They don’t belong.” Sure enough, when a child is murdered, the enraged mob turns on Cygnus, the mesmerizing fabulist who believes himself to be half swan - and has the wing feathers to prove it. “Storytellers are always suspect,” Camelot observes. But woe to those whose fantasies become too real.
And it’s only natural that supernatural elements should permeate their stories, since that was how the people of this profoundly superstitious world tried to make sense of the inexplicable events of their lives. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims, the wanderers pass the long nights telling tales. Either that or the wolf howling at night whenever one of them is about to die is no metaphor.
Each of the travelers on this grueling journey - including an albino child, two Italian minstrels, an ill-tempered magician and a one-armed storyteller - has a guilty secret, and one of them may be a murderer. The novel’s aged narrator, a hideously scarred peddler of bogus religious relics called Camelot, finds himself leading a small band of outcasts to safe haven in the north of the country after word arrives that a pestilence has struck nearby. In COMPANY OF LIARS (Delacorte, $24), a jewel of a medieval mystery by Karen Maitland, those would be the times when you realize how lucky you are not to be living in England in 1348, when three separate plagues broke out among a population already beaten down by the deprivations of the Hundred Years War.
Every historical novel has its “Aren’t you glad?” moments.
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