(preview image: Bloodborne Fanart by Jeremy Fenske)
AND SO WE DEVOUR
by
Christopher Ruz
Prologue
January 1791
Frosts had awoken the River Rhône.
The ice sheet that’d formed over the past week was now thick enough that a man could stroll merrily from one bank to the other. Sadly, not thick enough for the driver who’d taken a bet to lead his four-horse carriage off the end of the Lyon docks and up the centre of the river. He now lay with his horses on the riverbed, and as Abbe Boucher followed Lyon’s harbourmaster along the scuffed planks of the boardwalk, he looked out at the spot where the driver had plunged into the waters and whispered a little prayer for the lost.
With every word, every breath in, Abbe Boucher felt the hairs inside his nose freeze over. The priest’s feet throbbed inside his shoes. God above, even his lips hurt.
He should’ve been in bed, beneath heaped blankets, composing his next sermon. Sweeping the pews. Reflecting on past mistakes. But he had duties, and today his task was to attend to the dying.
Harbourmaster Dupont’s voice came muffled from behind layered scarves. “The ship is from the Americas, although we don’t know how many stops it made between here and there. One sailor mentioned Algiers. Another, Alexandria. Carrying trinkets bound for Versailles, I heard.” They passed stevedores along the piers working with axes to seperate wooden crates seized by skins of ice. Merchant ships sat bound by the chill, ice clawing up their hulls and sending shocks of needle-point crystals along their gunwales. Dupont pointed to the far end of the docks, where a black-hulled merchant frigate rolled with the river swell. “The doctor said their sickness is likely from spoiled food. Nothing they can pass to us. All that’s left are the final rites.”
The ship waddled heavy in the water, sails slack like old skin. Looping white script along the prow: Washington. A single sailor waited at the head of the gangplank, ushering them aboard; almost skeletal, thin-limbed and hollow-eyed. As Abbe Boucher raised one hand in greeting the wind turned toward him, and he caught a sweet stink coming off the ship that brought tears to his eyes.
Rot. The sickness that came with long voyages, scurvy and hunger and loneliness. It was a long journey from the Americas, and not all were strong enough to survive the thrash and spit of the waves. “How many are dying?”
“Three men. Two are raving and the third is close enough to death that it doesn’t matter either way. I thought it prudent you came to minister to them before the end. Although, perhaps we should make it four. That fellow up there doesn’t look like he’s long for this world.”
“I brought no bread,” Boucher said. “Nothing for communion.”
“They couldn’t eat even if they wanted to. Besides, I don’t even know if they’re Catholic.”
“Why me, then?”
“Because your parish is close.” Dupont crunched up the gangplank, ice crystals splintering beneath his feet. “Because I miss our conversations. And maybe because I knew you wouldn’t say no.”
Boucher held his protests as the lone sailor waved them towards the hold and the reek of decomposition grew worse, so thick he could almost taste death at the back of his throat. The sounds of Lyon—the morning church bells and the clatter of carts and the barking cries of stevedores—faded away as they descended, swallowed by the groan of the Washington as it rocked gently against chains of ice.
The frigate’s hold was a forest of spider-silk bedding strung tight between beams. Every breath burned Boucher’s throat, and he fought the urge to run back towards the light, the sweet kiss of fresh air.
The three men lay in cots, twisted upon themselves, brows gleaming with sweat. Their fingers were bent back in pain and their cheeks were livid with bruising. Hard to tell whether it was inflammation or blood pooling beneath the skin.
The sailor who’d brought them aboard hung back inside the doorway, unwilling to get any closer to his companions. He coughed into a clenched fist and said, in English, “They wouldn’t give confession even if you asked.”
It was many years since Abbe Boucher had visited London, and his English was rough. “When did it begin? Did they eat any bad food?”
“They ate well,” said the sailor. “We all ate well.”
“Stop in any strange ports?” He thought of the Austrian physicians, their new theories of contagion that dwelled in microbes, small enough to vanish in the folds of your skin. “Meet any strange people?”
“All ports are strange,” the sailor said, and retreated into the dark.
Dupont, too, hung back. “Do what you need to,” he said, voice suddenly trembling. “Make it fast, Abbe. Please.”
The leather soles of Boucher’s shoes squeaked on the planks as he approached. The sick men were insensible. Eyes rolling, lips fluttering silently.
Yes, he’d make it fast. No need to extend their suffering. He’d seen it before; men balanced on the precipice, waiting for the final touch from a priest before stepping over and letting go of their pain. He could be that release.
