The Owl Killers

september

patron saint of cripples, lepers, and nursing mothers. in provence he defended a hunted hind from king wamba, and was permanently crippled by the arrow aimed at the deer.

bEATRICE, WAIT A MOMENT,” Healing Martha called after me, as I hurried out from the midday prayers in chapel.

If I ignored her, she might seize on someone else to carry out whatever task she had in mind. The afternoon was sunny, the first good day after more than a week of heavy rain, and I’d no wish to spend it indoors stirring some evil-smelling ointment over the fire or cleaning up the old lady who’d fouled herself again. An afternoon spent gathering rushes reaps cuts and blisters, but at least I could feel the sun on my face. But Catherine tugged on my sleeve, so I could hardly pretend I hadn’t noticed her. Healing Martha limped up to us, still calling my name, pain gouged deep in the lines of her face and her hand pressed to her back.

“I’ve run out of water betony and I’ve no time to go myself, with all the sick in the infirmary. Will you fetch some for me, Beatrice? I believe there was a good patch on the bank further up the river, and you might find some herb Robert thereabouts; bring me as much of that as you can too.”

Catherine was hovering at my elbow looking eager as usual. “Stinking Bob? Is that the one, Healing Martha?”

Healing Martha smiled indulgently. “That’s the one, child. Why don’t you go with Beatrice to learn how to gather it, for I fear that with so many patients to tend I’ll have to depend on others in the future to fetch my herbs.”

It was not the sick that kept Healing Martha from gathering the herbs herself, but her back. Some days she could hardly drag herself around, but she was too proud to admit it.

Catherine beamed and rushed off to get the pokes to carry our harvest before Healing Martha could change her mind. But though I wanted an excuse to be outside, I resented being asked. I was not a Martha, so I was at everyone’s beck and call to run errands and help with tasks, as if I was one of the children.

Servant Martha had let me believe that, as the community expanded, there would be a role for me. I had thought that as Healing Martha became more frail and less able to work, I would take her place, under her at first of course, but later to take over as the Healing Martha. But she showed no sign of drawing me in.

They needed me as a Martha, though none of them seemed to realise it. Servant Martha was in the twilight of her days. Did they think she’d live forever? And who would take over when she was gone? Healing Martha was even older. Kitchen Martha was interested only in food. Merchant Martha could scarcely contain herself to sit still in chapel until the prayers were over and she could get back to work. Tutor Martha had great learning, but she couldn’t even control the children, never mind a whole beguinage. Who was there except for me who had the skill and energy to manage such a household? But if I was not even a Martha, how could I become the next Servant Martha?

Catherine returned with our cloaks and we left the gate, heading towards the shallow ford. The branches on the trees hung low, their leaves sodden and heavy. As we turned towards the river, I tried not to look at the villagers’ fields, where the grain lay flat, battered into the mud. We had lost some, but at least ours had been cut and stooked, so most of it could be rescued. Two sheaves had been scorched by the lightning, but the rain had doused them before they could set the field on fire.

Catherine and I stripped off our shoes and hose to wade across the river, giggling like children and holding on to each other as we tried to keep our balance on the slippery stones of the ford. We had to hitch our skirts to our thighs to keep the hems from getting wet. The water was deep after all the rain and so cold. The bones of my feet ached in the chill of it and I rushed the last few steps, almost falling in my hurry to get out, which made Catherine giggle.

We flopped down on the bank. I lay back in the damp grass watching Catherine pat her feet dry with her skirts. The sun was bright, not hot, but pleasantly warm. I could have danced with the bliss of feeling its light on my face after the misery of the rain. It was such a joy to be outside breathing in the fresh air, heavy with the smell of steaming earth and crushed grass, I could almost forgive Healing Martha for sending me.

A great flock of starlings swished across the blue sky, their feathers gleaming as iridescent as oil on water.

“I can fly across the land and rivers, the forests and the villages, and float on the wind.”

Catherine jerked upright, looking horrified, and I realised I must have spoken the words aloud. She stared at me as if she thought I was crazed.

“I mean, wouldn’t you love to be a bird, Catherine?”

