Read Online 29 - The Oath by Michael Jecks - Free Book Online

pony.
    Without his bill, which Otho had taken, he had no protection, and perhaps this dagger would help him. Not that it would be much use in its present state. Better by far to rely on his old dagger . . . and then he realised that the horse-driver had stolen it. At his waist there was nothing but an empty sheath.
    ‘Bastard son of a diseased whore,’ he muttered from gritted teeth.
    Well, that made his decision easier. He had to bend this dagger straight if he wanted a weapon of some kind. With that in mind, he set his good foot on it, wincing as his injured shin twisted, but the metal didn’t budge; his whole weight wouldn’t move it. Behind him was a hedge, and there were surely stones at the base to maintain its shape. Robert hobbled over to it, trying to find a gap between the rocks, but there were none; the vegetation was too thick. Pushing his way through further, he finally found a good gap, and here he managed to set the blade into a niche. By throwing his body’s weight against it, he succeeded by degrees in setting the blade almost true.
    Looking down the length of the metal, he was satisfied. Pushing it into his old sheath, he found that it fitted very loosely, but at least it should be safe there.
    His next problem was the matter of a staff. To walk without one in his present state was impossible. There were no decent lengths he could take from this hedge, for the boughs were all thick, and those that weren’t, were too short to be of any use. However, at the far side of the hedge was a small wood. The trees loomed overhead.
    With some effort, Robert pushed himself through a thinner part of the hedge. It appeared to have been used before, for the way was already partly hacked, he noticed. Once in the wood, he was about to search for a six-foot staff, when he became aware of a strong odour in the air. To a countryman there was something familiar about that smell; like the stink of a fox, it was instantly repugnant. He realised it was rotting meat.
    A gust hit him. The smell was everywhere. Keeping hold of the branch he had found, wincing with pain, he had to swallow hard to stop from throwing up. Then his eyes were drawn upwards, and he felt his breath catch.
    It was like a blow in the belly, that sight. The head was that of a man with wild, dark hair, and it lay resting in the fork of a tree a scant two feet away. The eyes were heavily-lidded as though stupefied, the mouth just a little open, the lips blue and, beneath the chin was the raw meat where his throat had been hacked apart.
    And Robert fell back, cursing, before his body at last convulsed, and his vomit spattered on the grass. Rising, he dare not look at that hideous spectacle, but pushed sobbing through the hedge once more, out into the clear, wholesome road.
    Then something clubbed him below his ear, and he fell, senseless once more, to the muddy ground.
    Bristol Castle
    In the castle’s hall, Sir Stephen Siward the Coroner stood warming his hands by the fire. His clerk and he had been holding an inquest into the death of a boy knocked down by a cart in the street. The matter was simple, the accidental death sad, but commonplace. But now, as the clerk carefully bound the rolls ready to be installed in the chest where they must await the arrival of the Justices, Sir Stephen found his mind returning to that other inquest.
    He remembered it so well that it almost felt as if it were only yesterday afternoon that he had been called to the Capon house, to stand there watching, his heart in his throat, as those awful, mutilated bodies were dragged out and laid in a row.
    The Capon inquest must have been completed legally, for his clerk, who was a stickler for the correct words and due process, did not criticise. The bodies were rolled over and over, naked, while the jury watched in grim silence, but their self-possession began to fracture at the sight of the last two. The men of the jury were roused to rage at the sight of Petronilla’s slaughtered