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As the dust from their passing settled, a lone form staggered out of the gulch. She was tall and thin. She wore a man's clothing, worn and dark with the dust of the road. Her hair was matted and had gathered brambles and thorns. Her face was streaked with tears and lined with pain.
She made her way into the circle of tents and dropped to her knees, staring at the huge cross topping the central tent. No one saw her enter. The only light in the camp came from the rear of The Deacon's tent, which was lit so brightly with candles it seemed to be on fire. Her gaze was drawn to that light, and like a moth to flame, she staggered to her feet and started forward.
From the shadows, kneeling beside his horse, Creed watched. He'd trailed her from half a mile beyond the empty trapper's camp. He'd been ready to call out to her, to try and calm her and get her to ride with him back to town when the scream silenced the world. The girl had turned toward that sound, not away from it, and she'd started walking again. Creed had followed. He would have caught her, too, but as he saw the wagons and horses line up and leave the camp, the crows took flight once more. The suddenness of it stole his breath, and had him reaching for his gun, and by the time they'd wheeled into the sky and disappeared into the distance, the girl had made it to the gates of The Deacon's camp and inside.
Now there was nothing left but to watch.
Chapter Nine
She crawled out of the night like a creature from hell, seeking salvation.
There were no saviours in The Deacon’s city of canvas and prayer.
She knelt, flakes of hard rock cutting savagely into her knee. There was so much pain in her thin body she barely felt the bite of the stone. The tears in her eyes robbed the clutter of tents of any defined shape or form. The light she'd seen flickered above her like hot flames, and colors bled into one another as her grip on the world slipped away. The world had descended into the primal, leaving her to fight for her life on instinct alone, her mind too numb from the pain for coherent thought. Cramps tore at her stomach in waves. She cradled her belly and whimpered into the darkness that rose up to swallow her. For one single beat of her fracturing heart, she gazed up at the sky and saw that it fill with a thousand points of silver light, and then a million and a billion as the pain exploded white-hot across her eyes. Then everything dipped to black.
She lost her balance, unable to stay up on her knees. She slumped and curled in a foetal position, instinctively trying to protect her unborn child from the agony devouring her flesh. There was no protection. No relief. There was nothing she could do as another stab of pain tore up through her womb and into her heart.
Somewhere deep inside, a sound echoed. She latched onto it, clung to it like a branch held over quicksand. It came again, louder, and she fought to make it out. The pain threatened again and she bit her lip hard, willing it away. She needed to hear that sound, to hear any sound, to see or feel something beyond the pain.
She turned her face to the sky again, but there were no stars. Instead she saw a face, a man's face. He smiled down at her gently.
"Something's wrong." She said. "It hurts..God, it hurts..."
The words choked out of her, so drenched in tears and misery they were barely coherent. She spoke to the man, but whispered to the world. They were simple, heartbreaking words; the desperate plea of mother who felt the impending loss of a child she'd never even seen.
"Hush girl."
The man's voice soothed her. He knelt beside her and rested a hand on her distended belly. He kept his voice low, a gentle barrier against the pain raging through her. She surrendered to that voice, grateful she was no longer alone.
When she opened her eyes, he asked, "How far along are you?"
She tried to think. Voices swirled through her thoughts, breaking them apart before she could pin them with her tongue and spit them out. She concentrated.
"I don't know." She said. "I..."
She couldn't get beyond that thought. She had seen childbirth. She knew the risks. If her child came like this, it would die – she would die.
"Help me, please." She clutched the stranger’s hand. It was firm and strong, and just for a moment that touch steadied her. He didn’t pull away as her cracked and broken fingernails dug into his wrist. She fixed her gaze on his lips – he was saying something but she could not hear the words. A prayer? An invocation? Her fevered mind imagined he might be beseeching the heavens or calling down an angel to guide her soul to the next world. She tried to shake the thoughts free, but they lingered. His voice was not only soothing – it was mesmerizing.
She felt blood and water between her legs and she knew it was too late. She was as good as dead. She didn't scream. The finality of the moment slid into her like a long, sharp blade of ice. She closed her eyes. The last sight she saw was the rough wooden cross, high atop the biggest tent. That image strobed in her mind, and she felt the tickle of her heartbeat. It was funny, after everything that had happened to her, that two lengths of wood should evoke such a sense of hope. But just as there were two spars to the cross there were two underlying sensations; the first was the hope, the second weighing down so heavily on her she could barely breathe, was futility.
Fresh cramps tore through her and she drew her legs up tight to her stomach even as the man hushed her again.
"What’s your name, child?"
"Mariah."
In a gesture of curious tenderness the man wiped a finger across her cheek, his warmth absorbing the tears that stained her face. She felt a tiny flicker of heat swell beneath his touch and spread slowly through her skin into the bones beneath. He stroked her gently, his hand moving from her cheek down her neck and between her breasts to her distended belly, and lower. There was nothing sexual in the connection despite the fact that she found her body responding to the warmth, her back arching even as he knees drew up tighter to her stomach.
