Flesh and Spirit Page 15

  A scrawny, tangle-haired man stood at the base of the knoll holding six horses. With a smothered curse at my loose-lipped folly, I recognized him as Gorb the Seedsman. He’d not worn the orange scarf about his neck three hours past.

  The five were chanting a pattern of four words, one each, over and over around their circle until I could distinguish the voices—three men and two women—and the Aurellian words: sanguiera, orongia, vazte, kevrana. Bleed, suffer, die, purify. With every repetition, the moonlight dimmed and the weight of night and despair descended upon my shoulders like an iron yoke. After the fifth or sixth time around, a tall, pale-haired woman in an orange cloak raised her arms, holding a short staff in her two hands as if to challenge the sky. Her clear voice incised the air like a silver lancet, and every hair on my flesh rose.

  Powers of Night and Storm and Terror, of Desert and Ice, of Death and Life,

  O mighty Gehoum, heed our sacrifice.

  Withhold our doom as we cleanse this land of decadent pleasure,

  Of all that distracts us mortals from our proper reverence.

  May this blood and fire and pain be a sweet odor to fill the long night of thy passing

  And bear upon its vapors our vows renewed to purge the world of all that stands between us and thy immortal being.

  “Heathen witch! Magrog take ye to his everlasting fire!” The raw, choking curse came from the victim at their feet…Boreas, no doubt of it, not so dead after all.

  “Feel the cleansing fear, mortal man,” said the tall woman, lowering her arms and bending over him. “Thou art a blight upon the universe, diseased, depraved, an insult to the Powers who control the world’s fate. Of all thy miserable existence, only thy ending will serve a purpose. Suffer and bleed and rejoice in the terror of darkness.” She plunged her staff into the ground…into the man…ripping a cry of agony from his very depths.

  Horror rooted my feet as each of the five bent to touch him. Then Sila Diaglou—of course, the pale-haired woman was the priestess I’d seen at Gillarine, the warrior who could rouse people to destroy their own fields and cities in the name of repentance—led her companions down the knoll to Gorb and the horses.

  The seedsman gave the priestess a leg up into her saddle. She laid a hand on his head and murmured, as if bestowing a blessing, and then she and her cohorts rode toward me. I hid myself as best I could and still be able to see them as they approached the wood. Using every skill at my command, I etched their features into my memory.

  Scarce forty, Sila Diaglou was a handsome woman with a high forehead and intelligent eyes set well below thin brows. The diagonal scar that seamed each cheek tainted her beauty with cruelty. Her hair floated like beaten flax as she rode, yet her wide mouth lacked any hint of generosity or mercy. Her lips, and those of her companions, were painted black with blood.

  The smaller woman followed, particolored skirts draping her mount and a fluttering orange scarf wrapped about straight black hair. No more than a doe-eyed girl, eighteen at best, she rode like a queen, soft, copper-hued features devoid of emotion. The three men, too, I memorized as they came: the one with a beardless needle chin and colorless eyes, the one with a malformed ear and oiled black curls tied into a club at his neck, the third with a dog’s face, all lumps and crags, with but a fringe of hair about his round chin and a dagged cloak of purple velvet. Weedy Gorb mounted his own beast and rode after the others.

  I held still until they had passed out of my hearing. Then I raced to the crest of the knoll.

  Spirits of fire and darkness! Stripped to his braies, wrists and ankles stretched and bound to wooden stakes, my old comrade leaked blood from every quat of his length and breadth. Blades had shredded his flesh and punctured his eyes. The priestess had plunged her staff through his middle, not through his heart or his bowel to kill him quickly, but through his side so that every breath, every trembling shudder, tore him apart.

  Swallowing my gorge, I knelt beside him and spoke softly. “Ah, Boreas, you god-cursed gatzé, I knew you’d get in trouble without me.”

  “Who’s there?” he croaked. His battered lips scarcely moved. His head rolled side to side, as if he might be able to see, if he but turned his bloody sockets in the proper direction.

  Gently I stilled him. “It’s Valen, come to help you as I vowed I would.”

