He laughed at himself, put his first fish of the day into his net bag and staked it in the stream – carefully, so that he’d know if a snapping turtle was intending to take the fish. He had a spear. If he had to, he could kill the turtle.
‘I love the Wild,’ he said aloud.
And cast again.
The Manor of Middlehill had never been a great one, and the whole was held for the service of a single knight, and had been for ninety years. Helewise Cuthbert stood by the ruins of her gatehouse and her tongue pushed against her teeth in her effort not to weep, while her young daughter stood closer than she had stood in many years.
The Knights of Saint Thomas said that it was safe to return to their homes in the north, and had paid them well in tools and seed to return. Helewise looked at her manor house, and it looked like the skull of a recently killed man – the stone black from fire, the once emerald-green yard strewn with refuse that had once been their tapestries and linens. The windows, purchased with glass from Harndon, a matter of great family pride, were smashed, and the great oak door was lying flat, with a small thorn growing through its little lattice window.
Behind her stood twenty more women. Every one of them was a widow. Their men had died defending Albinkirk – or failing to defend it, or the smaller towns to the south and west of Albinkirk – Hawkshead and Kentmere and Southford and the Sawreys.
They gave a collective sigh that was close to keening.
Helewise settled her face, and gathered her pack. She smiled at her daughter, who smiled back with all the solid cheerfulness of age nineteen.
‘No time like the present,’ Helewise said. ‘It’s the work you don’t start that never gets done.’
Phillippa, her daughter, gave the roll of her head that was the dread of many a mother. ‘As you say, Momma,’ she managed.
Her mother turned. ‘Would you rather give it up?’ she asked. ‘A year’s work, or two, and we’ll be back on our feet. Or we can go be poor relations to the Cuthberts in Lorica, and you’ll become someone’s spinster aunt.’
Phillippa looked at her feet. They were quite pretty, as feet go, and the laces on her shoes had neat bronze points that glittered when she walked. She smiled at her feet. ‘I don’t think I’d like that much,’ she said, thinking of some of the boys in Lorica. ‘And we’re here now. So let’s get to work.’
The next hours were almost as bad as the hours in which they’d fled, while old Ser Hubert rallied the men of the farm to fight the tide of boggles. Phillippa remembered him a sour old man who couldn’t even flirt, but he’d waded into the monsters with an axe and held the road. She remembered looking back and watching him as the axe rose and fell.
Her views on what might be useful in a man had undergone what her mother would call a ‘profound change’.
Jenny Rose, one of the few girls her own age, found the first bodies, and she didn’t scream. These women’s screams were about spent. But other women gathered around her and patted her hands, and old crone Gwyn gave her a cup of elderberry wine, and then they all began to pull the pile of bones and gristle apart. The boggles went onto a pile to burn. The others—
They were husbands and brothers and sons. And, in two cases, daughters. They’d all been eaten – flensed clean. In some ways, that made the task easier. Phillippa hated clearing dead mice out of traps – so squishy, still warm. This wasn’t as bad, even though they were the bones of people she’d known. At least one set of bones belonged to a boy she’d kissed, and a little more.
Stripped of their flesh, they all looked the same.
They found a second pile of the dead later in the day, in the apple orchard. By then, Phillippa was more hardened to it. Or so she thought, until Mary Rose spat and said, ‘These is midden heaps.’ She spat again, not in contempt, but in her effort not to retch.
Phillippa and Mary and Jenny were the youngest women, so the three of them were given most of the heavy work. They were all pretty fair at using the shovels, and Phillippa was learning to cut with the axe, although using it raised calluses on her hands that would not please the boys in Lorica. If she ever went back to Lorica.
When the sun was past midday, her mother rang the bell – the monsters didn’t steal the really valuable things, the way reivers and skinners would do. So she went down the hill from the apple orchard. There was an intact rain-barrel under the eaves of the manor house, and she washed her hands.
Jenny Rose smiled. ‘You have nice hands, Phillippa.’
Phillippa smiled. ‘Thanks, Jen. Though I’m afraid they’re going to get worse before they get better.’
