Mistress of the Art of Death

Fourteen

She sat on the Cam ’s bank in the same spot, on the same upturned pail that Ulf had sat on to do his fishing.

She watched the river. Nothing else.

Behind the house at her back, the streets were full of noise and bustle, some of it to do with the assize, much of it caused by the search for Ulf. Gyltha herself, Mansur, the two Matildas, Adelia’s patients, Gyltha’s customers, friends, neighbors, parish reeve, and those merely concerned all were looking for the child-with increasing despair.

“The boy was restive in the castle and wished to go fishing,” Mansur had told Adelia, so stolid as to be almost rigid. “I came with him. Then the small, fat one”-he referred to Matilda B.-“called me into the house to mend a table leg. When I came outside again, he was gone.” The Arab refused to meet her eye, which told her how upset he was. “You may tell the woman I am sorry,” he’d said.

Gyltha hadn’t blamed him, hadn’t blamed anybody; the terror was too great to convert into anger. Her frame wizened into that of a much smaller, older woman; she would not stay still. Already she and Mansur had been upriver and down, asking everybody they met if they had seen the boy and jumping into boats to tear the cover off anything hidden. Today they were questioning traders by the Great Bridge.

Adelia did not go with them. All that night she’d stayed in the solar window, watching the river. Today she sat where Ulf had sat and went on watching it, gripped by a grief so terrible that she was immobilized-although she would have stayed on the bank in any case. “It’s the river,” Ulf had said, and in her head she listened to him say it over and over again, because, if she stopped listening, she would hear him scream.

Rowley came crashing through the reeds, limping, and tried to take her away. He said things, held her. He seemed to want her to go to the castle, where he was forced to stay, being so busy with the assize. He kept mentioning the king; she hardly heard him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I must remain here. It’s the river, you see. The river takes them.”

“How can the river take them?” He spoke gently, thinking her mad, which, of course, she was.

“I don’t know,” she told him. “I have to stay here until I do.”

He nagged at her. She loved him but not enough to go with him; she was under the direction of a different, more commanding love.

“I shall come back,” he said at last.

She nodded, barely noticing that he had gone.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. Some of the passing boat people who knew what had happened shouted encouragement to the woman on the bank sitting on her upturned bucket with a dog beside her. “Don’t worry, my duck. He’s maybe playing some’eres. He’ll turn up like a bad penny.” Others averted their eyes from her and remained silent.

She didn’t see or hear them, either. What she saw was Ulf’s naked, skinny little body struggling in Gyltha’s hands as she held it over the bath preparatory to letting it drop into the water.

It’s the river.

She made up her mind when, in the late afternoon, Sister Veronica and Sister Walburga came by in their punt. Walburga saw her and poled to the bank. “Now don’t you lecture us, mistress. Prior didn’t send enough supplies upriver to feed a kitten, and we got to go up again with more. But we’re strong again, ain’t we, Sister? Strong in the power of God.”

Sister Veronica was concerned. “What is it, mistress? You look tired.”

“Not to be wondered at,” Walburga said. “Wearied from a-looking after us. Angel, she is, blessings on her.”

It’s the river.

Adelia got up from her bucket. “I shall come with you, if I may.”

Pleased, they helped her into the punt and sat her on the stern thwart, her knees bent up to her chin with a crate of hens under her feet. They laughed when Safeguard-“Old Smelly,” they called him-disgruntledly set off to follow them by the towpath.

Prioress Joan, they said, was telling the world that Little Saint Peter had been vindicated, for when had so many been so ill and only two died, one of those elderly? The saint had been tested and not found wanting.

The two nuns took turn-and-turn-about at poling with a frequency that showed they hadn’t recovered all their strength yet, but they made little of it. “Harder yesterday,” Walburga said, “when us was poling separate punts. But we got the Lord’s strength on our side.” She could go the farthest before she rested; nevertheless, Veronica was the more lissome and economic in movement and made a lovelier shape as her slim arms pressed on the pole and raised it, hardly stirring water that was turning amber in the setting of the sun.

Trumpington flowed past. Grantchester…

They were on a part of the river left unexplored on Adelia’s day with Mansur and Ulf. Here it divided, becoming two rivers, the Cam to the south, the other entering it from the east.

The punt turned east. Walburga, who was poling, answered Adelia’s question-the first she had asked. “This? This be the Granta. This un takes us to the anchorages.”

“And your auntie,” Veronica said, smiling. “It takes us to your auntie as well, Sister.”

Walburga grinned. “That it do. Her’ll be surprised seeing me twice in a week.”

The countryside changed with the river, becoming something resembling flat upland where reed and alder fell back to be replaced by firm grass and taller trees. In the twilight, Adelia could see hedges and fences rather than dikes. The moon, which had been a thin, round wafer in the evening sky, gained substance.

