Page 44 of The Devils
End Times
Alex kept trudging, head down. Best to keep her eyes on the dirt. It was where they belonged. Look up and she’d see how far it was to the horizon, how shitty the journey was likely to be, and that there’d be nothing worth having when she got there.
Safe to say she was not in the best of moods.
‘You need a turn on the horse?’ asked Sunny.
‘Me? No. Last thing I want. I hate horses.’ God, she’d have loved a turn on the horse. Her left foot had been buggered for days, just one massive blister, then she’d stepped in a rabbit hole and buggered her right foot, and now she hardly knew which leg to limp on.
Sunny looked dubious as well as hurt, shoulders hunched around her hood, arms hugged around her ribs.
‘I’m fine,’ said Alex, in the same tone you’d say I’m dying , but though Sunny could see a mouse at half a mile, it seemed she was blind to any subtext, even when it was hobbling along next to her with a face like a smacked arse. Or maybe Sunny saw the subtext plainly but didn’t really want to get down on Alex’s account, which was no surprise, since Alex had fucked up their friendship if they’d even ever had one. Who’d want to kiss a greedy piece of shit like her? The moment she got her fingertips to something halfway good she had to ruin it by grasping for more.
She frowned off, desperate for a distraction, towards the row of crooked posts on one side of the track, all wonky like they’d been put up by a drunk. Here an old sheep skull had been stuck on top of one, rotten wool blowing, and there an iron circle or a copper wheel hung, clattering and tinkling in the breeze. ‘What’s all this business?’ she asked.
‘It’s got quite the pagan flavour,’ said Vigga, stomping along barefoot but somehow having no trouble with her feet at all. ‘Reminds me o’ home … and not in a good way … not that there’s any good way to be reminded of home … or anything in the past, really …’ She trailed off, looking puzzled. ‘What were we talking about?’
‘The fence,’ said Sunny.
‘It’s notice of a joint Papal and Patriarchal Interdict,’ said Brother Diaz, scratching at the patchy beard he was developing.
‘Papal into what?’ grunted Vigga.
‘ Interdict ,’ he snapped back at her, waving at the nearest post. Monks and werewolves likely don’t make natural travelling companions, but the two of them seemed to be winding each other up worse than ever. ‘It must be the boundary of the Barony of Kalyatta. The place was devastated by the Long Pox thirty years ago. Killed a quarter of the population.’
‘Sounds bad,’ muttered Alex. She remembered the Long Pox coming through the Holy City. The guards herding the sick into the pest-houses. The reek of smoke from the burning bodies. Folk chanting lists of saints’ names to ward off the vapours. The choirs wailing day and night for the forgiveness of the Almighty.
‘The fourth plague to strike the region in a decade,’ said Brother Diaz. ‘The Sighing Sickness had been even worse. There was an account of it in my monastery’s library. Too many dead for the graveyards, so they buried them in pits by the hundred. Buried them in every inch of consecrated ground, under every shrine, church, or chapel in the region …’
The landscape wasn’t much different beyond the fence, but knowing the story lent it a threatening feel, somehow. A whole province wiped off the map. Alex shivered, and drew her stolen coat a little tighter around her torn jacket. ‘Sounds really bad.’
‘Bad enough to force the squabbling Churches of East and West for once to act together. They declared the whole barony cursed, ordered it evacuated, and had it placed off limits until reprieved by a certified divine intervention.’
‘Looks like God never showed …’ murmured Sunny.
‘He’s got a habit of doing that,’ said Alex.
‘Plague on one side.’ Brother Diaz gazed gloomily past the posts into the scrubby no man’s land beyond. ‘War on the other.’ And he gazed gloomily back towards the burned-out wreckage of the village they’d passed not long before. ‘One could start to think these are the End Times.’
Vigga snorted. ‘You priests are always announcing the End Times. Like the gothi in my village. Oh, the omens! Look how the crows fly! Ragnarok comes! Butchers sell meat, coopers sell casks, and your lot sell End Times, it’s how you fill the pews.’
