He hoarded it so carefully. Said their plants were not propagating well in the foul weather. That the abbey had any healthy plants at all was a wonder. Perhaps their god had powers enough to protect his holy place.
Matins came and went, allowing me to forget myself for a while in the beauteous surge of their singing—fifty-three strong male voices honoring their god. What deity could fail to manifest himself with such power at his beck? Yet in the ensuing silence, the warning in my belly grew more insistent, and hot, as if Brother Robierre had made another incision and implanted a burning coal inside me. I slammed a fist into the thin pillow wadded under my head.
This is far too early. I buried my face in the pillow, unable to stop the calculation. Twenty-one days. The problem, of course, was that the remedy had become its own disease, and I could no longer distinguish one from the other.
So think of something else. The wind whined in the cold and lonely blackness outside the infirmary walls. The blanket wool tickled my nose. Propped up on my elbow, I drained the last of the weak ale Brother Anselm had left me, and then threw the mug across the square red tiles. The clay vessel shattered. No rushes on the infirmary floor. No straw. Brother Anselm thought them unclean. I curled my arms over my head. This is no battlefield with the stench of death all around.
No whorehouse after the women have moved on to other customers. No stinking back street with rats and refuse your only company. Nor even is it that wretched house in Palinur where your existence was an offense to those who birthed you. Let the cursed sickness burn itself out. But the coal took flame in my gut, its fiery wounding spreading rapidly into my chest and limbs, into my head, my eyes, my dry tongue.
I shoved off the blankets and lay there naked and exposed, unbearably hot as I tried to breathe away the pain.
The light seared my eyes. The rain drummed like thunder; the wind bellowed like maddened oxen. Why had I thought of my parents? A spasm contorted every sinew in my back, as if a giant played knotwork with my spine. Cascading cramps wrenched my shoulder, legs, and belly.
Ignore them. On a small painted chest near my bedside lay my torn shirt, stained padded jaque, ragged braies, and hose, neatly folded and stacked. The monks had cleaned or brushed them as I lay insensible, and set them alongside my rifled rucksack. I just needed to see.
I grabbed the rucksack, knocking the stack of clothes onto the floor. Every object I touched seared my skin as if it were iron new drawn from a forge. Jerking the scuffed leather bag onto my lap, I prayed that what I needed would be there. I turned the bag inside out and fumbled at the thick seam.
Blessed be all gods. I dragged the stinking rushlight close only to find it on the verge of guttering death. Muttering epithets, I snatched another from the stack under the table, set the fresh one aflame from the stub, and clipped it in the iron holder. The little green bag—the one Boreas had not found—fell into my trembling hand.
And the craving swept through me as a fire sweeps across a parched grassland. In the pool of smoky yellow light I set out the shard of mirror glass, the silver needle, and the white linen thread, and spilled the tiny black nivat seeds—all that was left of my emergency store—onto the table. My sinews cramped and knotted. My hands shook. Sweat beaded my brow, my arms, my back. Soon…hold on… Perhaps my injuries had made the disease and the hunger for its remedy come upon me early and so dreadfully fast.
Holding one end of the thread between two fingers, I let the other end dangle into the reeking little mess, using the connection to channel every scrap of magic that lived in me into the patterned spell.
The black paste heated and bubbled. In the enchanted mirror glass I watched the otherwise invisible vapors rise from the unholy brew. Waiting… A mixed-blood alley witch named Salamonde had given me the glass fragment on my fourteenth birthday. For the first and only time in my life, I had swallowed pride and hatred and begged my parents for help with my sickness.
My mother, typically, retired to her bedchamber and drank herself senseless. My father tied me to his favorite grate and beat me until I pissed myself, insisting that my malady was naught but my vile nature festered in my soul. He said no remedy existed for it. And so, on that night, for the twentieth time that year, I broke the locks on my room and ran away. By the time they dragged me back home three days later, old Salamonde had introduced me to perversion. The rushlight flickered.
I squinted at the glass. One final wisp of vapor drifted upward, taking the last of the earthy scent. I scooped the dark droplets onto my finger and onto my tongue.
The potent liquor spread quickly to my pain-racked extremities…the satisfaction of cool ale on a parched tongue…the scent of rain after drought… Groaning, I snatched up my rucksack and bit down on the leather strap, for the tasteless paste that was my salvation would not instantly quench the fire.
