Sycorax E-Book

J.B. Aspinall

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In the credulous squalor of medieval Yorkshire a peasant girl is accused of being sorceress. The suffering inflicted upon her by male superstition sparks a spectacular and terrifying retort which initiates the legend of the witch Sycorax. Many years later, the story is recounted for us by Edmund, a flawed monk at Byland Abbey, who undertakes to write a history of the witch as a penance for lascivious fantasies. In the process, Edmund uncovers a brutal and eerie tale in which he becomes fatally involved. Not just a trip into another epoch, more than a just another supernatural thriller, this absorbing novel of medieval times reveals that the compulsions and delusions examined are endemic in us all today.

Leseprobe

Map of Slatterdale region, 1396–1431

PRAISE FOR SYCORAX

‘As historical fiction goes, this book is a grubby little pearl ... this is such an imaginative, entertaining novel. The myth of Sycorax concocted by Aspinall is completely believable (it’s a name shared by Caliban’s mother in The Tempest). As well as being a really spooky tale of madness and magic, with great period detail, it offers a clever satire on the hysteria that so often afflicts groups of men, but which less insightful writers usually attribute to women.’ – Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, Independent on Sunday

‘Sycorax tells the story of a young peasant girl in medieval Yorkshire who is accused of sorcery and brutally treated by the authorities. Her revenge as the witch Sycorax is documented by Edmund, a monk who still struggles with the legacy of his own lustful past and becomes entwined with lust, sorcery and accusations of witchcraft ... a rambunctious satire on social hysteria and an amusing portrait of one man’s struggle between sex and God. The real heroine of the piece is the witch, who goes from a free-spirited young girl to a shrieking, skeletal agent of Satan. Boisterous, lurid and well written, Sycorax comes recommended.’ – Big Issue

SYCORAX

It is 1396, and in the superstition and squalor of medieval Yorkshire a shepherd girl is accused of sorcery. The physical and mental suffering subsequently inflicted upon her by her gaolers and others, including a drunken brute of a husband, sparks a spectacular and terrifying retort resulting in the legend of Sycorax the witch.

The story of the Slatterdale witch is told by Edmund, a flawed monk at Byland Abbey, who undertakes to write her history as a penance for lascivious fantasies. To uncover this brutal and eerie tale, however, he must journey to Sycorax’s birthplace, there to suffer temptation, ridicule, the threat of religious condemnation and even accusations of witchcraft. His quest to find her ends with death and lunacy in a compelling climax on the mid-winter moors of Yorkshire.

A highly original work of fiction that combines magical realism, a satirical social conscience with a mordant wit, this compelling novel examines delusions and compulsions still familiar to us today.

JOHN BRIAN ASPINALL read History at Balliol College, Oxford. He taught literature in city comprehensive before becoming a full-time writer in 1990. He has had numerous poems published in magazines and has published two novels: Gringo Soup (2001) and Sparrow Hall (2003). He currently lives in France.

