The Enterprise of Death (15 page)

Awa allowed herself a long, sighing “Oooooh” as she carefully removed one plank after another of smooth pine, some covered in hide to protect the image, others blank, virginal, and she separated the laths into two piles. Continuing her investigation, she found three large, rough cylinders of charcoal wrapped in more of the hide, several small wooden dowels and twine, a handsome little case containing a stylus and a pouch of black powder, and several more personal effects—a tiny doll made of sticks and bright green cloth, and a gold crucifix on a leather thong. There was also a wineskin containing much finer drink than she had thus far found, and after building up the fire she settled in with the wine and the sketches.

They were unlike anything she had ever seen, or at least remembered—Omorose’s harem must have contained art of some variety, but that was a lifetime ago, and there in the cave Awa doubted the images were equaled anywhere in the world. They were of dead men, mostly, though eyes less versed in the markers of the grave might not have noticed these subtle details in many of the portraits. There was also a larger nude of a woman with curly hair, which Awa did not let herself focus on until last. A few were clearly done using charcoal, and these were much more smudged than the ones he had evidently gone over with some kind of ink.

Finally she held the image up to the light, the shadows making the woman come alive, and Awa felt her chest tighten at the beauty of the creature, and she bit her lip, keen to allow herself a tiny bit of sport with such a fine inspiration to help her along. Then the image of Omorose shoved herself in the way of Awa’s arousal, and she had a compulsion to cast the plank into the fire. Instantly horrified by the impulse, she quickly covered the sketches back up and stowed them in the pack, save for the small nude she had taken from the other bag—this she wrapped carefully in dry cloth and put with the large satchel she had claimed for herself.

The sketches decided things for Awa, who now realized why Manuel’s thumbs and forefingers were stained black. She ordered the corpses of Werner, Bernardo, and the Kristobel cousins to their feet, and then had them go out into the rain and dig their own graves, their swords biting into the gray mud. Once the graves were sufficiently deep she had them crawl inside and, after shedding her clothes and leaving them in the dry cave, she buried them. The rain felt good on her skin, and the fire felt even better when she was finished, and then she brought Manuel back from his little death.

“Get up,” she ordered, releasing his spirit back into his body. Rather than promptly rising like the undead he rolled on the ground, gasping and clutching his face. Before he could fully recover, Awa launched into her spiel. “You’ve been sick ever since you rescued me, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern. You’ve had a fever and told me you saw dead men and that I was really a witch, but I’m not. You seemed to see a lot of things that did not really happen. This happens to men with fevers. Do you still have a fever, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern?”

“Blart,” said Manuel, vomiting all over himself.

“You’re still sick,” Awa observed.

“You killed me,” Manuel groaned, his headache distracting him from any potential, and indeed advisable, duplicity in the matter. “My heart stopped, I heard it. Felt it. You looked through the gear, and took them outside. The dead—”

Manuel dry-heaved and Awa licked her lips, watching him. She had forgotten that when her tutor had applied the little death to her she had been perfectly conscious the entire time. That was a problem. She approached him again.

“Saved you,” Manuel panted, strings of bile dangling from his chin like an old man’s last few beard hairs. “I fucking saved you! Please!”

Awa reached toward him again, and he drew back with a
whine. She stopped, her fingers still stretching out toward him, and then closed her hand into a fist. They could talk whether he was alive or dead, and it occurred to her that if she killed him again she could raise his corpse and interrogate it as to Manuel’s character, especially in regard to his opinion of witches. But she did not know if by doing so she would actually kill him instead of giving him the little death—could those whose spirits were not fully removed from their bodies be raised as mindless ones? The question certainly bore looking into.

The witch was considering him, her fist between them. She did not look so young anymore, nor so slight. She was thick and made of nothing but hard angles, her dark skin making her appear more statue than woman to the artist.

“You can kill me anytime,” Manuel said before her hand could unclench. “Please, let’s, let’s talk for a while. Please?”

