By Sylvian Hamilton Read Free Page B

with stones in the stream.

    'Some
of it. The rest is pig's blood. They killed a pig yesterday.'
Straccan was shivering hard. 'I had little bladders of blood to use
in case my nose stopped bleeding.'

    'How'd
you make it bleed?'

    'I
had to pick a quarrel with poor silly Brother Odo. He swung at me and
got my nose and I kicked him in the balls. I think he was still
crawling towards the infirmary when I left. I fell over something
soft.'

    'Here.
Put this on.' Bane produced a crumpled rolled-up shirt and a thick
knitted jerkin. Straccan pulled the clothes on, carefully tucking the
relic in a leather pouch between the woolly and the hide jacket he
put on over all.

    'We'll
go along in the stream as far as we can,' he said. 'Then out and back
south past the abbey. If they're looking for us, they won't be
looking that way, and if they use dogs, the stream'll throw them off.
They might not even realise I've switched the girdles; not for a
while anyway, if we're lucky. It would be a help if it snowed some
more. Cover our tracks.' His teeth were chattering.

    Bane
silently offered an unstoppered bottle.

    Straccan
drank, gasped, shuddered and drank again. 'Have you got any food?'

    Bane
produced bread and cold meat, shouldered his pack, and they set off,
splashing along in the stream while Straccan chewed and swallowed.
His throat felt sore. 'This will give me belly ache,' he said. Ice at
the stream's edge crackled and clattered. He clenched his chattering
teeth. 'How far to the horses?'

    'More
than a mile. Can you make it?'

    'I'd
better. I doubt you could carry me.' He sneezed violently several
times. 'Bugger! I've got their sodding cold!'

    It
began to snow.

    Chapter
3

    The
wicket shot aside with a sharp crack and through the aperture two
pairs of eyes fixed upon each other. The man outside the gate saw a
round pink velvety face with big brown eyes and a small pursed mouth
framed in a starched white wimple and black veil. Dame Laurencia saw
a lean face, still tinged a faded bronze from long-ago foreign suns,
with flint-coloured eyes round which fans of pale creases showed
sharp against the tan. The man had a wide thin mouth, square chin,
straight nose and cropped sunbleached hair beneath a russet cap which
he now tugged off. They stared at each other until Straccan held up a
lead disc, no bigger than a penny, on which was stamped Prioress
Hermengarde's seal. The nun smiled and nodded. 'Wait,' she said.

    The
wicket snapped shut and Straccan heard her footsteps receding. He
stuffed his bonnet down the front of his dusty jacket, rubbed a hand
over the stubble on top of his head then turned and stroked the nose
and neck of his horse. Presently he heard feet again. Bolts were
pulled back and the gate creaked open. 'Come in.' Two nuns now: the
rabbity gatekeeper and another, tall thin and pale like a scraped
bone. Also a servingman, a groom by the look and smell of him.

    The
pale nun said, 'Martin will take your horse. You have Mother's
token?' He held it up again. She looked at it suspiciously. 'Mother
Hermengarde died last autumn,' she said. 'Mother Rohese is prioress
now. She will see you.'

    Inside
the gate they scattered in different directions; the gatekeeper to
her tiny room over the gate, the horse led one way, the man another,
across the cobbled yard where three lay sisters laboured at washtubs,
bony red elbows going up and down as they laughed and chattered,
openly staring at the man, splashes flying and their sacking aprons
soaked.

    Through
a door, along a dark flagged passage. Straccan sniffed at the
unpleasantly familiar smells of damp, incense, candlewax and cooking
fish. The nunnery, he noticed, was much cleaner than any house of
monks –everything washed and scoured, including the ladies, to
within an inch of their lives. Monks cleaned what showed, dusted what
could be seen, leaving festering corners full of grease and dirt,
cobwebs behind curtains, dead rats under furniture, scummy residue
between flagstones. And