The Other Side of Heaven (4 page)

Unable to look away, Gwen stood frozen as Ugly’s severed head bumped into her sack. The mouth was open, moving, as if he were still conscious and trying to say something.

She gagged and fell to her knees. “Don’t faint, don’t faint.”

A man’s deep baritone called out in Latin, “
Laudatio Deus
… praise God you were not slain, Brother. Brother?”

Pulling her hood over her head, she squeezed her eyes shut and whispered, “Go away.”

“Brother?”

Trembling, Gwen looked out from her cowl
. He’s wearing chain mail. God no, no. An iron helmet… a bloody sword.
She swayed slightly and then caught herself.

“Good Brother,” he said, “you might give thanks instead, for there is no further need to pray. Their souls have already flown to hell, and there shall be no retrieving them now.”

Walking through the gore, checking the dead, he led the biggest horse she’d ever seen. He wore a sleeveless tunic over his chain mail, sewn with a coat of arms depicting a greyhound, its bared teeth gripping a bone. The other horsemen had the same emblem over their––
She started and stared. Chain mail? And why was he speaking Latin? He wasn’t a priest.

The cloying smell of blood, mixed with the stink of offal from opened abdomens, insinuated itself into Gwen’s nose, her throat, and pushed her senses into overload. She lurched sideways, wanting to scream, but threw up instead, over and over until she felt faint.

Wiping at her mouth, trying to regain some control, Gwen focused on his leather boots sporting intricately shaped spurs with a greyhound crest. She cried out. Would he attack her next?

Her stomach convulsed again.

“Good Brother,” the same baritone addressed her, more gently this time, as he casually retrieved the head and tossed it aside.

Stunned by his nonchalance, she tried to focus on his words. He didn’t sound cruel, but after what he just did…

“Brother?”

He thinks I’m a monk.
The disguise would keep her safe, as long as nobody touched her. She mustn’t blow her cover.

“
Ita
.” Nodding, Gwen rose and then spoke slowly, trying to sound like a man, using the deepest tone she could manage. “
Laudatio Deus
,” she mumbled in response, and then switched to Italian. “
Per favore
… let me use your phone. I need to call home. Please tell me you have a phone. I need to call and tell them I’m here.”

“Brother, are you befuddled?” he asked. “There is no dwelling nearby or folk who might hear if you called out. Forgive me, but your speech is nonsensical. Pray, take a moment to clear your thoughts.”

His Latin was so perfect, so fluid, that she gaped. Puzzled, she switched back to Latin. “No, I am not befuddled! Why is everyone refusing to speak Italian?”

He frowned, then turned and barked orders to his men. It sounded familiar but off, like Igor’s speech in Santa Lucia. A local dialect? The accent, the turns of phrase were odd, unlike anything she’d come across.

“You’ve nothing to fear from me, Brother. Did the brigands harm you? Was anything stolen? Your hands need tending.”

Gwen gazed at them, startled by what she saw. Her left hand was only scratched, but the right one was a mess, with several gashes on her knuckles, bruising, and plenty of blood. She realized just how badly they hurt.

The man stepped to his horse and pulled something from a saddlebag.

Gwen, not stopping to consider why, fumbled with her wristwatch, then yanked it off and shoved it into her sack.

Within seconds he was back, motioning for her to sit on the ground.

From within the safety of her cowl, Gwen watched as he prepared to dress her injuries. He was tall and trim with broad shoulders – very broad. His lower face, as much as she dared to examine, was blanketed by a thick growth of dark stubble mingled with a hint of gray, his jaw square, his mouth tight-lipped, serious.

He knelt beside her and lifted her right sleeve. Gwen let her gaze fall away. She wasn’t ready to look him in the eyes yet, feeling sure she would give away her secret if she did.

He worked swiftly, cleaning the wounds with a cloth saturated with something that stung and smelled worse than it felt.

“Hold this close against the cuts while I prepare the bandage,” he ordered.

