Authors: S. A. Swann
Wolfbreed (8 page)
Uldolf stepped next to Burthe. “She’s got a bad wound on her shoulder, too.”
“Draw me some fresh water, and bring some clean linens.” Uldolf nodded and went outside to the well. The ground here might be hard and rocky, but at least they had good water. Their Christian masters might have taken most everything, but they hadn’t taken that.
Burthe undid the cloak and unwrapped the girl so she could get a good look at her.
“Oh, you poor child.”
“Mama?”
“Shh, Hilde, Mama’s working.”
The shoulder wound was awful, as well—a ragged crater in the middle of shreds of torn flesh, larger than the head wound. It was incredible that the girl hadn’t bled to death. Incredible enough that Burthe checked her breathing again, and felt for her heartbeat.
“You’re strong,” Burthe whispered. “That’s good.”
Strong like her own children, maybe strong enough to fight off the fever that would inevitably come after such an injury.
“Young, too. That will help.” Burthe went to a small chest she stored on a shelf next to the hearth. She walked back to see Uldolf standing over the girl’s bedside holding a large bucket of water, the linens draped over his shoulder.
Burthe glanced at her son’s expression, then down at the girl, lying uncovered in her son’s bed.
“Uldolf!”
He tore his gaze away from the injured girl’s nakedness to look at her.
“Set those things down, and maybe allow our guest a little modesty?”
Uldolf’s face turned bright red and he set down the bucket. He started walking away, but Burthe cleared her throat. “Those as well.”
For a moment, her son looked confused. Burthe sighed, reached up, and took the linens off his shoulder. “Go on, then. Don’t you have game you can dress?”
He nodded and headed out the door, closing it behind him.
Burthe turned back to her guest. The girl was her son’s age, maybe a little younger. There was no denying that she was attractive, even in her distressed state. She really couldn’t blame Uldolf for staring.
“Can I help, Mama?”
Burthe sighed and looked at her daughter. Hilde was still on her bed, but only just. She was up on her knees and straining about as far forward as she could without falling off. Burthe’s annoyance was tempered by the fact that Hilde’s excitement seemed to have renewed her strength.
Better to placate Hilde’s curiosity before it got her into trouble.
“Only if you can be very quiet and still. Can you do that?”
Hilde’s face lit up. “Yes, Mama!”
“Then pick up that stool and come sit over here.”
Hilde scrambled out of bed and brought the stool over, sitting at the head of Uldolf’s bed. When she sat, Burthe handed her the chest. “Now, when I ask you for something, you hand it to me.”
“Yes, Mama.” Hilde nodded vigorously, a very serious expression on her face.
“Good.”
Burthe took one of the linens and dipped it in the water. First things first; she needed to clean those wounds.
t was a long, laborious process, and Burthe was grateful the girl was unconscious. Even though the wounds were remarkably clean, without pus to drain or dead flesh to cut away, they were deep and ragged. After cleaning the dirt, she cut the hair from around the girl’s head wound.
Cleaned and exposed, Burthe saw that there were two wounds, as if something had impaled the poor girl’s flesh, cracking but not quite breaking the skull underneath. A surgeon would more than likely take a drill to the skull there, releasing the vapors and evil humors that would gather at the injury.
“It isn’t sunken,” she told herself. “She’s not in obvious distress.”
“Mama?”
“Shh, my child.”
If there had been tremors, or chills, or cold white skin, she might have tried to open the skull, despite not having the proper skills or equipment. But with the girl merely unconscious, the risks did not seem worth it.
As to what had impaled her at such an angle, Burthe had no clue. “Perhaps she fell on a branch.”
Though that wasn’t a satisfactory answer, since she couldn’t conceive of what kind of force that would require, or imagine the kind of tree that grew branches this thin that could pierce flesh without splintering.
Regardless of how she had come by her injury, Burthe knew well how much pain this wound could cause, even after it healed. She’d been a young girl once. She took great care in sewing the raw edges of the wound.
“What are you doing, Mama?”
“If someone is hurt this badly, Hilde, the skin won’t heal together all by itself.”
“It won’t?”
“No. The edges of the wound need to touch to mend properly.”
“Does that mean she’s going to have a seam in her head, like my dolly?”
Burthe smiled and knotted the thread on the third stitch. She was tying them as small and close as she could. That, and some salve, would help to minimize the scar. “Just for a little while. When the skin heals back together, I’ll remove the thread.”
As she worked her way up the scalp, her patient remained blissfully unconscious.
“Does that hurt?” Hilde asked her.
“Not as badly as it did when she injured her head.”
“I don’t think I could sleep through that.”
After she had stitched and bound the girl’s head, Burthe started working on the shoulder.
Once the wounds were taken care of, Burthe turned her attention to cleaning off the mud, blood, and filth. It was an exercise that took almost as long as tending to the girl’s injuries. As she cleaned the girl off, Burthe did notice one other strange thing. Filth and blood covered her entire body, except for her left foot. That, for some reason, had remained untarnished by whatever had befallen the unconscious girl. It was even clean under the toenails.
