The Bones of Avalon

LVI

Brown Blanket

A half circle of men were around us, the two torch-carriers standing either side of the gibbet frame, and in the fuzzy light I saw Fyche and his son, Stephen, and Sir Peter Carew, pale-eyed in the thick air. A jabbering amongst them, and then Carew’s voice was lifted above it.

‘Hellfire, let him alone. If he wishes to pull her neck like a chicken, so be it, the end’s the same.’

Still I held her up, arms wrapped about her covered legs, my cheek against a thigh. Could feel the rope that bound her hands. Gripped one of the hands, and it was cold. Prayed, as I’d never prayed before, to God and all the angels, the noise in my head like the bells crashing in the tower from which all the bells were long gone.

‘In fact, give a hand, Simmons,’ Carew said.

The man with cracked teeth moving forward, pushing aside the vicar, who was still bent and retching from my blow to his throat…

…and then stopping.

‘Well, go on, man!’ Carew roared. ‘Before his feeble fucking spine snaps.’

I looked up and saw what the man with cracked teeth saw.

‘Angels!’ he screamed.

But what I saw was a white-gold bird rising from the fire of two torches meeting in the mist with a burst of gases.

Then the rope gave, and she felt into my arms, her body slumped against my head and shoulders. Dead weight but I would not let go, would never let go.

The mist gathering around us, wrapping us in its brown blanket.

‘Say it!’ Dudley snarled. ‘Say what you did.’

Stephen Fyche was backed up against a leg of the gibbet. He stumbled, swore. I had the impression he’d been drinking. His father turned and walked away.

‘You had a nail hammered under his fingernails,’ Dudley said. ‘Then, when he yielded nothing, you started to slit his gut.’

The pikemen’s hands were tensed around their weapons for they knew not this man who’d strode through the mist, his sword out to cut through the hangman’s rope.

‘No…’ Stephen glancing around, maybe looking for his father. He wore his monk’s robe and his new beard looked to have been cut fine and sharp for the occasion. ‘That’s horseshit. Who is this fucking bladder?’

I kept quiet, sitting in the mud under the still-swinging rope, my arms around Nel, listening to her breath coming in harsh snorts. Celestial music.

Fyche was back. Somebody must have told him who Dudley was, most likely Carew.

‘My Lord, before you accuse my son-’

‘Who took out his guts?’ Dudley said to Stephen Fyche. ‘Who took out his heart with the doctor’s tools?’

‘The fucking witch!’

‘Why not the doctor himself?’

A small sound came out of Nel’s half-strangled throat. Dudley edged closer to Stephen Fyche.

‘Tell us, boy.’

‘Aye,’ Carew said. ‘Maybe you better had.’

‘How…’ Stephen Fyche rose to his full height, swaying. Even I could smell the wine on his breath. ‘How dare you accuse a man of God, sirrah?’

And turned slightly, and I saw that he held a dagger close to his side and that Dudley saw it, too, and his hand was making a familiar short journey to his belt.

‘No trial needed here, then,’ Dudley said.

‘Uh… no.’ Carew gripping his wrist, twisting his sword out of his grasp. ‘Not your place.’

I’d seen something akin to this before.

Carew half turning this time, holding Dudley’s side-sword in both hands, and then the sword was a tongue of flame in the light of the torches and there was a look of faint puzzlement on the youthful face of Stephen Fyche as his body sagged below it.

Carew moved twice more, short hacks, and Stephen’s head seemed, for an instant, to be quite still in the air before it dropped to earth and rolled once into the grass where the body already lay, spouting its blood into the soil.

‘My place, I think,’ Carew said.

The silence on the tor seemed eternal. It was as if it were done by the hill itself. As if, deprived of one life, it had taken another.