Warrior of the West (57 page)

At first, Wenhaver was enraged when Gawayne excitedly shared his plans with her, but as she contemplated the presence of a wife in their relationship, she realized that his marriage could be a perfect foil against discovery. Gawayne felt a moment’s revulsion at her words, a reaction that must have been visible to Wenhaver’s keen eyes, because she wept, sulked and begged before she finally elected to deny him her body. Inside, Wenhaver was being devoured alive by jealousy.

Autumn in the citadel of Cadbury was, therefore, an uncomfortable few months for everybody. Artor was increasingly distant, while Myrddion was abstracted and clumsy in the presence of Nimue, and seemed always on the point of bursting into some rash, self-effacing speech. Nimue found the people’s awe of her amusing and irritating by turns, while Wenhaver gave petulance a whole new meaning.

As Gruffydd confided to Percivale, the fortress had the feel and intensity of a place over which a great cataclysmic thunderhead was building. He, for one, didn’t care to be present when the storm clouds finally burst.

Percivale nodded and kept his own counsel. But his sharp young eyes missed nothing, especially the queen’s sneers when Artor was not present. True to his oath, Percivale awaited the day of reckoning.

The harvest was almost done when a gleaner disappeared. As in all nations, at all times and in all customs, the indigent were permitted to seek out the fallen grain heads after the fields were reaped and the grain was collected and threshed. From dawn to dark, the elderly, the poor, children and widows bent their backs to find a little measure of grain to guard against starvation during the winter. As the crop was particularly plentiful that year, Nimue often saw women holding aprons heavy with grain as they made their way home to their children in the autumn evenings. Wood smoke perfumed the air as the thrifty citizens smoked fish taken from the streams, or cured venison and ham. The world of Cadbury seemed pregnant with life, ripe and ready to be plucked and enjoyed.

A single woman, especially one who lived on the fringes of the wild woods with her infant son, was scarcely likely to be missed.

After spending a night in the woods, a hunter carrying a brace of coney heard the plaintive cry of a child as he was returning home to his cottage. Usually indifferent to others, on this occasion the man halted to investigate the sound and found a six-month-old boy child in a deserted cottage. The infant was soiled, hungry and alone. The fireplace in his mother’s hut was cold and the child’s condition, while not critical, was sufficiently worrying for the good man to take the infant home to his wife.

The next morning, the concerned hunter, Alric, informed the fortress guard of his find.

Artor had ordered that widows within his realm should receive special care, for many men had lost their lives during the war years when he had been consolidating his kingdom. But his warriors were not always so diligent. Several of their number checked the one-roomed cottage at random, but the gleaner seemed to have been swallowed whole by the earth. Even her name was forgotten, for she was simply the widow of the wood to those few persons who knew of her existence.

After a week, with no sign of the woman, the warriors decided she must have found a new man and that she had departed, forsaking an unwanted child. Life was often cruel, and no one, not even the hunter, wondered at her continued absence.

Coincidence rarely happens, and the gleaner’s disappearance would have been forgotten, but for Alric, the same hunter who had found the babe. He had set his trap-line along the banks of a small rivulet. A man of habit, he checked his lines before first light each day. One morning, nearly two weeks after finding the abandoned child, as he was expertly breaking the neck of a trapped buck rabbit, the night breeze suddenly changed and an odour of corruption came with it. The stench was one that Alric could not help but recognize.

Suddenly, the comforting darkness seemed to be filled with watchful eyes. Every noise in the forest, every creature that stirred in the underbrush, now seemed to be menacing.

Nervous and cautious, in spite of many solitary years spent living in the forest, Alric took to his heels, slinging the rabbit into his hide bag as he ran. He deftly avoided holes and the darkest coppices until he arrived, out of breath and shaking, at his cottage.

Inside, the widow’s son was howling lustily. He was a fine boy, and Alric had been secretly pleased that he could raise another son. Now, with the memory of the vile stink that had been carried to him on the night wind, and with his imagination conjuring up images of its source, Alric vomited against the outer wall of his cottage until his revolted stomach began to heave up bile.

