Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2)

by Roberto Calas

  Praeteritus darts a lethal glance at Tristan. “You mean the idea that dead people oughta stay dead?”

  Tristan opens his mouth, then closes it. “Probably not the most important lesson these days.”

  Praeteritus is a smart chicken.

  “How are you alive?” I ask.

  “God sent me back.”

  Figures in the distance lurch toward us. I am almost relieved to see ordinary plaguers.

  “God?” Belisencia touches the cross at her neck. “Why would He send you back?”

  “I used to think I was His arrow. That He sent me back to punish bad people. To give them the ‘wages of sin.’”

  I give Tristan a glance. If this man has the third plague, he will be a danger to all of us. Tristan’s shoulders tense.

  “Wages of sin?” Belisencia says. “You mean…kill them?” She takes the smallest of steps backward.

  Praeteritus nods. “I used to kill men for the Bishop of Ely, before this new plague got started.”

  “The Bishop of Ely?” Belisencia says. “You killed for a man of God?”

  Praeteritus smiles. “All men are men of God. Bishops just profit from the relationship.”

  “Do you still think you are God’s arrowhead?” I tap the pommel of my sword with a thumb as subtly as I can so I can draw it in an instant if needed.

  He looks at the lepers that have huddled about twenty paces away. “I ain’t certain of anything anymore.”

  I study the lepers as well and remember the white-robed figures that watched us in Caistor St. Edmund.

  “Well, you are clearly not dead anymore,” Belisencia says. “You should not say that you are.”

  “You’re wrong, m’lady,” he says. “I will always be dead. The priest gave me the rites. Put the oil on my body.”

  “But you were alive,” I say.

  “I ain’t certain if I died or not. All I know is that the Church said I was dead. The odd thing about the Church is they have a ceremony for when you die, but they ain’t got one for when you come back. And priests are too stubborn to admit they’re wrong. So they just pretend you don’t exist. Once you’re dead to the Church, you don’t never come back.”

  I have heard of such things. Men and women declared dead, anointed and given last rites, then rising from their beds. They are shunned as abominations. The lucky ones are merely driven from their homes and villages.

  “You poor man,” Belisencia says.

  The plaguers continue toward us. Some of them wear mail. It is time to move on. The island fortress is two miles and a bag of walnuts away.

  “We should continue this conversation somewhere else.” I nod toward the lepers. “Are they with you?”

  “They are,” Praeteritus replies. “They live in Caistor St. Edmund for now, with three hundred other lepers. And I am their king.”

  “Ralf the Leper King.” Tristan sits on the driver’s box and takes the reins.

  I open my mouth to invite the lepers into the cart but hesitate. These men followed us from Caistor St. Edmund to save us from the demons, but they are lepers. Blighted men and women. They are the unclean. Unloved by God. Damned and confined to the shadows by the magnitude of their sins. So reviled that the church declares them dead and strips them of their possessions. I understand why Praeteritus has found kinship among them: they, too, are the living dead.

  “Where are your horses?” I ask. “Are they nearby?”

  “Our wagon is two miles east, on the south side of the river,” Praeteritus replies. “There are rafts there, on the Wensum, to allow crossings.”

  Tristan and Belisencia look back at me without expression and I do not acknowledge them.

  “Tell them to climb in,” I say. “We’ll take you to the rafts.”

  Belisencia stares at me with wide eyes. I know she will not enjoy traveling two miles while squeezed into a cart with lepers, but it will be good for her. A trial to teach her humility and tolerance.

  “Edward,” she whispers. “They’re lepers!”

  I nod. “Hallelujah.”

  I think about my own sins and wonder that I am not a leper already. Perhaps bringing them onto the cart will afflict me with their disease. Three months spent avoiding this new plague only to contract leprosy. But if humanity is to live, then we must show ourselves to be human.

  Praeteritus calls the lepers over. The three men approach slowly. One rings a bell, another rattles a clapper.

  “Unclean!” they shout as they approach.

  “Stop that,” Praeteritus shouts. “I told you, you don’t have to do that no more.”

