Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  “Are they sick?”

  “No, but many of them are learned where others are ignorant, faithful to beliefs that others don’t understand. Often they are rich while others are poor. People will speak evil of them, Jude. Don’t listen.”

  Jude gave that single nod, then walked up the narrow board onto the boat. Father Pierre Roger greeted them warmly. “There is a cabin, but you will need to pay the crew—have you money?”

  Elisha fingered the coins in his purse, the last of his wealth, aside from Thomas’s ring and Isaac’s pin, and the fur-lined cloak itself. It should be enough. “Aye, Father. I have terrible sea-sickness and am unlikely to be about for the crossing, but Jude will tend me.”

  “Fare you well, then.” Father Pierre turned back to the company of Jews who laid out blankets and found space for themselves on deck. Most of them would spend the several days of the crossing in the open air, hoping for good weather. Elisha thought to give up his own cabin for one of these families, perhaps the mother with her two small children, but more dangerous to them than a bit of rain would be the plague he knew he carried. Best he stay apart and pray for a quick recovery.

  A fleet-footed ship’s boy led the way, and they were soon settled in a narrow cabin curved at one wall into the bow of the boat. By the time the orders echoed from bow to stern and the ship heaved-to into the sea, Elisha’s armpits and groin ached with swelling, and he had trouble concentrating. Stripping off his outer clothing, he lay down, keeping Jude’s hand for as long as he could, speaking to him of attunement to one’s surroundings, the spreading of that awareness through contact and knowledge, the laws of affinity, polarity, and mystery, the uses of a talisman to echo the power of a magus. Jude carried his own talisman about his waist: the leather thongs that bound his wrists at the hospital, stained with his blood and marked with his fear.

  The rolling of the waves carried them away from Italy, and Elisha’s stomach roiled. Jude placed a bucket beside him, unflinching. The boy knew sickness, but his father had never taught him sympathy. For now, it was a relief not to bear the burden of another person’s worries. Elisha’s hands and back ached, his pulse leaping, and he could give no more lessons. He retreated within, burrowing down even as his mind wandered. The fever rose, heating his face, blazing into his scars. He sucked on scraps of willow bark, vomiting them back again as often as not. Jude patiently offered another, sometimes turning Elisha’s face with his small, cold hand to push the medicine between his teeth. Elisha fought him off, but weakly, sobbing, clenched around his hollow, aching stomach.

  Jude lay his hand on Elisha’s cheek, sending images from his own illness, his small body thrashing off his sheets—bound, always bound—black swellings bright against his pale skin, burning with fever, then one day, cool again. Before he grew distracted with his own suffering, Elisha searched himself. He methodically reviewed his knowledge of anatomy and of every illness he had ever seen or treated. He slid through veins and arteries and experienced the pounding of his heart, the twitching of his limbs, the swelling inside his nodes that pushed forth and blackened the skin. Little things, Danek had said, and Elisha felt them, as if that single flea spawned thousands inside of him, forging a contact with his every vessel and poisoning every one, a seething mass of foreign creatures intent on his destruction.

  When the fire raged at its worst across his skin, and he began to lose all sense of himself, Elisha clung to Jude’s hand, begging for mercy, begging to be shown the way to live, or the way to die.

  The Valley sighed open, vibrant with lost souls. Lost in his own fire, Elisha did not heed it. He remembered that he used to be cold, frigid even, so cold that his hand could bring comfort to the fevered, so cold he could make ice of the Tower moat on a summer’s day. But he would die not in ice, but in fire. Like Mordecai.

  His mentor’s presence rose into his awareness, and they sat again in the dining room of the manor house on the Isle of Wight, Mordecai watching him over a pile of books, the knowledge he loved and used to defend his own sensitivity. Elisha tried to retreat from him. Surely, the plague that ravaged his body would hurt his teacher, but Mordecai showed no pain at all.

  “The best way, you think, to gain knowledge?” Mordecai inquired.

  “The library taught me nothing.” Elisha tapped one of the books before him, a manual on the punishment of witches. Not all books were worthy of reading.

