by Bobby Adair
Chapter 91: Fitzgerald
Having come through the familiar door and into the front room of The House of Barren Women, Fitz stopped. Everything about the room, the dim light, the feel of the floor under her feet, the bench along the wall on which she’d sat with the other girls, the other merchandise, waiting to be selected and put to use, and the smell of too many bodies doing too many things in too small a space, burrowed tentacles through her mind connecting all of her memories—a few sweet, but most she’d prefer to forget.
“And the high harlot queen of the ashen Temple has fallen,” taunted Housemother Mary, coming into the parlor through a side door.
Fitz eyed Ginger, one of the three girls on the bench, those awake early enough to serve a man in need of some morning attention. Ginger said, “Be kind, Mary.”
Fitz said nothing. She’d expected Housemother Mary to say something callous, but she was hoping that Mary would see past petty cruelty after what had happened at the Temple. Fitz hoped for a favor.
Mary stepped to the center of the room. “You want to bring General Tenbrook’s wrath down on us? Is that why you’re here? You don’t want to stand on the pyre alone?”
“No,” Fitz said. She turned and reached for the door behind her, realizing she’d made a mistake.
“No!” Ginger stood up from her place on the bench.
“Sit back down,” Mary spat. “Or you’ll be washing sheets and scrubbing floors until your hands are too calloused to please a man.”
Hearing the commotion, more girls came into the parlor from a door that led to the dining room and kitchen.
“I’ll wash my own sheets,” said a tall, dark haired girl named Ashley who’d just come into the room.
Other girls sheepishly offered to do their own housework.
With a face that was reddening with fury, Mary spun on them, baring her teeth. “You barren sluts best get back in the kitchen.” She turned away from them, expecting them to comply without resistance. She refocused on Fitz. “Go! We don’t want you here. Go sleep in a pigsty. Go climb the wall and feed the demons. Or save everyone the trouble and go stand on a pyre in the square until the wood dries out.” She finished with a wave of her fingers as if she was brushing a bug off a loaf of bread.
“Don’t go,” Ginger told Fitz, crossing the room to take hold of Fitz’s arm. Ginger turned on Housemother Mary and looked defiantly at the shorter woman. “Fitz will stay in my room. And you’ll not say another word about it.” Ginger’s words took a menacing edge, and she added, “And you’ll not tell Tenbrook’s men, either.”
Housemother Mary stabbed a bony finger toward Fitz and shouted, “She’s a thief. Did you know that? I caught her with Father Winthrop’s stolen baubles myself. And when I took her to him, she escaped a burning by bewitching the Bishop and twisting him to her will.” Mary scanned the room, looking at each of the other women. “She’s doing the same to each of you now. Don’t trust her.”
Ginger gripped Fitz’s arm tighter.
“I should go,” said Fitz, worried that no matter what was said here in the parlor, at the first chance, Housemother Mary was not only going to betray Fitz, but every girl in the house. That was clear enough already, and Fitz didn’t want to see anymore of her friends killed.
“No,” said Ginger.
“You’ll stay, Fitz,” said Ashley, who turned and whispered something in the ear of the girl just behind her. That girl, a new girl Fitz didn’t know, looked back at Ashley, wide-eyed, reluctant. Ashley told her, “Go.”
Focusing on Ginger, the source of the defiance, Mary said, “Go up to your room and stay there until you’re needed.”
Ginger stared at Mary, but didn’t answer.
Mary crossed the parlor in a flash, slapping Ginger across the face. “You’ll do as your told! Upstairs with you!”
With her cheek stinging and tears in her eyes, Ginger said, “No. Fitz is one of us. You won’t turn her out.”
