[Angelika Fleischer 02] - Sacred Flesh

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  Manfried Haupt turned sideways, sticking his shoulder outwards, to guide himself through the multitude of pilgrims. They’d invaded the abbey grounds! Scarcely a square yard of the flat and barren ground around the abbey was now free of thronging penitents. With the press of their bodies, they’d snapped the branches from its few, pathetic trees. There had to be at least a hundred of them. Maybe twice that number. Moneyed burghers in fine, dyed clothing jostled elbows with rag-clad wretches. Men, women and children alike stamped impatiently wailing and praying. Some carried tents in great bundles on their backs as Manfried’s men stopped anyone who tried to pitch one. It was the same with fires; fires would have to be lit on the rocks below.

  Manfried had underestimated these seekers of mercy. He had imagined them to be as ill prepared for this misbegotten wilderness as he had been. He should have known that their desperation would breed ingenuity. They’d found ways to bypass the ancient stairs, and with them, his gate keepers. They’d pounded metal rods into the very rock of the mountain and strung them together with filaments of dwarfish chain, making themselves a network of hand holds up the steep and naked slope.

  Just yesterday, he had learned a fact so obvious in hindsight that he had literally been forced to slap himself in the forehead: the pilgrimage was now so famous that professional mountaineers had come to Heiligerberg, to make their fortunes ferrying petitioners along its slopes! Manfried could see a few of these ragged opportunists in the throng; they rang a bell and screamed out for customers who wanted help getting down the mountain, now that they were up it. A smirking halfling held the bell, as he sat on the shoulders of a swarthy bull of a man, his face a tangle of scars. Father Eugen had gone to talk to them. They styled themselves adventurers and said this was a much easier way of earning a living than plumbing monster-ridden old dwarfish ruins in search of antique gold.

  These accursed adventurers—did not the very term scream out their blatant anarchy?—these accursed adventurers had found alternate routes that made a mockery of all Manfried’s painstaking plans. One route stretched up the side of the taller mountain to the west, then required a thirty-foot vertical climb on ropes to the extant part of Heiligerberg’s dome-shaped peak. The rest of the journey, though tricky, could be accomplished on foot, ending in the sisters’ garden, which had now been trampled beyond recognition.

  It also transpired that there was a passable route up along the side of the mountain, which the sisters knew about but had not thought to mention. Everyone just naturally took the terraces, they told him. The terraces were easier. The sisters were impossible. The thought that one might want to control the number of pilgrims on the peak was completely unnatural to them, and, despite many hours of trying, he had yet to instil it in their unworldly little heads. If they’d omitted these crucial details out of treachery, he might have understood it! They would be just like his fellow churchmen back home, those drooling curs! But to betray him out of sheer ignorance—frankly, he was astounded!

  All around him the invading pilgrims coughed and chanted and wheezed and sweated and stank. He stuck out his elbows to part them, but they’d been pressed together long enough that gentle measures scarcely fazed them. He turned sideways to use his shoulder as a battering ram. The oval head of a skeletal young woman failed to bob out of his way in time. Manfried banged her in the face with his shoulder. She meekly stumbled backwards into the blobby arms of her pinch-faced nurse, who cursed loudly and variously while Manfried ploughed his way through the crowd.

  He surged too close to an old woman who she bared her few remaining teeth at him until he barked at her to stand aside. After he had left her in his wake, he felt a sudden moistness at the back of his neck. He touched his fingers to it and saw that she’d hocked a great wad of foamy spittle onto him. Manfried resisted the urge to turn around and punch the last dangling teeth from the woman’s rancid gums. He even restrained himself from ordering that she be ejected from the mountain. He would, however, point her out to the gatekeepers and instruct them never to admit her into her grace’s presence. This was not petty vengeance, but prudence: it would not do if the crazed old harridan spat on Mother Elsbeth, would it?

  He came finally to the gates, where four of his men nervously stood guard, halberds held aloft. Manfried looked at their faces, then at the heavy but deteriorating planks that made up the gate. He turned to take in the totality of the massing crowd and then exchanged grim glances with his men. The only force preventing the mob from trampling them, smashing flat the doors and stampeding as one into the abbey grounds was its collective desire to behave. In other words, the personal safety of himself and his men, and of all the sisters, now hung on a matter that could not remotely be depended on.

