“You were, Wolf. The dame promised.
Filia pulchrior.”
“But I done the ones she left behind, didn’t I, Scarry? They was entertainment, wasn’t they?”
“Bleated, they did, Wolf. Lambs under the slaughter.
Is agnus, ea caedes est.
Oh, rapture.”
“An’ I’m a-going to do you,” Wolf said. “I can do anything.”
His eyes never leaving hers, he began fumbling at his crotch. There was a splashing sound. He was urinating, waving his penis back and forth so that it sprayed the grave of those he’d butchered.
The other creature neighed with pleasure.
At that, a great fury was released in Adelia. She stood up, not knowing that she could, nor why she did, except that she was the last remnant of civilization in this terrible place. Here were men without souls, for whom there were no limits, no restraints, who’d relinquished every decency humanity had forged in order to set itself apart from brute beasts. Chaos had come again. It had overtaken the dead, who were being dishonored, it would overwhelm her, but for their sake, however alone, she had to be on her feet to face it.
Wolf smiled.
She wasn’t alone. Somebody’s mumbling was coming nearer. “But you said … You promised us … Ain’t right, Wolf, it ain’t, it ain’t.” It was Alf. He was coming back, fighting against terror as against a high wind but pushing against it so that he could stand in front of her.
Wolf smiled again, fondly, twirled the stake in his hands like a baton, and struck Alf with it across the neck. He fell at Adelia’s feet, still whispering protest as if he couldn’t stop. “You said … you said … you said … ain’t
right.”
“Shut the fucker up, Wolf,” the thing called Scarry said casually.
Wolf twirled the stake again, catching it above his head in midair
so that it faced downward, the moon shining wickedly white on its sharpened point.
He held it high, stepped nearer, enjoying it, a priest about to sacrifice. Adelia smelled earth. Coming forward.
Later, she was to tell herself that she killed him of her own volition. At the time, it seemed that the sword, which she’d forgotten was in her hand, leaped up by itself and lunged.
All at once, in front of her, was a bare human chest from which a pommel and part of a blade were sticking out and vibrating.
For a moment, a long, silent age, woman and creature were connected by a piece of iron; she saw the eyes flicker in surprise. This wasn’t how it should be.
Wolf coughed.
There was a sucking noise as his body released itself and fell back.
Then there was just a sword point that dripped. Adelia stared at it. “Good gracious,” she said.
“What’ve you done, you bitch?” The thing called Scarry came leaping across the glade and threw itself down to take the body of its leader in its arms.
“Aaaaah.”
Wolf’s eyes, still astonished, stared up at his friend. He tried to say something. His chest heaved with dry coughs.
Scarry looked up, staring round the glade as if for help from the gods he’d worshipped here. “He’s hurt. Do something, in the name of God. Somebody do something.”
It’s his lung,
Adelia thought.
The sword went into his lung.
The grotesque creature of which she’d been so afraid had been transformed into a patient. He was suffering. She went down on her knees and listened to the chest. Air was making a flopping sound as it flowed through the lung’s puncture hole.
Scarry screamed at her like a man at the ending of his world. “Do something.”
Adelia heard her foster father’s voice as he’d bent over a man stabbed in a Salerno brawl whose chest was making the same sucking noise,
“If we could open the thorax and sew up the ripped lung
…
but we cannot
…
He will die in minutes.”
Already Wolf’s eyes were glazing over. Beneath the mask of leaves, his face was changing color.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry. There’s nothing to be done.”
“Bloody is,” a voice above her head said earnestly. Will was trying to get her to her feet. “We run.”
Scarry was kissing the dying face, begging. “Te
amo.
Don’t leave me, my Lupus.
Te amo, te amo.”
“Run,” Will said again. He’d taken the sword from her, pointing it at the sobbing Scarry. “And quick. He ain’t going to take this kindly.”
She was pulled up. Toki and Ollie had a stumbling Alf by the arms. “Run,” Will was shouting now. “He’ll fuckin’ kill us.”
What had happened, what
was
happening, the horror of this place … She let herself be dragged into a run.
Out of the glade, through trees.
Behind them rose a screamed lament that ruffled the leaves. “Come back, my Lupus!
Te amo! Te amo!”
She was leaping over fallen branches, along a stream, breath coming short; whether woodland hurtled by her or she was hurtled past it was impossible to know.
