Daughter of the Wolf (44 page)

Thancrad clicked his tongue and tugged Blis away from a tall clump of summer grass. ‘Elfrun, everyone knows about the abbot of Donmouth and the shepherd's wife. Everyone, it seems, but you and maybe the shepherd. It's a long while since they first started playing their bed games.'

Elfrun's face looked stiff. Her jaw muscles visibly tightened. ‘But that's wrong.'

Thancrad sighed. There was a fallen tree beside the path. ‘Look, you need to think, not go hurry-scurry in.' He gestured. ‘Sit, and talk?'

At last she nodded.

He unfastened Blis's girth and put the saddle down, then spread her saddlecloth over the log. ‘Your chair, lady?'

There was a wraith of a smile. She slithered down, and sat. Gethyn slumped at her feet.

There was a long silence, broken only by the brooding coo of ring-doves and the gentle patter of rain on the beech leaves above their heads. At last Elfrun looked up. ‘I should talk to my grandmother, really. But Ingeld has been always her favourite. I don't even know if she would listen. Or care, for that matter.' But again she remembered that overheard conversation, and she knew Abarhild would indeed care, but also that she was powerless.

Thancrad squatted on his haunches in front of her. ‘Even so, would you want to hurt her by making a scandal?'

‘No.' Elfrun brushed her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘Why has he never married?'

‘I only know scraps from what I've heard. But putting them together – she's always wanted him to be a bishop. Archbishop, even. My father for king's thane and her darling Ingeld a great prince of the Church.'

Thancrad snorted. ‘Married bishops are not unknown.'

She looked up then, eyes dark peaty hollows in her pale face. ‘But not in Frankia. Father Fredegar and my grandmother are always talking about how pure the Church is in Frankia, and how we are backward and degenerate... They think I don't understand their language but their Gallic words are enough like Latin... I've been learning some Latin.' She swallowed, her hands pleating the linen of her skirt. ‘
Il fuiet lo nom christiien
, Fredegar said. He has abandoned the name of Christian.'

‘Your uncle, he means?'

‘Yes. The way he behaves upsets Fredegar. And it makes my grandmother so angry she cries. I thought it was just hunting, and feasting, and playing dice.' A crease had appeared between her eyebrows. ‘But this... And with Saethryth, of all people.'

Thancrad thought back to the vision of silver-gilt hair, soft curves and sensual abandon that they had encountered in the barn. The abbot had all his sympathy, and a small amount of his envy. He looked down at the clinging tangle of goosegrass and dead-nettle around his feet, not wanting Elfrun to see his face. He desperately wanted to talk to her, but he didn't know where to start.

She was still talking. ‘I don't understand what men like so much about her.'

Thancrad sighed thickly. ‘And that's probably for the best.' He stood up. ‘So you'll hold your peace a little longer, then?' An unexpected gust of wind tugged at his hair, and the rain, which had been pattering lightly down, began to fall in earnest, darkening her fine linen scarf and sticking rats' tails of soaked hair to her temples.

‘Come on.' He picked up the damp saddlecloth, pulled a face and laid it carefully over Blis's back. ‘I don't want to have to explain to your grandmother how I came to let you catch your death.'

‘Let's walk, though. I'm stiff.'

‘If you like.' Now for the saddle. ‘To the minster?'

She nodded, and they fell into step. The path, such as it was, was rapidly turning into a quagmire, and there were whippy trailing sprays of bramble waiting to snag the unwary. Neither of them had much time or energy to devote to conversation. They had left the line of the stream now and were cutting diagonally across the slope, heading south-east towards the minster inlands.

After a while her silence began to trouble him. The horses were between them and it was hard to see her face, but her steps were dragging.

‘Are you sure you won't ride?'

‘We're nearly there. There's only a mile or so, though the heifer field is heavy going.'

They came out of the trees and into the rough grazing, a wide dell that deepened steeply before rising again, where the minster heifers were kept. As they descended the slope Thancrad spotted them, clustered in the shelter of the bottom, stolid and shaggy, heads down and their backs to the wind and driving rain. Under its deceptive covering of lush green the meadow was pocked and pitted where the cattle had trampled the sodden earth, and Elfrun kept stumbling. Her skirts were soaked to the knee, briar-snagged and tricked out with goosegrass and burrs.