  Two of them have only stumps for hands. I reach out and take one of the stumps, fighting revulsion, and help the man up.

  “Don’t pull too hard,” Tristan says.

  “That’s not funny, Tristan,” Belisencia says.

  “My apologies,” he says. “Are they all on board?” He glances back, brows furrowed. “Maybe I should rephrase that.”

  “You are a horrible man,” Belisencia says, but she edges away from a second leper that Praeteritus helps up. Blood has soaked though his filthy white robe in blotches.

  I reach a hand out to the third, but Praeteritus shakes his head. “Not him. He stays here.”

  The leper makes no attempt to board the wagon.

  “You cannot leave him to be…to be…” Belisencia glances at the approaching plaguers.

  “He won’t be eaten,” Praeteritus replies. “Plaguers don’t eat lepers.”

  “And what about you?” I ask. “You were bitten.”

  “Plaguers don’t eat lepers, and survivors of the Black Death can’t get this one.”

  “You’ve been bitten before?” I ask.

  “More than I care to remember,” he replies.

  The only way all five of us can fit in the cart is if we stand. The arrangement is not ideal. I do not think I can stay on my feet for very long. The fever is not as bad as the one I had when we visited Paul the Doctor, but it is worsening.

  We take hold of whatever section of the cart is nearest us as Tristan snaps the reins. The horses strain against the added weight, but once the wagon creaks forward they have no trouble trotting away from the city of Norwich. The metal strips chime and the leper with the blood spots rings a bell in response.

  “Unclean!” he shouts.

  “You don’t have to do that no more,” Praeteritus says.

  Belisencia swallows with effort and smiles at the leper. “Yes,” she says. “Your past failures do not put you beyond redemption. Pray to Christ and he may forgive your sins and make you worthy once more.”

  “That man’s disease is no more his fault than this Red Plague,” Tristan says. “People get sick. It doesn’t mean they have failed or that God is punishing them.”

  “How do you know?” Belisencia asks. “Leprosy spreads through wanton, impure sexual habits and through immoral character. That is known. Why is it that you think you know more than everyone else? Why must you deny all common knowledge? Don’t be such a baboon.”

  “If God gave him leprosy,” Tristan says, “then God also gave the plague to the nuns of your convent.”

  “And how do you know that it was not Lucifer who gave them the plague?”

  “Because it wasn’t,” I say. “John of Gaunt gave them the plague. Let’s stop talking and watch for plaguers.”

  The metals chime on the wagon. I have lost count of how many chimes there have been. I draw a walnut from the sack and toss it onto the cart floor. Praeteritus looks at me curiously but says nothing.

  The leper we leave behind pulls one of the bandages from his face, and even from fifty paces away I see that his chin is badly swollen on one side. Things begin to make sense to me. The keystone falls into place.

  I point to the leper in the distance. “Is he plagued?”

  Praeteritus rubs one of his hands slowly against the other. “The plague affects lepers different,” he says. “Some of them can’t get the affliction. But the ones that can
…well, it affects them different. They become…” He shrugs and points toward the city. “They become those.”

  The leper turns away from us and walks slowly toward Norwich. “There were five leper hospitals round Norwich before the plague came on. And more than four hundred lepers outside the city. When the townsfolk ran off or got ate, the lepers took the city as their own.”

  “What about the plaguers?” Belisencia asks.

  “Like I said. Plaguers don’t eat them. Norwich became a leper city. A place where everyone was the same. Where no one was cursed, and no one was spit on.”

  “Sounds lovely,” Tristan says. “A leper Eden.”

  “But the serpent found them, didn’t it?” I say.

  “Just because the plaguers don’t eat lepers don’t mean they can’t hurt them,” Praeteritus says. “Most of the afflicted left the city. I guess not even plaguers want to be near lepers. But a few plaguers stayed. And if backed into a corner, the afflicted will even bite lepers. I don’t know what happened. But plague spread in Norwich again. The city got overrun.”

  “I thought you said not all lepers can become afflicted,” Belisencia says.

