Winters for our Sins II

estershire

In Estershire, where Deerdown meets Rutherston Walk and old Mrs. Eyton keeps a quaint garden of lavender growing by the road, a house had been supported by an unusual pair of stilts. It had a conventional door and, for being the property of a rich merchant, three front-facing windows with wooden shutters closed and sealed against the cold. The door and the entry path flanked the village street while the largest portion of the house, the bedroom chambers, were added in later years when the rising price of cooperage and the design of a marketplace brought prosperity to the household.

Winston Quirke, the cooper of the Shire and the leading exporter of waterproofed in the Marcher Kingdoms, built this loft for his daughter. The village hated him for it.

Her name was Sherisse and she wore her hair down in the square, dressed her ears with flowers, and represented everything that was inappropriate to anarchic England. When she turned fourteen and her figure took the attention of married peasants, the women of Estershire revolted in their slander circles. Sherisse was the only daughter of a rich merchant and could afford to live a luxurious lifestyle and to avoid the spinning wheel that others of her demographic obliged. Stories were invented of how she spent her free time; from corner-working to midnight rituals of witchcraft in their vicious spectrum. Despite the rumors, Sherisse continued her practice of coy nonchalance and, in secret, spent most of her time with a man she met from Caer Gwaun. He was a priest—a holy man whose piety she adored. A fire was flickering weakly beyond the loft shudders where she currently attended to him. He had injured his hand on his way through the woods.

"Don't go to the trouble, Sheri. They'll push a way out on their own. It's that way with human skin," he said. Along with the fireplace, the room was lit by a candle by the bedside where the two of them sat. Linens were layered and styled in Sherisse's extravagant manner. An embroidered pillow had been sewn by her grandmother and propped against a wooden headboard.

"You need a surgeon. You'll get the gangrene. And don't give me anything about divine purification. You are a man like the farmers that I see without fingers. If we are to be married then I want this one to wear a ring like when Barons take wives. You would wear a ring to show me devotion?"

"I would. Of course I would."

"Then let me take your hand and you can tell me how lovely I am while you bite on this branch."

She dipped the paring knife she was holding in a pot of coals, wiped it clean with a rag, and began digging in his palm. Her motions were delicate and strong but she had not been trained. He bled in lines down the swollen underside of his hand where it was punctuated by knifetip wounds and by large pine splinters and where the epidermal layer was rubbed away by friction. A glistening sweat of pus had reacted to rigorous washing and was inching its way down his wrist.

"Your poor finger," she said, twisting with the knife. "This one is barely anything but bone. We had better get you a proper walking stick so you don't trip again."

He nodded obediently, and his eyes were welled in the extent of pain. His mind wandered to the Wairwulf and to the chase that happened prior. He could never share this memory with her—she wouldn't let him take that road again, and he wouldn't have her company in those vast winter evenings before a trade route was established.

"I just need a bandage. We'll use my father's wool and you'll be more comfortable." She said, and she ducked down the stairs before returning with the gauze. The man kept his palm upward where the series of holes were leaking a generous pool into its center. When she wrapped the wounds, there was enough fluid to create a glue.

"Promise me you will pray to God for your behalf." She told him.

He, who had pulled the stick from his teeth and placed it on the table, nodded.

"And mine? You can't rot, Tomas. It would be terrible."

"I promise. I can't lose my hand, either."

He placed his bandaged palm at an angle of extreme care and stretched back across the matting. Sherisse abandoned her knife to the corner table and curled beside him, resting her head on his stomach. Her blonde hair had been braided in the way she prefered and she struggled, at that angle, to keep the purple lilac from crumpling on her ear.

"It doesn't make me sick, your blood." She said.

He made a low sound of recognition.

"I usually get sick when I see blood, or when someone is injured, and I have to turn away. It's not like that with you. Is that silly?"

"Not really, I guess. I don't like seeing my own blood. I couldn't be a soldier."

"Well you belong with the church. I believe we're all destined for a position decided before we are born. It's all written in stars and in Heaven." She said, and she arched her back. Being sixteen, she had adjusted to the contour of her frame and could bend in ways that weakened her male company. She listened to him swallow hard when she forced her breasts up toward the lip of the tiny yellow frock.

"And what's yours?" He asked. He placed his own head of tangled hair on the pillow and was staring at the steepled roof.

"I will be a beautiful wife and will make beautiful children whom shall inherit the fortune of my family."

He smiled down at her. She had hazel eyes that flicked with confidence and a rosy complexion where her happiness at that moment caused a visible glow. She had no reason to doubt herself.

"Tell me again about heaven. What it's like, and what you see when you're there." She said.

"No man knows what heaven is like exactly. You see a great tunnel and stairs that climb to gates that are tended by Angels. In revelations, the Kingdom of Heaven will descend upon Earth as a holy citadel. I suppose it could look like Caer Gwaun." He mused.

"That's blasphemy." She struck him, and placed her hand on the leg of his trousers. "Those big walls are unsightly. There must be orchards like when I read of Eden."

He paused, smirking. He was five years her senior and the desire in her body language was transparent.

"Sherisse, are you tempting me toward sins out of wedlock?"

She curved herself further so she could look at him upside down with a guilty slant to her eyes. "We're getting married. I could make the arrangements now. I have a ring of my mother's in the drawer down stairs."

