The Scourge
Nostrum
The Scourge
Nostrum
Roberto Calas
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Roberto Calas
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
e-ISBN: 9781477858882
For Rina and Nick, who once had nothing, and so give me everything.
Table of Contents
EPISODE 1
Map for Episode 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
EPISODE 2
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
EPISODE 3
Map for Episode 3
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
EPISODE 4
Map for Episode 4
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
EPISODE 5
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
EPISODE 6
Map 1 for Episode 6
Map 2 for Episode 6
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
EPISODE 7
Map 1 for Episode 7
Map 2 for Episode 7
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
EPISODE 8
Map for Episode 8
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Episode 1: Historical Note
Episode 2: Historical Note
Episode 3: Historical Note
Episode 4: Historical Note
Episode 5: Historical Note
Episode 6: Historical Note
Episode 7: Historical Note
Episode 8: Historical Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Kindle Serials
EPISODE 1
Chapter 1
When I was a child, I watched a man burn at the stake for mixing tinctures to cure the Black Plague. I remember him smiling just before the flames seared his flesh. A haunting smile that has bewildered me to this day. The monks who burned him told the lingering crowd that prayer is the only true and righteous weapon against illness. That alchemy is a sin.
Some weeks later those same monks dunked a saint’s body into a vat of wine in the hopes of creating a cure for the same plague.
I am a simple knight. It is difficult for me to see the difference between a tincture and a corpse’s bath water. But after two days of prayer I understand that neither God nor the saints will heal the woman I love. I must look to alchemy, even if it means burning in the very fires of hell. And I, too, will smile as the flames lick my flesh. For I will have saved the woman I adore and earned eternal salvation in her eyes.
“You are stealing from the church!” Brother Phillip is the last remaining monk in the monastery of St. Edmund’s Bury, my current sanctuary. He is not happy today. “You imperil your very soul, Sir Edward!”
“I am not stealing from the church,” I say. “I am stealing from you.” I stare at him until he takes a step back. One of his eyebrows twitches.
In my experience, monks are quick to threaten God’s Fury. They wave His wrath like a whip whenever you stray from the path they have chosen for you. But I believe every man must find his own road to salvation. Job, from the Old Testament, followed the road of perseverance. Saint Edmund, the martyred king who gives this town its name, put faith in his principles. And me?
My own personal path to salvation depends on chickens.
I roll a wheelbarrow full of the feathered creatures through the churchyard of St. Edmund’s Monastery, toward the prior’s house. The massive monastery buildings rise around me like mountains of cut stone and stained glass. Brother Phillip walks beside me, holding my great helm and prattling on about the loss of essential food.
Essential food. There are only four people left alive in this abbey, and yet there are enough animals and provisions to feed a small village for a year. But I am tired of explaining this fact to Brother Phillip. I have spent two days listening to his ceaseless whining on every conceivable topic. Perhaps he is God’s punishment for my sins. I have murdered, stolen and lied, but surely not even those sins warrant an affliction by this man. I understand now why the other monks left him behind when they fled the monastery.
I look at Brother Phillip and feel a momentary pang of pity for him. I, too, must leave him, for I have found new purpose.
“Chickens are clever,” Brother Phillip says, desisting from his complaints to offer this golden insight. I suppose, when compared to him, chickens might be clever. “Thomas Cockerel told me that chickens can dream. Just like you or me.”
If chickens dream like I do, then I would see the tears in their tiny eyes each morning. I would see scars on their knuckles from the stone walls of the abbey. If chickens have dreams like mine, then I pity the creatures.
“Why must you take them, Sir Edward?” Phillip asks. “How can chickens help Elizabeth?”
The birds coo, sounding like tiny monkeys, and they peck at the canvas stretched over their heads. I stare at Phillip for a long moment, the black mist settling into my stomach as I think of my wife. “She’s getting worse, Phillip. I have to do something.”
Phillip fusses nervously with the wooden cross at his neck and his eyebrow twitches again.
“You’ll take care of Elizabeth, like you promised?” I ask. An icicle stabs my soul when I utter her name. “You and Sister Mildred?”
There is a nun here in the abbey. A kind woman who cooks for us every day and tries to restore some shred of order to the world. She has nursed Elizabeth while I have prayed.
“Mildred will care for her,” Brother Phillip says. “But it is an imposition. Sister Mildred has to tend the livestock and the gardens as well.”
