Flesh and Spirit (9 page)

When the lay brother Anselm had hurried off to bed and the choir monk Robierre to the church for another bout of praying, I prowled through the infirmary stores. Using scraps of twine and linen from Brother Robierre's baskets, I wrapped up small amounts of his powders and herbs—anything he had in plenty that I might sell or need. I discovered an herb knife with a nicked blade shoved to the back of a shelf, and I took that, too, bundling it with the medicines in a rag and stuffing the bundle under my palliasse with the bits of cheese and bread I'd saved from every meal.

As I worked, a lesser puzzle nagged at me. Pureblood families flaunted their unbroken descent from the decadent Aurellians by speaking Aurellian and Navron interchangeably. It was a useless skill that only they and hidebound scholars set store by now Aurellia was reduced from a great empire to a walled city a thousand quellae distant. But such childhood training penetrates very deep. Even after twelve years away from pureblood society, I could not have said in which language I articulated my thoughts. Therefore, I could wonder at the Aurellian farewell that Brother Gildas had exchanged with the Evanori lord.
Teneamus
—we preserve.

The infirmary was dark, a single tall rushlight left burning. After returning from his prayers, the yawning infirmarian had retired gratefully to his own bed in the monks' dorter, declaring me well enough to survive the night with only Iero's angels to watch over me.

The weather had taken a turn for the worse. Sleet clicked on the roof and the stone path outside the open window, threatening to freeze and rot what scanty harvest might have ripened in the disastrously short, cold summer. A month or more remained till Saldon Night, and I ought to be basking in Ardra's golden summer, pleasuring a milkmaid out of her chastity in a haystack instead of shivering in my bed.

Unnerved by the day's events, I was infernally restless. When my breath became visible in the air, I dragged the blankets over my head, abandoning my toes to the cold draft left by the waning flames in the infirmary brazier. My wounds itched and throbbed, more annoying than sore. But deep in my gut sat a small tight knot, cold and quiet for the moment, the threads that linked it to every particle of my being slack.

A disease had gnawed at my gut since I was seven, probably longer if one assumed the rebellious temper and indiscipline that caused my parents to despair of me in the nursery were its first manifestations. Every day of my life I had lived with an unrelenting restlessness. On occasion it would worsen, exploding into a tormenting fire in the blood and a virulent overexcitement of the senses—everything I heard or smelled or looked on exaggerated until my body felt raw. By the time I was ten these attacks had become a regular occurrence, and as I got older, the symptoms grew worse and lasted for days at a time. Even soft candlelight would blind me, whispers set my nerves screaming, and any smell stronger than porridge leave me nauseated. The knot in my gut was ever the precursor of an attack.

I lay wide-eyed, sated with the days of sleep, wishing I had been able to convince Brother Robierre to give me poppy extract again. He hoarded it so carefully. Said their plants were not propagating well in the foul weather. That the abbey had any healthy plants at all was a wonder. Perhaps their god had powers enough to protect his holy place.

Matins came and went, allowing me to forget myself for a while in the beauteous surge of their singing—fifty-three strong male voices honoring their god. What deity could fail to manifest himself with such power at his beck? Yet in the ensuing silence, the warning in my belly grew more insistent, and hot, as if Brother Robierre had made another incision and implanted a burning coal inside me.

I slammed a fist into the thin pillow wadded under my head.
This is far too early. It's scarce been a fortnight.
I buried my face in the pillow, unable to stop the calculation. We had abandoned the battle before its second day and spent two on the road, then I'd lain two days insensible in this infirmary, and four more recovering…and I'd last dealt with this a twelveday before the battle. Twenty-one days. Since I'd first chosen to control my disease with magic, I'd never felt its waking sooner than twenty-eight days. The problem, of course, was that the remedy had become its own disease, and I could no longer distinguish one from the other.

