Elisha Barber: Book One Of The Dark Apostle (25 page)

“
No,
” Elisha replied, the water carrying the force of his word, so that the touch of Sage’s presence faltered.

Louder, into the air, Elisha said, “Leave me be. I will be no witch. I came here to be cleansed not cursed yet again.”

“
Cursed
,” Sage mused. “
In truth, it is a curse, a burden to be borne, but not by all. The curse lies not in magic of itself, but in the way it comes. Some it takes as gently as a mother, some it shakes like a rabid dog.
”

At first, the man’s continued presence irritated Elisha. Had he not said he wanted to be left alone? If Sage wanted to remain, let him at least be silent. Instead, he prattled on with more of his morose philosophy. And yet—and yet—the angel’s touch still warmed his face. He thought to turn his back on witches and their ways, to abandon his pretense, yet his impulse was to refute this man. “
Marigold does not speak so.”

“
Marigold. Magic has taken hold of her not as mother or as dog but as a princely lover, promising to make her wishes true. She dances ever in that embrace and never knows that others might be clenched too tightly ’til they break. She would use you to rally the magi, even if it means war. She is the most insensitive magus that I have ever felt.
”

This rankled, and Elisha stood, as if his height might serve him now.

Again the river brought him laughter. “
Teach yourself patience, Bittersweet. Teach yourself control, or you will find that others know your heart before you know it yourself.
”

Startled, Elisha said, “
You feel my anger
.”

“
I am a sensitive,
” Sage replied. “
Like you. We spend our strength to avoid being too attached to others, else their feelings cloud our own. When I first awoke to magic, I thought I had gone mad. At every touch I was assailed by fear, by love, by joy, by fury. Unlike you, I had to learn to ignore them
.”

“
First you say that you are like me, then you say that you are not.
”

“
You send out your emotions as a hurricane around you, but you feel little in return. Tell me, have you yet cast a spell?
”

This touched a nerve, and Elisha hesitated to answer, knowing at the same time that this was answer enough.

“
How long have you screamed your own emotions hoping not to listen to those of others?
”

Elisha considered this. He hummed during surgery for this very reason. He was never unaware, but unaffected, unwilling to accept that Nathaniel and Helena might be in love, not counterfeiting to escape—her position, his loneliness. Trampling the hopes of Martin Draper, pushing aside the warmth of Lucretia’s affection, even taking the child’s head on this mission of his own when he suddenly realized all the damage he had done. How long?

“
Since that day
.” That day when he had watched them kill an angel.

Sage’s presence warmed again. “
Thought as much. Cursed we are, Bittersweet, but it is not a choice. Not a thing you say I will, or I will not. You are, or you are not. Cast off the trappings. Refuse the knowledge. Ignore the voices. You’ll not be the first.”

“Then I’ll say farewell,”
Elisha concluded.

“
Cut off your arm,
” Sage continued, as if he had not heard. “
Carve out one eye. Cripple your leg. Does it change what you are? Makes it harder, that’s all. Each of us is as God has made us, cursed and blessed in equal measure.”

Elisha let himself drift, his hair drawn out by the current, his feet anchoring him in the river’s bed. Cursed and blessed in equal measure. Even these last few hours, he had found it so—at last to love, at last to face what he carried with him. “
Take from me this cup
,” he murmured.

Sage answered with a laugh so deep and rich that Elisha swore he heard it through his entire body, and so responded with a smile. Cursed and blessed, blessed and cursed. There was a talent in his hands which not all possessed, a talent which brought pain as well as comfort. Why should this magic be so different? He hunted it for the basest of reasons—to assuage his own guilt—but why should he not accept it for the purest?

“
I thank you, Sage. Again, you are here when I most doubt.
”

Abruptly, the laughter died. “
Do not thank me yet, not until you understand this cup we all must drink from. As to my presence, in truth, I am as fickle as the rest. I am no friend of yours, nor any man’s, nor woman’s either. Do not depend on me, Bittersweet—I cannot afford to let you near
.” The touch washed away with the current, taking away the last vestige of warmth in the night.

Something echoed in those last few words, a sense of the other man’s own worry, a sort of hollow, hurtful place as if the heart had gone from within, or kept itself so secret that even its keeper had forgotten it.

Elisha rose up from the river. Water rushed down one leg, and he realized that his emergency pouch, always at his side, had filled with the water which escaped it now. “Holy Mary!”

Then he laughed, grateful that Sage had left before he started cursing. On a post of the stone bridge, he emptied the contents of his pouch—a card of needles, small rolls of suture, the vial of opium, a little bottle of rose oil, a few tightly rolled bandages, the long strip of cloth Martin Draper had forced upon him, and the packet of flaxseeds taken from the vestry earlier that day. Thankfully, most of these things would recover once dried. Only the seeds might suffer from the wet. He thought of the egg, crushed and unknowable, and like Sage, a cipher begging for answer, yet fleeing the question. The details of the world chimed with sudden resonance, as if he recognized a pattern he had never considered before.

He freed a single seed from the soggy parchment and saw it not as a familiar thing, but as a mystery, a wonder unto itself, a thing inviolate. He could list all that he knew about it and yet never understand how sun and earth could make it grow. Seen by that light, the seed concealed its truth from him. Earlier, he had been humbled by all there was to know about it. Now he realized that he knew nothing, for its essential nature escaped him utterly, its private magic held within, awaiting some secret signal to arise and unfurl itself into the sky. Like a bird, hidden in the potential of its egg.