For Frances

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased

– Byron

Contents

Preface

The Trangressions and Penance of Brother Edmund

A Journey to the Territory of the Fiend in Slatterdale

The Ale Wife Alys and the Beginning of the Investigation

The Young Gentleman and the Shepherdess

Brother Denys Betrays Secrets of the Confessional

Brother Edmund Makes a Report and Receives a Reprimand

The Arrest of the Witch Sukie

The Interrogation and Condemnation of the Witch Sukie

The Sojourn of the Witch Sukie in Pickering Gaol

The Ordeal of the Witch Sukie in Pickering Stocks

Brother Edmund Is Drawn to the Ale House in Nithermoor

Mumping Night and the Bewitching of Brother Edmund

The Homecoming and Wedding of the Witch Sukie

The Comportment and Gruesome Death of Watkin Trothers

The Comportment and Gruesome Death of Abbot Fabian

The Flight of the Witch Sukie and the Advent of the Fiend Sycorax

Mayhem Is Wrought by the Fiend Sycorax in Pickering

Brother Edmund at the Trial of the Witch Alys

The Expedition Against the Fiend Sycorax, 1414

What Befell the Expedition at the Lair of the Fiend

The Retaliation of the Fiend Sycorax

The Triumph of the Fiend Sycorax, 1414

The Bewitching of Brother Edmund and the Hanging of the Witch Alys

The Expedition Against the Fiend Sycorax, 1431

The Triumph of the Fiend, 1431

Winter at Byland

Preface

HE SYCORAX MANUSCRIPT never achieved book form even by medievalstandards. We can speculate about Edmund of Byland’s failure to finish it by using clues he furnishes in his last contributions. Discouragement, spiritual confusion, mental instability and terror all seem to have played their part in bringing him to abandon the work. On the other hand, the fact that he did not destroy the text suggests that the matter was taken out of his hands, as foretold in his second interview with Prior Jocelyn (page 205 of this edition).

One presumes that the manuscript remained at Byland in the same form in which it was discovered four centuries later in the archives of the See of York: that is, as a large number of separate folded sheets, unnumbered and disarranged, in a leather wallet secured with straps. The ‘properly written and illustrated volume’ which Edmund mentions, both in his introduction and elsewhere, as being intended to emanate from his document, has never been found, nor any reference to it. In fact there is no historical evidence to corroborate the Sycorax manuscript. None of the events are reported elsewhere and the names of important personages such as abbots seem to have been changed.

There have been several editions of Edmund’s Latin text: the latest of which – The Sycorax Codex (Otto Baluth, Ocean Palisades Press, 1983), hereafter referred to as ‘the Codex’ – seems definitive and has guided my procedures.

It includes a literal translation and an exhaustive commentary. Since my own approach is not scholarly but aimed at producing effective literature I have made a number of adjustments to the text as postulated by the Codex.

Professor Baluth asserts that it is impossible to be confident about the order in which Edmund wrote the manuscript, it being a ‘thicket of shuffled palimpsests’. There is evidence that some of it was written as investigations proceeded, whereas other passages were inserted at a later date with the benefit of hindsight. The Codex imposes a degree of coherence by confining all Edmund’s autobiographical material to the notes and appendices, leaving the history of the witch Sycorax uncluttered. I have preferred to construct a narrative that reflects Edmund’s consecutive experience: his personal problems and adventures intertwined with the facts about the career of Sycorax as he gathered them. To achieve this I have had to take liberties with the original text, without, I hope, altering the gist or intent.

I have also added passages of my own invention. Some of these give background detail, to make the medieval world more accessible. Others extrapolate the characters, particularly Edmund, and interpret moti vation. It would be nice to think that my additions are not only compatible with the rest of the text but so seamlessly interpolated that the forgery cannot be detected without use of the Codex!

I have removed several passages of conventional piety – and countless brief expressions of the same – judging them irritating to most modern readers, but have tried to retain enough to be representative of Edmund and his epoch.

Translation presented a number of difficulties, some solved by cheating, as a comparison with the accurate translation in the Codex will show. While I have avoided anachronisms, I have chosen a ‘modern’ rather than ‘medieval’ idiom because it is less contrived and more accessible. At the same time I have tried to preserve something of the cadence of Edmund’s Latin.

The chapter headings I use are mostly taken from marginalia to Edmund’s main text in what seems to be a different hand.

The speeches which Edmund records in local dialect present as sturdy a challenge as Latin. They could not be understood by a modern reader without use of the glossary in the Codex. I have translated them into a hybrid of northern peasant which I mean to seem exotic without being too baffling. I apologize to those whom this annoys. The direct speech which Edmund renders in Latin I have translated into the formal style of the bulk of the text. It is usually conversation between ecclesiastics.

J.B. Aspinall

Gascony, 2006

The Transgressions and Penance of Brother Edmund

AM EDMUND OF Byland. I surrendered my surname to God when I came here as a novice in 1413.

