Hill of Bones (21 page)

The moment Gilbert heard the distant shouts, he knew they must run for it. His captive, still squirming in his arms, managed to scream for help, and instantly the cellarer slapped a hand over his mouth and increased his choking grip.

‘Bring that sack, then run!’ he yelled at Maurice, who was standing in the clearing, paralysed with fear. Without waiting for him, Gilbert dragged Eldred bodily into the trees, still stifling his attempts at crying for help. He was a powerful man, stocky and muscular, able to trot across the gently sloping ground at a fair pace while half-carrying his wriggling victim.

Left alone, Maurice was suddenly galvanised into action and, grabbing the sack with the money and treasures, he raced after Gilbert. When they had covered a few hundred paces, Gilbert stopped and listened for any sounds of pursuit. His keen ears picked up some shouts in the distance, but none that seemed to be coming their way.

‘Go forward slowly and don’t make any noise!’ he hissed at the panting Maurice. Still keeping a hand firmly over Eldred’s mouth, he moved onward at a walking pace for a few score yards, before dropping to the ground behind a clump of hazel bushes. Pulling out his dagger again, he touched the point to Eldred’s neck. ‘Make a sound and you’re dead, damn you!’ he hissed.

He motioned Maurice to lie down nearby and they waited and listened. A few distant shouts eventually died away and there was silence, but the cautious Gilbert, knowing his neck may depend on it, waited almost motionless for many more minutes, his knife still drawing a small bead of blood from Eldred’s neck.

The pause gave him time to get his breath back after his exertions and also provided time to think out a plan of campaign. The original idea of riding to Southampton was ruined. Their horses were lost to them and no doubt search parties would soon be combing these woods. On the positive side, he still had his loot and now also a hostage, who might be of some value if they were trapped.

When the silence had lasted for what seemed to be an age, but was probably no more than half an hour, he rose cautiously and pulled Eldred up with him, his knife now being brandished in front of the terrified lay brother’s face.

‘Those others have gone in another direction, so there’s no point in your yelling – and if you do, I’ll cut your damned throat!’ he snarled. With a jerk of the head at the almost equally terrified Maurice, he grabbed Eldred by the collar of his tunic and began marching him up the lower slopes of Solsbury Hill.

Selwyn and Riocas stood in the clearing and shouted repeatedly for Eldred, but silence was the only response. They made a few forays into the undergrowth and trees surrounding them, but soon returned to the clearing, as there was no indication of which direction the fugitives had taken.

‘We’re townsmen, not trackers,’ exclaimed Selwyn in exasperation. ‘We need help to find the little fellow.’

‘You mean we need a damned big posse with hounds to search the area,’ growled Riocas, equally frustrated by the disappearance of their friend.

Although they had not yet guessed who had spirited him away, the horses tethered at the edge of the clearing soon raised their suspicions. Selwyn went over to the two rounseys to pacify them, as they were still skittish from all the recent disturbances. As he patted the neck of the nearest to soothe it, he gave a sudden exclamation.

‘Riocas, these are from the abbey stables! Their harness has the same cross stamped on the harness that Roger the saddler uses, like the one he put on that sandal.’

The bigger man came across to see for himself. ‘Two abbey horses hidden in a forest! It’s those two thieving, murdering swine from the cellarium! And now they’ve got our Eldred!’

After an agitated discussion, they had to accept that there was nothing the two of them could do alone, as they had no idea where to look for the fugitives and their captive.

‘You ride back to Bath as fast as you can, Selwyn,’ suggested Riocas. ‘That search party was supposed to be leaving early. If you can find some of them, raise the alarm and bring them back straight away.’

‘What about you?’ demanded the steward. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll follow with these two animals on head ropes. We can’t just leave them here,’ replied the cat-catcher, though he was lying about his intentions. When Selwyn had left to hurry back to their own horses, Riocas untied the tethers on the two abbey rounseys and hitched them up where they could crop a fresh patch of grass.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t forget you’re here,’ he reassured them, and then slipped into the trees, heading for the top of the hill.

Gilbert reached it a good twenty minutes before the furrier, in spite of having to march his captive in front of him. He took a diagonal path up the incline to lessen the gradient, steering Eldred between the trees and bushes, his knife still prominent in his left hand. Maurice stumbled after him, clutching the precious bag with the valuables and mumbling a litany of anxiety and fear as he went.

