The Night Wanderer

TWENTY

Hrype sat cross-legged before the small fire he had lit. He had been walking for the greater part of the last two days and nights, if the furious, driven striding on his long legs through wood and field and around marsh and fen could be called walking. He knew, if he was honest with himself, that he was fleeing from the truth, for it was extremely unwelcome and uncomfortably painful.

Earlier, he had woken from a brief and restless sleep. He had sought shelter in a hay barn, tunnelling into the fragrant hay like the rats and mice who kept him company to lie in the grip of dreams of violence and horrible images. Waking, he had believed he detected the ring of truth in the nightmarish dreams, and, steeling himself, he had found an isolated place and lit his small fire. He had taken his rune stones out of the bag and spread out the cloth on which he always cast them. He was finding it difficult to put himself into the right state for reading their message. Closing his eyes, he forced his mind to detach. To elevate into that strange realm where the spirits waited, and from which, if you were lucky, they might deign to communicate.

He cast the runes and looked down.

The first thing he saw made him smile grimly. The powers that ruled his life, it seemed, were intent on showing him aspects of himself he preferred normally to ignore. First there had been Gurdyman, earnest, deeply concerned, brave in his determination to stand firm in the face of Hrype’s increasing anger and make him hear the truth. Now the runes were following where the old man had led, for what Hrype read was the combination of symbols that he suspected meant Jack Chevestrier, and beside them the ones that implied a tearing away of smoke screens; a confrontation with the true nature of something, or someone.

Slowly Hrype nodded, as if indicating that he accepted the message.

I have always found it hard to trust Jack Chevestrier, he admitted to himself, because, certain as I have been from the start that Gaspard Picot is involved, in the thefts and perhaps the killings too, I convinced myself that Chevestrier too is crooked and corrupt. Both men work for the sheriff – Gaspard Picot is the wretched man’s own kin – and I allowed that to persuade me.

But now he accepted that he had been wrong. The stones told him so. Moreover, seeing the truth displayed so clearly before him, he realized that he had allowed his antipathy towards Jack Chevestrier to cloud his vision.

Hrype dropped his head in his hands. He was ashamed. He was a seeker after the truth. He prided himself on his clarity of vision; his ability to rise above the petty sentiments and emotions of ordinary human beings and courageously stare the truth in the face. In the space of two days, he had been shown to himself for what he was, and the pain was intense.

He removed his hands and looked down at the runes again, for he had got no further than the first message before being overcome.

He stared. Rubbed his tired eyes, stared again.

What he thought he read couldn’t be true; surely not!

He did something he very rarely did, for the powers that drove the rune messages didn’t like having their word doubted. He gathered them up, held them tightly in his hands, prayed to his gods for help and guidance, shook the stones hard and once more cast them on to the sacred cloth.

The message was there; and this time it was expressed even more forcibly.

For a few moments, Hrype couldn’t move. He muttered, ‘I have been blind. Blind!’

Then, in terrible haste, he gathered up the stones, hurriedly performed his ritual thanks and made his reverence, then stowed them away in their bag. He stood for a moment undecided. Where should he go? He could help – he knew that, for the runes had told him so – but where was he most needed?

The answer sounded in his head, clear as a bell on a still day.

He ran.

I was running as fast as I could, but the effort was enormous; as if I was straining against a rope holding me back. I was heading not for the tavern and Jack, where I longed to be, but in the opposite direction.

Everything in me wanted to go back to him. He was my patient, he was very badly hurt, I ought to be beside him. I didn’t admit that I also loved him; I didn’t know quite what I felt, only that running away from him was hurting like a stab in the heart.

He has Father Gregory with him, I told myself. I have not left him untended. But-

I didn’t let the protest form.

I ran on. I was over the Great Bridge now, diving into the network of alleys behind the market square. I had come this way often with Jack over the past few days and didn’t have to think about my route, which was hard because it freed my mind to think about him instead.

Stop.

I reached the narrow passage I knew so well. I stopped to listen, but there was no sound of footfalls. If anybody had been pursuing me, I had lost them. I walked on.