The charcoal burner’s hut. They stopped, panting.
Will found his voice. “Is he after us, Toki?”
Adelia could hear nothing except the pounding in her own ears.
“He’s after us,” Toki said.
She was put up on a donkey; they were all on donkeys and galloping. When they reached the road, knowledge came to her. “Dear God, I killed him.”
The tithing took no notice. It just galloped faster.
T
HEY TOOK HER
to the cave on the Tor and sat her down by the spring. It was quiet there.
The night was still dark, though. Being so near to the summer solstice, the sky had never been completely black and, even with the sun still below the horizon, was lightening as if filters were being removed from it one by one. Bats flittered against it.
“Toki?” asked Will.
A blackbird emitted its first song of the day, an isolated sound.
Toki nodded his head and puffed out his cheeks in relief. “We lost him.”
“Then you get back down the hill an’ wipe out our tracks. He can sniff a footprint in the dark, can Scarry.”
Adelia looked up at them. “I killed him,” she said.
“Pity you di’n’t do Scarry while you was about it,” Will told her. “He ain’t a-going to like losing Wolf.”
Ollie spoke for the first time. “But he don’t know where she lives, Will, does he?”
“No, he don’t,” Will said with satisfaction. “I told Wolf as she come from Wells.”
“I killed him.”
She, whose oath was to preserve life, had
taken
life. Didn’t they realize it?
“You saved Alf,” Will pointed out. “He was a-goin’ to do Alf.”
Alf.
Here, at least, was somebody she
could
help. They’d laid him down on the grass. The skin of his throat was raw and swollen
where the stake had been struck against it. She tore a strip off the hem of her green tunic, soaked it in the cold water of the spring, and applied it to the bruising. She tried to get him to drink some water, but swallowing was too painful for more than a few sips.
“Can you talk, Alf?” she asked with tenderness.
He huffed a response.
“Is he going to be all right?” Will asked her.
“I think so. His voice should come back when the swelling goes down.”
“Pity,” Will said savagely. “He talks us into more fuckin’ trouble than he’s worth… . Him an’ his bloody truth. Everyone got to keep their word… . Pain in the arse, Alf is.”
Adelia looked up, angry. Then she saw that Will was ashamed of his and the others’ cowardice in the glade, humiliated that it had been Alf, not him, who’d come to her aid.
“He can’t help it, Will,” Ollie said.
That’s the extraordinary thing,
she thought.
He can’t.
Smoothing the greasy hair back from Alf’s young, pockmarked face, she thought what a jewel was here. The Lord only knew how, petty thief that he was, the truth flamed bright in Alf’s soul—not honesty, not regard for other people’s deer, but the truth. It had dragged him, unwilling, moaning with fear, back to her side in the glade from outrage that Wolf had broken his oath to the tithing. He’d tried to save her life and, if she had then saved his, it was something to set against the fact that she’d had to kill to do it.
By the time Toki came back, dawn had broken. They gave Adelia some dried meat that she chewed on without identifying it, and she accepted a harsh but invigorating drink out of a filthy bottle. But when, having cleaned it, Will threw the sword down beside her, she saw only the image of Wolf’s lung and the rupture
this blade’s tip had made in it so that air had escaped into the pleural cavity.
“I don’t want it,” she said.
“You bloody keep it,” Will told her. “And pray God as you won’t need it.”
This was such unusual piety for Will that she asked, “Who
is
Scarry?”
Will shrugged. “Don’t rightly know. Wolf, now, he come from the Quantocks, always mad, he was. Strangled his mother when he were still a lad, so the story goes, and lived wild in the forest ever after. Chancy, Wolf was, and no loss, so don’t you go frettin’. World’s a better place with that bastard gone.”
Perhaps it was, but remembering that it was she who’d sent him out of it put a weight on her that would never be lifted. She shivered. “And Scarry? He could speak Latin.”
Will nodded, and Adelia noticed that he, too, had a momentary coldness and drew his cloak around him. “Educated, Scarry is. Nobody don’t know for sure where he come from, up north as like as not. I heard his name was Scarlett or Scathelock, summat like that. Some say he was a priest and done wicked things so’s the Church chucked him out. Or he was a noble and done wicked things so’s he was outlawed. Joined up with Wolf, what, three, four year ago. Fish divin’ into water that was for Scarry. Loved it, liked the killing. Don’t know which of ’em was chancier, him or Wolf.”