The trees thinned, and almost abruptly they found themselves at the lower edge of the grassy rampart and ditch that encircled the top of Solsbury Hill. The renegade monk shoved Eldred over the rim and down into the gully beyond, a good ten feet below the level of the flat summit.

‘Keep going or I’ll skewer your kidneys,’ he snarled, pricking the small of Eldred’s back with the point of his dagger. With Maurice trailing behind, they hurried along the flat bottom of the ditch until they had reached a point almost halfway round the circuit. This was the furthest point away from the ‘nose’ of the hill that looked south over the Chippenham road far below and was nearest to where the forest came along the ridge from the north. Here the trees were in a small valley, their tops almost level with the crest of the hill. Gilbert used a break in the lower rampart to climb out again and pushed his captive across to the forest edge, forcing him to stand with his back to a slim birch, just inside the tree line.

‘Our habits are in that bag,’ he snapped at Maurice. ‘Take the girdles from them and tie this fellow up.’

The plaited black cords that had belted their robes were now used to lash Eldred to the tree, one from wrist to wrist around the trunk. At Gilbert’s direction, the other was passed around his neck – firmly, but not enough to strangle him unless he struggled. Satisfied that the lay brother was now immobilised, Gilbert used his knife to cut a strip of cloth from one of the habits. He gagged Eldred with it, the material cutting between his lips to produce a maniacal grin. Frightened and exhausted, the captive’s head dropped on to his chest and he seemed uncaring as to what happened to him. After all the panic and exertion, there now seemed to be a sense of anticlimax, as the two criminals regained their breath and stared at each other.

‘Now what do we do, brother?’ demanded Maurice, with a fragile show of defiance. ‘We have no horses, no food and we are stuck on top of a hill, miles from anywhere – especially Southampton!’

Gilbert had his own ideas about solving this dilemma, but he had no intention of sharing them with his former assistant.

‘We get away from here as soon as possible, before they come searching for us. We’ll keep to the forest and aim north towards Sodbury, then go east, giving Chippenham a wide berth.’

He dipped into the bag and retrieved a few handfuls of silver pennies, which he stuffed into the pouch on his belt.

‘I’ll hide the rest, we can’t lug it all across England. Then we can creep back here in a few weeks to collect it, when all the hue and cry has died down.’

He lifted the leather sack and began walking back to the ditch, Maurice following him uneasily.

‘What about Eldred?’ he whined. ‘You can’t just leave him there!’

‘Why not? He’ll either be found by the searchers – or he’ll die of starvation, I don’t care which,’ Gilbert grunted callously, striding along the deep cutting. He scanned the sides of the ditch as he went and stopped opposite a patch of loose earth where a rabbit had kicked the soil out while digging a burrow. It was one of many such excavations around the top of the hill, where conies, foxes and badgers had dug shelters for themselves.

Gilbert squatted in front of the hole and thrust his arm inside to check that it went deeply into the ground. Satisfied, he pushed the bag inside as far as he could reach, then kicked earth back into the burrow and tamped it firmly with his fist to hide all trace of the treasure.

As he peered into the hole to satisfy himself that the bag was completely hidden, a sudden sound behind him made him wheel around to find Maurice looming over him with a knife held high in his hand. With a yell, Gilbert threw himself sideways as his clerk lunged desperately downwards, aiming to bury the blade between the cellarer’s shoulder blades.

The puny Maurice was no match for the other man, who grabbed his ankle and pulled him violently to the ground, the knife skittering away out of reach. Leaping to his feet, Gilbert gave the clerk a vicious kick in the belly to keep him down, then unsheathing his own knife, drove it deep into Maurice’s chest.

‘Stab me in the back, would you, you bastard!’ he hissed. ‘I was going to kill you anyway. Did you think I was going to share any of my hard-won spoils with you?’

His former assistant made no reply as he was already dead, the long blade having sliced through the root of his heart. Gilbert pulled it out and wiped it on the grass, then stood quivering as he regarded the corpse.

‘Now I’ve got to hide you as well, damn you!’ he muttered.

He climbed the outer bank and looked around cautiously, but the hill top was deserted, apart from the still figure of Eldred tied to his tree.

