Elisha Barber: Book One Of The Dark Apostle

by E. C. Ambrose

  The blood fled from his face, and he felt again the hangman’s rope burning at his throat, the hand that could heal him lying cold forever.

  Chapter 33

  His back to the mossy stone, Elisha sobbed. He pulled the fading warmth of Mordecai to his chest in his strong, helpless arms.

  Too much had already been lost—too much blood, too much time, and now his last resort was closed to him. Not that he had even been sure what to do with the talisman if he had it. Without it, he was nothing, and even Brigit was out of his reach. He had only that torn scrap of a pennant to call upon. It had been enough for eggs and arrows, but it could not stand against this enemy. Alone, he had not the power nor the skill to save a man. The loss of hope left him shaking.

  Tears streaming down his face, Elisha stared at the barren blue of the sky. Not even a raindrop to give vent to his anguish. Each man must fight his own battle, Mordecai had told him, until he falls beneath the enemy and cannot rise again. If it was death he fought, then death had overcome him at last, and he had agreed to become its messenger.

  His back scraping on stone, Elisha slumped to his knees.

  His chin dropped to his chest, ragged with sobs. Mordecai lay in his arms, pale beneath his olive skin, his ribs barely rising. His left hand draped at his hip, his right lay upon his chest, separate and terrible. Through his shirt, Elisha could feel the prayer shawl, still warm; that worn and faded width of fabric, symbol of a god who had let this happen. An edge of darker threads resisted the blood that soaked the rest.

  Freeing one hand to wipe away the tears and his own dark curls, Elisha brought up one end of the shawl. Not dark threads, but hairs—some of them long and thick, others shorter and softer—human hairs, woven in alongside the white wool.

  They had sought to humiliate Mordecai, stripping him of his robes and using the shawl of his faith as a loincloth. Instead, they had left him the one thing that mattered: his talisman.

  Elisha suddenly knew that he was not alone, that even if his bit of painted cloth was not enough, the Jew’s prayer shawl rippled with power of its own.

  He pushed himself up again. Not the church, then, but to find another place for magic. A place where power was close to the surface. Unbidden, the image of the hanging tree flashed before his eyes, a great, sturdy oak of uncounted years, where he had nearly died and been called back from the house of death.

  Striding purposefully, Elisha ignored the growing ache at his wrists and neck as they throbbed with every step. He winced at the sight of the tree and shied away, following closer to the reeds at the river’s edge. He came around to where the tree’s roots thrust into the water and sank down there, settling Mordecai in grass which showed the marks of heavy treads—three men leaning into a rope to swing him…

  Elisha jerked his attention back to the moment. He inched his toes into the water and called out, “I need you.”

  “What?”

  “We are magi, not dogs, we do not come when called.”

  “What do you need?”

  Unrolling his leather emergency kit, Elisha said quickly, “Sage has fallen. He’s not dead yet. He’s lost a hand. I think I can save him, but I have no skill.”

  “With the wounded? You have skill enough, I’m told.” A gentle touch, but strong. Willowbark, he thought.

  “I am still weak,” he said to the dissonant voices. “And this is beyond me—too much shock, and pain—I felt it like my own hand.” Even as he told them, the trembling returned, dizzy bubbles of weakness drifting up into his mind.

  “You use too much of yourself,” Willowbark replied. “Let the talisman be your strength.”

  “But how have you felt his injury?” asked another voice, querulous and detached.

  From the packet, he lifted the tattered strip of parchment with its single painted wing. The irony struck him in an instant, and he giggled. “We are too sensitive, we both are. Something he shared with me bound us together.”

  “That may be enough.” A strong, soothing touch in the cool water. “I will send what I can.”

  Elisha took the truncated arm gently in both hands, studying the wound. The ends of the bones showed clean, cut above the joint. That should make things easier. The tendons, already curling back, would be more of a challenge.

  “We cannot help him,” the other voice scoffed. “Too much focus is required for such sharing. What if we are discovered?”

  “Then you have not hidden yourself well enough,” Willowbark advised.