  Mordecai smiled gently, his steely hair curling beneath his cap, his moist eyes patient. Then he was standing at the door to the makeshift hospital where Elisha had first met him. At Elisha’s back, the injured dragged themselves from the battlefield, shattered by bombards and pierced with arrows. Mordecai ran that hospital, before Lucius imposed himself, adding torturous treatments to the already agonizing injuries of the soldiers. Mordecai the surgeon had been harsh, distant, almost disdainful—terrified of being found out as a Jew, not to mention a magus.

  By day they antagonized each other, the arrogant young barber defying authority to his own detriment, the experienced surgeon simply working to heal. By night, they spoke in the river, Elisha learning only much later that the calm voice of Sage, the magus in the stream, belonged to the master-surgeon. “We are each of us soldiers in our own war,” Sage once told him, “All we can do is soldier on until we fall beneath the enemy and do not rise again.”

  And Elisha had answered him, “Or rise again in a way even we cannot imagine.”

  Elisha had learned all he could of the plague. It was time to rise again. Jude held him, anchoring him in the gloom of the ship’s cabin, in the realm of the living. As Elisha tracked this contact back to his own corrupt flesh, he could almost feel Mordecai’s rare smile. He returned to the sound of singing, Jude’s small voice, crooning the familiar lullaby that Elisha had once sung to him. The English words broke in strange places, merely sounds to the boy, but comforting enough for all of that.

  His eyes blinked open. Clammy linens draped his legs. The bucket at his side smelled, but faintly—it must have been emptied regularly.

  Lying still and exhausted, Elisha said, “Jude. Thank you.”

  As if the words released some cork at the boy’s emotions, the contact flooded with relief, shame, fear, regret, hope, bombarding Elisha with all that he had been holding back these last few days. How many? Six. The boy slumped against the bedside, as wrung out as Elisha by the ordeal.

  Taking sips of water from a leather bottle, Elisha worked to integrate what he had learned by living inside the disease with everything he had witnessed as a doctor and as a magus. Danek was right; there was no way to stop it, not the whole rising tide of plague that swept the land as tainted blood from the sick carried their sickness to those who were well. But the fleas avoided cold; they would not bite a mancer, nor Elisha himself—not until he had to embrace his mortality to escape Vertuollo’s terrible onslaught. One by one, he could mark those he would defend. One by one, he might force back the plague in someone already infected, by sending his awareness so deeply within another’s flesh that he could defeat those tiny invaders. But the world itself he could not save.

  What remained, then, but to stop those who would profit from the world’s devastation. The ship groaned around them, still tossing on the waves, but sea-sickness could not compare with what Elisha had just lived through, and he mastered his stomach. Hoping to send comfort, he stroked Jude’s hair, but the boy flinched away with a flash of horror and shame. More deliberately, Elisha touched Jude’s shoulder. “If you wish, I can shave your hair and leave them no place to hide. We can kill them all.”

  “All the demons.” The boy turned, meeting Elisha’s eye.

  “Yes,” said Elisha. “Them, too. But I don’t yet know how.”

  When he had eaten a little, rested a little more, and finally felt steady enough, Elisha plied his razor, shearing Jude’s wild, dark hair and spreading his magic, conjuring just enough of death to kill the fleas. Here upon
the sea, it should be safe, and he did not feel the reaching of his enemies looking for an opening to attack. At the last stroke of the razor, Jude withdrew, running his palm over his bare scalp. For the first time since they had met, quite possibly for the first time ever, Jude smiled, a slender glow that pierced the veils of sickness and despair. Too thin, too pale, too scarred, the boy looked like a child-saint, his suffering granting him majesty.

  Overhead, orders rang out and ropes groaned, men pattered about in the flurry of duties as they came to port.

  Elisha pushed himself up and changed from his sweat-damp clothes while Jude gathered their few possessions back into the sacks and bound them at the ready. With the rising voices outside, Jude’s tension grew, spilling over into his presence and making his movements shaky. Elisha tucked his hand into his medical pouch and handed over the last of his salted blades, small, but sharp, perhaps Jude would be able to put this one, too, to good use. Elisha’s side still ached from his forced healing, but it was a wound he would always be grateful for. In his vulnerable state, Jude needed even the slight edge of power the blade could offer.

