The Way Between the Worlds

EIGHT

My huge joy at the realization that it was Rollo who had been calling out to me made me walk on air for two whole days. Then, as I woke on the third morning from a deep and dreamless sleep without the merest suspicion of words spoken inside my head, I was hit with a sudden sense of dread, so profound that for a moment I felt physically sick.

He had been in terrible danger. He had been hiding in some frightful pit once used in the initiation rites of an ancient religion. He had been wounded, sick, desperate. I had seen him, and I had heard him call out to me, many times. Now the dream visions had gone and the words had ceased.

I was awfully afraid I knew what that meant: Rollo was dead.

I put my head in my hands and wept.

Gurdyman was kind, in the sense that he told me quite brusquely that I had no proof and should not plunge into despair without good cause. I felt I had reason enough, but the determination in his bright eyes made me wonder if I was right. Instantly, Gurdyman spotted my moment of doubt.

‘You must keep busy, child,’ he remonstrated gently. ‘Moping about here and thinking the worst will avail neither you nor this Norman of yours.’ I had told him quite a lot about Rollo, although, as so often with Gurdyman, I felt I was revealing things he already knew. He had a way of slowly nodding his head as I spoke, as if to say yes, yes, this I am aware of. The mere mention of Rollo’s name had been enough, for Gurdyman seemed to know all about the Guiscard family. To my relief, although he referred to Rollo as my Norman, I had the distinct impression that he did not view the Guiscards as ruthless and brutal conquerors. On the contrary, he seemed to have a certain respect for them.

He was right, of course, and I did indeed need to keep occupied, but just at that moment I was at a loss to know what I ought to be doing.

‘I need some supplies,’ Gurdyman announced, getting to his feet. ‘Many of the bottles on the crypt shelves are almost empty, and there are some items which even our apothecary has run out of. Come, child — ’ he reached for his stout stick — ‘we shall step out in the sunshine of this fine morning and walk down to the quays, where, with any luck, we shall be able to find some merchant who has fortuitously just taken delivery of the very items we require.’

I fetched my shawl and we set off. Knowing him as I was coming to, I was pretty sure that he was right and a boat with a cargo of rare and exotic herbs, spices and oils would just be tying up.

We emerged into the marketplace, where the food stalls were already doing brisk business. Making our way through the maze of little streets and alleys on the far side, soon we were stepping out on to the road that leads up to the Great Bridge. On the far side, I could see Castle Hill, and at its foot men were busy on the site where the new priory was being built. We remained on the south side of the river, turning to the right just before the bridge and heading off down the long quay.

Presently, Gurdyman raised his stick and pointed to a long, sleek boat which was just manoeuvring up to the quay. A sailor stood barefoot on her deck, holding a rope, and another man waited on the quayside to catch it. ‘Jack Duroll,’ Gurdyman exclaimed with satisfaction. He turned and gave me a smug smile. ‘He’ll have exactly what we need. I shall-’

But his words were interrupted by a shout from the quayside, followed by a confusion of sounds: a lot of splashing, a babble of loud voices, a woman’s high, thin scream. Gurdyman forged a way between the rapidly-gathering crowd of interested people, and soon we were standing on the edge of the stone quay looking out across the water.

Another boat had been following Jack Duroll’s up the river, presumably heading for a berth a little further on. But something was wrong. . I tried to see what had so alarmed the onlookers. The boat — a squat little tub of a thing, with weather-stained boards and an unkempt look — seemed to be towing something along behind, something attached by a line. From the consternation among the boat’s small crew, it was very apparent that they had been unaware of whatever was accompanying them until the people on the quay had drawn their attention to it.

What was it? I edged up beside two stout women who stood muttering together, heads close, faces wearing expressions that indicated both shock and curiosity. One of them turned to me and, eyes alive with excitement, said, ‘It’s a body!’

