Rebellious strands of red hair streaked from beneath her headdress. She was a young woman, tall but well proportioned, a fact scarcely concealed by her sombre dress. There was no fear on her pale features, just a slight expression of repulsion and curiosity. She rode a horse, a fact that signified that she was no ordinary religieuse but a woman of rank. The leading traveller had drawn near on his mule and gazed up with a terrified expression on his white features.Īnother of the party, one of the two women, urged her mount nearer and gazed up at the corpse with a steady eye. What remained of his clothing proclaimed it to have once consisted of the habit of a religieux, though there was no sign of the crucifix, leather belt and satchel that a peregrinus pro Christo would have carried. The head of the body was also shaven with the tonsure of Columba. The face of everyone in the party was grim with apprehension as it examined the body. Almost as one they had halted to sit staring up at the body of the man hanging in gruesome wide-eyed death, the tongue blackened and stretched between the lips in what must have been one last frantic gasp for air. Each was clad in the undyed wool tunica of the religious, and the hair of the men was shaven at the front, their tonsure markingthem as brothers of the church of Columba from the Holy Island of Iona. The party of travellers consisted of four men and two women. What had caused the party to draw rein on their mounts, an assortment of horses and mules, was something else. The sight of one more unfortunate suspended on a tree no longer troubled them. The Angles and Saxons who dwelt there seemed to live by a harsh code of penalties for those who transgressed their laws, from an assortment of mutilations of the body to execution by the most painful means devised, the most common and humane being by hanging. The travellers had become used to witnessing ritual executions and punishments since they had crossed from the land of Rheged into the kingdom of Northumbria. It was not the fact that a man had been hanged on a crossroad tree that caused the small party of travellers to halt. The contorted hands, still sticky with blood, showed that the man had not died without a struggle. The clothes were torn and if the man had worn sandals then they had since been taken by scavengers for there was no sign of any footwear. The head was twisted at an awkward angle where the neck had been broken. The body swung to and fro in the faint breeze, suspended at the end of a stout hemp rope from the branch of a squat oak tree.

The blood and spittle around his twisted lips had not even dried.

Absolution by murder