As with the fields, the road should have been busy. This was the time of year when goods and grain were moved toward the great autumn markets and fairs… and in riding across northeastern France toward Paris Thomas was traveling the busiest land trading route in Europe. Sweet Jesu! There should have been pedlars, merchants, pilgrims, beggars, cripples and the flotsam and jetsam of society at every bend of the road!
And yet there was nothing but silence and stillness.
Even the woods in the near distance to Thomas’ left were still.
Not even birdsong.
Thomas sat up straighter, pushing the reluctant gelding into a fast walk. He looked to right and left.
Nothing.
He twisted about in the saddle—but there was no one behind him.
Thomas could see a considerable distance about him: the road was empty, the fields offered no hiding place for brigands … but he could not help the tingle of fear up his spine.
Something was very, very wrong.
Where was everybody?
Thomas pulled the gelding to a halt and stood up in the stirrups, peering ahead.
The company of soldiers had, apparently, spurred into a gallop toward some far distant trouble, for there was no sign of them ahead, just the lingering dust of their passing.
But… but there was something … something else … Thomas wrinkled his nose, then sniffed.
“Sweet Jesu!” he muttered, then thumped back into the saddle and dug his heels into the flanks of his mount.
He had smelt that odor once before in his life, and the cause then had been so appalling that he’d hoped never to smell it again.
It was the tainted scent of roasting human flesh.
The gelding snorted, then broke into a gallop.
WITHIN MINUTES Thomas caught sight of a village ahead. It appeared as any other village he’d passed through: a collection of timbered and thatched cottages
grouped about a communal green, a stream and a pond, a scattering of geese, chickens and pigs, and, just beyond the village, a small hill with a stone church halfway up its rise, a fortified manor house on its crest. And yet, as Thomas rode closer, he saw that it was very much not as other villages he’d passed through.
The village green was thronged with soldiers, presumably those Thomas had been ambling behind for the past half day. They were dismounted, among them a tall and solidly built knight dressed in a chain mail hauberk and with an unvisored globular basinet on his head. Both his arms and legs were protected with white plate armor that sent shafts of sunlight glinting in every direction as he turned this way and that.
His sword was drawn, and he was gesturing angrily to his soldiers who, as Thomas rode closer, commenced a frantic search of the village buildings.
There were no peasants to be seen … and Thomas quickly realized why.
In the center of the green was an open fire, and over this fire was a large spit, and still gently rotating on this spit was the blackened corpse of a man.
To one side was a group of huddled bodies, although Thomas could not yet discern whether they were villagers or others.
The knight turned, several soldiers leaping to his aid, as Thomas rode into the green.
When the knight saw Thomas’ robe, he waved his soldiers away and lowered his sword, striding toward Thomas with undisguised relief across his face.
“Brother!” he cried, and his voice betrayed that emotions other than relief were raging within him: horror, disgust, and anger beyond reasoning.
Thomas did not look at him, nor could he speak.
He could only stare at the sickening scene before him.
It was not so much the corpse roasting on the spit—now close, Thomas could see it was a man—but the huddle of corpses to one side.
Women and children. The two adult women were naked, their legs lying sprawled uncomfortably apart, blood and semen staining their inner thighs.
Each had been stuck through their bellies with stakes.
With them were the bodies of three small girls—none over the age of eight. The two eldest had been violated in the same manner as the women; they had died through the hemorrhages caused by their brutal rapes.
The youngest child, probably only two or three, was lying partially huddled beneath the still form of one of her older sisters.
The children still wore fragments of their clothes and it was obvious that these were not peasant children, but of noble blood.
“Brother,” the knight whispered, and Thomas felt a hand on his thigh. “Brother?”
Thomas dragged his eyes away from the carnage and back to the knight.
The man had tears streaming down his swarthy face, which worked with emotion.
He had to struggle to speak, and he needed to swallow in order to get his words out.
“Brother … Brother, please, they need your care.”
Slowly Thomas dismounted, his eyes moving between roasting corpse—God!
Someone had sliced some of the flesh off his buttocks!—the bodies of the women and children, and the knight.
“How?” Thomas said once he was finally off his horse. “Who? Why?”
The knight shook his head, and held out a hand in either uncertainty or supplication. He did not speak.
Thomas walked hesitantly toward the man on the spit. He reached out a trembling hand and grabbed the handle of the spit, stopping it dead.
Sweet Jesu! The spit had been driven through his anus up through his body to emerge from his throat!
Thomas sent a swift prayer to all the saints in heaven that the man had already been dead when his murderers had commenced hammering the spit through. But somehow, considering the brutality of this scene, he thought the man had more probably been alive … at least for the initial part of the spitting.
“His name is Sir Hugh Lescolopier,” said the knight, who had stepped up behind Thomas. “And that,” he pointed to the first of the women, “is his wife Marie, and there his sister Beatrice, and these his three daughters. This is Hugh’s land. His manor house stands beyond the common fields.”
Thomas did not look at the house in the distance. He could not see past the corpses before him.
“But who could do such a thing?” Thomas said.
The knight spat on the ground. “Who? Who? His vile peasants, bastard dogs all, did this! Can you see what they have done? Look! Look! They have sliced Hugh’s meat from his body and forced it into Marie’s mouth even as they were forcing themselves into her body! Can you see? Can you see?”
Thomas stepped closer to the women, and saw a piece of blackened flesh protruding from Marie’s mouth.
He crossed himself, dosing his eyes briefly, and murmured a prayer.
The knight moved to his side, and when he spoke his voice was flat with hatred and grief. “I am Gilles de Noyes,” he said, “and Marie was my sister.”
Thomas turned and stared at the man. De Noyes was staring down at his sister, and there was revenge and grief mixed in equal amounts there.
He introduced himself to de Noyes, and added, “God will have his vengeance on her murderer.”
“Not before I have my vengeance!” de Noyes said, and would have said more, but just then there was the faintest movement on the ground before him.
Thomas jerked his hand away from de Noyes’ arm and stared wild-eyed at the bodies, half expecting the brutalized Marie to twist about on her stake and point a cold dead finger to where her rapist-murderers hid.
But it was not Marie, nor the Lady Beatrice.
It was a rat, chewing on the leg of the smallest girl.
Without thinking, de Noyes leaned down and pulled her from the pile of bodies, swatting violently at the rat, which scurried off.
“Is she alive?” Thomas asked. He hoped not. It would be far better if she were dead.
“Nay,” de Noyes mumbled. “She could not have survived what has been done to her.” He lifted his head, and stared at Thomas with a face so ravaged by horror he
looked an old man.
“She has been violated as have the others!”
“Sweet Jesu!” Thomas tried to peer about de Noyes’ arms, but the man had the dead girl folded so tight Thomas could barely see her.
“Gilles, my friend, perhaps we could—”
“Do not touch her! Ah, Thomas, I am sorry, but I remember holding this girl in my arms last Christmastide. She had barely begun to walk then, and she laughed and giggled as if she had no care in the world. Why this, Thomas? Why this?”
Thomas gestured impotently. “God’s will—”
“Then I say fuck to God’s will!” de Noyes yelled. “How can God will such as this? Eh? Tell me that, friar!”
Then, before Thomas could respond, there came a shout from behind one of the cottages, and several of de Noyes’ soldiers emerged dragging with them a middle-aged man.