Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Habidah replied, “They feel like they’ve been attacked. When religious figures they trust and fear tell them that the secret to their safety is killing people they’ve hated all along, they’ll listen.” She hadn’t forgotten the burning of the Jews in Naples and Strasbourg and a long list of other places throughout Europe.

  Habidah said, “Important to remember that gods can ask you to do horrible things.”

  Kacienta said, “Like participate in the annihilation of an interplanar civilization under the pretense that death doesn’t exist.”

  Habidah said, “Or allow a third of a world’s population to die of a curable disease, all along believing that death does exist.”

  The church must have been one of the first buildings constructed in this village. It would hardly have accommodated the village’s pre-plague population. One of the rafters had rotted away. Habidah, Joao, and Kacienta were rapidly pushed toward the wall.

  The master of the troupe stood behind the altar and waited, imperiously, while the crowd filled the church. The ten followers he’d brought with him lined up behind him. They’d done this before. This was just another stop. Their clothes hid most of their bodies, but, looking carefully, she could see bright red, poorly healed scars and scabs on their ankles and wrists.

  Without prompting, the marshal began to deliver Mass. That surprised Habidah. He wore nothing to indicate that he was ordained. His Latin was stilted and broken. But his audience listened attentively, without understanding, as no doubt they always had. Habidah looked among them for the village’s priest, but without success. Either he was protesting by sitting out, or he had died. There was no Communion, which reinforced a suspicion Habidah had harbored since the marshal’s first words. This was well outside church orthodoxy. The papacy had a more tolerant view of Jews, for one.

  The marshal’s ten followers stripped to the waist. Each had a lash in their hands. And then the sermon changed to French.

  The marshal harangued his audience. He accused them of lust and faithlessness, wretched thoughts and evil deeds, of harboring Jews and failing to keep their Sunday holy. At each new accusation, one of his followers lashed themselves across their naked breasts. The third man drew blood. As did the woman who went next. From then on each snap of the whip grew more severe. The villagers gasped or twisted in discomfort. None looked away.

  Joao was no longer bothered to hide his disgust. Habidah transmitted, “You’ll draw attention.”

  “I don’t feel like pretending anymore. From the moment we reached this plane, I wanted to leave. These people never had anything to teach us. The amalgamates knew it all along.” He groaned as another realization struck him. “All of our funding came from governments, politicians. That means, somewhere further back down the line, the amalgamates. The people of the Unity were never interested in a project like ours.”

  After another moment of standing and watching, he asked, “Why did Niccoluccio’s master come to us, anyway? The Unity is so large that we can hardly comprehend how many people live in it. But it’s only the four of us who got stuck dealing with this.”

  Kacienta said, “Had to happen to somebody.”

  Habidah said, “There’s a far more likely explanation.” She gave Kacienta and Joao a chance to consider that.

  When she looked back at Joao, his lips had tightened. He said, “Of course. We’re not the only ones. We can’t be.”

  Habidah said, “We’re dealing with powerful creatures, masterminds, gods, but I don’t think they would rely on a single plan. They would want more than one point of contact. Or hundreds. Or thousands. I expect what’s happening to us is happening all over the Unity.”

  “Fuck,” Kacienta muttered, aloud.

  Joao said, “Then it really doesn’t matter what we do.” His transmitted voice sounded perfectly level, but Habidah doubted he would have been able to speak aloud.

  Another thirty lashes passed before the conclusion of the sermon. The marshal and his cohort strode outside. The villagers followed like herded animals. Habidah, Kacienta, and Joao were among the last out.

  The rest of the marchers had spread across the churchyard. The villagers formed a semicircle around them. Their master took a place at their center.

  At an unspoken signal, the marchers struck bizarre poses. Some lay supine, and others on their sides, with hands raised and fingers outstretched. One arched her back and bent backward to touch the ground with her fingertips. Another jutted his gut, craned his neck, and reached for the sky on his tiptoes.

  The marshal said, “Ask these men and women what sins they’ve become.”

