Brother Cadfael 01: A Morbid Taste for Bones

well asleep. Deep asleep!"
    "So it looks to me!"
    "But the arrow entered his breast," she said. "How, then, could he fall on his face?"
    "That we have to find out. Also why he bled behind, and not in front. But lie on his face he did, and that from before the rain began until after it ceased, or the grass beneath him could not have been dry. From half an hour before noon, when the first drops fell, until some minutes past noon, when the sun came out again. Sioned, may I, with all reverence look closely again now at his body?"
    "I know no greater reverence anyone can pay to a murdered man," she said fiercely, "than to seek out by all possible means and avenge him on his murder. Yes, handle him if your must. I'll help you. No one else! At least," she said with a pale and bitter smile, "you and I are not afraid to touch him, in case he bleeds in accusation against us."
    Cadfael was sharply arrested in the act of drawing down the sheet that covered Rhisiart's body, as though what she had said had put a new and promising idea into his head. "True! There are not many who do not believe in that trial. Would you say everyone here holds by it?"
    "Don't your people believe it? Don't you?" She was astonished. Her eyes rounded like a child's.
    "My cloister-brothers... Yes, I dare say all or most believe in it. I? Child, I've seen too many slaughtered men handled over and over after a battle by those who finish them off, and never known one of them gush fresh blood, once the life was out of him. But what I believe or don't believe is not to the point. What the murderer believes well may be. No, you have endured enough. Leave him now to me."
    Nevertheless, she did not turn her eyes away, as Cadfael drew off the covering sheet. She must have anticipated the need to examine the body further, for as yet she had left him naked, unshrouded. Washed clean of blood, Rhisiart lay composed and at rest, a thick, powerful trunk brown to the waist, whiter below. The wound under his ribs, an erect slit, now showed ugly and torn, with frayed, bluish lips, though they had done their best to smooth the lacerated flesh together.
    "I must turn him," said Cadfael. "I need to see the other wound."
    She did not hesitate, but with the tenderness of a mother rather than a daughter she slipped an arm under her father's shoulders, and with her free hand flattened under him from the other side, raised the stiffened corpse until he lay on his right side, his face cradled in the hollow of her arm. Cadfael steadied the stretched-out legs, and leaned to peer closely at the wound high on the left side of the back.
    "You would have trouble pulling out the shaft. You had to withdraw it frontally."
    "Yes." She shook for a moment, for that had been the worst of the ordeal. "The tip barely broke the skin behind, we had no chance to cut it off. Shame to mangle him so, but what could we do? And yet all that blood!"
    The steel point had indeed done little more than puncture the skin, leaving a small, blackened spot, dried blood with a bluish bruise round it. But there was a further mark there, thin and clear and faint. From the black spot the brown line of another upright slit extended, a little longer above the arrow-mark than below, its length in all about as great as the width of Cadfael's thumb-joint, and a faint stain of bruising extending it slightly at either end, beyond where the skin was broken. All that blood - though in fact it was not so very much, though it took Rhisiart's life away with it - had drained out of this thin slit, and not from the wound in his breast, though that now glared, and this lay closed and secret.
    "I have done," said Cadfael gently, and helped her to lay her father at peace again. When they had smoothed even the thick mane of his hair, they covered him again reverently. Then Cadfael told her exactly what he had seen. She watched him with great eyes, and thought for some moments in silence. Then she said: "I did see this mark you speak of. I could not account for it. If you can, tell me."
    "It was there his life-blood came out," said Cadfael. "And not by the puncture the arrow certainly made, but by a prior wound. A wound made, as I judge, by a long dagger, and a very thin and sharp one, no common working knife. Once it was withdrawn, the wound was nearly closed. Yet the blade passed clean through him. For it was possible, afterwards, to trace and turn that same thrust backwards upon itself, and very accurately, too. What we took for