Rich Larson - [BCS289 S01] - The Star Plague (html) Read online

  The Star Plague

  By Rich Larson

  “Your burns are healing, Northman. And your eyes are stronger every day.” The young priest called Symond smiles his crooked-toothed smile. “God has more sights to show you.”

  “I want to see the back of you,” Bragi says.

  But it’s true that his vision is finally returning. Things are grayed and blurry—behind Symond the yard’s clucking chickens are indistinct blots—but it’s far better than when he arrived, dragged to the monastery covered in burns and blind as Hod, howling against the dark. The Anglish priests have tended to him as well as any healer back home could have done.

  He’s indebted to them. He hates being indebted.

  “The back of me?” Symond echoes, turning the sentence over in his mealy accent. He is the only priest who speaks Bragi’s language, learned from travels in Svitjod, and Bragi has gathered only a few Anglish phrases in the past weeks. So when he speaks, it’s only to Symond.

  “Go away now,” Bragi says, to make it clearer.

  Symond looks startled for a moment, then smiles again. “Yes. I should get back to work.” He packs away his pastes and bandages. Pauses. “Brother Litton has gone to look at the pit. Where you were found. He should be back tonight.”

  He scurries back into the abbey, leaving Bragi to sit alone until the baby goat that keeps slipping her pen ambles over to him. He scratches her chin, lets her nuzzle his hand. Then he grabs her and holds her in his arms, feeling her warm pulse through her downy fur.

  “Siv, you are my only friend in this foreign and forsaken land,” he says. “Tell me your secrets, and I will tell you mine.”

  Siv bleats at him and wriggles free. Bragi watches resentfully as the goat wobbles back to her mother. Then he shuts his damaged eyes and remembers back to the night he was blinded. He sees the black sky set on fire, feels the fire searing his bones. He was certain it was the end of the world. He was certain it was ragnarök.

  But here he is alive. He hates being alive.

  Bragi spends the rest of the daylight away from the monastery, down at the shore. The brown-clad priests let him wander. Some shift nervously as he passes by. He knows he’s a curiosity to them: his lye-bleached hair and beard, the fading blue-black designs on the shaven sides of his skull, his net of scars. They have not seen men like him.

  He has not asked them yet where they hid his blade and his axe. There is a time for all things.

  He climbs down the embankment half by feel, scrabbling his hands through the loose dirt, gripping for roots. Then he finds a smooth stretch of sand and sits, pulling his wool cloak around himself against the chill. The waves are the same gray as the sky; he can’t make out the seabirds but he can hear them squawk and scream.

  Out across the sea lies everything the gods and the jarl have taken from him. Once the soft crash of the tide was comforting to him, a mother’s heartbeat, but now he only hears the gulls and he knows they are mocking him. They are free to go where they want. He is not.

  “Fuck you, birds,” he says. “Fall your feathers and break your beaks and waste away your wings.”

  The birds cry back: útlagi, útlagi, útlagi. Fuck you, too.

  The priest called Litton returns at supper, and Bragi realizes he knows him—not his blurred face but his slouch and the sound of his voice. Bragi came across him once during the night, back when he was still half-delirious, stumbling through nightmares. Litton and another priest. The two of them had been rutting on the benches in near silence, muffling their grunts.

  They were shocked to see him, he remembers, and neither of them extended him an invitation to join.

  The priests break their evening silence as they crowd around Litton, a rising hubbub of Anglish of which Bragi understands nothing until Symond wriggles his way over to him. His crooked smile is firmly in place.

  “Brother Litton says the pit is as deep as a well, and there is ash and cinder all around. The trees are splintered into pieces. He could not see the bottom, because there is a strange red dust in the air that will not settle.” He points to the oldest priest, the one with shaking legs. “Father Wilthrop says it was a falling star. It might be a sign of the end times, or it might be a natural thing. He says there is no way of knowing.”

  “He should ask your dead god,” Bragi says, taking a hunk of black bread from an abandoned place at the table. The priests eat a very small nattmal, and never meat.

