XXVI
Josef woke to birds chirping. He yawned and blinked a few times. Above him, leafy branches framed a threatening red-gray predawn sky. Dampness coated the skin on his upper body, chilling him. For a moment he was unclear about where he was or what had happened. He had gone to find Maria, talked to her, and started their return to Gród Narew.
Had he fallen asleep?
He raised his hand to wipe the fatigue from his eyes and stopped. Blood streaked his hand, and the image raised so many horrific possibilities that his mind recoiled.
He started to sit up but felt a weight holding him down.
He looked down at himself and saw one of those horrific possibilities made flesh. Maria was draped against him, her hands on his stomach, her head by his thighs. Her arms were coated with blood, and blood stained the bandages around his wounds.
Had the worst happened? Had the false pagan god called its vengeance on its servant?
Then he saw that she breathed.
The memory of the night returned to him slowly. The sudden fatigue, his near collapse, Maria shredding his clothes.
“Christ have mercy,” he whispered, and said a short prayer of thanksgiving that the beast had not found them asleep in the night.
He was naked from the waist up, and what didn’t serve as a new dressing on his wound had been shoved under his head as a pillow. She hadn’t made any such provision for herself. She slept with her cheek resting against his thigh, her black hair obscuring her face except for her half-open mouth. He could feel her breath, even through his breeches.
He remembered kissing her.
Her hands were still tangled in the dressing covering the wound in his belly. Even now, where gore didn’t streak her skin, her knuckles were a bloodless white. He reached out and touched her hand, and she jerked, lifting her head, shaking the hair out of her eyes. She blurted something in Polish, and Josef told her, “I seem to have survived.”
“God forgive me, I fell asleep—”
“No one can stay awake forever.” He squeezed her hands.
“No, he’s still out there.”
“Maria, we’re fine.”
She looked down and shook her head. “You are far from fine. You almost spilled your life out for lack of attention.”
“I am blessed, then, that you cared to mind me.” He let go of her hands. “And perhaps you might unclench your grip and see if the wound has sealed itself again.”
She looked down at her hands, still holding down the bandage at his stomach. She nodded and grunted a little, and Josef could swear he heard the sounds of bones creaking, as she unclenched her hands and pulled them apart. For a moment it looked as if she had hurt her hands, the skin bruised, the fingers dislocated and swollen. But it must have been a trick of the light, because she shook them both once and Josef saw no more sign of injury other than his own blood crusting the skin.
She felt around the place she had been holding down and, after some investigation, told him the bleeding seemed to have ceased.
“Good,” he said, pushing himself up from the ground. “We can return to the fortress.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder; it was distractingly warm against his chilled skin. “You shouldn’t be walking around.”
“And the alternative? Remain here?”
“You could pull that wound open again.”
“I appreciate your concern.” He bent over to push himself upright, and Maria grabbed his arm and draped it over her shoulders.
“If you won’t rest,” she said, “let me help you.” She hooked her arm behind him, holding his back as she lifted. She moved slowly, gently, and with a reserve of strength he didn’t expect. He reached his feet and felt a wave of disorientation that made his knees wobble underneath him. But she kept him upright.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I will not let you kill yourself.”
He tried to lift his arm off her shoulders, but she grabbed his wrist with her free hand.
“I can walk by myself,” he said.
“And you can walk with my assistance.”
He didn’t have the energy to debate her on the point.
The sky remained threatening, but the rain held off as they approached Gród Narew. Since it was still before dawn, the gates hadn’t been opened for the day. However, there were guards emplaced who saw them slowly climbing the main road up the hillside, and by the time they reached the walls, the gates were opened for them to enter.
A half dozen men grouped themselves around Josef and Maria, and as they asked question after question in a language Josef couldn’t understand, he began to realize how awful he must have looked—shirtless, stomach bound by gory bandages, bloodstained breeches, skin pale as death, supported by a woman half a head shorter than he was.
Maria answered their questions, and a pair of the guards ran off while another pair led the two of them deeper into Gród Narew.
