The Enterprise of Death (20 page)

She would not, although at first she did seem calmer. Then the reason for her lack of aggression became apparent: “Girl, I’m trying very hard to pick up a rock to brain you, but my body won’t listen. What have you done to me?”

Awa had awoken early and brought her mistress outside just before sunset, and as the sun sank between the peaks like the lidless, bloody eye of a dying beast, Awa shook her head, disappointed
but, she found, hardly surprised. “He’s cursed me, Omorose, so that the dead cannot harm me.”

“Isn’t that a tragedy,” said Omorose, and she knelt and picked up a rock. Awa watched her closely, and saw the exposed musculature tighten around the stone, Omorose’s entire arm going rigid. She turned and tossed the stone over the cliff. “Poor little ape, protected yet again by her beloved daddy.”

“Don’t,” said Awa, her tongue feeling as fat and stupid as Omorose insisted the rest of her was. “Please, Omorose, don’t. I know what I did to you and—”

“You’re sorry?” Omorose said sarcastically. “Apology accepted, beast, just as soon as you fling yourself off that cliff.”

“I won’t,” Awa said quietly, relieved she had not been asked to do so the first time she had returned Omorose’s soul to its body. She would have, then. Probably.

“Oh well,” said Omorose. “Then why don’t you get on with raping me or whatever you’re going to do?”

“I’m not.” Awa felt the tightness wrap around her throat, as though her mistress were choking her. “I’ll never touch you again. I, I found a way to make it so you’ll be alright, so you can be normal. So we can be even.”

The words sounded so foolish that Awa could not blame Omorose for the incredulous look on her raw, frostburned face. Taking out the ring the necromancer had given her, she offered it to Omorose. The undead horror blinked at it and said, “Am I supposed to be touched that my violator made me a present?”

“I didn’t.” Awa swallowed, resisting the urge to throw it over the cliff and send Omorose hurtling after it. “It’s, it was his. It will make you … normal.”

“Normal?” Omorose plucked the ring from Awa’s palm and slid it on. “You mean
not so much rotten meat
when you say normal, beast?”

“Yes,” Awa whispered, looking away. “Focus on how you
would like to appear. Now. But if you call me beast again I’ll ruin you, understand? I’ll take you apart and—”

“Oh!” said Omorose, and looking back at her, Awa echoed the sentiment. The young Egyptian woman looked even more delicate and lovely than she had in life, and her tattered, stained shroud was replaced with a lovely blue-and-green silken abaya embroidered with tiny trees and flowers. She took Awa’s heart yet again as she admired herself, and for a moment she seemed to forget her antipathy as she gazed at her own flawless hand. “Am I … is the rest of me so fair?”

Awa nodded and, finding her limbs slightly more obedient than her mouth, retrieved the clothes she had made Omorose and offered them next. Glancing at them, Omorose sneered. “What use have I for that trash? My garments are made of far finer stuff, are they not?”

Awa nodded again, and striking a low bow, managed, “I would use the ring to make myself inconspicuous on the road, but I have done you a great wrong and don’t know a better means of making amends. Please forgive me, my lady. Please. All I have is yours, and I would give you my life if I did not need it to better serve you.”

Omorose made a low sob, and Awa kept her head low so her mistress could not see her smile. She had finally forgiven Awa, or if not that, then at least realized that her servant was contrite. Awa would be washed clean in the tears of Omorose, and no longer need blame herself.

Except Omorose was not crying. As her mistress laughed and laughed, Awa supplied the tears she felt the occasion deserved, and only when the dry chuckles faded with the light did Awa daub her eyes with the rejected tunic she held clutched in both hands. Then Omorose demanded she explain what had transpired to allow her to leave the mountain, and with a wondrous ring to boot. Awa told her, in as clipped and dead a tone as the mindless ones giving their answers to any who asked.

“Well, beast,” Omorose said when Awa had concluded, the night fully around them. “I have no use for lizard eggs, and as I cannot bury it in your wretched breast I do not want your dagger, either. I do want his book, though, and I will find it, and I will break your curse.”

The last words obliterated the first, and that small patch of hope in Awa’s breast grew larger and wilder, her palms damp, her mouth dry. “Together we’ll find it, and once the curse is gone I’ll find a way to make you all better. All better, I swear!”

“Once the curse is off I’ll carve out your eyes and tongue and cunt and every other thing that gives you joy,” Omorose snarled, and before Awa could draw back in hurt or lash out in anger her mistress had spun away and was dashing across the glacier. Then Awa’s indignation trumped her naïve surprise, and she pushed Omorose’s soul out of her fleeing body.

Except Omorose was already too far away, and moving farther with every instant. Appreciating just what she had done, and finally dispensing once and for all with her unrealistically charitable opinion of her beloved, she scrambled up in pursuit lest Omorose get away and make good on her threat. Awa could outrun anything on the mountain, and—her right leg was asleep and she tripped, falling in the snow.

Crying out in frustration, she got up and hobbled after Omorose, but by the time she had shaken the limb awake her reanimated mistress was gone, swallowed by the night mountains as neatly as Awa’s tutor would swallow her spirit if she did not find his book, and find it before Omorose. Chastising herself, Awa returned to her hut and changed into the clothes she had made for Omorose. They fit perfectly, given that she had knit them based on her own proportions, and putting the dagger, the box of salamander eggs, the smoked meat, her blanket, and extra clothes into her leather bag, Awa turned her back on the only home she now remembered.

