“It is your blessed fortune that I meant to take my midday meal at your inn, and I will still do so,” the priest said. “As is my duty as an inquisitor of the Church, I will hear this woman’s testimony and render a judgment, but I will do so in the morning, after a night of prayer for her soul. Until then, she is to be left in my care.”
He gestured to the trio holding the woman, and they dragged her up to the platform. The priest gazed at her slack face, an exaggerated air of fatherly concern in his features. He gestured again, and the magistrate hurried to open the door to the inn for the trio. The priest turned back to the crowd, raised his right hand, and rattled off a blessing in Latin, calling upon God to watch over the village and its residents until such time that he-God’s instrument-could vanquish the evil assaulting these poor innocents.
The crowd milled about for a few minutes, pacified by the priest’s benediction, before they slowly began to disperse.
“A bit dramatic, don’t you think?” Andreas offered.
“But effective,” the mounted knight replied.
“Do you know him?” Andreas asked.
“Konrad von Marburg,” the knight replied. “He is as he says: an inquisitor of the Roman Catholic Church.”
“I saw him earlier, on the road. I did not see you with him.”
“I am not traveling with him.”
“But you know of him.”
The knight looked down at Andreas, his gaze resting for a moment on Andreas’s cloak brooch. “You ask many questions for a man who has not bothered to introduce himself. Some would see that as impertinent and more befitting a man of low character than a knight of a holy order.”
“Many of the order who do know my name would still say the same,” Andreas replied. He pulled back the right sleeve of his robe and offered his hand to the knight. The knight glanced down and, seeing the scar on Andreas’s forearm, tugged the sleeve of his mail back. The two men clasped forearms, and Andreas felt the roughened edges of an old scar on the knight’s forearm. Similar to his, but slightly different. As they all were.
“I am Raphael, lately of…Cologne,” the knight said.
“Andreas,” Andreas replied. “Lately of Petraathen, but more recently-” He shrugged as if it wasn’t important. Ultimately they were all from the old citadel. That was where they took their vows and where they received their scars and their swords.
“Well met, Brother Andreas,” Raphael said, releasing Andreas’s arm. He nodded toward the closed door of the inn. “I had thought to ride farther today, but perhaps I will inquire as to suitable care for my horse. Do you think yonder establishment might be able to offer us sustenance and shelter, should we need to tarry overnight?”
“It might,” Andreas smiled. “We could even offer to share a room.”
“Spoken like a true penitent,” Raphael said. “But you get the floor.”
Andreas bowed. “As long as you are paying, Brother Raphael.”
Raphael laughed.
Gerda had woken that morning to the sound of her husband’s hound baying in fright. Her head fuzzy with sleep, she had dragged her recalcitrant body from beneath the woolen blankets and stumbled toward the door of the one-room hut she shared with Otto. The hound, an old herding dog that Otto had taken pity on several years ago when it had broken its leg chasing a frisky ewe across a gopher-hole-riddled field, lay crouched on the floor not far from the wooden door. Its paws between its snout and its body pointed toward the door, it growled and whimpered as if were both angered and frightened by something on the other side of the warped wooden panel.
Gerda had not yet noticed her husband was missing from the bed, and annoyed at the dog, she had pulled open the door to see what was causing the animal so much distress. As the door opened, the dog yipped in fear and leaped away, running toward the back corner of the room. She had turned toward it, meaning to curse it for its cowardice, and in doing so, caught her first glimpse of what lay directly outside the hut out of the corner of her eye. She froze as the smell struck her. She had hunted with her father as a girl, and he had taught her how to dress the rabbits and squirrels he caught in his snares. She knew the smell of fresh blood.
Trembling, she had turned her head and started screaming when she recognized her Otto’s face staring up at her from the ground. Just his head, canted on one ear, lying in the center of a large smear of dark blood.
The first person who had come in response to her terror fled as soon as he identified the round shape. Others came and went after that, and she had no memory of their faces other than their wild eyes and gaping mouths-not unlike her dead husband’s. All that she could recall of the next few hours after being dragged out of the house was the forlorn expression permanently fixed on Otto’s dead face.
Her neighbors and friends-people whom she had traded bread and vegetables with, whom she had laughed and danced with at the last village feast-looked at her with hate-filled eyes. Some spat on her; others made the sign of the warding eye, refusing to let the Devil leap from her sin-ridden body to their own. The magistrate, who had commented on the flowers in her hair only two days ago when he had encountered her near the communal bread oven, had very little control over the mob’s rising panic. If the priest on the black horse had not appeared when he had, she would have been torn apart by the villagers.
He was an inquisitor of the Roman Catholic Church, and he was not the compassionate savior she had first imagined. When he lifted her chin and looked upon her tear-streaked face, she saw no pity in his sky-colored eyes.
Her trial was to be held in private, immediately after the priest took his meal, and she was forced to kneel before his table while he sated his prodigious appetite. She had tried to catch his eye, but he was intent on his meal as it was laid out before him: a bowl of steaming stew, the scent of which made her already shriveled stomach cramp even further; a loaf of warm bread; tankards of the ale brewed by her sister’s husband’s cousins; a chicken slow-cooked in hot coals so that the meat slid effortlessly off the bone when the inquisitor tore into the leg and wing with his hands and teeth.
After a while she could not bear to look upon the inquisitor, his hands and face shiny with grease and ale, and she sank to the floor, clutching her shackles to her belly. She lay still, her mind slowly fading away from the welter of confusion and despair that filled her body.
AVARITIA
After parting with a few coins and ensuring that his horse would be well cared for, Raphael made his way back to the inn. The green was deserted but for a few malingerers loitering around the pyre, and they glared at Raphael as if daring him to accuse them of being eager to see the judgment of God meted out. Raphael ignored them; he had seen far worse behavior in men during the Fifth Crusade, and while he did not like to dwell on his lack of moral outrage at such fiendishness, he had come to terms with a certain amount of pragmatism in the years since his first blooding as an exuberant initiate of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae. Righteousness dwelt within the heart of a man, not within his hand or his sword.
As he entered the inn, he was assaulted by the noise and the smell of many people clustered within the low-ceilinged room. A sullen fire crouched in a hearth on the opposite wall, and not all of the smoke from the wet wood was going up the chimney. A gray pall clung to the wooden beams of the ceiling. A large cauldron hung on an iron rod, and whatever stew bubbled within smelled delicious enough that Raphael’s stomach did not care how long it had been boiling in that pot. Men shouted back and forth to one another, a minstrel struggled to make himself heard, and the beleaguered tavern staff were constantly summoned to every corner of the room by whistles and wordless grunts and shouts. Raphael surmised that the stairs at the back of the common room led to private chambers on the upper floor. Likewise, one if not both of the other doors out of the common room would lead to a more private dining area.