Chapter 272 215: The Trial of Piacenza (Part 2)

A wheat field was on fire, the blaze concentrated at its far end.

A few houses were burned to blackened skeletons, as were two dairy cows.

A calf was lowing mournfully on a small hillock, barely visible behind a curtain of white smoke.

The fire would spare the calf.

However, the ten ragged men nearby would not.

They were already testing the smoldering earth, seeing if the heat would burn through the tattered rags and ruined shoes on their feet.

They were already brandishing axes and daggers.

They did not look like farmers.

Eric scanned the field and saw a pair of legs sticking out from an unburned patch of wheat.

This was clearly a murder, and these men had likely set the fire.

'They should have waited and watched longer before approaching, but it was too late for that now.'

The killers had glimpsed the passing carriage through a gap in the woods and evidently considered it a windfall.

One of them spotted Eric. He was initially wary, but then they all noticed the Monk's Robe Eric was wearing. Remembering there were ten of them, they summoned their courage and charged toward the carriage.

But as they broke through the treeline, they discovered they hadn't run into a lone Cultivator, but an entire company—and of Knights, no less.

Eric had the Knights take care of them.

As they continued toward Piacenza, Eric was surprised to find that the city had no garrison.

Not only was there no garrison, Eric didn't even see any guards at Piacenza's city gates.

'That made sense,' he thought. 'If the city had a garrison, those murderers wouldn't have dared to kill and burn so close to the walls. The surrounding farmland belongs to the citizenry.'

This completely contradicted the news he'd gotten from the Tuscan border city of Parma two weeks earlier, before he'd left Tuscany for Pisa.

It also conflicted with the news Otto had brought.

The strangest thing was, there wasn't even a single citizen at the city gate.

The city walls were a yellowish-white, like bone. Towers stood proudly, spaced about a lazy bowshot apart.

Eric had Guy remain outside the city with the main body of Norman Knights, while he himself entered with twenty of them.

They rode for about ten minutes before Eric finally spotted figures in the streets.

The streets were narrow and muddy, and the Knights were disgusted by the filth underfoot.

On some streets, the houses and shops were so close that they almost whispered to each other above the muddy path, shrouding everything in shadow.

Bodies were being collected in handcarts pushed by desperate-looking men. Most of the corpses were mutilated, their faces contorted, and the stale air was thick with the stench of death.

From atop a Church tower, several laughing citizens with bows and arrows were shooting at something in the street below.

As Eric and the Knights rounded a pile of empty, broken wine barrels, they saw the target: a very fat corpse, bristling with thirty or forty arrows. More arrows were embedded in the mud around it, or lay broken where their tips had shattered against the stone building behind.

He wasn't the only target, of course—there were others—but he was by far the most conspicuous.

They were all hanging from gallows.

Eric passed a wooden statue of Christ on a stone pedestal. At its base, a feverish woman was laughing, cradling a dead cat in her arms.

A limping old man looked up at the long-faced statue and muttered, "You're still there, aren't you? If you are, then get down from that thing and do something.

Or at least wink at me. You can do that, can't you? I'm begging you!"

It didn't wink.

But the woman blinked.

Other statues of Saints, Kings, and Apostles stood on pedestals, their stone lighter in color than the greenish-black moss on the walls. Their limbs and faces were sparsely spattered with blood. Though hard to see in the gray light of dawn, the stains looked bright red and fresh.

Eric sighed.

They continued toward the Butcher District. The air grew thick with the smell of blood and guts from slaughtered animals mixed into the mud. Though most of the city was paralyzed, some butchering was clearly still taking place.

A man grinned at them, almost toothless, while slitting the throat of a suckling pig whose feet had just been tied. Blood sprayed onto his leather apron and into a bucket he had placed below. He shouted the price of the pig, but they couldn't hear him over its squeals.

From this point on, there were more people.

Eric soon noticed they were heading toward the city center. 'By convention, the main Church should be at the heart of the city,' he thought.

Eric and the Knights followed the crowd.

Dogs were barking, and children sat on their fathers' shoulders, trying to get a better view.

Men were crying out, beating their chests, and women tore at their hair, fainting from religious fanaticism.

Monks wove through the throng, their voices raised in loud prayer.

Those who had been waiting since dawn were trading their standing spots, selling their positions to those eager to feel the heat of the Holy Fire.

Every window and rooftop overlooking the square was packed with people.

In the center of the square, a wooden stake had been driven into the ground.

Firewood and brambles were piled around its base.

To the slow beat of a drum, a man was brought into the square.

He sat in the back of a donkey cart, which had brought him from the dungeons beneath the Bishop's Palace and onto the main street.

He was wearing a shabby shirt.

Eric realized the "shirt" was a chasuble worn backward, painted with the saltire of Saint Andrew to symbolize his doom.

Beneath his chasuble, the scars and bruises from long imprisonment were visible.

"He deserves it!"

"He hasn't repented!"

"Burn him!" the crowd roared.

The prisoner struggled in his shackles, trying to scream something past the tightly-bound gag. The gag was there to prevent his endless blasphemies from polluting the ears of the devout, and he looked to be in immense pain.

His eyes were wide, not with fear, but with rage.

He was dragged from the cart, his hands bound behind his back.

The gag slipped.

"Only faith can save you all," he shouted. "Not the Church! This is a temple of man, not of God. Only faith, hope, and love—"

A guard struck him roughly to the ground and forced the gag back into place.

The Cultivators moved slowly through the crowd, holding gleaming candles aloft and chanting, "Pray for the lost soul of Jesuade, for today he faces his maker..."

He was brought to the stake and bound with coarse ropes that had been soaked in water to make them burn slower.

There was no iron collar on the stake—no garrote to grant a quick death by strangulation.

Because the prisoner had refused to repent, he would not be granted the common mercy of being strangled before the flames were lit.

He would be burned alive.

As the sturdy knots were pulled tight, he managed to spit out his gag again.

"The Clergy must be allowed to marry," he cried. "Celibacy is not the will of a perfect God, but the will of imperfect men! The Church pursues its own ends in these matters—"

"Blasphemy!" a Cultivator roared, throwing a stone.

The stone struck his temple. His head lolled to his shoulder.

He blinked, trying to regain consciousness.

A man who appeared to be the leader of the Cultivators sat on a platform, his gray robe illuminated by the noon sun. He tried to ignore the commotion at the stake, gesturing for the crowd to be silent. The crowd quieted, and the chief executioner quickly read out the sentence.

The chief executioner stepped back, bowed to the Cultivator leader, made the sign of the Cross, and then nodded to the executioner.

A reed Torch was touched to the kindling at the prisoner's feet.

The crowd held its breath, staring at the flames.

The flames flickered, sputtered, and then died.

The crowd let out a disappointed roar.

The executioner stepped forward and relit his Torch.

The flames briefly licked the fuel, reached for the condemned man's feet, and went out again, producing a plume of smoke that curled toward the sky.

People began to whisper: Is this an omen?

People made the sign of the Cross, leaned in closer, trying to see more clearly.

The executioner took out a new Torch, lit it with the old one, and knelt to his work again.

The fire at the prisoner's feet remained hesitant, producing more smoke than heat and choking the spectators closest to the stake.

The spectators began to grow restless,