The Devil's Novice Page 11

  Meriet had set out as grave as ever, but as the morning progressed, so did he emerge from his hiding-place into muted sunlight, like the day. He snuffed the forest air, and trod its sward, and seemed to expand, as a dried shoot does after the rain, drawing in sustenance from the earth on which he strode. There was no one more tireless in collecting the stouter boughs of fallen wood, no one so agile in binding and loading them. When the company halted to take meat and drink, emptying the leather bucket, they were well into the border areas of the forest, where their pickings would be best, and Meriet ate his bread and cheese and onion, and drank his ale, and lay down flat as ground-ivy under the trees, with the toeless boy sprawled in one arm. Thus deep-drowned in the last pale grass, he looked like some native ground-growth burgeoning from the earth, half-asleep towards the winter, half-wakeful towards another growing year.

  They had gone no more than ten minutes deeper into the woodland, after their rest, when he checked to look about him, at the slant of the veiled sun between the trees, and the shape of the low, lichened outcrop of rocks on their right.

  “Now I know just where we are. When I had my first pony I was never supposed to come further west than the highroad from home, let alone venture this far south-west into the forest, but I often did. There used to be an old charcoal-burner had a hearth somewhere here, it can’t be far away. They found him dead in his hut a year and more ago, and there was no son to take on after him, and nobody wanted to live as lone as he did. He may have left a cord or two of coppice-wood stacked to season, that he never lived to burn. Shall we go and see, Mark? We could do well there.”

  It was the first time he had ever volunteered even so innocuous a recollection of his childhood, and the first time he had shown any eagerness. Mark welcomed the suggestion gladly.

  “Can you find it again? We have a fair load already, but we can very well cart the best out to the roadside, and send for it again when we’ve unloaded the rest. We have the whole day.”

  “This way it should be,” said Meriet, and set off confidently to the left between the trees, lengthening his step to quest ahead of his charges. “Let them follow at their own pace, I’ll go forward and find the place. A hollow clearing it was—the stacks must have shelter…” His voice and his striding figure dwindled among the trees. He was out of sight for a few minutes before they heard him call, a hail as near pleasure as Mark had ever heard from him.

  When Mark reached him he was standing where the trees thinned and fell back, leaving a shallow bowl perhaps forty or fifty paces across, with a level floor of beaten earth and old ash. At the rim, close to them, the decrepit remains of a rough hut of sticks and bracken and earth sagged over its empty log doorway, and on the far side of the arena there were stacked logs of coppice-wood, left in the round, and now partially overgrown at the base of the stack with coarse grass and mosses. There was room enough on the prepared floor for two hearths some five long paces each in diameter, and their traces were still plain to be seen, though grass and herbage were encroaching from the edges of the plain, invading even the dead circles of ash with defiant green shoots. The nearer hearth had been cleared after its last burning, and no new stack built there, but on the more distant ring a mound of stacked logs, halfburned out and half still keeping its form beneath the layers of grass and leaves and earth, lay flattened and settling.

  “He had built his last stack and fired it,” said Meriet, gazing, “and then never had time to build its fellow while the first was burning, as he always used to do, nor even to tend the one he had lighted. You see there must have been a wind, after he was dead, and no one by to dress the gap when it began to burn through. All the one side is dead ash, look, and the other only charred. Not much charcoal to be found there, but we might get enough to fill the bucket. And at least he left us a good stock of wood, and well seasoned, too.”

  “I have no skill in this art,” said Mark curiously. “How can such a great hill of wood be got to burn without blazing, so that it may be used as fuel over again?”

  “They begin with a tall stake in the middle, and stack dry split logs round it, and then the whole logs, until the stack is made. Then you must cover it with a clean layer, leaves or grass or bracken, to keep out the earth and ash that goes over all to seal it. And to light it, when it’s ready, you hoist out the stake to leave a chimney, and drop your first red-hot coals down inside, and good dry sticks after, until it’s well afire. Then you cover up the vent, and it burns very slow and hot, sometimes as long as ten days. If there’s a wind you must watch it all the while, for if it burns through the whole stack goes up in flames. If there’s danger you must patch the place and keep it sealed. There was no one left to do that here.”

