Chapter 21 Elsebeth
Elsebeth
When I wake sometime in the afternoon, the sun hot on my skin, for we never made it back to the shack after we made love in the sweet long grass, I feel sore all over.
It’s not to be wondered at, bruised and bloodied as I am, but it’s not unpleasant.
Though some sand sticks to my skin, I am slick with drying sweat, and my cunny is all wet, I feel quite clean.
I feel light also, as light as a dandelion seed that the wind blows this way and that.
I study Ursula. She’s still asleep, her dress pulled over her like a blanket.
I look at her pretty long fingers, which brought me to such bliss only a short while ago.
I remember how they felt inside of me, her hand twisting sweetly just underneath my womb, and I flush and smile.
My eyes travel up that pretty white hand of hers to the slender wrist, the swell of her arm, the way it curves into her shoulder, and I feel love, tenderness, and many other things surge inside of me.
Mayhap it’s unholy, this love for her that has taken root inside my breast, but I am weak and can’t rip it out. I fear it has grown too strong for that anyway, and to pull it out now would wound me terribly.
Not that I want to rip it out. I want to nurse it like a bit of coal so it can keep me warm. For so long, I have survived on small sips of beauty, but now that I’ve drunk deeply of it, I’d rather die than go without.
Mayhap it’s not so bad to be damned if I get to be with Ursula, I think.
Before I met her, that thought would have terrified me and filled my head with fear, doubt, and guilt. Now, it still frightens me, but only a little. I sit with that feeling for a moment, then push it out of my head; I want to be filled with thoughts of other things now.
I wriggle underneath Ursula’s dress until I’m between her legs.
The fabric is thin and lets the sunlight through, and so I can see very well.
I stroke her thighs, so white and warm, the hair that covers them like dark down.
She shifts, and for a moment, I think she comes awake, but she only sighs and grows still again.
With my fingertips, I follow the green veins that marble her flesh and through which the blood, sleep sluggish, streams gently. A few hours ago, it pounded as wildly as a storm-fretted sea. Remembering that, my own blood sets to running, and lust makes my belly ache.
No, I think, not lust. Ursula told me it’s only love, and love is no sin. I rub my cheek against the inside of her thigh, inhale her scent, and I am content, happy, and many more things besides.
When I have mapped her thighs well enough in my mind that I can think of them whenever the world grows ugly and cruel again, and I can be comforted by their beauty, I move my eyes and fingers higher.
The hair on her mound is much darker and coarser, and beautifully curled, almost like a sheep’s pelt.
In places, it’s long enough to braid. How beautiful she would look with pink ribbons tied in neat bows!
I wind a curl around my finger and delight in the feel of it.
Again she sighs and shifts, but this time, she wakes.
I can feel it in the way the muscles in her thighs tighten a little, and in the way her breathing changes.
When I am done running my hands through her hair, I gently nudge Ursula’s legs aside. Between the fur lie beautiful folds of flesh, all snug like a rosebud.
“Indeed, you are like a rose,” I whisper, “for like a rose, you are pink and fragrant, and when loved, you bloom.” I touch her with the tip of my finger and find she is slick. My belly clenches and spit runs into my mouth as it does when I think of something delicious.
“Oh!” she sighs, and the sound is precious to me.
Gently, I part her folds. No rosebud after all; she is open and sweet for me.
I touch her with the tip of my tongue, and then I am lost. I lick, lap, and suck, and I moan and close my eyes as I do so, for she is delicious. She tastes like biscuits, like meat, like brine, like fish, all these wholesome things.
She begins to flow, and soon, so do I. I feel it on my thighs, sticky and cool. A corner of my dress has caught between my legs, and I moan and thrust so that the rough fabric rubs me just right.
As I pleasure her, she winds her hands in my hair to keep my mouth on her. She tries not to scratch, tries not to pull, for she is a sweet thing, all gentleness and compassion.
But I don’t want her meek.
I want to ravish and raze her as she did me. It’s not long before she goes wild, tugging on my hair. For a moment I freeze, for it brings back the memory of Gottfried, but I remind myself it’s not his hands on me, and I grow calm again.
Ursula is gasping and moaning. The blood is marching through her veins now, fluttering as frantically as a moth caught behind a curtain. Her thighs clench around my head as she spends, and then I am spending also.
When we have both been battered by bliss and grown calm again once more, I wipe my mouth and chin with my hands and nestle next to her.
“Mein Liebchen, how sweet you are,” Ursula says. Her color is up, and her eyes are dreamy.
We should get up, see if our shifts have dried, mayhap wash our dresses in the stream—at least those bits that have our spending on them—but it’s heaven to lie here, and so we are full of sloth and do none of those things.
Until she suddenly sits up, her body all taut.
“What is it?” ask I.
“I just remembered my dream. Oh, Elsebeth!” She puts her hands to her mouth and laughs.
“That must’ve been quite the dream, to make you laugh so,” say I.
“It was, oh it was!”
As we lie side by side, she tells me all of it.
With every detail—the old-fashioned way in which the skull speaks, how ill-tempered she is, how she moves around as if she’s underwater—I feel something come alive inside of my chest, this little flickering flame of hope that fills me with warmth, for how could Ursula and I dream her in the same manner when I barely told Ursula anything about her?
I cannot dwell on this miracle for too long, though, because what use is it to us when we have lost her? “It’s all very nice that the saint commands you to come fetch her,” I say to Ursula, “but how are we to do that?”
I expect her to slump a little and admit that she doesn’t know.
Instead, her eyes stray to the side, and I feel her mind pull away from me as she thinks.
When she speaks, it’s in a slow, almost dreamy voice.
“When I gave Saint Columba’s skull to that soldier, I didn’t give him the map.