  It was clear: Mother Elsbeth could not be allowed to slacken the pace of her audiences.

  Because if she did, the mob would very likely fall into a frenzy and kill them all.

  A distressed voice cried hoarsely from the other side of the gate. “Father Manfried! I must find Father Manfried!”

  “I’m right here,” Manfried boomed.

  “You must come quick, sir!” said the voice on the other side of the door. It was Giselmar, or Giselbrecht, or whatever his name was.

  Manfried gritted his teeth. “Prepare to open the door,” he told his men. They kept agitated eyes fixed on the roiling crowd behind him. “We must open the door,” he said.

  The four guards turned, hammers in hand, seeking out the biggest, boldest pilgrims at the head of the crowd, staring them down. “Ready!” one of them hollered.

  Inside the gate, two other guards lifted the big, fresh-sawed plank that served as the door’s bar. “Ready!” they chorused. They pushed the doors open, on rusty, complaining hinges. They held their hammers, ready to strike.

  Manfried stood facing the crowd, the gate on the periphery of his vision. He waited until the gap between the opening doors was large enough for a proper departure. He would not turn his back to them and slip through a mere tiny crack. These people did not know him, but he was their commander all the same. They could not be permitted to think he feared them.

  The crowd surged at him. He stood his ground. A broad-shouldered fellow with a battle-scarred face was pushed from the mob, toward Manfried. Manfried stepped toward him. He trembled sheepishly and tried to force his way back into the mob. The crowd rippled as those in back pushed and shoved to get closer to the opening gate.

  Manfried held his hammer aloft, as the Grand Theogonist would do with his dragon-headed sceptre. “Halt!” he boomed at them. “Halt now, lest you be forever cursed by Shallya!”

  The shoving slowed then stopped.

  “What unholy dogs are you,” Manfried bellowed, “that you would try to rush these gates?”

  He let a lengthy pause excruciatingly unfurl itself over the crowd. He breathed in deeply, to hide the pleasure it gave him, to exert mastery over this unruly throng.

  “The patient—the deserving—will be healed!” he orated. “But ye who make of yourselves an insensate mob, not only will audience be denied to you—your souls will be forever damned! So get back—and search yourselves for the strength to wait, as these trying circumstances demand!” With long backwards lopes, he swept backwards through the gap. The interior guards scrambled to bang the door shut. Pilgrim voices exploded once more, calling out prayers and panicked entreaties. Manfried’s men grouped around him, bracing for the doors to come splintering in at them.

  He turned smartly on his heels, beckoning Gismar, or Gisbert, or whoever he styled himself as, to lead him wherever he was supposed to go. He wished Eugen were here. With Eugen, he could let himself boast a little. He would have liked to see any of his fat-bottomed rivals back in Averheim handle a crowd like this. He pictured mutton-lipped Father Erwin in front of a horde like that, trying to worm his way out. Or his ultimate nemesis, boozy-eyed Father Ragen. If it had been Ragen, the entire abbey would already be aflame.

  “The exalted mother is faltering,” said Gisli
ng, or Gasbert—whoever.

  “Not again.”

  The man nodded gravely.

  Just what I need, thought Manfried, as he pushed his way past his vaguely-named inferior into the abbey’s dank and coal-grey corridor. They passed together into the cloister and through its dull, unforgivably plain columns. Then he beheld the tent in which her grace met carefully selected members of her endless, bleating flock.

  He stopped short. A dozen or so waiting pilgrims had somehow eked their way through the abbey gates and now milled aimlessly along a courtyard wall. Two more of his men poked at them with their hammers, trying to herd them back toward the big wooden doors.

  “What is this?” Manfried asked.

  “They slipped through earlier, sir, when the supplies were brought in. They refuse to rejoin the throng. They claim it’s too dangerous out there, and—”

  Manfried made a fist and shook it. “Get them out of here, or club them down!” His words seemed to animate the heel-dragging penitents, who edged back toward the gates—and directly into the path between Manfried and the entrance to Elsbeth’s tent.