  Habidah stepped forward with the rest of the crowd, but she didn’t need to draw attention by speaking. “I’m lust,” said the woman who had stretched upside down. “The lust I had in my youth for my neighbors, that I have now for my husband.”

  The man who had craned his neck back proclaimed, “I’m the pride I took in my deeds, in building a home, managing my master’s farm, buying my freedom.”

  One of the women lying on her side announced, “I’m the perjury my husband and I committed to sell our horse. We placed mustard seed in its nose.” That would force it to raise its head and look healthier, Habidah figured.

  An old woman lay on her stomach in the grass. “I am the adultery I committed while my husband was dying of the pestilence.”

  One broad-bellied man lay on the ground as though he’d been hog-tied, grabbing his feet. “I am the murder I committed when I robbed men on the roads to Paris, by my captain’s orders.”

  The marshal had been patrolling with the rest of the crowd. At this, he raised his three-tailed whip. He brought it down hard on the murderer’s stomach. Some in the audience cried out. They and the rest rapidly made their way back to the sidelines. The marshal didn’t wait. He again lashed the murderer, and now it was the murderer’s turn to scream. The next time he raised his whip, he sent it into one of his adulterers. Blood sprinkled across the dirt.

  Once back in the sidelines, Joao asked, “Is this why we’re here? You think we deserve what’s happening to us?”

  “No,” Habidah said.

  Kacienta said, “None of us wants the amalgamates to be here.”

  Habidah didn’t contest that. Instead, she said, “Nobody deserves this kind of suffering.”

  The marshal’s whip was clearly designed to not only inflict pain, but to make a show of it. When his whip’s nails stuck in a victim, rather than pluck them out, he yanked the handle from a different angle to split more flesh. After only two dozen lashes, the ground was soaked with blood.

  The marshal whipped each of his marchers in turn while they yelled their sins to the sky. After the second and third times each of them felt the blow, Habidah figured that they were no longer crying for their audience’s sake. The ones who wavered, who couldn’t keep control of their voices, got extra attention. One of the perjurers, a boy no older than fifteen, lost his voice after the first lash drew blood across his neck and sternum. Again and again, the whip fell on him. He tried to cough out his sin, but couldn’t speak at all. He flopped onto his stomach.

  Kacienta said, “They certainly think they deserve it. We’ve all seen behavior like it before. People castigating themselves in the face of natural disasters.”

  Joao said, “It’s their way of feeling they can control what happens to them. Easier to think that it’s their fault than simply out of control.” After a pause, he asked Habidah, “You sure you’re not making the same mistake?”

  Kacienta said, “If Niccoluccio’s master is against the Unity colonizing this world, it’s not for the same reasons we are.”

  Habidah said, “I’m not siding with Niccoluccio’s master. Or with the amalgamates.”

  Joao asked, “Then what are you doing?”

  Habidah opened her mouth, but at that moment the marshal tossed his whip aside. It landed in the dirt, bloodied and still bearing scraps of skin and flesh. But the marchers still had their own whips. Gradually, they rose
. Even the fifteen year-old managed to stand and readied his whip.

  Habidah had seen satellite recordings of the next part of the performance. But images taken by satellite weren’t the same as being here. What followed was the most savage instance of ritual self-injury she had seen on any of her trips so far. Even Kacienta couldn’t restrain a gasp. The marchers kept calling their sins. They brought their whips down on themselves as hard as they could, across their necks and bare chests, faster and harder until their voices burbled and they couldn’t restrain their sobbing. Three marchers, men who had accompanied the marshal into the church, took it upon themselves to walk amongst their fellows and cheer them on. They did this even as they whipped themselves, and their robes and trousers became soiled with blood.

  This was a performance, yes, but these people weren’t acting. Infrared revealed none of the usual markers of emotional deception. Some of them were hardly sensate. The fifteen year-old collapsed again. No one tended to him. Blood dripped down his naked ribs. One of the whip’s spikes had landed in his shoulder, torn his muscles. He wouldn’t ever be able to use that arm again without pain accompanying every motion.