  Together, they pushed open the door and blinked into the sunlight. The Jews, too, had packed their things and clustered at the center of the ship, staying out of the way of the scurrying sailors. Fishermen’s cabins edged the water, surrounded by the upturned hulls of boats and spread with nets. A stone jetty thrust out from the rocky beach, and a small party of soldiers waited there. One man, richly dressed with golden chains, shouted at the captain, who stood with Father Pierre, gripping the rail and shouting back in Italian. He pointed at the young priest, voice rising. Father Pierre waved off the furor with one hand, and answered in French, his voice calm and commanding.

  Finally, the captain shouted again and the sailors sprang into action, bringing the boat about, still pitching with the waves as one sailor tossed a line around a pillar on the jetty. Father Pierre turned about with a grimace and his eyes lit upon Elisha. The French priest offered a purely Roman shrug. “In fear of the plague, they will not allow the sailors to land, and they demand high fees from the Jews. I have claimed you for my retainer so they don’t ask the same price. Someone must go ashore to make ready for disembarking.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Elisha. “And thanks.” Wobbling with the shaky deck, he made his way to the gunwale and watched for a moment. Timing his leap, he jumped down to the jetty and made fast the rope, then accepted another, tying that off as well, though the activity left him weak and panting. Jude scrambled up and followed after, moving more surely on the deck, and helping to lay down the ramp.

  “Your son is much improved,” Father Pierre remarked as he accepted Elisha’s hand to balance on the narrow ramp. “I do believe sea-living agrees with him, if not with you.”

  “He’s chosen his better self,” Elisha replied, then he stood ready to help the Jews, accepting the worried looks of the women, and the suspicion of their menfolk as they came down and huddled on the jetty while the priest negotiated their port fees. Purses and sleeves gave up far too many coins, and the harbormaster glared at each and every one—checking their necks for signs of swelling before he allowed them to pass.

  After dragging down the plank and casting off the ropes, Elisha tossed them back to the sailors. Weary from his days of sickness, he wondered if he had enough coin left to purchase a horse for them to ride, or perhaps river passage up to Avignon. He could barter with the golden ram pin Isaac had given him, but he would hate to part with it. Once he was on land, the vibrating presence of the Valley rose steadily in Elisha’s perception, threatening to topple him with its growing strength. The Valley within him echoed that rhythm, and Elisha’s hollow frame, battered by sickness, felt again that horrid rush. Back in Heidelberg, Vertuollo announced would unravel Elisha like a bit of poor embroidery, and by God, he’d nearly done it. Elisha sought balance between the power of death and the urgent need of living.

  Taking up their things, Jude and Elisha walked up the jetty, the boy’s hand knotted into his, head bowed. As they passed the group of Jewish families who had disembarked from the boat, one of the men leaned over and whispered, “You’re the man the rabbi wrote us about? I am Menahem—please tell me if you need any help.” He straightened and looked away as if he had said nothing of importance.

  Hoofbeats ahead announced the arrival of a new party and the soldiers parted in rough attention as the newcomers approached. Elisha extended his senses, coaching Jude to do the same, squinting at the mounted men. Priests, from what he could see, and one in the rich red cloak and square hat of a cardinal. One long face he recognized right away: Father Osbert, the inquisitor he’d last seen in England, examining the evidence of Elisha’s own sorcerous crimes. Before he could identify any others, Jude’s fingers dug into his hand. Through the contact, he was screaming.

  Chapter 24

  Elisha settled his other hand over Jude’s, projecting calm. “That’s it, Jude, you are in control. You make the choice. Who is it you fear? Can we face him together, as we faced my enemy?”

  In answer, Jude sent him a blinding flash of red.

  The cardinal. “You have been so brave on the ship and earlier. Can you be brave again?”

  Jude hesitated, but the incoherent terror of his touch had ebbed, and he swallowed hard. Finally, he gave a nod, and Elisha returned his attention to the gathering.

