Chapter 32
Ursula
One moment, there is only the stinging pain in her throat, and the cold creeping into her limbs, and the wetness of her dress as the blood soaks it. The next, she is lying on the ground, and she is weak, and the world is dark.
Is she dying? Is that why she has gone nearly blind? Her hands fly to her throat. Someone has bound fabric around it, very tight, as if trying to strangle her. She whimpers, tries to work her fingers underneath the folds.
Rough hands take hold of hers, pull them away.
“Don’t, my love. The necromancer slashed open your throat.
Do you not remember? I sewed the wound shut, then put some fabric around it so the threads won’t catch on anything.
I would have done a better job, had I silk or catgut to sew with, but for now, it’ll do. ”
She knows that voice. It is sweet to her.
Elsebeth, she remembers, and with that, all her memories come flooding back.
She sits up, feeling sick with fear, and grabs Elsebeth’s shoulders. “The necromancer! Elsebeth, quick, quick!” she babbles.
Elsebeth loosens her grip, brings one hand to her mouth, kisses it tenderly. “Fear not, my love. I have slain him. No, don’t look! It’s a sight I wish to spare you, for I made his death long and hard. He shan’t ever hurt you again. We are safe.”
Sister Ursula can’t reply, not now that she has looked into Elsebeth’s face. Her eyes have changed. There is no white anymore, just an orange color, like the yolk of an egg, and a large round pupil.
They are the eyes of a snake.
“What is it?” Elsebeth asks, a little frown on her face.
“Your eyes,” Sister Ursula manages to say. “They are not your own anymore.”
Elsebeth grows still. “What do you mean?”
“They are snake eyes. Mein Liebchen, what have you done?”
And Elsebeth tells her. She tells her everything, the whole sordid story.
When she is done, Sister Ursula presses the heels of her hands hard against her eyes, which she hopes are still their usual human brown.
The pressure makes fantastic colors bloom.
She feels sick and strange, knows not whether to laugh or to cry.
If she can still cry.
Can a corpse cry? For that is what she is now: a walking corpse, not living, not yet quite dead, either.
An abomination unto the Lord.
And for what? All because Elsebeth could not stand to be alone. A selfish girl, she, and now damned for all eternity…
“Say something, my love, please,” Elsebeth begs.
She touches Sister Ursula’s wrists. Sister Ursula recoils violently.
Intense pain flickers over Elsebeth’s face.
It shines in her new eyes, no longer gray, that beautiful color of storm clouds and slate, of a pigeon’s down and a dog’s fur, but orange as the fires of Hell, in which she will burn until the end of time and maybe beyond that, for what is time but another thing the Lord made and can thus undo?
“Is it so bad you can’t stand for me to touch you?” Elsebeth asks in a small voice.
“I don’t know,” Sister Ursula confesses. “Your soul is the most precious thing you possess. You shouldn’t have sold it for anything in the world, but especially not for me. Oh, Elsebeth, how could you?”
“My soul is mine to do with as I please. And it pleased me to sell it so that I could have you next to me again.”
Sister Ursula laughs bitterly. “You sold yourself cheaply then.”
“I did not!” Elsebeth says hotly, her hands balled into fists once more. “I love you above all else, and so I sold my soul, and sold it gladly, to have you back.”
“You’re supposed to love God above all else.”
“But I don’t. I love you more than Him, and that may well be why I am damned now, yet I care not for any of that as long as I have you at my side!”
“You have saddled me with a debt I may never repay,” Sister Ursula whispers.
Elsebeth rakes her hands through her hair in frustration. She has lost her cap. “There is no debt. I don’t expect anything from you in return, though I would like for things to go back as they were before, when you gave me your love and affection freely. Please, Ursula, won’t you understand?”
“How can I? It’s a wicked and selfish thing you did, Elsebeth. Why do you demand my compassion and understanding when you have none for me?”
Elsebeth throws herself at Sister Ursula then. She wraps her arms around the other woman, holding her fast. Sister Ursula doesn’t know what to do, so she stands stiff and still, not reciprocating but not pushing her away, either.
“I do have compassion and understanding for you,” Elsebeth murmurs.
“I know I am wicked. You need not tell me. But I sold my soul not solely for my own sake. Had I been sure you were in Heaven, I would have left you, but I wasn’t sure, for Satan would not tell me.
Were you? In Heaven, I mean? Or were you in Hell?