  “They can’t. But even if only half the lepers in Norwich could plague, that’s still more than two hundred afflicted lepers running through the streets. The unafflicted lepers fled. And they have been looking for a home ever since.” He stares at the white-robed men standing in the cart. “A band of soldiers found the wandering lot of them and got to killing them. They said the plague was caused by lepers. I been told it was a bloodbath. Fifty dead. Lots more wounded. The survivors made it to Caistor, where I found them. But there’s not much there. Just a ruined Roman city. They want a home. Something safe. I promised I would find them one.”

  “The bloated ones in the city,” Belisencia says. “Why don’t they leave? They wouldn’t follow us past the gates.”

  Praeteritus looks back toward the city, then gazes at one of the three lepers in the cart. “I don’t know. I think they remember a little. They know it’s home. The world was hell for them. But in Norwich, they weren’t damned no more. It was their Promised Land. God forgave them.” He shrugs but there is something painful in the gesture. I do not think the lepers are the only ones seeking God’s forgiveness. Perhaps these poor broken men are Praeteritus’s penance. He turns back to Belisencia. “Why would you leave Eden?”

  The cart rattles over a rabbit hole as I think on his words.

  “So the things in Norwich are plagued lepers,” Belisencia whispers.

  Praeteritus nods.

  “And they’re not demons,” I say.

  Praeteritus watches the man walk through the gates and into Norwich. “Depends on who you ask.”

  The wagon chimes and the leper rings his bell once more. “Unclean!” he shouts.

  “You don’t have to do that no more,” Praeteritus says.

  “Unclean!” the leper cries. “Unclean!”

  We leave Praeteritus and his subjects at the bank of the Wensum, where two rafts of reed have been drawn up on the mud. I call to him as he drags one of the rafts into the river.

  “Praeteritus, did you come here to save us, or to bring that afflicted leper to Norwich?”

  He picks at grass wedged into the raft reeds. “There always got to be one answer to everything?” He tugs the raft into the river current and helps one of his lepers onto it, hands the man a long wooden pole.

  “Good-bye, Leper King,” Tristan shouts.

  “Good-bye, baboon,” Praeteritus replies.

  We continue our eastward journey, through golden fields of cowslips and flat expanses of wild grasses and forgotten furlongs. I lie on my back while Belisencia and Tristan fret about my condition.

  “How bad is it?” Tristan’s jaw is tight as he glances back at me.

  “Perhaps there will be another doctor at the island fortress,” Belisencia says. “We should pray for that.”

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s precisely what I want to pray for. Another doctor.”

  The nun draws a walnut from the bag every ten chimes. The constant rattle of the wagon makes me restless, so I sit up and watch the flat landscape.

  The walnuts run out about five miles from Norwich and I feel a welling of disappointment from deep within my marrow. We are still far from the coast. If we turn to the northeast or southwest, as the painted wagon tracks show, and travel two miles like the boy at Bure said, we will still be far from the coast. I know from my last visit to Norwich that the shore is nearly ten miles from the city.

  “I knew this wouldn’t work,” I mutter. “A bag of walnuts? What in God’s teeth was I thinking?”

  “Settle down,” Belisencia says. “The boy said that we had two more miles after the walnuts ran out. We have to turn the cart and keep going.”

  Fever and failure form a noxious cloud in my mind. I turn on Belisencia. “Until what?” I shout. “Two miles will put us more than three miles from the coast. Or didn’t they teach you nuns to count? We’ll still be in the middle of nothing after two miles! There are no islands in the middle of Norfolk, Belisencia! There are only fields. Endless fields and hedges and flowers and great heaps of bloody nothing! Look around you! What do you see? Fields! Tell me if you see an island. Tell me if you get the scent of the ocean. Tell me if you catch sight of a single bloody gull! We have failed! We are landlocked, don’t you understand that?” It feels good to shout, and I want to continue shouting, but Belisencia is not looking at me anymore. She is staring over my shoulder, eyes wide.

  I whip my head around, but there is only a half-ploughed field and endless stretches of flatlands. The woman must be going mad.