The cattle were restless as they approached the boggy bottom, stamping and lowering their heads. Thancrad frowned. ‘They're not happy. Maybe it's Gethyn.' Elfrun grabbed the hound's collar with her free hand, and Thancrad nodded. ‘I'll try and shift them. Am I right in thinking it's a long way round otherwise?' She nodded. ‘Can you take Blis, too?' He passed her the reins to loop over her arm and took a pace or two, then turned to glance back at her, burdened with the two horses and the dog. Gethyn was no happier than the heifers, he was straining and whining, and Elfrun was having a hard time of it. He raised his arms and shouted, ‘Get! Get!' The ground where the cattle had been was churned and filthy.

There was something there. Something wrong. He took a few more stumbling paces, waving his arms but his heart wasn't in it. As he drew closer the heifers' collective nerve suddenly broke, and they wheeled and rocked away.

There was a man lying there in the mud and the cow-sharn. Thancrad could tell he was dead, because the man's face was pressed deep into the slurry. But he would have guessed anyway, because the body was naked and the rain now falling was hard enough to send little splatters of mud across the drained white skin.

Thancrad stepped carefully closer, the mud sucking at his feet. A well-built, broad-shouldered man, pale-skinned and with a little fat on him. Shortish hair that looked dark, but with the rain and mud who knew? Thancrad took a deep breath. Hunkering down by the man's side, he put a tentative hand on the shoulder blade and felt an otherworldly chill. He tried giving the shoulder a little shake, wondering if by some miracle the soul was still present, but the body felt stiff, and heavy. It would be a struggle to turn it over. The face was buried up to the ears.

He had to be dead.

If he hadn't been dead when he went into the muck he would most certainly be dead now. Thancrad's stomach heaved at the thought of swallowing or inhaling that stuff. Sorry as he was that there was nothing to be done, it was still a relief to step back and wipe his hand down the front of his tunic. He had a premonition that the feeling of that cold, slick skin would haunt him for a while yet.

He nodded once or twice to himself, trying to order his thoughts.

Someone would have to stay with the body. The carrion birds would be down soon. He was surprised they weren't already here. Perhaps the heifers had kept them at bay.

Someone would have to go for help.

He turned and went back to Elfrun. Her eyes widened as he approached and he guessed his face looked wild. ‘There's a dead man. Not dead long.' But very dead, for all that.

‘Oh, my dear Lord. Who is it?'

‘I don't know. I'll stay here and keep the birds off if you go to the minster for help? Take Blis, she's lighter on her feet.'

She hesitated.

‘You rode her earlier, didn't you?' She bit her lip and he shook his head at her. ‘No, of course I don't mind. Go on.'

Even before he had finished speaking she was thrusting Hafoc at him and hauling herself on to Blis. Her wet dress clung to her thighs, and she was gripping the pony's flanks with blue-white, goose-pimpled knees. ‘Come, Gethyn.' She whacked backwards with her heels and Blis lurched off at a startled canter for the far corner of the field, Gethyn in lolloping pursuit. Thancrad picked up Hafoc's reins and walked back over to the corpse. The dun baulked and jibbed as they got closer, and Thancrad clucked soothingly, to calm himself as much as the horse.

He had hunted all his life; he helped slaughter the beasts for the table. He dealt with dead bodies as a matter of routine. Stag and boar and hare, bull calf and sucking pig, stiff and dull-eyed and smelling of blood. Thancrad hugged himself, tucking his hands into his armpits. Why was this so different?

It was hard to believe that that inert and pallid lump had lately been a warm man, breathing and eating and laughing.

Hafoc nickered gently, and Thancrad went back to him and started walking him up and down. ‘I'm cold too, my friend. I'm cold too.'

It seemed a long time before help arrived.

They came on foot, heads down against the torrents of rain, that foreign priest and a couple of the minster servants. Thancrad was angry to see that they had allowed Elfrun to return with them, even though someone had had the sense to lend her a cloak.

