Emaculum (The Scourge Book 3) (21 page)

“I will go by myself,” I say. “The rest of you hide in the trees over there. There’s no sense in risking all our lives.”

“I thought we came to an understanding about this at the priory, Edward.” Morgan runs the whetstone over his dagger blade as he talks.

“Where you go, we follow,” Tristan says. “I don’t want to quote the Bible, Edward, but I will.” He purses his lips and squints. “In truth, I can’t remember the verse, but it has to do with falling into a cesspit or something.”

“‘Two are better than one,’” I say. “‘For if one falls, the other will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up.’”

“That’s the one. Don’t make me say what you just said.”

It was the verse Belisencia spoke to me when I tried to sneak away from the Hedingham nunnery. I wanted to leave them there, in safety, while I finished my search for the alchemist. But they would not allow me to. I look at Tristan and he returns the stare.

We continue walking.

“If Richard’s men are waiting for us there,” Tristan says with a grin, “You all know what to do, no?”

Zhuri and Morgan grin. All three of them shout it at once: “Flee! Flee for your lives!”

“What possessed me to bring such fools as you along?” I grumble.

“To bring
fools such as you along
,” Zhuri corrects.

 “We’re not fools,” Tristan says. “We’re clever chickens.”

“And you’re hopeless without us,” Morgan adds.

I smile in spite of my anxiety and call back to the Italian. “Pantaleon, you can go if you want. We may be walking right back into Richard’s hands by entering that village.”

The Italian shakes his head. “You want that I go so you not have to give to me the paid. I follow behind. Perhaps you find for me a woman to have the pleasure with?”

 “We don’t even have a horse for you to have the pleasure with,” Tristan replies.

Zhuri sighs. “I could use a good woman. Or a good horse, really. It has been a while.”

He and Tristan chuckle.

Pantaleon laughs with them. “If you are needing the pleasure so many, you can to bugger my arse. For the paid, of course.” He continues to laugh. Tristan and Zhuri grow silent. We all stare at the Italian.

“What did you say?” Morgan asks.

Pantaleon smiles nervously. “It is a thing that sometimes is done, in Italia. Men put their . . . their
pene
into arses. For the pleasure.”

“I know what buggering an arse is!” Morgan stammers. “Do you let men do this to you often, you obscene bastard? For pay?”

“It was for joke!” the Italian shouts. A flush rises in his cheeks. “You say bugger a horse, and we are missing horses, so I offer donkey! It was joke only!”

Tristan’s laugh is loud and short. “You were talking about the donkey?”

Pantaleon frowns, gestures toward the animal. “Do you not speak the English? A donkey in the English has name of
arse
.”

“Ass,” Tristan replies. “A donkey is called an ass. Two small letters, one enormous difference.”

Pantaleon frowns. “Then what is the arse?”

“It’s a filthy canal.” Tristan shrugs. “That’s what the alchemist called it.”

“Quiet,” I say. “They’re looking.”

The soldiers face us now, their helms dipping toward one another occasionally to exchange comments. I wonder again if Richard’s men have been here. Morgan runs the stone across his dagger blade as we walk. It sounds like death’s fingers scraping toward us.

A door of bound wooden logs blocks entry to the village. The soldiers peer down at us as we near. They wear flat-topped nasal helms with chainmail coifs, but I cannot make out the arms on their tabards. One of the men calls down when we are ten paces from the gate. “Are you here for the trial?”

Tristan looks to me but I do not return the glance. I keep my eyes on the soldier and nod. “Yes. The trial.”

“What’s that thing with you?” The soldier calls down.

I glance back at the animal Pantaleon holds. “It’s a donkey.”

“It is ass,” Pantaleon shouts.

“I know what a donkey is,” The guard calls back. “I’m not concerned with the donkey. I’m talking about the other thing. Is that an Arab? No infidels are allowed in the village during the trial.”

I glance at Zhuri. “He’s not an infidel.”

 “I’m not?” Zhuri asks.

