understand why this could be done, why men could kill and destroy for no reason. Until he could understand that, he could have no peace, because if there was no reason, then why would God allow it? Surely God in his wisdom would have prevented such barbarity?
Almost without thinking, he spurred his horse to bring him level with Black.
“Black, can you understand why?”
The hunter glanced up, his expression one of absorbed concentration, but even as the recognition glimmered in his eyes, he turned to look back at his trail again. “I don’t know. I’ve only seen it once before, that was back long ago when I was up north.”
“Well, did you ever find out why they did it?”
“No. I wasn’t wanted in the posse because I wasn’t a local. Oh, I followed, I wanted to see what the killers looked like, but we never found them. No, I never did find out why.”
Simon frowned at the ground. “What could have made them behave like that? All they needed to do was tie up the men and take what they wanted, they were only merchants. They couldn’t have put up much of a struggle even if they wanted to.”
The hunter shrugged. “I don’t know. They were either mad or just didn’t want to leave anyone to recognise them later. How can I tell? All I know is I want to get them and stop them before their next attack.”
“You think they’ll attack again?”
“Aye. They will. While they know they can get away with it they’ll carry on.”
Simon looked away and up to the horizon in front. “Where do you think they’ll be heading?”
“I don’t know. It depends whether they know we’re following them or not. If they don’t, they might swing back towards Crediton or Oakhampton, or keep heading south, to Moretonhampstead, maybe. If they know we’re behind, they might keep going south, but they could try to avoid us or even ambush us if they feel strong enough.” He paused. “Damn them, the bastards!”
The poison in his voice vaguely shocked Simon, as if even the sights they had left behind them should not have so affected the hunter’s usual equanimity. He had not realised how much the camp had horrified the imperturbable man, but now as he looked he could see Black’s jaw clenching with a steady rhythm, as if he was chewing at a piece of gristle, and his eyes, normally so calm, were wide and staring with his desire for revenge.
Simon slowed and left the hunter on his own in the lead, dropping back to join the main group of the posse, feeling even more disquieted.
They had been following the trail for over an hour when they came to a road. Black, still quiet in his deep fury, held up one hand to stop the others, then jumped down from his horse and almost ran to the verge, his head swaying from side to side like a dog sniffing for a scent, before he cried out in a pagan yell of cruel delight. Simon spurred his horse and quickly went after him.
“What?”
“They weren’t so clever this time! Look!” He pointed down at the grass by the side of the road. There was little here between the road and the moors beyond, apart from the occasional clumps of heather and gorse, adding purple and bright yellow splashes of colour. The edge of the road gave onto scrubby grey-green grass and on the verge, Simon could clearly see the marks of hooves, a great number, that had destroyed the grass and turned the verge into thick, black mud. Black looked up at him with a face filled with pitiless pleasure. “I can follow them to Hell now if I need to. There’s nowhere else for them to lose their tracks, not here on the moors,” he said.
There was a call from behind them, making them both jerk round together. Hugh was pointing up the road to the west, and as they followed his hand they saw a group of six men riding towards them at a steady lope.
Black scrambled over the road and onto his horse, grabbing his sword and unsheathing it, before spurring to ride to the strangers.
“Black, stop!” shouted Simon, staring at them with a small frown. If this was the band, he thought, they would hardly ride so obviously along the king’s road. Surely they would have hidden here and ambushed us while we followed them, not come down the road as if they were out for a morning’s gallop?
The posse came out of the woods and grouped on the road to wait for the men to get closer, the horses seeming to feel their riders’ tenseness, stamping and blowing as they stood.
At last, when the group came closer, Simon felt his heart lift and he spurred his horse with a shout of joy. It was Tanner and his men.
Later, as the darkness crept slowly over them and even Black admitted that they could not continue, they all stopped in the shelter of a great pile of granite and made camp.
They had followed the tracks on an almost direct line south, bypassing several small hamlets as they went, and crossing a number of small streams that, each time they saw them, made them fear that the trail bastons would try to throw them off their track, but each time they found that the trail continued, as if the men they followed were convinced of their invulnerability and safety from attack. It was almost as if they were tempting the posse to chase them, and every now and then Simon felt concerned that this was exactly what they did want. Were they just leading the posse on into the moors so that they could turn and fight on their own terms? Were they leading them to an ambush? Somehow it did not seem likely, it seemed more probable that they were so sure of themselves that they had no fear of any group that might chase them.
At last, when the horses had been seen to and the other members of the posse were sitting resting sore legs and bodies in front of their fires and chatting desultorily, their voices making a soothing accompaniment to the spitting and crackling of the burning logs, Black and Tanner joined Hugh and Simon as they crouched in front of their own fire.
Simon lay on one elbow, the better to rest his thighs and backside as the others came up and sat opposite. “So, then, constable. What have you been doing since we split up?”
Tanner’s square face was serious and pensive as he recalled his journeys of the previous days. “We started off on the road to Barnstaple, and we stopped anyone we met to ask them about the killer of the abbot, but we had no luck. The trouble is, there’re so many roads leading off that one. Whenever we came up to one, we stopped and checked down it a little, but after a half mile, if we couldn’t see any sign, we went back and continued on our way. We checked the sides of the roads, but I’m fairly certain no one went off the roads that way. If we were behind them, they must have kept to the roads themselves.
“At the end of the first day we’d got as far as Lapford. We camped outside the village and carried on next day. We checked all the way up as far as Elstone, but we’d seen nothing by the time we got there, so we started back. Some of the men were tired out after all the riding, so I sent them back the way we’d gone, but I thought the trail bastons might’ve gone across country and we’d missed their tracks, so I took the others with me by some of the smaller lanes, heading south. I was going to go to the Oakhampton road and then back up to Crediton. Well, at the end of the second day we heard about the trail bastons over to the west of Oakhampton, so I thought: might be the same ones that killed the abbot. It seemed from their tracks that they were heading east, towards Crediton, so I sent one of the men back to tell you and came south quickly.
“We’ve been there since, searching, but some people we saw said they were heading east. Last night we heard there’d been an attack this way, so we came over to see whether we could help.”
Simon stirred. “It was lucky you told your man to look for me. I wasn’t at home, and he got one of the monks to come and find me.”
“Really?” said Tanner, looking surprised. “I didn’t tell him it was that urgent, it was just to let you know where we were.”
Obviously impatient with the long story, John Black interrupted and quickly ran through the journey up from Crediton and the scene they had seen that morning. “It was awful, Stephen. There was bodies all over the place, and they’d even burned two of them in their wagons.”
“Why, though?” said Simon pensively, making the other; look at him in surprise. “Why burn the bodies?”
Tanner shrugged. “Often happens, bailiff. They burn to torture, to find out whether there’s more money or not, they burn to get rid of evidence. And they burn for fun – they sometimes enjoy it.”
“It seems to fit in with the killing of the abbot, anyway,” said Black. “And Brewer.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Simon, morosely hugging his knees as he sat and stared at the flames. The others looked over at him, surprised at his curt denial of their assumption.
Black recovered first. “What do you mean? Of course it does, senseless killing and robbery, and done by men that enjoy burning their hostages. It’s exactly the same.”
