This time, she let the tears come.
They had only known each other for a few hours, but already Andreas had grown quite fond of the other knight, while trying to swallow a certain amount of slack-jawed awe at the bits of personal history the man dropped with casual humility. He spoke so many languages-fluently, too-and he knew the Holy Roman Emperor well enough to call him friend, though he doubted Raphael would ever deign to claim as much to anyone. He was well traveled, probably more so than Andreas was himself, which was no mean feat, even though Raphael was a few years his elder. And he had not chastised Andreas for his fanciful stories about the Crusades.
Raphael was right about the Sixth Crusade; Andreas had seen very little fighting during the time he had spent in the Levant, and while Raphael had not spoken of his own martial experience, Andreas suspected the man was quite well versed in the art of the sword. Plus he was well-read, a physician, and somewhat of a philosopher and an orator. Was there any way in which the man was not skilled?
Raphael was not very adept at tracking, as it turned out. What appeared to him to be an impossible morass of dirt and mud and detritus was a discernible history to Andreas. He tried to remain nonchalant about the ease with which he deciphered the tracks around Gerda’s house, but tiny thrills of excitement ran up his legs and arms as he led Raphael toward the woods that abutted the fields near the village.
“There. Do you see it?” he said, pointing at a broken stalk of a weed. “The stalk and leaves are green, but do you see how it bends over on itself like that? And the dark patch here? That is blood.”
“Otto’s?” Raphael bent and peered closely at the weed. He tried to lift the stalk upright, but it fell back over when he took his hand away.
“Yes.” Andreas looked toward the trees and scratched behind his ear.
“What is it?” Raphael asked, his hand straying to his sword hilt.
“If you were going to carry a head some distance, would you wrap it in a cloth or carry it by its hair?” Andreas asked Raphael.
“I have not had many opportunities to concern myself with that question.”
“Once, I carried some number of heads in a basket.”
Raphael raised an eyebrow. “For what purpose?”
“They were enemy scouts. We had caught them trying to infiltrate the citadel. At Tyrshammar, in the north. One of the local warlords thought the Rock would be a much better citadel than whatever ramshackle lodge he had. He marched on the Rock and tried to scare us into opening the gates for him.”
“Who was the Master of Tyrshammar at that time?”
“Feronantus.”
Raphael fought to hide his grim smile. “That sounds like Feronantus. How many died in this little fracas?”
“Just those five,” Andreas said. “We threw their heads down, and the warlord’s troops scattered. Most of the Shield-Brethren never even bothered to assemble their kits. Feronantus put us initiates to the task.”
“Of course he did. He needed to know what you were willing to do to win a battle.”
“It is not a pleasant task, carrying a head,” Andreas said, “but once you get over your initial revulsion, you consider the practical issues. They tend to…drip for some time. That is why I used a basket. With one, I would use a piece of cloth or a satchel-I would have burned such material afterward-but while I was transporting the head, I would not have wanted it dripping on me.” He pointed at the stalk. “Or the ground.”
“He was in a hurry?” Raphael suggested.
Andreas nodded absently, his gaze straying along the ground and toward the tree line. Had he been running? he wondered. Had he already planned to leave the head? Where had the others gone?
The answers to his questions would not be revealed by standing in the field, and so he strode off toward the verge of the forest, his gaze roving across the ground, watching for the sporadic signs that he was still following the back-trail of the culprit.
The standing stones were crumbling, moss-covered stones, and half of them had toppled onto their sides where the forest had even more aggressively covered them with vines and tiny shoots. But Andreas had seen enough of the pagan circles in the north to recognize the oblong shapes. As he and Raphael approached the edge of the ring, an animal growled at them from the center and he caught a flash of gray fur as he noisily drew his sword from its scabbard. Raphael drew his sword too, and the scavengers fled, leaving the bounty that lay in the center of the old pagan ceremony ring.
There were four bodies altogether, and as Raphael cautiously approached the jumble of slaughtered corpses, Andreas inspected the stones around the ring and the nearby forest. There was no threat from within the circle, but the presence of the dead-and the scavengers that were already stealing scraps-made his skin crawl. He wanted to be sure there was no looming threat that might pounce on them.
“Here is Otto,” Raphael said, and Andreas looked at the corpse that Raphael was indicating. The body was off to one side of the center area, clearly missing its head.
“And the others?” he asked.
Raphael shook his head. “I do not know them.”
“Have they been dead long?”
“No. I would surmise they died around the same time as Otto.”
Raphael nudged the bodies with his foot for another few moments and then turned his attention to Otto’s corpse. Satisfied there was no lurking danger, Andreas sheathed his sword and entered the ring. He knew it was a vestigial childhood fear-old superstitions that were never quite excised from the body-but he could not suppress a shiver as he crossed the boundary of the circle.
“The others were killed quickly with a sword,” Raphael said as he examined Otto’s corpse. “Otto was not as fortunate.”
Andreas took one look at the ravaged corpse of Gerda’s husband and turned away, the old superstitions crawling, like spiders, up his spine.
“Ita ut comedatis carnes filiorum vestrorum et filiarum vestrarum,” Raphael whispered, his voice filled with dread. And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons and daughters. “God’s vengeance upon the unfaithful.”
“Virgin help us,” Andreas said, staring back at Raphael. “All of them?” His mind quailed at the thought of the entire village being flesh-eaters.
Raphael’s face was pale and the muscles in his jaw flexed as he stood. “Let us hope not,” he said grimly.
SUPERBIA
The door squeaked, a thin noise that would have normally gone unnoticed at home as the door of their tiny hut squeaked and groaned constantly whenever the wind played with it. But she was not at home; she was not buried beneath the blankets with Otto, hiding from the weather and the world. She was lying on the cold stones of the inn’s hearth, and Otto…Otto was gone.
She was curled around her hands, and she wanted to curl even tighter, but her body was too stiff to bend any further. She started to roll onto her back, and as the first patch of raw skin pressed against her clothing, she remembered what had happened and caught herself, tensing her entire body to keep from putting her weight on her flayed back.
As she curled up again, she remembered the sound that had woken her-the creak of the door. She sat up, wincing at the pain, and stared toward the closed door.
“Who’s there?” she croaked. The ale she had drunk earlier had dried to a thin film in her mouth.
A figure sidled out of the deep shadows behind the door. The magistrate’s face was slick with a sheen of sweat and his eyes bulged, making him look like a swollen, glistening frog. “I’ve waited a long time,” he whispered. “And I saved you. I have come to take my reward.”
“You lied to him,” she whispered. “You lied to God.”
“Haven’t we all these many years?” he replied, crouching nearby, staring at her. His tongue moved behind his lips and he stroked his chin. “We send our tithe to the Archbishop in Mainz twice a year. We do not complain about how much we have to give, because it is a slight burden compared to the alternative. We have no Roman Catholic presence in our village. Just a few priests who come through on their way to larger cities. We are easily forgotten, Gerda. No one cares what we do as long as we keep it to ourselves.”