The Fallen

by Tarn Richardson

  “Got to wonder why they suggested this poor sod goes with you, Corporal Abelli,” said the Sergeant, looking Pablo up and down disdainfully.

  “They obviously know class when they see it?” another of the soldiers replied, chuckling.

  The Sergeant Major ignored the comment and scowled at Pablo. “You sure you’re able to carry all that gear up a mountain,” he asked doubtfully, looking at the Private’s meagre frame.

  Pablo nodded. “I’ve done my training. Six months.”

  One of the soldiers whistled and another laughed.

  “Try six weeks in the Carso,” said one of them.

  The Sergeant Major told him to shut up. “You’re in no position to lecture, Private,” he told the soldier. “You’ve not even seen any action yet.” He turned back to Pablo. “So, the Priests, they must care about you if they delivered you here personally.”

  Pablo shrugged. “I suppose so. They were my Priests, at the church in Udine.”

  “Family in Udine, are they?” asked the Sergeant, and Pablo’s face darkened and he shook his head, looking at his boots.

  “No, I don’t have any family,” he answered bluntly.

  “Everyone has family,” replied Corporal Abelli.

  “Not me,” said Pablo, and there was heat now in his face.

  “Well, we’re your family now,” said the Sergeant, cooling the situation.

  “Poor bloody sod,” said one of the Privates, and laughter followed among his peers.

  “Hey!” the Sergeant replied, raising a chubby finger in his direction, “the army cares about all of its soldiers.”

  “If they cared about us,” growled a Private from across the path, “they wouldn’t have sent us to this godforsaken place in the first place! Less than two months since Italy entered the war and already men are dying by the thousands in these mountains.”

  The Sergeant Major rounded on him. “Some soldier you are, Sarem!” This is war, Private! Death is caught up with it. You should know that! It’s why you wear your uniform.”

  “Well some crazy war this is!” replied Sarem. “What are we even fighting for? You tell me that!”

  “To do our bit.”

  “Well I cannot see any sense in it. There’s nothing but rock and stone for two hundred miles over my back. No good will come of it. There is nothing to be gained from striking against the Austro-Hungarians here.”

  The Sergeant laughed. “Private Sarem! I never knew you were so gifted in the art of warfare planning? If I’d known, I’d have asked for you to have been transferred to the military camp in Santa Maria Capua Vetere!”

  The newly arrived Private anxiously cleared his throat and the Sergeant turned back to hear him speak. “The Treaty of London,” he said. All eyes studied Pablo and his skin flushed crimson.

  “There you go, Sarem,” replied the Sergeant, looking over into the adjoining unit. “The Treaty of London. You’re clearly wasted among these fools, Private Gilda. Why’d they bring you here anyway?” he asked Pablo.

  “The Priests brought me,” replied Pablo. “Just told me it was time for me to do my duty and I did what I was told to do.”

  The Sergeant tapped him on the shoulder. “You carry on like that, Private Gilda,” he said, winking and turning to leave, “and you’ll be just fine.”

  “Don’t worry about Private Gilda,” Corporal Abelli said to the Sergeant, “We’ll take good care of him.”

  “What about this Treaty of London?” asked Lazzari, another soldier of the platoon, seemingly intrigued. “I never heard of any Treaty.”

  “This war, it is a chance to take territories along our border long desired,” replied Pablo, as if reciting from a book.

  “Well that’s one reason for it,” said Abelli, and Pablo followed the line of the soldier’s stare to the valley sweeping beyond them. “How do you know so much then, Gilda? You schooled?”

  Pablo reddened even more deeply and shrugged, wishing he hadn’t been so quick to speak. “Only by the Priests. They’ve looked after me for much of my life. And from the newspapers.”

  The Corporal laughed, and some of the men around him laughed too.

  “You’ll never find anything of value in those papers, son,” the Corporal warned. “Lies and propaganda. They won’t tell you anything of worth. Not anything of what this land really represents. Of what really resides within them.”

  “And what is that?” asked Pablo.

  “Horrors.”

  “Do you mean the enemy?”

