“Well, can you walk?”
She tried a quick smile and a nod. If he was from town, he would know that she wasn’t. She did not want him getting too friendly or inquisitive.
“Speak up, lad. Are your parents about?”
A stranger. She was safe for a while, then. Erde shrugged, shook her head and, inspired at last, put her fingers to her throat in the time-honored explanatory gesture of mutes.
“Oh. That’s how it is. I see.”
She nodded again, trying now to slip invisibly out of his grasp.
“Well, I’m sorry for that, boy.” The man frowned, not without pity but as if the very idea stood in for all the world’s other evils as well. “Let me guess . . . when was the last time you ate something?”
Her eyes flicked at him and away so fast that he chuckled out loud. “No need to be ashamed. We’re all a little short these days.” He dug into the wide studded belt that banded his peculiar red jerkin, and brought out a coin. He flipped it to her, and Erde, untrained in such maneuvers, fumbled it and nearly dropped it on the cobbles before managing a firm grip. She shot him a look of gratitude, even as she wondered why he should bother to help an unknown prentice lad.
Now the man was studying her speculatively, as if he regretted the coin already. Fearing he might ask for it back or demand some service in return, Erde saluted him quickly with her clenched fist and ducked away. He called after her, but she managed to lose herself in the crowd. It wasn’t until she was well away from him that she sneaked a glance at the coin. She nearly dropped it again. It was a silver mark, stamped with the king’s portrait on one side and the royal coat-of-arms on the other. It conjured a sudden image of festival market days and her grandmother’s long-fingered hands, so like her own, counting out in the king’s own currency her careful payment for a bolt of Italian velvet or a bushel of exotic citrus.
Erde could hardly believe her good fortune. She held in her hand money enough to buy food for a month, or maybe, several sheep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
She nearly ran after the man in the red jerkin to thank him properly. But the impulse quickly passed. It was only her upbringing talking, appropriate for a baron’s daughter but not for a fugitive murderess. Besides, the man must have some ulterior motive to go about giving silver marks to beggar boys. Either that or he was so very rich that having one mark less would mean little to him.
The excitement of this windfall infused her with new energy. She could actually buy her dinner now, like a normal honest citizen. Clutching the coin in her palm as if it were a religious relic, she fell in with the crowd again, streaming along the main thoroughfare that led to the church square. The many lanterns swinging in people’s hands made the chill puddled street seem warm and festive. Most of the single-story shops were still shuttered, but here and there, lamps gleamed behind wrinkled glass as the hungrier shopkeepers prepared to open early. The food sellers would bring their wares along on carts and set up at the big event, wherever the crowd was headed. Erde was greatly cheered by the prospect of a hot meal. She strode along in her most boylike gait, just on the verge of enjoying herself.
The market square was already packed with people, with crowds pouring in from all directions. Erde had never seen it so full, even on market days, especially so early in the morning. She thought back through the church calendar, wondering if in the recent chaos of her life, she’d forgotten some major religious festival.
Her own throng arrived at the far end of the broad windy rectangle, opposite the church. Tubin’s church was the largest in the baronage, and Erde thought it a proper model for all churches, even though the two-towered sandstone edifice was as yet uncompleted and she had never known it without scaffolding veiling its tall facade. Standing on tiptoe, she could see the top few tiers of scaffolding over the heads of the crowd, the maze of rain-heavy canvas windshields and the ramps and cross-bracing dripping water. Behind it all, like an unfinished sun, rose the outline of the huge round window that the monsignor claimed to be the latest in church design, which he said would surely convince the Bishop of Ulm to elevate it from church to cathedral, and thus bring visitors and pilgrims from far and wide into Tubin’s marketplace. Come dawn, the masons would return to continue mortaring the delicate curved mullions. When completed, the window was to be fitted with the finest colored glass imported all the way from Venezia.
She was distracted from her reverie by the aroma of roasted meat, drowning out even the heavy odors of farmer’s boots and unlaundered clothing. Searching frantically above the heads of the milling townspeople, Erde spotted the iron braziers burning on sturdy flatbed wagons parked along one side of the square. Flame shadows danced across the painted signs and multipaned windows of the craft guild halls behind. Prentice boys dodged about, dark shapes bobbing against firelight, tossing on armloads of wood, turning the spit-cranks. The spitted carcasses were thinner and stringier than the fare that had always graced the baron’s table. Once she’d have thought them too scrawny to be worth cooking. Now she thought differently. Her mouth watered. She thought of the dragon with its tongue-tip hanging out, and laughed in anticipation, except that what came out of her mouth could hardly be called a laugh, being all breath and no sound. It was the first time she’d even attempted a laugh in the three days since she’d lost her voice. Remembering why drained the breath and joy right out of her, leaving only hunger, now honed to a knife’s edge of determination. Her whole body tightened like a fist. She had to restrain herself from pushing through the crowd. She had an inkling now of why a person might kill in order to eat.
The first food seller she approached was a thin, quiet woman who glanced at the coin on Erde’s palm and shook her head. “You could buy the whole stock and stall with that coin, dearie, and what would I have left to give you in change? Tell your master you need something smaller next time.”
