Pacze Moj, page 3
“Yes,” Gremius cleared his throat, “I will best leave you to it then.”
He turned to leave. Stopped halfway through the roughly cut arch; and, with his back turned added flatly: “Cudgel, since you are almost done, it will be all the same to you, I have decided that I want the prisoner brought up early. I want her outside while the sun still shines.”
With that, he disappeared, leaving only a faint echo and Cudgel Thecker again scratching his head.
Cudgel sunk backward until his haunches felt the cold rough rocks of the wall, then dropped onto his heels. He sucked in air through his teeth. His back was tender, scratched. He stretched out his legs, slumped forward and felt like sucking his thumb. There was no going to M-whatever’s now. The lucky sow would keep her red hair. But he quickly forgot about that. His own head—and precious neck—was in danger. He tried to remember other burnings. He’d already prepared the kindling for a few of them, watched someone else do it a half dozen times more. What was thrown round the burning pole? Surely, he didn’t need his little brown book to do something as simple as put together a parcel of wood to choke a witch.
He racked his brain.
He pulled on the ends of his hairs.
He stroked his stubbly chin.
And, as a last resort, he pulled his eyelids closed.
Sightless, he saw: M-whatever laughing at him. She looked unambiguously insane. He growled and her face made way for an image of himself sitting on a wet dungeon floor with his back against the wall and his eyes closed. Pathetic! He concentrated harder: he was starting his apprenticeship, he was eating dinner across from his sisters and flinging soup at them when no one else was looking, he was being promoted to assistant to the Witchhunter General, he was sitting his second year witchhunting exams, he was studying for those exams—
His eyes flew open.
Of course! This was on the exams and in his notes and there was a poem. He started to recite aloud, letting intuition take over:
Five parts oak,
Three of pine,
And never release the smoke,
Without a dash of poke,
Nor a creeper’s vine.
Next one fresh green apple,
A sun-dried yew,
And please recall,
Most important of all:
The Demssous.
He stood up triumphant, puffing out his chest like a cock of the walk, and strode across to the metal table where his work awaited. Barrels of labeled woods and other dry materials and jars of multi-coloured alchemicals lined the walls. There were also tongs, knives and painful-looking spikes—but those were extras from the torture room next door. Sadly, he’d never been allowed to torture anyone. If only M-whatever could be the first…
Someone screamed in the catacombs below. He grunted out of his fantasy, stretched out his hand and dangled his fingers over a barrel labeled “oak”. Like a naughty boy’s into a cookie jar, in went his hand and he pulled out five pieces, one by one, of fresh timber. He laid them out on the table and scanned for the next label.
He found the yew. Again he dangled his fingers and—wait, but wasn’t it one cactus, too rather than a sun-dried yew? Before he could decide, he was suddenly sure that one fresh green apple was wrong, as well. He didn’t remember any apples. He liked apples. If there’d been apples he’d have eaten them. “What in the King’s name rhymes with apple?” he pondered with his fingers suspended over the barrel of yew.
Come to think of it, there was an introduction to the poem:
You need wood to burn a witch,
But you needn’t remember witch,
As long as you rehearse,
The following three-part verse.
Three-part? Great. He’d skipped the entire middle verse. Or maybe he never did memorize that stanza. His memory was fuzzy, but it did remind him that he had gotten a C+ in Introduction to Immolations. Then again it wasn’t like he knew many other poems. Surely he could remember one—this one—in its blessed entirety.
[…]
Nor a creeper’s vine.
With a willow intertwine,
A goose-or wild-berry,
No, that wasn’t it.
The fly returned, buzzing. “Bugger!” he swiped at it in mid-flight.
No luck.
Does any type of tree have a spine, do any shrubs shine? He thought about M-whatever’s pear-shaped behind. And was about to get angry with himself when he said the world aloud: “Behind.”
There were five paintings hanging in this particular dungeon. Each, Cudgel remembered, placed strategically over a spot where a neck shackle used to be back when Torture had its office here. But what suits someone from Torture is hardly what suits someone from Witchhunt. His department was cultured. More importantly—he took one of the paintings off the wall and peered at the back of the frame—his department made it easier—he replaced the painting and tried the next—for students—and the third—to cheat on their exams. There it was in all its carved glory:
Four parts oak,
Three of pine,
And never start the smoke,
Without two dashes of poke,
Wrapped in one creeper’s vine.
Have an evergreen in mind?
That’s fine, but remember—all,
Trees that flower in the fall,
Are as a rule defined:
The Witchhunter’s pitfall.
Next, add leaves from any tree that’s tall,
Add bamboo,
Then finally recall,
The most important tree of all:
The exceptional Demssous.