Mary Rose paused to dip her own hands. ‘What were the boys like in Lorica?’ she asked, bold as brass.
‘Mary Rose!’ said her sister.
‘Much like boys everywhere, I expect,’ said a new voice.
Standing by the corner of the house was a tall, slim woman in a nun’s black habit with the cross of Saint Thomas on it. She smiled at the girls. ‘Handsome, funny, angry, preening, stupid, vain, and wonderful,’ the nun continued. ‘Are you Phillippa? Your mother was worried.’
The three girls curtsied together. Jenny and Mary made a stiff obeisance, the kind that the village priest taught you. Phillippa sank down, back straight and legs apparently boneless. ‘Sister?’ she asked.
The nun had a beautiful smile. ‘Come,’ she said.
Jenny whispered, ‘Teach me to do that.’
Supper was ham and cheese and good bread that must have come from the fortress with the nun. The mill at Gracwaite cross was a burned-out ruin, and none of the towns around Albinkirk had had bread – fresh bread – in weeks.
There was a fine palfrey in the yard, and a mule.
The nun was a curiosity – neither particularly well bred, nor ill-bred. She was somehow too robust to be a noblewoman – her brown hair was rich but unruly, her lips were a little too lush, and her eyes had more of command than languor. But Phillippa admired her immensely.
The nun had a tonic effect on the gathered women. She seemed oblivious to the shadow over all of them, and she had brought seeds for late planting. The mule was to stay as a plough animal until the fortress sent oxen.
‘I gather that you have found quite a few dead,’ she said. She said it quite plainly, without the embellishment of false sentiment.
‘Almost all the men,’ Helewise noted. ‘We haven’t found Ser Hubert. I’d expect to know him. He had his brigandine on.’
‘I saw him fighting,’ Phillippa said, without meaning to. ‘I saw his axe. I never liked him. I wasn’t nice to him.’ Her voice cracked. ‘He died for us.’
The nun nodded. ‘Hard times change us all, in ways that are far beyond our little knowledge,’ she said. ‘They teach us things about ourselves.’ She frowned.
Then she looked up. ‘Let us pray,’ she said. When she was done, they ate in relative silence. And when she’d finished her share, the nun rose. ‘When we’ve washed up, let’s go bury the dead and say the service,’ she said.
Phillippa, who had never been a great one for religion, was surprised by how moved she was by the nun’s quiet prayers, her open-faced plea to heaven for the souls of the departed, and by her homily – on how deeply they’d all been touched, and how they must trust in God.
When the nun was finished, she smiled and kissed each woman on both cheeks. Then she walked to the pile of dead boggles. They didn’t smell, but they didn’t rot as men do – their leathery hides and the heavy cartilage of their ‘shells’ took time to return to the soil.
‘God made the Wild, as surely as he made Man,’ said the nun. ‘Although these were our enemies, we pray you take them to you.’
The nun raised her face to heaven, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross; the entire pile turned to sand.
Twenty women lost the ability to breathe for a moment.
The nun turned to Helewise. ‘The afternoon is yet young. Now, about the seed?’
Ser John had fished for too long.
He caught and killed more than ten pounds of trout – perhaps much more than ten pounds – and the fishing was superb, at least in part because most of the other fishermen were dead. He didn’t want to stop, but as the sun began to sink in the west he made himself pull his line off the water. He was a mile downstream from where he’d started – a mile from his horse, and, he suddenly realised, a mile from his spear.
Feeling more foolish than afraid, he plucked his harvest from the water and started back along the bank. The late summer sunlight was still strong and red, and the Wild had seldom looked less threatening but Ser John was too old in the ways of the Wild to be fooled by it, though. He moved quickly, making as little noise as he could.
He’d travelled a quarter of the distance back to his horse when something alerted him – a movement, perhaps, or a sound. He froze, and then, very slowly, lowered himself to the ground.
He lay still for a long time, watching, and the sun’s angle steepened. Then he rose and began to stride rapidly along the trail. Every stream like this one had a trail along its bank – men made them, and so did the Wild. They shared the trails.
