The Farrier's Blight Ledger

• Chapter 1: The Foal of Blackmire
• Chapter 2: Split Hooves and Bitter Hay
• Chapter 3: Signs in the Marrow
• Chapter 4: The Miller’s Grey Mare
• Chapter 5: Salt and Vinegar Dressings
• Chapter 6: Murrain in the Low Pastures
• Chapter 7: A Deposition Taken at Oakhaven
• Chapter 8: Bleeding the Oxen
• Chapter 9: The Milk Turned Grey
• Chapter 10: The Bailiff’s First Summons
• Chapter 11: The Trembling of the Herd
• Chapter 12: A Letter to Brother Anselm
• Chapter 13: The Lord’s Redoubt
• Chapter 14: Ash in the Wellspring
• Chapter 15: The Swineherd’s Hands
• Chapter 16: Inquisitorial Interrogation of the Smith
• Chapter 17: Cautery and Quicklime
• Chapter 18: The Burning at Low Gallow
• Chapter 19: An Edict of Pure Iron
• Chapter 20: The Fever in the Cradle
• Chapter 21: The Lord’s Apothecary
• Chapter 22: Rot in the Great Stables
• Chapter 23: Testimony Under the Rope
• Chapter 24: The Sulfur Trench
• Chapter 25: A Ledger Bound in Hide
• Chapter 26: The Silence of the Vale

A horse is an honest creature because it lacks the wit to lie about its belly. When a man is sick, he will swear on the bones of his grandfather that he is merely tired, or that the ale was sour, or that the parish priest looked at him sideways. A horse simply stops eating, drops its ears, and lets the world know it intends to die.

My name is Tobias Finch. I am a farrier by trade, though in our valley, where a physician will not tread unless the road is paved with silver groats, I am called horse-leech, cow-doctor, and whatever else a desperate husbandman mutters when his draft team begins to cough up yellow foam. I keep this ledger not because I have a fondness for the scratch of ink on vellum, but because iron rusts, cattle rot, and the bailiff always demands his tallies at the Michaelmas audit. If an ox drops dead in the ditch, someone must account for the hide, and if the hide is full of holes, the lord wants to know who cheated the tanner.

The trouble began in the third week of April, during the lambing moon, though there was precious little moonlight to be had through the fog that sat over the bottomlands like cold grease on a kettle of broth. Blackmire lies three miles south of the high bridge, tucked into that miserable fold of ground where the alder trees always have moss growing on their south side and the ditches smell of sour cabbage. It belongs to old Hob, a tenant whose family has farmed the same six strips of stony clay since the third King Edward’s time, and who has never once paid his rent without a week of weeping.

Hob’s boy came pounding on the smithy door before the dawn had even turned the sky to the color of a wet slate. He did not use the knocker, which is an old iron stirrup I hung by the lintel, but hammered on the oak with a flint stone until my mastiff, Brisk, began to howl from the wood-shed. When I pulled the latch, the boy nearly fell into the cold hearth. His boots were wrapped in greasy sackcloth, soaked through with the peat-water of the marsh, and his teeth were clattering together like dry walnuts in a leather bag.

"The mare’s dropped," he gasped, his breath smelling of wild leeks and old curd. "The roan mare. She’s cast a colt, Master Tobias, but the thing ain't right. Father says you’ve to bring the draw-knife and the sweet oil, and you’ve to come swift before the sun gets up."

"If she’s dropped it, the work is done," I told him, reaching for my apron of heavy ox-hide, which was stiff with dried tallow and old hoof-parings. "Either it breathes or it goes into the ditch. A draw-knife won't put the breath back into cold lungs, boy."

"It breathes," the lad said, looking over his shoulder toward the road as if he expected the fog to sprout claws and take him by the neck. "That’s the trouble of it. It breathes, but it looks like a turnip that’s spent two winters under the dung-heap."

I took my leather wallet—the one with the small rasp, the horn of goose-grease, the bleeding fleams, and three yards of clean linen tape—and set off down the track behind him. The valley of the Ouseburn is never a cheerful place in the spring thaw, but that morning the air had an uncommon weight to it. Usually, when the blackthorn blossoms, the hedges smell of bitter honey and damp earth; that morning, the mist carried a faint, sweetish reek, like the bottom of an empty beer-cask that has stood too long in the sun.

