“Some of us up here go down to lay hands on a corpse today, Sally,” she told in a hushed, suspenseful way. “There's murder afoot in our shire!” Rhia thought it courteous to give Sally all the news, though clearly Sal had not the wits to take it in.
“Three fish,” said Sal. “I'll have three of those fish.”
Rhia wiped the gruel from Sally's chin and confided, “There's a fine black boat from the earl himself that came and went as well, though I only saw it from afar. Not his pleasure boat what brought those young squires, but still, it seemed quite grand! Reeve Clap came up here yesterday to bring direct word of the murder to Mam, though he'll take any excuse to see her, I'd say, wouldn't you?”
“Three of those fish,” answered Sal.
Rhia combed Sal's hair with Granna's bone comb. “I'm glad your brother fell to his death,” Rhiannon whispered as she smoothed Dull Sally's beautiful golden locks. She often said this, but that day she added, quite sassily, “I'm sure he burns with the devil.”
Feeling both shocked and pleased with herself for that new bit of nervy talk, Rhiannon took her leave of Dull Sal and reluctantly went next door, to the cottage occupied by the Man Who Sleeps. She didn't bother knocking, as he was far past hearing.
He lay there on his bench with his arms crossed upon his chest and his ankles crossed as well, just as the four men arranged him who had carried him up to this cottage a fortnight past. No one knew a single thing about him, as he was found on the beach, but he looked somewhat noble with his strong-angled face and sharp beard. Therefore, they'd crossed his arms and also his ankles, as is done for a knightly Crusader.
Privately, Rhiannon figured him for a pirate.
No one could feed him much, though Mam got a bit of gruel to drip down his throat and oft stopped by to wet his lips from a crock of water they kept beside his bench.
He wasted away, though the wasting was slower than you might expect.
Rhia quickly wet his lips from the crock and left, as he plain gave her the willies.
Gimp Jim was at their place when she got back to it, drinking a mug of ale Granna had given him and all beaming with happiness about that morning's coming expedition.
“Little did I expect to ever see fair Woethersly again when I was carried up here all bloody and one-legged and done for!” he exclaimed, raising his mug in a salute. “Here's to the fine sight the town will make!”
Granna raised her own mug to his, but as Jim quaffed his ale, she jerked her head, signaling Rhia to join her in Mam's medicinal corner.
There, she was solemn. “Best these two, the child and the gimp, have us as friends close beside them and alert for hazards of all sorts today,” she whispered.
“You still say they'll not be welcome in Woethersly?” Rhia whispered back. “But Daisy's just a child! And Jim is so funny and good-natured. Why, I myself would have hard feelings if someone's ill-driven oxcart had left the path and run
me
over in my own toft, yet Jim bears no grudge. How could anyone bear hard feelings toward
him,
then?”
Granna just looked for a long moment deep into Rhia's eyes. Then she murmured, “Granddaughter, I hope you're right and I've misjudged the feelings of the town. But we mustn't count upon it, as my misjudgments happen so extremely seldom.”
Â
The sun was fair high in the sky when they set off down the trail. Granna led the way, then came Gimp Jim on his one leg and his stick, and Rhiannon bringing up the rear with Daisy's hand tight in hers.
“You dasn't let go my hand for any reason,” she told Daisy every few yards, squeezing her small palm all the tighter. “The trail is treacherous if your wits aren't about you at all times, understand?”
Daisy would nod each time, three sharp dips of her head, her eyes wide and serious.
To one side of them was the deep forest, and on the other was the sheer drop down to the sea, with bracken hiding the edge. The trail often changed, new pieces of it having fallen away from the rough kiss of the constant wind. One false step could be the last of you, as it had been the last of Dull Sal's bad brother.
“You look pretty!” Daisy suddenly chirped. “What's
that
?”
She was pointing to the sprig of wild cherry blossom Rhia'd painstakingly worked through the loose weave of her shawl. She'd pulled back her hair as well, knotting it in three places with grapevine so it swung to and fro jauntily as a horsetail, and she'd changed to her other skirt, the one Granna'd dyed deep red with beetroot. She was certain it was neither sinful nor proud to go wearing your best on such a day, since indeed it showed courtesy to the poor dead man. Still, she'd taken pains to avoid Mam's sight once she'd donned this festive garb.
