by Robert Earl
“Exactly,” Stirland said, as emphatically as he could. He even slapped his palm onto the table in an effort to get Averland’s attention. “Exactly what 1 think, too. We will exile these terrible folk from our fair lands. I even have a place in mind, an old demesne I inherited, called Flintmar.”
“Exile?” Averland turned back to him, confusion clouding his flushed features. “Oh, I thought you meant… Well, never mind. Get them all in one place, and then we’ll see. Yes, round them up, and then we’ll see.”
The fire of his passion left him. His shoulders slumped back down, and his eyes dropped to the floor. He returned to his chair, absent-mindedly wiping his hands on his tunic, and stared into his flagon of water.
“So, that’s decided then,” Stirland said. “Now, how about we celebrate?”
“Celebrate,” Averland said vaguely, his thoughts a carnival of murderous possibilities. “Maybe later.”
Stirland grunted, and, deciding that he’d had enough of diplomacy for one day, emptied his goblet of water onto the floor, refilled it with wine and started to drink.
CHAPTER FOUR
“The uglier the woman, the better the wife.”
– Strigany saying The crows had been busy. Their beaks were dark with gore, and when they flapped away from the rotten excess of their feast, their movements were heavy and slow.
Chera, of the caravan of Malfi, didn’t blame the birds for their gluttony. On the contrary, she welcomed the sight of it. Ever since she had been old enough to toddle along behind her father’s wagon she had regarded them as birds of good omen. Wherever she had seen crows gathered and fattened, there had been rich pickings for her family and their caravan.
Today was no exception. The dead streets of the hamlet they had discovered were alive with the birds, with rats, too, and dogs, and a flabby pig, whose owner’s death had provided him with both freedom and food.
Most of the scavengers fled as the Strigany, all two dozen of them, dismounted from their wagons and entered the hamlet’s main street. Only the pig remained, its tusks pink as it lifted its head from the rancid body upon which it had been feasting.
Chera watched her father unsling his blunderbuss. He had found it in a town a few weeks ago, and ever since, despite the cost of black powder, he had been like a child with a new toy. As she watched, he eagerly drew back the hammer, poured a measure of fine black powder into the firing pan, and carefully lit the fuse with his pipe. Then he took aim at the pig.
The animal looked back at him. In this part of the Empire, not even the peasants knew much about black powder, and their animals knew nothing. There was little in the pig’s eyes but curiosity, and the spiral of its tail twitched in welcome.
“Don’t shoot him, domnu,” Chera said, putting her hand on her father’s arm. “Look how friendly he is.”
“Friendly!” her father scoffed, pulling back the hammer. “Try telling that to the man he’s been eating.”
“Can’t tell him anything,” Chera shrugged, “he’s dead.”
“You’re too soft-hearted,” Malfi told her, and aimed at the point between the pig’s eyes. Then a voice spoke in his ear, and he jumped.
“We happily feast upon those who devour us,” it said, and the domnu looked down to find the wizened figure of Petru Maria, who was standing beside him. She hadn’t been standing there a second before, of that he was sure.
“What’s that you said?” he asked, trying to hide his surprise.
“It’s what’s written above the lintel of every wagon on our caravan,” she told him. “We happily feast upon those who would devour us.”
“Has that always been our motto, Maria?” Chera asked, and the crone nodded.
“Yes, my sweetness, and we have always honoured it.”
“For Freia’s sake,” the domnu said, realising that, as usual, he had been outmanoeuvred by his daughter and Petru Maria. He lifted the blunderbuss, took aim at the corpse the pig had been feeding on, and fired.
There was a roar, a gout of red flame, and a cloud of dense black smoke. The domnu had been pushed back by the blast, and his pipe had been sent spinning out of his mouth. Chera picked it up for him, as the smoke cleared and he examined his handiwork. The corpse had been hit dead centre, its ribs and flesh splattered in a wide arc across the street. The pig was a dot racing into the distance.
“Oh, good shot daddy, I mean, domnu,” she said, handing Malfi back his pipe.
“Yes, well,” he said, patting the stock of his gun with the absent-minded fondness of a man for a favourite child. “We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s get on with it. It’s a fine day, so let’s start with putting everything on the street, bodies and loot both.”
Chera gave his arm a quick squeeze of affection, and then joined the rest of the Strigany as they went to work. Like all of them, she wore an oiled apron, and thick leather gloves, the tops of which flared out almost to her elbows. A few of the other Strigany wore bandanas around their mouths, but not many, and not Chera. The smell of rotting corpses was something that she had long been accustomed to, and even the plague held no terrors for her. In Main’s caravan, you either died of the plague young or not at all. Beneath the ragged thatch of her hair, Chera’s pinched features bore testament to her victory over the plague. They were still marked with a cicatrice of pale scars, the white marks and pock marks the ghosts of the disease she had overcome.
The people she found within the darkness of the first house had not been so lucky. Even though the stinking confines of the house were lit only by the meagre strip of daylight that came through the door, Chera could see that there were at least three generations of a family, rotting together, as closely as they had once lived.
