The Briscian Saint

Kage Baker

We shouldn’t have killed the priest,” said the first soldier.

He was one of three who fled from the long high smoke-pall of the burning city and he glanced back now to see what white rider might be flying over the fissured plain, following them.

“Don’t be stupid, what else could we have done?” said the second soldier. “He swung an axe at us. That made him a Combatant, see? So it was all right.”

“But he cursed us, before he died,” said the first soldier uneasily.

“So what?”

“So then the earthquake hit!”

“It didn’t get us, did it?” said the third soldier, as he jogged steadily on.

“It got our side,” said the first soldier, whose name was Spoke. “One minute we’re a conquering army, the next minute the Duke’s buried under a wall and we’re on the run!”

“It got plenty of the Briscians too,” said Mallet, the second soldier, panting from the weight of the burden he carried. “And the Duke never paid us much anyway, did he? So to hell with him, and the priest, and the whole business. We’re clear away with a fortune, that’s all I know. That’s called good luck.”

“We’re not clear yet,” said Spoke, and an aftershock followed as if on cue, making them all stagger.

“Shut up!” said the other two soldiers, and they ran on, and Spoke turned his face too and ran on, peering desperate up at the hills. Only he who rode behind Mallet regarded the flaming devastation, now, staring from the leather pack with wide sapphire-colored eyes. If the prayers of the dying reached his golden ears, he gave no sign, for his faint smile altered not in the least.

By nightfall they had made the cover of the trees and followed a stream up its course, crossing back and forth to throw off anything that might be tracking them by scent. They crawled the face of the wide-exposed stone gorge, expecting any moment to be nailed in place by pistol-bolts; but no one attacked, and when they lay gasping at the top Spoke said:

“I don’t like this. It’s too easy.”

“Easy!” said Mallet, who had carried on his back a statue weighing more than a child. He slipped off his pack with a groan and set it upright, but it toppled over and the golden figure struck the rock, ringing hollowly. Spoke cringed.

“And that’s a bad omen!” he said.

The third soldier, whose name was Smith, sat up. “If it was,” he said, “I’d think it’d be a bad omen for the Briscians, wouldn’t you? Their saint falling over?”

“You’re both idiots,” said Mallet. “Omens! Portents! My ass.”

“If you’d seen what I’ve seen over the years, you’d be a little more respectful,” Spoke persisted.

“My ass,” Mallet repeated.

Spoke crawled to the statue and slipped it from the pack, handling it gingerly He set it upright before them, knelt, and cleared his throat.

“Blessed saint, have mercy on us. We are poor men in need, and we fought only for pay. Our Duke is dead, maybe by your just anger; so be appeased, and take no further revenge on us. We promise to atone.”

Mallet snorted, “I promise to take that thing straight to the first goldsmith I find. The eyes alone are probably worth a farm.”

Wincing, Spoke cried: “Judge us separately, blessed saint! Rebuke his blasphemy as you see fit, but accept my contrition and spare me.”

“Oh, that’s lovely,” said Smith. “So much for being comrades-in-arms, eh?”

“Haven’t you ever heard any stories about this kind of thing?” said Spoke. “Remember what happened to Lord Salt when he mocked the Image at Rethkast?”

Mallet just shook his head in disgust and got up, looking about them. He moved off into the trees, picking up broken branches as he went.

Smith slipped off his own pack and rummaged in it for flint and steel. “Have you ever noticed,” he said, “how those stories are never about ordinary people like us? It’s always Lord This and Prince That who piss off the gods and get blasted with balefire.”

“Well, there could be a good reason for that,” said Spoke. “Highborn people get noticed, don’t they? If they’re punished for sin, everyone sees. Makes a better example than if the punishment fell on nobodies.”

“So the gods think like men?” said Smith, standing up to peer through the shadows. He pulled down a low bough and yanked free a handful of trailing moss, rubbing it between his fingers to see whether it was dry enough to take a spark.

“They must think like men,” argued Spoke seriously. “At least, when they’re dealing with us. They have to use logic we’ll understand, don’t they?”

Smith ignored him, breaking off dry twigs and settling down to the business of starting a fire. He had a little creeping flame established by the time Mallet came back with an armload of dead wood. The wood caught, the flames leaped up; the clearing above the gorge lit in a small circle, and the black shadows of the trees leaned back from it all around.

