‘Father Brice sent me to fetch you,’ I said now. A sudden sting in my right foot, in the soft flesh of the arch.
That grunt again in the back of his throat. ‘Tell him no.’
I looked from Yvain to Dristan, who gave the slightest shrug of his narrow shoulders, his eyes fixed on me as he worked the strap back and forth.
‘Father?’ I wondered how Yvain could refuse before he had even heard what Brice wanted of him.
‘He wants me to go somewhere,’ he said. ‘To the village or to the nuns. Somewhere.’ He lifted his chin and Dristan stopped pulling the strap, so that the workpiece went suddenly still. Yvain blew on it, examining it closely as Dristan caught his breath. ‘Whatever it is, tell him no. I’m not going out there.’ Again, he lifted his beard, all flecked with wood chips, and with nimble hands Father Dristan unwound the strap so that Yvain could remove the workpiece from the lathe. ‘I’ll not leave this island again, Galahad. Not in this body.’ He turned the piece in his big hands, seeming less than satisfied. ‘I’ve work to do. Tell Brother Brice that.’
‘It’s for the child,’ I said, ‘and … for his mother. Father Brice would put the infant in the grave with the body of a grown man.’ Father Dristan was frowning at me. ‘A man on the crannog was dying—’
‘And Brother Brice wants me to go over there and bring his corpse back to Ynys Wydryn,’ Father Yvain interrupted me, turning the workpiece over in his big hands. ‘To go out there and risk my neck to bring a dead man back for a dead child.’
Father Dristan’s eyes widened at that, but he knew better than to question Father Brice’s wishes in front of Yvain, even if those wishes seemed at odds with our faith.
‘I’ll not go,’ Yvain said. ‘Not this time.’
I nodded and could not help but wonder at the things, the terrible things, that Father Yvain must have seen out there in the marsh and even beyond. Things of which the brothers whispered, wide-eyed, in the dormitory. Tales which grew yet sharper fangs and claws in night’s ensuing silence, preying on us each in the lonely dark.
‘Well, Galahad,’ he said, and held up the fruit of his labour, turning it this way and that in the pale shaft of daylight which quested through the smoke-hole along with spitting gusts of rain.
‘It is beautiful, Father,’ I said.
Yvain frowned. ‘It might be. When I bring out the grain and if it doesn’t crack.’
It was a goblet made of spalted beech. A simple thing. But I knew that Father Yvain would work the beeswax into the wood until those strange, dark patterns told stories as rich as those of any bard.
‘Off with you then, lad. And remember what I told you: I’ll not go.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘And get that splinter out of your foot.’ He took a knife and sliced a burr from the underside of the goblet’s base. ‘A little thing like that will kill you if it can.’
He didn’t miss much, Yvain. I nodded and pulled my cowl over my head, wondering how the rough wool would feel against my bare scalp come the new moon, when my novitiate would end and I would take the tonsure and become a brother.
Then I stepped out into the damp day and for a moment stood looking up at the sky. Above me, several rooks bickered and cried, tumbling like black ashes against the vast emptiness. Dusk was gathering, the day retreating, and I could feel the light leaching out of the sky. The brothers’ voices, rising and falling with the breeze, seemed as much a prayer against the coming night as a liturgy for the poor child who had not lived but a day.
Father Brice glowered all through Compline, though his ire was wasted as Father Yvain was not there to see it. Of the others, only Father Padern had supported Brice’s idea of seeking a recently deceased adult to share the infant’s grave. Not that the old cellarer volunteered to risk the marsh and venture to the folk on the crannog when I relayed Yvain’s refusal.
‘I will go myself,’ Father Brice had declared, pressing his mottled hands together, each gripping the other. But if he had believed that at all, his resolution faded like the fog of those words on the cold air. Father Padern arched a brow at me. Neither of us thought Father Brice was seriously considering leaving the monastery. But for Padern and Prior Drustanus, who had lain on his sickbed since the first ospreys had been seen in the marshes, gathering their strength before flying south for the winter, Brice was the oldest of the brothers. And while his mind was talon-sharp, his body was more suited to prayer than to sculling through the bogs in midwinter. Besides, there was evil out there among the reed-beds and fens. Evil lurking in the carrs and twisting with the willows’ roots. Malevolence moving in the mires.
We had all heard the tales the folk of the island villages told of the thrys, a race of human-like creatures who dwell in the darkest reaches, sometimes underwater, waiting to murder unsuspecting travellers. Every few years, word spread of folk who had gone into the marshes never to be seen again.
And there were the mists which rose from the black water as though pyres, as many as there are stars in the night sky, burned in the underworld, their smoke passing through the veil into our own world. There was also the dreaded marsh fever, which could be caught from these unholy fogs and which would have you vomiting and yellow-skinned, your bones rattling in your flesh until you died.
Of us all, only Father Yvain dared the marsh, carrying messages from Prior Drustanus to Prioress Klarine at the convent, or to fetch Ermid the smith from the lake village when we needed something forging which was beyond the wood-turner’s own talents.
‘I’ve faced worse than some stinking fen-dweller,’ he had told me once when I had asked why he was unafraid to take the coracle out onto the dark water, not knowing what was out there beyond the safe haven of our island. Father Yvain had been a warrior once, had even fought as a spearman for Lord Arthur, though he would rarely talk of those days now. If Yvain was not willing to leave our little sanctuary and go out there, then no one was. Father Brice would have to resign himself to laying the child in its grave alone and hope that our Lord’s angels would find their way through the mists of Avalon to guide the infant’s soul to heaven.
And so the old monk glowered through the night prayers, and Father Yvain turned his wood in the workshop, and the poor exhausted woman sobbed because she feared her baby would for ever wander the shadowy realm between our world and the next.
For myself, I wondered if the Lord God even knew we were here, we ten clinging to that island in the marshes where the old gods of Britain had once abided before the Saxon gods came to the Dark Isles. I could speak the prayers by rote, leaving my mind free to roam, and though I felt some guilt at pondering such a thing at such a time, I decided it was better to seek the answers to these questions now, in my novitiate, than later. That way, by the time I took my vows and Father Brice himself gave me the tonsure, my mind would have been put at ease that I might devote myself fully to God.
And yet even such thorny contemplations withered in the damp cold of this night, so the Lauds of the Dead found me shivering and yawning in the reedlight-flickered dark at the rear of the church, thinking of my bed and of sweet sleep, when I should have been thinking only of my devotions.
For the little church was draughty in winter, when the apple trees beyond the pasture were black skeletons and bitter gusts blew from the west across the marsh and rolled up the tor like a wave. The reed thatch leaked, and we waited for drier days to replace it, in the meantime huddling beneath it, warmed only by our own breath as we sang and by the illusion of heat provided by the fragile flames of tallow lamps. And even though Father Yvain joined us for Lauds, his habit strewn with wood shavings, there were not enough voices to drown the sobs of the grief-stricken woman which seeped through the wattle wall and pierced the rhythmic rise and fall of our song.