Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04

by Chaz Brenchley

  Fess was a boy of fourteen, who reminded Blaise painfully of himself at that same turn of life. Born to be big but born without a father, without name or place in the world, he'd scavenged for bread and begged for work since he was a child; that showed on his skin, tight-stretched over raw bones and muscles like bowstrings, no flesh at all. Too many years of short commons and short sleep, it would take years longer to mend, to fill him out to the man he should have been. Blaise knew.

  Like Blaise before him, Fess had been waiting till he was old enough to be sworn a military man: for the God or for his local lord, no matter. But then the preacher had come and Fess had seen a way to overleap his age, to be blooded young and so present himself a soldier ready-made.

  He'd followed the march with the light of that ambition in his eyes, a burning hunger when Blaise had spoken to him, and thrilling at the chance to make it happen. Thrilling at the food, too, surrendering a lifelong hunger, eating with both hands at every halt. The villagers were generous, with their storehouses full of that year's second crop; or else they were afraid, such a rabble dogging such a strange parade and camping in their fields or their lord's pastures. Fear could make anyone open-handed, however little they had to spare. If Fess fancied that a soldier always ate like this - well, he would learn. And regard the lesson lightly, no doubt. Even barrack fare would seem like feasting, after a diet of cabbage-water and scorched grains gleaned from others' fields. Blaise knew.

  Blaise had helped the boy to treat and dress a gash on his forehead, the result of a stone flung by a nervous goatherd; just a small cut, but it bled freely as scalp-wounds always do. After that they'd sat half the night over a glowing fire, while Fess talked and Blaise listened, sharing his memories in silence.

  The following morning, the boy had lain stiff and still in his blanket, seemingly awake but unstirring, his eyes wide and blank as though his spirit were snared in horror. Blaise had struggled in vain to rouse him, finally had to be pulled away by others as the disciples gathered round. He'd been barely aware of the voices urgent in his ear, 'Let the preacher have him, let him be healed, there's nothing you or any of us can do for him now.' He'd wanted to fight with fists or knife, with whatever it took to keep Fess from a walking nightmare; better to let him die and bury him a stranger in a land where he'd never found a home.

  It was only later, too late, that he'd thought he might have put his knife to another use, to help Fess to a speedy death. Instead he'd stood slackly, uselessly, while the boy was snatched up and hurried off to where the preacher waited. He hadn't watched the healing. He'd seen too many of those tainted miracles already; he'd busied himself with sifting through Fess's few belongings, keeping the short sword and rolling the rest into the boy's ragged blanket, which he would carry himself in impotent fury at the preacher, at the world, above all at himself. Once more he'd failed, the boy had needed saving and Blaise had let him slip.

  So now he walked beside Fess, or the semblance of Fess. The boy looked as well as ever he had, and yet he looked utterly different, almost unrecognisable as he paced steadily along on stiff, inexhaustible legs. He used to walk with an ungainly slouch, awkward yet in his growing body; now he carried himself almost like the soldier he'd yearned to be, except that it seemed to Blaise as though something else carried him. There was nothing boyish, little that was even human in his gait; his face was blank of any feeling, and his eyes were strangely dark where they had been blue before.

  'Fess? How is it with you?'

  Nothing, no response.

  'Fess, speak to me, lad. It's me, Blaise, I have your things...'

  Again, nothing. The rough bandage was gone from the boy's head, and only a pale scar showed where the skin had been so badly torn only two days before; the preacher's healing touched more than the sickness. But Blaise had known that already. Cripples walked when they were blessed by the saints dead hand, the blind moved about without guidance, lepers lost their sores. Whether the power lay in the preacher or in his blessed relic, even that much Blaise had not yet contrived to learn. The only certainty — at least to Blaise's eyes - was that no power passed to the one healed, there was no true strengthening in this medicine.

  He believed in miracles, he had to, he had seen them in all their swift brutality; but he was losing his faith in miracle cures. There was nothing holy here. Seized back from death, these bodies had been seized by another's will, and marched to his desire. There was no healing in them, and only the illusion of health; they might as well be the animated dead of heathen tales. The preacher's cause might be sanctified, if he truly meant war against heretic Surayon, but what he had done to achieve it was pure wickedness and could not be forgiven.

  Blaise tried again and yet again to speak to Fess, and won not the slightest reaction. In his frustration, he forgot to watch where he was treading; his foot came down on a sharp flint in the road. It cut through the ragged sole of his sandal and bit deeply into his instep. He cried out at the sharp stab of it, and still saw no reaction from Fess or any of the disciples. Hobbling, he lost his place, and was swept up in the following crowd. Someone there passed him a staff to lean on; even with that he could barely keep up, and was soon struggling in the dust at the rear of the march.

