Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2)

by Roberto Calas

  I pass near the town of Sudbury. It is a wool town, prosperous and—before the plague—full of the Flemish. I understand that the Flemish were put in Sudbury by King Richard’s grandfather, Edward III. He settled them here to help revive England’s dismal cloth trade. Richard told me once that Edward “would not even wipe his arse with English cloth.” Fortunately, the Fleming transplant took root. Sudbury flourished in the cloth trade, and Edward could safely wipe his arse with English cloth.

  I suppose it may still be full of the Flemish, but they likely have lost most of their Flemishness. All plaguers speak the same language, and it is not French.

  I become aware of the riders shortly after passing Sudbury. Two of them. They are a half mile from me, but they ride swiftly. I consider veering off into the countryside, but I am certain they have seen me already. If a man can watch a horse run away for two days in the flat East Anglian plains, how long can he watch a cow?

  “Maybe they’re friends,” I say to Abigail. She farts.

  I nod and place one arm over the cannon so it is partially hidden.

  The men reach me and slow their horses. One wears a rusted chain-mail tunic, the other a leather jerkin. Both are armed. They fall in step with Abigail, one on each side, and laugh. Abigail twitches her ears. I shift uneasily on her back and try to gather as much dignity as I can. I could not find a long enough rope to make Abigail’s halter, but I stumbled upon an old maypole with a long pink ribbon dangling from it. That ribbon is Abigail’s reins. I am certain it is not helping my knightly bearing.

  I nod to each of them. “It is good to see other healthy men in East Anglia.” I hope I am still healthy.

  “Oi, Stephan.” The man in the chain mail ignores me and calls to his companion on my left. “What would you call a knight that rides a cow?”

  Stephan gives me a long look. “An udder failure,” he says.

  The two men laugh again. I keep my eyes on the road ahead. I have enough strife with the afflicted. Must I have it from the unafflicted as well?

  “Unless he comes from Jerusalem, Henric,” Stephan says. “In which case I would call him a Mooooor.”

  Henric bends over in the saddle as he laughs. “A Mooooor!” he says, catching his breath. “A Mooooor!”

  I remove two flints from a pouch at my belt and hold them in one hand as I rummage through my shoulder sack. Stephan smirks at me.

  “Moors are from Spain and Africa,” I say.

  Henric finally addresses me. “Stephan’s got a gift with words,” he says.

  I nod my head but do not meet the man’s gaze.

  “My father was a punster,” Stephan says. “I wasn’t any good at ’em till he died. Just as we dropped him into his grave, his way with words passed on to me.” I can see him smiling up at me from the corner of my eye. “You could say it was a gift from the Lowered.”

  Henric bursts into a fit of laughter again. “Gift…gift from the Lowered! Ain’t ’e just the funniest man you ever ’eard?” He doubles over with laughter again and punches Abigail in the side. “Gift from the Lowered!”

  I turn my head toward him and draw a firing cord out from the shoulder sack. “If you strike my cow again,” I say, “I will grind you into grain and feed you to her.”

  Henric seems to think this is as funny as Stephan’s puns. He hoots with laughter, then mimics me. “If you strike my cow again…hooooooo!”

  I place the firing cord in my lap. “I’m glad I could provide some entertainment,” I say. “Godspeed to both of you.” I kick my heels into Abigail’s side and she accelerates to a slightly faster walk. It is not what I was hoping for.

  Henric wipes at his eyes, then grows sober. He takes hold of Abigail’s pink reins and halts his horse. “I’m afraid you need to get off the heifer now, Sir.”

  I begin striking the two flints together, creating a shower of sparks in my lap.

  “You deaf, cow-knight?” Henric says. He draws a short sword. “I said get off.”

  “What’s that he’s doing?” Stephan asks. “You lighting yourself on fire?”

  “No,” I say.

  Henric lets go of Abigail’s reins and draws his horse away from me. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m lighting a firing cord,” I say. The cord catches and begins to smolder. I put the flints away.

  “What’s a firing cord?” he asks.

