Mother Ruth peered through the gaps in the converted
storeroom door at the girl chosen for the ritual. Mara, clad only in her night
shift, her hair still loose, knelt before the simple, wooden altar lighted by a
lone candle, beeswax not tallow. An older version of the girl Ruth had once killed.
Had it been real? She no longer remembered. That night had been nearly a lifetime
ago. Before she’d donned the white and been touched by the goddess’s light.
Bitterness like sour smoke rolled off the girl as she
prayed, to god or goddess Ruth did not know. Mara was a near stranger to her,
although by rights she shouldn’t be. Abducting her had been risky. When her mother discovered her missing, there was
bound to be a reckoning. At dawn, Ruth would commend her soul into the hands of
the goddess for the good of the village. After that, it wouldn’t matter. Every
year, her order tried to disrupt the village’s ancient ritual and supplant it
with their own. Only once had they succeeded.
The villagers called her order the Night Ravens, sometimes
worse when they thought none were within earshot. An epithet meant to convey
that they would all be the better plucked and roasted. Not that any of them would
dare lay hands upon a priest.
“Mother,” Brother Dawid shuffled up the drafty, torchlit
hall as quickly as he could without running, keeping his voice low as decorum
dictated. “A crowd has gathered outside the gate.”
Ruth turned away from the door. “Tell them to return after
morning prayers,” she said, tucking her hands within her felted sleeves.
Brother Dawid’s robes were still mud spattered from the
nocturnal errand she’s charged him with. She wondered how many others he’d
pressed into service. No more than a handful. Too many were locally born and
would take a dim view of her actions despite their vows to set aside their
former lives.
Brother Dawid ducked his head and hunched his shoulders in
an unconscious act of subservience, a habit she abhorred as much as she valued
his surprising loyalty given he, too, had family in the village. “They threaten
violence if you do not speak with them.”
Ruth sighed. “Then I suppose I must. Keep an eye on the girl
until I return. No one is to interrupt her prayers.”
“Yes, Mother.” He cast his eyes toward the floor. “I’ll see
to it myself.”
Ruth strode down the stonework hall, her sandaled feet no
more than a whisper as she passed the arches to the galleries where the
monastery stored apples, root vegetables, cheeses and honey wine along with the
granaries filled with freshly harvested seeds for sowing next spring. At the
wrought iron gate that led to a stair up and out of the cellar, she pulled a
silver chain through the neck of her robe until she clutched a brass key in
hand. It rattled in the lock as she turned it until the heavy latch clanked
free. The gate sighed open. In her time as Mother, Ruth insisted on proper
maintenance throughout the monastery. If cleanliness brought the siblings
closer to the goddess then maintaining her property brought them closer to her order.
Ruth locked the gate behind her. To her left lay the
entrance to the whisper chamber beneath the nave with its adjacent niches and
chapels where the order’s many martyrs lay entombed. Instead, she turned right
and ascended the stair to the covered passage near the cellarer’s office.
Brother Dawid’s office. His and hers were the only cellar keys.
She emerged just in time to see a novice whose name escaped
her rushing across the cloister, frantically scanning the portico until she
spotted Ruth. Ruth paused and let the girl come to her. Only at the last minute
did the girl remember her station and slow her pace from a near run. And still
she arrived breathless.
“Mother…” she started then remembered again to bow her head
and wait to be acknowledged.
Ruth stood silent a moment before responding to allow the
girl to catch her breath. She couldn’t be but maybe a year older than the girl
locked away in the cellar. “What is so urgent my child that it pushes you to
the edge of decorum when all the novices should be abed?”
“There is a mob outside the gate. They threaten to break it
down…”
“Slower, my child,” Ruth calmly interrupted her. “Start at
the beginning.”
“Sorry, Mother.” The girl kept her eyes upon the flagstones
as she mastered her composure before she recited what she’d been told. “The Night
Vigil heard a pounding on the church doors. When he opened the eye hole, he was
confronted by an angry mob that accused us of kidnap of a village daughter and
demanded her return. He woke the Sacrist who summoned all the novices to reinforce
the west range gate where the mob now gathers. She sent the Cellarer to find
you.”
“And so he has,” Ruth replied. “Go tell the Sacrist to
inform the villagers I will address them from the porch above the gate.” A hollow
boom reverberated through the stone passage that led to the west range gate as
if the mob truly meant to break it in. When the girl stood rooted, Ruth added.
