Liars and Thieves (A Company of Liars short story) (2 page)

Even as I said it, I realised that they had not been dropped on to the track by accident. I tried to scramble up, but it was already too late. Before I could prise myself up any further than my knees, a stinking sack had been thrown over my head and pulled down over my arms, pinning them to my sides. I heard both Adela and Zophiel cry out and guessed that they too had been caught.

A length of cord was rapidly twisted around my arms and shoulders. I yelped as it was pulled tight, biting into the wound on my shoulder. Hands hauled me to my feet and I found myself being pushed face-down over the back of an animal; not Xanthus, a smaller beast, a pony or donkey. More rope was lashed around me, binding me tightly over the beast’s back. There had to be at least three men, probably more. But they clearly had no need to speak to each other. This was a well-practised kidnapping.

Adela was yelling for her husband, Osmond, but he could have been anywhere in the forest and even if he heard his name above the howling wind, it would take some time for him to reach us. Adela’s cries were abruptly severed and a cold dread seized me. Had they knocked her unconscious or silenced her for ever?

I heard Xanthus’s shrill whinny and guessed someone had pulled the caltrop from her hoof. At least they’d not abandoned her to suffer. My head thumped and jolted against the pony’s side as it was pulled forward. My ribs were being crushed against its back, and I was struggling to draw breath inside the suffocating sack. Thin whipping branches slashed across my head and legs. They were dragging us through dense vegetation. My head was pounding so violently that I began to fear the caltrop spike had been tipped with poison. It was not unknown.

The pony stopped. Hands fumbled with the knots in the rope that tied me to its back. The rope gave way and I slid off. There was a moment of relief as the pressure on my ribs eased. But as my shoulder hit a rock, a shock of pain engulfed me and I passed out.

The roar of the wind in my head grew louder and the burning pain in my shoulder surged back with it. Every bone in my body felt as if it had been pounded with a hammer. I opened my eyes, but could see nothing except a dim light filtering through the weave of the sack. I’d been propped up in a sitting position against a tree. I could feel the rough bark pressing into my back. When I tried to lift my hands, I found that both my wrists and ankles were tightly bound.

‘Nothing in his pack worth having either,’ a man’s voice growled, ‘save for a few teeth and bones. And the bones are that old and dried, can’t even use them to flavour the pot.’

They’d found my saints’ relics. Pity they couldn’t feel holiness emanating from those bones, but that was hardly surprising considering they’d been purloined from a charnel house and might have belonged to any old sinner. Maybe I should’ve told them what I told the people in the marketplace –
That scrap of cloth was cut from the very cloak of St Apollonia and is a certain cure for toothache. Wear that finger bone of St Hyacinth around your neck and you’ll never fear drowning.
But there are some men even I cannot convince with my tales.

‘He must have the silver under his shirt.’

Footsteps came towards me. I heard the rasp of a man’s breathing as he bent over me. Instinctively I drew my legs up, trying to protect my chest, bracing myself for the dagger thrust which I was sure was coming. My fear was made worse by not being able to see where he would strike.

‘If I’d silver or gold on me,’ I said, ‘I’d not be tramping through mud, carrying a sack of bones. I’m a piss-poor pedlar, nothing more.’

A man grunted. ‘He’s awake then. What’s he saying?’

Hands seized the front of my shirt, jerking me forward.

‘You try anything and I’ll cut your throat quicker than a kestrel can pounce on a mouse.’ The man’s voice had a peculiar whistle to it.

I felt the sack being dragged upwards. The cold wet air hit my face like a slap. I greedily sucked it into my searing lungs. The world began to steady around me and I peered blearily upwards.

We were in a forest clearing, surrounded by birch scrub, spindly saplings and the rotting stumps of ancient trees. The ruins of an ancient rough-stone building stood nearby. Its corners were covered over with frames fashioned from branches and woven through with reeds and bracken, in an effort to provide some shelter from the rain. Several tiny bothies made from a ragbag of fallen stones and rough-hewn wood huddled against the half-tumbled walls.

Zophiel and Adela sat bound to the bases of trees a few yards away. Zophiel’s head and shoulders were covered with a sack, similar to the one that had been pulled from me. He was slumped forward against his bonds. It was impossible to see if he was merely unconscious or dead. There was no sack on Adela’s head, but a filthy rag had been tied tightly across her mouth as a gag. I could see her chest heaving in short, shallow breaths and her eyes were wide with fear.