Beyond him, Gwen watched as his troop heaped the bodies in a pile, realizing the sight of gore bothered her far more than the fact men had been killed. She had to admit she felt satisfaction at seeing the butchered bodies of her would-be rapists.

“Have you a name?”

Name?
“Uh… er, Brother Godwyn.”

“It is an unfortunate truth of our times, Brother Godwyn, that brigands so freely roam our countryside, waylaying even the lowliest and holiest. My apologies.”

“You speak Latin perfectly,” Gwen ventured. But why? He didn’t look anything like a scholar.

He paused in his work, and she peeked out from under her hood. He was staring at her hands. What exactly was he looking at? She pulled back reflexively.

He cleared his throat. “Of course I speak it, Brother, as would anyone in my position.”

Gwen nodded, deciding to keep quiet for a while. This place made no sense. Why was everything turned on its head? She thought about Alice in Wonderland and felt a kinship.

“Whence came you, Brother?”

She hesitated. Her instincts told her to lie about being an American. “Britannia,” she finally said, giving the old Latin name.

“That is a great distance,” he said, surprised. “I see from your cowl that you are a Benedictine. How old are you? By your hands, your voice, you seem… quite, uh, young. When did you take your vows?”

Vows! When did the religious orders take their vows?
All she could think of was Maria in
The Sound of Music
. “Last year,” she cautiously offered. “I took my vows last year. I… I’m on pilgrimage, and, and there was somebody else with me, but we got separated. His name is Stefano. He’s blond, tall, maybe injured. Have you seen him?”

“No, we’ve seen no one on the road since the village of Emilia.” He reached out and took her hand to finish dressing her wounds. “You need not fear me, Brother Godwyn. I am Alberto Uzzo, lord of Canossa. I have been to seek council with the Holy Father and now return to my lands. We have extra horses, and you may join my party, if you wish. It would not be safe to journey alone in the open, as you have witnessed. Moreover, dusk is upon us, and the devil will soon be abroad.”

Gwen frowned.
The swords, Latin, chain mail, and now the devil abroad.

She looked away, terrified of what it all meant.

“Father Warinus rides with us,” Lord Alberto went on, nodding over his shoulder. “If I had my choice, I would burn the corpses of such filth, but he has prevailed upon me to allow for their burial. So, we must tarry here while my men dig a pit large enough to hold them. It will be a late night. Nevertheless, we will break camp early tomorrow. Father Warinus journeys to Pavia. Mayhap he will take you there.”

“How far is Pavia?” She was almost afraid to hear his answer.

He released her hand, sat back on his haunches, and calculated out loud. “We left Modena at daybreak. We must spend some time tracking down those who escaped into the woods, and we’ll ride late because of it. We plan to make camp this night by the river down yonder.” He glanced toward the boulders and the valley beyond. “It will be another three days, at least, until the priest and I part company. As for Pavia, a week more.”

Gwen nodded. “Pavia, yes, I see.” She could barely utter the words, her emotions bubbling near the surface. A week? It couldn’t be more than a hundred miles from this location.

Everything she’d experienced since the quake came crashing down on her. She recalled the landscape on her drive north from Rome to Santa Lucia. The countryside was never barren, never unpopulated. Towns and villages popped up everywhere you looked, while vineyards, orchards, or farmland covered everything else. But civilization had simply fallen away after she’d left Santa Lucia. The world had gone out of kilter. Why? Her head hurt. She wanted to be away from this place, where normal wasn’t anything like normal.

Lord Alberto gathered his things and left Gwen’s side when the horsemen pursuing the escapees returned empty-handed. The men spoke quietly with their leader for several minutes, then broke away to help with the digging. Once the dead were buried, one of Alberto’s men brought Gwen a horse, and soon they were on their way.

Gwen kept well back in the troop, avoiding conversation with anyone around her. She forced herself to ask hard questions, to assess her surroundings and all she had seen. She needed to analyze everything with clear, level-headed thought, but her mind refused, firmly discarding the only obvious explanation.

