by Carol Berg
Alehouse riddling threatened to squeeze out more useful thoughts. Shaking my head, I stretched out my forearms, dug my elbows into the muck, and dragged myself forward on my side perhaps one quat—the length of a man’s knucklebone. Ominous warmth oozed out of the gouge on my back. My leg felt like a molten sword blank awaiting the smith’s hammer.
I rested my head on crossed forearms. One moment to catch my breath…
Much as I pretended elsewise, even to myself, I could shape spells, of course. Mostly destructive things, minor illusions, a child’s wickedness. Nothing that could heal a wound. Nothing that could summon help. Nothing useful.
The driving rain splashed mud in my face. Sleet stung the back of my neck. The cold settled deep in my bones until I wasn’t even shivering anymore. I hated the cold.
“Magrog take you, Boreas,” I mumbled, “and give you boils on your backside and a prick like a feather.”
Groaning shamelessly, I jammed my left foot into the rut and rolled onto my back. The dark world spun like soup in a kettle, yet I felt modestly satisfied. I might be doomed to blood and water and ice—madness, too, if breeding held true—but by Iero’s holy angels, I would die face up in this cesspool.
Rain spattered softly on my cheeks and the ground, on the puddles, the leaves, and a large rock, each surface producing a slight variant of the sound, defining the world on the far side of my eyelids. The scents of rotted leaves and good loam filled my nose…my lungs…seeped into my pores. My body blemished that vast landscape like a fallen tree, soon to be rotted, dissolved, and completely one with that cold, dark, and very wet place.
Soft padding steps rustled the wet leaves, stirring up smells of grass and moss and sea wrack, everything green or wet in the world. Paused. Fox? Rabbit? Mmm…bigger. Cold rain and warm blood had long washed away fear. Moments more and I wouldn’t care what kind of beast it was. A faint shudder rippled through my depths. Terrible…wonderful…to dissolve in the rain…
Creaking wood and iron sent the beast scuttering away. Soft yellow light leaked around my eyelids—a lamp spitting and sprizzling in the rain.
“You heard him at the sanctuary gate? From all the way up here?”
“By Iero’s holy name, Brother Sebastian. His cry sounded like the seven torments of the end times. When I poked my head out the shutters and saw none lay at the gate, conscience forbade me to lie down again without a search.”
“Never use the One God’s name lightly, boy. And in future you must seek Father Prior’s permission to go beyond the walls, even when on duty.”
A warm weight, smelling of woodsmoke and onions, pressed lightly on my chest. If I could have moved, I would have wrapped my arms about it. Kissed it even.
The weight lifted. “He breathes. I’d call it a miracle you found him, but now I look, I’m coming to believe you heard the fellow, after all. For certain he’s been through the seven torments. Here, lend me your hand.”
Hands grabbed me behind my left shoulder, where Boreas had extracted a second arrow and a sizable hunk of flesh. I left off any thought of joining the conversation. Breathing seemed enough. Keeping some wit about me. Listening…
The two mumbled of Iero and Father Prior and Saint Gillare the Wise, as they laid me on my side on a wooden platform that stank like a pig wallow and then proceeded to tilt it at such an angle that all my painful parts slid together in one wretched lump. The cart bumped forward, causing me to bite my tongue.
“Was he left by highwaymen, do you think, Brother?” The eager young speaker labored somewhere in front of me, expelling short puffs of effort.
“Highwaymen don’t leave boots with a man, even boots with soles thin as vellum. No, as his outfit’s plain and sturdy underneath the blood, I’d name him a soldier come from battle. Doesn’t look as if he’s eaten in a twelvemonth, for all he’s tall as a spar oak.”
“A soldier…” The word expressed a wonder that comes only when the speaker can’t tell a pike from a poker or a battle from a broomdance. “One of Prince Bayard’s men, do you think?”
“He might serve any one of the three, or this mysterious Pretender, or the Emperor of Aurellia himself. Such matters of the world should not concern you. Once Brother Infirmarian sees to the fellow, Father Abbot will question him as to his loyalties and purposes.”
Bones of hell…one would think an abbey so out of the way as this one might not care which of the three sons of King Eodward juped his brothers out of the throne.
