Elisha Magus

by E. C. Ambrose

  “You are, aren’t you?” she murmured, drawing away, her eyes roving across his face. “If you were not, you should have protested more.”

  “It isn’t what you think, Lucy.” He shook his head, wanting to explain it all and afraid to at the same time. He wanted to assure her he was no servant of evil, and yet how could he be sure? How could a man who drew strength from the dead claim to be in the service of God?

  With a muffled cry, she released his hands, wriggling her arms back to her own side of the grate as she stared at him. Struggling with her heavy habit, she pulled herself to her feet.

  “Please, Sister,” he cried and bit down on his lip to stop the quaver in his voice. “Please, I need your prayers now more than ever.”

  She wavered, one hand on the silver cross at her neck. “Yes, I can see that you would,” she said faintly. “I will not lecture you—you attended mass often enough to understand your sins. Is Helena’s sister right about you? When did the Devil find you?” In the echo of her voice, he heard the question she did not ask: had she herself been so wrong?

  Pulling himself up on the bars, he swallowed the tang of blood. “Sister, I have never been in league with the Devil, and the Church was all I knew of witches until weeks after I left here. We don’t kill infants.”

  “No,” she said, blinking. “Apparently you kill kings. I cannot reconcile this with the man that you were, Elisha.”

  Elisha grasped what hope he could. “Do you still work at the hospital?”

  She nodded once.

  “You use the medicines and treatments that you can, and you heal some, and some of them die. Some of them die no matter what you do. What if God gave you a way to heal them? Wouldn’t you try it?”

  Lucretia stepped a little further back. “You are trying to entrap me, aren’t you? I’ve heard of moments like this.”

  “No, I am entreating you. You know me, Lucy, you know who I am and what I stand for. There’s nothing to reconcile because I am still here, I’m still the man I always was.”

  Flicking a tear from her cheek, she said, “It isn’t me you need to convince.” Then she slipped a hand under the priest’s arm and dragged him up. “Come, Father, we’re done here.”

  “What, what?” he asked. “You’ve got to speak up.” As she drew him into motion, he turned back over his shoulder and made a cross in the air. “Te absolvo,” he muttered. “Te absolvo.”

  Absolved and abandoned, Elisha sank to the floor holding back tears. She was right, of course she was. He wanted to live, and yet no man could, not without unnatural power. He was meant to face a slow, terrifying death. And no one had come to give him the means to escape it. If he died, if he let go of his magic, could he face the judgment of God and of history?

  Men came for him and led him down the dark corridor to stand blinking in the sunlight. The earl looked away, rocking on his heels as the cart was brought around. A phalanx of armed men glittered in the light of day, but Elisha hardly saw them. His mind turned over on itself. If he died, Thomas would blame himself. If he lived, he could never see any of his friends again. If he died, he was no servant of evil. If he lived—Was Allyson evil? Or Martin, who dared to love men instead of women and must, therefore, be more evil than the others? What about Brigit and her mother, desperate to save their people and willing to use any means? Were not ordinary princes taken by that same ambition?

  They prodded him into the cart, his bound arms held before him. But if a soul as loving as Lucretia’s could not allow for magic, then could it not be he who was deceived? The oxcart lurched into motion, and he swayed, but did not fall.

  People lined the streets, jeering. Something smacked against his head and oozed down—an egg. Elisha almost laughed. Once, he had thrown an egg at King Hugh, a diversion to chase him away. Now it seemed his every deed would return to haunt him. Fitting, on this, the day he should die.

  Rotten vegetables exploded on the cart and on his body, wetting him with the stink of decay.

  Something brushed his hand, something piercingly hot in the chill of his turmoil. A man in a monk’s robe and broad-brimmed hat walked alongside, a thick Bible in his hands. His lips moved, and Elisha caught the chant of Latin verses. “You need to concentrate in order to go through with this,” said Mordecai’s voice inside his head. He did not look up.

  Clamping his jaw, Elisha shook with fear and confusion. “I can’t—I don’t know how any more.”

  “You can,” he said, his voice sharp and urgent. “Listen to me, Elisha, listen. There is a torrent of emotion pouring from you.” His fingers dug into the wooden covers of his book. “What has happened to you?”

