by Matt Turner
“Aye, that’s right,” Plague said. “Plague and Famine, at your service.” He gave her a mock bow.
“Bullshit,” she coughed out in a voice drowning with blood. “The Horsemen serve the Kingdom.” Her remaining eye rolled in its socket.
It took John a minute to recognize the rude expression of dismissal.
“Those traitors? You seriously think we’re those Prophet pussies?” Plague seemed to have taken personal offense at whatever she had just said. “Speaking of which, know where we can find one?”
“Fuck. You.”
“Are you sure about that?” Plague placed the tip of the crossbow a foot away from her bleeding and deformed face, directly opposite her bloodshot eye. “I hear eyes take the longest to heal of all…if they ever do, of course.”
“Fool,” the woman sneered. “The Prophets will find you, and they’re gonna skin you alive—” Her words descended into a shriek as the crossbow bolt tore into her skull and into the pile of bodies.
“Been there, done that.” Plague dusted his hands off, reached for the crossbow bolt wedged in the screaming woman’s face, and then thought better of it. “Shall we be off, John? The Kingdom’s soldiers have a very annoying habit of only speaking in threats.”
“How?” John gasped out in horror as the soldier continued to scream. The strength of her exertions was so great that she even managed to make the other wounded bodies roll off her, into the dirt of the road. “How are they—”
“Still alive?” Plague finished. He cocked an eyebrow at John and gave him a disappointed look, as though he had failed some sort of test. “There’s no escaping your second death, Reverend. Makes wars a pain in the ass, really.” He kicked one of the soldiers into a small ditch by the road. “Broken necks.” He lazily pointed out his handiwork on the mangled, twisted bodies—bodies that still moaned and breathed. “Give this lot a few centuries and they’ll be as good as new.” A cruel grin crossed his lips. “Might take their brave commander a little while longer, though!”
“FUCK YOU!” the blinded woman screamed back at the taunt.
“Good God,” John whispered, still staring at the hacked, leaking bodies that should have been dead a dozen times over. A horrible thought suddenly arose—of the other faces he had seen in the trees. He couldn’t help but look back down the road where they had come, toward the smoldering ashes of the forest. “The people back there…the other suicides…”
“What of them?” Plague waved the thought away and pulled at John’s shoulder, urging him onward. Even through the fabric of the cloak and the thick layer of bark, the touch of that strange mark on Plague’s hand made a shiver of revulsion run down John’s spine. “Our journey is long, Famine, and we have many appointments to keep.”
“Y-yes,” John stammered. He began to walk forward, if for no other reason than to make Plague stop touching him. “What of them?” he shakily agreed.
Plague gave him a toothy grin. “Now you’re starting to get it.”
Even so, John could not ignore the heaviness in his heart as they left the struggling bodies to rot.
14
Even in the happiest years of his life, Simon had never been a calm man—largely because the happiest years of his life, he sourly acknowledged to himself as he fumed in the depths of the slave ship, had been filled with overwhelming violence and bloodshed. To be fair, most of it had been against the enemies of God; no one could say that the damned Cathars didn’t deserve his fury. But now, he had finally ascended to a level above that: a pure white-hot rage that consumed his every thought. The only thing holding him back from violently beating the living shit out of his miserable companions was the painful aching of his testicles.
He groaned as one of the doors above was opened, and yet another goddamned fucking captive was thrown down into the brig. There was a steady stream of curses as the other slaves sullenly shifted to make room, and again the man seated next to him scooted to the side and bumped his elbow against Simon’s bruised ribs.
“Move, asshole,” the man grunted. “You’re taking too much space.”
“I am the right hand of King Philip II, the Leader of His Holiness’s Crusade, and the lord of ten thousand acres,” Simon snarled. “And if you touch me one more fucking time—”
A shit-eating grin crossed the other man’s face, and, without any warning, he leaned over and wrapped one arm around Simon’s shoulders.
Simon tensed, ready to break the peasant’s nose, but immediately stopped as another stab of pain shot through his bruised balls.