When we reached Blackmire, the sheep were standing along the dry-stone wall, huddled into a gray knot despite the absence of any wind. Sheep are foolish beasts at the best of times—they will walk into a lime-pit if the lead ewe thinks there is a thistle at the bottom—but these were not grazing. They were staring down into the yard with their pale, horizontal eyes, all sixty of them, silent as cemetery posts.

Hob was standing outside the low-roofed hovel he called his stable, holding a pitchfork with both hands as though he were waiting for the Scots to come over the hill. He is a small man, dried out by smoke and sour beer until his skin looks like the rind of an old ham, but his hands were shaking so hard the iron tines of the fork clinked against the stones of the threshold.

"Did you bring the fire?" he demanded before I had cleared the muck-heap.

"I brought what I usually bring to a foaling," I replied, setting my wallet on the water-trough. "What would I do with fire in a thatch-roofed barn, you old fool? Set your straw alight?"

"It needs burning," Hob whispered. He did not look at me; his eyes were fixed on the gap in the doorway, where a single tallow candle was guttering in an old horn lantern. "The priest is down at the abbey with the belly-ache, and the curate won't cross the ditch after dark. You look at it, Tobias. You tell me if that came out of a Christian mare."

The roan mare was an old beast, fifteen hands high, with the broad chest of a Flemish wagoner and hooves like dinner plates. Hob had bought her cheap from a carter who broke an axle near High Tor three summers back. She had dropped four healthy foals in her time, strong-legged things that went to the plow before they were three. She was lying on her side in the short straw, her belly still heaving with the hard after-labor, her coat dark and slick with sweat.

She did not turn her head when I stepped into the stall, which was bad. A good mare will nick or try to nip your sleeve when she is fresh from the drop, out of pride or temper. This one merely groaned, a dry, rasping sound from the back of her palate, and let her tongue slip between her yellow teeth into the dirt.

The foal lay by her flank, half-covered by a piece of greasy wool sacking.

I knelt in the litter, setting my lantern on an upturned firkin. The first thing that struck me was not the shape of the creature, but the heat. A newborn foal is warm, certainly, fresh from the dam’s belly, but this small carcass was throwing off a dry, baking heat like a baker’s oven three hours after the embers have been drawn. When I laid my palm against its flank, the hide felt thin and papery, without that thick, greasy coat of foal-fuzz that keeps the spring chill out of a youngling’s blood.

"Take the cloth off," Hob muttered from the door. He would not step past the lintel, though the damp was getting into his knees.

I pulled the sacking away. It was a colt, dark bay by the look of the sparse hair on its croup, but its head was entirely devoid of skin. Where the soft muzzle and the nostrils should have been, there was only a hard, greyish plate, like the shell of a pond-turtle or the horn that grows over an old seam in an anvil. The nostrils were not round holes, but two narrow slits set high between the eyes, wheezing with a whistling, thin sound every time the tiny ribs contracted.

"Is it a monster?" Hob asked. His voice was cracked with the peat-smoke. "The Miller says a monster in the spring means the King will die or the rye will turn black."

"The Miller is an idiot who thinks the moon is made of lard because it’s round," I said, though my fingers were none too steady as I lifted the foal’s upper lip.

There were no teeth, nor even the red pads where the milk-teeth should be forming under the gums. The whole jaw was lined with a row of small, yellow points, hard as flint and sharp enough to score my thumbnail when I pressed against them. They were not horse-teeth; they looked more like the spikes on the head of an eel, curved backward toward the throat.

The eyes, however, were what made me take my hand back. They were wide open, perfectly clear, and had no dark pupils at all. They were the color of clear honey when it is held up to a tallow dip, with little red threads running through the jelly like hair dropped into a vat of varnish. As the lantern flickered, the two yellow globes turned toward the light, not with the dull, wandering stare of a beast that has not yet learned to see, but with a sharp, immediate twitch.

The little creature tried to rise. It did not have the long, clumsy legs of a horse-foal, which are all joint and tendon; its forelegs were short, thick, and bent inward at the knee, like the roots of an ash tree that have grown against a rock. The hooves were not black or yellow horn, but were split down the middle from the coronet to the toe, soft and white as tallow, leaking a clear, yellowish fluid that smelled of brass-filings.

"The mare won't lick it," Hob said. "She turned round once, took one smell of the rump, and kicked the side-board out of the stall. She knows it ain't hers."

"She knows it’s dead," I said, though the thing was still whistling through its horn-snout.

"It ain't dead," Hob spat. "It’s looking right at your boots."

