“Look at yourselves,” Teresa hissed. “You should be ashamed. Are we not one people? Control yourselves.” Some had the grace to look ashamed.
Alvito flexed his arms. “We share or I throttle the next.”
“So you can eat it all,” Eva whimpered.
Teresa didn’t even mention she’d carried the young woman the last day. “The lady with the shawl will hold the food and you divide it equally,” Teresa said instead, choosing those two at random simply because they seemed more reasonable. “We’ll all watch to make sure it’s fair.”
The next crusts were seized and reluctantly passed over. With no more mad scramble, the Northerners soon lost interest and ceased tossing tidbits. Eva sorted out thirteen pieces and they all got one mouthful. Teresa chewed as slowly as she could, but it was gone all too soon.
An hour later, the officer instructed the emptied stewpots be set in front of them. They arranged the pots in the center of their huddle and took turns at the blackened remains in the bottom of the pots. With no utensils, they scooped out the cooling stew with bare fingers. Not enough for a meal, it still left a warm comfort in her complaining stomach and a gleam of pride that they’d refused to act as animals.
She managed to scoot next to Alvito. “I don’t believe they want any information from us. They’ve asked no questions.” Not that they could with no one speaking the same language. But there had been no attempt at intimidation. “They don’t seem to care about us at all, other than to take us along with them. I don’t think it matters if we hide our connection or not.”
Alvito raised a brow. Despite the lack of food, his body continued to heal. He had not the same pale cast as before but had taken back his normal honeyed tan. “It wouldn’t matter anyway. They’ll come for me tonight. I see the anticipation in their looks.”
Teresa had seen it, too, but refused to say as much. “A beard is just a symbol. It is not worth dying over. It’s what’s inside that counts.”
“I know it’s not nearly the same comparison, but would you tell the girls taken beyond the wagon not to fight? To lie there and take it? It may not be the same violation, but maybe my resistance can help them—because I can barely live with myself now.”
Teresa fought back tears at his words. She had known her entreaty was wasted breath.
“I couldn’t help when they took the women. I did nothing when they shaved the men.”
“There are too many of them,” Teresa protested.
“Salvador wouldn’t have cared. He’d have tried and died. So would Ramiro,” he whispered, eyes turned toward the firelight. “I did nothing to protect the citizens of Colina Hermosa.
“I went into the military with barely a thought,” he continued. “My cousin Salvador did it, and it seemed easier than other types of work. The uniform set off my looks, helped me entice women. Alcohol flowed freely for soldiers. It was only supposed to be the occasional border dispute.” She had never seen his face so grave. “But honor is more than just a beard. It is what treatment we will accept and what we will fight. I never took much seriously before. Eat, drink, and be merry was my motto. I must set the example for every soldier they ever capture. I keep my head down no more.”
“Hi-ya, Cat.” Her voice wobbled. “Take a few of them with you.”
They came for Alvito minutes later—six of them. She watched him go quietly as they dragged him away and forced him down by the fire, refused to watch as they held him while a seventh displayed a straight razor. Eva huddled against her, sobbing softly, while the silk-shawled grandmother clenched Teresa’s arm in a viselike grip. The taunts and laughter, though in another language, were indisputably clear. No amount of clamping her hands over her ears could shut them out.
Then the tenor of the voices changed, becoming alarmed. Teresa scrunched her eyes tightly closed, unwilling to witness the end, but the grandmother took this for invitation to comment. “Your friend knocked one off. His arm is loose. He has the razor. A stab to the neck. One is down. By the saints, they’re on him again. Oh! They have him down.”
“Stop!” an unfamiliar voice rang out. “Tell them to stop and drop their weapons.”
Teresa started up. A burly man with black skin and wearing the brown robes of a wandering friar had appeared from nowhere and stood at the edge of the firelight. One arm was awkwardly placed around the neck of a tall woman. Teresa scooted apart of the huddle to see his arm ended in a swath of bandages and no hand. The woman’s hair had been hacked off raggedly, and though she wore clothing from the city, her coloring proclaimed her Northern. The way she stood, so straight and undaunted while completely controlled, said she was used to her position being otherwise. In the friar’s single hand, he held a slim white rod pointed at her throat.
