02 - Sacred Flesh

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  Angelika became aware of her heart, pounding intensely. “Isn’t there a saying, that Shallya has a soft spot for children, animals and idiots?”

  “I think in the actual saying the word used is fools, and I resent—”

  Up above, Rausch let loose a shout of recognition. He pointed at Jurg. “Look! Look at his belt! He did it! He killed Altman!”

  The miller reached wildly for an object swinging from his purse: it was Altman’s relic, the supposed chunk of Sigmar’s hammer.

  “You lying swine!” he shouted. He grabbed the offending object and tried to rip it loose, but it was tied too tightly. Rausch lunged at Muller. Franziskus headed into the fray, but the pilgrims were gathered closely together. He tried to navigate around the prioress, but she turned the same way to avoid him, and they collided painfully.

  Muller dashed along the lip of the slope, with Rausch on his heels. Richart Pfeffer followed.

  “Murderer!” the prioress screamed.

  The sailor joined the chase, but lost his footing on a skiff of dead leaves and slid along the ground, grunting in pain. Franziskus disengaged himself from the prioress. He smacked into Brother Lemoine, who’d been standing and vacillating, deciding whether or not to join the pursuit.

  Muller ran until the slope smoothed itself out then dashed down a mound-like hill into a well-forested gully. Rausch leapt over a log to close the distance and come at his flank. Muller reached for the knife in his belt, but Rausch struck first, crashing into him shoulder to shoulder. Muller skidded on damp pine needles and slid into the trunk of a tree. He fell to his knees. Rausch stuck out an elbow, and fell on the gasping miller. It struck its target at the base of Muller’s neck. Muller howled. He was crawling on hands and knees to Richart, who grabbed him and pulled him to his feet. Rausch grabbed Muller’s legs.

  “I’ve got him!” the young physic shouted. “I’ve got him!” Muller twisted, wrenching himself from Richart’s grasp, and launched himself at Rausch, pressing thumbs into his eyes. Richart threw himself onto Muller’s back, knocking him off the doctor. Rausch staggered back, blinking furiously to confirm that his eyes were still safely in their sockets. His groping hands found a piece of branch as long and thick as a man’s arm.

  Angelika, stuck on the slope, clambered her way back up toward the trail. To get past Ivo, she angled herself to the right; Ivo compensated in the opposite direction, blocking her path. Angelika went left; Ivo went left. His boot heel knocked loose some dirt; the wind blew it onto a fuming Angelika.

  Muller rolled on top of Rausch, punching furiously. Rausch raised the branch, readying his aim to club Muller down. Franziskus shouted for calm, as his boots slipped beneath him and he slid down into the gully. Rausch swung his branch, but it connected with Franziskus’ temple, spinning him around, sending him to the forest floor. Rausch got his hands on Muller’s throat and squeezed. Rausch looked at Franziskus, then at Muller, then at Franziskus, then at Muller, deciding who he should attend to. He chose the miller. He clubbed him in the back of the head with the big branch. Blood cascaded from Muller’s mouth. His head hit the ground. Rausch brought the branch down on his head again. Muller’s head bounced on the ground. Richart danced around the brawling men, and held up his hands as Rausch readied another blow.

  “Enough!” he cried.

  Muller’s body spasmed; he coughed up more blood and reached an arm out to grab at Richart’s trouser cuff. Richart stepped away from him.

  Finally, Angelika made it into the gully. She pulled Rausch away from Muller who was lying on his back, his stare unfocused, his mouth working like a fish on a dock. Rausch circled him, moving into Angelika’s blind spot. Muller lifted up a hand then dropped it at his side, next to his knife. Rausch smashed him in the face with the log. Muller twitched and was still.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Angelika shrieked, seizing Rausch by the tunic and shaking him. The branch dropped at Angelika’s feet. She picked it up and cocked it to swing at the physic. He flinched. She shook its blunt, dirty end in his face. “Did you want to kill him?”

  Franziskus stumbled over to Muller’s side. He jabbed Jurg’s throat in search of a pulse. He tested the miller’s wrist. “I think he did kill him,” Franziskus said.

  Rausch sank, quaking, to his knees. Thick beads of sweat issued from his neck and forehead. “He was the murderer,” said Rausch, his voice flat and distant. “He was going to get us all.”

