punishment for running away.”
The boy looked first dismayed, and then mutinous, and began to argue.
“Hop!” ordered Cadfael briskly, cutting off his objections. “You may ride him. Here, up with your foot… so!” He cupped a hand, and hoisted the boy into the saddle before he had time to decide whether to be aggrieved or flattered. But the feel of the fine beast under him did the trick. His face became one complacent beam, he gathered the reins importantly, ignored the stirrups that were far too long for him, dug his heels into the satin sides, and chirruped at his mount as casually as if he rode such beasts every day.
When they had watched him far enough along the ride to be sure that he was competent, and would do as he had been bidden, they turned and went on. The glade ended, trees closed in again on the track. Here and there, in places where the grass was thin and the ground soft, they saw the mark of a hoof. They had gone perhaps another quarter of a mile before Brother Edmund, who was leading, suddenly halted.
“He is here.”
The thick, powerful body lay sprawled on its back, head against the roots of a great oak, arms spread. The trees grew close here, and the deep shadows swallowed the rich colors of his clothing, so that the upturned face stared out of a green darkness, suffused with blood, open eyes bulging and reddened. The brutal, muscular quality of the face seemed to have melted and run like wax from a candle. As well the child had been sent back before he could run ahead of them and stumble over this in valiant innocence, and sicken in too early knowledge of good and evil.
Cadfael put Edmund aside and went forward, dropping to his knees beside the motionless body, and in a moment Edmund followed him, and crouched on the other side. He was accustomed to easing old men into their deaths, but deaths as gentle as affectionate care and the company of friends could make it, and this abrupt severing of a vigorous life appalled and daunted him. The two novices and the lay brother who had followed them drew near and stood silent.
“Is he dead?” asked Brother Edmund fearfully, and understood at once that it was a foolish question.
“Dead some hours. Around dawn, it might be. He’s cooling but not cold.” Cadfael lifted the heavy head on his hand, and felt the sticky foulness of congealed blood on his fingers. High at the back of the head, behind and above the left ear, the bald crown bore a ripped bruise, which had oozed blood from a dozen scratches, now drying. Where his head had lain, and for a hand’s-length above, the bole of the oak bore smeared traces of the impact. Cadfael felt delicately over and round the bruise, and the skull seemed to him intact, there was no depression under his touch.
“He was thrown from his horse, and heavily,” ventured Edmund, watching, “and fell on to this oak-bole. Could such a fall kill him?”
“It could,” said Cadfael distractedly, but did not see fit as yet to make plain that it had not.
“Or if he lay out, not regaining his senses?the chill of the night…”
“He has not been here all night long,” said Cadfael. “The dew of the mist is under him. And if he was thrown, you see he was thrown backwards, not forwards, out of the saddle. The horse did not stumble.” For the body lay diagonally half across the path, head against the tree on the right, his feet towards them as they approached from the brook. “It was in the early morning, and he was hurled backwards. He was certainly riding back then to his own household. The path is good, at least for a man who knows, but I should guess there was also some light already, for I think he was riding briskly, to come down so heavily.”
“His horse reared,” suggested Edmund. “Some small night creature started under his feet, and shocked him …”
“That could be.” Cadfael laid Domville’s head carefully back, and the broken crown rested at the foot of the grazed and bloodied streak on the bole. “He has not moved since the fall,” he said with certainty. “Only the heels of his boots, see, have scored deep through the grass, as though in some convulsion.”
He rose to his feet, leaving the body just as it lay, and began to move about the ride, eyeing it from many angles. One of the novices, sensibly enough, had turned back to meet the sheriff’s men, who would certainly be despatched from the bishop’s house as soon as the boy brought his news. They would need a litter, or a door lifted from its hinges, to carry the dead man back. Cadfael also retraced his steps some dozen yards along the path, and began to work his way back to where the body lay, viewing all the trees on both sides with great care, at a level above his own modest height, as Edmund noted without understanding.
“What is it you’re looking for, Cadfael?”
Whatever it was, he had found it. Some four paces from the dead man’s feet he had halted, fixing his eyes first on the trunk on his right, well above his own head, and then transferring the same intent stare to the tree opposite.
“Come and see. Come, all, and bear me witness when I tell it.”
On either trunk at the same level there was a thin, scored line, scarring the fine ridges of the bark.
“A rope has been stretched between these trees, throat-height to a man of middle stature and well-mounted, though even at breast-height it would have fetched him down. It was light enough for a canter on so good a pathway, I fancy, for surely he was going briskly. You see how far it toppled him. We shall find the mark of it on his throat.”
They stared, appalled, and had no word to say, as they followed him in awed silence back to where the body lay, and he turned back the collar of the coat, and bared Domville’s neck. For the dark-red slash of the cord was not all they found under the beard, on the thick, sinewy flesh. There, plain to be seen, were the wreathing, blackened bruises of two human hands, and the two thumbs, overlapping, had left a great, mangled stain on the Adam’s apple, and possibly crushed the gristle within.
They were still gaping in horrified silence when they heard urgent voices approaching along the ride, the sheriff’s loudest among them. The intimation of disaster had gone before, but as yet its magnitude was a secret among these few.
Cadfael drew the collar close over the evidence of strangulation, and turned with his companions to meet Gilbert Prestcote and his officers.
When the sheriff had viewed everything Cadfael had to show him, they brought a litter, and lifted Huon de Domville on to it, drawing the folds of his cloak over his face. At the spot from which they raised him they fixed a cross bound from two sticks, to enable them to find and search the place again at need. Then they carried him back, not to the bishop’s house but to the abbey, to be laid in the mortuary chapel there and made decent for burial
