Chapter 29
Ursula
Sister Ursula and Elsebeth run.
Sister Ursula has the almost irresistible urge to laugh; the only reason she doesn’t is because she can’t spare the breath. Already her lungs are aching, and that stitch in her side is back. A lifetime in the convent has hardened her to most discomforts, yes, but it hasn’t made her a strong runner.
Soon, Elsebeth is taking the lead, dragging Sister Ursula along. Her hand is sticky. She smells so strongly of decay and vinegar that Sister Ursula only occasionally catches a whiff of this wet, clean night scent that is all around them, cutting across their faces in wild, cool shafts.
They stop running only when Sister Ursula slips in the wet grass and falls down, dragging Elsebeth with her, who instinctively curls her body around the saint’s skull to protect it.
“Are you well?” Sister Ursula asks as soon as she has breath to speak. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine. Fret not. The skull is well, too, just a little dirty with Otto’s fluids.”
Sister Ursula sits up, clasps Elsebeth’s dear face all speckled with gore. “Did he hurt you?”
“No,” Elsebeth says. “No, but I hurt him. Do you think he’ll die? Truly die, I mean?” She shudders suddenly, causing her teeth to clack together with a hard, clean sound. “Do you think it’s still a sin to kill someone if they were already dead?”
She squeezes Elsebeth’s face. “No. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ doesn’t apply when you defend yourself and others from a sorcerer of Satan. Do you understand? This was not a sin! And if you don’t believe me, I shall drag you to the nearest river and scrub you all clean again.”
Elsebeth laughs. “What a papist thing to say, and with such fire! If you had been born a man, you would have made a fine priest. I can see you in a pulpit, preaching love, kindness, and charity.”
“Do you not like that?”
“I like it very much. Before Otto hit you, you scared me a little. You were so cool, calm, and collected, it was like you were another, not my Ursula at all. I like you best when you are true to your own self.”
Now it is Sister Ursula’s turn to laugh. “Cowardly, afraid, and quite useless, you mean?”
Elsebeth frowns. There’s a dark smear on her forehead drying into a crust. Her frowning causes the crust to crack.
Flakes rain down, catching in her lashes.
She blinks hard. “You are not useless. You are kind, and you are careful, and those things have served you well thus far. Why would you mislike being that?”
Sister Ursula shudders, then laughs, then shudders again; she can’t help it.
“You forget I tend to freeze when I am scared, which I am often. I couldn’t let that happen, not tonight, so I pretended I wasn’t my own drab little self, but a saint.
Saints so often were both mighty and meek even when martyred.
But when I had my knife at Otto’s throat, I didn’t feel meek at all.
I felt like Judith must have just before she cut off Holofernes’s head: powerful and full of righteous anger.
” She touches the side of her face where Otto punched her, which is hot with pain and swelling swiftly.
“Though Otto knocked all those feelings clean out of my head in the same manner David felled Goliath.”
Elsebeth has pulled her handkerchief from her pocket and moved it through the tall wet grass so that it is now sodden.
She presses it against Sister Ursula’s bruised eye as she says, “And like Goliath, I thought for a moment that you were dead. That is why I went a little mad, and I stabbed Otto so…”
Sister Ursula presses a kiss to Elsebeth’s mouth.
She tastes of vinegar, wine, and salt, of violence, anger, and greed, but the longer Sister Ursula kisses her, lapping up that taste and taking it inside herself, the more her Liebchen tastes sweet and true again.
After a while, she stops, takes Elsebeth’s handkerchief, and uses it to wipe away the worst of the gore from Elsebeth’s face.
Her hands are trembling with excitement.
“Come,” she says. “I don’t know if the necromancer realizes we took the skull, but we mustn’t assume we are safe. Better to keep going and only stop once we’ve had our wishes.”
* * *
They reach the point marked on the map as the sun is setting.
It is a crossroads.
Had it not been for the map, they would have walked past it without a second glance.
It is, after all, just a place where two roads meet, of which there are many in this world.
There is little that sets this particular crossroads apart from all those others: no chapel, no shrine, not even a simple marker telling those who can read where the road will take them if only they walk a certain number of miles farther.
