“To kill!” said Sioned, burning darkly.
“Even that I question, mad though it may seem. See the angle at which it enters and leaves. And then see how the blood is all at the back, and not where the shaft entered. And remember all we have said and noted about his clothes, how they were wet behind, though he lay on his back. And how you yourself said it was the attitude of a man who had heaved himself over from lying on his face. And one more thing I found out yesterday, as I kneeled beside him. Under him the thick grass was wet. But all down by his right side, shoulder to hip and body-wide, it was bone-dry. There was a brisk shower yesterday morning, half an hour of rain. When that rain began, your father was lying on his face, already dead. How else could that patch of grass have remained dry, but sheltered by his body?”
“And then,” said Sioned low but clearly, “as you say, he was taken by his left shoulder and heaved over on to his back. When he was well asleep. Deep asleep!”
“So it looks to me!”
“But the arrow entered his breast,” she said. “How, then, could he fall on his face?”
“That we have to find out. Also why he bled behind, and not in front. But lie on his face he did, and that from before the rain began until after it ceased, or the grass beneath him could not have been dry. From half an hour before noon, when the first drops fell, until some minutes past noon, when the sun came out again. Sioned, may I, with all reverence look closely again now at his body?”
“I know no greater reverence anyone can pay to a murdered man,” she said fiercely, “than to seek out by all possible means and avenge him on his murder. Yes, handle him if you must. I’ll help you. No one else! At least,” she said with a pale and bitter smile, “you and I are not afraid to touch him, in case he bleeds in accusation against us.”
Cadfael was sharply arrested in the act of drawing down the sheet that covered Rhisiart’s body, as though what she had said had put a new and promising idea into his head. “True! There are not many who do not believe in that trial. Would you say everyone here holds by it?”
“Don’t your people believe it? Don’t you?” She was astonished. Her eyes rounded like a child’s.
“My cloister-brothers… Yes, I dare say all or most believe in it. I? Child, I’ve seen too many slaughtered men handled over and over after a battle by those who finish them off, and never known one of them gush fresh blood, once the life was out of him. But what I believe or don’t believe is not to the point. What the murderer believes well may be. No, you have endured enough. Leave him now to me.”
Nevertheless, she did not turn her eyes away, as Cadfael drew off the covering sheet. She must have anticipated the need to examine the body further, for as yet she had left him naked, unshrouded. Washed clean of blood, Rhisiart lay composed and at rest, a thick, powerful trunk brown to the waist, whiter below. The wound under his ribs, an erect slit, now showed ugly and torn, with frayed, bluish lips, though they had done their best to smooth the lacerated flesh together.
“I must turn him,” said Cadfael. “I need to see the other wound.”
She did not hesitate, but with the tenderness of a mother rather than a daughter she slipped an arm under her father’s shoulders, and with her free hand flattened under him from the other side, raised the stiffened corpse until he lay on his right side, his face cradled in the hollow of her arm. Cadfael steadied the stretched-out legs, and leaned to peer closely at the wound high on the left side of the back.
“You would have trouble pulling out the shaft. You had to withdraw it frontally.”
“Yes.” She shook for a moment, for that had been the worst of the ordeal. “The tip barely broke the skin behind, we had no chance to cut it off. Shame to mangle him so, but what could we do? And yet all that blood!”
The steel point had indeed done little more than puncture the skin, leaving a small, blackened spot, dried blood with a bluish bruise round it. But there was a further mark there, thin and clear and faint. From the black spot the brown line of another upright slit extended, a little longer above the arrow-mark than below, its length in all about as great as the width of Cadfael’s thumb-joint, and a faint stain of bruising extending it slightly at either end, beyond where the skin was broken. All that blood—though in fact it was not so very much, though it took Rhisiart’s life away with it—had drained out of this thin slit, and not from the wound in his breast, though that now glared, and this lay closed and secret.
“I have done,” said Cadfael gently, and helped her to lay her father at peace again. When they had smoothed even the thick mane of his hair, they covered him again reverently. Then Cadfael told her exactly what he had seen. She watched him with great eyes, and thought for some moments in silence. Then she said: “I did see this mark you speak of. I could not account for it. If you can, tell me.”
“It was there his life-blood came out,” said Cadfael. “And not by the puncture the arrow certainly made, but by a prior wound. A wound made, as I judge, by a long dagger, and a very thin and sharp one, no common working knife. Once it was withdrawn, the wound was nearly closed. Yet the blade passed clean through him. For it was possible, afterwards, to trace and turn that same thrust backwards upon itself, and very accurately, too. What we took for the exit wound is no exit wound at all, but an entry wound. The arrow was driven in from the front after he was dead, to hide the fact that he was stabbed in the back. That was why the ambush took place in thick undergrowth, in a tangled place. That was why he fell on his face, and why, afterwards, he was turned on his back. And why the upward course of the arrow is so improbable. It never was shot from any bow. To thrust in an arrow is hard work, it was made to get its power from flight. I think the way was opened first with a dagger.”
“The same that struck him down from behind,” she said, white and translucent as flame.
“It would seem so. Then the arrow was inserted after. Even so he could not make it penetrate further. I mistrusted that shot from the first. Engelard could have put a shaft through a couple of oak boards and clean away at that distance. So could any archer worth his pay. But to thrust it in with your hands—no, it was a strong, lusty arm that made even this crude job of it. And at least he got the line right. A good eye, a sensitive hand.”
“A devil’s heart,” said Sioned, “and Engelard’s arrow! Someone who knew where to find them, and knew Engelard would not be there to prevent.” But for all her intolerable burdens, she was still thinking clearly. “I have a question yet. Why did this murderer leave it so long between killing and disguising his kill? My father was dead before ever the rain came. You have shown it clearly. But he was not turned on his back to receive Engelard’s arrow until after the rain stopped. More than half an hour. Why? Was his murderer startled away by someone passing close? Did he wait in the bushes to be sure Rhisiart was dead before he dared touch him? Or did he only think of this devilish trick later, and have to go and fetch the shaft for his purpose? Why so long?”
“That,” said Cadfael honestly, “I do not know.”
“What do we know? That whoever it was wished to pin this thing upon Engelard. Was that the whole cause? Was my father just a disposable thing, to get rid of Engelard? Bait to trap another man? Or did someone want my father disposed of, and only afterwards realise how easy, how convenient, to dispose of Engelard, too?”
“I know no more than you,” said Cadfael, himself shaken. And he thought, and wished he had not, of that young man fretting his feet tormentedly among the leaves, and flinching from Sioned’s trust as from a death-wound. “Perhaps whoever it was did the deed, and slipped away, and then paused to think, and saw how easy it might be to point the act away from himself, and went back to do it. All we are sure of is this, and, child, thank God for it. Engelard has been set up as a sacrificial victim, and is clear of all taint. Keep that at heart, and wait.”