  “Make way!” Gibbrecht cried, taking the license to gleefully shove any pilgrims who moved too slowly from his path. Manfried revised his estimation of the fellow; perhaps he had potential after all.

  “I keep forgetting your name,” Manfried confessed.

  “It’s—”

  the fellow said, but his next word was drowned out by a sudden banging in Manfried’s ear. One of the misplaced pilgrims, a gaunt, toothy man, his face wreathed in an idiotic smile, banged cruelly on an enormous drum, as his fellows began an ululating chant that set Manfried’s teeth to clenching.

  “You know what this experience has taught me?” Manfried asked, frowning back at the cacophonous worshippers.

  “What, sir?”

  “Religion should be left to the professionals.”

  He pushed on as his still-nameless subaltern continued to part the way for him.

  Father Eugen sat on a stool next to a crude wooden bed, which someone had dragged into the tent without Manfried’s say-so. In the bed lay Mother Elsbeth, her skin damp with sweat. Eugen mumbled soothing words and mopped at her forehead with a cloth. Four of Elsbeth’s fellow sisters stood off to one side, their noses ostentatiously out of joint. When they saw Manfried enter, they made a point of sniffing at poor friendly-faced Eugen, making it clear that their prerogatives had been usurped. Among them stood a stooped old sister with an emaciated figure that reminded Manfried of the sticks and branches of a small tree. She wore a soiled patch over her left eye; her chin wobbled in the perpetual rhythm of palsy. Dema was her name, and her disapproval offended Manfried; he had considered her one of his few allies here.

  Manfried stood over Mother Elsbeth. “You’re certain you can’t go on any longer?” he said.

  She did not reply.

  “She struggles just to remain conscious,” said Eugen.

  “The supply of holy liquor is not infinite,” Manfried told him, repeating a fact the older priest already knew. “We must receive the greatest possible number of pilgrims between each dosage.”

  “She can’t receive anyone in this condition,” said Eugen.

  Manfried addressed Dema. “How is it that we’ve got through so few visitations this time?”

  “She has treated dozens since the last restorative,” Dema croaked.

  “How many dozens?” Manfried demanded. “Can it be that no one is keeping track?”

  Eugen whispered at him. “Manfried, she’s awake and can hear you…”

  Manfried bent over and took hold of Mother Elsbeth’s limp and yielding arm. He felt the wrist for a pulse. Frowning, he forced open one of the holy woman’s eyelids. “Awake? She’s barely alive!” Manfried rounded on the sisters. “You’re letting the life ebb out of her!”

  Dema tilted her neck, in what might or might not have been a shrug. Another of the sisters, a trout-faced woman named Ursula, stepped forward to defy him. “It is her stated desire that we should do so!” She drew herself close to Manfried; her breath smelled like cabbage. This Ursula had already impressed Manfried as truculent and uncooperative, but never before had she dared to openly challenge him.

  He met her stare. “You aim to replace her, do you?”

  Ursula sputtered. “How dare you!”

  “You may have your naive fellow sisters fooled, but I know ambition when I see it. You’re putting yourself on record as having stood up to me—while at the same, ushering your predecessor into her grave.”

  Ursula turned red. Her mouth gaped, as she groped for words. “A shocking accusation!”

  Seeing her response, Manfried revised his opinion of her. He concluded that she was sincere, as unsophisticated as the rest of them. Not that it mattered. “Answer me this, Ursula. Are you a miracle worker? Certainly, you can take over temporal command of the abbey. You’re a tough-minded woman and I dare say you’d do a better job of it. But I don’t see you curing any plague, or knitting any twisted bone back into its proper shape, do I?”

  Ursula crammed her pasty brows together.

  Manfried almost felt sorry for her, but continued nonetheless. “Nor do I see anyone else around here who can take on her mantle of healing power. If I’m wrong, show me her true successor and I’ll regretfully stand aside as you hasten your dear Elsbeth’s demise.” As this last comment left his lips, and he saw Ursula heave in a great gust of air, Manfried realised that he had overstepped himself. It was his favourite mistake—he could never resist that final twist of the knife.