All it really has are a number of rough black rocks the size of sheep that look as if they have been thrown down haphazardly by a giant who no longer wanted to play with them.
The wild, almost ecstatic joy that possessed Sister Ursula those first moments after they stole the skull, already somewhat dampened by their hours of frantic rushing through woods and fields to get here as fast as they could, is now extinguished almost entirely.
She rubs her eyes. They are sore with tiredness.
“This can’t be right. Are you sure this is the place on the map? ”
“I am. Look.” Elsebeth shows her the piece of fabric. “This thread is the road, and these clumps of dark wool must be those stones. There’s seven of them on the map, and I count seven here in front of us.”
Bewildered, Sister Ursula looks from the crude embroidery of the map to the stones and back again. “How do we know those clumps are meant to be stones? They could be anything, really, the embroidery being so poorly done.”
“What else could it be?”
“But this can’t be it! I don’t see a crypt here, or a shrine, or some other place we could reasonably expect to find a saint’s sacred remains!”
Elsebeth stuffs the map back into her pocket without bothering to fold it neatly first. “Mayhap Otto was right, and there is no saint. There never was. We have been tricked,” she says, her voice flat.
Sister Ursula shakes her head so fast, her hair lashes her cheeks. “No, no! Saints do exist, as do miracles.”
“No, they don’t, and if they did, they wouldn’t happen to the likes of me. Good things are rare in life. This was too good to be true.” She falls to her knees, the heels of her hands pressed hard against her eyes. She moans, this animal sound, rough and full of pain.
Sister Ursula stands stricken, trying not to cry. There is a pain between her breasts, a soft, pulsing ache that radiates up her throat. She tries to swallow it down, but it remains, hard as a pit.
What if Otto was right? What if this is no saint’s skull, but just the skull from one of the ordinary dead?
Only the ordinary dead aren’t usually buried at crossroads. That’s a special kind of degradation saved for suicides, criminals, and all the others who are deemed not worthy of being buried in consecrated ground.
But no, it can’t be that the skull in her hands belongs to such a sinner. No ordinary skull could travel into her dreams to instruct her. And not just her dreams, either; twice, Elsebeth dreamed of the skull speaking to her, too. Three dreams. Three is the number of the Lord.
Three makes it true.
Sister Ursula kneels next to Elsebeth, moves the girl’s hands away from her eyes. “Don’t despair,” she says.
“Why not? We have come so far, suffered so much, and for what?” Elsebeth growls.
“Not all is lost yet, mein Liebchen. I think—”
“And for what, Ursula? I’ll tell you for what.
For a fairy tale that I knew in my heart of hearts to be false, and yet I let the promise of a wish seduce me into cutting off a dead woman’s head, and stabbing a man, and countless smaller sins besides!
” With each word, Elsebeth’s voice becomes louder and shriller, and Sister Ursula’s heart aches for her.
“Listen!” she says sharply, clasping Elsebeth’s wrist with her free hand and digging her nails into the thin skin to snap the girl out of her grief and anger.
“You are tired, and you are hurt, and I understand, but just because there is no church or chapel or crypt here doesn’t mean there is no saint.
Think about it. If you had to hide a sacred relic to keep it safe from soldiers and plunderers, where would you hide it? ”
“Somewhere people wouldn’t think to look,” Elsebeth says.
“Exactly. Would you think to look for a saint’s body at a crossroads like this if you didn’t have a map to tell you she lies buried here?”
“No.”
“And that is why I think we are in the right place after all. Have some faith, mein Liebchen. There is always hope. Now let’s hurry.
” Sister Ursula loosens her grip on Elsebeth’s wrist. Her nails have left little marks that are flushing almost purple now that the blood comes rushing back.
If she had more time, she’d bring the wrist to her mouth and kiss it to soothe the flesh she has marked.
Instead, she places the skull on one of the black stones at the side of the road, so it is safe and out of the way.
“Oh, but we are truly blessed! More digging!” Elsebeth sneers as she follows Sister Ursula to the middle of the crossroads. They have no shovel, but the earth is still wet with dew and thus soft. With their bowls, spoons, and hands, they set to digging.
