by C. B. Currie
The Northman was not accustomed to fighting on horseback and was not on a fighting horse in any case, so he had just moments to make a move. They’d fought together and bled together and the knight owed him money. Whatever needed doing, he was getting Beland out of this.
He drew his sword, raced straight past the cluster of wrestling nobles and slashed at one of the enemy horsemen. The man parried with his sword, but Algas had expected he would, but he drew the horse as close past as he thought safe, then simply leaped from the saddle, caught the man unaware and, tackling him about the waist, they tumbled together to the ground in a tangle of stirrups and crashing armor. The landing was hard, but Algas was on top and the soldier’s a helmet, mail coat, steel shin guards and bracers, as well as the shield strapped to his back, all weighed him down heavily. The Northman’s advantage was that he had planned for a fall and landing on top was crucial.
Now the melee began around them. Beland was engaged in a slashing battle with another enemy rider, Jandryl and his son had drawn their swords and the enemy commander had let go of Jandryl’s horse and was hollering at his men. The ranks of mercenaries were scattering Jandryl’s surprised militia and hacking down those who resisted or capturing survivors.
Algas and the rider below him struggled on the ground. His sword was too long to stab with this close but he bashed at the man’s face with the pommel. His opponent had lost his own weapon in the fall, but was flailing and pushing and the Northman’s face with both hands. Suddenly, the man simply slid away from him, as if by some sorcery, flat on his back and still reaching for Algas’s face. The horse, which had stood stunned for a moment had come to its senses and bolted with its rider’s foot still in the stirrup. It galloped into the field with the hapless soldier bumping along beside it and trying not to get dragged under the hooves.
With the sound of weapons clashing and hooves stomping all about, Algas leaped to his feet, sword ready for another opponent. It was then he saw Beland slumped in his saddle. He ran a few steps and grabbed the bridle, touched the knight’s shoulder and saw that he stirred. There was blood running down the horse’s side. Jandryl’s bodyguard had cut down or chased off their immediate opposition, but were cut off from their own fleeing forces. Algas saw that the enemy commander had fled to his footmen and was galloping around them, urging them forward.
‘Ride!’ Jandryl shouted. One of his men was dead but his son and the other were still on their horses. Algas cast about but could not immediately see where his own beast had gone. He leaped onto Beland’s mount in front of the knight and for the second time in his life, the Northman fled battle.
Thirty two
The hovel was low, dimly lit and small. Vanis wrinkled his nose as he looked around. There were only two rooms and both were cramped. There was a cot and a fire pit on the floor in the front room and a tattered curtain separated the back one. There had been a wooden bucket full of human waste outside the door when he had entered and the smell carried inside. Or perhaps the smell was everywhere anyway. The ramshackle huts and houses and the stinking ditches were a part of The Gutters were something he had heard of, but he had never planned to visit this part of the city himself.
He had done well for himself in the past few days as word of his availability had spread. People were dying and relatives needed prayers said and the priests of the Great Chapel, the monks of the priory all hid behind their walls of finely dressed stone, fearing to venture into the plagued city. Vanis was not especially afraid. He was young, strong and had almost never fallen ill in his life. He had visited half a dozen houses, recited the words as best as he could remember them, had gotten paid, and had not taken sick. That was all he needed to know.
The first family had been far from well-off but he had extracted a few pennies from them. The man who had lain dying had been a laborer and the working season had finished and the following summer, if he were gone, the wife and children might starve if they couldn’t find a new man. That was not Vanis’s problem, for he did not plan to be in Bastion next summer anyway. The next two had been better off, a wine merchant and a jeweler’s wife. For those he received a handful of coppers each. From a landowning commoner, he had gotten a silver shilling. He wondered if he could ever get into a noble household. There they might even pay him a gold crown. But he reasoned, such families probably could procure the services of the otherwise timid Bastion clergy.
