The Scourge (Kindle Serial) (34 page)

“Dear Lord,” Tristan says. “What is that…that thing?”

“It is the sun, Tristan.” I turn my face upward and soak in the warmth. “It is the sun.” I watch one of the few clouds drift across the sky until it blocks the light. I sigh.

“Ah, well,” Tristan says. “At least I can tell my grandchildren that I saw it once in my lifetime.”

I do not care if there is sun or not, because we will reach St. Edmund’s Bury today. And I will find my Elizabeth. My joy is tempered by the loss of Morgan, but I try to put my faith in St. Luke. It feels more like madness than faith, though. We stay off the Roman road. There are too many plaguers upon that highway, and I have a nagging fear that Sir Gerald or his men will continue to follow us. So we ride past villages I have never seen on my travels to and from Suffolk. Gestingthorpe and Long Melford and others whose names I have never heard. I begin recognizing landmarks after midday. Elizabeth and I traveled to St. Edmund’s Bury every summer for five years. Until this year, when plans for our castle forced me to stay behind. Of course it would be this year.

Sir Tristan and I are not on the Roman road, so our approach is unfamiliar, but I can feel familiarity in the land. We are on the outskirts of the town and my Elizabeth is so close that I must fight the urge to gallop the last five miles.

The town was named after King Edmund, a Saxon who chose to die rather than compromise his religious values. The Danes captured him after years of battle, but Edmund would not yield to their demands. I don’t know what the demands were, but Edmund felt they impinged on his religious convictions. So he was tortured and shot with so many arrows that you could barely see his body through the forest of shafts.

He was a man of unbending principle, and men of unbending principle rarely die of old age. I have bent my principles on occasion. That is why my name will rot with my body, while St. Edmund’s name lives on.

But, with any luck, I can die of old age.

We ride past miles of rotting wheat. No one has harvested it. We spot bones and half-eaten corpses here and there. Plaguers wander the land in small groups or limp on their own.

A shape flutters in the summer sky. We hear a sickly cry from a bird of prey.

“It’s not possible.” Sir Tristan dons his helm. “How does that thing keep finding us?”

The peregrine swoops toward us and I cut it down with one stroke.

Sir Tristan gapes at me. I shrug.

“Stupid bird is never going to get better.”

None but the afflicted inhabit the lands surrounding St. Edmund’s Bury. We see only a few of the plaguers at first and this buoys my spirits. If the sickness did indeed start in Suffolk, then it seems to have gone elsewhere.

The town gates are open. We ride over the deserted and cobbled streets toward the north, toward the heart of the town, toward the rising spires of the abbey.

I never cease to be awed by the enormity of the abbey at St. Edmund’s Bury. It may be a place of worship, but I have seen castles that are easier to breach. Curtain walls encircle the compound, broken only by towers and massive gatehouses. The abbey’s churches rise like an elaborate mountain range within. Nothing in the flat East Anglian landscape can compete with the soaring spires and arches of that abbey. It is like a city, a glittering city of stone and glass calling like a beacon to all within sight.

And all within sight are indeed there.

I now realize why there are so few plaguers around St. Edmund’s Bury. Because every plaguer within fifty miles is heaving at the walls of the abbey. They are pressed thirty deep. Two thousand yards of rotting humanity searching for a weakness. Howling for blood.

We approach from the southwest. One of the smaller churches in the monastery rises over the walls on the south side. It, too, is devoted to the Virgin Mary. Another milestone on the road to our fate.

I don’t stray closer than a quarter mile from the abbey walls, because I can see the swarm of plaguers blocking the South Gate. We circle to the west but are thwarted again. St. James’s gate on the western wall teems with the afflicted. A few actually try to climb the old Norman tower as I watch. They aren’t coordinated enough and the tower is too steep to allow it. But they try.

The Great Gate, farther north on the western wall, looks damaged, but it appears to have been reinforced with great stone blocks. The snarling line of bodies has no breaks. We ride to the north edge of the abbey and it is the same there. The Abbot’s Gate is surrounded. The arched Abbot’s Bridge, which spans the River Lark beside that gate, has all of its portcullises down and locked in the river. The afflicted clog the barriers like debris, writhing and clambering against one another.

