Stripped of their flesh, they all looked the same.
They found a second pile of the dead later in the day, in the apple orchard. By then, Phillippa was more hardened to it. Or so she thought, until Mary Rose spat and said, ‘These is midden heaps.’ She spat again, not in contempt, but in her effort not to retch.
Phillippa and Mary and Jenny were the youngest women, so the three of them were given most of the heavy work. They were all pretty fair at using the shovels, and Phillippa was learning to cut with the axe, although using it raised calluses on her hands that would not please the boys in Lorica. If she ever went back to Lorica.
When the sun was past midday, her mother rang the bell – the monsters didn’t steal the really valuable things, the way reivers and skinners would do. So she went down the hill from the apple orchard. There was an intact rain-barrel under the eaves of the manor house, and she washed her hands.
Jenny Rose smiled. ‘You have nice hands, Phillippa.’
Phillippa smiled. ‘Thanks, Jen. Though I’m afraid they’re going to get worse before they get better.’
Mary Rose paused to dip her own hands. ‘What were the boys like in Lorica?’ she asked, bold as brass.
‘Mary Rose!’ said her sister.
‘Much like boys everywhere, I expect,’ said a new voice.
Standing by the corner of the house was a tall, slim woman in a nun’s black habit with the cross of Saint Thomas on it. She smiled at the girls. ‘Handsome, funny, angry, preening, stupid, vain, and wonderful,’ the nun continued. ‘Are you Phillippa? Your mother was worried.’
The three girls curtsied together. Jenny and Mary made a stiff obeisance, the kind that the village priest taught you. Phillippa sank down, back straight and legs apparently boneless. ‘Sister?’ she asked.
The nun had a beautiful smile. ‘Come,’ she said.
Jenny whispered, ‘Teach me to do that.’
Supper was ham and cheese and good bread that must have come from the fortress with the nun. The mill at Gracwaite cross was a burned-out ruin, and none of the towns around Albinkirk had had bread – fresh bread – in weeks.
There was a fine palfrey in the yard, and a mule.
The nun was a curiosity – neither particularly well bred, nor ill-bred. She was somehow too robust to be a noblewoman – her brown hair was rich but unruly, her lips were a little too lush, and her eyes had more of command than languor. But Phillippa admired her immensely.
The nun had a tonic effect on the gathered women. She seemed oblivious to the shadow over all of them, and she had brought seeds for late planting. The mule was to stay as a plough animal until the fortress sent oxen.
‘I gather that you have found quite a few dead,’ she said. She said it quite plainly, without the embellishment of false sentiment.
‘Almost all the men,’ Helewise noted. ‘We haven’t found Ser Hubert. I’d expect to know him. He had his brigandine on.’
‘I saw him fighting,’ Phillippa said, without meaning to. ‘I saw his axe. I never liked him. I wasn’t nice to him.’ Her voice cracked. ‘He died for us.’
The nun nodded. ‘Hard times change us all, in ways that are far beyond our little knowledge,’ she said. ‘They teach us things about ourselves.’ She frowned.
Then she looked up. ‘Let us pray,’ she said. When she was done, they ate in relative silence. And when she’d finished her share, the nun rose. ‘When we’ve washed up, let’s go bury the dead and say the service,’ she said.
Phillippa, who had never been a great one for religion, was surprised by how moved she was by the nun’s quiet prayers, her open-faced plea to heaven for the souls of the departed, and by her homily – on how deeply they’d all been touched, and how they must trust in God.
When the nun was finished, she smiled and kissed each woman on both cheeks. Then she walked to the pile of dead boggles. They didn’t smell, but they didn’t rot as men do – their leathery hides and the heavy cartilage of their ‘shells’ took time to return to the soil.
‘God made the Wild, as surely as he made Man,’ said the nun. ‘Although these were our enemies, we pray you take them to you.’
The nun raised her face to heaven, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross; the entire pile turned to sand.
Twenty women lost the ability to breathe for a moment.
The nun turned to Helewise. ‘The afternoon is yet young. Now, about the seed?’
Ser John had fished for too long.
He caught and killed more than ten pounds of trout – perhaps much more than ten pounds – and the fishing was superb, at least in part because most of the other fishermen were dead. He didn’t want to stop, but as the sun began to sink in the west he made himself pull his line off the water. He was a mile downstream from where he’d started – a mile from his horse, and, he suddenly realised, a mile from his spear.
Feeling more foolish than afraid, he plucked his harvest from the water and started back along the bank. The late summer sunlight was still strong and red, and the Wild had seldom looked less threatening but Ser John was too old in the ways of the Wild to be fooled by it, though. He moved quickly, making as little noise as he could.
He’d travelled a quarter of the distance back to his horse when something alerted him – a movement, perhaps, or a sound. He froze, and then, very slowly, lowered himself to the ground.
He lay still for a long time, watching, and the sun’s angle steepened. Then he rose and began to stride rapidly along the trail. Every stream like this one had a trail along its bank – men made them, and so did the Wild. They shared the trails.
When he was just a bowshot from his horse, he climbed a tree to have a look. There were no carrion birds but there was a persistent rustling away to the south, and twice he heard the distant crash of a large animal moving too quickly for stealth. And darkness was just an hour away.
He swung down from the tree, cursing his shoulder muscles, his age, and how much all this was going to hurt the following day – but he paused to pluck his bag of fish from the ground by the tree.
To his immense relief – he hadn’t even known how worried he had been – his horse was merely nervous, not boggle-food. He saddled the big riding horse – a failed warhorse – and fetched his heavy spear from the crotch of a forked tree where he’d left it at sunrise.
‘I’m an idiot,’ he said aloud. Calm again.
The Wild’s army was beaten, but the woods were still full of danger. He had been very foolish to leave his horse. He stood with it, calming it.
He got one foot in the stirrup, powered into the saddle, and turned for home.
Two hundred feet in front of him, a young doe bolted from the trees into the meadow. She was too young to be cautious, and she turned towards him, never seeing the man or the horse.
Behind her, a dozen boggles burst from the wood line. One stride into the clearing, the lead creature paused – a slim dark figure against the light, and it took Ser John a moment to register what he was seeing. The boggle had a throw-stick.
The spear left the throw-stick as fast as an arrow and the missile took the little doe in her hindquarters. She tumbled, fell, and blood sprayed. But terror and wild determination fuelled her, and she rose and drove forward – right at the knight.
Between his knees he could feel his horse’s nerves. Old Jack had failed as a warhorse because he shied at the tilt – and had done so over and over.
‘Always another chance to excel,’ muttered Ser John, and he lowered the spear point.
The doe saw the horse and tried to turn, but her limbs failed her and she fell sprawling, and the boggles were on her.