A Gathering of Ghosts

by Karen Maitland

  The clouds drifted from the moon, filling the wood with cold white light and sharp, twisted silhouettes. It touched the forest floor, and the shadows ran lightly across it, so that the great mossy humps seemed to move, like waves rearing up in a stormy sea. Tendrils of glowing mist slithered between the knotted roots and through the branches, not hanging as they should but creeping and writhing as if they were alive. Yet, the air was unnaturally still.

  The whirling of bird wings forced him to look up. Crows, jackdaws, rooks and ravens were flying down and alighting on every branch around him, their beaks glistening silver in the moonlight, their eyes glittering inches from his own. He ducked away from them, instinctively trying to raise his arm to shield his face, but he couldn’t lift it above his shoulder for the sickening jolts of pain shooting upwards from his chest. He was drenched in cold sweat and struggling to breathe. Then he heard it: the long vibrating note of the hunting horn. Except it wasn’t coming from outside the wood but from inside its very heart.

  Darkness flowed down over the trees again. Nicholas couldn’t move. How could the huntsman have reached the wood ahead of him, and if he was here, where were the hounds? He tried to calm himself. The sound was being distorted – these rocks, these hills flung it around, so you couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  Something flew straight into his face. Feathers covered his mouth and nose. Talons raked his skin. Though every blow sent pain shooting through his body, he beat it off and scrambled across the boulders, clawing up the steep slope towards the centre of the wood. He could no longer remember why he must get there, only that he could think of nothing else to do.

  ‘Holy Virgin, make the clouds roll back! Give me light, any light,’ he begged.

  With abject relief, Nicholas realised that his fervent prayer was being answered. The clouds were sliding away from the moon, as if the Blessed Virgin herself had stretched forth her hand and was pulling aside the curtain. He was in a small clearing. The trees there formed a circle around a massive spear-shaped rock. But he registered the rock only dimly, merely as a backdrop to the two women who were standing in front of it.

  The cold white light fell on their naked bodies, running down the curves of their breasts, trickling over their ribs, stark as the timbers of a wrecked ship, dripping over their flat bellies and pooling in the hollows of their thighs. Snakes of mist, glowing green as the walls of the well, coiled about their ankles, slithering around their legs. Nicholas gaped in disbelief. Were these women humans or sprites?

  In spite of his pain and exhaustion, he could not wrench his eyes from their bodies, from where the fingers of mist were reaching up, probing, penetrating. His hands twitched as if they would reach out to touch them too. If these were sprites, he would willingly surrender to their enchantment.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here.’ The voice was all too human.

  He looked at their faces, their wild hair hanging down in wet strands. He saw now that they were beggars, nothing more than common vagabonds or street whores, probably both. As the one who’d spoken turned a little, he glimpsed the livid welts on her hip and shoulder. She had probably been stripped and whipped out of the nearest town, though she’d not been flogged nearly hard enough if she was still flaunting herself.

  Fear was ebbing away from him and anger bubbling up in its place, as he remembered exactly who had driven him out on to this accursed moor in the middle of the night. He stared at the women coldly, his desire for them instantly extinguished.

  ‘Now, just what manner of game have we caught here?’ he said. ‘It would seem that someone is hunting these hills with a pack of hounds. Is it you they’re seeking? Thieves, are you? Runaway serfs? Don’t invent some lie. What you are doesn’t interest me. But I will strike a bargain with you. Show me the way to an inn or somewhere I can shelter for the night and I’ll see what I can do to call off your pursuers. I dare say a well-filled purse will convince them to lose you for good.’

  He had expected the women to look alarmed that he had discovered their hiding place or grateful that he had offered them a means of escape. He was even prepared for them to try to wheedle some coins for themselves, but though it was hard to see their expressions, he could have sworn they were laughing. Perhaps they were simple or mad.