  One woman lashed her own breast until she writhed on the ground. Old lashes on her stomach had left her rippled with scars. One of the marshal’s blows to her arm had gone straight through the skin and exposed the yellow fat underneath.

  The marchers whipped themselves with terrifying vigor, almost a lust, but even they weren’t indefatigable. Gradually their voices weakened. More of them fell, too exhausted and too lost in their agony.

  Finally, the marshal shouted, “Stop!” and the last of the whips ceased.

  Slowly, in awe, the crowd spread themselves among the panting and weeping marchers. Some of them held cloths to the marchers’ wounds. When the cloth soaked with blood, some of the locals held them reverently, or tucked them under their own clothes. Relics. Charms against their God’s wrath. Other villagers recited prayers with those marchers still capable of speech.

  Joao muttered something dark under his breath. Habidah had been right. There was still enough of an anthropologist left in him, and in Kacienta, for this to hold their attention. Joao said, “This is about control, all right, but not like we were talking about. Look at the locals.” He gave a sideways nod to the marshal. “They’re terrified. They’ll do anything he says.”

  Habidah asked, “Is it easier to be terrified of God than disease?”

  Joao said, “Maybe for the villagers, but that’s not what’s happening. He just wants them cowering before God. And since he’s God’s intermediary, they ought to cower before him.”

  “You certainly reach your conclusions quickly.”

  “After everything we’ve seen, I’m not feeling any obligation to be fair.”

  Habidah said, “Then we’ve seen enough.”

  As the marshal prepared for another sermon, she and the others slipped away. None of the marchers, except the marshal, looked at them as they left – and he only briefly. She trudged back to the shuttle, taking the return journey half as fast as they as she’d made it.

  Joao looked glassy-eyed. Kacienta kept pace, ready to support him should he falter. Joao asked, “Do you really believe that all Niccoluccio came here to do is deliver a message?”

  Habidah said, “I think he believes that.”

  Kacienta said, “I only wish we knew the nature of the trap.”

  Habidah steered the subject away. She needed their minds back on that village. She said, “These people have the wrong idea for their situation, but maybe the right one for ours.”

  Joao snorted. “Beating ourselves bloody? Burning scapegoats?”

  “We can’t fight powers as far above us as Niccoluccio’s master, or even the amalgamates. The only way to change their minds is to appeal to them directly. Give them what they want.”

  They walked behind her, so if either of them gave her any looks, she didn’t see them. They said nothing.

  Dew dripped off the shuttle’s wings and tail. None of them said anything as they boarded and settled into their couches. Though it was now fully daylight, there was no one near to see the shuttle. Once they attained cruising altitude, a person looking up might see a thin black arrow flitting between the clouds, but Habidah was beyond caring.

  Habidah’s thoughts boiled she watched the landscape flatten. Part of her had never stopped being an academic. There were a dozen papers she could have written on what she’d just seen. But the urge to write them had been getting smaller and smaller. They rode in silence. She stared straight ahead, seeing nothing. A weight sat behind her eyes. It felt like fatigue, but she didn’t want to sleep.

  She kept a careful eye on Kacienta and Joao’s use of bandwidth. Neither of them sent any signal until they’d nearly touched down. Even then, her packet sniffers reported only that they’d given orders to the kitchen to prepare a meal and drinks.

  They weren’t checking the cameras. They hadn’t looked for Niccoluccio.

  The landing struts thumped onto soil. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Kacienta and Joao clambered out of their couches and down the ramp without waiting. Habidah opened her eyes and, on the monitors, watched them step into the barn hiding the field base.

  After they disappeared, Niccoluccio stepped out from behind a patch of trees.

  Habidah watched him board. She raised the ramp behind him.

  He stepped uncertainly into the cabin and settled into a couch. He tugged at its safety harness, trying to draw it over himself. He asked, “Was the deception truly necessary?”

