Milk and Honey (3)
The light streaming in through the window beside her came at a harsh angle and highlighted any imperfections on her skin, of which there were not many. He did see irregularities on her upper arm, a series of evenly spaced thin white scars. The scars were barely perceptible as he lightly ran his hand over the patch of skin.
At his touch, she said, “I got stuck in a thicket of brambles and scratched myself badly.”
Not true, he thought.
Oh, true in a way, he’d believe well enough that she scratched herself up badly time and again when she was in the woods. But that was not what had left these traces. Those for certain had been set deliberately, and not with thorns.
He knew that the Northerners still practiced rituals of blood-letting for nearly every malady or misbehavior you could think of, as they valued traditions from the Dawntime higher than the findings of physicians, who had long turned away from such counterproductive methods in this age of reason.
He thought of something that Sister Noiramas had pointed out to him from her dealings with the hooded novice.
This is what you do, Anrirathu, isn’t it? You give an answer that you hope we’ll accept for a question we haven’t quite asked, an answer that is true perhaps for another question but not the one that matters. You would like us to form our own false image of what you are?
He stepped back and asked her to turn again, now knowing what to look for. He found it in a small white trace situated in a most vulnerable spot on the lower belly; halfway between the navel and the pubic bone. Again, he very lightly touched the spot.
She cringed and moved to cover herself and turn away from him, her facade of indifference to her nakedness crumbling.
He retreated from her, picked up her clothing and held it out to her. She dressed with her back to him.
“How did the... injury occur?”, he asked.
She answered by telling him of how she’d broken her arm. How she’d come into an orchard that seemed half-abandoned, rich with apples ripe well past the time they should have been picked and brought to market. How she climbed up and feasted on them. How she heard someone approach, and fell, trying to climb down quickly to escape. Not so easy when your vision is hampered by having to cloak your face. Instead of punishing her, the man had done his best to pamper her, and wanted to take her to the settlement in the valley. He mentioned how too many of his farmhands had run off in Spring, to join with some foreign army for gold and glory, and far too few had come back. Not nealy enought hands for the harvest so he didn't mind a poor wretch stealing a few apples. She had not wanted to hear anything about the village and had struck out on her own again, but that had been a mistake as the fracture didn’t set properly and she was unable to fend for herself as before. Soon she had been starving and lost.
That was part of her story but of course not what he had asked for.
He waited for a moment as she looked out the tower chamber’s window into the middle court and composed herself. She was looking down into the middle court.
There stood the posts.
Four apiece the posts of the Lesser Penance which were occupied almost every morning. The Lesser Penance would smart but still permit you to do that day’s work. Anyone in the Order, novice or initiated, could seek it out anytime.
Three were the posts of Purification; at one of them Mirasintsa had squirmed and cried this morning. Novices like her were not yet allowed to choose their purifications for themselves; initiates could stand there when they felt the need. No work would be expected for the day after a Purification.
Two posts for the Greater Penance, which could only be administered to those who were found to carry betrayal in their heart.
A distance from all others, a single one, the Black Post, so called because it was never cleaned of blood. It was only used when Heresy was discovered within the order. That had not happened, luckily, during the years he had held his office.
She considered them, and then sat down again on the stool in front of the desk.
“You have said that your shroud is as much for our protection as yours.”
“Do you dare tell me, … what would I see if I lifted it? What is it in your face that is so dreadful to look upon? What would come to pass?”
She rose up again and turned away. After a long pause,
“You would look upon … the face of fear itself. Your very own fear. The... innermost, utmost fear that is found in you. You may not even know it lived in you. You might not be able to name it, or you might have known it and forgotten it in childhood. The Adversary, the one who stands behind Death himself. Death who mercifully stretches out his arms to catch you lest you should fall to that Curse. The Nemesis. Phobia. It would etch itself on my face in that very moment. Just for you. And that is what you would see, when you look upon me.”
Some of these words were not her own, he knew. You've done some reading, haven't you?
“If your face is revealed with no one looking?”
“Then… then… in the light, in any trace of light, it just… hurts… the moon is enough. In the night, every shadow seems to burn my face…”
“Anrirathu”, she spat out her now-revealed name bitterly, “Child of the new moon. It is the only time I can dare to feel fresh air on my face! But only alone! There must be no one near with lamp or torch.”
“The tomb. Or the tomb. I could live in a tomb...”
She was choking on sobs now and the High Priest got up and laid his arms around her in attempt to comfort.
She was frozen stiff, her hands sticking out awkwardly behind his back, a tremor in her body, until the rigor that had gripped her subsided and she let her weight fall on him, wrapping her arms around him and resting her head on his shoulder. It must be incredibly difficult, she had such grief to share, but always had to stay under that hood. Concealing her face and swallowing her secrets.
He remembered how completely she had withdrawn into the abandoned hermit’s cave in the first weeks at the Order.
He had kept a tally of the times when he caught her at near-falsehoods, evasive statements and deliberately misleading answers, but he had no doubt concerning her sincerity about the condition of her curse.