And, too soon, I was at the front door of Gurdyman’s twisty-turny house.

The door opened as I pushed it. I went inside.

So terrified had I been that I would be met with the real-life version of what I saw in the shining stone that it was quite hard to accept that he wasn’t lying there before me with no throat.

I stepped carefully along the passage. ‘Gurdyman?’ I called softly.

He was standing in the little inner court. The sun shone on his dome of a head, and his bright blue eyes softened as he saw me.

‘Lassair,’ he breathed. Then, anxiously, ‘You are unhurt?’

‘Yes! And you?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He was staring at me, puzzled. ‘There was something…’ He broke off. ‘I have been staying with a very old friend,’ he said, and I was quite sure it was a last-minute substitute for what he had been about to say. ‘He lives in a little house on a patch of higher ground out in the marsh, almost an island. It is reached by a stretch of narrow causeway that is so well concealed that it is all but impossible to find. This secret dwelling is on the fen edge, to the south of the great bulge that you walk around to get from your village to the town. It is a small and perfect house, right out in the wilds, and you cannot find it unless someone tells you where it is. My friend built it himself, many years ago when the need for solitude overtook him and he began to walk away from the world, increasingly deeper into his studies. It has a magical sort of name, but that must remain hidden.’

I tried to take in what he was telling me; why was he telling me? ‘Is that where you’ve been?’

‘Yes. Hrype said I should go, for this town was not safe for one such as I.’

‘Because the Night Wanderer was killing other magicians’ – in my mind’s eye I saw Osmund, and then Morgan and poor, pathetic Cat – ‘and Hrype thought you’d be next.’

‘Precisely that,’ Gurdyman agreed.

But something was wrong with that. ‘You disappeared the night Jack and I saw Osmund being slain,’ I said slowly. ‘He was the only wi-’ I had been about to say wizard, but I stopped; I’ve always thought Gurdyman disliked the word. ‘He was the only one like you who had died, then, for Robert Powl, Gerda and Mistress Judith did not spend their private hours in magic workrooms.’ Gurdyman didn’t answer; he just went on looking at me. ‘You knew more would die,’ I whispered. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘I believed it, yes.’

‘How could you have left them to their fate? Morgan, and Cat! He tried to protect his master, you know. His body was found flung across the old man’s, but it didn’t help either of them.’

Gurdyman saw my distress and held out a hand to me, but I ignored it. ‘Child, do you not think I tried?’ he said, an edge of anger in his voice. ‘I railed at Morgan with all my strength, trying to impress the horror of what I had seen just ahead, but to no avail.’

‘You could have-’

Gurdyman drew himself up. His anger increased, and just for an instant it felt as if a flame was brushing my skin. It hurt. ‘Ow!’

‘I’m sorry, child, but you are losing yourself in your own emotion, and, while your urge to demand retributive justice for Morgan and Cat is admirable, you need to know the truth. Morgan refused to leave his home and his work, and Cat refused to abandon her.’

‘Him,’ I corrected automatically.

There was utter silence. Something crackled momentarily in the air.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Gurdyman’s.

‘The name, in fact, is Morgana.’

I felt my jaw drop. ‘He – she – Morgan was a woman?’

‘Of course,’ Gurdyman said shortly. ‘Since Cat was quite clearly male, his magician had to be female. Always there must be the opposites, the poles, the two sexes. Animus and anima,’ he added.

I sank down on to the bench that stands by the wall of the inner court. ‘Why did she pretend to be a man?’

‘She was brilliant, and her powers were great,’ Gurdyman said. ‘The world – even the world of like-minded souls – was perhaps not quite ready to accept that such a leading light could be female.’

Animus and anima. I took out Gerda’s pendant and silently gave it to Gurdyman. He went pale. ‘Where did you get this?’

So I told him. Trying to be brief, I told him everything that had happened since he left.

When I finished, he joined me on the bench. ‘It begins to add up,’ he murmured.

But I barely heard. I had been thinking about the night he disappeared; the night I thought I saw him and Hrype, down in the crypt, only when Jack arrived with a light – oh, Jack! – there was no sign of either of them.

