He removed the cooling brick from the foot of the bed, fetched a replacement from the kitchen, and sat down to resume his vigil. This was certainly sleep now, but a very uneasy sleep, broken by whimpers and moans, and sudden shudders that passed all down the long body. Once or twice Elyas labored in evident distress, throat and lips and tongue trying to frame words, but achieving only anguished, indecipherable sounds, or no sounds at all. Cadfael leaned close, to catch the first utterance that should have meaning. But the night passed, and his vigil had brought him nothing coherent.
Perhaps the sounds that measured out the cloistral day were able to reach some quiet core of habit even within the sufferer’s disrupted being, for at the note of the bell for Prime he fell suddenly quiet, and his eyelids fluttered and strove to open, but closed again wincingly against even this subdued light. His throat worked, he parted his lips and began to attempt speech. Cadfael leaned close, his ear to the struggling mouth.
“. . . madness . . .” said Elyas, or so Cadfael thought he said. “Over Clee,” he grieved, “in such snows . . .” He turned his head on the pillow, and hissed with the pain. “So young . . . wilful . . .” He was lapsing again into a better sleep, his disquiet easing. In a voice thread-fine but suddenly clearly audible: “The boy would have come with me,” said Brother Elyas.
That was all. He lay once again motionless and mute.
“He has the turn for life,” said Cadfael, when Prior Leonard came in to inquire after the patient as soon as Prime ended, “but there’ll be no hurrying him.” An earnest young brother stood dutifully by to relieve him of his watch. “When he stirs you may feed him the wine and honey, you’ll find he’ll take it now. Sit close and mark me any word he says. I doubt if you’ll have anything more to do for him, while I get my sleep, but there’s a ewer for his use if he needs it. And should he begin to sweat, keep him well covered but bathe his face to give him ease. God willing, he’ll sleep. No man can do for him what sleep will do.”
“You’re content with him?” asked Leonard anxiously, as they went out together. “He’ll do?”
“He’ll do very well, given time and quietness.” Cadfael was yawning. He wanted breakfast first, and a bed after, for all the morning hours. After that, and another look at the dressings on head and ribs, and all the minor hurts that had threatened suppuration, he would have a better idea of how to manage both the nursing of Brother Elyas and the pursuit of the lost children.
“And has he spoken? Any sensible word?” pressed Leonard.
“He has spoken of a boy, and of the madness of attempting to cross the hills in such snows. Yes, I believe he did encounter the Hugonin pair and their nun, and try to bring them into shelter here with him. It was the girl who would go her own way,” said Cadfael, brooding on this unknown chit who willed to venture the hills in both winter and anarchy. “Young and wilful, he said,” But however mad and troublesome they may be, the innocent cannot be abandoned. “Feed me,” said Cadfael, returning to first needs, “and then show me a bed. Leave the absent for later. I’ll not quit Brother Elyas as long as he needs me. But I tell you what we may well do, Leonard, if you’ve a guest in your hall here making for Shrewsbury today. You might charge him to let Hugh Beringar know that we have here what I take to be the first news of the three people he’s seeking.”
“That I’ll certainly do,” said Prior Leonard, “for there’s a cloth merchant of the town on his way home for the Christmas feast, he’ll be off as soon as he’s eaten, to get the best of the day. I’ll go and deliver him the message this minute, and do you go and get your rest.”
Before night Brother Elyas opened his eyes for the second time, and this time, though the return to light caused him to blink a little, he kept them open, and after a few moments opened them wide in blank wonder, astonished by everything on which they rested. Only when the prior stooped close at Cadfael’s shoulder did the brightness of recognition quicken in the sick man’s eyes. This face, it seemed, he knew. His lips parted, and a husky whisper emerged, questioning but hopeful:
“Father Prior . . . ?”
“Here, brother,” said Leonard soothingly. “You are here with us, safe in Bromfield. Rest and gather strength, you have been badly hurt, but here you are in shelter, among friends. Trouble for nothing . . . ask for whatever you need.”
“Bromfield . . .” whispered Elyas, frowning. “I had an errand to that place,” he said, troubled, and tried to raise his head from the pillow. “The reliquary . . . oh, not lost . . . ?”
“You brought it faithfully,” said Leonard. “It is here on the altar of our church, you kept vigil with us when we installed it. Do you not remember? Your errand was done well. All that was required of you, you performed.”
“But how . . . My head hurts . . .” The sighing voice faded, the dark brows drew together in mingled anxiety and pain. “What is this weighs on me? How am I come to this?”
They told him, with cautious gentleness, how he had gone forth again from the priory, to make his way home to his own abbey of Pershore, and how he had been brought back broken and battered and abandoned for dead. At the name of Pershore he grasped gladly, there he knew he belonged, and from there he remembered he had set forth to bring Saint Eadburga’s finger-bone to Bromfield, avoiding the perilous route by Worcester. Even Bromfield itself came back to him gradually. But of what had befallen him after his departure he knew nothing. Whoever had so misused him, they were gone utterly from his disturbed mind. Cadfael leaned to him, urging gently:
“You did not meet them again? The girl and boy who would press on over the hills to Godstoke? Foolish, but the girl would go, and her younger brother could not persuade her . . .”
“What girl and boy were these?” wondered Elyas blankly, and drew his drawn brows more painfully close.
“And a nun—do you not recall a nun who travelled with them?”
He did not. The effort at recall caused him agitation, he dragged at memory and produced only the panic desperation of failure, and in his wandering state failure was guilt. All manner of undischarged obligations drifted elusive behind his haunted eyes, and could not be captured. Sweat broke on his forehead, and Cadfael wiped it gently away.
“Never fret, but lie still and leave all to God, and under God, to us. Your part was done well, you may take your rest.”
They tended his bodily needs, anointed his wounds and grazes, fed him a broth made from their austere stores of meat for the infirmary, with herbs and oatmeal, read the office with him before bed, and still, by the knotting of his brows, Brother Elyas pursued the memories that fled him and would not be snared. In the night, in the low hours when the spirit either crosses or draws back from the threshold of the world, the sleeper was shaken by recollection and dream together. But his utterances then were broken and mumbled, and so clearly painful to his progress that Cadfael, who had reserved to himself that most perilous watch, bent his energies all to soothing away the torment from his patient’s mind, and easing him back into healthful sleep. Cadfael was relieved before dawn, and Elyas slept. The body rallied and healed. The mind wandered and shunned remembrance.
Cadfael slept until noon, and arose to find his patient at rest in wakefulness as he had not been in sleep, very docile, without much pain, and well tended by an elderly brother with long experience of nursing the sick. The day was clear, and the light would last well. Though the frost was unbroken, and without doubt there would be fresh snow in the night, at this hour the sun and the remaining hours of daylight tempted.
“He’s well enough cared for.” said Cadfael to the prior. “I may leave him for a few hours with an easy mind. That horse of mine is rested now, and the ways none so bad until the next fall comes or the wind rises. I’ll ride as far as Godstoke, and ask if these truants ever reached there, and whether they’ve moved on, and by what road. Six days it must be now since he parted from them, at Foxwood you said. If they came safely to the lands of Wenlock priory they may well have made their way either to Wenlock or Shrewsbury by now, and all the coil over them will be done. Then we can all breathe freely.”