The perverse remedy had first to feed the torment. As did I. Fiery agony swelled to monstrous proportion…devouring my organs, my limbs, my senses…threatening to completely unhinge my mind…until the moment body and spirit teetered on the verge of dissolution, and then… O, elixir of heaven! An explosion of exhilaration engulfed every sense, every limb, every part and particle of my flesh and spirit, transforming pain to pleasure as quickly and as absolutely as the ax of a skilled headsman transforms life to death… …and then with the same abruptness, it was gone, the convulsion of sensation past.
Fire quenched. Cramps dissipated. Throbbing wounds silenced. Every shred of my being quivered with release, the searing heat of my flesh yielding to languid warmth like the aftermath of carnal climax, lacking only joy or merriment. Not oblivion, but assurance that the world was right and ordered exactly as it should be.
The rucksack dropped to the floor. My forehead rested on the scratched wood, my dulled mind fallow, my senses throbbing in gratification. The knot in my gut unraveled. The spell was called the doulon. Such was no concern of mine. Some of those enslaved to the doulon burnt or mutilated themselves before they succumbed, for the degree of pleasure in the release always matched the severity of the pain that preceded it. I had not fallen so far out of mind as to do that—not yet, at least.
Nor did I use it for ordinary physical discomforts that I could anywise tolerate. I told myself that these practices delayed the inevitable consequence. Every doulon slave went mad eventually, trapped inside a ruined body whose perceptions of pain and pleasure were irretrievably tangled. Unfortunately, between the disease itself and the nivat hunger, the consequences of stopping were equally dreadful.
Move, fool. Quickly, before losing all sense, I licked the thread clean and purified the needle in the rushlight flame, packed all away in the empty green bag, and stuffed it in the bottom of my rucksack. No time or means to sew the flap shut again. I hobbled away from the worktable and threw the rucksack onto the painted chest. Naked and shuddering, I crawled under the blankets and gave myself to dreams of pain and pleasure.
Had Brother Horach himself inked the illustrations? The copyist had surely borne a fascination with the natural world, inserting energetic and sometimes fantastical representations of stags, foxes, and racing hounds alongside the angels and vines that graced the prayers and psalms.
Yawning, feeling lazy and dull-witted as always on the day after the doulon, I traced my fingertips over the letters as I had so often as a child. The fingers are the conduit of magic. I no longer wasted my resources on that particular exercise. I had come to terms with my incapacity and managed well enough all these years. But if these holy brothers discovered my lack, they would surely pitch me over their lovely wall.
That was damnably annoying. Jumbled thoughts of murdered monks and abbey benefactors who just happened to serve unsavory princes had plagued me all the boring day—or at least when I could avoid thinking of my empty nivat bag and the difficulty of refilling it. I had trained myself to set that worry aside for a few weeks between necessity, refusing to allow the disease or its unhealthy remedy to set the course of my life.
The attack, a full week short of the usual and with so little warning, had profoundly unnerved me. Sooner or later the earnest fellow would approach the bed with his piss jar or his magnifying lens or his well-polished lancet, asking politely to examine my eyeballs or the underside of my tongue or to take some sample of my regenerating bodily fluids.
Fifty of them at the least. Angels preserve the boy from ever seeing the battlefield itself. I had never subscribed to myths of noble purpose or personal glory in battle, but I had believed that shoving a spear into a twitching body busily shitting itself could make a man of me.
After tossing a few loose items from the shelves into a wooden chest, he slammed the lid, fastened the latch, and hefted it onto his shoulder. Before you could blink, only the chilly draft remained with me in the infirmary. The laws of sanctuary and the sanctity of abbey walls seemed suddenly flimsy.
Two of the royal brothers, Perryn, Duc of Ardra, and Bayard, Duc of Morian, had maintained a deadly balance for three years. The third and youngest brother, Osriel the Bastard, regent of Evanore, had taken no active part in the three-year dispute save his grisly reaping on the battlefield. Some said Osriel cared naught for ruling on earth, but aimed to supplant the divine Magrog himself as lord of the netherworld.
Others claimed he was waiting only for his brothers to weaken each other so he could sweep them both aside with an army of gatzi. He had allied with the Harrowers. The Harrowers denied both the elder gods and the Karish upstart Iero, claiming that Navrons had lost their proper fear of the true Powers who ruled the universe.
Their priestess, Sila Diaglou, said that our cities and our plowing had defiled the land and that our false religions had caused us to forget these Powers that she called Gehoum, and that was why the weather had gone sour and the plagues and wars had risen. For years people had laughed at a woman speaking out as if she were the divine prophet Karus come back again, set on changing the ways of the world.
