Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2)

by Roberto Calas

  “‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding!’” The priest shouts. “‘Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen!’”

  It is the same line the alchemist quoted to me before I left the tower. How can the same verse be used by two people with such different views?

  “I will help your Elizabeth,” the alchemist said. “Whether the dragon blood works or not. I promise I will help.”

  How could he have helped? If the dragon blood did not work, he would have been in the same situation as before. Stuck. Frustrated. Nearly defeated. His words had rung in my ears like an empty promise. A reassurance meant to show camaraderie or to motivate me in my journey. But as I think on them, I wonder. He was a clever man, and his gaze that day held a hidden meaning.

  The conviction of things not seen.

  I am running before I realize it. Lepers walk aimlessly through the monastery, staring in awe at their new home. Tristan and Belisencia are on their way to the docks. I dart past them and storm into the church, then run up the endless circle of spiral stairs until I reach the alchemist’s workshop. It is in ruins. Shattered glass everywhere. Tables overturned. I hope he did not live to see this mess. Only his workbench seems unaffected.

  I step over a table, my boots crunching on broken glass, and a voice calls out from the far side of the room.

  “At least one good thing will come of this day.” Sir Gerald sits against a wall to my left. He wears his armor, but no helmet. Twisted scars wind along his face like gnarled tree roots. I draw my sword as he stands, but he shakes his head. “You will not deny me this time, Sir Edward. I may die today, but I will die holding your cold, black heart.”

  I walk toward the workbench, avoiding a fallen jug and a broken mortar. “You can live, Gerald. I will tell them to let you go. I don’t want to kill you.”

  He raises something toward me. A sculpted pipe so old that the iron has gone green. It is half again as long as his hand and looks as if its surface was once ornately carved. He holds a tiny candle in his other hand. “King Brian gave this hand bombard to me,” he says, gesturing toward the pipe. “It’s smaller than yours, but it will do the task required of it.”

  I hear Tristan’s voice in my head, a half dozen irreverent replies to Gerald’s comment, but I remain silent.

  “This one came from Asia. You light the back and death erupts from the front.” He takes a step toward me. I notice a familiar glass bottle on the workbench. “We tortured the alchemist. He told me that he had a cure for the plague,” Gerald says. “He said it was on the shelf closest to the door, but he lied. All I found were dried plants. And by the time I got back to him, the fools were already burning him.” He takes another step. “But I knew that you would know. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To find the cure. You and he were thick as mud, weren’t you? Did you truly think I would believe that ridiculous story about how you escaped?”

  “Put the cannon down, Gerald,” I say. “I will walk out of the tower with you and tell them to let you go. I swear it.”

  Gerald raises the canon and takes another step toward me. He is two strides away. “God will reward me for killing you, Edward. He will give me everlasting glory.” He draws the candle toward the touchhole. “I will cut off your head and shit in your dead mouth, and God will smile.”

  “I don’t want to kill you, Gerald,” I say. “Put down the cannon and yield.”

  “You don’t want to kill me?” He laughs. “You don’t want to kill me? You are the one on the death side of this gun, Edward. And you ask me to yield? Are you mad?”

  In these times of madness…

  “I am truly sorry, Gerald.” The sword of Saint Giles hums as I swing it with all my strength. The blade strikes the glass bottle on the workbench, shattering it, sending glass and liquid toward Gerald. He flinches as the fluid spatters him. For an instant he looks at me with confusion and perhaps a touch of humor. But only for an instant. Then his screams tear through the workshop.

  He howls as the liquid eats away at the flesh of his hands. The cannon falls, clattering, to the wood floor. I kick the weapon away as Gerald screams and works madly at the strap of his bevor. The acid eats slowly through his breastplate. He yanks the bevor off his neck and hurls it away, then fumbles at the straps of his breastplate.

  No man deserves to die like this. I sheathe my sword and run toward the garderobe. The water in the tub is full of feces and urine, but it is all I have. I use a bucket to scoop some out and return to Gerald.

