The Crystal Empire (2 page)

There was a cough.

He looked up at the travel-stained warrior who’d awakened him. “What wish you of me, soldier?”

The nightmare had evaporated, giving way to the horror of reality. Still, this was no faceless, obedient murderer. He knew this man, and well. D
e
spite their mutual weariness, each afforded the other a grin.

“By the good God, Willi, I’ve ground five horses into butcher-bait getting here. You’d damned well better recognize me!”

“Profaning in a sanctuary,” answered Wilhelm, shaking his head. “So this is what has become of my big brother Emil. Like every young Swiss youth he longed to go away from his native Glarus years ago, questing for wealth and glory. Unlike most, he managed to accomplish it—the leaving, anyway. Now he is a mercenary, spreading death and destru
c
tion in a world already overflowing with it.”

Wilhelm wasn’t certain whether he spoke in seriousness or in jest. He was too tired to decide.

Pulling a soiled helmet-coif over his sweaty head, Emil responded, “For the moment, good friar, I’m a simple messenger—though ’tis mine to wonder what’s become of my
little
brother. ’Twould seem I’ve been sent here, bearing personal regards—for him alone—from none other than the Pope in Avignon. Nor shall he—Willi, not the Pope—receive the least sy
l
lable of them till he explains—to the head of his family, I might add—how such a thing can come to pass!”

It was an old joke between them. Emil was elder by less than a year. Their father had died before the younger brother had been born, his death a gangrenous agony from a woodcutter’s accident.

With great effort, Wilhelm climbed to his feet, muscles stiff not so much from overuse as from months of working their owner’s will against a steady burden of futility. He felt terrible. Nor, despite deepest wishes to the contrary, could he keep from examining himself, minute to minute, tongue, throat, armpits, and groin, for the signs of incipient di
s
ease. He su
p
posed it was more commendable than fleeing to a country villa, refusing, as many priests and doctors were doing elsewhere, to e
n
ter the presence of victims of the Mortality.

Emil at his side, he left the cavernous nave, at last finding a quiet a
l
cove. Here they could talk.

Unlike his brother, Emil was a big man, hardened by combat, his height and breadth exaggerated by soldier’s trappings. Bits and pieces of the un
i
form Wilhelm recognized as French. A scabbarded two-handed sword—another sacrilege in this place—slapped at Emil’s thigh. A cre
s
cent-guarded basilard, insignia of the Swiss mercenary, spanned the small of his back.

He was dirty; also, he smelled of the last animal he’d ridden to death getting here.

The monk was too exhausted for much curiosity about the message from Clement VI, too exhausted to explain it had been unexpected only in its means of being delivered. But he was too exhausted for many of the things which each day he’d accomplished nonetheless.

Relating to his brother the events upon the island in the Rhine, he complained, “I was cursed, Emil! Although I prayed for no more than to be a humble servant to my God, I was burdened with a selfish lust to
know
. I returned from the fire with two strange notions. The first was that the Great Mortality represented neither the curse of God upon Man, nor a Jewish ‘well-poisoning’ plot against Christians, but a natural a
f
fliction of some kind.

“The second was that there ought to be some way to prove it.”

3

Old Father Albert had never uttered a word of protest. He, too, had been horrified by the mass incineration of the canton’s Jews, against the specific injunction of the Holy Father.

In the next days, Wilhelm spent much time meditating upon the Mo
r
tality. The boys’ mother had always hated rats, believing them a source of illness and corruption. It was, at the least, a place to begin. Wilhelm r
e
solved to put his mother’s belief to trial.

With the greatest imaginable pains, he caused the minster to be sealed, flushing the cellars with fire and water, following in the wai
n
scoting with vinegar and pungent incenses, bribing small boys to mai
n
tain a constant vigilance against the rodents, killing a few which had escaped the purge—the many which chewed their way back in—with their little crossbows, burning the remains without touching them.

The building was scoured after each Mass. During this time, not one soul who resided upon the minster site—other friars, the sexton’s fam
i
ly, servants and retainers—was afflicted.

Realizing some would claim it was the holiness of the church which protected its inhabitants, he persuaded others in the town—some few who suffered the same pangs of conscience he and Father Albert did—to repeat the prophylaxis upon their own houses, quoting Scripture where plain a
r
gument failed. The results, save those whose occupations took them into buildings unprotected, were the same as at the minster.

With the approval of his abbot, he wrote a letter to the Holy Father in Avignon. The reply Wilhelm received exceeded his most sanguine e
x
pect
a
tions. Having tried in vain to stem the tide of anti-Jewish sentiment hi
m
self, Clement was overjoyed to receive Wilhelm’s suggestion that, whatever its unknown fundamental nature, the Mortality was transmitted neither by Jews nor evil spirits, but somehow by rats.

By that time, Wilhelm, suspecting fleas rather than the rodents who ca
r
ried them—
“And he that is to be cleansed...shall shave all his hair off his head and his beard and his eyebrows, even all his hair he shall shave off, and he shall wash his clothes, also he shall wash his flesh in water, and he shall be clean”
—had begun to devise experiments afresh.

4

“Our mother is dead, Willi, three weeks since. The house lies empty, the door swinging upon a single hinge.”

Emil coughed again, spat upon the floor.

“This sheds some light upon one mystery, at least.” He rubbed his temple. “Not much. Willi, I was instructed by the Pope himself to tell you a peculiar story of my own.”

