An Ancient Evil (Canterbury Tales Mysteries)

by Paul Doherty

  The knight, the clerk and Dame Edith rode back through the darkness to St Anne’s. A porter let them in and took their horses. Dame Edith joined her two companions in the guest house for some bread and wine. Sir Godfrey could hardly keep awake. McBain found he was trembling and gulped greedily at the wine. Only Dame Edith seemed composed. She shook Sir Godfrey gently.

  ‘We must,’ she insisted, ‘make plans for the morrow.’

  The knight rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘I am tired, my lady. My orders were to root this evil out of Oxford and I have done that.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ the exorcist retorted. ‘We must pursue them now. They are devil-worshippers, felons, traitors and plan more murderous mischief!’

  ‘What more can we do?’ Alexander murmured. ‘Sir Godfrey has asked for all the southern ports to be sealed.’

  ‘Of course he won’t use those!’ Dame Edith replied. ‘The priest is no fool.’ She nibbled on a morsel of bread and took a small sip of wine. ‘When we met the priest at the church, he said he hailed from a town in the north.’

  ‘Whitby,’ Sir Godfrey said wearily. ‘A small fishing port between the Tees and the Humber.’

  ‘I know it well,’ Dame Edith continued smilingly. ‘You forget I hail from those parts. A small harbour overlooked by a steep hill with an abbey on top. Ah, yes, the abbey of St Hilda’s.’

  ‘Why should he go there?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘Oh, master clerk, apply your logic. He knows the southern ports have been sealed, yet he has to escape from England. So, where can he go? To France where English armies roam at will? To Holland and Zeeland full of English merchants? No, he will try to get back to Moldavia or Wallachia, those wild countries where I spent years as a prisoner. And what better route than through the northern lands, vast open spaces where he will not be recognized, free of any official or inquisitive church clerk.’

  Sir Godfrey rubbed his eyes. ‘I agree,’ he said, ‘and Whitby is the best port for such destinations. Moreover, the priest knows the routes well and will have a good two days’ start on us. The rains are stopping. The roads will be hard and he will carry little baggage.’

  McBain got to his feet and bowed to Dame Edith. ‘Sir Godfrey, my lady, I must sleep.’ He smiled. ‘Or at least think. I bid you good night.’

  ‘Wait! Wait!’ Sir Godfrey went over to stand at the window and stared into the darkness. McBain paused, one hand on the door latch, Dame Edith glanced in the direction of the knight.

  ‘What is it?’ she murmured.

  ‘All my life,’ the knight began slowly, ‘I have fought against flesh and blood: in the lists, on the tourney ground, in battles such at Poitiers where I helped to break the French advance. I have fought with dagger and sword either in blood-filled drenches before the towns of Normandy or against French scouts in some desolate, rain-soaked glade. But this,’ Sir Godfrey shook his head. ‘Corpses being revived after hundreds of years, blood sacrifices, demon-priests.’ He breathed out noisily.

  ‘And yet,’ McBain interrupted, ‘you go to mass, Sir Godfrey? You take the sacrament. You believe a wafer of bread and a cup of wine are, substantially, the body and blood of Christ?’

  ‘Yes.’ The knight turned around, rubbing the side of his face. ‘But that’s religion, a matter of faith. Different from . . .’ his voice trailed away.

  ‘From reality?’ Dame Edith asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, from reality!’

  Dame Edith pushed the sleeves of her gown back. ‘But what happens, Sir Godfrey, if there’s no difference? If everything is only part of the one reality. And, as the great Aristotle says, we only draw dividing lines to make things appear more reasonable?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ the knight snapped.

  ‘What she means,’ McBain declared curtly, ‘is often debated in the schools of Oxford and Cambridge.’

  The knight made a rude sound with his lips.

  ‘No, listen,’ McBain explained patiently. He walked over to the window and pointed to the shutter where a small insect was crawling. ‘Do you think this flea, or whatever it may be, is aware that we are in this room? Even better, Sir Godfrey, do you think that insect understands the concept of this room or our existence?’

  The knight shook his head.

  ‘But,’ McBain pressed the point, ‘just because that insect isn’t aware of our existence, surely it does not mean that we don’t exist?’

  The knight shrugged.