She recovered and began to speak again.It is surprising that she is willing and able to speak of her curse at all, the Priest thought. Most victims of such powerful black magic were reduced to utter silence or incoherent mouthings when you tried to elucidate their condition.
“I should say that it has happened once that I was revealed in sight of men by accident. That is the same as the light falling on my face. It’s the burning pain striking me, but not them. I believe the curse will leap only at the one who wills to look at me, and I look back at him.”
“What did these men see?”
“I would think what I feel. Scars and knots and ridges. Ugliness. They turned away. “
”It… Father, it changes. In the complete dark, sometimes it feels not much worse than a raised rash. Especially in a place of little sin.”
“A place of little sin?”
“In the wilderness, Father, some place were men go so rarely that it must have been years that anything evil was done or even thought there.”
“And the temple…?”
“There also, to some degree, Father, but forgive me, even the Hall of Ceremony is not as free of sin as the distant wilderness. The vaults under the Temple though… Sister Noiramas took me there once. Complete darkness, hardly anyone ever ventures there. If you allow, I might want to make my bed there.”
“The heart that goes to the Ceremony wants to be free of sin but we all know it is not. It struggles to be. I know what you mean about the wilderness. The vaults are no place to live in, you’d catch your death in that cold.”
“The Meditations of Mardovant.”, he continued, “You know these texts.”
It was not a question.
“He read from them, in the tent. For her education.”
“He, for her? Who, for whom?”
“The General. The Gabardine general. Stadmar.”
So she had been in Tsilsne’s inner circle. As Sister Noiramas had guessed, from her strange behavior around the maid, Mirasintsa. Whom she seemed to know but avoided.
“He read the Meditations for … the Queen Tsilsne’s education?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know for what purpose he thought it necessary to educate her about the Meditations?”
“One reads them to better know oneself?”
“So it is, I guess. It was Mardovant who wrote first in this way of the Adversary. That a Devil is not some horned creature to be described in a bestiary, but that it is a fiend that hides inside each mortal. Some of what you said echoes the exact words as written twelve hundred years ago. At least, as they are translated.”
“The Devil reads Mardovant too, then, I guess.”, she said bitterly, “or he found the memory of the words in my mind and said them back to me.”
“The Devil spoke to you?”
“Yes, Father. I met the Devil, my Devil, he explained my Curse, and he pressed it upon my face.”
“You walked past the outspread arms of Death?”
“Father, you saw all of me that is safe to look at. Do I look dead? Death did not scoop me up into his merciful arms. The Devil took me as I am, alive.”
“The Devil explained his curse, you say. He told you, that you would become like a Devil yourself, the Adversary, for anyone who looks at you?”
“I am cursed, Father, not infused with the powers of devilry myself. The fire of my face will not burn the world. It would happen once, to one. I know, I feel this to be true, where you to stand me up on a scaffold in front of a crowd and tear off my shroud, in that crowd there would be just one who really sees me, and he would find his Devil, and that would be the end of it. It could be anyone though.”
“As for you, you would then regain your true face, at the price of another's pain?”
“Devils make no promises. What does a devil know of mercy?”
“There was no promise for me to be delivered, for me to be healed. There were only... taunts. Father, this Devil was … inside me. He could… make taunts out of my innermost dreams… make cruel silliness of my most secret wishes and hopes. That is all he gave me. Taunts. I was not challenged by the Gods to fulfill some quest so that I might be restored. I was cursed by the Devil.”
“So you would for evermore carry the face of that person’s intimate Adversary, the darkest dream, the deepest fear of the one who revealed you?”
“The face? It would go deeper.A horrid face can shock for a moment but it cannot be someone’s Devil. I would have to become that thing and walk the earth as it. That is why... I would wish to stay, if I could, as I am for the rest of my life. To be shrouded. Though I fear it cannot be. I would rather be the faceless creature, than the face and form of someone else’s Devil. ‘When I’m nothing I am free’, if I may say. I would rather be a nothing, but my own nothing, than someone else’s demon.”
“That is not what the saying means, but I understand. You believe in no salvation from your curse?”
“There are things that never leave us, that we can never shake off.”
“Here we say, and trust, and practice as a matter of Doctrine: That all can be purified.”
“One way or another, perhaps yes, Father. Who would I be to deny. But some things will always stay.”
“Such as?”
“An evildoer could say, ‘I have been a thief, a gambler, a robber; I ceased with it and repented, and paid back twice all whom I injured, and so I am a thief no more’. But there are things of which you cannot say you were them. Once you become them, you are, forever.”
The Priest thought of his own past. He had not only turned his back, he had done deeds of repentance. He had freed the people on that ship. But there was no way he could go back and effect the manumission of each and every soul his sinful self had ever sold into bondage. Many of them would continue to live like that when he had left the Earth.
“Things that cannot be undone?”
“Father, ... what I have become, and will remain... I am a murderess.”
The young lady was trying her best to be something else, the Gardener forces her into the role of 'Shadow-girl'.
... it only took about 20.000 words to get there 
