Land of the Silver Dragon

ONE

A murder seems a hundred times more shocking when you know the victim. It seems to make the danger personal.

It is an exaggeration to say I knew Utta of Icklingham: more accurately, I knew who she was. She was my sister Goda’s mother-in-law, and, although one should not speak ill of the dead, by common consent she was a shrew of a woman and no great loss.

Word of the drama first reached us in Aelf Fen via the peddler who regularly wheels his barrow from village to village. Icklingham is about six miles away, and by the time he reached us, the peddler had already told his tale to several groups of wide-eyed people in the hamlets and settlements dotted along his route.

‘They say a great, fair, red-bearded giant of a feller burst into the house,’ the peddler announced, gazing round at his audience with a face twisted into a rictus of horror. ‘And, lacking a single drop of Christian charity in his stone of a heart, he set about breaking every pot and every stool, chair, bed and board in the place!’ Peddlers, I have observed, tend towards the dramatic when they tell a tale. ‘Not that they had much,’ this particular peddler added prosaically. ‘It was a poor sort of a household.’

‘What about the murder?’ a voice yelled from the back of the crowd, which had grown sizeable by now. I wasn’t the only one to spin round and glare at the speaker — it was the old washerwoman, Berta — since her remark had been singularly heartless and spoken with detectable relish.

‘I’m coming to that!’ the peddler yelled back. ‘Seems like the poor, pitiful victim came home unexpected-like and surprised him, and he hit her on the head with whatever he had in his hand. Must have been something big, hard and heavy,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘given the mess it made of the poor old girl. Skull driven in like an eggshell, blood and brains all over the place, and-’

‘Enough,’ came a quiet, firm and very authoritative voice. It was my aunt Edild’s, and she, as a very fine healer, is held in respect by almost all in the village.

The peddler subsided, although not entirely. He went on muttering to those crowding most closely around him, and suddenly we heard the name of the victim, hissed and whispered from person to person like the wind in the rushes: Utta, Utta of Icklingham, it’s old Utta who’s been killed!

My mother, who had quietly come to stand beside me, paled visibly. What on earth was wrong? I put out my hands to her, for I thought she might be about to faint, but she threw me off. Shouldering her way into the knot of people (my mother is a big woman, and there were several muttered curses and cries of ouch! as she trod on toes and dug her elbows into tender ribs) she thrust a path through to the peddler.

‘Is anyone else hurt?’ she demanded. She gave him a shake — he’s a runt of a fellow, certainly no match for my mother — and even from where I stood I heard his teeth rattle. ‘Tell me!’ my mother yelled.

It was then that I remembered who Utta of Icklingham was. With the horrible feeling that someone had put ice down my back, I understood why my mother was so distressed.

‘There was another person hurt, yes,’ the peddler said, trying to wrestle himself out of my mother’s grip and regain some semblance of virility in the face of this fury of a woman towering over him. ‘Big, fat, bad-tempered lass as is married to Utta’s lad Cerdic. She-’

My mother did not wait to hear the details. She didn’t even pause to reprimand the peddler for his description of Goda (which I reckoned was in fact pretty accurate). She spun round, strode back through the crowd and grabbed me.

‘Where’s Edild?’ she demanded, looking round wildly. ‘She must go, straight away, and she’s got to-’

‘I’m here, Essa,’ my aunt said calmly. She took my mother’s hand, gently stroking it. Edild is very fond of her sister-in-law.

‘Edild, Goda’s hurt, she’s been attacked, and you must go to her straight away. You-’

‘Lassair will go,’ my aunt announced. ‘I am in the middle of a very busy day attending to our own sick and wounded, and I cannot leave them. Lassair is fully competent,’ she added. Turning to me, she said, ‘You have your satchel with you, I see.’ Indeed I did; when the peddler arrived, I’d been about to set out to visit an outlying dwelling where I was to dress the infected toenail of an elderly man. ‘Have you everything you might need?’

I ran through a mental list. Bandages, ointments to stop blood flow and to knit bones, lavender wash to remove dirt; gut and fine needles for stitching large wounds.

Oh, but this was my sister I was preparing to treat! The realization brought me up short. I was not, admittedly, very fond of Goda, and it had been an enormous relief when she’d left home to wed Cerdic, but nevertheless she was my own flesh and blood. I might not like her, but I recognized that I loved her.