  ‘The clerk is right,’ Dame Edith chuckled softly. ‘Like the insect, we define our reality, Sir Godfrey, by what we see, touch, feel and understand.’

  ‘But the Strigoi?’ Sir Godfrey exclaimed. ‘With their sharpened teeth and blood sacrifices? Your story, Domina, about the spirit of one Strigoi being able to leave a corpse and take up residence in another body?’

  ‘Have you seen the effects of the plague?’ Dame Edith asked.

  ‘Yes.’ The knight answered softly. ‘My first wife died of it.’

  ‘I am sorry, sir knight. Yet can you explain how the plague moved from one person to her? Or from her to someone else?’

  The knight shook his head.

  ‘The same is true of the Strigoi moving from one body to another,’ Dame Edith continued. ‘To put it bluntly, Sir Godfrey, just because I can’t explain it, doesn’t mean it can’t happen.’ She sighed and spread her hands. ‘The sharpened teeth, well that is a small matter, teeth can be filed down. Some may have it, some do not.’

  ‘But the spirit of the Strigoi?’ Sir Godfrey persisted.

  ‘Sir Godfrey, you fought at Poitiers, you helped break the French advance?’

  The knight nodded.

  ‘You became tired? Weary?’

  ‘Aye, Domina, to the point of death.’

  ‘But brother knights, comrades in arms, were cut down?’

  ‘Aye they were, God assoil them!’

  ‘And what effect did their deaths have on you?’

  Sir Godfrey raised his eyebrows. ‘I fought all the harder as if given a new lease of life.’

  Dame Edith leaned forward. ‘But how do you know that the spirits of your dead comrades did not strengthen you?’

  The knight smiled thinly and walked back to the table.

  ‘Everything,’ Dame Edith explained, ‘everything under the sun has an explanation. As I’ve said, just because we can’t find one doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘But the Strigoi Lord?’ McBain asked, sitting down next to Sir Godfrey. ‘A corpse which can survive uncorrupted for hundreds of years and then be revived.’

  Dame Edith shrugged. ‘All I can say, Alexander, is that there must be an explanation.’ The exorcist rubbed her face in her hands. ‘When I was a prisoner in Wallachia, I heard stories from the east, strange tales about men who could sleep for years, appear as dead. In Wallachia there were similar stories about the Strigoi. Now, the peasants there have a name for the Devil. They call him the “Great Dragon” or “Dracul” and claim these Strigoi lords are his sons.’ Dame Edith tapped the side of her head. ‘God knows the power of the human mind. Its goodness is eternal and so is its malice. The good Lord said that if we have enough faith or power we can ask a tree to uproot and plant itself into the sea. Why can’t the Lords of Darkness have similar powers, if their malice is thick or deep enough? We live in a world of signs and symbols. I shake your hands, that means we are comrades. I put my hand on the book of the gospels to make a promise and I am bound by oath.’ She shrugged. ‘The demons of the air and their retainers on earth also have their sinister, dark ceremonies.’

  Alexander stretched forward, grasped the exorcist’s thin hand and gently squeezed.

  ‘A scholar as well as a fighter,’ he teased gently. ‘Sir Godfrey, Dame Edith is right. If you read the history of Eusebius you’ll find a story, well documented, about seven young brothers who, in the reign of one of the Roman emperors, hid and slept for centuries in a cave outside Ephesius.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Sir Godfrey interrupted. ‘I have heard of t
hat tale.’

  ‘And go to churches,’ Alexander persisted. ‘Why is it the bodies of certain holy men and women never corrupt, such as those of Saint Philomena or Saint Lucy?’

  Sir Godfrey stretched. ‘Perhaps you’re right but,’ he added abruptly, ‘this Strigoi Lord. Now we must hunt this son of the devil down and kill him!’

  ‘Exterminate him!’ Dame Edith declared harshly. ‘Extinguish all sign of him and his followers from the face of the earth. We must give him no resting place under the sun. Believe me, there is a tie between the Strigoi Lord and this kingdom. One day he will return, coming back along the same route by which he left. He’ll either come alone or with his followers but he will return to wreak great evil!’