“I’ll do what I’ve been charged to do, which is to keep you whores in line,” Mary shouted, slapping Ginger again, before turning and pushing Fitz. “Get out of here. I’m not going to the pyre for the likes of you. You’re a vile, self-serving witch. You got Franklin killed. You got all the fathers killed. You got the Temple burned for the sake of your heretic ideas and your scheming. I’ll see you burn before this day’s end. Mark my words. And any of the rest of you whores who want to join her? You go right ahead.” Mary turned to look at the others and unexpectedly gasped.
Fitz saw Ashley standing, now facing Mary close, too close.
Ashley’s face was expressionless, hard. She stepped back as Mary grasped at her stomach and stumbled forward a few steps. Ashley stepped out of her way, and Fitz saw a dripping red kitchen knife in Ashley’s hand.
Everyone in the room stared, shocked. Fitz’s eyes widened.
“All of you,” Mary gasped, between labored breaths, a red stain spreading down her dress, “all of you will pay.” She pointed to a girl on the bench. “Kayla, come help me.”
Kayla looked at her feet, frightened. She started to get up.
Ginger said, “Don’t.”
Kayla froze.
Mary’s hateful eyes fell on Ginger, and she turned and raised her hand to slap her again. “You pig bitch.”
Ginger grabbed Mary’s wrist and stepped over beside Ashley, spinning Mary around to face her. Ginger reached out to take the bloody knife from Ashley and slashed it across Mary’s throat.
Blood poured out and Housemother Mary collapsed on the floor, gurgling and struggling for another moment before going still.
They all stared as Mary’s blood spread in a puddle on the floor.
Chapter 92: Tenbrook
Tenbrook sat alone on the dais, watching the square, the center of his domain. The Cleansing platform stood empty in the middle, abandoned until the next Cleansing Day when the inspectors would wait as lines and lines of women and children climbed the steps and disrobed, hoping their skin was unblemished by spores and warts.
Well past the Cleansing platform, fifty of the city guard drilled in the falling rain. Around the edges of the square, women, some with children, hurried through, crossing from one side of town to the other, deathly afraid to look in Tenbrook’s direction.
On the far side of the square were the remains of the Temple. The stone walls still stood, but the roof had caved in, and its ancient colored glass windows were shattered. Black smoke stains ran up the walls. The smell of burned wood and charred flesh floated in the wet air.
Is this what absolute victory feels like?
Tenbrook hadn’t thought winning would be so easy. He didn’t think it would happen so quickly. That saddened him. Now, what would he do? No challenge existed.
Sure, Blackthorn might come back with a raggedy army’s remnants in tow. But what of it? Blackthorn was a dying man. He’d given up already. He’d present no difficulty.
The clergy was wiped out. Tenbrook smiled as he thought about how brilliantly he’d handled that. He was indeed a master.
What of the Scholars? He’d crushed Evan’s insurgency, but the Academy was still intact, probably shivering in their study halls and pissing on their shoes as they thought about what had happened to the clergy. No, the Scholars would present no problems either—not for a long, long time.
That left only demons.
Tenbrook had to wonder, as he looked into his future, how effective Blackthorn’s expedition had been at exterminating demons. While he surely had no chance of killing them all, Tenbrook hoped that enough of them were left alive on this part of the great flat earth that they’d mass from time to time to come for the people of Brighton.
Without that one possibility to relieve boredom, the future didn’t hold any appeal at all.
Except for one.
Tenbro
ok’s thoughts drifted to women, the only interesting thing of which there seemed to be a ready supply. With most of the men having been dragged on Blackthorn’s folly, the women now outnumbered men ten to one. And of that minority of men, most were so old as to be too feeble to march out with the army.
Tenbrook decided to let his imagination run free through his most lurid fantasies. With a practically endless supply of female flesh, the only limit on his pleasure would be the breadth of his imagination. Through the years, he’d imagined so much.
Until he found some other way to alleviate the boredom of the victorious, women would have to suffice.
Chapter 93: Fitzgerald
Mary’s body had drained its blood on the floor and now lay bound with rope and wrapped in several layers of blankets in her room upstairs. The floor in the parlor was clean. The front door was barred and barricaded, as was the back. All of the windows on the first floor were shuttered. For men coming to find some entertainment at The House of Barren Women, there’d be no shooing them away, no explanation. The House would be closed up.