Safeguard was beginning to limp, and Veronica said he should travel with them, poor thing. Once the hens stopped protesting at his presence, there was silence broken only by the last twittering of birds.

Walburga took the punt to an inlet from which a path led to a farm. As she lumbered out, she said, “Now don’t you go lifting all that stuff on your own, Sister. Get the old codgers to help you.”

“They will.”

“And you can manage it back on your own?”

Veronica nodded and smiled. Walburga curtsied to Adelia, then waved them off.

The Granta became narrower and darker, finding its way through a winding, shallow valley in which beeches occasionally came down to the water and Veronica had to crouch to avoid branches. She stopped to light a lantern, which she placed on the board at her feet so that it lit the black water ahead for a yard or so and reflected the green eyes of some animal that looked at them before turning away into the undergrowth.

As they cleared the trees, the moon reached them again to silver a black-and-white landscape of pasture and hedge. Veronica poled to the left bank. “Journey’s end, the Lord be praised,” she said.

Adelia peered ahead and pointed to a huge, flattopped shape in the distance. “What’s that?”

Veronica turned to look. “There? That’s Wandlebury Hill.”

Of course, it would be.

A tiny, twinkling star seemed to have landed on the hill’s head, deceptive in the nature of stars so that a blink sent it away and another blink brought it back.

She shifted in order to let Veronica lift the hen crate from under her legs. “I shall wait here,” she said.

The nun looked at her doubtfully, and then at the baskets still in the punt needing to be carried to the unseen anchorages.

Adelia said, “Would you leave the lantern with me?”

Sister Veronica cocked her head. “Feared of the dark?”

Adelia considered the question. “Yes.”

“Keep it then, and the Lord take care of you. I’ll be back in a while.” The nun hefted a sack over her shoulder and, gripping the crate in her other hand, set off up a moonlit track leading into trees.

Adelia waited until she’d gone, then lifted Safeguard onto the bank, picked up the lantern, raised it to see that its candle was good and stout, and began walking.

For a while, the river and its accompanying path meandered in the general direction in which she headed, but, after perhaps a mile, she saw that it would take her too far to the south. She left it to keep due east as the crow flew-except that a crow wouldn’t have been impeded by the obstacles that now met Adelia: great stretches of brambles, hillocks, and dips made slippery by the recent rain, hurdle fences that sometimes could be climbed or crawled through and sometimes couldn’t.

If human eyes watched from Wandlebury Hill, they saw a tiny, errant light straying across the dark country, going this way and that with apparent aimlessness as Adelia circumambulated one obstruction, then another. Sometimes the light paused because she fell, and fell awkwardly in an attempt to keep the lantern from hitting the ground and going out, Safeguard standing by until she got up.

Occasionally, not having heard it, she was startled by a deer or fox fleeing across her path-her own sobbing breath being too loud to hear anything else, though she sobbed not from grief nor exhaustion but from effort.

However, the watcher on Wandlebury Hill, if there were a watcher, could have seen that for all its vagaries, the little light was coming closer.

And Adelia, struggling through her valley of shadows, saw the hill slowly swell until it dominated everything else ahead. The star that had gotten entangled on its brow was no longer intermittent but sent out a steady glow.

She nearly retched as she went, sick with her own stupidity. Why didn’t I go here straight away? The bodies of the children told me, told me. Chalk, they said. We were killed on chalk. The river fixated me. But the river leads to Wandlebury Hill. I should have known.

Scratched and bleeding, limping, yet with the lantern still lit, she heaved herself up onto a flat surface and found it to be the spot on the Roman road where Prior Geoffrey had once screamed to anyone who would listen that he could not piss.

There was nobody about; indeed, it was late now and the moon was high, but Adelia was encapsulated away from time; there was no past where people lived; there wasn’t a child called Ulf, she had stopped hearing or seeing him; there was a hill, and she must reach its top. Followed by the dog, she took the steep track without recalling the occasion on which she had first taken it, merely knowing that it was the way to go.

When she gained the top, she had to look for the twinkling light, bewildered that it had led her from a distance but was no longer apparent. Oh, God, don’t let it be put out. In darkness and among this vast expanse of hummocks, she’d never find the place.

She saw it, a glow through some bushes ahead, and ran, forgetting the depressions in the ground. This time, when she fell, the lantern went out. No matter. She began to crawl.

It was a strange light, neither a fire nor the diffusion of candles-more like a beam directed upward. Scrabbling toward it, her hands touched nothing and she was jerked forward so that she was humped over a slope. Safeguard was looking straight ahead, and there it was, three yards away from her in the center of the bowl-like depression. It wasn’t a fire or lanterns. There was nobody there. The light came from a hole in the ground. It was the gaping mouth of hell lit by the flames below.

All Adelia’s training had to come to her aid then, every nut of natural philosophy, every hypothesis proved, every yardstick of common sense had to be set against unreason in order to fight the howling panic that sent her scrabbling away from the hole, wailing. She prayed for deliverance: From terror by night, Almighty God defend me.