“Comrade!” the other man exclaimed in delight. “Another Russian! Thank God!”
Simon found himself dumbfounded by the man’s unexpected response. “What the hell’s a Russian?” he blurted as he tried to pull away from the other slave’s unwanted embrace.
The other man chuckled and gave Simon a sly wink. “Of course, Comrade, you are right. There are no Russians now, only proper Soviets!” Utterly ignoring Simon’s body language, he pulled him closer in to whisper in his ear. “There is some mischief afoot, Comrade. I fear that we have been kidnapped by the capitalists—or worse, the fascists.”
The bizarre words were utterly foreign to Simon’s ears.
“Senior Sergeant Mucogov Tarasovich, Second Guards Tank Corps,” the strange man blithely rambled on. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Comrade, even in circumstances such as these.”
“What?”
“Your name, Comrade, your name,” the man whose name sounded like a sneeze said impatiently. He slapped his hand onto Simon’s shoulder, inadvertently irritating the wound where the harpoon had impaled him.
It was impossible to be anything but bewildered in the face of such overwhelming stupidity. “Earl Simon de Montfort,” Simon hissed out in pain. “Stop touching me.”
Mucus or whatever his name was frowned in confusion. “Forgive me, Earl, but your accent is strange. Where do you come from?”
This conversation was quickly growing tiresome, Simon decided. “I am the lord of Montfort-l’Amaury and a score of other estates, you daft peasant,” he snapped. “Now piss off before I kill you.”
Mucus (Simon knew that the man had another name, but he was damned if he was going to bother to remember it) gave him a strange look, and then nodded. “I understand, Comrade Earl,” he said in a low voice as he pulled away from Simon. “You’re with the NKVD, da?”
“Fine, fine, yes, I’m a Russian or a capitalist or whatever the blazing hells you’re spewing out,” Simon spat.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP,” one of the other captives bellowed from the other side of the brig.
“PISS OFF,” Simon roared back.
“I know that tongue—that’s English!” Mucus said as understanding filled his eyes. “You plan to infiltrate the capitalist bourgeoisie when we land, eh?” He shook his head in astonishment. “The intricacies of the NKVD have always astounded me. But fear not, Comrade—my lips are sealed!” He mimed sealing his mouth shut.
Is this what Hell is like? Simon wondered as he buried his bruised face in his hands. Getting the shit kicked out of you and having to endure the unending company of fools—come to think of it, it wasn’t that different from his normal life.
“Did you see the bloaters?” Somewhere in the crowded darkness, one of the slaves murmured the question to his neighbor.
Simon’s ears instinctively pricked up and he leaned back, trying to hear the response.
“Only one before they fished me out,” his neighbor gruffly responded.
The words that he used were foreign, yet somehow Simon found that he could understand their meaning. No matter, he decided when he abruptly realized that his conversation with Mucus had been the same. He had more pressing concerns than the inane jabbering of foreign tongues.
“Like wrinkled ballsacks, trying to paw at me. Know what they are?”
“They’re the ones the sailors didn’t fish out,” the other man whispered back in a voice so low Simon had to strain his e
ars to hear. “The people who stay down there in the dark…for years…”
“That’s a load of shit. How do you even know that?”
“One of the sailors told me.” The other man sounded defensive. “I studied Latin in college—”
“Oh, so you speak their goofy ass language now? Whatever, man.” The second captive sighed. “I can’t wait for this trip to be over. I’m never doing shrooms again.”
Idiots, Simon decided. With that damning judgment in mind, he gritted his teeth and continued to wait. The ship would have to make port eventually; his time would come.
As it turned out, his time came far sooner than he would have expected. Within a few hours, there was a rustle of excitement in the brig. “I see land,” one of the captives, a slant-eyed man who could have only come from Cathay, exclaimed as he gazed out through a small crack in the red wood of the ship. “I see land!” No one seemed to understand his words except Simon, but his meaning became clear to the other captives as he excitedly gazed outside, and a violent brawl quickly broke out over control of the tiny window.
