The Owl Killers

beatrice

cOME ON, LASS, shift your arse,” Pega bellowed.

Osmanna was gazing down the hill in the direction of the forest. She didn’t seem to realise Pega was talking to her. “I swear I’ll swing for her,” Pega muttered. “It’ll take two trips to get this hay down to the barn and if she doesn’t get a move on we’ll still be here at midnight.”

“Have patience with the child,” I pleaded. “She’s not used to working the fields.”

“Aye, well, she’d best get used to it quick. Ulewic folk have carried D’Acasters on their backs for generations. About time one of them D’Acasters learned that bread’s made from sweat and blisters.”

It was all very well for Pega; she could toss dead sheep onto a hurdle single-handed, but some of us had not been brought up to work the fields.

The heat was making us all irritable. The air was thick and sultry. Below us the fields were shimmering in the heat haze, so that they looked like some great lake of rippling water. Even up on the hill, not a leaf stirred on the shaggy trees, as though they were too sleepy to move. It was not yet midday, but already my clothes were sticking to my back and my arms were aching.

I shouldn’t have been working in the fields at all; none of the Marthas were, because they had their own duties. I should have been a Martha myself by now, but Servant Martha had taken against me from the first. She was the one stopping me; I knew that, no matter what the others said. I’ll tell you this: Servant Martha might think she ruled the beguinage, but she didn’t. We all had a say and I wouldn’t be kept down by her. I’d had a lifetime of women like her ordering me about.

A peal of giggles rang out across the meadow. At least the children were happy, bless them. They loved gathering up the bundles of sweet warm hay, though more got scattered than collected as they tossed it over one another. It wasn’t work for them, for they were delighted by any opportunity to abandon their lessons. Only little Margery hung back shyly. She stood behind us sucking her thumb and staring down the hill towards the river, glinting in the pale sun.

“Where does the river come from, Pega?” she asked.

“River comes from a stream and the stream comes from a drindle and the drindle comes from Anu’s pool miles away in the great hills. That’s where they all begin.”

“What’s Anu’s pool?” Margery asked.

“It’s where Black Anu lives. She gives birth to the river. It runs out from between her legs. Haven’t you heard tell of Black Anu?”

Margery shook her head, smiling expectantly.

“She’s one of the fay folk-half of her is a woman, but she has the legs of a goat, except no one ever sees those for she hides them under her robes. She sleeps deep in the black pool while it’s day, but at witch-light she rises in robes green as pond weed, glowing in the dark with her silver hair trailing behind her. She’s so beautiful any man who glimpses her can’t take his eyes off her. But that’s just her witchery, for inside she’s really a withered old crone with a heart as black as a marsh pool. If any man should dare to tread near her lair, Anu lures him to dance with her till he’s all tangled up in her hair, then she drags him down into the pool and drowns him. And then…” Pega stretched out her long arms, grabbed Margery and hissed into her ear, “she sinks her teeth into him and drinks his blood.” She nipped Margery on the neck and the child ran off screaming in horrified delight.

“Osmanna,” Pega yelled again. “Bring that hay sledge here-now!”

The poor girl started violently and turned towards us, her hands clenched as if she was about to leap into a fistfight. Osmanna always looked wary and guarded. Even when you spoke to her, her gaze was somewhere else, as if she constantly feared an ambush.

Pega shook her head in disgust as Catherine, always eager to help, ran over to help Osmanna drag the sledge higher up the slope. There was no getting a haywain up to these small meadows on the hillside; you had to use sledges.

I was glad that Catherine had at last found a friend. When Osmanna first arrived, Catherine dragged her round the beguinage introducing her to everyone as if she were presenting her at court. Catherine was so eager to show her every inch of the beguinage. But Osmanna’s face wore a perpetually frozen expression as if she was afraid to take pleasure in anything. Poor Catherine did her best. She even tried the story of the well on Osmanna.