"A pretty name," the man soothed, keeping his voice calm. "Around here they call me The Deacon. Believe me when I say that it was God’s will that you found me, child." He let his hand linger above the birth canal. "Of all the people you could have run to, He guided you to me. That in itself is a miracle."
"Something's wrong," she said. She felt stupid and helpless, repeating the words over and over. "You have to make it stop."
An agony of tears stained her face. "Something’s wrong," she barely got the words out the second time. "I can feel it."
"Have faith, Mariah," The Deacon whispered. Her eyes flared open as she felt the heat of his touch sink deeper beneath the skin as though being absorbed by the dying child in her womb. It had to be the pain, making her crazy. She needed that pain to stop, but she knew that it wasn't going to happen. Not while she lived. Not while she bled.
He withdrew his hand and raised it to his lips, as though to taste the heat of her pain and the life of her child on his chapped lips, and then stood.
"Don’t leave me," she pleaded, reaching up until another wave of hurt caused her to double up again. He didn’t seem to hear her. Between the tears the world blurred, all the colors swirled into a chiaroscuro wash of unrelenting pain. It looked to Mariah as though he reached inside his chest and pulled something – his heart? – out. She shook her head. For a full minute the world refused to focus, and then she saw his fingers fumbling with the drawstrings of a small pouch.
Chapter Ten
The Deacon loosened the rawhide thong that cinched the leather pouch. He felt the girl’s pain empathically, its hooks rooted deep down in the nerves beneath his flesh. He turned his head away and hawked up a wad of blood and phlegm. This was new and not altogether pleasant. He wiped beads of perspiration from his pocked brow, frowning as his concentration slipped. For a moment longer than he could bear, he allowed too much of her pain through. He had never felt the suffering of another quite so acutely. He gritted his teeth against it, driving the devils of agony out of his mind.
They refused to leave him.
He pressed his fingers to his te
mple, aware of the bitter irony that he could not do for himself what he could so easily do for others.
He was weak from the earlier healing, but he had opened himself up to greater hurts than this before and borne them with ease. Another lance of pain flashed behind his eyes, this time so sharp it caused his vision to fail. He did not panic or cry out but rather clutched the leather pouch, drawing strength from it.
"Hush now, Mariah," he said, not to the wretched girl leaking her life into the ground at his feet, but to the pain itself. It pulsed like an infected canker deep inside him. Her child was dying. He had looked inside her and felt the life force failing. That was his gift; the ability to reach inside another with his senses and to understand the state of things. In the girl, Mariah, everything felt wrong. To mend her, he needed to be able to fight it, restoring a balance to the blood and bone, marrow and fat. But there was always a price owed for such a gift, like now, knowing that the child was choking to death on the cord that bound it to its mother. It was hard to believe in goodness when what gave life so mercilessly took it away from the most innocent of children. A holy man would have shuddered, but The Deacon served his own Lord, and this was his way.
His vision was clear on one thing. For either to survive The Deacon had to bring the babe out into the light.
He could not simply cut the child from her belly though, not if he wanted her to live. Not if he wanted to give the illusion to his followers that he had tried to save them both. Save the mother? Save the child? Save both or damn them?
The Deacon clasped the pouch tighter, as though seeking wisdom from the relic within. It responded to his touch with a brief surge of intense, fiery heat. Aloud, in case any might be near enough to witness what was happening, he concentrated his thoughts into questions, offering them as prayer.
"Can I save both? Do I have the strength to oppose your will and keep both mother and child in this mortal realm? Do I have the right?" Then, almost as an afterthought, the question, "Or are they both to leave us now? Have you led them to my door to be harvested, Lord?"
He reached down and tore away the cloth from Mariah's breast with an urgency approaching anger. He laid the pouch against her bare skin and pressed his hands flat to her ribcage, riding gently with the rise and fall of her shallow breath.
The girl made a vague gurgling noise as her eyelids fluttered open. Her eyes rolled up into her head, leaving milky white orbs staring blindly to Heaven. The Deacon licked his lip and forced himself to wait a heartbeat, then another, before he touched a finger to her throat. The pulse was there, but little more than a weak flutter.
He closed his eyes and focused on the flow of the blood beneath his fingertips, the rhythm of it. Slowly, he let himself sink into that trickle of life. He fed his strength into her through that contact and felt the sharp draw on his vitality that he knew so well. It was not magic; not in the tribal or shamanic sense, it was God – or some other power equally compelling - moving through him, channelled through his flesh into the dying girl’s blood to make it stronger. That is the story he told, that the creator used him for repairs that he was only roadway for a higher power to walk. Sometimes, alone at night and staring into the heavens, he even believed it. He concentrated, and the outpouring of energy slowed, stilled, and then reversed. The Deacon closed his eyes, relishing the heat as it flowed back into him.
The laying on of hands drew almost as much from him as it gave to those in need of his talents. It was two sides to the silver coin that paid the Boatman, a blessing and a curse and all of those other truisms connected so virulently to the Lord to exemplify that He both gave and took away when divine whimsy struck. It never passed without leaving its mark, and it was an intricate dance.
"Not yet, child, not yet," he murmured as the warmth spread out from his fingers, supplementing her pulse and passing the blood flowing to her brain.
