False Dawn

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “I didn’t think it mattered. I thought you knew.” Evan had not moved, hut his whole body was tense, coiled like a cat.

  “But you know that interference with the works of the Lord is blasphemy. All else is evil and Heresy. You have heard Father Leonidas. You are of the Faith. You must recognize the devil’s work when you find it.”

  Evan spat.

  “I see.” Brother Philian stood straight. “It is a pity. Obviously you have chosen to ally yourself with her and the flesh, and have spurned God and Paradise. If I may say so, this is a foolish mistake.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Again Brother Philian felt himself through the robe, a glazed satisfaction in his eyes. “Heresy…heresy is punished with flames, my son Only fire can take away that sin…You will burn: you and she. We will mingle your ashes.”

  When Brother Philian had left, Thea had sat with her back to Evan, not speaking. She was too wrapped in her hurt to hear the few words he had said to her, and the cut on her face was like a seal on the document of her shame. While rage and humiliation burned in her, she shut him out, not trusting his concern.

  “Thea?” Evan said quietly after almost an hour had passed, then sat still.

  Some while later, Brother Odo arrived to milk the cows, remarking that it was fortunate that the witch had not dried up their udders. He rubbed the teats with holy water to protect them from that peril. When at last he gathered up the pails, Evan made a hooting noise and rattled his chains to speed the monk on his way.

  At last Brother Roccus had come, shortly after midday. He held a book and carried a crosier. “I will hear your confession now, given of your own free will, without instruction or coercion, for the glory of God and the triumph of faith.”

  Thea remained immobile in the straw. Evan looked at the monk, one eyebrow raised. “I would prefer not to.”

  “Your confession is necessary,” said Brother Roccus. “Without it, your sin will stain our sanctuary.”

  “Will it?” Evan pulled himself to his feet, taking advantage of his stocky build. For although Brother Roccus twitched with energy, he was both short and thin, and Evan’s solid strength was more imposing than his greater height.

  “We must seek out error. You must acknowledge that error before the Throne of God so that what we do is for His Greater Glory, and not the Sin of Man.”

  “Any error I have made will be professed if it is required, but not to you, nor any of your Brothers. You’re a sadistic bastard, not a servant of Heaven,” Evan said calmly as he crossed his arms. “You get nothing from me.”

  “It is necessary,” the monk insisted. “Brother Philian says there is grave error here. He will pronounce anathema on you if you do not repent and confess.”

  “I don’t give a damn. You’ve hurt Thea and you’ve already made up your minds to kill us. And don’t pretend it’s otherwise,” he went on, making the most of Brother Roccus’ confusion. “You want a show of a burning…it was burning, wasn’t it?”

  Brother Roccus’ brow darkened. “It is ten days until the Lord’s Day. Father Leonidas has said that on that day your guilt will be offered up.”

  “Charming.”

  The anger in the barn grew denser, almost palpable. The cows moved restlessly, sensing powerful emotion, and a few of the sheep began to mill in their tight little pen, baaing in distress.

  “I will have your confession. I do not need to hear the woman—we know her sin already.”

  “Get out.”

  Brother Roccus stood his ground with a visible effort. “You must confess. I have been sent to hear your confession, and if you do not…”

  Evan finished it for him. “If you do not hear my confession, Father Leonidas will give you an Act of Contrition to perform, won’t he? He must give you a lot of them. And not just Rosaries or the Stations of the Cross.” Evan remembered that it was Brother Roccus that Father Leonidas had reprimanded the morning before.

  “My sins are not in question,” the monk declared.

  “Aren’t they?”

  The sheep had huddled together in the far side of their pen, bleating nervously, their small hooves tapping on their confining boards as if trying to escape.

  This was too much for Brother Roccus. He had endured more from Evan than he was able to stand. He charged this tormenting prisoner, his book upraised, making a gobbling sound as he came.

  Evan moved back against the wall, but not in fear. He was getting as much play as possible in the chain that held his wrists. When he had enough, he swung it expertly, almost casually, across Brother Roccus’ face and shoulders.