No yew, no apples. He studied the crooked words of the poem in detail. He would need oak (check), pine, poke, a creeper’s vine, bamboo, Demssous, anything tall and whatever evergreens he could find as filler. His trees all in a row, life suddenly wasn’t so bad. It was almost a barrel of monkeys. He stopped sweating. He hung the painting back on the wall and laughed: a poem scratched into a painting of a woman on a horse. He’d been saved by art. And, glancing at the painting again, not a very good example of it, either.
Buzzzz…
“Oh, for the sake of—”
He twirled and punched the air.
The fly buzzed and buzzed and avoided his slow hands. It almost seemed to be taunting him, flying close, then far, then close, inviting him to take swing after missed swing. He looked ridiculous. He soon realized he looked ridiculous. Punching a fly? Foolishness. He stopped and looked sheepishly about the room. There was no one there except the lady on the horse in the painting. She wasn’t laughing.
Buzz, buzz, BUZZ!
He swiped again. The fly flew through his pudgy fingers. He clapped at it. The fly flew under his legs. He spun, and watched his tiny enemy maneuver deftly toward the wall of alchemicals. He watched it zig and zag and prance and float and all the while he waited patiently for it to settle. One cannot box with a fly. It must be taken by ambush. He decided he’d write that down before he went to sleep.
The fly finally came to rest on the lip of a little ceramic pot.
Cudgel approached at a half-croach.
The fly shook its wings and pitter-pattered around the edge of the pot. Inside was a fine golden dust. The label said Prunus subhirtella autumnalis. Cudgel paid no attention to the label but plenty to the fly. It had stopped moving and was now hopping in place.
He neared, readied; and lashed out.
It wasn’t a deadly blow, the fly wasn’t mortally wounded, but he did manage to knock it into the pot. Or at least he caused the wind that knocked it off balance. The particulars made no difference, it wasn’t going to get back out. Cudgel watched it struggle inside. There it was, his mighty adversary, buzzing, defeated, stuck, wildly flailing its little limbs to get out of the pollen dust. For a few more seconds he watched its stupid fly determination. Then, curling his fingers into a fist, he punched into the jar and brought the combat to an end.
Everything was now in order, as it should be. He removed his yellow hand from the pot and went in search of the pine barrel…
Chapter V
Ever since she’d come to, she was alone. Her only companions were a headache and a maniacal laughter that periodically reverberated from somewhere beyond her cell, down-corridor. She remembered everything—the boy, the dagger, the army patrol—and had no illusions about where she was; she knew she was a martyr. But she had killed Daniel McAlister, that was what was important. Her duty to the Coven had been performed. It may not have been much, it certainly wasn’t decisive in the greater war, but it was her contribution and if it meant that another young witch like herself or Victoria continued to have a safe place to flee and live without fear and persecution, then she was proud.
Pride, however, is no cure for the common fear of death; which meant that even now Esmerelda couldn’t keep her hands still. Ever-so-gently they oscillated on her knees. She was seated. She wasn’t chained or confined in any way other than being kept in a cell. It was roomy cell, too. It obviously wasn’t meant to house only one prisoner. By that she concluded that either the King’s subjects were suddenly obeying the law much more often than usual, the King wasn’t enforcing his law as strictly and swiftly as was normal, or the other prisoners had been temporarily moved elsewhere, crammed twice as tightly into some other cell. Of the three, the last option was the likeliest—meaning: she wouldn’t be here long.
There was a rustling of keys.
Somewhere, an iron door was unbolted and opened.
Esmerelda got to her feet and walked towards the vertical bars that cut her off from the sort-of freedom beyond the cell. She looked between them. A shadow flickered across a distant wall. Her hands, hanging at her sides, began to shake again. She grabbed two of the bars and steadied them. The bars were wooden, maybe maple or cherry. Or else a metal wrapped in wood. Wooden bars? She rethought her hypothesis about the other prisoners. Normal prisoners could be kept behind naked metal. She looked around: nothing in the cell was metal. She was in a cell specially designed for keeping witches. Perhaps she would be here longer than she first imagined.
Through the bars she could see a few other cells, all empty. She focused her eyes and, through the dark dungeon haze, brought their bars into focus. Wooden, too. She remembered the last time a witch had been caught. It was at least three months ago; and the one before that another three. She did a count in her head and came up with twenty-two: the number of witches she remembered being martyred since she had turned up at the Coven as a girl. It seemed wasteful to have so many special cells for so few prisoners. But she was a witch and they were human. Rationality was not their strong point. Or else, since the castle was old—and she was sure she was in the castle—perhaps the cells had been constructed in unfulfilled anticipation; or perhaps there once was a real need for so many. That would at least mean the war was turning in the witches’ favour. History, she admitted meekly to herself, was not her strong point.
Another shadow flickered.
This time followed by voices, which were themselves followed by an extra-eager burst of maniacal laughter. Crazy as it was, she was comforted to know that she was not totally alone in this deep pit underneath the Capital.