  “It’s eating me!” He shouts. “It’s eating me!”

  I dump the feculent water over him and when I turn to gather more, he barrels into me, knocking me to the ground. I land on my knees, but before I can turn to face him I hear my sword slide from its sheath.

  “That…that is…agony,” he says, glancing at his burned hands. I spot the hand cannon beside one of the toppled tables. Too far away. “I’m done with you, Edward Dallingridge! Die, demon. Right fucking now!”

  He raises Saint Giles’s sword in both bleeding hands and jabs it down at me with every ounce of strength he has. I roll toward the hand cannon, knowing the brigandine won’t stop Gerald’s blow. Knowing that I must try to live, for Elizabeth. I feel pressure at my ribs. Soldiers often do not feel the sword blows that kill them. I feel only a slight pressure. My hand clenches the cannon.

  “No!” Gerald’s scream echoes across the room. “No! No! No! No! No!”

  I tumble to one wall and snatch a candle from a sconce, but I needn’t have bothered with the dramatics. Gerald hasn’t moved. He stands with tears in his eyes.

  “Why won’t you ever die?” He looks at my sword in his burned hands. Only the hilt remains. Shards of steel litter the floor. I look at my sheath; holes have been burned through the leather.

  Gerald tosses the hilt aside and slumps against the wall. “The sword shattered. It just shattered.”

  I touch the spot where he stabbed me and shrug. “God is my armor.”

  I let him leave the tower. Every instinct says I should kill him, but I let him go. If humanity is to survive, then we must show ourselves to be human. And perhaps by letting him live, I will buy Elizabeth’s life.

  I kneel by the window where I saw the alchemist before I left. I run my fingernails along the wooden planks. One of them is loose. I rock it from side to side, pulling upward with my nails, until the short plank rises. I toss it aside and draw a tiny brass coffer from the hole. My hands tremble as I work the latch. I take a long breath. Then I flip open the top.

  Inside are three ampoules with Arabic writing on them.

  Chapter 59

  I walk toward the docks. Many of the lepers have gathered by the pyre and listen to the shouting priests. Tristan and Belisencia are there, too, as is Praeteritus.

  “The monastery is yours now.” Tristan sounds unusually sober. “Looks like your lepers found a home.”

  I take my place beside them and once again watch as a man burns for mixing tinctures to cure the plague. I do not know if he smiled as the flames licked his body. His body is beyond expression now. The fire has turned him into a shadow. A husk. An empty vessel from which no cures will ever flow again. My teeth grind with such force that a chip comes free from one of them.

  The priests shout, spittle flying from their lips. They tell the gathered crowd that alchemy is a sin. That prayer is the only true and righteous weapon against plague.

  But they are wrong.

  I look down at the three phials in my hand. The baked clay glows orange in the light of the flames. Alchemy may be a sin, but prayer is not the only weapon we have. I hold a new weapon in my fist. And if I burn in hell for using it, then 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.

  Episode 1: Historical Note

  The episode you have just read is as historically accurate as I could make it. As I mentioned in the previo
us book, Sir Edward Dallingridge is a real knight. He was favored by King Richard II and the earl of Arundel and went on to become a knight of the shire and warden of London (for a time). But perhaps his most enduring accomplishment was the castle he and his wife, Elizabeth Wardieu, built at Bodiam, in Sussex. Visit it if you have a chance; I can’t recommend it more highly. Of all the castles in England, Bodiam is my favorite. I believe it embodies the romance, the chivalry, and the adventure of the Middle Ages, even though the interior was gutted in the seventeenth century, during the Civil War.

  In this episode I mention a manor house called Lutons Place, in Long Melford. That manor house still exists, although it is now known by the name Kentwell Hall and is another place worth visiting. It does not look as it would have looked in Edward’s time, but it is still a quirky old manor with centuries of history. The poet John Gower, a close friend of Geoffrey Chaucer, owned the manor for a time before the Clopton family moved in.