When he was just a bowshot from his horse, he climbed a tree to have a look. There were no carrion birds but there was a persistent rustling away to the south, and twice he heard the distant crash of a large animal moving too quickly for stealth. And darkness was just an hour away.
He swung down from the tree, cursing his shoulder muscles, his age, and how much all this was going to hurt the following day – but he paused to pluck his bag of fish from the ground by the tree.
To his immense relief – he hadn’t even known how worried he had been – his horse was merely nervous, not boggle-food. He saddled the big riding horse – a failed warhorse – and fetched his heavy spear from the crotch of a forked tree where he’d left it at sunrise.
‘I’m an idiot,’ he said aloud. Calm again.
The Wild’s army was beaten, but the woods were still full of danger. He had been very foolish to leave his horse. He stood with it, calming it.
He got one foot in the stirrup, powered into the saddle, and turned for home.
Two hundred feet in front of him, a young doe bolted from the trees into the meadow. She was too young to be cautious, and she turned towards him, never seeing the man or the horse.
Behind her, a dozen boggles burst from the wood line. One stride into the clearing, the lead creature paused – a slim dark figure against the light, and it took Ser John a moment to register what he was seeing. The boggle had a throw-stick.
The spear left the throw-stick as fast as an arrow and the missile took the little doe in her hindquarters. She tumbled, fell, and blood sprayed. But terror and wild determination fuelled her, and she rose and drove forward – right at the knight.
Between his knees he could feel his horse’s nerves. Old Jack had failed as a warhorse because he shied at the tilt – and had done so over and over.
‘Always another chance to excel,’ muttered Ser John, and he lowered the spear point.
The doe saw the horse and tried to turn, but her limbs failed her and she fell sprawling, and the boggles were on her.
Ser John put the spurs to his horse, and the gelding leaped out from beneath the old tree.
The doe screamed. One of the boggles already had her open and was dragging her guts out while another sank his four-way hinged mouth into her haunch. But the boggle with the throw-stick had a long knife. The thing made a keening noise, and wrenched his throwing spear from the dying deer.
Ser John didn’t have time to ride him down, and he didn’t fancy facing the throwing spear without armour, so he rose in his stirrups and threw his own spear – a cloth yard of steel at the end of six feet of ash. It wasn’t a clean throw but it caught the boggle in the head as it pin-wheeled through the air, and the thing shrieked.
Ser John drew his sword.
His horse put its head down as he rode straight at the doe’s carcass.
I’m avenging a dead deer, for Christ’s sake, he thought and then he was reining in, and four of them were dead. The one he’d knocked down with his hastily thrown spear was bubbling as the little things did when they were broken, their liquid innards emerging throught rents in the carapace as if under pressure.
There was one missing.
The horse shied. It all but threw him with a sidestep and a kick – he whirled his head and saw the creature, covered in ordure, emerge from within the doe’s guts, exploding up in a spray of blood and muscle tissue. But its claws went for the man.
The horse kicked it – rear left, rear right. Ser John managed to keep his seat as the terrified horse then trampled the boggle which had been kicked clear of the carcass and lay in the dust of the old road.
Ser John let the horse kick. It made both of them feel better.
Then he checked his fish.
Afternoon was tending to evening and the nun was in the kitchen with Phillippa’s mother. Phillippa went there to help – as darkness fell, the cleanliness of the manor house chimney and the kitchen chimney had taken on paramount importance, and Helewise and the nun agreed between them to delay dinner a little longer.
There were birds’ nests in the chimneys, and raccoons in the chimney pots. Phillippa thought the task was better than finding more corpses, and she pitched in with a will, climbing the roof slates in the last light with Jenny Rose and shooing the raccoons out with a broom. They didn’t want to go – they looked at her over their shoulders as if to say ‘We just want a nice bit of chicken, and can’t we all be friends?’
She caught the flicker of movement away off to the north, and held out a filthy hand to Jenny Rose. ‘Shush!’ she said.
‘Shush yourself!’ Jenny said, but then she saw Phillippa’s face and froze.