  Both men sat quietly for a few moments, chilled by the passion in Dame Edith’s words. Then the exorcist quietly excused herself and walked out of the guest house, politely refusing both Sir Godfrey’s and McBain’s offer to accompany her. She walked unerringly through the darkness, moving her face gently, remembering the different paths and obstacles. She paused for a while, feeling the breeze on her cheeks. She choked back a sob as she recalled her youth in Northumberland, walking along the parapets of her father’s castle, letting her hair be tossed and whipped by the wind. The dead thronged about her but she felt comforted not frightened by their presence. They were only friends standing on the other side of a river, patiently waiting for her to cross.

  ‘Soon,’ she murmured. ‘Soon I’ll be with you. No more pain. No more terror. No more darkness.’

  Dame Edith walked along the gravelled path. She hoped McBain and Sir Godfrey would stay with her. ‘Good men and true. Christ strengthen their arms and sharpen their wits.’ Then she stopped. She remembered McBain’s hand in the upper room at the tavern, ice cold! Was that a warning of things to come? She hurried along to the church. A lay sister, just inside the postern gate, led her back to the cell. Dame Edith closed the door behind her and lay down on the simple cot bed, chanting her prayers, asking for God’s mercy, not for herself, but for her companions. Dame Edith thought of tomorrow’s journey and raised her head.

  ‘Oh, God have mercy!’ she whispered. In her mind’s eye, Dame Edith glimpsed the Strigoi Lord and his party galloping along the deserted roads, cloaks flapping, like ravens speeding to their nests.

  ‘They’ll need strength,’ she murmured. ‘Oh, God have mercy, they’ll need strength! Oh, sweet Lord, bless all travellers on this terrible night!’

  Words between the pilgrims

  ‘By pig’s bones!’ Harry the taverner exclaimed, stretching his hands out towards the candle-light. ‘An eerie tale, sirrah.’

  The knight sipped from his wine goblet and stared down the table at the monk who had now pulled his cowl well over his head.

  ‘Is this possible?’ the nun’s priest asked in his rich, mellow voice. ‘Do such things happen?’

  ‘I have seen them!’ the wife of Bath explained.

  ‘Seen what?’ the cook shrilled.

  ‘I have seen the uncorrupted bodies of holy men.’ The wife crossed her arms. ‘And if the good Lord looks after his own, so does Satan.’

  ‘Where are the corpses?’ the Manciple interrupted harshly.

  ‘What bodies?’ Harry the taverner asked.

  ‘The bodies?’ the Manciple persisted. ‘Those of the students killed by the Strigoi?’

  The knight dabbed his lips with a napkin. ‘My tale is not yet finished,’ he declared quietly. ‘Listen to the truth . . .’

  ‘Truth?’ the summoner sneered. ‘Nightmares to frighten children!’

  The knight shrugged eloquently. ‘Sir, I was asked to tell a tale and that’s what I am doing.’

  ‘It is true!’

  The shipman sprang to his feet, knocking his stool over. He pointed down the table. ‘St Anne and all God’s holy angels be my witness. You mentioned Whitby, Sir?’

  The knight nodded.

  The shipman now seized the wine jug and filled his own cup. ‘Sir,’ the shipman lifted his cup, ‘I salute . . .’

  ‘Sit down!’ the knight ordered. ‘And, as I have said, I’ll finish my tale!’

  PART V

  Chapter 1

  The carts and caravans of the Moon people trundled along the moorland path under forbidding, iron-grey skies. The rain had stopped falling but the gorse and brambles on either side were still heavy with water and the cobbled trackway had turned to a soggy morass. The painted sheets of the wagons had begun to run, the dye streaming down the sides of the four-wheeled carts. Even the horses seemed dispirited, raising their hooves lacklustrely, heads down against the cold, biting wind. The drivers and carters, huddled in their shabby cloaks, cursed the elements and the driving rain which had forced them to shelter in caves for most of the day. They’d never reach the next village by nightfall and would have to camp out on the open heathland.

  Imelda, the dancing girl, trailed behind one of the carts, her jet-black hair hidden by a shabby cowl; her voluptuous, sinuous body was covered in an old blanket with a hole cut in the middle, her only protection against the icy rain. Every so often, cheap bracelets jangling on her wrists, Imelda would wipe the rain from her face and trudge on, mindful to stay at least a yard behind the cart, away from the mud and dirt flung up by the iron-rimmed wheels. She heard her mother, lying on a bed in the cart, moan and groan. Imelda closed her eyes. Her mother groaned again.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ Imelda whispered to herself. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you!’