Shortly afterwards, he reported his suspicions to the senior officer at the tor.

Warriors were dispatched to the scene and, on this occasion, Myrddion Merlinus accompanied them. Artor’s interest was stirring with suspicion, and he required his most trusted eyes present.

Alric had been instructed to accompany the armed warriors, at least until the source of the corruption had been found. He was unwilling but could think of no way to deny the High King.

The peasant crossed himself in superstitious dread. ‘I won’t be wandering though the Wildewood so carelessly in future,’ he told Myrddion. ‘There’s something wicked walking along my trap-lines. I can feel it. It’s fair been giving me the shivers, because I’ve been thinking that someone has been watching me. I hope that smell isn’t the widow but, if it is, I have her boy in my cottage and we’ll see him raised right.’

And then the seasoned hunter crossed himself again, and soundlessly guided the search party towards their destination. The shadows of the trees swallowed them, and Myrddion wondered at the loneliness and solitude that a hunter embraced so willingly.

The warrior escort studied the trap-lines, and wound strips of fabric over their lower faces to weaken the stench of rotting flesh. Myrddion scented the breeze like a hunting dog. He had inhaled this sweet evil practically from birth, so one more dead body held no fears for him. Having determined the direction from which the odour was coming, he walked the length of the trap-line, his eyes fixed firmly on the ground. Other than a scuffing of leaves under a young birch and faint scars in the tender bark of several trees, he saw nothing worthy of note.

Then he spied the first signs of violence.

A hand had gripped this sapling tightly in the darkness, with sufficient strength to break the narrow stem. Scrambling feet had churned the ground, leaving faded scars that led in the direction from which the vile stink was permeating the air.

Myrddion instructed the warriors to fan out into an extended line, and to avoid disturbing any traces of previous movement left behind on the forest floor.

A mere thirty steps into the blue-black shadows of the mature trees, one of the warriors made a grisly discovery.

‘Lord Myrddion?’ he called, his voice a little shaky for one so used to carnage.

The searcher had found the body of the missing woman where she had been tossed like a rag doll into a crack in the earth, worn by the spring thaws of countless years. She lay, half naked, with her flesh swollen, split and greenish in the filtered light. She was tightly curled into the foetal position and Myrddion realized that she had probably lived for a short time after the attack that killed her. She had died forsaken and in an extremity of pain.

Myrddion sighed, and commenced to sketch the body quickly with chalks and charcoal on to a piece of vellum. He knew that Artor would require a detailed record, no matter how unpleasant. Then he picked his way into the shallow gully, calling for the most capable of the warriors to accompany him.

‘Her poor face,’ Myrddion exclaimed as he eased the tangle of hair away from her profile. She had been beaten just before death and the livid remnants of burst blood vessels and cuts to her skin marred features that had already begun to show signs of tiredness and ageing. Her mouth gaped, and Myrddion could see her tongue had been torn out. Maggots fed in her throat, and he felt his stomach spasm with revulsion. Other scavengers had attacked her remains post mortem, and her exposed flesh was torn and partly devoured.

‘Turn her on to her back,’ he told the greying warrior in a voice that was harsher than he intended.

Her ash-green flesh gaped from breastbone to pubic hair. Within the cavity, scavengers had feasted and did so still, so that her dead flesh was invested with a strange, writhing life.

‘I’ve seen my share of blood and guts,’ the warrior growled through his makeshift mask. ‘But nothing like this. Look at her legs!’

The woman had bled copiously, but not only from her terrible wounds, for a large quantity of blackened blood had trickled down her thighs from her distorted genitals.

‘She must have been alive when she was raped, for blood doesn’t flow after the heart stops beating,’ Myrddion stated.

He was revolted, despite his long experience as a healer and a physician.

‘And the ground is thick with dried blood,’ the warrior added. ‘It’s almost as if she bled to death right here.’

‘Lord Myrddion?’ The voice of a younger soldier interrupted from the edge of the fissure. ‘Someone sat on his heels over here and watched her die. His heel prints are deep, and they’re very clear to see.’