Tristan shakes his head. “God has blessed us with another trial.”

We both mutter hallelujahs as we study the abbey walls.

“There’s not a single break in their lines,” I say.

“Not good news,” Tristan replies.

I give him a smile. “It’s the best of news. If Elizabeth is in the abbey, then she is safe. The afflicted can’t get inside.”

“You’re right,” Tristan says. He stares down at the rippling mass of plaguers that surround the abbey like a human moat. “The afflicted can’t get in.” His eyes find mine and his point is obvious but he speaks it anyway. “And neither can we.”

I look to the Abbot’s Bridge and follow the River Lark northward. “That’s not entirely true.”

Sir Tristan cocks his head to the side. “The city might as well be under siege. We would need a hundred cannons to get to that gate.”

“It’s a good thing the prior is a bloody coward, then.”

Tristan studies me but doesn’t ask and I don’t offer. I lead him southward, following the River Lark at a distance. We ride past the walled abbey vineyards for a hundred yards until I spot a lonely willow upon a rise in the river’s banks.

Prior John Timworth brought me to that willow on our return from a hunting expedition only last year. He is a vain, boastful man, but rich beyond measure. I watched as he splashed into the river and pulled aside creeper vines to reveal the gated entrance to a rough, stone-lined tunnel that wormed into the ground. “They won’t catch me,” he told me with a smile. “I’m smarter than those drooling gudgeons in the town.”

The drooling gudgeons, in his esteem, were the people of St. Edmund’s Bury. The townspeople hated the abbey. They hated the growing influence it had over their lives. And they hated the monks, who took more and more from the town with each passing year. Each year the abbey gained a greater influence over the region, at the expense of the town itself. I saw the greed of those monks myself. False deeds granting lands to the abbey. Monks driving villagers from their homes or forcing heavy taxes upon them.

The townspeople rose up fifty years ago or so. They rioted and burned down part of the monastery, then captured the abbot and killed a handful of monks. Soldiers quelled the riot but no one ever addressed the real problem. So the townspeople still seethed, and there was always talk of another riot.

But Prior John Timworth was smarter than the drooling gudgeons. He had an escape tunnel built when he redesigned the prior’s house.

“If the drooling gudgeons ever breach the wall again,” he told me, “I have a way out.”

And now Tristan and I have a way in.

Tristan looks nervously toward the abbey walls as we reach the willow. We are less than a hundred paces from the army of plaguers. The afflicted have yet to notice our presence, but I know they will, given time.

I dismount by the tree, drawing one of the torches Sister Margaret gave us. Tristan dismounts and I tell him to unsaddle his horse. He understands. Tethering the horses here would be tantamount to executing them. Better they should run free and have a chance. I hope we can find new horses when we return.

When the beasts are stripped, we smack them hard and send them running southward. I watch the golden mare race across the pasture, away from me, and feel an odd sense of dread.

Creeping ivy blankets the bank where it rolls into the river. I strike sparks until the torch catches fire, then wade into the water up to my hips. The vines upon the bank are torn and twisted here. The rusted iron gate lies open, crushing the ivy beneath its weight.

The prior. He must have fled with his men. My heart pounds at the thought that Elizabeth might have passed through here, too. What if she’s not in the city? What if I never find her? I steady my breathing.

Tristan steps into the river behind me, holding both cannons. “In Sussex our secret tunnels are a bit more secret, don’t you think?”

“You only leave a secret entrance open when you don’t plan on returning.” I wonder why the prior would have fled. The answers I come up with churn my stomach.

“I find that when secret entrances are left open, all manner of things find their way in.” There’s concern in Tristan’s voice, and it’s not for himself. He puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. He is preparing me for the worst.

Oh, Elizabeth. Please, please let her be safe.

I wonder whom I am offering the prayer to. Is it God? Yes, I suppose it is. In spite of everything, or perhaps because of everything, I believe he still listens. I believe he helps those who help themselves. And I believe he will show me the way to my wife.

There, before Prior John’s tunnel, I strike a bargain with God: if he leads me to my beautiful Elizabeth, then never again will I question him.

Hallelujah. Amen.

