by Mark Teppo
“I do not know. But we have until dawn to find a solution.” Andreas offered Raphael a wry smile. “Is it not better to act than to stand idly by?”
Raphael sighed. “Is there really any choice?”
Andreas shook his head, though his grin widened.
The inquisitor and his men were still in the inn, along with the magistrate and the woman, Gerda. There was no opportunity to speak with the accused directly, and so they turned to the villagers instead. At the first few houses, no one answered their summons, and when timid faces did begin to respond, they would pretend not to understand Raphael’s German. It was Andreas who finally managed to get the townsfolk to open up to them. His breezy insouciance and obliviousness to their resistance to talking of the incident earlier in the day gradually broke through barriers, both real and imagined.
They were pointed toward Gerda and Otto’s tiny shack on the edge of the village, not far from the dense wood that ran all the way to the banks of the Rhine. They knew they had found the right house from the blood staining the stones of a rectangular plot in front of the house. Inside, much to Andreas’s dismay, there were signs of both looting and a struggle. Whatever meager possessions owned by Gerda and Otto had already been pilfered by greedy neighbors.
Mounted to the stone wall above the soot-darkened hearth was a narrow wooden icon, a depiction of a dark-eyed maiden with garlands of flowers wreathing her hair. Andreas rested his fingertips against the wood, his eyes half-closed, and Raphael did not interrupt the other man’s prayer.
The Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae had a Christianized name, but that did not mean they had forgotten their ancient origins. Many of the Shield-Brethren observed the rituals and rules of the Roman Catholic Church, but a fair number still used the Virgin Mary as a shield for devotion to a much older, though equally chaste goddess.
“There is very little to support a claim of witchcraft,” Raphael mused, kneeling next the bloody ground outside. “She finds her husband’s head left as a cruel offering, but no one will speak ill of her or her relationship with her husband.” Many feet had stirred up the ground and trampled the wild grasses around the narrow plot of flat stones. It was frustratingly impossible to discern any clue as to the identity of who might have brought the severed head.
“The body has not been found,” Andreas said, appearing in the doorway behind Raphael. “Though there was talk of a struggle in the woods, not far from here.”
“But why bring the head here? Why reveal the existence of this murder unless, in doing so, you achieve some other end. Was it meant to frighten Gerda?”
“It certainly did.”
“No, I wonder if it was meant as a symbol of some pagan ritual. An old warning that would have had some significance to her.”
Andreas pursed his lips, warily eying Raphael. “You think she is still a pagan?”
“Don’t you?” Raphael asked, somewhat guilelessly.
“If she is,” Andreas said, side-stepping Raphael’s inference, “I do not suspect she tried to deliberately hide it. The other villagers would know.”
Raphael indicated the bloodstained stones. “What triggered this rage, then? This was not an act of isolated passion. The villain—”
“Or villains,” Andreas interjected. “If what we have heard is true, Otto was torn open and his viscera removed. Such deviltry would be more readily accomplished if there were more than one assailant.”
“Villains then,” Raphael nodded. “So they slaughtered Otto elsewhere and then brought the head here where it would be discovered. But why did her neighbors leap to the conclusion that she had perpetrated this crime?”
“You ask curious questions, Brother, and I do not think we will find easy answers. I suspect we have been granted all the aid we are going to receive from the people of this village.”
“Aye,” Raphael said. “Our inquiry begins to frame an accusation to be laid against other folk, and though it is entirely un-Christian of them to protest otherwise, we have not seen any evidence that these individuals are willing to come forward and admit culpability in the crime. No one is going to volunteer to take Gerda’s place, and given the Inquisition’s predilection for casting a wide net in its capture of heretics, anyone who casts aspersions on their fellows could very easily find themselves named as a coconspirator in the ensuing tribunal.”
“And yet Gerda did not name anyone else in her confession,” Andreas noted. “Either she does not know who might wish her and her husband ill, or…”
“Or she thought her sentence might be lessened if she were to be the only culprit in this crime,” Raphael said, finishing Andreas’s thought for him. “Which would imply that she knows who is responsible.”
“Or suspects.”
“The magistrate?” Raphael posited.
“I would not be averse to asking him a few questions.”
“He has seen the enmity between us and the inquisitor; he will hide behind the priest. If he protests his innocence, the inquisitor will agree with him.” Raphael shook his head. “No, we need irrefutable proof, and I suspect the truth may be more readily revealed by seeking the knowledge of others.”
INVIDIA
The inquisitor had given Gerda an unexpected blessing when he had instructed her to pray silently. He had intended his words to be a threat, as a means of keeping her quiet as he lashed her, but she had taken them to heart. After the first few strokes, she stopped feeling the lash as it fell upon her back and buttocks. Her body would jerk and spasm from the physical blow, but she felt no pain. She fell into a stupor; the only sensation remaining to her was the sound of her own voice, echoing in her head as she prayed.