So why were his feet so heavy now? Why did he hesitate to approach? Wasn’t this his purpose: not to salve the guilt of Lyon’s politicians and aristocrats, as he did each evening in private services, but to salve the pain of the third estate, the labourers who would have broken bread with Christ himself?
One more step. Even in the gloomy hold he could see the terror in the first man’s eyes. The dying sailor’s irises were yellowed and when he blinked it seemed to Boucher that his pupils were almost… thinned.
And now those eyes rolled. Fixed upon Abbe Boucher.
He kept himself from jumping back. “My child.” He drew the sign of the cross above his body. “Through the great goodness of his mercy, may God pardon…”
The man whispered, in a voice made sibilant with thirst, “Father. Father.”
“Yes?”
A whisper, too low for Boucher to make out. He inched closer. God, how he hated the dark corners of the hold. Too many shadows pooling there, seeming to leap and twist with each slow motion of the Washington yawing against the river ice.
Almost as if someone or something were standing just out of sight.
“How many aboard, did you say?” he called to Dupont.
“Four, including the man up top.”
Only an illusion, then. Oh, how he wanted to believe. “Four? You’re certain?”
“Just say the words already, Abbe.”
It was the closeness of the hold that made it so hard to think. The cloying air, the sores he could now see blooming blue and black on the tip of the dying man’s tongue.
He needed to finish this.
Abbe Boucher leaned over the dying man. Brought his ear within a half-inch of the sailor’s lips. In broken English, he managed, “Do you wish to confess, my child?”
“I went below,” the man whispered.
“Where?”
“Below. I shouldn’t have.”
One long, hacking breath. When the sailor gasped, a sore on the tip of his tongue split, wept yellow.
“It saw me,” he whispered. Thin fingers tightened on Boucher’s collar. “It saw me! It saw me!”
#
“It was cleanly done, Abbe. Could have gotten us out of that hold a little faster, but…”
Boucher and Dupont had left the Washington behind in favour of the docks, where Boucher sucked down air. The stink inside the hold had left a greasy film on his skin, and the madness in the dying man’s eyes, the flicker of motion at the edges of his vision, the trick of the light that made those shadows billow and stretch…
He distracted himself by watching the docks awaken. Even with the river frozen, cargo had to be moved, reorganised, auctioned. Crates and containers wrapped in canvas, barrels and antique chests lifted high by cranes and pulleys, sailors steaming in the chill air as they hauled on tar-black ropes. A few sailors had dared inch out onto the ice, axes in hand, in an attempt to free their frigates. They sweated and cursed in rhythm, their languages a frantic mix of English, Dutch, German, rough-hewn American.
Lyon was growing. No longer just the home of French silk, no, it was the hub through which grain and gold flowed outward across France. Simmering, bulging, alive.
Abbe Boucher hated it. The stink of the docks, the swill in the gutters. Even seeing Dupont again for the first time in nine months—and goodness, how his position as harbourmaster had aged him, gray in his temples and in his eyes—could not soften Lyon’s rough edges.
“Always a shame,” the harbourmaster said. “Dying so far from home. That’s why I never took to sea, Abbe. If I have to be buried, bury me in France.”
“And you’re sure it isn’t the plague? Smallpox?”
Harbourmaster Dupont didn’t answer, and Boucher was struck by the image of this sickness clinging to his clothes, his skin. A poison he couldn’t see but could carry, could press into the palms of Magdalene and then from Magdalene to sweet Emilie…
No. To think on that would invite madness.
“I confess, I’m glad you came,” said Dupont. “Not just to administer the rites. To see a friendly face. It’s been a difficult year and we’re not even half done with the bastard. Cargo going missing and the damn freeze stopping river trade and taxes, taxes, always more taxes. But no riots lately, thank God. Thank Chalier, maybe. I’m tired of it, Abbe. One day, it’s the royalists kicking up dust. The next day, the Jacobins. First they call for King Louis to show a firm hand and then they demand a fresh constitution, and they fight in the streets and throw tiles through windows and… I’m tired, Boucher. I just want to run an honest port.”
Dupont wasn’t exaggerating. Lyon was no longer the sparkling city of silk and promise it’d been in his youth. Trade had turned it into a clutched fist of tenements with spiral staircases winding skyward like parasitic vines clinging to the stone. Gutters flowing red and thick with offal from the butcheries. Tailors sitting cross-legged in the front windows of their stores, huge silver scissors in hand, the violent snip snip snip cutting through the morning frost, the sewer flow out front of their stores stained lurid by the run-off from the mills where ten thousand women with blistered hands dipped their fabrics into caustic dyes, dried and measured and dipped again.