He savoured her heart beat as it echoed within him, racing at first but then slowing to match his. She showed no sign of waking. Sometimes The Deacon liked to watch the fear and understanding spread across the face of a penitent as he performed a harrowing, but this time he sensed everything was different, and he was glad for the lack of distraction. He pulled the rest of her dress away from her shoulders and down to bare the glorious mound of her belly. He slid his hands down to rest on either side of her stomach, feeling the outline of the child beneath the protective sack of the mother’s flesh.
There was no life there.
The Deacon closed his eyes.
"Give me a sign, Lord. Guide my hand so that it might serve your will."
As though in response, the winds around the tent gusted, churning the dust from the surface of the hard baked dirt into devils that blew along the pathways forming the wretched canvas settlement.
"Is this your will? Is this as you would have it?" He raised his hands and thrust them into the air above his head. The winds answered, the dry crack of thunder rumbled over the distant hills. The Deacon grew very still. His head cocked to the side, as if he discerned words in that dull roar. His voice shifted when next he spoke, dropping a full octave and becoming thick with gravel. "Then so it shall be done."
There was no rain.
The wind rose and tore at the flaps of the tents surrounding them. Guide ropes thrummed like plucked guitar string and tugged against the stakes anchoring them to the earth. The taut canvas walls beat a wretched cacophony to rival the wing beats of the hundreds upon hundreds of black winged birds that had descended upon the town the night before. The Deacon's hair whirled about him wildly. His jacket threatened to tear back and blow free of his shoulders. Still the noise rose, accentuated by the scratch and scrap of claws on the canvas of the tent roofs.
The crows had returned to carry the shriven soul away into the night. The Deacon thought for a moment that he could distinguish voices in their calls and in the cry of the wind and the snap of the heavy canvas where it tore free of its restraining guide ropes. Was that what the Lord sounded like, a voice too huge to be heard?
Savoring the taste of them on his lips, The Deacon recited the words of the harrowing, his fingernails bloody as they dug into Mariah’s pale skin, clawing in deeper and still deeper as though they might somehow pare away the souls of mother and child from their corrupt flesh.
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Creed hunkered lower, trying to see through the battering wind and the churning dust devils. He pressed his hat down low over his face, using the wide brim to shield him from the worst of the elements. There was no respite.
He didn't know for sure what he was witnessing until The Deacon stood. He cradled something in his arms, something small and very pale. The darkness drained away the colors, but for some reason Creed saw blue. The Deacon spoke softly, words of solace perhaps, a prayer for the lost soul, some last rite for a stillborn child? The sound flew with the wind
Before Creed could stand, shadows broke free of the darkness obscuring The Deacon and his burden. Several of The Deacon’s misfits shuffled into view, surrounding him. Their deformities both repulsed and fascinated Creed; it was as though corruption itself had tainted their flesh and bones, or some deep, integral part of them had been stolen and carted away.
They knelt beside the woman. They lifted her, shuffling, shambling pall bearers without a coffin to separate them from their load. She hung limp in their arms. Creed knew instinctively that they did not intend to help her. Something in the way they pulled back from The Deacon, and the child, told him the mother's part in this morbid drama was played out.
The group turned away from The Deacon without a sound. They manhandled the woman, carrying her unceremoniously toward where Creed hid. He remained very still, sure that if he moved, they would hear, and not certain they wouldn't catch his scent. Something in the way they'd entered the clearing without being summoned gave the impression of acute awareness. They stopped within a few feet of him, pulled back the tarp from one of the wagons and dumped the limp and bloody body into the flatbed.
> Still Creed didn’t move.
He crouched, transfixed by the macabre theatre of it all, staring slack-jawed as The Deacon raised the child to his lips and kissed its death palled forehead. The child writhed, then squirmed in his grasp. Creed's stomach lurched. The newborn coughed wetly, and then a moment later cried, announcing itself to the world with tears of grief and shock and horror. There was no life or joy in that cry. It was the voice of ultimate suffering.
As The Deacon turned, Creed saw the hideous deformity that marred the child in his arms. That child had no place on God’s green earth. All he could think, seeing it squirming in The Deacon’s arms, was that it was dead. No, not merely dead, soulless.
And yet it screamed.
The sudden lurch of the wagon startled him from his reverie. It rolled forward, and Creed drew back involuntarily. He watched, knowing that he should follow, that he should see what became of the girl, if only to be certain she received a burial, and wasn't dumped in the cold of the desert to feed the vultures. He knew it was the right thing to do, but he turned away.
He watched as The Deacon carried his burden to the back of his wagon, silhouetted against the canvas walls of his tent, beyond which candle flames still danced. Those candles should have toppled in the wind. That wagon should have gone up in flame. Now the wind died to a whisper, and The Deacon vanished through the entrance at the back of his home, joining the dancing shadows within.
Creed turned, stumbled once, then caught his balance and ran. He'd left his horse in the gulch. He dropped over the rim and slid down the shale and gravel, digging the heel of his boot through stone and bones. His breath was ragged, and his heart raced. He thought he still heard The Deacon murmuring to the death-child in his arms.
Hallowed Ground Page 4