“They’re fetching the doctor for you,” Maria told him.
“Do I need a doctor?” He felt his stomach tighten for reasons quite aside from his wound.
“You cannot think otherwise.”
“No,” Josef said. “But I have seen too much of their ministries to think gladly of the prospect.”
“Think of it what you will. Your wounds will be tended to.”
Josef closed his eyes and allowed her to lead him. In his mind, Nürnberg was too close—the smell of death, the cries of the lost, and the physicians who calmly advised abandonment of the afflicted before they themselves fled to the countryside.
A cloudy dawn came slowly over Gród Narew, the sky boiling red and gray. The overcast light in the stables barely exceeded the moonlight from the previous night. Darien was still crouched in the rafters, waiting. He licked his lips when his prey arrived. A young stable hand, sandy-haired, maybe sixteen, carried a pair of large sloshing buckets into the aisleway.
The boy did not look up. And when Darien was certain that the boy’s gaze was turned in the right direction, he gently pushed the cross and chain off the timber with his foot. It fell glittering to the aisleway in front of the boy.
The boy’s eyes widened in surprise, and he set down the buckets as he walked to where the treasure had fallen upon a pile of manure. He picked the cross out of the pile, holding it up by the chain to catch the weak dawn light.
Above him, Darien’s bones stretched and creaked, and his muscles writhed, and his teeth became sharp and long in his growing muzzle. The horses, until now dim to the danger in their midst, began rearing and stomping in a cacophony that sent the stableboy spinning around to see the source of their terror.
Drool slid from Darien’s slavering mouth, dripping from his tongue to land on the boy’s left shoulder. The boy looked up to see Darien falling down upon him, and if he had time to scream, it was lost beneath the cries of the terrified horses.
Josef remembered little of the next hour or so. He was placed on a table in an unfamiliar room. Men came and went. The doctor or his assistant forced him to drink wine flavored with bitter herbs until his stomach was near bursting and his vision became cloudy and unfocused. They talked much, but he understood little. Maria held his hand.
They placed a leather-wrapped block of wood in his mouth as they tore the bandages free and washed his wound, and he thought the pain of that was intolerable. Then they used a needle to close the wound again.
She held his hand through it all, even when he clenched it in pain.
When the doctor had finished, he bent over Josef and said in butchered German, “You be fine.” The words came out in a breath that stank as if the doctor had taken several doses of his own medicine. He slapped Josef’s shoulder and said, “Strong.”
He chuckled and left. For the moment, Josef was alone with Maria.
Josef reached up to touch the clean linens that now covered his belly. The doctor’s assistant had washed him only as far up as his sternum, so a line separated clean skin from the mud and blood spatters on his chest.
“Leave it be,” Maria said.
He looked up at her; her face looked pale. She had sat there, watching the whole thing, and it had probably been all the worse for her, without pain and alcohol to take her mind off it. “The doctor said I’d be fine.”
“God willing,” she said.
He leaned his head back down, because the wine made his head swim. “I think I’m more ill from the cure than the wound.”
“You rest, Josef. Please? I will go talk to the bishop.”
“I should see you there, explain—” He started to push himself up from the table, but she placed her hand on his chest.
She leaned over him, her face above his so that her hair brushed his cheek. Her eyes shone with reflected tears. “Whatever happens,” she said, “please don’t risk yourself again. Not for me.”
“I—”
She interrupted him by lowering her mouth to his. Her lips were sweet, and soft, and trembled slightly as she cried. She raised her head and laid a hand against his cheek. “You cannot love me, Josef.”
“Maria—”
She placed her fingers on his lips, and he saw an expression of wrenching sadness on her face. “More than anything, I want that. If I were the woman you think I am, I’d fall into your arms and gladly go wherever you led.” Her thumb traced his lower lip. “But if I did that, it would be an unspeakable cruelty.”
“But—”
“Promise that you will forget me,” she whispered.