  “I do. But which enemy?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “But I thought you read the papers?” Pablo shook his head and the Corporal leaned towards him. “You a god-fearing man, Private?”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “There is a legend that the Devil resides within the Carso, that it is his domain, that the limestone mountain is his iron flesh, that the turquoise Soča river which courses through the valley his cold blood, that the very highest peaks are his throne where he resides.”

  The Corporal had returned his gaze once more to the very top of the Carso mountains where Pablo knew he and the rest of the Third Italian Army would soon be headed. He shivered and was no longer aware of the low murmur of conversation from the rest of the army, the rhythmic clank of a hammer on an anvil, the occasional hoarse shout of laughter from somewhere within the camp.

  Instead, he ran his eyes back along the high ridge of mountains above them where he knew the massed ranks of the Austro-Hungarian Fifth Army lay entrenched in narrow crevices and passages waiting for the Italians to begin their push east.

  Its height brought a weight to Pablo’s chest when he looked up, but the Corporal seemed to peer at it fondly. “Nothing can live here and prosper, save for unspeakable things which crawl out of their caves and lairs on a night, scavenging for the unweary, the foolish.”

  “What things?” asked Pablo urgently.

  But the Corporal either couldn’t or wouldn’t say. “Nothing can hope to gain favour from this barren land,” he said instead. He had produced a steel cup from his belt pocket and filled it with coffee from the smoking pot over the fire, setting it to his thick ruby lips. The coffee looked hellishly black and as strong as death. There were flies on its onyx surface but he either didn’t see or didn’t care. The sun beat down on the back of his ruddy neck, a rivulet of sweat running from his broad hairline down the side of his face. He swiped the trickle away absently, before turning his attention back to the young soldier. He shook his head and muttered something which sounded like a curse to Pablo.

  “This wasteland, it is a place of blood and death and suffering. We go to it to face our ending, however that might come to be, and face our true enemy within it. It is a cursed place, cast away by God as a execration for allowing the Devil to find shelter and refuge within it. ‘Let this be a kingdom of stone,’ God spoke, ‘where men labour to survive.’ And so we shall.”

  “Survive?” asked Pablo, feeling his heart beat in this throat, knowing the Corporal with whom he had been placed was clearly troubled.

  The soldier looked at him and shook his head. “No, we shall not survive,” he replied, turning to look at the Sergeant who had blanched at his words, transfixed by their barren nature. “But we shall labour,” he said. “Greatly.” Corporal Abelli’s attention fell to Pablo’s hands. Pablo noticed and immediately scrunched them into fists in an attempt again to hide them from him. But not quickly enough. “Your hands,” asked his Corporal.

  “What about them?”

  “Let me see them.”

  Pablo hesitated for a moment before holding them out. All his life he had been tormented because of them, shamed by his parents, taunted by those he knew and strangers alike for his oddity while growing up in the foothills of Udine. Eventually, turned out at the age of twelve by those he loved, he had been taken in by the Church, who had cared for him and, on his eighteenth birthday, had encouraged him to join the army. A life fit for a man such as him, acc
ording to their wisdom. Six months later, Italy had entered the war and drawn Pablo in with it.

  “Six fingers,” said the Corporal, looking between the outstretched hands, “on each hand.”

  “Go on then,” retorted Pablo, taking them back and hiding them from view in his armpits, “say something.”

  “Like what,” shrugged the Corporal. “Congratulate you that you’re descended from Saph and Rapha of Gath, and the giant Goliath? If so, seems to me you’ve come to the right place,” he said, his face brightening.

  “I don’t understand?” asked Pablo, fearing a trick. “What do you mean by that? Of Goliath and Gath?”

  “What is the matter with you?” asked the Corporal. “I thought you were the wise one? Have you never studied your Old Testament?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re a liar,” the Corporal laughed. “Ishbi-Benob. Saph. Lahmi and his brother Goliath. They were all descendants of Gath, the Nephelim, born of Satan’s blood, great warriors and wielders of six fingers on each hand.”

  “I never knew!” replied Pablo, holding his hands up in front of him, as if regarding a gift he had unknowingly carried with him all his life.