  ‘Come now, my dears, you’ve nothing to fear from me.’ He braced his arm against his ribs, trying not to gasp with pain as he talked. ‘I’m a knight of St John. Not even the sheriff’s men would dare seize you, if you were under my protection.’

  But instead of begging for his help, the girl who had spoken threw back her head and began to sing. At least, it was a kind of singing, he supposed. The unearthly chant made his skin crawl, as if a thousand flies were creeping over it.

  If the Virgin Mary had been holding up the curtain of cloud, she now let it drop and the grove was plunged into darkness again. The trees were crowding in, shuffling towards him, like evil old men, carrying their birds nearer and nearer. The raucous kaah, kaah was all around him, hundreds of wings flapping furiously, beaks snapping. Blindly, he tried to fight his way out, but could find no space wide enough to squeeze between the trunks. How had he come in? There must be a gap – there had to be! Where was it? Then he heard it. The blast of the hunting horn so close, so piercing, he knew the sound was coming from someone standing in the centre of the glade.

  All at once he saw them, the great black beasts with their burning red eyes, standing in a circle around him, just beyond the ring of the trees. He saw the blue lights crackling from their coats, saw the long, pointed teeth flash white as they threw back their heads and gave that deep sonorous howl. They were slowly padding towards him, a merciless black tide, and he could no more turn them back than a man can stop a monstrous wave rolling towards a stricken ship. The pain in his chest was almost numbed by his abject fear, for even as he drew his knife, he knew deep down that not even his sword or a hail of flaming arrows had the power to save him from this foe.

  Brother Nicholas’s legs gave way and he sank abjectly to his knees, crawling frantically away from the women, away from the hounds. But instead of colliding with a tree trunk or stone as he had expected, his leg vanished into the gap between two rocks. He wriggled backwards, trying to ease his battered body into the shelter of a hollow. It was a small space, no bigger than a kennel, but just wide and high enough for him to squeeze himself inside.

  He crouched there on all fours, the blessed solidness of rock covering his head, his back, his sides, like steel armour. Relief surged in his belly, and he gripped the knife with returning confidence and the growing excitement of a seasoned knight facing an enemy he knows he can defeat. He was protected on all sides, save the front, where he could freely wield his weapon. That was the only place the dogs could touch him, and the entrance was so narrow that they could attack only one at a time. Kill the first and second, and the hounds’ own bodies would shield him from the rest of the pack. And once the beasts smelt blood, they’d more than likely turn on their own dead and wounded. He could fight these fiends and he could win.

  He waited, every muscle in his aching body tense. ‘Come on, you brutes, try to take me now. Who will be first to have their throat slashed?’

  Through the demonic cackle of the birds in the trees above him, through the baying of the hounds that shook the pillars of Hell beneath, he heard the women laughing.

  And then his back arched in agony as a dozen white-hot stings stabbed into his legs, his sides, his neck. He stared down in disbelief as the sinuous bodies wriggled over his hands. Vipers! They were crawling over his shoulders, dropping into his hair, slithering down his face. He twisted and shrieked as their fangs struck and struck again, begging the Holy Virgin for mercy, but mercy was not granted.

  When the first brilliant rays of the rising sun touched the tops of the hills, all that remained of the noble knight of St John of Jerusalem was dismembered, bloodstained bones. The birds had feasted well. Before anyone discovered them, the bones would be covere
d with moss, indistinguishable from the roots of the twisted trees and the rocks among which they lay scattered. Those who stumbled over the skull would think it another mossy boulder. Ferns would grow through those broken ribs, liverworts plant themselves in the eye sockets. The birds would rear their young, safe and warm, in nests lined with strands of grey hair.

  Pick nothing up in that wood. Take nothing from it, for who knows whose remains you will hold in your hand? Do not disturb the resting place of the dead, for the hounds that guard it guard it well.