  The road was roughly made, and it seemed that at every step his foot would come down on a stone, and hurt the more. At last he had to stop, to bind it up; he bound rags around the sandal too, and then around the other to forestall another accident. With both feet lame, he'd lose touch altogether with the preacher and his band. As it was, he had to hasten after with a cripple's gait, using the staff to cover great stretches of ground, hop and swing, before he could catch them up again. He'd been on forced marches that were faster, but not by much. The mountains were a constant high shadow to the east; they'd already passed the border between Tallis and Less Arvon, and another week or so should bring them to where the land was Folded, the impossible, impassable barrier that hid Surayon. What would happen there, Blaise couldn't conjecture. He was only sure that the preacher had an intent, a purpose that was equally hidden. There was something inexorable about their progress, something sinister and significant in the way that they could bypass settlements all day where the people were perfectly healthy; it was only in those villages where they stopped for the night that they found the sickness waiting.

  As that night, when they came in the brief dusk to a small community of huts huddled in the foothills' lee, on the banks of a rushing stream. News of their coming had flown ahead of them, as it always did; they found a fire of welcome blazing in the open space between the huts, the village headman on his feet with an awkward speech prepared, and three quiet bodies laid out at his back.

  The preacher stepped forward, pushing back his hood; his disciples made a ring around him, the headman, the sick and the fire, encompassing all within their silence. Blaise and his companions pressed close at their backs, and the villagers came shyly, hopefully out to stand in their own quiet knot a little distance off. They were Catari, but that was not unusual; this disease discriminated, it struck largely at the poor, and the poor of Outremer were most of them Catari. Fess had been an exception. Unless it was that the disease picked its places rather than its victims: never a castle or a town, always those convenient settlements a days hard march ahead, always close to the rising hills but never so close as to slow the preachers progress. Blaise's people kept mosdy to the towns, even after forty years of occupation; out here the lords and their servants kept to their manors, where a rabble like this would be closely watched and questioned. If Blaise had wanted to move a congregation quickly through the country, he would have picked this route or one much like it. ..’ Holy one, I have said enough. What more? There is only this: we are not of your faith, but our prayers have failed as our medicine has. Can you, will you save our children?'

  'I can, and I will.' The preacher's face looked at its finest, its strongest and most noble in this light, all glare and guttering shadows. By day he seemed weaker, more gau
nt, half mad; tonight, though, Blaise knew exactly what these hopeful, hungry peasants would be seeing. The high brow and the backswept hair that hung to his shoulders; the eyes that glittered from the blackness of their sunken hollows; the thin lips that snapped at words and were overhung by the great hooked nose that was its own monument. Nameless and potent, he made a striking figure, terrifying in the way that those who hold power and hidden knowledge are always terrifying to the weak and ignorant. Blaise counted himself with the villagers in this; at such a moment he could forget even that Magister Fulke frightened him the more.

  'Bring them to me,' the preacher said, and the three still forms were carried forward, by men who flinched back from the touch of his shadow but were still prepared to lay their children at his feet.

  These really were children, Blaise saw. Swathed in heavy blankets with only their faces showing, and those veiled by sickness and the uncertain light, they were indeterminate of gentler, but children none the less. The smallest would stand only half the height of a man - even a short Catari man - if it could or would stand at all. Now, not; but it would do shortly. Nothing could be more certain.

  The village folk must be less certain, they hadn't seen what Blaise had; but still they'd give their children over into alien hands, to an alien religion even, sooner than watch them die. Blaise thought he'd let any son or daughter of his go to death and paradise, before he'd let them go to a Catari priest for a dubious healing. But then, Blaise was not a father. Nor a husband, nor ever an acknowledged son; he knew that he didn't understand the kind of love that knotted families together. There were parents among the camp-followers who thought their healed children monsters, possessed, perverted, irredeemable. Blaise had heard them say so. And yet they followed where the preacher led, where the army marched, many miles from home towards a war that was nothing of theirs. It must be some tie of flesh that dragged them, a need that clung day after hopeless day, to keep gazing on a face they'd loved even when the spirit was long lost.

  And every night they gathered around a fire such as this, they watched this same scene played out time and time again with others' children, or grandmothers, or lovers. And they did nothing, said nothing, held their hands as still as their tongues when he thought they should have been screaming warnings, fighting to prevent another family from suffering as they did. He didn't believe that the pain could be easier, for being shared. There was an expression that Blaise had heard from the Catari, they spoke of white bones walking when they meant that a man was sure to die. Here it made a different, a terrible kind of sense. Himself, he'd willingly fling earth to cover the face of a dead friend sooner than see that face stare blindly into the sun as it hauled its shadow south. But he was a man alone, and most people were a mystery to him.

  The preacher crouched above the children's silence. His long fingers reached to unpeel their coverings and the clothes they wore beneath, to show the dull grey slackness of their skin that even the fierce firelight couldn't enliven. Then he slipped a hand inside his own rough robes to pull forth the talisman that had brought them all this far, and would take them further yet.

  A blessed relic, he said it was, the mummified hand of a long-dead saint that he had recovered from a cave in the wilderness. The instrument of his healing, he said it was, that also. Blaise had never seen it close; from this distance, from any distance it looked like a claw struck from some bird of myth and monstrosity. Black and twisted, glinting strangely, that dead thing caught the light and played with it as the living victims of the sickness could not. It had seemed bigger once, at the first healing that Blaise had witnessed; he remembered how everything had seemed bigger and more important when he was a child, and thought that he was ageing faster now.