Erde nodded her thanks and moved on. The next man wouldn’t even look at her. He was too busy fawning over a large party of richly dressed men who seemed intent on devouring the entire scrawny lamb turning on his spit, before it was even cooked. Erde ducked away, wanting to avoid any local landowners who might know her father. She passed by a baker’s boy unpacking a small basket of loaves and meat pies onto a portable tray. The pies smelled delicious, but she was sure he wouldn’t have change for her silver mark. At the next stall, thin chickens dripped over glowing coals. Erde showed her coin to the red-faced owner, pointing and nodding at the biggest hen.
The food seller squinted at the coin. “What’s that you’ve got, boy?”
Erde held it into the light of his pole-lantern. The man snatched at it, narrowly missing it. Erde sprang back a step, but pointed again at the sizzling bird.
The man grinned. “Oh, that one? Now that one’ll cost you all of it.” He held out his hand.
Erde shook her head, amazed that she was even tempted.
“You don’t think I know where you got that?” the meat-seller hissed. He began to wave his arms and shout at her. “What do you think I am! Get away from me, you little thief!”
Erde backed away from him, appalled. The prentices had stopped their fueling and cranking to stare in sullen hope of an interesting fight. Erde turned and fled into the crowd, reconsidering the value of Red-jerkin’s gift. Maybe he’d meant to get her caught. She might be forced to steal her meal after all.
There was a stir in the market square. Something was going on in front of the church. The throng was lining up now, in disorderly rows three and four deep. Small children were being lifted up to sit on their fathers’ shoulders. They blocked Erde’s view of the square, but food was more important to her right then than whatever ceremony was about to begin. She made her way along the back row toward the end of the line of food stalls to try her luck again. Suddenly, the crowd in front of her parted in a wave and regrouped to open a passage from a side street into the square. A hush fell over them. Even the children lowered their voices. Necks craned in the direction of a muffled drumbeat
and the creak of wagon wheels. Erde peered around the plump shoulder of the woman in front of her, and shrank back immediately.
White-robes!
Marching to solemn cadence in their all-too-familiar double-file formation came Fra Guill’s thirty acolytes, heads bowed, deeply cowled. Two of them walked a pace ahead, beating small hand drums. The rest pulled a slat-sided wooden cart, leaning into the ropes as if the burden were greater than any mere mortal could bear. Yet the cart was small and it carried only a solitary woman.
Slim torches burned at the cart’s four corners. The woman stood tall, gripping the thigh-high side rails, shivering visibly but staring straight ahead. She wore only a rough muslin shift, wet through from the rain, so that her full, handsome breasts and smooth hips were plain for all to see. Erde found herself blushing for the woman’s sake. She had never seen a person in such a state of public undress. How could she hold her head so high? Had she no modesty?
Among the watchers, the wives muttered their fear and disapproval, which only barely hid their envy, for the woman was very beautiful. The men shifted about and hiked up their clothing at the crotch.
Then Erde noticed that the woman’s wrists were tightly bound to the rails, and she felt her stomach drop away from her backbone and every hair on her body thrill with horror. Now she understood the conversation she had overheard on the road into town. She had stumbled onto a witch-trial. She was unsure why this complete stranger’s predicament should compel her so, except that it reminded her of Alla. And it was confusing to sense a faint stirring of pride that the woman could look so strong and beautiful, even when wet and shivering and obviously terrified. Erde had promised to flee at the very scent of a white-robe, but now she found she could not.
When the grim procession had passed and the last white-robe had put his back to her, she stole a glance after them. In the square, at the bottom of the church steps, prentice boys hauled canvas tarps off of a stack of twigs and branches wrapped with grass into thirteen bundles. The canvas had kept the grass pale and dry. The twigs were dark with a coating of pine tar. Inside each bundle was a stack of logs. Erde’s horror increased. This was not a trial at all, it was a burning. The white-robes had found a victim. Run, run, urged her voice of reason, but morbid fascination held her rooted to the spot.
Her grandmother, the baroness, had a dislike of witch-burnings which many considered peculiar, so they had not been common around Tor Alte during her reign. She would not allow them on her own lands and discouraged her household from attending them elsewhere. Yet it seemed to Erde that she’d heard almost every woman she knew over child-bearing age accused of being a witch at some point or another, particularly if they did something out of the ordinary. The baroness herself came under suspicion as often as any. Erde had never thought much about it. Not that she didn’t believe in witches. She’d heard the stories of witches’ spells and curses. Sometimes she’d even seen the results. But she couldn’t take such talk seriously about people she knew—except maybe the chicken-crone.
But the chicken-crone was old and impossibly ugly. The woman in the church square was still young and lovely, most likely a mother of young children. She must have done something very awful indeed to deserve the stake at her age. But then, Brother Guillemo had passed over the chicken-crone and tried to burn Alla. Erde knew Alla hadn’t deserved burning, whether she was a witch or not.