She had to be wrong. Boats didn’t tow their dead along behind them, I was sure of it. I heard voices shouting out in a foreign tongue: the boat’s crew, busy claiming, no doubt, that they knew nothing whatsoever about their unexpected companion. I heard several local voices respond, with everyone steadily growing more agitated. One man shouted, ‘Bloody foreigners! They’ll have killed him and chucked him over the side, you mark my words!’

Quite a lot of people did mark his words, if the mutterings of agreement were anything to go by. I thought this theory highly unlikely, for if the foreigners had killed someone on-board and disposed of the body, surely they would have made quite certain, before coming into the town, that they weren’t towing the evidence of the crime along behind them.

Then I heard a clear, authoritative voice that I recognized. I didn’t understand the words, for they appeared to be in the same language that the foreign sailors spoke. But I knew the tone: it was Gurdyman. He was addressing a tall, broad, fair-haired and bare-chested giant of a man who appeared to be the squat tub’s captain.

I hurried to join them. Gurdyman posed a question, to which the captain replied with a great gush of words, waving his hands about and gesturing to his boat, his crew and the dead body. Gurdyman waited until he paused for breath — which was a long time, as the man apparently had huge lungs — and then asked another question. The man nodded vigorously, pointing back up river to the north-east.

I nudged Gurdyman. ‘What’s happened? What’s he saying?’

Gurdyman turned to me, frowning. ‘In a moment, Lassair. First we must summon the sheriff.’

I was quite surprised. Gurdyman does not have a very great opinion of our town sheriff, suspecting him, as do many of the townspeople, of taking the common pasture and using it for himself. Prowling wolf, filthy swine and dog without shame are some of the more polite epithets applied to our sheriff. But I thought I knew why Gurdyman was even now sending a lad off to find him. There was a dead body in the water beneath the quay, and all business, commerce and trade would come to a halt until someone in authority did something about it.

Gurdyman took my hand and led me right up to the edge of the quay. Together we looked down at the body. It was floating, face upwards, just behind the boat, to which it seemed to be attacked by a length of rope. The eyes were shut and the jaws clamped together. The skin looked slightly tanned, a bit like leather, and from what I could see the body was naked.

‘You don’t really think the crew killed him and slung him over the side, do you?’ I whispered.

Gurdyman shook his head. ‘I am sure they did no such thing. The captain tells me they got lost in the fens last night — a fog sprang up, apparently, as so often it does at dusk — and they missed the main channel. They went too far over to the east and got caught up in a narrow channel in the peat workings. They had to turn round and the boat’s stern was stuck in the bank. It took quite a lot of effort, apparently, to push them free.’

I would have thought that the blond-haired giant could have poled the boat along single-handed, but did not say so. ‘Do you think the body became attached then, when they were stuck in the peat?’

Gurdyman did not speak for some moments. I had the sense that his thoughts were far away.

‘Gurdyman?’ I prompted. ‘Was the body in the peat?’ It would account for the tanned appearance of the skin. We have a lot of peat around us at Aelf Fen, and we know the effect that the brown water can have on anything immersed in it for any length of time.

He turned to me. ‘Hmm?’

I was about to repeat the question, but we were interrupted by a loud cry of ‘Make way, there! Make way for the sheriff!’ And, with an advance guard of two armed soldiers and a rearguard of three more, the puffed-up, gaudily-dressed figure of Cambridge’s sheriff made his way along the quay.

I melted away into the crowd and watched. The tall, blond captain towered above the sheriff, but, even so, there was no doubting who was in charge out there. A crafty fox our man might be, but he had something about him. He seemed to expect it as his right to have Gurdyman translate for him, and, indeed, Gurdyman did not seem to mind. In fact, he appeared quite determined to be included in whatever process of the law was being enacted.

The body had, at last, been dragged out of the water. It was indeed naked, and the general assumption that it was male proved correct. I was used to male bodies by now, through my work as a healer, and I looked with some interest and without embarrassment at the dead man.