Throughout the summer campaign, while Prince Perryn dithered and regrouped farther and farther south, claiming that no rabble could stand against his knights and legions, the Harrowers burnt villages and fields and left us nothing to eat and nothing to defend. And then Prince Bayard and Sila Diaglou had joined forces and swept us up like chaff from a threshing floor.
The abbey bells clanged in an urgent rhythm. Distant shouts, mysterious door bangings, and running footsteps from the infirmary courtyard accompanied the summons.
The evening reeked of danger. Unable to lie still, I threw off my blankets and pulled on my wool shirt, trews, and hose. He shoved bowls and basins aside, knocking half of them clattering to the floor. Then he whirled about, dark stains on his arms and in his eyes. Where does he k-keep them?
Together we lifted out two trays of small, fine instruments—pincers, scalpels, probing tools of thin wire, and the like—laid out between sheets of leather. In the bottom of the chest lay a number of larger, linen-wrapped bundles. The boy dragged out cautery irons, mallets, and strangely shaped implements of unknown purpose. That one. I wheedled the recalcitrant lock open and handed over the precious brown flask.
I stowed the nicked herb knife and the pilfered herbs and medicines in my rucksack and tied the bag around my waist with a length of linen bandage. Caution demanded I bolt. To strike out directly across the River Kay behind the infirmary would get me away from the abbey quickest. Though twilight lingered in the outer airs, night had already settled in the confines of the inner courts. The ripe stench of a latrine overlaid the scents of brewhouse and granary. All very natural. Yet I peered over my shoulder fifty times in that short journey, and gripped my alder stick so fiercely I likely put dents in the smooth wood.
The guesthouse sat dark. I breathed freely only after I hobbled into the maze of gardens and hedges before the church. I paused amid the overgrown yews, wondering at the quiet. Perhaps circumstances were not so dire as the fears of naive boys implied. Only a fool would pillage a church and abandon such a comfortable sanctuary without ripe cause. So instead of bearing right into the church, I headed left toward the abbey gates.
Just inside the massive outer wall of the abbey and its twin-towered gatehouse lay the walled enclosure the brothers called the Alms Court. In this pleasant space of fountains and mosaics, where, on ordinary days, Brother Porter dealt with visitors, five dead bodies lay wrapped neatly in linen. The mournful Porter, Brother Cadeus, filled a pail at a splashing fountain and dashed it over the paving stones as if to expunge the horror. Save for these few and a trickle of monks hurrying through with blankets, soup crocks, or rolls of gray linen bandages, the courtyard was deserted.
I had expected it to be overflowing with wounded. Tucking the heavy pitcher in the crook of my arm, I joined the procession. The gate tunnel itself was quiet, the sharp click of my walking stick and uneven clomp of my heavy boots on the stone paving far louder than the shuffle and swish of passing sandals and cowls.
The thick wooden gates halfway along the tunnel had been propped open. The broad sky blazed with orange-edged clouds and swaths of gray and purple. Torches had been mounted on staves, illuminating, not a hundred, but surely sixty or seventy bloodied soldiers sprawled on the puddled apron of grass before the gatehouse. I had seen the ravages a defeated army could work upon a town or village. And these men were defeated. The wounded huddled quietly, suppressing moans and gasps of pain while mumbling prayers and curses.
Other men sat silent, twitching at every noise, each man closed into himself, glaze-eyed with exhaustion and hunger. Monks moved among the crowd like bees in a clover patch, offering prayers, ale, bread, blankets, and strips of linen men could use to bandage themselves until others could see to them.
Fires sprang up here and there as the river damp rolled in with nightfall. Close by the gate tunnel, an Ardran wearing a ripped tabard and cloak over hauberk and mail chausses fidgeted near a small group of monks. His bearing proclaimed him an officer, as did the sword at his waist and the riding crop in his hand. The moment the group dispersed, leaving only one stocky, bald-pated brother standing by the gate, the officer pounced.
He will have his proper reception. What lord lay there with no horses or banners? None of the regular soldiers paid him any notice. Nestled above the tunnel between the twin gate towers was the room where, as Saint Ophir had commanded, one member of the Gillarine fraternity remained ever alert for those in need of sanctuary—certainly to my own benefit.