Inside the ruins of the building, two men, their hoods pulled low over their faces, sat around a fire pit, and a woman, clad like the men in coarse leggings and tunic, was deftly plucking a woodcock which was bloody and half-mauled as if she had wrested it from the teeth of some predator.

The man who’d removed my sack was standing a couple of paces away from me. The long points of his hood were wound around his mouth and nose to disguise his face.

‘We found nowt in your scrip. So where’s the gold?’

‘I’ve nothing  . . .’ My throat was so dry, I could hardly force the words out. ‘Told you, I’m a camelot. But between the pestilence and this rain, a one-legged tightrope walker could’ve earned more than I have on the roads these past months.’

‘Funny how they all tell us that, isn’t it, lads?’ the outlaw said. ‘Amazing how many men set out on a long journey and forget to bring so much as a bent penny with them.’ He looked round at his companions, who laughed mirthlessly.

‘But see, here’s the thing, I bet if I was to strip you, I’d find a purse you’d forgotten all about hidden away, just to keep it safe like. I know how it is. An old man like you can’t be too careful these days, so many wicked robbers about, isn’t that right, lads? Shocking it is. I don’t blame you for keeping your gold well out of sight. Thing is, though, Jack here does the searching and he’s not a patient man, isn’t our Jack. Can’t abide liars, can you, Jack? That comes from him having been in holy orders.’

‘There’s a place in hell specially made for roasting liars,’ the man by the fire said.

‘And if Holy Jack searches a man and finds he’s been lied to, he’s apt to send the sinner straight to that place himself, isn’t that right?’

‘“Vengeance is mine, says the Lord,”’ Jack recited cheerfully, waving a dagger so long it could have pierced the heart of an ox.

‘So you see, it’d be best if you told us the truth now, afore we ask old Holy Jack to discover it, ’cause he looks so comfy by that fire, we wouldn’t want to have him move for no good reason, would we? Doesn’t improve his temper any.’

My tongue felt like a wad of dry wool in my mouth, but I tried to moisten my lips. I was desperate not to be searched.

‘I’ve a few coins sewn into the edge of my cloak, but there’s not much left in there.’

The man bent towards me and I tried to bring my bound hands up to cover my face as I glimpsed the flash of a knife. But the blade didn’t touch my skin. It sliced through the fastening of my cloak and he wrenched it off. I gasped as the movement jerked my injured shoulder.

‘Go easy, Pecker,’ the woman murmured. ‘He’s an old man, and by the looks of his face he’s suffered more than most. ’Sides, you only got to see his clothes to know he’s worth nowt. I don’t know why you bothered with them. They none of them look as if they’ve a farthing to bless themselves with.’

‘Couldn’t see who they were in this stinking weather,’ Pecker said sulkily.

He worked methodically over every inch of the cloak, cutting out coins whenever he felt them. But I think even he realised that I’d hardly be carrying anything of great value if I’d gone to such trouble to hide coins worth so little.

‘Dye’ll see to your wound,’ he muttered. ‘She’s a rare talent for healing  . . .
If
we let you live long enough for her to work her magic.’

The woman threw the plucked woodcock into the cooking pot. Then she rose and ducked down into one of the bothies. She emerged with a wad of cloth and a clay jar. She dipped the cloth into the jar, coating it thickly with some green unguent. Dye tossed it to the third man in the group, a small, hunched wretch with weeping sores round his mouth and nose, and one scaly hand knotted into a useless claw, which looked as if it had been withered from birth.

‘Here, Weasel, get him to press on that. It’ll stop the bleeding.’

Weasel ambled over. He ripped the hole in my shirt wider over the wound and stuffed the wad of cloth through the hole. I felt the unguent growing hot against my skin, as if the tongue of an animal was probing into the wound.

‘Something’s not right here,’ Pecker said, frowning. ‘You got a horse, a fine-looking beast ’n’ all, compared to most we get in these parts. It’d be worth a fair bit. See, I’d have thought that if you was as poor as you claim, you’d have sold that horse or eaten it by now.’

Pecker crouched down and peered menacingly into my face. ‘That man and his woman, what’re they to you? She your daughter, is she? ’Cause he don’t look like any pedlar.’

Holy Jack squinted over at Zophiel. ‘Swear, I’ve seen him somewhere before and he wasn’t with any woman then. He wasn’t dressed like that neither.’ Jack scratched his head thoughtfully with the point of his dagger.