Not to the Christian God, but to the older spirits, the ones her grandmother had believed in—the spirits of wood and water, field and forest. The old ghosts who had haunted this land long before the Christian missionaries had come from Rome, extolling the virtues and sacrifice of their crucified god. He is the same, her grandmother had told her once. They had been picking flowers in the meadows beyond the river. The men from Rome hung him from a cross and then sealed him in a cave; our peoples burned our god and scattered his ashes upon the fields. But the manner of his death did not matter; he still came back.
But when her grandmother died, some part of the old ways died with her. It became harder and harder to remember the prayers sung in the spring over the freshly planted fields; the invocations at harvest languished as the farmers became more concerned with getting their bounty to the market in Mainz than maintaining their fields in the old ways.
Her grandmother had always liked Otto. He is a kind boy, she had said of him when he and Gerda were younger. He is not afraid of the forest. Her grandmother had been pleased when she told her that Otto sought her to be his wife, and after her grandmother was gone, she swore to herself that she would teach her children the same lessons.
But there had been no children, and in time Otto had stopped trying, no matter her efforts. She had despaired, trying desperately to figure out the reasons why her womb refused to allow his seed to take root and produce children. Was it because she still believed in the old gods when the rest of the village had transferred its devotion to Christ? She tried—she really did—but she found no solace there either.
Eventually she gave up, believing that the gods—both old and new—had abandoned her. She was a lost child, adrift between two worlds and party to neither. She hoped she would vanish, swallowed by the forest one day, and no one would miss her.
But the opposite had happened. She had begun to attract the attention of the other men in the village. Otto was liked amongst the villagers, and it was not because they pitied him for his barren wife. But it was something else—something about her and her alone—that drew them to her. She did not seek their attention, and she began to spend more and more time by herself, either in the narrow confines of their hut or in the woods. She could not bear their eyes on her. They whispered amongst themselves, as if she were deaf and dumb.
> As the inquisitor beat her, Gerda begged for understanding. Why? she pleaded.
And in the darkness of her mind—so similar to the darkness beneath the trees on the nights when the moon was nothing more than a pale sliver in the sky—she heard the voice of her grandmother. It is the way, child. It is always the way. Blood must be given to the land.
But why Otto? Why me?
Because you are loved, child. Because you are loved above all the rest.
Gerda did not weep as the lash flayed her skin and her back ran wet with blood.
Blood must be given.
The room was cold and dark when she woke, the fire having dwindled to a few lingering coals in the narrow hearth. The room was devoid of the table and chairs it had held earlier and the door was firmly closed—barricaded undoubtedly from the other side. They had left her on the floor, and she had lain there, senseless, for long enough that the blood had dried to a crusted layer on her back. She moved gingerly, sliding her thin shift back down her body, and even though she knew the scabs on her back were tearing, she felt no pain.
Next to her was a cup, half-filled with ale, and a plate with a piece of bread and a half-eaten chicken leg. To her eyes and stomach, it was a lavish repast, and she fell upon the meal eagerly, making short work of it. The food eased some of the tension in her belly but did little to ease the ache in her heart.
Slowly she crawled across the floor toward the hearth. It put out very little heat, but the stones in front of it were still warm. She curled up as best she could with her manacles and her torn back and tried to rest.
She had seen the pyre in the green. She knew they would come to take her to it in the morning.
As she slipped toward a senseless slumber, she was saddened by the idea that they would not scatter her ashes in the fields. How else would she see Otto again?
This time, she let the tears come.
They had only known each other for a few hours, but already Andreas had grown quite fond of the other knight, while trying to swallow a certain amount of slack-jawed awe at the bits of personal history the man dropped with casual humility. He spoke so many languages—fluently, too—and he knew the Holy Roman Emperor well enough to call him friend, though he doubted Raphael would ever deign to claim as much to anyone. He was well traveled, probably more so than Andreas was himself, which was no mean feat, even though Raphael was a few years his elder. And he had not chastised Andreas for his fanciful stories about the Crusades.
Raphael was right about the Sixth Crusade; Andreas had seen very little fighting during the time he had spent in the Levant, and while Raphael had not spoken of his own martial experience, Andreas suspected the man was quite well versed in the art of the sword. Plus he was well-read, a physician, and somewhat of a philosopher and an orator. Was there any way in which the man was not skilled?
Raphael was not very adept at tracking, as it turned out. What appeared to him to be an impossible morass of dirt and mud and detritus was a discernible history to Andreas. He tried to remain nonchalant about the ease with which he deciphered the tracks around Gerda’s house, but tiny thrills of excitement ran up his legs and arms as he led Raphael toward the woods that abutted the fields near the village.
“There. Do you see it?” he said, pointing at a broken stalk of a weed. “The stalk and leaves are green, but do you see how it bends over on itself like that? And the dark patch here? That is blood.”
“Otto’s?” Raphael bent and peered closely at the weed. He tried to lift the stalk upright, but it fell back over when he took his hand away.
“Yes.” Andreas looked toward the trees and scratched behind his ear.
“What is it?” Raphael asked, his hand straying to his sword hilt.
“If you were going to carry a head some distance, would you wrap it in a cloth or carry it by its hair?” Andreas asked Raphael.
“I have not had many opportunities to concern myself with that question.”
“Once, I carried some number of heads in a basket.”
Raphael raised an eyebrow. “For what purpose?”