  Gathering his wits, Elisha framed the moment in the cell with Lucretia, the loss of one of his dearest friends. His hand brushed Mordecai’s raised fist wrapped around the book. In that contact, he projected his conflicts. He had no time to polish the sending, to make it more bearable, and he saw Mordecai reel with the shock of it.

  “I’m sorry,” he gasped to the air.

  “Then hear your own words, Elisha. Why are we here? Why are there magi at all? Ha shem created the heavens and the earth and all the creatures who live here. We are a part of His work, Elisha. Some men are kings, and some are healers, and some of us are magic.”

  Mordecai jerked his head up, the Latin litany faltering as they approached the gate. “There is no time.” The hat twitched aside as Mordecai met Elisha’s eyes. Mordecai’s stricken face begged for understanding, but he shoved the hat back into place. “The talisman will be under your right hand. The headboard of the coffin is loosely nailed, you should be able to pull it in. There’s a bundle of clothes at the Red Lion Inn, in the crook of the stable eaves.” His shoulders hunched, and he clutched the book to his chest. “You must not give up, Elisha, you’re almost free!”

  But the cart bounced around the corner, forcing Mordecai back into the crowd as the crossroads came into view, and no words could have won Elisha back from the terror that swept through his heart.

  He should have expected to be buried at a crossroads, the traditional place for suicides, murderers, witches. The crowd left an open yard around the area, broader in one patch where the king sat tall upon a wooden throne, his courtiers arrayed around him so that Elisha could not see his face as they approached. Clergymen of all ranks interspersed among them, prepared to defend their immortal souls and to be sure that God’s justice, as well as the king’s, should be served. On the packed earth, a coffin lay open atop a pair of ropes, ready to lower it down into the gaping pit. A man in an executioner’s mask stood by, weighing a hammer in his gloved hands. A mound of dirt towered beside him, two men leaned on their shovels, waiting, and one of them was Morag.

  Chapter 34

  Just for an instant, Elisha had seen his face, the blunt features, the crooked grin with its blackened teeth. Their eyes met, then the crowd shifted, crying out for Elisha’s death, and the man was just a stranger, chewing on a stalk of grass, doing his job.

  Morag! Even if Elisha had mistaken this stranger for that other, much stranger, gravedigger, enough of Morag’s presence lingered here that it chilled Elisha, skin and bone. Whiffs of ruined flesh drifted on the air, the sting of old tortures and the faintest echo of dying moans. Morag had been here. By Christ, what had he done? Had he stolen the talisman, replaced the coffin, nailed the loose board so Elisha would suffocate under the dirt?

  “No,” Elisha shouted, resisting as the soldiers came around to grab his elbows and help him from the cart. He struggled against their grip. “No, Your Majesty, don’t do this!” He flailed, and they pulled him down, tumbling to the ground at first, then hauled up again, their fingers digging into his arms. “Your Majesty, please!”

  He stubbed his toes on the ground, anything to slow their pace as they dragged him forward. Thomas couldn’t help him even if he wanted to, and Elisha felt sick knowing how his shouts must pierce the king’s heart. “I’m sorry,” he cried, and the threatening tears stung his eyes.


  “Too late for that, Devilspawn!” a woman shrieked, her face contorted, her finger jabbing at him.

  He tried to ignore her, searching the crowd. Where was Mordecai? If he could reach him—but what would the surgeon do? A Jew disguised as a monk, coming to his rescue with sorcery? They’d be for the fire for certain.

  “The barber’s bald!” shouted a man nearby, followed by the splat of a rotted onion that seeped into his thin garment. Elisha shivered, as much from the hatred as from the chill.

  “Where’s your brother’s child, butcher?” someone called.

  Elisha’s eyes blurred the faces of the crowd. He racked his mind for someone who could help him, anyone. Focus! He forced himself to see, but he recognized too many of the faces: children whose births he had assisted, men whose bones he had set, women whose hair he cut just so. Or rather, he thought he recognized them until he saw the hatred that twisted their lips and the scraps of garbage in their hands. A group of the whores who used to come to him for cures opened their bodices and laughed, displaying the breasts he would never touch. He had steeled himself to be ignored by the king, but not to be so thoroughly reviled by those he always sought to aid.

