water to the cooking pot and covered it with a broken plank of wood weighted down with stones. The pottage would doubtless be our breakfast in the morning, assuming we survived the night.

  Wrinkling her nose she glanced over at the dead monks. ‘You going to get off your backsides and get those bodies shifted? Stench of blood ’ll draw every beast in the forest and I don’t want to be kept awake all night by foxes and badgers fighting over the corpses.’

  ‘Get more peace if we put you down the gullet,’ Pecker said sourly.

  Dye flashed him a disdainful look. ‘You fancy spending the night driving off packs of stray dogs, do you?’

  Pecker gave the resigned sigh of a man who knows he can’t win. ‘Come on, lads, may as well get them stripped. See what prizes they brought us. Then we’ll swim them, see if they float or sink. Guilty or innocent, what do you reckon?’

  Pecker and Weasel dragged the corpses apart and, while the two of them worked on stripping one, Holy Jack searched the other. It isn’t easy undressing a dead man, but the outlaws were not concerned with preserving the monk’s robes, quite the reverse. Using their knives, they cut away the salvageable cloth into lengths, tossing them to Dye who neatly folded them. The bloodstained cloth they threw onto the fire where it hissed and smouldered for a long time before burning to ashes.

  The men made a small pile of the treasures they found – leather drinking flasks, a couple of weighty money bags, rings wrenched from fat fingers, two wooden crosses and finally scrips containing sealed letters written on rolls of parchment together with some smoked fish and dried mutton which they were evidently carrying to stave off hunger on the journey. Dye immediately added the fish and meat to the pottage in the cooking pot, while the letters crackled on the fire. Their scarlet wax seals melted, running down like blood, until they turned black and vanished in a plume of smoke.

  Weasel, using his good hand, turned the scrips upside-down, shaking out the last of the contents, obviously hopeful that some object of value might still be concealed in them. But the only things to tumble out were a stray coin of little worth, a packet of fern seeds, doubtless to protect the monks from the attention of evil spirits, and a heavy object wrapped in woollen cloth which thudded onto the ground. Weasel pounced on it and deftly unwrapped it with one hand, his eyes gleaming with anticipation in the firelight. His groan of disappointment was audible across the camp.

  ‘Poxy stone! As if we needed any more of those.’ He petulantly kicked the nearest pile of rubble. ‘What’s he want to carry a stone about for?’

  Zophiel raised his head.

  ‘Penance,’ he said coldly. ‘He may have knelt on it to pray or slept on it. You’ve probably murdered a saint.’

  Holy Jack snorted. ‘So when I throw him in the gullet, he’ll walk on water and raise all the other corpses into the bargain. If he does, I’ll be the first to beg his holiness’s pardon.’

  Weasel sniggered.

  ‘Anyway, that’s no penance stone. Not sharp enough,’ Jack said, peering over at the object in Weasel’s hand. ‘I reckon he was carrying some treasure or other to an abbey, only some bastard got there before we did, switched the packages while our saint was sleeping or stuffing his gorpe-belly at an inn. Seen it done many a time.’

  ‘Doubtless because you were the one doing it,’ Zophiel retorted.

  Holy Jack’s fist clenched around the handle of his knife, and his jaw tightened. I would have kicked Zophiel hard had I been closer. Didn’t he realise if Jack lost his temper we could yet be joining the monks in that pottage of human corpses.

  But thankfully the tension was broken by a roar of laughter from Pecker.

  ‘Not Jack it wasn’t. If you want to summon the Holy Spirit, Jack’s your man all right, but if you want something spiriting away, it’s our Weasel you need. That’s what landed you in the dung heap, wasn’t it, Weasel? Spiriting away a sweet little jewel while an old lady slept. Only he hadn’t spotted, she’d a lapdog beneath her skirts. Had to run for it. Claimed sanctuary at Beverley and they sent him in sackcloth to the nearest port, but he couldn’t find a ship to take him on, could you, Weasel? Ships’ captains reckoned he’d never be able to work his passage with only one hand. But he can do with one hand what most can’t do with two. Can slide a man’s ring off his finger or take a purse from inside his shirt and he won’t even know it’s gone.’