The cart jounced through a pothole. The older man grunted. I sank into mindless misery.
Anyone might have mistaken the cold uncomfortable journey for the everlasting downward path. One of the two fellows—the younger one, I guessed, not the wise Brother Sebastian—chirruped a psalm about running with Iero’s children in sunlit fields, a performance so cheery it could serve as proper torment on such a road.
Eventually we jolted to a stop. Above my head arched a stone vault of uncertain height, not an ever-raining sky, though a round-cheeked aingerou carved into a corner spat a little dribble of rainwater onto the wagon bed. The yellow lamplight danced on the pale stone.
“Run for Brother Robierre, boy, and tell him bring a litter.”
“But I’m posted sanctuary, so I must give—”
“You’ve walked me halfway to Elanus. I’ll stay right here and give the fellow his blessing.”
Elanus. A small market town. South? West? Ought to know. How far did we run? I’d been more than half delirious on the road.
Bells clanged and clamored from the church towers, and out of the night rose the sound of men singing plainsong, clear and strong like a river of music, quickening my blood like a fiery kiss.
“Brother, it’s the call to Matins!” said the boy. “You have to go!”
“All right, all right, my hearing’s not so bad as that.”
Matins—morning at midnight. A perverse custom.
The wind shifted the lantern so that its beams nearly blinded me. I squeezed my eyes shut again. The night’s edge seemed sharp as a razor knife. I’d always heard the Ferryman’s mortal breath dulled the senses.
A dreadful thought shivered my bones: Had the Ferryman himself been breathing at my ear? He’d even smelled of sea wrack. I’d never truly believed…
“I’ll send Brother Infirmarian,” said Brother Sebastian. “When he no longer requires you, hie you to prayers yourself. The good god excuses no green aspirants.”
“Of course, Brother.”
Footsteps trudged away. A warm hand touched my brow. “By Iero’s grace, find safety here, thou who fleest sword or hangman. By the saint’s hand, find healing here, thou who sufferest wound or sickness. By gift of holy earth, find strength here, thou who comest parched or weak. And by King Eodward’s grant and his servants’ labor, find nourishment for thy flesh and spirit. God grant thee ease, traveler.”
An interesting prayer…gift of holy earth…King Eodward’s grant…all mixed in with the Karish god Iero and one of his saints. For the most part, the Karish dwelt peaceably side by side with the elder gods, but I’d never before heard a joint invocation.
I lifted my head. “Perhaps, if you could just help me out of this corner…”
An uncomfortable ricketing tilt of the cart brought a pale, narrow face above me. The lamplight revealed the thickening brows and downy upper lip of oncoming manhood, and such delight and amazement as could only emanate from the same soul that sang cheery psalms while slogging a manure cart down a mountainside in the rain. “You’re alive!”
I didn’t feel at all sure about that, having come so close as to hear the Ferryman’s footsteps. “Not dead. Thank you.”
“No need to thank me, sir. It’s my duty, you see, assigned me by the prior, who was given the task by the abbot, whose authority is from the hierarch and the One God in Heaven. I sleep above the sanctuary gate, ready to hear the bell and open the gate for any who come. You’re the first since I was given the task. You do beg sanctuary, don’t you?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“Thus you must have broken the law of God or king, or someone believes it so…” He tilted his head and drew his brows together. Clearly his excitement at receiving a supplicant was now tempered with consideration of my soul’s peril. My offenses were, indeed, countless, and my peril ever present.
“If you could just help me sit up.” So long tipped downward in the stinking cart had my belly mightily unsettled, not that there was aught left in it to spew.
The untonsured boy was as diligent with his wiry arms and gentle hands as with his words. By the time a gray-haired monk with darkish skin about his eyes, something like a badger’s markings, dropped a bundle of long poles on the paving, I sat across the lip of the three-sided cart, my head bent almost to my knees and my lip bloody from biting it.
“Jullian, unfold the litter. Let me examine what we have here. Ooh…” A glimpse of the broken, dark-stained shaft protruding from my black and swollen thigh was clearly the most interesting thing the fellow had seen that day.
