The Traitor's Tale (34 page)

So what to do next?

Face down Sire John and have the packet from him one way or another, or else set him on his way to
Lady Alice. Either would do, and Joliffe found himself favoring the latter, not wanting to have the thing himself unless he could acquire a full suit of armor to wear while he had it and someone to guard his back for good measure.

He re-covered the body, wished the man's soul well with a brief prayer, and went out of the charnel house, closing the door behind him. The setting sun was large and orange above the spread of trees that edged the western sky here, but the storm clouds that had been climbing black out of the east were now sweeping overhead and would likely overtake it before it set. One more trouble and one more bar to him being away from here as soon as he would have liked. To add to his unease, no one had come to ask what he was doing in the churchyard or charnel house. A village usually knew everything that went on within it, with someone always ready to ask questions of any stranger. That no one had come to question him was warning of how awry things were here.

As he untied his reins, Rowan raised her head from grazing what grass there was along the fence and looked at him with what seemed a suggestion that a dry stable and oats would be well bethought.

"Maybe," he told her, swinging into the saddle. "Maybe not. This isn't going as easily as we could hope."

With a great-heaved horse-sigh, she gave way to his tug on her reins and headed down the road toward the priest's house. As they crossed the lane by which he had come from the alehouse he saw at its far end what looked to be the men from the alehouse clotted in a tight bunch, crowding into the lane and shouting at each other with the rabble-growl of men gone past thinking into blind, ugly doing. Yet they didn't look to be quarreling and readying to fight each other. Whatever they were angry at, they were at one about it and it was for someone else.

A few women were standing in their own doorway along the lane, some with tightly crossed arms, others with a huddled look, many with a hand out to keep a peering child or children behind them, but all of them staring toward their angry men. Joliffe stopped Rowan near one of them with a baby on one arm, a toddler by the hand beside her, and a frightened look on her face. With a nod toward the men, he asked, "What is it?"

"The priest," the woman answered, fear in her voice, too. "They're all stirred up against him."

"For what?"

"For everything." For a moment anger joined her fear. "He's not a good man. He won't leave off about 'his rights', wants his full tithes and heriot no matter how hard things have maybe gone with someone. He ..." Several of the men at the lane's end made a sudden start away from the others, yelling and gesturing for the rest to follow them along the lane.

"Oh, blessed Saint Edmund," the woman gasped. "They're going to do it."

Joliffe swung Rowan away from her. Sire John's house stood blank-faced, with no one heading that way with any warning, and Joliffe did not mean to be seen doing what none of the priest's own people would do. He cared too much for his own neck, but he set Rowan into a trot along the cross-street, toward where he thought—hoped—there would be a gate into whatever rearyard the priest's house had.

There was, and it was standing partly open. Dismounting, he drew Rowan's reins hurriedly through the gate's round handle and went into the small yard. There were a barn and sheds on one side, a small garden of herbs and vegetables and a grassy square with a bench to the other, with a path through the garden to the house's back door. Joliffe went for the door at a run and on the threshold came almost into collision with the priest's lean servant going out.

"The village is up!" Joliffe said at him. "They're after Sire John. He has to get out of here!"

"That's what I've been telling him," the man snarled. He had a bundle clutched to his chest with both arms and shoved Joliffe out of his way with an elbow. "He won't go, But I am."

And he did, breaking into a shamble-legged run for the rear gate.

Joliffe opened his mouth to call after him, gave it up as useless, and went into a kitchen that showed Sire John's devotion to his comfort and belly. Pots, frypans, sieves, ladles, and other kitchen gear hung about the broad cooking hearth, a heavy, wooden-topped work table sat in the room's middle, and a closed chest with a large lock against one wall probably held such costly things as spices. The villagers would make short work of the lock, Joliffe thought as he crossed the room. As for Sire John . . .

The priest was standing at the streetward window of his parlor, had opened one shutter and was looking out and along the street with no sign of alarm or fear about him, only—as he looked around at Joliffe—dawning anger. "You," he said. "Why are you . . ."

Joliffe pointed toward the rabble-sound of men coming along the street. "They're coming for you. Against you. You have to get out of here. Quickly. Before someone among them thinks to block the back way."

Sire John drew himself up straight, his thick neck holding his thick head high. "Let them come. I'm their priest. They'll not dare raise one hand against me."

"They mean to raise more than one hand against you,' Joliffe snapped, shoved him aside, slammed shut the shutter, and dropped the bar across the window. At least the servant had bothered to bar the front door before he fled. "Have you ever seen what happens when men give up being men and turn into one great, vicious beast? That's what's coming up the street for you!"

Sire John disdained that with, "They're my people. I'm their priest. They'll not dare to . . ."

"Have you ever given them one single cause to love you? Even one?" Joliffe snarled. "Whatever else they do, they're going to burn down your house and everything in it, and it will be over your dead body they do it if you don't get out of here!"

That got him what he wanted more than Sire John's escape. He had already given up hope he could shift the priest fast enough to save him, too fool-pleased with himself as he was to believe he could ever come to harm. Joliffe, on the other hand, had a strongly set sense of his own mortality and wanted out of here. But he also wanted what he had come for, and at his deliberately said threat of burning, Sire John's gaze snapped sidewise toward the closed doors of the aumbry against the end wall, telling Joliffe what he wanted to know. On the instant he let the priest go and went to snatch open both the aumbry's doors, ignored Sire John's outraged cry, and knelt and began roughly pulling out the piled scrolls that mostly filled it. Not pious books but records of property and income. Sire John advanced on him with thunderous anger and intent to hurt, but a sudden smashing at both the shuttered window and barred door stopped him and turned him half around with—finally—alarm.

