Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"That way and this." Shelagh swept her arm from left to right, indicating a faint, but clearly worn path that crossed the clearing in front of the long- house, disappearing into the woods on either side. "We know he didn't go towards Glevum or we would have seen him, and this path seems to be the only one leaving here. It has clearly been well used, if we split up and go both ways, one of us should find him."

"There's one more path," Rufio added. "I saw it when I found the bodies. It leads back into the forest, in that direction." He waved his arm towards the trees, at right angles to Shelagh's path. Three paths, three riders.

"Let's rejoin Liam and talk about this," I said, silently cursing the heavy rain, which seemed to be increasing.

When we had joined him, I explained the situation and Liam merely nodded and sat silent, waiting for me to tell them what to do.

"Very well then, we'll split up, one to each path. But let's be sensible in this. None of us needs to spend the night lost in the woods. We are on horseback, Mordechai's afoot. That means on a clear, unblocked path we should be able to move at least three times as fast as he can; probably four times faster. Let's assume he has been gone since early this morning, sometime after daybreak, eight hours or so. I calculate we have four hours or more of daylight left to us. But in two hours, each of us should be able to cover the entire distance he might have made on foot, so be aware of time! Two hours, no more. At the end of that, turn back, no matter what, and let's hope one of us will have found him by then. Liam, you stay here and wait for us. Light a fire if you can, but don't try too hard or too long. Everything will soon be too soaked to burn. Don't drown yourself in the attempt. Let's go. We have no time to waste."

Rufio took the path that he had found and Shelagh and I went east and west along the main pathway that crossed the clearing. I turned one last time to wave to Liam Twistback, whose eyes were on his daughter's receding form, and as I did so the sky was sundered by a blast of searing blue light, followed by a deafening crack of thunder that brought Germanicus up in a screaming rear of fright. I fought him down grimly, and swung him back onto the path again, letting him feel my spurs as I put him towards the storm-lashed forest.

XXIV

The day darkened rapidly as I rode along the narrow, twisting path among tall, close-packed, slender trees that bore delicate, pale leaves too small to impede the falling lancets of rain. The ground sloped upward steadily so that at times the pathway underneath my horse's hooves resembled a brook more than a footpath. About a mile from Mordechai's clearing, however, both the surrounding trees and the nature of the pathway changed for the better, giving way to a broader, drier path of needles carpeting the ground beneath soaring, heavy conifers. My mount responded quickly to the new ground underfoot, and for a time we made much better progress, increasing almost to a full gallop in places before the ground began to level out again and then slope downward. By this time I was riding through a craggy, rock-strewn landscape, where sudden cliffs, rearing up from the ground beneath and girt in places with the thick, gnarled roots of ancient trees, reminded me of the primeval forest we had traversed in Eire.

As we moved downward now, the slope increased and soon we dropped below the line at which the conifers began, finding ourselves again in a deciduous forest where the previous autumn's dead leaves, slick with the rain, made downward progress arduous and hazardous. At one point, the path became almost precipitous and I was thinking halfheartedly of dismounting and leading my mount down, when he made the choice for me, setting his hooves upon the slippery slope without a sign from me. Accepting that he knew what he was doing, I leaned back in the saddle, letting my reins go loose and trusting him to find his own way down. Avoiding the temptation to lean forward and see for myself where he was stepping, I looked about me instead, and saw the figure of a man hanging from a tree.

The sight terrified me for a moment, and the first thought that leapt into my mind was that I had found Mordechai. A second glance, however, told me I was wrong, because whoever the hanged man may have been, he had been swinging from that tree for months. Even in the semi-darkness of the hillside twilight, I could see the pallid glint of bones from where I was. In days, or weeks, now that the spring was here, nature would complete her reclamation and the last remains of this once-human thing would fall apart, dropping into the undergrowth beneath. Idly, and gauging only from the angle of the hillside beneath where he hung, I speculated that he had been bound on the ground beneath the tree, then hoisted into place by several others, higher up the hill. Sure enough, as I drew closer my eye picked out the other length of rope, stretching away beyond the gallows branch to the base of another tree farther up the hill.

I had reached the bottom of the descent safely and was riding on, eyeing the ghastly sight and idly wondering who the fellow could have been, when something else caught my eye. I could easily have missed it, gazing as I was at the rags and bones above, but that my horse shied and sidled, snorting nervously. I looked down and saw a tattered blanket lying on the path. Dismounting quickly, I gathered it up, saw it had been ripped apart and then saw bloodstains in the wool and the watery remnants of spilled blood beside where it had lain on the stony ground. Glancing backward, up along the slippery path we had just descended, I could now clearly see the marks where someone had fallen and slid down. Mordechai must be close by, I knew. Like me, he must have seen the hanging man and, distracted, had missed his footing and fallen, injuring himself.

I cupped my hands to my mouth and called his name several times, listening hard each time for a response, but I heard nothing other than the wind and rain. And then I saw fresh leaves and twigs in the mud, and beside them a deep mark gouged in the ground, and beyond that another, then another. It was plain that Mordechai had injured himself badly enough to have cut himself a crutch and padded the end with a piece of this torn blanket. I mounted quickly and set out to follow the marks he had left behind. Two hundred paces farther along, I came to a steep bank, which Mordechai had faced and failed to climb. His crutch marks, numerous and deep at the bottom of this clayey bank and deeply graven in the slick slope's surface, told the story eloquently. From there, accepting failure, he had veered aside and off the path, the marks of his crutch disappearing so steeply downward into the forest itself that I could not ride after him. Dismounting, I caught my horse's bridle and set out on foot, leading him, but quickly led him back up to the path again and tethered him. It would have been impossible to take him down into that wilderness and maintain anything approaching speed, and I knew that speed was vital. I knew, deep in my heart, that Mordechai was in deadly peril.

I found him a short time later, literally almost falling on top of him. The hillside was free of trees in this area; I had passed through the last of them some way above. The bushes that carpeted the hillside here, however, were so thick as to be almost impenetrable, and their very density permitted me to see where he had forced his way through them. And where he had gone I followed, almost to the end. I was saved from sharing his fate only by the fact that he, in falling, had grasped at a clump of shrubs on the edge of the abyss that had entrapped him, and from their condition it appeared that they had held him for some time, but he had been too weakened to pull himself back up and so had fallen. Using extreme caution, and aware of my heart thumping at my ribs from my close escape, I crept forward and peered over the edge.