Navigating their horses through the forest was only an inconvenience, although Caesar made its distaste for the thick underbrush painfully apparent through incessant wines.
Felix made sure to move slowly. Horses, for all their speed and power, were much like Achilles—suffering a fragility of the ankles. He would not have his trek cut short if Castigar, his black stallion, suffered an injury. Just as he served the Church, Castigar served him. And he would not betray its loyalty.
French knights would have many horses, and their care was delegated to their attendants and squires. Felix disliked the carelessness for which the French treated their horses. A knight may have five or more of them on campaign. For transport, they would have a few palfrey which they would ride on their march to the battlefield. They were a lighter, dependable stock. When it was time to don their armor, they would use a destrier like Castigar, a tall muscular breed that could bear the added weight and use its bulk to charge in with ferocious force during a lance formation. Then, if things didn’t go well, they’d have a courser, the swiftest breed, safely behind their lines waiting with a squire. Enemy forces may not kill the squires and armorers, but the knight was a noble, and was worth capturing for a ransom. They’d flee back to their attendants after a rout, leap from their war horse, mount that courser, then ride like their life depended on it—because it often did.
This was how cavalry often operated. The word for cavalry came from the Vulgar Latin, caballus. It meant nag, a good for nothing horse only good for pulling a wagon, and then came to refer to all horses. The late Latin had a habit of diminishing things, just as the Roman Empire diminished with it. The common people relished in dismantling all things proper, all things sacred. The old Latin word for horse was equus. It meant noble steed. It was the proper description, one befitting Castigar.
“There,” called out Haddie. She had rediscovered the road. They could continue their journey.
“We do not stop,” said Felix, wary of contact with plague beggars. The sooner they were through this village, the better.
A town appeared just ahead. It was small, and sparse. Only a few buildings, all of them shuttered. It was eerily silent, the sound of their horses hooves on the ancient cobblestone road was all there was to hear.
Then, something did break the silence.
“Ho, there! You must be mad or desperate to come here.”
The voice, low and gruff, seemed to come from all around them and nowhere.
“Down here!”
Felix rode up to the voice, making sure to keep some distance. There, in a ditch that they did not see on their approach, was a filthy man in a black hood—shovel in his hand.
Felix’s fingers found their way to the hilt of his sword, more out of habit than mistrust.”I could say the same for you.”
“Oh, me? I had it as a boy," he said, then pulled down the neck of his shirt and revealing a latticework of pop-mark scars, a constellation of pain. “Recovered somehow. Saints or luck, I don’t know. Now I dig. Always digging. Besides, these fine people have already paid for my services.” He held up a dirty hand and pointed to a stack of bodies wrapped in white linen at the bottom of his ditch. “It would be unchristian of me not to give them a proper burial.”
“You’re a gravedigger, then.”
“Aye, I am. The only profession lower than executioner, I believe. People hate being reminded of death. But it comes to us all the same, and someone’s gotta do it. Grave digger’s work doesn’t stop, not even for the plague.”
The man began scratching at his wiry beard, his clothes and face stained with the same earth as the pit around him, his form nearly indistinguishable from the mud.
“How long has the town been quarantined?”
“I’d say nearly a month. That’s what quarantine mean, don’t it? Four weeks. That’s how long it takes for the sickness to reap an entire town—least until there’s no one left to get it.”
Caesar let out a low bleat, and the man chuckled, seemingly amused by the goat’s presence. Haddie turned to Felix, uneasy. "We should go back.”
The man shrugged, and returned to his digging, kicking the shovel into the soft earth with his foot.
Felix’s eyes swept over the crow-pecked town. "No. We press on. The dead are no danger to us.”Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Haddie grimaced, but did not protest.
A faint, high-pitched sound of a baby’s cry broke the silence. Haddie stiffened. "Do you hear that?"
Felix frowned. "Leave it. It’s not our concern."
Haddie ignored him, heading toward the sound, and Felix followed with an exasperated sigh. Caesar trotted after them, his hooves clicking against the stones of the street. They stopped at a small house with its door slightly ajar. Haddie pushed it open, and the smell hit them immediately—rotting flesh, excrement, death.
Inside, the air was stifling. Caesar refused to enter. A man lay sprawled across a straw-stuffed mattress, his face blue-gray, his hands caught in a rigor mortis prayer. His insides had turned to liquid, soaking into his linen mattress and pooling onto the floor in a viscous black-green ichor. In a chair beside him, a woman slumped lifelessly, pop marks on her face, her breast exposed. A baby, not a year old, writhed weakly in her arms, crying in a hoarse, pitiful wail.
