Free The Scourge (Kindle Serial) by Roberto Calas Page A

hell’s cattle drove. I have never heard a more beautiful sound.
    “I don’t like this,” Morgan says. “These people are sick. We are taking advantage of them.”
    “Morgan,” Tristan says, “do you truly believe this is a plague? That these people can be cured?”
    “The bishops say it is so,” he replies. “And God speaks through the bishops and the priests.”
    “I pray that God isn’t that stupid,” Tristan says.
    I find a stone the size of a melon and use it to batter the lock. It takes four mighty blows before the metal yields. We pull the lock free and scramble to our horses. I hold the hanging flowerpot up by its cord. Sir Morgan lights a strip of thatch with his lantern and uses that to set the plants in the flowerpot ablaze. Thick smoke tumbles up from the mixture.
    The smell of burning water mint wafts thick into the air.
    It takes ten heartbeats for the plaguers to catch the scent. Their moans and hisses turn to shrieks as they push through the iron-studded door and spill onto the moonlit path. They are a nightmare of bloody faces and clawing hands. The first man out is missing his lower jaw. He hisses, and the skin of his torn throat flutters. Beside him a woman rakes at her own face, shrieking as she tears the flesh from her cheeks. They pour from the mill house in an endless stream of madness, their noses flared to the scent in the air.
    I nod to Tristan and Morgan. “The mint works.”
    We trot our horses away from the millhouse and out of Corringham. The legions follow behind us, staggering and screaming.
    In France, I often led companies of men. At Nájera I even commanded the left wing of our formation. But I have never led an entire army out to battle. It has been a secret desire of mine to thunder toward the French ranks with five thousand howling men at my back, our wind-whipped standard held high above my head.
    I have only five or six hundred soldiers behind me tonight. They are men, women, and children, and they are not particularly fast. But they howl with the unholy power of hell. Their lurching footsteps thunder upon the heath behind me. I hold no standard, only a smoldering flowerpot, but I have achieved my secret desire. I ride toward the French with an army.
    An army of the dead.
    The ghouls behind us lose interest in the mint after less than a half mile. They slow and their ranks begin to scatter. We rein our horses so that the closest plaguers can almost lay hold of us, then ride forward again. It keeps the staggering soldiers focused, but only just. Fortunately, we only have to keep the front ranks interested in us. The others just follow mindlessly.
    But each time we try this new technique, slowing and then accelerating, the plaguers seem less and less interested.
    “Soldiers these days,” Tristan says. “No discipline. No dedication.”
    On a hunch I cut open my arm and let the blood flow, and that seems to focus the howling mob for a few dozen paces. But I have only so much blood and we have another four miles to go.
    “Let’s pray that the sun sleeps in today,” I say.
    Sir John will send his forces in at dawn. If I am not there with my demons, he will ride north to kill my angel. I pray to St. Edmund to keep her safe, then look back at the slow, limping strides of my soldiers. I cut another gash into my arm. Blood is their wage. I pray I can pay them well at dawn.

Episode 2:
Historical Note

    Perhaps the most glaring inaccuracy
in this episode, aside from the obvious, is that, in 1381, there was no bridge
across the Temes (Thames) River. There’s a picturesque bridge there now, and a
tunnel, but the Temes is quite wide at that point and building a bridge would
have been a major undertaking.
    Alvilea (Aveley) exists of course,
as does St. Michael’s Church. Father William is a fabrication. I am sure the
priests of St. Michael’s were far kinder, and most certainly are now.
    Corringham exists as it did then.
The great stone church at the center is another St.