The Cross and the Black: The Three-Episode Box Set

The Cross and the Black: The Three-Episode Box Set

By Luwa Wande

Smashwords Edition

Copyright By Luwa Wande 2014

http://omnifish.wordpress.com


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IMPORTANT


This story contains Christian blasphemy and non-explicit depictions of homosexual desire.

Chapter One


It was Lent, the season of grieving and repenting and braying sententious monks. Enter here, Claude Severin ambling to the wine shop, grinning like a happy baboon on this feast day of St. Joseph, patron saint of manly losers. The melody of a jig sloshed in his heart, its rhythm light in his fingers. Passersby gave no eye to his threadbare tunic or his ragged hose; nor did they stop to admire his hat lined with velvet and a red plume—a gift from an apothecary for times sweaty and happy.

Claudi, Claudi, came the strident trill of Tomasa and Simo rushing from behind him.

Claude, clutching his money purse, clucked silently. Turning to face the brother-sister duo, he made ready to harden himself. But the sight of Tomasa’s scrawny bosom heaving behind a tattered bodice and Simo’s little hands scaly with scabies scars broke a dam in his heart. He gritted his teeth and willed himself strong. You had to be or you would find yourself poorer than a grave if you gave ear to every pauper in Toulouse.

I have no coin for you, Claude said.

Tomasa’s steely eyes worked him over. A few denier for Simo’s bread—

This coin, Claude shook the coin pouch before their ripening eyes, is for the good wine my master had ordered me to buy. He growled at the thought of justifying his nineteen-year-old self to a thirteen-year-old wench.

Was it not two weeks ago, your master paid you last—

My coin is for my person.

"Oc, yours to throw away to the demons of wine and sloth."

Claude growled at the sky hoary and grey. No, the demons of wine and sloth did not haunt him, but lately that cow-faced, grass-lipped demoness, so called Lady Fortuna, had been a sully wench. Of the thirty sous his master had given him two weeks ago, five sous remained after his settlement of various gambling debts and charitable contributions to other vagrants. And there was a matter of the five sous gambling debt to god-raped student sissies. He shuddered, quirked a glance up the street, and hoped the God-raped sissies were not hiding in the approaching blur of wagons and liveried servants.

Impatient, Claude shifted from one foot to another, and still Simo’s face rounded the perfect fruit of sweetness and grace. He grumbled to Tomasa, Already you lust after another man’s coin. You’re growing up to be a little whore—Ow.

Sharp-lipped, Simo had stamped on his foot. My sister is not like you, you frog sissy—

Tomasa muffled his mouth, and Claude glowered at every second of the boy fighting to free from her strong brace.

Claude sighed. Let him be. Truth is truth. Before the boy would speak too openly about his heretical vice, he made his bid to dive away, but Tomasa held back his elbow.

You will let us some scraps from your master’s wedding feast, please? she asked.

Claude was at once hot and cold. What wedding?

Claudi, you ever jest. I overheard during mass.

Claude laughed a little, raised his hat to let the air cool his overheating head. Yes, yes, you’re all welcome to come. I’ll give you more than scraps.

Her face plumped now with a smile. Claude marveled at how a smile could make the gauntest of faces the loveliest image this side of Toulouse, could even turn an everlasting crone into the freshest of maidens. He dug through his purse angrily and shoved a one sou coin into her hand. You had better keep away from me for the next six months, and I shall drown you both in the Garonne.

St Etienne keep you strong. St Sernin will keep your head ever full of blond lovely hair. St Dennis will grant you the prettiest wife… cascaded the benedictions, which hurled Claude far away into the bramble of wagons.

The money, he reasoned, would be doubled on the morrow because God should at least wink at his charity even if he was a damned soul. God, yes, would take his judgment, but he could count on God to be fair. But of a sudden, a dastardly thought cut through his fluffy notions. This wine he would buy, good German wine, his master had demanded. Usually they drank pipette—a most terrible sour wine—and now this good wine in the middle of Lent? An evil feeling howled deep in his bones—No, it could not be. Church gossip had yielded some spectacular news over the months: Lisette’s bastard baby was born with three arms, Jean-Simon won a duel only to be struck dead by a chamber pot full of shit, and now Serge was getting married? Nonsense! The man was unsmiling in a school of maidens. He knew his master, and his master knew him. With that his mind floated aloft with a quadrille, and his feet sprang to the music of good luck.

