Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2)

by Roberto Calas

  The smoke makes me cough. I know we do not have much time in here.

  “Lean to the right hard as you can, Tristan!” We both struggle as Gilbert crawls back to me, his fingers squeaking against my breastplate. I put everything I have into sitting up but something is pinning us to the floor. Sweat trickles through my hair. It is miserably hot in here.

  Gilbert’s hands find my face. I open my mouth to bite his fingers, then think better of it. One of his nails gouges my cheek. I crane my neck away from him. His teeth crunch against the mail at my hip.

  “Are you pulling, Tristan?” I shout. “Lean, you miserable bastard, lean!”

  “I am leaning!” He coughs. “What is the purpose of this?”

  “To sit up!”

  He falls silent and the realization comes to me. “To your left! My right, your left!”

  Tristan and I groan. I can hear him coughing too. The ropes bite at my wrists but slowly the tent post rises until it is vertical again. The tent is still attached to the pole, so the canvas spreads, although it sags downward without the support of the guy lines. I can see the hellish blaze that engulfs the far side of the tent. The guard’s empty chair is on its side and on fire. Bits of smoldering cloth fall from the canopy. We can see the church through great flaming rents in the fabric on the other side of the tent. Figures lurch across the graveyard. The dead walk. And we burn.

  The heat makes the skin of my face tighten. I can hear little over the roar of the fire. Gilbert bites the cuisse on my thigh as I kick at him. But he has room now. He stands, pushing the sagging canopy upward with his head. He snarls and approaches from the side, where my legs cannot get to him. I kick meekly and brace myself for his final leap. I feel shame that my death will come at the hands of this idiot. Crushing sorrow for failing Elizabeth.

  But Gilbert does not leap. He jerks and grows rigid, sways on his feet. Then jerks again and falls lifeless onto me. The Virgin Mary? Saint Giles? A seizure of the heart? I don’t question it.

  “Stand…up…” I can’t stop coughing. I feel dizzy with the smoke. “Stand up, Tristan!”

  We struggle to our feet, lifting the tentpole with all our strength.

  “Never…never seen…a two-man caber toss,” Tristan says.

  And that is exactly what it is like. The Scottish barbarians have a sport where they hold twenty-foot poles by one end and flip them into the air. The pole Tristan and I hold is only half that length, and there is no possibility of us flipping it, but I feel, for the moment, like a savage Scot.

  The pole tilts to my left, so that the burning wall of canvas rushes toward us. I lean to the right. The pain in my ankle is too great. I stand on one foot and the pole pitches to one side. Tristan stumbles and the two of us groan as we right the pole again. The canopy above is melting into flame.

  “Edward?” Tristan says.

  “Yes?”

  He looks over his shoulder at me. “It’s good to see you.”

  I smile in spite of everything. It is good to see him too.

  “Edward?” he says.

  “Yes?”

  “Our situation has not improved.” Tristan coughs. The sweat on his grimy face glistens in the orange light of the flames.

  No, it has not. My ankle throbs with pain. I do not think I can bear the weight of this tent much longer. The pole feels heavy as a ship’s mast. All of the canvas rests upon the shaft, and the shaft rests upon our wrists. The heat is unbearable. My chin touches the bevor above my breastplate and the metal is hot enough to cause pain.

  “Lean…” I cannot talk. I am coughing too much. “Lean…right…” I cough, then shake my head. “No…your left…” We lean to my right, and the weight of the pole and burning canvas topples us. We tumble sideways to the ground and the burning canopy falls upon us.

  I hear Tristan’s screams. The fires of hell have found us. I will not smile as the flames sear my flesh, because no one will heal Elizabeth.

  Chapter 10

  The heat fades as I die.

  Purgatory is dark and smells of burnt flesh and canvas. An angel stands before me. Perhaps I have been reunited with Elizabeth in the afterlife. But Elizabeth holds a smoking shovel, which seems odd to me. And Elizabeth has dark hair. I look more closely. It is the nun.

  Her habit dangles mostly off her head. Soot and dirt smudge her face. But seen in the moonlight, she is a handsome woman.

