She was holding a blouse or shift in her wax-white arms, arms up to the elbows in the water, rubbing and squeezing it with eerily slow movements. Small clouds of pulsating blood were drifting from the shift like smoke. The blood floated through the water, colouring it crimson, pink froth bathing the horses’ knees.
A strong wind blew; a sudden, fell wind, rattling the now green branches and tearing from the sides of the ravine clouds of last year’s dry weeds. Reynevan and Samson squinted. When they opened them, the apparition had vanished.
But blood was still flowing in the water.
They said nothing for a while.
“Are we going?” Samson finally cleared his throat. “Or turning back?”
Reynevan didn’t answer, just spurred his horse, urging it to catch up with Puchała and the Poles who were already vanishing among the greening alders.
In the next ravine, they walked into a trap.
Shots were fired and bowstrings twanged from a thicket on the far hillside as a hail of balls and bolts fell on the Poles. Men yelled, horses squealed and several of them reared up and fell to the bottom of the ravine. Among them was Samson’s.
“Find cover!” roared Puchała. “Dismount and find cover!”
The thicket sang again with the clang of bowstrings and the hiss of bolts. Reynevan felt a blow to his shoulder so hard that he fell to the ground, unluckily onto a slope covered in wet fallen leaves as slippery as soap. He slid down them to the bottom of the ravine, and only then, as he tried to stand, did he see the fletching of a bolt protruding below his clavicle. Christ, not the artery, he managed to think before weakness overcame him.
He saw Samson free himself from under his dead horse, get to his knees and then his feet. And fall with his head bloodied, even before the deafening roar of a harquebus fired from the thicket had died away.
Reynevan yelled, but his cry was drowned out by another handgonne salvo. The ravine completely filled with smoke. Belts whistled. The wounded groaned.
Although his arms and legs had turned to jelly and every movement was causing him convulsions of pain, Reynevan crawled over to Samson. A large pool of blood had already spread around the giant’s head, but Reynevan saw that the ball had only grazed his temple. The skull, he thought, the skull might be damaged. Dammit, it must be. His eyes…
Samson’s glazed eyes suddenly rolled back in their sockets. Reynevan watched in horror as the giant’s head shuddered, his mouth contorted and saliva ran from it. A strangled cry came from his throat.
“It’s dark…” he mumbled indistinctly, in a strange voice. “Dark… Black… Jesus… Where am I? It’s night here… I want to go’ome…’Ome! Where be I…?”
Reynevan, horror-struck, pressed a hand to Samson’s bloodied temple and whispered—or rather croaked—the formula of the Alkmena spell. He felt cold overcome him, flowing from his shoulder, from the bolt lodged beneath his clavicle. Samson struggled and waved an arm as though shooing something away. His eyes were suddenly clearer. And more lucid.
“Reynevan…” he panted. “Something… Something’s happening to me… While I still can… I’ll tell you… I have to tell you…”
“Lie still…” Reynevan bit his lip with the pain. “Lie still…”
In a second, Samson’s eyes misted over and terror filled them. The giant whimpered, sobbed and curled up in the foetal position.
The exchange is happening. Recollections and associations flew through Reynevan’s spinning head like a gale. Someone is leaving us; someone is coming to us. The monastery idiot is returning to his mortal shell from the darkness he passed into. The negotium that usually comes from the darkness is returning to the darkness. Going back to where it came from. The wanderer, the Viator, is going back to where it came from. In front of my eyes, Death is doing what the sorcerers couldn’t.
Pain racked him again, spasms squeezed his lungs and larynx, utterly paralysing his legs. He felt his back with a trembling hand. As he had expected, the point of the bolt was sticking out. And blood was flowing.
“Hey, you whoresons!” yelled someone from the thicket beyond the ravine. “Heretics! Godless curs!”
“Whoresons yourselves!” Dobko Puchała roared back from the other side of the ravine. “Sodding papists!”
“Want to fight? Then come over to our damned side!”
“You bloody come over to ours!”
“We’ll kick your fucking arses!”
“We’ll fucking kick yours!”
It appeared that the none-too-sophisticated and painfully trivial interchange would last an eternity. But it didn’t.
“Puchała?” said a voice from the thicket in disbelief. “Dobko Puchała? Of the Wieniawa?”
“And who’s bloody asking?”
“Otto Nostitz!”
“Oh, damn! Grunwald?”
“Grunwald! The Day of the Sending Out of the Apostles, 1410!”
There was silence for some time. The wind, however, was carrying the smell of smouldering fuses.
“I say, Puchała? We won’t go for each other’s throats, will we? After all, we faced each other in battle. It’s not fucking right.”
“Not at all. After all, we crossed swords. Why don’t we go our way and you yours? What say you, Nostitz?”
“I say we may.”
“I have casualties down there! If I take them, they’ll expire on the way. Will you look after them?”
“My parole. We crossed swords, after all.”
Reynevan, not knowing how he found the strength, finally stemmed the bleeding from Samson’s head by repeating a spell over and over. And realised that he was quite awash in blood himself. Everything went black. He stopped feeling the pain.
Because he had lost consciousness.
Chapter Twenty-Two
In which the fever eases and intensifies by turns, but the pain increases. And, to make matters worse, they have to flee.
He regained consciousness in semi-darkness, saw the darkness yield before the light and the light merge into the gloom and combine with it, creating a shadowy, translucent suspension. Umbram fugat claritas, flashed through his head. Noctem lux eliminat. The Aurora, Eos rhododactylos, rose and painted the eastern sky pink.
He was lying on a hard pallet and any attempts to move caused pains to shoot through his shoulder and scapula. Before he even touched the thickly bandaged place, he recalled in detail the bolt that had been there, the fletching of goose feathers at the front, an inch of ash wood and another of iron point sticking out at the back. There was still a bolt in there. An invisible and immaterial bolt of pain.
He knew where it was. He’d been in many hospitals, so the funk of many fevered bodies, the stench of camphor, urine, blood and decay was nothing new to him. And superimposed on it, the unending and intrusive melody of soft snores, moans, groans and sighs.
The reawakened pain in his scapula pulsated, neither subsiding nor easing, radiated across his back, up to his shoulders and downwards to his buttocks. Reynevan touched his forehead, felt the wet hair under his hand. I’m feverish, he thought. The wound is festering.
Things are looking bad.
“God help us, Brother, may God help us. We’re alive. We’ve made it through another night. Perhaps, dammit, we’ll get out of this…”