Chapter 24
Otto
The sun rises, and sets, and rises again.
Although Otto’s voice cracks, his throat feels as if he has swallowed shards, and he weeps till his head feels too tight and his eyes are sore; even though his tear ducts produce nothing but the occasional reeking black tear, the necromancer takes no pity on him, and so Otto must continue to confess to his sins.
Only when the necromancer grows bored does he break Otto’s enchantment.
“Enough for now,” he declares and yawns hugely. “We shall eat and drink, we shall sleep, and then we shall be on our way.”
Otto sinks down, too wrung out even to sob.
The necromancer bends over him and pats him on the head. “There, there,” he says, “I bet it must have been quite a relief to purge yourself of all that filth, you naughty boy. We shall continue some other time.”
Otto wishes he were well and truly dead.
* * *
Over the next few days, as the necromancer uses his little bones to find their way to the saint’s body, Otto retreats into himself. He prepares meals for the necromancer, he walks, he sets up camp, and he remembers none of it.
The only times he is snapped out of this state is when the necromancer takes the skull out of her box, which happens once or twice a day. He fingers her red hair, traces the line of her jaw, once even presses a kiss to her teeth, which makes Otto’s stomach roil, dead though it may be.
There is something about that skull that is revolting, though Otto is hard-pressed to say what.
He isn’t usually affected by human remains, not anymore, only his own body, which is rotting quite severely now, his skin discolored and ruptured in places, his belly distended, his eyes feeling dry and scratchy.
Maybe it’s because the skull belongs to a saint, and Otto is a sinner bound to a witch.
Her presence naturally makes him uncomfortable because it reminds him of the filthy state of his soul, which is especially tender now that the necromancer has made him recount his sins.
The worst of it is that there are so many more Otto hasn’t yet spoken of, like that time he cut off a farmer’s fingers joint by joint so that it took a long time until only the palms were left, all because the man had refused to hand over his horse when Otto’s general asked; he had said he wouldn’t be able to plow his fields without it, and then what would the army eat next year?
Now, he looks at his own fingers, all black with rot, the nails gone, the flesh hardened to leather in some places and strangely slimy in others.
The tips of his index finger and thumb of his dominant hand have fallen off, revealing the bone underneath.
It looks oddly yellow in the light of the fire he has made to cook the necromancer’s supper.
He imagines the farmer’s fear, his despair, the sickening pain, and he shudders.
“How horrified you look, dear Otto,” the necromancer says, glancing up from the skull in his lap. “Would you like to tell me about it?”
Immediately Otto hides his ruined hands behind his back, as if he’s a little boy trying to hide some small infraction from his father.
“No, no, please. No more of that, I beg of you. I don’t want to talk about all this filth anymore.
I am so tired of raping and maiming and killing,” he groans.
His voice still hasn’t recovered from his outpouring of sin, and is all rough and low.
Likely it will never recover. Until the necromancer finds him a new body, he’ll be stuck with this raw whisper, like that fellow soldier who took a butt of a sword to the throat during battle and spoke in this high-pitched whine until a farmer gored him to death.
“You wish to retire?” the necromancer mocks him as he combs through the skull’s hair with his fingers.
“Live in a little cottage with your beloved Frieda rather than in a leaky tent, wake to the smell of her baking rather than unwashed bodies and horse dung, see your cows frolic around rather than some soldiers fighting over a game of dice, a stolen cup, a whore?”
“Yes, I wish that very much,” Otto answers.
He fears that his time with the necromancer has made him unfit to be a soldier.
If that creepy skull gives him a wish as well as that necromancer once they return it to its body, he’ll spend it wisely on a life for him and Frieda far away from the horrors of war.
The necromancer smiles again. Otto has been so focused on his goat eyes that he only now realizes the man has more teeth than most. They all crowd together like epileptics at a public beheading; it is believed that drinking the blood of someone healthy and recently dead can cure all manner of ailments, including the falling sickness, and so those poor wretches afflicted with it stand close to the scaffold with cups in hand, hoping to catch the blood as it spouts from the neck of the executed. “Who says you get a wish?”
Otto feels as if a cold finger brushes past his spine. He represses a shudder. “If I am bound to you still and must follow you until you’ve returned the skull to its body, then why wouldn’t I get a wish as well as you? They say God’s love is endless and He loves a sinner, don’t they?”
“You misunderstand me, dear Otto. What I mean is this: Why do you think there is a wish at the end of this journey?”
Otto blinks in confusion. “Because that’s what Gottfried told me, and he heard it from that Swede who had the skull before him.”
The necromancer stops combing the skull’s hair. “What, exactly, did Gottfried tell you?”
“That this is the skull of a saint, and if you return it to the saint’s body, she’ll give you a wish. That’s why you are doing all of this, isn’t it? Because you want to use that wish for something?”
The necromancer’s dark eyes widen. Then, he laughs. He laughs so hard, he shakes with it, and it’s like watching someone having a fit. Between his long lean fingers, the skull shakes as well, as if she, too, is laughing.
It takes a long time until his laughter ceases. By then, the necromancer’s sallow face has gone red in ugly patches and is wet from both tears and sweat. He wipes it on his sleeve, then looks at the skull, and that sets him off again.
“What’s so funny?” The necromancer’s hysterical laughter and that disgusting skull have made all the hairs on Otto’s body rise. Some primal part tells him to flee, to run as fast as he can if he wants to live, but his legs are still bewitched and won’t listen to his brain.
Still the necromancer laughs.
“What? What is it?” Otto screams, and his throat is on fire, and it’s somehow the worst pain he has ever felt, even worse than that bullet that went through his arm a little while after Magdeburg, though maybe that’s because the body remembers pain so poorly once it has passed, but even though his throat feels cut and peeled, he grabs the necromancer by the shirt, shakes him roughly, and hisses, “What is so fucking funny, you fucker?”
“God, you reek. We should find you a new body soon, don’t you think? This one won’t last much longer.”
Otto refuses to take the bait. “Tell me!”
The necromancer smiles, and it’s awful. “This skull belongs to my wife.”