***

The vespers bell peals of St. Sernin, St. Etienne, St. Nicholas, rippled across the heavens a meandering, exuberant tirade, ushering him to evening peregrinations around the church square of St. Orens. There was still another ten minutes walk through a network of passages when he came to a three-sided junction. To his right, an ass-drawn cart barred the way. Straight ahead, a peddler with a heavy-looking box on his back was deliberating impassionedly with a fat man, and to his right a group of maidens barred the way. Upon closer inspection, he recognized the shivering pebble of Bearitz Aleçon before a trio of maidens. It was a familiar occurrence for the daughter of Dona Aleçon. The girls yanked at her auburn hair and poked flinty fingers at her kerchief shielding her humble bosom. But Bearitz stood mute and pale, like Mary Magdalene before her accusers.

You dare lift your ugly eyes on our Isarn again.

Your sickly color isn’t good enough for our Isarn.

Cheeks like maggots and you dare bewitch our Isarn.

Isarn, Isarn, Isarn, the name puckered up the fabric of Claude’s mind. Bearitz’s pallid face was truly pitiful, and he was shuffling elbows and twisting gazes and scratching his lice-ridden testicles in his pose of rabid contemplation. Isarn, he thought, a lout of broad shoulders and tawny lovelocks, a thief of his good peace, who rammed down his ears cansos of his love conquests. And Bearitz’s pathetic show of passivity—Claude fisted a hand to his lips—silliness from a wench who should kiss more and swoon less. But men did best not to involve themselves in the squabbles of women.

Swallowing hard, he determined Bearitz would have to learn of courage all by herself. He muscled for the path ahead, but a cramp blundered through his right side. God-raped sissies—three youths striding their boisterous way around the peddler. The men were draped in the brown copes of university students; hilts of illegal two-handed swords poked from their waists. Leading the pack was the stupid one, Benoit. With a prominent forehead and a dimple for a nose, he looked like God had punched his face in before he was born. Claude, hearing their lazy clops against the flagstones, shuddered before a revelation of this puissant God aiming judgment on his unholy arse with the arrow of Benoit’s fury. God’s teeth!

He whirled back the direction from where he had come. But before he could skitter away to freedom, a sound of a magnificent slap stunned him in place. The triplets nodded imperiously over Bearitz, whose lips were rippling in a quiet tremolo of umbrage and cries.

Thou rump-fed toadstools! Claude cried. Why did you witches slap her?

The women focused their venomous stares onto him, and so did the three men.

Marry, is that the sissy who owes me five sous? Benoit thundered.

For certes!

The students brandished blades and annoyance; the wild metallic whine sliced through the barbarous air. The crowd scarcely gasped or shrugged as the clatter of hard boots charged for Claude. In the moment it took to sigh at his fate and huff an athletic breath, Claude sprinted and traversed through the row of the Isarn-addled wenches, grabbing Bearitz as his prize.

Raaaaaat! The students bellowed at the escaping duo in the square of L’Eglise des Cordeliers.

Dog. By the College de Narbonne.

Devil-buggered sheep. By L’Eglise de Saint-Pierre de Cuisines.

All the while Claude’s maiden expended more energy spitting, Bon Dieu, bon Dieu than running her fair share. They darted around the wagons immobile with barrels and the footmen leading ungainly masters. Those idle over the buttery sun knew instinctively to step aside. Even the throng of monks marching barefoot in a penitential procession parted easily before them like the miracle of the Red Sea.

They ducked into a small street tucked in amongst the rose hues of brick houses. Bearitz’s home was a narrow tall two-story building with a massively carved door. He swung her against it and told her to open quickly. Worn out and blue-lipped, she hung her hand on the handle and plopped her head against the door.

Open it!

She did not budge. Footsteps flitted past them.

