The Bone Thief

by V. M. Whitworth

  Ednoth and Gunnvor were running down to join Ronan.

  Where was Thorvald? And then he heard a shout.

  He looked around wildly.

  It came again, from the marsh below the far side of the causeway.

  Wulfgar ran across.

  Thorvald and another man were grappling frantically. The stranger had a long knife. Thorvald was showing astonishing strength for such a slight man, holding the stranger’s wrists high above his head. He looked to be unarmed.

  Thorvald had more to fight for than any of them. But he was not winning. Wulfgar could see his feet skidding under him as he was being forced away from the drier ground. He flung himself headlong down the slope, heedless of the risk of impaling himself on the blade he was still holding.

  Thorvald saw him.

  ‘Wulfgar!’ he yelled.

  But the moment’s inattention was enough. The stranger kicked out at Thorvald’s kneecap and his leg betrayed him, crumpling him backwards into the mud, his opponent on top of him. And the stranger shouted, ‘Men of Wessex, to me! To me!’

  Wulfgar half-heard the words but they made no sense to him in his feverish state. He hurled himself across the half-a-dozen paces of ground and jabbed his knife down into the stranger’s back. It went in, deep, astonishingly easy. He heaved it out and stabbed once more. This time it stuck. He had to jerk it out, and then he stabbed again, over and over and over. He kept seeing Leoba’s strained young face, and that of her tiny, helpless baby.

  ‘Wulfgar. Wuffa.’ A hand fastened on his shoulder. ‘You can stop now.’

  The voice came from very far away. It took a while for the sense to filter through into his mind. When it did he went cold. The hand holding the knife loosened its grip as all his sinews disobeyed him. He staggered a few paces away from the body of the man he had been butchering, fell to his knees, and was sick. But, on another plane, he was clear, cold and hard as the moon now sailing free above. This is not the time, that part of him said. It was that part which won. He struggled to his feet and went back to where Ronan was turning the man over.

  That answered his first question.

  It was not Garmund.

  ‘Is he dead?’ And a third question he hardly dared ask. ‘Was he a West Saxon?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Father Ronan’s tone was one of bleak satisfaction. ‘And a very dead one at that. Well done, Wulfgar.’

  Wulfgar crossed himself slowly. He thought, I am a man of the cloister. Dealing death is not my profession. I have vowed never to hunt animals, not so much as a bird, and now I have killed a fellow human being, the pinnacle of God’s creation. He looked in disbelief at his belt-knife where it lay in the mud, and at his bloody hands.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ said Father Ronan, looking at Thorvald. The little reeve lay curled on his side. Ronan moved across and turned him over, gentle as a mother. The remorseless moonlight showed gouts of blood black across his chest and, more ominous, more blood oozing from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Surely we shouldn’t move him,’ Wulfgar said.

  ‘But what choice do we have?’ Ronan looked up, back in the direction of Bardney. ‘We didn’t kill them all. I missed my stroke, as luck would have it, and my man escaped. And from what you said earlier, there’ll be plenty more to come.’

  ‘Sixteen, when we met Garmund at Offchurch.’

  Ronan crossed himself. ‘And we’ve only dealt with four. And there will be Bardney men to reinforce them. What do we do? Leave him to die? Or take him and chance it?’

  Put like that there was no choice. Wulfgar helped Ronan cradle Thorvald and supported the priest as he staggered to his feet.

  ‘Can you manage?’

  ‘Ach, he’s no more burden than an empty basket.’

  There was a slithering from behind. They both jumped out of their skin. But it was only Ednoth, sliding down the bank.

  ‘Put your sword back in its sheath,’ Father Ronan said, ‘before you do yourself some damage.’

  ‘There are three men dead up there! I killed one, and Gunnvor—’ Slowly he took in the tableau in front of him. ‘Oh.’

  Wulfgar could see Gunnvor’s dark outline against the moonlight on the bank above them. There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘Well done, lad,’ Father Ronan said. ‘No point in waiting for their friends, though. The man I let get by me will be raising the cry by now. Let’s see if we can find our way across that stinking marsh without a guide. Pick up your knife, Wuffa.’

  Wulfgar looked at it in revulsion.

  ‘I don’t want it any longer.’

