The Way Between the Worlds (32 page)

He did not appear to realize we were following him. It became clear quite soon where he was bound. Although I had not been to the spot myself, I had heard it described. He strode swiftly round the abbey walls and left the settlement behind. He crossed several fields, always heading straight for the places where the hedges were low enough to climb over and the streams and winding little waterways fordable or narrow enough to leap over. He had obviously come this way many times before.

Hrype and Rollo both seemed to know how you followed someone without letting them become aware of your presence, and I just did as they indicated. We trailed the black-clad figure for some time, and he never even suspected we were there.

Or so we thought.

He led us to the far corner of the last field before land gave way to water. There was a rough wooden shelter, very dilapidated, and the pile of dung on the dirty straw suggested the abbey donkey had been there not long ago. He was not there now.

The false priest went right to the edge of the field and stood above the brownish water that lapped at his feet. Then, without turning round, he said mildly, ‘I know you are there. At least one of you is armed.’

Slowly, he spun round to face us, his hands in the air. ‘I have no weapon,’ he added. He smiled, a warm, friendly expression, and I was filled with the dreadful certainty that we were wrong, totally wrong, and this man was exactly what he claimed to be. I reached out to grab Hrype, intent on telling him, on warning him, but Hrype could see with clearer eyes than I.

As, it seemed, could Rollo, for he was drawing a short sword out of the scabbard he wore across his back, concealed beneath his over-tunic.

I had not even realized he bore a weapon. He certainly hadn’t carried it when I stripped his wet clothes from him up on the foreshore. It must have been tucked right down inside his pack, and he had quietly strapped it on before we left Gurdyman’s house.

Father Clement stood watching us, his expression benign and warm. His eyes were watchful, and, as they met mine, I felt a jolt as if someone had nudged me hard in the ribs.

And I began to think we might have been right all the time.

It was as if he had cast a spell on the three of us, and for a while nobody spoke. Then Hrype gave himself a violent shake, like a dog emerging from water, and raised his right arm. I felt a brief crackling force in the air, and the priest stepped back, flashing a sudden grimace at Hrype.

It appeared that whatever Hrype had just done had also released Rollo from the enchantment. He leaned towards Hrype and said quietly, ‘We should be quick. He will not remain alone for long.’

Hrype nodded. Then, drawing himself up so that he stood tall and strong, he said, ‘We do not know your name, but we know you are not Father Clement, whose body lies at Cambridge. You sacrificed him as a victim to the Threefold Death, giving his body to the water and securing it in the old way, with honeysuckle ropes and hazel stakes. You took his identity, and you came here to the abbey, where you killed the young novice, Herleva, because she had witnessed your accomplice raising the storm that drowned the king’s ship-army.’ He paused. I could sense even from where I stood, a pace or two away, that some huge force was aimed at him and he was countering it. He was shaking with the effort.

I tried to turn to Rollo, to see if he, too, felt that strange, paralysing power, but found I could not move.

Then the man who was posing as Father Clement began to speak.

‘I may look like a priest of the church and the servant of a Norman king and his bishop,’ he said. His voice was quiet, his tone kindly. It did not match up in the least with the power that I felt blazing through him. He glanced down at his black robes, running a hand over his clean-shaven jaw. ‘This is a guise I can readily adopt, and in addition the ways of a priest are very familiar.’ He paused, and a look of pain crossed his face. ‘I was a wild child, for I lost my close family when I was very young and I was angry with the whole world. The remainder of my relatives could not deal with me and so they put me in with the monks, who tried to beat the spirit out of me and turn me into one of them. They did not succeed. I remain what I am: a son of the north, whose allegiance is exclusively to the old ways and the old kings.’

We were right! I wanted to shoot a glance at Hrype, but I could not move my eyes that far.

‘I learned last autumn that King Malcolm had advanced into the north of England,’ the black-robed man was saying. ‘He has edgy neighbours, has Malcolm, for his own lands are only in the south and the east of Scotland. The north and west are ruled by the Scandinavians and the wild people he refers to as the godless Gaels. We are not godless,’ he added vehemently. ‘Our gods are numerous, and a man like Malcolm ignores and derides them at his peril. But his time will come.’