Where did they come from? Teresa thought, knowing instantly she’d never seen them before.
“Tell them to stop and drop their weapons,” the friar said again. This time he followed the words with a shake and a tightening of his arm around the woman’s neck.
She spoke in their language, her words a sharp command. The Northern soldiers looked uncertain. She spoke again, a quick roll of syllables that blurred together to Teresa’s ears. Their officer spoke and a short interchange between him and the woman led to weapons being dropped. The men on Alvito got up. Feet shifted and the Northerners withdrew slowly toward their wagon, never turning their backs.
“Tell them to keep going or I kill their priestess,” the friar said. Then his attention fell upon the prisoners. “Remove the ropes! Run! Get away before they change their minds. I can only hold them off so long.”
Some of the people around her began to comply. Teresa pushed the noose from her neck, then did the same for Eva. “Go. Go,” she urged.
Then everything fell apart.
The tall Northern woman the friar had called a priestess turned as swift as a snake. She shouted out in her language. The Northerners’ indecision turned to anger. They rushed forward, diving for the dropped weapons. The friar released the woman and struck her a blow across her temple that felled her.
As a Northern soldier rushed past her, Teresa reached out and seized him around the ankles, bringing him down. She felt other prisoners doing the same. Eva bashed the head of the man she’d tackled with a rock. Teresa saw Alvito stab one soldier with the straight razor, then launch a knife he’d scrounged from the ground into the officer’s chest.
The friar retreated from the first soldier to approach him, holding the white rod back as if to shield it. The soldier reached for the friar’s arm; at the same time, the friar twisted. Instead of grabbing the friar, the soldier’s hand encircled the top of the strange weapon. To Teresa’s astonishment, the man went rigid in a spasm, then dropped boneless.
Alvito brought down another with a fresh knife toss. Her fellow prisoners struck out with anything they could find. Teresa threw sand in the eyes of the nearest Northerner, bringing him to a painful halt. The man who had stolen the first bread crust kicked that soldier in the knee, then in the head and belly when he fell.
The few Northerners still able ran from the camp. Teresa lay upon her back, staring up at the night sky and panting as the stars twinkled distantly. She’d helped to kill. Rather than remorse, a fierce gladness pounded in her heart.
When she sat up, she saw the friar pulling the tall Northern woman to her feet again. The other prisoners exchanged glances as if they couldn’t believe their good fortune. “Hurry,” the friar said. “You’ll need to be gone before they regroup.”
Knowing good advice when she heard it, Teresa hastened to Alvito. The Northerners hadn’t managed to cut his beard. The perfection of his features was untouched. A half dozen dead Northerners surrounded him. Then she noticed it: He sat with his hands around his thigh. Bright blood spurted in a stream, staining his pants and the ground. An artery had been hit. All her joy evaporated as their eyes met. “Bring them home for me,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Aye, Cat. That I will, thanks to you.�
�
He nodded to her once more, then said, “Go.”
She turned, not so much at his command, but because she didn’t want him to see her tears.
Chapter 20
They buried the pelotón soldier at noon the next day. Telo spoke the words over the man called Alvito and the other unknown prisoner who’d perished in the short uprising. As a wandering friar, he officiated many funerals for people he’d never met. Usually improvisation and inventiveness got him through the difficulties of such ceremonies. After the events of the night before, he didn’t feel confident enough to carry that off and stuck with the memorized words from San Lucius’s book of sermons—though the dead men deserved better.
As their hero, the man Alvito had slain seven of the enemy single-handed, apparently securing their knives when Telo had ordered them dropped. The other prisoners had helped, but it was Alvito’s removal of the officer to which they owed their lives. They could only assume his loss kept the Northerners from regrouping and returning to find them as they floundered around in the darkness.