Catherine shook her head vehemently. “Some little boy with his slingshot would break my wings and I’d end up in Kitchen Martha’s flesh pot. I wouldn’t like that.” She stood, shuffling from foot to foot. “Oughtn’t we to go? It’s a long walk.”

I sat up reluctantly and dried my feet on the hem of my kirtle.

“Catherine, do you want to stay here as a beguine?”

She looked puzzled as if the answer was so obvious she couldn’t imagine why I asked the question. Then her confusion turned to anxiety. “Has Servant Martha said…? I know I’m not clever like Osmanna, but I will try, really I will.”

“Don’t take on so, child. Servant Martha hasn’t said anything and I know you’d make a truly good beguine. Cleverness is not the only gift. You have gifts too-faith, gentleness-and you work hard.”

Catherine stared miserably at a daisy head and absently pulled the petals from it one by one, as if she was making a test of true love. “But Osmanna reads things. I don’t even understand the words, but Osmanna can debate them with Tutor Martha and even with Servant Martha. I’ve heard her. What does it mean-one God in the three persons and three persons in God alone? Osmanna has tried to explain it over and over to me, but I know I’ll never understand it, so I just say I do.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I just want someone to tell me what it is they want me to do.”

I reached over and stroked her hair. “Osmanna shouldn’t even be thinking about these things at her age.”

Servant Martha should have had more sense than to force Osmanna to read such books, never mind discuss them with her. The poor girl was pale and drawn, as if she already lay awake half the night worrying. Servant Martha would never listen to me, but I would have words with Tutor Martha, tell her to not to burden Osmanna with books. Someone had to look out for the child.

“Come on, Catherine. Let’s find where the water betony grows. Where do you think we’d best look?”

She brightened at once. “This way,” she called, confident again, for that was a task she knew she could perform.

We walked alongside the twisting river, following its line upstream, often having to cut away from its banks to avoid the thick pools of mud and rushes. Autumn was approaching much too swiftly, as if it had been fooled by the storm into thinking it was later in the year than it was. But I was still hungry for the sun; it was too soon for the cold and dark to start to close in around us again. Even worse was the thought of the hours we would soon spend dipping those rushes, sweaty, stinking, suffocating hours circling the cauldrons of hot tallow, eyes stinging and arms smarting from a dozen little blisters from the spitting fat.

In the old days, as mistress of my husband’s house, I’d simply sent a boy to buy the candles we needed. I gave not a thought to them beyond seeing that none disappeared into the sack of some light-fingered servant. Then in Bruges, our sisters who kept bees made candles themselves from wax smelling of honey and thyme and newly plucked apples. And as if the wax were not sweet enough by itself, they mixed oils of rosemary, lavender, and roses in it, so that even in winter the rooms of our houses were filled with the breath of warm, sleepy summer.

I knew it was a sin to look back. Yet I repeated the sin again and again, like a drunkard who would not stay his hand from the wine. I don’t know why I did it, for it caused me nothing but pain.

The river cut deep into the fold of the hills and the water cascaded in foaming torrents over stones and boulders. The sides of the valley began to rise steeply around us and we found ourselves scrambling over rocks as we climbed alongside the bank. In the sunshine, tiny rainbows swam above the river in the spray cast up by the crashing water. But there was no sign of the herbs that Healing Martha needed.

At the bend in the river, I scrambled up onto the mound and stared back down the valley behind us. The flat plain stretched out far below us, pea-green patches of grazing land between the dark brown strips of ruined crops. The river slithered across the plain, glinting here and there as the sun caught it where it coiled through the trees and rushes. Far in the distance the land tipped into emerald marshes edged with brown and, beyond that, the dark blue line of the sea scumbling into the paler blue of the sky.

It was so quiet up here. The only sounds were the rush of water over stones and the cry of a buzzard circling on the warm air, scarcely bothering to flap its wings. As I turned back to the river I spotted a clump of dark green leaves.

“Water betony,” I called to Catherine, pointing out the patch. “Not much, but it’s a start.”

She frowned. “But that’s brownwort.”