  Thick lengths of black hair have come free of her habit and fall across her face and onto her shoulders. Sculpted cheekbones and clear skin speak of a well-bred woman, but it is the lips that truly define her. Healthy, soft lips, emolliated by lanolin and rosewater. They are the lips of a woman who demands, and whose demands are always met. She was never meant for a nunnery. She was broken with the nun’s habit as a wild horse is broken with saddle. I wonder which of this woman’s demands got her banished to the convent. And I thank all the saints that my Elizabeth is not like her.

  Most of the tent cloth has been pulled away from us, so that we can see the night sky. We lie on one wall of the tent and the rest of the fabric lies to the side in flames. Gilbert’s body lies a few feet away. His legs are on fire and the smoke of it fills the air with the gagging scent of burning flesh. It won’t be long before the flames reach the fabric beneath us. Tristan coughs beside me. I remember his screams when the canvas fell.

  “Gilbert’s knife,” I croak.

  The nun pokes at the knife hilt with the shovel head until it falls from the sheath. She rips a strip from the hem of her robe and uses it to pick up the hot metal, then saws at my bonds.

  “You injured, Tristan?” I ask.

  “I think my neck…has melted,” he says, still coughing. “Nothing a fashionable sack over my head won’t fix.”

  A dark shape lurches toward us from behind a gravestone. The nun is intent on cutting my bonds. She doesn’t see him coming. My wrists are almost free. “A little faster, love,” I say. I don’t want to panic her.

  “It is never enough, is it?” she says. “I saved your lives, and all you can do is goad me to move faster. Where I was raised a humble ‘thank you’ was the proper show of politeness from a grateful knight.” She scowls and saws with both hands. The ropes fall away from my wrists. I stand, drawing my sword in the same instant, and shove the nun aside with one hand. The blade of Saint Giles flashes upward and lops a diagonal chip from the plaguer’s skull and he falls in a lifeless heap.

  “Thank you.” I lean the sword on my shoulder and extend a hand to the nun. “Sir Edward of Bodiam.”

  She takes my hand and I help her to her feet.

  “Sister Belisencia,” she whispers and shivers at the sight of the dead plaguer. I recognize the man. It is Stephan. The nun’s pampered lips tremble.

  “It’s all right,” I say. “He’s with the Lowered now.”

  Tristan and Belisencia look at me. I shrug. “He had a gift.”

  I take the knife from her hand and slice Tristan’s bonds with one slash.

  He dabs at the back of his neck and winces, then studies the long, slender shape of the nun’s body. “You were in a convent?” He shakes his head. “Bit like feeding roasted sturgeon to a pig, isn’t it?”

  “You would be grateful for roasted sturgeon, would you?” she asks.

  “I’ve eaten all types of fish, my lady,” he says. “And I find the nobler fish to be the bitterest and most unsavory.” He takes her hand and kisses it. “Sir Tristan of Rye.”

  “Where did you get the shovel?” I ask her.

  “Next to a gravestone,” she says, shuddering.

  “How did you know it was Gilbert you were hitting with it?” Tristan asks.

  “I didn’t,” she says. “I was rather hoping it was you, Sir Tristan.”

  More figures lumber through the graveyard. I cannot tell if they are plagued or wounded. Screams echo from the church. Giant shadows play across the stained glass windows as torches inside capture the struggles. God has looked away and hell has found His church.

>   I walk toward the battlemented stone walls, feeling the familiar ache in my ankle. Tristan follows.

  “Where are you going?” Belisencia asks.

  I look back. Her hands are splayed out to the sides, her shoulders shrugged.

  “To hell,” I say. “You coming?”

  It is a massive arched door—traced and studded with iron—that leads into the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. And it is ajar. I hold Gilbert’s knife in one hand and draw the door open. The church is like most other Norman churches. It is a thing of feathered arches and table tombs, of effigies and stained glass. And tonight it is also a thing of dark corners and lurking horror.

  Wooden chandeliers dangle from the ceiling and cast enormous shadows of themselves on the walls. Bracketed torches bathe the church in quavering orange and create even thicker shadows behind the arches that lead to the aisles.