‘Were you really there that night?’ I whispered.

He knew exactly what I meant. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Hrype had come to fetch me and we were on the point of leaving when you turned up. Hrype was convinced the forces of the law would soon break in – that’s who we thought you were – and that was why I’d-’

‘That’s why you tidied up the crypt,’ I interrupted, ‘to make sure there was nothing incriminating to be found.’ Nothing, I added silently, that would give away who and what you are, for that knowledge is very dangerous.

‘Yes,’ he murmured.

‘How did you do it?’ I had to know. ‘One moment you were there – I saw you – and then you weren’t, yet you couldn’t have got out because I was standing at the foot of the steps, and Jack was coming down right behind me.’ It was conceivable that Gurdyman and Hrype might have squeezed past me without my feeling their presence, but they couldn’t have got past Jack. He was too broad.

Gurdyman was looking at me, his head on one side. ‘Do you remember what I told you about this house?’ I shook my head. He had told me many things, and I wasn’t in any state to run through the store of my memories and extract the right one. ‘I said,’ he went on softly, ‘that this house of mine holds many secrets, and that you would come to know about some of them, although some would remain hidden.’

‘Is this a secret I won’t know?’ I whispered.

He smiled gently. ‘Not yet, child, for there is no need.’

‘But-’

‘Enough.’

My mind was roaming wildly, throwing up possibilities. Did he mean there was another exit from the crypt, one so well hidden that I had no idea it was there? One that, perhaps, only revealed itself when there was desperate need? Oh, but that was impossible, surely, even for Gurdyman, unless-

Quite gently and firmly, he stopped the thought. I found I just couldn’t pursue it; it had ceased. Just like that.

I stared at him. He looked so normal, sitting there in the sunshine, his wonderful, gaudy shawl wrapped round him, his blue eyes twinkling benignly. For a moment I doubted everything. He was just a rotund, absent-minded old man, and the rest was all in my imagination.

Presently I said, ‘You came back. Does that mean it’s safe now?’

But he frowned, his face darkening into anxiety. ‘Oh, no, child, it is very far from safe. I came back precisely because of that; for the peril reaches its climax now, and we shall have to fight it.’

Something suddenly struck me. I sat up straight, looking around. ‘Where’s your friend?’ I demanded. ‘The one you were staying with, in the house with the magical name?’

Gurdyman looked down at his small, plump hands, folded in his lap. ‘I do not know.’ He met my eyes. ‘Something happened this morning; an enchantment, I believe, affecting both my friend – his name is Mercure – and me.’ He frowned. ‘I believe I perceived something I was not meant to see, and then some power overcame me and obscured the sight.’ Now he looked pale. ‘I believe that power might have emanated from the Night Wanderer.’

‘Oh!’ My hands flew up to cover my mouth, muffling the sound.

‘I do not know where Mercure is,’ Gurdyman repeated, ‘for he was not there when I was released from the spell and came back to myself.’

I had an image of him, out at his friend’s house. Waking from trance, or sleep, or enchantment – whatever it had been – and finding himself alone. Desperate with worry for his friend, yet leaving the lonely, isolated house to return here.

Gurdyman nodded, as if he followed the line of my thoughts. ‘I am indeed very anxious for Mercure, but he is powerful, and wise, and better able to look after himself than almost any other.’ He reached for my hand, briefly holding it. ‘My greater fear was for you.’

I stared at him. While it made me feel warm with pleasure that he should care about me in this way, at the same time I was filled with dread because Gurdyman, whom I’d come to think of as inviolable and omnipotent, had just admitted to anxiety and fear. If a magician of his quality was afraid, what hope was there for the rest of us?

‘What should we do?’ I whispered.

‘We shall go down into the crypt,’ he said firmly, ‘where I have in mind certain defences which I shall begin straight away to-’

He was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming slowly, draggingly, along the passage. Both of us spun round.

An old man in long robes was creeping towards us. He was very white in the face, as if he had suffered a severe wound or a dreadful shock. His dark eyes stared imploringly at us. His garments – musty black, or perhaps a deep shade of brown or grey – were dirty, and the flowing skirt of his robe was torn into tatters down one side. He clutched the remnants to him, perhaps in a pathetic attempt to preserve his modesty and hide his pale and bony legs.