“I hope you’ve a sharp knife, Brother,” I said, my voice shaking, “and a steady hand.”
Then he touched it, and the world slipped out of my grasp.
Chapter 2
“How do you feel this morning, my friend?”
I cocked one eye open. The smudge-eyed monk peered down at me, his arms overflowing with bundled linen and wooden bowls. Plastered walls hung with strips of green-dyed cloth rose up behind him to a timbered roof, and an array of narrow windows, paned with horn, admitted murky light. A smoking rushlight clamped to an iron tripod revealed ten more beds lined up neatly in the long plain room. From my odd vantage—I lay on my left side, some kind of bolster propping me up from the back and legs tipped higher than my head—the beds appeared unoccupied.
“I feel like Iero’s wrath,” I said. Every particle of my flesh felt battered; my leg throbbed as if the arrow point were grinding its way into the bone. My shoulder might have had rats chewing on it. Damp all over, I shivered helplessly despite a pile of blankets.
I had known better than to pull the damnable arrow out of my thigh when I had no help but Boreas, who was convinced that burying a live cat under an oak at the full moon would cure his crabs, and that spitting over a bridge rampart while wearing a moonbird’s feather would speed the healing of his broken hand. I knew little of the body’s humors. But one of a man’s great veins lay in the thigh, and I’d seen men bleed to death faster than a frog takes a fly while removing an arrow point carelessly from just the same spot as my wound. And we hadn’t been able to stop moving. When the Harrower priestess had thrown her legion of madmen against us, the battle had gone completely to the fiery pits, and six thousand other bloodied soldiers who had wagered their fortunes on the wrong side in this cursed war were soon to be right on our heels.
A halfwit would understand what the delay would cost me. Though I had weighed bleeding to death likely preferable to sepsis and amputation, in my usual way I had postponed the decision, figuring it was better to die tomorrow than today. Now the payment was falling due.
Mustering my courage, I broached the question gnawing at my gut. “You’ll take the leg, I know, Brother. But think you I’ll live to raise a glass again?”
The monk dropped his bundled linens atop a wide chest pushed against the end wall of the infirmary, then began arranging the wooden bowls on shelves already crowded with ewers and basins, jars and bottles. “If the One God’s mercy continues to hold sway, your leg will heal with no ill result. Your fever’s broken just this morn. Young Jullian will be certain his prayers are answered. You’d think the boy had delivered you from the gates of hell bearing sword and shield like the Archangel himself.”
“But it’s putrid, and when you remove the arrow—”
“The nasty bit of iron is two days out, lad, and for certain, you’ve the constitution of an ox. You’re on the mend.” The monk was a strapping fellow. Despite his circled eyes and his stubbled cheeks that drooped excess skin about his jaw, his face expressed naught but good cheer. He spread out an array of bundled plants on a long table that stood between the last bed and the stack of shelves. Perching his backside on a backless stool, he began picking leaves from the array. “I’m Brother Robierre, as it happens, by Iero’s grace the infirmarian of Gillarine Abbey.”
“Oh!” Astonishing how much better I felt straightaway. As if the jagged bits of a shattered mirror had put themselves together again. As if I’d pulled the veil off my contracted bride and found some girl I loved. I dropped my head on the pillow and crowed like a banty rooster. “May the angels scribe your name, Brother! The moment I’m afoot, I’ll dance you a jig and carry you to heaven on my back!”
A stoop-shouldered monk with piebald hair and a gray scapular over his cinched black gown scuttered out from behind me, casting a mildly shocked glance my way. The steaming crock he carried past my bed to the table left a scented trail in the air. Chicken—holy mother, could it be?—and onions and carrots and thyme and savory. My stomach rumbled uproariously.
Months had passed since I last tasted meat. In early summer Boreas and I had shot an aged squirrel, three bites apiece and broth from the boiled bones with little more than grass to throw in it. Then and since the Ardran legions had been squatting on land long raided, gleaned, and stripped. We’d had only bread like dried leather made from shriveled peas or even acorns ground into flour. And never enough. No planting or harvest this year in any of western Ardra. The summer campaign had been only one of Prince Perryn’s gross miscalculations in pursuing his father’s throne. Not even the worst.