  We walk down the narrow nave. I lead. Tristan walks behind me, and Belisencia clutches at his arm. Hisses echo. Shapes move at the edges of our vision. A man howls somewhere in the gallery above and all three of us jump. Belisencia shrieks, then covers her mouth when Tristan and I look at her.

  The gallery is a masterpiece of burnished wood, with faces of bishops and cardinals at intervals and a tapestry showing Christ feeding the masses with five loaves of bread. Once it was a place from which a choir flooded the church with celestial song. But the only sounds I hear tonight are the dying man’s broken screams and the loud slurping of plaguers as they feed. Belisencia buries her head in Tristan’s shoulder.

  Two faces peer down from the gallery at us, and they do not belong to priests or bishops. I can just make out the dark stains around their mouths.

  “Check the nave and chancel first,” I say.

  Tristan nods.

  “Why…why are we in here?” Belisencia asks. She is holding Tristan so tightly that he stumbles on her robes.

  “They have our swords and cannons,” I say. “And a dead man’s leg.”

  “A dead man’s leg?” she says.

  “The nuns will be pleased that you remembered,” Tristan says.

  The waxing moon sends a faint shaft of silvery light through the stained glass windows. Flickering torches give life to the carved angel corbels, turn them into demons that leer and scowl. I think of my angel back in St. Edmund’s Bury and the state I have left her in.

  A hulking figure drags itself across the moonlit floor over sunken tombs and toward the back of the church. It is a great bull of a man wearing mail and a tabard. The links of his armor scrape against the limestone as he slithers forward. A carved wood panel spans the rear wall of the chancel, similar to the panel the madman, Peter, had moved into his stable.

  The man reaches the panel and pulls himself upright onto one leg. His other leg hangs limp and at an odd angle. He becomes unbalanced and crashes downward with a wail, his elbow striking one of the hinged seats and pushing it open. He moans softly and looks up to the web of beams on the ceiling, then notices us. His face is seamed with pain. He holds a hand out. “Thanks be to God. Help…help me.”

  A plaguer wearing leather armor and carrying an unstrung bow on his back lurches toward the man. I discover my shoulder sack hanging upon the edge of a pew a few paces from altar. Two other sacks lie on the floor. I assume they are Tristan’s. The two cannons are on the bench, as are our swords, helmets, and knives.

  I draw my sword from its sheath and approach the plaguer. It hisses at me and I take its head off with two swings. The body collapses in a spurt of blood that pools around the altar. The nun takes a sharp breath and covers her eyes. Tristan gathers our items while I walk toward the kneeling man.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  The kneeling man gurgles, spits. “My name is Alexander.”

  Something explodes behind us, sending thunderous echoes through the church.

  I whirl but it is not an explosion at all. A plaguer has leaped from the gallery and fallen to the stone floor of the nave, striking the chandelier on his way down. Shadows lurch dizzyingly across the church as the candles swing.

  The plaguer tries to rise but his leg is broken and his cheek shattered. He struggles to one knee, then is flattened by another plaguer falling on him from the gallery. Tristan picks up his sword and draws it from the scabbard. “Finish your chat,” he says. “I’ll entertain our guests.”

  I turn back to the wounded man. “So you’re Alexander the Cruel?”

  He stares at me wordlessly. The crest on his tabard is the gold engrailed cross of William, earl of Suffolk. A steel arrow brooch on his shoulder marks him as a ventenar, a man who leads twenty archers. Alexander the Cruel is nothing but an up-jumped longbowman.

  It is not just the man’s leg that is broken. One of his arms hangs limp. Perhaps he fell from the gallery too. His fingernails are cracked and broken from the limestone floor.

  “Just a name,” he says. “Just…just to…scare people.”

  “You scared those Frenchmen on the road,” I say. “They must have been terrified when you strapped them to those carriage wheels.”

  “Invaders,” he says.

  “People,” I say. Two figures lurch from the shadows of the north chapel. I jam my cannon into the shoulder sack, then strap my sword belt around my waist.

  “Kill them,” Alexander says. “Please, dear God, kill them.”