So think of something else.
The wind whined in the cold and lonely blackness outside the infirmary walls. The blanket wool tickled my nose. Propped up on my elbow, I drained the last of the weak ale Brother Anselm had left me, and then threw the mug across the square red tiles. The clay vessel shattered. No rushes on the infirmary floor. No straw. Brother Anselm thought them unclean. I curled my arms over my head.

This is no battlefield with the stench of death all around. No whorehouse after the women have moved on to other customers. No stinking back street with rats and refuse your only company. Nor even is it that wretched house in Palinur where your existence was an offense to those who birthed you. You're fed and warm and healing. You've friends here already. You don't need this. Let the cursed sickness burn itself out.

But the coal took flame in my gut, its fiery wounding spreading rapidly into my chest and limbs, into my head, my eyes, my dry tongue. I shoved off the blankets and lay there naked and exposed, unbearably hot as I tried to breathe away the pain. The light seared my eyes. The rain drummed like thunder; the wind bellowed like maddened oxen.

Why had I thought of my parents? If ever the gods had played a wicked prank on human folk, it was on the day they quickened my father's seed in my mother's womb to produce me. From the distance of so many years, my parents' hatred seemed wholly out of proportion to my misdeeds—at least in the years before I learned to detest them in equal measure and was old enough to demonstrate it.

A spasm contorted every sinew in my back, as if a giant played knotwork with my spine. Cascading cramps wrenched my shoulder, legs, and belly.
Ignore them. You've been abed too long.

On a small painted chest near my bedside lay my torn shirt, stained padded jaque, ragged braies, and hose, neatly folded and stacked. The monks had cleaned or brushed them as I lay insensible, and set them alongside my rifled rucksack. They wouldn't have examined the bag too carefully. Surely. I just needed to see.

I grabbed the rucksack, knocking the stack of clothes onto the floor. Every object I touched seared my skin as if it were iron new drawn from a forge. Jerking the scuffed leather bag onto my lap, I prayed that what I needed would be there. I turned the bag inside out and fumbled at the thick seam. Intact.
Blessed be all gods.
Now for a knife…

Holding on to the wall, the rucksack looped over my arm, I hobbled across the tiles to Robierre's worktable. I dragged the stinking rushlight close only to find it on the verge of guttering death. Muttering epithets, I snatched another from the stack under the table, set the fresh one aflame from the stub, and clipped it in the iron holder. Then, seated on the brother's stool, I used his well-honed herb knife to rip the long stitches that held the newer layer of leather to the bottom of the rucksack.
Great Kemen Lord of the Sky, Mother Samele, Lord Iero and your angels or Danae or whomever you dispatch to watch over your children be thanked.
The little green bag—the one Boreas had
not
found—fell into my trembling hand. And the craving swept through me as a fire sweeps across a parched grassland.

In the pool of smoky yellow light I set out the shard of mirror glass, the silver needle, and the white linen thread, and spilled the tiny black nivat seeds—all that was left of my emergency store—onto the table. The fragrance of spice, dust, and corruption burst from the nivat as I crushed the seeds with Robierre's knife. I could not rush, could not afford to be careless, yet the first monk who saw what I was about would know me as a cursed twist-mind, Magrog's slave, a gatzé's whore, and boot me over the wall to languish in the darkness with the rest of the Adversary's servants.

A prick of the needle freed three drops of blood from my finger to mix with the aromatic powder, the pain of the bloodletting as exquisitely shrill as a virgin's scream. My sinews cramped and knotted. My hands shook. Sweat beaded my brow, my arms, my back.
Soon…hold on…
Perhaps my injuries had made the disease and the hunger for its remedy come upon me early and so dreadfully fast.