That was no idle pounding and demands, Joliffe thought. Those were axes being wielded against the wood, and he had reached the back of the cabinet without finding any packet. The shutter started to splinter. Sire John was caught in the middle of the room, unsure against which outrage to move first. Joliffe drew his dagger and dug the point under the bottom board of the cabinet, prying upward, certain that somewhere here there was a hidden place but without time to find the catch to open it. The door, hacked off its hinges, was giving way and hands were through the broken shutters, shoving aside the bar there. The board gave to Joliffe's dagger and he flung it up to show the expected hollow underneath, with a velvet pouch, a wooden box with painted lid, and an oil cloth-wrapped packet that had to be Burgate's.

And too bad if it wasn't, Joliffe thought, snatching it up.

Men were climbing over the windowsill, shoving at each other to be first. Sire John was going toward them, crying out in outraged protest. Joliffe thrust the packet down the front of his doublet. For good measure, since it was there, he grabbed up the velvet pouch, too, feeling the shape and weight of coins through the thick cloth, and thrust it after the packet, trusting to his belt at his waist to keep both pouch and packet with him, leaving his hands free for his dagger as he sprang to his feet.

At the broken front door men were elbowing and pushing at each other, crowding to be in. Sire John, too late frightened, was backing away with nowhere to go because men were coming in from the kitchen, too. From there came the first crash of something being thrown down, and Sire John half-swung around toward the sound, mouth open in more useless protest unheard in the shouting all around him.

Then the men closed on him from all sides and had him. He was grabbed, shoved, struck with fists. Joliffe, shouting, too, and with a fist raised, to seem as if he belonged there, slid rapidly sideways toward the kitchen door, keeping his back to the wall as much as might be. Intent on the priest, no one heeded him. Sire John was down, men were piling over him, and Joliffe was almost to the kitchen door through the men still crowding in from that way when he saw that he was being stared at by a man along the wall the other side of the kitchen doorway.

Stared at as if the man knew he did not belong there.

But then neither did the man. He was no villager; was rough-clothed but for riding, not work, and his hair was cut to court-style more than country—and most betrayingly, he was no part of the rout happening around him, was coldly watching it all with head high and no yelling.

And having probably made much the same judgment of Joliffe, he was beginning to move Joliffe's way with a set, flat intent in his eyes that made Joliffe think letting him come close would be an ill thing, and with new urgent need Joliffe shoved among the men toward the doorway, as hampered by them as the other man but nearer to it. If he could get into the clear and run for Rowan . . .

The sickening thuds of wooden clubs had been added to the pounding of fists and now suddenly the shouting went to a greater roar and all unexpectedly there was a mighty shoving back of men from the middle of the room, crushing Joliffe to the wall just short of the doorway. His foe, with better luck, kept coming. Above the suddenly cleared space in the room's middle someone swung up an ax. Its blunt back struck one of the beams, making the downward stroke clumsy and shortened but ending in a thick crunch that told it had found bone.

Joliffe saw his foe glance toward the sound with flaring laughter. Other men were laughing, too, and cheering, and someone was holding up the priest's head in two hands, lifting it high, blood pouring from it . . . With a final hearty shove of two men out of his way Joliffe broke clear and into the kitchen, moving fast for the rear door but feeling, rather than hearing over the cheers and yelling, the other man come in behind him, and because behind him was not some place he wanted the man to be, he spun around, drawing his dagger as he did, to find the other man already had his own dagger in hand and was closing on him as if he wanted blood more than he wanted answers.

For choice, Joliffe preferred to give him neither.

The kitchen was not wide or high enough for good sword-work, but wanting more than only his dagger between him and the other man, Joliffe shied sideways to the firewood stacked beside the hearth and grabbed up a long and narrow piece. With that and his dagger at the ready, he backed toward the outer door while the other man circled the work table intent on cutting him off from that escape. But a jostle of village men broke suddenly from the parlor into the kitchen maybe belatedly having found they did not want to be part of what was happening in there. They caught both Joliffe and the other man in their rush toward the rear door, giving no heed to either them or their drawn daggers. Then one of the men swerved to
grab a broad frypan from the wall, and the other men realized what they were missing and instead of flight they were suddenly grabbing what they could, and in their shove and shift, while Joliffe, off-balance, tried to fend his way out the door, the other man reached him. Unable to swing around enough to bring his dagger between them, his other arm hampered by too many men around him, Joliffe wrenched sideways, and broke clear but too late, felt a blow low on his left side in the same moment that he was finally able to bring his rough piece of wood around hard at the man's head. It struck solidly, with all the weight Joliffe could put behind it.

The man dropped, and dropping the piece of wood, Joliffe shoved away from him and out the door into the yard, a hand pressed to his side. He was hurt, he knew, but had no time to find out how badly. Hampered as he'd been, he doubted he'd hit the man hard enough to keep him down for long and wanted very much to be away before the fellow was up again. At more a stumble than run he made for the back gate, to find on its far side that Rowan was gone.

His heart lurched downward before he saw her, hardly ten yards off, head down, pulling at grass growing along a back wall, unconcerned with the world's travails, her reins trailing beside her.