Chapter 110: Maxwell of Tarth

I made some kind of disgusted sound. That was now, all that I could think about.

We worked as much of his armour off him as we could and some of it came loose regardless of what we tried. In the end we had to cut a good chunk of his hair away to get the coif off his head and his shoulders looked dreadful. We belted him up as best we could to keep the weight off the top of his body and got him onto the back of the horse which I led. It wasn't that far back to the nearest town where we had to bully our way in to see the local healer who, for a change, turned out to be a man.

Even then we had to use a significant chunk of my remaining funds to get the poor kid seen to.

Taking the chain-mail off him was awful. I won't lie it was fucking awful. It was also clear that the chain-mail that they had given him to wear was the oldest and shittiest chain-mail that they could find. It was literally falling apart with loose rings coming off in our hands. In the end we were cutting it away and taking pliers to pull the bits of chain-link out of his skin, especially around his shoulders. The healer and I worked for the majority of a day and well into the night to get the job done, my working to get the metal out, the healer then applying salves and ointment in an effort to stop the injuries from going bad.

Kerrass was given a list of the herbs that the healer needed to mix the necessary medicines and came back regularly, helping to mix the stuff up.

There was one incident, in the three days that we spent there, where a large group of knights came through the town, looking for the people that had killed their fellow knights. It had the potential to start looking grim so Kerrass went out. Swore at them a great deal and called them the cowardly bastards that they were, before leading them on a massive goose chase before coming back later that evening. In the end we got the kid calm enough to be able to sleep.

He spent a lot of his time being delirious so it was a couple of days after Kerrass had led the knights off before he was able to talk. He also had a martyr complex a mile wide. He was convinced that he was evil and deserved the things that had been done to him.

We got him sat down on a stool. We were constantly applying wet cloths that were soaked through with herbal lotions to his back and shoulders. When one dried out we would have to replace it with another.

“Why don't you tell me what happened?” I tried again for what felt like the fiftieth time.

“What do you mean, “what happened?”. I failed didn't I.” It seemed we were going to be going for an anger series of questions.

“What did you fail at.”

“Being a proper knight.”

“Who told you that you failed?”

“Bishop Sansum. Flame but how many times do you have to be told. I was given orders to follow and I couldn't follow orders.”

“Why not?”

“Because.....Because I couldn't that's why. Because I'm weak and puny and, and too susceptible to evil.”

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“That tells us nothing of any use.” I told him. “But also, while I'm on the subject. Who is Bishop Sansum?”

“The head of my order.”

“Never heard of him.”

The boy looked at me horrified. “Everyone's heard of Bishop Sansum.”

I turned to the healer who was busy mixing another soothing solution for the lads back. “Have they?” I asked him.

“I've heard of him.” The man commented. “Ambitious. Thinks the world is being brought to an end by all the filthy female Sorceresses, monsters and other magic users. Mostly though he doesn't like women. Sorceresses, Witches, lesbians, any woman that doesn't do what she's told which means stay at home and put out regular.” He sniffed to show what he thought of that. He was a good sort, despite being a little cowardly.

“Ah, so he thinks the more people that he can brutally torture and kill, the better for everyone right?”

“Pretty much,” The man (No, I'm not telling you his name. I have visions of Robart or one of his sympathisers hunting down the people that helped us and doing their best to make them see the error of their ways. I won't be a party to that.) changed the latest cloth on the back of the poor kid. It came away with a wet kind of sucking sound but his injuries were so numb now that he barely felt it. “Unfortunately,” the healer went on, “he also has a bit of an attitude of “better safe than sorry” which means that anyone who even might be magical are fair game.”

“So he's also not very educated?”

“Not really. I learned my healing at one of the Melitele shrines but, being a bloke, am unable to become a “priestess of Melitele” so I came out here. Unfortunately for me this means that I'm a woman worshipping charlatan as he doesn't trust people that are cleverer than him either.” Thanks for reading on ManaNovel!

“Lovely. Sounds like a real piece of work.” I turned back to the kid. “This is the kind of fuck-pig you're protecting?”

“But he's a priest.”