  There was another sound from Brother Roccus now, one that sent the livestock milling, distraught. Brother Roccus fell, lying slumped at Evan’s feet, his face torn away where the chain had hit it; he was not breathing. Evan leaned back against the wall and waited.

  “Evan?” Thea said after a moment.

  He looked over at her, lowering the chain. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, touching the scab that had formed on her cheek and was at the center of a massive bruise. “It’ll heal,” she said.

  It was almost an hour later when the monks came to find what had happened to Brother Roccus, and by that time the body was cooling. In horror they looked at their murdered Brother, and then at Evan, who twitched the chain suggestively as he grinned, his eyes ferocious.

  A monk was sent running for Father Leonidas and when that austere man arrived, he reddened visibly under his filth. “This is the Great Second Crime!” he thundered.

  “Take his feet and drag him out. I don’t want to smell him anymore.” Evan gave this order as the old monk came near. “And if any one of your men try to touch me or Thea, I’ll do to him the same thing I did to that vermin.”

  Brother Odo was given the task of pulling the corpse from the barn, and the monks retreated hastily to prepare for the Requiem.

  That night there was no bowl of gruel nor anything else for them to eat. From the chapel came chanting and the recitation of the long vigil for the dead, broken occasionally by exhortations from Father Leonidas. In the barn, Thea and Evan listened, counting off the hours of the night as the cycle of prayers continued.

  The sun had been up for some time when Evan heard the first sound, like a distant cannon; a crack that echoed across the valley and brought him upright in his chains.

  “It’s the thaw,” Thea said after a moment. “The ice is breaking up in the river. Maybe it’s March already.”

  “What about the snow?” Was it his imagination, or had the smell of the air changed, too, promising the green scent of new grass?

  She listened critically. “This is in the valley still. Maybe a week at most before it spreads higher up, unless we have a late storm, the way we did two years ago.”

  “That means the passes will be open before long,” Evan said, a deep frown settling between his brows; he was light-headed and short-tempered from hunger and fatigue. “Graeagle is too close.”

  “It won’t matter in a couple of weeks, not to us,” Thea reminded him. The sharp hurt of the chains had become a persistent ache and she moved with difficulty.

  Evan considered the bound cloth leggings they had been given to serve as shoes when the monks had taken their boots after they had removed Brother Roccus’ body; he tested them with his hand. He scuffed speculatively at the wall. “How far do you think these would last?”

  “I don’t know. Not very far, and then we’d have real trouble.”

  “Could we walk out of here, if we were out of this compound?”

  “It depends on the cold, and how wet it is, and what route we take. The road wouldn’t be safe, and going up to one of the ridges could turn these to rags in a day or so,” she said when she had thought about it. “It would be chancy. Frostbite is worse than rocks; it could slow us down and kill us as much as fire could.”

  “I’d like to take the risk,” said Evan.

  “So would I,” she agreed, and sat down again.

>   Through the day the distant river boomed for spring.

  After sunset, Father Leonidas appeared in the barn once more. “In ten days it is the Lord’s Day, when He Rose Victorious,” he informed them. “On that day, you who are in sin and without repentance, you shall surely perish. You will be offered up as He was offered up, for the redemption for the evils of man, so that you will do one thing of merit in dying that you could not achieve while you lived. And the body of Brother Roccus shall stand as sentinel over your deaths so that his murder will accuse you as you die.”

  “Delightful. Do you think he’ll keep that long?” Evan murmured. “You may want to burn more incense.”

  Father Leonidas quivered, his face suffused with red. “Infamy. Infamy. Iniquity.”

  In response Evan’s chains chimed together. He had the satisfaction of seeing Father Leonidas back away from him, reciting prayers as he went.

  The rising moon dappled the barn with soft light a week later. There had been clear skies for two days, and the hills sang with freshets. The chanting had continued in the chapel, and occasionally three stave-armed monks would bring a bowl of gruel and a jug of water to the barn for the prisoners. The air was cold, but not the deep biting cold it had been before. With no latrine and little room to move, the barn had begun to stink.