“It’s not the Pit,” a voice said, primly, in her head, “It’s a pit.”

Of course it was. A pit. Just a pit. And Ulf was in it.

She started to crawl forward and struck her knee against something that lay in the grass and had seemed merely part of the ground but which, after a minute, her exploring hands discovered to be manufactured-a huge and solid wheel. She crawled over it, finding it covered with turf.

She put out her hand to stop Safeguard from coming too close, then, with the slowness of a turtle, extended her neck to look over the pit’s edge.

Not a pit. A shaft, some six feet across and the Lord only knew how deep-the light rising from its bottom confused distance-but deep. A ladder led down into whiteness-white, all white, as far as she could see.

Chalk. Of course it was chalk, the chalk on the dead children.

Rakshasa hadn’t dug it; excavation such as this had involved the labor of hundreds. He’d found it and used it; how he’d used it.

Is that what all the depressions on the hill were? The filled-in entrances to mines? But who had needed chalk on such a scale?

It doesn’t matter; their purpose doesn’t matter now. Ulf is down there.

So is the killer. He’s lit the place-those are flambeaux down there; this is the light the shepherd saw. Dear Lord, we should have found it; we walked this stinking hill, skirting every depression to look into it; how did we miss this open invitation to the underworld?

Because it wasn’t open, she thought. The turfed wheel she’d crawled across wasn’t a wheel at all, it was a cover, a lid, a wellhead. When it was in place, it made this dip in the ground look like any other.

Such a clever fellow, Rakshasa.

But some of Adelia’s skin-crawling horror of the killer left her because she knew that when Simon’s cart had carried Prior Geoffrey up the track to Wandlebury Hill, Rakshasa had panicked. Like the guilty thing he was, he had taken the bodies from the shaft by night and carried them down the hill, so that his lair would be kept secret.

This shaft is your place, she thought, so precious it makes you vulnerable. It glares for you as it does for me now, even when the lid is on; it is the tunnel into your body, the entrance to your rotting soul, your doom to be discovered. For you, its existence cries to God, whom it outrages.

And I’ve found it.

She listened. The hill around her rustled with life, but the shaft delivered no sound. She should not have come alone, oh, mercy, she should not. What service was she providing that little boy by bringing no reinforcement and in telling nobody where she had gone?

Yet the moment had demanded it; she could not think of what else she might have done. Anyway, it was done, the milk was spilt and, somehow, she had to mop it up.

If Ulf were dead, she could pull out the ladder and push the wheel into place, entombing the living killer, and walk away while Rakshasa thrashed around in his own sepulchre.

But she had followed the belief that Ulf wasn’t dead, that the other children had been kept alive in Rakshasa’s larder until he was ready for them-a hypothesis based on what the body of a dead boy had once told her. Such frail evidence, such a gossamer of belief, yet it had pulled her into the nuns’ punt and marched her across country to this hellhole so that…

So that what?

Lying prone, with her head over the pit, Adelia considered her choices with the chill logic of despair. She could run for help, which, considering how long it would take, was no option at all-the last habitation she’d seen had been Sister Walburga’s auntie’s farm-and now that she was close to Ulf, she could not leave him. She could descend the shaft and be killed, which in the end she must be prepared to do if, thereby, Ulf could escape.

Or, and this had considerably more merit, she thought, she could descend and kill the killer. Which entailed finding a weapon. Yes, she must look for a stick, or a stone, anything sharp…

Beside her, the Safeguard shifted suddenly. A pair of hands seized Adelia’s ankles and raised them so that she slid forward. Then, with a grunt of effort, somebody threw her down the pit.

What saved her was the ladder. It met her fall halfway down, breaking some of her ribs on impact but allowing her body to slither the rest of the way on its lower rungs. She had time-it seemed quite a long time-to think I must stay conscious before her head struck the ground and she wasn’t.

AWARENESS WAS A LONG TIME coming to her, traveling slowly through a misty crowd of people who insisted on moving about and shifting her and talking, which irritated her to the point where, if she hadn’t been in such pain, she’d have told them to stop. Gradually, they went away and the sound of voices dwindled down to one that persisted in being just as irritating.

“Do be quiet,” she said and opened her eyes, but the effort hurt so much that she decided to stay unconscious for a while, which was just as impossible because there was horror waiting for her and someone else, so that her mind, determined on her own and the someone else’s survival, insisted on working.

Stay still and think. God, the pain; her head was being trepanned. That would be concussion-how severe it was impossible to estimate without knowing for how long she’d been unconscious; the length of time would indicate the severity. Damnation, it hurt. And so did her ribs, possibly two fractures there but-she experimented with a deep breath, wincing-probably no puncture of the lung. It wasn’t helped by the fact that she seemed to be standing with her arms over her head, causing compression on her chest.

