Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) (25 page)

We travel eastward. I spot the first of the plaguers to the north. Small groups of them wandering without aim. They turn to face us and there is a moment of hesitation before they lurch toward us. I have seen many plaguers do this. As if they are startled to see us. As if, for one heartbeat, they have forgotten that we are food. But they remember quickly.

I lash the horses with a branch and the wagon outpaces the afflicted. Tristan rides close to us. “That chiming probably sounds like a dinner bell to them.”

When I think we have gone a mile, I turn the wagon northward again, toward Norwich, and I find the first problem with my plan.

Chapter 36

There is a river in our path.

The Yare again, or perhaps the Wensun. I should have thought this through. I stare into the dark water and watch small clusters of bodies drift peacefully downstream. The bodies do not move, but I know better than to think them dead. Morgan, Tristan, and I found out in a catastrophic way that dead bodies in rivers are rarely dead these days. There were more bodies than this in the Thames when we crossed it. Many more. So many that when they started moving and climbing onto our boat, we capsized. We tumbled into hell itself, plaguers above and below the surface of the water. It was the hairy sea and we were nearly devoured in it.

I stand on the driver’s box and squint. I can see the walls of Norwich from the bank of the river. They sweep around the city, a city punctuated by squat, round towers every hundred paces or so. There is no wall on the east side of Norwich, because the river is barrier enough. The east gate is flanked by tall drum towers. We are too far to see if there are plaguers at the eastern bridge. It does not matter. We do not need entrance into the city. We just need to get closer. I sit back down. It is not even possible to start our journey from here, because we are on the wrong side of the river.

I think of the child in Bure. Theodore. What was it he said about the simpleton and the fortress?
He couldn’t go there no more
. I begin to understand.

Tristan and Belisencia are silent. I rub at my eyes. The fever is growing worse.

“There is only one choice,” I say.

“I truly hope it’s not the choice I think it is,” Tristan replies.

“Does the choice you are thinking of involve us riding eastward for miles until we find a ford or bridge?”

Tristan cocks his head and squints. “Actually, no.”

“Good,” I reply. “Because that’s not the choice.”

“Wait…I like that choice.”

I turn the horses to the west and goad them toward the south gate of Norwich.

He couldn’t go there no more
. Of course he couldn’t; he always had to go
through
the city. And sometime in the last few months, the city had succumbed to plague. The afflicted occupy Norwich now, an invading army with soldiers recruited from nightmares.

“Edward,” Tristan says. “Let’s talk about that eastward choice, shall we? I just want to discuss it a bit. Please? Edward?”

Nothing he says will deter me, and he knows it. This is the only way. We must enter Norwich and cross the entire city to reach the east gate.

Belisencia brings her hands together, closes her eyes, and prays.

We pass an abandoned priory on the banks of the river; high grasses and wildflowers slowly devour the stone buildings. Just past the priory is the first gate. A sign over the entrance declares it to be King Street Gate. It lies just west of the river but it is not the main gate of the city. I do not want to travel through winding streets trying to find our way to the east gate. So we ride past.

Berstrete Gate is a few hundred paces to the west. It is an imposing stone gatehouse with a tall round tower on the left and shorter one on the right, but it is not the one I want, either. I have never been through Berstrete Gate and I do not know where it leads. We rumble past it, and a quarter mile to the west I spot an old leper hospital that I passed the last time I arrived in Norwich. It, too, looks abandoned, and just beyond its overgrown garden lies St. Stephen’s Gate. That is the entrance John of Gaunt took me through. It rises like a castle keep from the flint walls of Norwich. Thick, crenelated towers flank the gatehouse. Angels and saints decorate the stonework, and statues of dead priests and bishops fill niches along the walls.

Saint Stephen was a deacon who was stoned to death for disagreeing with church doctrine. I think about the church view of alchemy and grit my teeth as I guide the wagon toward his gate.

“Edward, we will be trapped in that city.” There is no humor in Tristan’s voice as he calls to me from his horse.

I slow the cart so we can talk. “We won’t be trapped, because there won’t be enough time. We will storm through the city so quickly that the plaguers won’t be able to gather.”

Tristan shakes his head and pulls his helmet on. “We’d have a chance if we were all riding horses, but with a cart?” His helmet shakes from side to side.

