Free Relics by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

choked. An implacable weight was pinning me against stones, crushing my breast, and I knew that I was dying. Sadness rushed into me, became the river. I was drowning in regret. The weight vanished and I floated in blackness. As my life guttered out, my last, absurd, thought was of an old, one-eyed sheepdog I had loved as a child, barking and barking, begging me to play.

Chapter Five

    I

    t was dark and cold, and a dog barked in my ear. I floated, caressed by the cold which tugged at my fingertips and my feet. I was lying on my back, and found I could see stars through the branches of a tree. Then I understood. I was floating in the river, held somehow against the current. I felt about carefully, and found that my rolled habit had snagged on some part of a dead tree. Then I panicked, struggled, and almost drowned a second time. It was agony to twist myself around and grope with frozen hands until I had a firm hold on the branch and could pull myself close enough to it to free the cloth. Spiderwebs of pain shot across my chest, and the memory of the horse's terrible weight pinning me down came to me in a flash.

    I do not remember how I dragged myself up the bank. Much later I awoke in a nest of dry grass and rushes. The dog was barking again, very loud, and I opened my eyes to find a wet snout a hand's breadth from my face.

    'Hello, dog,' I said, and fell back into darkness. It was night again, or late evening. I sat up, and the pain rippled over my chest again, not nearly so bad this time. My clothes had dried, at least the front of them, so I must have slept through a sunny day. There was no dog to be seen, and I wondered if I had dreamed him. I got up and staggered away from the water. I was in flat country, that much I could tell in the fading light. I was in a swale of bulrushes that lay in a crook of the river, but all around me stretched fields, and I could see the dim shapes of cattle standing about, hear the soft scrunch of chewed cud. Away upstream a darker mass flecked with faint lights hunkered across the skyline. I was in the water-meadows.

    I shook my head, trying to clear it. Pain clanged inside my skull and I began to understand. Dead to the world, I had floated right through the city and out the other side. How far -two miles? Four? Why had I not drowned? Now I remembered, in tiny, tattered rags of memory, a sensation of weightlessness, of flying, water dragging through my fingers. Some instinct had kept me on my back. Then I remembered my burden, and felt for the golden hand. It was still bound to me, but it had slipped, knocked in the fight, I supposed, and was now hanging against the small of my back. So there was part of the answer: St Euphemia's hand had been my ballast, my keel, keeping me face-up and arse-down. I rebound it tightly to my chest, but could not bring myself to look at the thing and recoiled from the oily coldness of the metal. I felt a sudden and overwhelming urge to tear it from me and throw it far out into the river, but Will's voice came back to me. 'It's all you have, Patch,' he'd said as he wiped the blood from the gold.
    Sound advice as ever, dear friend, I thought. And then I remembered: Will was dead, lying in a ditch away on the other side of the city. A new pain flared in my breast, as if some part of my vitals had been torn away as I slept: the raw, bloody void was filling with grief and with an awful, bitter guilt. No more beer or whores for Will, no more laughter or warmth. He would never see Flanders now, and I would not see his crooked smile again in this world. I fell forward into the wet grass and his face swam before my mind's eye, slack and lifeless as it had been the instant after Sir Hugh's flail had caught him. I had killed Will as surely as if my hand had struck the blow: Death had followed me from the cathedral. And Sir Hugh himself? I seemed to recall the horse rolling over him as we went into the river. Dead as well, I supposed, the madman undone by his own