It doesn’t matter. You’re in such danger, your medical condition doesn’t matter. Think and survive.

So. She was in the shaft. She remembered being at its top; now she was at its bottom; her brief glimpse had shown enclosing whiteness all around. What she couldn’t remember was getting from one to the other-the natural result of concussion. Pushed or fallen, obviously.

And somebody else had fallen, or had been brought down before or after Adelia herself, because the attempt at opening her eyes had shown a figure against the opposite wall. It was this someone who was ceaselessly and so irritatingly making a noise.

“Save-and-preserve-me, dear-Lord-and-Master-and-I-shall-follow-Thee-all-my-days-I-will-abase-myself-unto-Thee. Punish-me-with-Thy-whips-and-scorpions-yet-keep-me-safe…”

The babbling was Sister Veronica’s. The nun stood ten or so feet away on the other side of the ceilingless chamber that was the pit of the shaft. Her wimple and coif had been torn down to her neck and her hair hung over her face like wisps of dark mist. Her hands were stretched above her head where, like those of Adelia, they were manacled to a bolt.

She was out of control with terror, spittle running down her chin, her body shaking so that the iron manacles about her wrists rattled an accompaniment to the prayer for release issuing from her mouth.

“I wish you’d be quiet,” Adelia said petulantly.

Veronica’s eyes widened with shock and, a little, with justified accusation. “I followed you,” she said. “You’d gone, and I followed you.”

“Unwise,” Adelia told her.

“The Beast is here, Mary, Mother of God, protect us, he took me, he’s down here, he’ll eat us, oh, Jesus, Mary, save us both, he’s horned.”

“I dare say he is, just stop shouting.”

Enduring the pain, Adelia turned her head to look around. Her dog lay sprawled at the bottom of the ladder, his neck broken.

A sob forced itself out of her throat. Not now, not now, she told herself; there’s no room for it; you can’t grieve now. To survive you must think. But oh, Safeguard…

Flames from two torches stuck into holders at head height on either side of the chamber illuminated rough, round walls of whiteness marred here and there by a green algae so that she and Veronica stood as if at the bottom of a massive tube of thick, dirty, crumpled paper.

They stood alone; there was no sign of the nun’s Beast, though leading off from either side were two tunnels. The opening to the one on Adelia’s left was small, a crawling space barred by an iron grating. The one to the right was lit by unseen torches and had been enlarged to admit a man without bending. A curve in it blocked her view of its length, but just inside the entrance, propped against the wall and reflecting the chalk opposite, stood a battered, polished shield engraved with the cross of crusade.

And in the place of honor, in the center of this torture chamber, midway between her and Veronica and the dead dog, stood the Beast’s altar.

It was an anvil. So ordinary in its rightful place, so awful here; an anvil heaved from the thatched warmth of a smithy so that children might be penetrated on it. The weapon lay on its top, shiny among the stains, a spearhead. It was faceted-as were the wounds it had inflicted.

Flint, dear God, flint. Flint that occurred in chalk, seams of it. Ancient devils had labored to dig this mine in order to reach flint that they might shape it and kill with it. As primitive as they, Rakshasa used an implement made by a dark people in a dark time.

She shut her eyes.

But the bloodstains were dull; nobody had died on that anvil recently.

“Ulf,” she shrieked, opening her eyes. “Ulf.”

To her left, from far up the darkness of the left-hand tunnel, deadened by the porous chalk yet audible, came a mumbling groan.

Adelia turned her face up to the circle of sky above her head and gave thanks. The sickness of concussion, nausea from the smell of obliterating chalk, from the stink of whatever resin it was the torches were burning, gave way to a waft of fresh, May air. The boy lived.

Well now. There, on the anvil, just a couple of yards away, lay a weapon all ready for her hand.

Though her hands were tethered, from what she could see of Sister Veronica’s situation and if it resembled her own, the manacles holding their upstretched arms were attached to a bolt that went into the bare chalk. And chalk was chalk; it crumbled-as much use for retaining a fixture as sand.

Adelia flexed her elbows and pulled at the bolt above her head. Oh, God, oh, hell. Pain like hot wire through the chest. This time, she’d surely, surely punctured a lung. She hung, puffing, waiting for blood to come into her mouth. After a while, she realized it wasn’t going to, but if that blasted nun didn’t cease moaning…

“Stop gibbering,” she yelled at the girl. “Look, pull. Pull, damn you. The bolt. In the wall. It’ll come out if you tug it.” Even in pain, she’d felt a tiny give in the chalk above.

But Veronica couldn’t, wouldn’t, comprehend; her eyes were wide and wild like a deer facing the hounds; she was gibbering.

It is up to me.

Another full tug was to be avoided, but wiggling the manacles might shift the bolt sufficiently to create a cavity around it and enable it to be eased out.