Two individuals of the opposite sex will, if forced to go on a journey together, fall in love. Often begrudgingly, and with a great deal of reluctance by at least one of the parties, to be sure, but love will fall as surely as night after day. In the unlikely event that one of the two is homosexual, asexual, already in a loving relationship, or otherwise disinclined from romancing their traveling companion, love will fall all the harder, like cannon fire upon a charging cavalry; indeed, the less likely the two are to fall in love naturally, the more certain it is that the sojourn will bring them together.

Somehow, preposterous though it may sound, Awa and Manuel did not fall in love on their journey together, in spite of the wife at home who adored Manuel, in spite of Awa’s lack of sexual interest in men, in spite of their mismatched personalities, and in spite of their growing and mutual fondness for one another. The best they could muster was a lessening of fear on Manuel’s part and the honest—if painfully disinterested—observation on Awa’s that Manuel was not so bad-looking, and that was only observed as the result of some self-deprecating jibe the artist had made about his own downward-angling nose. Pathetic.

The more time Manuel spent with Awa, though, the more he wanted to draw her—to sketch and then paint her likeness, and
not upon wooden boards but canvases and abbey walls. Her full lips contrasted her hard cheeks in a splendid fashion, and the bulging muscles in her arms and legs endowed her with a body reminiscent of Minerva, tempting to an artist who had spent so long paying tribute to Venus-like figures. She was, in fact, just as strong as he, yet lacking the androgynous looks that characterized the few other women he had met who carried a sword instead of a spindle, and in her unorthodox and scarred fashion she represented the ideal model.

She would have none of it, at first, but eventually he wore her down with the same disarming charm he hoped would convince von Stein not to have him killed once he returned to the front and reported his mission a failure. He had stood over Awa for a long time the night before they set out on their journey together, the weight of the iron burdening hand and heart alike as he debated with himself whether or not to bind the witch. Part of what it had come down to was, unflattering a light though it may shine on Manuel’s soul, her obvious fondness for his work—had she been a critic that would have made things much easier.

There were other factors, of course. The way she clung to the little piece of smut Bernardo had commissioned as she slept, for one, so much like the way Manuel’s niece had held on to the doll he had made her when she was young, the doll she insisted he take with him for luck, the doll he had seen the witch remove from his bag, hold as reverently as a relic, and then carefully return to his bag as he lay dead on the floor of the cave, watching.

Manuel had wondered if she would struggle as he put the chains on her, if she would resist the bag and the blindfold, both of which would be necessary. He couldn’t very well look at her after that, nor have her look at him. He didn’t think she would fight him.

Fuck that, and fuck him for even thinking it.

Manuel the martyr
, he had thought as he envisioned himself beheaded like John the Baptist or pierced with arrows like Sebastian or dunked in tar like … like … Manuel’s memory for the gory ends of God’s servants failed him there due to the stress of the moment, but his imagination helpfully supplied a picture of all three grisly ends happening to him at once, von Stein cackling, his family shrieking, but then he remembered Awa’s expression when she had asked him if he was living as God would want, or however she had put it, and that was that. Manuel the martyr and the nameless witch, fast friends and road partners. Ludicrous.

Awa could not believe she had a living friend, and sometimes found herself victim to giggling fits to match the one Manuel had suffered in the cave. He was conceited, incredibly conceited, and thought he knew everything, and he came off as condescending even when he was obviously trying not to, but still. A friend, a breathing friend who knew she was a necromancer yet still shared a wineskin with her. Ludicrous.

“You seem like a decent girl,” Manuel said once she had, to some extent, stopped frightening the ever-loving shit out of him. “So why traffic with the devil?”

“I’m a
woman
,” Awa snorted. “And I’ve never dealt with your anti-god, if he even exists.”

“But the raising of the dead is an evil act, rife with—”

“So I’m to understand the taking of lives is less evil, as you say, than the returning of them?” said Awa.

“Now, putting it like that is dodging the issue,” Manuel argued.

“No it isn’t,” said Awa. “You kill other men for money, never knowing, as you yourself admitted, if they’re desperately protecting their homes or simply after the lucre like you.”

“I said that?” It did sound a bit like something he might say.

“You did. So you kill other men, possibly innocent men, for
money. You told me that first night it was to feed your family, but you seem like a smart enough man to earn wages doing something else. I, by contrast, restore life to those who have lost it, and not for money but to help those cut down before their time.”

“Now, I don’t know if Werner and—”

“An exception, and a rare one. These last few years I have scoured this world on a desperate errand, and as I often stopped in churchyards on my travels I found cause to raise the occasional corpse, it’s true, but always, with only a few exceptions, at the behest of the spirits of the dead, souls returned from wherever the dead go.”

“Ah!” said Manuel, careful as ever not to ask about her history. “But you admit there’s a Heaven and a Hell! You said where the dead go! You did! And how can there be a Heaven without God?”

“I didn’t say anything of the sort,” said Awa, exasperated. “Do the sort of people you usually debate with tolerate these, these shenanigans?”

“The people I usually debate with aren’t versed in arcane mysteries.” The artist laughed.

“That’s it, mysteries,” said Awa. “You’re learning. What I do is simply mysterious, not impossible or, as you would have it, evil. As a child I was taught that we are born even, balanced, and maintaining that balance is how we live a just life.”

“You mean a balance of good and evil? That would justify evil actions, wouldn’t it?”

“Using those words, yes, I do mean a balance of good and evil. I think that’s what she meant, anyway, my mother. It’s as sure as daybreak in the east that we will act in our own self-interest at the expense of others, but so long as we maintain a balance we are living … good lives.”