Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (6 page)

‘Brother Stephen,’ Thomas asks, ‘when you brought me food this morning, did you say one of the sisters has gone missing?’

The Dean nods. He looks grim.

‘Found her now, though.’

‘Is she well?’

The Dean lowers his voice.

‘Dead,’ he says. ‘So the Prioress says. We’ll bury her tomorrow.’

It takes a moment for this to settle in.

‘Riven has her rosary beads,’ Thomas says.

The Dean stares at him, calculating the value of the news, then he lunges suddenly, shoving Thomas aside.

‘Look you!’ he shouts. A sword blade hums through the space where Thomas had been standing, and the man Riven called Louther staggers among them, off balance. The Dean grabs his padded coat and hauls him onwards so that he crashes over the cloister wall, dropping his sword as he goes. Thomas turns, sees the giant lolloping towards them with that axe, a cruel confection of pick, spike and blade that might have been better employed to murder an ox.

‘Run!’ the Dean bellows at Thomas. ‘Run, Brother Thomas.’

He snatches up Louther’s sword and charges at the giant, aiming a savage cut to his face.

The giant bats the blade away with a simple chop of his axe and the sword is wrenched from the Dean’s grip. The giant raises the axe to kill him, but Thomas has found Riven’s staff and runs at him. The giant sees him and diverts his axe to catch Thomas’s clumsy blow. He flicks his wrist, catching the staff under the steel pick, smashing it from Thomas’s grasp. Then he swats Thomas with a backhand punch that sends him scrabbling in the mud. Strange whirling lights fill his vision. The giant moves towards him.

The Dean takes up the staff, cracks it against the fourth man’s skull, who reels away, and then he flies at the giant, diverting him while Thomas rolls out of his reach. Riven is up, but still bent and clutching Thomas’s planted staff for support. Thomas shoves him backwards, unplugs the staff and turns back, just in time to see the giant block another of the Dean’s attacks. The giant takes the blows on the fleshy part of his arm without even flinching.

The Dean steps back, looking up at the giant with something like awe.

‘Run, Brother Thomas!’ he shouts over his shoulder. ‘For the love of God, just run!’

Then he wades in again, hacking at the giant, and again the giant parries the blows with ease. The giant has a blank smile on his lips as he aims a swipe that would have taken the Dean’s head off. But now the fourth man is up again, coming at the Dean from behind. Before Thomas can move he smells wine and feels something touch the skin below his ear. The point of a knife.

Riven.

‘See what happens, shall we, hey?’ Riven says. ‘Against the law to kill a bull without first baiting it, you know?’

It is over soon enough. The giant feints. The Dean doesn’t fall for it. The fourth man swings at him and the Dean blocks it and even pushes him back, but then the giant feints again. This time the Dean is drawn. He dives forward, aiming his staff at the giant’s throat, but the giant steps aside and swings his axe blade down and there is a noise like that of a shovel in dirt.

The Dean’s bellow of rage turns into a wailing scream. He staggers forward with blood guttering from a gash from throat to sternum. He manages a few steps before dropping to his knees in a slew of blood. His wrist hangs to his knees. Blood is everywhere. He falls forward into it, and it seethes on to the muddy grass where he lies twitching. A moment later he is still, the blood slows and its smell drifts in the breeze.

There is silence. The canons stand in a row, their faces a line of pale coins.

‘Well, that went all right,’ Riven says. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

Thomas feels the knife prick his skin, but he no longer cares. If he is to die then let it be now, and let it be quick. He brings his wooden clog crashing down on the toe of Riven’s boot. Riven roars and Thomas turns and crashes his elbow into his open mouth. Riven tumbles back, his shirt open, the rosary beads sliding into the mud. Thomas bends to take them.

The giant starts towards him.

‘Stop!’ It is the Prior, his arms raised, his voice high with emotion. ‘Stop in the name of God! Stop in the name of all that is sacred!’

Without breaking stride the giant chops him in the face with the back of his hand. The Prior collapses and the giant kicks his body aside like a child’s plaything and advances on Thomas.

Thomas stands a moment before finally doing as the Dean instructed. He tucks the beads away and turns and runs for the cloister roof, hauling himself scrabbling up across the slates.