I glance sidelong at Phillip. “It wouldn’t kill you to help her with her chores.”
“I do help her,” he says. “I pray every day for her health and for our continued safety.”
I reach the prior’s house and set down the wheelbarrow so I can open the door. My armor feels heavy after two days of wearing a tunic. A sack containing more of Phillip’s essential food—dried meats and bread—hangs from my shoulder.
“Prayer is good, Brother Phillip,” I say. “But God helps those who help themselves.”
He crosses his arms. “If that is true, Sir Edward, then why do you need the chickens?”
Has Brother Phillip found wit?
I open the door and roll the wheelbarrow to a sparse room at the back of the house. “I need these birds because they are loud. And because they can only fly for short stretches.” I reach down and take hold of an iron ring set into the floor, pull upon it until the trapdoor swings open. The stench of rotting flesh nearly knocks me over.
It is cloudy outside, but enough light streams down into the pit to reveal the swaying, groaning, clawing mass of pale bodies at the foot of the ladder.
“But most importantly,” I say, “I need chickens because they are fast.”
I untie the front of the canvas and tilt the wheelbarrow forward toward the pit. If chickens have dreams, then this is their nightmare.
“Brother, if you would?”
Brother Phillip shakes his head but sets down my great helm and stretches the canvas forward, so that the chickens can’t escape their fate.
“This is madness,” Phillip says. “Absolute madness.”
In these times of madness, only madness will save us.
A knight who is now my enemy once spoke those words, and I think I should have them chiseled onto my tombstone. Madness defines my life these days. I spent more than a week with two of my knights traveling from my home in Sussex to this monastery in East Anglia. I would have traveled into hell itself to save my angel from the plague that has ravaged England. But the plague ravaged my angel, too.
I thought perhaps God was punishing me. I have sinned more than I care to think about and, perhaps, as punishment the Lord took the one thing in this world I could not be without.
I have tried prayer. I tried a relic from Saint Luke, the healer. I even flogged my own back until it bled. I would be there still, in the cathedral with my Elizabeth, flogging and praying, if I had not noticed the black marks on her wrist.
The plague forced me to bind my angel to a torch bracket so she could not afflict others. But she hated the bonds. She struggled against the silk cords, yanked her arms, and hissed. And the cords left their mark. Black rings of dead flesh.
Her body will not heal. Every bump. Every scrape. Every cut. Every wound she suffers will be hers for eternity. Her body will fall apart in time. And though I would love her no matter what physical state she is in, I wonder if her mind is falling to pieces as well.
I padded the silk cords with feathers and hay and tried to put such thoughts from my mind, but they would not go. For two days I gave myself to God and prayed that He would heal her. But He did not listen. And I understood that Elizabeth’s only hope lay with an alchemist who might not exist, on an island that might never be found.
So I stood with tears in my eyes and kissed Elizabeth’s fingers, said good-bye as she hissed, as she tried to bite through the padded silk gag around her mouth. Before I left, I drew a silk glove and a phial of lavender oil from a pouch at her belt. I sprinkled her scent onto the silk and tucked the glove into a pouch at my belt. “God helps those who help themselves, my angel,” I said to her. I’m not sure where I first heard that phrase. Brother Phillip assures me that it is not in the Bible and that, in fact, God wants us to rely on Him and not on ourselves. But if that were true, the Jews would still be slaves, and Goliath’s army would have crushed the Israelites.
I have no sling and I have no staff, but I am fairly certain that I can part the sea of plaguers beneath the prior’s house.
The chickens squawk and cluck as they tumble into the pit. I hear wings fluttering and pray that some of the birds make it past the plaguers.
Most of Phillip’s chickens die swift and horrible deaths. A few make it to the wet tunnel leading out of the monastery. The mob of lurching plaguers pursues the screeching birds down the passage. The creatures were human once and are perhaps human still. But they do not look human. They look like demons. Bloody, snarling creatures with terrible wounds on their bodies and eyes as black as the Abyss. I hope Phillip’s clever chickens can wade the river at the end of the tunnel, or my Red Sea will crash upon me before I am through.
I wait for a time, calculating the speed of chickens chased by demons. When I imagine the animals would have cleared the tunnel, I take a deep breath. I don my great helm, light a thick altar candle, and say good-bye to Brother Phillip. He is a bastard and a coward and it is because of him and his brothers that my Elizabeth needs this alchemist in the first place, but I cannot stay angry at him. There is not enough spine in Phillip for the anger to take hold.