Even underling friars must maintain our wits and decorum. Coming this way. They seem to move too quickly for foot. Perhaps one with better eyes should take up the watch. The newcomers are likely more sad cases like these. Stay at your post. As the saint taught, good order will carry us through all earthly trials. Perhaps innocent men were not primed to expect trouble when dealing with such ugliness as war.
Or perhaps the prior was just a fool. I had soldiered on and off since I was seventeen and knew that unexpected company rarely brought any good. The monks needed to get these men behind the abbey walls. If I were to avoid any ugly encounters, I needed to be on my way as well. Almost a fortnight had passed since Wroling Wood.
A woodcart rattled through the tunnel. I stuffed the pitcher and my alder stick into the bed, gripped the cart rim for a support, and moved into the field.
Once we reached the center of the crowd, I extracted stick and pitcher and wandered off on my own, searching for someone who could tell me what I needed to know.
I stayed cautious. Little chance any would know me. The pale, slab-sided soldier was retching and choking, half drowned in his own vomit. The heat of his fever could have baked bread.
I set my pitcher on the ground and helped prop the fellow on his side. A cold like deep-buried stone weighed my spirit as I touched him. The gore-soaked wad of rags bound to his belly oozed fresh blood. Where was it fought? West beyond the ridge? Or more northerly, near Elanus? And the mad ones…screaming like beasts and waving orange rags on their spears.
Felt it. The terror that sat inside your gut and kept trying to climb out. The youth took a grateful sip, and I left him trying to give the bulk of his own portion to his friend. He ought to have drunk both portions himself. Control of death and life were beyond any pureblood bent. I gave the wretched proceeding a wide berth. And in which direction? We fought Bayard the Smith himself at Wroling Wood.
The whore priestess of the Harrowers rode beside him. You must have given Prince Bayard a noble struggle. But I needed to understand his geography. Perhaps you went the long way round and ran into another fight along the way? But even His Grace and his lordlings lost their mounts there at the end. Or dead. Pompous prickwit. With Perryn taken, Bayard would never chase down sixty wounded men, a few knights, and a minor lord.
Drink up, put on your boots, and set a watch. I sped away as fast as I could hobble. My leg was not up to running, but I needed no stick to propel me across the field toward the river and the cart road south. Did these monks understand what was going to happen here? Bayard, Duc of Morian, called the Smith for his crude and thuggish manner, would surely slaughter these men to take his rival and might violate the abbey itself. Sanctuary was only effective if the pursuers respected the concepts of mercy and salvation.
The stench of charred meat hung over the crowd of wounded surrounding the infirmarian and his assistant. I ought to warn the brothers. Robierre and Anselm would likely not come away from the field. And truly, as I thought of it, I owed them no debt, as their service had naught to do with saving me, but with their own gifts and obligations.
I pushed through the listless press and crouched down behind the boys. Gerard gaped at me blankly, as if too horror-sated to make sense of common speech. Jullian, though, snapped his head around. What are you doing out here? Everyone must help in such a desperate time, even such as me. Come now, leave your task for those more knowledgeable, and get you to the church.
His voice dropped to a whisper. Jullian jumped up, dragged the other boy to his feet, and gave him a shove. Begin the psalm for the end times!
Jullian crouched down again, whispering excitedly. This afternoon, Brother Gildas reprimanded me for my loose tongue…I mean, I had heard them say that your book could be the key and surely the god had sent you here, and so I assumed you knew of the lighthouse.
Cries of dismay broke out from several sides. Do you understand? But only for a moment. Matters were deteriorating too rapidly. The first outriders thundered across the fields toward the abbey, swords raised, cloaks and pennons flying. The little cadre of bristling lances moved slowly from the center of the field toward the gatehouse—away from the coming assault, which did naught but affirm what I suspected about the lord they protected. Get him inside now. Do you understand me?
Brother Broun, Fescol…ring the bells! As the alarm rippled in from the perimeter, Abbot Luviar strode straight out through the stirring soldiers as well. Rise up and take arms. Support your comrades to stand as well.
Navronne needs your strength. If good is to be made of your suffering, then these riders must not find you asleep. Mighty Iero will lift your arms, if you but stand. This fight is bigger than you know.
The stakes grander than all of us. One by one, men who but moments before were ghosts of warriors, drained of blood and spirit, grasped pikes or spears and rose to their feet, drawing their fellows up to stand beside them and face outward.
None of them seemed to notice the knights retreating toward the abbey. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, Flesh and Spirit pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone.
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