I put my own helmet on and lash the horses to a canter. “Lie as flat as you can in the cart,” I call back to Belisencia. Her lips quiver as she curls up in the bed. I wish I had a dagger to give her, but I lost mine in the forest outside of Bure.

St. Stephen’s Gate is open. The spikes of the portcullis poke from the top of the gatehouse like Lucifer’s teeth. I take a long, slow breath. In this plague-swept kingdom, cities and towns are death.

I pray to Mary, Giles, and God.

Let us make it through the city. Keep us alive
.

I cross myself, kiss the pommel of Saint Giles’s sword, and take the wagon through the devil’s open mouth.

And I find nothing.

It is a city, nothing more. No armies of plaguers. No dead bodies. Just an abandoned city. Rows of tile-roofed, narrow houses line the northwest side of the cobbled street. Derelict fields lie to the southeast, the ridges and furrows sprouting the first stubble of grass. Our wagon wheels sound like thunder on the silent lane, the chime of the metal strips like a church bell. I squeeze the velvety reins tightly and turn my head to one side, then the other, searching through twin rectangles for the first of the plaguers.

“Where are they?” Tristan shouts. He holds his sword in one hand, swinging the blade toward our own echoes.

I understand how he feels; the anticipation is dreadful. It is like a crossbow pointed at my face. I would prefer them to come all at once than to suffer the torture of waiting.

I spot Norwich Castle up ahead, soaring above us on a motte nearly a hundred feet high. I can make out the great white keep and the walls of the inner bailey. We pass the fields and the houses and reach a baffling junction of streets. Roads split off to the south, the east, the northeast, and the northwest. I stop the wagon and think. The helmet makes my head hurt. It is too hot inside my armor. I do not know which way to go.

“Ed?” Tristan’s horse tosses its head. It looks as nervous as Tristan does.

“Give me a moment,” I say.

“Why are we stopped?” Belisencia’s voice is shrill behind me.

“A moment!” I shout. The Bishop’s Gate. The name comes to me from nowhere. Perhaps Mary or Giles felt pity on me. The Bishop’s Gate is the eastern gate. It lies near the cathedral, which I remember is northeast of the castle. I study the northeastern road. A trickle of filthy water runs down the central gutter, smelling of sewage and old waste. The road appears to lead directly to the castle. Not where we need to be.

I slap the reins and turn the cart to the northwest. The crisp clatter of our horses’ hooves spills out across the city again. A stone church with a Norman tower rises in front of us. The sign by the gravestones declares it to be St. Mary’s, and I know I have taken the correct road.

The thoroughfare widens abruptly into a long market square, but there are no stands or marquees. It is empty and eerie. A gust blows a child’s filthy hat across the cobblestones as we rumble through. Homes of wood and halls of pink carstone stand shoulder to shoulder along the square, but no one moves in them.

When I was young, I was often taken to Rye, where French stone shipments arrived with some frequency. My father loved Caen stone, despite its French origins, and used nothing else on the buildings of his manor. Father would lead me to the docks before the sun rose so we could be the first to see the consignments. He taught me to read the stones, to find weaknesses in the great slabs, and to only buy stones that would outlast civilizations. I was often in Rye before the sun rose, before the world woke. It was quiet on those mornings, but you could still hear the town’s pulse. The rattle of handcarts. The waking cries of gulls. The boom of sailor’s voices. The creak of ropes upon pulleys and the rumble of wooden crates dragged onto ramps. The heartbeat of a city at rest.

But here in Norwich there is utter silence. There is no pulse, no heartbeat. The city does not rest; it is dead. And not even the plaguers want its corpse.

Fear rises in my throat like bile. Why would the afflicted avoid a city? I think of the dragon in Bure. The last time plaguers ran from something, Tristan nearly died. But something else pulses just beneath my fear: a wild hope. Could we cross the city without encountering even a single plaguer? Will our journey through Norwich be bloodless?

We pass a thatched, wooden tollhouse and the market square ends at another crossroad: East or west? I stop the cart. We are still not completely past the castle. It is too early to go east. But the western thoroughfare takes us in the opposite direction to where we want to go.