Holding one end of the thread between two fingers, I let the other end dangle into the reeking little mess, using the connection to channel every scrap of magic that lived in me into the patterned spell. Touching the mixture directly with my agonized flesh would sap the spell's strength before it reached full potency—a hard lesson I'd learned when first experimenting with this particular remedy. The black paste heated and bubbled. In the enchanted mirror glass I watched the otherwise invisible vapors rise from the unholy brew. Waiting…

A mixed-blood alley witch named Salamonde had given me the glass fragment on my fourteenth birthday. The disease had seared my gut and lacerated my senses with such virulence that day, I'd felt the Ferryman's breath on my neck. For the first and only time in my life, I had swallowed pride and hatred and begged my parents for help with my sickness. My mother, typically, retired to her bedchamber and drank herself senseless. My father tied me to his favorite grate and beat me until I pissed myself, insisting that my malady was naught but my vile nature festered in my soul. He said no remedy existed for it. And so, on that night, for the twentieth time that year, I broke the locks on my room and ran away. By the time they dragged me back home three days later, old Salamonde had introduced me to perversion.

The rushlight flickered. I squinted at the glass. One final wisp of vapor drifted upward, taking the last of the earthy scent. I scooped the dark droplets onto my finger and onto my tongue. The potent liquor spread quickly to my pain-racked extremities…the satisfaction of cool ale on a parched tongue…the scent of rain after drought…

Groaning, I snatched up my rucksack and bit down on the leather strap, for the tasteless paste that was my salvation would not instantly quench the fire. The perverse remedy had first to feed the torment. As did I.

I gripped Brother Badger's grinding stone and slammed it, edge on, into my wounded thigh. Once. Again. Fiery agony swelled to monstrous proportion…devouring my organs, my limbs, my senses…threatening to completely unhinge my mind…until the moment body and spirit teetered on the verge of dissolution, and then…

O, elixir of heaven!
Rapture! An explosion of exhilaration engulfed every sense, every limb, every part and particle of my flesh and spirit, transforming pain to pleasure as quickly and as absolutely as the ax of a skilled headsman transforms life to death…

…and then with the same abruptness, it was gone, the convulsion of sensation past. Fire quenched. Cramps dissipated. Throbbing wounds silenced. Every shred of my being quivered with release, the searing heat of my flesh yielding to languid warmth like the aftermath of carnal climax, lacking only joy or merriment. Not oblivion, but assurance that the world was right and ordered exactly as it should be. The rucksack dropped to the floor. My forehead rested on the scratched wood, my dulled mind fallow, my senses throbbing in gratification. The knot in my gut unraveled.

The spell was called the
doulon
. Legend claimed the nasty little enchantment was Magrog's wedding gift to Nemelez when he took his human bride to the netherworld—to ease the pain of their coupling. And more than just the ignorant believed that every invocation of the doulon opened a door to Magrog's kingdom and allowed a demon gatzé to crawl into the earthly plane. Such was no concern of mine.

Some of those enslaved to the doulon burnt or mutilated themselves before they succumbed, for the degree of pleasure in the release always matched the severity of the pain that preceded it. I had not fallen so far out of mind as to do that—not yet, at least. Nor did I use it for ordinary physical discomforts that I could anywise tolerate. I told myself that these practices delayed the inevitable consequence. Every doulon slave went mad eventually, trapped inside a ruined body whose perceptions of pain and pleasure were irretrievably tangled. Unfortunately, between the disease itself and the nivat hunger, the consequences of stopping were equally dreadful. Once in the year just past, I'd had to wait three days until I could get nivat, and I would throw myself off a cliff before doing so again.

Move, fool.
Quickly, before losing all sense, I licked the thread clean and purified the needle in the rushlight flame, packed all away in the empty green bag, and stuffed it in the bottom of my rucksack. No time or means to sew the flap shut again.

The bent, the power for spellworking, was the only virtue of my pureblood birth I'd ever seen, and for good or ill, I had chosen to abandon the small magics I had learned as a boy and whatever greater uses I might develop as a man and spend it all on this. I hobbled away from the worktable and threw the rucksack onto the painted chest. Naked and shuddering, I crawled under the blankets and gave myself to dreams of pain and pleasure.

