Rising, he pulled his hat back over his brow and stared about him. He was tired, after standing awake much of the night at Wally’s side, and the bright morning sun made him wince, peering with his good eye like a sailor searching for a ship.
He walked back to the body, noting the smell of decay and the way the belly had expanded. If he knew anything, and he had seen plenty of dead men, this body would soon be ready to explode.
He left Wally’s remains and went to the bush with the bloodstain, picking up the timber and looking at the scratches once more. They were his mark; the timber was from his mine. Any miner would recognise it as his. Some bastard had stolen it from him, hammered the nails into it, and used it to kill Wally. Who could it be, though? Hamelin? Christ’s Cods! The man was a friend. But someone else could have wanted to frame Hal or Hamelin. Who? Tapping the timber against the palm of his hand, he let his eyes move to the mire ahead, to the smoke beyond that showed where another group of miners worked.
They were probably getting their cooking fires ready to heat a flat pancake of oats with maybe a little meat from a bird or a rabbit, whatever they could catch out here. And one of them, perhaps, had stolen a piece of his wood, knowing that he marked every balk against theft, and used it to murder Wally so that he, Hal, would be implicated. That thought was not a comfortable one.
Hal was one of the more successful miners. He had found tin in places where others saw nothing, and some said he possessed a magic, that a witch or demon had granted him the ability to find ore where others couldn’t, but he asserted it was simply his organised way of looking. Others were slapdash, digging one hole, deciding there was nothing there, and moving on to a fresh site. Hal wouldn’t do that. He dug one pit, then a line of others, running across the base of a hill where he thought a seam might lie. Sometimes he was right; often he was wrong – but the men who created malicious rumours about him ignored his failures.
Some men had grown to hate him, he knew. They were either scared of him, thinking that he was touched by the devil, or they were jealous, envying his success. He didn’t care which type of man had used his wood to kill Wally. Whoever it was, Hal had other things to concern him, like what to do now?
His eyes dropped from the smoke and a small smile touched his lips. He walked down the hillside to the green, shimmering land beneath. There was a pile of stones, as there were in so many parts of Dartmoor; this one was named Childe’s Tomb. He walked past it and on, careful now, stepping cautiously over the soft grasses and rushes. When he found a boot sinking deep into a patch of mud, he stopped. He prodded the grass in front of him with the timber, and saw the gentle rippling that spread across it.
It was a mire. One of those evil spots where the water built up beneath a thin layer of soil and plants. A man or beast who put his foot on to that would sink through the grasses and drown in the thick, peaty waters beneath. There was no possibility of rescue, so far away from civilisation.
Hal studied his timber once more, and then pushed the end of it into the ground before him. It sank quickly, and when it had disappeared, the grasses and reeds floated back over the hole as though nothing had ever disturbed the smooth grassy surface.
Chapter Nine
There was no obvious justification in posting a sentry to watch Hal, but Rudolf was a practical man, and when he saw strangers about, he wanted to know that they weren’t the precursors of an attack.
Rudolf was in his little tent when Welf, his son, returned. He was a sturdy young fellow, with broad shoulders and thick dark hair. He was trying to grow a beard, and the other men ribbed him about the fine fluff that was all he could manage, but never Rudolf. He believed that a man was no less a man just for the lack of hair on his face. A man was measured by other things, like physical strength and courage.
‘So? Was macht er? What is he doing?’
Welf sat by the brazier that glowed with coals and held his hand to the warmth before answering in German. ‘He stayed there all day with the body. Last night he settled down and remained near it. I went closer and watched until almost dawn. He was asleep by then, and that was when I returned to the cross and waited to see what happened when he awoke. He washed, then went down to the bog and threw in the morning star.’
‘And now someone else is up there on the hill?’
‘Yes. Brother Peter the almoner from the abbey.’
‘Good. You have done well. Eat and sleep.’ Rudolf sat a while longer, frowning at the fire.
They had travelled all the way here from an urge to see what the world was like. Rudolf was a pewterer by trade, and in his home lands in the mountains his work was prized, even among the nobles. Glancing about him, he couldn’t help but curl his lip. This land was ever wet and depressing. There were bogs all over the moors, and the mountains were mere bumps in the soil, not at all like the crags among which his home nestled. There, men had to avoid the high passes, because they were populated by dragons and other monsters. No, people lived in the broad