It doesn’t take long this time. Whoever buried the saint’s body must have been in a hurry and didn’t dig deep; Sister Ursula and Elsebeth are only two handspans in when Sister Ursula’s bowl strikes something hard.
“Oh dear Lord!” Sister Ursula exclaims. “I think I found something, Elsebeth!” She puts her bowl aside and digs with her fingers, carefully removing crumbs of black earth until she reveals rough, cheap cloth that falls apart when she tries to lift it.
Inside lie small bones, some long and lean, others round as pebbles.
No, some of those are pebbles. They are white, yes, but speckled or banded with pink, blue, and gray. Sister Ursula removes them. With cloth this poor, it’s not to be wondered at that some stones have gotten mixed in with the bones. “What do you think these bones are?” she asks.
Elsebeth bends closer to look. “Methinks those are the bones of the hand. They look a little like the sheep knucklebones my sister and I used to play with, only smaller.”
Relief makes Sister Ursula feel all weak. It’s only now that they have found bone that she can admit to herself that she was, for a moment, truly terrified that they weren’t at the right place, or worse, that there was no saint’s body to reunite the skull with, no wish.
“They’re a little damaged,” Elsebeth remarks, picking up one of the little bones. It has a large crack running through it.
Sister Ursula sits up, looks at the skull as it stands grinning on its piece of rock, winces. “Do you think I did that? That I broke her hand when I struck it with my bowl?”
“If you did, it’s nothing the good Lord won’t know how to heal, I’m sure.
How were you to know they had placed her in such a shallow grave?
Though it’s a good sign for your theory that she was moved here not so long ago, when she was already a skeleton.
Else, an animal would have dug her up and eaten her, and the bones would be scattered. ”
They quickly exhume the rest of the body, flinching at every sound, their nerves stretched almost to the point of fraying by the knowledge the necromancer might reach them at any minute.
The cloth in which the saint’s remains are wrapped has rotted to the point where they can tear it off with ease; even a ripe apple on a bough offers more resistance to being plucked than this cloth does.
With every bit of cloth they rip off, they uncover more of the skeleton: a femur, an ulna and tibia, a rib cage.
All of them are that same chalky white, unnatural for bone so old.
The skeleton has been buried lying on its belly, and that is odd, but as soon as they uncover the place where the head should be and find it missing, none of that matters anymore.
Sister Ursula begins to laugh with joy. “It’s her! It’s really her, Elsebeth!” she says.
Elsebeth sits frightfully still, her hands at her mouth.
Then, she jumps up, throws her fists into the air, and shouts, or maybe laughs; it’s hard to tell.
When she is done, she flings her arms around Sister Ursula’s neck and draws the other woman so tightly to her, she could clasp her own elbows.
“I am sorry I doubted you,” she whispers.
Sister Ursula’s arms are pinned to her sides, so all she can do is rub her cheek against Elsebeth’s head.
Her cap is filthy. When all of this is done, and such everyday concerns as laundry will start to matter again, she will scrub at it and beat it until it is as clean as it can possibly be.
For now, she says, “I doubted myself, too.”
Elsebeth lets her go. “I am sorry for it all the same.”
“What does it matter now? Let us be glad!” Sister Ursula places a light kiss on Elsebeth’s nose, then gets up to go fetch the skull.
In the dying light of day, the skull’s red hair seems to have harnessed the sun’s fire and glows various shades of red and orange.
It is not at all like the dry, brittle hair they took from the Aufhocker’s mother; that looked dead. This looks alive.
Sister Ursula carefully picks up the skull. “I am sorry my hands are not any cleaner and that we have dirtied you so,” she says. Otto’s blood has set in the fine mesh. Their rubbing has only seemed to spread the stains.
Maybe the saint won’t mind, though. She had to wait a long time to be reunited with her body. The fulfillment of a wish that big and held for so long would leave anyone in a good mood, especially someone already filled with godly grace.
Sister Ursula brings the skull to her mouth and gently plants a kiss on the forehead. The mesh feels cool and slippery against her lips. “Time to bring you back where you belong,” she whispers.
“Ursula, look out!” Elsebeth screams.
Sister Ursula whips around, allowing the necromancer to plunge Elsebeth’s little gore-streaked knife into her throat.