‘There, see,’ said Pecker. ‘You’d best give us the truth. Holy Jack here can sniff out a liar better than a dog can scent a rabbit.’

It took me a few moments to realise that he assumed Adela was Zophiel’s wife or mistress. In any other circumstances I’d have laughed, imagining the look of disgust on Zophiel’s face at the mere thought of touching Adela, never mind being the father of her baby. I glanced at Zophiel, but he still hadn’t moved.

All eyes were turned on me and none of them were friendly. It occurred to me that this might just be a trick. What if Adela had already told them that her husband and the others were out there in the forest somewhere, or if they’d realised the man she was shouting for was not the man they had tied to a tree? If they even suspected a lie, the dagger Jack was playing with would slice through my throat. And that’s if I was lucky. I’d heard that some outlaws amused themselves by torturing men before they killed them, thinking up novel ways to make their ends as drawn out and painful as possible, just to while away the hours. I stared at Adela, willing her to give me some sort of sign, but all I could see were fear and panic in her eyes.

‘I told you, Holy Jack isn’t a patient man,’ Pecker growled. ‘You don’t want to—’

He stiffened, staring into the trees, listening. My heart began to race. Our companions must have discovered we’d been taken. They were out there somewhere, creeping towards us, trying to rescue us. Desperate not to give them away, I stared fixedly at the ground as if I’d heard nothing, but I was straining to listen as intently as Pecker. There was a sudden flapping of wings, as if birds had been disturbed from a roost, maybe by our little band moving through the undergrowth. The outlaws scrambled to their feet.

‘More plump pigeons heading this way,’ Pecker announced.

Before I could even turn my head, the outlaws had vanished into the forest. Somewhere a horse screamed. The caltrops had claimed another victim.

We huddled close to the outlaws’ fire pit in the ruined building, digging into the common pot with spoons made of sheep’s bones to fish out pieces of hare and the flesh of several different birds, but I was gobbling so fast I barely had time to taste it. I hadn’t realised how ravenous I was. Zophiel had at last regained consciousness, though he seemed to have little appetite. There was a streak of blood on his forehead and he looked even paler and more gaunt than usual. Adela was picking listlessly at the leg of the woodcock Dye had shoved in her hand. Like Zophiel, she was barely eating.

The night was a dark one, without so much as the glimmer of a star, and the glow of the fire lit up the faces of the outlaws from below, the scarlet flames reflected in their eyes, dancing like imps from hell. Pecker had unwound the tail of his hood from his face to eat, and I saw the reason for the strange whistling when he breathed. His nose had been sliced in two straight down the middle so that he had a dark hole in the middle of his face, with two puckered lumps of flesh hanging on either side. Looking at his tight cap, I suspected his ears had been lopped off too. He’d been mutilated in the pillory. What for? Coin clipping? Sodomy? It was certainly not a question I was about to ask. I always took great care to conceal my own past. The present is all you can truly know of any man, and even of that you can glimpse only a fragment, however long you remain in his company.

The dead branches of the trees clattered in the cold, damp breeze. At least the rain had stopped, but judging by the thick clouds, it would not be for long. Were Rodrigo and Osmond and the others looking for us? They must surely have realised something was wrong by now. I only prayed they would not try to follow our steps along the track. In the dark it would be only too easy to stumble on to more of the caltrops. I had managed to warn Adela and Zophiel to say nothing about the rest of our company. Our only hope of escaping without any of us being killed was if the outlaws were unaware that someone was out there searching for us.

I shuffled closer to the warmth of the fire. The wound on my shoulder had stiffened, but Dye’s ointment had stopped the bleeding and the pain had eased a good deal. I shivered and Dye tossed another lump of wood on the fire.

I nodded gratefully, holding my hands out over the blaze.

‘Aren’t you afraid the fire’ll be seen?’

‘Not out here. Besides, who’d be travelling through the forest at night? They’d not dare. Be too afeared of outlaws cutting their throats,’ Dye said.

Pecker and Weasel chuckled. Adela flinched and, shuddering, glanced behind her. I knew only too well why she and Zophiel had lost their appetites. For just a few yards away, the bloodstained bodies of two monks lay heaped one on top of the other, their habits pulled up to their waists as if they’d been killed in the act of making love. It had amused Holy Jack to arrange them so.