“Good,” grunted Smith, stretching out his hands. He slipped off his helmet and went down to the water’s edge, where it ran shallow and transparent over the smooth rock before plummeting down in mist. Here he rinsed his helmet out, and brought it back full of water. Arranging three stones close against the flames, he propped it there where it would take heat. After a moment, the other two men followed his example.

They sat in silence, watching for the water to steam. Spoke, however, turned his troubled gaze now and again to the image of the saint.

“Was his face pointed toward us, before?” he said at last.

“Of course it was.”

“I thought—it was looking straight ahead.”

The other two glanced over their shoulders at the statue.

“You’re right!” said Mallet. “Oh dear, what’ll we do now? There Holy Saint Foofoo sits, taking advantage of the fact that all these jumping shadows make him look eerie as hell. As soon as he’s got us good and scared, you know what he’s going to do? He’ll start creeping toward us, a little at a time. Only when we’re not looking, naturally”

“Shut your face!”

“He’ll come closer, and closer, and then—”

“Stop it!”

“Then he’ll realize he’s two feet tall and armed with a teeny little golden tambourine in one hand and a—what is that thing in his other hand?” Mallet squinted at it. “A silver toothpick?”

“It’s supposed to be a dagger,” said Smith.

“Oh, I don’t know how I’m ever going to fall asleep tonight, with a supernatural menace like that around,” said Mallet.

Spoke stared into the fire.

“It was looking straight ahead,” he murmured.

“You couldn’t have seen that, as dark as it was here,” said Mallet.

Smith shrugged and took up his pack again. He pulled out a ration-block wrapped in oiled paper, a little the worse for wear after being knocked around in the company of his other gear. He opened it, picked off dirt and lint, and broke a few chunks into the water in his helmet, which was beginning to steam slightly.

“Let me tell you about something that happened in our village,” said Spoke. “AU right? We had a saint of our own. She watched over the harvest and she kept away the marsh fevers. And if you had a toothache, you could pray to her, and she’d heal you every time. All you had to do was leave offerings in her shrine. And make sure her image was kept polished.

“Well, one time, somebody’s little boy went in there and left a lump of butter in the statue’s open hand. He thought she’d like it. But it was summer, and the butter melted, and then dust blew in from the road and stuck to the mess. When the old priest saw it, he thought somebody’d been disrespectful, and he cursed whoever’d done it. And, do you know, the child was taken ill that very night? And he burned with fever until his mother figured out what he’d done, and she went and made an offering in apology? And right away the child got better.”

“Some saint!” said Mallet, stirring bits of ration block into his helmet.

“Well, it would have been the priest’s mistake, not the saint’s,” conceded Smith.

“Damn right; a statue can’t make mistakes,” said Mallet.

“And I’ll tell you something else that happened!” said Spoke. “The old priest died, and we got a new one. But he wasn’t a holy man. He was greedy, and people began to notice that the offerings were disappearing from the shrine, almost as soon as they were put out. When pig-slaughtering time came around, somebody left a beautiful plate of blood sausages in front of the saint’s image; but they disappeared the same night.”

“Was this shrine outdoors, by any chance?” asked Mallet.

“Listen to what happened, before you laugh!” said Spoke. “This priest had a mole on his face—”

Mallet began to chortle.

“And from that night it began to grow, you see? It got huge, hanging down the front of his face, and it turned dark red and looked exactly like a blood sausage!”

Mallet fell back, guffawing, and Smith snickered. Spoke stared at them, outraged.

“You think this is funny?” he demanded. “This really happened! I saw it with my own eyes! And finally the priest died of shame, but before he did, he confessed he’d been stealing the offerings left for the saint.”

“Sounds like he died of a tumor, to me,” said Mallet. “And I have news for you: all priests feed themselves on the stuff left at shrines. In my city they did it openly. And what’s so unusual about a child getting a fever? Children are always getting fevers. Especially in marshy country. Especially where people are too ignorant and superstitious to go to a doctor instead of a priest.”

“So you’re a skeptic,” said Spoke, as though the word had a bad taste.

“I’m a sane man,” said Mallet. “And proud of it, brother.”

“I did see something I couldn’t explain, once, though,” said Smith thoughtfully.

“I’ve seen—” began Mallet.

Spoke made a strangling noise and jumped to his feet. He pointed at the statue.

“It turned its head!” he cried.

“No, it didn’t,” said Mallet wearily, tasting his soup. Smith turned to look, and went a little pale.

“It is facing the other way now,” he said.

“It’s just your imagination,” said Mallet.

