Elixa, page 18
part #0.50 of The Torcal Trilogy Series
The foreigner inhaled sharp enough for Elixa to hear.
‘Well,’ the nasal voice justified, ‘she deserves it. They say she worships a false Moon Goddess. Can you believe she used some heathen stones and cursed water to take the milk out of an old man’s eyes.’
Perhaps she only imagined it, but it seemed that at the mention of the stones the foreigner caught his breath.
The nasal voice didn’t seem to notice and continued, working himself up to anger, ‘She had no right to do that. God himself blinded the man because of all his sins.’ He sniggered again, ‘Well, they know what to do with the likes of her at the castle, I can tell you!’
At that moment footsteps that she guessed were the Commander’s had approached and the nasal voice had become guarded as he reprimanded the foreigner, ‘Be off with you. I cannot stand around all day talking to the likes of you.’
The Commander ordered them to set off, and Elixa was jostled around again as her horse followed the men.
When they finally stopped at nightfall and pulled her off the horse, she managed to catch a glimpse of flaming torches and the dim outline of a dark, shadowy fortress.
She had no notion of where she was.
They dragged her up steps and dumped her onto a cold, hard floor. The tunic that had covered her head was pulled off and in the smoky torchlight she could see a row of heavy doors with a tiny, barred window set in each: a dungeon. One of the men insisted the guard water her from his costrel, saying, ‘We have to keep her alive until she burns.’
With her mouth at last free of the rag, she drank greedily.
They untied the ropes which had bound her hands and feet, and then the guard threw her into a stinking cell. Struggling against the guard’s strength, Elixa screamed. But the guard bellowed at her, ‘It is no use, witch, no one can hear you.’
‘What are you doing to me?’
‘Tomorrow you burn for heresy!’
Although her fevered imaginings during the ride had considered this possibility, she screamed again.
Hearing the words spoken out loud was far worse than anything she could have imagined. The guard threw her to the floor. Elixa refused to give in and continued screaming.
In an abrupt motion, his leg shot out and he kicked his boot at her head.
In a blinding flash of pain, Elixa lost consciousness.
37
Elixa opened her eyes. She blinked away the pain in her head and the bleakness in her heart. For a moment, she could not understand where she was. She had spent the rest of the night drifting in and out of consciousness.
In a horrifying moment, everything came flooding back.
Glancing around, she could just make out that her cell was a large, empty chamber. She huddled, cold and aching, in a corner of it as an eerie gloom settled around her, an icy blackness that stabbed at her very soul.
When dawn broke, it sent a faint glow of daybreak through a small, barred gap in the wall.
The far side of the chamber was wet with puddles of water across the floor. The stone walls had moss and mildew growing out of every crevice, thickest of all around the window.
A scent of moist dirt, rotting iron and long dead leaves clogged her nostrils.
In the darkest corner, a rat scurried across the floor.
It eyed her and Elixa bit down on a scream. They would surely come if she slept and bite into her flesh.
She closed her eyes and prayed to God, pleading for Him to help her. She curled herself into a ball, but all heat and comfort seemed to have left her body.
Desperation flooded into her. How could this have happened? The day before yesterday she had been placing flowers on the altar for a church service in the abbey she loved so dearly. Now, she was accused of being a witch, of heresy, and lying, battered, on a straw-covered stone floor among rats.
Hammered metal shackles hung from the walls and more were fixed into the floor. Elixa had a vision of being chained in them, unable to move while rats crawled over her body, and she silently thanked God for the small mercy that at least they hadn’t done that to her.
There was a pit in the floor with an iron grille over it. She crawled over the rough, uneven stone floor and peered in, wondering if she would see someone below it, but the empty cavern gaped back at her.
The stench of death hung in the air.
A dark red stain spattered the back wall. She shuddered. Someone had seen terrible pain there.