  “So it would seem,” said Abelli, clapping him on the back. “You’re just the person we’ve been waiting for, Private, a great warrior, come to claim back his domain.”

  FOURTEEN

  TOULOUSE INQUISITIONAL PRISON. TOULOUSE. FRANCE.

  Tacit was breathing hard now. The nails driven firmly through his hands into the wood of the chair had done the trick, made him break sweat, his chest tighten, his heart pump. He looked up through his brows, his wild bloodshot eyes set firm on his torturer, and spat at him wordlessly, hissing and seething like a demon.

  Salamanca smiled proudly and drew another nail from his tray of implements, the gaggle of jailers and miscreants of the prison guard hooting with laughter and excitement. This had exceeded their expectations. They never expected Salamanca to have reached for the nails so soon with this prisoner. The torturer held the spike up in the light, admiring the six inches of matt grey iron as a connoisseur might a glass of fine wine. He turned his eyes onto his unyielding victim and his face hardened.

  “What are you resisting for?” he asked, unable to hide his disappointment that the Inquisitor had still refused to break despite all Salamanca had done to him. The torturer had never known a subject like Tacit. They always broke with the nails. After everything which had gone before, the blades, the hot irons, the tearing of the fingernails, the raking of the skin, nails hammered hard and firm into the arms and hands always broke even the most determined of resisters. It was why they nailed victims up onto crosses during crucifixions. The practice had long been stopped but here, deep within the Inquisitional Prison, a few liked to keep at least some aspects of the past alive.

  “You will break eventually,” he warned Tacit, taking the nail and setting it hard into the skin of the Inquisitor’s right forearm. He raised the hammer high above his head and behind him the audience clapped their hands in expectation. “You may as well do it sooner rather than later. Trust me, it’ll make it easier, if you break now.”

  “Who for?” growled Tacit, his lower lip hanging slack in his mouth, a stalactite of spit dripping from it. “You, or me?”

  Salamanca allowed himself a brief chuckle, but inside his anger raged.

  “Oh, you’re a brave one, Tacit. Brave, but deluded. It doesn’t bother me to see you resist, to see you hold out like you’re trying to do. I’ve seen other men, better men, braver men than you do much the same, but all go the same way in the end. It’s the application of pain which I like. It gives one such a sense of … superiority. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Inquisitor?”

  “Unchain me and we’ll see what superiority you really have,” warned Tacit, tensing against his bonds and the nails which held him firm to his chair.

  A voice, shrill and deceitful, caught suddenly in Tacit’s ear, speaking of baleful actions and power, words only he could hear. Tacit fought harder against the chains in a vain attempt to silence the demonic sounds.

  “Such strength!” mocked the torturer, watching Tacit struggle, lowering the hammer and standing back, crossing his arms. He’d made a note in his book for his contact at the Holy See, as instructed. The person there had wanted to know everything about Tacit’s behaviour and his reaction to the different techniques Salamanca was so skilled in applying. Whether he reacted differently to fire or the knife’s edge, if the torture of the mind affected him as much as the torture of the flesh, if ever it seemed that a particular method significantly influenced the reaction of the prisoner.

  If Salamanca ever felt the presence of the Devil in the room through his actions. They had been quite insistent.

  “Such bravado! Such determination! Pathetic!” he hissed, and snatched Tacit tight by the throat, thrusting him hard into the chair, his face held close to the Inquisitor’s. “You playing the part of the strong man? Hah! You’re nothing! Nothing but a fool and a joke. You’ve already shown your weakness once, Inquisitor, to the whole Catholic world at the Mass for Peace. You might think you’re important, that you’re better than everyone else, that you can act as you please, above the doctrine, above the faith. But you’ve not fooled me. Do you honestly think you’re somehow more special than everyone else? You’re no more special than the shit on my shoe. In fact, you’re worse. Special? Pah! How can someone who does exactly as his masters decree be special? A lackey more like, a lackey around the finger of the Pope and everyone else in the Holy See.”