For the first time, emotion had crept into his voice. He waited – getting himself under control, I guessed – then spoke again.

‘He made a mistake when he married that wife of his. Margaret changed the land, and for a small woman, she has made a dramatic impact. The Roman Church now takes dominance over the Celtic, and Benedictine monks swarm in her wake. Even the eight children she gave her king are called by English and not Gaelic names.’

There was a short pause, as if he were giving us time to assimilate the various sins of Queen Margaret.

Then he said coolly, ‘I hate everything English, even as I hate the Church of Rome. My allies in the north-west told me of Malcolm’s advance into Lothian. There would be a counter-invasion force; that was obvious. I watched and I waited, and as the snippets of knowledge came in one by one, slowly and steadily I began to see the whole picture. I knew what must be done.

‘There is a skill, possessed by members of some families and passed down through the generations, back into the mists of the past and the dawn of the line. It is a perilous skill, hard-learned, and its practice drains a man until he is all but dead.

‘On the twenty-fifth of September last year, a man with this skill stood ready. The ships bearing King William’s army sailed right past him as he stood in the place of power, and the storm that he raised destroyed them utterly.’

His eyes went from one to the other of us, along the line that we formed as we stood before him. Then he spoke again, and he sounded as if he were chanting. ‘I will tell you of the place of power. It was once revered and honoured by all of the people who understood the force of the natural world and the huge reserves of might that lie bound up in the crossing places, the margins, the half-and-half worlds of daybreak and twilight, river fords and marshland.

‘I will tell you of the circle as it once was, with tall timber uprights and, inside it, an upturned oak stump, its trunk deep in the ground, its roots in the free, open air. Here an ancient people made a sacred place. The wide-spreading roots of the mighty oak were the platform where they laid the body of their greatest magician, giving it up to the sea, the shore. A huge fire was lit. The four elements were all there, and their spirits, summoned by the men of magic, came readily: air, fire, water, earth.’

He spoke as if he had been there. As if he had seen with his own eyes that body on its strange bier, the encircling wooden walls and the fire that surrounded them.

‘The body was not that of a man,’ he said, his voice barely more than a breath. ‘The greatest magician of the people was a woman.’

The echoes of his words seemed to twist and float around us. Then, as if he had waited deliberately so as to gain the maximum impact, he picked up his tale.

‘The man who raised the storm believed himself to be alone that day, but someone saw him. She was just a young girl, with a round face and a sweet smile. She was very afraid.’ Briefly, he closed his eyes, as if remembering something. ‘The man wore a cloak and carried a staff. His hair was long and uncombed, and his beard reached his chest. The power was on him, in him, and he scarcely appeared human.

‘She knew the terrain better than he did, and she evaded him. But he followed her. He had diminished into human form, and he trailed her without her noticing him. She led him to Chatteris, to this abbey, where to his dismay she announced to the nuns that she wished to join them. Now you probably do not know that for the first few months, a young postulant is all but walled up here, having no contact whatsoever with the outside world. The only man she encounters is the priest. The magician knew that he had to reach her: he had to find out if she had indeed witnessed his storm-raising and whether she would tell anyone.’

He frowned, as if recalling the dreadful problem he and the storm-raiser had been faced with. Then he said, ‘There had to be a way. I prayed, begged my guardian spirits and my ancestors for help, and they heard me. I learned that the elderly priest at Chatteris had just died and was to be replaced by a certain Father Clement, lately the priest at Crowland Abbey, which you may or may not know burned down last year. No,’ he said, glancing at Hrype, ‘I had nothing to do with that.’ Then, with a swift grin, ‘You don’t care much for religious foundations, do you, cunning man?’

He knew. He understood what Hrype was  . . .

‘I went to Crowland,’ the impostor said. ‘Father Clement had already left. He had been summoned by his bishop, to speak to him before he took up his new appointment. Accordingly, he had gone to Bishop’s Lynn, where I followed him. He stayed with the bishop for a day and a night, and the following morning he set out for Chatteris.