I drew my small fleam from the wallet—the one with the two-inch horn handle and the broad leaf-blade I use for opening the neck-vein of a bullock. It is a clean tool, ground every Saturday on the oil-stone. I did not want to waste an iron ball or a pint of elder-bark drench on a creature that would never carry a pack or draw a furrow. In the low country, when a calf is born with two heads or an extra leg behind the shoulder, we knock it on the poll with the broad end of the wood-axe and throw it down the dry well behind the chapel. It is the only sensible course; an unnatural beast brings nothing but bad dreams to the women and strange birds to the thatch.

As I set my thumb to the colt’s neck to find the great vessel under the gullet, the skin did not yield like the hide of a beast. It was tough, like a salt-cured pig’s ear, and the flesh beneath had no fat in it, only hard, stringy muscle that felt cold despite the furnace-heat coming off the ribs.

I drove the blade in behind the jaw.

A horse’s blood is thick, dark red, and smells of grass and sweet sweat. It comes out in great, heavy pulses that will fill a four-quart piggin before you can recite the Pater. What came out of this foal’s neck was neither red nor thick. It was thin as whey, of a pale, brownish-grey color, like the water that runs off a dung-cart after a three-day rain, and it did not spurt; it seeped out sluggishly, clotting almost instantly upon the straw in small, dry lumps that looked like parched peas.

The colt did not thrash. It simply let its head drop into the bedding, gave one long, dry hiss through its snout, and went limp. The yellow eyes did not cloud over as a dead beast’s eyes usually do; they remained clear, bright, and dry as two amber beads on a lady’s rosary.

"Get your spade," I told Hob, wiping the blade of my fleam against the leather of my boot. The steel had a dull, tarnished look where the grey juice had touched it, like a silver penny that has lain in a privy-vault.

"I ain't burying that in the garden," the old man said, crossing himself three times with a thumb that was black with earth. "The kale won't grow if that’s under the mold. I’ll take it to the ditch on the high road. Let the parish deal with it."

"If the bailiff finds a cast beast in the lord’s ditch, you’ll sit in the stocks till your shins turn blue, Hob. Dig a hole under the elder-bush behind the pig-pen. Go four feet down, past the blue clay, and throw two handfuls of quicklime over the belly before you turn the sod back."

"I have no lime," Hob whined. "The lime-burner hasn't come down from the hills since Martinmas. He says the road is too foul for the mules."

"Then use salt," I said, rising and feeling the stiffness in my back. I was fifty-two that spring, and fifty years of bending under the bellies of bad-tempered geldings leaves a man’s hips feeling like ungreased wooden axles. "Take the grey salt from the herring-barrel and cover the head with it. Do it before the flies find it."

I went back to the mare. She was still shivering, small tremors running along the loose skin of her neck and shoulders. Her udder was swollen, hard as an oak knot, and hot enough to blister a man’s knuckles. When I drew the teat down between my fingers, expecting the thick, yellow first-milk that a newborn must have if it is to clear its bowels, nothing came out but three drops of clear oil that smelled distinctly of marsh-gas.

"She’s dry," I said.

"She can't be dry," Hob said, coming closer now that the small thing on the straw was motionless. "She’s had five pecks of crushed oats and the best of the meadow hay every night since the frost broke. She’s the only team-beast I have left since the black ox took the staggers in February."

"You can feed her gold and honey, Hob, but she’s dry. Her blood has turned sour. Give her three quarts of warm ale with four ounces of ground fennel and a handful of soot from the chimney. If her belly doesn't soften by compline, bleed her two pints from the left side of the neck, no more. And keep her away from the common pasture."

"Why the common?" Hob asked, peering at me with his rheumy, suspicious eyes. "The grass is coming up sweet by the water-gate. Everyone’s turning their beasts out this week."

"Because I say so," I told him, packing my wallet and buckling the greasy straps. "And because if I see this grey water coming out of any more calves or colts between here and Oakhaven, the lord’s reeve will have us all in the court-leet for concealing a murrain."

I left him there by the stable door, with his spade in one hand and his pitchfork in the other, looking down at the small grey carcass like a man who has found a toad in his porridge.

The track back to my shop followed the curve of the Blackmire ditch, where the water usually runs clear over the gravel before it reaches the big peat-hags. That morning, I stopped by the wooden bridge to wash the grease from my hands. When I knelt on the timber and leaned over the water, I noticed that the minnows, which are usually as thick as midges in the shallows under the willow roots, were all floating on their sides against the reeds. They were not rotted; they were stiff, white, and looked as if they had been parboiled in an iron pot.