Frantically, she began jiggling her hands up and down, oblivious now to everything except a piece of iron, as if she were enclosed in chalk with it, moving it grain by grain, hurting, hurting, but seeing the near end of the protesting bolt separating from…

The nun screamed.

“Quiet,” Adelia screamed back. “I’m concentrating.”

The nun went on screaming. “He’s coming.”

There had been a flicker of movement to the right. Reluctantly, Adelia turned her head. The tunnel’s bend, which was in Veronica’s view, prevented Adelia, opposite her, from seeing the thing itself, but she saw it mirrored in the shield. The uneven, convex surface threw back a reflection of dark flesh, at once diminished and monstrous. The thing was naked and looking at itself. Preening, it touched its genitals and then the apparatus on its head.

Death was preparing for his entrance.

In that extremity of terror, everything abandoned Adelia. If she could have sunk to her knees, then she’d have crawled to the creature’s feet: Take the nun, take the boy, leave me. If her hands were free, she’d have bolted for the ladder, leaving Ulf behind. She lost courage, rationality, everything except self-preservation.

And regret. Regret pierced the panic with a vision, not of her Maker but of Rowley Picot. She was going to die, and disgustingly, without having loved a man in the only health there was.

The thing came out of the tunnel; it was tall, made taller by the antlers on its head. Part of a skinned stag’s mask covered the upper face and nose, but the body was human, with dark hair on chest and pubis. Its penis was erect. It pranced up to Adelia, pushing itself against her. Where deer eyes should have been, there were holes from which blue, human eyes blinked at her. The mouth grinned. She could smell animal.

She vomited.

As it sheered back to avoid her spew, the antlers rocked and she saw that bits of string tied the antlered contraption to Rakshasa’s head, though not tightly enough to prevent them from wobbling when he made a sudden movement.

How vulgar. Contempt and fury engulfed her; she had better things to do than stand here threatened by a mountebank in a homemade headdress.

“You stinking crap-hound,” she told him. “You don’t frighten me.” At that moment, he hardly did.

She’d discomfited him; the eyes in the mask shifted; a hiss came from between the teeth. As he retreated, she saw that the penis had drooped.

But he was feeling behind him with one arm while looking at Adelia. His hand found Sister Veronica’s body, crawled upward until it reached the neck of her habit, and ripped it down to the waist. She screamed.

Still watching Adelia, the thing swaggered for a moment, then turned and bit Veronica on the breast. When it turned back to see Adelia’s reaction, its penis was rampant again.

Adelia began to swear; language was the only missile she had, and she pelted him with it: “You turd-mouthed, stench-sucking lummox, what are you good for? Hurting women and children when they’re tied? Not excited any other way? Dress like a dog’s beef, you son of a pox-ridden sow, under it all you’re no man, just a betty-buttered mother’s boy.”

Who this screaming self was, Adelia didn’t know, didn’t care. It was going to be killed, but it wasn’t going to die in debasement like Veronica; it would go cursing.

Lord Almighty, she’d hit the gold; the thing had lost his erection again. He hissed and, still looking at her, wrenched the nun’s clothes down to the crotch.

Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Gyltha’s Saxon English, Adelia used them all; filth from unknown gutters came to her aid now.

A jellybag, she called him, a snot-faced, arse-licking, goat-fucking, bum-bellied, farting, turd-breathed apology, Homo insanus.

As she shouted, she watched the thing’s penis; it was a flag, a signal to her victory or his. The act of killing would bring it to emission, she knew, but, in order for it to be in a condition to emit, the Beast needed his victim’s fear. There were creatures…her stepfather had told her…reptiles that dragged humans underwater and stashed them until their flesh was soft enough to make a pleasurable meal. For this one, terror was the tenderizer. “You…you corkindrill,” she yelled at it. Fear nourished Rakshasa; it was his excitement, his soup. Deny it to him and, dear God grant it, he couldn’t kill.

She shrieked at him. He was a farting, pudding-pulling chaser, a maggot-brained hog with a cock like a winkle; she’d seen bigger balls on a raspberry.

No time to be amazed at herself. Survive. Taunt. Keep blood in your veins and out of his. With every word, she jiggled the iron cuffs around her hands-and the bolt in the chalk moved more and more easily.

There was blood on Veronica’s stomach-her fear had gone beyond terror into a state where her body remained flaccid to the thing’s abuse-her head back, eyes closed, her mouth in the rictus of a skull.

Adelia kept swearing.

But now Rakshasa was himself tearing the nun’s manacles out of the wall. He stood back to hit the girl across the mouth and then took her by the scruff of her neck to march her toward the small tunnel where he slammed her to her knees. He removed the grating with one pull. He pointed. “Fetch,” he said.

Adelia’s cursing faltered. He was going to bring the child into this uncleanness and befoul him.

Veronica, on her knees, looked up at her torturer, apparently bewildered. Rakshasa kicked her backside and pointed into the hole, but he was watching Adelia. “Fetch the boy.”