  Their slower companions were coming up through the trees. Meriet led the way down the slight incline into the hearth, with Mark close at his heels.

  “It seems to me,” said Mark, smiling, “that you’re very well versed in the craft. How did you learn so much about it?”

  “He was a surly old man and not well liked,” said Meriet, making for the stacked cordwood, “but he was not surly with me. I was here often at one time, until I once helped him to rake down a finished burn, and went home dirtier than even I could account for. I got my tail well leathered, and they wouldn’t let me have my pony again until I promised not to venture over here to the west. I suppose I was about nine years old—it’s a long time ago.” He eyed the piled wood with pride and pleasure, and rolled the topmost log from its place, sending a number of frightened denizens scuttling for cover.

  They had left one of their hand-carts, already well filled, in the clearing where they had rested at noon. Two of the sturdiest gleaners brought the second weaving between the trees, and the whole company fell gleefully upon the logs and began to load them.

  “There’ll be half-burned wood still in the stack,” said Meriet, “and maybe some charcoal, too, if we strip it.” And he was off to the tumbledown hut, and emerged with a large wooden rake, with which he went briskly to attack the misshapen mound left by the last uncontrolled burning. “Strange,” he said, lifting his head and wrinkling his nose, “there’s still the stink of old burning, who would have thought it could last so long?”

  There was indeed a faint stench such as a woodland fire might leave after it had been damped by rain and dried out by wind. Mark could distinguish it, too, and came to Meriet’s side as the broad rake began to draw down the covering of earth and leaves from the windward side of the mound. The moist, earthy smell of leaf-mould rose to their nostrils, and half-consumed logs heeled away and rolled down with the rake. Mark walked round to the other side, where the mound had sunk into a weathered mass of grey ash, and the wind had carried its fine dust as far as the rim of the trees. There the smell of dead fire was sharper, and rose in waves as Mark’s feet stirred the debris. And surely on this side the leaves still left on the nearest trees were withered as though by scorching.

  “Meriet!” called Mark in a low but urgent tone. “Come here to me!”

  Meriet looked round, his rake locked in the covering of soil. Surprised but undisturbed, he skirted the ring of ash to come to where Mark stood, but instead of relinquishing the rake he tugged the head after him across the low crest of the mound, and tore down with it a tumble of half-burned logs, rolling merrily down into the ashen grass. It occurred to Mark that this was the first time he had seen his new helper look almost happy, using his body energetically, absorbed in what he was doing and forgetful of his own concerns. “What is it? What have you seen?”

  The falling logs, charred and disintegrating, settled in a flurry of acrid dust. Something rolled out to Meriet’s feet, something that was not wood. Blackened, cracked and dried, a leathern shape hardly recognisable at first sight for a long-toed riding shoe, with a tarnished buckle to fasten it across the instep; and protruding from it, something long and rigid, showing gleams of whitish ivory through fluttering, tindery rags of calcined cloth.

  There was a long mome
nt while Meriet stood staring down at it without comprehension, his lips still shaping the last word of his blithe enquiry, his face still animated and alert. Then Mark saw the same shocking and violent change Cadfael had once seen, as the brightness of the hazel eyes seemed to collapse inward into total darkness, and the fragile mask of content shrank and froze into horror. He made a very small sound in his throat, a harsh rattle like a man dying, took one reeling step backwards, stumbled in the uneven ground, and dropped cowering into the grass.

  Chapter 8

  IT WAS NO MORE than an instant’s withdrawal from the unbearable, recoiling into his enfolding arms, shutting out what nevertheless he could not choose but go on seeing. He had not swooned. Even as Mark flew to him, with no outcry to alarm the busy party dismantling the stack of cordwood, he was already rearing his head and doubling his fists grimly into the soil to raise himself. Mark held him with an arm about his body, for he was trembling still when he got to his feet.