“Talk?” This broke the witch’s reverie, and she stared at him as though toads were hopping out of his mouth instead of words. “What would we talk about?”

“You,” Manuel said, and as her face sharpened into a scowl he added, “And me? I’m an artist. You saw those sketches? Mine. And the nude I sold to Bernardo, the one you saw first, that’s mine, too.”

“That’s mine now,” Awa said. “I like your … pictures. Tiny little shards of their spirits live in them.”

“Ah,” said Manuel, his sudden flush of pride instantly cooled by the creepiness of her appraisal. Perhaps his old master Tiziano had been right—he should have stuck to still life. “I can sketch one of you, if—”

“No!” Awa backed away from him. “If you try it you go back to death, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern, and I won’t wake you. Understand?”

“Of course.” Manuel nodded. “Absolutely. Whatever you—”

“Think I’ll fall for your tricks?” Awa demanded, although she
wondered if the hazy remnants she felt in the planks would be strong enough to have any influence at all over a complete spirit like hers. “I know others can do as I do, or like I do. Are you a witch, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern?”

“No,” Manuel said, relieved that she had given him a little room. “I’m an artist, and I’m a soldier, and very often I’m a fool, if my wife or captain are to be believed, but I’m no witch. I’m a man of God.”

“Man of God?” Awa said. “The same god that walked as a man and then returned from the dead, that god?”

“God.” Manuel nodded, not sure what she was driving at. “The only God.”

“Where I was born men thought the spirits were gods,” said Awa, remembering her early conversations with her tutor more than the actual faith of her mother and father. “And here men believe in a man who was a god. How do you know he was not a trickster, a necromancer? How do you know he was not my tutor, or his tutor, or some other like them? How do you know you don’t worship a monster that has deceived you, a man capable of stealing bodies, raising the dead, and living forever through sorcery?”

“Ah,” said Manuel, not having anticipated anything so complicated as a theological debate with a witch when he had set out to earn some paint as a mercenary. At least she was sounding more like the witches he had heard about, being completely fucking heretical and all. “Well, faith, you know? Faith.”

“Faith.” Awa crinkled her brows. “You mean belief?”

“Well, yes,” said Manuel. “I believe God is who He is, and that He will redeem me, if I please Him.”

“How do you please him?” Awa eyed him. “Killing his enemies? Killing the worshippers of his enemies?”

“No,” said Manuel, deciding that he had no more to lose than his life were his honest answers to displease her, and he had
already lost that once tonight without any continued ill effect. “Some think that way, but I don’t believe it. I believe we please Him by living good lives, by following His example.”

“What is good to the fox is not good to the hare,” said Awa. “He was a soldier, then? Your god? He wore a blade and delivered witches unto their death, but only so long as his friends did not seek to rape them? This is his example?”

“No,” said Manuel, the incongruity of his current occupation with his belief something he had gone over enough times on his own that he did not hesitate before answering. “I am not living up to His example. I was trying to, but then I went to war, and the only recent time I have done as He would was when I helped you escape and—”

“You
helped
me escape?” said Awa, taking a pull of his wine. She could not remember being so happy, the fire warm and the questions bubbling out of her lips like tea-water over the side of the cauldron. Not for the first time, she wished she had wormwood close at hand. “Before you said you saved me, yet now you acknowledge that you only helped, and that, had I not fended for myself, all might have been for naught. How long, I wonder, until you admit that without my blade you would have died, that I saved you?”

“My blade,” Manuel snapped, unwilling to let her take all the credit for his near martyrdom. “Your hand, yes, but my blade that you took from my sheath. I’d say that means we saved each other, or helped each other if you prefer.”

“Yes.” Awa nodded. “That’s true, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of—”

“Manuel,” said he, “is what I’m called. There’s no need to say it all like that.”

“Oh,” said Awa, a little embarrassed.