“Now you may move with the purpose of my authority.”
Wide-eyed, the girl turned and fled toward the gate, her
white robes flying behind her like the trailing remnants of a ghost. The night
was prime for such apparitions, a misty cold bordering on first frost.
Ruth strove to maintain her own composure as she strode around
the perimeter of the cloister toward the passage where the girl had disappeared.
Gate was not much of a misnomer. Compared to the ancient god reborn, the
goddess had not long resided in north. The local populace accepted her presence
uneasily. The monastery remained her only fortified outpost. The mission had
been here for decades yet had met with only limited success. The villagers
stubbornly clung to the old ways even where outlawed by their recently
converted king. This deep in the marches, they only begrudgedly recognized his
authority anyway, usually under duress. Her order was determined to save them
from themselves and their backward ways no matter how many lives it took.
The blue moon hung just over the slate rooftop of the
western range. The Betrayer’s Moon. The eastern sky had not yet begun to
lighten with even the false dawn. A long time to delay the mob outside but she knew
she must. Only when the sun had breached the horizon could Mara be committed to
the goddess. Then she would be beyond the reach of the angry villagers forever.
Ruth stared at the stake in the center of the cloister where
the ritual would be performed. To either side twin stacks of firewood had been laid
crosshatched for the bonfires. The fires that would burn the girl’s sins away
and leave her pure before the goddess. The girl knew she had done wrong. The
ritual was her only way to atone.
As Ruth approached the covered passageway across the
cloister from where she’d emerged, she saw the Sacrist rallying the novices to
reinforce the bars and braces on the west range gate. The mission walls were
thick and high, its doors heavy and reinforced. The goddess had received an
uneasy welcome when her followers had first arrived in the north. The
intervening decades had been long and sometimes bloody with martyrs beatified
on both sides.
Another resounding boom echoed across the cloister as wood
collided with iron-bound wood. The villagers must have crafted a makeshift ram.
The Sacrist shot Ruth a pleading look as dust danced in the torchlight of
arched passageway. Ruth instructed two novices to retrieve torches from the
wrought iron wall sconces and follow. She turned to ascend the nearby stairs.
She emerged onto a porch high above the west range gate. She
motioned her torchbearers to remain beside the door. As she waited for their light
to draw the villagers’ attention, she surveyed the scene below.
A small sea of torches greeted her as she approached the waist-high
parapet. The villagers were arrayed in full rebellion, most armed with simple
three-pronged hayforks and threshing flails. At points like polestars
interspersed within the crowd, torchlight flickered off the blades of scythes,
billhooks, and makeshift glaives. A small cadre of woodcutters near the fore encircled
a matronly woman whose righteous anger rivaled the firebrands lighting her familiar
face. Horpa. Beside her a pale, sickly young man Ruth knew to be a fyrdman for
the local lord leaned against rude crosspiece-lashed ladder. Malon. Horpa’s
son, the girl’s brother. No aid would be forthcoming from that quarter.
Directly below, eight sturdy field hands swung a
fresh-felled timber as big around as a child’s waist against the west range
gate. Without a frame for leverage, it created a mere grumble of their
discontent. In the pasture behind the fishpond, just beyond the siblings’
cemetery, a conical bonfire had been laid. It remained as yet unlighted.
Ruth folded her hands within her sleeves as she waited. When
that moment stretched toward discomfort at the single-minded focus of the mob,
she beckoned her torchbearers to the corners of the parapet encasing the
platform. The light finally lifted the villagers’ eyes. The stentorian voice of
their battering ram fell silent.
When the mob fully settled, Ruth called down, “Why do you disturb
the night offices of this holy enclave? Disperse and we will receive you after
our laudatory prayers.”
“You know full well why we’ve gathered, sister,” the matron
called back up. “Your goatsuckers stole my daughter under the mantle of
darkness. We come to claim her back.”
Ruth saw no point in denying the girl was inside. That much
the villagers surely knew. “Mara is reflecting with us on her future of her own
accord, Horpa. Return at dawn and receive her decision with the rest of us.”
“She made her decision at the Eastern Rising,” Horpa spat.
“When she chose to lie with the god reborn, she chose the ancient ways.”
