The Book of Earth (16 page)

Which he already had. Every eye in the square had been fixed on him breathlessly from the instant he’d grabbed the torch and started up the scaffold.

“Oh my people! I call you to witness!” The priest’s deep voice carried to the back of the crowd, echoing like cannon fire off the stone facades of the merchants’ houses and guild halls, like the thunder of avalanches rolling down from the surrounding mountains. “The Time of Plague is upon us! As the dawn brings light today, the Light of God will enter this place as we make a bold stroke against Satan, our mortal enemy. But ridding ourselves of one viper does not clean out the whole deadly hidden nest!”

At his gesture to the brothers below, the drums rolled again. A black-garbed priest of the parish ushered two children from inside to stand on the church steps. They had been dressed in white, in clothes obviously not their own. Bitterly, Erde decided Guillemo had missed his proper calling. He should have been an actor, or a creator of theatricals. At least then his madness would have remained relatively benign.

One of the children was a girl nearly Erde’s age. The
younger, a boy, tried to break free and run to the woman standing in the cart, but the priest held him firm. Guillemo began his harangue, pacing up and down the scaffold platform just as he had on the bench in the baron’s eating hall, as if it were a pulpit.

“See here, oh my people, the corruption of Innocence! See here how the Devil hides himself in alluring disguise . . .”

Erde stopped listening. She felt a sob working its way up from deep in her gut. She could not press her hands to her ears or sing hymns to drown him out, as she’d once seen villagers do to a priest who bored them with his sermon. She eased herself backward, letting heads and shoulders screen her view, then turned away as if to canvas the food stalls. To her horror, there behind the baker’s boy was the man in the red jerkin, his glance casually taking in the crowd as if he was looking for someone who might not want to be found. Erde feared it might be her, for Red-jerkin was probably one of Guillemo’s civilian searchers, or even a white-robe in disguise! She hunched into her cloak and drew up the hood, as if against the rain, which had stopped a while ago. She was trapped. What a bold and reckless notion it had been to come into town!

Fighting for calm enough to consider her options, Erde decided she had a better chance getting past Red-jerkin than the combined forces in front of the church. She observed him covertly for a while from beneath the fold of her hood, and because she was watching him so carefully, she noticed the change in his attention when Guillemo threw into his rant something about the king, some not-so-veiled insult. The crowd pressed forward, murmuring their approval. A few clenched fists were raised. And Erde saw the anger that flushed Red-jerkin’s face, his glare at Guillemo as quick and venomous as a snake-strike and as quickly hidden again behind his former businesslike manner.

Perhaps not the priest’s man after all. What sort of man, then, to care so much for the honor of the king? Erde knew she was confused about this issue. Tor Alte was too rugged, too far away and too unimportant to be on the aging monarch’s visiting schedule. The king was at most an ideal to her, since her grandmother while she ruled had offered all
due fealty and respect to this distant sovereign, insisting that a central absolute authority helped keep civilization together. But her son disagreed, and since her death, Josef von Alte had been increasingly vocal about the king’s incompetence and irresponsibility, as well as his presumption in claiming sovereignty over so many far-flung baronetcies, especially when his own family lands weren’t much to speak of. Her father even spoke positively of the widening split between the old king and his barons.

So Erde thought it peculiar that an obvious man of the world such as Red-jerkin would take a common complaint so much to heart. She felt that she knew a secret about him, and that she was somehow obscurely privileged, even though she hoped never to lay eyes on him again. She wondered if he served any of her father’s vassal barons. At least she could see he had no love in his heart for Guillemo.

She meant to sneak past him while his attention was engaged, but then she heard Tor Alte’s name flung against the stone facades to echo around the square. A spontaneous roar rose from the crowd, then died away into a darkening murmur. She saw Guillemo pause, high on the scaffolding, waiting them out, quieting them with little waves of his hands until he could be heard again.

“And lo! You’ve all heard rumor of the trouble at Tor Alte! Now let me tell you the truth of it! Your own, your very own valiant and pious lord cannot keep the Devil from his door! Consider that, oh my people! If the most high cannot protect themselves, woe be upon the lowly! Woe indeed!

“Your own baron’s immortal soul was in deepest peril when I arrived, and he never suspecting it! God help
him
, had I not found him in time to root out the Evil that dwelt in that stronghold, poised as it was to seize control!

“But all glory be to God and all his saints, who protected me from evil and put the strength of righteousness in my hand! The witch of Tor Alte is dead and her spells and demons could not harm me!” Fra Guill’s right arm shot up, fist clenched as if it held a flaming sword. The crowd roared again and shook their own raised fists. “She claimed innocence like this one here, and like this one here, she was put to the test by the holy office of the Church. Oh my people, that you’d been there to witness it! The fire of His
Righteous Wrath shriveled her into cinders right as she stood there, spewing out her pernicious lies!”

You lie!
Erde was grateful she had no voice to betray her now when she’d have been unable to keep from screaming her outrage.
Alla took her own life to keep it from your hands!

“A sacred day!” the priest howled, “A holy day, oh my people! The witch is dead, and her warlock minion!” Again, another growling roar, and again Guillemo waited for quiet.

“But wait, oh my people, but wait . . .” He dropped his arms as if in defeat and hung his dark head as he paced back and forth in an eloquent posture of shame and torment. Then he turned to face the square, palms spread in entreaty. “It is not all good news I bring you this day. We had one holy victory at Tor Alte, and will have another here today. But, oh my people, here is the sad tiding I bring you: though your good baron was saved by God’s Will, working through His most humble servant, I did not come to Tor Alte in time to save the baron’s only daughter! The black evil that lodged in her grew desperate at my advance, supported by the strength of my good brothers, God’s holy champions. It stole away the innocent child’s voice to prevent her from speaking its name in exorcism! It corrupted her sweet obedient womanhood!”