‘He did not get far. I waited until we were well away from the little town, with the last of the dwellings far behind us. I waited until the track ran down close to the water; we had not long crossed the Nar, and the great Ouse meandered along to our right. I caught up with Father Clement and, in the guise of a lonely traveller eager for a chat and a bit of human company, I engaged him in conversation. We walked for some miles, and then I suggested we share my pot of gruel while it was still warm.’

Even if I could have spoken, I do not think I had words to say. I stood spellbound, unable to look away from the black-robed figure before us.

‘He died easily. There was no pain, for the draught I gave him rendered him drowsy. He was smiling as I killed him. I tethered his limbs to hazel stakes and gave him to the salt marsh. Then I came to Chatteris. I discovered quite soon that the little nun was called Herleva, that she was a chatty soul who loved to giggle. Not very bright, but affectionate and popular. She had a friend, a slightly older girl who was also a white-veiled novice. The two spent as much time together as they were allowed, and it was clear that there was a deep friendship between them.

‘I thought I was safe. Six months had passed, Herleva seemed happy and content, and it appeared there was nothing in her new life to remind her of the events that happened as she was leaving the old one. I was about to slip quietly away, when something happened. Herleva’s friend had a visitor; her sister, I believe, although I did not meet her, or even see her myself, so I cannot be sure. But this young visitor was learning to be a healer. She was being taught other skills, too; I hid carefully and sat unobserved, listening as she whispered to her sister the nun, telling her of the wondrous things she was learning.

‘She left, and the nun went to seek out her friend Herleva. She told her with awe in her voice of the things her sister had just been speaking about. I knew what was going to happen. I wished I could stop it, but I could not. I moved my position slightly so that I could observe the two of them. I can see them now: Herleva’s frown, the downturned mouth, the disgruntled expression as she realized that her best friend’s visitor had left a deep and lasting impression. She was jealous.

‘The temptation, it seemed, was too much for her. “I once saw magic too,” Herleva said, in a tone of such self-importance that you would have thought she had performed the magic herself. “It was just before I left home to come here,” she went on in her light little voice. “I’d been up by the sea, saying goodbye to some of my favourite spots. I saw that a storm was brewing, and I took shelter in a hedge. I saw the storm grow and burst. I saw a fleet of ships that perished. I saw hundreds of men drown, screaming as they died. I saw the man who stood alone up on the shore and made the magic happen.” ’

He paused, running a hand over his face. Then, his expression oddly ironic, he said, ‘She might have been about to say more, to utter the words that I dreaded to hear. She didn’t. But I dared not take the risk; I had to act. She was sent out here, to tend the donkey in this field down by the water. I followed her. I said, “Cold this morning, Herleva.” I held out my flask. “Here, have a sip of this. It’s gruel, and it’s hot.” ’ He glanced at us: Rollo, Hrype, me. As if to exonerate himself, he muttered, ‘She suffered no pain.’

I sensed a mighty, silent protest form itself in Hrype and burst out of him. The impostor felt it too; he staggered back a pace or two.

Quickly, he recovered. ‘She might have told her friend of her suspicions! I couldn’t risk it. I sought out her friend – her name is Elfritha – and I said I was making a new mixture to warm and comfort the cold and hungry poor who flock to the abbey for aid, and asked her if she would be so kind as to sample it and tell me what she thought. “You have a friend, or perhaps a relative, who is a healer, I believe?” I said.

‘ “Yes, I have,” she agreed readily, blushing and smiling with pleasure at being able to help. “My sister is apprenticed to our aunt, whose reputation is widely known in the fens around our home village.” ’

I felt a pain like a knife in my guts. It was all my fault! If I’d kept my mouth shut and refrained from boasting of my latest knowledge before my sister, then she wouldn’t have told Herleva, and Herleva wouldn’t have been driven to try and do better with an even more fantastic tale of her own. Herleva would still be alive, and Elfritha would never have been poisoned. And, even worse, my beloved sister had actually bragged about me, her very words making her more suitable to test out the false Father Clement’s foul draught!