These little lies he played at – posing as a monk and pretending to be authorized to give folk their dying rites had been profitable enough to get him accommodation. He was still unable to afford an inn like the Laughing Cockerel, but he did manage to get a room with a small bed at a boarding house and nightly he visited another tavern, ironically named the Thirsty Prior, where his performances of chapel songs earned him a meal and a few drinks. He was surprised at how easy it was to earn some coins in the city, even in times of trouble: every day, more bodies were carried out to the graveyards.
But the misery of the Scourge had not really impressed him until this day, late in the afternoon as the sun was sinking low and the chill river mist crawled across the streets, when he first visited The Gutters, and saw how a large portion of the city’s poor really lived. A young man with a limp and a lisp had led him here to find an old woman, feverish and delirious as the rest, wrapped in a blanket on a straw mattress and stinking of piss. The boy might have been a bit simple, for he spoke in short, direct sentences and made no small talk. The woman might have been a healer of sorts, for various jars and concoctions cluttered the room, stacked haphazardly on makeshift shelves and boxes, or in loose sacks. If she did know any potions they hadn’t done her any good.
‘She’s been like this for days,’ the lad told him. ‘There’s no more room at the sick house and nobody has been round to see her since the first day.’
‘How long has she been like this?’ Vanis asked. The question was superfluous because he didn’t have the slightest idea about healing the sick. His business was strictly with those soon to be dead, something he could at least pretend to be competent at.
‘She’s been abed since last winter. Stopped walking all of a sudden. But folk would come to get her remedies and so we earned enough still.’
‘I mean the fever.’
A few days, maybe three? She has these boils on her back.’ And the boy held his hands up in a circular shape to demonstrate.
Vanis knew by now that was usually the end of it. He did feel sorry for the pair. The old woman was frail and it looked like she might have been a handful for a half-lame simpleton to take care of even before the Scourge had taken her. Still, he needed to eat.
‘The Chapel would appreciate a small donation,’ he told them and stood waiting, as was his usual practice.
‘Of course, father,’ the youth said and shuffled into the front room of the shack. Vanis restrained himself from pointing out the difference between a priest and a monk again. He even managed not to roll his eyes this time.
The boy came back with a small coinpurse in his left hand and a copper penny pinched between the thumb and forefinger in his right. Vanis held out his palm and the boy dropped the copper into it. He left his palm open and after a second’s more hesitation, the lad reached into the pouch for another and added it to the first. Vanis understood they had precious little coin to spare and decided he had better not press his luck. He closed his palm around the coppers and turned to the woman, kneeling beside her bedroll.
‘Heaven bless you, Brother,’ the woman croaked through parched lips and gaps in her yellowed teeth.
Raising hand over the stricken woman he made the holy sign and began to recite.
‘Mighty Heaven take this woman into the prophet’s arms. Bless and keep her and rest her soul in the eternal light. Absolve her wrongs and…’
‘Deceiver!’ hollered an angry voice from behind him and Vanis turned to see an old, disheveled monk storming into the room. The monk was followed by a local man, someone he’d visited the day before. He was
speechless as the old man bore down on him.
‘You little bastard!’ the clergyman continued, voice hissing and face contorted. ‘You come in here and cheat these honest folk out of their hard earned money with promises of salvation, like a common swindler!’ and the monk snatched up a long wooden ladle that rested in an empty pot in the corner and began to strike him with it.
‘Liar! Imposter! Thief! Swindler! You’ll be condemned to the underworld! You of all people should know better!
And on and on the old monk ranted as the blows rained down and Vanis cowered under raised hands. The boy with the limp stood slack-jawed against the wall in the corner and the old woman stared wide eyed from her sickbed. But Vanis was laughing and weeping tears of joy as he suffered strike after strike. For the old monk was not a monk but a priest. He was Father Haendric.