“They were enemy scouts. We had caught them trying to infiltrate the citadel. At Týrshammar, in the north. One of the local warlords thought the Rock would be a much better citadel than whatever ramshackle lodge he had. He marched on the Rock and tried to scare us into opening the gates for him.”
“Who was the Master of Týrshammar at that time?”
“Feronantus.”
Raphael fought to hide his grim smile. “That sounds like Feronantus. How many died in this little fracas?”
“Just those five,” Andreas said. “We threw their heads down, and the warlord’s troops scattered. Most of the Shield-Brethren never even bothered to assemble their kits. Feronantus put us initiates to the task.”
“Of course he did. He needed to know what you were willing to do to win a battle.”
“It is not a pleasant task, carrying a head,” Andreas said, “but once you get over your initial revulsion, you consider the practical issues. They tend to…drip for some time. That is why I used a basket. With one, I would use a piece of cloth or a satchel—I would have burned such material afterward—but while I was transporting the head, I would not have wanted it dripping on me.” He pointed at the stalk. “Or the ground.”
“He was in a hurry?” Raphael suggested.
Andreas nodded absently, his gaze straying along the ground and toward the tree line. Had he been running? he wondered. Had he already planned to leave the head? Where had the others gone?
The answers to his questions would not be revealed by standing in the field, and so he strode off toward the verge of the forest, his gaze roving across the ground, watching for the sporadic signs that he was still following the back-trail of the culprit.
The standing stones were crumbling, moss-covered stones, and half of them had toppled onto their sides where the forest had even more aggressively covered them with vines and tiny shoots. But Andreas had seen enough of the pagan circles in the north to recognize the oblong shapes. As he and Raphael approached the edge of the ring, an animal growled at them from the center and he caught a flash of gray fur as he noisily drew his sword from its scabbard. Raphael drew his sword too, and the scavengers fled, leaving the bounty that lay in the center of the old pagan ceremony ring.
There were four bodies altogether, and as Raphael cautiously approached the jumble of slaughtered corpses, Andreas inspected the stones around the ring and the nearby forest. There was no threat from within the circle, but the presence of the dead—and the scavengers that were already stealing scraps—made his skin crawl. He wanted to be sure there was no looming threat that might pounce on them.
“Here is Otto,” Raphael said, and Andreas looked at the corpse that Raphael was indicating. The body was off to one side of the center area, clearly missing its head.
“And the others?” he asked.
Raphael shook his head. “I do not know them.”
“Have they been dead long?”
“No. I would surmise they died around the same time as Otto.”
Raphael nudged the bodies with his foot for another few moments and then turned his attention to Otto’s corpse. Satisfied there was no lurking danger, Andreas sheathed his sword and entered the ring. He knew it was a vestigial childhood fear—old superstitions that were never quite excised from the body—but he could not suppress a shiver as he crossed the boundary of the circle.
“The others were killed quickly with a sword,” Raphael said as he examined Otto’s corpse. “Otto was not as fortunate.”
Andreas took one look at the ravaged corpse of Gerda’s husband and turned away, the old superstitions crawling, like spiders, up his spine.
“Ita ut comedatis carnes filiorum vestrorum et filiarum vestrarum,” Raphael whispered, his voice filled with dread. And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons and daughters. “God’s vengeance upon the unfaithful.”
“Virgin help us,” Andreas said, staring back at R
aphael. “All of them?” His mind quailed at the thought of the entire village being flesh-eaters.
Raphael’s face was pale and the muscles in his jaw flexed as he stood. “Let us hope not,” he said grimly.
SUPERBIA
The door squeaked, a thin noise that would have normally gone unnoticed at home as the door of their tiny hut squeaked and groaned constantly whenever the wind played with it. But she was not at home; she was not buried beneath the blankets with Otto, hiding from the weather and the world. She was lying on the cold stones of the inn’s hearth, and Otto…Otto was gone.
She was curled around her hands, and she wanted to curl even tighter, but her body was too stiff to bend any further. She started to roll onto her back, and as the first patch of raw skin pressed against her clothing, she remembered what had happened and caught herself, tensing her entire body to keep from putting her weight on her flayed back.
As she curled up again, she remembered the sound that had woken her—the creak of the door. She sat up, wincing at the pain, and stared toward the closed door.
“Who’s there?” she croaked. The ale she had drunk earlier had dried to a thin film in her mouth.
A figure sidled out of the deep shadows behind the door. The magistrate’s face was slick with a sheen of sweat and his eyes bulged, making him look like a swollen, glistening frog. “I’ve waited a long time,” he whispered. “And I saved you. I have come to take my reward.”
“You lied to him,” she whispered. “You lied to God.”
“Haven’t we all these many years?” he replied, crouching nearby, staring at her. His tongue moved behind his lips and he stroked his chin. “We send our tithe to the Archbishop in Mainz twice a year. We do not complain about how much we have to give, because it is a slight burden compared to the alternative. We have no Roman Catholic presence in our village. Just a few priests who come through on their way to larger cities. We are easily forgotten, Gerda. No one cares what we do as long as we keep it to ourselves.”
