The Owl Killers

epilogue

sMOKE BILLOWED UP FROM THE RUINS of the beguinage. Only the buildings burned. They had been stripped of anything moveable as soon as the women and their curse were gone from the village. Looted for valuables first by the Manor, as was their liege-right-even thieves know their place-then by the villagers gleaning for broken furniture, food, pots, and sheer curiosity. The Manor found little worth the bother of their efforts except the livestock, wine, and stores of grain, but the villagers were always glad of any prize they could snatch from their neighbours, be it a straw pallet or a patched blanket. Tables and benches rejected as too rough and plain for the Manor were carried off on cart or foot. They were far too big to fit inside the cottages, but good wood was hard to come by and they could always be made into doors to keep out the cold, or hurdles to keep in the sheep. Even the dead got their dues, for a tabletop makes a serviceable bier.

The villagers stripped the beguinage to the bare bones, but in this world even bones have their scavengers, and finally the beggars were allowed their turn at the carcass. They all took something, even the slowest and feeblest cripple scuttled away with crocks and scraps, for the meanest rag is a fur robe to a naked man.

Too occupied with fighting for the spoils, no one so much as glanced at the two slender mounds in the dirt outside the chapel walls. One was almost grassed over now, invisible. The other, smaller, strip was still bare. A little wooden trolley stood at the foot of the grave. A boy snatched it up; it would make a fine toy. The villagers trampled the tiny grave flat, not knowing or caring that the wasted body of a child lay just below their feet. It was only little Ella, that was all. But she had been loved. Ella and Gudrun, they had both once been loved, and love needs no cross to mark it.

Father Ulfrid hurried straight to the chapel. The green altar stone with its bloodred flecks, the chalice, and the paten were all gone. Carefully wrapped in wool they were safely stowed in the beguines’ chests on the ship bound for Flanders. There was nothing left to show that women had ever served at this altar.

Father Ulfrid was not expecting to find anything of value, but even so he had convinced himself that the reliquary containing Andrew’s Host would be there, waiting for him. The Commissarius had ordered the beguines to surrender it to the church and the Commissarius could not be disobeyed, for he held the keys of Hell in the next world and in this.

But the reliquary was not standing on the altar where the priest expected it to be. Unable to bring himself to accept that his last hope of salvation had vanished, Father Ulfrid spent a long and fruitless time turning the chapel upside down inch by inch, even brushing the rushes aside to see if there were any signs of it having been buried in the ground. Pale with frustration, he scoured the walls of the chapel desperate to find any loose stone or niche that he had overlooked. But at last he had to admit that the miraculous Host was gone.

He glared up at the walls, choking with rage. He had been so obsessed with searching for the reliquary that he had barely glanced at the wall paintings, but now he saw them. The paintings were finished at last. The serene eyes of the dying beguine looked down on him, her triumphant smile undisturbed by his rage. Her long hair flowed from under her invalid’s cap, bright and shining as if she was a girl again, and the Son of God Himself held out a hand from Heaven towards her, a bridegroom welcoming his bride. Every muscle and bone in the priest’s body were so racked with hatred that he felt as if his sinews were tearing themselves apart. He snatched the knife from his belt and gouged into the plaster, chipping and scratching away at that painted face like a cornered rat.

“Whore! Heretic! Blasphemer! Cunt!”

He tore at the body like a torturer with a flesh rake, obliterating breasts, loins, and hands until only a space remained, a hollow outline of an empty woman.

As he spun away, he stumbled hard against the stone altar. A dark red stain, the size and shape of a holy wafer, marred the whiteness of the stone; for a moment, Father Ulfrid thought it was his own blood. Without thinking, he reached out to wipe it away, but as his palm touched the red stain, he yelped in surprise, clamping his stinging hand under his armpit. He examined his palm. A burning livid red sore was etched deep into it, as if an iron nail had been driven right through it. Aghast he stared at the wound, then he fled from the chapel, leaving only the Virgin staring sadly down above the altar.

Outside, the Owl Masters were waiting, blazing torches at the ready. Dry straw and rags had been dipped in tallow and stuffed under eaves and in the crevices. Piles of dry rushes had been heaped inside the open doorways.

“Do we burn the chapel too?” they asked Father Ulfrid. Even they would not presume as much without the voice of God to give authority.

“Burn the vipers’ nest out. Burn every stinking stick of it. There will be not a stone left standing to remind anyone that this foul abomination ever existed.”

It burned and was burning still. But there was something that escaped the burning. It lay outside the gate, half hidden in a patch of weeds, its wrappings crumpled nearby. A villager had snatched up the bundle, not troubling to find out what it was, and then discarded it as soon as he’d unwrapped it. It was a battered thing, bound in calf’s leather, a book, just an old book. Tomorrow it would be picked up by a peddler, a camelot with a badly scarred face, on his way to a fair in a distant town. It might not fetch much, but the camelot was learning that anything was a profit on nothing and someone, somewhere would buy even an old book, if he spun them a good enough tale.

High up on the hill above the burning beguinage, a woman squatted on the bank of the river by old Gwenith’s tumbledown cottage. She could smell the smoke and if she had looked, she would have seen the distant lick of flames climbing into the darkening sky. But she did not raise her head.

