by Judith Field
When he cut through my wrist, it was the worst pain of all.
¤
“There.”
He need not have said it. The monastery stood on top of a hill, its lanterns specks of light in the evening gloom. A dusting of snow covered the hundreds of steps leading up. In my exhaustion, they looked like a stairway to Hell.
I stumbled off the cart and rested my back against a tree. The peasant swam in front of me; he snapped the reins and moved off without another word.
I staggered towards the steps. My teeth chattered and a wave of nausea overtook me. I thrust my freezing hands—no, one hand and a bandaged stump—into my coat and took the steps one at a time. I could barely see where each one was, through the pain and the sweat drenching my face. I stumbled more than once, before I reached the top and paused to gulp the cold air. Flames burned from a lamp either side of the huge oak door.
There was a bell. I reached out—
No, no good anymore. I choked back a sob and pulled the cord with my right hand instead.
The door opened. A warden stood there in his black robe. “What?”
“I seek… seek…” His eyes became four and the flagstones on the floor grew larger. “…sanctuary.”
I fell.
¤
When I woke, I found myself lying naked underneath a thin sheet. My stump felt wet and, for the first time in days, without pain. A woman was sitting on my bed with her back to me, wearing the hooded white robe of an abbess. She had a small table, where she worked at something with a mortar and pestle.
She turned, aware of my consciousness. “Ah, awake at last.” Her voice was soothing, yet radiated an unmistakeable confidence. Her silver eyes were so much younger than her lined face.
“Yes,” I croaked.
She handed me a mug and I sipped gratefully at some water.
“Now your arm,” she said. I let her raise my stump. I could only look at it for a moment—blood encrusted, yellow pus dripping—before turning away. “Here you go.” She lifted a glob of green paste out of her bowl with a spatula and smeared it on the stump.
I gasped, but it didn’t hurt.
“Just one more thing to do,” she said. She placed a glowing finger on my wound and it suddenly felt warm. The green substance seeped in.
“Now,” she continued. “We’ll let it heal in the air and you can tell me who did this to you.”
“What have you done?” I said, tilting my head towards my arm. It was all the movement I could muster.
“A healroot infusion and some love from the Lady. You should start to feel better soon.”
“Love from the Lady? You mean magic?”
She gave me a knowing wink and changed the subject. “Was it Ivanov?”
I sighed and closed my eyes. “Yes.”
“I can tell by the way it was done. And what did you do to deserve this fate?”
Should I tell her? Why not, the secret was already out, and it would only help my… my what? My mission?
“My friends and I, we made a pamphlet that we printed every week. Ivanov wasn’t happy.”
“No, he wasn’t happy. What was the name of this pamphlet?”
It had been Natasha’s idea. I remembered her joy when we’d agreed on it. “Interregnum.”
She laughed. “You couldn’t have made it more obvious, implying the Revolution is a short period between Kingdoms. And your friends?”
“One was taken. The others… I sent a message by a Scribe, but when they took me, I…” I turned from her in shame, “…I told them everything.”
Her expression was kind, kinder than I deserved. “Lady Laryssa will forgive you.”
I looked away from her, unable to meet her eyes. An icon of the Lady hung on the wall. She stood on a hill. Long blonde hair billowed around her angelic face, light shone from her hands and a broadsword hung on the back of her armour. At her feet lay the Host: eight men, as handsome as she was beautiful, gazing adoringly at her.
“Which one fell here?” I asked.
She looked at the icon. “Didn’t you learn anything in school? It was Exetl. He’s second from the right.”
“School was a long time ago,” I said.
She frowned. “People forget so easily. But no more, now that the Host have returned.”
I gasped out loud. “But they fell—they died—after defeating the Demorin…”
Her face creased and she appeared puzzled. This was the greatest news of the age and she should have been shouting it from the rooftops. So why did nobody else know?
“The angels are here. I healed the rest earlier, while you slept.” She indicated my groin as she stood. “Rest now, Nikolay, and we will bring you food after.”
I realised later, as sleep found me, that I had not given her my name.
¤
Natasha was beneath me, eyes wide, waiting. I pressed my lips to hers—gently first, then with more urgency. She was alive.
Her body responded, pressing against me. I moved my lips lower, down her neck, across her throat and she moaned. I tasted her saltiness before my lips met the collar of her blouse.
I opened a button, exposing more exquisite, porcelain skin. She bucked against me harder, inviting me to push down, to show her what was to come. Quickly now, I opened another button to expose the fullness of her breasts and I licked the skin between them.
And then I saw it—a left hand poised at a button—not mine, but the red-lit hand of Ivanov. In an instant, her buttons closed of their own accord. She glared at me in accusation, and then she was gone.
I sat up in my monastery bed, bathed in a feverish sweat, my heart thumping, my hand missing, and I wept for all that I had lost.