Fitz’s bet was that none of the few men left in town would have the nerve to take the matter to Tenbrook, the only authority in Brighton at the moment. After his volatile performance at the Temple, no one, probably not even the city guard or cavalrymen, would want to be at the center of his attention.
Now Fitz was standing in Mary’s upstairs room, the largest room in the house after the parlor and the dining hall. All eighteen of Fitz’s conspirators who’d been meeting with her in the Temple, the strong women, along with the women in The House, were in Mary’s room staring at Fitz. Franklin’s death hadn’t changed the view of the eighteen women that she was the leader. And the Barren Women had joined them.
The leader of what? Fitz wasn’t sure anymore.
She’d hoped that by gathering the townsfolk around Franklin and the ideas he spoke about, they’d be able to cow Tenbrook with the weight of their numbers. In Fitz’s vision, it would have happened without the loss of life or shedding of blood. The degree to which she was wrong shook her confidence and made the loyal gazes of all her friends difficult to bear.
What if she made another miscalculation?
They’d all die just as brutally as Franklin had.
How many could she lead to their death to satisfy her ambition?
And that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Ambition.
Fitz had a difficult time wrestling with the idea. Was it wrong that what she wanted coincided exactly with what was good for Brighton? Did that make her ambition wrong?
Another question that gnawed at her confidence was the temperament of The People. They’d all watched, horrified and paralyzed, as Tenbrook stood on the stage in the Temple and murdered Franklin. They stood back while a few dozen soldiers slaughtered the clergymen. They’d let the war horses trample their friends and neighbors.
So had she.
The criminality of what they’d all witnessed was irrefutable. Though scant few of them could count higher than their fingers, nobody needed mathematics to figure out that the people being killed vastly outnumbered the men doing the butchering, and yet, the murderers did as they pleased. They walked away arrogantly and without the slightest fear of punishment.
That made Fitz fear that her lofty thoughts about right and wrong and her ideas about what could and couldn’t change were rare thoughts to have in Brighton. Most people were sheep, and apparently always would be. Some were wolves. Fewer still were shepherds.
Fitz had to ask herself which she was. She was no sheep, though she’d been behaving as one her whole life. She thought she was a shepherd, but she wondered whether all wolves saw themselves as shepherds, as well.
All of those questions needed answers before Fitz could decide what to do next: climb the wall and run, more like a rabbit than a sheep, or stay in Brighton and accept that she’d always be a sheep until the day that Tenbrook slaughtered her. Or maybe she’d put on a wolf’s hide to do the things necessary and then, at the end, rise above it all like a shepherd.
The girls continued staring at her, waiting for her to tell them what to do next and how to avoid the pyre now that they were all complicit in murdering Housemother Mary. Fitz needed an answer for them, and she needed a plan.
Chapter 94: Fitzgerald
“We need more women,” Fitz said, looking around at the others.
The House women and the eighteen watched her, their hope fighting with the fear in their eyes.
“More women?” Ginger asked, clutching the knife. “How are we going to convince them to join us, after what happened here?”
“Or what happened at the Temple?” Ashley added.
Fitz watched them for a moment. “Maybe we can use that tragedy to our advantage.”
“What do you mean?” Ginger asked.
“Tenbrook’s hope is that by destroying the Temple and The Word, he’ll prevent anyone from meeting together. What he doesn’t realize is that for every person who died, many more are affected.”
“Affected by fear. He wants to frighten everyone into submission,” Ginger argued. “How can we get them to listen to us?”
Fitz paced Mary’s room. Although it was larger and cleaner than the others, the smell of men’s sweat seeped through the doorway, reminding Fitz of the years she’d spent there.