He had been in early middle age, I guessed; medium height, spare build bordering on skinny, long limbs. His wet hair trailed down on to his shoulders, swept back from the face. Both the hair on his head and his body were dark, stained slightly reddish by the peaty water. Long ropes hung down from his wrists and ankles, and I thought I saw something wound around his neck; perhaps it was one of those ropes that had become caught on the boat and dragged him out of his resting place. Had he been hanged, I wondered? Had they bound him and strung him up, cutting him down once he was dead and throwing him into the fen?

Gurdyman grabbed my hand. ‘Come, child.’ We fell into step behind the small procession, which consisted of the sheriff and his guards, now carrying the corpse between them, and the captain of the squat tub.

‘Where are we going?’ I hissed.

‘The sheriff wants to know how, when and where this man died,’ Gurdyman whispered back. ‘If a crime has been committed in his area of jurisdiction, he’ll have to investigate it.’

‘How’s he going to find out?’

He smiled. ‘Well, I thought a couple of people who, in their different ways, know something about the human body might be able to help him, so I’ve just volunteered you and me.’

We were in a low-ceilinged, stone-walled room under the big building to which the sheriff had taken us. It was quite similar to Gurdyman’s crypt, although neither as clean, tidy nor sweet-smelling. The body had been laid on a big oak table, and Gurdyman and I had been left alone with it.

Gurdyman rolled back his sleeves and nodded to me to join him at the table. I, too, pushed back my sleeves, glad that I’d braided my hair and covered it with a coif that morning, as I always did when I was working. There’s nothing more disgusting than discovering your hair has been dipping in something smelly, whether it’s a bowl of pungent oil or a pot of some sick patient’s piss.

I stared at the dead man. Then I watched Gurdyman as, slowly and unhurriedly, he went over every inch of the body. ‘A strong man,’ he mused, ‘perhaps a little on the thin side. His muscles are well developed; I’d say he was used to walking big distances.’ He leaned over the corpse’s head and deftly lifted an eyelid. ‘Dark eyes. Aged perhaps in the mid-thirties; possibly a little younger. Uncircumcised.’ He paused and raised the corpse’s right shoulder a little way above the table, leaning across the body to repeat the process with the left shoulder. He leaned closer, studying the flesh. ‘Look, Lassair,’ he murmured.

I looked. I made out faint marks, almost like a pattern etched into the skin. ‘Is it a tattoo?’

‘No, I don’t believe it is,’ Gurdyman answered. ‘I think he’s had a whipping.’

A whipping. My mind filled with the sort of images I didn’t really want to see. It was time to change the subject. .

‘How did he die?’ I asked.

Gurdyman put gentle fingers to the rope around the neck. As he began carefully to remove it — there was an intricate knot beneath the left ear — he made a soft exclamation. ‘Look,’ he repeated.

He was indicating a cut, about the length of my little finger and quite deep.

‘This incision would have severed the vessel that bears blood up to the head,’ he said. ‘Death would have followed swiftly.’

‘But I thought he’d been hanged,’ I protested.

Gurdyman was slowly unwinding the rope from around the throat. I saw now that it was not in fact rope, but a length of plaited leather. ‘This is a garrotte,’ he said. ‘It is used to break the neck, like this.’ He mimed throwing the rope around a neck and then rapidly pulling it tight, one end crossed over the other, with a sort of jerk. Then, horribly, he raised the head and wobbled it around. It was clear even to me that the neck was broken. ‘The knot would serve simply to hold the rope in place,’ he added vaguely. Again, I had the impression he was thinking about something else.

‘In place round his neck?’ I persisted.

‘Hmm? Yes, that’s right.’

I looked quickly at the dead man’s neck. The indentations made by the garrotte were clearly visible — perhaps a little more deeply marked around the back of the neck than the front, although it was hard to be sure.

I looked up at Gurdyman. He had put down the leather braid and was now handling the ropes that were wound around the man’s wrists and ankles, running his fingers delicately along them as he spoke, turning them over and over in his hands. ‘That is very interesting,’ he said softly.