The penetrating damp seeped into her aching bones. She struggled to her feet and shuffled to the door. Through the grille in the wooden door, she could see a dank tunnel. It led to freedom, but the thick wooden door blocked her path.
A sharp breeze crept along the corridor, through the iron grille, and tugged at her hair.
She sank to the floor and, reflexively, chewed on the inside of her cheek. Whenever Mamá caught her doing this she scolded her. What she would give to hear that voice now, even if it was just to say goodbye.
She stopped chewing and licked her tongue around her mouth, poking it into the raw skin of her cheek. If only she had listened to more of what Mamá had said. If only she had been a better daughter. But how could she reconcile herself with marriage to a man she did not know or love? Mamá had said that all maidens faced the same thing.
But she had believed herself different. Had thought that the harsh rules of life did not apply to her. That, by devoting herself to understanding the Luna miracle, she might live a life filled with learning and love. That hers would not be an existence governed by fear and necessity, until those few short, miserable years ended in age or infirmity and death.
So much for Elixa Luz, the maiden who would learn about the elixir of long life. She who had been chosen by Luna, the Moon Goddess, to protect the health and life of the Torcal people. But this Elixa Luz, now imprisoned, had learnt a harsh lesson about the realities of life. And when the time finally came to leave this foul dungeon, she would yell and plead with them not to take her, because where she would go after that would be infinitely worse: it would be the place where they would put her to death.
With the rough, cold stone against her back, she sat and cradled her head in her arms. Her mind emptied as hopelessness set in.
Finally, Elixa let the tears flow. She cried for Brother Luis and for Mamá. She would never see them again. She would never see Enrique either. Nor their new home.
For the next hour her mind staggered between self-pity, sadness for those she left behind, the aching knowledge that the wondrous, loving Luna gift to the community of water would not be received and would surely seep away into the earth. She sent up silent cries to God, begging for mercy. She even called aloud for Luna, the Moon Goddess to save her.
She wanted to feel anger, but at this moment the strength for that had deserted her.
Gradually, she began to notice occasional wafts of a horrible stench drifting into the dungeon.
The odour was similar to when Mamá burnt a side of pork in her pan over scorching coals. The fatty sour stench assaulted her nostrils.
The smell was sickening. It even left an unpleasant taste on her tongue.
Hauling herself to her feet, Elixa stumbled to the window. Stretching up onto the tip of her toes, she could see out.
She seemed to be high up in a cold tower. The fortress had thick walls surrounding a central courtyard. Over the castle battlement she could see the startling blue of the ocean. A grassy meadow led down from the castle walls to the sea, where waves crashed onto the sand and foam swept ashore. A whistling wind whipped away the smell for a moment, as she stared out at the sea’s constantly moving mass of water.
A deep sadness filled her.
From the abbey, she had often glimpsed the sun shining on the distant water and dreamed of being down at the sea’s edge, but not like this.
The taste of salt came to her lips as she stretched her neck to peer into the courtyard. Sea birds squawked overhead. She followed their spiralling and then watched them dive down. On the ground, they pecked at what seemed to be blackened bones. They were disturbed by two men dragging large tree trunks and throwing them into a stack in the middle of the dry ground.
For a moment, Elixa did not understand what they were doing. Then, it came to her in a horrible moment of realisation with the recollection of the guard’s words: Tomorrow you burn for heresy.
They were building a pyre.
Elixa’s chest seized up. Her breath caught in her throat.
The guard had not been saying those words in idle threat.
She could not force her gaze away from the pyre they were making. A large wooden pole stood tall in the middle of it. Logs and branches were stacked high around it.
She looked more closely at the seabirds and realised that the bones they were poking at lay in the middle of a charred circle, and that the small wafts of smoke that still came from that piece of ground were the source of the foul stench.
No, no, no!
How could giving thanks to God and the Moon Goddess warrant such a hideous punishment? How could God and his Luna angel choose her for their work, and then consign her to this dreadful fate?