I would not, however, be the efficient healer that she needed just then if I allowed my emotions to undermine me. I straightened my back, raised my head and, fixing my aunt with a firm stare, said, ‘Yes, I have. I will leave immediately.’

I made the best speed I could to Icklingham. The weather was fine — we were all hoping we had seen the last of winter — and the tracks were dry, and, with the fen waters low, I was able to leap over the few meandering streams and ditches I encountered without having to hang around waiting for someone to ferry me across.

I did not allow myself to speculate on my sister’s possible injuries. I knew I must stay calm, so that I would arrive in the best frame of mind to treat her. When I walked into her village, I had almost persuaded myself that this was just another patient.

There was a large gaggle of interested onlookers milling around outside the little house that Cerdic built for his wife, all craning their necks and trying to see round one another. I heard snatches of fascinated, avid gossip. They say there’s blood all over the floor! Smashed her head, he did, and her brains flew everywhere! Huge, he was, like some giant out of the old legends!

I did not yet know who was within: my sister, presumably, but what of her husband — the dead woman’s son, after all — and the couple’s two little children? This lurid talk of blood, brains and a giant of supernatural size was hardly going to calm them and help them cope with sudden, violent death. My instinct was to wade in and give the thoughtless gossips a good ticking-off, but my years of study with my aunt Edild — the epitome of calm in a crisis — had taught me that there was another, better way.

Approaching the stocky, tough-looking man at the back of the crowd who had just made the remark about spattered brains, I touched him on the arm and said quietly, ‘I wonder if you might let me through, please? I’m a healer and I’ve come to see what I can do to help the injured woman.’

The man turned, a slightly guilty look on his face, and I gave him my best meek smile. Perhaps pretending to be helpless brought out some latent chivalry in him; anyway, he changed instantly from leader of the gossips to my champion, pushing his fellow villagers roughly out of the way and shouting, ‘Make way, make way, you feckless lot, the healer lass is here!’

The interior of the cottage was dark and smelled of blood and something else: somebody — perhaps the dead woman, in her terror — had lost control of their bladder. I set my satchel down on top of a stool and, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, looked around.

There was no sign of the body. To my enormous relief, they had already taken poor Utta away.

My sister was lying on the bed against the far wall; the bed she shared with Cerdic. I knew her house and its contents well, for, in addition to my occasional subsequent visits, six years ago I had been summoned by my newly married sister to look after her through her first pregnancy. An arduous, painful and all but unendurable pregnancy, according to the disgruntled Goda; in my view, she had suffered no more than any other woman, and most of her problems had come about because she’d been bone idle and far too fat.

I pushed my unpleasant memories of that earlier time right to the back of my mind.

Suddenly I noticed Cerdic, who was hovering around behind the door and looking like a man who has just endured slightly more than he can stand. His mother had been brutally murdered and, knowing my sister, I would have been surprised if she had been the consoling, loving helpmeet that he needed at that moment. I had a very quick look at Goda — she was pale, there was blood on her face and neck, but I judged by the way she was opening her mouth to shout at Cerdic, or me, or both of us, that she was in no immediate danger — and then crossed swiftly over to Cerdic.

I reached out and took hold of his icy hands. He looked vaguely at me for a moment, then managed a feeble smile and said, ‘Hello, Lassair.’

Good, he knew who I was. I did not think this was the time for commiserations, and instead I said softly, ‘Cerdic, where are Gelges and little Cerdic?’ My niece and nephew are five and three; far too small to be coping with this by themselves, and they were not in the house with their parents.

Cerdic made a helpless gesture. ‘Oh, someone took them.’ Even he seemed to appreciate that this was hardly adequate and, frowning, added, ‘My cousin. She lives along the track.’ He waved a hand.

His cousin. Yes, I recalled that Cerdic had many kinsfolk in Icklingham. The first time he’d set eyes on Goda, he’d been accompanied by his father and his uncle, and I remember lots of aunts, uncles and cousins attending the wedding. Cerdic’s father had died a couple of years ago, and that was why his mother had moved in with her son and my sister.