With a soft exclamation, Gurdyman removed his shawl and held it out to the shuffling figure, helping him to wrap it around his narrow hips. He guided the old man to the bench by the wall, encouraging him to sit down. Over his shoulder he said, ‘A restorative for our visitor, I think, Lassair, if you would be so kind.’

I couldn’t take my eyes off the old man.

He was-

‘Lassair?’ Gurdyman prompted. ‘Mercure needs your help.’

I hurried inside to the kitchen, lowering the pot of water closer to the fire in the hearth and then quickly mixing honey with pinches of the soothing, calming herbs for a comforting drink. So that was Mercure. Gurdyman had said he was powerful, capable of looking after himself, but he didn’t appear so now. He looked as if he’d just suffered some frightful attack.

It didn’t take much imagination to work out who had attacked him. He was Gurdyman’s friend, and I was in no doubt that he performed the same sort of work. So had Osmund, Morgan and Cat, and all three were dead. And that horrible line of rips in Mercure’s robe could easily have been done by a set of sharp claws.

The water was boiling and I quickly made the drink. Hurrying back out to the court, I handed it to the old man, who thanked me with a nod.

Silence fell. Mercure sipped at his drink, but made no sound. I was just thinking idly that it was unusual for somebody to consume almost boiling liquid without slurping at it when I became aware of a low, soft humming. I was going to make some comment – to ask Gurdyman what it was, to question, perhaps, if it was some strange bird – but then the impulse, and the curiosity, left me. It was a nice sound. I smiled, and the humming intensified. My legs felt weak – what a lot I’d done recently! No wonder I was so weary – and I moved backwards so that I could lean against the wall.

I was looking at one of the late-flowering blooms in the little flower bed, thinking how pretty it was, how intense the colour, when Gurdyman said, his voice oddly strangled, ‘Lassair!’

‘It’s no good, you know, my dear friend.’ Mercure’s voice was like liquid silver, and I thought it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

‘Lassair!’ Gurdyman’s, by contrast, sounded like the coarse croaking of a hideous bird. ‘You must- aaaah!’ Abruptly his words choked off, and he put both hands to his throat.

Oh, dear. He seemed to be in some sort of distress.

That flower was so pretty!

Somebody else was humming now, in a higher octave. It was quite sweet, and blended well with the deep, powerful vibration now flooding the inner court and bouncing off the walls. With faint surprise I realized the new sound was coming from me.

Mercure and I were humming together, and the music was quite enchanting.

I turned to face him. It wasn’t a conscious move; I had no choice. I looked right into his deep, dark eyes. They were like wells in the pale face. I straightened up into a long, thin reed and poised to dive right down into them.

But at the very last moment, something held me back. I could see Gurdyman, still trying and failing to call my name and capture my attention, but the enchantment held him mute.

It must, then, have been another’s voice that yelled, over and over again, Lassair! Lassair!

It was the voice of a man in his prime, loud, vibrant with strength, desperate with fear for me and full of terrible warning.

It was enough – just – to make me pause.

Mercure laughed softly, a sound so sweet that I yearned towards him. ‘Ah, but you resist!’ he said gently. ‘I am pleased to see it, Lassair, for it demonstrates, if demonstration were needed, that I am right in my choice.’

His choice?

He stood up and moved closer to me. He was no longer stooped and cowed. He was straight and tall, and it occurred to me that he wasn’t an old man after all…

He reached out a long, graceful hand and touched my cheek. I leaned towards him, yearning, longing. His raised arm had parted the neck of his robe a little, and I saw he wore beneath it a medallion on a gold chain. My eyes were drawn to it and I saw the image etched into the gold.

A human figure composed of man and woman, half and half, wearing a single crown.

I managed to pull my gaze away from it and met his stare. For an instant, before he changed, I saw right into his eyes, and they were black holes that opened into a pit. But then he smiled, his eyes were human again and compelling me, drawing me, towards him.