I dried my hands on my apron and took my ledger from my pocket—this small book of sheep-skin that I bought from the peddler out of York four years ago. I sat on the rail of the bridge, dipped my reed into the horn of soot-ink I carry at my belt, and wrote the first entry under the heading for the Year of Grace 1347:

Item: At Blackmire, Hob’s roan mare dropped a dead colt, unnatural in its skin and teeth, the head being like horn and the eyes yellow. The blood thin like birch-sap, greyish. The mare dry, with an inflammation of the vessel. Ordered salt for the pit and the soot-drench for the dam. Value of the foal: nil. Fee for the visit: two loaves of barley bread and a half-pound of lard, unpaid.

I looked at the ink as it dried on the pale parchment. It did not sink in properly; the damp in the air was so thick that the letters remained shiny and wet long after they should have turned dull.

Across the valley, from the direction of the church at High Tor, the bell began to toll. It was not the call for Prime, nor the slow, heavy stroke for an old man’s passing. It was the quick, irregular double-stroke they use when the timber-bridge at the mill is threatened by the flood, or when a wolf has been seen in the sheep-cotes.

I closed the book, thrust it back into my bosom next to the warmth of my wool doublet, and started up the hill toward the village. As I walked, the wind began to shift from the east, bringing with it the smell of the low moors—not the clean, cold scent of the heather and the limestone rocks, but something heavier, like the steam that rises from an old malt-kiln when the floor has turned to slime.

A farrier sees many things die. A horse will break its leg in a rabbit-hole and must be knocked on the head; an ox will gorge on clover till its paunch splits; a pig will eat hemlock and die swelling like a bladder. These are common matters, the small change of a countryman's life, no more to be wept over than the falling of the leaf in Martinmas.

Yet as I climbed the stony track toward the forge, my fingers kept twitching toward the pocket where my fleam lay. The metal of the small blade was still cold against my ribs, and through the thick ox-hide of my wallet, I could have sworn I still felt that dry, unnatural heat, like a live cinder wrapped in a dead man's shroud.

The clapper of the church bell ceased its clatter before I reached the crest of the forge hill, cut off mid-stroke as though the ringer had either lost his wind or been struck dumb by the sight from the belfry. The quiet that tumbled back into the valley was worse than the ringing. It was the sort of hush that falls over a hay-meadow right before an August hailstorm rips the roof-thatch into ribbons, thick and prickly with cold iron.

My shop sits at the four-ways where the track from the low marshes crosses the drove-road that runs north toward the market town of Cross-Keys. By rights, the smithy should have been roaring by mid-morning. I keep an apprentice, a hulking simpleton named Ned whose father traded him to me for two yearlings and an iron kettle back when the Scots burned the northern granges. Ned lacks the wit to tell a right shoe from a turned one without holding it up to his own heel first, but he can swing an eight-pound sledge until the timber handles split from his palms' sweat.

When I pushed through the wicker hurdle of the yard, the bellows were cold. The hearth was full of grey slag from the night before, dead as yesterday's mutton, and Ned was crouching behind the anvil on an overturned butter-firkin, gnawing his thumbnail down to the pink quick.

"You let the fire die," I said, unbuckling my wallet and tossing it onto the beechwood bench. It landed with a dull, leaden clatter against the row of shoeing-tongs. "The coal is two pence a basket from the carriers, Ned, and if it goes out, we waste three bundles of dry birch-twigs to wake it up again. Get to the treadle."

The boy did not move to the leather strap. He pointed a dirt-blackened finger toward the ox-stall at the back of the bay. "It ain't the coals, Master Tobias. It's the Bailiff’s carters. They come through two hours before Prime with the wool-wains from the high grange. They left Simon's bullock in the pound-stall and swore they’d have the hide off me if I took a hammer to his shoes."

I wiped my brow with my sleeve. The dampness in the air had followed me up from Blackmire, clinging to the wool of my doublet like greasy lard. "Why would a carter bring a beast to a farrier and tell him not to shoe it?"

"Look at the foot," Ned whimpered, his eyes white and wide as peeled plovers' eggs. "Look at the hoof, Master. It ain't right. It smells like the ditch behind the butcher's yard after three days of south wind."

