The Court of the Sovereign King

by David Landrum

  My first few days as a sister had been memorable. I had faced challenges and done well. When I laid my head on my pillow that night, I knew I could thrive in this place.

  Or so I thought.

  Chapter 2

  The first year passed quickly due to routine. When it’s the same thing every day, the days roll and flow along. Waking, breakfast, grooming, worship, dance and movement, midday meal, assignments as a witness, free time, worship/meditation, chores, bed.

  Mostly I went to stand witness in the law courts. This proved excruciatingly boring. We heard land disputes, lawsuits over ridiculous matters, paternity cases and, now and then, stood at trials for violent offenders. I thought at first I might be called upon to give the details of a trial when someone appealed to the king, but the other sisters said this was not how it worked. If a judge granted an appeal I would be called upon to witness that a trial had indeed taken place and that the outcome matched the transcript. Only that. Officials could be bribed or intimidated. Clerks might alter documents. But we—cloistered, forbidden to speak with men, or women for that matter, secluded and under vows of poverty, obedience, and virginity—could not be approached. We were holy in our bodies and spirits and holy to the truth. No one could bribe or influence us; no one could threaten us with harm if we did not change our testimony. We gave credibility to the legal system in the Court of the Sovereign King.

  I had hoped executions were rare and I would not be called to witness them very often. Neither of my hopes were realistic.

  I worried about Janessa. Moody and sullen, she did not settle well in the community. Eventually, she received a flogging for her “impudence.”

  “You need to hide your anger,” I had admonished her when she was with me.

  She did not behave any better. The Venerable Mother brought her to the recreation room for punishment. Janessa undid the top of her habit, rolled it down to her waist, and took off her bra. A sister gave her a towel to hold over her breasts. Katarine, a tall, strapping farm girl who had vowed three years ago, gave Janessa ten lashes with a wide leather whip. She hit her hard. The whip left red impressions on her back. The first few times Janessa only gasped in pain, but after that she screamed and sobbed. When the flogging was over, Sister Anne and I took her to the sick room, washed her wounds, and applied healing ointment. Janessa wept and shook as we slathered the ointment on her wounds.

  “Damnation,” she said, her teeth clenched. I shushed her. Sister Anne had gone to get Janessa a draught of wine.

  “Janessa, please. If you go on like this you’ll be in trouble.”

  “And they’ll kill me. That doesn’t sound like a bad deal.”

  “It does to me.”

  She raised her head and looked up at me.

  “I need you,” I said. “You’re my friend. We grew up together. I love you. Please don’t leave me alone here. Please don’t do something that will make them take your life.”

  She lowered her head, letting her chin rest on the wooden table on which we had laid her.

  “Okay. Don’t say more.”

  “I’ll only say it isn’t that bad.”

  I did not know what lay in store for me in two weeks.

  I soon learned why the older nuns often seemed weary of life. I often saw one or another of them staring into space, faces blank, as if in a trance or having taken a stupefying medication. Some days they would be confined to their rooms and we, the younger sisters, were not allowed to see them. The middle-aged sisters—those thirty to forty-five—behaved oddly from time to time. With them it was more jumpiness. If you approached them they reacted with startled fear. Sometimes they sat alone and talked to themselves. Many were gray long before their hair should have turned; they look older than their years.

  “They act like they’re mad,” Janessa said one day.

  I had to agree with her.

  “I wonder what they see that makes them like that,” she pondered.

  We soon found out.

  I had seen an execution my first day on duty. Soon I began to see them frequently. Every one required two witnesses. Now and then I would be called on to witness torture.

  I knew governments executed traitors and could give my assent to such a fate for someone who would betray the state and harm the people of a kingdom. I soon, learned, however, that the executions at the Court of the Sovereign King went far beyond the realm of those who betrayed their country for political reasons.

  My third week there, two weeks after I saw Xanti killed for treason, the mother dispatched Sister Alicia and me to the underground chambers. The two of us, a number of guards, two or three women, and a group of twenty young women in coarse earth-tone smocks stood at the edges of the circular chamber. After a time of tense silence, a door opened. Two burly guards pulled in a girl who could not have been twenty-years-old through the entrance. Other guards spread a large black cloth in the center of the cell. The two guards escorting the girl dragged her by the arms and pushed her to her knees just past the edge of the black cloth. She looked blank-faced, insensible to where she was or what was going to happen to her. Another guard carrying a yellow cord stepped up behind the girl, looped the cord around her neck, and strangled her.

  I will not describe her death. When she went limp, the guards lowered her, rolled her body up in the black cloth, and tied it around her remains with the yellow cord. The women in smocks, whom I discerned by now were prostitutes, filed out of the room. The guards carried off the black-wrapped body. Alicia and I signed papers stating we had witnessed one Hannah, a comfort woman, seventeen, strangled for the crime of refusing to yield her body in service as ordered. We were the last to leave the chamber. When I saw Janessa, she told me she had witnessed a similar killing.