  ‘That’s as may be. But you might need it.’

  They let Gunnvor go first. She was the lightest on her feet and still claiming to be able to see in the dark. Ronan followed with Thorvald across his shoulders. Wulfgar squelched along a pace or two behind him. He had two sacks of bones to carry now and he could feel the difference they made, his feet sinking far more deeply into the mud than they had on the way out.

  Always assuming Gunnvor was bringing them the right road.

  He was keeping at bay the truth of what he’d just done, bringing the power of every prayer he knew to bear on the limp body in Ronan’s embrace. Thorvald looked unconscious, but every so often a deep rattling moan escaped him and more blood bubbled at his mouth. Ednoth brought up the rear, his sword back in its scabbard now to allow him to carry the third trophy-sack, turning often to look and listen along the near-invisible path behind.

  It seemed that Gunnvor had been paying close attention when Wulfgar had asked Thorvald how he knew the way, for she brought them slow but sure-footed all the way back to the lambing pens. As she went, Wulfgar saw her pull up each of the willow staves and cast it aside.

  She saw him watching her, and her teeth glinted in the moonlight. ‘No point in helping our pursuers.’

  Moonlight shivered and broke on the water. As they drew nearer, and the ground became drier under their feet, his thoughts were caught up less with thoughts of pursuit, more with the picture of Leoba, innocent ahead of them, waiting for her husband to come home.

  Thorvald was still alive when they got back to the lambing pens. Ronan laid him down inside the thorn-hedge just as Leoba came out through the hut’s low doorway. She took in the scene at a glance.

  ‘He’s dead.’ Her voice was flat.

  ‘Dying,’ Ronan corrected her gently.

  She came over and looked down at him for a moment, and then knelt. Just as she did so another great bubbling groan came out of him and a new rush of blood poured over his chin.

  ‘Lung wound, then,’ the girl said. ‘He’ll not have long.’ She turned to Ronan. ‘Will you see he goes like a Christian?’

  ‘Has he been baptised?’

  She shrugged and turned her head away.

  Wulfgar couldn’t bear it any longer. Pushing Ednoth out of the way, he got down on his knees the other side of Thorvald and picked up his arm, moving down to find his hand.

  ‘Thorvald, don’t move. Don’t try to speak. But if you can, squeeze my hand.’ The secretary looked intently at the dying man’s face. Did he dream it, or had those thin, hard fingers fluttered butterfly-like in his? ‘Thorvald, do you believe that God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Do you believe Christ died for you?’ Wulfgar thought, I killed to save this man, and now his life is draining out before my eyes. I can’t let his soul go, too.

  Thorvald coughed once more, and even in the moonlight they could see how bright the blood was.

  ‘Thorvald, if you can hear me, answer. Squeeze my hand, God damn it.’

  And he did. No doubt about the pressure this time. Wulfgar’s eyes blurred. He looked up at Ronan. ‘He said yes. He said yes.’

  Ronan had to bless the dying man with his left hand as his right hand was supporting Thorvald’s head. He said rapidly, ‘Thorvald. You died a hero in the service of your saint. The angels stand waiting, rejoicing with St Oswald, to lead you through the gates of paradise.’ His voice was steady but Wulfgar could see the
re were tears running down his face.

  Wulfgar pressed Thorvald’s hand but this time there was no response.

  ‘He’s going,’ he said.

  ‘Then, Thorvald, I absolve you from all your sins by the powers vested in me, I absolve you in the name of Holy Peter, who guards those gates, who has the power to bind and loose.’ The priest spat on his thumb and made the sign of the cross on Thorvald’s forehead, his eyes, over his breast. As he was doing so a little guttural noise escaped from Thorvald’s mouth. Then he went limp, his hand slipping from Wulfgar’s.

  Wulfgar bit hard on his lip.

  When he looked up, he saw Gunnvor hunkered next to him.

  ‘I tried to save him,’ he said. ‘I killed that other man to save him. I thought I had saved him.’ He couldn’t stop shaking.

  ‘I know,’ she said gently. She reached over to close the dead man’s eyes and used the cuff of her sleeve to wipe away the blood from his mouth. ‘Wulfgar, I know. Here.’ She helped him to his feet, her hand steady below his elbow.