The younger son of a yeoman tenant of this abbey, I learnt Latin at grammar school in York and at one time seemed likely to progress in scholarship and make my people proud of me. But even before I had fully attained manhood I was a hapless sinner, given to drink and fornication. This disqualified me from the Chantry school in York and returned me disgraced to my father’s estate where for two years I wallowed in further lewd and drunken godlessness, until the scandal arising from my conduct and the exasperated intervention of my father constrained me to submit to God and enter this abbey. The fact that I took refuge here (though under a degree of compulsion) for the protection of both my body and soul is the first major irony supplied by my history for the sardonic entertainment of Satan.

At the time when I lost my surname I also hoped to discard all my antics in Satan’s dominions, for I had come to fear both the temporal and spiritual consequences of such error. In general, for many years, I found tranquillity here, in duty and abstinence. But the lovely, soothing ritual of the abbey never managed to dispel a sinful residue of my adolescent self, a poison smuggled inside me. Sixteen years later Satan was still able to use me as a duct whereby he might bring his monsters into the holy haven: when I was sleeping, or if I had been swallowing this abbey’s excellent wine, or was otherwise made unwary. Sometimes even when I was at devotion they posed and leered before me and my brain was helpless to exclude them.

Peasant lasses I blithely swived in my youth came as succubi and incubi, shameless and shaming demons. There was Nell with her gaptoothed grin, Malkin spry as a weasel, Nance who gave such raucous grunts of greedy glee. They all came smiling to lean over me or squat under me, hoisting their skirts from their pudenda. Notable among them was Luce, her auburn hair and pale, soft belly, with whom I had been taken in flagrante delicto and beaten almost to death by her husband, sub-tenant of our water meadow.

After years of confession and countless trifling penances, along with the conscientious consumption of lentils, lettuces and other known depressants of lust, had failed to prevent recurrence of these filthy visitations and end my torment, I undertook, with the prompting of Abbot Fabian, a more vexatious and time-consuming penance: a history of the Slatterdale witch, Sukie Trothers, later known as the Fiend Sycorax.

I daresay it seems a bland sort of penance: scratching out a book in this snug room, within sound of the bells and peacocks, the wind in the tall elms of Byland, safe from need, plague, wolves, trulls and whatever else folk are enduring out yonder. So I begin by pointing out what Abbot Fabian explained to me when he first broached the notion: that my penance and the book would together be worthless if the task did not involve an unusual degree of toil and even suffering. Rather than concocting some artificial hardship, such as inscribing the entire work left-handed, so disciplining my soul at the expense of the project, we decided it best that I punished myself as I benefited the book, by the rigour of my research.

My labours at my Byland desk with ink, parchment and candle are the least arduous aspect of my penance. In pursuit of the full truth I have suffered discomfort and peril, both physical and spiritual, in places where no godly or learned man would willingly be found. I have consorted with half-wits in sunless vales, drunkards in pig-huts, crones in the gutters of wicked towns. The worst of the hellish visions I confess and atone would be shrugged off as nothing – tolerated with the morning’s hangover – by the boors out there on Satan’s acres. Whatever it once was, my nature is now delicate, scholarly and refined: it has been as painful for me as for the holy man among the heathen of the Danube, to be sequestered with those yokels among the hovels of the North Riding of Yorkshire, enduring their belches and farts, the vomit-provoking stench of their proximity and the humiliation of their sodden familiarity. North Riding men of the vulgar class, whether in town or demesne, seem to count it obligatory to drink their flat, muddy ale all day long until unconsciousness prevents them. Their women are slovenly and immodest, only saved from harlotry – if then – by listlessness.

Remembering my disgusting secret self, I can endure contact with more blatantly disgusting humanity: but it is not the only hazard out there, nor the worst. God is in the Church and in those rare homes and hearts that have ousted the domestic fiend; the rest of the earth is pitfalls to Hell. The North Riding, in particular, even before the rise of the great Fiend Sycorax, was full of ancient evil: goat-footed demons and camouflaged goblins. I do not speak only of metaphor, of spiritual peril. There is a local tradition of fiends that have material impact: a red-eyed serpent that can drag you down through the rustling underbrush into the earth; a great bird that swoops to carry you kicking away; a black wolf that prowls the gorse moors and bracken slopes, ready to lope off to Hell with a sinner in its slobbering jaws. Satan can bite you to the bone in this terrestrial interim as well as claim you for eternity. Hildebrand tells of a German bishop who had a hundred menat-arms to guard him day and night in case the fiends of Satan should bear him bodily away.

