The Way Between the Worlds (13 page)

I was awfully afraid I knew what that meant: Rollo was dead.

I put my head in my hands and wept.

Gurdyman was kind, in the sense that he told me quite brusquely that I had no proof and should not plunge into despair without good cause. I felt I had reason enough, but the determination in his bright eyes made me wonder if I was right. Instantly, Gurdyman spotted my moment of doubt.

‘You must keep busy, child,’ he remonstrated gently. ‘Moping about here and thinking the worst will avail neither you nor this Norman of yours.’ I had told him quite a lot about Rollo, although, as so often with Gurdyman, I felt I was revealing things he already knew. He had a way of slowly nodding his head as I spoke, as if to say
yes, yes, this I am aware of
. The mere mention of Rollo’s name had been enough, for Gurdyman seemed to know all about the Guiscard family. To my relief, although he referred to Rollo as my Norman, I had the distinct impression that he did not view the Guiscards as ruthless and brutal conquerors. On the contrary, he seemed to have a certain respect for them.

He was right, of course, and I did indeed need to keep occupied, but just at that moment I was at a loss to know what I ought to be doing.

‘I need some supplies,’ Gurdyman announced, getting to his feet. ‘Many of the bottles on the crypt shelves are almost empty, and there are some items which even our apothecary has run out of. Come, child –’ he reached for his stout stick – ‘we shall step out in the sunshine of this fine morning and walk down to the quays, where, with any luck, we shall be able to find some merchant who has fortuitously just taken delivery of the very items we require.’

I fetched my shawl and we set off. Knowing him as I was coming to, I was pretty sure that he was right and a boat with a cargo of rare and exotic herbs, spices and oils would just be tying up.

We emerged into the marketplace, where the food stalls were already doing brisk business. Making our way through the maze of little streets and alleys on the far side, soon we were stepping out on to the road that leads up to the Great Bridge. On the far side, I could see Castle Hill, and at its foot men were busy on the site where the new priory was being built. We remained on the south side of the river, turning to the right just before the bridge and heading off down the long quay.

Presently, Gurdyman raised his stick and pointed to a long, sleek boat which was just manoeuvring up to the quay. A sailor stood barefoot on her deck, holding a rope, and another man waited on the quayside to catch it. ‘Jack Duroll,’ Gurdyman exclaimed with satisfaction. He turned and gave me a smug smile. ‘He’ll have exactly what we need. I shall—’

But his words were interrupted by a shout from the quayside, followed by a confusion of sounds: a lot of splashing, a babble of loud voices, a woman’s high, thin scream. Gurdyman forged a way between the rapidly-gathering crowd of interested people, and soon we were standing on the edge of the stone quay looking out across the water.

Another boat had been following Jack Duroll’s up the river, presumably heading for a berth a little further on. But something was wrong  . . . I tried to see what had so alarmed the onlookers. The boat – a squat little tub of a thing, with weather-stained boards and an unkempt look – seemed to be towing something along behind, something attached by a line. From the consternation among the boat’s small crew, it was very apparent that they had been unaware of whatever was accompanying them until the people on the quay had drawn their attention to it.

What was it? I edged up beside two stout women who stood muttering together, heads close, faces wearing expressions that indicated both shock and curiosity. One of them turned to me and, eyes alive with excitement, said, ‘It’s a body!’

She had to be wrong. Boats didn’t tow their dead along behind them, I was sure of it. I heard voices shouting out in a foreign tongue: the boat’s crew, busy claiming, no doubt, that they knew nothing whatsoever about their unexpected companion. I heard several local voices respond, with everyone steadily growing more agitated. One man shouted, ‘Bloody foreigners! They’ll have killed him and chucked him over the side, you mark my words!’

Quite a lot of people did mark his words, if the mutterings of agreement were anything to go by. I thought this theory highly unlikely, for if the foreigners had killed someone on-board and disposed of the body, surely they would have made quite certain, before coming into the town, that they weren’t towing the evidence of the crime along behind them.

Then I heard a clear, authoritative voice that I recognized. I didn’t understand the words, for they appeared to be in the same language that the foreign sailors spoke. But I knew the tone: it was Gurdyman. He was addressing a tall, broad, fair-haired and bare-chested giant of a man who appeared to be the squat tub’s captain.