  “It is a length of hemp that has been soaked and rolled in flammable powders.” I draw my gun from the shoulder sack and aim it at Henric. “It is used to light cannons like this one.” Henric stares at the weapon. “I appreciate the friendly banter,” I say. “Really I do. But it is time you fellows continued toward wherever it was you were heading.”

  Abigail chooses this moment to explore the high grasses on the roadside and I have to rotate my torso to keep the gun facing Henric.

  “You …you got one shot,” Henric says. “You won’t ’ave time to reload.”

  Abigail walks further off the road, toward a line of coppiced trees, and I pivot until I am almost facing backward. I am unhappy with Abigail’s priorities. I lift one foot so that it rests on her back and prop the cannon upon my knee. The movement shows off the hilt of Saint Giles’s sword. “Why would I want to reload?”

  Stephan creeps his horse toward me, so I turn the cannon to face him. He stops, holds up a hand, and smiles. I wave the end of the cannon southward.

  “Move on. Both of you.”

  Henric smiles. I do not like the way he does it. There is a confidence to that smile. “It’s a fine sword you ’ave, cow-knight. A shame that swords can’t kill people from far away.”

  “If people are far away, you don’t need a sword,” I reply. “So shut your mouth and get far away.”

  “Stephan, what would you call a weapon that was part cannon and part sword?”

  Stephan has the confident smile now too. I look from one to another. They know something that I do not. If I do not find out what it is soon, I might well be dead. I study them. Their hands are on the reins. Their horses are calm.

  “I would call it a cannord,” Stephan says.

  “Cannord sounds a bit French, don’t it?”

  Stephan nods. “Perhaps a swannon?”

  Henric makes a sour face. “A bit flimsy. Like a girly bird.”

  Stephan makes a great show of thinking, tapping his chin with a finger, then his eyes widen. “Why, Henric, there’s already a name for such a thing.”

  “Is there?”

  “Yes,” Stephan says. “I believe they call it a longbow.”

  Neither of these men has a bow. I shoot glances toward the coppiced trees, but there is no one waiting in ambush. Then I catch motion to the north on the Roman road. Horsemen. Several of them. Everything falls into place. The archers from last night. Sir Gerald’s men.

  I need a horse. There is no time for thought. I raise the cannon and touch the firing cord to the powder hole. Henric holds up his hand and backpedals his horse, but he has no time to escape. His confident smile is gone and I have a heartbeat to savor it. The cannon fires, cloaking all three of us in thick smoke and the bitter smell of spent saltpeter. Abigail tenses and leaps to one side. I have to jump clear of her to avoid falling clumsily to the road. Pain jolts from my ankle all the way up my leg. I hear Henric’s horse shriek and see its silhouette as it rears. Stephan’s horse bolts southward. I can hear the drum of the other horsemen’s hooves on the road.

  I reach blindly for the reins of Henric’s horse. The smoke clears enough for me to get a good look, and I am stunned by what I see.

  Henric is unharmed. There is not a mark on him.

  “You…you missed!” he says.

  I do not know how I could have missed from four feet away. I’m glad Tristan wasn’t here to see it. Damn these blundering cannons.

  Stephan trots back to us. The confident smiles are back. The horsemen are almost upon us. “We are not cowed by your fancy cannon.”

  Henric laughs. “Cowed!” He leans over and sm
acks his saddle. “’E’s got a gift! Cowed!”

  I throw the cannon down in disgust as the horsemen surround me. There are eight of them. All broad-chested men wearing leather jerkins, with unstrung bows in leather cases upon their backs.

  A horrible death awaits me.

  Chapter 6

  The horsemen are the archers I saw back at Lutons’ Place. I ask if they will take me to Sir Gerald, but they do not know who he is. Hope smolders in my heart.

  Perhaps they are from a lord’s militia. Deserters or survivors. I ask who they fought for as they strip me of my sword and my shoulder sack. None of them reply. They cut Tristan’s helmet from my belt and bind my hands.

  One of the archers flexes his bow, bending the stiff yew until he can string it. Without a word of warning he nocks an arrow, draws the string back with a grunt, and shoots Abigail in the flank. She kicks with her legs and tries to flee, but two of the archers hold the rope around her neck. The men laugh.