  I look into my shoulder sack to make sure the thighbone of Saint Luke is still there. It is. But something else is missing. I search the pews, fighting down panic, then drop to my knees. The pouch containing Elizabeth’s glove lies beneath a pew. I open the small leather bag and breathe in her scent before running my belt through the loop at the back of the pouch.

  Tristan returns from his grim task and tugs his helmet onto his head. “Thanks for finding this,” he says.

  “They’ll eat me while I live,” Alexander hisses. The first plaguer stumbles on a fallen candelabra. The metal clanks loudly and scrapes along the floor, chains jangling and echoing in the nave.

  I look back at Alexander. I think of nine women raped and split slowly in half. “Do you see that carved shelf beneath the seat that you are leaning on?”

  His eyes glance away from the approaching plaguers to the platform, then back to me. “They’re almost here! For the love of God! I have money. I have horses. Whatever you want.”

  “It’s called a misericord,” I say. “It’s a French word. Do you know what it means?”

  “Mary and Joseph, they’re going to kill me!”

  Tristan shakes his head. “No, I think that would be, Marie et Joseph, ils vont me tuer.”

  I give Tristan a look that makes him back away, then address Alexander again. “Do you know what it means?”

  The plaguers have found a way around the candelabra.

  Alexander tries to drag himself away from them, but with one arm he can only creep. The pain makes him cry out. “Why are you talking about French words? I don’t know what it means! I don’t have any idea!”

  “No.” I say. “I imagine you don’t.” I don my great helm and motion Tristan and Belisencia toward the door.

  “You’re killing me!” Alexander shouts. “You are killing me!”

  There are no words to his next scream. Only unholy terror. Alexander screams from the soul.

  Chapter 11

  Belisencia turns on me as we step outside. “You left that man to be torn apart!” She glances into the church one last time and crosses herself. “He’s still alive! Oh, Mother Mary, he’s still alive!”

  “Mea maxima culpa,” I say.

  There is an old stable behind the church, a three-sided structure of weathered oak with short partitions separating it into ten stalls. Eight horses are tethered in the stalls, but a pair of plaguers ravage one of them. The horse lies on its side and nickers softly. One leg kicks out occasionally as if in a spasm. The acrid smell of blood mingles with that of horseshit. A plaguer has thrust most of his face into the animal’s ravaged stomach. Another tears strips f
rom its flanks. Tristan and I draw our knives and bring miséricorde to all three.

  We unhook saddles and harnesses from the partitions and ready the horses. I turn to Belisencia and offer my hand to help her onto a pale gelding. She steps into the stirrup and pivots, so that both her legs are on one side of the saddle.

  Tristan snorts. “Are you going for a tour of the orchards? Or perhaps sauntering to the fishpond for a bit of air?”

  I hold out a hand to silence Tristan. “We may have to ride swiftly, my lady,” I say. “Neither of us will be able to guide your horse.”

  She glances at the gelding, then back at me. “But I am not dressed to ride astride.”

  “The dead rise to feed on the living and entire villages cram into churches seeking safety,” I say. “I think modesty is a luxury of the past.”

  “Modesty is what separates us from animals,” she replies. But she pivots and lowers her legs to either side of the horse. The robe slips upward to her thighs. Tristan grins and his gaze sweeps along the curve of her leg.

  Belisencia tugs at the robes but they will not fall any lower. She glares at Tristan. “Anyone who looks at a woman’s body with lust has committed adultery with her.”

  “Truly?” Tristan’s grin is devilish. “Did you enjoy it?”

  She clears her throat and tugs at the robes again. “I think I mixed up the verse.”

  I toss her a saddle blanket. “Everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” I say. Father Aubrey loves that verse. Perhaps because he spends so much time committing adultery, in his heart, with all the girls of the village. “What sort of a nun are you?”

  She unfolds the blanket and drapes it so that it covers her legs. “The kind that saved your lives. Shall we head out?”

  “We are bound for Hedingham,” I say. “And you?”

  “Somewhere safe,” she says, kicking her horse forward. “Without demons.”

  Tristan holds his hands up and sighs with exasperation. “You gave her a blanket? Now we have nothing to look at on the long journey.”