The corridor of which their alcove was a part was still in darkness. At its ends, however, Wilhelm discerned the light of the coming dawn. T
o
gether, they rose and walked, coming to an unglazed window which overlooked the flagstones of a parapet-walk below, and, past it, the va
l
ley of the Rhine.

The air was clean and cold. Wilhelm needed it.

Almost a year had gone by since the fire, since the nightmare began coming. He’d labored toward its exorcism, yet still it came. Perhaps it a
l
ways would.

But perhaps what Emil had to say might banish it.

“A private army—of which your big brother happened to be part—was called upon July last to ring the wicked port of Marseilles. D’you know where that is? You do? You surprise me with your worldliness, little brot
h
er. Anyway, we marched inward with great clamor, beating weapons upon shields, with the object of driving rats, hundreds of ’em, thousands, nu
m
bers which I in my ignorance don’t know how to name, through cunning wicker chutes into the hold of an ancient-hulled old tub at the quayside.”

He leaned out the window to spit.

“We were paid off and dispersed, but some time afterward your Clement requested of our captains lists of men among the Free Comp
a
nies at Marseilles who were from Switzerland, in particular Basle or Glarus.

“There was I, of course, and here I am.”

Lifting his leg with an effort, he tucked thumb and forefinger into an age-darkened boot-top, levering out a folded scrap of soiled parchment.

“I can attest,” he told his brother, “this is a letter from Clement, for he wrote it as I stood before him, there, ’twixt those great blasted braz
i
ers he keeps going day and night to fend off the plague. He gave it thus into my hand to give to you.

“Here it is.”

There was no signature, no salutation. Wilhelm recognized the wri
t
ing:

I eschew certain proprieties, valued friend, with an intention to pr
e
serve the sanctity of our converse from prying eyes
—
also, as you’ll see, your esteemed pe
r
son. My messenger will relate a tale of the Marseilles “campaign.” Others of my court discerned in your inquiries the oppo
r
tunity of accomplishing what no Crusade has.

The vessel, I’ve determined by distasteful methods, was crewed with convicts who’d survived the Pest and were thought immune. Its destin
a
tion was the S
a
racen shore, the object to bring the Pest upon the people there. The vessel itself was no great loss, a derelict, its keel full of Co
r
nish ballast, the detritus of ages in the tin trade.

Yet, once put to sea, in some mysterious fashion the character of the Pest malevolently altered. Each soul aboard perished in the most horr
i
ble ma
n
ner—I’ve seen their dead faces. Storm-driven, the death-ship fetched up on the Genoese coast, its nonhuman pa
s
sengers escaping to sow new terror which we suffer in increased numbers.

Wilhelm paused.

Before this evil intervention, the Mortality, what Clement called “the Pest,” had been slaying between a third part and half of the population. Sometimes it seemed that rats and fleas had naught to do with it, that one could breathe it in and die before the victim one took it from. There were rumors of calamity from Iceland to the farthest eastern reaches of the known world.

Wilhelm, struggling now to save a pitiable handful of villagers, knew the New Death, unlike the old, was killing horses, cattle, even housecats, em
p
tying the land.

I’ve excommunicated the instigators
[Clement continued],
cursing their souls to eternal damnation. Too late it is to prevent the perversion of your di
s
coveries, my son, but from what I believe to be my deathbed I’ve ordained publication of our correspondence, of the truth concer
n
ing the attempted extermination, not of the Saracens alone, but of Chri
s
tendom, of the known world, and beyond.

The universe we know disintegrates about us. Those “Crusaders” beyond my reach spin superstitious fantasies that such things as the use of clockworks, waterwheels, and gunpowder are responsible for the ra
g
ing Pestilence. Every manner of tale is being placed in currency to o
p
pose the truth. Of those who still care, many prefer the lies.

I caution you, friend, against the possibilities of assassination. Those there are who wouldn’t have their story contradicted. They may have followed my messenger to you, but I believed it important you hear the truth from me.

“Know you the contents of this letter, Emil?” Wilhelm asked after he had read it through twice.

Looking up as if just awakened, his brother shook his head. “When have I’d time to learn reading? What’s it say—or ought I ask?”

Wilhelm read the letter to his brother, the grim expression on his face soon matched by strain upon Emil’s countenance.

“If this be true,” the friar mused, “it would explain why so many more are afflicted than was the case ere now.”

Emil coughed. “The land’s passing empty, Willi, ’tween Avignon and this place, with naught but ragged penitents whipping themselves from town to town.”

Wilhelm frowned. Flagellants appeared everywhere, trying to expiate the sin of all mankind—and perhaps the Mortality itself—through self-mortification. Authorities considered it heresy, an attempt at direct i
n
tercession, rather than through offices of the Church.

“In truth,” Emil continued, “Basle’s well off by comparison. ’Tis as if an invisible army’s murdered all of Christendom. The world’s dying. ’Tis the end.”

Wilhelm shook his head. “Yet the world began once with a single man and woman. If a single man and woman should survive, my brot
h
er, it can begin again, can it not?”

The soldier pushed away from the window.

“Don’t speak to me of such things, brother. I left a woman—did you know I’d married?—I left Jeannette to do this errand for your Pope. I don’t know whether she or our two small children yet live. Knowing’s more i
m
portant than you can imagine.”

Wilhelm placed a hand upon his brother’s shoulder. “I did not know that you had married.” He shook his head. “But I am a man, am I not? Though I be bound by vows of celibacy, I can imagine—”