  “Dead, and alive again,” Symond corrects, then lowers his voice. “I have asked God. I think it was a sign. But not of the end times.” He blinks his bright eyes. “I think it was a sign for you. You are like Saul, blinded on the road to Damascus. That was what brought Saul to the faith, and it will bring you also, Northman.”

  “No,” Bragi says, and leaves the long table before the priests can start their next round of droning prayers. He passes the priest called Litton on his way. There’s a strange smell to him, like something rusted, and he is coughing into his roughspun sleeve.

  Bragi cannot sleep in the night. The monastery walls are well-built against the cold—he has run his hands along the stonework often enough as he navigates. The hearths are kept crackling warm. He even has solitude, in the small room reserved for the sick.

  But his thoughts won’t let him rest. He keeps remembering the judgement, the glee in the jarl’s voice when he was declared outlaw. He wishes he could crack open his own skull and tear out his gray brains and smear them across the sky like Ymir, just to be rid of the memory.

  He is considering freeing Siv from the goat pen, so he will have company, when the priest called Litton pads inside. Bragi recognizes his slouch, but he’s moving strangely, stiffly, and his body seems bloated in the dark. Bragi watches the priest feel his way along the straw pallets.

  “Northman,” he whispers. “Northman.”

  “So now you want to fuck?” Bragi asks.

  Litton gets to the foot of Bragi’s pallet and crouches there. His breath is heavy and the rust smell is strong. Bragi sees his hands shaking. “You, Northman. You. Cwelle.” He pauses, makes a grunt of frustration. “Kill.” His Anglish accent makes the word distended. “You. Kill.”

  Bragi stares. His eyes are still weak and the darkness is thick, but there is something incorrect about the shape of the priest’s face. “Now and then,” he says.

  “You kill,” Litton chokes. “You kill.” He reaches, and Bragi seizes his arm, feeling the spurs of combat kick at him for the first time in weeks. His neck prickles. Then the priest’s arm goes slack and he starts to sob in his other language, the prayer language. “Da mihi veniam, pater.”

  He crawls away, then out the door. Bragi thinks of following, to see if maybe the priest is being visited by his dead god, to see what form he will take. But such things are private. Instead he lies back on the straw, and after many more tortured remembrances he descends into a dream of red dust that does not settle.

  “Pagani! Pagani!”

  Bragi has heard the word screamed before, but this is the first time he has woken to it. He jolts upright, making his burns stretch and sear, and finds himself surrounded. The priests are jabbering in Anglish, faces red with fury. The bulkiest ones are holding farming tools. He looks around for Symond and doesn’t see him.

  Because he does not want to die impaled on a wooden fork by a fat foreign priest, Bragi lets himself be dragged from the room and herded out into the yard. The sky is paling, but the sun has not risen yet. There is a huddle of priests kneeling in the dirt. They always pray early, at least once before Bragi normally wakes, but he suspects he is not being invited to join them.

&
nbsp; They stand, part, and Bragi sees the corpse. The sight does not jar him much, but when he gets closer he is surprised that it is not Brother Litton. It’s some other priest, stripped naked, pale flesh riddled up and down with stab wounds. Blood has pooled and thickened underneath him and stretches outward into the dirt as dark red fingers.

  Bragi realizes he is being accused of murder again. The unfairness drops into his belly like a stone.

  “Litton,” he says, enunciating the foreign name. “Litton. Go find Litton, you fetid fucking fools.”

  The priests are too angry to understand him, but then a shout comes from the gates. Bragi lets himself be shoved along again. He calls Siv as they pass the sheep pen; the baby goat kicks herself in a circle, yammering at her mother. A red slice of sun is cresting the moor. There’s a tall ash tree not far from the monastery walls, and he sees a figure standing beneath it, maybe dancing.

  When they get close Bragi can hear Litton’s reedy voice chanting the night words: da mihi veniam, pater, da mihi veniam, pater. He is not dancing. He is beating himself, hammering his back with a knotted rope. His body is swollen under his brown robe. One of the priests lets go of Bragi’s shoulder and takes a hesitant step forward, calling to him in Anglish.