“No, I’m sure—”

“I saw it move!” said Spoke. “Are you both crazy? Look at it!”

“It looks the same to me,” said Mallet. “But if it did move—well, it’s sitting on an uneven surface, right? And we’re outdoors. The wind could have shifted it.”

“It’s too heavy for the wind to shift,” said Smith.

“Then, it didn’t move,” said Mallet with finality. “And if you think you saw it move, then your eyes were playing tricks on you, because statues don’t move.”

“Look at it,” said Smith. “I’m not joking, Mallet.”

Mallet turned and looked. “I didn’t notice which way it was facing before. It might have been facing that way, for all I know. We’re dead-tired, we haven’t eaten in hours, and we breathed in a lot of smoke. How can we trust what we see?”

Smith looked from Mallet to the statue, shook his head, and leaned forward to stir his soup. Spoke backed away a few paces, watching the statue in silence. After a long moment he sat down again, and without taking his eyes off the statue reached for his helmet. It was hot, and he drew back his hand with a cry of pain.

“Uh-oh! Another bad omen,” said Mallet.

“Just shut up,” said Spoke.

Smith slipped out of his jacket and used it to lift his helmet from the fire, gingerly, and propped the helmet between his boots as he dug in his pack for a tin cup. He dipped out some of the soup and blew on it to cool it. Mallet followed his example. Spoke did not. The statue watched them all without comment, as the light danced on its golden face.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Smith inquired of Spoke.

“Not yet,” said Spoke.

“Can we have your soup, then?” asked Mallet.

“Go ahead,” said Spoke.

“Oh, come on!” said Smith. “You can’t be so scared of that thing you don’t eat. That’s stupid.”

“Let him suit himself,” said Mallet, slurping his portion.

“I’ll have it later, then,” said Spoke. Mallet looked sidelong at Smith.

“So,” he said, “How’ll we divide watches?”

“I’ll take first watch,” said Spoke.

“All right,” said Mallet slyly. “That all right with you, Smith?”

“Fine,” said Smith. He glanced over at the statue.

They finished their soup, tilting the helmets to get out the bits that hadn’t dissolved, and pulled blankets out of their packs.

“I’m dead tired,” said Mallet. “Aren’t you, Smith?”

“Too bloody right I am,” Smith replied. He felt about on the rock with his hands, trying to find a place where its bumps and hollows roughly corresponded with his own. Giving up at last, he wrapped himself in his blanket and settled down. Mallet spread his blanket out, and opened Spoke’s pack.

“I’ll just borrow your blanket, then, Spoke, since you’ll be sitting up,” he said. “You won’t mind, eh?”

“No, I won’t mind,” said Spoke.

Mallet fed a couple of sticks into the fire. He stretched out beside it. Smith shifted to make room for him, glancing one more time at the statue. It did not seem to have moved, but he couldn’t be sure.

An hour went by. Tired as he was, Smith couldn’t drop off. The stone on which he lay seemed to suck all the heat from his body As he was debating whether to get up and move closer to the fire, he felt Mallet sit up abruptly.

“Drop that right now,” said Mallet. Smith rolled over and saw Spoke, backing away from the fire, clutching the statue in his arms.

“I’m saving all our lives,” said Spoke. “I’m taking this back.”

“Are you crazy?” Smith said. “The Briscians will cut you to pieces!”

“You idiot, that’s our retirement pay,” said Mallet, who had thrown the blanket aside and scrambled to his feet. He was holding a spike-axe in his hand. “I knew you were going to do something stupid. Give it here!”

“I—” said Spoke, but Mallet lunged forward and grabbed the statue by one raised arm, the one bearing a tiny dagger.

“Give it here!”

“No!”

And it seemed to Smith, as he stared at them, that the golden figure writhed like a living thing between them, turned its shining body, and Spoke must have seen it too because he gasped and let go. Mallet pulled it away from him.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I’ll fix your holy saint right now. I’ll pound the damn thing into pieces right here. The goldsmiths won’t care—”

He knelt and set the statue on the rock, preparing to hit it with his spike-axe, but Spoke leaped forward.

“You mustn’t—”

Mallet turned and swung at him in exasperation, hitting him squarely between the eves with the spike end of the weapon. Spoke halted where he was, staring, and Smith sat bolt upright.

“Holy gods, what’ve you done?”

“Shit,” said Mallet. He pushed at Spoke, who toppled backward on his heels and fell, smacking his head on the rock, carrying with him Mallet’s spike-axe that was firmly stuck in his skull.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” said Mallet, breathing hard.

