The vision-sight seemed to linger on Morgan. Something strange was happening, and it felt as if my mind was unable to interpret what I saw. Morgan was dressed in his usual dark robe, high-fitting at the neck until the killer had torn it away to get at his throat. He was Morgan, his sad old face showing still the shocked expression of brutal death. But then he wasn’t quite Morgan: he was subtly altered. The slash in his robe was now extending, right down to the waist and beyond, and I saw…
‘No!’ I shut my eyes tightly. I didn’t want to see what the shining stone seemed to want to show me. Morgan’s body had been decently clad when I saw him in death, and I didn’t want to see what lay beneath his garments. Death robs men and women of so much, and I surely owed it to Morgan not to look.
The shining stone went cold.
Just like that, in an instant.
It was icy in my hands, and, wincing, hastily I wrapped it in its sheep’s wool and replaced it in the leather pouch, putting it in my satchel and fastening the strap.
Shaken, I stood up and hurried back to the village and the safety – or so I fervently hoped – of Edild’s house.
I said nothing to my aunt about what had happened. As we sat beside the hearth with our bowls of savoury gruel that evening, however, I think she was aware something was amiss. Well, I’d have been surprised if she hadn’t been, for she is an astute and sensitive woman and knows me well.
I cleared away and washed our supper crocks and was just stacking our bowls in their accustomed place ready for the morning when we heard running footsteps on the path outside. A moment later, there came a frantic banging on the door and my elder brother Haward’s voice cried out, ‘Edild! Lassair! You must come at once, Squeak and Leir have been attacked!’
My aunt and I grabbed our satchels and she flung open the door. Haward looked awfuclass="underline" wide-eyed with shock, hair on end, face flushed and sweaty from exertion. ‘Come on!’ he yelled.
We gathered up our skirts and flew down the path behind him.
As we ran, I tried to go over in my mind what sort of injury my brothers might have sustained. Squeak, fourteen years old, worked with my father with the eels; out in all weathers, often up to his neck in water, vulnerable to all the unseen obstacles that lay half-buried in the dark mud. And eels have teeth… But no, I told myself, the eels were largely dormant now, retreating down into the black fen depths to see out the winter before spring, and the longer, lighter days, called them up again.
And what hurt could have come to Leir? He was still a little boy, for all he yearned to work beside Squeak and my father at a man’s job. But Leir was Squeak’s shadow: everybody knew that, and the village smiled indulgently at the sight of the small figure trotting along behind the boy on the cusp of manhood, trying in vain to make his short legs match his elder brother’s long strides.
My mind and my heart full of my brothers, I realized how much I loved them. Fear for them put new life in me and, outpacing even Haward, I was the first to reach my parents’ house.
The door opened as I approached, and my father looked out. ‘Do not worry,’ he said calmly, ‘neither of them is going to die.’
I threw my arms round him in a brief, tight hug. Then he released me and gently pushed me inside. Haward and Edild came in behind me, and Edild and I knelt down beside the grouped figures by the hearth.
My mother held Leir in her arms, cradling him to her broad comfortable bosom as if he was a baby again. He, too, had set aside all aspirations to be older than his years. His thumb had crept into his mouth, and he was twiddling a stray strand of my mother’s long fair hair between the fingers of his free hand. His eyes, wide and intensely blue, were red-rimmed from weeping and his nose was running.
Squeak lay flat on his back. The lacings of his tunic were open, revealing a long cut all the way from the top of his shoulder to his breast, where it stopped just above his heart. It was pouring blood. Edild gave a short exclamation, reaching in her satchel for a pad of clean linen, which she folded and pressed hard against the wound. It would need stitching, I thought. That was going to hurt.
Save for Edild’s quiet words of command to me, and my occasional replies, there was silence in the room. My aunt and I had performed these tasks so often together: the wash with hot water and lavender, the careful checking of the cut for dirt, grit, and other minute objects whose presence would interfere with healing and perhaps set off infection, and then the closing of the wound. Edild’s needle was very sharp and her hands were deft and swift, but nevertheless Squeak had to bite his lips raw to stop himself crying out, and the poor boy was only partially successful.
Eventually, though, it was done. Edild washed the blood off her hands and packed away her equipment, while I put a fresh pad on my brother’s chest and bandaged it carefully in place. ‘Will it leave a scar?’ Squeak asked hopefully, with a flash of his old spirit.
‘Oh, dear Lord, yes!’ I assured him. ‘You’re marked for life, little brother. The girls will flock from miles around to see.’
He smiled in satisfaction.
But not for long, for, now that his injury had been treated and the immediate emergency was past, it was time for the questions. My father fixed Squeak with a steady look and said, ‘Now, son, what happened?’
I could see what an ordeal it was going to be for Squeak to relate his story. He looked, if anything, even more fearful than when Edild had hovered over him with needle and stitching gut. But he pulled himself together, brave boy that he was.
‘You’d left me to watch that little tributary at the far end of the main stream,’ he reminded our father, ‘in case there were any signs that the eels that live there were still active. I didn’t spot anything, and after a bit Leir came to find me and said it was time to go home, so we set off. It was getting dark, and we had quite a long way to go, so we were jogging along and chatting and laughing and then suddenly-’ Abruptly he stopped, and his already ashen face grew paler.
‘What happened?’ my father prompted gently. For all that he spoke quietly, I could see the furious tension building up in his big, strong body. Somebody had attacked his child. In my father’s philosophy, that could have only one response.
Squeak swallowed. I saw the developing Adam’s apple bob in his thin throat. ‘Someone came out of the shadowy gulley beside the stream,’ he whispered. ‘He – it jumped out at us.’ He shuddered. ‘It was huge.’
‘Go on,’ my father said tonelessly.
‘It was dressed in a dark cloak, or something, with a deep hood that was drawn right forward, and all I could make out was dark, deep, staring eyes.’ He shuddered again. ‘It had something in its hand, something that glinted sort of silvery. It was sharp-pronged, like a gleeve.’
I pictured the eel-catcher’s tooclass="underline" the trident-shaped gleeve with its deadly, sharpened points.
There was a pop as Leir took his thumb out of his mouth. ‘It wasn’t a gleeve,’ he piped up.
‘I didn’t say it was a gleeve, I just said it had pointy ends like a gleeve,’ Squeak snapped, with the abrupt, furious anger of someone who had just been very badly scared and was trying to hide it. Leir’s bottom lip wobbled and tears came into his eyes. My mother, anxiety all over her face, silently wrapped her arms more tightly around him. He put his thumb back in his mouth and leaned against her.
Squeak muttered, ‘It was a weapon of some sort, anyway.’
Leir, apparently restored a little by his mother’s big, warm presence, removed his thumb again and, aware of our eyes on him and looking slightly ashamed, hid it behind him. ‘It wasn’t a weapon at all,’ he said in a quiet, firm tone that carried far more weight than a screech or a yell. ‘I know because I had a good look while it was – while it was doing what it did to Squeak.’ He hesitated, then, finding his courage, said, ‘It was actually part of its arm. Like a claw.’