“Of course, Brother.”
Footsteps trudged away. A warm hand touched my brow. “By Iero’s grace, find safety here, thou who fleest sword or hangman. By the saint’s hand, find healing here, thou who sufferest wound or sickness. By gift of holy earth, find strength here, thou who comest parched or weak. And by King Eodward’s grant and his servants’ labor, find nourishment for thy flesh and spirit. God grant thee ease, traveler.”
An interesting prayer…gift of holy earth…King Eodward’s grant…all mixed in with the Karish god Iero and one of his saints. For the most part, the Karish dwelt peaceably side by side with the elder gods, but I’d never before heard a joint invocation.
I lifted my head. “Perhaps, if you could just help me out of this corner…”
An uncomfortable ricketing tilt of the cart brought a pale, narrow face above me. The lamplight revealed the thickening brows and downy upper lip of oncoming manhood, and such delight and amazement as could only emanate from the same soul that sang cheery psalms while slogging a manure cart down a mountainside in the rain. “You’re alive!”
I didn’t feel at all sure about that, having come so close as to hear the Ferryman’s footsteps. “Not dead. Thank you.”
“No need to thank me, sir. It’s my duty, you see, assigned me by the prior, who was given the task by the abbot, whose authority is from the hierarch and the One God in Heaven. I sleep above the sanctuary gate, ready to hear the bell and open the gate for any who come. You’re the first since I was given the task. You do beg sanctuary, don’t you?”
His eagerness exhausted me.
“Yes. Certainly.”
“Thus you must have broken the law of God or king, or someone believes it so…” He tilted his head and drew his brows together. Clearly his excitement at receiving a supplicant was now tempered with consideration of my soul’s peril. My offenses were, indeed, countless, and my peril ever present.
“If you could just help me sit up.” So long tipped downward in the stinking cart had my belly mightily unsettled, not that there was aught left in it to spew.
The untonsured boy was as diligent with his wiry arms and gentle hands as with his words. By the time a gray-haired monk with darkish skin about his eyes, something like a badger’s markings, dropped a bundle of long poles on the paving, I sat across the lip of the three-sided cart, my head bent almost to my knees and my lip bloody from biting it.
“Jullian, unfold the litter. Let me examine what we have here. Ooh…” A glimpse of the broken, dark-stained shaft protruding from my black and swollen thigh was clearly the most interesting thing the fellow had seen that day.
“I hope you’ve a sharp knife, Brother,” I said, my voice shaking, “and a steady hand.”
Then he touched it, and the world slipped out of my grasp.
Chapter 2
“How do you feel this morning, my friend?”
I cocked one eye open. The smudge-eyed monk peered down at me, his arms overflowing with bundled linen and wooden bowls. Plastered walls hung with strips of green-dyed cloth rose up behind him to a timbered roof, and an array of narrow windows, paned with horn, admitted murky light. A smoking rushlight clamped to an iron tripod revealed ten more beds lined up neatly in the long plain room. From my odd vantage—I lay on my left side, some kind of bolster propping me up from the back and legs tipped higher than my head—the beds appeared unoccupied.
“I feel like Iero’s wrath,” I said. Every particle of my flesh felt battered; my leg throbbed as if the arrow point were grinding its way into the bone. My shoulder might have had rats chewing on it. Damp all over, I shivered helplessly despite a pile of blankets.
I had known better than to pull the damnable arrow out of my thigh when I had no help but Boreas, who was convinced that burying a live cat under an oak at the full moon would cure his crabs, and that spitting over a bridge rampart while wearing a moonbird’s feather would speed the healing of his broken hand. I knew little of the body’s humors. But one of a man’s great veins lay in the thigh, and I’d seen men bleed to death faster than a frog takes a fly while removing an arrow point carelessly from just the same spot as my wound. And we hadn’t been able to stop moving. When the Harrower priestess had thrown her legion of madmen against us, the battle had gone completely to the fiery pits, and six thousand other bloodied soldiers who had wagered their fortunes on the wrong side in this cursed war were soon to be right on our heels.
A halfwit would understand what the delay would cost me. Though I had weighed bleeding to death likely preferable to sepsis and amputation, in my usual way I had postponed the decision, figuring it was better to die tomorrow than today. Now the payment was falling due.
Mustering my courage, I broached the question gnawing at my gut. “You’ll take the leg, I know, Brother. But think you I’ll live to raise a glass again?”
The monk dropped his bundled linens atop a wide chest pushed against the end wall of the infirmary, then began arranging the wooden bowls on shelves already crowded with ewers and basins, jars and bottles. “If the One God’s mercy continues to hold sway, your leg will heal with no ill result. Your fever’s broken just this morn. Young Jullian will be certain his prayers are answered. You’d think the boy had delivered you from the gates of hell bearing sword and shield like the Archangel himself.”
“But it’s putrid, and when you remove the arrow—”
“The nasty bit of iron is two days out, lad, and for certain, you’ve the constitution of an ox. You’re on the mend.” The monk was a strapping fellow. Despite his circled eyes and his stubbled cheeks that drooped excess skin about his jaw, his face expressed naught but good cheer. He spread out an array of bundled plants on a long table that stood between the last bed and the stack of shelves. Perching his backside on a backless stool, he began picking leaves from the array. “I’m Brother Robierre, as it happens, by Iero’s grace the infirmarian of Gillarine Abbey.”
“Oh!” Astonishing how much better I felt straightaway. As if the jagged bits of a shattered mirror had put themselves together again. As if I’d pulled the veil off my contracted bride and found some girl I loved. I dropped my head on the pillow and crowed like a banty rooster. “May the angels scribe your name, Brother! The moment I’m afoot, I’ll dance you a jig and carry you to heaven on my back!”
A stoop-shouldered monk with piebald hair and a gray scapular over his cinched black gown scuttered out from behind me, casting a mildly shocked glance my way. The steaming crock he carried past my bed to the table left a scented trail in the air. Chicken—holy mother, could it be?—and onions and carrots and thyme and savory. My stomach rumbled uproariously.
Months had passed since I last tasted meat. In early summer Boreas and I had shot an aged squirrel, three bites apiece and broth from the boiled bones with little more than grass to throw in it. Then and since the Ardran legions had been squatting on land long raided, gleaned, and stripped. We’d had only bread like dried leather made from shriveled peas or even acorns ground into flour. And never enough. No planting or harvest this year in any of western Ardra. The summer campaign had been only one of Prince Perryn’s gross miscalculations in pursuing his father’s throne. Not even the worst.
“Thank you, Brother Anselm,” said Robierre. “I do believe our patient’s going to appreciate the soup today. Inform the abbot that our supplicant is awake, if you would.”
Piebald Brother Anselm nodded solemnly to the infirmarian and scurried away. To my delight, Brother Robierre put aside his activities and selected a wooden bowl from the shelf. I almost moaned as he filled the bowl from the tureen, acquired a spoon, and dragged a low stool to my bedside.
The good brother insisted I drink some concoction that tasted like boiled scrapings from a stable floor first of all. But after the first spoonful of the soup, I would have knelt to kiss the hairy toes that peeked out from his sandals had he but asked.