Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2)
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Authors: Roberto Calas
The Scourge
Nostrum
The Scourge
Nostrum
Roberto Calas
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Roberto Calas
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
e-ISBN: 9781477858882
For Rina and Nick, who once had nothing, and so give me everything.
Table of Contents
EPISODE 1
Map for Episode 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
EPISODE 2
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
EPISODE 3
Map for Episode 3
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
EPISODE 4
Map for Episode 4
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
EPISODE 5
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
EPISODE 6
Map 1 for Episode 6
Map 2 for Episode 6
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
EPISODE 7
Map 1 for Episode 7
Map 2 for Episode 7
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
EPISODE 8
Map for Episode 8
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Episode 1: Historical Note
Episode 2: Historical Note
Episode 3: Historical Note
Episode 4: Historical Note
Episode 5: Historical Note
Episode 6: Historical Note
Episode 7: Historical Note
Episode 8: Historical Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Kindle Serials
When I was a child, I watched a man burn at the stake for mixing tinctures to cure the Black Plague. I remember him smiling just before the flames seared his flesh. A haunting smile that has bewildered me to this day. The monks who burned him told the lingering crowd that prayer is the only true and righteous weapon against illness. That alchemy is a sin.
Some weeks later those same monks dunked a saint’s body into a vat of wine in the hopes of creating a cure for the same plague.
I am a simple knight. It is difficult for me to see the difference between a tincture and a corpse’s bath water. But after two days of prayer I understand that neither God nor the saints will heal the woman I love. I must look to alchemy, even if it means burning in the very fires of hell. And I, too, will smile as the flames lick my flesh. For I will have saved the woman I adore and earned eternal salvation in her eyes.
“You are stealing from the church!” Brother Phillip is the last remaining monk in the monastery of St. Edmund’s Bury, my current sanctuary. He is not happy today. “You imperil your very soul, Sir Edward!”
“I am not stealing from the church,” I say. “I am stealing from
you
.” I stare at him until he takes a step back. One of his eyebrows twitches.
In my experience, monks are quick to threaten God’s Fury. They wave His wrath like a whip whenever you stray from the path they have chosen for you. But I believe every man must find his own road to salvation. Job, from the Old Testament, followed the road of perseverance. Saint Edmund, the martyred king who gives this town its name, put faith in his principles. And me?
My own personal path to salvation depends on chickens.
I roll a wheelbarrow full of the feathered creatures through the churchyard of St. Edmund’s Monastery, toward the prior’s house. The massive monastery buildings rise around me like mountains of cut stone and stained glass. Brother Phillip walks beside me, holding my great helm and prattling on about the loss of essential food.
Essential food
. There are only four people left alive in this abbey, and yet there are enough animals and provisions to feed a small village for a year. But I am tired of explaining this fact to Brother Phillip. I have spent two days listening to his ceaseless whining on every conceivable topic. Perhaps he is God’s punishment for my sins. I have murdered, stolen and lied, but surely not even those sins warrant an affliction by this man. I understand now why the other monks left him behind when they fled the monastery.
I look at Brother Phillip and feel a momentary pang of pity for him. I, too, must leave him, for I have found new purpose.
“Chickens are clever,” Brother Phillip says, desisting from his complaints to offer this golden insight. I suppose, when compared to him, chickens might be clever. “Thomas Cockerel told me that chickens can dream. Just like you or me.”
If chickens dream like I do, then I would see the tears in their tiny eyes each morning. I would see scars on their knuckles from the stone walls of the abbey. If chickens have dreams like mine, then I pity the creatures.
“Why must you take them, Sir Edward?” Phillip asks. “How can chickens help Elizabeth?”
The birds coo, sounding like tiny monkeys, and they peck at the canvas stretched over their heads. I stare at Phillip for a long moment, the black mist settling into my stomach as I think of my wife. “She’s getting worse, Phillip. I have to do something.”
Phillip fusses nervously with the wooden cross at his neck and his eyebrow twitches again.
“You’ll take care of Elizabeth, like you promised?” I ask. An icicle stabs my soul when I utter her name. “You and Sister Mildred?”
There is a nun here in the abbey. A kind woman who cooks for us every day and tries to restore some shred of order to the world. She has nursed Elizabeth while I have prayed.
“Mildred will care for her,” Brother Phillip says. “But it is an imposition. Sister Mildred has to tend the livestock and the gardens as well.”
I glance sidelong at Phillip. “It wouldn’t kill you to help her with her chores.”
“I do help her,” he says. “I pray every day for her health and for our continued safety.”
I reach the prior’s house and set down the wheelbarrow so I can open the door. My armor feels heavy after two days of wearing a tunic. A sack containing more of Phillip’s essential food—dried meats and bread—hangs from my shoulder. “Prayer is good, Brother Phillip,” I say. “But God helps those who help themselves.”
He crosses his arms. “If that is true, Sir Edward, then why do you need the chickens?”
Has Brother Phillip found wit?
I open the door and roll the wheelbarrow to a sparse room at the back of the house. “I need these birds because they are loud. And because they can only fly for short stretches.” I reach down and take hold of an iron ring set into the floor, pull upon it until the trapdoor swings open. The stench of rotting flesh nearly knocks me over.
It is cloudy outside, but enough light streams down into the pit to reveal the swaying, groaning, clawing mass of pale bodies at the foot of the ladder.
“But most importantly,” I say, “I need chickens because they are fast.”
I untie the front of the canvas and tilt the wheelbarrow forward toward the pit. If chickens have dreams, then this is their nightmare.
“Brother, if you would?”
Brother Phillip shakes his head but sets down my great helm and stretches the canvas forward, so that the chickens can’t escape their fate.
“This is madness,” Phillip says. “Absolute madness.”
In these times of madness, only madness will save us.
A knight who is now my enemy once spoke those words, and I think I should have them chiseled onto my tombstone. Madness defines my life these days. I spent more than a week with two of my knights traveling from my home in Sussex to this monastery in East Anglia. I would have traveled into hell itself to save my angel from the plague that has ravaged England. But the plague ravaged my angel, too.
I thought perhaps God was punishing me. I have sinned more than I care to think about and, perhaps, as punishment the Lord took the one thing in this world I could not be without.