The False Virgin Read Online Free PDF Page A

imagine . . .’
    ‘She’s dead, little brother.’
    ‘Who did this to her, Wulfred?’ Cynwulf’s voice was broken by dry sobs. ‘Who would want to kill such a wonderful creature?’
    ‘I don’t know who did it, but I do know who will be blamed for it. As soon as her body’s discovered, all of Badanoth’s guards will be questioned. The one who challenged
us must have recognised us. In that lightning flash he saw our faces as clearly as if it was noon, and he saw in which direction we were headed. They’ll think this is our revenge for the
insults Badanoth heaped on our father.’
    ‘Then we have to get out of here,’ Cynwulf said frantically. ‘We can’t go home; that’s the first place his men’ll come searching. We have to get far away.
Come on!’
    But his brother pulled him back. ‘If Badanoth thinks we killed his daughter he won’t just seek our deaths, he’ll start a blood feud between our kin that’ll last for
generations. We won’t need the Vikings to destroy us, we’ll do the job ourselves. No, we have to make them blame someone else . . . The Vikings! Badanoth constantly fears a raid, and
where else would they make for but a church?’
    ‘Badanoth isn’t stupid. He knows they’d never sail in a wind like this,’ Cynwulf protested.
    ‘So . . . they could have been blown off course, driven to take shelter in the bay, and with the night so dark and windy they’d easily get past the guards,’ Wulfred said,
trying to sound more certain of this than he felt.
    A spasm of grief suddenly overwhelmed Cynwulf again and he crumpled against his brother. ‘But she’s lying in there – dead. My Beornwyn is dead!’
    ‘Yes,’ Wulfred said grimly, ‘and by dawn she must be more than a stabbed corpse.’
    ‘What . . . what do you mean?’
    Wulfred felt the trembling grip of his brother’s fingers on his arm and knew that Cynwulf was not going to be able to face what must be done.
    ‘Stay here on guard and swear to me, little brother, that whatever happens you will not set foot inside the church again tonight.’
    Another flash of lightning cleaved the darkness and as the thunder answered it, the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. The storm had broken at last.
    The young priest did not make his way to the church until mid-afternoon. The downpour had beaten the vegetables and fruit in his little patch into the mud, and now that the sun
was shining hot and strong again, he’d spent several hours salvaging what he could and laying them out to dry before they rotted in the mud. The daily offices he’d said in haste and
with a good deal of ill humour as he worked. But only when he’d saved as many of his crops as he could did he finally toil up to the church to check that the wind had not wreaked more damage
than usual there.
    He knew something was wrong when he saw the door half hanging from its hinges, though he tried to convince himself that the wind must have battered it open. But he smelled the stench of blood
and shit before he even set foot inside.
    He had taken no more than a pace into the church before his legs buckled and he sank to his knees. He didn’t even have the strength to crawl outside before he vomited. It was a long time
before he could steel himself to look again. A severed head with long brown hair was impaled on the top of the wooden cross on the altar. The limbs had been hacked from the corpse and hung at each
corner of the church – north, south, east and west. The feet and hands had been cut off and dangled like bizarre fruit from the windows. Blood had dripped onto the sandy-coloured stones
below.
    Beornwyn’s flayed skin lay draped over the stone altar like an altar cloth and a buzzing cloud of flies crawled over the skinned torso, which had been dumped beneath the smashed image of
St Oswald. Even as the priest stared in horror, a single blue butterfly fluttered drunkenly in through the open door and alighted on the mutilated corpse among the flies.