  “No!” My scream echoes across the countryside. I run at the archer and send him crashing to the ground. The man struggles to rise, but I shatter his cheekbone with one of my boots. I draw my leg back for another kick, but two men drag me away. Another knocks me senseless with a blow to my jaw. Archers have brutal strength, and this one puts everything into the blow.

  I regain my senses as three more archers string their bows and aim at Abigail. “No!” I scream. “Why?”

  The two men guarding me hold knives in my direction and peer over their shoulders at Abigail. She is lowing and tossing her head. She raises one hind leg halfway to the arrow, then puts the leg down again.

  The archers fire. Four arrows strike Abigail. I have never heard a cow shriek, but that is what she does. A long, high-pitched grunt. She bucks and yanks against the ropes, then falls to one side and lows. I break away from the men guarding me and kneel beside her as the archers continue to fire. I touch my head to hers and stare into her eye as the men fire arrows around me into her flesh. They laugh and try to land arrows as close to me as they can. I whisper soothingly to her. Her long tongue slips in and out of her mouth.

  I am sorry, Abigail. Mea maxima culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

  I add another name to the list of snuffed lives that I am responsible for.

  I turn on the men. The rage is upon me. It is difficult to see anything. Only shapes, which I run toward. But there are too many. They knock me to the muddy grass and hold me down. I mutter curses, promise them that every one of them will die. I scream and make threats, until one of them hammers me in the temple with a fist.

  The archers brought two spare horses with them. Henric takes one and Stephan the other. When I regain my senses they sit me on a horse in front of Henric. Three men cut at Abigail’s body while the rest of the group rides leisurely along a worn track that heads eastward. I look back at Abigail’s corpse and swear to Saint Giles and the Virgin Mary that I will avenge her. Perhaps I am losing my mind.

  “She was all dried up,” Henric says. “No milk. We can’t use a dry cow. She’d have slowed us down and brought the demons on us. But now we’ll have meat.”

  “What do you want with me?” I ask. “Why am I bound?”

  “A knight like you?” Henric says. “Must be a ransom for your return.”

  “Release me,” I say. “I promise, on my honor, that I will return with my ransom. I have money in Sussex.”

  “Money?” he says. “What do we need money for? We need horses. I imagine we can get ten horses for a knight.”

  Is coin finally worthless? Are we to barter horses and goats now like the savages that wandered Britain a thousand years ago? I think of Brother Phillip and his wealth of livestock back in St. Edmund’s Bury. The monk could be a king in this new land.

  I spot a cloud of crows in the distance. It is another two miles before I see the first of the wheels.

  One end of a thick log has been driven into the fertile earth. The log rises to about the height of a man. A carriage wheel has been affixed to the top of the log, facing toward the sky, so that the entire assembly reminds me of a monstrously big mushroom. The wheel is not perfectly parallel to the ground, so it rotates a few inches to one side, squealing in the wind, then slowly back again.

  A man lies bound upon the top of this wheel with his arms and legs spread wide. I am not certain I can call the poor creature a man anymore. Someone has shattered his limbs countless times with hammer blows, so that his arms and legs seem to ooze bonelessly through the spokes of the wheel. Pus, buzzing flies, and clotted blood cover the man’s body.

  I jump in the saddle when his eyes open as we pass. He is still alive. Dear God, he is still alive. The eyes are blue within white, not black within black. He hisses a word. It takes me a moment to realize he is speaking French.

  “Miséricorde.”

  The man wants death. If my hands were not bound, I would oblige him. Not even the French deserve such torture.

  There are nine more carriage wheels along the old track. They must have run out of carriages, because the last wheel looks like a simple iron hoop with boards lying across it. Each wheel supports a man whose arms and legs have been beaten into jelly. Some have smashed faces. Some have had their stomachs opened so the flies and ants can feast on their entrails. Most of the men are still alive. A few still have the strength to moan. The wind or the men’s spasms make the wheels spin slowly and creak gently in the East Anglian afternoon.

