Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) (12 page)

“Belisencia,” I say. “Whether he is right or not, you should not leap into this without thinking it through.”

“We have leaped already,” she says. “We leaped into purgatory. Look around, Edward. The dead walk. Madness spreads like fire upon dry reeds. Look at the tapestry. Fire. Hunger. Fear. Sorrow. Matheus is right. Hugh the Baptist is right. Their words are the only things that make sense.”

Tristan takes her arm gently. “Belisencia…”

“No, Tristan,” she says. “I told Edward that I do not want to live in a world where I cannot trust anyone. And I truly do not want to live here. We cannot trust, because no one is trustworthy in purgatory.”

She shakes Tristan off and nods toward Matheus. He smiles and leads us back down the spiral stairs of the Norman tower. “Perhaps when you witness Belisencia’s ascension, the two of you will change your minds,” he says.

“Belisencia’s ascension,” Tristan says. “Sounds like one of those bawdy stories the minstrels tell when everyone is in their cups.” He is joking but I hear the anger in his voice.

We leave the church and are guided back to the manor house. Four of the white-robed pilgrims sit carving their masks now. As I watch, the nine-year-old girl joins them. She sniffles and touches the wound on her shoulder, cries when her fingers brush the bloody, broken skin. I look at the afflicted girl and feel despair so deep that it makes me weary. I feel like sleeping. Like lying down and never rising again. But Elizabeth needs me. The slow kindle of fury burns away the weariness. A molten forge of injustice. I want to direct the anger at Matheus, but I am not yet convinced he is wrong. Has he killed the girl or given her eternal joy?

Belisencia takes Matheus’s arm and walks toward the font. The soldiers shove us back with their spear shafts to keep us from following.

“Belisencia!” Tristan shouts. “Don’t!”

Matheus speaks the same words that the bald priest spoke for the others, then tips the ladle onto Belisencia’s head. The blood washes down her face, follows the long strands of dark hair to her shoulders and along her back. She flinches at the touch of blood on her skin. There is a suggestion of a smile on her face, but her gaze darts to the outbuilding and her fingers worry the sleeves of her robe.

“You won’t go to heaven!” Tristan says. “He just needs more oxen!”

Matheus guides Belisencia toward the temple of Hugh the Baptist. Tristan’s shoulders relax. He sighs deeply. Then he springs forward, surprising the guards. He manages five steps before they knock him down. I do not know what he would have done with his hands bound as they are.

“Belisencia! You will die!” he shouts. He strains against the soldiers, but there are too many holding him down. “You will die! Don’t do it!
Don’t do it!
”

I do not know if Belisencia is right in doing what she does, but Robert Knolles, my commander in France, once told me never to buy anything in a market until you have spoken to other merchants.

“I want to see it,” I shout.

Matheus pauses and glances my way. “Pardon?”

“You said you would take us to Hugh the Baptist. I want to see him. I want to watch as she is saved. Perhaps it will sway me.”

Matheus stares at me silently for a time. He glances toward the bald priest, who shrugs.

“You may watch,” Matheus says. “Cut him loose.” He raises a forefinger. “But you will have a knife at your throat. If you try to stop Hugh the Baptist, your life will spill out in the temple, and Satan will claim your soul.”

I nod. The mercenary with the swollen cheek draws a seax from his belt, the metal blade ringing as it leaves the sheath. He cuts the ropes binding my hands and crowds next to me, brandishing the knife, grinning malevolently. Italian, I decide. Probably Genoese.

And together the four of us—Matheus, Belisencia, the mercenary, and I—go to see Hugh the Baptist.

The door creaks open. A small window high on one wall lets in a shaft of light. Dust motes rise and swirl in the sunbeam. The chamber is smaller than it looked from outside. No more than four paces in any direction. A thick candle burns on a shelf that runs the length of one wall. I expected to see plaguers, in a cage perhaps. But all I see is a man sitting in a chair. Presumably Hugh the Baptist. He wears a bishop’s hat and robes, but I cannot make out any more details in the gloom. There is a small door behind Hugh, and I imagine that is where the plaguer, or plaguers, are kept.

The Italian mercenary closes the front door, then steps behind me and I feel the steel edge of the seax against my neck. “Perhaps I slit you even if you no make trouble.” His whisper is fierce, his accent thick. “When he turns he back, I can say you try to fight me, no?”

Matheus turns his back. I stand perfectly still.