“He cried for love of Wolf.” That dreadful scream:
Te amo, te amo.
“Yeah, well.” Will shifted uncomfortably. “The pair of ’em was funny like that.
What?”
Alf was tugging at his elbow and croaking.
“He wants as you should tell her the rest of it, Will,” Toki explained.
Will spat. “Gor bugger, Alf, you want me to lose me best customer?”
It appeared from an indistinct whisper that Alf did.
Again, Toki translated. “Alf says as you’m a prize baker and don’t need to work for that old bitch.” He paused. “Maybe as we owe it to the missus, Will. She ought to know.”
“What old bitch?” asked Adelia.
“All right,
all right.”
Will sat down beside her, pulled up a piece of grass, and chewed savagely on it. “ ’S like this. See, Wolf knew as your lady’d be on that road. He was a-waiting for her, like.”
“
How
did he know?” God, it was becoming hot; the air was accumulating weight and making her gasp for breath.
Will sucked on his grass. “See, the big manors round here, they used to suffer something terrible from Wolf. He raided their beeves, sheep, barns, nothing safe from Wolf. And that weedy old sheriff not doin’ anything proper to stop un, nor Glastonbury, nor Wells.”
“So?”
“Well, so the lords and ladies as was suffering, they came to an arrangement, like. With Wolf. Payin’ him to stay off their land, see?”
Danegeld. The manors had paid Wolf to procure their peace and safety. At this moment, a disgraceful history seemed irrelevant, but Alf, in whom truth spouted like clear water from a fountain, thought it necessary that she should know it. “I see,” she said.
“So that night, the night as your friend was turned away from Wolvercote …” Will paused.
The air became heavier, suffocating.
“Well, that night Wolf got a message from there a-saying as there’d be a rich lady and party a-leavin’ of Wolvercote. Nice pickings for him, it said. They’d be taking his road, it said.”
“A message?” Adelia said stupidly. Alf was nodding. Then it came to her. “She sold them?
She sold them?”
“Don’t know about that,” Will said, getting up. “I’m just saying as what happened.”
She’d sold them. The mistress of Wolvercote Manor had looked on Emma and the child, seeing only a threat to her position. And wanted them dead. And set the wolves on them.
“No need to worry about Eustace,” Will said, looking down at her. “He’s a-laying in Street Church and, when we’re off the hook for the fire, we’ll bury the poor bastard,
with
his fingers, the which is still by the abbey bloody wall.”
But Adelia wasn’t worrying for Eustace. It was the betrayal of Emma that had wiped everything else from her mind. And the bodies in their shallow grave in a lawless forest, killed twice—once by a woman who’d turned them from her door with murderous intent, and once by an animal. And who was the guiltier? The animal? Or the lady in her velvet manor?
Adelia’s mouth moved. “She sold them.”
Emma, Roetger, and Pippy. The souls of the dowager’s victims called out to her. Where were they?
She looked out toward the blue-and-green pattern of the marshes to clear her mind—an anatomist’s mind so clinical that it could not bear untidiness, whatever jumble of monstrosity had been fed into it.
Surely they are dead,
she thought. They sustained wounds in the battle with Wolf and died of them. But Lord in heaven, did all bodies vanish in this godforsaken country? Was there some hole that sucked people into it without a trace?
Clear as clear, over and over, she watched Emma on the cart lash its horses into a gallop, saw Roetger flailing at their pursuers, heard Little Pippy screaming … a pack mule cantering behind them.
And then nothing. They vanished. She couldn’t see them anymore.
She raised her head. “Glastonbury, Alf? You said they were last seen galloping in the direction of Glastonbury. My friend and the cart.”
Alf huffed his assent.
“They didn’t get there.”
Will said, “Horses veered, maybe. Crashed ’em somewhere ’mongst the trees. Killed ’em.”
Yes, that might be the explanation: three more corpses rotting in that hellish forest, noticed only by the wildlife feeding on them.
Gently, because it was unbearable to envisage otherwise, Adelia’s mind gathered the bodies up and laid them in the trench that held their companions, folding their poor hands, pleading for rest to their souls… .