The nun crawled into the tunnel and the clank of the manacles on her hands as she moved became muffled.

Adelia prayed a silent scream: Almighty God, take my soul; I am past what can be borne.

Rakshasa had picked up the body of Safeguard. He threw it on the anvil so that it was on its back. Still watching Adelia, his hand reached for the flint knife and ran its point experimentally down the back of his wrist. He put up his arm to show her the blood.

He needs my fear, she thought. He has it.

The antlers wobbled as, for the first time, he took his gaze off Adelia and looked down. He raised the knife…

She closed her eyes. It was a reenactment, and she would not watch it. He will cut off my eyelids, and I shall not watch it.

But she had to listen to the knife striking into flesh and the squelch and the splinter of bone. On and on.

There was no more swearing in her now, no defiance; her hands were still. If there is a hell, she thought dully, his will be set apart.

The noises stopped. She heard the approaching pad of his feet, smelled his stink. “Watch,” he said.

She shook her head and felt a blow on her left arm that brought her eyes open. He’d stabbed her to get her attention. He was pettish. “Watch.”

“No.”

They both heard it: a scuffling from the little tunnel. Teeth showed beneath the stag’s mask. He looked toward the entrance where Ulf was stumbling out. Adelia looked with him.

God save him, the boy was so small, so plain, too real, too normal against the monstrous stage the creature had set for him; he skewed it so that Adelia was ashamed to be on it in his presence.

He was fully dressed but tottering and semiconscious, his hands tied in front of him. There were blotches round his mouth and nose. Laudanum. Held over his face. To keep him quiet.

His eyes traveled slowly to the shredded mess on the anvil and widened.

She shouted, “Don’t be frightened, Ulf.” It wasn’t an exhortation but a command: don’t show fear; don’t feed him.

She saw him try to concentrate. “I ain’t,” he whispered.

Courage returned to Adelia. And hatred. And ferocity. No pain on earth could stop her from this. Rakshasa had turned half away from her in Ulf’s direction. She jerked her hands and the bolt came out of the wall. In the same movement she brought her arms down so that the chain connecting the manacles to each other should go over Rakshasa’s neck that she might throttle him with it.

She hadn’t achieved enough height, and the chain caught on the antlers. She swung on it so that the headdress tilted ludicrously backward and to one side, its strings dragging tight under Rakshasa’s nose and across his eyes.

For a moment he was blinded, and the assault took him off balance. His foot slid and he went down, Adelia with him-into the segments of dog intestines that made the floor slippery.

There was grunting, hers or Rakshasa’s, and she hung on, she couldn’t do anything else, linked by chain to the antlers, to which he was linked by string; they were joined together, his body crooked under hers, her knees on his outstretched knife arm. Awkwardly placed, he struggled to throw her off so that he could strike backward with it; she struggled so that he shouldn’t displace and kill her. All the time she was shouting: “Get out, Ulf. The ladder. Get out.”

The back beneath her rose; she rose with it and then went down as Rakshasa slipped again. The knife went out of his hand into the slick. Still carrying Adelia, he crawled for it, shoving against Ulf and Veronica in his effort so that they fell into the melee. The four of them rolled back and forth across the mess of the floor in an intricate bundle.

There was a new element somewhere. A sound. It meant nothing; Adelia was blind and deaf. Her hands had found the antlers and were awkwardly twisting them so that a point should go into Rakshasa’s skull. The new noise was nothing, her own agony nothing. Twist. Into the brain. Twist. Mustn’t bump me off. Mustn’t let go. Twist. Kill.

The string on the antlers broke, leaving them in her hands. The body beneath slithered away from her and, turning, crouched to spring.

For a second they were opposite each other, glaring and panting. The noise was loud now; it came from the top of the shaft, a combination of familiar sounds so inappropriate to this struggle that Adelia paid them no mind.

But they meant something to the Beast; its eyes changed; she saw a dulling; the alert joy of the kill went from them. The thing was still a beast with teeth exposed, but its head was up, sniffing, considering; it was scared.

Dear God, she thought, and was afraid to think, that’s what it is; beautiful, oh beautiful, the blow of a horn and the belling of hounds.

The hunt had come for Rakshasa.

Her lips split into a grin as bestial as his. “Now you die,” she said.

A shout came down the shaft. “Halloooo.” Beautiful, oh beautiful. It was Rowley’s voice. And Rowley’s big feet coming down the ladder.

The thing’s eyes were everywhere, looking frantically for the knife. Adelia saw it first. “No.” She fell on it, covering it. You shan’t have it.

Rowley, sword in hand, was nearing the bottom of the ladder, obstructed in getting off it by the bodies of Ulf and Veronica.

