Читать книгу The Price of Blood - Patricia Bracewell - Страница 10

Shrove Tuesday, March 1006

Calne, Wiltshire

Æthelred knelt, his head clutched in his hands, bowed beneath the weight of his crown and his sins. Somewhere above, the vesper bells rang to mark the call to evening prayer, and at the very moment of their tolling he felt his limbs tremble, convulsed by a force beyond his control.

The familiar, hated lethargy settled over him, and though he strove to keep his head down and his eyes shut, a will far stronger than his own pulled his gaze upwards. The air before him thickened and turned as black and rippling as the windswept surface of a mere. Pain gnawed at his chest, and he shivered with cold and apprehension as the world around him vanished. Sounds, too, faded to nothing and he knew only the cold, the pain, and the flickering darkness before him that stretched and grew into the shape of a man.

Or what had been a man once. Wounds gaped like a dozen mouths at throat and breast, gore streaked the shredded garments crimson, and the menacing face wore Death’s gruesome pallor. His murdered brother’s shade drew towards him, an exhalation from the gates of heaven or the mouth of hell – he could not say which. Not a word passed its lips, but he sensed a malevolence that flowed from the dead to the living, and he shrank back in fear and loathing.

Yet he could not look away. For long moments the vision held him in thrall until, as it began to fade, he became aware of another figure – of a shadow behind the shadow. Dark, indistinct, shrouded in gloom, it hovered briefly in the thickened air and then, like the other, it was gone.

Released from the spell, he could hear once again the pealing of the vesper bells and the murmur of voices at prayer, could smell the honeyed scent of candles and, beneath it, the rank stench of his own sweat. The golden head dropped once more into cupped hands, but now it was heavy with fear and tormented by a terrible foreboding.