But worse than any fleshly peril is the hazard into which I have plunged my soul in search of Sycorax. The fact that my task began as a quest for spiritual benefit is the second great irony with which my life has gratified the Fiend.

It all seemed very different at the outset, only a year ago. I can remember the cool fingers of the Abbot stroking my tonsure, as I knelt before him in shame and self-pity at my ignominious transgressions. Leaning from his stool to chastely embrace me, he let out a little moan of compassion. In his bleak private cell, after that confessional, we discussed the details of the project which was intended to be my purgation but which was to bring Abbot Fabian to a terrible death and myself to the brink of Hell.

‘You entered the abbey young, Brother Edmund, and have no memory of the world out yonder except as an ignorant sinner. Now that you are strong in devotion and obedience it will benefit you to confront that world again. Once you are confident that you can repudiate its evil squalor it will cease to torment your spirit with obscenities that you were once unable to resist.’

He paused, but I said nothing. I wanted to say that I felt weaker and more sinful than other men – not fit to be let at large beyond the safety of the abbey. But I could not reject the Abbot’s confidence in me, nor refuse the ordeal he proposed.

‘Your spiritual need, dear Brother Edmund, though close to my heart, is not the only reason that I have chosen you for the task – or chosen the task for you. You are the most scholarly monk in Byland if I do not include myself. I rejoice to have a kindred intellect in my care, even if that intellect resides in such troubled flesh as yours, which is why I have not hesitated to offer you such friendship and esteem – indeed, partiality – as is not incompatible with our stations and the rules of our order.’ He squinted his pale old eyes in the light begrudged by the narrow window and smiled at me almost coyly. ‘I am confident that you are fully qualified for the task I confer on you, not just by virtue of your literacy but because your keen wits will enable you to avoid the superstitious ignorance which affects so many of your brothers.’

It was not the first time Abbot Fabian had confided his views to me. His was a lonely and unpopular eminence at Byland, partly because of the stringency with which he had applied the Cistercian discipline and stamped out abuse.

‘I find it regrettable that no original literary work has ever been produced in Byland. While our abbey has a valuable collection of documents, they are all copies of scripts that reside in other abbeys. I realize that this attitude of mine is eccentric within the Cistercian order. It is certainly not shared by any of your brothers here. Our rules have always promoted the virtues of physical toil and by this have avoided some of the abuses rife in more scholarly orders, but we have thereby become prone to other shortcomings.’

I said, ‘Satan is ready to make a weakness out of an asset as soon as we blink.’

He poured me another minute measure of gooseberry wine. ‘There is a body of opinion among the Fathers of the Church that original composition is an act of pride unbefitting a monk, who can best show his obedience by the faithful transcription of established authority.’

I said, ‘I will eschew the pride of original authorship, Father, and be a humble collector and recorder of the testaments of others.’

He nodded approval. ‘I am keen that such a book should be particular to Byland not merely because it is composed here but also because it treats a local event. I suggest that the subject might be some local holy personage whose words are instructive and deeds exemplary, so that the book can be of interest and devotional value even to abbeys outside the shire.’

Sadly, when I set myself to examine the Abbot’s proposal I was confronted with facts which he was unable to refute. The North Riding of Yorkshire, as I have already indicated, is one of the most godless tracts in Satan’s world and almost entirely populated by brutish sinners. Those with any claim to virtue have been discouraged, if not corrupted, by the prevailing nastiness: the best have seen fit to undergo the ordeal of life with prayer and submissiveness in the relative safety of holy ground, avoiding the Devil rather than wrestling with him and sheltering from noteworthiness as well as from temptation. The virtuous having adopted such a low profile, I thought it best, with the rueful approval of Abbot Fabian, to make wickedness the topic for my labour, so that if I could not give an example for those who aspire to Heaven I could warn sinners with a glimpse of some of the workings of Hell.