  He gasped, a whooshing stridor that only after a panicked moment did I realize was a laugh. “So I’m dead then. Of all Magrog’s servants come to take me at my end, ne’er thought ’twould be you, Valen. And I ne’er thought ’twould hurt so wicked to be dead.” His dreadful laughter stretched into a sob.

  “Hush now.” I bent over so he could feel my breath. “Neither of us is dead. The baldpates saved my leg and my life, so I’ve you to thank for that. I heard you were up here, and I came to—Well, that doesn’t matter. Holy gods, I’m sorry I’m so late.”

  I could see no way to help him. Pull the stake from his middle and the splintered shaft would draw his entrails, and he’d bleed his life away in agony. Leave it and his every breath would be torment and still he would die. But only after long dreadful hours…or days.

  “No luck today for neither of us. Threw the last of our loot into the pond, they did. After killing—” A croaking sob. “Ah, Kellna was a merry lay. I never understood when ye said the best girls danced with ye. But Kellna…she danced.”

  “I’ll pay her passage, Boreas. I promise.” I ripped off my rucksack and scrabbled through the contents of the bundled rag. Nothing in the pilfered medicines would help him. Few did I even know the proper use of. But the little knife…“Hold still and I’ll get your hands free.”

  With the pointed, finger-length blade of the stolen herb knife I split the ropes that bound his wrists and ankles. He could not move his tortured limbs without crying out, so I did it for him, drawing them to his sides. Then I laid my monk’s gown over him. His massive body trembled.

  “Somehow they knew I’d nivat. Said I was a twist-mind…abomination to their Gehoum…and I’d be better use to the world bleeding. I tried to tell ’em…” Growing agitation had him gasping between words. Blood welled out from around the stake. “They’ve left me in the dark, Valen. There’s naught here. Naught. I’m fallen in a well that has no bottom. Don’t leave me this way…”

  “Hold on.” I pressed my hands on his shoulders. “Let me think what we’re to do.”

  Perhaps the stake wasn’t all the way through. With one hand on his shoulder to calm him, I touched the wooden shaft. Embedded deep in the earth, the stake did not move…

  Dread…terror…suffocation… I was drowning in blood. In torment. Violated. Soul and mind raped with fire, then immersed in a cold midnight beyond bearing. Alone. Sensing a desolation so profound that it seeped into the grass, the earth, the very air.

  I snatched my hand away. Lifting my face to the cold air and the moonlight, breathing deep to ease my shaking, I gave guilty thanks for life and light and the broad sky above me. What rite could create this dread that crushed the heart and devoured the soul, that stole the night’s glory and blighted this sweet meadow? The thought that I had brought down this vileness on my old comrade appalled me, yet plain sense said I could not have imagined such an outcome. As I could not undo my careless babbling, I saw only one way to make it up to him. No one deserved to suffer so.

  “I can’t undo this, Boreas. I’m sorry. If I could—”

  “Didn’t think so.” Pain snagged his rasping voice. His forehead felt hot beneath my hand. “Ye ought to leave. Don’t let the orange-heads pray over ye. Their prayin’ emptied me out, till I can’t think of naught but the dark—” Despair edged his words with panic.

  “Hush now. You’ll not be alone. I swear it. Will you trust me?”

  “Ye’ve never broke yer word.”

  “Listen…you’ll not believe my plan for winter…”

  I told him every detail of my rescue and the abbey. Of Jullian and Sebastian, of Brother Badger and Brother Gildas, of bells and books an
d prayers and mysteries. Of rich smells and jewel-colored windows and rippling barley. As I talked, I drew out the little green bag and used the mirror to crush the nivat on a rock. Trying not to inhale the scent, lest it trigger my own craving, I pricked my finger and worked my perverse magic.

  “Here, now, I’ve something will ease you a bit. Give it a try.” I scooped up the bubbling black paste and poked it in his mouth.

  Pain devoured him. Scoured and shook him as would a dragon lion of Syanar. I waited. When, at last, his ravaged body convulsed in ecstasy, I stabbed the sharp little knife—sure and fast and deep—into the hollow at the back of his neck. Forgive.

