The Crimson Outlaw by Beecroft Alex

Author:Beecroft, Alex [Beecroft, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2013-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

Sunlight was pouring through the inner courtyard windows of the room when he awoke, sweltering, sweating all over from too much heat, his cheeks burning and his mouth dry. From the kitchen came the sound of the whole village gathered to cook and eat together—familiar jokes told in voices to which the resilience was returning. Easy-sounding laughter and quarrelling, and a rattle and clash of plates.

Vali shoved the many sheepskins off the bed and lay luxuriating in the cool for a few moments before he realised that the biggest source of heat in the bed was Mihai. All the points of contact that had been a comfort the night before were now almost burning hot. The man had a high temperature when healthy, but this was like being pressed against a stove. Sitting up swiftly, Vali threw back the rest of the sheets and saw that Mihai’s whey-pale skin was now crimson as blood. He looked more burned than Maria, and his eyes were half-slitted—a stripe of pearly white showing between the lids as he muttered half-formed words to himself in a breathless wheeze.

When Vali burst into the kitchen in panic, he received little sympathy.

“It’s the wound fever.” Nicolae did not look up from his breakfast of soft eggs and coffee. He had the air of a man who felt he’d done enough and was now owed a rest. “It’s fine. Put the covers back on him and let it burn itself out. God willing, he will come through it well enough.”

“And if God isn’t willing?”

“Then there’s nothing you or I can do.”

Maria was up, looking like some newly hatched demon spawn, slathered all over as she was with green salve. At her mother’s urging she came over to hug Vali, then ran back behind her mother’s legs and shyly observed him from there, holding on to her mother’s skirts with a bandaged hand. He wiggled his fingers at her in greeting, and smiled when she smiled, but was glad to be able to turn back to the matter of Mihai at once.

“Isn’t there medicine for it? Isn’t there anything we can do?”

Father Petru drew out an unoccupied chair and sat, applying himself to his own breakfast, managing to make it seem as though he had inserted himself between Vali’s glare and Nicolae’s hangdog resentment entirely by accident. He waved a hand at the massive reinforced door that lead out into the central keep of the fortress. It now stood open, and the church was visible through it, surrounded by the modest flowers and heavy fragrance of a garden of herbs. “You could pray. Or you could keep your mind off it by helping with the rebuilding. The warriors pass through, Hungarians, Austrians, Turks, Wallachians, Moldavians, and they think they shape the world. But underneath there is always the harvest to think of, the crops to plant, the animals to feed. These things don’t stop for the sword.”

So Vali spent the morning learning to guide a team of oxen to drag half-burnt support timbers out of the ashes of two houses.

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