I kept warm from paddling, but for my hands which were raw and growing numb, and my feet chilled by the water sloshing in the bilge. I wondered how Iselle fared, crouching behind me, thinking she must be terribly cold though she did not say it. The only time she spoke was to tell me to take this passage or that, and even then she had to raise her voice to be heard over the seething rain and the wind, too, which had been gathering when we set off, jostling the lapwings and stonechats against the darkening grey sky. Now that wind buffeted the little coracle, seeking through the weave of my habit. It keened from the west, sweeping across the marsh to bend the tall grasses and send furrows racing across the water.
Sometimes the wind was with us, leaning into the stretched hide which covered the boat, pushing us on. Other times it drove us into the reeds and muddy shallows so that I had to scull fiercely with the paddle, my muscles burning, and Iselle had to work with the Saxon spear, thrusting it into the sludge to push us back into the channel. Eudaf the cobbler was not much help, but in the end we three threaded our way through the web of saltwater channels unmolested by spirits and fen-dwellers, perhaps made as invisible as spirits ourselves by the veiling rain and winter gloom. And we came, wind- and rain-flayed, to Ynys Wydryn as the light was draining from the world.
I swept my loops through the water, looking up at the tor, which loomed in the dusk like a whale breaching the grey sea. It was Iselle who saw the figure up there on the crown of the hill, a dark speck against the sky. One of the brothers, I knew even before my eyes found him, thinking how miserable it must be, keeping watch up there in that foul gloaming. Looking for me.
‘You went without their permission, didn’t you?’ she called. I could not tell if her words were of admonishment, or even respect. Or mockery, that I might need the consent of others to leave the island.
The wind howled. Frenzied now, as if it had snarled itself on the island of Ynys Wydryn and could not tear free. I battled the fretted water and took us in to the jetty, where Father Yvain was waiting, the rain spilling down his face as it would course over a crag of rock.
‘Damned fool!’ he bellowed into the wind, grabbing hold of the coracle and pulling it alongside the mooring. Behind him came two torches, the flames hissing and bucking, and in the light they cast I saw the faces of Father Padern and Father Dristan. ‘God-damned fool!’ Yvain said, as Iselle and I wrestled Eudaf’s corpse across the rocking craft to the monk’s waiting hands.
You’re not him, Galahad, Yvain’s eyes said. You’re just a frightened fool who should have known better.
Yvain threw the body over his shoulder and I lifted the coracle out of the water, fighting to keep hold of it in the wind.
‘What’s got into you, Galahad?’ Father Padern demanded, his firebrand hissing. ‘In the name of the Thorn, what have you done?’
‘Father Brice is going to flay you alive,’ Father Dristan told me, helping me steady the coracle and carry it to a sheltered spot, where we turned it over beside its twin, weighing it down with stones. ‘And who is that woman?’ Rain pattered on the hide which he clutched at his neck, drops beading on the waxed surface and spilling off in rivulets. ‘What’s she doing with you?’
‘I’m alive because of her,’ I said, clenching and unclenching my hands, trying to work some feeling back into them as I watched Father Yvain hefting the corpse along the track towards the cluster of buildings huddled together beneath the tor, out of the prevailing winds.
Father Dristan stopped me, grabbing hold of my arm. ‘You don’t need to prove yourself to us, Galahad,’ he said, rain spitting from his lips. He followed my gaze to Father Yvain. ‘He has been looking for you since you missed dawn prayers. Even took the other boat out when he realized you’d gone into the marsh.’
I looked up at the tor and wondered which of the monks was on his way down now, soaked to the marrow and wind-blasted, having been up there looking down onto the reed-beds.
‘Come along, Galahad!’ Father Padern swept his arm to usher me towards the monastery, his troubled expression lit now and then by the failing torch. ‘Let us get inside before we are all carried off into the night.’
I looked at Iselle, who was standing on the jetty still, the elm bow over her shoulder and the spear and sword in her hands. A striking figure against the rain which lanced the water behind her. Some of her hair had escaped the hood and now whipped about in the wind. She gripped those weapons as though she might use them again at any moment, and for a little while we held each other’s eyes.
Then I turned and went to meet my fate.
‘She cannot stay,’ Father Brice said again. Father Dristan had built up the hearth fire and those of us who had been out in the night now stood around it, holding hands or the hems of our habits near to the flames as we dripped onto the rushes. The stink of wet wool cloyed the air and men coughed and spluttered with the smoke, because the applewood which Dristan had brought in was not properly seasoned.
‘You can’t send her into this storm, Father,’ I said.
‘You forget your place, Galahad,’ Father Judoc warned, pouring himself a cup of wine. ‘You are a novice, nothing more. Remember that, unless you wish your punishment to be more severe.’
Iselle had yet to speak, though the brothers had allowed her into the warming-house and given her a space near the hearth. She stood there now, gazing into the flames which flapped in the draw of the smoke-hole.
‘Brothers.’ Father Yvain was rubbing his huge hands and spreading them near the fire. ‘Galahad must be punished, no one says otherwise.’ He glared at me from the shadow of his furrowed brow. ‘He’ll be punished for being a bloody fool and going into the marsh—’
‘And for leaving the island without the Prior’s permission,’ Father Judoc cut in, getting a grunt from Yvain and some murmurs of agreement from the others.
‘But the lad is right about the girl,’ Father Yvain went on. ‘We cannot send her out.’
Iselle swept the sodden hood from her head and twisted it in her hands so that water dripped onto the hearth stones. By the fire’s light, and because the blinding terror had ebbed from me now, I saw her properly for the first time.
‘A woman cannot stay the night under our roof,’ Father Padern said. The way he looked at Iselle, you would have thought she was a thrys, one of the fen creatures said to feed on human flesh.
‘There is a woman in the infirmary now, Brother,’ Dristan reminded him, and though his voice was timid there could be no denying it.
‘She has no boat,’ I told them. ‘Would you have her swim back to the village?’
‘I don’t live in the village,’ Iselle said, but received only stares in reply.
‘I’ve warned you, Galahad,’ Father Brice said, holding an ink-stained finger up to silence me. ‘Do not make it worse.’
‘There are ways,’ Iselle said. ‘Old paths through the marsh.’
‘Not where a God-fearing soul can walk,’ Father Padern creaked, tugging at his white beard. A log rolled out of the flames and lay hissing.
‘We know of this young woman.’ Father Judoc frowned at Iselle, who showed no sign of hearing any of us now, so absorbed was she with the fire. Her eye was caught by a spider scuttling across the rough bark of the errant log, seeking escape. ‘She is a wild creature.’