‘Kill him!’ he hears Riven scream, and he feels the giant’s fingers on his cassock. He kicks out and pulls free. The giant tries again but misses and Thomas scrambles away, up over the roof of the refectory with a clatter of his clogs, the tiles warm beneath his palms, and then down heavily in the yard. He staggers to his feet.

Through the door behind him he can hear the crash of someone running through the frater house. He unbars the beggars’ gate and hurries through. The rain has softened the ground, and the millwheel is turning again. Smoke rises from blackened circles where Riven’s men lit cooking fires the night before, but they’ve moved on and now the furlong is deserted save for two of the lay brethren, shovelling something down by the river’s bank by the ford.

Thomas stops. Where to? He cannot think. He turns and the giant is in the yard, ducking through the gateway after him, moving fast on his bare feet, that great axe still in his hand. Thomas catches a glimpse of someone moving down by the river, near the mill, where the ferryman’s lighter lies still upturned on the bank. He cuts that way.

‘Help!’ he shouts. ‘Help me! Jesus!’

Whomsoever he’d seen there is gone now or maybe had always been a flit of his imagination. He grabs the lighter. It is a rough-built, flat-bottomed thing, turned over, and heavier than he’d thought. He bends and tries to right it, but isn’t strong enough. He looks for the ferryman’s boat pole: if he cannot use it to lever the boat over, then at least he can use it as a weapon.

The giant comes on.

The pole is nowhere to be found.

There is nothing for it.

He turns and faces the giant.

‘Why?’ he shouts. ‘Why me?’

The question seems to hold no meaning for the giant. His face betrays the same emotion a man might feel milking a cow or washing a bowl. He holds the axe at his side as if he has no need for it now. He towers over Thomas. Thomas throws a punch. The giant catches it, his hand hard as a plank. He twists Thomas’s fist over and forces him to his knees.

‘Why?’ Thomas cries again. ‘What did I do to you?’

The giant says nothing, but puts aside the axe and seizes Thomas’s shoulder. He lifts him as if he were a doll of plaited corn. Thomas kicks him between the legs. There is no reaction. It is as if he does not feel pain. The giant grabs his throat and Thomas can feel each fingertip. The giant forces him backwards on to the upturned boat. Thomas struggles and kicks but it is no use. The hand tightens. He feels the giant stroke his cheek, and he sees there is an almost tender look in the giant’s eyes, but then Thomas sees the ball of his filthy thumb coming down on his right eyeball.

He screams.

WHEN THE BELL
rings the alarm, the Prioress ushers the sisters into the chapel and locks the iron-bound door behind them. The candles have already been lit for Mass and the flames shiver as the women kneel in uncertain silence and pray.

Katherine watches Alice in alarm. Her earlier resolve has leached away, along with all colour in her face, and she rocks on her knees, weeping incoherent prayers while her fingers punish her rosary beads. When at last the sedate tolling of the bell signals the end of the crisis, the sisters rise as one and clutch each other’s hands. They are forbidden to speak in the church, lest they interfere with the prayers of the canons beyond the wall that bisects the nave, but gestures are enough. Alice puts her thin arms around Katherine and crushes her with a hug.

At length they return to their places and kneel again and silently give thanks to God for delivering them from they know not what. Katherine gives Him thanks not only for the delivery from the horsemen, but – perhaps more heartfelt now that the former danger is passed – that the canon has not been seen in the cloister.

She cannot imagine what her punishment might have been had he been seen, for since the day she had joined the Priory, all those years ago, the Prioress had forever been inflicting ever crueller punishments. Katherine had still been warm with the memories of her mother’s love when she had come, or so she now imagined, and the sudden change in her life had seemed almost unendurably hard, but as the years passed, she’d come to see that the cloistered life needn’t be so harsh, only that the Prioress went out of her way to make it so.

In the early years she had spent weeks at a stretch alone in her cell subsisting only on rye bread and lentils. If she were lucky: salted fish. She passed the hours on her knees, praying for she knew not what, to a God of whom she was unsure, but as her life progressed from one hardship to another, each visited upon her for something she did not understand or did not do, she began to wonder if God was the merciful deity that the priests espoused. She began to wonder whether He was not an absent God, or perhaps a powerless one, for she could not believe he was a vengeful one, who wished her to suffer this way.