“Jim looks funny!” Daisy noticed then. “He walks with but one leg!”
“Shush, now, with such talk,” Rhia whispered, breaking part of the cherry blossom to slip through a small hole in the bodice of Daisy's shift. “You'll hurt Jim's feelings.”
Jim had heard, but far from acting low about the childish comment, he pulled off his watch cap to reveal his wispy orange hair, did a one-legged bow to his companions, then danced a comical little jiggy hop to make Daisy laugh the more.
To say it plain, though death was almost for certain making its gnarled way up the bluff to Ona and her worse-burned child that day, those going down the bluff began to assume some high spirits, as will happen when you're traveling in good company on a fine clear day under the cool sun in the frolicsome spring. When Rhia came down the trail each month to take their things to market, to do her mother's errands, and to gather town news, she was usually alone. Granna rarely went down these days, her knees ached her so. And Mam hardly as often as Granna anymore, being required at all times by the constant needs of her invalids.
Rhiannon had forgotten how company makes a long, steep trail seem much shorter.
As the path twisted and turned, over this boulder and around that oak, they settled into a companionable picking of the way, though studying to keep footed. Daisy turned out to be sure-stepping as a little goat, so Rhia concerned herself most with the two in front.
They finally got nigh to the last big twist in the path, a zigzag through thick ash trees. Rhiannon hefted Daisy into her arms for safety, knowing that this stretch was especially treacherous but that once by it she could consider them past harm's way. The ground would level out quite a bit then, and they'd be able to see the port and the castle in the distance, with watermeadows and fields stretching from them all the way to the town.
“What was that?” Granna suddenly demanded, stopping in her tracks so quick, Jim ran right into her back, nearly toppling the both of them before he managed to right himself.
“Woman give a care to signal ere you halt, please!” he complained. He reached his stick to retrieve his watch cap, knocked clean off his head by the force.
Granna seemed not to even notice the small havoc she'd caused. “The woods be strangely changed right here,” she said in a quick, tight way, cupping her ear with her hand. “Do ye all not perceive it?”
Rhiannon held her breath, listening. What with taking charge of Daisy last night and then all she'd had to think about this morning, she'd clean forgot about the stone folk she and Gramp had perceived on the beach yesterday. But now they came rushing back to her mind, clothed in their eery stillness. They'd been clustered on the part of sand that stretched just below this ashy part of the trail, hadn't they?
“The wind is all it is,” she said quickly, swallowing her feeling of dread. “It's died down so sudden, that's the change. The stillness is all you hear, Granna.”
But there
was
something amiss, and Rhia well knew it. She could hear a faint clicking, like locusts, only not really like locusts at all. And she thought she perceived ghostly shadows slipping through the new ash leaves, darting from tree to tree.
“Or it's red deer, mayhaps,” she added in a whisper, holding Daisy tighter.
“We'd best move on,” Jim said gruffly. “This steep ledge is no safe place to tarry.”
Granna didn't argue, but straightaway resumed her downward trudge. She wasn't one to be bullied into speed, so Rhia was all the more certain that Granna suspected something fearsome in those ashy trees and had decided she must hurry them past it.
Shivering, Daisy circled Rhia's neck with her small arms and circled Rhia's waist with her small legs and pressed her face against Rhia's shoulder. The child felt it, too, then.
Breathe in, breathe out, keep watch on your feet, keep your wits,
Rhia cautioned herself.
It seemed endless, that fraught trek through the shadows. But then suddenly as one wakes from a bad dream, they came from the dark shawl of woods into glistening sunlight and the last short stretch of the trail, which was none so steep as before and none so rugged. In the distance you could see the quay with its English boats and also several Welsh coracles, tiny craft made from oiled hide and shaped like tortoise shells. Rhiannon's father had owned one for fishing and carried it to the water snugged onto his back. Rhia remembered laughing at that when she was small.
Daisy lifted her head from Rhia's shoulder and squirmed, eager to take her own feet.
“Not quite yet,” Rhia whispered, holding tight.