  The memory of those moments tormented me. The middle-aged and older sisters understood and behaved kindly toward me that evening, though they did not ask us the cause of my distress. They knew.

  Only weeks later, a group of noble families in the western provinces rose up in revolt. After a defeat by the army, most of them escaped to join the forces of Ottava. Some were captured, however, and many of these were tortured. I witnessed more than one such procedure. I do not intend to describe much of what I saw, since it strikes me as unseemly to do so. But I remember one woman in particular. What I did when I saw her torment put a black mark by my name that jeopardized my life when war broke out.

  The woman, from one of the noble families of the western lands, had fallen from her horse and hurt her ankle. Otherwise, I was told in whispers, she would never have been captured because she was a formidable warrior and a good rider. She limped in. The soldiers tore off the smock she wore. I had never seen a woman so strong and with such a beautiful body as she. Her name was Elizet. They tied her to a wood frame. They usually tortured victims with hot irons.

  I did not want to watch but, as always, had no choice. Janaria, Queen Linise’s cousin and a favorite of hers, performed the torture. Sister Thelka stood with me as companion witness.

  He burned her. I readied my ears for the scream I was certain would come from her throat, but she did not scream. She fought it back. Air puffed through her tightly closed lips, her body trembled, her eyes grew big, and the veins on her forehead convulsed, but she managed to stifle her outcry. She trembled and tears flowed from her eyes, though she did not cry. Janaria, amazed as the rest of us were, stared, and then smirked.

  “Well, Elizet. You hold your tongue well. I’m amazed. But you’ll scream. And beg. I’ll see to that.”

  She did neither of these things. He burned her twice more. She managed to fight off an outcry both times. I could see, though, that the effort had weakened her. I gaped at Janaria, wondering how a man could do such a thing to another human being, and a woman nonetheless. He caught the look on my face and returned it with a dark scowl.

  “You don’t like what I just did?”

  I could only stare at him. His eyes bored into me and I could see
anger in his face. My heart pounded with terror.

  “I asked you a question, woman.”

  I could not react. Fear had paralyzed me. I couldn’t even open my lips. One of the courtiers spoke.

  “My Lord, she is a pledged woman. By the rules of her order, she may not speak with men.”

  My heart was pounding so much I could see the blood vessels in the side of my vision each time it beat. The stress of watching a woman brutalized had torn my spirit. I wondered if I would faint or throw up like Joscasta had. At that moment, Elizet gasped loudly, straightened her body, stared out for just a second, and then went limp, body drooping, head falling forward.

  Everyone stared. No one moved until one of the courtiers put two fingers on the large vein in her neck. Silence filled the room as we waited. He looked at Janaria.

  “My Lord, she’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “I feel no pulse.”

  Janaria picked up a white-iron and touched it to the side of Elizet’s face. I heard the searing sound and smelled burnt flesh. No motion came from what I knew was now only her corpse. Her heart had burst.

  Janaria scowled at her and then turned his gaze on me.

  “I told you to stop staring at me.”

  I wanted to lower my eyes but could not. I stared at him in disbelief that he could do such a thing to a woman and feel no remorse and no shame.

  “She has no right to give me a disapproving look,” he said to those around him. Then he turned his attention back to me. “You think you’re morally superior to me because you’ve never been laid? Maybe some experience would open your eyes to the world around you and maybe I’m the one to give it to you.”

  “She can’t speak to men,” his colleague said. And, not wanting the situation to escalate, he nodded at the soldiers, who were regulars and had served at executions and tortures before. They took Elizet’s body down from the wooden frame and wrapped it for burial.

  Janaria glared at me as Thelka and I left.

  * * * *

  The older nuns soon found out what had happened and whispered it all through the convent. I felt too scared to eat. The Venerable Mother spoke with me in private, asking my version of the story. After I told, she contemplated.

  “You behaved properly by not speaking. But did you give him a disapproving look?”

  “I would be lying if I said I did not, Nemara.”

  “That is an indulgence you must never allow yourself. Do you understand me, Sister?”

  “I do, but—”

  “There is no more to it. You will keep your judgments and your feelings to yourself. You are a witness, not a judge. It is not your place to adjudicate.”

  My mouth opened before I could stop myself.

  “I could not but feel compassion for such a beautiful woman and the way in which she endured the brutality she was subjected to showed me she must have been a woman of high character.”

  “A traitor.” She took a breath as if she preparing to give me a lecture but then stopped and relaxed. “Come here,” she said. “Kneel in front of me.”

  I obeyed. She touched my shoulder and my hair.

  “Alethea, there are many things here that are evil and dark—and twisted. You saw this at its worst today. But you must rein in your feelings. Otherwise, I’ll have to arrange for you to sleep the sleep of death.”

