Brother Cadfael 08: The Devil's Novice

from his bones, or even the hair from his head. Laboriously they brushed away debris of charcoal and ash and half-consumed wood from him, but could not keep him intact. The collapse of part of the stack had started his joints and broken him apart. They had to gather up his bones as best they could, and lay them out on the grass until they had, if not the whole man, all but such small bones of finger and wrist as would have to be sifted from the ashes. The skull still retained, above the blackened ruin of a face, the dome of a naked crown fringed with a few wisps and locks of brown hair, cropped short.
    But there were other things to lay beside him. Metal is very durable. The silver buckles on his shoes, blackened as they were, kept the form a good workman had given them. There was the twisted half of a tooled leather belt, with another silver buckle, large and elaborate, and traces of silver ornamenting in the leather. There was a broken length of tarnished silver chain attached to a silver cross studded with what must surely be semi-precious stones, though now they were blackened and encrusted with dirt. And one of the men, running fine ash from close to the body through the sieve, came to lay down for examination a finger-bone and the ring it had loosely retained while the flesh was burned from between. The ring bore a large black stone engraved with a design fouled by clotted ash, but which seemed to be a decorative cross. There was also something which had lain within the shattered rib-cage, burned almost clean by the fire, the head of the arrow that had killed him.
    Hugh stood over the remnants of a man and his death for a long while, staring down with a grim face. Then he turned to where Meriet stood, rigid and still at the rim of the decline.
    'Come down here, come and see if you cannot help us further. We need a name for this murdered man. Come and see if by chance you know him.'
    Meriet came, ivory-faced, drew close as he was ordered, and looked at what lay displayed.
    Cadfael held off, but at no great distance, and watched and listened. Hugh had not only his work to do, but his own wrung senses to avenge, and if there was some resultant savagery in his handling of Meriet, at least it was not purposeless. For now there was very little doubt of the identity of this dead man they had before them, and the chain that drew Meriet to him was contracting.
    'You observe,' said Hugh, quite gently and coldly,'that he wore the tonsure, that his own hair was brown, and his height, by the look of his bones, a tall man's. What age would you say, Cadfael?'
    'He's straight, and without any of the deformities of ageing. A young man. Thirty he might be, I doubt more.'
    'And a priest,' pursued Hugh mercilessly.
    'By the ring, the cross and the tonsure, yes, a priest.'
    'You perceive our reasoning, Brother Meriet. Have you knowledge of such a man lost hereabouts?'
    Meriet continued to stare down at the silent relics that had been a man. His eyes were huge in a face blanched to the palest ivory. He said in a level voice: 'I see your reasoning. I do not know the man. How can anyone know him?'
    'Not by his visage, certainly. But by his accoutrements, perhaps? The cross, the ring, even the buckles - these could be remembered, if a priest of such years, and so adorned, came into your acquaintance? As a guest, say, in your house?'
    Meriet lifted his eyes with a brief and restrained flash of green, and said: 'I understand you. There was a priest who came and stayed the night over in my father's house, some weeks ago, before I came into the cloister. But that one travelled on the next morning, northwards, not this way. How could he be here? And how am I, or how are you, to tell the difference between one priest and another, when they are brought down to this?'
    'Not by the cross? The ring? If you can say positively that this is not the man,' said Hugh insinuatingly, 'you would be helping me greatly.'
    'I was of no such account in my father's house,' said Meriet with chill bitterness, 'to be so close to the honoured guest. I stabled his horse - to that I have testified. To his jewellery I cannot swear.'
    'There will be others who can,' said Hugh grimly. 'And as to the horse, yes, I have seen in what comfortable esteem you held each other. You said truly that you are good with horses. If it became advisable to convey the mount some twenty miles or more away from where the rider met his death, who could manage the business better? Ridden