Peredur closed his fingers anxiously on her arm, and drew her against his side. “Hush, you must not say such things. These brothers would not lie to you.”
“At what hour,” asked Cadfael, “did your father set out this morning?”
She looked at him, and was a little reassured. The ring of silent onlookers drew nearer, listening attentively, ready to take her part if she needed an army.
“A good hour before noon. He was going first to the fields in the clearing, so he would be coming here by the shortest way, cutting through a quarter of a mile of forest to the usual path. He had plenty of time to be here before noon. As far as the clearing Engelard would be with him, he was going beyond, to the byres over the hill. There are two cows there ready to drop their calves.”
“We are telling you truly, child,” said Father Huw, his voice as grave and anxious as her own, “we waited for him, and he never came.”
“What can have happened to him? Where can he be?”
“He will have crossed with us and gone home,” urged Peredur, hovering unhappily at her shoulder. “We’ll ride back, we shall surely find him there before us.”
“No! Why should he turn back, and never come to the dinner? And if he did, why so late? He would have been home long before I dressed my hair and set out to meet him, if he had changed his mind. And besides, he never would.”
“I think,” said Father Huw, “that my whole parish has some interest in this matter, and we had better put off everything else, even the services of the church, until we have found Rhisiart and assured ourselves that all’s well with him. Truly this may be no more than a tangle of mistiming and misunderstanding, but let’s resolve it first, and wonder about it afterwards. There are enough of us here. Let’s send out in parties along all the roads he may have taken, and Sioned shall show us where she thinks his short cut from the upland fields would bring him to the path. He could not well meet with any dangerous beasts in these woods, but he may have had a fall, an injury that has halted or slowed him. Father Prior, will you join with us?”
“With all my heart,” said Prior Robert, “and so will we all.”
The less active among them were sent along the open ride, with orders to scatter on either side and comb the surroundings as they went, while the more athletic took the narrow footpath beyond Cadwallon’s stockade. The woods here were not yet close-set, mere was thick, springy grass under the trees, and no dense undergrowth. They spread out into a half-circle, moving along within a few paces of one another, Sioned pressing purposefully forward up the path with set lips and fixed eyes, Peredur with every evidence of desperate affection following close and murmuring agitated urgings into her unheeding ears. Whether he believed in his own reassurances or not, out of all question he was a young man fathoms deep in love, and ready to do anything to serve and protect Sioned, while she saw in him nothing but the boy from the next holding, and tiresome at that.
They were perhaps half a mile beyond Cadwallon’s enclosure when Father Huw suddenly plucked at Brother Cadfael’s sleeve.
“We have forgotten Brother Jerome and Brother Columbanus! The hill of the chapel is off to the right here, no great way. Ask Prior Robert, should we not send and call them to join us?”
“I had indeed forgotten,” admitted the prior. “Yes, by all means send someone. Best one of your parishioners, they’ll all know the way.”
One of the young men swerved aside obediently between the trees, and ran. The slow-moving scythe swept on into deeper forest.
“About here,” said Sioned, halting, “he would have come down from the clearing. If we go obliquely to the right here, and spread out as before, we shall be covering his likely way.”
The ground rose, the trees grew closer, the undergrowth thicker. They began to thread the encroaching bushes, having to part company by a few yards, losing sight momentarily of their neighbours. They had gone thus only a short way when Bened the smith, crashing through bushes at Brother Cadfael’s left hand, uttered a great shout of discovery and dismay, and everyone in the wavering line halted and shook to the sound.
Cadfael turned towards the cry, thrusting through thorn-branches, and came out in a narrow oval of grass surrounded every way with thick bushes, through which a used track no wider than a man’s shoulders clove, the long way of the oval. Just where he must have brushed through into the clear space, Rhisiart lay on his back, his right hip hollowing the grass under him, shoulders flattened to the ground and arms spread wide. His legs were drawn up under him with bent knees, the left leg crossed over the right. His short, defiant beard pointed at the sky. So, and at the very same slanting angle, did the feathered flight of the arrow that jutted out from under the cage of his ribs.
Chapter Five
From both sides they gathered, drawn to the smith’s call, breaking through bushes like the running of a startled herd of deer, and halting appalled round the oval where the body lay. Cadfael went on his knees, and looked for any sign of breath within the drawnback lips, any pulse in the stretched throat or rise and fall of the pierced breast, but there was none. And for that first moment he was the only one who moved within the open space of grass, and what he did was done in strange, too-intense silence, as though everyone round him held his breath.
Then everything broke out at once in noise and motion. Sioned clawed through the screening circle and saw her father’s body, and uttered a great shriek that was more of fury even than of grief, and flung herself forward. Peredur caught her by the wrist and pulled her round into his arms, one hand cupped behind her head to press her face into his shoulder, but she shrieked again, and struck out at him with all her strength, and breaking loose, hurled herself to her knees facing Cadfael, and reached out to embrace her father’s body. Cadfael leaned across to ward her off, his hand braced into the grass under Rhisiart’s right armpit.
“No! Touch nothing! Not yet! Let him alone, he has things to tell us!”
By some intuitive quickness of mind that had not deserted her even at this moment, she obeyed the tone first, and awakened to the words immediately after. Her eyes questioned him, widening, and slowly she sat back in the grass, and drew her hands together in her lap. Her lips shaped the words after him silently: ” — things to tell us!” She looked from his face into the face of the dead man. She knew he was dead. She also knew that the dead speak, often in thunder. And she came of proud Welsh stock to which the blood-feud is sacred, a duty transcending even grief.
When those following gathered closer, and one reached to touch, it was she who spread her arm protectively over the body, and said with authority: “No! Let him be!”