  Without turning her back on the physic, Angelika bent to double-check Franziskus’ diagnosis. Indeed, Jurg was dead, his skull deeply indented by Rausch’s blows.

  Rausch kept talking, his words gaining a childish speed and intensity. “Bad enough we come out here and find that everything in the world wants to eat and kill us, when it’s supposed to be a holy pilgrimage of love and mercy. Bad enough with orcs and goblins and wolves out to slay us. They’re the enemies of mankind; that’s how it is. But him. He was one of us. He was one of us.” Rausch stopped to twitch, and to take in short, shallow puffs of air. “Traitorous swine. That’s what he was. I didn’t mean to kill him but I’m glad I did. He deserved it.” Rausch sat down in the dirt, sticking his head between his knees. “Deserved it.”

  “You don’t even know for certain he did it,” Angelika said, more for the others’ sake than for Rausch, who had clearly left rational thought behind him.

  Richart tugged at the dead miller’s purse, untying the bailiff’s holy relic. “He did have this,” he said, dangling it up for Angelika to see. Blood now slicked its chain. “It is a motive for murder. Anyone who believed Altman’s claims would think it worth a dozen fortunes.”

  “But no one ridiculed those claims with greater fervour than Jurg.”

  Richart clucked his tongue pensively. “Maybe he thought it was clever, if he was planning on stealing it, to make a big show of how little he thought of it. Or he might have been overcome with sudden greed. He wouldn’t be the first man to enviously disparage the thing he secretly covets.”

  The rest of the pilgrims approached, led by Ludwig, his arms well scraped from his fall. Behind him came the summoner, the friar and the advocate. The others hung back. Devorah stood behind the prioress, who tightly held her hand.

  “All of you come and look at this,” Angelika said. “I want you to see the physic’s handiwork.”

  The hangers-back nudged infinitesimally ahead. Ludwig limped right up to look indifferently down into the dead miller’s face. Waldemar frowned and did the same, though he quickly averted his gaze.

  “From now on,” Angelika announced, “the meting out of justice will be left to me. Do you all understand?”

  “You are our guide, not our leader,” Waldemar sniffed.

  “I agreed to get you to the mountain alive. All of you—not just those of you who remain after you start killing each another. Let me make it plainer. The next one of you to raise a hand to one of your fellows gets my dagger between their shoulder blades.”

  “What difference does it make,” scoffed the sailor, “that it was the doctor who dispatched him? You’d have done the same, once you were sure he killed Altman.”

  “It’s far from proved. Jurg was nettlesome but I saw no evidence he was stupid. Why would he murder a man for a relic, break his fingers to free it from his dying grip, then leave it dangling in plain sight, for all to see?”

  The question provoked a chorus of shrugs and murmurs.

  “The killer’s still among us, alive and well,” announced Angelika, as she strode behind Rausch to wrap her fingers around his ear. He dryly swallowed. “Clearly he slew Altman for some reason unrelated to the relic, then planted it on Muller to draw suspicion away from himself. Or perhaps he did kill for Altman’s holy trinket, but then grew frightened and got rid of it. At any rate, you did his work for him, Physic Rausch.”

  “What you say is merely speculation,” Rausch stammered. He seemed to have regained a portion of his composure.

  Angelika shook her head. “If I’m wrong, it makes
little difference. If you’re wrong, you rashly slew a man for no good reason.”

  “But he ran away! Surely that implies guilt!”

  “Or he might have thought he was in the sort of crowd who’d falsely accuse him and then beat him to death.” As she spoke, it occurred to her that maybe Rausch was the killer, and that he’d clubbed Muller’s skull to cover his own guilt. Angelika resolved to keep an especially close watch on him.

  As if reading her suspicions on her face, Rausch stood to address the others. “Let us have a tribunal, then. If I am to be reproached, let’s have the entire group reproach me. The rest of you would have done the same. I know it!”

  Prioress Meilwig stepped forward. “Indeed, Fraulein Fleischer. To elect you as our magistrate and executioner would be greatly imprudent. How do we know you’d hand down your sentences any more mercifully than the physic here? I’ve already petitioned you on a matter of justice, only to be rudely rebuffed!”