  Elisha bowed his head, forcing back tears that would only give them more fodder for their curses. He brought up his arms to cover his ears, but it did not matter, the disgust and fury of the crowd crashed over him. Their loathing cut him. Hoots and brays of laughter stung his skin.

  Guards pushed back the crowd, struggling to do their duty. If anyone caught Elisha’s eye, they thrust up sticks or fingers forming the cross. Shivering uncontrollably now, Elisha felt the cold tendrils of Death reaching out for him. His teeth chattered. His enemy had been there, and his friends could do nothing but watch, believing he would find the means they had provided for his escape. They would watch in vain, and his attempts to reach them now would only torture them later, when they realized they had failed him.

  The calloused hands of his guards felt too hard, too angry or, worse, too uncaring, as if he were not a man about to be buried alive, but a corpse indeed, ready to be thrown to its rest.

  His skin itched with the mounting hatred, the curses lashing against him. He had once withstood twenty-seven lashes without weeping, but that bravado dissolved beneath the weight of other men’s emotions. He tried to curl back into himself as he had inside the cell, but the curses pierced him still, his defenses weakened first by Lucretia, then demolished by that sense of Morag. He tried to cling to Mordecai’s voice inside his skull, the details of the plan he had proposed. Then his shadow touched the coffin laid out just for him.

  The sky overhead went dark. Losing sight of his shadow, Elisha looked up. Thousands of crows swirled in the air above. They croaked, mocking him from on high, come to see him fulfill their mistress’s curse. More and more of them arrived from all directions, soaring and wheeling over the crowd, the black mass of their enormous flock centered over the coffin. A few of them perched on the edges and defecated on it, defiling the place of his death.

  The human gathering, silent at the crows’ appearance, began to murmur and huddle a little closer to each other.

  “They’ll think I am the Devil now for certain,” Elisha muttered, glancing back up at the circling birds.

  One of the guards spat at his feet. “You’re not so high as that. I’ve heard how the Devil takes his witches.”

  Elisha swallowed the tide of nausea rising from his gut. He, too, had heard the stories, the Devil seducing his handmaidens for their evil work. No wonder the crowd was disgusted by him—men were supposed to be stronger than that. Thank God no one had seen the kiss in the dungeon last night, or they’d throw Martin in the grave as well.

  The chubby bishop was arrayed in cloth-of-gold and decked with a jeweled scapular. The staff he carried gleamed with yet more wealth, especially the golden cross at its peak, glittering in the sunlight that shifted through the wings of the circling birds.

  Raising his arms, the bishop began to mumble something in Latin. Many of those in the lords’ echelon bowed their heads and folded their hands together, and the gathered clergymen, be they monks or priests, moved their lips in echo.

  As he had in Father Michael’s faith and Lucretia’s compassion, Elisha felt the power of the Church, in a physical way. This time, the words of the liturgy rebounded all around him in a sort of binding and repelling spell, bent on casting him out, banning the Devil he was thought to serve. He could not understand the words, but their intention was plain enough, and they hummed in the air and in the earth beneath his feet. As the chant grew, it drowned out the excited peasant crowds beyond, then even the raucous crows. It beat upon his ears louder and louder.

  The guards brought him to stand with his toes at the coffin’s edge, facing the rough wood. It looked dark and mottled, as if they had expelled its last victim to make way for him. Could this be Morag’s work? Elisha gulped for breath.

  The force of the Church’s mystic language died away, leaving a resounding silence, and Elisha brought his eyes back to the crowd. In his position, Rowena, knowing herself to be without escape, had used her final power to make an angel of herself. She tried to show her accusers that she held the power of God, not of the Devil, and they had shot her full of arrows for it. Elisha contemplated a similar attempt, drawing up the power he would have in that moment to sway the crowd with some spectacle even more astounding than his death. But when his death came, perhaps hours after they’d topped him with the final clod, he would be already buried, the coffin tight around him, the earth and stones piled upon him. Any casting he could make must reach beyond the grave in the most awful, literal sense.