I took a candle-end from the shelf over the slack-tub, blew the ash off the wick, and lit it from the small ember I keep buried in the lime-pot. The carter’s ox was a massive, dun-colored creature, six years old, bred for the heavy timber-drags that haul oak down from the High Tor woods. Usually, an ox in a strange stall will lower its horns and snort into the hay, daring any man with an iron tool to step within reach of its dewlap. This brute stood braced on three legs, its great horned skull hanging so low that its muzzle was pressed into the dry bedding. Its breath did not mist in the chill shop; it came out in faint, whistling puffs that barely stirred the chaff.

I set the candle on the salt-box and walked down its flank, keeping my shoulder pressed to the ribs so the brute could not cow-kick me into the water-butt. Its coat had a greasy, bristling feel, like a hog that has been scalded with water that was not hot enough to slip the bristles. When I slid my palm down the off-foreleg, the beast gave a dry, clacking groan from deep within its belly, but it did not try to pull away.

The hoof was ruined.

A bullock’s shoe is a simple thing—two half-moons of broad iron, nailed to the two claws of the cleft hoof so the soft horn does not split on the flinty roads. I had shod this very ox three weeks before Easter with good Spanish iron from the merchant at Hull. The shoes were still there, bright and clean enough where the road-metal had polished the caulks, but the horn itself had turned completely to mush.

It had not worn away. It had divided. The wall of the hoof, which should be as tough and slick as a seasoned ash bow, was cracked from the hair-line of the coronet right down to the ground-face, not with a straight sand-crack, but in three jagged splits that exposed the quick. From these fissures ran a thick, curdled slime, the color of spoiled mustard, that dried as it struck the air into little yellow flakes.

I took my paring knife from my leather pocket and touched the heel-bulb. The horn was so soft that the blade sank into it three inches without any pressure from my wrist, as easily as if I were cutting through a winter cheese. There was no resistance from the frog, no hard core of horn—only a spongy, greyish mass that hissed softly as the iron entered it, venting an odor that made my gorge rise into the back of my mouth. It did not smell of thrush, which is foul enough and smells of rotted swamp-grass and old sheep-dung; this had the sour, alkaline stench of lime-wash mixed with old mutton-tallow.

"The nail-holes are gone," Ned whispered, creeping up behind my shoulder and peering over my back like an owl from a barn-loft. "The iron is just hanging by the clinch-points. I touched it with the pincer, and the whole half-shoe came away with a piece of the horn stuck to it like bread-crust."

"Did they say where they found the grass?" I asked, withdrawing the knife and wiping it immediately on a tuft of dry moss. The iron was spotted with dark, pitting marks, as though the yellow slime were vitriol from an alchemist’s vial.

"They didn't find grass," said Ned. "There ain't no grass up on the high road. They was feeding the teams out of the tithe-barn at High Tor. Hay from the second cut last Lammas. The Bailiff had three ricks opened on Monday to make room for the new shearings."

I stood straight, my spine cracking with a noise like a dry elder-twig. My knees were stiff from the damp, and my mind was turning over the strange matter of Hob’s foal. A foal born without skin upon its head was an accident of nature—the work of an evil moon, or perhaps the dam had drunk from a pool where a spotted toad had died. But a six-year-old draft-ox does not turn its hooves to turnip-rind in the space of a four-mile haul unless something has poisoned the humors from the inside out.

"Where are the carters now?"

"Over at the Harrow and Comb," Ned said, pointing with his greasy chin toward the village street. "Drinking small ale and cursing the steward. They say their hands are burning them."

"Their hands?"

"Aye. Simon was holding the lead-rope by the nose-ring, and he had his thumbs wrapped in the hemp. He said the rope was wet with the ox's drool, and now his thumbs have gone the color of a turnip that's caught the frost. He’s got them in a pot of cold grease by the ale-bench."

I did not wait to bank the forge. I took my leather-bound ledger, my ink-horn, and a pair of long-handled pincers from the forge wall and walked out into the road.

The village of Oakhaven is nothing more than thirty wattle-and-daub cottages clinging to the side of the limestone ridge like swallows' nests under an eave. At the bottom runs the beck, which turns the Miller's wheel before it flattens out into the great peat-bogs of the lower valley; at the top stands the bailiff's hall, built of squared ashlar from the old Roman quarry, with a slate roof that looks down upon the thatch like an eagle on a flock of starlings.

Usually, at this hour, the women are at the washing-stones by the water-gate, their wooden paddles clacking against the homespun linen while the geese hiss and quarrel in the mud. Today, there were no women at the brook. The wooden paddles lay abandoned on the flat stones, half in the water, and three grey geese were standing on the bank, their necks stretched out flat against the mud, their beaks agape as though they had swallowed dry bone.