  “But after he’s declared himself before all and sundry? And he’s been a magus less than a month—how can we trust him? I won’t do it. No—not for any Jew or stranger.”

  At this, a spark leapt in Elisha’s spirit, igniting the anger still simmering there. “He’s not only a Jew, he is a healer and one of the magi. If you can’t lay aside your prejudice even for this, I would rather see you burn!”

  “Don’t cast your curses on me, Bittersweet—save them for the king when he comes for you.” The forceful touch slapped against his ankles, and was gone as the magus withdrew.

  Another woman’s voice joined them, lighter, and more distant. “Marigold is right. If we do not stand together, who will ever stand for us? I will do what I may.”

  “But what may we, at that?” Willowbark asked.

  “Perhaps a binding spell, to fix the spirit into the body,” someone suggested.

  “With what components to establish the affinity? There is little time.”

  “A summoning,” said the other woman, “calling him back.”

  “A simple healing?” suggested another.

  “He may be too weak for healing alone.”

  As the magi discussed in the ripple of the river, Elisha heard them with only half his mind. The rest of his concentration turned to the task of understanding the wound, recognizing the damage done, and the amount of blood spilled. But their words at the back of his mind began to form a pattern and a prayer. Binding, summoning, healing. If he could call forth blood from the marrow, if he could beseech the return of the departing spirit, if he could bind it all together. His fingers remembered the heat of those hands together, cupping his own.

  Spilling out the contents of his kit, Elisha hunted and found a strong needle. His hand throbbed with the pain of the brand, his fingers feeling thick and unresponsive, so it took him a few tries to thread the needle with a length of suture. Affinity: the joining of the stitch, the joining of the flesh, and of the spirit to the flesh. The likeness of this man to his angel, wounded and in need.

  In preparation for stitching, he brought together the severed hand with its lonely wrist. Knowledge: how the wound was made, how the bones were cut, how the veins and tendons should work. The way Mordecai had touched his throat, as if the surety of his knowledge were enough.

  Elisha shifted his grip, sending his awareness into the cold flesh of the hand, feeling out the pathways to be joined. When he settled the hand just so, something tingled in his own wrist, a rightness of place, and he took the first careful stitch.

  As he worked, forcing his numb fingers to obey, Elisha reached out for the witches in the water, their focus buoying him up. He remembered the year his father bought their only horse, teaching his boys to guide the reins. Now he drew in the reins of the power all around him. Warm wishes flowed to him from the river, dark strength gripped him from the tree roots running deep, the painted hawk’s wing fluttered in a breeze of its own making.

  At Mordecai’s waist, the hairs woven in his prayer shawl resonated with an inner current.

  Mystery, Elisha thought, the mystery of this man’s soul, of his faith, and his pain. Elisha had felt but the keenest edge, masking a wound that cut into the surgeon’s heart, long healed over, bearing a scar that reminded him every time he spoke, and especially when he came close to smiling. “Pity,” Mordecai had said, when Elisha refused to concede his death.

  Elisha began to hum, drawing energy from the others in the water. They might be around the bend, or in an
other county—one, at least, sheltered in the castle of the renegade duke, while another might be in the camp of the king, terrified lest Elisha spark a witch hunt. As he sank deeper in his work, the howling cold of death rose up around him, spreading darkness through every contact Elisha made: through the earth, through the water, through the chill flesh he fought to save. Elisha shivered at the touch. His heart pounded, and he struggled to maintain the easy rhythm of his breath.

  The earth beneath him writhed with angry tendrils of oak. The tree that stood so long sentry by the river, the tree that had lifted his weight so easily to kick at the air, now groped toward him, branches creaking overhead, leaves cackling. It would drag him up again, his hands useless, his legs trying in vain to run away.

  Elisha’s throat constricted, choking off the humming in a gasp for breath. He had chosen the wrong place, a place of evil. He had to run. His fingers shook, his hands going numb in remembered horror.