“Tell him that you follow Christ.” I whisper through clenched teeth.

“Edward, I have no doubt that Christ was a wonderful man, but Muhammad is my prophet.”

“Tell. Him. You. Follow. Christ.” I wave cheerfully to the soldier.

It is several heartbeats before Zhuri speaks, and I realize the turmoil I have created in his heart. “I am not an infidel,” he calls. “I used to be. But I . . . I follow Christ, now.”

The guards whisper to one another. “If you follow Christ, then quote the scripture, infidel.”

Zhuri lets out long blast of breath and looks to me, then Morgan. It is impossible to relay a verse to him without the guards seeing it. But Zhuri does not seem to need my help.

He looks back at the soldiers, clears his throat, and quotes scripture: “‘There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emissions were like those of horses.’”

“So sayeth the Lord!” Tristan shouts.

The silence that falls upon us is a profound one.

“That’s not in the Bible,” one of the guards calls finally. “You just made that up.”

“Do you not know the Words of God?” Zhuri shouts. “Perhaps
you
are the infidels.”

“Those are good Words,” the other guards says. He disappears, and the gatehouse shivers as he clumps down stairs that we cannot see. The door of wooden logs swings open and the guard nods to us. “The Arab can come in, but the leper has to wait outside.”

“I’m not a leper,” Morgan snaps. “These are clerical vestments!”

“We could give him a bell to ring,” Tristan says. “Could he come in then?”

It takes us time to convince the soldier that Morgan is not a leper. The second guard climbs down and joins in the argument. Tristan thoughtfully offers to let the soldiers “bugger the Italian’s arse” if Morgan is allowed in, which almost gets Pantaleon banned from the village as well. But it is the tiny book of lewd Bible verses we found in the scriptorium that finally ends the argument. Tristan hands it to the guards. One of the two can read, and he thumbs through it warily, then with more enthusiasm. The two soldiers chortle over the selected verses and wave us into the village without looking away from the book.

Tristan says something to them, but I do not hear his words. No sound comes to me at all as I stare into the village.

 “Shut the gate!” I shout. “Shut the gate!”

But there is no time. Nearly fifty afflicted souls run toward us, snarling, howling, unstoppable.

The village seethes with plague.

EPISODE 5

Chapter 25

The sword of Saint Giles sings as it leaves its sheath. Tristan’s blade flashes in the morning light. The plaguers—a dozen paces away—stumble toward us, shrieking.

“Run!” I resist the urge to tell my friends to flee for their lives. “Run!”

The first line of plaguers jolts. Their heads snap backward. Their legs skid forward and they fall to the muddy earth. The next line does the same. And the ones after that. They fall upon each other in a groaning mass of rotting flesh, one wave after the next, until all of them lie writhing on the ground, chains clinking and grinding.

“They’re chained,” Morgan’s breath trembles. “They’re bloody chained.”

The two soldiers burst into laughter.

Zhuri picks himself off the muddy track and brushes at his clothes. “Funny? Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“It’s not a joke,” the guard replies. “But it’s funny, anyway. Don’t matter how many times I see it.” The two soldiers laugh again.

The plaguers have been fitted with iron collars. Long chains connect these collars to a large, metal ring driven into a sunken log.

“What is the purpose of these plaguers?” I ask.

“Their purpose,” one of the soldiers says, “is to eat.” They burst into laughter again.

“And they will eat, if you don’t replace that rusted ring,” Tristan snaps. “You’ve got all of them hooked to one ring? Are you mad?”

The guards wave us into the village again and return their attention to the book of lewd verses.

A thickset soldier holding a spear meets us inside the walls and introduces himself as Brian Nottynge. His surname means ‘bald’ in the old tongue, and it suits him. A thick brown beard runs wild about the bottom of his face, but, like a mountain, no shrubbery makes it to the upper slopes.

Brian motions for us to enter a long post-and-beam hall. A ripple of fear courses through me. I wonder again if Richard’s men have been here. I wonder if we are walking into a building full of soldiers. I wonder if we will die today.