“Whatever you call it, that’s what Healing Martha needs. You gather this and I’ll go further up and see if I can find some more. Be careful not to bruise the leaves when you gather it. Cut it, don’t try to break it off. Those stems are tough and they’ll slice your fingers.”

I scrambled on up the river and was soon out of sight of Catherine. I found another small patch of water betony but the leaves were full of holes and mildewed. Then I saw some more, higher up, which looked more lush. I continued to climb, knowing Catherine would follow eventually or sit and wait for me to return. I was glad of the sensation of being alone. No sound of bells or children yelling. Just the sudden piping of the skylark as it soared upwards, as glad to be out on this day as I was.

I reached a place where the river was squeezed by a rocky outcrop on either side into a raging torrent of water, but on the bend of the river, the bank flattened out into a long shelf of wiry grass. I was so intent on searching for the herbs that I didn’t see the cottage at first. One moment there was nothing, then in a single stride I saw it, as if it had mushroomed from the ground in the time it took to blink.

The cottage crouched between the fingers of a rocky outcrop, hidden from both the peak above and the valley below. The wattle-and-daub walls were threadbare and patched with greenish mud and dung. The thatch had not been attended to for many seasons and had slipped, leaving holes like ringworm in the mildewed straw. It looked as if it had been abandoned for many moons, but yet a thin trickle of blue smoke rose from a turf-damped fire outside the door. It was clearly inhabited by someone, but only a hermit, a madman, or an outlaw would live so many miles from his neighbours.

A solitary thornbush grew from the cleft in the rock near the cottage. It was covered with little bunches of dead flowers, ribbons, faded pieces of cloth, teeth, bones, fairings, and pieces of tin. They hung from the twigs like thank offerings in a church. But there was no cross and this was no Christian shrine. This was not the dwelling of a hermit and I had no wish to meet the madman or the outlaw who lived there. I turned away, trying to retrace my footsteps, treading softly and carefully so as not to arouse any who might be inside.

“What brings you here, Mistress?”

I turned sharply. An old woman had appeared by the fire as if she had been conjured from the smoke. Startled, I crossed myself and she grinned mockingly. Bright sloe eyes flashed out from a withered crab apple of a face. She was filthy. It was hard to tell where the rough brown cloth of her kirtle ended and her walnut skin began.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you, Mother. I was…” My voice dried up as she shuffled towards me.

“Want a man in your bed?” she croaked.

I blushed furiously and shook my head, stepping back as she edged forward. But she merely laughed, throwing back her head and showing the two remaining blackened stumps in her gums.

“Maybe you’ve had one already, now you want his seed out of your belly?”

She reached out a long skinny hand and pressed it against my stomach, laughing louder still. Her hand seemed to burn like ice through the cloth. I shrank back.

“Nay, that’s not it,” she said. “There’s death in your belly, Mistress. Stone babies. That’d be it, that’s why you’ve come-the stone babies.”

I recoiled as if she’d struck me. How could she tell that? No one here knew. I wanted to run, but my feet seemed to have taken root in the earth.

She nodded towards the festooned thornbush. “Aye, there’s more come to my door now in want of bairns than want rid of them. Cattle won’t fall with calves neither, so they say, nor sheep nor hogs. Land’s sick. People’ve forgotten the old ways. Try to wrest too much from the land, then wonder why She turns against them. Still they know old Gwenith can get them with spawn. What have you brought me? A gift for a gift.”

“I want nothing,” I said, at last finding my voice. “I came by accident. I was gathering herbs.” Gwenith-I’d heard that name before, but I couldn’t think…

“None comes by accident. If you weren’t seeking me, then she brought you. She can call all manner of wild creatures. She must have seen something in you.” The old woman stared hard at me. “Aye, I see it too.” She pointed to the hut. “Go to her.”

I didn’t want to, but I found myself walking towards the door. I could feel the old woman’s stare on my back. I ducked inside. A ragged grey light filtered in through the holes in the thatch. The beaten earth floor was damp and stank of piss. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the roof wattles, but they were evil smelling and did nothing to sweeten the air. Near the remains of a fire, a heap of rags covered a pile of last year’s bracken. I guessed it to be the old woman’s bed, a hard and chilly resting place for sharp old bones. An iron pot and clay jars stood by some charred cooking stones, but there was no table, nor chest, not even a stool to sit on.