What haunted Telo and stripped his confidence was the death he had caused—accidental though it was. The Northerner had grabbed the Diviner even as Telo had attempted to avoid using it.
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive.
Telo didn’t think that applied to the sin of killing.
As the words of the sermon flowed from his tongue, he glanced down at the rocky burial mounds at his feet. A soldier’s job was to protect and that could mean taking lives. The Church instructed that the Lord understood and overlooked that sin from soldiers. Without question, they would say the buried soldier went to his just reward and wouldn’t face judgment in the afterlife. Part of Telo’s mind mocked that—otherwise how else would they find men to be soldiers?—but his trust in the Church held.
He refocused on the job at hand. “May almighty God bless you, He and all the saints.” Telo touched heart, mind, liver, and spleen as he concluded the ceremony—ever mindful of the chain linking him to Santabe and that she remained enough distance away, so she couldn’t kill him as easily.
His thoughts returned to his own soul. The Church would say the Lord forgave him this one death for the lives of many. Once he’d made the decision to intervene to save the prisoners last night, to the Church’s eyes that made him a soldier of the Lord and gave him the same exemption. His soul felt tarnished just the same.
“Would you like to say a few words?” he asked the roundish peasant woman in the poncho. She seemed to know the fallen best. With her shorn hair and trousers, it had taken two looks to make sure she was a woman.
She nodded, then to his surprise launched into a child’s rhyme:
Saints above,
Saints below.
God’s hand spiritual,
God’s rule made flesh.
Covet not the miracle,
It brings death.
“Be at peace, Cat. I won’t forget what you did for us.”
Telo remained at the grave as the other prisoners shuffled off to gather up the few possessions they’d poached hastily from the Northern wagon before their flight. They couldn’t take too much, burdened as they were with the bodies. After hearing all his news, they intended to head east, toward what remained of Colina Hermosa and then on to Suseph and Crueses. Despite their liberation, they were a silent group; after the suffering of captivity, the news of the burning of their home had struck particularly hard. Even the food they’d taken from the wagon of the Northerners had not loosened their tongues. Telo could respect that sort of grief.
A tug came from the chain securing Santabe as the woman fidgeted, reminding him that he should get moving also. What he had seen only steeled his resolve to find and deal with Ordoño. Instead, he moved closer to the roundish woman in the poncho—Teresa, his mind supplied the name randomly from the confusion of last night as it often did with names—pulling Santabe with him. Calling Teresa plain was to be generous. With her mannish clothing and hair, Telo was not surprised the other prisoners left a space around her.
“That was an interesting choice of words, my child. Why that poem, if I may ask?”
Teresa looked up, then rubbed at her glistening eyes. “It seemed fitting. He survived a wound that should have killed him a sevenday ago—miraculously one might say—only to die today. Like the Hypothesis of Morales.”
Telo’s interest grew. Few people had heard of that theory. It wasn’t something the Church wanted bandied about. It was only because Father Vellito in his first monastery took interest in a bandit-turned-wandering-friar’s questioning mind that Telo had been taught about it. Most considered miracles as something to covet, a sign of divine favor. Morales postulated that as most who suffered miracles perished as martyrs; it was a punishment sent by the Lord, not a kindness. It was from Morales’s hypothesis that the childish rhyme had grown nearly two thousand years ago, though few enough knew of the correlation. Telo had always wondered if the Church played a part in covering it up.
“I subscribe to the Suseph Decree, my child,” Telo said to see if she’d heard of it. The Church in Suseph had created an alternative theory that was now widely held.
“Because it is the stance taken by the Church,” Teresa said. “To forsake it is heresy. I’ve met few priests who don’t toe the line.”
