Alys Clare - The Way Between the Worlds

I did as Gurdyman bade me and set off for his house. As I strode along, it suddenly occurred to me that the way our man in the fen had died was uncannily similar to the way in which poor little Herleva had met her death: both had been poisoned, both had suffered a blow to the head, both had a cut to the throat. I was well on the way to deciding that our dead man and the chatty little nun had both been sacrificial victims when I made myself stop and think about it properly, and very quickly I realized I was wrong.

The dead man had been put in the water. He had been offered to the crossing place, that strange zone that is neither land nor water but some potent amalgam of the two. Such places hold their own magic. Like dawn and twilight, like a ford over a stream, they are where two different elements meet and part. Day and night; earth and water.

I knew that Herleva’s body had been found in no such place. I thought hard and brought to mind my sister’s words: she was found behind the stables . There was nothing remotely magical about the stable block of a place like Chatteris Abbey; quite the opposite, I imagined, for surely a stable was a place of animal sounds and smells, redolent with the stench of dung, horse sweat and hard human toil. No man intent on making an offering to the powers of the dark fen would leave his victim behind an abbey’s stable block.

It must, I concluded as I hurried through the shadowy alleyways to Gurdyman’s house, be after all no more than a gruesome coincidence that Herleva and the man in the fen had died in the same manner. There were only so many ways of killing a person. Slitting the throat and strangulation could hardly be uncommon, and I was left with the miserable, discouraging and decidedly worrying thought that not one but two killers were on the loose.

I had not been home for long when Gurdyman arrived. I thought this probably indicated that the sheriff had accepted the shortened version of Gurdyman’s findings concerning the dead man, and so it proved to be.

‘What will happen now?’ I asked. ‘Will they bury him?’

Gurdyman shook his head. ‘No, not immediately. Enquiries will be pursued around the place where the boatmen think the body became caught up with their craft, to determine if anyone answering the dead man’s description has been reported missing. Nobody likes burying a man with no name,’ he added softly, ‘and even our sheriff seems to be no exception.’

I gathered from Gurdyman’s expression that this unexpectedly decent aspect of the sheriff’s character came as quite a surprise. ‘They’ll keep the body somewhere cool in the meantime?’ I said. The weather was mild for spring, and bodies quickly begin to decompose in all but the coldest seasons. The thought of that stomach I’d held in my hands, and its steadily rotting contents, brought on a wave of nausea, but I managed to control it.

Which was just as well, because with his next breath Gurdyman remarked in amazement that it was long past noon and high time I fetched us something to eat. We do not keep much in the way of supplies in the house — Gurdyman claims he has no idea how to cook, and, beyond a basic ability, it is not in truth among my skills either — but we have the good fortune to live close to a busy market square where people bustle about every day, not just on market days, many of them from out of town. Where there are hungry people, you always find food stalls eager to relieve them of their money, and not a hundred paces from Gurdyman’s front door there is a stall whose proprietor sells the tastiest pies in Cambridge.

When I got back, the delicious smell of hot gravy making my mouth water and my stomach rumble so loudly that it embarrassed me, I found that Gurdyman had opened a stone jar of cool white wine and poured out generous mugfuls for both of us. We settled in the warm, still air of Gurdyman’s little interior courtyard and began our meal.

When I had taken the edge off my hunger, I put down my knife and said, ‘Gurdyman, how do you come to know so much?’

I realized straight away I had phrased my question wrongly, for if my teacher were to begin telling me how he came by all his extraordinary knowledge, we would be there all night and all the next day too. ‘I mean, today I watched you remove a man’s stomach, open it up, inspect it, then neatly put it back inside him in exactly the right place.’ I shook my head in wonder. ‘You must have more skill in your hands, more wisdom in your head, than all the doctors in Cambridge, if not in the whole of England!’ Any of whom, I reflected, would probably have stood over the body, mumbling about death having been caused by an imbalance of the humours, or Mars being in an adverse conjunction with the Moon. .

Gurdyman finished chewing a mouthful of pie and took a considering sip of wine, nodding his approval. Then he wiped his lips with a clean napkin and smiled. ‘Thank you for the compliment, Lassair.’ He paused, his eyes gazing out, unfocused, over the little courtyard. I sensed his thoughts were far away, and I hoped this meant I was about to get a full and satisfying answer to my question.

So it proved to be.

‘I was born a long time before the Conquest,’ Gurdyman began, ‘in a little village on the coast road between London and Hastings. My mother was quite advanced in years, as indeed was my father, and my birth was treated as a miracle. As I grew and thrived, my mother wished to give thanks, and so the three of us set off on pilgrimage to Santiago.’ His eyes flashed to me. ‘Do you know where that is, child?’

‘No.’

‘It is on the north coast of the land called Spain, right out in the west where the land gives way to the great sea. We reached the place safely, my elderly parents and I, but my mother was exhausted by the long journey and we stopped on our way home for her to regain her strength. We put up at a simple hostel — there are many such places along the pilgrim routes — and, since we were poor, my father found work to pay for our keep.’

‘What did he do?’ I had never heard Gurdyman speak of his past before; I was fascinated and quite happy to wait for a while before getting the answer to my original question.

‘My father brewed ale,’ he said with some pride. ‘There is always work for a man who knows his beer. Soon he had more orders than he could manage alone, and he took on an apprentice.’

‘Was that you?’

Gurdyman laughed. ‘No, oh, no. I was far too busy soaking up knowledge from a local man who had spotted my hunger for it. His name was Raymond — ’ I noticed that a look of great love and respect softened Gurdyman’s features as he spoke of this man — ‘and he it was who awakened my mind. But I digress. My parents found that they were happy living in Galicia — that is the name of the land — and my mother no longer suffered from the wracking coughs that had affected her every winter back in England, so they decided to stay. As for me — oh, Lassair, what an exciting place that was to grow up! The Moors held the land to the south, but Galicia was a Christian land, and the atmosphere around me was rich with the best of both cultures. My village teacher had travelled much in the Muslim lands, and, once he had taught me as much as he could, he suggested that I, too, go south, to continue my education. Accordingly, one bright spring morning when I was almost fifteen, I said a loving farewell to my mother and father, promised faithfully to send regular letters for Raymond to read aloud to them and set off for Al-Andalus.’

His eyes had gone unfocused again, and I sensed that his mind was far away in both place and time. Out of respect for his memories — what an amazingly long and interesting life he’d had! — I let him be for a moment. Then I said, very gently, ‘And that is where you learned so much about the body? From the Arabs of the south?’