  And then I see it.

  Cutting through the middle of the farmer’s plot is a square sail. It drifts westward across the field and into a meadow that brims with tall stalks of red valerian. I point to the sail, feeling like an idiot for pointing when the others have clearly already seen it. But I cannot stop pointing. A sail is cutting through a meadow. Does this ceaseless Norfolk wind allow sailors to tack through farmland? Could the specter of a dead sailor’s ship haunt these plains?

  I follow the square sail with my finger as it turns southward. A midge buzzes into my open mouth. I spit it out and watch with my mouth closed. A second sail comes into view in the farmer’s plot.

  I look back to my companions. Belisencia looks at me with no expression at all.

  I scowl at her. “Stop being so bloody smug.”

  Chapter 43

  Tristan gives a shout and flails the horses with the reins. He sends us toward the sails and I do not stop him. I want to know how ships can cross meadows.

  I get my answer when we are a fifty paces away: a narrow channel of water has been carved into the land. The channel is steep-sided and invisible from a distance, and the two clinker-built cogs sail westward through it.

  Both ships are on fire.

  “This is like some bizarre dream,” Belisencia says. “Are we going insane?”

  “Allow me a moment to consider this,” Tristan says. “You have been witness to a plaguer that talks, a dragon that eats virgins, and a chain of crying men and women who dance themselves to death. And this is where you begin to question your sanity?”

  Belisencia sighs. “They weren’t virgins, Tristan.”

  He barks a laugh.

  “The ships aren’t burning,” I say.

  Something has been attached to the boats. Rails of some sort that extend from the hulls. The rails encircle the cogs completely, and it is these rails that are on fire.

  “I wouldn’t be amused by those if I were a plaguer trying to board,” Tristan says.

  “Exactly,” I reply. “Those captains are used to sailing through plaguer-infested waters.”

  We could overtake the ships if we tried, but I do not want to try. There is no way to tell how many men are on board and what their motivations are. I have a suspicion that the ships are coming from the fortress. I do not know why; I simply have a f
eeling. Perhaps we are not as far from the coast as I had thought. Hope blossoms. Even the fever seems to have weakened.

  We ride back to the place where we first spotted the sails. I find the plank of wood and hold it in front of Tristan with the painted tracks curving left. The horses turn to the northeast and, with a glance back at our tracks, we begin our two-mile journey to the island fortress. In two miles, I pray I will learn that my Elizabeth can be cured.

  It is roughly a mile and a half before my hopes dwindle again. The landscape has not changed. There is no island. No smell of the sea. Not even a single bloody gull. We are still miles from the coast. It has been a colossal waste of time. The walnuts. Norwich. Everything. I have squandered two days of Elizabeth’s life. I understand now that I am not worthy of her. Another knight would have found the cure by now. Another knight would not have wasted two days riding in a chiming cart and tossing walnuts from a sack. We ride the remaining half mile in a tense silence. Tristan does not stop. He keeps the horses moving long after we have traveled the two miles. Our heads swivel from one side to the other as we search out anything that might lead us to an island.

  “Stop the wagon,” I say.

  Tristan does not stop the wagon.

  “Tristan…”

  “Maybe it hasn’t been two miles yet, Edward.”

  “Let’s go back to where the walnuts ran out,” I say. “We can try turning the wagon to the southeast.” I am not hopeful. Northeast was where the ships came from. It was our best chance.

  “Just a little longer,” Tristan replies.

  Black smoke rises a few miles to the east of us. Another village consumed by hellfire. I spot an old monastery far to the north. Just walls and a glittering spire from this distance.

  “There!” Belisencia says. “A monastery. We can talk to the people there. They might know something useful.”

  “Yes, good thinking,” Tristan replies. “Pardon me, but have you seen an island in your fields? Or perhaps your vineyards?”

  “And your plan consists of riding aimlessly through Norfolk,” she replies.

  “I’m not aimless at all.” Tristan points forward. “I’m going that way.”

  “Go to the monastery,” I say. “Maybe they’ll have a surgeon.”