B
etween supper and Compline, as the gray light filtering through the infirmary's horn windows faded, I was alternately dozing and perusing the intricate little drawings attached to the margins and headings of my psalter. Though lacking the elaboration and gold leaf one would likely find in the abbey's service books, the little codex had been created with the care always given holy books. Had Brother Horach himself inked the illustrations? The copyist had surely borne a fascination with the natural world, inserting energetic and sometimes fantastical representations of stags, foxes, and racing hounds alongside the angels and vines that graced the prayers and psalms. I speculated as to whether he had suited the beasts' postures to the mood or sense of the prayer, which struck me as a clever idea.

Yawning, feeling lazy and dull-witted as always on the day after the doulon, I traced my fingertips over the letters as I had so often as a child. In those days, believing I might remedy my persistent failure to decipher the mystery of written words, I had allowed magic to roar from my body's center into the confounding shapes on the page—scorching no few books in the endeavor. The fingers are the conduit of magic.

I no longer wasted my resources on that particular exercise. I had come to terms with my incapacity and managed well enough all these years. But if these holy brothers discovered my lack, they would surely pitch me over their lovely wall. That was damnably annoying.

I slammed the book shut and hunched deeper in the bed, warm and dry again after the previous day's unsettling excursions. Jumbled thoughts of murdered monks and abbey benefactors who just happened to serve unsavory princes had plagued me all the boring day—or at least when I could avoid thinking of my empty nivat bag and the difficulty of refilling it. I had trained myself to set that worry aside for a few weeks between necessity, refusing to allow the disease or its unhealthy remedy to set the course of my life. The attack, a full week short of the usual and with so little warning, had profoundly unnerved me.

Under the more direct beams of the rushlight, Brother Anselm worried over his colored chart that detailed astrological influences on the body's humors, certain he would find some correlation with my relapse in the cloister garth. Sooner or later the earnest fellow would approach the bed with his piss jar or his magnifying lens or his well-polished lancet, asking politely to examine my eyeballs or the underside of my tongue or to take some sample of my regenerating bodily fluids.

I was trying to decide whether to give in to sleep and thus keep good Anselm at bay, when a blast of cold air heralded Jullian's appearance in the infirmary doorway. The boy was as pale as an Ardran milkmaid's ass. “Brother Anselm, Brother Robierre summons you immediately with his medicine box and both litters. We've wounded soldiers at the gates!”

“Who?” I said, sitting up straight as Brother Anselm jumped from his stool and dragged litter poles from beneath the vacant beds.

“Ardrans. Fifty of them at the least. Or a hundred…bloody…torn to pieces…”

The boy's peaked complexion and strangled declaration indicated that the evening's events had already profoundly altered his understanding of the world. Exposure to ugly injuries such as mine was one thing, but four or five cadres' worth of battle wounds would be far different. Angels preserve the boy from ever seeing the battlefield itself.

It had required many a tankard to dull the images of my own introduction to the soldiers' mysteries. I had never subscribed to myths of noble purpose or personal glory in battle, but I
had
believed that shoving a spear into a twitching body busily shitting itself could make a man of me. I'd blundered through innumerable bloody days since, as much avoiding other fools' spears and axes as wielding my own.

Brother Anselm wrapped the litter poles in their leather slings, dumped them into the boy's outstretched arms, and threw a stack of linens atop the load. After tossing a few loose items from the shelves into a wooden chest, he slammed the lid, fastened the latch, and hefted it onto his shoulder. Before you could blink, only the chilly draft remained with me in the infirmary.

The laws of sanctuary and the sanctity of abbey walls seemed suddenly flimsy.

Two of the royal brothers, Perryn, Duc of Ardra, and Bayard, Duc of Morian, had maintained a deadly balance for three years. As no one had produced Eodward's authentic writ stating elsewise, Bayard claimed the Navron throne by right and precedent as Eodward's eldest son. But Eodward had granted Prince Perryn regency in Ardra—the ancient seat of Caedmon's line—and Perryn insisted that this demonstrated Eodward's intent to name him king over his poorly educated elder brother.