  The sleep of death came by a poison. The main use for it would be if the palace fell to enemies and the sisters were in danger of defilement. But now and then the prioress administered it to a nun who had disgraced the convent. I knew I might already be in that category. She saw the worry in my eyes.

  “You’re not in any danger. But be circumspect. You don’t want to make enemies among the royals or the chief courtiers. Alethea, you are such a worthy addition to our fellowship. It is a difficult path at times. We don’t want to lose you. Take what I say to heart.”

  I nodded and she dismissed me.

  After that I tried to be oblivious and not react to the injustices and barbarities I continued to see. Things settled into a pattern. I sensed my reaction to Elizet’s death had been dismissed or overlooked. I was wrong. I knew I would be the subject of scrutiny every time I witnessed someone being killed. I had to be careful and bury my feelings.

  One bright note in that time was that Janessa began to behave herself.

  Chapter 3

  A few months later, when the issue of the revolt had died down, the mood in the convent changed. I felt tension. The older women looked disturbed. The Venerable Mother looked troubled and would sometimes gaze at me with fear in her eyes. I wondered if I had done something that would doom me to death after all. I tried to hide my fear but was almost frantic when Nemara summoned me to her office. I wondered if she would give me poison to drink.

  I entered and bowed. As she had told me early on, the convent emphasized that all sisters were equal and no one “outranked” the other. We bowed to the mother out of deference to the responsibility she bore as leader of our fellowship.

  “Alethea, I’m pleased you are here. Sit.”

  I sat in a chair by the side of her table.

  “I will get right to the point, Sister. You have been selected for a solemn and highly important function.”

  I had no idea what this might be. I had seen so much distress in her eyes when she looked at me the last two weeks. I had worried about the king and his family ordering me killed for how I had behaved at Elizet’s killing. I even absurdly wondered if I had been selected to be sacrificed. Human sacrifice had never been practiced in our kingdom, even in ancient times, but the Venerable Mother had looked at me with such fearful vacancy that I imagined as much.

  “What is it I have been selected for, my Lady?” I paused, then added, “If it is death, I will go willingly and obediently.”

  She sighed. “You are a virtuous young woman, Alethea. The king asked me to choose one of our sisters who was young, strong and of unimpeachable character. Of all the women under twenty-five who are members of our community, I have chosen you.”

  I never had any confirmation of this, but I often think she chose me not merely because she thought I was virtuous, but to protect me from the queen’s anger.

  I felt relief and fear at the same time. If this was a matter that required virtue, why did she seem to dread even the mention of it? Perhaps I was to be sacrificed after all.

  “I hardly feel worthy of such an honor, Nemara. May I ask what I have been chosen to do?”

  “You know,” she began, “we are at war with Ottava. Unfortunately, the war is not going favorably for us. The king has decided to use magic. He will, in a week, summon the Fire Witch of Gessa to aid our armies.”

  I had to fight to keep my food from coming into my mouth. Cold gripped me and yet I felt sweat drip on my arms and bead on my forehead. “How might this involve me?”

  “The Fire Witch must take human form to manifest herself to us. She must come to our realm through a human body.”

  Fear made me feel light-headed. “Will she possess me, Nemara?” My question, abrupt and demanding an answer, violated our unstated rules for proper speech. A sister did not ask questions that put constraint to answer on another sister—especially not upon the Venerable Mother. But I was frightened.

  “No, child, but she will use your body as a portal, a conduit, to enter our world. And she will take form from your body.”

  “Will I die, Venerable Mother? I’m sorry I’m demanding—”

  “No, you will live. But what you must do is dangerous and difficult.”

  I could only nod. The next thing I knew, Anna and Thelka, who had been standing by the door to the mother’s office just in case something like this happened, were picking me up off the floor. I had fainted. They helped me back into my chair. Thelka dabbed my face with a cool cloth. Anna gave me water to drink.

  The Fire Witch was the sorceress who sent lightning across the sky and glowed in the
form of ignus fatuus, the false fire seen in swamps. She ruled hot springs, volcanoes, and the destructive lava that flowed from them and from fissures in the earth. At one time, and not that long ago, she was worshipped in our land. The ruins of temples dedicated to her stood empty and in ruins, here and there in the countryside. A group of powerful magicians removed her from her demesne and it had been a desolation for many years. The place to which she had fled (or been driven, depending on which version of the story one heeded) was said to lie outside our world and outside of time.

  “Alethea, your virtue will assure your recovery from the trauma of the witch passing through your body and soul. You are strong physically and morally. Your goodness shines in everything you say and do. You are qualified above all the other maidens here to be the path of access for the witch. Your participation in this endeavor will save our kingdom.”

  I understood from the way she worded her sentence that I had no choice.

  “I’m sorry, Nemara, but this is such a fearful thing.”

  “It is your duty.”

  “Yes, my Lady.”

  “You will perform it willingly.”