Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

Why had I thought of my parents? If ever the gods had played a wicked prank on human folk, it was on the day they quickened my father’s seed in my mother’s womb to produce me. From the distance of so many years, my parents’ hatred seemed wholly out of proportion to my misdeeds—at least in the years before I learned to detest them in equal measure and was old enough to demonstrate it.

A spasm contorted every sinew in my back, as if a giant played knotwork with my spine. Cascading cramps wrenched my shoulder, legs, and belly. Ignore them. You’ve been abed too long.

On a small painted chest near my bedside lay my torn shirt, stained padded jaque, ragged braies, and hose, neatly folded and stacked. The monks had cleaned or brushed them as I lay insensible, and set them alongside my rifled rucksack. They wouldn’t have examined the bag too carefully. Surely. I just needed to see.

I grabbed the rucksack, knocking the stack of clothes onto the floor. Every object I touched seared my skin as if it were iron new drawn from a forge. Jerking the scuffed leather bag onto my lap, I prayed that what I needed would be there. I turned the bag inside out and fumbled at the thick seam. Intact. Blessed be all gods. Now for a knife…

Holding on to the wall, the rucksack looped over my arm, I hobbled across the tiles to Robierre’s worktable. I dragged the stinking rushlight close only to find it on the verge of guttering death. Muttering epithets, I snatched another from the stack under the table, set the fresh one aflame from the stub, and clipped it in the iron holder. Then, seated on the brother’s stool, I used his well-honed herb knife to rip the long stitches that held the newer layer of leather to the bottom of the rucksack. Great Kemen Lord of the Sky, Mother Samele, Lord Iero and your angels or Danae or whomever you dispatch to watch over your children be thanked. The little green bag—the one Boreas had not found—fell into my trembling hand. And the craving swept through me as a fire sweeps across a parched grassland.

In the pool of smoky yellow light I set out the shard of mirror glass, the silver needle, and the white linen thread, and spilled the tiny black nivat seeds—all that was left of my emergency store—onto the table. The fragrance of spice, dust, and corruption burst from the nivat as I crushed the seeds with Robierre’s knife. I could not rush, could not afford to be careless, yet the first monk who saw what I was about would know me as a cursed twist-mind, Magrog’s slave, a gatzé’s whore, and boot me over the wall to languish in the darkness with the rest of the Adversary’s servants.

A prick of the needle freed three drops of blood from my finger to mix with the aromatic powder, the pain of the bloodletting as exquisitely shrill as a virgin’s scream. My sinews cramped and knotted. My hands shook. Sweat beaded my brow, my arms, my back. Soon…hold on… Perhaps my injuries had made the disease and the hunger for its remedy come upon me early and so dreadfully fast.

Holding one end of the thread between two fingers, I let the other end dangle into the reeking little mess, using the connection to channel every scrap of magic that lived in me into the patterned spell. Touching the mixture directly with my agonized flesh would sap the spell’s strength before it reached full potency—a hard lesson I’d learned when first experimenting with this particular remedy. The black paste heated and bubbled. In the enchanted mirror glass I watched the otherwise invisible vapors rise from the unholy brew. Waiting…

A mixed-blood alley witch named Salamonde had given me the glass fragment on my fourteenth birthday. The disease had seared my gut and lacerated my senses with such virulence that day, I’d felt the Ferryman’s breath on my neck. For the first and only time in my life, I had swallowed pride and hatred and begged my parents for help with my sickness. My mother, typically, retired to her bedchamber and drank herself senseless. My father tied me to his favorite grate and beat me until I pissed myself, insisting that my malady was naught but my vile nature festered in my soul. He said no remedy existed for it. And so, on that night, for the twentieth time that year, I broke the locks on my room and ran away. By the time they dragged me back home three days later, old Salamonde had introduced me to perversion.

The rushlight flickered. I squinted at the glass. One final wisp of vapor drifted upward, taking the last of the earthy scent. I scooped the dark droplets onto my finger and onto my tongue. The potent liquor spread quickly to my pain-racked extremities…the satisfaction of cool ale on a parched tongue…the scent of rain after drought…

Groaning, I snatched up my rucksack and bit down on the leather strap, for the tasteless paste that was my salvation would not instantly quench the fire. The perverse remedy had first to feed the torment. As did I.

I gripped Brother Badger’s grinding stone and slammed it, edge on, into my wounded thigh. Once. Again. Fiery agony swelled to monstrous proportion…devouring my organs, my limbs, my senses…threatening to completely unhinge my mind…until the moment body and spirit teetered on the verge of dissolution, and then…

O, elixir of heaven! Rapture! An explosion of exhilaration engulfed every sense, every limb, every part and particle of my flesh and spirit, transforming pain to pleasure as quickly and as absolutely as the ax of a skilled headsman transforms life to death…

…and then with the same abruptness, it was gone, the convulsion of sensation past. Fire quenched. Cramps dissipated. Throbbing wounds silenced. Every shred of my being quivered with release, the searing heat of my flesh yielding to languid warmth like the aftermath of carnal climax, lacking only joy or merriment. Not oblivion, but assurance that the world was right and ordered exactly as it should be. The rucksack dropped to the floor. My forehead rested on the scratched wood, my dulled mind fallow, my senses throbbing in gratification. The knot in my gut unraveled.

The spell was called the doulon. Legend claimed the nasty little enchantment was Magrog’s wedding gift to Nemelez when he took his human bride to the netherworld—to ease the pain of their coupling. And more than just the ignorant believed that every invocation of the doulon opened a door to Magrog’s kingdom and allowed a demon gatzé to crawl into the earthly plane. Such was no concern of mine.

Some of those enslaved to the doulon burnt or mutilated themselves before they succumbed, for the degree of pleasure in the release always matched the severity of the pain that preceded it. I had not fallen so far out of mind as to do that—not yet, at least. Nor did I use it for ordinary physical discomforts that I could anywise tolerate. I told myself that these practices delayed the inevitable consequence. Every doulon slave went mad eventually, trapped inside a ruined body whose perceptions of pain and pleasure were irretrievably tangled. Unfortunately, between the disease itself and the nivat hunger, the consequences of stopping were equally dreadful. Once in the year just past, I’d had to wait three days until I could get nivat, and I would throw myself off a cliff before doing so again.

Move, fool. Quickly, before losing all sense, I licked the thread clean and purified the needle in the rushlight flame, packed all away in the empty green bag, and stuffed it in the bottom of my rucksack. No time or means to sew the flap shut again.

The bent, the power for spellworking, was the only virtue of my pureblood birth I’d ever seen, and for good or ill, I had chosen to abandon the small magics I had learned as a boy and whatever greater uses I might develop as a man and spend it all on this. I hobbled away from the worktable and threw the rucksack onto the painted chest. Naked and shuddering, I crawled under the blankets and gave myself to dreams of pain and pleasure.