Before she'd let Daisy go, she scanned the part of the beach now spread on their left and a little below. The endless water lapped at the white sand like the large blue tongue of some huge dog, but where the stone people had stood yesterday, the shore was empty.
“The Lord be thanked,” she whispered, putting Daisy to her own feet.
“I saw monsters in the woods,” Daisy mentioned in a tiny voice. “I did!”
“You saw red deer and squirrels.” Rhia forced a laugh. “Silly thing!”
If only she could convince herself that her
own
imaginings were silly. Because by the time they went back this way, the shadows would be much, much longer . . .
“I can see the castle!” Daisy suddenly cried, clapping her hands. Rhia squinted into the distance and gratefully focused on that splendid sight.
The motte, as the Normans called the man-made mountain beneath the castle, had been built up on the beach by order of King William just after the Conquest. The local peasants had used the glistening beach rock to construct it, then on top of it they'd built the tower, gatehouse, and stockades with huge burnished oak logs from Clodaghcombe Forest. When the sun shone bright as it shone today, the whole thing, sandy motte and oaken castle, seemed to be crafted from the same big chunk of sparkling gold.
How could ancient haunts thrive in the vicinity of such a modern wonder? Rhiannon felt the phantoms of the woods give up the last of their clinging hold. The power, might, and sheer beauty of the castle could fend against anything!
She crouched and pointed, her arm around the child's waist. “Look how you can see the goings-on inside the castle bailey from way up here, Daisy. What a view! Our own high trail is the only place in the shire to have such a vantage of the country all round, wouldn't you say so, Granna?”
But Granna had no interest in praising their trail.
“I had a
fine
vantage when I was a girl, all right,” Granna muttered, resuming her downward trudge. “Afore that
mountain
was built by these
invaders
where God's beach had once stood. And now I hear tell they'll be building all over again in stone! Stone! There'll be the crushing of some workmen's good skulls. Saxon skulls and Welsh skulls and none of them Norman, you can wager on that. Why, if . . .”
Granna raved on quite contentedly as she went, and Jim followed a few good yards behind her, not eager for another of her quick stops to tilt him off-balance. Rhiannon stood up but stayed still a moment longer, clutching Daisy's hand.
She'd just spotted a lone walker on the beach, someone she'd not seen around before.
“Rhiannon, why are the pretty red flags no longer flying from the castle towers?” Daisy asked quietly. “Once my mother brought us to the beach and I saw that the castle flags were red and had yellow lions on them. I liked the lions.”
“All King Henry's castles fly black flags just now, Daisy,” Rhia murmured, her attention elsewhere. “Prince William Aethling lies drowned beneath the waves.”
Not much beyond her own age, she'd have said the walker was, long of limb and graceful in his movements. He wore a coarse black robe snatched up at the bottom and hitched into his rope belt so his legs to the knees were bare for wading. A young priest, then, but with straight and shiny brown hair blowing in the wind, not tonsured, priestly hair at all. His eyes were deep-set above cheekbones so high and sharp they'd purple shadows pooled beneath them. He seemed to be thinking about something, surely something extraordinary and important from the intelligent look upon his face. His feet were skinny and white. She thought them comical and smiled.
“Rhia!” Daisy squealed, jerking her arm.
Rhiannon had nearly stepped right off the trail and into thin air.
Chapter 5
Now they had finally reached the flat land with Woethersly in clear sight, but they'd still the River Woether to ford and then the common barley field beyond to trek through.
“I wonder where upon this riverbank the foul murder was committed,” Rhiannon murmured as they waded the shallow crossing. She kept her eyes on little Daisy, who splashed and whirled, laughing with delight as she slip-slid over the smooth river grasses.
Granna put a hand on Jim's shoulder to steady her crossing, then again used him for balance while she turned her wet shoes to pour out the river rocks. Patient Jim grunted and leaned hard on his stick so's not to topple as Granna took a penny from her waist pouch and bit it till it was bent and killed, then threw it over her shoulder into the river. This was a thing she did each time she came to town, for protection from all the evil that had overtaken the place since she was a young girl, back when the Saxons were still in charge and all was well with the world.