For Myrddion, that information was the worst part of this ghastly tableau. Plainly, a man had raped this poor, friendless woman, gutted her as he rutted inside her body, and then he had sat calmly and watched her bleed to death.

‘Did she beg? I wonder. I suppose she did - for the sake of her baby, if not for herself,’ Myrddion speculated. ‘Well, it seems that we hunt a beast in human form.’

He looked reflectively at the blurred imprints of the boots worn by the killer. The soles indicated they were made of good, strong leather, and the depressions in the muddy ground showed deep but indistinct crescents.

‘From what we can see here, I believe that watching her die probably gave him his greatest enjoyment, because she took some time to bleed to death. Perhaps the rape was a mere foretaste of the pleasure he was seeking.’

‘May the gods preserve us,’ one young man exclaimed, sickened by what his imagination visualized.

‘Aye,’ Myrddion replied with a sigh. ‘We shall bury her here alongside this stream. Her body has told us all it can, and I lack the heart to heap further indignities upon her. I shall send a priest to say prayers over her remains.’

The warriors obeyed, breaking the eroded banks of the gully with their shields to form a shallow depression in which they laid the woman’s form. They used their axes and fallen pieces of timber to heap earth on top of her until her body was covered.

When Artor received the report from Myrddion, his face turned grey with consternation.

‘Peace seems to elude us, doesn’t it, old friend?’ he muttered darkly, while he stared ponderously at his sandalled feet. ‘I sometimes think I’ve seen too much to remain human, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m grateful that you discovered this victim and not I.’

Artor began to pace, his long legs covering the spartan room in just a few strides.

‘We must warn all the women in the fortress and the township to avoid the lonely places,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But I’ve no doubt that rumours are circulating through the whole of Cadbury already.’

‘Then I hope we find the perpetrator quickly,’ Myrddion responded. ‘The animal who carried out this violence is a madman, and his hunger will not be slaked with just one killing.’

After Myrddion had bowed and departed, Artor was left alone with his dark thoughts.

A vicious and disturbed man who liked to kill lived close at hand in the Cadbury environs. From the quality of his boots, he was obviously a person of means, and he was driven by impulses that Artor couldn’t understand. He was a man who hunted for unwary women - to hurt, to kill and to feed on the fear that came with imminent death.

Reluctantly, on the evidence of Myrddion’s eyes, Artor acquitted Caius of the murder. This crime was quite different in method and motive from the Severinii atrocities. Artor had thought of Caius as an unpunished monster for so long, deep in his secret heart, that he had almost hoped his foster-brother was guilty. Caius made a convenient scapegoat, but now he must face facts. A monster other than the one he had always held close to his breast had chosen Cadbury as his playground.

The High King thrust his bleak thoughts aside and spat the sour taste from his mouth.

Mid-autumn was marked by another missing person, this time a child, a girl, who had been gathering fallen branches for the winter store of firewood behind the cottage where she lived. She had not ventured into the forest, but the earth showed drag marks, as if her hair had been used to pull her bodily into the shadows of the trees.

Her butchered corpse was found swiftly, for Artor’s warriors had learned from Myrddion what signs to seek during their searches. The injuries inflicted on this girl were identical to those found on the rotted flesh of the widow, but this victim was discovered within twenty-four hours of her disappearance. She lay curled in a pathetic little ball, the marks of her beating still livid on her cooled flesh. Although the rigidity of death had passed, the warriors were superstitious about even touching her until Myrddion ordered them to roll her body on to a rough stretcher of tree branches covered with an old cloak. The child was buried while a priest intoned prayers for her soul and, suddenly, all of Cadbury reeked of fear.

Perhaps the murderer would never have been caught if sheer chance had not trapped him in the end. Sheer chance, and the folly of a sudden urge by Nimue, the Maid of Wind and Water, to collect ingredients for her medicines.

During late summer and early autumn, Nimue had had vague sensations of being observed by an unseen presence within the fortress. But she had simply shaken her head, and put the prickling of her scalp down to an over-active imagination prompted by the troubled times in which she lived.