Greg Keyes: The Born Queen

A shriek of pain lifted into the pearl-colored sky and hung on the wind above Tarnshead like a seabird. Roger Harriot didn’t turn; he’d heard plenty of screams this morning and would hear quite a few more before the day was done. Instead he focused his regard on the landscape, of which the west tower of Fiderech castle afforded an expansive view. The head itself was off to the west, presently on his left hand. Stacks of white stone jutted up through emerald grass, standing high enough to obscure the sea beyond, although as they slouched north toward town, the gray-green waves became visible. Along that slope, wind-gnarled trees reached their branches all in the same direction, as if to snatch some unseen prize from the air. From those twisty boughs hung strange fruit. He wondered if he would have been able to tell what they were if he did not already know.

Probably.

“Not everyone has the stomach for torture,” a voice informed him. He recognized it as belonging to Sacritor Praecum, whose attish this was.

“I find it dreary,” Roger replied, letting his gaze drift across the village with its neat little houses, gardens, and ropewalk. Ships’ masts swayed gently behind the roofs.

“Dreary?”

“And tedious, and unproductive,” he added. “I doubt very much it accomplishes anything.”

“Many have confessed and turned back to the true path,” Praecum objected.

“I’m more than familiar with torture,” Roger told him. “Under the iron, men will confess to things they have not done.” He turned a wan smile toward the sacritor. “Indeed, I’ve found that the sins admitted by the victim are usually first in the guilty hearts of their interrogators.”

“Now, see here—” the sacritor began, but Roger waved him off.

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” he said. “It’s a general observation.”

“I can’t believe a knight of the Church could have such views. You seem almost to question the resacaratum itself.”

“Not at all,” Roger replied. “The cancer of heresy infects every city, town, village, and household. Evil walks abroad in daylight and does not bother to wear a disguise. No, this world must be made pure again, as it was in the days of the Sacaratum.”

“Then—”

“My comment was about torture. It doesn’t work. The confessions it yields are untrustworthy, and the epiphanies it inspires are insincere.”

“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 bind a knot in the name of Sephrus, and when you are becalmed, release the wind by untying it.’”

He smiled. “That’s from the Sacred Annals of Saint Merinero. Was he a heretic?”

The sacritor pursed his lips and fidgeted. “I read the Life of Merinero,” he said. “I don’t remember that.” “The Life of Merinero is a paragraph in the Sahtii Bivii, ” Roger said. “The Annal is a book of seven hundred pages.”

“Well, then I can hardly be expected—”

“Tell me. I’ve noticed you’ve a chapel for Mannad, Lir, and Netuno. How many sailors make their offerings there before going out to sea?”

“Few to none,” Praecum exploded. “They prefer their sea witches. For twenty years they’ve spurned—” He broke off, his face red, his eyes bugging halfway from their sockets.