Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,56
all the farms selling stuff, buttons and needles and things he made out of old bones; and when we found him, we reckoned we’d best tell the boss up at the grange, and he sent down two of his men to look out at night, and then the same thing happened to them. I said, that’s no wolf. Knew all along, see. Seen it before.”
That hadn’t been in the letter. “Is that right?” I said.
“When I was a kid,” the man said (and now I knew the problem would be getting him to shut up). “Same thing exactly: sheep, then travelers, then three of the duke’s men. My grandad, he knew what it was, but they wouldn’t listen. He knew a lot of stuff, Grandad.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Him and me and my cousin from out over, we got a couple of shovels and a pick and an ax, and we went and dug up this old boy who’d died. And he was all swelled up, like he’d got the gout all over, and he was purple, like a grape. So we cut off his head and shoveled all the dirt back, and we dropped the head down an old well, and that was the end of that. No more bother. Didn’t say what we’d done, mind. The Brother wouldn’t have liked it. Funny bugger, he was.”
Well, I thought. “You did the right thing,” I said. “Your grandfather was a clever man, obviously.”
“That’s right,” he said. “He knew a lot of stuff.”
I was doing my mental arithmetic. When I was a kid—so, anything from fifty-five to sixty years ago. Rather a long interval, but not unheard of. I was about to ask if anything like it had happened before then, but I figured it out just in time. If wise old Grandfather had known exactly what to do, it stood to reason he’d learned it the old-fashioned way: watching or helping, quite possibly more than once.
“The man who died,” I said.
“Him.” A cartload of significance crammed into that word. “Offcomer,” he explained.
“Ah,” I said.
“Schoolteacher, he called himself,” he went on. “Dunno about that. Him and the Brother, they tried to get a school going, to teach the boys their letters and figuring and all, but I told them, waste of time in these parts, you can’t spare a boy in summer, and winter, it’s too dark and cold to be walking five miles there and five miles back, just to learn stuff out of a book. And they wanted paying, two pence twice a year. People around here can’t afford that for a parcel of old nonsense.”
I thought of my own childhood, and said nothing. “Where did he come from?”
“Down south.” Well, of course he did. “I said to him, you’re a long way from home. He didn’t deny it. Said it was his calling, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
It was dark by the time we reached the farm. It was exactly what I’d been expecting: long and low, with turf eaves a foot off the ground, turf walls over a light timber frame. No trees this high up, so lumber had to come up the coast on a big shallow-draught freighter as far as Holy Trinity, then road haulage the rest of the way. I spent the first fifteen years of my life sleeping under turf, and I still get nightmares.
Mercifully, the Brother was there waiting for me. He was younger than I’d anticipated—you always think of village Brothers as craggy old fat men, or thin and brittle, like dried twigs with papery bark. Brother Stauracius couldn’t have been much over thirty; a tall, broad-shouldered man with an almost perfectly square head, hair cropped short like winter pasture, and pale blue eyes. Even without the habit, nobody could have taken him for a farmer.
“I’m so glad you could come,” he said, town voice, educated, rather high for such a big man. He sounded like he meant it. “Such a very long way. I hope the journey wasn’t too dreadful.”
I wondered what he’d done wrong, to have ended up here. “Thank you for your letter,” I said.
He nodded, genuinely pleased. “I was worried, I didn’t know what to put in and leave out. I’m afraid I’ve had no experience with this sort of thing, none at all. I’m sure there must be a great deal more you need to know.”
I shook my head. “It sounds like a textbook case,” I said.
“Really.” He nodded several times, quickly. “I looked it up in