  “You awake?” Evan asked softly as he watched the moon through a crack in the wall. He reckoned the time near midnight, but he was not tired, though inactivity had made his muscles sore.

  “Yeah. You too?”

  “I was thinking,” Evan said dreamily, “what it used to be like, a soft winter night like this with spring just coming on. Usually we were in London, and we’d walk along Old Brompton Road, looking in the dark shops. Most of the time it rained, but once in a while it would be clear and cold. Or there’d be just enough snow to make the city shine. God, I loved London. I can remember in ‘88, the Thames froze enough to skate on; it lasted four days. You should have seen it. People everywhere. It was like a festival.”

  “It must have been very pretty,” said Thea, unable to picture it.

  “It was beautiful. A lot of things were beautiful.”

  “Get some sleep, Evan.”

  He shook his head. “I want to see this. I want to remember it.” He added, very softly to himself, “I want to remember you, Thea. Thea.”

  After the monks pronounced formal Anathema on them, they were left alone once again. Thea scrambled up in her chains holding a rust-speckled crowbar. “I found it under the floor boards behind the byre,” she said. “I think I can get the cleat loose if I work at it.” She paused. “If there’s time, I’ll do you, or you can take the crowbar yourself.”

  Evan didn’t feel noble and didn’t attempt to fool her. “I’m not looking forward to burning,” he said. “I hope there’s time for us both. But if there isn’t, get away.”

  She looked toward him across the barn, feeling a rush of pity for the dirty, ragged, gaunt man he had become. “If I can, I’ll get us both out.” It was a promise. Then she set to work with the crowbar on cleat bolted to the stall-beam; the shackles passed through its ring and held her chained to the wall.

  Outside the monks bustled about gathering wood for the auto-da-fe, taking care to choose branches that were green and would burn long and slowly. They worked with more animation than they had shown before, and greater concentration, so it was not until the Pirates reached the gates of the monastery that anyone realized what had happened. Evan heard the warning shouts and tried to look out the shutters to see what was going on.

  The first gunshots blended with the breaking up of the ice and the moaning of chains as Thea struggled with the crowbar; Evan had not heard the sound of the attack when it began, or if he did, he paid it no attention. He did not want to think of the monks, or of what they were doing beyond the confines of the barn, but the disruption commanded his attention.

  Then one of the Brothers outside the chapel gave a yell and rushed off, shouting for help to his fellows.

  “What is it?” Thea asked, pausing in her sweat-drenched work.

  “An attack,” Evan said slowly as he separated the sounds in his mind. “Pirates, I think. We knew they had to break through soon.”

  “Then we can get out; we’ve got cover,” she said as she went back to work on the chains. “They won’t have time to burn us now.”

  “Not if they see us, we can’t. Cox wants my head and you’re a Mute. Cox and Father Leonidas would agree about that: they both hate Mutes. Cox might be a little harsher, perhaps, but the end would be the same. And they’d flip a coin for the pleasure of cutting out my liver.” He leaned back and listened more attentively.

  Thea stopped working once more to look at him, seeing him clearly now, seeing his face, thin under the tangle of his white-flecked sandy beard. His eyes were hollow and there was tightness about his mouth that told more than the short sound of his words of his misgiving. She could see the gray in his hair, sprinkled more heavily than when she had last studied him at Gold Lake. She could not see her own face, the scars and deep lines that had been drawn by the ordeal that was her life. There were streaks of white she had not seen growing in the dark shadows of her hair, and she had lost another tooth, making a total of three. The winter was over how, she realized. Her birthday had long passed, while they were at Quincy. She was twenty-eight years old. She felt fifty, and doubted she would ever feel young again.

  “Get back to work, Thea,” he told her as gently as he could. “You haven’t got much time. They’re working on the gates.”

  “And leave you to Cox or the monks?” she asked, pushing harder on the crowbar. “You’re crazy.”

