Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  She was my second, in my eyes anyway, for all that Sir Eland assumed that role was his. I didn’t know how much I could trust Anne, not really, but I knew I couldn’t trust Sir Eland at all. Oh, I would trust Anne with my life on the battlefield, make no mistake. I had done so, in fact, many times, and had been pleased to call her my friend, but now that we were nearly home? Now we were almost home and business was calling, that might be a different matter.

  “Have a drink, boss,” she said.

  She pushed one of the tankards toward me. I nodded and took it, took a swallow to say thank you even though I didn’t really want it.

  “Did you notice what this town was called, Anne?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Someone’s ford,” she said. “Harrow’s Ford? Herron’s Ford? Something like that.”

  “Anything strike you as queer about it?”

  Again, she shrugged. “Market town,” she said. “All the same.”

  She was right; they were all the same. Burned out or starved out or everyone dead from the plague, every single one we had come across on our long, slow march back home. Until this one.

  “This one isn’t,” I said. “This one’s not dead.”

  “Soon will be,” she said. “There’s three thousand hungry men here.”

  She had a point there, I had to allow.

  Those were the times we lived in.

  We might as well make the most of it while it was still there.

  THREE

  I woke up the next morning with my face pillowed on my arms on the table, stiff and sore and with an aching head. I sat up and swallowed spit that tasted of stale beer. Most of the crew were still lying where they had passed out, all but Bloody Anne. She was sitting by the door, picking at her nails with the point of her dagger and obviously keeping the watch. She was a good soldier, was Anne.

  Someone had to be.

  “Morning, boss,” she said.

  I nodded to her and got up, and headed out the back for a piss. The kitchen had been ransacked, I saw, all the cupboards opened and anything fit to eat already taken. Cookpot knew how to give a place a thorough foraging, I had to give him that.

  I stood in the muddy yard behind the inn, pissing into a thin morning rain. It was cold, and everything seemed to have taken on the color of fresh shit. This town might not have been dead yet, but I could see now that it wasn’t far off it, and the arrival of our regiment would surely be helping it along its way. I looked up at the overcast sky and guessed it was an hour past dawn.

  I laced my britches back up and leaned against the door for a moment, thinking. We were three, maybe four days’ march from Ellinburg. The regiment would break up in this town, I knew. This was farming country, and most of them were farm boys, with land and wives and pigs and sheep to get back to. If they were lucky those things might even still be there waiting for them.

  Jochan and I, we were city boys the same as Fat Luka and Cookpot. We had grown up together, the four of us, been in school together. Those two knew what my business was, and before the war Luka had even helped out now and again. He was a good man, handy in a pinch. He might be fat, but he was strong with it and he could fight. Lady, but could he fight. Cookpot couldn’t, not worth a spit, but he could steal and he could cook, and those things made him useful too. In a regiment where almost everyone could fight and hardly anyone could cook, it had made him very useful indeed. I had been glad to have him in our company then, and I was glad to have him in my crew now.

  I wondered what the rest of them would make of the city, Sir Eland and Brak and Stefan, Bloody Anne and Borys and Nik the Knife and the others. Sir Eland said he’d been to Dannsburg, to court even, although that part was about as believable as him being a knight at all. Court was where the queen lived, this queen we had gone through Hell for, and they didn’t welcome the likes of Sir Eland there.

  I didn’t even know what the queen looked like.

  All the same, Sir Eland had spun a yarn you could almost half believe if you were drunk and stupid, so I supposed he must at least have seen a city somewhere along the line.

  Not Ellinburg, though. He wouldn’t have been there. His accent spoke of the south and the west, and we had been going north for weeks now. North was home, far away from the border. Away from the war. Our regiment had been founded there, among those cold, wet hills, and there it would break apart again. I didn’t know what would happen to them. Those lads who thought they were going back to their old lives were in for a hard surprise, so far as I could see. They’d find their wives starved or dead of the plague or run off with anyone who had food to give them, most like. They’d find their sheep fucked and their pigs eaten and their lands burned.

  Those were the times we lived in.

  We had won the war, but at what cost? The queen had beggared the country to do it, and trade had died out and then the weather turned and the crops failed and the plague came. A superstitious man might say those things were related, but I wouldn’t know. I was a priest, not a mystic, and Our Lady gave no answers.

  I pushed the cowl back from my head and ran my hands through my hair, letting the rain dampen it. It felt good just to stand there, to breathe the fresh morning air and feel the rain on my face and listen to it pattering into the puddles. I remembered days of choking dust and tearing thirst, the bellow of the cannon and the acrid fumes of blasting powder.

  The rain felt good on my skin, clean and fresh. There had been nothing clean or fresh at Abingon, nothing but fire and dust and shit and death, men dying of wounds and burns and the bloody flux. What we would have given for a cool rain, there.

  What we would have given . . .

  I felt a touch on my shoulder and turned faster than I knew what I was doing. Remorse flashed from her scabbard, and I laid steel against flesh. I had the blade against the side of Jochan’s neck before I knew it was him. He just stared at me, the fires of my memories reflecting back at me from his haunted eyes.