I turned into the low door of the Harrow and Comb. It is a dark, foul-smelling hovel kept by an old widow named Margery, who brews beer so thick and muddy you could lay an iron nail upon the froth without it sinking. The tap-room was full of men, but there was no shouting, no rattling of dice on the trestle-tables, and no singing of carols.

Six men sat on the low benches by the cold peat-hearth. Two of them were the carters from the high grange, rough fellows in greasy leather jerkins with their wool hoods pulled low over their brows to keep the drafts from their ears. Simon, the elder carter, was sitting with his bare feet tucked into a basket of straw and his hands held out over an earthen crock.

"Tobias," he said as the iron latch rattled behind me. He did not lift his head; his voice had the flat, hollow sound of a man who has walked twenty miles through a salt-marsh without water. "Did you see my beast?"

"I saw him," I said, leaning against the door-post to keep clear of the bench. "His horn is dead. He won't draw another log between now and Michaelmas. If you try to put a shoe to that claw, the nail will drive into his marrow like a spade into soft loam."

"He was sound when we yoke him at High Tor," Simon said. He held up his right hand. The skin of his thumb and the first two fingers had turned a sickly, leaden grey, the exact shade of the foal's muzzle I had seen two hours before in Hob’s stable. It was not swollen; rather, the flesh had shrunk against the bone, leaving the nails standing out like the claws of a dead buzzard. Around the roots of the nails, a thin, yellow water was weeping into the greasy wool of his sleeve.

"What did you touch?" I asked, coming closer.

"Nothing but the hay-fork and the hemp," the man growled. "We opened the north rick at the grange by the Bailiff’s order. The Lord's men are coming down from the castle on Friday to count the stores, and the Bailiff wanted the old hay cleared out of the lower bays before the wagons came for the wool."

"Was the hay heated?"

"It was cold as well-water," said the other carter, a squinting lad named Peter whose father kept sheep near the limestone crags. "Cold and heavy. It didn't look like good meadow hay. It was dark, like it had been cut out of a ditch after the water went down, and it had a bitter taste to it. The horses wouldn't look at it. We had to mix it with four bushels of chaff and crushed beans before the oxen would take a mouthful."

"A bitter taste?" I looked at him sharply. "Did you put it to your tongue?"

"A man has to test the provender before he gives it to the lord’s cattle," the boy said defensively. "If it’s musty, they get the colic, and the reeve docks our pence at the quarter-day. It wasn't musty. It tasted of nothing at first, and then it hit the back of the palate like copper-water or the juice you squeeze out of a spurge-root. It made my spit run cold for an hour."

"And the ox?"

"He took two fork-fulls," Simon said, looking down at his grey fingers with a stupid, wondering expression. "He chewed it slow, like he had stones in his jaw. By the time we crossed the High Bridge, his nose was dripping that clear slime, and when we hit the flint-rise by the cross-roads, he started to limp on both forefeet at once. It wasn't no stone-bruise, Tobias. His whole hoof just come apart under him like wet parchment."

The tap-room was silent save for the dripping of ale from a cracked spigot into a wooden tub. Margery, the ale-wife, came out of her buttery with a wooden trencher of dry salt and a jug of elder-flower vinegar.

"Rub that on the flesh, Simon," she said, her voice shaking like a cobweb in a draft. "It’s what my grandmother used when the sheep took the black-liver back in King Edward’s father’s time. Salt draws the evil out through the hide."

"Do not touch the vinegar," I told him, stepping between the woman and the bench.

"Why not?" Margery snapped, her small eyes flashing in the gloom of the hovel. "You’re a farrier, Tobias Finch. You know iron and you know horse-shoes. You don't know the humors of men. My grandmother cured forty head of yearlings with salt and vinegar when the great murrain came over the sea."

"Your grandmother buried three husbands and five children in the churchyard behind the chancel, Margery," I said, without looking at her. "I looked at the foal at Blackmire this morning. Its blood was grey, and it had the same stink on its ribs that this man has on his fingers. If you put vinegar to that flesh, it will open the pores, and the rot will run up his forearm before the sun crosses the meridian. Keep the skin dry. If you have any ashes from the smithy—clean oak-ash that has been burned twice to white powder—dust it over the fingers and wrap them in clean linen. But keep the water away from it."

Simon looked from me to the vinegar jug, then slowly tucked his grey hand back into the filthy folds of his wool tunic. "Is it the murrain, Tobias?"