“I can’t—”
This time he was interrupted by a familiar voice from the doorway. “Who is this woman, and what is she doing with my man?”
Maria straightened up and turned toward the doorway, allowing Josef an unobstructed view of Komtur Heinrich. His master bore an expression of pure malice, directed right at Maria.
The Pole Telek, the new lord of Gród Narew, walked in from behind Heinrich and looked at Maria with an expression of grim but unfocused anger. “She is a servant, Brother Heinrich.”
“Then why is she acting the harlot?” Heinrich snapped.
Some of Telek’s anger seemed to find a focus in Heinrich. “She was the person I charged with taking care of your knight here.”
“Taking care—”
“His wounds. His meals.”
“You had a woman do this for a monk?”
“Sir—” Josef began.
Heinrich pointed a bony finger at him and said, “Silence. Nothing from your lips, Josef. I see what has turned you from the Order, and I have no heart now to hear of your sins.”
“Brother Heinrich,” Telek snapped, “we only have so many servants that speak your tongue well enough to be of use.”
“And you took no consideration of our vows, our commitments to God?”
“This is not a monastery.”
“So you ply my men with whores and prostitutes?”
“I am not a whore!”
Josef’s breath froze in his mouth as he heard Maria’s words. Her voice sounded strained, hurt, but her eyes glared at Heinrich with a dangerous fury.
Heinrich drew back for a second—the shock of a man who was never corrected by his lesser. Then, even though his voice changed little in tenor or tone, his face turned the ruddy color of barely repressed anger. He took a stride across the room. “You will not contradict me, woman!”
Heinrich backhanded her with his closed fist. Her head jerked to the side, and Josef felt blood spray across his naked chest. He pushed himself upright as Telek stepped forward and grabbed the Komtur’s shoulders. “This is quite enough!” Telek said as he pulled Heinrich back.
Maria spat blood from her crushed lip and said quietly, “Is this how you serve God?”
Heinrich raised his hand again, but Telek grabbed his wrist. Maria stood unbowed, glaring at Komtur Heinrich, waiting for him to strike her again.
They were interrupted by a breathless guard bursting into the room, yelling in Polish. Josef understood none of the guard’s babbling except for the name “Telek.” However, Josef could see the reactions in the faces of those around him. Maria’s eyes went wide, and her blood-streaked mouth hung open. Telek’s jaw set firm, and he tightened his grip on Heinrich’s arm.
“You should come, Brother Heinrich,” Telek said. “We may have need of your expertise.”
Heinrich, who knew a fair bit more of the Slavic languages than Josef did, had obviously understood enough to distract him from correcting Maria. “Take me there,” he said.
“What has happened?” Josef asked.
“He’s here,” Maria said, her voice as quiet as death.
Telek led Heinrich away, but as they left, Heinrich said, “Do not leave that woman alone with him. He is yet a member of the Order, and until he is released he will behave as one.”
Telek snapped something in Polish, finishing with a dismissive wave at Maria.
Maria looked down at Josef and gently touched his arm.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“I have to leave you,” she said. “Please stay here and heal. Find a safe life without me.”
“Maria—” His voice died in his throat. He looked up into her face, bloodied from Heinrich’s blow. His fist had split her lip and left a long cut on her cheek—at least that’s what he had seen after his master struck her. As she looked down at him now, her lip wasn’t swollen or bruised at all. Except for a smear of blood, her lip was untouched. Even the tiny cut on her cheek seemed much smaller than he remembered from a moment ago.
And as he looked up into her face, he saw the cut on her cheek shrink, then completely disappear. “Your face,” he whispered.
In response, her hand went to her chest, between her breasts. It was a gesture he had seen her make many times, touching the silver cross she always wore.
But she wasn’t wearing it now.
The guard stepped next to her and said something, and Maria nodded as the man led her away.
Josef stared after her.
“This cannot be,” he whispered. “God, please show me that this isn’t so.”
When no answer was immediately forthcoming, he slowly sat up and climbed carefully off the table.