My hand rests on the hilt of my sword as I enter.

I was correct about the soldiers, but not their purpose. Six of them, wearing hardened leather tunics, order us to remove our clothing and boots. They inspect our bodies for bite marks and touch hands to our skin to feel for fever. One of them, a wiry man with a cleft chin studies the scars and scabs upon Morgan’s body.

“Self-flagellation,” I offer. “He suffers so that God may lift this plague.”

The guard grimaces at the extent of the wounds. “He keeps suffering like that and he’ll be able to ask God to lift the plague in person.”

Brian Nottynge watches from a bench by the door as we don our armor again. “So you’re here for the trial?”

Morgan works the straps on my breastplate. I want to ask Brian about horses, but I do not want to raise suspicions by asking too quickly. So I simply nod to him.

“I can’t tell you how we laughed at that joke by the main gate, Brian,” Tristan says. “Can you picture how funny it will be when they jump out at an old woman? Maybe she’ll die right away and not suffer through the pain of a ruptured heart.”

“Not meant as a joke,” Brian replies. “The councilmen wanted them on the outskirts. But you can’t leave demons untended. Up by the gate, they’re guarded.”

“Unassailable logic,” Tristan replies.

Brian picks at his beard. “There’s no chance that any of you are attorneys, is there?”

“No,” I reply. “No chance of that.”

“Do any of you have a familiarity with the law?”

I am a member of Parliament and know the law well enough, but I will not tell this man anything that will identify me. My first thought is to simply say no, but helping others is often the surest way of helping yourself. “I’ve settled disputes in a manorial court. Are you in need of advice?”

He scratches at the unruly beard and nods. “That might just help. What’s your name, sir?”

“John Radynden.”

Radynden is my family name, though no one knows me by it.

“Well, Sir John, you may prove quite useful today.”

We leave the hall, and Pantaleon unties the donkey from the small apple tree where he left it. Brian leads us along a rose-lined track, past clean and well-tended wattle-and-daub cottages. We reach a stone church with an octagonal tower. The building sits in the crook of two roads at the village center. At least a hundred villagers have gathered around a waist-high wooden platform built in front of the church. The men and women look thin, but healthy, and I marvel that this village has managed to shrug off the plague, perhaps even thrive.

There are two men on the platform: one sits in a chair, wearing a simple knee-length woolen tunic, and the other stands before him, dressed in the long, wide-sleeved houpelande robes that attorneys wear. The two men do not speak, and I imagine they are waiting for proceedings to begin. Someone has built a scaffold next to the platform and a hangman’s rope dangles from it.

“Gallows at a trial,” Tristan says. “How wonderfully efficient.”

“Wait here.” Brian pushes his way through the gathered villagers. I mark his progress by the ripples of the crowd. Tristan points down the road, just past the church, to a metal cage hanging from an oak bough. A skeleton rots inside the enclosure. “Do you think they have five of those cages for us?”

I look at the gibbet and think once more about Richard’s soldiers.

Brian returns, escorting a well-dressed fat man. This new man approaches, arms held wide to the side, a smile opening like a chasm on his jowly face. “Welcome! Welcome to Wickham Market! I am Martin, the mayor and chandler of this village.” He leans forward, places a hand beside his mouth, palm out, as if guarding his words. “If you need any candles, give me a nod and I’ll dazzle you with wax. Special prices for my new friends.”

“Prices?” I ask. “Do you still accept coin here?”

“Why, of course we do,” Martin replies with an exaggerated wave of his arms. “Plagues come and go, but coin is eternal.” He reaches into a pouch and draws out a silver penny, studies it, then holds it out to us with a flourish. “This coin was stamped forty years ago. Forty years, my friends. It has seen two kings and two plagues. It has lived through the Battle of Crecy, the Treaty of Bretigny, and the death of the Black Prince.” He makes lofty gestures with his hand as he speaks. “The world has changed and changed again, but the coin carries on, unaffected, like a boulder in a stream.”