“I am a lord,” Simon bellowed at the others as he waded into the crowd of fighting captives. “Now get out of my fucking way!” None of the peasants appeared to give a shit about Simon’s noble lineage, which in the end suited him just fine—it was an excellent excuse to smash some faces before he arrived at the makeshift window. He easily tore the Cathay man away from the small crack and pressed his face up against it, eager to see the outside world.
“What do you see, Comrade?” Mucus asked excitedly over the cries of the wounded men.
Smoke. A massive black plume of it shrouded the entire horizon in darkness, stretching so high that it blotted out half of the dim sky. But, closer than that, a small beach stretched just a short distance away. Simon was able to make out the outlines of buildings, docks, and even another ship that was offloading its cargo of humanity. “A dock,” he told Mucus. “They’re going to dump us on land soon.”
“Thank God,” Mucus breathed. “Er—I mean, thank our good fortune, Comrade.”
Simon scowled at the smoky, sunless sky. Deep down, he was starting to doubt that God had anything to do with his current predicament. I am a servant of God, a soldier in His Crusade, he told himself. But the little niggle of fear remained.
One of the trapdoors leading down to the brig burst open, bringing with it a blinding ray of light. “All right, you lot,” one of the sailors called down. “You’re going to come up this ladder one at a time—ONE AT A TIME—or we’re tossing you back for the bloaters.” He pointed his middle finger down at them, indicating the number in question. “ONE. UNO. EINS. ODIN.”
“He’s saying the number ‘one,’ Comrade,” Mucus said, as though that wasn’t already blatantly obvious. “What could it mean?”
“Here comes the ladder,” the sailor said. “If any of you lot try anything clever, I swear to Christ—” He slid a thin rickety ladder through the trapdoor and nastily chuckled when the bottom rung smashed into a captive’s foot, eliciting a yelp of pain. “ONE AT A TIME,” the sailor yelled again as there was a mad rush among the slaves to climb up the ladder.
A middle-aged woman reached it first and began to climb, but a man immediately began to ascend the rungs after her.
“ONLY ONE!” the sailor above bellowed. He let out a sharp whistle, and a great arm of creaking metal and steel skin suddenly descended through the trapdoor. Two of its great claws seized the woman by the head and lifted her up into the sunlight. There was a terrific CRUNCH, a scream, and then a distant splash. Before any of the other captives could react, the arm returned to seize the man who had begun to climb the rungs. Again, he was lifted into the air, never to be seen again.
“CHRIST, ONE AT A TIME!” the sailor raged. “We have a stiltwalker up here, you idiots. Now, only one!”
The next captive to climb the ladder was far more hesitant. He reached the top of the rungs and looked down nervously, as though he were contemplating whether or not to return to the relative safety of the brig.
“For God’s sake.” The irritated sailor groaned. “Hurry up.” He grabbed the captive’s arm and jerked him up onto the deck. There were no bone-grating crunches or screams of pain, which Simon decided to take as a good sign.
Over the next hour, the sailors proceeded to empty the brig through the slow, laborious process. Simon spent most of that time peering through the small crack in the ship’s hull. Through what little he could make out, it seemed that the ship had stopped at one of the docks jutting out from the beach. He stared at the blood-colored water lapping against the side of the ship and struggled to process it all. What was happening?
At last it was his turn to climb up the ladder. He put on his most dignified face, ignored the sailor offering a hand to pull him up, and once again ascended to the deck of the ship. He took in a deep breath of the salt air and sighed. It was so much freer here than it had been in the cramped hell of the brig; why, even the air tasted different—
A sailor immediately clacked a pair of manacles onto his wrists and chained them to the next man in line. “Put these on,” he ordered, shoving a pair of threadbare trousers and a ragged coat into Simon’s hands. “No one wants to see your naked body, old man.”
I am the Lord of Montfort-l’Amaury, Simon started to say, but he caught himself. “You’re too kind,” he sneered back, somehow in the same strange tongue that the sailor had used. His right shoulder inadvertently twitched as the sailor’s eyes widened in surprise, but before the man could say anything, the line of slaves jerked Simon forward, and he was forced to move on.