The crowd moaned as one. This time Guillemo did not wait for quiet. He let the horrified murmur swell, then raised his own voice over theirs until the very air shrilled with it. Erde’s skin prickled with the eerie power he possessed. “That blackest Evil put the sword of Darkness in her hand and raised up her child’s arm against an innocent man so that she slew him and then another and another until no man was left to stand against her and she escaped! Escaped, oh my people! This demon incarnate walks abroad among us!”

Erde felt his eyes sweep the crowd, felt his searching glance, felt despair and terror close around her like a vise. She backed up blindly, bumping the spectators behind her. But they were too inflamed with the priest’s rhetoric to notice. What soul would believe her now, in the face of such convincing lies? She almost believed him herself, staring at him up there, seeing him as the crowd saw him: a
militant saint or angel, larger than life, with the torch blazing behind him and the new dawn bleaching the shadowed tint of his robe to silver.

“And here is my revelation!” cried the man on the scaffold. “Another piece has been revealed to me of the mysterious dream-omen that stalks me every hour I lay down in sleep, my God-sent holy vision of the witch-child and the Devil’s Paladin! This is the child, oh my people! The witch-child is come among us and she is a child you all have known, become an agent of Satan who seeks the destruction of your immortal souls! We must call on our God to protect us! THE DAYS OF PLAGUE ARE AT HAND!”

The priest fell to his knees on the swaying scaffold. In the square below, four of the white-robes grabbed the torches that burned at the corners of the witch-cart and stood with them at the ready. Guillemo tore open his robe, spread his arms wide and bared his naked hairy chest to the heavens. “Rise up in flame against the powers of darkness, o my people! Set the holy and cleansing fire of righteousness! Burn this evil from the land . . . and . . . from . . . our . . . SOULS!!!”

The four white-robes flung their torches at the witch-cart. The grass bindings on the bundles caught in a rush, speeding their eager blaze to the tar-soaked twigs. On the church steps, the little boy began to wail and beat his fists against the priest who held him. The girl-child just stared ahead, seeing nothing. Flame and dark smoke exploded around the witch-woman faster than a gasp of breath. At first she coughed and tried to turn her head away. The useless poignant gesture tore at Erde’s heart. Then the woman’s brave composure deserted her. She struggled senselessly against her bindings until her wrists tore and bled. Erde’s hands worked at her own wrists. She feared the poor woman might tear her arms from their sockets, like a wild animal pinned in a snare. When at last the fire licked at the hem of her shift, the crowd sighed and leaned forward. The woman began to scream.

Erde spun away through the press of eager spectators, blind and nauseous, seeing herself burning, breathing that black acrid smoke, with those same soul-rending shrieks tearing the life from her own lungs. This would be her fate, if Fra Guill ever got his hands on her.

Around her, children sobbed and the women crossed themselves, weeping and fainting. Erde shoved through the confusion unheeding. When she broke free of the crowd, she found herself two steps from the baker’s tray, where the boy had left it to climb up one of the brazier carts for a better view. There, he danced up and down, his small fists clenched and his eyes riveted to the spectacle.

Erde learned then that hunger is a strong instinct. Like a rush of cold water, cunning cleared her head. She dropped the silver mark into the heel of her boot, then quickly doubled up the flap of her cloak to make a pocket. She darted a glance up and down the line of food stalls. No one watching. Like the baker’s boy, the entire throng was rapt by the witch-woman’s death throes.

Except Red-jerkin. He had spotted her from the far end near the church. Her movement counter to the crowd had drawn his attention. Erde froze like a wild animal, and their eyes met. He raised his arm a bit, as if to signal her covertly, then started to work his way through the throng in her direction. It seemed that he too was seeking to avoid notice, and this terrified her all the more. What unknown pursuers lay in wait for her in addition to the known?

Erde let instinct take hold. She stepped up to the baker’s tray, cleared the entire surface into her cloak with one sweep of her arm. Then for the second time in three days, she turned and ran for her life.

*   *   *

The streets of Tubin were deserted as the unwelcome dawn lightened the narrow band of sky between the rooftops to the color of pewter. The wet cobbles and stone walls shone dully as if the entire world had turned to metal, slick, cold, and gleaming with malice. Clutching her laden cloak against her breast as if it were her life and not mere bread that she carried, Erde ran with the last of her strength. She ran for the dragon. If she could only reach the dragon, she would be safe. Even when her breath threatened to fail her, she would not stop, could not even think of stopping, sure that the echo of her own footfall in the narrow wet streets was the clack of Red-jerkin’s booted heels on the paving behind her.

But she cleared the town gates safely and swerved off the main road into the maze of cottages and yards and
kitchen gardens. There, she hid gasping behind a hayrick for long enough to assure herself that there was no pursuit, and long enough to gobble one of the meat pies she had stolen without inhaling the bulk of it into her lungs.

When her breathing had steadied, she chose a more concertedly circuitous retreat through the emptied farmsteads. There was no one about, but she was weak and shaking with exhaustion. She had no more flight in her. But the food did help. In one unguarded cottage yard, she found a small flock of goats penned in a muddy thornbrush corral. Erde halted, considering, while she wolfed down another pie. She spotted a coil of rope abandoned atop a barrel, and this somehow decided her. She dug the silver mark out of her boot, then searched out two especially long curving thorns from the brush fence. At the cottage door, she stuck the thorns crosswise into the soft, worn planking to form a tiny cradle, into which she slid the silver coin. The side stamped with the King’s Arms was facing out, and she noticed that a horned and rampant dragon supported the shield. An omen of good favor, she decided, pressing at it to be sure it would rest there safely until discovered.

She ate another meat pie. Then she returned to the corral to collect her dragon’s dinner.