The Fiend Sycorax was so recent a scandal that her fame and power were still current in the region and the end of the story not yet known. This both attracted me to the topic and assisted my account by providing me with many witnesses to events, from those who knew young Sukie Dobson forty years ago to children visited by nightmare at the last full moon. It is a tale that corroborates the doctrine of the Church by illustrating the urgent danger to us all from the power of Satan working through the weakness of a woman. It is also a tale typical of the age in which we live, because at this time witchcraft is as widespread and flagrant as were any of the great heresies that in past centuries challenged the diligence of the Holy Inquisition. Thousands of moonlit sabbaths are celebrated throughout Christendom every week, with obscenity and blasphemy. Countless respectable country wives are versed in the witch’s lore of herbs, use love-charms and potions, and at night put out little bowls of cream for the ancient demons that visit their sleep. Even as I write this account there is news of a witch in armour leading the armies of France to victory against our English forces, with the approval not merely of the French soldiery but of the Dauphin of France and his court and even of many French churchmen that have sold themselves to Satan and taken the side of the French. It seems that in Satan’s world great nonchalance is being shown towards both God and Satan!

These grand matters of state may seem a far cry from Sukie Trothers and the plight of Slatterdale, but our wisdom, as well as our destiny, must begin at home. It is essential that we use what we know best to inform ourselves and each other of the dangers, under the guidance of Mother Church and in submission to the Will of God. The case of Sycorax is a microcosm of the entire assault of Satan upon God’s purpose for man. By studying this matter in the great detail available we may gain an inkling of issues otherwise too vast for our understanding, as one might augur the whole calamitous harvest from the examination of a single diseased plant. So each of us may be helped to avoid damnation and shorten our sojourn in Purgatory and the whole of Christendom may avoid the wrath of God and the great plagues which have afflicted us.

Much of the history of Sukie Trothers is no more amazing than that of any prey of Satan, but before the story is over you will read of events that are bound to strain your credulity. It may be hard for you to credit that I have rejected large quantities of spectacular and implausible material, accepting only such as was verified by several witnesses, or came from witnesses I esteem reliable, or is in accordance with proven and established authority. If my judgement in such matters should be brought into question I would ask you to remember that, though devout, I am no mystic but disposed towards reason and logic. If there is a flaw in my account it will be that I have underemphasized the miraculous and looked for mundane explanations. I also fear that in the tone of my book and my commentary on events I may sometimes shirk my duty from soft-heartedness, letting my compassion for the silly woman Sukie Trothers hinder my detestation of Satan’s darling Sycorax.

When I dare to comment or interpret during the narrative that follows I trust that I do so with reference to the word of God as made manifest to me through the authority of the Church. If I err, as mortal man must, I am hopeful that my superiors will pity my simplicity and seek to correct the error rather than castigate the man.

As well as the history of Sycorax I shall relate my own adventures and suffering in pursuit of the truth. This is not from pride or the need for attention; nor does it otherwise contradict the assurances I gave Abbot Fabian about my motives. I am happy to know that another book is to be produced from this text, by another hand than mine: a properly written and illustrated volume that will reside in a library long after this present text is destroyed and my contribution forgotten. I am content if all reference to myself is removed from that official history.

It was in fact Abbot Fabian himself who suggested that I should include an account of my own experiences in the history of Sycorax. It should reassure my readers that I invent nothing, simply giving an account of what I have seen and heard: but this is not why the Abbot suggested it, as shall be seen later in this text. The third great irony, the third prong of Satan’s pitchfork, is that in the course of my search for Sycorax I have myself become a witness to her story and she has become a terrible part of mine.

A Journey to the Territory of the Fiend in Slatterdale

HE ONLY PERSON in Byland Abbey who had had even indirect dealings with Sukie Trothers (née Dobson) was Brother Denys, but I hesitated to approach him, though he would have been a logical starting point for my investigations. He was an educated man and had been held high in esteem by the previous abbot, to the extent of being an obedientiary entrusted with care of the library, but he had been relieved of this post soon after the succession of Abbot Fabian twenty years ago. At that time the mortal sin of sodomy was rife in the abbey. As well as by precept and objurgation, Abbot Fabian had excised the vice by transferring or expelling some monks, eclipsing the influence of others.