Haddie gasped and moved toward the child, but Felix grabbed her arm. "Don’t touch it."
"It’s still alive!" she snapped, wrenching free.
Felix unsheathed his sword and used the tip to gently nudge the baby’s head. Its tiny face turned toward him, revealing the telltale red blotches of the plague spreading across its fragile skin. Felix grimaced. "It’s already marked. It’ll die. Probably by tomorrow. I can make it quick," said Felix, raising his blade.
"No!" Haddie stepped between him and the child.
Felix’s eyes narrowed. "It’s a mercy. You want it to suffer, to choke on its own breath? The plague is no kinder than a sword."
Haddie bent down, picking up the baby despite Felix’s protests. She swaddled it in the remnants of the mother’s dress and rocked it gently against her chest. The baby’s cries softened to a weak whimper.
“Damnit, Haddie,” shouted Felix. “Do you want to kill us both?”
The baby grew quieter, its breathing shallow. Felix watched, his jaw tight, as the child slowly grew still in Haddie’s arms. It died there, cradled against her warmth. Haddie’s shoulders shook as she clutched the lifeless body. "There is no mercy in this world," she whispered.
Felix knelt beside her, his expression cold. “Put it down.”
Haddie placed the baby back in the mother’s arms, arranging them as though they had passed peacefully in each other’s embrace. She stared at the scene for a long moment, her face pale. "There’s no heaven waiting for them," she said. "They’ll rot here like everything else, until they’re nothing but dust."
Felix looked at her sharply. "Do you really believe there’s nothing after death?"
"Yes," Haddie said, her voice flat.
"Then we believe the same thing."
She turned to him, confused. "What do you mean?"
Felix rose, sliding his sword back into its sheath. "I believe God made the universe. And, when I die, I’ll return to Him. If you believe nothing made the universe, then nothing is what you’ll return to. Hope is what God offers, hope that the world can’t be suffering and nothing else.”
Haddie stared at him, her expression unreadable. "Maybe," she said softly, standing and brushing off her dress. "But I’ll never believe in a God who lets children die like this. I didn''t even know its name.”
Felix didn’t reply. He merely glanced at the bodies one last time, then turned to leave. "We need to move," he said. "The longer we stay, the more we tempt our own fate. Your heart may well have doomed us.”
Felix moved to the door, but Haddie lingered. Felix looked back from the doorway. He could feel an anger boiling. They were risking too much being here.
“Is this how you were found, Hexenjager? When that peasant couple took you in…”
Now he was angry.
“You swaddle all the plague babies you want, and when the buboes grow in your armpits and your tongue swells so large you choke, you remember that I warned you, and your gentle heart didn’t listen.” Then he stormed out.
Haddie wouldn’t have it, and she rushed after him. “Do you have love for nothing? No heart at all? Do you even know what it is to love? To lose someone?”
Felix whirled around, “Aye!” he shouted. “I have lost much. I have lost all that I cared for, and then I lost myself. I have sins to pay for. More than most. And I will burn in hell for eternity if I do not make amends. Do not deny me of that chance.”
“Who was it?”
Felix made a steely expression, but his quivering lip betrayed him.
“I will tell you. But first we must leave this place and linger no longer, or we will be party to that gravedigger’s pit.”
“Her name was Elsebeth,” said the gravedigger. He was standing nearby, leaning on his shovel. “She was born just before it started. They were a kind couple, and she was loved—all the way to the end.”
Felix and Haddie stood in shocked silence.
“I’ll collect them. Don’t worry. They’ll have a Christian burial, and they will be reunited again in heaven.”
Felix took a gold florin from his belt, and tossed it to the man. It was the only one he had left. The old gravedigger caught it, and shivered in excitement, holding it out in his filthy palm in disbelief. It was more than he’d make this year and the next.
“We are all slaves to our station,” said Felix. “But I do not think low of gravediggers. It is a noble profession.”
“Thank you,” said the gravedigger, a tear streaked down his cheek, clearing away the mud and muck, and allowing for a single clean spot to radiate his fresh, pink skin beneath.
“Let’s go,” said Felix to Haddie.
Mounting their horses, Felix patted Castigar firmly on the side. Then he looked to Caesar, ambivalent to the situation, and Haddie—a white witch almost ethereal on her white horse. If he could feel love, he felt it in this moment.