‘I see you recognize the symbol,’ he said, his breath like a soft, fragrant breeze against my cheek. ‘The male and female must both be there, and I have striven to achieve union within myself, without the aid of pupil or Soror Mystica. Morgana had her Cat, Gurdyman has you’ – for a moment his gaze seemed to reach right inside me, as if fine cords emanated out of his eyes to enter into mine – ‘but I believed I could manage fusion alone.’

He winced and slumped briefly, as if in memory of some awful pain. Then, recovering, once more he focused himself on me. ‘I have been working these many long months – years – to bring full life to both sides of myself, the female and the male, but I have not succeeded, and I must conclude that what I have striven for cannot be achieved.’ He made a strange gesture then: he wrapped both arms around himself, at the level of his ribs, and squeezed very hard.

It looked as if he was trying to hold himself together.

‘It is not meant to be, I think,’ he said ruefully. ‘My experiments have made a great rift, and although I try to put my two selves together again, I am no longer myself.’

I ought to have been curious. I ought to have been bursting with frightened questions, for he spoke – in that calm smooth voice – of things that were far beyond anything I’d ever learned; far beyond, surely, what men should even think of attempting.

But I stood, silent and docile, like a lamb awaiting the blade.

‘We who do the great work allow the fools who share this precious earth with us to believe what they see as our goal,’ Mercure went on. ‘For them to view us as covetous men and women seeking to make gold out of lesser metals suits us well, for it disguises our true aim. Not that we expect outsiders to see the huge importance of this aim, for who but we value the refinement of the soul?’

He kept his eyes on me, holding me as if I were in chains.

Then suddenly he clutched at himself, and my healer’s experience told me he was in dreadful pain. At the same instant, I had a slight disturbance in my sight; it seemed, in the space of a blink, that he altered. That the guise of a benign old man tore, and something else looked out.

Before the terror could burst out in a long scream, he had me – and perhaps whatever lurked inside him – back under his control.

‘I have erred, Lassair,’ he whispered, and the agony made his voice shake. ‘I tried to suppress my dark side; to bring it under my own control and then release it back into myself. But dark sides are not amenable to our control. Mine, at least, is not.’ He sighed, and now I could detect that his breath reeked; that it was foul and corrupt with some dread matter.

‘I have altered my soul’s true nature by what I have done to myself,’ he murmured – I noticed that he was trembling, his whole body shaking as if he was in the grip of some sort of fit – ‘and I am forced to admit, at the last, that I cannot achieve my uttermost desire alone.’

Now he turned on the full force of his glamour, and I felt it descend on me like a glittering cloak. ‘You shall come with me,’ he said – it was more like a chant – ‘and we shall go to my house on the island, and I shall destroy the causeway so that we are for ever alone, my Soror Mystica and I, and we shall unite our bodies and our different essences – our very souls – into the ultimate.’

He raised his hand, began to back away, and I followed.

But our route to the door was blocked. Somebody stood in the passage.

Hrype said calmly and firmly, ‘She will not go with you, Mercure.’

Mercure spun round and, again, I had that glimpse of something terrible beneath the disguising robes.

But his voice was still sweet and so seductive.

‘Oh, I think she will,’ he said.

He moved so quickly. He lowered his right arm, seemed to reach deep within his voluminous garments, then raised it again.

It was no longer a human arm.

The forelimb was bright, shining silver, and the hand was the paw of a savage animal, with long downward-curving claws that glittered sharp as blades.

One of those dread claws had a small chip on the tip.

He made an inarticulate, bestial sound and lunged at Hrype. He swung the clawed limb, and I heard the whistle as it descended down through the air.

Hrype stepped aside.

Mercure, his own momentum forcing him on past Hrype, turned and tried again. But just as the raised claw was about to home in on Hrype’s throat, a hand caught it from behind.

Twisted it, bent it, caused Mercure to roar with pain as his shoulder dislocated.

He looked wildly around, and his dark presence seemed to fill the narrow passage so that I could not see who had stopped his murderous attack. Then he gave a great cry, and, the pain making him retch, he drove his claw of an arm up towards his own throat and tore it out.