Far from resenting his demotion, Brother Denys had remained one of the few monks who spoke admiringly and gratefully of Abbot Fabian, dating his own salvation from that purge. It was not therefore from diplomatic delicacy, or any suspicion that he might resent me as the eventual usurper of his librarianship, that I hesitated to approach him. The problem was that in recent years he had seen necessary to do penance by delineating his old offences in ignominious detail, not only to God in the confessional but to any who could find no means to avoid being an audience. In any case I already knew – from past exposure to his self-castigating reminiscences – that a certain Brother Simon (transferred by Abbot Fabian to Rievaulx) had been a more immediate witness to the events known to Denys and would surely be less tedious and embarrassing to interview. I decided to keep Brother Denys in reserve and commence my investigations at the birthplace of Sukie Dobson in Slatterdale.

My throat was dry with trepidation as I peered out through the abbey gates that April morning. In Byland we are even less reclusive than most Cistercian communities: monks frequently leave the premises, usually travelling to the sheep granges and other properties that the abbey has purchased or been bequeathed since its foundation. Occasionally my duties as librarian had provided scope for contact with other abbeys, but I had always contrived to avoid these opportunities. My sense of my own vulnerability to Satan, fully justified by the lamentable history of my youth, had ensured that I had neither budged from holy ground nor clapped eyes on a woman for sixteen years.

Riding a couple of plump white stots we took the north road from the abbey: a wagon track that skirted Sawton Moor to Helmsley Castle, where we crossed the River Rye and met the main thoroughfare through the Riding to Pickering and Scarborough. Northwards, on our left, moorland rose purple and yellow towards the Cleveland Hills, while to the south, once we had passed beyond the range of the Hambletons, there was the great plain of the Derwent stretching towards York.

I came myself from the Vale of York and had little notion of the district into which I was heading, other than that the route was one infested by outlaws as well as by the snares of the Fiend. The Abbot had given me the services of a sturdy young lay brother, John, to guide and protect me. But it was not merely the intrepid face of the lad and his weighty bludgeon that eased my anxiety. My physical and spiritual insecurity was effortlessly offset by the crisp spring day, the skylarks singing and a juvenile sense of release that was giving the commencement of my penance the semblance of a holiday.

The bulk of the day’s journey was the fifteen miles of main road between Helmsley and Pickering castles. The curiosity of the children in the villages through which we passed made me think that there is not normally a lot of traffic on that road. Once we were met by a wagoner bringing baskets of salted lampreys and live lobsters for our abbey and that of Rievaulx. Once we passed a load of woollen bales heading for Scarborough. We lunched at the roadside on the oatcakes and watered wine provided by the abbey kitchens.

I was favourably surprised by the cheerful and well-nourished appearance of such people as we saw until we came to Pickering, the aspect of whose denizens was more compatible with my notion of Satan’s kingdom. The streets were infested with hard-faced thugs of both sexes and all ages. Ancient paupers brandished stumps of hands removed by leprosy or the law. Their rags revealed their sagging teats or testicles and their cold old thighs of speckled bone. Shaggy children played football with a shaggy bundle that looked like the head of a child. There were trollops with shameless eyes and a great gruff chorus of insane mirth came from an ale house in the middle of a workday afternoon.

The boldness of my early morning humour was dashed, and I found it comforting to reach the order and piety of Kirkholt Grange, one of many sheep farms owned by our abbey in the Riding. Here, five miles from Nithermoor and the mouth of Slatterdale, it had been arranged for me to spend the night.

Prior Jacobus flattered me with a cordial welcome such as one might give a visiting dignitary and at refection questioned me diligently about my purpose in Slatterdale. He also spoke at length of the horrors visited on the region by Sycorax during her supremacy and of the destruction of the force at last sent out against her: stories that were common throughout the Riding and which I shall recount later.