  He thought of that moonlit vision he had had of her, back on the causeway, with those same strong, warm hands ready to yank back the head of a fellow human being and jab a knife-tip into his exposed throat.

  The moon was low in the west now, occluded with dirty rags of cloud. With that, and with the chill and exhaustion that had come over them all, there was no going further until they had a few hours’ sleep.

  ‘We should be safe enough,’ Ronan said out of the darkness. ‘Safe till dawn, at least. We should sleep out here, though, where the first light will wake us.’

  Wulfgar shivered at the mere thought of sleeping in the hut; Garmund’s men could catch them there like cornered rats. He sat down heavily next to his sacks of earth and bone. Ednoth sat down next to him and yawned luxuriously.

  ‘I should clean my sword,’ he said. There was a note of intense satisfaction in the boy’s voice.

  Four men dead back there, Wulfgar thought, and one here, and I’m the only one who seems to care. He put out a hand to grasp the rough, damp, lumpy bulk of the sack beside him. Thorvald died for these trophies, he thought. Are they conceivably worth that sacrifice? He put his head in his hands. He couldn’t resolve these riddles.

  ‘Wulfgar?’

  He looked up. The dim bulk looming over him had to be Ronan.

  ‘Wuffa,’ the priest said, ‘I’m sorry to ask anything more of you. If we can, we should sort out the bones now. We can rest until first light but then we have to be on our way at once. We can’t load these sacks onto the horses, not as they are.’

  Ronan was right. The sacks were sodden and the sacking itself was beginning to give way. Wulfgar squatted down beside the priest, only a few feet from Thorvald’s body, and they started work once more. Wulfgar plunged in his hands, scooped up fistfuls of the dirt, rubbed his fingers through it, over and over again. He was reminded, in a strange, sideways fashion, of his mother making pastry. The repetitive action was deeply soothing.

  ‘Do you remember?’ he said to Ronan. ‘Bede writes that the very soil from the spot where Oswald fell could cure the sick.’

  Ronan paused for a moment, sitting back on his heels and knuckling his lower back.

  ‘Faith, I do indeed,’ he said, ‘but Thorvald’s not sick, lad. He’s dead. Very, very dead.’

  Leoba came out of the hut with a fresh sack, and when Wulfgar found any bones, however tiny, he put them into the new one. It seemed that none of them could sleep, but Gunnvor.

  Ednoth, too, came to help. He didn’t say anything but Wulfgar found some comfort in the way that he settled down to work at his side.

  ‘We did well back there,’ Ronan said. ‘They weren’t expecting us to be so well-armed, maybe. And they had surprise on their side. But I shouldn’t have let that man get by me.’

  ‘I killed a man,’ Wulfgar said. It was all he could think about.

  ‘You were trying to save Thorvald. But you know that, lad.’ Ronan sat back on his heels and looked at him. ‘I’ll hear your confession when we get time.’

  Wulfgar nodded his gratitude. The lump in his throat stopped him speaking.

  Those bits of spongy carved wood went into the sack as well, and something else, a little plaque that felt like metal, that must have been scooped up with the coffin. There was some kind of embossed design on it and Wulfgar wanted to have a closer look but the night was too dark, the moon wrapped in ragged clouds and no paling yet in the eastern sky. They worked as fast as they could by starlight, using their fingers as much as their eyes.

  ‘That’s it.’ Wulfgar stood and stretched. Ednoth picked up the sack and weighed it at arm’s length.

  ‘Much better,’ he said.

  ‘Can Fallow manage it?’ Wulfgar asked him. ‘I – I would like her to carry the bones, if she can.’

  ‘She’ll have to,’ Ednoth said, and then, ‘I’ll put your other saddlebags up on Starlight, with mine, if you want. Spread the load a bit.’

  It felt like a truce, and Wulfgar was glad.

  The longest day of my life is over, he thought. I must go to sleep.

  But his mind was racing, his thoughts a chaotic jumble of impressions and anxieties. He still couldn’t really believe Garmund was here at Bardney. Even though Leoba had warned them. Even after Garmund’s men had attacked them.