No doubt I was going to hear a lot more about that over the next few hours.

‘Go along to your cousin’s house and reassure your children,’ I said quietly to him. ‘I’ll look after Goda.’

For the first time I saw a sign of life and light in his face. ‘Am I allowed?’ he asked.

I realized that being with his little daughter and son was exactly what he wanted most, and guessed that only my sister’s imperious command that he must stay there with her had prevented him from doing what he surely knew he should.

‘Of course you are,’ I said. ‘They need you, Cerdic. Go and take them out to play.’

He looked aghast, as if I’d suggested something sacrilegious or downright criminal. Then his expression cleared, and he squared his shoulders and stood up straight. ‘Yes,’ he murmured, ‘yes, that’s exactly what I’ll do.’

Without so much as a glance at Goda, he wriggled out through the door like an eel escaping the jaws of the trap and ran off up the track.

I turned to face my sister.

The deluge of words started even before I’d had the chance to roll up my sleeves and begin my examination of her wounds. Without even bothering with hello, never mind thank you for coming so quickly, at the top of her voice she screeched, ‘Fool of a girl, what do you think you’re doing? Go and get him back — I need him, I’ve been viciously attacked and he ought to be here to protect me!’ She shoved me roughly aside so that she could peer out through the doorway, her eyes wide. ‘That great brute’s probably lurking outside, just waiting for me to be alone so that he can come and have another go, and he won’t rest till I’m as dead as Utta!’

There were so many things with which to argue in her outburst that I didn’t know where to begin. I opened my mouth to start with the obvious — that there was half a village loitering about outside the house, and no assailant in his right mind would risk an attack with so many witnesses — and planned to go on to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that her little children needed their father much more desperately than she did.

But then I seemed to hear my aunt’s soft voice inside my head, issuing a timely reminder that people who have just had a bad shock are not themselves, and must be treated with a tender kindness that makes allowances for temporary unreason.

I ignored the part of me protesting that this demanding, selfish behaviour wasn’t in the least out of character for my sister. I also ignored her hands batting out at me as I crouched over her; admittedly, this was a little more tricky. Then, in my most reassuring healer’s voice, I said, ‘Lie back now, Goda, and let me look at you.’

Her injuries were not too bad, although I did put a stitch in the cut on the side of her head, mainly because I was finding it hard to stop the bleeding. Otherwise it was mainly a bit of bruising, incurred as she fell over after the assailant hit her.

As I helped her into a clean gown, promising I’d put the bloodstained one in to soak, my sister’s angry resentment came galloping back. It had hurt her when I’d put in the stitch, although I’d done it as gently and swiftly as I knew how, and the pain had temporarily shut her up. It soon became clear that she was intent on making up for lost time. I had been trying to ignore her loud rantings, hoping she might stop, but presently I realized it was a vain hope.

‘-and when you’ve got the blood out of my gown, you can finish laundering it, and there’s a bag of the children’s clothes waiting so you’d better do them too. Then you can clean the floor, because I can’t be expected to put up with lying here and staring at all those muddy boot prints all over the place.’ The men who had come for Utta’s body evidently hadn’t paused to wipe their feet. ‘That pool of piss needs mopping up, it stinks,’ my sister’s dictatorial tones went on, ‘and then you’ll have to see about getting a meal ready, although, God help us, if you still cook as badly as you did last time you were here then I don’t suppose anyone’ll have much appetite for it, and then you can-’

‘Stop,’ I heard myself say.

For a moment, I was dumbstruck, amazed at my own daring. Then I knew exactly what to say.

I went to sit on my sister’s bed and stared right into her eyes. Taking a steadying breath, I said, ‘Goda dear, I will not be staying.’ Her deep, furious frown and gaping mouth suggested she was about to protest, so I plunged on. ‘I have my work to do and I cannot abandon it. I will come to see you again in a week or so and remove that stitch, unless someone here can do it, and, in the meantime, you should keep the wound clean and try not to get it wet. I’ll leave you some lavender oil and you must put a drop or two on to the cut each day.’

I stood up, packing the tools of my trade into my leather satchel and preparing to leave. I took a step towards the door. Two steps; three. I thought I’d got away with it.

I should have known better.

