The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [1]
“Then how would you have us proceed?”
Roger pointed toward the headland. “Most of those you question will end there, swinging by their necks.”
“The unrepentant, yes.”
“Best skip straight to the hanging. The ‘repentant’ are liars, and those innocents we execute will be rewarded by the saints in the cities of the dead.”
He could feel the sacritor stiffen. “Have you come to replace me? Are the patiri not pleased with our work?”
“No,” Roger said. “My opinions are my own and not popular. The patiri—like you—enjoy torture, and it will continue. My task here is of another nature.”
He turned his gaze to the southeast, where a light saffron road vanished into forested hills.
“Out of curiosity,” Roger asked, “how many have you hung?”
“Thirty-one,” Praecum replied. “And besides these behind us, twenty-six more await proving. And there will be more, I think.”
“So many heretics from such a small village.”
“The countryside is worse. Nearly every farm-and-woodwife practices shinecraft of some sort. Under your method, I should kill everyone in the attish.”
“Once an arm has gangrene,” Roger said, “you cannot cure it in spots. It must be cut off.”
He turned to regard the whimpering man behind him. Roger first had seen him as a strong, stocky fellow with ruddy windburned cheeks and challenging blue eyes. Now he was something of a sack, and his gaze pleaded only for that dark boat ride at the border of the world. He was tied to a wooden pillar set in a socket in the stone of the tower, his arms chained above him. Six other pillars held as many more prisoners, stripped and waiting their turn in the spring breeze.
“Why do you do your work up here rather than in the dungeons?” Roger wondered.
The sacritor straightened a little and firmed his chin. “Because I believe there is a point to this. In the dungeons they contemplate their sins and yearn for sunlight until they wonder if they really remember what it looked like. Then I bring them here, where they can see the beauty of the world: the sea, the sun, the grass—”
“And the fate that awaits them,” Harriot said, glancing at the gallow trees.
“That, too,” Praecum admitted. “I want them to learn to love the saints again, to return to them in their hearts.”
“You filthy whoreson,” the man on the pillar sobbed. “You vicious little sceat. What you did to my poor little Maola…” He shuddered off into sobs.
“Your wife was a shinecrafter,” Praecum said.
“She was never,” the man croaked. “She was never.”
“She admitted to tying Hynthia knots for sailors,” he shot back.
“Saint Hynthia,” the victim sighed. His energy seemed to be ebbing as quickly as he had found it.
“There is no Saint Hynthia,” the sacritor said.
Roger tried to bite back a laugh, then thought better of it and let it go.
The sacritor nodded in satisfaction. “You see?” he said. “This is Roger Harriot, knight of the Church, an educated man.”
“Indeed,” Roger said, his mind changed again by the sacritor’s smugness. “I’m educated enough to—on occasion—consult the Tafles Nomens, one of the three books available in every attish.”
“The Tafles Nomens?”
“The largest volume in your library. The one on the lectern in the corner with the thick coat of dust on it.”
“I fail to see—”
“Hynthia is one of the forty-eight aspects of Saint Sefrus,” Roger said. “An obscure one, I’ll grant you. But I seem to recall that one ties knots to her.”
Praecum opened his mouth in protest, closed it, then opened it again.
“Saint Sefrus is male,” he finally said.
Roger wagged a finger at him. “You’re guessing that, based on the Vitellian ending. You’ve no idea who Saint Sefrus was, do you?”
“I…there are a lot of saints.”
“Yes. Thousands. Which is why I should wonder that you didn’t bother to check the book to see if Hynthia was a saint before you started accusing her followers as shinecrafters.”
“She gave sailors knots and told them to untie them if they needed wind,” Praecum said desperately. “That reeks of shinecraft.”
Roger cleared his throat. “And Ghial,” he quoted, “the Queen, said to Saint Merinero, ‘Take you this linen strand and