Liars and Thieves (A Company of Liars short story) Read Free Page B

hour,’ he added glumly, as if the rain had spoiled all their fun.
    I caught the grin on Pecker’s face and briefly wondered if this was just a tale to frighten us into submission. But it was plain from the casual swiftness of the murders that this was by no means the first time Jack and Pecker had killed. I glanced back at the naked buttocks of the monks, smeared with bloody streaks from Holy Jack’s fingers. Just how many bodies lay rotting in that quarry?
    The night was growing colder, and Adela’s gown was soaked from the rain. In spite of the fire, her teeth began to chatter. Dye shrugged off the ancient sheepskin cloak in which she’d wrapped herself. She wandered over and crouched behind Adela, wrapping the skin tightly about Adela’s shoulders and rubbing her arms briskly with it.
    ‘You don’t want to be catching a chill, not with the bairn.’ She laid her hand on Adela’s swollen belly. ‘Carried one myself once, but that were a long time ago. Boy, it was.’
    ‘Did he grow into a fine man?’ Adela asked.
    A spasm of pain creased Dye’s face. ‘Never drew breath, poor mite. My husband’s fist saw to that when it was still in my belly. At least the babe never learned what it means to be afeared.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Adela whispered.
    ‘Whatever for?’ Dye heaved herself to her feet. ‘Fine mam I’d have made. Probably woken up some morning to find I was trying to feed its arse ’stead of its face.’ She laughed and the outlaws chuckled with her.
    But I saw tears in Adela’s eyes as she watched Dye walk back to the fire.
    Now that everyone had either eaten their fill or given up trying, Dye added water to the cooking pot and covered it with a broken plank of wood weighted down with stones. The pottage would doubtless be our breakfast in the morning, assuming we survived the night.
    Wrinkling her nose she glanced over at the dead monks. ‘You going to get off your backsides and get those bodies shifted? Stench of blood ’ll draw every beast in the forest and I don’t want to be kept awake all night by foxes and badgers fighting over the corpses.’
    ‘Get more peace if we put you down the gullet,’ Pecker said sourly.
    Dye flashed him a disdainful look. ‘You fancy spending the night driving off packs of stray dogs, do you?’
    Pecker gave the resigned sigh of a man who knows he can’t win. ‘Come on, lads, may as well get them stripped. See what prizes they brought us. Then we’ll swim them, see if they float or sink. Guilty or innocent, what do you reckon?’
    Pecker and Weasel dragged the corpses apart and, while the two of them worked on stripping one, Holy Jack searched the other. It isn’t easy undressing a dead man, but the outlaws were not concerned with preserving the monk’s robes, quite the reverse. Using their knives, they cut away the salvageable cloth into lengths, tossing them to Dye who neatly folded them. The bloodstained cloth they threw onto the fire where it hissed and smouldered for a long time before burning to ashes.
    The men made a small pile of the treasures they found – leather drinking flasks, a couple of weighty money bags, rings wrenched from fat fingers, two wooden crosses and finally scrips containing sealed letters written on rolls of parchment together with some smoked fish and dried mutton which they were evidently carrying to stave off hunger on the journey. Dye immediately added the fish and meat to the pottage in the cooking pot, while the letters crackled on the fire. Their scarlet wax seals melted, running down like blood, until they turned black and vanished in a plume of smoke.
    Weasel, using his good hand, turned the scrips upside-down, shaking out the last of the contents, obviously hopeful that some object of value might still be concealed in them. But the only things to tumble out were a stray coin of little worth, a packet of fern seeds, doubtless to protect the monks from the attention of evil spirits, and a heavy object wrapped in