  Devorah gave the prioress a puzzled look; Heilwig puckered her haughty brow.

  Stefan Recht, the advocate, made it his turn to speak. “The prioress is right. The entire group must decide what Rausch’s punishment would be.”

  “I don’t warrant any punishment at all!” Rausch stood, exchanging his pitiable demeanour for one of anger. “You all saw that things simply got out of hand! If he hadn’t fought us, it’d be him on trial now!”

  “Angelika’s right,” said Ludwig. “There’s many a party of pilgrims who never made it to their destination, because they fell to fighting amongst themselves. I say we cease our squabbling, grant the physic proper naval justice, and string him up.”

  The handsome doctor puffed in disbelief. “You say that now, but just wait until one of you gets snake-bitten or needs a wound dressed. You need me—if you noose me up, you’ll be dooming yourselves!”

  Ivo snapped his fingers in thwarted recollection. “Isn’t there a test of guilt we could perform on Muller’s corpse? You know—as with witches, when you put them in water, to see if they drown?”

  “No, no, no,” snapped Waldemar. He kicked a foot in the direction of Muller’s body. A dark patch had formed in the dirt around the dead man’s head. “Again your doctrinal ignorance is conclusively exposed. Anyone with even the faintest awareness of the subject knows that such ordeals work only when the victim still breathes!”

  “I was just making a suggestion,” said Kirchgeld.

  The friar patted him on the shoulder. “Your logical error is a simple one: the ordeal by water—or its cousin, the ordeal by fire—demonstrates the individual’s innocence by killing him. Since Muller is already dead, he can’t be so exonerated.”

  Angelika crossed her arms. “Now that we’ve finished hearing from the theologians, I’ll tell you what will happen. Unless you count this tongue-lashing, no punishment will fall on Physic Rausch. He just got carried away by the madness of battle. I’ve seen it happen all too often. So the rest of you—do not start any more fights, because in the blink of an eye a body can end up dead. And that body could be yours.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A ruddy-faced acolyte at his side, Father Manfried Haupt stood outside the abbey gates, impatiently shifting his weight from left to right and back again. He did not want to pace, not in front of his young inferior. Pacing was a sign of weakness. He had resolved to break himself of it, as well as the fidgeting, lip chewing, nail biting and his constant habit of clenching and unclenching his fists when his hands had no other duty to perform.

  They stood near the edge of a lip of rock. A few determined patches of sod clung to it, along with the occasional woody, survival-minded weed. Their angle prevented them from seeing down the mountainside, so they looked out into an empty blue sky. Behind them squatted the dumpy abbey building. Around it brooded a trio of much higher peaks, draped in curtains of ice.

  Manfried could not prevent himself from asking, “Where is Father Eugen? You said he was on his way.”

  “So the message said,” replied the acolyte, whose name was Gisbert, or Gismar, or Giselbrecht, or some such. He was a sharp-nosed, dark-haired fellow who concealed a glint of smirking intelligence behind an expression of bland obedience. Gisbert, or Gismar, was all of nineteen years old, thick of hew, sprung from a family of no great consequence. Manfried sensed that he was clever, and, since he distrusted the cleverness of others, particularly in the young and strong, he resolved to be rid of him as quickly as he could.

  Caution would be necessary, however, as it was entirely possible that this Giselmar, or Gisbrecht, or whatever he called himself, had been installed in Manfried’s retinue by his enemies within the church.

  “Are you not cold?” Manfried inquired.

  “We are exposed to the winds here, father.”

  Manfried reached for the warhammer that swung at his belt. Its long handle was carved in oak and its blunt head had been cast in iron, moulded so that it bore the angry face and flowing beard of Sigmar, his warrior god. The acolyte had a hammer too, though not a fancy one. “Perhaps we should spar, to pass the time, and keep us warm.”

  The smirk fell from the acolyte’s face. “I am sure Father Eugen will be here any moment. The journey up is steep, and takes its toll on lungs unused to this thin mountain air.”

  “To the true warrior, there is no such thing as a spare moment. There is always time to hone one’s art.”

  The acolyte looked up at the sun, which was making its slow and resentful progress up into the cloudy morning sky. “It is still early, sir. I thought you promised the sisters there’d be no banging of hammer on shield until after morning prayers.”