Claude immediately hunkered over Bearitz, pressed forehead to forehead, embraced her tightly. The pose was scandalous in the not-yet-dim afternoon and more so unthinkable, for he had no feeling desirous of her fluttering eyes. But there were only a few moments to be borrowed from the rich storehouse of impropriety and discomfiture; he hoped and waited and panted.

Claude’s lips quivered.

Bearitz’s eyes fluttered.

Claude’s lips quivered.

Where did that effeminate oaf go? A foreign male voice echoed down the length of the street.

Claude’s face twitched up fireworks, and he turned to the voice’s direction with a passion to demand, who was this lady oaf. But the door opened, and the couple fell over like a sack of flour into a conical figure of Dona Aleçon. Such a lovely couple they were, Bearitz and Claude, rolling and rolling their noses in what seemed like a downy pillow—much too perfumed with a rosy musk.

Claaaaude Severinnnn, Dona Aleçon growled.

Claude kicked off to the side and jumped to his feet. He bowed repeatedly. "God keep you, Na." With a quick one-two glance at both ends of the street, he scurried away before she would fetch her itching powder reserved for the lubberly suitors who asked after her daughters.

Enter here again Claude Severin kicking lazily down Le Rue de la Bourse. He felt safe, safe from the gnarly hands of creditors, safe from Dona Aleçon’s violent fatty hands. He did wonder if the good of saving a maiden from bullies made up for the sin of gambling and absconding from creditors. There was no satisfactory answer on that, and he would just have to ask the priest during his next confession.

As he thought of other theological things to ask his confessor, his blond hair swirled in a sudden updraft. The crest of his ears bit with cold.

He reached for his hat—No hat.

Jhesu Christz! Claude cursed some more, ‘the Virgin’s fingers’ and then hotfooted through a gushing stream of blasphemies, The Virgin’s fingers, toes, nose. When he was about to defame the beloved womb that birthed his Lord and Savior, God conspired to suffer him some reverence and bumped him into dogs playing jingle with their jewels or sooty children with greedy stares. Holy reverence was necessary, the season being Lent and all.

Claude calmed down to a halt as his troubles came to focus. Benoit was not his only creditor. There were two other debts outstanding.

Money. The desire for it was like an unreachable itch.

Claude nodded his head thoughtfully, Should I or shouldn’t I? The innkeeper Picard would have work for him, if it could be called work.

For moral and godly reasons, he should keep away from the vicious Picard at least during Lent, but coin beckoned with its tinkles of pleasures and satiety. Money. The desire for it was like an unreachable itch.

It was decided. Resolutely, he turned around for Picard’s inn in St. Cyprien quarter on the west banks of the Garonne.

Against the canvasses of red brick, evening shadows lengthened their pall. The charcoal stains and brown handprints on the walls blended into the familiar black. The ever-present stink of urine bothered him none, nor did the rot chopped up with the heady aroma of supper bread. The Garonne painted a serpentine grave of spit, sewage, and sand banks. Tournis Island floated to the south. The Basilique de Notre Dame de la Daurade stood sentry over the Le Pont de la Daurade, which spanned a covered bridge across the river. The Hotel Dieu and l’Hopital de la Grave towered jointly like a colossus at the eastern end of the bridge.

Just before crossing the river, Claude covered his ears as he passed by the bellows of a one-eyed Jacobin. The black-robed monk spoke of his fervent vigils before the statue of the Black Virgin in the Daurade church. He testified of the statue crying milk tears. A sign, he wailed, of another summer of plague and dust that would befall Toulouse, just like the last summer of plague and dust. Claude mouthed, "Oc, yes, yes … hell, very hot. Yes, yes … no heaven for me," and shambled into the St. Cyprien district.

The cold, dry air herded him past the busy square of St. Nicholas and swiftly into the warmth of Picard's inn. The room was roaring with a crackling fire, a sonorous troubadour, and men with impatient appetites. Rubbing his hands and jumping in anticipation, he was delighted for the livelier songs rocking the inn and not the dirges of repentance usual for Lent.

From a counter Picard raised his eyebrows, his chest swelling in uplift as though he were