‘We do not know who he is,’ I pointed out.
‘No,’ Gurdyman agreed. ‘Although we may be able to supply an identity and a name, in due course. .’ The absent look returned to his face, but quickly he came out of his reverie. His bright blue eyes firmly on mine, he said, ‘This man was killed by a sorcerer. A man or a woman of considerable skill and power sacrificed him and gave his body to the fen.’
Too shocked to speak for a moment, I tried to absorb what he had just said. I swallowed and whispered, ‘How do you know? And a sacrifice? People don’t do that any more!’ Still he watched me, his expression unreadable. ‘Do they?’
‘In answer to your first question, I surmise that he was a sacrificial victim because of the manner of his death: poison, the cut in the blood vessel that feeds the head and the garrotte round his throat that broke his neck.’ I must have looked puzzled; I certainly felt it. ‘Count,’ he commanded.
One, the poison. Two, the cut. Three, the garrotte. From somewhere in my memory, I recalled my Granny Cordeilla speaking of something called the Threefold Death, used for ritual sacrifice when the victim went as a willing — or not so willing — offering to the gods, either to appease, to beg a request or in humble thanks for a prayer answered. But Granny had been speaking of a custom from generations past, long ago in the history of our people. .
Something occurred to me. ‘Is this — do you believe this man was killed hundreds of years ago?’ I asked. ‘The peat preserves, and-’
‘No, child. It would be comforting to conclude that, wouldn’t it? It would be easier to believe that this body has lain undisturbed since ancient times.’ Gurdyman shook his head. ‘But it is not so. He was, I believe, put into the fen within the last year, and probably more recently than that. See, these woven stems are still quite fresh, and certainly not more than a twelvemonth old.’ He reached out and picked up a length of the fibrous rope that had been twisted around the man’s wrists and ankles.
‘Honeysuckle fibres,’ I murmured.
He nodded absently. Then, looking closely at the rope around the man’s right ankle, he carefully extracted a short length of wood that was trapped in the loop at the far end. ‘And a hazel stake,’ he said.
Honeysuckle and hazel. Two of the sacred plants; hazel is full of magic and is the diviner’s and the dowser’s wood of choice. It has a close affinity with water. Honeysuckle — which we also call woodbine — is a friend both to the healer and, so Granny used to say, to the magician. Edild and I use it a lot, to ease constriction in breathing, for problems with urination and for labouring women. It was honoured of old in binding charms, and Granny told me that children used to wear bracelets made of woven honeysuckle to bind them to their homes and keep them from straying into danger.
I tried to put the qualities of both woods together. Something to bind, something to carry a message down into the water. If Gurdyman was right, this man had been staked out in the fen and given to the water. To appease, to ask for something, to give thanks for something given.
I stared down at the dead man. His face was peaceful; I found myself hoping that he had not suffered. He had been. . used, was the only word I could think of. Someone — a sorcerer, Gurdyman believed — had needed to make a sacrifice, and this man had been his chosen victim. Why? What had been special about him?
I looked up from the dead man and found Gurdyman still watching me. He made a small sound of assent, murmuring, ‘I see that you agree with my conclusion.’
Did I? I wasn’t sure. I realized I was very cold, and I had a vivid sense that forces far too strong for me were whirling and circling in the small room. Before they grew too powerful and overcame me, I had to act.
‘The first thing we must do is try to find out who he was,’ I said. To my amazement, two things happened simultaneously: the spell, if that was what it was, broke. And Gurdyman burst out laughing.
‘Well done, Lassair,’ he said when he had stopped. ‘You were quite right; the magic was growing too strong, and you and I needed to be brought back.’ Had I done that? I was both surprised and secretly pleased. ‘Now, we must find the sheriff, and then I think we shall return home and decide what to do next.’
NINE
Gurdyman summoned one of the sheriff’s men and told him we were done, and the guard instantly hurried away to fetch his master. ‘You need not stay, child,’ Gurdyman said softly to me. ‘Go on home and wait for me there. One of us will suffice to pass on our findings.’
‘You’re not going to tell him about the mistletoe and the Threefold Death, are you?’ Something in me was rebelling furiously at the very thought.
Gurdyman chuckled. ‘Of course not. I shall say as little as I can get away with. Our sheriff,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘is not a man blessed with a lively imagination, so I think that a simple account of some unknown, unidentifiable victim who died by drowning, and just happened to get caught up in a rope trailing from a passing boat, will be sufficient.’
I hoped he was right. ‘Won’t he notice that the body’s been cut open and sewed up again?’ I whispered nervously. I was, I discovered, morbidly curious about that aspect of Gurdyman’s inspection. How had he known what to do? Was he even allowed to do such a thing to a corpse? I wanted to find out, but now was not the moment.
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Gurdyman replied. ‘If he does, I’ll say we found several wounds on the dead man — that we conclude were caused by being dragged through the water — and dealt with the worst of them.’
‘But-’
He put a hand on my shoulder, his touch firm. ‘Enough,’ he said. As if he knew full well what I was burning to ask, he added softly, ‘We will speak later.’ He smiled at me, and I saw the bright intelligence sparkling in his eyes. I wondered what on earth I had been worrying about, for I realized then that the sheriff was no match for Gurdyman. Whatever awkward questions might be posed, my teacher would answer them as easily as if he himself had put them in the sheriff’s mind.
I did as Gurdyman bade me and set off for his house. As I strode along, it suddenly occurred to me that the way our man in the fen had died was uncannily similar to the way in which poor little Herleva had met her death: both had been poisoned, both had suffered a blow to the head, both had a cut to the throat. I was well on the way to deciding that our dead man and the chatty little nun had both been sacrificial victims when I made myself stop and think about it properly, and very quickly I realized I was wrong.
The dead man had been put in the water. He had been offered to the crossing place, that strange zone that is neither land nor water but some potent amalgam of the two. Such places hold their own magic. Like dawn and twilight, like a ford over a stream, they are where two different elements meet and part. Day and night; earth and water.
I knew that Herleva’s body had been found in no such place. I thought hard and brought to mind my sister’s words: she was found behind the stables. There was nothing remotely magical about the stable block of a place like Chatteris Abbey; quite the opposite, I imagined, for surely a stable was a place of animal sounds and smells, redolent with the stench of dung, horse sweat and hard human toil. No man intent on making an offering to the powers of the dark fen would leave his victim behind an abbey’s stable block.
It must, I concluded as I hurried through the shadowy alleyways to Gurdyman’s house, be after all no more than a gruesome coincidence that Herleva and the man in the fen had died in the same manner. There were only so many ways of killing a person. Slitting the throat and strangulation could hardly be uncommon, and I was left with the miserable, discouraging and decidedly worrying thought that not one but two killers were on the loose.