  Litton turns. His face is spattered with blood. A sob wracks his body, then he lunges.

  Bragi retrieves Siv from the pen and rubs his cheek against the little goat’s silky fur while he watches things unfold. Litton has been bound, wrapped up in a fishing net. He kicks and wails and babbles in Anglish, then the prayer language, then Anglish again. The monastery has emptied itself; all thirty-odd priests are in the yard. The one they call their father is cleaning himself with water from a silver chalice, making the sign of his dead god across his chest.

  Symond appears at Bragi’s elbow, carrying a small sack. His face is pale and his eyes are bulging with fear. “Good morning, Northman. Though the morning is not good.”

  Bragi nods. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  Symond licks his chapped lips. “Father Wilthrop says this is not a thing of nature. It is a thing of the spirit.”

  “Your god inhabits him?” Bragi asks, nodding his chin at the writhing Litton. “Your god compelled him to make a blood sacrifice?”

  “No!” Symond shouts the word so loudly it draws stares. “No,” he repeats, softer. “No, no. This is not a thing of God. He’s inhabited by an evil spirit. A demon. Father Wilthrop must drive it out. With salt and with water.”

  “Oh.” Bragi picks a tick from behind Siv’s twitching ear—the baby goat jerks—and crushes it between his thumb and finger. Litton is moaning the same Anglish words over and over. “What’s he saying now?”

  Symond’s mouth contorts. “He says he is a husband.”

  “He must not like his wife much.”

  “He has no wife,” Symond says heavily. “You can’t stay here any longer, Northman. Many believe that you brought this demon to us. They believe it is one of your heathen gods. So Father Wilthrop has ordered you to leave.” He holds up the sack, and Bragi realizes it must be his belongings. “I’m sorry.”

  Bragi stares at the sack, rubbing his thumb behind Siv’s ear. He supposes it is the plan of the Norns that he be cast out anywhere he goes. “I’d like to barter for the goat,” he says.

  Bragi’s second exile is less painful than the first, but it still stings more than he thought it would. He even wonders if the priests are right, if maybe Loki followed him to this foreign land to play one last trick, to see him driven away from his food and shelter. And from his only friend, because the priests refused to trade him Siv.

  He has lost his weapons, too. The priests would not return them. That was what made Bragi’s temper boil over at last—he bloodied a nose on his way out; they chased him with sticks and locked the gates behind him. It was not a dignified farewell.

  Now he is roaming under the open gray sky, across the rolling moor. Pale green grass and bruise-purple scrub and dark gray rock. His sight is sharpening by the hour. He will not be blind, so the gods have at least spared him that much. He pulls up his hood against the wind and for a while follows the crumbling remnants of an ancient wall.

  The monastery is far from everything—Symond told him as much. There were no traders during his weeks there, and the nearest town is two days’ walk to the south. Bragi is not going south. He is wandering, aimless, but from the edge of a cloud-cloaked sun he knows he is wandering roughly northwest. Towards the sparse forest, where he was hunting on the night the sky caught fire.

  Bragi decides to go see the pit for himself. He has nothing better to do.

  The woods are a silent and blackened ruin when he arrives. He had no sense of the fire’s size or direction as he staggered through the trees that night, arms outstretched. He realizes that he was lucky, very lucky, to have stumbled out of the forest and not deeper in, to where the smoke would have choked him. Now he goes deeper in, nose filling with the sharp smell of ashes.

  Half the trees have toppled; the other half are charred and skeletal, their leaves burnt away. Bragi hears no birds, no rustlings in the undergrowth. Sooty twigs crunch to powder under his feet. The woods must have burned for days, belching smoke into the sky, while he groaned and cursed and the priests put pastes on his scorched skin.

  He sees the first of the splintered trees Symond mentioned to him. Not felled by fire but by force—it looks as if a giant kicked it over. The stump is jagged and the trunk is shattered to pieces. There are more of them further along, forming a rough ring, and he knows what he will find in the middle. He picks his way through the blackened wood. Every touch smears his hands.