  PART TWO

  A Gathering of Wolves

  Chapter 11

  The hierarch’s flat feet measured almost the same in their length and width. They pained him when he had to stand on cold hard granite slabs for long periods of time. I knew this because he crunched up his toes and splayed them out again, rocked from toe to heel, and rolled them to the side. He did not wear sandals, for, of course, he was not a vowed brother of any monastic order, but the highest-ranking clergyman in Navronne, a common practor who had achieved a rank on par with a duc. His embroidered slippers were soft purple velvet held on by white silk ribbons that crossed over his thick, stockinged ankles. Every little while he set one foot upon the other to rest it, leaving dusty smudges on the top of his fine shoes.

  Feet and their various coverings and the grimy hems of gowns, robes, and other vestments were all I could see of my investiture rites. As I had for the past three hours, I lay prostrate before the high altar of Gillarine Abbey church, the unending prayers and admonitions rolling over me like the billowing incense smokes. My shoulder ached, my leg had stiffened, and my long straight pureblood nose had been rubbed raw by the same cold hard granite slabs that so tormented the hierarch’s feet.

  Someone sprinkled water on my head and back. Drips rolled down the shaven patch at the crown of my head. Tonsured…great Kemen, Lord of Sky and Storm, what woman will ever lie with me now? Drips spattered on my black gown, absorbed by the layers of wool. Drips rolled down my bare feet, tickling. I tried not to twitch. My trembling was due more to the marrow-deep chill creeping through me from the floor than awe of my current intimacy with the divine.

  I was not wholly irreverent. I honored all gods who professed an interest in human folk, and I respected custom and rituals that evoked the great mysteries of the world: death and birth, forests, ocean, and storms, music, copulation, and fermentation. But I saw no virtue in mere endurance and had never understood why a god would wish to be so long preoccupied with any one event.

  Best keep my mind somewhere close to business. News brought by the hierarch’s traveling party had only confirmed my decision to stay here—plague had broken out in the Moriangi port of Haverin.

  Pestilence, famine, war…how many times in the past few days had I heard mention of the end times? The long night, Jullian had said, as if it were a lovers’ assignation for which he had been awaiting only notice of the time. Before long these doomsayers were going to have me hanging bells on my ears and painting my forehead with dung.

  I dared not close my eyes. Brother Sebastian had rousted me as the bells rang for Prime, scolding me roundly for sleeping, for sleeping in the bed, for sleeping too long, and for sleeping naked. “A monk must always lie down girded in no less than trews, shirt, and hose so he will not be late to pray the night Hours, so spake Saint Ophir in his Rule.” While I reluctantly rolled into the frigid air and drew on the clean underthings he had brought me, my mentor had tightened his lips at some additional transgression. “Are you yet a sapling like these boys who cannot yet control their fleshly dreams? Surely you did not profane your vigil night apurpose!”

  It was the bed linens bothering him. I had shaken my head vigorously and shifted the treacherous appendage inside my trews, attempting to look properly humiliated while trying to remember just what had happened on my return from Elanus. Numb, exhausted, I had hidden my green pouch and the packet of knife and medicines in the garden maze outside the church and prayed that the bells I’d heard as I slogged over the last slope and down the road to the gatehouse were Matins and not Lauds.

  But “fleshly thoughts” had dogged me all the way back through the bogs and woodlands: the taste and feel of Adrianne on my tongue and fingertips and the memory of the dusky-smooth limbs and silken hair of the catamite. Strange and perverse that such images could arouse me after I had murdered a comrade I’d sworn to defend…after I’d spent half the night scraping a hole in the soft black dirt of Graver’s Meadow and laying Boreas and his woman there, my last coppers on their eyes and some of Brother Badger’s herbs in their hands and mouths to pay their tally to the Ferryman. Somehow the simple rites in the darkening meadow had left me at peace, and then the feel of the living earth under my hands as I sought the road back to Gillarine had sent unseemly desires coursing through my flesh. Truly I was a lunatic.