When the old priest’s anger and indignation had subsided, they had returned together to the House of Enduring Grace. Now they sat in Haendric’s room at the hospice, each on the edge of one of the two small beds, and drinking a sharp, dry red wine. Vanis was still very happy to see him, but under the circumstances had the decency not to smile so much. Haendric had made sure Vanis returned the coins he’d received to the old woman and her son, lectured him about being an imposter, about taking from grieved families and about exploitation, and finally demanded he hand over the rest of the money the bard had earned in Bastion as a donation to the needy. They both agreed that giving it back to the credulous locals would open even more wounds.
‘How could you?’ Haendric repeated his earlier question, tiredly and sounding very disappointed.
Vanis was mildly defiant. ‘You’re pretending to be a monk, as well.’
‘I was a priest. Heaven spare me, I still am. You have never been ordained. And taking money for absolution like a common pardoner. Do you know what the archdeacon would do if he caught you?’
‘Disrobe and exile me I suppose,’ Vanis shrugged.
‘Not in these times, boy. You’d like as not be hung for thievery.’ Then Haendric’s voice lowered and he looked sad beyond his years. ‘They beheaded Prior Algwyn. And they sacked the priory.’
‘Who?’
‘The archdeacon’s men. There is talk of war afoot. The king and the deacons against the nobles and landowners. And this while people are dying like insects. Never in my life have I seen such times, and I’ve lived longer than most.’
‘I am sorry,’ Vanis said.
‘You’re always saying that, and always getting into more trouble,’ Haendric reminded him. ‘But this time I fear I’m in more trouble than even you could conjure.’
Vanis leaned in eagerly. He always did so when Haendric’s tone changed so.
‘I shaved and took the monk’s robes to hide from the authorities. When we got to Bastion they arrested the prior and next they would have come for me.’
‘But why?’
‘The books. They’re after heretics. The eastern books, the heathen ones. The Qureshis.’
‘What do they want with those?’
And now Haendric had a light in his eyes. ‘There’s something in them, Vanis. Something that was sitting in the library all these years, right under our noses.’
‘But I’ve read them too, and didn’t see anything wrong,’ Vanis protested.
‘And your reading of Qureshi is so good, you might be better than I someday, but neither of us knew what we were reading. They’ve always hated the heathen texts but now they might just have found something so dangerous they can’t just rail against it in sermons. Something they have to expunge completely, and everyone who’s seen it.’
‘Worth killing a man over?’
‘Worth killing a hundred men. Worth starting wars and dethroning kings. The Lost Testament.’
A cough sounded from the other room and Haendric looked at the door helplessly.
‘The lost…?’ Vanis started but then his memory began to work. The Strictures consisted of eighteen books, six testaments - the Gospels of the Prophet Celimar, as told by his followers a thousand years before. The Qureshis recognized only fifteen of these and had three more of their own, for the Martyr Khelim, who was their holiest figure.
‘Yes,’ said Haendric, sensing the young man’s realization, and at that moment Vanis wasn’t sure he knew his old mentor anymore. He spoke with a conspiratorial fervor the youth had never seen in him before. ‘But there were more weren’t there? There were three more that neither our chapel’s Faith nor the Heathen’s creed accept. The Path, Vanis, the three Gospels that make up the Lost Testament.’
‘That’s what they called it, the Path?’
Haendric sighed, suddenly deflated again. ‘I’m not sure. But that’s what it’s called in Al Ghalil’s book, I think.’
‘I never read that one.’
‘There were two,’ Haendric said, suddenly full of fervor again. ‘We had two of them in the library at Havenside. That’s what the deacons are looking for. I have one here.’
Haendric reached under his bed and pulled out the leather bundle, unwrapped the book and handed it to Vanis. The runaway opened it, flicked through the pages of familiar, cursive symbols and looked up. ‘Is it original?’
Haendric shrugged, ‘They’re late copies of course, written three hundred years ago, but near as we’ve ever been to the original. Al Ghalil only transcribed them then. If they are the gospels, then they were first laid down by Celimar’s own followers.’
‘That’s still six hundred years after the Prophet’s life. But where is the other one?’