Lost as she was in despair, she still noticed a voice that drifted up from the courtyard. A horribly familiar voice.
Brother Grigori.
38
Elixa had seen him slam the abbey gates shut, so he must have ridden after the men who had taken her. Which meant that not only was it he who had denounced her, he had also known exactly where they were taking her. The nasal voiced guard’s words came back to her now. The sour man who had given the order to take her must have been Grigori himself.
She gaped in disbelief. A monk who had taught her in school had ordered such a fate for her. How was that possible?
Through a daze, she noticed the man in front of the hideous monk.
This man was tall and lean and looked like a Moor. She had never seen a Moor before, but Mamá had told her what they looked like, and this man fitted that description. His head was wrapped in a turban with a veil over his nose and mouth. His long tunic floated in the breeze and danced around his sandalled feet.
He must be important, because several men stood respectfully behind him.
They were clustered at the gate, the monk inside and the Moor and his men out.
Brother Grigori didn’t look pleased at the Moor’s presence. He seemed to be trying to block the visitor’s view of the courtyard.
The Moor lifted the cloth from his face. His tawny skin shone like a fawn’s silky coat. On a normal day, Elixa would have been amused at the way the snap of the wind caught the ends of the Moor’s veil and tugged it this way and that. But the sight of the monk’s face filled her head and it took away life’s little pleasures.
A head taller than the monk, the Moor sniffed and wrinkled his long nose at the smell. ‘I beg forgiveness for my intrusion here, Brother, but I was advised that this castle housed an important centre of religious justice and that I might benefit by learning from those in charge of it. I divine from your scholarly aspect that you must be a leader here, and I would greatly value some knowledge of the work you oversee.’
Brother Grigori seemed to puff up, some sense of pride overcoming his desire not to talk to this stranger. ‘Christianity moves to a new age and its faith must be renewed. Small groups of the devout, such as ours here, have holy orders to perform this work. There are trials being conducted to root out heretics. The punishment is death by the flames!’
The Moor raised an eyebrow. ‘But should they not be branded on their foreheads with a red-hot iron? Or beaten with rods or rocks in a public square, and then driven off?’
Brother Grigori spat on the ground, but the tortures contained in this reply seemed to encourage him to converse further. ‘Heresy has spread throughout the Christian kingdoms at an alarming rate. We will not allow it to grow here, as it did in Languedoc with the Cathars. These people not only menace the Church, they undermine the very foundations of Christian society.’
The Moor persisted, ‘Surely at worst, you could forbid anyone to give them shelter, so that they die partly from hunger and partly from the cold of winter?’
Brother Grigori shook his head. ‘According to the agreement made by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at Verona, the heretics of every community are to be sought out, removed before they can inflict further devilment and damage, and be brought before the Papal Court in order to receive suitable punishment.’
The Moor swatted a fly away from his face. ‘Yet it seems from what you have said that heretics are being burnt here, rather than put on trial in this court of which you speak. Is this not contrary to the very agreement to which you refer?’
Terror coursed through Elixa from the horrors she overheard referred to in such an abstract way in this conversation. Another part of her, though, wondered why this Moor seemed to be taking her side, with the polite but persistent questioning that she could see was infuriating the monk.
‘God’s bones!’ Brother Grigori spat out his hatred. ‘As a man of a false religion you cannot see that Christian Europe is so endangered by heresy that this type of punishment is becoming a necessity. As well as condemning their own immortal souls to perpetual Hell, these heretics are a menace to Christian society,’ he continued. ‘Here we speed the process of their cleansing by, in extreme cases, allowing the sufficiently holy to pronounce an immediate sentence of death upon heretics.’
Bile rose in Elixa’s throat. The monk sounded so zealous. So full of hatred.
‘The authorities are bound to perform this duty, but many have grown weak and do not, so here,’ Brother Grigori waved his hand expansively, ‘these devout members of the church find the strength to carry out their Godly duty for them.’