  Weasel gave a sly grin, showing sharp yellow teeth. He flashed the stone he was holding and it had vanished into air before we could blink. A moment later, he was pulling it out of the front of his shirt. I saw Zophiel lean forward, his eyes narrowed. Here was a magician who was almost as skilled as he was, not that Weasel would ever have given himself that exalted title.

  From far away in the darkness came a long, drawn-out howl. Adela, Zophiel and I all stiffened, glancing anxiously at each other. We’d heard that cry before.

  ‘Are you done with those corpses yet?’ Dye snapped. ‘I told you, the wild dogs ’ll latch on to the smell of blood afore you can fart.’

  Weasel sprang up.

  ‘Mangy curs! I hate ’em. They’d eat us alive given half a chance.’

  As the howl came again, he hurled a stone out into the darkness, but it thudded against what sounded more like wood than living flesh. Scooping up more stones from the ground, he flung them after the first. We heard a yelp and a whimper. One at least had hit its mark.

  ‘Leave ’em be. It’ll take more than stones to drive them off,’ Pecker said. ‘Dye’s right, it’s the blood they can smell.’ He sighed. ‘Come on, you take the feet of this ’un, I’ll take the head. Dye, you mind the spoils. We’ll divide them later.’

  He craned round, staring at the three of us sitting round the fire, wisely dismissing both Adela and me as being useless for the task of disposing of the bodies.

  ‘You, what’s your name?’

  ‘Zophiel.’

  Pecker laughed. ‘You could sprain your tongue saying that. Your mam think you a little prince, did she? Well, your Highness, be so good as to shift your arse over here and help Jack carry the other lump of crow-bait.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing. I won’t help you cover up a murder.’

  Dye sprang at Zophiel, knocking him flat on his back. Before he could recover his senses, she was straddling his chest, pinning down his forearms by grinding her knees into them. She pressed the edge of her knife to his throat.

  ‘Listen, your Highness, you can help us get rid of the body or you can be the body we get rid of. It’s all the same to me. Of course, we could save you the bother of carrying the monk to the gullet. Just tie you to his corpse and leave you both out in the forest for the wild dogs to play with. So
what’s it to be?’

  Zophiel glowered unblinking into her face, but if he thought that was going to unnerve her, he was mistaken, for she merely glared back, pressing the flat of the blade hard against his throat until he began to choke.

  Finally he gasped something which Dye seemed to take for surrender. Still holding the sharp point of the dagger towards Zophiel, she shuffled off him and jerked the blade silently towards the corpse. Zophiel, his jaw clenched, rose with what little dignity he could muster and limped towards the second corpse. He bent to grab the man under his armpits, then froze, peering at the man’s arm.

  He pulled a branch from the fire pit and held the burning end over the body.

  ‘She told you to pick it up,’ Pecker growled.

  ‘Wait!’ Holy Jack said, snatching the branch from Zophiel and holding the flame close to the monk’s arm. ‘He’s a mark on his skin here.’

  He glanced sharply up at Zophiel.

  ‘What’s it mean?’

  Zophiel shrugged.

  ‘How should I know? I thought you were in a hurry to dispose of these corpses.’

  ‘It means something all right,’ Jack persisted. ‘I saw the way you looked it at.’

  ‘It’s a . . . curious mark. I haven’t seen anything like it before.’

  ‘Ahh, but I reckon you have.’

  Pecker took several stumbling paces back from the bodies.

  ‘Here, it’s not the pestilence is it? I heard some of ’em gets blue marks on their skin. If he’s brought—’

  Jack stared intently at the corpse’s arm. ‘It’s red. Someone’s marked his skin with a brand or some such, but it’s no felon’s mark. It looks a snake . . . with legs. But what I want to know is, what it means.’

  Both Jack and Dye moved so swiftly, Zophiel had no time to step aside. In one fluid movement Jack pressed his dagger against the side of Zophiel’s throat, while Dye pressed hers between his shoulder blades, all but skewering Zophiel between them.