  I stood there for a moment, my heart pounding and my sword at my brother’s throat. A horse whinnied, somewhere in another street, and broke the spell. I sheathed the blade and pulled my cowl back up over my wet hair.

  “What?” I said.

  Jochan shook his head. He said nothing as he walked past me and out into the yard where the rain was falling harder now. He unlaced and took his piss out in the open, careless of the weather or anything else.

  “Home,” he said, when he was done. He laced up and looked at me, the rain dragging down his wild hair. “We’re going home, then. Aunt Enaid has been holding the business?”

  I shrugged. “She told me she would,” I said. “We’ll see, won’t we? When we get there. You and me, Jochan, and your crew and mine.”

  “And if she fucking ain’t?”

  I gave him a look.

  “Then we’ll have two crews, and we’ll take back what was ours.”

  He nodded. That had been the answer he wanted to hear. Jochan wasn’t done fighting, I could see that much. The enemy might have been defeated, but that thing inside that drove him, that violence of the soul that our da had left him with, that would never be overcome. We were different in that respect, I knew. Our da had left me with a cold devil, but Jochan’s was hot and wild. He started to laugh. I don’t know what at, but he laughed, standing there in that yard that was more horseshit than mud.

  “The lads are going to fucking love Ellinburg, ain’t they?” he said.

  I shrugged. I had to allow that they wouldn’t, but they’d get used to it. City life had its advantages, after all, and it would be my job to make them see that.

  “Fucking tell me something, Tomas,” he said, after a moment.

  It was pouring now, and I took a half step back into the open doorway to keep the worst of it off me. I didn’t think Jochan had even noticed the rain that was now plastering his wild hair to his face in wet straggles.
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  “What’s that?” I asked him.

  “How are you a fucking priest?”

  “I said the words,” I told him. “I took the vow.”

  “And that’s all there is to it?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  The ministry of Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows had little in the way of doctrine or scripture. She wasn’t a goddess for learned men, for mystics or merchants or politicians. She was a goddess for soldiers, and most soldiers can’t even read.

  It’s funny how people always think soldiers worship a god of war. Do we fuck as like. The knights had one, of course. Real knights, that is, not frauds like our Sir Eland. They had an iron god of glory and honor, with a big long lance and a mighty beast between his legs. Us conscripts don’t want glory or honor. We just want to not die today. That was what Our Lady offered, if you were lucky and you fought your balls off.

  That was all we had, all we could hope for in this world.

  Jochan shook his head, his wet hair showering droplets of water into the falling rain.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Why not? The company needed a priest, once ours crossed the river with an arrow through his neck. A priest listens to people. A priest leads people. I can do that.”

  “But you don’t care about people,” Jochan challenged, taking a step toward me. “You never fucking have!”

  “No one ever said you had to,” I said. “Listen and lead, the captain said. He never said care.”

  Jochan laughed so hard he blew snot out of his left nostril.

  “Fuck a nun, Tomas,” he said. “You, a fucking priest?”

  “Aye,” I said. “Me, a priest.”

  He looked at me then, sensing the change in my tone. I wasn’t angry with him, but he was close to saying something that I couldn’t let pass. I could tell he knew it too.

  He pushed the sodden hair back from his face and shouldered past me into the inn without another word. I let myself relax against the doorway once he was gone, just breathing in the clean smell of the rain.

  I was going to have to watch Jochan.

  I gave him a minute or two and then followed him back into the common room. Most of the boys were awake now, his crew and mine, and there was an uneasy divide down the middle of the room. I strode straight into that empty space between the two crews and stood with a wall behind me where I could see both sides of the matter. Jochan was sitting with his own lads, I noticed, dripping wet onto the floor.

  “Right,” I said. “Have a listen, my boys. For those as don’t know me, my name is Tomas Piety. I’m Jochan here’s big brother, and I’m a priest of Our Lady.”

  I paused for a moment to let that sink in with the two or three of Jochan’s lads who had been too drunk or too stupid to realize that last night.

  “The war’s done,” I went on. “We won, for all that it doesn’t feel like it. We won, and now we’re nothing, disbanded and unwanted. Well, I say fuck that.”

  I paused again, watching the nods and listening to the grunts of approval from both sides of the room. I hadn’t broached this with my own crew yet, but it seemed like now was the time. They might as well all hear it at once, to my mind. The regiment would break up in this town, as I have written. Most of them would want to be off back to whatever was left of their past lives, but I needed to keep my crew with me. My crew and Jochan’s as well, if I could.

  “Three or four days north of here is Ellinburg,” I said. “We grew up there, me and Jochan, and Fat Luka and Cookpot too. I’ve got a business in Ellinburg, a good one. Good money to be made. Lady knows the army don’t want you no more, but I do. I’m no noble, to be looking down my nose at you, and I haven’t always been a priest. The army made me that, but I came from the same place you did. My da was a bricklayer, and I was a bricklayer’s ’prentice. That was until I decided breaking my back carrying a hod to build rich folks’ houses was no way to live. Those who follow me to Ellinburg will have jobs when you get there, food in your bellies, and money in your pockets. Does that sound good, lads?”