  Father Pierre stood before the mounted men, hands spread in greeting. Elisha unfurled his awareness, using his knowledge of the young priest to listen attentively and begin to understand his French. Thankfully, with French often spoken in England, even so long after William the Conqueror, the language was not completely foreign.

  “We could not land at Marseilles, Cardinal, and I am sorry for your trouble,” Father Pierre said. “Had I known you were waiting, I should have tried to send a message.”

  The cardinal’s head tipped down, his red hat toward the jetty as he listened, but his fingers tapped out impatience upon the pommel of his saddle. “Yes, Pierre. You should have expected some sort of escort, what with all of the messages that have come and gone in recent months. The Holy Father does hold you in some esteem after all.”

  His voice sounded curiously familiar, and Elisha bristled at the cardinal’s tone, addressing the archpriest as if he were a wayward child, as if the Pope’s esteem were ill-placed. Then he remembered the rumors of Father Pierre Roger’s birth, that some claimed him to be the son of the Pope himself. Did the cardinal imagine that Father Pierre’s position was merely a matter of his parentage? Even before the cardinal raised his head, Elisha placed that voice, too sinuous for sincerity: Renart, the French mancer who had orchestrated the ruse in the Alps, bringing Brigit’s still body to give birth there to the legend she had apparently become.

  Sealing his own skin and raising his defenses, Elisha encouraged Jude to do the same. The boy’s presence slammed shut. He learned fast, giving Elisha some reassurance about the next stages of their journey. Already, he had learned to master his fear and to control his presence, and his sensitivity enabled a depth of awareness few could match. With time and patience, Elisha realized, Jude could become one of the greatest of magi. If they had the time. Cardinal Renart’s head twitched as if his eyes traveled to the boy, then up to meet Elisha’s gaze. He revealed nothing, projecting holiness, arrogance, impatience. Arrogant indeed if he did not care that anyone else would notice his rudeness to his fellow cleric.

  “I am sure I do not deserve such esteem, Cardinal. Perhaps you can tell me, what is the best way to arrange transportation for these families?” Father Pierre continued.

  “That is hardly your concern, Pierre. Let them make their way as they will. We have a mount for you, it will have to be sufficient.”

  At the cardinal’s side, Father Osbert, the inquisitor, gazed at Elisha with frank curiosity. “Here is another person I believe the Holy Father shall take notice of, Cardinal.” He ges
tured toward Elisha. “Some months back, I was sent to England with a commission to investigate certain rumors of miracles surrounding this man. He is somewhat changed, but I should recognize that face even were he to lose half his weight.”

  “Few men have witch’s eyes,” murmured a voice behind them, a slight figure at ease on a tall horse. Harald.

  Elisha’s heart leapt to find an ally, but he gave no sign of it. Instead, he found words in English, his own tongue sounding foreign to his ears. “I should be pleased and honored to meet the Holy Father, if that suits him, Father.”

  Father Osbert stared down at him, then straightened, adopting a tone of authority. “I command, by order of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, that you shall stand before the inquisitors to answer for charges of witchcraft in the recent events of the succession of the crown of England.”

  The charge jolted Elisha, and he took an involuntary step back while Father Pierre asked in French for an explanation. Father Osbert repeated his charge in French and Latin both, his voice stronger with each repetition—or perhaps it only seemed that way as all other voices fell silent in a spreading wave. Cardinal Renart stared down from his horse, a prim little smile on his lips. Elisha had fought a hundred battles since the one that placed Thomas firmly on the throne in England—he had thought the matter far behind him, and Lord knew, he had the greatest battle yet to come. But he wasn’t sure what could be done about it—he had already said he willingly went on to Avignon. How would resisting such a summons, or even flatly denying the charge, reflect on his innocence? His word against the cardinal’s here would surely fail, but Father Osbert was a fair man, a good observer. Elisha caught his breath. No matter: Father Osbert was the face of the inquisition. The idea of facing the inquisition, here in France where the Templars had burned and the Cathars before them, chilled Elisha to the very heart.