‘Slatterdale still belongs to the Fiend Sycorax,’ he said. ‘It is entirely her kingdom and Satan’s. There is no priest beyond Nithermoor and if any Christian souls still abide there they do so at their peril.’

It was clear that my task would involve more than one trip to the region of Slatterdale – which would be preferable to spending an extended period outside my abbey – and I had decided to proceed as far as possible chronologically, beginning by gathering information about the family and youth of Sukie Trothers. Prior Jacobus was unable to give me any information on this but advised me to journey to Nithermoor and make enquiries there. He also proposed that I take a lay brother with me: not John, who was off back to Byland in the morning, but Colin, a native of Slatterdale, who would be useful both as a guide and a translator of the local dialect which the Prior declared unintelligible.

I was given lodging in a guest room rather than the dormitory. This permitted a sense of my importance – or at least the importance of my mission – to mingle agreeably with the permissible alleviation of the monastic rule and the exhilaration of travel which had survived both the unpleasantness of Pickering and the reiteration of the terrible legend of Sycorax. It was only when I had settled seriously to prayer that I was able to become sufficiently sober and humble to remember my shame and penitent’s purpose, abjuring both vainglory and the cheating comeliness to be found here and there in Satan’s realm. In particular I chided myself and prayed God’s mercy because of the feral eyes of a Pickering wench that had looked back at me over her shoulder. That done, I went to bed and sank at once into a sweet and dreamless sleep such as was rarely vouchsafed me in the abbey.

Colin had no horse but led my stot by the bridle or walked beside me. Neither did he have a cudgel, and he was a skinny little fellow who looked as if he would be able to offer me very little protection against robbers and other menaces. He did, though, beguile our climb into the hills with chatter that I found informative:

‘I aren’t a lay brother, rightly speaking, Feyther, just a shepherd what works for bread and bed. And I aren’t a Slatterdale lad, I aren’t one o’ yon sheep-shaggers. I’m from Nithermoor, sithee. But these times Nithermoor’s full o’ yon Slatterdale lot what run from t’witch while half proper Nithermoor folk’ve buggered off. Aye, there’s nowt in t’dale now, nobody at Beck Gap, not a shepherd. There’s not a sheep in Slatterdale beyond t’Nithermoor pastures. It don’t bother me, though, coming back up Nithermoor, for I were nobbut a bairn when there were all that flapdoodle wi’ t’witch. I’ve cousins up yonder yet, but most of us family buggered off along wi’ t’others.’

Nithermoor crouched at the junction of Slatterdale Beck and Picker ing Beck, where the track came out of Slatterdale to join the ancient ridgeway that ran northwards over a moorland wilderness to Whitby. It was an untidy village of mud and wattle dwellings, swarming with pigs and scabby dogs. The clothes of the humans seemed made of dung and their skins were grey as drudgery. It was clear that to people of Nithermoor Pickering would represent a glittering metropolis full of savants and modish sophisticates.

Colin pointed at a hovel that looked no more inviting than the others, though a garland on a stake outside proclaimed an ale house. ‘The grub there’s famous grand and what’s more it run by us cousin, so thoo’s sure to be safe and welcome.’

Though I had taken only wine sops for breakfast I proposed that we push on into Slatterdale, approximately four miles to the hamlet of Beck Gap where Sukie Trothers was born and grew up. I felt it was logically where I should begin my investigations, even if there was nothing left to see there. I also had an impulse to invade the territory of Sycorax while my spirits were high and the sky bright. And a large part of my motive was to stay in the open air for the time being, rather than commit myself to the stinking interior of a Nithermoor hovel.

I regretted my decision as we climbed alongside the beck, between the moors and forest. For Slatterdale was an eery and discomfiting spot even then, fifteen years after the catastrophe. Across the beck in the royal forest were many acres of black and palsied trees, evidence of the great fire that had accompanied the other horrors. A sheet of cloud like grey metal had covered the sun as we came into the dale. The track was strangled with gorse and bramble, so that it was clear that nobody ever passed that way: there were not even sheep tracks in the swart tangle of the moorland slopes. A hawk hung in the sky and other birds were silent.