  I saw nods all around the room, nods from everyone but Sir Eland. He was just watching me, I noticed, his eyes narrow and weaselly. It would have felt like justice to kill Sir Eland, right then. I made myself ignore him, and carried on.

  “Good,” I said. “I welcome you all, my crew and my brother’s. If you’re with me, that pleases Our Lady and it pleases me. If you ain’t, there’s no bad feelings but the road’s out there and you know the way back south. Best be going.”

  I watched them, and nobody moved toward the door. That gave me maybe twenty men, all told. Part of me wished Sir Eland had taken up his stolen shield and ridden off on his stolen warhorse, but he just sat there looking at me with a mug of morning beer in front of him. I nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “Have a drink and a piss and be ready to march in an hour.”

  FOUR

  We rode into Ellinburg three days later, as the sun was going down.

  Jochan was at my right hand on his skinny rowan gelding, Bloody Anne at my left on her gray mare, and Sir Eland behind on his stolen warhorse leading a column of nineteen men on foot. The gate guards eyed us suspiciously as we approached the city wall at the south gate, but soldiers returning from war could hardly be turned away. Certainly not when they were led by a robed priest, they couldn’t. The sound of our horses’ hooves echoed in the gatehouse tunnel that cut through the wall, and then we were past the gates and into the city proper.

  The smell hit me like a fist in the face. Ellinburg was an industrial city, home to tanneries and smelting works and forges beyond counting. The river that ran along the east side of the city was a polluted nightmare of effluent from the factories that lined its bank. I had grown up here, and yet during the three years of the war I had still managed to forget how it smelled. I patted my mare’s glossy black neck to calm her. I had been given her by the captain when I took my holy orders. She was no city horse, and I could tell the noise and the smell were bothering her.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at the column of men behind us. Fat Luka had a big grin on him, and Cookpot was staring with wide eyes in his round face, drinking in the familiar sights. Two or three of the other lads had gone a bit green, and one of Jochan’s country boys was actually bent over and vomiting into the gutter.

  I grinned.

  “Welcome to Old Reekie,” I said. “Welcome to Ellinburg.”

  They didn’t look too welcomed, most of them. Jochan and me, Fat Luka and Cookpot, we were home. The rest of them looked like they were seeing the second worst thing of their lives. The very worst, of course, had been Abingon. We all had Abingon in common and that was what had forged the bond. That was what held us together. Men who have been through Hell together tend to stay together, if they can. The shepherds and pig farmers of the regiment might have left, but these lads, these ones who had been made of the sort of stuff that held men together under Jochan’s chaotic leadership or under my cold harsh justice, these were lads who would stay together through anything.

  I hoped so, anyway.

  We rode out from the long shadow of the walls, and I looked around properly. The more I saw, the more I lost faith in the thought that Aunt Enaid might have kept things in her grasp for the past three years.

  Ellinburg had never been a handsome city, it was true. This was no capital, and there were few grand buildings here. There were no palaces or great library or theater or house of magicians or any of the other things Sir Eland said he had seen in Dannsburg. If he had ever been there.

  All the same, Ellinburg had been prosperous, before the war. There was a grand Great Temple of All Gods on the hill at the top of Trader’s Row, and I could see that still stood at least, but now half the shops were boarded up, and I saw broken windows and alleys mounded with decaying refuse. There were beggars in the streets, far more than there should have been, dis
playing the stumps of missing limbs or bandaged eyes to uncaring passersby. Too many of them for comfort looked like veterans.

  We turned our column off the main street and headed down into the Stink, the warren of slums that lay close to the river and the tanneries. This was our neighborhood, this was home, and it was well named. The stench we rode into was like a living thing, cloying and vile. That was normal, but down here there had been life too. The narrow streets of close-packed homes had been alive with wives scrubbing their steps, unwashed children chasing each other and whooping and shouting in the gutters. Now there was barely a soul in sight, and those we did see looked starved to the edge of death. The streets smelled of bitterness and despair. It seemed every fourth door had the sign for plague on it in cheap, faded white paint.

  “Lady’s sake, Tomas,” Jochan said beside me. “What the fuck happened?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, and immediately I saw the flames leaping in the streets of Abingon, the diseased, starving people being dragged out of their homes and put to the sword. I remembered mounds of corpses being shoveled into mass graves by soldiers with scarves tied over their mouths and their eyes gone numb to horror.

  “They brought it back with them,” I said, thinking of the veterans begging near the city gates. “The wounded and the maimed, the plague followed them home from Abingon, and Our Lady’s face was turned to the south at the time.”

  Jochan looked at me like he thought I was mad. Perhaps he did, but then it takes one madman to recognize another.

  “If Aunt Enaid was running the business she’d have fucking sorted this,” Jochan said. “These are our streets, Tomas.”

  “How do you suppose she’d have sorted the fucking plague?” I snapped, as close to angry now as I dared let myself get with him.

  “Aye, well,” he muttered. “You know what I mean. There should be . . . I dunno. There should be food, at least. And doctors. And . . .”

  He tailed off, and I knew he had remembered that every doctor who had less than sixty years to him had been conscripted into the army. Most of them had died of plague in Abingon, and the country was the poorer for it.