Emaculum (The Scourge Book 3) (3 page)

Seeing Elizabeth with the plague nearly broke my mind. But seeing her as an abomination would break my soul. If the cure turns her into something worse, I will hold her tight, kiss her snarling mouth, and drive my sword through both our bodies.

I look back toward the millhouse. The archer has allowed my quest to continue. If I can bring joy to him and his wife, then I have a duty to do so. We have no cures to spare now, but a son might return to his family and, for the moment, the weeping in my soul has been silenced.

Now, if I could only silence Tristan’s nattering . . .

Gerald does not pursue. He did not see us enter the rowboat, so perhaps he thinks we crossed the stream and are hiding in one of the old cottages. The current whisks us toward the northeast and I spot the horse and cart again in the distance. One man sits on the driver’s platform, the other in the cart. I wonder where they are from and what errand brings them out of hiding.

Tristan rows us eastward. I reach into the shoulder sack and draw out the jar of dragon blood. It is wrapped in a half dozen sheets of leather-bound linen. I squeeze the bundle to make sure it has not cracked. England’s fate might well depend on this jar. I tuck it carefully back into the sack.

The stream we are on joins the River Bure. The Bure flows toward the North Sea, and the North Sea is far from St. Edmund’s Bury, so we beach the rowboat and walk south for a time, our boots squelching in the waterlogged soil.

I smell lavender again. The odor seems to emanate from Tristan.

“Are you wearing a scent?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, have you put something on that makes you smell like a woman?”

“Of course I haven’t,” he replies. “What a strange thing to ask. Why would you ask that? It’s ridiculous.”

I lean toward him and sniff. “The smell is coming from you, Tristan.”

“No it isn’t.”

I sniff again. “It’s coming from your hands.”

He lets out a sharp breath and takes off one of his gauntlets, holds his wrist to my nose. “Is that what you smell?”

“Lovely scent. Are you hoping to attract a nice earl or duke?”

“These gauntlets have sharp edges on the inside.” He shows me a jagged ridge on the inside edge. “Scrape my wrists awful. I wasn’t going to wear them anymore, but Elizabeth gave me an ointment. Now, the sharp edges just glide over the skin. Haven’t bothered me since.”

Elizabeth. The name slashes through me. His Elizabeth, not mine.

“You don’t have to make excuses, Tristan. I’ve known many girlish knights. I could introduce you to a few if you’d like.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Your coat of arms has a flower on it, doesn’t it?” I ask.

“It’s primrose,” he snaps. “Bringer of good tidings.”

I nod.

“I’m finished with this conversation,” he says.

We walk in blessed silence for a time.

It does not last long.

“What a very strange world we live in,” Tristan says.

I do not reply. Frustration has replaced my humor. We had to abandon our horses when we fled into the forest, and now we have rowed another three miles farther east to rid ourselves of Sir Gerald. I am three miles farther from Elizabeth, I have to walk to St. Edmund’s Bury, and I am in no mood for Tristan’s silliness. Not that it matters. His silliness is a force of nature and my silence will not stop it.

“I stabbed a man in the throat a short time ago,” he says. “The man wasn’t attacking me. He obviously had a woman at home. Maybe children. I stabbed him in the throat and he died, and I feel no remorse. And yet, I feel terrible when I kill one of those mindless, savage plaguers. And they want to crack open our skulls and slurp out the jelly.”

His words are not silly after all. It is the great irony of our current existence. The plague has made enemies of our loved ones. It was easier before we found a cure. The priests and bishops told us that only death could set plaguers free. And because God wanted us to kill the afflicted, we killed with a righteous confidence. We sent the dead to Heaven on the edge of our swords and shouted “Hallelujah” as we did. We thought we were saving them.

We were fools.

There is a cure. We can bring the afflicted dead back to life, but we found only three ampoules. Three cures, nothing more. So precious little. We hold life in our hands, but give death, instead. And with each death, the world loses a little more humanity. It is a terrible weight for a soul to bear.

I wish Tristan had spouted silliness.

“I hope Elizabeth is well,” he says.

My heart leaps at the sound of her name, but I realize he is speaking of his Elizabeth, not mine. The woman we knew as Belisencia accompanied us for a week on our journey to find the alchemist. Tristan fell in love with her and she with him, before it was revealed that she was actually Elizabeth of Lancaster, daughter to John of Gaunt and sister to the exiled Henry Bolingbroke.

Tristan insisted that she wait at St. Benet’s while he and I journeyed to St. Edmund’s. It was a long and terrible argument, but she finally relented. She slipped a cross around his neck, a relic that once belonged to Sir Morgan of Hastings, and told Tristan not to visit any plaguer brothels. It was a jest—a reference to a man we found whoring out plagued women in Corringham—but the tears had brimmed in her eyes as she watched us go.

I do not blame him for making her stay. The foul wind of this plague has churned England into a storm-swept sea, and only the fortified islands of castle and church can keep the waves of plaguers at bay. I do not blame him for making her stay. But when I heal my Elizabeth, I will keep her beside me for every moment of every day. I will chain myself to her side and cherish my imprisonment.

If the cure works.

“Edward.” There is a sharp edge to Tristan’s voice. “We have guests.”

Shapes lurch toward us across an overgrown field of rotting cabbage. They bear the unmistakable, lurching gait of the afflicted. Others approach from our right. A stream on our left blocks our only way around them. I don my great helm and draw my sword from its sheath.

“Let’s rid the world of some humanity,” I say.

We walk calmly toward the plaguers, swords held low and away from our bodies. I glance at the tooth in my pommel. Saint Giles is the saint of madness, but he is also the saint of cripples and healing. I do not have enough ampoules to cure these plaguers, so Saint Giles will have to heal them instead. I raise his sword and sigh as an afflicted man in a filthy tunic approaches.