As inexplicable as that was, Burthe didn’t think any more of it once she was done.
he awakened, naked, in a strange bed, as if she had been asleep for a very long time. As if she barely remembered ever being awake.
She remembered dreams—dreams of being someone else, being some
thing
else. She remembered being someone cold, unfeeling, angry, and very cruel. The nightmares she remembered frightened
her, even though they were all mixed up in her head in a confusing muddle.
It felt as if she had been dreaming for years.
She tried to move, and winced, pain shooting through her shoulder and her skull. Something that was half memory and half dream told her that there were men who wanted to hurt her. She wanted to think that was just the dream; it wasn’t real.
But the pain was very real.
She wondered where she was, who she was, and how she had come to be in such a place. She thought she knew, but as she reached for the thought, something inside her flinched, as if it didn’t want to know.
She remembered, vaguely, the man who had pulled her from the stream. He had given her his cloak and had kept talking to her. The words should have made sense, but she couldn’t understand. It had frustrated her so much that when the man reached for her, she had bit at him.
He had yelled, making her cower. But after a few moments, he had lowered his fist and had started speaking lower, more softly. That’s when she had realized he only had one arm. She had realized then, because he hadn’t struck her, that he couldn’t be one of the bad men.
The thought of bad men brought a painful flash of memory—of blood, of men screaming, of flesh tearing; too vivid to be a dream, too horrible to be anything else.
She swallowed and pushed the evil thought away.
Those weren’t the people here. She was somewhere else now, away from the bad men.
Maybe here she would be safe.
InterludeAnno Domini 1229
en years before the bloodbath at Johannisburg Keep, before the keep existed and before the town bore the name of Johannisburg, Erhard von Stendal, a knight of the Order of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem, had been elevated to the title of Landkomtur, province commander of the Teutonic Order. Before then, he had been serving in the Holy Land as a simple knight of the Order.
His elevation had been no common event. Normally, a brother arrived at a position of authority in the Teutonic Order by a consultation of his peers. It would be the collective wisdom of the Kommende—the house where the knight served—that would raise him to commander. Likewise it would be the collective wisdom of a province’s commanders that would raise such a Komtur to the level of Landkomtur, province commander. Until he’d been granted the title himself, Erhard had no idea that a brother might achieve that rank in any other way.
However, only a few weeks after the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II was crowned king of Jerusalem in the church of the Holy Sepulcher, the grand master of the Order himself, Hermann von Salza, had informed Erhard of his new duties. Erhard was to leave his own house and travel to the frontier of Prûsa. No brothers had consulted to elevate him because, as far as Erhard could tell, there were no brothers in the province he commanded. Nor, in fact, did there seem to be an actual province.
Erhard accepted these orders without question, even though he had little idea why the grand master would call him from his brothers in Jerusalem, or why he was elevated in rank in such an unusual manner. He was certain that any adventures to Christianize Prûsa would create more houses and provinces for the Order, though he had never heard of creating leadership for such beforehand.
When he rode into Kulmerland on the southwest edge of the Prûsan wilderness, he still believed that his destiny would be to lead a force of men into battle against heathen, infidel, and pagan. He expected to use the point of his sword to protect those who preached the glory of God, and those who had accepted the words of Christ. He had never thought that following the Lord’s will would be the easy path, but he still believed he knew where it led.
On this summer day, that path led him to a monastery east of the city of Torun, along the River Drweca.
Thanks to a rare episode of agreement between the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX—an agreement brokered by Grand Master Hermann von Salza himself—the lands just to the north of Erhard had been jointly granted to the Teutonic Order. By virtue of papal and imperial authority, the Teutonic knights held sovereignty over the whole of Prûsa.
Currently, it was a fief in name only, as Prûsa was still untamed, stretching through bog and dense woods to the north and east along the Baltic. The pagans who made those woods home had a reputation as fierce as any Saracen.
The Prûsan appetite for Christian blood had troubled all their neighbors: Danes, Saxons, and Poles. The Poles’ failure to contain the continual pagan raids across their northern border led the duke of Mazovia to beg for the intervention of the Teutonic Order in the first place.
The monastery Erhard now approached was a testament to that Prûsan barbarism. The walls were scarred by fire and partway collapsed, crosses had been defaced, and a statue of Mary that had once filled a niche near the entrance had been toppled, the head removed. Yet Erhard knew that the building did not suffer the worst. The brothers serving this mission who hadn’t been killed outright had been taken as slaves by their Prûsan attackers. It was only one in a long line of offenses against the body of Christ: slaughtered bishops, destroyed churches, and enslaved converts.
However, this patch of Christendom had since been reclaimed, as shown by the Teutonic standard flying above the remains of the bell tower. The black cross whipping in the summer breeze lifted Erhard’s spirit. It showed that no defeat of the righteous was permanent.
It did trouble him somewhat that there was little sign of anyone reclaiming the mission here. He saw no monks as he approached, only armed men bearing various tabards over their armor, all quite serious in their bearing. Erhard could tell by their dress and the varied ways they wore their hair and trimmed their beards that these men were all secular.
