Company of Liars Read Online Free PDF Page B

realized that Zophiel had not even claimed this to be a mermaid. ‘One of the merpeople,’ was all he'd said. Zophiel was clever all right, sharp as a flayer's knife.
    The sun never seemed to rise at all in those dark days; it was as if we were living in some eternal twilight pressed down under the weight of the thick grey clouds and the heavy smoke of a thousand smouldering fires. Inside Zophiel's tent it was even darker, but cold, cloyingly cold. Not a place you'd want to linger in even to escape the rain. The tent was narrow, a kind of lean-to erected at the back of his wagon, room enough for three or four people to crowd in at a time. A viscous yellow light pooled out from a lantern illuminating the small cage balanced on the back of the wagon. The bars on the cage were not there to keep the creature in, it was in no state to run away, but to stop the customers breaking pieces off and carrying them away as they do from the relics at holy shrines. It's true that a mermaid is no saint, but neither is she of this world, so who knows what a fragment of mermaid might cure? The stench alone was enough to exorcize the most stubborn of demons.
    The creature lay on its back in the cage on a nest of sea-smoothed pebbles, shells, dead crabs, sea urchins, starfish and strands of dried seaweed. The smell of the seashore, of brine and fish, was powerful enough to convince anyone that this creature had its origins in the sea; powerful enough too to mask the fragrance of myrrh, incense, musk and aloes that lurked beneath it, unless you knew the smell of old.
    Few in these times would have recognized that heady, bitter fragrance. It was a perfume I hadn't smelt for many years, but once you have smelt it, you never forget it. Afterall these years it still has the power to make the stomach tighten and tears well up in long-dry eyes. It is the smell of the embalmed corpses of knights returned from Acre. Returning as they swore they would, but not at the head of a retinue laden with treasure and pardoned of all past and future sins. No, these returned home in caskets, escorted by ghost-eyed brothers and emaciated servants, to be buried too young in the cold crypts beneath their families' crests. Myrrh does not come cheap. It is the rare perfume of a delicate craft. We learned many things from the Saracens, not least how to preserve our slaughtered dead. Had Zophiel acquired the art, or had he bought the creature from another? Whichever it was, someone had paid a pretty penny for her.
    The mermaid, if maid it was, was no bigger than an infant. Its face was wizened, shrunken in on itself so that the eyes were mere slits, but slanted upwards at the corners. The head was covered with a fine straw-coloured fluff that stood up straight from the skin or perhaps the skin had shrunk away from the hair. Eyebrows and lashes were startlingly blonde against the tanned flesh, though it was hard to tell whether this was its natural colour or some artifice of the preservation of the body. The creature's chest was as smooth and sexless as a child's. The arms were human enough. One tiny fist grasped a hand-mirror of polished silver; the other was clenched around a doll carved from whalebone. The doll was in the form of a mermaid, the kind you might see among the grotesques on a church, with swollen hips, pendulous breasts and a long serpent's tail.
    But what was below the waist of this little creature? Now that's what we'd really come to see. It did not have legs, certainly. Instead there was a single long piece of flesh that tapered down from the waist to two curious projections atthe end, resembling the hind flippers of a seal. Like the rest of the body, the tail, if tail it could be called, was brown and wrinkled, but naked, devoid of either scales or fur.
    ‘That's no mermaid,’ sneered the man standing near me. ‘That's a…’ He trailed off, at a loss to find any name for the creature. He was sweating onions and the stench of his breath threatened