¤
I spent two days in the room before the fever broke. I had nothing to look at except whitewashed walls and the Lady’s icon. Whatever the abbess had done to my stump was gone; it ached constantly, even more than before. Worse, my hand—my phantom hand, likely in some dump or cur’s dinner in the Lubyanka—itched constantly. Occasionally a monk brought me food, but otherwise my only distraction was to think on what the abbess had told me.
Was the church’s dogma true after all, rather than the dreams of old women and simpletons? Had the Lady and her Host really come from the Hidden Realms to save us? As I grew up I had disbelieved, like so many others, despite the stories of power held in the monasteries. Stories weren’t enough to hold my faith, though, until now. My heart soared, just for a moment, before sense pushed its way into my consciousness. I had met one of what the abbess said were the Host, yet the Scribe was certainly no angel.
I could leave now, if I had the strength, and tell Ivanov. But likely he would laugh and cut off my other hand.
I had to see for myself.
¤
I looked in the mirror and barely recognised myself. I was haggard, my eyes sunken. My beard, assiduously cultivated, had grown wild so that it dominated my scrawny face. I spent some time taming it before I pulled on my clothes. A nun had put a fresh bandage on my stump that morning. She said it was healing. I took her at her word; I could not bear to look. Still, the pain wracked me and the itch drove me demented. The abbess had not returned to use her magic again.
I hid my stump in my coat pocket and shambled out. The corridor was empty, the doors of other guestrooms shut. Where to?
The layout was similar to the city monastery, I found. I reached the cloister and walked along the terrace outside of it, keeping under cover from a light drizzle. I rounded a corner and found a line of people—customers, really—stretching towards the main entrance. I joined behind a peasant woman who eyed me suspiciously. I ignored her.
We edged forward as each one entered the room. They all went in the same—anxious, agitated—and left the same, ashen-faced and hurried. Even the one low-level revolutionary—blue-clad, smug in his certainty—ran from the monastery, casting a terrified glance over his shoulder.
My turn came. The creature was identical to the other save for
one thing. The horrified human face was higher, almost to its neck. I kept my gaze focussed on the Scribe’s eyes.
The thought was hazier than I remembered, as if the Scribe had to struggle to plant it in my consciousness. I gritted my teeth through the pain—it outweighed my fear—and rubbed my absent hand against the fabric of my pocket. “No. I wish to know… where somebody is.” Natasha.
It tilted its head, studying me. Did it know why I was here, who had sent me? I had no choice anyway. If it knew, it knew.
So it knew something of me, at least. Perhaps I could be done with this quickly.
“The abbess says you are one of the Host. Is it true?”
I shrugged.
The thought was rougher this time, as if it grasped at my thoughts, trying to push something in. It was uncomfortable, much more so than before. My wrist flared in response.
The Scribe jerked. A slight movement of the head, but present nonetheless.
I hurried out. The line of people ignored me but the warden was there behind them. His silver eyes stared at me and I shivered.
I had done something wrong.
¤
That night, I slept fitfully. The itch was unbearable but what could I do? I scratched, knowing I shouldn’t, but the palm that itched wasn’t there. The pain of my wound, however, certainly was.
I heard a shuffling from outside my door. It should not have bothered me—it was a monk, likely. Something tickled my mind, reaching, feeling around.
I sat up and lit the lamp. The shuffling was still there. I padded to the door and listened, my skin crawling. I grasped the doorknob as if to stop it turning.
The noise stopped and the feeling in my mind evaporated. I took my hand away from the knob but stayed sitting by the door for the rest of the night.
It had to have been the Scribe. Somehow, it knew I was a threat, and that gave me hope.
¤
The next day, I looked for the abbess so I could find out more. I had to hurry; the Scribe suspected me and possibly the warden did too. If I did not find out more before I was evicted—or worse—Ivanov would surely have me killed. I felt the strongest I had in days, yet the pain and phantom itch still tormented me.
I went past the new line of people, careful to look away towards the cloister, when I saw a monk with yellowing eyes, just like the one in the city monastery. I paused and he looked away, as if caught in the act. You’re hiding something, I thought.
Emboldened, I passed between two pillars. He hurried towards me, preventing me setting foot on the grass.
“The Scribe is over there,” he said, pointing towards the line.
If I overplayed my hand now, I might be caught. It was better to leave my suspicions untested. “Of course, thank you.”
I joined the line and, as soon as he was out of sight, headed for my room.
There was something about the garden, something different. I would wait until it was quieter.
¤
A monk brought me dinner in my room that evening. I had never been invited to the refectory—and did not want to go—so it was possible some of them still did not know of my existence there, just like the one in the garden. Perhaps only the warden knew I had offended the Scribe.
When the sun set, I decided it was time. I donned my coat and made for the door when I heard footsteps. Icy fear gripped my stomach. But, no; it was footsteps, rather than the uncanny shuffling of the night before. My mind, too, remained clear.
There was a knock.
“Yes,” I croaked through dry lips.
The door opened and the warden’s eyes gleamed. “You have a visitor.”
He stepped aside and my heart skipped a beat.
Natasha!