The adults lay on the floor, their bodies twisted like driftwood amongst the meagre furniture. Chera assumed that they had been the last to go, because the beds were sodden with the decaying remains of their children.
She examined them, and saw that their bodies bore testament to the sickness that had been their ruin. Their throats were swollen into thick, choking collars, their eyes were red marbles of burst blood vessels, and their bodies were cratered with suppurating sores.
It was the plague, all right.
Chera reflexively quashed the feeling of sympathy she had. These were bodies, that was all. They weren’t people: not the little boy who clung to his grandmother’s bloated neck, not the husband who lay cradling his wife, and not the girl who had died strangely alone, huddled in a corner.
No, they weren’t people. They were bodies that had to be destroyed so that people could live.
Chera carried on telling herself that as she wielded the long pole of her billhook, snagging the steel hook into the first body and dragging it out onto the street. Then, she went in to fetch the next, and the next, and, as she carried on with this grisly work, it became easier and easier for her to forget about the nausea that twisted within her chest.
Some others were losing that struggle with their instincts. Chera heard the sounds of their vomiting or of sobbing weaving through the bump and the slither of their grisly work.
That was all right, she thought, that was good. They were Strigany, which meant that they were tough enough to work through their suffering. Anyway, as Petru Maria said, it was only when you lost that feeling of horror altogether that you had to worry. Although she never said what exactly you had to worry about, Chera believed her.
She dragged the last body out of the house she had chosen, took a deep breath of relatively fresh air, and went back indoors to complete the more agreeable part of her task.
After so many years, she had an instinctive knack for where to look. Her fingers rustled through the stinking bedding as eagerly as if it had been sweet corn, and when her fingers closed around the purse of copper coins she smiled. She counted them, and then dropped them into the pouch in her apron.
Next, she turned to the tools that hung from one wall. The man had been a cobbler, by the look of it, and Chera wasted no time in b
undling the tools of his trade into a blanket. After that, she looked through the cooking area. There was nothing worth having, but for the copper pot that rested on a huge clay brick stove. She dropped the cobbler’s tools into it, and prepared to drag it out into the street.
That was when she heard the noise from within the stove.
It was a wordless sound of pure animal panic. A bird that had flown down the cold chimney and become trapped, perhaps, or a cat locked away by its owners during their delirium.
Then the sound came again, and Chera, deciding that the thick leather of her gloves would be proof against either beaks or claws, went to open the stove door. There was a flurry of movement from inside, and the small creature shrieked as it was exposed. The thing extended two hands to ward her off, and Chera realised that it was not a thing at all. It was a child.
As always, when she met somebody who was not from her caravan, Chera instinctively raised her hands to cover her pockmarked face. Then, seeing how terrified the child was, she dropped her hands and smiled.
“Hello,” she said, and dropped to her knees. “What are you doing in there?”
The child made no reply. In the gloom of the stove, and beneath the soot that covered it, there was no way of telling if it was a boy or a girl. The flat shine of its terrified eyes could have belonged to either sex, and the tangled nest of its hair gave no clue.
“I’m Chera. My people have come here to help you. What’s your name?”
The only reply was a lowering of the hands, and a drawing up of the skinny legs. The child peered over the scraped knees, as if hiding behind them.
“Are you hungry?” Chera asked. “We can go and eat some porridge if you want, with honey in it. It’s my favourite. What’s yours?”
For the first time, the youngster dragged its gaze away from Chera for long enough to scan the room beyond. She was thankful that she’d cleared the room of the child’s family before finding it.
No, not the family, she automatically corrected herself, the remains of the family.
“I think that you should come with me,” she said, edging a little closer to the stove. “I’ll look after you.”
“Where’s Franzi?”
The voice was no more than a whisper, but it was enough to tighten Chera’s throat with sympathy.
“There is nobody here anymore,” she said. “Who was Franzi?”
“My brother,” the girl whispered from within the darkness of her hiding place. “He’s only little. We shouldn’t leave him on his own.”
Chera thought about the little body that she had found curled up in the chill embrace of its grandmother’s dead arms. She blinked.
“They’ve all gone to Morr’s garden,” she said. “Franzi will be all right there. Now, come along. Come and eat something. We’ll look after you now.”
She reached forward, and for a moment the girl drew back. Then, coming to a sudden decision, she leapt forward, wriggling out of the stove to throw herself against Chera’s stained leather apron, and wrap her arms around her neck.
“Good girl,” Chera said and, drawing a blanket over the child’s head, took her quickly away from the rotting remains of her old life, and to the beginnings of her new one. By early afternoon, Domnu Malfi’s caravan had picked the plague-blighted hamlet clean.
The festering remains of the inhabitants lay stacked in the street, like so much cordwood, and their valuables had been collected, cleaned, divided up and stowed in the wagons. They included the girl that Chera had found. Petru Maria had taken the child, bustling her into her wagon, as eager as a mother hen with a lost chick. She would care for the orphan until a family could be found who would take her.
As the Strigany finished dusting the heaped bodies with the corpse powder that would make them burn, the petru returned. She stood on a barrel so that she could see down the festering lines of the dead, and, although she held a black-bound book of Morr in one hand, she didn’t bother opening it. The blessing that she recited over the dead was the old one, the usual one, the one that she had recited a hundred times before.