  The brothers were singing now. Something different this morning. From each side of the choir, right and left behind me, came a different melody—two songs twined around each other, all the beauty and simplicity of plainsong, but counterposed to make something larger and more wonderful. I had heard them practicing this work, but I hadn’t known it was for this occasion. For me. Well, for Iero, of course…everything they did, everything they said, was to honor Iero and his saints and prophets. Nonetheless, of all the good comrades I’d encountered through the years, none had ever made a song for me. I felt like an ass, grinning into the floor.

  Music infused my bones and sinews, not only my ears and soul. As a child I’d been offered no training in any instrument beyond the minimum necessary for a “cultured man’s education”—that aborted on the day I smashed my music master’s three-hundred-year-old harp into a stone pillar. Alas, my voice did sound like a carpenter’s rasp, elsewise a bard’s life might have suited me most excellently. If only I’d been born to a family of pureblood musicians, perhaps I could have put up with all the rest.

  Hands touched my shoulders. “Rise up now, son of Iero and Saint Ophir, and with thy solemn avowal will thy new life begin.”

  Blessed gods be thanked! I tried not to appear a lumbering ox as I got to my feet.

  The hierarch occupied a purple-draped chair between me and the high altar, a regal figure, though his upper lip drew up in the middle like a church spire, and the lower one, full and fleshy, drooped below it like the seedsman’s iron scoop, leaving two large yellow teeth on permanent display. In droning solemnity, he intoned, “Swear thou, chosen of the One God…”

  I knelt before Eligius and a coolly serious Abbot Luviar and swore on my hope of grace and heaven to abide by the particulars of Saint Ophir’s Rule. I meant what I said, though, if anyone had listened very closely through the fits of coughing that overtook me at certain crucial moments, he might have noted that I altered a few important words, such as “for the duration of my novice vows” rather than “for the duration of my novice year.”

  Graver’s Meadow had reminded me why I was careful about oath swearing. As the condition of the brothers’ hospitality, I would do my best to obey their Rule, but I would not bind myself beyond reason. So as I knelt before the hierarch, I ensured my vows were entirely accurate. They would last only as long as they lasted.

  When the swearing was done, Sebastian and Gildas dropped a voluminous garment over my head, shifting it around so that the shortest sewn seam reached halfway down my breast, leaving the black wool cape open the rest of the way down. They adjusted the cowl’s soft folds about my neck and shoulders and then lifted its hood over my newly trimmed hair. The abbot himself knelt before me to slip my sandals onto my feet. And then it was done.

  From the outside I must appear like these other monks, who rose from the choir stalls and followed the hierarch, abbot, and prior in orderly procession through the nave. But, as far as I could tell, my every failing and regret remained hidden under my cowl, alongside unse
emly hatreds, new and old. Too bad. The morning’s prayers had promised that I might leave all such burdens behind.

  After we washed in the lavatorium—a capacious room in the understory of the monks’ dorter where water channeled from the river ran perpetually through a waist-high stone trough—Brother Sebastian led me up the south stair to the monks’ refectory for the first time. Most of the monks were already seated at the two long tables along the side walls. Facing the center of the room, backs to the walls, they arranged themselves in order of age, as it appeared, or length of time in the order, which was much the same. At the small head table the abbot and the prior sat on either side of the hierarch. Reminding me with a gesture to keep silent, Brother Sebastian hurried me past the great gap of empty places and delivered me to the table at the lower end of the rectangle. To my surprise Jullian and Gerard squeezed along the wall behind one row of monks and past the long gap of empty seats and took stools on either side of me.

  The large room was spare of decoration: no paintings, statues, or carvings, no color but the burnished walnut of the floor and the palest yellow on the walls and between the stone ribs of the high, barreled ceiling. Its truer grandeur was its extravagance of windows on all four walls. Though the chilly room had no hearth, its tall windows, composed of astonishingly clear glass panes, bathed every place, even mine, with light.

  Once all were seated, lay brothers carried in bowls of soup and baskets of bread. My stomach was near devouring itself after a long morning’s fast on top of my night’s adventure. The moment the steaming bowl was set in front of me, I snatched up my spoon and dipped, reaching for the bread basket with the alter hand. The knock of my spoon on the bowl resounded through the cavernous room like a tabor’s whack. I looked up. No one else had moved.