Belisencia crosses herself and mumbles a prayer as Matheus picks up the candle and places it on a trestle table beside the sitting man. The candlelight reveals Hugh the Baptist, and the sight of him shocks me. So much so that I jerk backward and crash against the mercenary. Belisencia lets out a short cry when she sees him. The Italian shouts in his language, spittle from his lips spattering my neck. He grasps a shock of my hair and pulls my head backward with one hand as the knife returns to my throat.

I stare at the man sitting in the chair.

Hugh the Baptist is a plaguer.

The man’s skin is pale and wrinkled and sagging. Blood stains his mouth and neck. He lost his nose at some point: a red splotch and shards of cartilage mar his features where it once sat. He looks like a drooping, black-eyed skull in a bishop’s hat. A rope around his waist binds him to the chair.

“After Hugh heard the word of God, he was called to the Kingdom of Heaven,” Matheus explains. “But the Lord sent him back to us. The Lord sent him back to spread the word. To offer a chance at salvation, even now, even to those who were found unworthy. Hugh shares his body with demons now, but he continues to do the work of the Lord.”

Hugh opens his mouth and makes a creaking sound that rises in volume until it is a shriek. Belisencia takes a step away from him and steadies herself on the shelf from which Matheus took the candle. Hugh’s scream ends abruptly. He sniffs at Belisencia, although without a nose I am not sure what he smells. He opens his mouth cavernously, wider than any human mouth ought to open, and hisses. Then Hugh the Baptist shocks me once more.

He speaks. A tumbling susurration of words, like many voices whispering, with no breaks. “Whodoesnotbelievewillbecondemned.”

I have taken part in sieges on two cities and five castles. And on several of these sieges, we employed sappers to tunnel beneath walls or towers. Sappers set roaring fires beneath fortifications. They use dead pigs and timber to create flames so potent that the heat collapses the structure above. I have always been on the side that employs the sappers, so I do not know how defenders must feel when their most reliable fortifications crumble without warning. But after hearing a plaguer speak, I can imagine. Walls and towers within my mind crumble in the face of this incomprehensible demonstration.

A plaguer has spoken. I have no defense for this.

And neither, it seems, does Belisencia. She swoons and Matheus catches her. He brushes back her hair and blows softly across her forehead. His movements have a practiced feel to them, as if he has done this many times. Her eyes flutter open and she leans against him as she tries to find her feet again. Matheus nods to her, runs a finger along his shoulder to show her where she should accept the bite.

The nun’s eyes are wide in the candlelight. She still looks unsteady, but she returns his nod, stares upward, and crosses herself.

“We are dead?” she asks.

“This is purgatory,” Matheus replies.

Belisencia’s chin rises. She leans toward Hugh the Baptist, her lips trembling. The plaguer’s mouth opens again, a dark chasm rimmed by yellowed teeth. Lines of spittle span the lips, like cobwebs across the mouth of a barrel.

I try to rush forward but the knife cuts into my flesh and the mercenary’s hands jerk at my hair as he chuckles. “You going next, knight man.”

This is her choice
, I tell myself.
This is her choice.
And perhaps she is right
.

I have watched a plaguer speak. I have seen the tapestry of Joseph the Devout.

Perhaps she is right
.

But it does not seem right, and I feel a coward for doing nothing.

Hugh the Baptist’s noseless face becomes a mask of seams and creases as he opens his mouth even wider. As he prepares to send Belisencia to heaven or to hell or to a shambling existence of mindless hunger. He leans toward Belisencia, and I pray that Matheus is right.

Chapter 17

Belisencia whimpers and just as I decide that I cannot allow this to happen, the sappers in my mind send another wall crumbling to dust.

Hugh the Baptist shrieks.

It is not like the previous cry. There is terror in the sound. The plaguer thrashes in his chair, shakes his head back and forth wildly, shrieks again and again. The old chair rocks backward and forward as the plaguer tries to flee from the nun.

Belisencia puts her hands to her ears and screams. She catches her breath and turns to Matheus, her eyes swollen with horror. “Wh-what is happening?
What is happening
?”

Matheus looks as horrified as she does. He pants a few breaths and looks from Hugh to Belisencia. “He…” But no other words come. Not even Matheus’s eloquence can counter the horror.

Hugh’s screams change to words. The same words over and over again. Wild cries, growing louder and louder.

