The Way Between the Worlds Read online

  In the depths of his sickness he cried out to her. But she did not come.

  He realized, as slowly he began to recover, that it was his own careful preparations that had saved him. His refuge was too far away from Hawksclaw’s stronghold for any of the dead man’s men to have hunted him down, even if they had tried. And his foresight in making ready a safe, sheltered place to lie up in had kept him from freezing to death when, helpless and wracked with fever, he had lain in his pit and longed for Lassair.

  In time, he had begun to understand that he would live.

  Now, he knew he could not go on hiding. His wound was healing – though in the absence of any professional attention it had closed in a ragged, bumpy line that itched and prickled. It should have been stitched, he knew; he had other scars on his body that, although the result of far graver wounds, had mended cleanly thanks to careful stitching. But he had baulked at sewing up his own flesh. His only remedy had been a small bottle of lavender oil; Lassair had told him it helped fight infectious humours. He wondered now if it had saved his life, reflecting that if so, it was the second time she had held him back from death.

  Now that his strength was returning, he knew he must hasten to send word secretly to the king, to inform him that the potential threat in the north-west no longer existed. Hawksclaw was dead and, without his leadership, Rollo did not believe that wretched, ragged band of old men in their lonely, tumbledown compound stood much of a chance of stopping a man like William.

  And then, after he had located one of his network of reliable men and dispatched his message, there was the matter of the other command that William had issued to him . . .

  Rollo had deliberately not thought about it until now. It was so different in kind from any challenge he had faced before that he was wary of it, to the point of being fearful. He was used to flesh and blood men – or women, he thought ruefully, remembering the girl in Hawksclaw’s bed – who came running at him with sharp steel in their hands trying to kill him. His world was a fighter’s world, and he was content that his talent for the silent, secret work of the killer spy had been recognized by his king, and that William was putting him to good use. But this other business was nothing like either a clean, open battle or a clandestine assignment.

  In his heart, Rollo knew that he did not want to do this job. It was so far outside his experience that he was not sure even how to begin, never mind bring it to a successful conclusion. And the whisper of the unknown force that seemed to be involved frightened him; he would not have said that he was superstitious, but for this terrible thing to have been achieved, the power involved must be awesome indeed . . .

  His thoughts were getting him nowhere. He did not have a choice, for the king had given him a mission and he had accepted it. He would have to do his best, and if that wasn’t good enough he would probably die.

  With a heavy heart, still feeling weak and far from well, he got up very early one morning, packed up his belongings and carefully went over every inch of the place that had been his strange refuge. When finally he turned his back on it and walked away, it would have been all but impossible to see that any man had been there.

  He trudged off along the line of the ancient wall that snaked away eastwards across this narrow neck of England. He had left Strega in the care of a man in a small and isolated village some miles away, and until he reached the place, he had no choice but to walk. His pack had rarely seemed heavier, and it was only willpower that kept him going. The weather was milder – spring was well advanced now – and for a fit man the march would have been a pleasure. Rollo, as he very soon realized, was very far from fit.

  As, eventually, the lonely hamlet came into view, Rollo hoped fervently that the stable boy had taken good care of Strega, for she and Rollo had a long ride ahead of them.

  He would travel on towards the east until he reached the sea. There were still some twenty-five miles to go, across the wild north country which his pursuers would know so much better than he did. Twenty-five miles to cover, during which he would be alone and vulnerable to attack. He would have to employ all his skill, using not only sight and hearing to detect a possible threat, but also that strange extra sense that seemed to be there when he most needed it. If Strega was well fed and well rested, as indeed she ought to be, then she would be eager to run and, with any luck, they would reach the sea by nightfall. He would find some busy, bustling port in which to lose himself, and he would have the luxury of a good hot meal, perhaps even a wash, and a comfortable bed to sleep in. Then – and his soul began to sing at the thought – at long last he would turn south and leave the desolate, dangerous north behind him.

  His next destination and his next mission lay just ahead of him, in the near future. The fact that what the king had ordered him to do was as dangerous, in its way, as a whole troop of murderous brigands with revenge in their hearts, he did not allow himself to think about.

  One thing at a time. And he still had to get to the coast . . .

  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; poss
ibly 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.