  It was too late for mercy or confession, for him to fall upon his knees and pray, or beg forgiveness, or whatever it would take to set him free.

  His hands writhed, torn by the metal cuffs. His eyes cast about for help. And fell upon Thomas. King Thomas, with Rosalynn at his side. They sat on a raised daïs to his right, set back from the crossroads, with only the soldiers and the clergymen interrupting their view. The duke of Dunbury stood behind his daughter, his hand upon her shoulder, his face grim and mournful. Rosalynn had placed her hand over his, protectively. Even from here, he saw the darkness that rimmed her eyes.

  Thomas sat rigid, his eyes vacant, his lips drawn together. His expression held a severe concentration, as if he were forced to sit through a performance he did not enjoy but could not leave. There was nothing of compassion in the face beneath the crown.

  The prayers finished, the herald pronounced Elisha’s fate. The yeoman warder shoved his back, and Elisha fell into the coffin, face down so that he would never see the Kingdom of Heaven. Horror slapped his skin, a dread beyond the mere moment. Morag had been here. In some awful, creeping way, Elisha was not alone.

  Immediately, he tried to scramble up, his bound hands under him, scraping the wood, his toes already bloody as he heaved himself to his knees. The heavy shaft of a pike slammed into his back, knocking the breath out of him as he fell. Blood ran from his nose and lips. His cry of pain became a blood-spattered cough. The sharp point of the weapon pinned him down, piercing his shoulder.

  Crows cackled, the only light that reached him broken by the swirl and flap of their wings. With a scrape of wood and a cheer from the crowd, the darkness encroached and was suddenly complete, the pike snatched back, that pressure gone, only to be replaced by the amplified sound of a pounding hammer driving nails into his coffin.

  Elisha gasped and coughed and finally caught his breath. His hands ached, trapped beneath him. His own blood confused the signs and he thrust out his awareness, hurrying, desperate to counter whatever Morag had planned. He could feel the stamping of the crowd, the victory of the priests and lords, the bouncing feet of the children, trying to see.

  Elisha’s questing fingers, seeking a more comfortable place, found an edge of wood beneath his right hand. The talisman, just as Mordecai had told him. Thank God! He had just enough room to shift to one side, his
back pressing the coffin’s lid, his left shoulder giving a stab of pain. His stubby nails pried loose the scrap of wood, and something slipped into his hand. His fingers closed around it, and all that was outside of him was swept away by horror and remorse.

  In his hand, he held his own razor, closed, its bone handle smoothed by years of use. The rivets that held it formed cool dimples against his skin. Something interrupted the flow of the thing, a bond holding it shut, but Elisha barely felt it as the stored emotions it held swarmed up through his hand. His brother had died with this razor.

  Just for a moment, he caught a glimpse of Nathaniel—no, he was inside of him, feeling the tension of waiting, the fear for his wife almost more than he could bear. In his tinsmith’s shop, he worked endlessly over a cooking pot, smoothing down a repair. Footsteps hurried up, and the midwife appeared in the workshop door, her hair wild, her hands bloody.

  “He’s done it,” she spat through shriveled lips. “Your damned brother’s killed your baby, and your wife, too. I told you to wait for the physician, but you—”

  Nathaniel staggered to his feet, the file and pot clattering to the floor, forgotten in an instant as disbelief and grief welled up in him. He ran for the door, shoving past the little woman. “Helena! Sweet Lord, Helena!”

  In a few of his long strides, he came to the door of the house they shared. He mounted the first step and froze, for he heard his brother’s voice. Elisha sounded furious and exhausted in the same breath, his insufferable arrogance finally pushed aside for a problem he could not solve. “If he’d only got to me sooner, maybe then. Or the hospital …”

  Gasping on the steps, unable to get enough air in his lungs, Nathaniel trapped a cry in his throat. It was true. Elisha had always known what to do, while he floundered along, too poor to support the wife he’d taken, not to mention the child. His baby. Dead and butchered. Sweet Jesus, what had he done to deserve this day?