‘The ox-cart is on its way,' the priest said. He stared down at the body. ‘The wheels will get bogged down. We will have to lift the body and carry it to firmer ground.'

‘Do you know him?'

There was no answer.

‘Father?'

‘Help me,' the priest said.

Thancrad joined the other two men in the mud, and with their feet skidding away beneath them they heaved the stiff, heavy body over. It came out of the mud with a sucking noise and fell on its back with a thump.

Elfrun gave a little cry.

Even through the thick smears of filth and blood they could see that the face and chest were a dull purple, an inhuman colour that Thancrad found perversely reassuring. There had been nothing for him to do, no death on his conscience. The driving rain was washing the streaks of dirt away, and they could see the great gash that had hacked right through the windpipe.

It was clear to all who stood by that the dead man was, indeed, someone they knew.

Ingeld, abbot of Donmouth.

22 J
ULY
860. F
EAST
OF
S
T
M
ARY
M
AGDALEN
.

There was nothing more that could be written. The ink dried to powder in the inkhorn, and between the corner of the vellum and the corner of the writing-slope a small spider spun its gossamer web.

It had been a beautiful day, the triumph of late summer, with barely a breath of wind to stir the clouds, so like handfuls of freshly carded fleece, that hung in the blue depths of the upper air. But Elfrun could not get warm. She forced herself to stay where she was, lips compressed, head held aloft. Under her father's cloak her arms were wrapped tightly around her ribs. At her feet Gethyn lay on the sand with his head resting on crossed paws. Every so often he gave a faint, crooning whimper, but he did not move.

The men came through the dunes and down the beach in a tight group, the long light of the evening sun behind them gilding their edges and leaving their faces dark, throwing their shadows far across the sand. Six of the seven moving with silent purpose, five of them with spears in their hands, their faces every bit as grim and set as Elfrun's.

There was a hiss, a sigh, from the crowd.

Abarhild wasn't there. Abarhild had spent the week since Ingeld's burial weeping, her veil discarded, tearing her hair and scratching her cheeks with her nails like a queen out of an ancient song. When she and Athulf had gone to her to bring her to the church, the old woman had clung crooning to Athulf, calling him Ingeld, her heart's darling and her last-born. And then later, at the graveside, she had turned to Elfrun and said, ‘Where are my babies? I miss my babies. Why are my arms empty?' Her eyes had been bloodshot but dry and her voice scratchy and hollow.

The seventh man, a head taller than any of the rest, blundered and stumbled, jostled along, his cries muffled by the thick folds of the bag that was tied over his head. When he tripped he could not save himself, for his wrists were lashed tightly together behind his back. The others let him fall, then two of them jerked him roughly back to his feet. The slightest of them set him going again with a vicious jab from his spear-butt.

As they moved from the dry sand of the dunes to the firmer footing below the high-tide line the hooded man began howling, flailing his body from side to side, trying to lash out with his feet at anyone he could reach. It was a pathetic sight, almost a comic one, but no one was laughing. His guards merely stepped back a pace or two by some tacit common consent, waiting for the man to wear himself out with his antics and fall again. This time, when he tripped and measured his length, thumping heavily face down, his raddle-stained hands twitching and helpless, he landed only a couple of yards from Elfrun's feet. She kept her face like stone.

The hooded man was moaning now. The five men with their spears waited for a few moments, and then began their prodding, jerking and worrying him once more to his feet. Even the youngest of them was taking his cue from the others, acting in silence with a set, expressionless face. The sixth man, the one without a spear, had a troubled look on his sallow face.

Elfrun shifted her weight on to the other leg and turned to look out to sea. The four-oarer was waiting on the sand. The golden evening light caught the headland and picked out every breaking ripple. At the edge of vision white birds were rising and diving, over and over. Impossible to associate that serene prospect with anything as dark as the scene behind her on the beach. But Elfrun knew fine well that the diving birds would be feeding on frantic silver fish, that a storm could boil up out of nowhere to claim its share of lives, that the deep water hid monsters.