Brother Cadfael 06: A Virgin In The Ice

surprise, "and I'll saddle you one of my own remounts. I came well prepared for any tangles you might get me into. I know you of old."
    To Foxwood was a fairly easy ride, being a used highway, but from Foxwood they climbed by even higher ways, and on tracks more broken and steep. The vast flank of Titter-stone Clee rose here to a bleak plateau, with the highest ground towering over them on the left hand, in cloud that dropped lower as the afternoon passed its peak. Yves rode close at Hugh's side, intent and important.
    "We can leave the village away on our right, the holding lies above here. Over this ridge there's a bowl of fields John has, and a sheep-pen up the hill."
    Hugh reined in suddenly, and sat with head raised, sniffing the air with stretched nostrils. "Are you getting the same waft I have in my nose? What should a husbandman be burning at this end of the year?"
    The faint but ominous stink hung in the air, stirred by a rising wind. One of the men-at-arms at Beringar's back said with certainty: "Three or four days old, and snowed over, but I smell timber."
    Hugh spurred forward up the climbing track, between bushes banked with snow, and up to the crest where the ground declined into the hollow. In the sheltered bowl trees grew, providing a wind-break for byre and barn and house, and partly screening the holding from view. They could see the stone walls of the sheep-pen on the rising ground beyond, but not until they had wound their way through the first belt of trees did John Druel's tenant-farm reveal itself to their appalled sight. Yves uttered a muted howl of dismay, and reached to clutch at Brother Cadfael's arm.
    The corner-posts of blackened buildings stood stark out of the drifts of snow, the timbers of roof and barn, what remained of them, jutted in charred ruin where they had fallen. A desolation in which nothing moved, nothing lived, even the near-by trees shrivelled and brown. The Druel homestead was emptied of livestock, stores and people, and burned to the ground.
    They threaded the forlorn wreckage in grim silence, Hugh's eyes intent on every detail. The iron frost had prevented worse stinks than burning, for in the littered yard they found the hacked bodies of two of the household dogs. Though some two or three fresh falls of snow had covered the traces since the holocaust, it seemed that a party of raiders at least ten or twelve strong had committed this outrage, driving off the sheep and the household cow, emptying the bam, and probably the house, too, of anything portable, stringing the fowls together by the legs, for scattered feathers still blew about the ground and clung to the blackened beams.
    Hugh dismounted, and clambered in among the wreckage of the house and barns. His men were quartering all the ground within and without the enclosing wall, probing the drifts.
    "They've killed them," said Yves in a small, hollow voice. "John and his wife, and Peter, and the shepherd - killed them all, or carried them off, as they carried off Sister Hilaria."
    "Hush!" said Cadfael. "Never jump to meet the worst until you've looked about you well. You know what they're looking for?" The searchers were turning to exchange looks and shrugs, and drawing together again to the yard. "Bodies! And they've found none. Only the dogs, poor creatures. They did their proper work, and gave the alarm. Now we'd best hope they gave it in time."
    Hugh came picking his way back from the barn, beating soiled palms together. "No dead here to find. Either they had warning enough to run for it, or they've been dragged off with the raiders. And I doubt if masterless men living wild would bother with captives. Kill they might, but take prisoners, of this simple kind, that I doubt. But I wonder which way they came? As we did, or by tracks of their own, along the hillside here above? If there were no more than ten of them, they'd keep to their measure, and the village might be too strong to tempt them."
    "There was one sheep slaughtered by the fold," said his sergeant, back from the hillside. "There's a traverse comes along the slope there, that might be their path if they wanted to avoid Cleeton and pick off some meat less well defended."
    "Then Druel may have got his family away towards the village." Hugh pondered, frowning at the drifts that had covered all traces of coming and going of men and beasts. "If the dogs gave tongue for the sheep, there may have been time. Let's at least go and ask in the village what they