The rounded bank of snow shifted, slid down in great folds upon itself, and fell, partly upon the end of the planks and the stack of slates waiting there, partly over the edge and sheer to the ground below. No such avalanche had been intended, but the frozen mass loosed its hold of the steep slates and dropped away in one solid block, to shatter as it struck the scaffolding. Haluin had leaned too far. The ladder slid with the snow that had helped to keep it stable, and he fell rather before than with it, struck the end of the planks a glancing blow, and crashed down without a cry to the frozen channel below. Ladder and snowfall dropped upon the planks and hurled them after him in a great downpour of heavy sharp-edged slates, slashing into his flesh.
Brother Conradin, busy almost beneath his scaffolding, had leaped clear only just in time, spattered and stung and half blinded for a moment by the blown drift of the fall. Brother Urien, standing well back, and arrested in the very act of calling up to his companion to stop, for the light was too far gone, uttered instead a great cry of warning, too late to save, and sprang forward, to be half buried by the edge of the fall. Shaking off snow, they reached Brother Haluin together.
It was Brother Urien who came in haste and grim silence looking for Cadfael, while Conradin ran out the other way into the great court, and sent the first brother he encountered to fetch Brother Edmund the infirmarer. Cadfael was in his workshop, just turfing over his brazier for the night, when Urien erupted into the doorway, a dark, dour man burning with ill news.
“Brother,.come quickly! Brother Haluin has fallen from the roof!”
Cadfael, no less sparing of words, swung about, clouted down the last turf, and reached for a woolen blanket from the shelf.
“Dead?” The drop must be forty feet at least, timber by way of obstacles on the way down, and packed ice below, but if by chance he had fallen into deep snow made deeper still by the clearance of the roof, he might yet be lucky.
“There’s breath in him. But for how long? Conradin’s gone for more helpers, Edmund knows by now.”
“Come!” said Cadfael, and was out of the door and running for the little bridge over the leat, only to change his mind and dart along the narrow neck of causeway between the abbey pools, and leap the leat at the end of it, to come the more quickly to where Haluin lay. From the great court the gleam of two torches advanced to meet them, and Brother Edmund with a couple of helpers and a hand litter, hard on Brother Conradin’s heels.
Brother Haluin, buried to the knees under heavy slates, with blood staining the ice beneath his head, lay still in the middle of the turmoil he had caused.
Chapter Two
Whatever the risks of moving him, to leave him where he was for a moment longer than was necessary would have been to consent to and abet the death that already had a fast hold on him. In mute and purposeful haste they lifted aside the fallen planks and dug out with their hands the knife-edged slates that crushed and lacerated his feet and ankles into a pulp of blood and bone. He was far gone from them, and felt nothing that was done to him as they eased him out of the icy bed of the drain enough to get slings under him, and hoisted him onto the litter. In mourne procession they bore him out through the darkened gardens to the infirmary, where Brother Edmund had prepared a bed for him in a small cell apart from the old and infirm who spent their last years there.
“He cannot live,” said Edmund, looking down at the remote and pallid face.
So Cadfael thought, too. So did they all. But still there was breath in him, even if it was a harsh, groaning breath that spoke of head injuries perhaps past mending; and they went to work on him as one who could and must live, even against their own virtual certainty that he could not. With infinite, wincing care they stripped him of his icy garments, and padded him round with blankets wrapped about heated stones, while Cadfael went over him gently for broken bones, and set and bound the left forearm that grated as he handled it, and still brought never a flicker to the motionless face. He felt carefully about Haluin’s head before cleaning and dressing the bleeding wound, but could not determine whether the skull was fractured. The bitter, snoring breathing indicated that it was, but he could not be sure. As for the broken feet and ankles, Cadfael labored over them for a long time after they had covered the rest of Brother Haluin with warmed brychans against simple death of cold, his body laid straight and shored securely every way to guard against the shock and pain of movement should he regain his senses. As no one believed he would, unless it was an obstinate, secret remnant of belief that caused them so to exert themselves to nourish even the failing spark.
“He will never walk again,”said Brother Edmund, shuddering at the shattered feet Cadfael was laboriously bathing.
“Never without aid,” Cadfael agreed somberly. “Never on these.” But for all that, he went on patiently putting together again, as best he could, the mangled remains.
Long, narrow, elegant feet Brother Haluin had had, in keeping with his slender build. The deep and savage cuts the slates had made penetrated to the bone in places, here and there had splintered the bone. It took a long time to clean away the bloody fragments, and bind up each foot at least into its human shape, and encase it in a hastily improvised cradle of felt, well padded within, to hold it still and let it heal as near as possible to what it had once been. If, of course, there was to be healing.
And all the while, Brother Haluin lay snoring painfully and oblivious of all that was done to him, very far sunk beneath the lights and shadows of the world, until even his breathing subsided gradually into a there shallow whisper, no more than the stirring of a solitary leaf in a scarcely perceptible breeze, and they thought that he was gone. But the leaf continued to stir, however faintly.
“If he comes to himself, even for a moment, call me at once,” said Abbot Radulfus, and left them to their watch.
Brother Edmund was gone to get some sleep. Cadfael shared the night watch with Brother Rhun, newest and youngest among the choir monks. One on either side the bed, they stared steadily upon the unbroken sleep beyond sleep of a body anointed and blessed and armed for death.
It was many years since Haluin had passed out of Cadfael’s care to go to manual labor in the Gaye. Cadfael reexamined with deep attention linaments he had almost forgotten in their early detail, and found now both changed and poignantly familiar. Not a big man, Brother Haluin, but somewhat taller than the middle height, with long, fine, shapely bones, and more sinew and less flesh on them now than when first he came into the cloister, a boy still short of his full growth, and just hardening into manhood. Thirty-five or thirty-six he must be now, barely eighteen then, with the softness and bloom still on him. His face was a long oval, the bones of cheek and jaw strong and clear, the thin, arched brows almost black, shades darker than the mane of crisp brown hair he had sacrificed to the tonsure. The face upturned now from the pillow was blanched to a clay-white pallor, the hollows of the cheeks and deep pits of the closed eyes blue as shadows in the snow, and round the drawn lips the same livid blueness was gathering even as they watched. In the small hours of the night, when the life sinks to its frailest, he would end or mend.
Across the bed Brother Rhun kneeled, attentive, unintimidated by another’s death any more than he would be, someday, by his own. Even in the dimness of this small, stony room Rhun’s radiant fairness, his face creamy with youth, his ring of flaxen hair and aquamarine eyes, diffused a lambent brightness. Only someone of Rhun’s virgin certainty could sit serenely by a deathbed, with such ardent loving-kindness and yet no taint of pity. Cadfael had seen other young creatures come to the cloister with something of the same charmed faith, only to see it threatened, dulled and corroded gradually by the sheer burden of being human under the erosion of the years. That would never happen to Rhun. Saint Winifred, who had bestowed on him the physical perfection he had lacked, would not suffer the gift to be marred by any maiming of his spirit.