At least this house of God is well defended
.
He rode up and one of the guardsmen took the reins of his horse as Erhard dismounted.
“You must be our new Landkomtur,” came a voice out of the entry.
Erhard turned to face the voice. “Brother Erhard von Stendal,” he said, squinting. The intense sunlight rendered the shadows in the recessed entry near impenetrable, and his host’s approach had
been masked by the fact that he wore black, from tunic to trousers to worn leather boots.
The man stepped into the sunlight to meet him. “I am Brother Semyon von Kassel.”
Brother Semyon held out a hand, and Erhard noted that he even wore black gloves. Erhard took his hand and said, “Hochmeister Hermann von Salza sends his greetings.”
Brother Semyon smiled. “But more important, he sends you.”
There was nothing particularly unusual about the man, other than his choice of black clothing in the summer heat. Brother Semyon was about Erhard’s height, if more slightly built. His face was lined by approaching age, but his hair still held most of its color, white only invading at the fringes of his temples and around his neatly trimmed beard. His eyes were gray as a stone.
The face was unremarkable, but the smile …
There was something in Brother Semyon’s smile that made Erhard uneasy. There was knowledge there—knowledge that probably was best not shared.
“I am here,” Erhard said. “But I’ve not yet been told why.”
“Why? To serve God, and the pope.” Brother Semyon chuckled and let go of Erhard’s hand. “Come, I have much to show you, and we have much to discuss.”
rother Semyon and one of the secular guards led him down a corridor black with shadow. It was a relief to be out of the sun, but the dimness rendered the brother little more than a darker shadow beside him. Erhard had the uncanny sensation that the darkness here was more than the absence of light.
“You’ve been given quite the honor. To be first to lead one of our special ‘provinces’ is a unique duty, and one that the Hochmeister only trusted to the most disciplined and discreet knight
of the Order. Your command will be exclusive. You will have no peers.”
“I assume you’re going to tell me what this command is?”
“All things in their proper order.” They stopped in front of a massive door. “Do you know why you were chosen?”
“I have not been enlightened.”
“The reasons are manifold. In the Holy Land, you proved adept at the more subtle arts of warfare—attacking the heathen in the mind and the soul as well as the body. You are adept with spies, subversion, and assassination.”
“I serve the Lord, my God.”
“And you do so with an admirable lack of sentimentality.”
Brother Semyon’s guardsman opened the door. It swung inside silently on well-oiled hinges. It revealed a corridor beyond, lined with several long cages. The cages were new, the black iron bars showing no rust, the stones forming the floor flat, even, and closely fitted together. The cages were tall and narrow, along the single outside wall, and lit only by vent holes in the upper wall no larger than Erhard’s fist.
Even so, after the darkened corridor, his eyes were adjusted well enough to see the cages in their entirety. They were barely wide enough for a man to spread his arms inside, and about twice that long. The occupants were uniformly naked, each chained by one leg to a heavy staple set in the center of their cell.
Children
.
Six of them, male and female, all about eight years old. All of them were quiet, looking down at the floor as Brother Semyon led Erhard and the guardsman down the aisle in front of the cages.
Erhard said a quick prayer for his own soul then turned on Brother Semyon. “What
is
this? Are these children baptized? What are they being punished for?”
Semyon laughed at him. “No, my good knight, you would no more baptize these children than you would your horse.”
Erhard felt the first prickings of horror. “Why would you deny them Christ? Absolution of their sins?”
“Sir, sin is the province of humanity. These you are calling ‘children’ are far from human.”
Erhard couldn’t credit those words.
He looked at the prisoners and saw nothing to distinguish them from children anywhere. Except, perhaps, one thing—
They were unnaturally silent.
These children did not babble, did not fidget, did not respond to his presence at all. The only indication Erhard received that these creatures were even aware of their surroundings was when he caught one girl’s steel-blue eye furtively watching him from behind the ragged strings of her blond hair.
“I am deeply troubled, Brother. You say these children are not human. How can I accept those words when I see this?” He waved at the cages.
“You will see more,” Brother Semyon said.
“Why do they say nothing? Are they mute?”
“No. They are merely well trained.” Brother Semyon shifted his speech to the barbarian tongue of the Prûsans. Fortunately, the grand master had sent Erhard north with some Prûsan slaves to be guides and to tutor him in the language. “Only speak when spoken to. Isn’t that right, Rose?”
“Yes, Brother Semyon,” whispered the naked little girl with the stringy blond hair. She didn’t straighten up and, despite answering, didn’t raise her head or turn to look at him. The one eye that Erhard could see through the tangled hair remained fixed on him.
“Staring is impolite, Rose,” Semyon continued in Prûsan.
At the brother’s words, the eye blinked and the girl’s head shifted. Now her face was completely hidden.
“Who are these children?” Erhard turned to look at Brother Semyon. “What are you doing here?”
The brother smiled at Erhard and resumed speaking in German.
“I am doing things you could not have conceived of when you spoke your vows in Jerusalem. However, before I explain, I must show you something.”