Someone somewhere hissed, but in the gloom I could not see who. Then Father Dristan’s elbow in my ribs drew my attention to Father Judoc, who was glaring at me from where he stood, to our right beneath the driest of the old thatch. He beckoned me with his eyes and so I wriggled through the brothers, still singing as I went, until I stood before Judoc and bent to put my ear near his mouth.
‘The girl, Galahad; it will not do. She is distracting the brothers from their prayers.’ I knew Father Brice had given her permission to spend the night in the infirmary with the little corpse, that our prayers might pass through the walls to give her solace. But from the sound of her sobbing, it seemed our devotions were giving her no comfort at all. ‘Take her some wine,’ Father Judoc hissed, ‘and only a little water.’
‘Yes, Father.’ I turned to leave.
He grabbed my arm. ‘Only a little water, Galahad,’ he repeated. ‘She will find some peace in sleep.’ He grimaced. ‘And we shall be spared a woman’s wailing.’
I nodded and went to fetch a jug of apple wine, wondering if I would still be at the brothers’ beck and call once I became fully one of them. When I rapped the cup’s base on the infirmary door, I realized that my palms were slick with sweat and my stomach was rolling over itself like a pot of eels. I thought of what I had heard Father Folant say, that the dead baby was Britain itself. But then, Folant was ever the voice of doom, filling our ears with his dark prophecies about the future.
There was no answer from within. The sobbing quietened, though, and I heard a rhythmic gasping as of someone trying to catch their breath. I lifted the jug to my nose and inhaled the aroma of fermented apples and honey, a smell of summer days conjured brightly in the mind as if by some charm. I pushed the door open and went in.
An oil lamp burned with fitful, sooty splutters which seemed to mimic the woman’s own breathing. By its light I saw that the bundle was back in its simple crib of pale birch, which Father Yvain had made on the day the woman’s husband had brought her to the tor. No one knew where her husband was now. Against the brothers’ advice, he had gone to fetch a healer who was known to live on a spit of land in the Meare Pool, but he had not returned and perhaps never would.
‘I am sorry,’ I told the woman, who sat by the crib as she had when her child still clung to life. She looked at me with such sadness as I had not seen for a long time. Her eyes were swollen and red. Her face glistened with snot and tears, and if I had felt trepidatious before entering that dim room, I felt contemptible now, standing there with an offer of apple wine, as if that would make things better. And yet she tried to smile.
‘Thank you, Galahad.’
I was shocked and must have shown it.
She frowned. ‘That is your name?’
‘Yes,’ I said, pouring the wine into the cup. I had added only half a beaker of water to the drink.
‘They talk of you,’ she said.
I moved closer and offered her the cup. She took it and drank, emptying it before I had the chance to place the jug on the table beside her. I refilled the cup and put the jug down. My name was known in Avalon. I knew that, and I hated it.
‘What is your name?’ I asked her.
‘Enid,’ she answered.
I nodded at the wine in her hands. ‘It is strong, Enid,’ I warned her. ‘I’ll add more water. If you like.’
She shook her head and drank again, then looked into the crib. ‘My child is lost.’
‘No. He will find his way to heaven,’ I tried to reassure her. ‘We all prayed for him. The one true God will welcome his soul.’
She scowled at me. ‘There are no gods here, Galahad,’ she rasped. ‘Not yours, not mine. My poor little boy is lost. We are all lost.’
I did not know what to do. What could I say? The brothers’ devotions carried through the wall and I wished that I were with them and not here with this woman whose pain was like a living thing, a beast with grasping hands and talons which seemed to claw into my own flesh in search of my heart.
I picked up the jug and filled Enid’s cup again, but she would not take it this time. She gripped the crib’s rail, her knuckles white by the guttering flamelight, new tears making her eyes pools of misery.
‘He is lost. My baby is lost and all alone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry.’ And with that, to my shame, I turned and hurried from the room.
I rejoined the brothers and lifted my voice to heaven with them, singing a little louder than before, even more afraid of hearing Enid’s sobs through the wall now that I knew her name and she knew mine.
But later, in my bed, when the only sounds were the mice scrabbling among the floor reeds and the snoring of men and, beyond our thin walls, the occasional screech of an owl or bark of a dog carrying across the dark water, I lay thinking of that woman and her dead child. I heard her words over and over in my head, as monotonous as the Litany and as forlorn as the marsh around our refuge. There are no gods here … not yours, not mine.
Cold words. Terrible words which pulled and plucked at me and would not let me sleep. And so, being as careful as I could not to make any sound or movement which might haul the others from their slumber, I rose and crept through the darkness towards the sliver of deathly pale light which showed beneath the door.
The sea’s breath was in my face, thin as hate. It stung my cheeks, made cold wells of my eyes and chafed my hands raw on the oar’s shaft as I pushed the coracle on through the reeds. Go no further, those brittle reeds seemed to whisper whenever the Hafren’s breeze quested through them, stirring the mist like the breath of some creature slinking low now that night gave way to dawn. You should not be out here, it hissed. The marsh is no place for one such as you. And neither was it, I knew, as I sculled the oar through the cold water – slowly, that my presence might go unnoticed by man. By creature. And by spirit.
Around me, the first curlews stabbed the muddy fringes with their long, downward-curving beaks, their plaintive and lonely calls weaving a sad sound. Cour-leee. Cour-leee. Cour-leee. Behind me, the tor loomed in the fog, humped and vast. A dragon’s back as old as the world. A dark mass in a dawn which, like the infant soon to be laid in the grave, seemed too weak to survive. For it was an unformed, insubstantial day. The kind when the veils between the worlds are thin as smoke and folk stay indoors by their hearths, busying themselves with work which can be grasped and held and felt by the flesh.
So why was I out in the reed-beds now? Woven willow rods and bullock hide all that was between me and the water and whatever lay beyond its obsidian blackness. What had I been thinking, skulking past the brothers out into the pre-dawn gloom, down to the jetty where the little coracle rocked gently among the reeds? Perhaps it was not too late to go back. To tie the boat to the piling and scurry up to the dormitory before anyone knew what I had done. For, once I lost sight of the tor in the marsh mist, I might never find my way back.
You are not him. Turn back now.
My flesh shivered. Last evening’s food and ale had curdled in my stomach and my bowels were sour water, so that I felt that the marsh was in me as much as around me. It pressed on me, heavy with threat, and I could not help but wonder at the fates of those folk who ventured here never to be seen again. Were they taken by the thrys, those creatures who dwell among the sedges and feed on human flesh? Did some madness come upon them, inhaled with this drifting fog? Some dark desire which compelled those doomed souls to give themselves to the marsh, the way those who believe in the old gods offer gifts of iron or silver to the water? Or perhaps the wading curlews around me had been men once, now turned by some enchantment into birds and bound to the marsh for ever.