From the floor, Adelia reached to grip Rakshasa’s heel as it went past, but her fingers slipped on its grease. Rowley was kicking the nun and boy out of his way. Adelia’s view of Rakshasa’s legs and buttocks as he sprinted for the big tunnel was blocked by Rowley’s sprinting after him. She saw Rowley fall, flailing, as he tripped over the shield; she heard him curse-and then he was gone.

She sat and looked up. The baying of hounds was loud now; she could see snouts and teeth poking round the head of the shaft. The ladder was shaking; somebody else was clambering onto it, ready to come down.

There was nowhere in her body that didn’t hurt. To collapse would be nice, but she dare not do it yet. It wasn’t over-the knife had gone.

And so had Veronica and the child.

Rowley came rushing out of the tunnel, kicking the shield out of the way so that it skidded and hit the anvil. He grabbed a flambeau from the wall and disappeared with it into the tunnel again.

She was in darkness; the other torch was gone. A flicker of light showed her a puff of chalk dust and the hem of a black habit disappearing into the tunnel Ulf had come out of.

Adelia crawled after it. No. No, not now. We’re rescued. Give him to me.

It was a wormhole, an exploratory dig that had not been worked because the flare of Veronica’s torch when it came showed a gnarled, glistening line of flint running along it like a dado. The tunnel turned with the seam, cutting her off from the light ahead, and she was in a blackness so deep she might have gone blind. She went on.

No. Not now. Now we’re rescued.

It was lopsided crawling; her left arm was weakening where Rakshasa had stabbed it. Tired, so tired. Tired of being frightened. No time to be tired, no. Not now. Nodules of chalk crumbled under her right hand as her palm pressed her forward. I shall have him from you. Give him to me.

She came on them in a tiny chamber, huddled together like a couple of rabbits, Ulf limp in the nun’s grasp, his eyes closed. Sister Veronica held the torch high in one hand; the other, around the child, had the knife.

The nun’s lovely eyes were thoughtful. She was reasonable, though dribble emerged from the corner of her mouth. “We must protect him,” she told Adelia. “The Beast shall not have this one.”

“He won’t,” Adelia said, carefully. “He’s gone, Sister. He will be hunted down. Give me the knife now.”

Some rags lay next to an iron post planted deep in the ground with a dog lead trailing from it, the collar just big enough for a child’s neck. They were in Rakshasa’s larder.

Circular walls were turned red by the flickering torchlight. The drawings on them wriggled. Adelia, who daren’t take her eyes away from those of the nun, would not have looked at them in any case; in this obscenity of a womb, the embryos had waited not to be born but to die.

Veronica said, “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck.”

“Yes, Sister,” Adelia said, “it would be.” She crawled forward and took the knife out of the nun’s hand.

Between them, they dragged Ulf through the wormhole. As they came out, they saw Hugh the hunter looking around him like a dazed thing with a lantern in his hand. Rowley emerged from the other tunnel. He was swearing and frantic. “I lost him; there’s dozens of bloody tunnels along there, and my bloody torch went out. The bastard knows his way, I don’t.” He turned on Adelia as if he was furious with her-he was furious with her. “Is there another shaft somewhere?” As an afterthought, he asked, “Are you women hurt? How’s the boy?”

He urged them up the ladder, tucking Ulf under his arm.

For Adelia the climb was interminable, each rung an achievement gained through pain and a faintness that would have toppled her to the bottom again if she’d not had Hugh’s hand supporting her back. Her arm stung where the creature had stabbed it, and she became concerned that it might be poisoned. How ridiculous to die now. Put brandy on it, she kept thinking, or sphagnum moss would do; mustn’t die now, not when we’ve won.

And as her head reached above the shaft and air touched it…We have won. Simon, Simon, we’ve won.

Clinging to the top rung, she looked down toward Rowley. “Now they’ll know the Jews didn’t do it.”

“They will,” he said. “Get on.” Veronica was clinging to him, crying and gabbling. Adelia, struggling to get off the ladder, was nosed by hounds, their tails in frantic motion as if with pleasure at a job well done. Hugh called to them, and they backed away. When Rowley emerged, Adelia said, “You tell them. Tell them the Jews didn’t do it.”

Two horses were grazing nearby.

Hugh said, “That where our Mary died? Down there? Who done it?”

She told him.

He stood still for a moment, the lantern lighting his face from below so that terrible shadows distorted it.

Teetering with frustration and indecision, Rowley shoved Ulf into Adelia’s arms. He needed men to hunt the tunnels below, but neither of the two women was in a condition to fetch them, and he dared not go himself or send Hugh.

“Somebody’s got to guard this shaft. He’s under this bloody hill, and sooner or later he’ll pop out like a bloody rabbit, but there’s maybe another exit somewhere.” He snatched Hugh’s lantern and set off across the hilltop in what he knew, they all knew, was a hopeless attempt to find it.