“But we were talking about God,” said Manuel, and as the words left his lips he started to giggle. She looked at him
curiously but he could not stop himself, and soon he was howling with laughter. Witches were real, the dead could walk, and here he was explaining his most private thoughts on faith to a strange woman, a Moor, who had performed a miracle comparable to the Lord’s resurrection, and upon his own flesh. For fuck’s sake.

“What’s so funny?” Awa asked, worried that she had broken the man’s mind. She hoped not, for already she liked him more than any living person she could remember. That perhaps was not so remarkable in her case as it would have been in another’s, but there it was. If she had driven him mad with her tricks she would be very annoyed with herself.

“Nothing, nothing,” Manuel managed, the realization that the witch was watching him a sobering one. He had to keep her entertained or she would kill him, or worse. Perhaps if he kept her talking until dawn she would—It was the middle of the day, he realized, the slackening rain revealing not night-shrouded darkness beyond the cave but a dreary afternoon. Fuck.

“Are you mad?” Awa asked.

“No.” Manuel shook his head. “I don’t think so, anyway.”

“Are you hungry? Or thirsty?”

“Yes,” said Manuel, realizing how famished and parched he was. “Very much so.”

“Eat,” said Awa, motioning to Werner’s stewpot that simmered over the fire. She was pleased the restorative soup would not go to waste. “And this is your wine, I believe.”

“Thank you,” said Manuel, taking his lightened skin and draining it in one long, sloshing guzzle. Quite tipsy herself, Awa switched to water and watched him scoot around to get at the stew.

Every time Manuel glanced up she was smiling at him, which did little to assuage his worry. Maybe he
was
mad, he thought, or consumed with fever, or simply dreaming. Then he wondered where she had gotten pork for the stew, and concluded that one
of the other mercenaries must have been holding out on him. He shook his head. He, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, gobbling up the tastiest meal he had eaten in months directly from a witch’s cauldron!

“You said that before you went to war you were trying to live like your god,” prompted Awa when he had finished. “Were you a priest, then? A monk or some other holy man?”

“No,” said Manuel, the wine soothing his panic. “Between the two of us, I very much doubt many monks or priests are living as He would like. Through a friend of a friend I was able to read a treatise by this Italian fellow, Niccolò Muck … Niccolò Mack … Niccolò. This Niccolò, he wonders if any ruler can practice what they preach to their subjects and remain in power, and though he was talking about lay leaders the point could, and maybe should, be applied to the Church as well. Maybe the clergy couldn’t stay in power if they expressly followed His tenets, but the whole point is living just lives, not maintaining the power you’ve inherited, which seems at odds with pardoners and all the rest.”

Very good
, thought Manuel,
since you’re dining with a witch why don’t you go and voice some blasphemies while you’re at it? Maybe later the two of you could eat a baby or something
. Did witches eat babies? Manuel had not given any heed to stories about witches once he had grown up, and so found himself unsure of what she might be capable of.

“You don’t think all of your holy men are just?” Awa could not believe her luck in finding an actual breathing person critical of the world around him, another person who thought instead of blindly believing. Such had prevented her from making many —or any, she corrected herself—friends among the living. She could account for faith, though she did not share it, but not the unquestioning obedience that brought about the horrors of the Inquisition that she had almost experienced firsthand.

“No,” said Manuel, resigned to let his wine-whetted tongue
run its course. It was rather liberating, for she seemed quite interested in what he had to say.
Of course she does
, he thought ruefully,
she’s a witch, and you’re speaking her language now, alright
. “Men lose their way, just like sheep, no matter how careful the shepherd. It’s not the shepherd’s fault, for even the best shepherd will, when his flock becomes large, rely on his dog, and if his dog is not dependable then sheep will be lost. Our Shepherd has a flock that requires a great many dogs to tend it, but dogs are hungry animals, and when there are tasty morsels everywhere to distract them the dogs—”