"I don't know what it is," I said honestly. A farrier who pretends he knows every sickness that walks the earth is a rogue who deserves to have his ears cropped by the bailiff. "The murrain comes with swellings in the flank and a hot tongue that turns as black as a shoeing-coal. This thing has no heat in it. It’s cold. It makes the horn rot while the beast is still on its legs, and it turns the spit to salt-water."

I turned on my heel and left the hovel, leaving them sitting in the grey light that crept through the oiled-linen windows. The street outside was completely deserted now. A stray pig—a lean, razor-backed sow belonging to the parish clerk—was rooting among the nettles beside the churchyard ditch. I stopped to watch it. Usually, a hog will eat anything from a dead dog to an old shoe-sole, grunting and tearing with its snout as though every mouthful were barley-meal.

This sow was not eating. She had found a pile of the carters' hay that had spilled from the tail-board of the wain as it turned into the village street. She was nosing it, turning the dark, stiff stalks over with the tip of her disc, her small red eyes blinking with an uncommon dullness.

I stepped across the ditch and kicked the hay away from her snout.

The grass was not meadow-hay. It was too coarse, the stems thick and tubular like the reeds that grow in the brackish pools where the river meets the salt-tide twelve miles to the east. But what caught my eye was the color. Hay that has been well-harvested under an open sky dries to the pale greenish-gold of honey-comb, smelling of summer and sweet clover; hay that has rotted in the rick turns black and wet, with white webs of mold running through the leaves that will choke a mule with the heaves.

This hay was neither green nor rotted. It was of a strange, dull lead-color, like the surface of an iron plate that has been rubbed with oil to keep the rust off. The heads of the grass were not the soft, feathery tassels of rye-grass or meadow-fescue; they were hard, black spikes, each grain swollen until it was twice the size of a barley-corn, curved like the claw of a kite and covered in a fine, greasy dust that left a dark smudge across the palm of my hand.

I pinched one of the swollen black grains between my thumbnail and forefinger. It was hard as horn, but when I pressed with all my weight, it cracked with a sharp, dry snap, like an empty nut-shell. The meat inside was not white flour; it was a grey, dry meal that smelled of rotten straw and marsh-gas.

Clavus, the monks call it when it grows on the rye after a wet autumn, though I had never seen it grow upon the meadow-grass that feeds the carters' teams. In the old books that the cellarer at the abbey used to show me when I went to bleed their mules, it is written that the horned grain comes from the dampness of the stars, and that if a woman eats bread made of it, her limbs will burn with the hidden fire until her feet drop off like dead boughs from an oak.

I took my ledger from my pocket, sat upon the mounting-block by the churchyard stile, and laid the small book across my leather knees. My fingers were cold, and the reed pen scratch-scratched against the rough sheep-skin with an angry, dry sound.

Item: At the forge, an ox of the Bailiff’s carriage, sound in wind and limb at dawn, now found with the horn of both fore-hooves divided and rotten to the quick. The horn soft like suet, smelling of lime. The carter Simon hath the skin of his thumb turned grey from the halter, weeping yellow moisture without heat.

Item: In the street, observed the hay dropped from the High Tor wain. The stalks grey, coarse like salt-rush. The seed-heads bearing the black horn (clavus), swollen and bitter. The parish sow refused the fodder, which is contrary to the nature of swine.

I looked up from the page. Down the lane, from the direction of the high stone bridge, came the sound of iron shoes clattering on the stones. It was not the slow, heavy thud of a farm-drudge, but the sharp, ringing trot of a well-bred hackney.

The rider was Master Gervase, the bailiff’s man. He was dressed in his fine blue wool coat with the pewter buttons that the Lord gave to the household servants at Christmas, his stirrup-leathers short after the manner of the southern horsemen, and his beaver hat tied under his chin with a silken tape. He looked neither to the right nor the left, his thin, sour face set like a plaster image in a wall-niche.

When he saw me sitting on the stile with my ledger on my knee, he drew rein so hard the grey gelding reared back on its hocks, its iron shoes striking sparks from the flint paving.

"Tobias Finch," he called out, his voice sharp as a butcher's cleaver. "Are you the farrier here?"

"I am," I said, not rising from the stone. A man who has shod three thousand horses does not jump to his feet for a bailiff’s servant, no matter how many pewter buttons he wears upon his belly. "Unless the trade has been given to the parish clerk since Prime."