“You killed him,” said Smith in horror.

“I didn’t even hit him that hard,” said Mallet. “Stupid bastard! If he hadn’t been so superstitious—”

“Spoke!” Smith crawled to his side. He pulled the axe free; slow blood rose from the neat squared hole, ran down into Spoke’s left eye.

“It was his own fault,” said Mallet. “You saw.”

“Well, he’s dead, whoever’s fault it was,” said Smith. He dropped the weapon in disgust. “What do we do now?”

“Pitch him over the edge,” said Mallet, nodding at the falls. “I’m not sleeping by a corpse.”

“That, without even saving a prayer?” demanded Smith. “You can’t be afraid his ghost is going to come make faces at you!”

“Of course I don’t believe in ghosts!” said Mallet. “But it’s stupid to camp by dead meat in a forest. The smell will attract wolves. Lions. Who knows?”

Smith swore at him. He dragged the body to the edge of the rock and arranged its limbs in a less undignified way. After searching through the pockets, he crossed the hands on its chest and stood with head bowed, murmuring a prayer under his breath.

“As though that’ll help him,” muttered Mallet. “That’s what got him killed, you know. That kind of thinking. And he’d have died anyway, if he’d gone back to the city. The Briscians would have liked him, and not quickly either. As it was, he died in a split-second. Didn’t he?”

Smith glared at him but did not miss a word of his prayer. When he had finished, he nudged the body forward with his boot, over the edge, and it rolled from the firelight and dropped, vanished into the shadow. A moment later, from far below, he heard a smack and winced, hoping the body had landed in the water at least.

He walked back to the fire and sat down across from Mallet. The statue lay still where Mallet had dropped it, smiling up at the forest canopy and the few stars.

“Well, that’s done it for me sleeping here tonight,” Smith said. “TU keep watch and you can sleep, or we can both push on.”

“Maybe it’d be wisest to go,” Mallet agreed. He looked at the statue again and cleared his throat. “But it would still be a good idea to break the damn thing up, don’t you agree? That way we can split the weight. You’ll get your share, I’ll get mine, and if we decide to go our separate ways, well, the loot’s already divided. You can have one of the eyes. I’ll take the other.”

“Whatever you say,” Smith replied curtly

“I think they must be aquamarines,” said Mallet, reaching for his spike-axe. “The Tyrant at Deliantiba buys them for his mistress, did you know? Has a standing offer out for good ones. Maybe TU go there.”

He put his hand down to steady the image before he struck.

There was a flash of gold, a glint in the firelight, and Mallet howled and drew his hand back. Smith jumped to his feet.

“It stabbed you!”

“No, it didn’t,” said Mallet, clutching his hand. “A coal popped in the fire, that’s all. A spark jumped.”

“I saw its arm move! It stabbed you with that little dagger!”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Mallet, lifting his hand to his mouth. He sucked the flesh at the base of his thumb. Smith stared at him a moment, and then grabbed for Mallet’s hand. Mallet ducked away, rolling over.

“Let it alone!” he said, putting his hand inside his shirt, but Smith glimpsed the bright blood-bead.

“That’s not a burn, that’s a wound,” he said. “It could be poisoned! What’s the matter with you?”

“There’s nothing the matter with me,” said Mallet, evening his breath. “But I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you. It’s the power of suggestion, isn’t it? You and Spoke, the pair of you, you were raised to buy into everything the priests said. So all that, that superstitious horseshit preys on your minds. See? Even though you know better now. Here we are in the dark in the woods, and we’ve been seeing death all day, and—wouldn’t you think Spoke’d have had more sense than to start scaring himself? And you?”

“Look, I know what I saw,” said Smith.

“No; you know what you think you saw,” said Mallet doggedly. “It’s all in your mind. You’re so worked up, after what happened, that your brain’s making ghosts out of everything. The mind does that. It’s not reliable.”

“Well, your burn is bleeding through your shirt,” said Smith.

“No,” said Mallet, with elaborate patience, “You only think you see blood.”

“Oh, you jackass,” said Smith, and went back to his side of the fire, but he gave the statue a wide berth.

There was a long moment of silence. Mallet stared into the fire.

“Or I’ll tell you what else it might be,” he said at last. “There was an earthquake today, right? And we’re still getting aftershocks. Well, that could be affecting our minds too. Making us hallucinate. Something in the rocks maybe, quartz veins clashing together and all. I’ve heard it makes animals go crazy Hell, aren’t we sitting on a big rock? So there you are.”