“You and I both know no girl chooses for herself,” Ruth
replied. Only years of discipline kept her eyes from narrowing as she
remembered that night so long ago. “That choice is only made by beldams like
you.”
“Better rebirth in the threefold cleansing than a permanent death
with you.” Horpa turned her back on the monastery, raising her arms, seeking the
crowd’s assent which came in a wave of brandished weapons and torches accompanied
by angry exclamations. She faced Ruth again, smiling smugly. “That we cannot
permit.”
“The king has declared your ritual outlaw.” Ruth stood
unmoved. “To defy his will borders on treason as well as heresy.”
“Chilion has never crossed the river,” called up Malon from
beside Horpa. “He wastes away in his castle, an tired old man trying to bribe
his way into paradise with whichever gods will listen. His edicts carry no coin
here.”
“You claim to be the light-bringers,” Horpa said. “Stand
against us and we will put your endurance of it to the test.” With her nod, a
torch sailed over the lay siblings’ dormitory. At worst it might light one of
the pre-laid bonfires on the cloister. The mission roofs were slate, the walls
stone. As a threat, fire was less than immediate.
Yet still Ruth flinched. Only the memory of the goddess’s
light soothed her like a balm. She knew she must stand firm or risk seeing
generations of work undone.
“You dare assault the goddess in her own house?” she called
down upon the peasant farmers. “If we withhold her seed, how many of you will
starve?”
“Those stores are ours by right and privilege,” Horpa responded.
“Who will stand against us should we choose to liberate them? You? Your
goatsuckers?”
“The first of you who trespass inside these walls shall see
the granaries set alight. If you survive the winter, you’ll have nothing to sow
come spring. Your god reborn will starve before the next Eastern Rising. Then
what shall you reap?”
Autumn’s chill had begun to coalesce the air. Each word of
Ruth’s threat hung before her like the smoking prelude of the dragon’s breath.
The villagers exchanged uncertain glances. Only the faint crackling of their
torches broached the descending shroud of silence.
Horpa appeared undaunted. “You always were a dedicated
believer, sister.”
Ruth didn’t know what to say to that so she merely waited,
knowing more would be forthcoming.
“Or so our mother thought when you were chosen,” Horpa
continued after a momentary pause. “Didn’t you vow to faithfully serve the god
reborn when you lay with him that night? Before you embraced cowardice and
crafted a new vow with your goddess. So then tell me, sister, which of those
vows is false?”
“With my vow broken, wasn’t it your duty to assume my place,
sister?” Ruth shot back. “Yet I still see you standing before me casting
stones. Perhaps your god reborn is more angry with your breach of faith than
mine. Perhaps you are why his power wanes.”
Ruth felt the mob’s support begin to waver. And yet Horpa’s
confidence remained undimmed.
“I offered up my own daughter to reconcile my sin,” she
called up. “Any woman worthy of the title mother understands how much harder it
is to sacrifice her child.”
“Any pledge I made to the god reborn was coerced. Only my
freely given word to the goddess matters. The same is true for Mara.”
“I see you remain defiant in your faith,” Horpa answered. “I
expected no less. It’s time to see if all your siblings share your resolve.”
She made a quick gesture with her hand. Her knot of axmen
dispersed within the crowd. Ruth sensed a trap closing around her though she
couldn’t quite outline its contours.
The axmen reconvened around a maiden with a pleasant face,
perhaps thirteen, standing near her elderly parents. As the axmen wrestled the
girl into the torchlight around Horpa, Ruth recognized her. Naomi. Dawid’s
sister.
Now she understood the danger. Ruth stepped back from the
parapet. Fishing the cellar key from beneath her robe, she motioned to one of
the novices.
“Take this to the Sacrist at the gate. Tell her to retrieve
the girl from the cellar and bring her to the cloister at once. We will perform
the ritual immediately.” She pressed the cold brass into the boy’s hand. When
he stood gazing at it an instant too long, Ruth added, “Fly, boy, if you ever
hope to see a sibling’s robes.”
As the boy’s sandals slapped against the stone stairs, Ruth
turned back to the edge of the balcony. She paused a moment to compose herself.
She needed to buy the Sacrist time. Everything else lay within the goddess’s
hands.
Once again, she stepped forward to confront Horpa and her
mob. The axmen had begun to bind Naomi to the fyrdman’s ladder already planted
in the ground. The girl didn’t struggle. Her face looked blankly angelic as she
turned her eyes toward heaven. Ruth knew she would feel honored to be so
chosen. Too bad she hadn’t been selected before the Eastern Rising.