“It sprang miraculously from the ground; Servant Martha prayed and then said ‘dig here’ and the men did, though they didn’t believe her, and at once the water came gushing out. The men were so awestruck they fell on their knees in front of her.”

That wasn’t quite how I remembered it. Servant Martha was certainly no saint and I couldn’t imagine anyone in the village kneeling to any of us, not even if the well had flowed with wine instead of water, but I didn’t interrupt Catherine’s tale.

“And the water springs up fresh and clear every day. Isn’t it the sweetest water you’ve ever tasted?” Catherine said eagerly.

But Osmanna shuddered and turned away, her arms wrapped tightly round herself, like an abandoned child. I tried to hug her as you would any motherless waif, but she recoiled as if she thought I was going to strike her.

Pega lifted a thick swathe of cut hay and rubbed some of the stalks through her fingers. She grimaced. “It’ll be the Devil’s own job to get this dry, but we’re late haymaking as it is, for it was such a piss-poor spring. We daren’t leave it any longer. This heat’s near to breaking.”

The sky was hazy, the sun a pale primrose disc, as if a veil of gauze had been drawn over it. You need either a good scorching sun or a stiff breeze for drying; we had neither, just this suffocating steamy wash-tub heat.

“Let’s hope it’s not a hard winter,” I said. “If the hay goes mouldy, we’ll start to lose beasts this winter, especially if it’s a hard one.”

Pega shook her head. “It’ll be wet, not cold, by my reckoning. Wet winters always follow a bad hay crop. But that’ll be a blessing, because I reckon it’ll be a bad harvest all round again.”

“You think a wet winter’s a blessing?” I asked in surprise.

“You’d rather a cold one?” Pega bound a swathe of hay deftly and dropped it for Osmanna to collect, before walking on to the next. “A freeze may be nothing when you’re tucked up in some cosy town in Flanders, but you don’t want to try it here with a sea wind cutting you in half.

“One year when I was a bairn, the river froze solid. Marshes too, even the edge of the sea. Freeze went on for weeks. We were living then at the forest end of Ulewic. Wolves came out of the trees right up to the edge of the village. Biting and scratching at the door they were, made your blood run cold to hear them. Mam clattered a stick against some pots to drive them off. Not long after, we heard screams like a girl was being murdered, though none of us dared go out to see. In the morning there was blood and hair all over the snow, with great paw prints trampled all round, and one of the Manor’s goats gone missing. Wolves had got her.”

“Thanks be to God it was only a goat,” I said, crossing myself.

“You might think that, but my brother was goatherd to the Manor then. He was only a bairn, no match for a pack of wolves.” Pega raised her voice and looked over her shoulder to see if Osmanna was listening, but she didn’t look up. “The bailiff tied my brother to the byre near the forest and gave him a right good thrashing. Then he left him tied there all night-D’Acaster’s orders. Next morning I sneaked along as soon as it was light to take him a bite to eat. I found him fainted clear away. He was near dead with the cold and terrified that the wolves might come back. Poor little reckling.”

She glowered at Osmanna as if she held her personally responsible, but Osmanna continued collecting the swathes of hay, and refused to look at Pega, though she must have heard her.

I wandered over to Osmanna, saying loudly, “Pack the swathes well down. If you just toss them on they’ll start sliding off as we take them down.” Then I added more softly, “Take no notice of Pega. She’s got a tongue as tart as lemon, but a good heart. She doesn’t really blame you.”

Osmanna stared at me, her face expressionless as if she didn’t understand what I was saying. Then she bent and wedged the swathe down in place. “Like that?” she asked.

I nodded and, defeated, turned away.

“Thank you, Beatrice.” The whisper behind me was so soft I thought I might have imagined it, for when I turned round again, Osmanna was stooping over the hay giving no sign she had spoken at all. I smiled to myself.

Pega took a long deep swig from a skin of ale before handing it to me. Then she picked the big basket of griddle cakes that Kitchen Martha had instructed a scrawny little village child to bring up to us. Grain was running low in our barns, but Kitchen Martha still continued to bake undaunted.

