Calvin Baker - Dominion

“Aye, it is the right one,” he said to Purchase, who had not known who he was when he saw him earlier that day, but only that he was a man who was being held as no man ought to be. Then he put the sword down and said to Magnus, “You don’t remember me, but I knew you when they called you Ware and you lived with your mother in a room at Sorel’s Hundred.”

He looked at the marks on his wrists and bid Magnus follow him outside, where they went a short way into the woods. There the older man pulled a spiky weed from the ground and broke the stem open until it oozed white with nectar. He rubbed this onto the scars on Magnus’s arms, and took a rock to slough away the dead skin, then added another anointing of the nectar. “It will heal the scarification,” he said, “so you will not be so vulnerable.” When he finished they went back to the house, where everyone talked until late into the night, because, other than perhaps Content and Dorthea, he was the most welcome visitor Stonehouses ever knew.

In the morning he was gone again when the house awoke, and Merian did not look to see what he had left or taken from the storerooms. He only hoped his friend would not be hunted down out there in the frigid wilderness but would make it to wherever he was headed on that path only he knew.

Nor were these the only disturbances that autumn on the land. The other, Magnus was first to see, as they sat in Content’s the day after Chiron had gone. It was then that the woman from the gambling house in the woods, and her partner, entered and took seats at a table. Instead of drinks, though, they asked only that supper be brought out to them immediately.

Jannetje, one of the lasses who worked for Content and Dorthea, brought the pair plates of stew and mugs of cider, and they began eating and talking together calmly, though it was strange to see a woman in the bar. When they had finished eating, the two stood and left to go back out, never once having acknowledged Purchase or Magnus. At the door, however, the woman turned to them and brazenly winked at the two men. When they asked Content later who the two were who had just left, he replied that they were traveling preachers, unattached to any kind of formal congregation. “It is scandalous to have a woman preaching, and even more than that for what the two of them have to say,” he opined, which was unlike him, because he usually tolerated or suffered all equally.

That night Magnus and Purchase went again to the roadhouse in the outlying country, Magnus only to keep Purchase company, Purchase because he was intent on finding the woman.

When they entered the room it was unchanged from how they had last seen it. The card players were arranged around the tables, and those there for other pleasure lined up against the bar as the women came in and went out in their costumes. There was a subterranean quality to the light that made it seem later in the night than it actually was, and the din from the crowd when someone either won a large amount of money or when a familiar customer came in, gave the room a depressed feeling that made Magnus uncomfortable. Purchase, on the other hand, enjoyed this about the place, finding that it built up whatever sensation he was already feeling.

He wished for the woman who had run away from him, after they were there last, and tried to channel that desire into a game of tarok, but the cards were unable to siphon his mood and he eyed the door expectantly whenever someone entered.

Magnus, surveying the crowd, began to think Purchase had only gotten himself wound up over something he was not to have. Still, as the night wore on he sat there in order to watch over his brother if he could.

When he had lost as much at the cards as he could stand, Purchase rose from the table, walked around the room, picked up one of the girls’ hand, and let her lead him to the back. She was not an attractive woman, and he had looked past her a hundred nights without seeing her. Tonight he wanted her in the ambiguous manner of wanting everything and nothing specific at all.

In the back room a lantern burned very low at the wick and he pulled his pants down, and pushed the woman to the mattress. He mounted on top of her without ceremony, letting her guide him inside, then began thrusting until he had finished.

The woman she lay there neither damning nor redeeming him but simply giving off a few moans for surprise and pleasure and doing what she had been paid for, which was to bear his weight in the darkness for a spell.

It was very quick satisfaction, and when he finished he pulled his pants back up and left the room with the feeling of having done a low thing. His sex and wanting, though, were sated, no longer gnawing at the inside of his brain like a untamed animal.

For the first time he noticed just how dingy the entire establishment was, and wondered how many hours of his life had passed there without finding the satisfaction he came in search of. What he also asked himself, and did not know, was whether it was more satisfaction than he would otherwise have known.

As they rode back home he felt a whistling emptiness and did not know whether it was caused by missing the one he sought or lying down with one he ought not have had. He was surprised that this last thing should occur to him, for it was something he had gotten away with a hundred times in the past.

Magnus rode alongside Purchase with a half smile on his face but tried hard to suppress it when he saw how the other was feeling. “If she is a preacher now, you’ll be hard pressed to find her in a place like that,” he said finally.

“You might be right, but I wish you had said something before,” Purchase replied.

“Don’t throw salt on me,” Magnus returned. “It was your notion.”

“Do you think I’m mean for what I did?”

“It is a funny sort of reckoning that takes one woman to get over another. It might work, but no one will ever explain how.”

“Well, it seemed like the natural place to look.”

“To look for a preacher?”

“That is where they were before. Where else do you think we should have gone?”

“You might have tried the church.”

In the end they did find her in church, though not the one in town but rather in an outdoor tent that had been set up in a field outside of Berkeley, on the road that ran past Stonehouses. It was Sanne who suggested they go, saying it would do them all good to hear some new voices mixed in with the old ones they had been hearing their whole lives. As she grew older she had become increasingly concerned with the keep of her family’s salvation, and she liked to believe that praying for people made up part of the way for them who did not pray enough themselves. Still, she knew this only made a small difference, so if she could get Merian and Purchase to pray any kind of way she would be happy. As for Magnus, she had no idea what condition his soul was in but would bet it needed upkeep as well.

On top of these other reasons she had never heard of a woman preacher before and was keen to know what she would have to say that might be different from what the other preachers promised and claimed about the state of the world.

Merian had never had much use for any of them and told her it would be the same as the rest, only set in a woman’s mouth instead of a man’s. “You might think its something different on account of the novelty, but I wager there won’t be anything new in it.”

“Since when have you been listening to so many preachers as to be an expert?” Sanne challenged. “Anyway, what’s different is that it is a woman. That itself is something new, in my mouth anyhow.”

In the end it was this that compelled all of them to get out of bed before the sun that Sunday, to get good seats under the tent, which had been pitched in the middle of a muddy field for what had been promoted in the area as a Revival and Awakening.