Be healed, brother. Be healed.

We walk for miles before finding the old Roman road that leads south from Norwich. I am glad that we did not see that city again. We had to ride through it when searching for the alchemist, and the horrors I saw there crawled into my mind. Horribly swollen and disfigured humans attacked us from all sides. We thought them demons, but they were lepers who had contracted the plague.

The Church says that lepers are cursed. I once believed that to be true, but an army of lepers helped me capture St. Benet’s Abbey. And I know now that they are not responsible for their affliction, any more than the victims of this new plague are responsible for theirs.

But the plagued lepers of Norwich still haunt my sleep.

My feet ache from walking, and my shoulders burn with the weight of my breastplate. I think wistfully of the two horses we left at the edge of the forest and curse Sir Gerald. A kiln burns in the pit of my stomach when I think of him. He has no honor. If ever I have the advantage again, I will not hesitate to kill him. The world has no need for his sort of humanity.

“Edward?” Tristan stares at a group of people standing beside something large. It looks like a wagon, but I’ve not seen a wagon of that size before.

“We should get off the road,” I say. “We should take cover before they see us.”

Tristan nods. “We should.”

I make out more and more details as we approach. “It’s a wagon I say. With a cage built into the bed.”

We both draw our swords quietly. “We should definitely take cover,” I say.

Tristan nods and follows me off the road. But it is too late. We have been spotted.

Chapter 4

“Help!” The voice is deep and desperate. “Please! We require assistance!”

There is no trap more effective against knights than the plea for charity. Such pleas are more often bait than desperation in these dark days, so I try to ignore them. But I rarely succeed. If I ignore the cries of suffering men, who will answer my cries when I suffer? Are we to become a kingdom of suffering men, crying out to deaf ears? I do not want Elizabeth to wake to that sort of kingdom.

I walk toward the wagon, ignoring Tristan’s stare.

A man walks toward us holding a staffed crucifix, the steady rain pasting his white robes against him. There are many others around the wagon, twenty or thirty souls in rain-sodden white robes.

“We are rutted,” the man says. “The oxen cannot pull us out.”

I am not certain what Tristan and I can do that thirty men and women cannot, but I will offer what help I can.

The wagon is enormous, and a rain-carved furrow has trapped one of the wheels. The two red Devons strain and grunt and toss their heads but the rut is too steep. A man shouts at the beasts, whips them hard enough to draw blood.

I note this absently, because my attention is on the massive cage built into the wagon bed. Tall, thin logs stand on end to form the bars of the prison. A rugged square of canvas is threaded with leather cords through holes in the tops of the logs, forming a roof. Beneath this roof, reaching through the bars with bloody, rotting arms, are more than two dozen plaguers. They growl and moan and snap their teeth, decaying bodies writhing against one another. A woman wearing a filthy green bonnet thrusts her face against a gap in the logs and screams. It is the scream of a plaguer—a cry that sounds as if it is inhaled instead of exhaled, a feral scream that holds no trace of humanity.

I point to the wagon. “What is that?”

 “It is our sorrow,” the pilgrim with the crucifix replies.

“Your sorrow looks a lot like people with plague,” Tristan replies. “Edward, doesn’t his sorrow look like people with plague?”

“It does,” I reply. “Tell me pilgrim, why does your sorrow look like people with plague?”

“Because God is testing us,” the man replies. “He has sent this scourge upon us to test our faith, like he tested Job. So we must stay strong in our righteousness and show our mettle. So sayeth the Lord.”

“Hallelujah,” Tristan replies. He says it in irony, as he always does when anyone claims that dark events are a test. But a chorus of shouts rings out from the others around the wagon, startling Tristan.

“Hallelujah!”

 “Are you traveling south?” The rain makes the man’s black hair sit flat on his head. “We could use two more warriors.”

Two men wearing chain mail and nasal helms step forward. The castle-and-lion crest of Norwich is sewn onto the left shoulder of their black cloaks, and they each hold the reins of a chestnut gelding. Garrison guards hired to protect the pilgrims, no doubt. They grip their poleaxes nervously and study us.

 “Who are you?” I ask the man with the crucifix. “And stop dodging my question. Why are there plaguers in that cage?”

“I am James of Wymondham,” he replies. “The afflicted in the cage are the people we love. God has cursed them. And there is only one way to remove a curse: Through faith and prayer. So sayeth the Lord.”

“And did the Lord sayeth you should wheel them around England as you pray?” Tristan asks.

“We are taking them to the shrine of Saint Edmund,” James snaps. “There we shall pray for them, in the sight of England’s Patron Saint. And through our devotion, they will rise again, like Jesus Christ, our savior, and be given wings of gold and allowed to suckle from the love-milk of Mother Mary’s breasts. So sayeth the Lord.”

“I’m not an overly religious man,” Tristan says, “but I’m fairly certain the Lord did not actually say that.”

Pilgrims have wandered England for as long as we have been a kingdom. The most popular destination is, of course, Saint Becket’s tomb, in Canterbury. Mounted pilgrims used to gallop recklessly for the last mile of that pilgrimage, but too many un-mounted pilgrims were being trampled. An edict was passed forbidding any horse from being taken into a gallop near Canterbury Cathedral. The pilgrims have since approached at a lively trot. A canter. Named after the cathedral itself.

But James and his flock are not going to Canterbury. They are traveling to Saint Edmund’s tomb under a mistaken premise.

“Edmund isn’t England’s patron saint anymore,” I say. “And St. Edmund’s Bury is flooded with plague. You won’t get near his shrine.” Anxiety claws at my stomach when I think of St. Edmund’s Bury. My Elizabeth waits there, her flesh rotting, and I am wasting time.

The pilgrims whisper to one another. James stares at me for a long moment. “What do you mean?”