  Chapter 55

  Hospitallers’ Priory of St Mary

  Meggy drew her chair closer to her fire, prodding it to send the flames blazing upwards. Outside, the wind wailed like a soul in torment and monstrous shadows flickered across the courtyard walls. All the days she had lived at the priory, the old gatekeeper had prided herself that she had loyally obeyed whatever orders the prioress had given, even if she thought them foolish. She’d have laid down her life as willingly as any knight of St John, not for the order – she had little patience with that – but for Johanne and this priory. But though the prioress had given instructions that fuel was to be kept for the kitchens and the infirmary, tonight Meggy knew it was wise to disobey: the prioress might know all about the running of a priory but she was a babe in clouts when it came to understanding the ways of Dertemora. It wasn’t the chill wind that drove Meggy to this small act of defiance – she was well used to feeling the cold and expected no less at her time of life. It was the hounds.

  She’d heard the beasts baying across the moors and felt again their great rasping claws on her back and their fangs snapping inches from her cheek. Her hand strayed unbidden to where the little bag had once hung at her waist before they had ripped it from her, almost cutting her in two. Save for that bloodstained rag, it hadn’t contained much – her son’s milk tooth and an iron nail her husband had fashioned into a little cross to keep her safe. It was all she’d got left of her menfolk . . . all she’d had, for those precious objects were now scattered somewhere among the heather and grasses of the moor.

  She knew the hounds had chased to stop her taking that rag to old Kendra, though she’d no idea why. Still, she counted herself blessed. There were not many souls who’d come face to face with the wisht hounds and lived to tell the tale. Those spectral hounds were hunting their prey again tonight and Meggy was in no hurry to chance her luck twice. If Brother Nicholas was still out there on those moors then God help him, for Old Crockern wouldn’t and the knight deserved all that was coming to him.

  Poor young Brengy had still not returned. Dye had tearfully begged the sisters to search for her brother, though she was too afraid to go out on the moor in the dark herself.

  But Sister Clarice had said firmly there was nothing to be done until cockcrow. ‘If we start wandering around out there at night, one of us will end up in a bog or worse, and with the wind as strong as this, even with torches we might walk within a foot of where he’s lying and not hear him even if he’s able to cry out.’

  Prioress Johanne had agreed. ‘There is little point in starting any search tonight. Sleep will serve us better. The servants and sisters can set out at first light tomorrow. We’ve no idea where Brother Nicholas set Brengy down, if indeed he did. He might have decided to take the lad with him all the way to Buckland.’

  The prioress had looked more drawn and anxious than Meggy had ever seen her, but she knew the poor soul had more on her mind than the missing stable lad.

  Meggy had coaxed Dye out of her wailing by asking her to help dip new torches and set them blazing on the walls outside, telling her that their lights could be seen as far off as Exeter. All Brengy had to do was walk towards them from wherever he found himself. The gatekeeper promised to sit up and listen for the bell all night till he came home. Besides, she told herself, she’d never be able to close her eyes with Old Crockern’s hounds howling out there on the moor. Privately, she wondered if poor Brengy would ever return. She wouldn’t put it past that devil Nicholas to throw the boy into the mire, like he’d threatened, just from spite, though she’d never have said as much to Dye. No sense in setting her off again.

  The sisters had long retired to their beds, but Meggy found she couldn’t rest until she’d checked and rechecked that the gates to the priory were locked and braced. She’d pulled a charred stick from the fire and drawn crosses on the threshold and casement of her hut, and binding knot signs around the fire to prevent evil from entering. Alban’s ghost, and maybe poor little Brengy’s too now, would be wandering the moor, searching for the lych-ways, and it was well known that such lost souls who’d been snatched violently from life were drawn to the living. They would try to enter their cottages and even creep into the mouths of those who lay sleeping inside, so desperate were they to remain in this world.

  But in spite of the wind, the distant baying of the hounds and her own fear, the old gatekeeper was exhausted, and the heat from the fire made her eyelids grow heavy, though she tried to resist sleep. She floated in that twilight between sleep and waking, noises from this world mingling with those from some place far off in her dreams, so that when the door of her hut creaked open, it seemed to her that the sound belonged in another realm.