She climbed on top of him and pushed his chest down against the matting, careful not to harm his bandaged hand.

"I want you to. With sin, it's always the woman who decides. How can it be something wrong when my body, that God has created in his own vision, tells me it is right?"

"It's a tribulation, Sher."

"You don't have to do anything. I know how—Livia told me. You cannot very well fight me with your hand, and it would be no crime. No one would know the difference except me."

"I just don't think it's a good idea," he said. "I would be guilty of influencing you."

He stiffened awkwardly and kept his eyes on the fireplace behind her. Watching him, she let out a furious sigh and, driven to conquest, held her provocative stance above. She could not understand at her age and her beauty that someone might not desire her.

"I'm tired, anyway. Can't you lay beside me?" He asked. He began to speak again but he was interrupted.

She silenced him as women will with a hurried kiss and a clash of teeth. She straddled low and put a warm hand under his shirt, undressing his trousers and forcing her open thighs around his bare mid-section. He relaxed into her motions and their kiss became a tangle of distracted lips while each body found its place within the other. The straps of her frock slipped over her shoulders to allow her tempting chest to bounce and she, in the glorious pain of her first sexual venture, let go a carnal moan.

She hooked her neck over his shoulder to press her lips and her tongue to his flesh there. She breathed against his skin like a vampire, savouring the taste of foreign enzymes. When he shuddered, she drove her pace against the pain it caused her loins. Her heart was racing, her tongue was numb, and his hand on her back lit a fire within her. His fingers gave her a delightful sensation of pressure that stole from the warmth at her abdomen. She at once realised that he was scratching her—deep enough that her blood dripped from the lacerations.

"Tom!" She cried. Her hand to her mouth, she pulled a mat of hair from behind her lower lip. She struggled her way and squirmed upon him but he was deep within her. When she looked down at him, Tomas was no more a man. Thick brown fur had covered his face. He had developed between his eyes a lupine snout. The proportion of his jaw had drawn like a dog's and she could see fangs behind his gentle mouth, pacified by a dreaming expression. It, as she had been, was at heights of this experience.

It made no growl when it opened its rows of teeth, looking at Sherisse with a lover's serenity and sinking incisors into the cartiledge of her nose. She felt hot blood erupt from the crushed blood vessels and stream down her breasts as those delicate olfactory bones were taken from her face. There was a tugging at the corners of her scalp where the skin was being pulled before it broke apart across her cheek and just under her eye, exposing those mysterious muscles that focused one's vision. She no more felt the sting of that beast between her legs, and her senses were flooded by the clumsy grinding of bone being snapped and swallowed. She realized in a clarity of panic that she must reach the knife on the bedside table.

The creature that Tomas had become was as an upright standing man. It had distinct legs and a hulking torso, swollen with muscles that stretched above the bone. It pulled her to its taught stomach with a taloned, five fingered hand that plunged into the white flesh at her lower back. Its right hand remained bandaged and rubbed against her wildly in an attempt to grip the girl's side.

In her rush of terror, Sherisse knew she had freedom of her left arm. When she turned her head away from the nipping jaws, the skin of her face peeled away and she could feel it dangling there in a flap. Without a nose, the cool air from the shutters brought blood down her throat and into her lungs. She felt a great weight in her head and an invasive shadow spread from the corners of her vision. With her fragile arm extended, she took the paring knife from the bedside table in her fingertips.

The creature that had become of the man she loved was writhing beneath her in the motions of animal intercourse. She could taste, with the iron of blood that streamed down her lips, the foul qualities of its breath. The girl let out a greivous howl that curdled in her throat from the fluids of injury. She had lost her beautiful young face and with it, as a woman of that era, her identity. Rage that welled deep within her crumpled before the mastery of despair. She held the knife to her milky neck and cut into the veins like a saw.

When that hybrid animal left Sherisse to decay she was hardly a skull and a yellow braid. It wore Tomas' jacket in a parody of human behavior. It had no sense to draw the trousers from its ankles and tore at them until they separated into gators. Speckled with red and with pieces of the woman's face, it lumbered down the stairs and toward the door with the intelligent reflex of a bipedal ape. It realized the location of the doorknob at once and released itself into the Estershire evening.

St. Benedict, his mouth agape and in the crescent moonlight, looked down upon the little world with creases of black rust that is known to situate on tarnished silver after a time without polish. The lanterns of scribes that had been winking late that night now rested unattended in black windows. For the overcast skies, few stars could pierce the rolling fog. The beast in the Shire street licked its lips and looked about with the depth of a profound discovery. It had seen its own hand, wrapped in woolen gauze, and studied this with glassy innocence before scraping the material and its caked blood on the pebbles. Sniffing primitively about itself, the creature developed a wounded air. It stood six feet to its full height and whimpered quietly before experiencing shame or fear and bolting for the concealment of the churchyard brush. Adam and Eve with the same expression concerned themselves with clothing as this beast, on his hind quarters, struggled with murder.

"Who goes there!" cried a voice, belonging to a man. It came from the church, one door swung wide.

At the sound, the beast recoiled and stepped from the gloom into the open walkway.

"Lord have mercy." Said the priest. He cast a lantern's light on the bloodstained scene. "Tomas, what have you done?"

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