  “Did you see? Did you see it?” he asked in a whisper. What remained of the half-burned stack was between them and their charges, no one had turned to look in their direction.

  “Yes, I saw. I know! We must get them away,” said Mark. “Leave this pile as it is, touch nothing more, leave the charcoal. We must just load the wood and start them back for home. Are you fit to go? Can you be as always, and keep your face before them?”

  “I can,” said Meriet, stiffening, and scrubbed a sleeve over a forehead dewed with a chilly sweat. “I will! But, Mark, if you saw what I saw—we must know…”

  “We do know,” said Mark, “you and I both. It’s not for us now, this is the law’s business, and we must let ill alone for them to see. Don’t even look that way again. I saw, perhaps, more than you. I know what is there. What we must do is get our people home without spoiling their day. Now, come and see to loading the cart with me. Can you, yet?”

  For answer, Meriet braced his shoulders, heaved in a great breath, and withdrew himself resolutely from the thin arm that still encircled him. “I’m ready!” he said, in a fair attempt at the cheerful, practical voice with which he had summoned them to the hearth, and was off across the level floor to plunge fiercely into the labour of hoisting logs into the cart.

  Mark followed him watchfully, and against all temptation contrived to obey his own order, and give no single glance to that which had been uncovered among the ashes. But he did, as they worked, cast a careful eye about the rim of the hearth, where he had also noticed certain circumstances which gave him cause for thought. What he had been about to say to Meriet when the rake fetched down its avalanche was never said.

  They loaded their haul, stacking the wood so high that there was no room for the toeless boy to ride on top on the return journey. Meriet carried him on his back, until the arms that clasped him round the neck fell slack with sleepiness, and he shifted his burden to one arm, so that the boy’s tow-coloured head could nod securely on his shoulder. The load on his arm was light enough, and warm against his heart. What else he carried unseen, thought Mark watching him with reticent attention, weighed more heavily and struck cold as ice. But Meriet’s calm continued rock-firm. The one moment of recoil was over, and there would be no more such lapses.

  At Saint Giles Meriet carried the boy indoors, and returned to help haul the carts up the slight slope to the barn, where the wood would be stacked under the low eaves, to be sawn and split later as it was needed.

  “I am going now into Shrewsbury,” said Mark, having counted all his chicks safely into the coop, tired and elated from their successful foray.

  “Yes,” said Meriet, without turning from the neat stack he was building, end-outwards between two confining buttresses of wood. “I know someone must.”

  “Stay here with them. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  “I know,” said Meriet. “I will. They’re happy enough. It was a good day.”

  *

  Brother Mark hesitated when he reached the abbey gatehouse, for his natural instinct was to take everything first to Brother Cadfael. It was plain that his errand now was to the officers of the king’s law in the shire, and urgent, but on the other hand it was Cadfael who had confided Meriet to him, and he was certain in his own mind that the grisly discovery in the charcoal hearth was in some way connected with Meriet. The shock he had felt was genuine, but extreme, his wild recoil too intense to be anything but personal. He had not known, had not dreamed, what he was going to find, but past any doubt he knew it when he found it.

  While Mark was hovering irresolute in the arch of the gatehouse Brother Cadfael, who had been sent for before Vespers to an old man in the Foregate who had a bad chest ailment, came behind and clapped him briskly on the shoulder. Turning to find the clemency of heaven apparently presenting him with the answer to his problem, Mark clutched him gratefully by the sleeve, and begged him: “Cadfael, come with me to Hugh Beringar. We’ve found something hideous in the Long Forest, business for him, surely. I was just by way of praying for you. Meriet was with me—this somehow touches Meriet…”

  Cadfael fixed him with an acute stare, took him by the arm and turned him promptly towards the town. “Come on then and save your breath to tell the tale but once. I’m earlier back than anyone will expect me, I can stretch my license an hour or two, for you and for Meriet.”