I didn’t think of it, and he didn’t ask for it, but, well… ”
“I don’t think he needs it. He’s a witch. He used dark arts to find us. No doubt he’ll use his dark arts to find his way to the saint’s body, too.”
“No doubt,” she agrees with me, “but what I meant to say is this: We may not have the skull anymore, but we know who does, and we know where they are going.”
“So?” ask I.
“So we can intercept them.”
“The necromancer will strike us dead, then defile our corpses by using them as puppets for all his evil deeds,” I say, but I have sat up very straight, for her words are fanning the fight lust in me. When I was firm in my belief in God, I used to feel like this, too: strong and eager.
She sits up as well and clasps my hands. “If he sees us, yes, but that he won’t, not if we are quiet and sly. Think about it, mein Liebchen: A proud and evil man such as he is not used to being defied. He won’t expect two weak women such as you and me to come after him to take back what he stole.”
Ursula speaks sense. The blood races through my veins.
I feel all restless. I pull one of my hands free from her clasp and use it to tear out bits of grass.
There’s something pleasing in feeling the blades resist being pulled in twain, in the way the roots cling to the soil, in the smell of rich earth being turned and sap being spilled.
“He may not expect us, but that doesn’t mean we can just take the skull and not expect him to find out, if not straightaway, then soon after,” I say.
“If we swap Saint Columba’s skull for a different skull, he won’t.
He might not even realize it’s gone until he reaches the spot where her body is buried, and then it shall be too late, because we will have reunited her skull and body already and claimed our wish.
Oh, mein Liebchen!” Her face is all flushed and her eyes shiny as if with fever.
I twist some grass around my finger, watching the tip go all pink. “He has mastered many dark arts. Won’t he feel the skull is gone without looking at it?”
“Maybe, but I am sure the saint’s powers exceed his, and she shall prevent that from happening.”
I don’t know about that, but all the same, this idea pleases me. But I cannot allow myself to trust it, not yet, not when it’s not complete. Plans can so easily go awry. “Where are we to get a skull?” I ask.
“That’s probably the easiest part of the plan. The graveyards are overflowing with the dead. Why, we might even take the skull of that poor Aufhocker’s mother, or at the very least her hair; it has the right color, if not quite the right texture.”
I can scarcely believe that this woman, who wouldn’t let me bury a dead man face down to keep him from becoming a Nachzehrer because that would be ungodly, and who often blanches at gruesome tales and sights till she looks ready to faint, is now proposing we defile a body by chopping off its head.
Ursula chuckles a little, as if she can scarcely believe it herself. “It’s awful, I know, but what are our choices here? We can walk away from this, wash our hands of the whole affair…”
“But then I shall never see my grandmother, my father, my mother, and my big sister, Margarethe, and my little brothers, Friedrich and Johannes, again, and you shall be haunted by your Sister Hildegard,” I whisper.
Ursula nods, her face grim. “I know. And some may say that’s the way of things, that the Good Lord wouldn’t have called them to Him if He didn’t mean to, and they may be right or they may be wrong, but there is also this to consider: If we give up now, we will allow the necromancer to claim a wish from the saint.
He shall use that to aid the devil himself. ”
I shudder. I can’t help it. For many years, Bavaria and other parts of Germany have been the devil’s playground already. If his servants grow in power…
“Don’t you see, Elsebeth?” Ursula says. She cups my face and makes me look at her. “God has chosen you and me as His instruments to stop the necromancer and the foul lord he serves. All we need to do is cut off that poor woman’s head and travel hard and fast.”
“A sin is still a sin,” I say, for though I want my wish very badly and I have done many a vile thing in my life, the idea of cutting off a dead woman’s head sickens me.
“Sometimes, we must sin in order to do good. God will forgive us, I’m sure, or He wouldn’t have asked this of us at all.” She wets her lips with her tongue, and I am suddenly seized by the need to kiss, lick, and suck them till they’re all swollen.
I blush and look at my hand, which is ruffling the long grass. If I were to bring it to my nose, I am sure I’d still smell Ursula underneath that good grass smell. “How prettily you speak,” I murmur.
“Do you not think I speak true?”
I look up at her big brown eyes. They are all aglitter now.
“That I did not say. It’s just…our parson said we humans hanker after sin like a hound after a bowl of water when the hunt is done, only I don’t think that’s true, or at least not always.
Some sins truly are awful. If we are to take that woman’s head, I want us to be sure of our plan.
Let’s say we boil it till the flesh falls off.
What then? It won’t look like the saint’s skull. ”
“My convent is on the way to where the saint’s body is buried.
We can get some gauze there to wrap it in.
We can sew the hair to the gauze and embroider it whilst we travel.
It needn’t be done very well, just enough to fool at first glance.
I doubt the necromancer takes the skull out of its box much; he’s in thrall to Satan and, as such, must naturally feel a certain kind of revulsion for something as good and holy as a saint’s bones. ”
I rip out another blade of grass. By now, I have a small pile of it, and my fingers are tinged green. “What about the glass eyes? Has your convent a pair of those, too?”
She shakes her head. “No. But not to worry. God will provide them in one way or another, I’m sure. Now come, mein Liebchen. We have much to do and very little time to do it. The longer we sit around talking, the farther the skull moves away from us.”
I put my hands to my face and groan. “All that hard work to put that poor wretch in the ground, and now I shall have to dig her up again.”
She bends close to kiss me. “I know, I know, but I shall be there to help you.”
She stands, but before she can move to put her dress on, I take her hand. “If we are to do this, you must promise me one thing,” I say.
“Anything for you, mein Liebchen.”
“After coming up with such a bold plan, you may never call yourself a coward again.”
She laughs. “Never,” she promises me and laughs, then kisses me again, and I think with only a little shame in my heart that I’d do much worse than cut into a corpse if it makes Ursula kiss me like that.