  “Never mind.” He watched her work as he listened to the fight growing louder. There were shouts and screams now, and the occasional splintering of wood, the rupture of gunshot and impact. Then there was the smell of smoke, drifting on the gentle wind.

  With a shout Thea broke free of her leg bonds, shaking her feet and pulling the metal around her ankles open as the chain slithered through the double rings that kept the shackles closed.. “Look, Evan!” She drew the chain from the huge staple that held it to the wall. “We can use this for a weapon if we have to.”

  “Take it with you,” he said, trying to keep the envy from his voice. To see her so close to escape tasted of gall to him, and as much as he hated the feeling, he knew he would rather have been the one to get free.

  “Just wait. I think I can get out of this one easier,” she said as she started confidently to work on the upper chain that held her wrists.

  The smell of smoke grew stronger, and from the chapel the bell began to ring, a wild desperate clanging in counterpoint to the determined snarl of engines and shouting. The Pirates were winning.

  “How are you doing?” Evan asked when the smoke had begun to sting his eyes, making him cough. He knew that if he inhaled much more smoke he would be ill, and mucus would fill his nose, sinuses, and throat.

  The sheep and cows were milling, almost mad, terrified by the smoke, the rattle of vans, and the crackle of the fire. They pushed against the walls of the barn, lowing and bleating, trying to break away from the threat around them.

  “I’m going to make it,” Thea grunted through clenched teeth. Tears almost blinded her eyes, slowing her work and streaking her face with soot and grime. “So will you, Evan. We’ll both get away.” Using her whole body she leaned with all her strength against the chain and finally was rewarded by a small seam in the link. The smoke was growing thicker, and the animals battered at their enclosures, breaking boards with their hoofs and butting their braces until their heads streamed with blood.

  “Quickly,” Evan told her as she worked. Two gunshots had come nearby and the monks were rushing from the chapel into the farmyard where their stores were gathered.

  The metal groaned with Thea as she forced herself against the crowbar. Slowly, slowly the gap widened.

  “Keep working, Thea,” he said as the smoke made him c
ough steadily. He felt a searing pain in his chest from the smoke, and thought that life was too sweet to end this way. He had come too far and endured too much.

  The wood on the far side of the barn began to smolder.

  “Got it!” she shouted as the link gave way at last. Then, sobbing from the effort and choking with smoke, she fell forward onto the hay.

  “Get up! You’ve got to get up, Thea!” The urgency of his voice brought her to her feet faster than the sight of the first lick of flames on the wall. She drew the rough fabric of the habit across her face and stumbled toward the door of the barn. Evan watched her go with regret.

  She flung open the door and stood back as the maddened animals bolted through it, their panic sending them into the mass of monks who were running for the storage sheds on the opposite side of the yard.

  There was a great crashing roar as the bell tower collapsed, and with it came the shouts of the Pirates as the first of their modified vans rushed into the farmyard.

  Thea grabbed a hatchet off the wall by the doom, then turned and scrambled back through the smoke to Evan. Without a word, she began to chop at the couplings that held his chains to the wall. The fire moved hungrily nearer and the heat became intense. She paused only to wipe her eyes, now reddening from the smoke.

  “Thea,” he said as she hacked at the wall. “Thea, please, get out of here.” As he said it, he knew he meant it. The smoke was making him dizzy now and the heat prickled his skin. She paid no attention to him, continuing her steady efforts with single-minded purpose.

  Outside, the Pirates started to run down the livestock that had bolted from the barn, and they slung the carcasses into the beds of their vans as they pursued the monks.

  Most of the far end of the barn was on fire now, and the beams above them were charring, ready to kindle. Evan tried to push Thea away, hut she shouted at him. “You fool! Stay still!” She staggered back through the smoke and returned with her crowbar. Gasping for breath, she gave it to him, motioning him to help her.

  They worked together against the metal as the fire ate its way nearer. At last she kicked the gouges she had made with the hatchet and part of his chain came away, a piece of the wood still attached to the cleat. With this break came fresh air, and it eased their breathing as it fed the fire in the rafters.