He was sweating, and his face had gone pale under the soot and dust of the day.

Smith spoke in as reasonable a voice as he could.

“I’m not arguing with you,” he said. “I don’t believe in omens any more than you do, and I don’t think the saint in Spoke’s village worked miracles. I’m just saying there might be something going on we don’t understand.”

“No!” said Mallet. “Don’t you see that the minute you believe in craziness like this, you open the door and let in the monsters? Give in this much and you’ll believe anything. What you can see with your own eyes is all there is, man.”

“But you just got through telling me I couldn’t trust my eyes,” said Smith. “Or my mind. And if we can’t believe our senses, then how can we perceive anything? There might really be fairies in the flowers. How would we know?”

“The point is,” said Mallet, with some difficulty, “the point is, everything can be explained. All right? Real things can be measured with calipers. We live in a rational world.”

Smith stared at him. “You’re a soldier” he said. “How the hell can you think we live in a rational world?”

Mallet just gazed at the fire. He sighed, and his hand dropped down on his lap. Smith saw clearly the dried blood, the livid swelling that had spread up his arm.

“That thing’s poisoned you,” he stated.

“No,” said Mallet thickly. “Scorpion hiding in the firewood. Maybe. And we didn’t see it.”

There was a tiny noise, like the muffled chime of a bell. Smith glanced over to see that the image had indeed turned its head, was looking straight at Mallet now. Mallet raised his eyes too, looked into the statue’s bright eyes.

“Scorpion,” he repeated. “S’all.”

The chime came again. The statue was raising its arm, the one with the tambourine, slow but unmistakable.

“Mallet,” said Smith, very quietly, “Let’s get out of here.”

“What?” said Mallet. “Nothing there. Nothing to be scared of. It’s just the play of the light.”

“Mallet, the damn thing’s moving right now.”

Mallet said nothing else. He leaned over and lay down, as though he were tired, and his breath began to rattle in his throat.

Smith got up, edged his way around the far side of the fire, and caught hold of Mallet’s leg.

“Come on,” he whispered. Mallet didn’t reply. He dragged Mallet a few feet and realized he was dragging dead weight; Mallet stared up sightless, and now Smith could see that the livid swelling had spread all the way to his throat.

Smith let go; Mallet’s leg dropped like a sandbag. Smith looked over at the statue. It smiled still. Was it moving?

He backed away crouching as he went, not taking his eves off the statue, into the running shallows until water rushed over the tops of his boots. He felt around for a rock. Here: his hands told him he had hold of a good one, the size of a melon, water-smoothed and flat on one side. He hefted it experimentally. Then he lifted it over his head and pitched it at the statue.

It landed with a crash, and the distinct sound of breaking pottery The fire leaped up, bright, shining on Mallet’s dead face.

Smith walked up the bank slowly, but nothing happened. He squelched around the perimeter of the fire. Picking up a long branch from the pile of firewood, he levered the rock to one side.

The image of the saint lay in pieces. It wasn’t gold after all, only gilded; though the gears and springs inside it, all its subtle mechanisms, shone like something precious.

Smith poked through it with the stick. Here was the little glass reservoir, shattered, leaking green venom now, and here was the clever tube that had sent its charge of poison up into the hollow dagger. Here was the lead weight in the base, where the pulleys had anchored that moved the golden limbs. Was this a switch, here, cleverly concealed? Had it been jostled in the rout, or when it had fallen over? What were these characters, inscribed to either side of it? Did they spell out, in fabulously archaic Briscian, BLESS and CURSE?

Or merely ON and OFF?

The face had been cracked open, and both blue stones knocked loose. Smith prodded them each a safe distance from the rest of the debris, and bent and slipped them into his pocket. He pushed the rest of it into the coals, adding more wood to the fire. Then he went back to his blanket and sat down, and pulled off his wet boots.

For a while there were strange popping and chiming noises from the fire, and every so often the flames leaped up in peculiar colors. The wood lasted until morning.

He walked all the way to Deliantiba to see if he could find a buyer for the stones, but the jeweler he consulted laughed in his face. He was kind enough to show Smith a case of real aquamarines; then he showed him foil-backed paste stones, and invited Smith to judge for himself what he had.

A girl in a public house admired them, so he gave them to her in exchange for a plate of fried fish.

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