Simon took a moment to examine his surroundings as he clumsily yanked the clothes over his bruised body. Once again, he stood upon the deck of the slave ship, surrounded by dozens of other slaves, most male, but with a few grim-looking females scattered here and there. They were all chained together in an enormous line that made a full circle around the ship and then stretched down the gangway to the shabby dock below. Another ship was unloading its cargo there—it seemed that they had already chained their slaves to that of Simon’s ship, making a single unbroken line of humanity.
The sailors themselves hardly looked any different from the slaves, with one notable exception: the man who operated the great steel beast that lurched and hissed fifteen feet above Simon’s head. “What in Heaven…” he murmured in astonishment as he gazed up at the metal monstrosity. It vaguely resembled a man, with two thin steel legs leading up to a cage-like body where its driver resided. There was even a pair of two metal arm-like appendages, which whipped about in the air, releasing sharp bursts of steam.
The man in the cage of the metal creature noticed Simon’s awed expression and grinned. “Like my stiltwalker, slave?” he taunted down. “Don’t piss it off!”
One of the metal arms suddenly swung down and stopped an inch from Simon’s face. The great metal claws on the end of it looked as if they could shear through a castle wall, he realized in shock. Where the hell am I?
The sailor found his surprise hilarious.
Another sailor jerked Mucus out of the brig and attached his manacles to Simon via the great iron chain. “That’s the last one,” he called out to the dock below. “Move ’em out!”
The line jerked forward as the sailors on the dock bellowed commands and the crowd of slaves sullenly shuffled forward onto the shore. “What is happening, Comrade Earl?” Mucus demanded as they were pulled down the gangway. “Where are we going?”
“Why do you keep asking me questions?” Simon snapped. One of the slaves beside him bumped into him, so he gave the man a violent shove and knocked him off the gangway into the water. A brief moment of chaos erupted as half a dozen more captives were dragged down in a domino effect.
“You are NKVD, yes?” Mucus said in a worried stage-whisper. Behind them, the stiltwalker reached into the water and began fishing the yowling and soaking captives out. “This is all some fascist plot that you are infiltrating, right?”
Simon did not even deign to reply. The great chained mass pulled them along, led by cursing and screaming sailors, off the rickety dock and onto the greasy black shore. But instead of leading them to the small clump of ragged wooden buildings, the sailors led them farther down the shore and began organizing the captives to stand in rows—an exceedingly difficult task that led to multiple cases of bloodshed and more than one intervention by the stiltwalkers that loomed like angry giants over the entire proceeding. Being at the very back of the chained line, Simon and Mucus were placed at the far-right corner of the great square of slaves that eventually formed on the beach.
One of the sailors—Simon recognized him as the captain of the ship that had captured him—strode to the front of the square. A toppled statue from some long-gone temple rose out of the dark sand, and he clambered up on its headless torso to have a better view of the captives.
“Here we go,” Mucus grumbled.
Simon couldn’t help but silently agree; the captain had the look of a self-important man about to deliver a grand speech.
“Welcome to the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace,” the captain announced grandly. His strange words were oddly familiar to Simon. Latin, he realized.
“Eat a dick, asshole! I have rights!” one of the slaves screamed out, seconds before a stiltwalker lazily reached down and crushed his skull in one fell swoop.
“I understand your confusion,” the captain said as two sailors dragged the twitching, bleeding body away and the stiltwalker hurled it back into the red sea. “But, you will soon come to find, our blessed Kingdom is the cradle of humanity—we were made here, we return here, and we stay here—forever. There is no escaping our grace.”
Someone in the crowd sneezed. Crunch went their head as soon as the stiltwalker identified them.
“But even the Kingdom has enemies,” the captain went on. “Enemies like that.” He pointed over his shoulder at the wall of smoke on the distant horizon. “These cowardly, lurking saboteurs have attacked one of our most precious resources, the Forest of Suicides.”