  Soft footfalls rustled through the bracken strewn on the beaten-earth floor. The flames bowed low in the breeze from the figure passing, then leaped up wildly. A small branch popped, and cracked open as the sap oozed out with a long, hissing sigh. Old Meggy jerked upright, almost over-toppling in her chair. The boy was standing not a foot away from her, his face half in darkness and half bathed in the ruby firelight. His head moved slightly from side to side, like a snake’s, as if he was trying to sense where she was.

  ‘What do you want this time of night? How did you get here?’ Meggy demanded.

  Even to herself she sounded angry, but the boy didn’t flinch.

  He tilted his face up, but his sightless gaze was fixed somewhere over her shoulder. Meggy half turned her head, fearing that something or someone was behind her, though she knew even as she did so that it was something blind folks did. They always said old Father Guthlac was looking at angels, but she was sure it wasn’t any creature from Heaven the boy saw.

  He took a pace forward, shuffling, feeling his way. He was learning how to move. Then his hand followed. It groped towards her and she wanted to draw back so he wouldn’t touch her, but it seemed a cruel thing to do to a child. Instead, against her will, she found herself stretching out her own gnarled hand, touching the icy fingers. The boy immediately grasped it and began to tug her towards the door.

  ‘Hold hard! Where do you think you’re going this time of night?’

  She couldn’t imagine what the child was doing so far from the infirmary. Had he slipped out to use the garderobe and been unable to find his way back? But no one used the garderobe at night – that was what the pisspots in the chambers were for. If the child heard her question, he gave no sign. Although Meggy’s arms were far stronger than those of most women her age, from years of toiling alongside her husband in the forge, she found she could not free herself from his grip.

  The boy dragged the door open and the wind barged in, clanging together the worn iron pots dangling from the rafters, tumbling ropes and nets to the floor and sending the ash and smoke from the flames swirling, like a whirlpool, about the small hut. Meggy gave a cry of alarm. The wind often made mischief when the door was opened, but the gate lodge was sheltered behind the high wall and it had never ransacked her room like this before. It was as if her home had been plucked up and set down on the very pinnacle of Fire Tor.

  ‘We’ll be knocked off our feet, if we venture out there,’ she bellowed, above the roar. ‘You’d best spend the rest of the night in here.’

  She struggled to slam the door, but either the wind or the boy was too strong – it must be the wind, surely. The grip on her hand tightened and, though she tried to resist it, she felt herself being pulled out into the darkened courtyard, as if he
r wrist was bound to a plough horse. She was punched and shoved by the gale and would have come crashing down several times, had the boy not clung to her, dragging her towards the great oak gates. Shutters whimpered against the flailing wind. Pails were thrown across the courtyard. Broken twigs and chips of goat bone were dashed against Meggy’s face, and now it had begun to rain again, great cold stinging drops that lashed her skin.

  She fought to turn back for the shelter of her little hut, but the boy pushed her hand up against the oak beam that braced the gates. She did not have to hear him speak to know he wanted her to wrest it back and open it.

  ‘You can’t go out there, lad! There’s a storm building and death hounds are hunting. I’ll not open those gates tonight, even if the Good Lord himself comes a-knocking.’

  He took her hand again, pushing it over and over against the brace. Still, Meggy tried to drag him away, but it was as if he suddenly weighed as much as a full-grown bull and she couldn’t even lift him to move him aside. Then, above the roar of the wind, she heard the sound of the bell tolling. Someone was outside, begging for admittance. Brengy! Was that what the child had been trying to tell her? Had he heard the bell over the noise of the wind when her old ears could not?

  She was already tugging at the beam, when caution stayed her hand. She had never opened the gate without checking first, and maybe it was only the fierce wind that was rocking the bell. She opened the shutter over the metal grille and peered out.