He must have died almost instantly. Released, all the strength – his strength – left me and I fell to the ground. I felt arms around me, and Gurdyman’s voice in my ear whispered words of comfort, reassurance.

I looked up. Hrype stood over us, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face. He seemed different, but I did not know what had changed.

But there had been someone else…

Mercure had had the ascendancy, for Gurdyman and I were already under his spell and Hrype surely could not have held out for long. Another’s hand had grabbed Mercure’s wrist, and that action had saved us all.

My eyes flew past Hrype, trying to look everywhere at once, searching, searching.

And then I saw him.

Behind Hrype, leaning against the stone wall of the passage, stood Rollo.

It felt like much later, but only a short time could have elapsed, for although the body of the Night Wanderer had been removed by some of Sheriff Picot’s men, his blood was still wet on the floor of the passage.

Gurdyman and Hrype had disappeared down to the crypt. Rollo and I sat in the inner court, and the sun shone on us.

He had told me how he’d been watching me for days. How he’d gone out to Aelf Fen and overheard what I’d said to Sibert about being safe with Jack. Guarded my footsteps as I returned to the town, aware that there was a grave threat and wanting to keep me from harm.

Watched me with Jack.

Seen me as I cradled his head in my lap, taken in every detail of my expression as Jack’s life blood soaked into my skirts.

He didn’t actually phrase it like that, but I knew what he must have seen.

‘Do you love him?’ he asked me now.

‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’

Rollo smiled briefly. ‘That covers every possibility,’ he remarked.

I truly had no idea what I felt. I was numb with shock, for I had just been under the spell of an exceptionally powerful man who had bent me to his will as easily as if I’d been a blade of grass. I’d seen him take his own life, right before my eyes. On top of that, as if it wasn’t enough, I was exhausted and I wanted to be with Jack because I knew he was in grave pain and perhaps he was dying, and here I was, half a mile or more away from him, and it hurt so much I couldn’t bear it.

I took a deep breath. Rollo had every right to ask me to explain, and I must do my best.

‘I love you too,’ I said. ‘As well as Jack, I mean.’ Normally I love you too is the response when someone has just declared their love for you, and I had no idea how Rollo felt about me now. ‘When you went away, I had no idea when I’d see you again, although you promised you’d come back and I believed you.’ I paused. He didn’t interrupt – for which I was very grateful – and after a moment I went on. ‘I’d had every intention of waiting for you, and it wasn’t too bad, really. But then I met him – Jack – and I liked him, because he’s a good man doing a hard job in a town that’s dirty with corruption, and-’

Of all things, an image of Jack’s geese floated into my head. Those guard geese, that he kept because he lived all alone and there were a lot of men who would rather he was dead because he spoke up for honesty and decency and the weak and the helpless, and he was never going to accept the right of powerful men to override all those things just because it made them rich.

That attitude, in a town where the law was corrupt and weaker men chose the easy path over the tough one, created a lot of enemies.

My hands in my lap were wet and I realized I was crying.

‘Rollo, he’s so very lonely.’

Rollo’s arms were round me, but there was comfort and kindness in the close hug, and, just then, nothing else. Thankful for his presence, for his strong heart beating against me, I surrendered to all the pain inside me and wept.

He went away.

‘I’m not going far,’ he told me firmly, ‘or, at least, not as far as I went last time.’ He smiled at some private thought. ‘But there’s something I have to do, and now seems a good time.’ He took my hand, holding it in a brief, hard grip. ‘Your man here is hurt, and I don’t think you can think of anything but that at the moment. If you find you love him, you can tell me so when I come back.’

He turned away.

‘I’m sorry that-’ I began, but he stopped me.

‘No recriminations, Lassair,’ he said. ‘I’ve been away a long time, and I sent you no word. If you got lonely, and took comfort in the love of another man, then the responsibility is as much mine as yours.’

He was being very fair. It was nice of him, I reflected, to say responsibility and not blame.

I looked at him, at the blond hair now threaded with strands of grey, at the dark brown eyes with unfamiliar lines around them. Wherever he’d been, it hadn’t been easy. He had suffered, and I read it all through his lithe body.