A city of hunger and misery.
A city he was wedded to.
But Dupont didn’t need to hear him complain. Instead, he said, “Honesty may be too much to ask in these times. Settle for profitable, if you can.”
“You always had a dry wit, Boucher.” The harbourmaster pointed up the pier, to where stevedores were wrestling a stack of rope-bound cargo into a neat pile. “See that? Everything that was aboard the Washington. Imagine coming so far and dying in a foreign land for so little. Your legacy reduced to a scrap of undocumented cargo.” Dupont shrugged. “Then again, sailors come and sailors go. I’ll gather their names, make sure someone takes word back to the Americas. All that’s left now is to manage the cargo.”
It wasn’t the crates wrapped in oilcloths that had Boucher’s attention. It was a blunt-edged box in heavy netting off to the side of the pile that snagged his attention.
“Ah,” said Dupont. “It’s interesting, isn’t it? Some relic destined for Versailles. This ship was supposed to continue a hundred miles upriver to Chalon-sur-Saone and unload, but…”
The box was five foot long, maybe two foot wide. Not wood. Stone, heavy, blunt, the lid stepped like some miniature ziggurat and the edges carved with looping glyphs. Some ancient alphabet of hands and snakes and eyes.
“They call it a sarcophagus but that’s just a fancy word for coffin,” Dupont said. “The Ottomans dug it up, sold it to the British, who sold it to King Louis. We contacted couriers at Chalon-sur-Saone but they won’t send a wagon. Not a good time to be seen ferrying fancy gifts to King Louis or that damnable Marie, understand?”
Abbe Boucher didn’t like it either. The coffin had, he thought, an unkindness about it that offended the eye. Maybe the harsh, jagged lines left by the chisels that’d carved out those runes along its sides. Maybe the runes themselves, serpentine, knotting.
“The question is,” said Dupont, “What to do with it all. Most of the cargo I can sell easily enough, but that box… Could be a thing inside, what do they call it? A mummy. Could be jewels. You know our Mademoiselle Marie had a taste for the fine things. A whole box of stolen necklaces, perhaps. Or ivory. Silk, perhaps…”
Boucher didn’t know what compelled his tongue, what drove the sudden panic breaking out as prickling chills across his skin. Only that he had a sudden, terrible revulsion at the thought of that lid being disturbed. At somebody peering into those dusty, forgotten recesses.
“If it’s jewels or ivory,” he said, “you’ll be tempted to sell them. Maybe today, maybe a year from now, but you’ll be tempted and you’ll give in, and the people you sell to will remember your face. They’ll hear Dupont and think of royal money. That’s a quick path to the guillotine. Bury it, my friend,” he insisted. “Bury it somewhere Louis’ men won’t ever find it. Somewhere you won’t ever be tempted to look inside. There’s trouble enough in this town without you poking into royal secrets.”
Dupont was silent a while. Then: “I can see why half our parliament comes to you for their advice and confessions.”
“They come because I know how to keep my mouth shut.” Unlike half the other priests in Lyon, who had signed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy without complaint, who had traded away their loyalty to God to secure political favours.
Sometimes Boucher wondered whether he was the fool for not joining them in that blasphemy. A man needed every advantage he could get, especially a priest who refused to swear an oath to France… not just to France, but to France above the church, above the pope, above God…
Down on the docks, a sailor tossed an old tarpaulin across the sarcophagus, and Boucher’s heart unhitched by a few precious degrees.
Even so, the dying man’s last whispered words sat heavy on his shoulders. “You’ve seen a lot of sick men come into port, haven’t you?”
“Every sort of man there is to see.”
“Is there a sailor’s illness that leaves men raving?”
“Sailors don’t need a reason to talk nonsense. But yes, many. They scream at the skies and drink seawater. They gnaw off their own fingers. Fuck each other and then toss each other overboard. Why, what did he tell you?”
Boucher looked over his shoulder, up the gangplank, to where the lone sailor still waited, one bony hand clutching the taffrail. Something in his expression chilled Abbe Boucher down to his toes. A pain, a haunting, like the eyes of those few young men who’d returned from the war in the American colonies, quiet and closed-in and always grinding their teeth down to stumps.
“Don’t call on me again, Dupont,” he said. “The air out here doesn’t agree with me.”
#
It was two days later, while waiting in the long line outside Henri’s Bakery, when Boucher heard about the sailors found floating in the Rhone. Dead by gunshot: one to the chest, the other two through the soft roof of the mouth and into the brain.
Of the fourth sailor or the Washington, there was no word.