Going back down to the body, Gilbert seized one hand and unceremoniously dragged it along the bottom of the ditch, looking for a large enough hiding place. He wanted to get away as fast as he could and this further encumbrance was highly unwelcome. He staggered along for a few hundred paces without finding any suitable grave for the clerk, so went out through a gap in the outer rampart and walked until he found a gaping hole under the roots of a solitary beech tree, which grew on the edge of a depression half filled with dead leaves. It must have been an old badger sett, but was large enough for him to push Maurice’s body inside. Thankfully, the former monk was small and skinny, and when Gilbert had pulled down a small avalanche of earth from the upper lip of the hole and liberally scattered armfuls of leaves, nothing was visible. As he did so, he wondered why he was bothering to hide Maurice’s corpse, as one more killing would make no difference to his final penalty if he was caught. The act was an almost instinctive one, to hide all traces of his most recent felony.

Then, almost exhausted by his recent efforts, he trudged back towards the ditch in order to get his bearings, as he had become disorientated and urgently needed to set off along the ridge that led northwards through the forest. Deciding that the clearest view would be from the flat top of the hill, he clambered up the inner bank of the dyke – and came face to face with a very large and very angry man!

Some years earlier, Riocas had explored Solsbury Hill, hoping to trap animals for his trade. However, the effort of climbing up and down every few days proved not worth the few rabbits he managed to snare, but he had learned something of the layout of the hill. This proved helpful now, as he laboured straight up the steep slope, stopping every few yards to listen for any sign of Eldred or his captors. As Gilbert had gone diagonally to the left, their paths diverged and when Riocas came out of the trees below the ditch and bank, he was on the southern side, a considerable distance from the other men.

All was silent, apart from the birds and the breeze. The cat-catcher stood for a moment on the lip of the first embankment, uncertain what to do next. Deciding that the higher he could get, the better the view, he climbed down into the ditch and up the other side to gain the grassy field on top. Across on the other side of the enclosure, he could see the dense trees of the ridge, but there was no movement to be seen anywhere and no cries of help. He began walking around the edge, peering down as he went into the ditch and at the trees lower down the hill. He stayed wary and alert, his only weapons being his dagger and a heavy stick, part of a fallen branch that he had picked up in the woods.

As he neared the trees on the north side, his eye caught a distant movement, which at first he thought was due to the wind. Then, a few yards further on, he saw that something was thrashing up and down. Hurrying towards it, he saw a leg waving and kicking back against a tree. It belonged to a figure tied to the trunk and a seconds later, he saw it was Eldred, bound and gagged.

Racing towards him, Riocas tore off the crude gag and untied the bonds that held him. The frail lay brother promptly collapsed at his feet and Riocas, surprisingly gentle for such a hulking fellow, cradled him in his arms and murmured reassurance into his ear.

When Eldred had recovered a little, he managed to flap a hand towards the further trees and whisper, ‘They went that way – Gilbert and Maurice, just a few minutes ago!’

After making sure that his friend had suffered no serious injury, Riocas propped him sitting up against the tree.

‘Selwyn has ridden for help – there will be city men here very soon, so you’re quite safe now.’ He rose to his feet and grabbed his makeshift club. ‘I’m going to follow those swine! When Selwyn and the posse get here, they’ll need to know which way they’ve gone.’

Leaving a limp and very apprehensive Eldred slumped against the beech, Riocas ran back to the ditch and climbed once again to the summit, unknowingly stepping over the rabbit hole that contained a small fortune.

On top, he reasoned that the only safe way off the hill for the fugitives was northwards through the forest, so he marched across the ancient enclosure in that direction. As he once more reached the rampart, he heard a noise and stopped to listen. Right in front of him came the sounds of scrabbling and heavy breathing, and a moment later the ruddy face of Gilbert appeared over the edge.

Shock, surprise and rage passed in succession over those belligerent features as he recognised who was glaring down at him – for everyone in Bath knew the oversized cat-catcher. Riocas had similar emotions and with a roar of anger, raised his impromptu club to strike the head of the man who was now heaving himself over the lip of the embankment. But just as he had bested Maurice, Gilbert now grabbed Riocas’ leg and toppled him over. The cudgel flew from his hand.