Her long hair gleamed black beneath a woolen hat, just as I remembered, but her eyes—her beautiful green eyes—were devoid of emotion.
She stepped into the room and the door closed behind her. I moved to embrace her, to wrap her up tightly and promise never to leave her again, when she placed a hand on my chest.
“No. What have you found out?” Her words—her cold tone—sent a shiver through me. This was not the Natasha I knew.
“What… what do you mean?”
“Your task was to find out about the Scribes. What have you learned?” She removed her grey coat and laid it on the back of a chair, revealing a functional white shirt under a black waistcoat. This looked like her—was her—but I could see nothing else I recognised.
“Why do you want to know?” I asked. “And how did you get here?”
“Ivanov sent me. I am your contact.”
I put my hand to the wall to steady myself. She was working for him now?
“I told the warden I needed sanctuary,” she went on. “When you tell me what you know, I can go.”
“What happened?” I asked, my breaths coming faster. “What did Ivanov do to you, that you are now doing his bidding?”
“I saw the light of the Revolution. I know now that the hegemony of old is for fools.”
It was the language of the revolutionaries; the rhetoric I despised. The rhetoric she had despised. And yet here she was, regurgitating it while the throbbing in my wrist nearly brought me to tears.
Her gaze was unwavering. “The revolution will lead our country to a glorious future.”
“Glorious?” My hand shook with rage; rage that had been suppressed by pain, exhaustion, fever and fear—until now. “You saw what they’ve done. How everyone is terrified to speak to their neighbour lest they be accused of counter-revolutionary activity. How the revolutionaries talk of justice and fairness, but it is only for themselves. How they… how they…”
I took my arm out of my pocket and waved its bandaged end in her face. “How they cut my god-damned hand off!”
The colour drained from her face.
“Do you see?” I was shouting now. I didn’t care who heard me, monk or Scribe. “Do you see what glory they have brought?”
“The will of the people—”
“No!” I reached out and grabbed her by the throat, not caring anymore who she used to be. I pushed her back against the wall and held her there. “The people were not asked. The people are you and me.”
“Stop, please.” Her eyes were wide with fear but I didn’t care.
“They hurt people—”
She kneed me in the groin and I doubled over, agony blazing through the skin Ivanov had burned. Something struck my temple and I fell to my knees. She held a shaking gun to my face.
“You’re not the only one he hurt,” she said. She slumped on the floor beside me, the gun balanced precariously on her knee, and a tear flowed down her perfect face. “You’re not the only one…”
She tucked her head between her knees and racking sobs shook her body. I finessed the pistol from her grip and left it to one side as she emitted a low moan. I took her hand and held it; she didn’t resist but stayed weeping, her face hidden.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t strong enough to resist… that I told them everything.”
The weeping lessened a little. I said no more; I did not know what to say. What had Ivanov done to her? She had her limbs but I didn’t know what part of her soul he had butchered.
We stayed that way until my pain became unbearable and I had to move, to make some vain effort to shake it off. The monastery was quiet—the drone of eventide hymns had passed—and some of my earlier urgency returned.
Natasha looked up at me. Her eyes were red; the mask had slipped.
“We need to go,” I said. “Ivanov wants his answers.”
She sniffed. “I know. And I have to bring those answers to him, or else…”
“Else what?”
“You will be killed. He has… other plans for me.”
I
helped her to her feet. Her return had strengthened my resolve to do something. Maybe I now had a chance to make up for what I had done. “Let’s figure out what’s going on here first, then worry about Ivanov.”
She dried her eyes on a handkerchief. “What is going on? What have you found out?” This time the question felt different, as if it were she asking me, not Ivanov.
I smiled. “You won’t believe me, but… the abbess says they are the Host.”
She frowned, but didn’t protest. Perhaps she’d had more faith than I. “Five hundred years after they fell. Why would they come now?”
“We have to find out. I was going to the cloister when you arrived. I think it’s important somehow.”
“Well then, we should go.” She put her coat back on and hid the gun inside.
I pushed the door open a little and looked out. The corridor was empty. We slipped in and out of shallow pools of light cast by the lamps. Nobody else walked by—most of the monks were in their cells by now.
We reached a corner of the cloister. A bitter breeze drifted between the pillars, carrying a scattering of snowflakes to the floor. Lamps burned along the outer, covered section of the octagon. In the centre, however, darkness reigned. As my eyesight adjusted, I could make out the shrubs which dotted the cloister.
“What are we looking for?” Natasha whispered.
I had no idea. I walked towards the corner where I had seen the furtive monk. “This way.”
I found nothing unusual, just a shrub. Natasha’s disapproval cut through the darkness. “Well?”
The scriptorium was at the opposite end of the octagon. I padded through the centre, away from the light. Natasha followed with a sigh. We arrived at more shrubs, these ones higher than the others.
My foot brushed against something hard. I crouched and ran my fingers along the ground, my stomach tight at the thought of finding nothing at all.
I touched a rough edge. A brick, perhaps? It was loose; I picked it up and looked closer, blowing the snow off.