We don our helms and I slosh forward and stoop into the tunnel. My heart batters the walls of my chest. The torchlight reveals a cramped tunnel of stone and rotting timbers. I have to hunch low to walk the passage. Tristan climbs in behind me and his torch creates secondary shadows. There is no sound but the splash of our footsteps and the echoes of dripping water. The tunnel smells of mold and dank earth, but there is a trace of something else. Something unpleasant.

Tristan hides our cannons in a niche just inside the gate. There’s not enough room in the tunnel to fire them and we won’t need them once we are in the abbey. I hope.

The tunnel is too small for swords as well, so I draw Morgan’s hunting knife. It comforts me to have something of Morgan’s with me. As if he is here with us.

We walk a hundred paces before I see the first bodies. I call them bodies, although they are more a loose collection of bones, mangled flesh, and shredded robes. They were monks once. Tristan turns away from them, holding the back of his gauntlet against his helm, where his nose would be. I study the bones.

“Teeth marks,” I say. Tristan glances at the bodies, then forward into the darkness. He licks at his lips. “You scared of getting caught in here?” I ask.

“No,” he replies. “I was thinking of the many people who will make the pilgrimage to this tunnel to visit the tomb of Sir Tristan of Rye.”

“You can go back,” I say. “I was thinking someone should catch our horses and keep them safe for our journey home.”

He draws his knife. “Good thinking. You go back and guard the horses. I’ll return with Elizabeth.”

I smile privately in my great helm. He will stay with me until the end.

We press on.

It is a long tunnel Prior John has built. Long and dark. Full of cobwebs and rats and strange echoes. The ground we walk upon is by turns mud and calf-deep water.

I try to convince myself that I don’t hear anything up ahead, but I do. I try to convince myself that it is not growling, but it is.

Tristan clears his throat and breathes deeply behind me. The steel of my helm feels cold against my cheek. Silhouettes become visible after fifty more paces. They cluster in a place where the tunnel widens into a small chamber. There are many of them. Twenty-five or thirty, perhaps. They shuffle and twitch and roam the chamber, staring upward toward a trap door in the ceiling, fifteen feet above. Their movements are a mockery of human grace.

I turn to Tristan and my torch is an orange sun against the steel of his breastplate.

“Last chance to guard the horses,” I say.

He shakes his head. “This is merely another blessing from God,” he whispers, but I can hear the trepidation in his voice. His visor is fixed on the shapes before us, his breath swift and loud. I turn back to the creatures and feel Tristan’s hand on my shoulder. “You’re supposed to…you know. Hallelujah.”

One of the shapes turns to us and snarls. The rest of them turn — a few at a time — as the first figure lurches toward us. The foremost plaguer wears a bloodstained apron. I wonder briefly if the blood was there before or after he became afflicted. The thought vanishes from my mind when he lurches farther into the light of my torch. Half the flesh is torn from his face, from forehead to chin, and dangles in a grimy lump near his throat. He seems part skeleton, and he comes for us with open mouth. I have a flash of the poor groomsman torn apart at the willow near Danbury, then put the image out of my mind. The others plaguers follow behind, a mob of blood and clawing hands. Dozens of them. Groaning and snarling and closing the distance between us. I wish I had a shield.

I slash at the butcher’s throat with my knife and cry out “Hallelujah!” My mind half formulates a plan to lure the plaguers outside and shut the gate. But I know it will never work. It is too difficult to walk in this tunnel. I hold the torch out toward the advancing mob and they slow at the flames.

Thank you, Sister Margaret
.

I nod to Tristan and we advance together into the small chamber. We swing our torches. We hold our knives high in the air. And we meet the wall of biting flesh with a crash and the war cry of “Hallelujah!”

I feel Tristan’s back against mine as the plaguers close upon us in a crush of cold bodies. We stab at eyes, slash at throats and kick to make room for ourselves.

We are two burning torches struggling madly against a ring of writhing darkness.

We are the flame of humanity, and we send them back to hell.

The demons lurch forward to their death. Their faces are unnatural. Mouths unhinged too far. Black eyes open too wide. Fingers too long.

And numbers too great.

Many of them are still standing when we drop our torches and leap for the rungs that lead to the abbey above. Tristan is behind me. He lost his fear in the battle frenzy and laughs as we clamber up the wooden boards. But his laughter stops abruptly.