‘Hoof beats,’ they both said together.
‘Can I light the fire, dear?’ called her mother.
‘Yes, and there’s someone coming!’ she shouted back, her voice a little higher pitched than it needed to be.
The nun was out the kitchen door in a moment, standing with her hands on her hips in the last real light. She turned all the way around, very slowly. Then she looked up at the roof. ‘What do you see, Phillippa?’ she asked.
Phillippa made herself do just what the nun had done. She turned slowly, balanced on the peak of the roof.
Jenny said, ‘Oh!’ and pointed. By the stream to the west of them, there was a flicker of light – beautiful pink light, and then another.
‘Faeries!’ said Jenny.
‘Blessed Virgin Mary,’ said Phillippa, who crossed herself.
‘Faeries!’ she shouted down to the nun. ‘By the creek!’
The nun raised her arms and made a sign.
The sound of hoof beats grew closer.
The faeries moved gracefully along the streambed. Phillippa had seen faeries before, but she loved them, even though they were a sign of the dominance of the Wild and it was supposedly a sin to admire them. But combined with the sound of galloping hooves, they seemed more sinister.
The sun passed behind the ridge to the west.
Almost instantly the temperature fell, and darkness was close. Phillippa shivered in nothing but her shift and kirtle.
Steel glittered on the road, and the hoof beats were close now. The horse was tired, but the man rode well. He was very old, and had wild grey hair flowing out behind him, but his back was straight and his seat was solid. He was dressed like a peasant, yet he wore a long sword. She had spent the summer among men who went armed. He had a spear in his hand, too.
He reined up for a moment at the ruins of their gatehouse, stood in his stirrups, and then said something to his mount. The horse responded with a last effort, and the man passed out of sight only to reappear walking under the two old oaks on the drive.
The nun held up a hand. ‘The sele of the day to you, messire,’ she said in a clear voice.
The old man reined up at the edge of what had once been the yard. ‘Greetings, fai
r sister. I had no thought that the resettlement had come this far. Indeed, I passed this way this morning and I’d wager there was no one here.’
The nun smiled. ‘Neither there was, good knight.’
‘Ma belle, you speak most courteously. Is there a bed here for an old man with an old horse?’ He bowed to her from horseback. It was fun to watch them from the roof, unobserved. Phillippa gave them both high marks for courtesy – they spoke like the people in the songs of chivalry that she loved. And not like the stupid boys in Lorica, who were all sullen swearwords.
‘We cannot give you as fair a hostel as we could in times past, Ser John,’ her mother said, emerging into the door yard.
‘Helewise Cuthbert, as I live and breathe!’ said the old man. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘It’s my house, I believe,’ her mother said with some of her characteristic asperity.
‘Christ on the cross,’ said Ser John. ‘Be careful. I killed three brace of boggles five miles back on the road.’ He grinned. ‘But I’m that glad to see you, lass. How’s Pippa?’
Phillippa hadn’t allowed her mother to call her Pippa in years, and while she had an idea who this man must be she couldn’t remember seeing him before.
‘Well enough, for her age. You’ll want a cup of wine,’ her mother said. ‘You’d be welcome here.’
He dismounted like a younger man, kicking his feet clear of his stirrups and leaping to the ground – an effect he spoiled slightly by putting a hand in the small of his back. ‘Is this to be a religious house?’ he asked the nun.
The young nun smiled. ‘No, ser knight. But I’m a-visiting; I’m to ride abroad to every new resettlement north of Southford.’
Ser John nodded and then caught both of her mother’s hands. ‘I thought you would be gone to Lorica,’ he said.
She reached her face up to his and kissed him. ‘I couldn’t stay there and be a poor relation when I have a home here,’ she replied.
Ser John stepped away from her mother, smiling. He looked away from her and then back, smiled again, and then bowed to the nun. ‘I’m Ser John Crayford, the Captain of Albinkirk. Yester e’en, I’d have said “ride and be of good cheer”, but I’m none too pleased with my little boggle encounter this evening. Which puts me in mind that I’d be in your debt for a rag and some olive oil.’