“Here.” Pega thrust the basket at Osmanna. “Make yourself useful, lass, take these to the bairns.”

Catherine and Osmanna wandered off after the children. Pega gazed after them, an expression of disgust on her face.

“Osmanna’s her father’s daughter all right. You’ll not get more than half a dozen words out of her and those as cold as a beggar’s arse in winter.”

“Healing Martha says she’s shy.”

“Healing Martha wouldn’t hear a bad word said about the Horned One himself. But I say if a fish is stinking, it does no good to pretend not to smell it, else it’ll poison the whole stew. Osmanna’s no fool. She deliberately makes a cowpat out of anything she doesn’t want to do so that she’s not asked to do it again. Yet, she’ll happily sit all day with her books, and Servant Martha only encourages her.”

She flashed another look of loathing at Osmanna. She was well out of earshot, but she was still watching us as if she knew we were discussing her.

“Just look at her.” Pega scowled. “She looks like she’s got the stink of the midden under her nose. Not that she’s got any cause to look down on the rest of us. I heard tell that her father turned her out of his gate for whoring. I could almost kiss the little cat, if it was true, but I don’t believe it. She’d freeze the cock off any man who tried to bed her.”

Pega had an easy way of talking about the couplings of men and women that I could never match. She’d known all breeds of men. I saw it in her face when she spoke of this man or that, vicious men who hurt her and gentle ones whose memory brought a look of mother softness to her eyes. And then there was the one who even after all these years still brought a sleep-smile to her mouth and a soft escape of breath. Once I asked his name, but she shook her head and turned away. “They don’t have names, nor faces neither.”

A woman who has tasted many men has no more curiosity. But when you have known only one and his bed was cold and cruel, then you wonder constantly if another man might have been kinder to you or if it really was your fault, as your husband constantly told you.

His mother and the priest and the physician, they all blamed me. They all said it was my fault that I was childless; my fault that my husband did not love me; my fault that I made him angry. They all said it so many times that I knew it must be true. The forsaken marriage bed and the empty crib beside it, I had only myself to blame for those things.

Sometimes I looked at men and imagined what it would be like to be loved by them. But even to imagine was a sin; the thought was as wicked as the deed. I’d been taught that with my catechism at my mother’s knee. But it was the pain which bound me to the sin, a dull empty ache that gnawed away inside me. Sometimes it lay so still that I thought it had gone. Then I would see a woman standing just so, her hand rubbing the swelling of her child-ripe belly, or I’d hear the branches of the yew tree in the churchyard rasping together in the wind as if a wailing baby was wombed within its wood. That is when it stirred again and I knew that the desperate longing to hold my own child in my arms would never leave me, not even if I lived to be as old as Abraham and Sarah.

Pega was staring intently over my shoulder at the clump of elms higher up the hill. The rooks, disturbed by something, were wheeling down and out as if trying to drive off a hawk or a cat. Their raucous cries shattered the still air. Pega stood up and shielded her eyes, then quickly crossed herself. I scrambled to my feet too, alarmed by her sign, and followed her gaze.

A young girl was standing motionless under the trees. A tangle of flaming red hair tumbled loose about her shoulders. Though she appeared to be about twelve years old, she wore nothing more than a thin dirty shift, ragged and short enough to show that her pale legs were bare.

“It’s only a beggar girl,” I reassured Pega.

The children, curious as ever, came wandering up to see what we were looking at. They stood staring warily at the girl, as if she was some strange animal.

Pega spat three times on the backs of her fingers. “That’s no beggar, that’s Gudrun.”

“Old Lettice says her mam was a witch.”

I looked down, startled by the small piping voice. The village child who had brought the cakes was standing behind Pega, a fold of Pega’s skirt pressed tightly against her face as if she was scared to look at the beggar girl.