‘Stolen that night of the storm, remember? Some thief has probably burnt it for kindling by now and taken the bindings. There will be more out there. On the continent, in Selevia, to the east as well no doubt. More than that, there has to be a third volume somewhere. I’m sure this collection came to our shores intact.’
‘So where did we…where did Havenside get it?’
‘I don’t recall. It may have been even before I arrived, though I came not long after Algwyn, Heaven rest him. Or perhaps I bought it from the book merchant that used to be here in Bastion. We had all those books for years in any case and it took me years to get around to Al Ghalil.’
‘And what’s in it?’
‘Read it for yourself.’
‘It’s Old Qureshi, it will take time for me to read.’
‘It has taken me time, but I have already learned so much. It showed me a new way tend to these plague victims.’
‘Have you saved many here?’
‘Maybe half, maybe a little more. There is still much I don’t understand. But I believe the prophet was a healer, and a sage.’
‘So if he was just a healer, why do the deacons care?’
Haendric frowned in that way he had always done, reminding Vanis how little he knew and making him feel small. He looked at the text as Father Haendric leaned over and turned the pages, then pointed out some lines. Vanis could make out heal and wound or sore and something like pierce or stab. Then he saw hands, and words and heal again, or possibly mend.
‘Somehow the Heathen cured them,’ Haendric said. But what words were that he said, or read or understood, the text does not make clear. The lancing of the boils has helped, but there’s some process missing. Perhaps a salve or an elixir of some sort, a recipe you make with your hands. I don’t know yet.’
‘A miracle?’
Hendric shook his head and looked down with just a hint of shame. ‘When I was younger I believed in them but I have never seen one. Oh, we might preach miracles happened on the pulpit, but I’ve never met a chapelman that truly expected to see one in his lifetime. Where are the miracles now with half the town falling sick? No, it must be something else.’
‘So is it heathen sorcery then?’
‘I taught you better didn’t I?’ Haendric scoffed. ‘Magic is even more preposterous than miracles. Yet there is something somewhat magical in them: knowledge, medicine, call it what you will. The Chapel Fathers would call it sorc
ery, but only because it comes from the Qureshis. That’s why they want it gone.’
‘And if I read it, I’m supposed to understand?’
‘No, but two heads are better than one. If it’s in there it’s buried.’
‘Why?’
‘I have always been a man of the Faith, but dear boy, I feel – have always felt – there was so much lacking, something that just wasn’t shared in the holy books. There were always gaps in our understanding of the world. Now I’ve stumbled across it and they’re after it too. And after me.’
‘Why didn’t you leave if they’re looking for you?
‘Donnal asked me, but I had to stay.’
‘Who is that?’
Haendric seemed about to say something, then gathered his words. ’He’s a Knight of the Chalice. They have a chapter house in Bastion. He and Beland fought in the east together.’
Vanis remembered some of Beland’s stories from the deserts. The battle at Buq Tala where half the army was starved and surrounded; the long siege of Sithi Musa, where they had broken into the citadel after months, only to find the few starving heathens had eaten the sacred corpses of their dead and damned themselves even in their own religion. Donnal was a name from those tales, but he had never thought to ask if the man still lived, let alone so near.
‘Asked you? Where is he?’
‘He left for Juniper Keep some days ago. I stayed to tend to the sick. I could not abandon them, not when so many are still coming in.’
‘So you’re in danger here?’
‘We both are now,’ the old priest chuckled and Vanis saw some mischief. Haendric had never seemed adventurous but he had ever liked a joke. Vanis was worried however. Until now he had been on his own adventure, and his only concern had been his old, dull life somehow catching up with him. The prospect of the authorities pursuing him was somewhat unnerving.
‘And what they said about Havenside?’
‘I haven’t heard much but the priory has been burnt down and the priests and monks all killed or imprisoned. I could not glean much but perhaps some novices and lay brothers were just sent away.’