  “Don’t pretend you care for Elsbeth’s welfare!” Ursula cried, a fat finger in Manfried’s face. “We’re the ones who care what she wants! And she has begged us to finally let her die a natural death!”

  Manfried strolled nonchalantly to the mouth of the tent. “And take all of those poor sick and dying people with her? Are you certain Shallya would forgive you for that?” He faced away from Eugen, avoiding his probable disapproval.

  “Mother Elsbeth is my superior,” said Ursula, deflated. “She must be the judge of Shallya’s wishes.”

  “Don’t absolve yourself so easily, Sister Ursula. Your god and mine are very different, but both of them ask hard things of their followers. Shallya tests your faith, that much is plain, even to a blustering, bullish outsider like me. And to pass the test, you must help Elsbeth from her bed and down to the treatment chamber, so that Shallya may heal her, and she may resume the healing of others. Even though it makes you unhappy to do it.”

  The argument would continue for several more minutes, but Manfried could tell from the defeated set of Ursula’s shoulders that he had won it already.

  Eugen stepped aside as Ursula moved to Elsbeth’s bedside. Ursula pulled Mother Elsbeth’s bony frame from her bedcovers and arranged herself under her arm. Dema’s young, scar-pocked aide slipped in to hold her up from the other side. Manfried checked to see that the stray, milling pilgrims had been herded back out of the gates then gave the all clear. Ursula and the young sister carried Elsbeth out of the tent and into the courtyard. Manfried followed; Dema came up alongside him. The profile she presented him was the one with the eye patch.

  “This would be easier if we had the holy implements back,” she said.

  Manfried mustered his most flavourless tone. “There is no news on that front, since we last spoke about it.”

  “You haven’t heard back from your man?”

  “I would not count on the implements’ quick return,” Manfried said. “As I believe I already explained to you, my man believes he has found the person who stole them. But he has not found the items. They’ve probably already been sold. He thinks the thief is coming back to get the rest of the set. When he has caught the culprit, I assure you he will be subjected to the most persuasive methods of interrogation available to the church of Sigmar.”

  “If I had the full set of implements, we could double the time between treatments. We might even perfect the general serum.
”

  Manfried had nearly given up on the prospect of a general serum. His initial interest in Dema’s project had made her his sole ally among the sisters. The treatment that revived Mother Elsbeth could safely be used only on the most holy devotees of Shallya. Dema hoped to use it as the basis for a restorative that would work its miracles on anyone, even those of merely ordinary faith.

  At first, Manfried had seen this as his deliverance from Heiligerberg. Imagine if Elsbeth’s healing power could be distilled into an easily transportable liquid form! He could return to Averheim with a barrel load of the stuff, dispense easy healing to the rich and powerful, and reclaim his patrimony as a matter of course. Unfortunately, it transpired that Dema’s work was insufficiently advanced; she had yet to hit upon a formula that did not immediately and fatally poison those who quaffed it.

  Just a fortnight ago Manfried had stood and watched, as the last subject’s jaw had melted away, dribbling liquified flesh down his tunic and onto the hard stone floor. This most recent victim had been a self-important bellyacher named Vilmar, who styled himself a great friend of Manfried’s rival, Father Ragen. He had importunately demanded access to this revolutionary new treatment as soon as Manfried let slip a hint of its existence, and although Manfried found it impossible to mourn his demise, he would admit, if pressed, to losing confidence in the one-eyed sister. She kept insisting that these stolen holy relics would make all the difference. It was beginning to sound like an excuse.

  “You’ve made that clear, Dema. All we can do is wait for my man to do his work.”

  “You said he’d be here by now.”

  “He and his quarry are travelling with other pilgrims. I imagine they’ve found the journey more arduous than expected.”

  Ursula and the scarred sister took Elsbeth across the courtyard. When they reached the cloister, the holy woman began to moan and weakly kick her heels. Ursula patted her on the head. Elsbeth attempted to wrench herself free but her protector kept a strong grip on her. Her cries resolved themselves into a single word, which she repeated, again and again.