The seed felt suddenly warm and expectant, ready to transform itself. As a boy, Elisha had sometimes checked the eggs of their few hens, noting the heat of the hen’s body, captured by the egg, and the changing weight and balance as some small miracle took place inside. He remembered asking how the thick liquid of white and yolk became the soft, wobbly chick, exhausted from pecking its way to freedom. Nobody knew. Laying, hatching, care and feeding, the thousand uses of the egg, the hundred ways to cook a chicken—every farmer and his family believed they knew all that could be known about an egg. As with the seed, they knew nothing. Ignorant, the physician called him, and arrogant. On both counts, correct. But ignorance was not always a bad thing, if it led a man to learning.

Elisha focused on the seed in his hand, near-invisible in the gloom. He remembered all he knew, or thought he knew, envisioning the tough, shiny hull as the shell of an egg, the tender meat inside as white and yolk, and at their center: What? A secret, a mystery, a miracle he could marvel at but never quite discover. To crack the egg, to crush the seed destroyed their power. Almost, he thought he should apologize, but the seed was gone.

An egg lay cupped in his tingling palm, dully reflecting moonlight from its expectant shell.

B
rigit called his discovery
the Doctrine of Mystery. She clapped her hands and danced in the river like a little girl when she saw the egg. She even let him kiss her, swift as the rushing current, under the bridge, before she danced away again.

“
You found another talisman, then?”
the river asked.

Shaking his head, Elisha laughed at himself. “
No
,” he said. “
I thought of one, but I had not gone for it.”

Downstream, Brigit basked in the sunlight. “
You must have had something. What did you bring with you?”

“
Only my clothes, which are nothing to speak of. Oh—and my pouch. That’s just a few medical things, a sort of emergency kit.
”

“
Nothing special or sentimental?
”

And he remembered the cloth, that long and narrow strip of mystery given him by Martin Draper, a man who cared much more for him than he should. By daylight the silk gleamed purple, the color of kings, but the gold threads worked into it formed birds, not lions. The piece of cloth had some significance, but he was damned if he knew what it was. “
Maybe
,” was all he said.

Every day, they found each other in the water, and Elisha learned to recognize her presence, and that of the other magi. Sometimes these others chimed in with their own lessons, helping him concentrate, helping attune himself to his surroundings, to the possibilities which seemed now to hover in the air around him. Elisha believed he would recognize Sage if he felt that
touch, but it did not come, neither by day when Brigit or Willowbark or even Slippery Elm gave him their advice, nor by night when he came alone, and he gave up waiting.

The encampment grew tense with the long siege. Sorties issued from the duke’s castle, taunted the king’s army and retreated, causing just enough havoc that the army couldn’t merely sit and wait. Meanwhile, many soldiers kept busy building new ladders and siege towers to prepare an assault. So several days passed with fewer casualties, giving Elisha ample time to practice his eggs and seeds. At first, it seemed he must recall his list of similarities over and over, and discover the mystery anew before he felt that tingle of power. Heat transferred from him to the seed, then it grew heavy and full in a breathless moment. Any distraction and the seed stubbornly remained. He never made so many eggs that he could not pass them off as findings, or purchases from some farmer of vague description who happened to be a friend of Brigit’s. Applied to those cauterized by Matthew Surgeon or scalded with the physician’s hot oil cure, the ointment kept the burn to a minimum and helped them heal that much faster.

Some six days after Elisha’s first casting, the siege engines were ready, and the blast of horns called all again to battle.

The bombards, silent for several days, blasted many of the new towers, sending shards of wood through limbs and smashing bones. When a handcart brought the first victims, Elisha and Ruari shared a grim look. Where before they might see a handful of men who had survived such a blast, with the army’s steady advance, they now faced dozens, screaming for attention or for death.

Mordecai and his assistants handled the officers and even captains who were not of noble blood, but this did little to ease the barber’s burden. He and Ruari got down to work. Many required careful setting of compound fractures, amputation of crushed limbs, or deep cuts to pry out the long daggers of wood impaling them. Rather than divide as they generally did, Elisha worked alongside Ruari, doing the cutting while Ruari held the patient, or steadying a wounded limb for Ruari’s careful labor. He couldn’t hum for fear of missing anything Ruari or the patient needed to tell him, so the screaming and the sound of the saw through bone burrowed inside his skull. He kept his teeth clenched wishing, for the moment, that his sensitivity had never re-awakened.
Whoever he might be, Sage was surely wise enough to avoid such work where raw emotions tore at the soul every moment. Defending the border of life and death, as Brigit had said.

A few of the king’s company grudgingly toted the fallen into the hospital and the dead out of it, the pile in the yard growing much too fast for Elisha’s comfort. Most of the corpses were men they’d not even seen yet, men who succumbed to their injuries even as they lay within reach of help.

This day, Brigit and the physicians holed up in Lucius’s little cottage. A musician joined them, his desperate fiddling a vain attempt to block the noise. Elisha caught snatches of music once in a while, when the tide of the wounded slowed.

Long after he should have eaten, Lisbet tugged Elisha into the courtyard for a quick meal. On his return—urging her to escort Ruari likewise—he saw clouds gathering over the castle. The counter attack would be that much harder in mud.

As they worked, they moved steadily further from the monastery, leaving their patients where they lay and going on to the next. Elisha’s arms ached from wielding the saw and immobilizing men so that arrows could be plucked. Even his callused fingers showed the jab of the needle too quickly used.

Ruari winced every time he moved, exhaustion etching circles under his dark eyes, drawing down his merry cheeks.

Then a horn blew long over the battlefield. Clouds darkened the sunset, and at last the day was done.

Distant cheers rose up from the battlefield, and Elisha looked up, his stiff neck creaking. A few of the siege towers yet stood, somewhat nearer to the castle than they had been. He made a disgusted sound at the back of his throat, and Ruari looked up.