"The Bailiff wants you at the Great Barn," Gervase said, leaning over the pommel of his saddle. His grey horse was trembling in the flanks, its neck dark with sweat, and I noticed that the animal kept lifting its near-hind foot and shaking it, as though a horse-fly were biting at the pastern. "He wants the fleams, the cautery irons, and every drop of pitch you have in the cellar."

"The pitch is for the boat-builders down at the creek," I answered. "I have only three gallons left, and that’s spoken for by the Miller for his wheel-cogs. What does the Bailiff want with cautery irons?"

"The sheep," said Gervase. He looked down the empty street, then leaned lower, his eyes shifting toward the churchyard wall as if he feared the dead might hear him through the turf. "The ewes in the High Tor fold. They’ve begun to slip their lambs, Tobias. Forty head since midnight. And the ones that are dropped alive have got no eyes."

"No eyes?"

"None," Gervase said, his hand twitching at the leather bridle. "Just two smooth patches of white horn where the sockets should be. The Lord is expected at the manor before the feast of Saint John, and if the flock is ruined, the Bailiff says he will hang every shepherd between here and the moss-edge. Bring your kit. Bring the great drawing-iron and the sulfur-pot."

"The sulfur is forty groats the barrel at Cross-Keys," I said, standing up and tucking my book into my bosom. "Who pays for the carriage?"

"The Lord pays for nothing," Gervase snapped, turning his horse with a sharp jerk of the curb-bit. "He takes his dues in wool and tallow. If the tallow is rotten, Tobias, he takes the skin of the tenants to make up the tally. Move your legs. The Bailiff does not like to smell cold hearths when he rides through the township."

He dug his rowels into the gelding’s sides. The beast sprang forward, but as it did, its near-hind foot gave way completely. The leg folded under the hock with a dry, muffled tock, like a dry hazel-rod snapping under an ox-cart, and the gelding stumbled onto its knees in the flinty mud.

Gervase cursed, hauling on the reins with both hands, kicking his boots clear of the stirrups as the horse scrambled back to its feet. The animal was shivering from ears to tail now, its eyes rolling until the yellow whites showed in the morning light. Where its shoe had struck the stone, there was no mark of clean iron—only a smear of grey, curdled horn, mashed flat against the flint like a piece of boiled turnip.

The beast had split its hoof from coronet to heel in the single stride it took from the churchyard stile.

Gervase stared at the foot, then looked down at his own leather boot, which was splashed with the thin, greyish ditch-water that ran from the horse’s fetlock. He did not say another word. He did not mount again. He took the reins in his hand, keeping his arm stretched out as far as the leather would reach, and began to lead the three-legged beast up the steep lane toward the stone hall, walking slow and wide, as if the ground itself were made of egg-shells that might crack beneath his soles.

I stood by the stile and watched them go. The sun had finally climbed above the shoulder of High Tor, but it brought no comfort with it. It hung in the pale, milky sky like an unpolished brass dish, casting long, watery shadows that had no blackness in them.

From the ditch behind the churchyard, the parish sow gave a single, shrill squeal—not the fat grunt of an animal that has found an acorn, but the sharp, thin scream of a beast that has caught its foot in an iron springe. When I looked, she was down upon her side in the dock-leaves, her short legs kicking at the air, her belly heaving with that same whistling, dry breath I had heard in Hob's stable.

From her mouth ran a long thread of yellow foam, thick as tallow, that did not soak into the mud, but lay upon the green weeds like a smear of cold grease.

I took the reed pen from my ear, opened the ledger once more, and dipped the point into the horn. The ink was cold, thick with soot, and it did not want to leave the slit of the reed.

Item: Master Gervase’s hackney, a grey gelding of five years, sound this morning, hath cast its hoof upon the church-flint without blow or fall. The horn parted like suet. The Bailiff reporteth forty lambs fallen blind at High Tor, with plates of horn where the sight should be.

Memorandum: The sulfur will not cure this. A beast that hath lost its horn is like an anvil that hath lost its face; you may heat it and hammer it as you will, but it will never bear the iron again.

I blew upon the sheep-skin until the soot-strokes lost their wet shine, buckled the strap of the ledger, and turned back toward the forge. In the shop, Ned was still sitting behind the anvil, his face buried in his leather apron, while the great dun ox in the pound-stall leaned its forehead against the oak timber and began, very slowly, to beat its horned head against the wood with a dull, hollow stroke that sounded like a coffin-lid being nailed down in a dry cellar.