The Scourge (Kindle Serial) (30 page)

“St. Giles told me to cleanse the world of evil. If this woman is not evil, then there is no evil in the world.” His voice is terrifyingly calm.

“Maybe she didn’t know,” I say. “Maybe she only just found out.”

“No.” Morgan shakes his head slowly. “She knew it wasn’t a cure when she sold it to Gregory. How would she know that? She had to understand what it was.”

We sit in silence for a time. I think about Elizabeth. What I would do if someone poisoned her like this woman poisoned Matilda. Isabella opens her eyes and doesn’t seem to realize where she is at first.

“You knew,” I say. “You knew what was in those phials.”

She looks at me but seems to have trouble focusing. “I stopped,” she says. “I stopped when I found out.”

“But you knew when you gave them to Gregory,” Morgan says. “You
knew
.”

“No,” she says, touching the side of her head and wincing. “No.”

“Then how did you know they did not cure the plague?” he asks. “You said you duped him. How did you know you duped him?
How
?”

She flinches at his scream. Her eyes widen. “I…I…” Tears flow again. She shakes her head, then winces again. “Gregory was the only one. It was only a dozen phials. He is a thief! He is a swindler! I thought he would drink one.”

I can see Morgan trembling and the red flush rising along his neck again. I make eye contact with Tristan. He nods. We step in close. If Morgan goes into a rage again, we will be ready.

But Morgan doesn’t go into a rage. He holds up the phial calmly so that Isabella can see it. “The blood of hundreds is upon your soul. Drink of this willingly and God may have mercy on you.”

“Morgan,” I say. “I don’t…”

He holds up a hand. “It is the will of St. Giles, Edward. He has spoken to me again. And this is his will.”

“ The Lord says thou shalt not kill ,” Tristan says, and I recall Morgan uttering those same words to Tristan not long ago. “Some people still respect the Word of the Lord.”

“Where did you get the phials?” I ask Isabella. “Where did they come from?”

“A simpleton,” she says. Her cheeks are shining with tears and black with eyeshade. “He is a servant at an island fortress not far from here.” She swallows, and the suggestion of a smile plays upon her lips. She is preparing for another performance. “There is a cure,” she says. “They have an elixir on the island. An elixir that cures the plague.”

“A cure?” Zhuri asks.

“Yes! Yes!” She hisses, nodding her head wildly, then wincing and touching the bruise. “An alchemist found a cure. The simpleton works for him. He was supposed to bring me the cure. But he brought this instead. He brought this instead! Never trust an imbecile, my lovely knights. They may mean well, but horses have more sense.” She ducks her head forward and whispers: “I can help you find the simpleton, my beautiful knights. We can find him and make him get the cure. We can all get the cure. All of us, and our loved ones.”

“When will the lies cease?” Morgan shakes his head and unstoppers the phial. “You would go to God with a lie on your lips?”

“It is not a lie! There is a cure! It’s the truth.”

“The simpleton told you that, did he?” Tristan asks.

“Yes,” she replies. “No. Well…he did. But I have heard it from others. Guards at the dungeon. They have heard it too. Release me and I will show you. Please, let me live, my beautiful knights. I swear I will help you find the cure.”

I know I shouldn’t listen to this woman, but the idea of an elixir for this plague makes my heart pound.

“The cure for you is here in my hand,” Morgan says.

“Morgan, you are not like this,” I say. “Listen to what you are saying.”

“God has called me, Edward. St. Giles has told me what must be done. In Moriah, God asked Abraham to kill his own son and Abraham didn’t hesitate. He has asked me to put an end to this witch-whore and that peddler Gregory. And it will be done.”

“No!” Isabella shrieks. “I have done nothing! Nothing!”

“Is this the same God who said we must never avenge ourselves?” I ask.

“What was it He said about revenge? ‘See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another.’ Is that the God you are talking about?”

“Do you speak of St. Giles, who wouldn’t even let a hind in the forest come to harm? Is that the man who wants you to kill this woman?”

Isabella is silent, her features frozen in terror, her gaze darting to Morgan, then to me.

“It is not for us to question, Edward.” Morgan’s gaze doesn’t stray from Isabella.

“You questioned it yourself, Morgan,” I say. “In Chelmsford, you asked me if you might not have imagined the voice. Are you so certain now? Would you kill this woman when there is doubt?”

Morgan doesn’t move for a long time. I watch the tears form and shimmer in his eyes. He stoppers the phial with trembling hands and passes it to me, then rises.

Isabella drops her chin to her chest and weeps.

“This woman killed hundreds with her actions. And more, perhaps.” His fingers fidget at his belt. “She killed Matilda. And she must be punished.”

Isabella looks up with a quick intake of breath, the terror back in her eyes.

Morgan draws the bridle knife and in one powerful motion, before I can move to stop him, plunges the knife down on Isabella.

