“That is possible,” said Mark simply. “It is for you to examine all these things.” And he took his leave, and set off alone on the walk back to Saint Giles.
“There’s no knowing, as yet,” said Cadfael, when Mark was gone, “who or what this dead man may be. He may have nothing to do with Meriet, with Peter Clemence or with the horse straying in the mosses. A live man missing, a dead man found—they need not be one and the same. There’s every reason to doubt it. The horse more than twenty miles north of here, the rider’s last night halt four miles southeast, and this burning hearth another four miles south-west from there. You’ll have hard work linking those into one sequence and making sense of it. He left Aspley travelling north, and one thing’s certain by a number of witnesses, he was man alive then. What should he be doing now, not north, but south of Aspley? And his horse miles north, and on the right route he would be taking, bar a little straying at the end?”
“I don’t know but I’ll be the happier,” owned Hugh, “if this turns out to be some other traveller fallen by thieves somewhere, and nothing to do with Clemence, who may well be down in the peat-pools this moment. But do you know of any other gone missing in these parts? And another thing, Cadfael, would common thieves have left him his riding shoes? Or his hose, for that matter. A naked man has nothing left that could benefit his murderers, and nothing by which he may be easily known, two good reasons for stripping him. And again, since he wore long-toed shoes, he was certainly not going far afoot. No sane man would wear them for walking.”
A rider without a horse, a saddled horse without a rider, what wonder if the mind put the two together?
“No profit in racking brains,” said Cadfael, sighing, “until you’ve viewed the place, and gathered what there is to be gathered there.”
“We, old friend! I want you with me, and I think Abbot Radulfus will give me leave to take you. You’re better skilled than I in dead men, in how long they may have been dead, and how they died. Moreover, he’ll want a watching eye on all that affects Saint Giles, and who better than you? You’re waist-deep in the whole matter already, you must either sink or haul clear.”
“For my sins!” said Cadfael, somewhat hypocritically. “But I’ll gladly come with you. Whatever devil it is that possess young Meriet is plaguing me by contagion, and I want it exorcised at all costs.”
Meriet was waiting for them when they came for him next day, Hugh and Cadfael, a sergeant and two officers, equipped with crows and shovels, and a sieve to sift the ashes for every trace and every bone. In the faint mist of a still morning, Meriet eyed all these preparations with a face stonily calm, braced for everything that might come, and said flatly: “The tools are still there, my lord, in the hut. I fetched the rake from there, Mark will have told you—a corrack, the old man called it.” He looked at Cadfael, with the faintest softening in the set of his lips. “Brother Mark said I should be needed. I’m glad he need not go back himself.” His voice was in as thorough control as his face; whatever confronted him today, it would not take him by surprise.
They had brought a horse for him, time having its value. He mounted nimbly, perhaps with the only impulse of pleasure that would come his way that day, and led the way down the high road. He did not glance aside when he passed the turning to his own home, but turned on the other hand into the broad ride, and within half an hour had brought them to the shallow bowl of the charcoal hearth. Ground mist lay faintly blue over the shattered mound as Hugh and Cadfael walked round the rim and halted where the log that was no log lay tumbled among the ashes.
The tarnished buckle on the perished leather strap was of silver. The shoe had been elaborate and expensive. Slivers of burned cloth fluttered from the almost fleshless bone.
Hugh looked from the foot to the knee, and on above among the exposed wood for the joint from which it had broken free. “There he should be lying, aligned thus. Whoever put him there did not open a deserted stack, but built this new, and built him into the centre. Someone who knew the method, though perhaps not well enough. We had better take this apart carefully. You may rake off the earth covering and the leaves,” he said to his men, “but when you reach the logs we’ll hoist them off one by one where they’re whole. I doubt he’ll be little but bones, but I want all there is of him.”
They went to work, raking away the covering on the unburned side, and Cadfael circled the mound to view the quarter from which the destroying wind must have been blowing. Low to the ground a small, arched hole showed in the roots of the pile. He stooped to look more closely, and ran a hand under the hanging leaves that half-obscured it. The hollow continued inward, swallowing his arm to the elbow. It had been built in as the stack was made. He went back to where Hugh stood watching.
“They knew the method, sure enough. There’s a vent built in on the windward side to let in a draught. The stack was meant to burn out. But they overdid it. They must have had the vent covered until the stack was well alight, and then opened and left it. It blew too fiercely, and left the windward half hardly more than scorched while the rest blazed. These things have to be watched day and night.”
Meriet stood apart, close to where they had tethered the horses, and watched this purposeful activity with an impassive face. He saw Hugh cross to the edge of the arena, where three paler, flattened oblongs in the herbage showed where the wood had been stacked to season. Two of them showed greener than the third, as Mark had said, where new herbage had pierced the layer of dead grass and risen to the light. The third, the one which had supplied such a harvest for the inmates of Saint Giles, lay bleached and flat.
“How long,” asked Hugh, “to make this much new growth, and at this season?”
Cadfael pondered, digging a toe into the soft mat of old growth below. “A matter of eight to ten weeks, perhaps. Difficult to tell. And the blown ash might show as long as that. Mark was right, the heat reached the trees. If this floor had been less bare and hard, the fire might have reached them, too, but there was no thick layer of roots and leaf-mould to carry it along the ground.”
They returned to where the covering of earth and leaves now lay drawn aside, and the ridged surfaces of logs showed, blackened but keeping their shape. The sergeant and his men laid down their tools and went to work with their hands, hoisting the logs off one by one and stacking them aside out of the way. Slow work; and throughout Meriet stood watching, motionless and mute. The dead man emerged from his coffin of timber piecemeal after more than two hours of work. He had lain close to the central chimney on the leeward side, and the fire had been fierce enough to burn away all but a few tindery flakes of his clothing, but had passed by too rapidly to take all the flesh from his bones, or even the hair from his head. Laboriously they brushed away debris of charcoal and ash and half-consumed wood from him, but could not keep him intact. The collapse of part of the stack had started his joints and broken him apart. They had to gather up his bones as best they could, and lay them out on the grass until they had, if not the whole man, all but such small bones of finger and wrist as would have to be sifted from the ashes. The skull still retained, above the blackened ruin of a face, the dome of a naked crown fringed with a few wisps and locks of brown hair, cropped short.
But there were other things to lay beside him. Metal is very durable. The silver buckles on his shoes, blackened as they were, kept the form a good workman had given them. There was the twisted half of a tooled leather belt, with another silver buckle, large and elaborate, and traces of silver ornamenting in the leather. There was a broken length of tarnished silver chain attached to a silver cross studded with what must surely be semi-precious stones, though now they were blackened and encrusted with dirt. And one of the men, running fine ash from close to the body through the sieve, came to lay down for examination a finger-bone and the ring it had loosely retained while the flesh was burned from between. The ring bore a large black stone engraved with a design fouled by clotted ash, but which seemed to be a decorative cross. There was also something which had lain within the shattered rib-cage, burned almost clean by the fire, the head of the arrow that had killed him.