  There was nothing, almost nothing to the miracle itself. If this were true salvation — a life drawn back from the very mouth of hell, a souls second chance gifted by the God's grace, the touch of a saint and the word and the prayer of a preacher - then there ought to be ritual, Blaise thought, there ought to be ceremony and more. A sight of the God Himself, perhaps, His voice in the thunder and His eyes' glare in the lightning of a storm. Something so momentous ought to rive rocks and send birds wheeling, screaming under a sky ripped like silk to let the stars fall down ...

  Instead of which, the preacher simply bent above the slack and heedless bodies, one by one. He muttered something that Blaise had never yet been able to hear, for all the nights of trying; he stretched down, to touch the children's Ups with the desiccated fingers of his saintly, shrivelled hand; he stepped away.

  And one by one, in the order of their touching, the children stirred. One by one they sat up, ungainly in their all-but-abandoned bodies; one by one they rose slowly to their feet to stand naked in the firelight and silence.

  That was all there was to see, figures and movement and stillness among the ever-shifting shadows. Blaise listened more than he watched, trying even yet to learn something, anything that he could offer to his master. He listened hardest in the moments of healing, but there wasn't so much as a tightening of breath from the children, a sudden catch on slippery life or a gasp at the snatching of their souls.

  As they rose up, the quiet was absolute. They didn't speak, and neither did the preacher, nor the disciples, of course, nor the camp-followers who had seen it all before, so often seen it all, and had each of them their own reasons to hold their tongues; nor the gaping villagers, crushed mute by the casual impact of a wonder.

  At last something snapped abruptly in the fire's heart, snapping also that endless moment that had caught them all like insects in amber. It broke the silence and the stillness both. The villagers surged forward, voices rising, crying in their own tongue that Blaise had never learned to understand; the preacher flung his arms out, his hands upraised to halt them, as he always did.

  'Back, be still!'

  They had come no nearer than the circle of disciples in any case, those dumb servants would let no rabble through; still, his voice and gesture quelled their rush. A few women were shrieking yet, mothers or aunts at a guess, but the rest were quiet if they could not be still, shifting restlessly on their feet, impatient to hear what he would say to them. They were his dogs for now, if he would use them so.

  It seemed for a while as though he would not use them at all. He turned his back on the mass of villagers, and spoke to their children only.

  'Dress yourselves,' he said, and they did, in the patched and tattered robes they'd worn beneath their shrouding blankets.

  Then, 'What will you do?'

  It took them a while, as it seemed, to find their voices. The words when they did come were slurred and tumbled across each other, though every child said the same and they were trying to speak together.

  'We will follow you, preacher.'

  'You hear them?' He turned around slowly, arms stretched wide. 'They came when I called, when I touched them with this holy relic; now they say they will follow me, although they do not know where I lead. That is faith, pure faith; they give themselves into my hands, from whom they have received blessing. That is as it should be. How many of you will do the same, when I tell you of the blessings that await you ... ?'

  There was protest, of course, there was the wailing of women, but Blaise had heard the same from what might as well have been the same women, night after night. He thought they wailed by rote, because it was expected of them. He gave it no more heed than the preacher did, or any who followed him, or the men of the village. The disciples sat down in their ordered circle and everyone else shadowed their movement, sitting behind in groups and clusters and huddles. Only the preacher remained on his feet. His voice cut easily through the women's noise, seeming to separate them from their distress as they were already separated from their menfolk, so that they fell quickly silent.

  'Your children have been touched by evil,' the preacher said, and saved only by the touch of the God. They are not the first. Here with me are many others who have suffered the same, and have been equ
ally blessed. More were not so fortunate; many have died before I could reach them, and their souls have been lost to eternity. This wickedness is spawned in Surayon, the cursed land of which you will have heard. It lies to the south, hidden by sorcerers. We are the Gods weapon, which he will hurl against it like a spear from His own hand. Follow me, and I will lead you to a place from where we can strike deep into the heart of impiety, cleanse the poison from this our land, free all our children from the kiss of demons breath ..

  And more, much more, but Blaise had heard it all before. And much like it from Magister Fulke at the Roq. Once he'd been rapt, he was still persuaded; he simply didn't need to listen any longer.

  He wished that once, just once someone would challenge the preacher, would ask the question that burned always in the back of his own mind: how a ragtag band of dreamers such as this could hope to do what a generation of lords and their armies had railed at, time and again. Surayon was small, to be sure, just a fingernail's width torn from every map he'd seen. Even so, these few could never overrun it if they'd been a well-armed military force. The preacher had a faith that blazed, and Blaise himself believed devoutly in the power of the God; but he was a soldier yet, and he believed also in the simple power of the sword, the weight of men in battle. There were fewer swords here than there were strong men, and those were few enough. Women and children outnumbered them; they added nothing, made only an extra burden, a weakness.