Adelia laid Ulf on the grass above the edge of the depression, taking off her cloak to pillow it under his head. Then she sat down beside him and breathed in the smell of the night-how could it still be night? She caught the scent of hawthorn and juniper. Sweet grass reminded her that she was filthy with sweat and blood and urine, probably her own, and the stink of Rakshasa’s body, which, she knew, if she spent her life in a bath, would never again quite leave her nostrils.

She felt expended, as if everything had gone from her and left just a trembling slough of skin.

Beside her, Ulf jerked into a sitting position, gasping at the reviving air, his fists clenched. He looked around, at the landscape, the sky, Hugh, the dogs, Adelia. He had trouble enunciating. “Where’s…this at? Am I out?”

“Out and safe,” she told him.

“They…got un?”

“They will.” God send they would.

“He never…scared me,” Ulf said, beginning to shake. “I fought the bugger…shouted…kept fighting.”

“I know,” Adelia told him. “They had to quiet you with poppy juice. You were too brave for them.” She put her arm round his shoulders as his tears began. “No need to be brave anymore.”

They waited.

A suspicion of gray in the sky to the east suggested that the night would actually have an end. Across the other side of the depression, Sister Veronica was on her knees, her whispered prayers like the rustle of leaves.

Hugh was keeping one foot on the top of the shaft’s ladder so that he might feel any movement on it, one hand on the hunting knife at his belt. He soothed his dogs, murmuring their names and telling them they were brave.

He glanced at Adelia. “Followed the scent of that old mongrel of yourn all the way, my lads did,” he said.

The hounds looked up as if they knew they’d been mentioned. “Sir Rowley, he were in rare old taking. ‘She’s gone after the boy,’ he said, ‘and very like got herself killed doing it.’ Called you a fair few names in his temper, like. But I told un. ‘That’s a fine old stinker, that ol’ dog of hers. My lads’ll track un,’ I said. Was that the old boy down there?”

Adelia roused herself. “Yes,” she said.

“I’m right sorry for that. Did his job, though.”

The hunter’s voice was controlled, dull. Somewhere in the tunnels below their feet ran the creature that had slaughtered his niece.

A rustle that caused Hugh to take the knife from his belt was the launch of a long-eared owl on its last foray of the night. There was sleepy twittering as small birds woke up. Rowley himself, and not just his lantern, could be seen now, a big, busy shape using its sword as a stick to prod the ground. But every bush on the studded, uneven ground flaked the moonlight with a shadow that could conceal a more sinuous darkness wriggling away.

The sky to the east became extraordinary, a lowering, threatening red band with streaks of jagged black.

“Shepherd’s warning,” Hugh said, “devil’s dawn.”

Listlessly, Adelia watched it. Ulf, beside her, showed equal indifference.

He is damaged, Adelia thought, as I am; we have been to places beyond experience and are stained by them. Perhaps I can bear it, but can he? He especially has been betrayed.

With that, energy came back to her. Painfully, she got to her feet and walked round the rim of the depression to where Veronica knelt, her hands steepled high so that the growing dawn light shone on them, her graceful head lowered in prayer, as Adelia had first seen it.

“Is there another exit?” Adelia asked.

The nun didn’t move. Her lips stilled for a moment before she resumed the whispered paternoster.

Adelia kicked her. “Is there another exit?”

There was a rasp of protest from Hugh.

Ulf’s gaze, which had followed Adelia, transferred to the nun. His treble rang out across Wandlebury Hill. “It was her.” He was pointing to Veronica. “Wicked, wicked female, she is.”

Hugh, shocked, whispered, “Hush, lad.”

Tears were plopping down Ulf’s ugly little face, but it had regained intelligence and intent and bitter anger. “’Twas her. As put stuff over my face, as took me. She’s in with un.”

“I know she is,” Adelia said. “She threw me down the shaft.”

The nun’s eyes stared up at her, beseeching. “The devil was too strong for me,” she said. “He tortured me-you saw him. I never wanted to do it.” Her eyes shifted and glowed red as they reflected the dawn behind Adelia’s back.

Hugh and Ulf, too, had turned suddenly to the east. Adelia spun round. The sky had flamed into savagery like an entire hemisphere alight and advancing to overwhelm them all. And there, as if he had conjured it, was the devil himself outlined in black against it, naked and running like a stag.

Rowley, fifty yards away, hared to intercept it. The figure capered for a second and changed direction. The watchers heard Rowley’s howl: “Hugh. He’s getting away. Hugh.”

The huntsman knelt, whispering to his hounds. He unleashed them. With the ease of rocking horses, they began the chase toward the sunrise.

The devil ran-God, how he ran-but now the hounds were outlined against the same stretch of sky.

There was a moment that stayed with those who saw it like a detail of hell on an illuminated manuscript, black on red gold, the dogs in mid-leap and the man with hands upraised as if he would climb the air, before the pack fell on Sir Joscelin of Grantchester and tore him to pieces.