‘Pagans have pews?’ asked Alex.
‘Well, benches, I guess? Maybe with a sheepskin for the rich folk.’
‘Everything has a sheepskin in your stories,’ said Sunny. ‘To hear you tell it, Scandinavia is all blood, boats, and sheepskin.’
Vigga waved that away. ‘That is just …’ She scratched her head as she thought about it. ‘… Not a bad summary, actually, but the point is …’ She stared off towards the horizon. ‘What’s the point?’
Brother Diaz rolled his eyes. ‘You make every conversation like this! You seize the reins, immediately drive the cart off the road into a bog, then sit there asking, “How did this happen?”’
‘But you have to admit it’s not dull!’ said Vigga, bursting out laughing. ‘Freya’s shite, look at the long faces on you lot.’ She hooked an arm around Alex’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze that made her groan. ‘Killed those bastards in the barn, didn’t I? Can’t see ’em bothering anyone again.’
‘It’s not the dead bastards that worry me,’ wheezed Alex, wriggling her shoulders to loosen Vigga’s crushing arm so she could glance back the way they’d come, ‘so much as the bastards still alive.’
‘Never look back, that’s my advice.’ Vigga let go of Alex’s shoulders, which was a huge relief, then grabbed her head with one big hand, which wasn’t, and twisted it slightly painfully to face forwards. ‘Eyes ahead. Scrape off the mud of grudges and regrets. What good does worry ever do?’ And she mussed Alex’s hair with her fingers.
‘I’ve always worried a very great deal,’ said Brother Diaz, ‘and it’s amazing the number of massacres I haven’t participated in.’
‘You’ve took part in a couple to my certain knowledge,’ said Vigga.
‘More witness than perpetrator … ’
‘My point is you’ve got to shake off the past. Like nutshells.’ And Vigga shook herself so hard her hands flopped about on the ends of her arms and her hair all fell in her face, so she had to stick her bottom lip out to blow it away, then it got stuck in her mouth, so she had to spit it out. ‘My point …’ as she walked up towards the top of the rise and stopped, hands on hips. ‘What’s my point?’
‘Cart in a bog,’ muttered Brother Diaz, stopping beside her. ‘Up to the axles.’ And Alex caught up to them and looked down into the valley beyond.
There was a village in the bottom. Not much of a settlement for a girl dragged up in the Holy City, but there were lights down there, twinkling in the chill twilight, and could she hear faint music on the air? Her mouth watered with a painful longing at a whiff of cooking.
‘Look at that!’ Vigga clapped Brother Diaz on the shoulder and near knocked him through the strange fence into the forbidden Barony of Kalyatta. ‘Civilisation! We’ve got money, don’t we?’
‘We do,’ said Alex. Those bastards Vigga killed must’ve been well paid to hunt her, and she had the silver scattered all about her person now in three different purses, both socks, and some folded rags wrapped under her shirt. She’d been tempted to slip the two little gold coins up her arse – a habit from her younger days when Gal the Purse would strip the children after they’d been robbing – but without a bit of olive oil it wasn’t the most comfortable operation so she’d sleeved ’em instead.
‘Might be we could find a hayloft,’ said Sunny, her eyes very big. ‘Spend a night out of the weather.’
‘Get us some fucking dinner ,’ sang Vigga, almost dancing a jig on her tiptoes. ‘I could eat a lamb chop, couldn’t you, Brother? Lamb chop in gravy!’ she howled at the sky, and she licked at her pointed teeth with her long tongue. ‘Baldr’s arsehole, I could eat a dozen of the shits!’ And she trotted off down the slope.
Alex looked worriedly over at Brother Diaz. ‘Going in there might not be the best idea.’
He winced towards the village, scratching again at his straggly beard. ‘It might not.’
‘Taking Vigga in there might really not be the best idea.’
‘It might really not.’ He turned to look at her and gave a helpless shrug. ‘But, Sweet Saint Beatrix, I could eat a lamb chop.’