The woman’s clothes were sodden and so caked with mud, you could scarcely see the grey of her kirtle beneath the dirt. Mud streaked her face and hands, but she wasn’t aware of that, nor of the way her hair tumbled loose down her back. She had discarded her grey cloak even though the air had grown icy. She no longer felt the cold. Her hands were too busy. She was too joyful.

First she had fashioned a mound of mud and dirt, long and narrow like a heap of soil over a new grave. Then she’d begun to shape it, dimpled legs and a fat little body, a softly curved belly, chubby arms and a beautiful smooth head. She put bright shining river stones on the tiny face for eyes and gave it waterweed for hair and a smooth silky pebble for a sleeping mouth. She bent to kiss the cold lips and smiled.

Then she began to make another mound. One by one she raised the graves from the earth; again and again she pulled from them her own mud babies. They lay all around her cradled in the moss, three, four, five of them, and still she worked making more graves and more babies. Light was fading so fast that she couldn’t see their faces anymore, but it didn’t matter, for she could feel their skins, soft and moist and slippery as newborns. She gently squeezed their chubby limbs and stroked their damp hair. They were sleeping. They didn’t cry because they were glad to have her as their mother.

A great black bird fluttered onto the ragged roof of the cottage. It stared down at the woman, its head cocked. The harsh caw made the woman look up. Someone was standing in the doorway of the cottage. In the darkness she could just make out the faintest shimmer of pale bare limbs and flame red hair. The woman smiled.

“There you are at last, my little Gudrun; where have you been? I’ve been searching for you everywhere.”

She’d known all along that the body they pulled out of the pond wasn’t her Gudrun dead. She knew her daughter would come home to her. Beatrice knelt on the ground and swept out her arms over the graves and the babies. They had all come back to her. And they would never leave her again.

The sun was almost gone now. Only a sliver of red rind showed above the hills and darkness crowded hard upon its heels. A gangling lad with straw-coloured hair and a dark-haired little girl stumbled homeward from the forest, dragging bundles of dead wood behind them by ropes looped across their shoulders. The girl trailed behind, wailing to her brother to wait for her. He pretended not to hear, but every now and then he slowed down, not enough for her to fully catch up with him, for he didn’t like to be seen walking with her, but just enough to close the distance between them.

Their hooks were tied to the bundles of the dry kindling twigs they carried on their backs. The boy’s sling was ready in his hand just in case a complacent bird or hare should amble across his path. The children’s grubby cheeks were flushed with exertion.

The little girl glanced fearfully over her shoulder. Imagine if the Owlman chased you while you were so weighted down, the wood dragging you back so you couldn’t run. Imagine feeling the breath of his wings at your back, hearing the snap of his beak. The darkness gathered about her and every bush along the path took on an animate form-a cutthroat with a murderous knife, Black Anu with her long talons, the faerie birch with white fingers long enough to strangle the throat of such a very small girl. In the forest a vixen screamed and both children started like rabbits. They should not have waited so long. The boy knew it was his fault, but he cuffed his little sister to make her hurry and to hide his own fear.

A hollow tapping, like fingers on a coffin lid, echoed through the gloom. The children stopped dead. It was coming towards them. In the witch-light you could just make out a shape, like a man, but not a man, wings dragging on the ground, hopping like some great bird. The little girl struggled to free herself from the tangle of wood and rope that was pinning her down between the forest and the nameless thing. Her brother clapped a sweaty hand across her squealing mouth and dragged her off the path.

The melancholy knell of the leper’s clapper drew nearer. Now they could just make out a figure limping on crutches towards them. One knee was bent under him, resting on a stick to keep the weight from his foot. A leper’s cloak was pulled down over his face and flapped behind him. He passed the children crouched in the bushes, but gave no sign that he had seen them.

The leper saw much, but registered nothing anymore. His mind was as numb as the stumps of his feet. He didn’t even turn his head as the boy fired stones from his sling at his sticks, jeering and boasting to his sister that he could knock the old crow off his perch. It was the boy’s revenge on the leper for making the boy hide as if he was scared, which of course he wasn’t, not for a moment.

The stones struck Ralph’s back, leaving small dark bruises, but he was almost grateful for the sting. He could at least feel that. He didn’t know where he was going, but he would hobble through the night and the next day and the next until he dropped from exhaustion, and even that would not be far enough away from this accursed village. For he knew the smell of the burning would cling to him like a drunken whore until they tumbled into the grave together. Ralph was not afraid of the dark, or the wolves or the Owlman. What could any of them do to him now that would not be a blessing?

Behind him, the little village of Ulewic hunkered down for the night, wrapping itself in the ragged smoke of a hundred hearth fires. The ditches and middens farted their noxious odours into the twilight air, but the village was comforted by the smell. It was the smell of its own fart after all. It shuffled down into the damp earth and its wooden bones creaked. Under the cover of darkness, bedbugs crawled out to feed on its frowsty flesh and the rats fought for its shit. Ulewic moaned a little in its sleep, that’s all; scratched, but otherwise it did not stir. It was complacent, senile, old, tired enough to sleep for a thousand years, and why not? Those troublesome women had gone and would not come again.

With outstretched wings the barn owl, silent and pale as a dead child, flapped slowly across Ralph’s path and the leper lifted his head. The winged cat from the threshing barn was seeking a new home. He turned his face away. Better not to think, not to feel, not to remember. He slammed his crutch against his foot as if to reassure himself his body at least was dead. Fiercely he dragged himself on, then turned, suddenly desperate for one last look at her, but the owl had vanished.

finis