The third and youngest brother, Osriel the Bastard, regent of Evanore, had taken no active part in the three-year dispute save his grisly reaping on the battlefield. Some said Osriel cared naught for ruling on earth, but aimed to supplant the divine Magrog himself as lord of the netherworld. Others claimed he was waiting only for his brothers to weaken each other so he could sweep them both aside with an army of gatzi.

Only in the winter just past had stories of a fourth brother—this child Pretender—risen, and as sure as dead men stink, before the rumor could gather strength enough to create him a rival, Bayard had made a devil's bargain that looked to win him the day. He had allied with the Harrowers.

The Harrowers denied both the elder gods and the Karish upstart Iero, claiming that Navrons had lost their proper fear of the true Powers who ruled the universe. Their priestess, Sila Diaglou, said that our cities and our plowing had defiled the land and that our false religions had caused us to forget these Powers that she called Gehoum, and that was why the weather had gone sour and the plagues and wars had risen.

For years people had laughed at a woman speaking out as if she were the divine prophet Karus come back again, set on changing the ways of the world. Yet, in the last years of Eodward's reign, when pestilence and storms grew worse and the king could pay no mind to aught but Hansker raiders—Sila Diaglou's direst predictions come true—folk began to listen and nod their heads. More and more wild-eyed rabble, dressed in rags and orange head scarves, heeded her call for burning and destruction to “harrow” the land and appease the Gehoum's wrath. Scorned by priests and nobles, she had grown her ragtag band of lunatics into an army to rival those of Navronne's princes.

Throughout the summer campaign, while Prince Perryn dithered and regrouped farther and farther south, claiming that no rabble could stand against his knights and legions, the Harrowers burnt villages and fields and left us nothing to eat and nothing to defend. And then Prince Bayard and Sila Diaglou had joined forces and swept us up like chaff from a threshing floor.

The abbey bells clanged in an urgent rhythm. Distant shouts, mysterious door bangings, and running footsteps from the infirmary courtyard accompanied the summons. The evening reeked of danger. Unable to lie still, I threw off my blankets and pulled on my wool shirt, trews, and hose.

A brown-clad body burst through the door and pelted down the long room to Brother Robierre's shelves—the other young aspirant, Gerard, a soft, stammering boy of fourteen. He shoved bowls and basins aside, knocking half of them clattering to the floor. Then he whirled about, dark stains on his arms and in his eyes. “B-b-bonesaws. Where does he k-keep them? He said the far end…”

I was already on my feet, alder stick in hand. “In that great iron chest down below.”

By the time I joined him, the boy's trembling fingers had scarcely got the lid open. Together we lifted out two trays of small, fine instruments—pincers, scalpels, probing tools of thin wire, and the like—laid out between sheets of leather. In the bottom of the chest lay a number of larger, linen-wrapped bundles. The boy dragged out cautery irons, mallets, and strangely shaped implements of unknown purpose. I'd seen enough use of such tools to recognize the wide blade and thin, squared handle of the bonesaw.

“There. That one. That's likely what he wants. And you'd best take the larger iron as well.”

The boy looked up at me like a begging pup, raising a small key in his hand. “And p-p-poppy extract. He said you'd know where to find it.”

“I'd guess that every wounded man who comes here learns where the good infirmarian keeps Iero's salvation…” I limped to the corner of the room where the roof truss lapped over the wall, forming a high shelf, and lifted down the heavy iron casket that likely only Brother Badger and I could reach. “…but he chooses not to leave it loose about to tempt boys or weak-minded malingerers like me. It will be a boon to those you've seen, as will the care the brothers give them.” Saints and angels, I didn't want the boy to start weeping.

I wheedled the recalcitrant lock open and handed over the precious brown flask. “Anything else?”

The boy shook his head, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and trotted out the door.

I stowed the nicked herb knife and the pilfered herbs and medicines in my rucksack and tied the bag around my waist with a length of linen bandage. Then I pulled my jaque over my woolen shirt, wrestled my boots onto my feet and my damp monk's gown over all.