The laughter subdued and four men appeared at the end of the corridor—first their silhouettes, thrown flickering against the walls by torches, then their bodies. They stopped a few steps in and one of the men, presumably the leader, pointed at her. The others nodded and moved in. As they got closer she could make out their leering, doltish expressions. They were big men, muscular and fat, possibly other inmates, violent ones, used to handle and intimidate witches. Maybe other prisoners, too. Politicals or merchantmen. Maybe they even exchanged prison sentences for tours of prison duty. She didn’t know and didn’t care. She also wasn’t intimidated. Her hands trembled fearing death, the end; not burly humans. What could they do: hit her, cause her pain? She was slated for burning anyway. She was living a suspended existence.
One of the oafs jangled a set of keys against the wooden locks that kept her cell doors closed. Another swung them open.
She remained in place, meeting their eyes with profound disinterest as they loomed over her in the entrance. They must have expected she’d either come of her own will or else panic and they would get the joy of dragging her out by the arms and legs. She imagined their brains sweating, struggling to crank out these basic thoughts under creased foreheads. It almost made her laugh. Humans were pathetic, and human men most of all.
“Come,” one of them finally said.
“With us,” a second added—either to finish the sentence of the first or else to offer a full independent thought of his own. She half expected the third to finish (“Now.”) but he kept his mouth shut.
Although she couldn’t see because of the meat blocking her view, she heard the fourth man, who must have been of the ruling class, say, “What’s taking so long? You better not be misbehaving. Remember what I said, ‘No bruises, no breaks, no visible indiscretions.’ You don’t want to make Gremius angry, do you? Perhaps if you’re good he’ll let you have some time with her later.”
One of the oafs licked his lips as if savouring the word “later”, while the other two took her by the arms and marched her out of the cell. They led her down the corridor, neither gently nor roughly, but with giant hands wrapped tightly round her forearms until she began to lose feeling in her fingers. That stopped their shaking. She imagined those hands formed into fists and wondered if that is what gave humans such confidence in the face of obvious inferiority. Big fists and brute strength made them brave—or dumb. But what was effective against other big fists or fat, immobile and unthinking cows wasn’t as effective against witches, or even bears. Big fists also couldn’t handle packs, as of wolves, or stealth, as of snakes, or self-destruction, as of diseased rats.
As they walked down this and other corridors and up swirling flights of stairs, she noted the spacing of the torches and knew that if she managed to free even one wrist, she could smother a light source, dazzle them with primitive conjurings in the dark and kill them one-by-one with their own clothing if need be.
They passed cells in which unmoving bodies lay curled up, others in which men and women with greasy hair that clung to wild faces lunged at the bars and passers-by. No doubt such a face was responsible for the laughter that had kept her company in her own cell. They passed another torch and she returned to her previous thoughts: a human, she mused, would do that: fight pointlessly to the end to the detriment of the cause itself. But she would not. Even if she made her escape from these four, what next? There were hundreds more in the castle: guards that wouldn’t let her through, witchhunters, petty civilians on business who would drop their own affairs and wrestle her to the death at the very sound of “escaped prisoner” and “reward”. And then there was the city itself, filled with human enemies of every kind. The only chance she’d have out there was at night, and, since she had completely lost her sense of time, daylight was just as likely as moonlight. On the other hand, in a fight she would betray secrets, abilities, tactics and valuable information that the humans might later use against her sisters. The odds didn’t compute.
And so her forearm stayed put, and her fingers numb, and all the torches they passed remained unsmothered and illuminating.
As they kept going steadily upwards the air grew warmer and the oafs started to breathe heavier. Finally, they reached an open door and stopped. She felt the unmistakable coolness of fresh wind. They were above ground; there was a window nearby. The non-oaf went in through the door.
From inside the room she heard a voice say: “Thank you, Cudgel. That will be all for now… I shall see you at the burning… Yes, have the guards stay outside. I will knock when they are needed… No, no binding is necessary. I will be fine.”
Cudgel Thecker stepped once again into the hallway and wiped his brow. It had been a nervous day for a while, but all was steady now. He told the oafs to toss Esmerelda into the interrogation room and reminded them to wait for a knock and further word from Gremius. From the accent of their grunts, they appeared to grasp the instructions. He ignored Esmerelda, smiled to no one but himself, and departed with time to spare before tonight’s festivities.
The oafs hesitated and looked at each other slightly panicked to have been left alone—albeit with commands. Esmerelda felt a touch sorry for them, or maybe she was just annoyed, eager to get closer to the fresh air. Either way, she took a step forward and carried out their instructions for them; but no such doing: they grabbed her by the clothes and dragged her back. “Sir said ‘toss’,” one said. “So we toss,” added the second. The third? He just did the tossing.