I hurried to join them. Gurdyman posed a question, to which the captain replied with a great gush of words, waving his hands about and gesturing to his boat, his crew and the dead body. Gurdyman waited until he paused for breath – which was a long time, as the man apparently had huge lungs – and then asked another question. The man nodded vigorously, pointing back up river to the north-east.

I nudged Gurdyman. ‘What’s happened? What’s he saying?’

Gurdyman turned to me, frowning. ‘In a moment, Lassair. First we must summon the sheriff.’

I was quite surprised. Gurdyman does not have a very great opinion of our town sheriff, suspecting him, as do many of the townspeople, of taking the common pasture and using it for himself.
Prowling wolf
,
filthy swine
and
dog without shame
are some of the more polite epithets applied to our sheriff. But I thought I knew why Gurdyman was even now sending a lad off to find him. There was a dead body in the water beneath the quay, and all business, commerce and trade would come to a halt until someone in authority did something about it.

Gurdyman took my hand and led me right up to the edge of the quay. Together we looked down at the body. It was floating, face upwards, just behind the boat, to which it seemed to be attacked by a length of rope. The eyes were shut and the jaws clamped together. The skin looked slightly tanned, a bit like leather, and from what I could see the body was naked.

‘You don’t really think the crew killed him and slung him over the side, do you?’ I whispered.

Gurdyman shook his head. ‘I am sure they did no such thing. The captain tells me they got lost in the fens last night – a fog sprang up, apparently, as so often it does at dusk – and they missed the main channel. They went too far over to the east and got caught up in a narrow channel in the peat workings. They had to turn round and the boat’s stern was stuck in the bank. It took quite a lot of effort, apparently, to push them free.’

I would have thought that the blond-haired giant could have poled the boat along single-handed, but did not say so. ‘Do you think the body became attached then, when they were stuck in the peat?’

Gurdyman did not speak for some moments. I had the sense that his thoughts were far away.

‘Gurdyman?’ I prompted. ‘Was the body in the peat?’ It would account for the tanned appearance of the skin. We have a lot of peat around us at Aelf Fen, and we know the effect that the brown water can have on anything immersed in it for any length of time.

He turned to me. ‘Hmm?’

I was about to repeat the question, but we were interrupted by a loud cry of ‘Make way, there! Make way for the sheriff!’ And, with an advance guard of two armed soldiers and a rearguard of three more, the puffed-up, gaudily-dressed figure of Cambridge’s sheriff made his way along the quay.

I melted away into the crowd and watched. The tall, blond captain towered above the sheriff, but, even so, there was no doubting who was in charge out there. A crafty fox our man might be, but he had something about him. He seemed to expect it as his right to have Gurdyman translate for him, and, indeed, Gurdyman did not seem to mind. In fact, he appeared quite determined to be included in whatever process of the law was being enacted.

The body had, at last, been dragged out of the water. It was indeed naked, and the general assumption that it was male proved correct. I was used to male bodies by now, through my work as a healer, and I looked with some interest and without embarrassment at the dead man.

He had been in early middle age, I guessed; medium height, spare build bordering on skinny, long limbs. His wet hair trailed down on to his shoulders, swept back from the face. Both the hair on his head and his body were dark, stained slightly reddish by the peaty water. Long ropes hung down from his wrists and ankles, and I thought I saw something wound around his neck; perhaps it was one of those ropes that had become caught on the boat and dragged him out of his resting place. Had he been hanged, I wondered? Had they bound him and strung him up, cutting him down once he was dead and throwing him into the fen?

Gurdyman grabbed my hand. ‘Come, child.’ We fell into step behind the small procession, which consisted of the sheriff and his guards, now carrying the corpse between them, and the captain of the squat tub.

‘Where are we going?’ I hissed.

‘The sheriff wants to know how, when and where this man died,’ Gurdyman whispered back. ‘If a crime has been committed in his area of jurisdiction, he’ll have to investigate it.’

‘How’s he going to find out?’

He smiled. ‘Well, I thought a couple of people who, in their different ways, know something about the human body might be able to help him, so I’ve just volunteered you and me.’

We were in a low-ceilinged, stone-walled room under the big building to which the sheriff had taken us. It was quite similar to Gurdyman’s crypt, although neither as clean, tidy nor sweet-smelling. The body had been laid on a big oak table, and Gurdyman and I had been left alone with it.