  “Joao’s dangerous. He doesn’t believe that harming you will help anything, but he’s on the verge of trying it anyway, out of desperation. The last time he saw you near the shuttle, if you’d kept going, he probably would have killed you.”

  “Or if he saw me going back now,” Niccoluccio said, soberly. He was just beginning to realize why Habidah had asked him to wait and hide.

  This excursion had been the only way she’d found to get him aboard. Joao and Kacienta had been watching Niccoluccio closely. Had she just taken Niccoluccio to the shuttle, they would have stopped her. She’d had to tire them, leave them exhausted and with too much to think about. Looking away for just a moment.

  Habidah said, “I’m not ready to fight him or Kacienta.”

  She restarted the shuttle’s ventral thrusters. They shuddered back to life, still hot from the last flight. This had to be fast. Kacienta and Joao would hear them even underground.

  Niccoluccio’s master had limited its contact with her for fear that it would be caught, but it couldn’t have stayed hidden from her forever. Lucky for it that she was willing to go along. Or maybe it had known that, too.

  Habidah charted a course to high orbit, and then to Ways and Means. She fed it to the flight computer, and held her breath.

  For a desperate moment, she dared hope the shuttle NAI would refuse her as it had refused Joao’s attempt to escape to orbit. But the shuttle responded.

  Niccoluccio moaned as the acceleration pressed him into his couch. He hardly noticed the safety harness snapping over his shoulders. He ran his hand along the side of his couch, and then the smooth curve of the bulkhead, as if to feel again how strange they were. He looked to the monitors, and to the half-dead world falling away beneath them.

  “How much do you really know about what’s going to happen next?” she asked.

  She was sure he’d heard her, but he kept his eyes on the land. No matter how long she waited, she never got an answer.

  It was just as well. Nothing he could have said would have satisfied anyone. She remained silent while the clouds slipped away beneath them.

  35

  Meloku was stirred out of sleep by her bladder, a rare experience. If nothing else, the past few days of traveling had confirmed that her demiorganics were wholly offline. Without them to regulate her, her body had gone completely out of control.

  She pushed out of her woolen blankets and through the flap o
f her tent. Daylight blinded her. She fought a brief moment of panic. She’d gone to sleep before sunset. She was never going to get accustomed to sleeping eight hours a night. There was so much that she could have done, so much that might have happened.

  Judging from what she saw, though, nothing had changed. Her mercenary escorts had made their camp in the leeward shadow of a small hill. All twenty tents were arranged as she remembered. A handful of mercenaries shuffled between them, moving lazily. One openly urinated. They were rough men, their skin turned leathery by the sun, but they also seemed healthy – a rare enough quality these days. They were the best she could do.

  Their captain, a middle-aged soldier named Fallard, was the only clean-shaven man among them. He stood next to Galien and a smoldering cookfire. His chin was greasy with bacon.

  Fallard’s company was late of the war between England and France. Though Fallard was French, he boasted of fighting at the Battle of Crécy alongside King Edward. The fact that he had done so in the streets of Avignon, a French city despite the papacy’s nominal sovereignty, spoke volumes about his wisdom and tact.

  Meloku’s association with these men had had become a scandal even in the short time before she’d left. Clement had sent a messenger summoning her to the papal court. She’d dismissed the messenger without bothering to explain herself. Eight of Fallard’s men had gotten into brawls before departing Avignon.

  Galien said, “We were beginning to wonder if you would ever wake.”

  Meloku shot him a dark glance, but he had already turned back to his breakfast. She said, “If you’ve been waiting for so long, why haven’t you struck camp and made ready?”

  Galien nodded to Fallard. “I tried to tell him.” He didn’t sound very concerned.

  Fallard shrugged. “Our generous employer hasn’t been here to tell us so.”

  “I told you all along how urgent this is.”

  Fallard gave her an indolent glance. “And yet you haven’t told us why.”

  “You don’t need to know. You’ll be paid as long as you do what I ask you.”