‘How dare you speak to me like that!’ my sister yowled. ‘That’s quite enough of your cheek, Lassair. You’ll remain here as long as I need you, and I just hope you know a bit more about how to run a home than you did the last time you made your feeble attempt to look after me! You-’

I watched all my fine resolutions about being calm, dignified, firm and a credit to my profession grow little wings and fly out through the door. As if I were a child again, and Goda my horrible, bossy, selfish, demanding and cruel tormentor, I raced back to her bed and shouted, ‘I did my best! I was thirteen years old and you were nothing better than a bully! You were such a fat, lazy cow that it was no wonder you had a rotten time — it was all your own fault, and yet you made absolutely sure that I was the one to suffer for it!’

For the first time in my life, I saw my sister shocked into silence. It occurred to me that I should have tried shouting at her before.

There was a long pause — I fought to bring my ragged breathing under control — and then Goda said in a very small voice, ‘But, Lassair, I really do need you. Who else will be strong enough to drive away the horrors when I see it all happening over and over again?’

Remorse flooded through me. My sister had witnessed murder today, and she had come close to being killed herself, yet the best I could do was yell at her.

I knelt down in front of her. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said humbly. ‘You’ve had a very frightening experience, and I shouldn’t have shouted at you.’ But some devil in me made me add, ‘I’m still not staying.’

The ghost of a smile crossed Goda’s plump face. ‘You’ve grown up, little sister,’ she said, and I detected grudging admiration.

The silence extended, but it was a more companionable one now. Presently I said, ‘Why don’t you tell me all about it?’ It might help her get over it, I thought, to relive the dreadful events while they were still fresh in her mind.

She lay back on her pillow, and the hand in mine relaxed. ‘Not much to tell, really,’ she said. ‘Utta and I were out with the children, setting off to the place where the peddler usually stops, since he was due this morning. I bought a few bits, and Utta moaned because he was out of fine thread.’ A look of intense irritation crossed her face and she added angrily, ‘Lassair, you have no idea what it’s like living with that cranky old bat! She’s self-centred, lazy, she thinks the sun shines out of Cerdic’s arse and, according to her, the woman’s not been born who’s good enough for him!’ I thought Goda had tempor-arily forgotten Utta was dead. The tirade ended as quickly as it had begun, and Goda said, ‘Where was I? Oh, yes. The old cow went on moaning all the way home and, in desperation, I told her that if she was going to be such a misery, she could go on ahead, and I’d stop and sit with the children in the sun for a while.’

I knew exactly what Goda was about to say, and I felt deep sympathy for my sister. I wondered if I should prevent her continuing, but, for one thing, it would probably do her good to express what was troubling her, and, for another, preventing my sister from doing virtually anything has always been a challenge.

‘If I hadn’t been so impatient, we’d all have got home together,’ she said on a sob, her face crumpling into an expression of remorse, ‘and then Utta would still be alive.’

‘But you and your children might not be,’ I said softly. ‘And Utta had already had a long life. If any of you had to die, better that it was the eldest.’

Perhaps not my most compassionate piece of reasoning, but I know my sister.

After a while she sniffed, wiped her nose and her eyes on her sleeve and said, ‘I suppose you’re right.’

To encourage her away from her guilty thoughts, I said, ‘What happened when you got home?’

‘There was this great hulking brute of a man smashing up my house, that’s what happened!’ Goda cried. ‘Utta was lying on the floor, and she wasn’t moving. The children were behind me, so I pushed them back outside and slammed the door. The giant was crashing round the room, picking things up, hurling them about, poking under the beds and into all the corners — honestly, Lassair, you’d have thought he was looking for something, only we’ve got nothing anyone would want!’ Bitter resentment filled her face, as if, in the middle of this new trouble, her perpetual, underlying anger at being married to a hard-working but poor man, who could not afford to buy her the luxuries she craved, had surfaced once more. ‘He looked up and saw me standing inside the door, and he gave a great yell, and came across and took a swing at me. Then he wrested the door open and fled.’

Her eyes wandered away in the direction of the shelf where she stores her cooking utensils and her few bits of good pottery. The utensils were bent and dented, and the pots were smashed to pieces.

‘I liked those pots,’ my sister said. Then, softly and quietly, she began to weep.