  Reaching out to gather Mordecai and take him from this terrible place, Elisha brushed the torn cloth of the pennant, and the touch blew away his panic like so much mist. He drew breath again and forced his dull fingers into motion, joining the skin as he urged the bones and tendons to join.

  Suddenly, the water seemed to echo with strangers, with harsh laughter and jeers. It sucked at his feet, offering deliverance in drowning, carrying the mournful touch of Benedict, lost at the moment he might have been rescued. The presence of the other magi felt treacherous, their offered contacts stung him, distracting him just as he must gather his strength. The magic he sought to control turned against him, perverted by the depth of power all around him. His mind reeled, the echoes of the hanging tree, the talisman, the memory of dying reverberating within his skull.

  Elisha’s toes edged him forward, his feet working to free themselves of the dangerous water. Voices called him, but shrieking laughter battered out all sound.

  His knee brushed an edge of bloody cloth, and warmth rushed through him, causing a swirl of cold that ripped at his ankles.

  “No!” Elisha dug in his feet, sending out clouds of silt.

  He called forth the memory of Mordecai’s touch, the strength of his hands, the tenderness of the vision that had bound them together. He had to go on, to concentrate on binding and summoning.

  “Yes, yes, Bittersweet, we are with you,” the water sang.

  The third assault crept from the still flesh under his feverish fingers. It stole down from the blue of Mordecai’s fingertips and seeped through Elisha’s skin like poison. Death could not be fought. It could not be defied.

  What he wanted could not be done. The body was too complex to be known, too familiar to be mysterious, and this man he worked over with all his hope did not even wish to live. Did not Mordecai himself call out for death? Did he not long to escape the horrors of earthly life, to hide forever from his persecutors? Had he not spent his life in hiding already, keeping his faith in private, defending himself with books from the touch of other magi? It had taken Elisha’s own death to draw any compassion from him. He was a Jew, a witch; he was alone in the world and did not seek for company. He should not live.

  And Elisha, who dared to defy this fitting death, what right had he? By what authority did he try to summon this man from death’s door? They were not friends, not even colleagues—Mordecai’s knowledge was so far beyond his own. This struggle was absurd, a losing battle, and one that would only leave Elisha weak and pathetic, lost as he ever was. How stupid of him to try, to fight so hard for something which was not his to win. He was not a magus, only a barber, despised by all as a butcher, responsible for his brother’s death, for the loss of the child, for the loss of affection they could have shared, and betrayed the widow with his wicked theft.

  Tears coursed down Elisha’s face. Even if it could be done, he was not worthy to work such magic. His arrogance had caught him once again. Pride goeth before a fall indeed—and daring even to quote the holy book of a god he had forsaken. He was cursed as surely as his sins deserved.

  Elisha’s shoulder’s hunched, his hands drawing in close as he shook with weakness and despair. His hair, once a source of pride, swung forward in its butchered state.

  One dark wave brushed along his cheek where once an angel’s feather had found him. The touch flared to life beneath his skin.

  Elisha gasped as wonder flooded through him. The last moment of her life, this woman, witch, angel, had reached out to him. It had been Elisha she struggled for, Elisha whose presence had been a comfort to her, even as arrows bit her flesh and flames snapped at her feet. From the very heart of death, the angel sent out her vivid gaze to him. Even as she died, she marked him as her own, blessing him with the transcendence of her flight.

  Blindly, Elisha set the final stitch, his eyes drawn away to a distant day as bright and fair as this one, and as full of warmth. The warmth of sun on his shoulders dispelled the darkness. The warmth of his companions in the river dispelled the cold.

  And despair left him at the merest touch of the warm fingers which, impossibly, gripped his own.

  Chapter 34

  Elisha drew a full, deep breath for the first time in nearly an hour. He held Mordecai’s hand gently in both of his, the row of small stitches showing like a pale bracelet against the olive skin.

  “How?” the surgeon sighed, his dark eyes searching their joined hands in wonder.

  The tension fell away from Elisha’s arms, and a helpless wave of laughter welled through him. He had done it! He laughed, bowing his head as his shoulders quaked.