  Manfried placed his hammer’s handle back in its loop on his belt and scowled back toward the abbey. The principles of ecclesiastical architecture were like mother’s milk to him, and he despised this horrible brick pimple of a building with every iota of his being. The abbey at Heiligerberg was a modest affair: two storeys of crumbling stone rooms arranged in the shape of a box, with a meagre courtyard in the middle. A fat and cosy chapel grew like a goitre from the abbey’s west side.

  When Manfried had first heard of this fabled mountainside shrine, where a goddess herself had deigned to touch the stinking ground with her divine and perfect feet, he had envisioned a soaring, airy construction shooting delicate limestone spires up into the heavens, rooted to the side of a stormy, implacable peak by a network of regal buttresses. The real thing was nothing like this. Granted, the structure was very ancient and thus partook of the simplicity of earlier times. Manfried understood the impulse to mistake plainness for honesty, but in this case it was man’s duty to make glorious, monumental church buildings that reflected the true and awesome power of the gods. To do otherwise was to disappoint the faithful, the simple worshippers who knew best about these things.

  The countless pilgrims making their ant-like way to the Holy Mountain would have expectations like Manfried’s. They would come all this way and have naught to behold but a dumpy assemblage of ancient, pitted, crumbling brick. There would be no decorations to catch the eye and provoke a sense of awe or wonder, as was fitting. Nor were there mouldings of unfurling leaves on the columns, or ornate traceries on the windows. Neither protective angel nor capering gargoyle stood above the archways to usher congregants from the profane outer world to the spiritual region of the abbey grounds.

  To be sure, Manfried had to admire the effort of its long-dead builders—to make anything in such a distant and inhospitable place was an accomplishment to be reckoned with. He would not want to have had to haul so much brick up the side of a mountain, or to try to lure sufficient numbers of skilled and haughty craftsmen so far from civilisation’s reach. Yes, he had drawn up several sets of plans for new, more suitable Heiligerberg abbeys during his brief time here. But he had done so merely as an exercise, to while away the slow, deadening hours. To undertake such a plan would be to admit defeat and to forfeit all of his ambitions. At any rate, it would be too difficult to marshal the fusty, resistant siste
rs to the cause. They liked the shrine in its present state, as dowdy and neglected as they were. Then there were the financial hurdles—who would donate to the grandeur of a church few people would ever see?

  Even the mountain itself had been a disappointment to him. By rights, it should have been the tallest peak the eye could see in any direction. Instead, Heiligerberg had mightier, sharper peaks looming all around it, like younger warrior brothers keeping their distance from a spinster half-sister. Its peak was not a thrusting spire, but a dome-like projection with a gigantic notch knocked out of it, as if it had been clubbed by some primordial titan. Granted, it was this very flaw that created the expanse of flat rock, about half a square mile of it, on which the abbey and its grounds rested. But it appeared naked and shabby, like an accident of nature.

  The sister’s ancient predecessors had carried mounds of earth up onto the flat rock, a legendary effort that Manfried could not help but admire. Every day the sisters toiled to keep alive a meagre expanse of green around their abbey. They tended to hardy weeds and scraggly bushes as if they comprised the private garden of the Grand Theogonist himself. There was even a patch of fresh soil, where the sisters constantly struggled to grow vegetables and the occasional, wizened rose.

  Below this half-plateau, the mountainside sloped down at a forty-five degree angle for several hundred feet of bare, snow-swept rock. The slope became gradually gentler at the mountain’s tree line, sweeping out and down for hundreds of feet. Hidden by the trees, Manfried knew, would be hundreds or even thousands of pilgrims, huddled up and shivering, but convinced that their ordeal was not only expected but worthwhile—if only they could gain audience with Mother Elsbeth. The angle of Heiligerberg’s slopes was such that it was possible, though brutally trying, to hike all the way up to the abbey without the use of ropes. Once they reached the final stage of the ascent, the mountain took mercy on its climbers, as it devolved into a series of stepped rock terraces that were relatively easy to traverse. There were harder ways up—a sheet of glaciated rock on the south face, for example—but Manfried could not imagine why anyone would be foolhardy enough to take it. They would all use the simplest route, the one the sisters’ servitors used for ferrying up their meagre supplies.