I loved him; there was no doubt of it.

But all I wanted to do was go to Jack.

So that’s what I did.

Down in the crypt, Hrype and Gurdyman heard the slamming of the door.

‘She has gone back to Jack,’ Gurdyman said.

‘She cannot do anything else,’ Hrype replied. Then, after a brief pause, ‘Do you detect it too?’

Gurdyman nodded. ‘As soon as I saw her.’

‘Does she know?’

‘No.’

The two men fell silent.

Then: ‘The other one has gone too,’ Hrype said. ‘And that is wise of him, since at present she is given over entirely to the care of the injured one.’

‘It is also kind,’ Gurdyman said with a faint note of reproof, ‘since to add to her burden by forcing her to decide between the two of them would be cruel.’

‘You think the Norman is kind?’ Hrype demanded. ‘It is not a word I use when speaking of his sort.’

‘And you are too blinded by your prejudices,’ Gurdyman flashed back. ‘In any case, both men are Normans. Lassair has the ability to look beneath that, and see them for what they really are.’

Hrype opened his mouth to give a stinging retort, but then he closed it again.

After a while, Gurdyman said, ‘I believe that since both Lassair and Rollo have gone, and their private conversation is therefore over, we may return upstairs.’ He led the way up the steps, Hrype following.

‘Where will you go now?’ he asked as, in the passage, Hrype turned towards the door.

Hrype looked at him for a long moment. ‘I’m going back to my village.’ He laid a slight emphasis on my, and Gurdyman smiled faintly. ‘As I walk along, I shall be thinking of the right way to say what I must say to Froya.’

Now Gurdyman’s smile was wide and delighted. But he spoke with careful restraint, for Hrype was a proud man. ‘I am glad, my friend,’ he said.

As if that short exchange was more than enough, Hrype abruptly changed the subject. ‘What happened to him? Mercure, I mean?’

Gurdyman sighed heavily. ‘I do not know,’ he confessed. ‘I think perhaps it was indeed as he said himself: he tried to work alone, and somehow, in trying to seek out his female side and treat it as a separate entity, he disintegrated his soul and couldn’t put it back together.’ He shook his head. ‘Mercure used powerful substances,’ he said darkly. ‘He was experimenting extensively with cinnabar, that is obvious, and it seems that all three of them – Mercure, Morgana and the young priest – believed that some combination of quicksilver and emerald might yield a deep and awesome result.’ He shook his head. ‘Morgana and the priest, however, appear to have been more cautious and circumspect, but I only begin to suspect some of the poisons Mercure must have ingested. Such potent and frightening substances must be treated with a great deal more respect than he showed them, in his desperate need, for they can have terrible consequences and drive a man deep into madness.’

He paused, a thoughtful expression on his smooth, round face. ‘And yet, despite the terrible and corrupt uses to which he ultimately put his great talent and skills, we must surely admire him. Somehow he perfected the ability to change his appearance, taking on the Night Wanderer guise with dead-white face and holes for eyes, but I fear it must have taken huge amounts of concentration and magical energy to maintain it. He had depleted himself savagely, and the image he presented right at the end’ – he hugged himself, as if feeling the blast of a sudden cold wind – ‘was incomplete. He had begun to shake almost ceaselessly, and bits of his true self appeared through cracks in the facade. As, indeed,’ he added, wrapping his shawl more closely round him, ‘parts of the darkness were appearing through when he tried to present himself as Mercure.’

It seemed to Hrype that, just for a moment, a cloud of blackness floated in the passage. Then it dispersed.

Silence fell.

Hrype said after a while, ‘He began his killings with the slaughter of the rat, the cat and the dog, I imagine, in order to introduce the belief that he was indeed the Night Wanderer, returned to haunt the town and embark on the same sort of terror that he had carried out before.’ He paused, frowning. ‘I understand why he had to kill Morgana and Cat and the young priest, for they were working towards the same ends, and I imagine he wanted no competition.’

‘I believe that is so,’ Gurdyman agreed cautiously, ‘although it is hard to say, when someone is so far gone into insanity.’