  “But I…” Mordecai began, his thin voice trailing away again.

  Shaking his head, trying to quell the laughter, Elisha watched him through the screen of his hair.

  Turning his wrist first one way, then the other, Mordecai puzzled. “Sutures? But the bones,” he murmured.

  Elisha couldn’t answer. There was too much to explain, and too much he wasn’t sure he could.

  Gently, Mordecai slipped free his hand and brought it close to his face. He raised the other hand as well, tracing the line of stitches. “Are they real? I cannot feel them, nor find their beginning.”

  “I don’t know,” Elisha said at last, his voice hoarse. He let himself turn away a moment, bending to scoop water from the river and drink deeply. He poured a handful over his sweaty forehead and sighed.

  He felt the slightest touch, bearing with it a heat familiar and humbling.

  “Elisha Magus.”

  His chin rose, and tears shimmered at his lashes. He blinked them away. “I’m just a barber,” he whispered.

  “A man of flesh and blood,” called one of the magi.

  Laughter rippled like gold in the water around him. “Welcome,” “Welcome,” “Welcome!”

  But their acceptance reminded him of the duke’s trust, and the memory of the king’s command returned to him with full force. He squinted at the sky. The hour must be up by now, and they would be coming for him.

  Elisha shook off the last of his giddiness. Despite the magnitude of the casting, he felt stronger than he had after the arrows in the rain. The magi’s advice about the talisman and the place, not to mention their own support, had carried him through. With an extra lift from the angel’s wing.

  Turning from the river, Elisha glanced down at Mordecai. Although conscious, he had not lost his pallor, and would need a long time to regain his strength. Still, Elisha could not afford to leave the king another captive, especially not one he thought already dead.

  “The king has given me a charge I must complete.”

  The surgeon nodded slightly. “Trading you for the messenger. He asked what I knew about you.” At this, a slender smile trembled on his lips.

  Stifling a chuckle, Elisha replied, “Everything.”

  “Nothing,” murmured Mordecai, “Not if you are capable of what you have just done.”

  “I can’t risk leaving you here. Can you walk?”

  “I asked you that myself not so long ago.” Mordecai
pulled himself to a sitting position, steadying himself on Elisha’s arm. “A lifetime ago.”

  “Two lifetimes,” Elisha said in return. He slipped an arm around the thin shoulders, and they rose together, both shaky, leaving the shadow of the hanging tree.

  As they made their way toward the hospital, a strange wind stirred the reeds on the opposite bank, as if they startled the air itself. In the lords’ encampment, nothing moved but a few pennants and the billowing of the tents, their flaps all lowered. The breeze carried a stamping of hooves from unseen horses. For the moment, Elisha was simply relieved to have few onlookers as he helped Mordecai up to his room.

  Wind scattered the pages Elisha had stacked so neatly, and the surgeon made a soft sound at the back of his throat. “All of my books,” he sighed. “I had so many books.” Disconsolate, he gazed about the room as if they would appear.

  Letting him down onto the bed, Elisha retrieved a scrap of parchment and offered it up.

  With a glance, Mordecai’s eyes brimmed with sudden tears, as quickly blinked away. “The prayer book. That alone could have no value, not to such as these.”

  Elisha bowed his head and sank to the floor. All the weariness of the past few days stole over him. “I was here,” he said, “looking for you. I should have guessed—” He interrupted his regret upon hearing a gentle chuckle, and looked up.

  Sitting nearly naked on his bed, his most loved possessions carried off, still Mordecai managed to sit tall, his chin raised. Without a word, he raised his right hand before him, his dark eyes on Elisha’s face, and smiled gravely. That air of knowledge Elisha had once found so intimidating seemed to grow again around him, the crinkles around his eyes and lips holding wisdom Elisha might never know. But then again, he might.

  A grin broke over Elisha’s face. Whatever happened next, whatever dark deeds he might be responsible for, this moment would shine. Impulsively, he asked, “Teach me, Sage. There is so much I still need to know.”