‘What’s interesting?’

He looked up at me. ‘The rope is made of fibres from the honeysuckle plant.’

I knew from his expression that this was significant, but I did not know why. I was about to ask when he put the ropes down and once more stepped up close to the body. He put one hand on the lower jaw and, holding the head steady with the other, forced the mouth open. He peered inside — the man, I saw, had had good teeth — and looked carefully at the tongue and around the gums. ‘Hmm,’ he said again. He had something on the end of his forefinger, and it looked a little like the small, pale, empty skin of a berry.

‘What’s that?’ I demanded.

‘I am not sure,’ he admitted. Then, as if it were something we did together every day, he said matter-of-factly, ‘I need to see what is in his stomach. We shall have to cut him open.’

My apprenticeship as a healer had not prepared me for anything like this. Hoping I would not disgrace myself by fainting or being sick, I steeled myself, took a deep breath and went to stand at my mentor’s side. He told me to find a bowl of some sort, and I went to the shelves behind the table and selected a pottery dish. Gurdyman nodded his approval. ‘I shall remove the stomach in its entirety,’ he announced, ‘and we shall open it on the workbench over there.’ He indicated a bench beneath the shelves.

I watched as he cut a long slit from the corpse’s breast to its navel. Then he reached inside and extracted the bag of the stomach. I had half expected blood, and Gurdyman must have seen my expression. ‘He had a cut in his neck, and he has been in the water,’ he said. ‘The blood will have long ago left his body.’

That reminded me of something I had meant to ask. To take my mind off the fact that my companion was holding a human stomach in his hands and was just about to slice into it, I said, ‘How long has he been dead?’

Gurdyman frowned. ‘I cannot be sure, for peat is a natural preservative and sometimes bodies that look to have been only recently put into the ground were placed there hundreds of years ago.’

‘Hundreds of years? Can a body last that long?’

‘Yes, child.’ He smiled at me. ‘Your own ancestors, you say, lived in the fens long, long ago. They might have treated their dead in this way, slipping the corpse into the peat so that it would be preserved for ever.’

He seemed to be implying that the ancient people had deliberately buried their dead in order to preserve them, but I just couldn’t believe it. ‘Did they-’ I began, but just then he pushed the point of his sharp knife into the stomach and cut it open, and I was so busy trying not to vomit that there was no room for anything else.

Edild told me once that the best way to overcome revulsion at some perfectly natural aspect of the human body is to concentrate hard on what it is teaching you. I did my best, making myself stare in wonder at what the inside of a stomach looked like, and after a few moments I felt I had won my private battle.

Gurdyman had poured the contents of the stomach into the pottery bowl. Using the end of his knife, he separated several tiny objects. Some looked like seeds, some like fruit of some sort. Those pale berries again.

‘Fetch some water, please, Lassair,’ Gurdyman said. I did as he asked and watched as, very carefully, he rinsed the seeds and the fruit fragments, washing off the tacky, viscous, smelly matter in which they were immersed. He placed them on the edge of the table on which the body lay. ‘Hmm,’ he said again. He beckoned me closer. ‘Look,’ he said. With the end of his knife he indicated a single seed. ‘Rye, I think.’

‘Yes.’ I nodded my agreement. ‘There are lots of them.’ I pointed to a piece of berry skin. ‘And the remains of lots of berries too.’ I tried to think of an edible berry that was white in colour, and all I came up with was an unripe mulberry or strawberry, and the fragments in the stomach did not resemble either. ‘What are they?’

Gurdyman looked up at me. ‘Mistletoe berries.’

‘But they are poisonous,’ I protested. ‘We use the plant, but only the young stems and the leaves, never the berries.’

‘Interesting,’ Gurdyman remarked. ‘What do you use them for?’