Refusing, because traveling through time, being thrust backward through the centuries to pre-Renaissance Italy, was simply too absurd to contemplate.

*

The western sky held but a trace of light, dusk’s deep violet-blue. The moon hung low among twinkling stars as Alberto rode out ahead of his men, wanting to be alone with his thoughts. There was something about the monk, something disquieting, but he could not guess what. Brother Godwyn. He was a tall youth with no beard, a stripling mayhap, yet he seemed older. On pilgrimage?
Bah!
he thought in disbelief. These days everyone, even pilgrims, had to travel in groups for safety.

Why was he on his own, wandering the countryside? Alberto rubbed his face, pondering. Godwyn almost certainly had something to hide, because of the way he kept himself hidden at the back of his hood. Was he truly a monk? Alberto shrugged. They would find out soon enough. Better to set his mind on the worries they would encounter upon reaching Canossa.

“You are deep in thought, my lord.” Father Warinus moved his horse alongside. “What weighs so heavily?”

“Our monk weighs heavily,” Alberto replied, sourly. “There is something odd about him. He appears very young, mayhap too young for one who claims to have taken his vows last year, yet something tells me he is not as young as he would have us believe. Although I do not sense evil or misdeed, neither do I think he is altogether who he says.”

Father Warinus sighed. “Are any of us, at a tender age? And I think you are mistaken in that. He does indeed seem young, for there is a vulnerability in his countenance, something years would erase, something which cannot be feigned. Those of us who choose to enter into the service of God do so for many reasons, and time hones us into the men we are meant to be. When I was the same age as Brother Godwyn, my ‘calling’ resembled something closer to terror. Mayhap this young Benedictine is still finding his way toward reconciliation between the path he has chosen, and the one he has left behind.” The priest crossed himself and then asked, “Have you any news of Queen Adelaide?”

“Rumors, but nothing directly from her, not since she sent me to Rome.” Alberto scratched his beard. “I’ll admit, the lack of communication is disquieting, but her husband’s men – God rest his soul – are true and stand firmly behind her. They will hold off Berengar’s advances for now, but time presses. After we part company, I intend to ride hard for home, gather my full force, and strengthen the queen’s garrison. I have decided it would be unwise to wait and hope for the best. As I said before, I have no doubt Berengar will try to wrest the kingdom from her before the end of summer.”

Silence fell between them, and Alberto let his mind wander over his worries once again. Abruptly, he twisted in his saddle and looked to the back of his troop. By torchlight, he could plainly make out the boy-monk, who rode with his head down, his hood in its usual cloaked position. Alberto couldn’t even see the lad’s nose.
What does he hide? What?

Alberto’s gaze flickered, unbidden, to the young man’s graceful hold on the reins. He noted the way the monk sat tall on his borrowed horse.
Why does his appearance plague me with doubt?
he wondered, as he straightened and stared forward. Godwyn’s hands were soft, his way with horses easy, confident. He came from privilege, that much was certain. Surely he was a second son, unhappily forced to wear the cowl.

But why had he not developed the inevitable calluses of a novice? They were usually worked near to death. Could Godwyn be of the nobility? Is that why he appears to have been coddled?

And why should it plague me so?

Suddenly, Alberto recalled the warmth of the youth’s skin as he’d dressed his wounds, the soft, unblemished curves of his forearm with its sparse, golden hair.

Jesus God, I am no sodomite!
He whacked his crop hard against his leather boot, startling his charger and causing the priest’s horse to shy.

God strike me down if I have such thoughts again!

*

The moon and stars had been out for some time when Gwen heard Lord Alberto call a halt by the river. The horses were tethered, bedrolls and blankets spread out in the open air, and a fire blazing by the time she’d returned from relieving herself behind a mound of brambles.

Although she had some food left in her sack, she gladly accepted a hunk of cold wheat cake from one of the soldiers. Gwen bowed her head before eating, just in case anyone watched, then tore into it, famished. Soon, another man kindly offered her a bowl of boiled fava beans and a mug of hot wine.