“You know the god reborn will recognize this girl is not his
bride,” Ruth called down. “How angry will he be with those who seek to deceive
him?”
“Then spare us all his wrath and return his bride to me,”
Horpa shot back. “You have no right to interfere.”
“No right?” Ruth spat. “At thirteen, I was chosen as his torchbearer.
A year later I was to be his bride. I know exactly what these girls go through.
I think that gives me every right.”
“Naomi was chosen as his torchbearer. Now, she’ll serve as
his surrogate bride a year early. That is but one of the duties of his
handmaidens. Or have you forgotten, sister?”
Ruth still shuddered at the torchbearer’s first duty.
Handmaiden, torchbearer and bride were a progression of honors in every young girl’s
dreams. Only the constant reinforcement of their pride at being chosen could
see them through the horrors of what each entailed. Better that the goddess
burn those sins away.
“No matter that she is my Cellarer’s sister? The man whose
actions stained our family? Now you seek to redeem his slight with your
daughter’s life. Don’t think I missed the envy in your eyes when mother pushed
me forward instead of you. Your jealousy was always as naked as your rage. But
this girl has no part in it. Have mercy on her. Leave her life aside.”
“If you value her life so well, send my daughter back and we
will cut her free. You have my word.”
When Ruth made no move comply, Horpa uttered one word to her
fyrdman son loud enough to lay her plan bare.
“Wood.”
The villagers began piling fuel from the pre-laid bonfire around
the girl until her ankles then her knees were obscured. Ruth had no doubt that
Horpa meant to make good upon her threat. Her leadership was ill-conceived, her
ritual a corruption.
What was taking the Sacrist so long? She should have sent
word by now that the girl was ready on the cloister. Once they lit the bonfires
and threw open the gates, the crowd outside would see Horpa’s extortion was in
vain. Ruth knew most of the villagers were good people, misguided but not
vindictive. In the face of futility, the mob would drift away.
As if summoned by Ruth’s thoughts, someone burst through the
door behind her. She turned to find the Sacrist leaning heavily against its
frame. Her temple oozed a bloody trail that meandered down her neck and stained
her white collar before it disappeared inside. She only managed to hold Ruth’s
eyes for an instant before she dropped her gaze and ruefully shook her head.
Even as Ruth pieced together the tale of what must have
happened belowground, an anguished cry erupted from the church doors to her
right.
“No,” Brother Dawid howled like a banshee, his white robes
aflutter as he ushered Mara across the greensward by an arm. The girl followed freely,
her bitterness blossoming into enrapturement at her answered prayers. A triumphant
cheer erupted from the crowd.
True to her word, Horpa cut Naomi from the ladder. The axmen
then tied a willing Mara in her place. Malon barred Dawid with an arm when
Horpa extended a torch to Naomi. Before the girl could perform the duty
demanded of her, Ruth turned away.
She descended the stone stairs back toward the cloister, the
Sacrist following, the novice sealing the door behind. Shielded against the celebratory
sound and fury beyond the wall, Ruth paused in the archway at the threshold of
the cloister.
“What should we do when Brother Dawid returns,” asked the
Sacrist, daubing her temple with the hood of her robe. The pristine white came
away a red that in the torchlight bordered on black.
“Allow the girl sanctuary,” Ruth replied, her surficial calm
restored, “but bar the door against him. With his betrayal, he has chosen
darkness over light.”
Even as she said the words, she was saddened by her
decision. She remembered too much of that same darkness the night Dawid had saved
her from Mara’s fate. She had misjudged him, misjudged the siren song of blood
over beliefs. Perhaps she had misjudged herself in thinking she could harvest
both and redeem her sister’s sin.
Ruth stared at the stake set between the twin laid bonfires that
dominated the cloister. The stake meant to serve as her niece’s salvation. The thrown
torch lay dead in a pool of blackened grass just short of the post’s base. She
had envisioned Brother Dawid standing beside her, watching Mara die between the
fires only to be reborn into the white once fully cleansed by the goddess’s
light. Just as he had watched a younger girl so many years ago as the stain of
her sins as handmaiden and torchbearer slowly burned away. The girl she’d
murdered. The girl she once had been.
© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III
© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III