“Lettice says her mam could change herself into a grey cat with great yellow eyes. The cat used to slink from byre to byre every night drying up the cows’ milk and fluxing the calves. Then one of the villagers caught the grey cat in a trap and cut out her tongue. He was going to hang her, but she scratched him and got away. And the very next day her daughter was born.”

“A wicked thing to say,” I told her sharply.

The child shrugged. “The woman died giving birth and the grey cat’s never been seen again. And Lettice says Gudrun was born dumb, can’t make a sound on account of them cutting out her mam’s tongue. So that proves she’s a witch.”

Pega was still watching Gudrun as if she feared to turn her back on her. The girl stared back at us. She looked so vulnerable and innocent in the torn shift, her skin creamy and soft like a little child’s. Threads of gold glinted in the red hair as the leaf-dappled sunlight played over it.

“Poor little thing,” I murmured. “Who takes care of her now?”

“The grandam, old Gwenith,” Pega said. “She has the cunning gift, but unlike her daughter she does no harm with it. She’s a good sort. Many in these parts go to her for charms and cures. She can get rid of warts and more besides.”

“Father Ulfrid doesn’t mind?” I couldn’t imagine a priest tolerating the presence of a cunning woman in his village.

“I doubt he knows. No villager would tell him; he’s an outlander. Old Gwenith lives far up the river, where the valley narrows. No one would ever find the place unless they knew to look. She only comes down to the village when she needs to buy a pot or some such. They say her great-grandam was one of the five cunning women who rid Ulewic of the monster that was terrorising the village.”

“What… what did it do?” Osmanna had stepped forward. She’d suddenly gone quite pale. The poor child was not used to heavy work in the heat. Servant Martha had no right to expect it of her.

Pega frowned. “The old’uns used to say, though it was years afore they were born, that the monster swooped down and snatched villagers for its prey, not just bairns, but fully grown men. Ate them alive, tearing the flesh off their limbs while they screamed and ripping their bellies open to pick at the entrails. And it wasn’t just those the monster hunted who suffered. Wherever its shadow touched, disaster followed. Cottages were smitten with leprosy and rotted to dust, crops withered in the fields, wells dried up, and byres caught afire without any cause. Only way to appease the monster was to give it cattle. By the end there was scarcely a beast left in Ulewic.”

The children were staring up at Pega, their mouths open, their eyes wide with fear. I realised I must look just the same. Was that what the dead man had been talking about in the forest on May Eve? Your creature, your creation of despair and darkness, who brought death to all who defied you.

“They say the whole village would have perished, but for the cunning women. God be praised the beast’s not flown since, and God willing it never will again.”

Under the elm trees the girl raised her bare arm and with one finger traced the flight of the rooks in the sky above. The sky over her head was black with them now. The birds were gathering round her, frenziedly flapping their ragged wings. They wheeled in and out, lower and lower, but they did not touch her and she did not move.

“But Gudrun’s no cunning woman,” Pega said. “She’s the same malice in her as her dam. Dumb she may be, but her bid speaks evil enough for both of them. Look, she has it even now.”

I strained my eyes to see where she pointed. Beneath the red weeds of her hair I glimpsed something large, glossy, and black on Gudrun’s shoulder. It was a raven. Its thick beak was so close to her ear, it might have been whispering to her. It was the presence of the raven that was disturbing the rooks, not the child. But like its mistress, the raven showed no fear of the mobbing birds. There was something unnerving about the stillness of girl and bird amid those circling rooks.

Pega jerked her head towards Gudrun. “There’s something not right. In all these years, I’ve never known her or her grandam take interest in what other folks are up to. Gudrun’ll not come near folks, never mind let herself be seen. We’ve been here for three years. So why has she taken to watching us now? And more to the point, why’s she letting herself be seen doing it?” Pega crossed herself again and, with the village child still clinging to her skirts, turned back towards the swathes of hay.

I turned to stare at the trees again. But the girl and her bird had vanished. The place was so empty that, but for the wheeling rooks, I would have sworn it had always been so. The sweat on my body felt suddenly cold and clammy. I shivered.