“East.” I call to Tristan, but he looks at something on our left. I follow his gaze across the square to a narrow alley between a row of three-story homes and workshops. A figure walks toward us. A normal gait. No lurching. No shambling.

My breath quickens and for an instant I mourn humanity; I mourn because I have learned to fear my kinsmen even more than I fear the plaguers ravaging our kingdom.

The figure walks toward us more quickly. There is something odd about its head. Tristan and I draw our swords at the same time.

“Stop!” I shout. “I am Edward of Bodiam. What do you want?”

The figure does not stop. It walks toward us at an even faster pace.

“Halt!” I shout. But the figure trots, then runs slowly, then sprints toward us, its arms pumping wildly. The thing shrieks, its cry like the trumpet of Judgment Day in the noiseless city. I get a good look as the figure clears the shadows. The world spins.

Matheus was right. Hugh the Baptist was right. We are in purgatory.

The creature running toward me is a demon.

Chapter 37

There is no time to escape. I leap from the wagon, feeling unsteady from fever, feeling the faint protest of my ankle, which still throbs occasionally underweight.

I have no doubt that the creature is a demon. The left side of the fiend’s face oozes and bubbles as if the flesh were made from melted wax or boiling pitch. The forehead bulges monstrously on the left side, like ten loaves’ worth of yeast rising, a deformation so large that I wonder how it keeps its head from lolling to one side. It wears a torn and filthy white robe.

The demon howls again as it nears us. Tristan canters toward it, his sword raised high in the air, but his horse rears. It is not a warhorse, but I imagine even warhorses would rear at such a creature. The fiend hurls itself at Tristan. Its hands reach forward, its misshapen mouth open. The demon crashes into the rearing horse, battering it with its grotesque flesh, knocks the animal to one side so that it almost topples. The fiend’s oversized teeth rip into the animal’s neck. The horse cries out and tries to rear once more, but the demon’s weight holds it down. Tristan leans low and hacks again and again with his sword, sending spatters of blood and strips of dirty cloth into the air.

Belisencia screams just as I reach Tristan. I whirl and see another demon sprinting toward the wagon from the opposite side of the square. One of its arms is far too big. I run back toward the cart and see another figure emerge from a workshop door. And yet another leaps from a second-story window. This last one falls to the cobblestones, then scrabbles to its feet and runs at the wagon, screaming the gibberish of madmen.

I take position between the cart and the approaching monsters. The first has a nose so misshapen and swollen that it simply looks like a thick cut of meat thrown across the face. The left eye is a black, glistening slit that lies slanted halfway down the cheek. One arm is swollen to an impossible size, as if pigs had burrowed beneath the skin and died there.

It leaps at me from three paces away. I slash and spin, and the demon’s body strikes my shoulder and tumbles to the cobblestones. I stagger to one side and fall to a knee. The creature rises. Blood from my slash seeps into the chest of the white woolen robe. Its good eye is dark as Satan’s arsehole and ringed in red.

“Tristan, they’re plag—” Something strikes me in the back with enough force to knock me prone. I roll onto my back and kick at the grotesque form above me. One eye protrudes from the side of the face like that of an enormous frog; a great bubble of an eye that looks as if it was nailed haphazardly against the melted flesh of its temple. I thrust my sword through that bubble and a rancid brown fluid erupts from it, trickles into my air holes and spatters warm upon my cheek. It smells like rotting milk. The creature does not even hesitate. It continues to claw at me, its shapeless teeth snapping. Do these demons not feel pain?

Belisencia calls for Tristan. The other fiends. I grab the creature’s bloated shoulder with one hand and shudder as my fingers sink deep into the soft flesh. I push the demon backward and try to drive my sword into its mouth. It is too close to me. The tip enters its mouth, but at an angle, and I have to slowly carve my way into its skull, straightening the sword little by little. Blood runs down the length of the blade. The demon makes choking sounds but does not stop clawing at my helm. I withdraw the blade and slash its neck. Then angle the blade deep into its other eye. The creature gurgles and flails like a herring in the net, but still it claws at me. I drive the blade all the way to the hilt. Twist it. Saw at the head until the monster stops moving. Then I kick the body away and scramble to my feet. I sway and look for my next foe.