Sir Edward and his knights start this episode by facing down a cavalry charge of sorts. It is not a standard cavalry charge by veteran soldiers; the knights bearing down on our heroes are not well trained. In a typical cavalry charge, the trick is to move forward in a straight line and to pick up speed slowly. The horsemen don’t accelerate into a full gallop until they are very close to their targets. But Sir Gerald’s hatred makes him ride at a full gallop from the start, which causes his men to bunch up. Which, in turn, causes the nightmarish wreck that allows our heroes to escape.

When Gerald corners them again, Zhuri fires a shot from the Spanish cannon. The shot hits Gerald in the chest but doesn’t penetrate the plate armor. This was a very real problem with the early hand cannons. I have fun writing about these weapons and might take a few liberties with their power, but many of them could not pierce armor. Not at this stage of the game, at any rate. This is one of the reasons such weapons were not embraced on the battlefield. They were painfully slow to load, cumbersome, and inaccurate. Arrows with bodkin tips, fired by trained archers,
could
penetrate armor and were much less high maintenance.

When our knights reach Chelmsford, Edward reminisces about a peasant uprising. He is talking about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. That rebellion was led by Wat Tyler, a commoner who was motivated to act in part by John Ball, an excommunicated priest. Ball gave a sermon in which he uttered the memorable line “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

The rebellion
was
partly about social status, but the more immediate impetus — as Edward alluded to — was the unfair levying of taxes. Richard’s fictional quote to Edward about how the uprising was linked to the plague is also accurate. The Black Plague wiped out so many peasants that lords had trouble gathering enough workers to farm their land. This gave peasants value and bargaining power, and it allowed them to push back when Richard levied a third poll tax. A similar thing happened during World War I in the British Isles. The working classes were ravaged by war deaths, so the remaining workers gained leverage against the upper classes, and parts of the rigid class system broke down.

As a last note, I wanted to offer a glimpse into an odd coincidence of research and storytelling. This novel began its life as a serial, which provides many benefits and not a few drawbacks for a writer. One of the minor drawbacks is that I can’t go back and change things. My story has to go linearly, always. Sometimes, when I have to reconcile a past decision with a present situation, it requires creativity (e.g., “Crap, I haven’t mentioned that falcon for two episodes. How do I work it back in?”). And other times, things just seem to fall into place with no effort at all. Case in point: the phials of the Virgin Mary’s blood that the knights bought from Gregory the Wanderer. Although I had the storyline for these phials in place, a lot of the details were still orbiting somewhere in my subconscious.

I wasn’t planning on taking the knights to Chelmsford. I had determined that they would find the “sorceress” at a monastery in northern Essex or Suffolk. But when I started writing, Morgan decided he wanted to go to Chelmsford. I’m sure there were lots of little reasons why it was beneficial for the knights to go there, but really, it was mostly Morgan doing. For some reason I had the feeling that he really wanted to be in Chelmsford. And no matter how much I wanted them to go north, he kept pointing me west. So I wrote that St. Giles (or God) had told him to go there. It was an internal joke for me. Or so I thought.

I found reference to an old friary in fourteenth-century Chelmsford, so I figured Morgan knew what he was doing, and off the knights went. But as I researched more, I couldn’t find much information about this friary. Another wonderful thing about serials is the time crunch. And by “wonderful,” I mean “stressful and causing panic.” I didn’t have time to send them somewhere else. I had already written part of the going-to-Chelmsford scene and had done a lot of research on the town. So I found an alternative to the friary: a cathedral in Chelmsford that used to be a small church. Perfect. That would do. The knights would find the “sorceress” that was distributing the phials of St. Mary’s blood in that church.

Yes. You know the rest. I had to read the name three times to believe it.

The Church of St. Mary.

Morgan knew where he had to go. I should listen to him more often.

Isabella’s scream is like a weapon. She hurls the cry at us and my ears ring with it.

The knife plunges with a thunk into the arm of the chair. It does not strike her, but she continues to shriek.

“He didn’t touch you, you stupid cow,” Tristan says.

“He didn’t,” I say quietly. I nod to Morgan and he looks away. “He didn’t.”

“I have failed God,” Morgan says.

“You are
not
a gentleman,” Isabella spits toward Morgan. “You are not a beautiful knight at all. God is watching. He is everywhere. He sees what you have done to me.”

“Allah be praised!” Zhuri holds up one of the sacks Isabella carried. He pulls out a handful of coins and sprinkles them back into the bag. “Silver! Silver coins!”

Tristan glances at Isabella. “The apothecary prescribed silver for your cough?”

“That’s mine!” Isabella shouts. “Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it, you dirty man!”

“Leave it and let’s go,” I say. “If we don’t dally we can make Hedingham Castle by nightfall.”

“Should we untie her?” Zhuri asks. “What if plaguers find her?”

“It’s only yarn,” I say. “She’ll free herself.”

Zhuri looks uncertain.

“Cut her free if you must, just hurry,” I say. “That horse we found in Danbury won’t make it to Hedingham today if we don’t leave immediately.”

Zhuri plucks the hunting knife from the arm of the chair and cuts at Isabella’s bonds.