  The afflicted are not the worst thing about this new England. Plaguers are hungry and desperate. I understand those motives. What, then, are the motives of the survivors? Power? Avarice? Cruelty? Of the two groups, the unafflicted survivors are the greater threat. I am uncomfortable with what this implies about my kind.

  I stare at the wheels and wonder who is responsible for such barbarism.

  “They’re French soldiers,” Henric says. “Our troop captured them in Essex. Mad. Every one of them.”

  “Mad?” I ask.

  Stephan nods. “They were gibbering when we found ’em. Said they fought a battle against Lucifer, near Hadleigh.” He laughs. “One of them said that demons chased them all the way to Halstead.”

  The men are not mad. Those were not Lucifer’s demons they fought near Hadleigh, they were mine. I led an army of the afflicted against Frenchmen who had landed at Lighe a week ago. The enemy had never seen plaguers, and they were terrified of them. These men were fleeing me. Poor bastards. Apparently I share the blame for this barbarism.

  “Were you two responsible for the wheels?” I ask.

  Henric shakes his head. “I don’t have the stomach for it. It were Alexander who did it. If you’re lucky, you won’t meet him.”

  “If you were decent men,” I say, “you would end their suffering.”

  “I would, truly I would, but then Alexander would ’ave me up on one of them wheels,” Henric says. “Besides, they’re French.”

  One of the men stares at me as I pass, and a single tear rolls down his cheek.

  Most of my life has been devoted to hating and killing the French. But here, on this lonely road in Suffolk, I find myself pitying them. What strange days these are.

  In these times of madness, even the French deserve sympathy.

  “If they ’adn’t been French, they would be dead already,” Henric says. “Alexander likes to use the Spanish donkey. ’Orrible to watch but kills them in a lot less time.”

  The Spanish donkey. One of the vilest forms of torture in existence. The simplest version is a log placed horizontally on tall supports. The log is trimmed with axes and filed so that the portion facing upward becomes a long, sharp edge. The victim, whose hands are bound to a rope that is slung over a tree branch or bracket above the log, is lowered gradually onto the sharp edge with his legs on either side. Heavy weights tied to his feet force him downward and the wedge of wood splits the man. The heavier the weights, the faster he is split. Sometimes the man holding the rope will pull the victim upward a bit to prolong his life. If the to
rturer feels pity, he can release the tension on the rope and the man is split in seconds. But torturers rarely pity. I have heard that sometimes a man can survive for hours when he is split from crotch to sternum.

  “Alexander sounds charming,” I say.

  “’E’s tough,” Henric says. “Had nine women raped and split last week. Left them alive for most of the day. They were pagans. All of them. The donkey was just a taste of the ’ell they ’ave waiting for them.”

  We leave the wheels of anguish behind, and I promise myself that I will come back to give the soldiers miséricorde. And if I meet this Alexander, I will end his misery too. And I won’t end it quickly.

  Henric, Stephan, and the archers lead me another mile to a tiny village. A wooden sign as we enter proclaims it to be “Edwardstone.” I don’t think much of the coincidence until they walk me toward a stone church at the village center. It is another church devoted to Saint Mary, the Virgin. It makes me think of Sir Morgan, who was convinced that Saint Giles was guiding him. I wonder if Mary is doing the same for me, although every fourth church in England seems devoted to Mary, so maybe I am overthinking things.

  Five grimy military tents are squeezed in among the tombstones of the churchyard, the canvas snapping in the wind. Eight equally grimy men mill around a fire pit. They watch us as we approach. One of them raises a hand and Henric waves back.

  They duck me into one of the tents. The canvas keeps out sunlight, so candles sit on two tall candlesticks at one end. A shaggy soldier sitting in a chair by the candles looks as if he has just woken. He nods to Henric.

  A man and a woman sit back to back in the darkness at the center of the tent, their hands bound around the thick pole that supports the entire tent. Someone has placed a burlap sack over the man’s head. It is hard to see in the faint light, but it looks as if the woman wears a nun’s habit.

  “Another one?” the guard in the chair asks.