  There is a circular ridge of dirt, knee-high, driven upward by the impact like the pock left by a hurled stone. Bragi clambers over it and finds himself looking down into the pit. His neck prickles. It reminds him of a throat: the red dust Litton described coats the sides of the pit scarlet, and at the bottom it roils and undulates like a living thing.

  Whatever madness or spirit took hold of Litton, Bragi knows in his bones that it came from this pit. This pit is not a natural thing. He feels a humming in the base of his skull, how one does in holy places, and he sees his bare skin turning to gooseflesh. But he is doomed anyways, so he unties his woolen trousers and takes a long hot piss into the hole before he turns back the way he came.

  He hears only a single snapping branch before the creature attacks.

  The priests left him his eating knife, and he finds the handle by feel. He’s pinned, the creature’s weight sinking his spine, the hot blast of its breath smelting his ear. He shoves his sack back towards its gnashing teeth, then heaves and rolls free. His knife slashes a wild arc as he goes; the creature shies away and he catches a glimpse of its malformed face, its slobbering jaws.

  Bragi doesn’t come fully upright, launching from one knee instead, driving his knife into the creature’s belly. It yowls. Hot spittle smacks his cheek. He yanks the blade upward, splitting flesh. The creature scrabbles at him with its nails. He stabs twice more, deeper, keeping his elbow in its neck to turn away its teeth. The yowl trails off into yelps and then into a thick wet gurgle.

  Bragi scoots backward, lungs gasping, heart beating his ribs. He blows a clot out of his nose and catches his breath while he watches the beast—a wolf—die.

  “Bragi, you braw and battle-brave bastard,” he pants. “You killed Fenrir himself with a supper knife.”

  A laugh burbles out of him, a half-delirious laugh he can’t stop. He howls at the sky and throws his fists, then collapses back onto the ground. Tears are trickling across his face. He’s killed a wolf, and there’s nobody for him to tell. He tries to laugh again, but it comes out coarse and wooden.

  Finally he gets up and inspects his kill. There is a reason he did not recognize it as a wolf: its face is mangled, snout split, one ear torn clear away. Old wounds from an old fight. Bragi frowns, moving the death-stiffened jaws with his hands. They do not close properly—that is why its bite n
ever came—and when he looks down the length of its body he sees it is sickly and emaciated.

  The wolf was half-dead already. Left behind by its pack. Scavenging carrion. Growing hungrier, more lonely and more desperate each day.

  Because nobody is there to see, Bragi buries his face in his arms and weeps. In the far distance, he hears the monastery bell ringing.

  Bragi hauls the wolf out of the woods on his shoulders. He has a vague and stupid plan to skin it, sell the pelt in the town, and drink himself into oblivion. The watery ale of the monastery never did more than remind him how badly he wanted to be drunk.

  But the town is far, and he wasted the daylight lying on the forest floor talking to imagined versions of all the people he will never see again. So when he finds a sheltered outcropping of stone on the moor, charred with remnants of a shepherd’s fire, he drops the stiff and bloated wolf and starts to search for kindling. He rubs his aching shoulder as he goes. Even a half-starved wolf is heavy, and his skin there is still tender from its burns.

  Dusk falls as he builds the fire. The monastery bell clangs again and again—he imagines it has something to do with their death ritual, with the burial of the murdered priest and maybe the burial of Litton, if they executed him. The ringing has barely stopped for the past few hours. It’s annoying, but it also reminds him of the paste Symond put into his sack for him.

  Once the fire is crackling, Bragi undresses. He spreads the paste over his waxy pink burns, soothing them, then dresses again and settles in against the rock. There is a loaf of black bread in the sack as well. He’s working on an overlarge mouthful of it when he hears someone approaching.

  If it is the shepherd, Bragi will scare him off. If it is a bandit, Bragi might have to test his fighting hand a second time today. He grips his eating knife and eases slowly to his feet. The stranger stumbles into the firelight.

  “Oh,” Bragi says. “You.”