‘As a heart tonic and to treat water bloating. Oh, and as a sedative.’ Briefly, I struggled with my pride. I won. ‘Actually, it’s only my aunt who administers mistletoe. She says it’s too powerful a plant for me to use unsupervised.’

Gurdyman nodded. ‘You learn by watching her, and soon she will trust you to work alone, even with potentially lethal plants,’ he said.

That was just how Edild would have phrased it. For a wonderful moment she felt very close, and silently I sent her my love.

‘And now to the rye seeds,’ he went on, carefully picking one up on the tip of his knife. Then he selected another seed which, as I looked more closely, I could see was subtly different. It was darker in colour, and the shape of the seed was slightly distorted. I felt that I recognized it, and mentally I ran my eye along the top shelf in Edild’s room, where she keeps the more dangerous items.

Then I knew what it was. Perhaps my aunt’s spirit was still close by and she had prompted me. I sent her my thanks, just in case.

‘It’s ergot,’ I said. ‘It’s a fungus that grows on rye and, like mistletoe, is potentially lethal.’ Edild had warned me gravely about what ergot could do, and I thought the effects — hallucinations, agonizing, burning pains all over the body and, eventually, flesh rot in the extremities — sounded ghastly.

‘You and your aunt use it?’ Gurdyman asked.

‘Yes. Edild prescribes it in tiny doses to help in childbirth, when the afterbirth is reluctant to detach and come cleanly away. Also, she sometimes puts it in headache remedies, although only for the terrible half-head afflictions that make people see dizzying visions and occasionally lose a part of their sight.’

Gurdyman’s expression indicated his interest. ‘You are lucky in your teacher,’ he observed. ‘Your aunt has a rare skill.’

Grateful on Edild’s behalf, I gave him a beaming smile. Before I could thank him, he returned his attention to the tiny objects laid out before us. ‘So, we have mistletoe berries and rye grains, many of which are affected with ergot,’ he said, ‘in a medium that looks like gruel or soup. What are your conclusions?’

I had been so busy congratulating myself on identifying the ergot that I’d lost sight of why it was important. Now my mind began to race, putting the picture together. Very soon I had the answer.

‘Someone poisoned him,’ I said. I thought of his wounds, the stab in the neck and the garrotte. Now we knew that he’d been made to consume a poisoned soup as well. ‘Maybe his assailant gave him the gruel to make him unconscious, so that they could kill him at their leisure,’ I suggested. ‘If he did not suspect what was about to happen, then it would have been easier for the killer to invite him to share his gruel than to leap on him and stab him in the throat, or wind that garrotte round his neck.’

‘Quite so,’ Gurdyman agreed. ‘In any case, we know the poisoned food came first, because a man cannot eat once he is dead.’

I felt myself flush. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Gurdyman must have seen my embarrassment. He reached out and lightly touched my hand. ‘Do not be hard on yourself,’ he murmured. ‘You think creatively, which is the first essential in work such as this.’

His remark comforted me. I watched him as, already immersed once more in the mysterious body, he bent down over it.

The silence extended for what felt like a very long time. I stood there beside Gurdyman, trying not to shuffle my feet; Edild complains if I fidget while she’s trying to concentrate. When at long last he came back to himself — I knew from his face and his demeanour that he had been far away — I knew I had succeeded, because he gave a sort of a start and said, ‘Lassair! I’d forgotten all about you, child.’

There was a new light in his eyes, and it seemed as if brightness was welling up out of him. Wherever he had been, whatever spirits he had been in communication with, his mind voyage had achieved the desired end. He grasped my hand and drew me back to the body.

He looked at the wound he had made in the belly, then glanced at the stomach, separate now from its shelter within the body. ‘We must put him together and sew him up,’ Gurdyman murmured. ‘Can you do that, Lassair?’

‘I-’ If you did not try new things you did not learn. Besides, I had stitched the living, and surely it must be far easier to stitch the dead. ‘Yes,’ I said decisively. ‘Er — if you will make sure I place the stomach correctly?’

