Chapter 1
Ursula
There is no warning. One moment, the road is just that: a humble country road in the Bavarian countryside on which travel a dozen people, all of them looking pinched and starved and miserable. The next, it is a slaughterhouse.
Had she been turned into a pillar of salt as befell Lot’s poor wife, Sister Ursula could not have stood stiller than she does when the soldiers swarm among them with their swords and knives and guns raised, their faces contorted with hatred.
She doesn’t mean to freeze, but terror has suffused her limbs and won’t let her move them.
Those soldiers must have lain in wait at the edge of the forest, where the shrubs and the trees hide them from our sight but not us from theirs, she thinks.
It’s the last clear thought she has. After this, fear makes her mind gutter like a candle in a draft, so that later, she only remembers the ambush in flashes.
An old man trying to gather his steaming entrails in order to push them back into his belly.
A soldier grunting on top of a woman, whose hands fist uselessly into the mud.
A child lying motionless with eyes glassy like marbles, their skull horribly dented just above their ear, which turns pink and orange and almost see-through where the light hits it, like a seashell. She can’t stop staring at it.
Such horror.
Such beauty.
She only breaks out of this trance when a skinny peasant girl takes her hand and roughly pulls her off the road and into the forest. They run as if the devil himself is on their heels, which Sister Ursula supposes is true.
Those soldiers are in thrall to Satan, possessed by rage and lust and greed.
The farther they leave them behind, the better.
Get thee behind me, Satan, she thinks and has the sudden urge to laugh. She has no breath to spare, though. The peasant girl may look half starved, but she is strong, and she is fast, her grip on Sister Ursula’s hand relentless.
They crash through the woods, not following any path that Sister Ursula can see. Branches snatch at their clothes, rake through their hair. Are those soldiers after them? She can’t hear over the pounding of her blood and her ragged breathing.
Someone grabs her cape. The cord that fastens it around her throat tightens like a noose as her body is yanked backward, ripping her hand from the peasant girl’s with such strength that her arm feels half wrenched out of its socket.
A soldier throws himself on top of her. He smells of sweat and blood, so strong that she would gag if only she had any breath to do so, but her cape, now caught underneath her body, is still strangling her so that she is scrabbling uselessly at her throat rather than fending him off as he tears at her clothes.
He only manages to rip off a button before the peasant girl launches herself at him, knocking him off Sister Ursula. Silently they roll on the ground, trading punches and trying to bite at each other.
Sister Ursula tears at the fastening of her cape, manages to loosen it enough to allow her to breathe. The cool, damp air does not soothe her wounded throat; rather, it makes it feel as if it is on fire, but it is sweet all the same. Gasping, she struggles to her feet.
The peasant girl and the soldier are still at each other’s throats.
Sister Ursula hesitates, approaches without knowing what to do.
Until today, she has never been in a fight before.
She feels for the little knife in her belt that she always carries to cut bread, but her hands tremble so much that she daren’t pull it out for fear that she’ll drop it.
When she draws closer to the two with the intention to somehow help the girl, the soldier’s booted foot connects with her right knee.
This time, she can cry out, and she does so as she falls to the ground, clutching her knee.
Her screaming is just the distraction the peasant girl needs.
As the soldier falters for only a second, no doubt spooked by the ragged sound produced by her bruised throat, the girl grabs a broken rock and smashes it against the side of his head.
With a grunt, he falls to the side, where he lies twitching and foaming at the mouth. The smell of urine fills the air.
The peasant girl spits at him, then wipes her mouth with the back of her hand before adjusting her little white cap, which, although much dirtied from all that rolling around, has remained on her head. This done, she pulls Sister Ursula to her feet.
They keep running. The ground is littered with branches and twigs, deadwood torn from the trees in past storms. They snap easily underneath her feet, the sound so loud that Sister Ursula mistakes them for gunfire at first.
Soon, her knee throbs and her side hurts with each breath. It feels as if someone is driving a needle into her flesh, trying to stitch something there clumsily, like a child who has yet to learn how to sew. She welcomes the sensation. It’s better than being terrified out of her mind.