The cart pulled up at the base of the church steps and the white-robes halted with a resounding slap of sandals against stone. She looked for Guillemo among them, but as usual, their faces were deep in the shadow of their hoods. The drumming stopped, the bell ceased its tolling. The sudden hush was deafening, as if everyone in the square had caught their breath. The torches on the cart danced and snapped, the only sound but for a child crying somewhere in the crowd. Their bright heat spilled across the wet paving stones as if the pyre was lighted already. Erde recalled the reflection of herself afire in her father’s cold eyes, and wished she’d fled when she could have done it unnoticed. Only by a supreme exertion of will did she keep herself from rushing in blind panic from the square. The witch-woman’s frozen stare was like the eyes of the deer before the huntsman’s grace stroke, calm with the understanding that struggle was useless and in the end, degrading.
When the silence had stretched almost to the breaking point, one of the drummers threw back his hood, set down his drum, and mounted the steps. Guillemo. Of course. Playing the crowd as usual. Erde shrank farther back into the press of bodies, fearful of his searching gaze, which had proved so adept at picking her out, perhaps even in so large a throng as this where he could not possibly expect to find her. One of the brothers held out a torch to him. The others began piling the bundled wood and twigs inside the cart, ringing the witch-woman’s feet. Guillemo accepted the torch with elaborate humility. At the top of the steps, he crossed the entry porch and swung up the nearest ladder to the masons’ scaffold. He climbed briskly, torch in hand, to the second, then the third level, where he set the torch into a workman’s brazier and spread his arms for attention.
Which he already had. Every eye in the square had been fixed on him breathlessly from the instant he’d grabbed the torch and started up the scaffold.
“Oh my people! I call you to witness!” The priest’s deep voice carried to the back of the crowd, echoing like cannon fire off the stone facades of the merchants’ houses and guild halls, like the thunder of avalanches rolling down from the surrounding mountains. “The Time of Plague is upon us! As the dawn brings light today, the Light of God will enter this place as we make a bold stroke against Satan, our mortal enemy. But ridding ourselves of one viper does not clean out the whole deadly hidden nest!”
At his gesture to the brothers below, the drums rolled again. A black-garbed priest of the parish ushered two children from inside to stand on the church steps. They had been dressed in white, in clothes obviously not their own. Bitterly, Erde decided Guillemo had missed his proper calling. He should have been an actor, or a creator of theatricals. At least then his madness would have remained relatively benign.
One of the children was a girl nearly Erde’s age. The younger, a boy, tried to break free and run to the woman standing in the cart, but the priest held him firm. Guillemo began his harangue, pacing up and down the scaffold platform just as he had on the bench in the baron’s eating hall, as if it were a pulpit.
“See here, oh my people, the corruption of Innocence! See here how the Devil hides himself in alluring disguise . . .”
Erde stopped listening. She felt a sob working its way up from deep in her gut. She could not press her hands to her ears or sing hymns to drown him out, as she’d once seen villagers do to a priest who bored them with his sermon. She eased herself backward, letting heads and shoulders screen her view, then turned away as if to canvas the food stalls. To her horror, there behind the baker’s boy was the man in the red jerkin, his glance casually taking in the crowd as if he was looking for someone who might not want to be found. Erde feared it might be her, for Red-jerkin was probably one of Guillemo’s civilian searchers, or even a white-robe in disguise! She hunched into her cloak and drew up the hood, as if against the rain, which had stopped a while ago. She was trapped. What a bold and reckless notion it had been to come into town!
Fighting for calm enough to consider her options, Erde decided she had a better chance getting past Red-jerkin than the combined forces in front of the church. She observed him covertly for a while from beneath the fold of her hood, and because she was watching him so carefully, she noticed the change in his attention when Guillemo threw into his rant something about the king, some not-so-veiled insult. The crowd pressed forward, murmuring their approval. A few clenched fists were raised. And Erde saw the anger that flushed Red-jerkin’s face, his glare at Guillemo as quick and venomous as a snake-strike and as quickly hidden again behind his former businesslike manner.
Perhaps not the priest’s man after all. What sort of man, then, to care so much
for the honor of the king? Erde knew she was confused about this issue. Tor Alte was too rugged, too far away and too unimportant to be on the aging monarch’s visiting schedule. The king was at most an ideal to her, since her grandmother while she ruled had offered all due fealty and respect to this distant sovereign, insisting that a central absolute authority helped keep civilization together. But her son disagreed, and since her death, Josef von Alte had been increasingly vocal about the king’s incompetence and irresponsibility, as well as his presumption in claiming sovereignty over so many far-flung baronetcies, especially when his own family lands weren’t much to speak of. Her father even spoke positively of the widening split between the old king and his barons.
So Erde thought it peculiar that an obvious man of the world such as Red-jerkin would take a common complaint so much to heart. She felt that she knew a secret about him, and that she was somehow obscurely privileged, even though she hoped never to lay eyes on him again. She wondered if he served any of her father’s vassal barons. At least she could see he had no love in his heart for Guillemo.
She meant to sneak past him while his attention was engaged, but then she heard Tor Alte’s name flung against the stone facades to echo around the square. A spontaneous roar rose from the crowd, then died away into a darkening murmur. She saw Guillemo pause, high on the scaffolding, waiting them out, quieting them with little waves of his hands until he could be heard again.
The Book of Earth Page 11