“We need to use the pain of what we went through to bring us together again. Not just the women in this room, but as many women as we can convince to join us from Brighton. We all know women in town, many of whom lost people in what happened at the Temple. We need to find them, and we need to use our experience to fight Tenbrook. We need to recruit and lead them.”
“What experience do us Barren Women have?” Ginger asked, throwing her hands in the air. “All we’ve ever done is lie on our backs, taking whatever coins men throw at us, hoping we can avoid a beating.”
“That’s exactly right,” Fitz said, thinking of Mary’s body with a grim smile. “Our bodies have been the only things keeping us alive. We’ve used our bodies to keep us fed, to keep us clothed, to avoid a beating. Those in The House have done whatever Mary has demanded. The rest of you have done whatever Brighton, the Elders, or your husbands have demanded. Maybe it’s time we used our bodies for ourselves for once.”
After a pause, Ginger nodded. “I’m sure the others will agree, once you’ve told it that way.”
“Listen,” Fitz said. “I have a plan.”
Chapter 95: Tenbrook
Tenbrook laughed out loud at the joke Sinko had just made. As the other captains laughed, Tenbrook said, “You’ve been hiding this sense of humor all along. I didn’t know you were a funny man.”
A girl came in and leaned between Captain Sinko and the man next to him, filling his cup with wine. He waved her away. “Enough, girl.” He looked at Tenbrook. “I talk too much when I have too much wine in me.”
“As do we all,” the captain across the table said.
Tenbrook leaned back in his chair and patted his stomach as he looked at a slab of roasted pork on the table. “I can’t eat anymore.”
The captains all stopped eating and looked at Tenbrook.
“Eat up,” Tenbrook told them. “Stuff yourselves. This is a night for us to sit on the laurels of our conquest and partake in the pleasures awarded the victors.”
“Pleasures?” Sinko asked. “Is there to be more than food and wine?”
“Here, here!” another captain agreed.
They were talking about women, of course. When men got drunk on victory and wine, every vague phrase alluded to a single thing: women.
“Let us finish our dinner first,” said Tenbrook. “For dessert, I have a collection of virgins for you to choose from. Take one if you like, two if you prefer. Three if you’re man enough to put them all to good use.”
“I
speak for us all, General,” said Sinko, “when I say I hope you have three each.”
“Perhaps,” said Tenbrook with a sly smile. The smile was a mask. He did have a dozen virgins in a room in the back of the house—all young, all pretty—but none of them were for him. He’d grown bored with young virgins, their timidity, their begging, their fear of his manhood. Sure, it was fun at first, but the fun of seeing a woman’s fear just by dropping his trousers had grown old. His tastes at the moment were for women who were greedy for a man, tough women who thought they could tame him, women with fire in their eyes, who didn’t accept the fear until they earned it.
That’s the sort of women Tenbrook wanted.
Perhaps he’d ride to The House of Barren Women later and treat one of those wenches to an unforgettable night.
A guard barged into the room, anxious, out of breath, trailing another guard behind him in a similar state.
Tenbrook, like the other officers at the table, hadn’t lived long enough to rise in the ranks because they reacted slowly to danger. Each of them jumped to their feet, hands on the hilts of their swords or daggers.
“What is the danger?” Tenbrook asked calmly, though he was already tense. In the back of his mind, he hoped it was a revolt. He relished the idea of a battle—even a battle against wretched peasants with pitchforks. That would be so much better than eating and drinking himself into a coma.
The first guard pointed through the open doors behind him. “In the square, sir. I think they’re worshiping you. You have to see for yourself.”
Chapter 96: Tenbrook
A thousand women danced in the square, lit by rows of fires, not wearing a stitch of clothing, moving in a slow rhythm around the Cleansing platform in the center. They sang a sad, slow song that the worshipers used to drone in the Temple after one of Winthrop’s bleak, haranguing sermons. But the women had changed the words. Where the song had contained “THE WORD”, the women had changed it to “TENBROOK”.