Gurdyman rolled back his sleeves and nodded to me to join him at the table. I, too, pushed back my sleeves, glad that I’d braided my hair and covered it with a coif that morning, as I always did when I was working. There’s nothing more disgusting than discovering your hair has been dipping in something smelly, whether it’s a bowl of pungent oil or a pot of some sick patient’s piss.

I stared at the dead man. Then I watched Gurdyman as, slowly and unhurriedly, he went over every inch of the body. ‘A strong man,’ he mused, ‘perhaps a little on the thin side. His muscles are well developed; I’d say he was used to walking big distances.’ He leaned over the corpse’s head and deftly lifted an eyelid. ‘Dark eyes. Aged perhaps in the mid-thirties; possibly a little younger. Uncircumcised.’ He paused and raised the corpse’s right shoulder a little way above the table, leaning across the body to repeat the process with the left shoulder. He leaned closer, studying the flesh. ‘Look, Lassair,’ he murmured.

I looked. I made out faint marks, almost like a pattern etched into the skin. ‘Is it a tattoo?’

‘No, I don’t believe it is,’ Gurdyman answered. ‘I think he’s had a whipping.’

A whipping. My mind filled with the sort of images I didn’t really want to see. It was time to change the subject  . . .

‘How did he die?’ I asked.

Gurdyman put gentle fingers to the rope around the neck. As he began carefully to remove it – there was an intricate knot beneath the left ear – he made a soft exclamation. ‘Look,’ he repeated.

He was indicating a cut, about the length of my little finger and quite deep.

‘This incision would have severed the vessel that bears blood up to the head,’ he said. ‘Death would have followed swiftly.’

‘But I thought he’d been hanged,’ I protested.

Gurdyman was slowly unwinding the rope from around the throat. I saw now that it was not in fact rope, but a length of plaited leather. ‘This is a garrotte,’ he said. ‘It is used to break the neck, like this.’ He mimed throwing the rope around a neck and then rapidly pulling it tight, one end crossed over the other, with a sort of jerk. Then, horribly, he raised the head and wobbled it around. It was clear even to me that the neck was broken. ‘The knot would serve simply to hold the rope in place,’ he added vaguely. Again, I had the impression he was thinking about something else.

‘In place round his neck?’ I persisted.

‘Hmm? Yes, that’s right.’

I looked quickly at the dead man’s neck. The indentations made by the garrotte were clearly visible – perhaps a little more deeply marked around the back of the neck than the front, although it was hard to be sure.

I looked up at Gurdyman. He had put down the leather braid and was now handling the ropes that were wound around the man’s wrists and ankles, running his fingers delicately along them as he spoke, turning them over and over in his hands. ‘That is very interesting,’ he said softly.

‘What’s interesting?’

He looked up at me. ‘The rope is made of fibres from the honeysuckle plant.’

I knew from his expression that this was significant, but I did not know why. I was about to ask when he put the ropes down and once more stepped up close to the body. He put one hand on the lower jaw and, holding the head steady with the other, forced the mouth open. He peered inside – the man, I saw, had had good teeth – and looked carefully at the tongue and around the gums. ‘Hmm,’ he said again. He had something on the end of his forefinger, and it looked a little like the small, pale, empty skin of a berry.

‘What’s that?’ I demanded.

‘I am not sure,’ he admitted. Then, as if it were something we did together every day, he said matter-of-factly, ‘I need to see what is in his stomach. We shall have to cut him open.’

My apprenticeship as a healer had not prepared me for anything like this. Hoping I would not disgrace myself by fainting or being sick, I steeled myself, took a deep breath and went to stand at my mentor’s side. He told me to find a bowl of some sort, and I went to the shelves behind the table and selected a pottery dish. Gurdyman nodded his approval. ‘I shall remove the stomach in its entirety,’ he announced, ‘and we shall open it on the workbench over there.’ He indicated a bench beneath the shelves.

I watched as he cut a long slit from the corpse’s breast to its navel. Then he reached inside and extracted the bag of the stomach. I had half expected blood, and Gurdyman must have seen my expression. ‘He had a cut in his neck, and he has been in the water,’ he said. ‘The blood will have long ago left his body.’