  Salamanca allowed a wicked chuckle to escape his lungs and then scowled, squeezing hard onto Tacit’s throat, making the veins protrude from the Inquisitor’s skull. “Pissed on by everyone you know, that’s what you are. Your masters, your colleagues, your acquaintances. How sad that they see you as nothing more than a bucket to piss in. I would say friends, but you don’t have any, do you? Never let anyone close enough to you, did you?

  “Although there was one, wasn’t there? What was his name? Georgi, wasn’t it? Georgi Akeldama? Was that him? Your friend from those very first days? Those innocent days as an acolyte, before you became a fully-fledged Inquisitor. Died, didn’t he? Vanished, apparently. Consumed by the Inquisition and the fires of their hate, so the rumour goes. Oh yes,” said Salamanca, recognising the surprise in Tacit’s face, “we know. We know everything.”

  “Except what happened to him,” Tacit retorted, with grim pleasure at the flaw in his torturer’s taunt.

  Salamanca stood back and slowly unbuttoned the fly to his trousers. The throng of guards and jailers behind him hissed and threw insults at the chained prisoner for they knew what was about to take place.

  “What are you resisting for, Tacit?” Salamanca asked, reaching for his cock and dragging it out, a diseased putrid-looking thing in his hand. Long had it been used as a weapon upon the witches and depraved brought into the prison. Often it stung Salamanca with agony and leaked a thick diseased sludge from its end whenever he tried to use it, a sure sign, in his mind, that he had drawn the poison out of the afflicted when he used it against them. It was a weight and a pain he was willing to bear, for his faith. “What are you resisting for, piss bucket?” he spat, forcing a stream of urine out of the tip of it and onto Tacit. The Inquisitor moaned when the spray touched him, but the bonds and nails held him tight. “Don’t tell me you’re holding out for some hope?” mocked Salamanca, the stream of glistening yellow piss curving onto Tacit’s soaked clothes. “For somebody to come and rescue you? To call for your release?” He stopped urinating and corrected himself, secretly pleased to find the act pained him less than usual. “You forget, you have no friends anymore, no one who cares about you. They’re all dead.”

  He laughed and stepped forward, picking up the hammer and nail and setting it back to the skin of Tacit’s forearm, the hammer held high. “It’s just you and me now for the remainder of your days, at least until I’ve decided I’ve h
ad enough of you. So come on,” he growled, his eyes growing wide, “entertain me while you can!” He brought the hammer down hard on the head of the nail.

  And the private voice returned, more loathsome than ever, crying guttural curses. And deeper still, lights began to flicker and burn red within Tacit.

  FIFTEEN

  THE VATICAN. VATICAN CITY.

  Father Strettavario watched Bishop Basquez slip from the Vatican Library and moved across the Belvedere Courtyard to meet him where the shadows of the Apostolic Library were erased by the sun.

  “Bishop Basquez,” the Father greeted him, standing square and firm. It was a stance never intended to intimidate or impress. Strettavario had always been squat and thick-set, ever since puberty had failed much to give him height, only widen his shoulders. He had always had the appearance of a man who could handle himself, should the teachings of God fail him.

  “Father Strettavario,” replied the Bishop, making no effort to mask his displeasure at seeing the ginger-haired Priest approach. “What can I do for you?”

  “A little tense this morning, aren’t we?” asked Strettavario, enjoying the opportunity to mock the wily Bishop.

  “Considering the times in which we live, I feel it prudent to be tense,” replied Basquez, his eyes narrowing with distain. “Inquisitors being killed within the streets of Rome. Demonic possessions enslaving a nation. A world war enflaming a continent. A war now come to Italy’s borders. And yet you face it with your pitiful wit, no doubt some attempt to form humour at my expense?”

  Strettavario snatched hold of Basquez’s sleeve and drew him close, the old Father’s strength alarming the ambitious young Bishop as he tried vainly to pull his arm free.

  “Don’t try to warn me about when and how to be prudent, Bishop Basquez,” growled Strettavario menacingly. “I’ve lived years longer than you, in situations far more grave than you’d ever dare to face, rubbed shoulders with folk who’d turn your hair white and your heart to pallid rubber. So don’t you dare lecture me about the dangers we face!”