‘But what of the others?’ Hrype went on.

‘The first victim brought into the town the rare and costly substance that the great work required, and the apothecary’s widow sold it in her shop. Mercure was simply stopping anybody else getting their hands on it.’

‘And the little whore?’

Gurdyman frowned his disapproval at the word. ‘Gerda was Osmund’s sister. If we could question Mercure as to his motive in killing her, I believe you would find that he thought Osmund was about to recruit her as his mystic sister; force her to adopt that role as well as being his blood sister.’

Hrype was shaking his head, a wry smile on his face. ‘How can you possibly know they were brother and sister?’

Gurdyman shrugged. ‘Margery told me. We are old friends, and I have known her for years.’

Rollo strode out of the town to the stables where he had left his horse. He found the sturdy mare turned out in a field, where she stood nose to tail with an intelligent-looking grey gelding which stared with interest at Rollo.

‘Sorry, but I’m taking your new friend away,’ he said to the gelding, gently pushing aside its questing nose.

He tacked up his mare, paid the proprietor what he owed and set off on the road south.

He couldn’t think about Lassair.

He planned to go back across the Channel, make his way to the court of Duke Robert of Normandy and sell, again, what he had learned at such cost in Constantinople and beyond. If he couldn’t have what he wanted – and how much more he wanted it, now that it appeared he couldn’t have it – he might as well use his time profitably and earn some more money.

He thought of the humble little dwelling of the wounded man, out in the empty village that would once have thrummed with life while the Conqueror’s workforce built his castle. He thought of the palatial house he intended to build for himself one day, when he had finally got travel, adventure and risk out of his blood and was ready to settle down.

He realized that, of late, he had been planning his house with Lassair in mind. How foolish that had been, when she wasn’t the sort of woman whose heart could be won by riches.

Despite his firm intentions, he was thinking about her.

Ruthlessly he shut off the images and began a mental list of everything he had ever heard concerning King William’s brother.

By evening, Jack seemed just about strong enough to risk moving him, although the process worried me deeply. But the little room off the tavern was no place for a badly wounded man. With the death of the Night Wanderer, the town was rapidly returning to normal – normal coloured by vast relief, joy at the end of the terrible anxiety, quite a lot of revelry and a great deal of drinking – and the tavern-keeper and his wife, understandably, wanted to encourage trade and not turn it away because the place had to be kept quiet so Jack could rest.

They liked and admired him, but business was business, and everyone had a living to earn.

Walter, Ginger, Fat Gerald and young Henry carried Jack on a makeshift bier, along the quay, over the Great Bridge, down the path beside the castle and through the deserted village to his house at the end of the track. For the first part of the walk, we’d had to dodge revellers spilling out of the taverns, determined to make the most of the lifting of the curfew and many of them clutching mugs of ale and already well on the way to insensibility.

It was a great relief to reach Jack’s house. Once the geese had set up their terrible racket and stopped again, it was quiet out there.

The four men gently lowered the bier and together, with me helping, we moved Jack on to the bed. He was half-conscious and he cried out in pain. Henry shot a swift look at me, and his eyes said accusingly, Can’t you do something?

Fat Gerald was already making a fire and Ginger had gone for water. I opened my satchel and took out my packets of herbs – they wouldn’t last long, I’d have to go out for more very soon – and mixed the right ones in a mug. I met Henry’s anxious gaze. ‘As soon as the water boils,’ I promised, ‘I’ll make the medicine.’

I would mix it strong. Jack needed sleep – it was probably the only thing that would mend him – and I would make quite sure he got it.

The men stayed long enough to check that the fire was going well, the water was coming to the boil, that I was adequately supplied with food and firewood and had everything else I needed. Finally they left. Walter, pausing to turn in the doorway, said quietly, ‘Don’t let him die.’

I felt something lurch inside me. Die. Oh, don’t even say the word…

I met Walter’s steady eyes. ‘I will do my best.’

He grinned, very briefly. ‘Reckon that’ll have to do, then.’

I went outside on to the track and watched them walk away.

Then I went back to my patient.