‘I will indeed,’ he said with a smile. ‘Then we must see about getting him buried,’ he added, his face falling into sombre lines.

‘We do not know who he is,’ I pointed out.

‘No,’ Gurdyman agreed. ‘Although we may be able to supply an identity and a name, in due course. .’ The absent look returned to his face, but quickly he came out of his reverie. His bright blue eyes firmly on mine, he said, ‘This man was killed by a sorcerer. A man or a woman of considerable skill and power sacrificed him and gave his body to the fen.’

Too shocked to speak for a moment, I tried to absorb what he had just said. I swallowed and whispered, ‘How do you know? And a sacrifice? People don’t do that any more!’ Still he watched me, his expression unreadable. ‘Do they?’

‘In answer to your first question, I surmise that he was a sacrificial victim because of the manner of his death: poison, the cut in the blood vessel that feeds the head and the garrotte round his throat that broke his neck.’ I must have looked puzzled; I certainly felt it. ‘Count,’ he commanded.

One, the poison. Two, the cut. Three, the garrotte. From somewhere in my memory, I recalled my Granny Cordeilla speaking of something called the Threefold Death, used for ritual sacrifice when the victim went as a willing — or not so willing — offering to the gods, either to appease, to beg a request or in humble thanks for a prayer answered. But Granny had been speaking of a custom from generations past, long ago in the history of our people. .

Something occurred to me. ‘Is this — do you believe this man was killed hundreds of years ago?’ I asked. ‘The peat preserves, and-’

‘No, child. It would be comforting to conclude that, wouldn’t it? It would be easier to believe that this body has lain undisturbed since ancient times.’ Gurdyman shook his head. ‘But it is not so. He was, I believe, put into the fen within the last year, and probably more recently than that. See, these woven stems are still quite fresh, and certainly not more than a twelvemonth old.’ He reached out and picked up a length of the fibrous rope that had been twisted around the man’s wrists and ankles.

‘Honeysuckle fibres,’ I murmured.

He nodded absently. Then, looking closely at the rope around the man’s right ankle, he carefully extracted a short length of wood that was trapped in the loop at the far end. ‘And a hazel stake,’ he said.

Honeysuckle and hazel. Two of the sacred plants; hazel is full of magic and is the diviner’s and the dowser’s wood of choice. It has a close affinity with water. Honeysuckle — which we also call woodbine — is a friend both to the healer and, so Granny used to say, to the magician. Edild and I use it a lot, to ease constriction in breathing, for problems with urination and for labouring women. It was honoured of old in binding charms, and Granny told me that children used to wear bracelets made of woven honeysuckle to bind them to their homes and keep them from straying into danger.

I tried to put the qualities of both woods together. Something to bind, something to carry a message down into the water. If Gurdyman was right, this man had been staked out in the fen and given to the water. To appease, to ask for something, to give thanks for something given.

I stared down at the dead man. His face was peaceful; I found myself hoping that he had not suffered. He had been. . used, was the only word I could think of. Someone — a sorcerer, Gurdyman believed — had needed to make a sacrifice, and this man had been his chosen victim. Why? What had been special about him?

I looked up from the dead man and found Gurdyman still watching me. He made a small sound of assent, murmuring, ‘I see that you agree with my conclusion.’

Did I? I wasn’t sure. I realized I was very cold, and I had a vivid sense that forces far too strong for me were whirling and circling in the small room. Before they grew too powerful and overcame me, I had to act.

‘The first thing we must do is try to find out who he was,’ I said. To my amazement, two things happened simultaneously: the spell, if that was what it was, broke. And Gurdyman burst out laughing.

‘Well done, Lassair,’ he said when he had stopped. ‘You were quite right; the magic was growing too strong, and you and I needed to be brought back.’ Had I done that? I was both surprised and secretly pleased. ‘Now, we must find the sheriff, and then I think we shall return home and decide what to do next.’