Once, there is a high-pitched scream close by, but it cuts off before she can tell whether it is human or animal in nature.
When they reach a little stream, they don’t pause to wash the mud from their feet and legs, or even to drink, but only to hitch up their skirts, and, in Sister Ursula’s case, to take off her shoes; the girl has none. The water is cold as the touch of a dead man.
Sister Ursula makes to cross, but the girl shakes her head. “We must wade upstream. That way, we will be harder to track,” she pants and points to their footprints, which are clearly visible in the earth all soft from the recent rain.
They wade upstream for as long as they can stand, then clamber out and continue running. They only stop when neither can run anymore. Sister Ursula thinks she might be sick from the pain in her side, which no longer feels like a needle stitching, but a knife repeatedly stabbing her.
An image rises in her mind, of a soldier sitting astride a little boy and knifing him over and over again. She can hear the wet, meaty sound of the knife as it cuts through skin and fat, can see the boy jerk with every stab, can smell the blood and the shit.
This is not some dark thing her mind has conjured on its own. I just saw that, she thinks, and if it wasn’t for this peasant girl, that could have been me. She begins to heave. She hasn’t eaten all day, though, and so when she bends over, all she brings up is a mouthful of bitter bile.
The girl helps her wipe her mouth with a dirty handkerchief, then pulls her along. “We must find some place to hide in case they come this way,” she whispers.
They find a spot in the undergrowth where the branches don’t grow so thickly, almost a kind of nest, with soft moss. They crouch there, holding each other close.
Sister Ursula wraps her cape around them to try and make them invisible.
It’s made out of coarse brown wool, and though it almost strangled her earlier and even on its best days rubs her throat red and raw, Sister Ursula knows to be grateful for it, as she is grateful for the humble dress she wears and her plain shoes, even though they are too big and she must stuff them with straw or else risk blistering her feet.
They keep her warm, don’t they? And they keep her safe; no one who sees her dressed like this will suspect she is a nun.
Ever since the war began and reports of unspeakable violence done to nuns and monks by the Protestant armies reached Sister Ursula’s convent, the sisters have worn laywomen’s clothes when forced out onto the road.
It’s a sad world in which she must hide that she is a bride of Christ, but it could be worse.
How many poor people has she seen on the road who have nothing to wear but rags, and sometimes not even that?
Like the peasant girl beside her, who doesn’t have any shoes to protect her feet from the cold and all the sharp, cruel things on the road.
It’s a miracle that the two of them are unharmed, at least for now.
What if the soldiers find them?
If they find them, they…
If they find them…
She works her free hand—the peasant girl still has a firm hold of the other—underneath the collar of her dress until she reaches her rosary.
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, she prays, clutching wooden beads with such strength she knows her fingers will come away with little red dents.
There’s no dousing the inferno of fear inside of her; she learned that when she and her sisters stayed in the castle of Eichst?tt whilst it was under siege by the enemy.
The shooting went on for two weeks. But though prayer can’t kill the fear completely, it makes it more manageable, and so she prays and prays until the cramp in her legs makes it impossible.
She sits down on the moss, wincing at its dampness, then gingerly stretches out her legs.
Her right knee throbs and burns. No doubt that soldier has badly bruised it, even though her knees have been hardened, calloused, even, by years of kneeling in prayer.
It’ll probably be black and blue tomorrow, but she doesn’t think she has damaged it beyond healing.
Her throat, too, hurts abominably and will likely be sore for days to come, but surely that won’t have any lasting effects, either?
If only Sister Junius was here! She would know. As their infirmarian, she tends to all their ailments. But Sister Junius chose to stay behind at the convent when they were ordered to flee, together with the handful of sisters too old or too sick to leave.
As Sister Ursula should have done, and would have done, if she weren’t a coward.
The peasant girl is still clutching her hand; the other is balled into a fist. Sister Ursula strokes her fingers gently to get her to let go.