“Godspeed, Sir Edward,” he says.
I descend the rungs quickly and draw my sword when I reach the bottom. It is the sword of Saint Giles, and Saint Giles is my saint. Not because he is the patron saint of the insane, but because he is the saint of Bodiam, the village where Elizabeth grew up. She loves Saint Giles and so I adopted him. I only hope the adoption is mutual.
“If any of the chickens survived,” Brother Phillip calls, “can you bring them back before you go?”
I would like to believe this is more of his newfound wit.
I walk through the long tunnel holding my candle as far forward as I can. The thick flame flickers and glistens back at me from a hundred moist stones. Halfway through the passage, the candlelight gleams off something metallic. I nearly fall to my knees at the sight.
It is Tristan’s blood-soaked helmet.
Chapter 2
There is no other trace of Tristan. Just the great helm, half-submerged in water and spattered with blood. I can think of no reason to take a helmet off in a tunnel filled with demons. Demons whose bites inflict plague. I scoop up the helmet and pin it between my candle arm and my chest.
If Tristan has come to harm, it is my fault. I should have left with him. We should be searching for this alchemist together. He stayed by my side throughout our journey to St. Edmund’s Bury, and I should have been at his side when he left.
Dozens of bodies litter the tunnel floor. I pause at each one to make certain that Tristan is not among them. He is not. I am not certain if these are the plaguers that we killed on the way in or fresh ones cut down by Tristan on his way out. The bodies of the afflicted are dead and decaying from the moment they succumb to the plague, which makes it impossible to tell when they were finally destroyed. A faint breeze in the tunnel makes the candle flame dance.
I hear footsteps in the distance. The uneven gait of the dead. I hold Saint Giles’s sword as far forward as I can and walk quietly onward. The candlelight makes the blade glow like molten steel.
Snarls echo in the passageway. I pad forward, readying myself to fly back toward the rungs. My sword trembles. Something darker than the tunnel’s darkness moves in the distance. My heart pounds. Not because I might die, but because I might die before healing Elizabeth.
Candlelight washes over the living dead. One of the chickens was not clever enough. Or fast enough. Two plaguers fight over the carcass like wild dogs. One of them sees a bigger prize in me and abandons the chicken. It is a female. A slim girl of no more than fourteen wearing a tattered chemise and walking with bare feet. She steps drunkenly toward me. The bright flame of my candle glints from her soulless eyes.
If there is a cure for this plague, then I pray God will forgive me for the scores I have murdered. And for the murders I must yet commit. I let Tristan’s helmet drop and whip my blade across the girl’s throat. She gurgles and claws at her neck, and I am reminded of Allison Moore, whom I slew upon the banks of the River Medway when I mistook her for a plaguer. But this girl does not die like Allison Moore. She advances again, blood seeping onto the collar of her chemise, spreading and blooming like a liquid rose.
I strike again, and this time she falls. Her companion, a man wearing a soiled silk doublet and cap, finishes with the chicken and approaches me. The bird’s blood is smeared across his face. It takes seven hacks of my sword t
o keep him from rising again. The massive candle gutters dangerously with each blow. I wipe my blade on his doublet and retrieve Tristan’s helmet before moving onward.
Light streams into the tunnel from the entrance 150 yards further along. The birds must have cleared the river, because I see the last of the plaguers shuffle out of the passageway and into the water. Clever chickens.
And there, at the mouth of the tunnel, I find a message from Tristan.
My hand cannon leans against the wall just inside the open gate, where we left it when we arrived two days ago. A blood-soaked shred of fabric has been draped over the barrel of the cannon. There are words scrawled across it; Tristan must have painted the message before leaving the monastery.
Good of you to come
Heading toward Brantry to find a lustful horse. (Don’t tell Morgan.)
Chelmsford after that
A skin and pouch lie next to the cannon on the muddy floor. The skin contains powder for the gun; the pouch holds five iron shots, wadding, and two powder-coated firing cords. I put away my sword and lean the cannon against my shoulder.
The clouds drift away from the sun. The light shines warm against my face. Tristan is alive.
Or at least he was when he left this tunnel. I stare down the River Lark toward St. Edmund’s Monastery, where my Elizabeth waits, tied with padded silk to a torch bracket. I pray to God and Saint Giles that I find this alchemist, but I know they will not help me. Alchemy is a sin.
Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) Page 1