“Whodoesnotbelievewillbecondemned. Whodoesnotbelievewillbecondemned!
Whodoesnotbelievewillbecondemned!
Whodoesnotbelievewillbecondemned!
”

His head jerks from side to side so powerfully that the flesh at his neck rips open and bleeds. The bishop’s hat sails from his head and lands in a corner. Wet slaps resound in the room as his cheeks strike the back of the chair again and again. His body spasms and lurches against the ropes. The chair rattles and pounds the wooden floor in a ragged rhythm.

“
Whodoesnotbelievewillbecondemned! Whodoesnotbelievewillbecondemned! Whodoesnotbelievewillbecondemned!
”

The cries are so loud in the tiny room that they seem to pierce my brain. Belisencia screams and screams. Matheus clutches at his hair and stares at Hugh with widemouthed panic. The Italian mercenary lowers his knife. I glance over my shoulder and see him backing toward the entrance, his eyes on Hugh, his head shaking from side to side slowly.

The door flies open and three guards stare inside, their eyes wide beneath the rims of their kettle helms. One shouts into the room, “Matheus?”

“Out!” Matheus screams. “Everyone out! Everyone out!” He shoves Belisencia toward the door. The Italian pushes his way through the soldiers. I deliberate for a moment and think about taking Matheus or Hugh or both of them hostage, but I decide against it. I do not know what is going on here. I do not know who is friend and who is foe. And I do not want to make an enemy of anyone that could banish me from my Elizabeth for eternity.

I am the last to leave the temple. I look back at Hugh the Baptist and all at once his screams end. His convulsions cease and he sits still and quiet. I gaze into his tar-pit eyes and he hisses softly.

“Whodoesnotbelievewillbecondemned
.
”

A silent crowd of soldiers and white-robed pilgrims stare at us as we step out into the sun. Matheus coughs. He licks at his lips, glances at Belisencia, then raises his hands in the air. The smile returns, but I note the tremble of his fingers.

“Hugh the Baptist has spoken,” he says. “This nun is…she…she cannot yet return to God. There is work for her here in purgatory.” He takes Belisencia’s hand and kisses it. “Go forth from the Holy Lands, Belisencia, and spread the word of Hugh the Baptist. Bring the wayward sheep back to the fold. Be the voice of God in the darkness of this drowning land.”

“I think there are many wayward sheep in the Hedingham area,” Tristan shouts.

“Go forth,” Matheus says. “Wherever God directs you.”

“I will,” Belisencia says, her chest still rising and falling quickly from the terror of Hugh’s outburst. Her eyes dart to the outbuilding. She does not seem fully convinced by Matheus’s words. “I will, Matheus. When should I return?”

Matheus’s smile fades for an instant. “There is much work to do,” he says. “Much work. Do not return overly soon. Jesus preached for three years, did he not?”

Our horses are returned to us. Matheus even gives us a basket of strawberries for the trip.

“Thank you, Matheus,” Belisencia says. “Thank you for entrusting me with this important task.”

“It is Hugh you should thank,” Matheus replies. Belisencia looks toward the outbuilding and Matheus adds hastily, “I will thank him for you.”

He takes her hand and kisses it, holds it as he stares into her eyes. “You are a beautiful woman, Belisencia.”

She turns her head demurely. Tristan pulls their hands apart and places a strawberry in Matheus’s open palm. “There is much work to be done, Matheus,” Tristan says. “Much work. We should be on our way.”

Matheus nods and eats the strawberry. “I hope enlightenment finds you, Sir Tristan,” he says.

“I hope the burning crotch disease finds you, King Matheus,” Tristan says.

Matheus’s brows furrow and I wonder if Tristan has pushed him too far. The two men study each other in silence, then Matheus shrugs. “In hell crotches burn for eternity, Sir Tristan. And quicksilver has no effect. I hope God frees you from the darkness.”

He nods to me, then turns and walks back toward the font, where the last of the white-robed pilgrims await baptism by blood. The Italian mercenary snarls at me from the doorway of the manor house.

We ride out of the Holy Lands in silence, a silence that lasts for several miles. I feel worse with every step of my horse. Something is wrong with me. I am burning with fever. Fear creeps through my soul like a muddy-pawed black cat. I push away the thoughts of affliction. The wound is festering. That is all. I will need to have the cut looked at and cleaned, but the plague has not found me. The nuns at Hedingham can take care of the wound. I steal a glance at Belisencia.