The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [42]
While she rubbed her face on her tunic the bandit chief began telling her about his family who lived in Alpujarra, where Moors still lived in peace with Spaniards, about Granada and far Aragon and the forging of one Spain from the pieces once held by Boabdil and Queen Isabella’s family, about the world beyond that even he had not seen. He told her about real wine and honest laughter and the way starshine transformed the plains outside Lorca from shattered desert to seamless dreamscape, the way the sea brought tears to his father’s eyes, the way his brother danced when the zither played just for him. He almost managed to convince her that life could be enjoyable again.
“When we get away,” Awa said long into the cask and the night, “when we’re free and we’ve burned down his hut and we can go anywhere we want, where do you want to go first? What do you want to do?”
“I want to go into the ground,” said the bandit chief. “I want to die once more, though I cannot remember what it was like to be properly dead. I have lived enough, and I desire nothing more than to rest.”
He did not want to make her weep again, but the dead cannot lie.
The Soldier and the Witch
Down the years, and the mountain, Awa stared at the soldier who had freed her as he wept and gibbered and pawed at the damp walls of the cave. Their interaction had been going well until he had noticed the resurrected corpses of his former companions, at which point things went rather downhill. Awa decided there was nothing for it but to be direct.
“I’m not a witch,” she told Manuel as he cowered in the back of the cave, and he realized he had been whispering that word over and over again, his eyes still fixed on the risen dead and the curtain of rain behind them at the mouth of the grotto. “Or maybe I am. He preferred the term ‘necromancer,’ though I gather there’s no real difference so ‘witch’ if you like. Bruja, warlock, wizard, sorcerer, witch, necromancer, diabolist, all the same—I can raise the dead, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern, and I can command them to do my will. I can parley with spirits, with demons, and I can kill any man that lives with only my touch.”
“Fuck,” Manuel squeaked, knowing she spoke the truth.
Awa took the cooking flesh from her fire and blew on the slick, oozing meat she had cut from her would-be rapist’s thigh. The pot bubbling over the fire contained the mashed-up hand and forearm of one of the corpses that she had prepared before the soldier had awoken, some naïve part of her thinking that it would be as simple as giving him a bone soup to heal his injured wrist, thus repaying his rescue, and then they would go their separate ways. She had not told Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern that, of course, nor anything else—not about her past or Omorose or her current predicament. Nor would she, much as she suddenly wanted to.
In the three and a half years since she had left the mountain he was the first living person to freely help her, to show her compassion, and now he crouched like a beaten dog, his eyes wide, his nostrils flaring, his trousers wet with piss. Why had she made such a show of raising them? Why had she raised them at all? She might have talked with Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern. They might have passed a day together in conversation, drunk wine and laughed, become fast friends. Instead she had ruined everything. Again.
The witch set down her meat and all four of the dead men tipped over, Werner teetering for a moment before he pitched onto the fire. The witch cursed and kicked him out of the coals, and Manuel thought he saw the pommel of a sword shining on the belt of one of the fallen Kristobel cousins. He scooted forward the slightest bit and her head snapped around, her eyes dark and her head haloed by the firelight