Sinner: A Prequel to the Mongoliad

INVIDIA

The inquisitor had given Gerda an unexpected blessing when he had instructed her to pray silently. He had intended his words to be a threat, as a means of keeping her quiet as he lashed her, but she had taken them to heart. After the first few strokes, she stopped feeling the lash as it fell upon her back and buttocks. Her body would jerk and spasm from the physical blow, but she felt no pain. She fell into a stupor; the only sensation remaining to her was the sound of her own voice, echoing in her head as she prayed.

Not to the Christian God, but to the older spirits, the ones her grandmother had believed in-the spirits of wood and water, field and forest. The old ghosts who had haunted this land long before the Christian missionaries had come from Rome, extolling the virtues and sacrifice of their crucified god. He is the same, her grandmother had told her once. They had been picking flowers in the meadows beyond the river. The men from Rome hung him from a cross and then sealed him in a cave; our peoples burned our god and scattered his ashes upon the fields. But the manner of his death did not matter; he still came back.

But when her grandmother died, some part of the old ways died with her. It became harder and harder to remember the prayers sung in the spring over the freshly planted fields; the invocations at harvest languished as the farmers became more concerned with getting their bounty to the market in Mainz than maintaining their fields in the old ways.

Her grandmother had always liked Otto. He is a kind boy, she had said of him when he and Gerda were younger. He is not afraid of the forest. Her grandmother had been pleased when she told her that Otto sought her to be his wife, and after her grandmother was gone, she swore to herself that she would teach her children the same lessons.

But there had been no children, and in time Otto had stopped trying, no matter her efforts. She had despaired, trying desperately to figure out the reasons why her womb refused to allow his seed to take root and produce children. Was it because she still believed in the old gods when the rest of the village had transferred its devotion to Christ? She tried-she really did-but she found no solace there either.

Eventually she gave up, believing that the gods-both old and new-had abandoned her. She was a lost child, adrift between two worlds and party to neither. She hoped she would vanish, swallowed by the forest one day, and no one would miss her.

But the opposite had happened. She had begun to attract the attention of the other men in the village. Otto was liked amongst the villagers, and it was not because they pitied him for his barren wife. But it was something else-something about her and her alone-that drew them to her. She did not seek their attention, and she began to spend more and more time by herself, either in the narrow confines of their hut or in the woods. She could not bear their eyes on her. They whispered amongst themselves, as if she were deaf and dumb.

As the inquisitor beat her, Gerda begged for understanding. Why? she pleaded.

And in the darkness of her mind-so similar to the darkness beneath the trees on the nights when the moon was nothing more than a pale sliver in the sky-she heard the voice of her grandmother. It is the way, child. It is always the way. Blood must be given to the land.

But why Otto? Why me?

Because you are loved, child. Because you are loved above all the rest.

Gerda did not weep as the lash flayed her skin and her back ran wet with blood.

Blood must be given.

The room was cold and dark when she woke, the fire having dwindled to a few lingering coals in the narrow hearth. The room was devoid of the table and chairs it had held earlier and the door was firmly closed-barricaded undoubtedly from the other side. They had left her on the floor, and she had lain there, senseless, for long enough that the blood had dried to a crusted layer on her back. She moved gingerly, sliding her thin shift back down her body, and even though she knew the scabs on her back were tearing, she felt no pain.

Next to her was a cup, half-filled with ale, and a plate with a piece of bread and a half-eaten chicken leg. To her eyes and stomach, it was a lavish repast, and she fell upon the meal eagerly, making short work of it. The food eased some of the tension in her belly but did little to ease the ache in her heart.

Slowly she crawled across the floor toward the hearth. It put out very little heat, but the stones in front of it were still warm. She curled up as best she could with her manacles and her torn back and tried to rest.

She had seen the pyre in the green. She knew they would come to take her to it in the morning.

As she slipped toward a senseless slumber, she was saddened by the idea that they would not scatter her ashes in the fields. How else would she see Otto again?

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.