  I make mention of the Flemish settling in Sudbury, but I couldn’t find room to talk about Simon of Sudbury, one of the town’s most famous sons. Here are Edward’s thoughts on Simon, in a paragraph that was cut from the book:

  Sudbury also had a connection to the peasants’ revolt a few years back. Simon of Sudbury, the inventor of the poll tax and archbishop of Canterbury, was beheaded by wild-eyed peasants in London during the riots. The peasants were not appreciative of his invention. Tristan likes to say that Simon’s head was staked to a poll.

  In the chapter where Edward is being taken to the bandit camp, he sees Frenchmen strapped to carriage wheels with their limbs hammered to rubbery pulp. This is nothing invented. This sort of torture device is called the Saint Catherine Wheel and it was, unfortunately, popular during the Middle Ages. An unknown writer from long ago described a victim of the wheel in far better terms than I do. He said the victim looked like “a sort of huge, screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones.”

  Something inside me shrivels when I read that. I can’t imagine the excruciating pain these poor victims must have felt. I feel shame for being nervous at the dentist.

  The other form of torture I mention is the Spanish Donkey, and this, too, was a real form of punishment. It was reportedly still used well into the eighteenth century.

  It’s sobering to think that human cruelty might actually be more terrifying than flesh-eating demons.

  Episode 2: Historical Note

  Most people think of the Middle Ages as a time of ignorance. A time when knowledge and the pursuit of scientific truths were suppressed. And in many ways, this is true. But a great many theories and discoveries were made during those so-called Dark Ages.

  The Venerable Bede was one of the greatest scholars of the medieval age, and he came from some of the darkest years of the Dark Ages—the seventh century. Bede, a monk, wrote more than sixty books on a wide variety of topics, including, as Edward stated, a treatise claiming the earth is spherical and not flat. Did I mention this was in the seventh century? He was versed in the classical philosophies as well as the religious and scientific ideology of his time. Not bad for an old man in the dark age of history.

  Edward spends much of this episode in the village of Edwardstone, in Suffolk. The village, which is to the east of Sudbury, has existed for more than a thousand years. It was one of the many locales to be swept up in Suffolk’s cloth trade, and it prospered in Edward’s time. The church is lovely. Battlemented on one side, with a thick, handsome Norman tower. It was renovated in the nineteenth century but still maintains much of its medieval feel, and the church has a thirteenth-century font that would have been there long before Edward was born.

  Okay, now for a confession. Some of you may know this already, but the Scottish sport of tossing the caber is generally thought to date from the early sixteenth century. I say generally, because no one knows for sure. There is much discussion about the origins of caber tossing. But like any sport, it probably predates the written historical records. I like to think that some form of caber tossing was around back in the fourteenth century, even if it had a different name. Not convinced? Then think about ice hockey. Variations of ice hockey were played in the early Middle Ages by the Danes. That’s more than a thousand years before it became recognized as the sport we know today. But were Scots really throwing twenty-foot-long poles into the air in Edward’s day?

  I’d say there’s a wee chance.

  Episode 3: Historical Note

  In this episode, Edward reflects upon the reason for spiral stairs going anticlockwise instead of clockwise. He would know a lot about such things because, as I have mentioned in the past, he designed and oversaw the construction of Bodiam Castle, which was—and is—in my opinion one of the finest castles in England. Edward was knowledgeable in the finer points of fortresses of all sorts. So knowledgeable, in fact, that he was appointed to survey the strengths and weaknesses of many English castles and settlements, including the towns of Winchelsea and Rye, and the castles in Calais and Picardy.

  Edward’s assertion that the church considered the left hand to be evil is correct. All knights were anointed in the eyes of God and had to be right-handed. So when invaders stormed up spiral staircases, you could be fairly certain that the attackers would be at a disadvantage because of the tower walls.