Elixa almost choked to hear Grigori’s words finally expose the mind that had lived within their community for so many years, had taught their children.
He had thrown aside all caution now and was talking animatedly. ‘It is simple, you see. We grant God’s mercy by killing the heretics, both for the good of the masses, and for the salvation of the immortal souls of those same sinners. We are being kind to them, giving them the opportunity to repent before Satan takes them for all eternity.’
Once again, she could not believe what she was hearing. The monk had always preached with an iron fist, endlessly warning about hell and damnation. But hearing him now it was as if he actually believed it his duty, the Church’s duty to not only perform vicious murder, but also to call it righteous.
Grigori kept on, ‘After seven hundred years of war and anarchy since the end of the Roman empire, this divine work is necessary to protect the people, restore the faith, and build a new, stronger society, as evidenced by the great cathedrals that even now are going up to herald the dawn of a new age.’
The monk continued, with a conceited tone, ‘As a learned and right-minded man, you should understand that the Church must take responsibility, but as a heathen you clearly cannot comprehend it.’
‘I am no heathen, Brother. I serve the same God as you. They are only called different names.’ The Moor fanned his hand in front of his nose as if to lessen the smell.
To Elixa’s eyes it seemed that he discussed this barbaric theology with the monk only to further some other aim, and that he was struggling to remain calm. And now he did, indeed, try to shift the conversation. ‘I met your men taking someone here yesterday. Tell me, is your prisoner to have a trial?’
If Grigori resented the Moor’s questioning he did not do so sufficiently to prevent his now thoroughly-loosened tongue from continuing. ‘No, she does not deserve that. As a witch she might trick her way out of a trial. In my esteemed position, I am able to report the truth which leaves no doubt as to her guilt. Besides, many witnesses have seen her perform witchcraft, as did I myself. And as if this were not enough, she was shown to be guilty of theft of monies from the holy Church. Her guilt can be in no doubt, and the authority I have been granted, both by the Church and by holy God himself, entitles me to enact suitable justice upon her body.’
Elixa’s breath came in stabbing gasps.
The Arab kept his composure, but a tautness in his body spoke loudly of his disgust to Elixa. ‘For a man, made by God with the capability to fight and do battle, perhaps I could understand burning to death as a punishment. But is it not also our duty to protect women, who keep our homes and nurture our sons? Can such a death truly be suitable for them?’
Grigori’s mouth was flecked with white spittle now. He looked at least as mad as any of the patients that had ever been sent to the abbey for nursing.
‘There is no record of a woman being burnt. Softness and laxity! This burning will be a good way to see how they fare in the flames. This is divine mercy, I tell you! A slow, agonising death gives the grateful sinner a taste of eternal hell, and allows their soul one last chance to repent. I pray that God may forgive her. She meets this fate for her own good.’
Elixa was dizzy with nausea now. She could not bring herself to believe what she was hearing.
The Moor’s shoulders were arched in tension and he wrinkled his nose again, his disgust barely contained. It seemed to her that he had clearly heard more than enough of the raving monk’s theology.
‘That is, of course, your prerogative,’ the Moor bowed his head in respect; ‘however, with all due respect, I would like to talk with you on another matter, my true reason for engaging your time. I heard your men speak of this witch and her use of stones and water. It is a subject about which I have a lot of curiosity. I have the good fortune to be a wealthy man, and it occurs to me that more good might be performed by your Church, by your good and righteous self, with a generous donation of gold coin in place of this witch’s death. What say you to an exchange?’
Grigori threw his head back in laughter and wagged a finger in front of the Moor’s face. ‘Ah, you have no doubt seen her. Perhaps you want her for yourself. I hear you Arabs like white skin and blonde hair. I imagine she would be highly prized amongst your kind, but do not be blinded by beauty, Moor. God knows, she is bewitching, of that there is no doubt, but she would cause you more trouble than she is worth.’
