The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [46]
“What is good to the fox is not good to the hare,” said Awa. “He was a soldier, then? Your god? He wore a blade and delivered witches unto their death, but only so long as his friends did not seek to rape them? This is his example?”
“No,” said Manuel, the incongruity of his current occupation with his belief something he had gone over enough times on his own that he did not hesitate before answering. “I am not living up to His example. I was trying to, but then I went to war, and the only recent time I have done as He would was when I helped you escape and—”
“You helped me escape?” said Awa, taking a pull of his wine. She could not remember being so happy, the fire warm and the questions bubbling out of her lips like tea-water over the side of the cauldron. Not for the first time, she wished she had wormwood close at hand. “Before you said you saved me, yet now you acknowledge that you only helped, and that, had I not fended for myself, all might have been for naught. How long, I wonder, until you admit that without my blade you would have died, that I saved you?”
“My blade,” Manuel snapped, unwilling to let her take all the credit for his near martyrdom. “Your hand, yes, but my blade that you took from my sheath. I’d say that means we saved each other, or helped each other if you prefer.”
“Yes.” Awa nodded. “That’s true, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of—”
“Manuel,” said he, “is what I’m called. There’s no need to say it all like that.”
“Oh,” said Awa, a little embarrassed.
“But we were talking about God,” said Manuel, and as the words left his lips he started to giggle. She looked at him curiously but he could not stop himself, and soon he was howling with laughter. Witches were real, the dead could walk, and here he was explaining his most private thoughts on faith to a strange woman, a Moor, who had performed a miracle comparable to the Lord’s resurrection, and upon his own flesh. For fuck’s sake.
“What’s so funny?” Awa asked, worried that she had broken the man’s mind. She hoped not, for already she liked him more than any living person she could remember. That perhaps was not so remarkable in her case as it would have been in another’s, but there it was. If she had driven him mad with her tricks she would be very annoyed with herself.
“Nothing, nothing,” Manuel managed, the realization that the witch was watching him a sobering one. He had to keep her entertained or she would kill him, or worse. Perhaps if he kept her talking until dawn she would—It was the middle of the day, he realized, the slackening rain revealing not night-shrouded darkness beyond the cave but a dreary afternoon. Fuck.
“Are you mad?” Awa asked.
“No.” Manuel shook his head. “I don’t think so, anyway.”
“Are you hungry? Or thirsty?”
“Yes,” said Manuel, realizing how famished and parched he was. “Very much so.”
“Eat,” said Awa, motioning to Werner’s stewpot that simmered over the fire. She was pleased the restorative soup would not go to waste. “And this is your wine, I believe.”
“Thank you,” said Manuel, taking his lightened skin and draining it in one long, sloshing guzzle. Quite tipsy herself, Awa switched to water and watched him scoot around to get at the stew.
Every time Manuel glanced up she was smiling at him, which did little to assuage his worry. Maybe he was mad, he thought, or consumed with fever, or simply dreaming. Then he wondered where she had gotten pork for the stew, and concluded that one of the other mercenaries must have been holding out on him. He shook his head. He, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, gobbling up the tastiest meal he had eaten in months directly from a witch’s cauldron!
“You said that before you went to war you were trying to live like your god,” prompted Awa when he had finished. “Were you a priest, then? A monk or some other holy man?”
“No,” said Manuel, the wine soothing his panic. “Between the two of us, I very much doubt many monks or priests are living as He would like. Through a friend of a friend