Tell me, my darling. Tell me, that I may know whether I have chosen wrong. ”
But Sister Ursula can’t say. Whatever has happened to her after she died has been snipped from her memory. Nothing remains. Instead, she says, “Elsebeth, you must let me go.”
“How cold you are! Why, my beloved? You were never so with me before.”
“You weren’t damned then.”
Elsebeth laughs, a horrible, low sound. “What a papist thing to say! I believe I have been damned from before I was born.” She presses her cheek against Sister Ursula’s sternum, rubs it as if she is a cat marking Sister Ursula as hers.
“But just because I am damned does not mean I have no feeling. My breast is aflame with it. When the necromancer cut your throat, and the blood spouted from it and drenched the earth, it broke my heart and mutilated my mind. That is how much I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Mayhap it’s a selfish thing, this love of mine, but I cannot help this.
Don’t you see? Will you not understand?”
Sister Ursula does, if not with her mind, at least with her body; she feels that phantom pain in her belly and hips again, that ache of gathering another’s suffering to her and feeling it as if it were her own.
“God wouldn’t…” she begins.
“Damn God!” Elsebeth screams. She raises her face so she can look at Ursula.
Her cheek looks all bruised from having rubbed it against the rough fabric of Sister Ursula’s dress.
A button has been stamped just below her eye like a brand.
“He took everything from me. My home, my family, even you. What right did He have to do that?”
Helplessly, Sister Ursula says, “Every right. He is God.” Her voice is hoarse and soft now; Elsebeth’s embrace is like a winding sheet, tight and choking.
“But why would he do this to me? What have I done that would warrant such a correction? Nothing, nothing! I do not claim to be free of sin, but I am no worse than many others, yet I do not see them suffer as I do. Or do you deny this?”
“I can’t think right now. Please, don’t hold me so tight. It hurts.”
Elsebeth groans, this deeply animalistic sound full of pain, and tightens her grip, her hands clawing at Sister Ursula’s dress.
Fear takes possession of Sister Ursula then, an instinctive terror at being suffocated. She can no longer stand still but begins to buck and writhe.
They struggle then, an awkward moment of shoving and grabbing, pushing and pulling that only ends when Sister Ursula bites Elsebeth’s cheek.
Shocked, Elsebeth recoils, her hand pressed to the seamed line left behind by Sister Ursula’s teeth.
Sister Ursula flees.
“No, don’t go! Please don’t leave me!” Elsebeth wails, but Sister Ursula doesn’t stop.
It seems that all she has done lately is run.
It has strengthened her legs and lungs, and so she keeps running for a long time.
When she can’t go on anymore, she crawls into a thicket that will obscure her from anyone on the road.
It’s not unlike that place where she and Elsebeth hid from those soldiers.
It even smells the same, of bitter earth and green sap.
Shall such scents now forever recall Elsebeth to her?
She finds that corpses can cry after all.
* * *
Something gently nibbles her earlobe. Sister Ursula sits up and discovers she is in back in her cell. It smells of incense and damp stone, and is cool as a cup of fresh water.
On her pillow lies the skull, coppery hair spread around like a halo, eyes keen behind the silk mesh.
“I am dreaming,” Sister Ursula says, her heart sinking inside her chest. For a moment, she believed she was home.
She resists the urge to grab the skull and hurl it at the wall, or shake it till the glass eyeballs spin in their sockets. “You have quite a lot of nerve, invading my dreams after all you have done to me and Elsebeth.”
Immediately, the skull shoots into the air and rages, “How dost thou dare call thyself a Christian when thou art so uncharitable to a poor creature such as me? If thou hadst suffered as I have, thine head and body in two different places, thy poor self betwixt death and life, thou wouldst not dare speak to me thus! I have no other way to speak anymore but through dreams.”
The skull’s anger and self-pity feed the flames of Sister Ursula’s anger. “And how well you used that ability to manipulate Elsebeth and me into doing everything you wanted!”
“What else was I to do? Wouldst thou have undertaken the dangerous journey to give me back my body, hadst thou known there was no reward for thee? Thou wouldst not. Thou art selfish, like all the rest.”
“We shall never know what I may or may not have done had you not lied to me.”
“I did not lie. I never claimed I was a saint,” the skull says petulantly.
“But you knew Elsebeth and I believed that, and you did nothing to correct us. That is a kind of lie.” Sister Ursula touches her throat. In her dream, the skin is still smooth and uncut. “I suppose I shall understand why you did it soon enough. We are alike now after all, you and I.”