  So they were two who arrived at the house near Saint Mary’s, where Hugh had settled his family. By luck he was home before supper, and free of his labours for the day. He haled them in warmly, and had wit enough not to offer Brother Mark respite or refreshment until he had heaved his whole anxiety off his narrow chest. Which he did very consideringly, measuring words. He stepped meticulously from fact to fact, as on sure stepping-stones through a perilous stream.

  “I called him round to me because I had seen that on the side of that stack where I was, and where the pile was burned out, the wind had carried fine ash right into the trees, and the near branches of the trees were scorched, the leaves browned and withered. I meant to call his attention to these things, for such a fire was no long time ago. Those were this year’s leaves scorched brown, that was ash not many weeks old still showing grey. And he came readily, but as he came he held on to the rake and tugged it with him, to bring down the top of the stack, where it had not burned out. So he brought down a whole fall of wood and earth and leaves, and this thing rolled down between, at our feet.”

  “You saw it plainly,” said Hugh gently, “tell us as plainly.”

  “It is a fashionable long-toed riding shoe,” said Mark steadily, “shrunk and dried and twisted by fire, but not consumed. And in it a man’s leg-bone, in the ashes of hose.”

  “You are in no doubt,” said Hugh, watching him with sympathy.

  “None. I saw projecting from the pile the round knee-joint from which the shin-bone had parted,” said Brother Mark, pale but tranquil. “It so happened I saw it break away. I am sure the man is there. The fire broke through on the other side, a strong wind drove it, and left him, it may be, almost whole for Christian burial. At least we may collect his bones.”

  “That shall be done with all reverence,” said Hugh, “if you are right. Go on, you have more to tell. Brother Meriet saw what you had seen. What then?”

  “He was utterly stricken and shocked. He had spoken of coming there as a child, and helping the old charcoal-burner. I am certain he knew of nothing worse there than what he remembered. I told him first we must get our people home undisturbed, and he did his part valiantly,” said Brother Mark, “We have left all as we found it—or as we disturbed it unwitting. In the morning light I can show you the place.”

  “I think, rather,” said Hugh with deliberation, “Meriet Aspley shall do that. But now you have told us what you had to tell, now you may sit down with me and eat and drink a morsel, while we consider this matter.”

  Brother Mark sat down obediently, sighing away the burden of his knowledge. Grateful for the humblest of hospitality, he was equally unawed by the no
blest, and having no pride, he did not know how to be servile. When Aline herself brought him meat and drink, and the same for Cadfael, he received it gladly and simply, as saints accept alms, perpetually astonished and pleased, perpetually serene.

  “You said,” Hugh pressed him gently over the wine, “that you had cause, in the blown ash and the scorching of the trees, to believe that the fire was of this season, and not from a year ago, and that I accept. Had you other reasons to think so?”

  “I had,” said Mark simply, “for though we have brought home, to our gain, a whole cord of good coppice-wood, yet not far aside from ours there were two other flattened and whitened shapes in the grass, greener than the one we have now left, but still clear to be seen, which I think must have been bared when the wood was used for this stack. Meriet told me the logs must be left to season. These would have seasoned more than a year, dried out, it may be, too far for what was purposed. No one was left to watch the burning, and the over-dried wood burned through and burst into a blaze. You will see the shapes where the wood lay. You will judge better than I how long since it was moved.”

  “That I doubt,” said Hugh, smiling, “for you seem to have done excellently well. But tomorrow we shall see. There are those can tell to a hair, by the burrowing insects and the spiders, and the tinder fringing the wood. Sit and take your ease awhile, before you must return, for there’s nothing now can be done before morning.”

  Brother Mark sat back, relieved, and bit with astonished pleasure into the game pasty Aline had brought him. She thought him underfed, and worried about him because he was so meagre; and indeed he may very well have been underfed, through forgetting to eat while he worried about someone else. There was a great deal of the good woman in Brother Mark, and Aline recognised it.