“Thank you, Brother Anselm,” said Robierre. “I do believe our patient’s going to appreciate the soup today. Inform the abbot that our supplicant is awake, if you would.”
Piebald Brother Anselm nodded solemnly to the infirmarian and scurried away. To my delight, Brother Robierre put aside his activities and selected a wooden bowl from the shelf. I almost moaned as he filled the bowl from the tureen, acquired a spoon, and dragged a low stool to my bedside.
The good brother insisted I drink some concoction that tasted like boiled scrapings from a stable floor first of all. But after the first spoonful of the soup, I would have knelt to kiss the hairy toes that peeked out from his sandals had he but asked.
“Abbot Luviar has been most concerned about you,” he said as I reveled in the savory broth and tiny bits of succulent poultry deemed suitable for an invalid. “He’s had prayers said, asked blessings as we sit at table. He’ll be in to see you now I’ve sent word you’re awake.”
“Mmm,” I said, holding the last warm spoonful in my mouth before I let it trickle down my throat. “Iero’s holy angels…all of you.” I was feeling quite devout.
He grinned, an expression distinctly odd for a badger. “I’ll get you more.”
I had never shared Boreas’s horror of monks, but then I had never been fool enough to creep over a priory wall with a bursar’s coffer on my back. Boreas had been sentenced to the loss of one hand, a flogging, and a week in pillory, but managed to escape before suffering any of the three. Now he was convinced that every monk and lay brother passed his description about the realm tucked in sleeves or under scapulars, and that every abbot and prior was determined to hang him.
Sadly, my own direst peril had less to do with lawbreaking or sin than with birth and blood, circumstances for which no sanctuary could be granted. But I had no reason to believe that my loathsome family or the Pureblood Registry could find me here or anywhere. I’d shed them both at fifteen and had long since drowned myself in a sea of anonymity. I had no intention of bobbing to the surface. Ever.
Two more bowls of the brothers’ heaven-kissed soup and I took even the changing of the dressing on my thigh with good humor. Warm, fed, and clean—indeed someone had washed me head to toe while I slept—and out of the weather, and no one coming after me with arrows, pikes, lances, or hands outstretched for money…perhap
s the boy Jullian was indeed the archangel who guarded the gates of Paradise. The truest wonder was that he had let me in.
I fell asleep as promptly as a cat in a sunbeam. When my eyes drifted open again sometime later, a long-limbed man of more than middling years sat on the stool at my bedside. A golden solicale dangled from his neck—the sunburst symbol of Iero’s glory worked in a pendant so heavy it must surely be an abbot’s ensign. Instead of effecting a modest tonsure like the infirmarian’s, he had shaved his head entirely clean.
Holding in mind my present comforts, I bowed my head and shaped my greeting in the Karish manner. “In the name of holy Iero and his saints, my humblest gratitude be yours, holy father. Truly the One God led my wayward footsteps to this refuge when the world and all its ways had failed me.” I didn’t think it too grovelish.
“Iero commands us offer his hand in charity,” said the abbot, “and so we have done. It remains to be seen what he has in mind for you.” His full-shaven pate, fine arched nose, and narrow, pock-grooved face made his cool gray eyes seem very large.
I squirmed a bit, suddenly feeling even more naked than I already was under my lovely blankets.
A younger monk, full-shaven as well, but with unmarked skin and dark brows that made a solid line above deep-set eyes, stood a few steps behind the abbot, hands tucked piously under his black scapular. Though his expression remained properly sober, his brow lifted slightly and his mouth quickened with amusement as he observed me under the abbot’s eye.
“What is your name, my son?” The abbot took no note of his attendant’s improper levity.
“Valen, holy father.”
“Valen. Nothing else, then?”
“Nay, holy father.” No title to mark me as nobility or clergy. No town or profession to mark me as a rooted man even if my father was unimportant. No association with any of the three provinces of Navronne—Ardra, Morian, or Evanore—or with their contentious princes. And certainly no colineal surname to proclaim my family pureblood, and thus my future beyond even an abbot’s right to determine. Especially not that. “Just Valen.”