Although the words were old, the crone’s impassioned recitation was as fresh as blood on snow.
“We are all made by the gods,” she began, when everybody had gathered around, “strong or weak, fair or foul, man or woman. Whatever we do in this life it is no more than the will of our creators, for we owe them everything.”
Even before she had finished the sentence, her whiskered lips drew back over her remaining fangs, in a snarl of derision.
“At least, that is what they would have us believe,” she scoffed, with such feeling that the words might have been her own, and not those written in the book that nobody else had ever read, “but even the gods have their time, and not even they can escape the Garden of Morr. Nor should they.”
Her clawed and blue-veined fingers scratched towards the sky as she continued, as though she was lecturing the gods.
“To each of us is allotted a time, and the will to make of it what we will. When that time is finished, and when that will is gone, then our work is finished. By then, we have made ourselves the house that we shall dwell in within the Eternal Gardens beyond.”
The crone paused to draw breath, her bony chest heaving with passion. Her people waited, heads bowed, and when she spoke again, her voice soared and rolled, and thundered in a way that should have been impossible for one with such a skinny frame.
“As we prepare to tidy away after the lives that these people have led, we can be sure that Morr is already guiding them to those dwelling places. Some will be wonderful, others won’t, but whatever these people find in that world will make the suffering of this one seem as fleeting as a nightmare, and the joys no more than a cool breeze on a hot day.”
The petru raised her hands in final benediction, and, as the Reikspiel she had spoken gave way to the incomprehensible hacking of the old tongue, she gesticulated over the ranked bodies as wildly as only a Strigany woman knows how.
It was only as she finished this final catechism that the Strigany realised that they were no longer alone.
The horsemen had come along the road that led out of hamlet and into the forest beyond. One look at them was enough to tell Domnu Malfi that, whatever they were, these horsemen were no merchants, far from it.
They had the lean and hungry look of professional soldiers: mercenaries, by the look of their ragged mismatch of uniforms, or maybe even bandits, Malfi thought, uneasily. Each of the men carried a lance, and each was harnessed with a unique collection of armour. The steel plates had the battered, ill-fitting look of loot.
Their leader, a grey and grim-faced man with an incongruously colourful feather stuck into his hat, saw Malfi, just as Malfi saw him. He reined in his horse and raised his hand to stop the column that followed him.
He and the domnu regarded each other for a moment. Then the mercenary looked down at the street full of corpses. His eyes rested on one of the smaller bodies, and, if anything, his face grew even stonier.
Malfi took a step forward.
“Good day, menheer,” he called out to the mercenary, his voice relentlessly cheerful.
The man looked at him, studying him as if he was something that had been left dead by the side of the road. For a moment, Malfi didn’t think that the warrior would reply, but, before he could think of anything else to say, the man did reply with a single, damning word.
“Murderers,” the mercenary pronounced.
Main felt his stomach drop, and he exchanged an anxious glance with the men beside him.
“No. No, that’s not what happened,” he called out, his hands spread in a placating gesture. “We are plague eaters. Look, you can see that we have been cleaning this town of the plague’s victims.”
“They even murdered the babes,” another of the riders said, ignoring him. “Strigany filth! Thank Sigmar we are finally to be rid of them.”
“We shouldn’t stand for this, captain,” another man added, his voice tight with h
atred. “There’s no mistaking death by poison. I bet the Strigany poisoned their well and then robbed the bodies. We should do more than just move them on.”
The captain said nothing. Malfi looked past him, and tried to decide how many were in the column behind. More than a dozen, definitely, but how many?
Resisting the urge to level his blunderbuss at the men, he squared his shoulders, and decided to become outraged.
“I have explained to you,” Malfi said, taking a step forwards, “that we are plague eaters. We provide a service for the Empire that none other will. And who might you be, who are so at home amongst the vapours of the plague?”
It was too late for words, however. Even as Malfi was speaking, the captain lifted his hat to reveal the steel skull cap beneath. His men reacted to the gesture immediately, their lances lowering as the feather in their leader’s hat described a blur of colour through the air.
Malfi cursed. For a moment, he wondered if these thugs genuinely disbelieved him, or if they were just seeking an excuse to plunder his caravan. Then he put such distractions from his mind.
“They’re going to charge,” somebody said behind him, and, as if those words had been the signal, the captain drew his hat down, and his men started to trot forwards.
“Ushoran preserve us,” somebody said, and Malfi could hear the fear in the man’s voice. He turned to find that some of his people had already started to retreat, scuttling down the street to the imagined safety of their wagons.
Every instinct in Malfi’s body urged him to follow them, but he knew better. There was no running from cavalry. They either stood their ground or they died.
“lerva, Mallik, Blythe, hold your ground!” he bellowed. “You know better than that.”
A command was shouted from the other end of the street, and the riders closed in, forming dressed ranks.
Malfi unslung the blunderbuss from his shoulder, and turned around to face his people. He was chilled with the sudden realisation of how old the grandparents were and how young the children.