Whoever old Gwenith had sent me in to see was not here. The old woman’s wits were wandering, hardly surprising living all alone in such a place. Perhaps she imagined her long-dead mother waited inside. The aged often think themselves children again and think they see their loved ones near them as if they still lived. It is as if the ghosts of the dead draw close to welcome those who are dying. I turned to go.

A faint slithering sound stopped me in the doorway. I whipped round, my heart thumping. I searched desperately for the source, afraid to move until I found it. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light I saw that a corner of the hut was screened off by a piece of cloth strung across it. The sound was coming from behind it. I cautiously lifted the edge with the point of my knife, then sprang back with a gasp.

A girl sat cross-legged in the corner. She was dressed in a thin torn shift, her wild red hair tangled loose about her shoulders. And, from a face as pale as the old hag’s was brown, gleamed a pair of cat-green eyes. It was Gudrun.

Her body was writhing and twisting, yet she sat perfectly still. Then, shuddering with horror, I realised what it was that was moving. Her body was alive with vipers. Twining themselves all about her, they slithered through her hair and twisted about her neck. A black-and-yellow bracelet curled about her wrist. She held it up to her face and her little pink tongue flashed in and out of her mouth as the viper flashed his tongue at her. Then without warning she looked straight at me. Her lips curled back as if she was laughing with delight, but no sound came from her mouth.

I fought my way out of the hut and scrambled down the hillside, back the way I had come, tumbling and slithering down the slope, only dimly aware of the thorns slashing at my clothes and legs. Catherine came racing towards me and caught me in her arms.

“What’s wrong, Beatrice? You look as if the demons from Hell are chasing you.”

“An old woman living up there-she startled me.”

Catherine glanced up at the hillside. “Was it old Gwenith? Pega said she lived hereabouts, but I never knew where exactly. Pega says she’s the gift of second sight. They say it’s dangerous to cross her.” She looked at me fearfully. “Did she curse you?”

I shook my head. “The old woman’s granddaughter was there too.”

Catherine’s eyes grew wider. “You saw Gudrun up close? She usually runs away before anyone can get near her. What was she like?”

I shook my head, trying to remember what I saw. Snakes! Were there really snakes? In that half-light, it was hard to be sure of anything. Who hasn’t walked along a track at twilight and seen an old man standing by the path only to find when you draw close that it’s nothing but the stump of a tree? Perhaps she had mazed me after all.

“I… I didn’t see her properly. Come on, you don’t want to be late for Vespers, do you?”

I knew that fear of being late for anything would drive all curiosity out of Catherine’s head.

AS WE DREW NEAR to the beguinage we saw a solemn procession making its way to the gates. Four men carried a shrouded corpse on a bier. A grey friar paced steadily in front of them. Several women followed silently behind, too well dressed to be from the village, but they were not women from the Manor either. There was no weeping or wailing, just a heavy silence. There seemed to be pitifully few mourners save for this sad handful; the corpse perhaps was someone very old, who had outlived most friends and relatives.

I caught Catherine’s arm and held her back. “We’ll wait here until they’ve turned towards the church. It’s bad luck to cross the path of a funeral procession. We should pray for the departed soul, whoever he or she might be.”

But to my surprise they didn’t turn towards the village. Instead, they walked to the entrance of the beguinage and laid the bier down before it. The friar spoke to Gate Martha, who disappeared inside, closing the gate firmly against them, but they waited and we waited too, not wanting to approach until they had gone. Presently Servant Martha came out with some of the beguines, who carried the bier inside. The friar and mourners turned and walked slowly back the way they’d come, eyes downcast, leaning on one another as if in great grief.

Catherine looked up at me, puzzled. “Why do they bring a corpse to us?”

“Perhaps I was mistaken and it isn’t a corpse, but someone very sick. We’d better hurry, Catherine. Healing Martha may have need of these herbs.”