Caution demanded I bolt. To strike out directly across the River Kay behind the infirmary would get me away from the abbey quickest. But the church would hold valuables—calyxes of gold or silver used for noblemen's offerings, or the offerings themselves—rare oils, coins, gems perhaps, or other gifts from wealthy benefactors and pilgrims. I made Iero's sign on breast and forehead, vowing to take only enough to pay for my book. Stealing from a god's house was a risky practice.

Though twilight lingered in the outer airs, night had already settled in the confines of the inner courts. The wood-splitters' yard was deserted, the wood stacked in the voluminous undercroft, splinters and flakes neatly raked and dropped in weatherworn tinder baskets. The ripe stench of a latrine overlaid the scents of brewhouse and granary. All very natural. Yet I peered over my shoulder fifty times in that short journey, and gripped my alder stick so fiercely I likely put dents in the smooth wood. The guesthouse sat dark. I breathed freely only after I hobbled into the maze of gardens and hedges before the church.

I paused amid the overgrown yews, wondering at the quiet. Perhaps circumstances were not so dire as the fears of naive boys implied. Only a fool would pillage a church and abandon such a comfortable sanctuary without ripe cause. So instead of bearing right into the church, I headed left toward the abbey gates.

Just inside the massive outer wall of the abbey and its twin-towered gatehouse lay the walled enclosure the brothers called the Alms Court. In this pleasant space of fountains and mosaics, where, on ordinary days, Brother Porter dealt with visitors, five dead bodies lay wrapped neatly in linen. A lay brother sponged blood and dirt from a sixth corpse, while a white-haired monk droned prayers over the dead man's battered head. The mournful Porter, Brother Cadeus, filled a pail at a splashing fountain and dashed it over the paving stones as if to expunge the horror.

Save for these few and a trickle of monks hurrying through with blankets, soup crocks, or rolls of gray linen bandages, the courtyard was deserted. I had expected it to be overflowing with wounded.

“Could you take this, Brother?” An overburdened monk thrust an ale pitcher into my hand. Tucking the heavy pitcher in the crook of my arm, I joined the procession. The gate tunnel itself was quiet, the sharp click of my walking stick and uneven clomp of my heavy boots on the stone paving far louder than the shuffle and swish of passing sandals and cowls. The thick wooden gates halfway along the tunnel had been propped open.

Beyond the vaulted entry lay a scene worthy of the Adversary's domain. The broad sky blazed with orange-edged clouds and swaths of gray and purple. Torches had been mounted on staves, illuminating, not a hundred, but surely sixty or seventy bloodied soldiers sprawled on the puddled apron of grass before the gatehouse. They didn't look to be in any condition to cause much trouble for the monks. I had seen the ravages a defeated army could work upon a town or village. And these men
were
defeated. The wounded huddled quietly, suppressing moans and gasps of pain while mumbling prayers and curses. Other men sat silent, twitching at every noise, each man closed into himself, glaze-eyed with exhaustion and hunger.

Monks moved among the crowd like bees in a clover patch, offering prayers, ale, bread, blankets, and strips of linen men could use to bandage themselves until others could see to them. Fires sprang up here and there as the river damp rolled in with nightfall.

Close by the gate tunnel, an Ardran wearing a ripped tabard and cloak over hauberk and mail chausses fidgeted near a small group of monks. His bearing proclaimed him an officer, as did the sword at his waist and the riding crop in his hand.

The moment the group dispersed, leaving only one stocky, bald-pated brother standing by the gate, the officer pounced. “An hour we've waited, holy father,” he said, his tight-lipped sneer more honest than his address. “My lord asks again when the abbot will come and grant his right of sanctuary. Nor have my lord's wounds been attended as yet.”

“All in good time,” said the monk, his shaven head and the silver solicale that dangled on his breast gleaming in the torchlight. “Abbot Luviar works in our farthest fields today. Though we've rung summoning bells, we've no horses to fetch him. Perhaps you can explain to me: I've granted sanctuary to all comers, but none have entered. They say their officers will not permit—”