The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“You ask too many questions. If you’re stupid enough, you’ll ask Father Benignus, not me. I’m just a poor man.”

“Even a poor man is made in God’s image, is he not? Is this right, what you do?”

Bartholomew had begun to shake, and by the sheen of sweat on his face and the pallor under his scruffy beard Alain suddenly realized that the man was terrified. He twisted the cloth of his tunic between his fingers, right over a slight bulge in the fabric where he, too, wore an amulet.

Alain shook his head. “I am sorry to see any man suffer so, but surely you and the others had committed grave crimes. I see the residue of them everywhere. I pray you, friend, give some thought to the fate of your soul.”

“Here’s the wagon,” muttered Bartholomew. “Wait outside.”

Father Benignus had handed the reins of his horse off to a stammering youth, who held its bridle while the hooded man swung awkwardly from the saddle to the bed of the wagon and, bending double, vanished inside the shelter.

“Stay!” Rage and Sorrow sat beside the wagon, but they looked ready to spring into action. As Alain scrambled up onto the tailgate, he heard the startled murmurs of the bandits in camp. Everyone was watching, as wolves watched an injured elk, waiting for its thrashing to subside enough that they can dart in to tear out its throat.

He ducked in after Father Benignus.

“I knew you would come.” Father Benignus had his back to Alain as he lit a candle and dropped the amulet into a bowl filled with a clear liquid. It hissed, and the liquid boiled and subsided, leaching a strong vinegar smell. “The others fear me, as they should. You should, too.”

The tent vaulted just high enough that he could stand upright in the center of the wagon. The flame flickered uneasily as the man unwrapped the veil and took off his broad-brimmed hat. He had long, greasy hair that might once have been blond. That much Alain glimpsed in the dim light before Benignus turned to face him and sank down on a narrow bed, exhausted.

He was horribly disfigured. Lesions had eaten away half his face, exposing bone. His eyes wept pus, and sores had long since eaten his ears.

“Are you a leper?” Alain shuddered. Leprosy passed from one man to another by means of contamination. It would strike any man. It was God’s worst punishment. Yet having come so far Alain would not retreat.

Because Father Benignus had no lips it seemed that he smiled all the time, a skeleton’s grimace. His teeth were good, strong and white; he was only missing two.

“I am no leper.” Benignus said mockingly in his soft voice. “I am least among men, but no leper. I am the one so easily forgotten even by those who used and discarded me. So easily forgotten by pawns and biscops alike, for you were only a pawn, as I was, weren’t you? Although Father Agius kept you close. Did he pollute you with his heresy?”

Alain recognized his voice, even distorted as it was by his affliction. He remembered pale blue eyes.

“I know who you are. I called you Brother Willibrod once. You were a cleric in the retinue of Biscop Antonia. She set you and the others to binding and working. You made the amulets that protected Lady Sabella’s forces from the spell laid on humankind by the glance of the guivre’s eye. They hoped to win the battle against King Henry.”

“But Father Agius killed the guivre! All our work for nothing! So we were abandoned, all of us who had poisoned ourselves doing God’s work! All but Heribert, who never soiled himself with binding and working! We were left to the mercy of the sisters of St. Benigna who locked us in an attic and left us to die!” Willibrod shook all over, then gagged, and reached for a flask hung from a nail pounded into the frame onto which the tent’s fabric had been nailed. His palsied hand could not grip the leather flask.

olomew made a strangled noise. What had passed for silence before deepened into a dreadful anticipatory pause, the moment before the executioner’s ax falls.

“What is justice?” replied Father Benignus in a voice so weary it might be called cruel.

He shook the reins and guided his horse forward, halting beside the corpse. With a stick, he fished for the amulet, hooked it, and yanked it hard enough to break the thong that held it around Stinker’s neck. Flipping up the stick, he caught the amulet in his hand and rode his horse toward a wagon covered with a tent to make a kind of house on wheels.

“Bartholomew, bring him. I want no more interruptions.”

“Yes, Father Benignus,” whispered Bartholomew, scratching his warty nose. He did not look at Alain; he sidestepped Stinker’s corpse and shied anxiously away from Sorrow’s growl. “Come, then, you fool,” he muttered in a low voice. “Can’t you see how dangerous it is to keep the good father waiting?”

“Who are these women?” Alain demanded, not moving.

“Fair winnings.”

“No better than slaves, fettered so. What happened to their children?”

“You ask too many questions. If you’re stupid enough, you’ll ask Father Benignus, not me. I’m just a poor man.”

“Even a poor man is made in God’s image, is he not? Is this right, what you do?”

Bartholomew had begun to shake, and by the sheen of sweat on his face and the pallor under his scruffy beard Alain suddenly realized that the man was terrified. He twisted the cloth of his tunic between his fingers, right over a slight bulge in the fabric where he, too, wore an amulet.

Alain shook his head. “I am sorry to see any man suffer so, but surely you and the others had committed grave crimes. I see the residue of them everywhere. I pray you, friend, give some thought to the fate of your soul.”

“Here’s the wagon,” muttered Bartholomew. “Wait outside.”