“Not for that reason, no.” Telo shook his head. “I subscribe to it because it speaks of hope. I prefer to believe our Lord has put off a chosen saint’s death, given them more time to prove their true worth. To see what they will do with it. We are all sinners in our Lord’s eyes, yet still he gives us hope in return for faith. It’s an opportunity, a second chance, you might say, to work His will, not a death sentence.” Even as he said those words, though, to cling to them like the lifeline he hoped they were, they slipped through his fingers, like the summer rains that would not come.
“I had not considered the Suseph Decree in that light,” Teresa was saying. “Interesting. I thought of it as just more dogma to give the Church a positive spin.”
“Only partially. It depends on your point of view. The Church is neither black nor white, as you’ll find of most people. You are university trained, my child, to know these things?”
“An expert on anthropology and cultures. In Colina Hermosa.”
Telo smiled. “It is one of the best.”
Teresa smiled in return. “Then you hail from Aveston, because only an Aveston man would say there are others as good.”
“Raised in the streets of the slums there,” Telo acknowledged. “Though I never attended that great facility.”
“Church trained, then?” she asked.
“And self-trained. I was a little too independent. My vows are to Our Lord, not to the Church—though it has my full support.”
“Interesting, Father. A man who only looks for the gray in people, instead of seeing good or bad. Then tell me why such a man of God has a woman chained to him?”
Telo admired how she looked him in the eye as she asked, since most would have had second thoughts of speaking. In fact, none of the other prisoners had asked. Most avoided looking at Santabe or himself, for that matter. He didn’t blame them, seeing how he wasn’t sure exactly what the answer was. He considered what to say to this strange woman, knowing the need for confession ran in every man, even those priests who offered solace. He wished some of the burden off his own chest by sharing it, and he believed her more than intelligent enough to have an open mind and not to judge. This Teresa was unique.
And yet, for all that, he knew that to tell her everything wasn’t an option.
He sighed. “It is a long story, involving this”—he raised his nub—“but I believe God gave me a second chance after I failed Him. I let something go when I was with the Northerners that I could have finished.” Telo winced for the covering euphemism, but it was the closest he felt able to approach the truth. He’d let the wildcat run and the destruction continued. “This woman is more devil than
flesh and blood. I’ve witnessed her handiwork. To chain her is only fitting, but she can help me back into their camp.
“I’ve told you the Northerners wanted you and the others for a sacrifice to their god, Dal; she is one of those who gives those orders and sees them carried out. She is my method back to finish my quest—if you will allow such egotism from a humble man. I don’t consider the Lord has laid his hand on me so much as he put opportunities in my path.”
She shifted her balance to her back foot as if deciding. “I, too, had a mission. From what you say, it succeeded. I was one of those sent with Ramiro by the Alcalde to find a witch, and you say he and a witch drove off the army for a time. My job would seem to be over, but I feel discontented with that. The witch succeeded more despite me than because of me. The university—my home—is gone.”
“You feel you have not done your part,” Telo supplied. He could see where the rescue and the death of her friend would lead her to feel this way. She suffered survivor’s guilt. A grimace tightened his face as he considered whether that applied equally well to him. Again, the doubt rose whether what he believed was nothing more than a justification of his guilt.
Now she did look away. “It must seem foolish. Here I am, a woman highly trained in understanding people and other cultures. Yet, you’ve learned more about them than I.”
He hesitated to encourage her. He could hear the question in her words, and his stomach churned at the thought of what she was asking. Finally, though, he voiced it. “You would come with me into the lion’s den, my child. I do not think there will be a return trip.”
“By your own words, I was saved from death. Perhaps my path is not finished.”
“Or perhaps it was no more than good fortune,” Telo said. “The Lord works beyond our understanding.” He regarded Santabe, sitting meekly—or as meekly as she ever did, a constant sneer never leaving her face. Regardless, she was obviously listening with all her might. The stump of his arm still throbbed from his recent scuffle with her. Had the Lord sent him the test of the captives to see if he deserved help? He could use the help, especially from one who seemed so capable and intelligent. It was true that a job halved was a job sooner done, and better for the company. And with his disability, he might need the assistance.
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