  Offchurch, he thought. Now that might have been your own idea, Garmund Polecat. But not this. No, not Bardney. Not St Oswald. He could sense the long arm of King Edward in this.

  How in the name of Heaven had they heard about the relics in Winchester?

  Ale-house gossip, he guessed wearily. Like that mocking, red-headed trader who had drunk with them in the Wave-Serpent. He couldn’t remember the man’s name.

  Garmund’s never going to give up, he thought, even if he doesn’t know it’s me who’s beaten him to the prize. Yet. Doesn’t know yet.

  If he learned that … Wulfgar shivered and pulled his cloak more closely around his shoulders, rolling down a long slope into sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  WHEN HE WOKE, after a brief and fitful doze, everyone else was asleep. The stars were fading and the waning moon was dropping in the west. Uht, he thought, like Uhtsang, the light before the true light. Like St John the Baptist … the light that shows the way to the sunrise … Where am I? Still half-asleep, he stretched, head aching, face stiff and every muscle protesting, and looked around, wondering what had woken him. Birdsong, perhaps.

  Ednoth lay face down, his head on his arms and his arms on his scabbard. Leoba was curled around her children like a cat with kittens, her face grubby with old tear-stains. And last night’s events came rushing back to him on a flood-tide of grief.

  Father Ronan looked as if he had tried to keep watch through the night: he had sat up with his back against the wall of the hut but he, too, had nodded off. Wulfgar shook his head. The priest would have a stiff neck when he woke, in this damp breeze. He was covered, face and hands and tunic, in dried blood.

  Wulfgar looked down at his own tunic then and shuddered in horror. And the tightness on his face was more blood, caked and crumbly. He picked at his stubbly cheek and looked at his fingers in revulsion. Thorvald’s blood on his hands, and the blood of the man he himself had killed, engrained in every faint crease and whorl of his hands. That none of it was his own proved small consolation.

  Gunnvor, now – where was Gunnvor? It was quite light enough to see that there was no sign of her. And, as he looked around, he saw that the sack of bones, which had been by his head as he slept, had also vanished.

  The shock hit like a drench of icy water. Aghast, he shot to his feet. Then he saw that her grey mare was still hobbled with the other horses. Gunnvor wouldn’t have left her horse, surely. At the very least she couldn’t have got far on foot. But – that must mean she had headed back through the marsh, back towards Bardney.

  Some pre-arranged interview with horrible Eirik?

  Were they even now haggling over the
market price of the saint?

  Finding it hard to breathe, he picked his way back down towards the fen-edge, trying to retrace their steps of the night before. The water was screened by thickets of gold-dusted goat-willow dotted about with rowan and alder, and there were wreaths of white mist rising from the reeds. A dauntless wren bobbed and sang on a willow branch, so close that he could see the lining of its beak, all pink and gold.

  And there she was, crouched at the water’s edge.

  His panic subsided but he still felt an unreasoning anger as he walked down towards her. He wasn’t stalking her on purpose but his footsteps must have been soundless because she didn’t hear him, though the wren flew off. It was a chilly morning, but Gunnvor didn’t look as though she was bothered by the cold. She’d taken off her over-dresses, leaving them in a gaudy pile on the bank, and she was hunkered down at the water’s edge wearing only her open-necked linen under-shift, kilted up to her thighs, with the sleeves pushed high above her elbows. She did the same thing over and over, twisting to reach for something, leaning forward to her hands in the water, then putting whatever she had been holding down to her right. Wulfgar frowned. There was something pale and gleaming in her hand. He could hear her singing under her breath.

  The hairs rose on the back of his neck. Seeing her like that had a dream-like quality, but he had never dreamed in this kind of detail. Her forearms and throat were stained by the sun, but her upper arms and her thighs were white as ivory, her breasts round as apples, white as the flesh of the sour-sweet apples from his father’s orchard …

  He put a shaking hand to his forehead to find the skin damp. He felt dizzy, hot and confused in a way he’d long told himself he’d outgrown, that belonged to the muddle of adolescence. But she moved him so profoundly, this forthright, unpredictable woman.

  I’ve always claimed the Lady has all my devotion, he thought. But, oh, Queen of Heaven, I’m coming to see that my love for her is hardly different from my dedication to You.