World Without End Page 0,27

man let him go, and he fell to his knees, coughing and retching.

The man looked at the rest of the family. "And the child that witnessed the fight...?"

Gwenda screamed: "No!"

He nodded in satisfaction. "The rat-faced girl, obviously."

Gwenda ran to her mother. Ma said: "Mary, Mother of God, save my child."

The man grabbed Gwenda's arm and roughly pulled her away from her mother. She cried out. He said harshly: "Shut your noise, or you'll get the same as your miserable father."

Gwenda clamped her jaws together to stop herself screaming.

"Get up, Joby." The man dragged Pa to his feet. "Pull yourself together, you're going for a ride."

The second man picked up the clothes and the weapons.

As they left the inn, Ma called out frantically: "Just do everything they ask!"

The men had horses. Gwenda rode in front of the older man, and Pa was mounted in the same position on the other horse. Pa was helpless, groaning, so Gwenda directed them, remembering the way clearly now that she had followed it twice. They made rapid progress on horseback, but all the same the afternoon was darkening when they reached the clearing.

The younger man held on to Gwenda and Pa while the leader pulled the bodies of their comrades out from under the bush.

"That Thomas must be a rare fighter, to kill Harry and Alfred together," the older man mused, looking at the corpses. Gwenda realized that these men did not know about the other children. She would have confessed that she had not been alone, and that Ralph had killed one of the men, but she was too terrified to speak. "He's nearly cut Alfred's head off," the man went on. He turned and looked at Gwenda. "Was anything said about a letter?"

"I don't know!" she said, finding her voice. "I had my eyes shut because I was frightened, and I couldn't hear what they were saying! It's true, I'd tell you if I knew!"

"If they got the letter from him in the first place, he would have taken it back after he killed them anyway," the man said to his comrade. He looked at the trees around the clearing, as if the letter might have been hanging among the dying leaves. "He probably has it now, at the priory where we can't get at him without violating the sanctity of the monastery."

The second man said: "At least we can report exactly what happened and take the bodies home for a Christian burial."

There was a sudden commotion. Pa wrenched himself out of the grasp of the second man and dashed across the clearing. His captor moved to go after him, but was stopped by the older man-at-arms. "Let him go - what's the point in killing him now?"

Gwenda began to cry quietly.

"What about this child?" said the younger man.

They were going to murder her, Gwenda felt sure. She could see nothing through her tears, and she was sobbing too hard to plead for her life. She would die and go to hell. She waited for the end.

"Let her go," said the older man. "I wasn't born to kill little girls."

The younger man released her and gave her a shove. She stumbled and fell to the ground. She got up, wiped her eyes so that she could see, and stumbled off.

"Go on, run away," the man called after her. "It's your lucky day!"

Caris could not sleep. She got up from her bed and went into Mama's room. Papa was sitting on a stool, staring at the still figure in the bed.

Mama's eyes were closed and her face glistened, in the candlelight, with a film of perspiration. She seemed to be hardly breathing. Caris took her pale hand: it was terribly cold. She held it between her own, trying to warm it.

She said: "Why did they take her blood?"

"They think illness sometimes comes from an excess of one of the humours. They hope to take it away with the blood."

"But it didn't make her better."

"No. In fact, she seems worse."

Tears came to Caris's eyes. "Why did you let them do it, then?"

"Priests and monks study the works of the ancient philosophers. They know more than we do."

"I don't believe that."

"It's hard to know what to believe, little buttercup."

"If I was a doctor, I'd only do things that made people better."

Papa was not listening. He was looking more intently at Mama. He leaned forward and slipped his hand under the blanket to touch her chest just below her left breast. Caris could see the