  Edward is a master of military tactics and defenses, but his Elizabeth wants him to be more than that. She goads him into reading the French Roman de Renard books. As Edward recalls, the Renard books were mostly about animals. They were a sort of twelfth-century Aesop’s Fables, except they rarely had a moral. They were simply snapshots that explored human emotions and motivations. The story Edward thought about is one of the most well known.

  The order of the Knights Hospitaller is a real order, one that has been around as long as the order of the Knights Templar. Both were started during the Crusades for the purpose of protecting pilgrims making their way to the Holy Lands. The Knights Hospitallers held a wealth of lands in England, including the Little Maplestead Preceptory, which was founded in circa 1186. A preceptory is simply a community of Knights Hospitaller or Knights Templar. Not much is known about the preceptor at Maplestead except that it held a messuage (dwelling house and outbuildings) and a garden, a hospital, three hundred and eighty acres of land, sixteen acres of meadowland, thirty acres of pasture, and a dovecote.

  I’m glad they documented the dovecote.

  Episode 4: Historical Note

  Those dancing people?

  Yes.

  There really was a sickness in the Middle Ages that caused men and women to dance uncontrollably. It was, as the knight Roger noted, called Saint John’s Dance, or, sometimes, the Dancing Plague. Although some cases of this peculiar illness were recorded as early as the eighth century, the first major outbreak was in Germany, in 1375. Thousands of people danced until they fell to the ground with exhaustion, and even after falling to the ground they would writhe and spasm. The theories as to why this occurred range from food poisoning to mass insanity, but nobody seems absolutely certain.

  History often provides subjects that are stranger than anything writers can come up with. Case in point: Tristan said the dancers hated pointy shoes and the color red, which, according to historical records, is true. The dancers reacted violently to pointed shoes, the color red, and any attempts to stop them from dancing. Entire novels could be written about this odd illness.

  Treatment for these people usually involved exorcism and isolation, and the success rate seems to have been about as low as you would expect. Which brings us to the treatment of wounds in general.

  Barbers in Edward’s time were no longer mere cutters of hair. They knew how to leech patients and performed routine, if crude, surgeries. Doctors had more learning, although the profession was riddled with superstition, astrology, and false knowledge. Humorism was a medieval belief that the body was controlled b
y four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. All illnesses were caused by an imbalance in these humors, and to recover one’s health, one had to realign them. Often this involved drawing blood with leeches, or prescribing herbal medications. And while humorism seems a bit backward to us, it was a very complex system that sometimes arrived at the correct conclusion. Although usually for an incorrect reason.

  Paul and the nun at Hedingham use mold to treat Edward’s wound. Mold, which is used to make penicillin in modern times, has been used to treat infection from as far back as the days of ancient Greece. In the Middle Ages, the mold often took the form of wet bread and cobwebs. I’m not entirely sure what the cobwebs added to the formula, but webs were often used to stop bleeding.

  Maggots were also used to treat infection, especially on battlefields, where surgeons observed that wounds with maggots in them were cleaner than wounds without. Maggots only have the ability to eat dead flesh, and they leave healthy tissue alone. Clever maggots.

  As with most areas of life in the Middle Ages, fraud was rampant in medicine. Some doctors or peddlers sold elixirs which they said would cure almost any illness. These elixirs were rarely useful in any way. Eventually a Latin term was applied to these sorts of worthless medicines that promised miracle cures.

  Nostrum.

  Episode 5: Historical Note

  Dragons have been a rich part of the history of England and Europe. Looking back with modern sensibilities, it may seem as if the people of England were a bit silly to believe in such things. But the beliefs of a society change as education and discovery shine light into the dark areas of our knowledge. There are many people today who believe that life-forms from alien planets come down and abduct humans. I can’t be certain this is not true, because our society has not explored the planets and galaxies of our universe. Perhaps, someday in the future, we will have irrefutable proof one way or the other, and the people of that distant age may look back with humor at our archaic beliefs.