  There never was but, whenever any journey became arduous or difficult, Imelda’s mother immediately became ill.

  ‘I am too tired!’ she would wail. ‘Too sick to walk!’ And she would climb into the gaudily painted wagon to take her ease as if she was the queen or some great lady.

  A curlew, braving the driving wind, swooped and shrieked eerily across the lowering sky. Imelda looked up. She saw the flash of its wing and wished she could fly. She’d flee from here! Far from the cold, the poverty, the pennies flung at her in some tavern or ale-house, the hot-eyed glances of the men, their greedy pawing and the jealous glares of the womenfolk. Her father had similar dreams which, she knew, he would repeat tonight as they gathered round the camp fire.

  ‘This is not our land,’ he’d begin. ‘We are of an ancient and noble people, driven from their lands after the Romans came.’

  Raquerel, her father, would then begin to describe strange lands, dark forests, lush river valleys and rich meadows, a land on which the sun always smiled. Imelda wondered if such a country did exist and, if it did, whether her father was telling the truth. Her grandmother, who now sat beside the driver of the cart in front, wrapped in her dark-blue cloak with strange symbols painted on it, told a different story. How the forests of that country sheltered demons and strange beings called Draculs lurked in fortresses built by devils on top of lonely crags. Imelda smiled. What did it matter? She was cold, soaked to the skin, and her feet, protected only by loose-thonged sandals, were beginning to turn to blocks of ice.

  ‘Will you dance tonight, Imelda?’

  The girl turned and glared at the thickset man who suddenly appeared beside her and, as usual, drew close until their shoulders brushed. Imelda wrinkled her nose in distaste at the man’s sour breath. She didn’t like Osbert. He wasn’t one of her people. A juggler, a mountebank, Osbert had joined their caravan two or three months earlier. Father had taken him in; Osbert was strong, he earned some pennies and provided good protection on the lonely roads. Nevertheless, Imelda disliked him, not just his wart-covered face and hairy nostrils, but his thick fingers always ready to touch her.

  ‘Will you dance tonight?’ Osbert repeated, drawing even closer.

  ‘No,’ Imelda replied through clenched teeth. ‘All I want is to be warm.’

  ‘I’ll keep you warm,’ Osbert whispered.

  ‘Have you ever seen my trick?’ Imelda demanded.

  Osbert drew back. ‘What trick?’

  ‘I can make a knife appear b
etween any man’s ribs?’

  The mountebank opened his mouth to reply when they both heard a shout behind them.

  ‘Riders on the road! Coming fast!’

  Imelda heard the drum of hooves. The carters began to pull aside. Her father was always subservient, every ready to concede the road to haughty noblemen and their well-armed bully-boy retainers or to merchants, so self important, for whom every second counted. As the cart in front lurched to one side, Imelda climbed into it.

  ‘What is it, girl?’ her mother whined.

  ‘Shush!’ Imelda replied. ‘It’s only riders!’

  She looked out through the mist. The horsemen had slowed to a canter.

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘Four, no five!’

  Imelda peered. ‘They are dressed in black, cloaked and cowled but their horses are fine. Perhaps they are a group of black monks, Benedictines.’

  The riders drew close. Imelda shivered. The strangers now clustered together. She could glimpse no weapons or glint of steel but they had a quiet, sinister purpose. They looked neither to the left nor the right. Imelda heard her grandmother gasp and begin to chant something in that strange tongue Imelda could only barely understand.

  ‘Silence, Grandmother!’ she hissed.

  But the old one continued her chant, an ancient verse against the evil one. The riders approached, the leader pulled back his cowl and smiled. Imelda relaxed. The man had a serene, smiling face, soft and gentle and, as he bowed his head in greeting, she glimpsed the tonsure.

  ‘Good morrow, Father!’

  ‘And greetings to you, my girl.’ The priest pushed his horse closer to the back of the cart. ‘How far to the next village?’

  ‘A few miles.’ Imelda smiled back. ‘You’ll reach it before us, sir, though you’re welcome to stay with us tonight.’

  The priest smiled and shook his head. ‘We are expected,’ he said. ‘And time is short but I thank you for your offer.’

  Osbert came round the side of the cart and glimpsed the priest.

  ‘Father Andrew!’ he cried.