Why would you want to be him? Turn back.
Some movement drew my eye and I started, almost tumbling off the coracle’s narrow thwart, the craft tipping dangerously, and I held the oar above my head, using it to balance as the rocking subsided. Just a marsh harrier out hunting, sweeping over the reed-beds, swooping in a flash of silver throat and nape, her brown back the same colour as the seed heads. Then she dropped into the reeds and was gone, and I wondered what prey she had seized with her killing talons. What little body she had punctured with those deadly claws.
‘Lord, give me courage,’ I whispered, afraid to speak aloud in such a place, even to God.
There are no gods here … not yours, not mine. Enid’s words rippled through the dark mire of my fear. Something plopped into the water off to my left and I glimpsed the sleek brown shape of an otter before it vanished, leaving a wake of bubbles behind it. I caught my breath, inhaling the sweet, musky scent of death and decay. I licked dry lips, tasting the salt of the Hafren and the bitter draught of my own despair, and I sculled the oar through the water, the blade describing a serpent twisting over itself, forever seeking to grip its own tail. On and on. Deeper, ever deeper into this insubstantial world, this girdle between land and water, keeping the weak dawn light on my right cheek. Towards the lake village. Now and then catching sight of the ancient causeway which the first people had built that they might more easily travel between the island settlements, though no man would trust that trackway now. No living man, anyway.
I saw something and cried out, raising the oar before me as though it were a weapon, or a staff imbued with the Lord’s own power against evil. Something was on that causeway. Or above it. Some fen-dweller looming in the mist, watching me with hungry eyes. Or a spirit? The ghost of someone who never crossed to the afterlife. Perhaps even one of the unknown men who had laboured on the trackway so long ago, a thousand years or more before the Romans came.
I made the sign of the Thorn but otherwise just sat there, the coracle rocking beneath me, my fear gripping me so entirely I could not move. Whatever the thing was, it was turning slowly, and I was drifting towards it, as though it commanded the currents of the dark water and summoned me to it. A breeze stirred, sickly and weak, as if lost to wander the marsh these hundred years, and now clawed at the mist, shredding it to reveal a face. Not some ungodly creature or spirit, but a face of flesh. Old, rotting flesh. Sunken cheeks and black hollows where once there were eyes which beheld God’s creation, before death fogged them and, after that, crows and gulls savaged them with greedy indifference to all that they had witnessed.
The corpse was suspended from a crude gibbet; an ancient pile robbed from the track and driven into the reed-bed. I whispered a prayer for the dead man’s soul, for all the good it would do him now, and thrust my oar into the water again, wondering who had strung him up like that, robbing the poor man of his life and surely damning their own soul in the foul deed.
I had made only a dozen strokes when the next victim revealed herself through the thinning mist. A woman with long red hair, her nakedness a shocking and shameful sight to behold. I tried to look away from that poor wretch, but my eyes kept finding their way back, until I had passed and could not gaze upon her without turning round, which I would not do. And these were not the only ones. Seven more corpses I saw, twisting slowly on creaking ropes, and one of them a child, a boy no more than nine years old, and I asked the Lord on High how any man could put a noose around a child’s neck and watch his life snuffed out like a candle flame.
‘The world beyond this island is a terrible, cruel place, Galahad,’ Father Brice had told me the previous summer, when Father Yvain had returned from one of his trips with news of all he had seen and heard. ‘Be grateful that you will never have to leave our sanctuary.’
‘Should we not try to help others resist all that is evil?’ I had asked, in my naivety. And the old monk had given a sad smile and touched my head, perhaps recalling a time long ago before he had completed his own novitiate and shaved his hair.
‘All we can do now is protect the Holy Thorn and ensure that our order survives,’ he said. ‘I fear Britain is lost, Galahad, her people scattered like chaff on the wind. But we few shall remain here, so long as we have breath. And we shall protect the Thorn.’
One of the dead boy’s eyes had been spared beak and claw. It glared at me through the sullen vapours and I felt the bitter accusation. The envy. The rage at a life cut short. I shivered, trying to ignore the burning ache of needing to empty my bladder. And I followed the channel, my eyes drawn skyward by the urgent mewing of gulls, a flock of hundreds flying into the west, turning like a shoal of fish, their white bodies flashing in a shaft of dawn light.
Soon after, I saw living children, doubtless long after they had seen me. Five of them, two boys and three girls, none taller than the bulrush and bur-reed around them. All filthy, wild-eyed and hungry-looking. They were the offspring of fisher folk or salt farmers, I guessed. Creatures of marsh, fen and bog, who watched me in silence, not afraid but wary, and I signed the Thorn at them, but they gave no indication of comprehending the blessing.
I caught the sweet smell of peat smoke on that thin breeze now. Could see it hanging in the wintry dawn, a darker grey smudge against the wan sky. Aiming for it, I came among thicker reeds and, leaning over, saw the silty bed of the shallows. I knew I must be close. I spied another channel and took it, sculling between low ridges of land thick with blackthorn, and eventually I came to the lake village, sweating now despite the chill and comforted to smell hearth smoke. I whispered thanks to God that I would soon be on dry land among men and women, safe from the unknowable dangers of the marsh.
I tied the coracle to a jetty thronged with similar craft and sleek, long dug-outs, and greeted a heron which stood looking out across the water. Beside that unmoving bird were piled half a dozen willow baskets ready to be set out in the marsh to trap perch and roach, trout and eel, and my stomach rumbled at the thought, for I had not broken my fast.
‘A brother of the Thorn,’ someone called. I looked up to see the broad shoulders and bearded face of a man above the willow fence which circled the cluster of roundhouses, keeping wind out and livestock in. ‘What brings you here?’ he called.
‘Eudaf the cobbler,’ I replied, slipping and sliding on the mud towards him.
The man frowned. ‘We sent his boy to you two days since,’ he said. ‘Your songs will do Eudaf no good now. He died in the night.’
‘I am sorry for the loss,’ I said, lifting the hem of my habit out of the filth before signing the Thorn in respect for the cobbler’s passing. And yet my spirits lifted upon wings of hope, that an infant’s soul might yet be guided to heaven and into the Lord’s keeping.
2
A Wolf in the Reeds
I HAD BEEN AFRAID BEFORE. Now I was faint with terror as I made my way back across the dark water, the mist wreathing around me like the ghosts of serpents. Cold sweat soaked me, and my heart was clenched tight as a fist in my chest. My breathing was shallow and ragged, and I felt that there was a scream in my throat ready to break free at any moment.
Where did Father Yvain find the courage to venture into the marsh whenever the brothers needed him to? I would never again set out across the water after this, I thought, glancing over my shoulder at the corpse of Eudaf the cobbler lying behind the thwart. His kin had wrapped him head to foot in two threadbare woollen cloaks, and I was relieved that at least I did not have to see his face, nor would he witness my fear. The man had lain in his dwelling on a bed of skins and stiffened there so that now he did not fit in the coracle but stuck out of it, his legs wedged beneath the bench upon which I sat with the oar, tracing knots in the water.