When she spoke of her thoughts to one of the other sisters, a girl to whom she believed herself close, the Prioress heard within the hour and that evening the whole community was called to witness Sister Joan holding her down while the Prioress thrashed her with a scourge, grunting at each stroke. The sin of Pride was deadly, the Prioress had gasped, and it needed eradicating. This was the first of many beatings Katherine received over the years and now, more than a decade later, the skin on her back and legs is capped by a hardened matt of needle-fine scars.

Only later was she entrusted with the daily task of taking out the Prioress’s nightly soil and her pisspot, but when Katherine had complained of it, had suggested the lay sisters should deal with it as they did the rest of the nuns’ excrement, she was beaten, and made to carry the bucket away while the blood dried against her cassock.

Now she leans forward to gain a view down the line of the sisters to where the Prioress kneels in profile, her heavy hands resting on the prie-dieu in an effigy of piety. She is not a pleasure to look upon, with a big jaw and heavy brows that glower even in prayer. She is immensely strong though, with a man’s shoulders, and when inflamed it is possible to see the blood of her Viking forefathers running through her veins.

Katherine watches as she rises now, her prayers at an end, and with a chopping gesture she instructs the sisters to rise too, to fall into their customary lines. After a pause she leads them across the nave to where Sister Joan stands at the north door. Katherine and Alice fall in beside one another and walk with downcast eyes, but as they pass Sister Joan, the older nun leans forward and pinches Katherine’s elbow to make her look up.

Joan’s eyes are like slits, and her tiny, pointed teeth are bared in a grin. She is laughing at something and pointing at Katherine. Katherine feels cold wash over her.

Of course the canon has been seen.

Almost blind with despair, Katherine follows the sisters through the cloister to the chapter house. Stark within, the room is dominated by a dais on which the Prioress sits like a queen, her head bowed in prayer. The stone floor is spread with rushes that sigh underfoot as they enter and take their places on the low bench and still without speaking each sister raises her hood to cover her face in prayer. When the Prioress has finished her own prayers she would ordinarily read to them from the Martyrology, but today she reads from the Rule of St Augustine, chapter four.

‘The fourth chapter of the Rule’, she announces, ‘deals with safeguarding chastity.’

Katherine feels something twist inside.

‘What should you do,’ the Prioress asks, ‘if you notice within your sister a wantonness of the eye? Would you admonish her so that the fault does not multiply, but stands corrected? Or would you treat it as an infirmarian might treat a wound?’

The Prioress looks around as if for an answer. There is none. She closes the book and steps away from the lectern.

‘Let me tell you this remarkable thing,’ she says, ‘for it is an example that might inspire you. During the time of Bishop Henry there was a convent of virgins at Watton in the province of York, to the north of here, and they took in an oblate, a girl of five. She passed her girlhood happily enough, in prayer and silent contemplation, but as she grew older, she began to show signs of girlish abandon.’

The Prioress pauses to let her words sink in.

Katherine’s eye is drawn to the tight-shut door.

‘Now one day,’ the Prioress carries on, ‘when some lay brothers were brought into the cloister to carry out some works, the eye of this girl fell upon one of their number, a handsome boy in the full bloom of youth.’

There is a stirring among the sisters, all of whom can imagine such a thing, though few have seen it for themselves. Alice at last seems to have understood what is being said, for she begins moaning and swaying again, as she had in the nave.

The Prioress continues, her gaze avoiding Katherine: ‘And this youth noticed the girl, too, and so it was that each watered in the other the seeds of desire, and soon their nods turned to gestures and they sought one another out in the secret darkness of night.’

The sisters gasp.

‘Block your ears, oh brides of heaven!’ the Prioress pronounces, enjoying herself, ‘for that night this girl walked out a virgin of Christ and in the next moment she was corrupted in the flesh as she had been in the spirit!’

‘Shame,’ a sister mutters. ‘For shame!’

Others agree. The Prioress lets them calm themselves before she begins again: ‘Soon the evidence of the nun’s wickedness was all too clear,’ she says, ‘and when the truth emerged that the girl was with child, the shocked virgins of the community clapped their hands together and fell on her, ripping the veil from her head. They whipped her without mercy! Some argued she should be tied to a tree and burned over charcoal. Others cried out that she should be skinned alive!’