The year the plague unfurled its sable sail and made the church bells wail, I walked a land of rot and clot, of blood made mud and mud made blood, where every lane became a vein and every rain smelled faintly of the slain.
The dead were stacked in pits so deep the earth itself seemed sick with sleep, and priests in blackened vestments swung their censers through the pestilent air, chanting prayer after prayer while despair sat naked in every square.
They rose in clouds and shrouds, buzzing hymns above the limbs of the freshly dead, crawling from eye to eye, from thigh to thigh, as though all flesh was merely bread.
It was then we broke the tomb.
Beneath a ruined chapel where the stones were overgrown with bone-white moss and root-black rot, we found her coffin.
Four men strained to raise the lid.
When the seal finally split, a breath escaped the crypt, thick and slick, a funeral exhalation that smelled of spoiled wine, old blood, and forgotten sin.
Another crossed himself until his fingers bled.
Yet when I looked down upon her face, I felt no dread.
The flesh had retreated from her teeth in a ghastly wreath.
Her cheeks had fallen inward.
Her eyelids were stitched shut by time.
Dried crimson stains ringed her throat like a bridal rope.
Maggots nested in the folds of her burial gown.
Her fingers were blackened twigs.
Her ribs pressed through parchment skin.
Yet all around me men whispered of salvation and revelation.
We placed her upon a litter draped in scarlet cloth and began the procession.
The candles slanted wax tears upon the roads.
Old men kissed the wood beneath her feet.
At first the stories multiplied.
A blind man claimed to glimpse the moon.
Everywhere we traveled, people hailed her as holy and lowly before her.
Flowers covered her bier.
The procession grew so vast it resembled a river.
The saint began to soften.
The saint began to spill.
One morning her little finger dropped upon the road with a sound no louder than a twig snapping in snow.
I picked it up and tucked it into my coat.
Three days later her jaw loosened.
A week after that, a worm-laden strip of flesh slid from her cheek and dangled against her neck.
The stench rolled outward like a curse rehearsed.
Dark fluid soaked the crimson cloth.
Maggots streamed from her belly in pale, writhing ribbons.
The priests burned more incense.
The rot burned through it.
Soon every prayer had to contend with the odor of opened organs and liquefied devotion.
The miracles began to fail.
The hopeful became resentful.
I watched faith decay beside her flesh.
Men abandoned the procession.
One bearer vanished at dawn.
Another disappeared by dusk.
Soon the road behind us was longer than the road ahead.
Through forests where wolves gnawed plague corpses from frozen graves.
Through valleys where gallows swayed and displayed their harvest of blackened feet.
Through monasteries abandoned to mildew and mildew abandoned to silence.
Her arm detached during the first snow.
I wrapped it carefully in linen.
Her teeth fell one by one.
A rib slipped free and clattered upon a frozen road.
I carried it against my chest like a sacred crest.
I braided the strands and kept them beneath my cloak.
The others looked upon her and saw corruption.
I looked upon her and saw continuation.
By winter there was no procession.
The burden and the devotee.
Not as pilgrims speak to relics.
As lovers speak to ghosts.
I told her of every crow perched upon every cross.
I told her of the red moons hanging above plague pits.
I told her of my wounds. I told her how my shoulders bled where the litter carved trenches through flesh and left crimson rivulets running down my back.
The blood soaked my shirt.
The cold sealed it there.
One night I found shelter in a monastery collapsing beneath centuries of neglect.
There, among worm-eaten ledgers and dust-choked scripture, I discovered the truth.
No blessed daughter of Heaven.
The records described a fraud.
A woman condemned and forgotten.
The miracles were inventions.
The legends were desperation.
The faith was fabrication.
I sat beside her all night.
The candlelight flickered across her ruined face.
Across the cavities where eyes had once rested.
Across the split remains of her chest where pale larvae fed among the remnants of organs long surrendered to decay.
Across the stains of ancient blood.
The sound echoed through the monastery like a funeral hymn.
Because everyone else had carried her for what they imagined her to be.
I had carried her for what she was.
The truth altered nothing.
Snow drifted through the shattered roof.
I gathered the bones that had fallen loose.
I tied her remains together with crimson cloth.
I bound her shattered limbs.
I placed her skull where it belonged.
My hands came away slick with old rot and fresh blood alike.
Then I lifted the litter once more.
Warm blood flowed down cold skin.
Church bells rang somewhere beyond the storm.
Like the beating heart of a dying kingdom.
And into the white wilderness I walked, carrying a woman who was never holy, beneath a sky the colour of old wounds, while crows wheeled overhead like scraps of burnt scripture, and blood marked my path in a ribbon of red, as though the road itself had opened a vein to follow where I led.
For by then I could no longer tell whether I was bearing her to a shrine, a grave, a pyre, or an altar.
I knew only this: The flesh had fallen. The miracles had vanished. The faith had perished. Yet still I carried her.