“So?”

“So, he knows things doesn't he. He knows what's right and wrong because otherwise he wouldn't be a priest. He knows the scriptures, he knows the psalms and the prayers. He's the mouthpiece of the Holy Fire itself. Literally, everything he says is holy. There's nothing he can do that is wrong because he is a priest.”

“Is he though?” I asked. “Also, just because he's a priest, does that stop him from being a fuck-head?”

“Blasphemy,”

The healer snickered.

“Not really,” I told him. “I'm just asking a question. Does being a priest stop you from being a fuck-head?”

“But...But....He's a priest.”

“Yes, you've said. Shall I let you into a little secret? My brothers a priest. Doesn't mean I don't hate the stupid turd basket whenever he steals the last piece of cake over the Equinox dinner table though. Self righteous Wanker that he is.”

The lad gaped at me.

“You wanna know who my brother is? I guarantee you've heard of him.”

The lad was still gaping.

“My brother is Archbishop Mark of Tretogor.”

“Fuck off.” The healer told me.

“No, it's true.” I told him. “My brother who, in a little while, is going to be promoted to Cardinal and called back to Novigrad to serve at the feet of the holy father. Do you wanna know about the giant hairy mole he has growing on his arse?”

The healer was chuckling to himself.

“He was my personal confessor for years.” I told the, obviously still horrified boy, but I thought I could see just a little bit of fascination crawling in to his gaze. “He was ordered by my father to give me penance for stealing boiled sweets from my little sister. He had me flogged for that, with a ruler, twice. Bastard. Still love love him though, puffed up prick that he is in his silly red suit and his even sillier giant hat.”

The boy laughed despite himself.

“Let me tell you about this trick he does.” I went on. “He likes to hold out his finger. He's done it so many times that we all know it's coming but my sister falls for it every time. I had a theory a little while ago that she's in on the joke and is just playing along to annoy us all. But he holds out his finger after a particularly large meal and demands that someone pull his finger for him. After which he lets out the longest, rudest, most obnoxious fart that you've ever heard. Much to the amusement of everyone watching and the embarrassment of the person who pulled the finger in the first place.”

“My brother used to do the same trick.”

I nearly cheered in joy. He was finally engaging with me.

“My point is,” I told him. “Priests are people too. They make mistakes. Fuck, the last Hierophant is responsible for the decimation of the magical class which meant, amongst other things, that the Nilfgaardians walked all over us in the last war. There are other reasons for that but nevertheless, that is a significant point.

The only reason that you or I are allowed to worship the Holy Fire, because I do, and the only person that the healer here is allowed to worship Melitele or the Prophets or the Holy Fire himself...”

“I like the Prophets myself.” The healer interrupted. “At least that way, I'm following the teachings of people that genuinely existed rather than some mystical power that I've never seen or heard.”

“But the only reason that the three of us worship who we like is because the Empress has a lot of fondness for the Northern Kingdoms and their religions. Otherwise there would be followers of the Sacred and Holy Sun stomping up and down the paths and byways of the North telling us to worship the sun like good and proper little Imperials.”

I took a deep breath. There had been some long restrained sentiment in the middle of all of that and I needed to take a minute or two to calm down.

“Wait,” the healer was staring at me oddly. “Are you Freddie Coulthard?”

“Errr, yes?”

“Then that Witcher must be the Kerrass of Maecht?”

“That's him, moody fucker isn't he?”

“I'm a huge fan,”

I looked at him as he produced a copy of my collected works and got me to sign it.

Yay, fame.

I looked back at the young man who was staring at me open mouthed.

“What I'm trying to tell you is that, priests are people too.” I told him. “Some of them are good people doing their best to do The Flame's work. Others are unscrupulous bastards who use the church and the influence it gives them for their own ends. Both of these things are true but sometimes, just sometimes, you get some real lunatics, men....or women because lets not forget that women can be really unpleasant too, but people in general can go completely bug-fuck insane and these are the people that we need to protect each other against. I don't know if this.....Sansum creature is one of these last but.....”

I left it hanging, hoping that he would be able to insert his own thought processes into the mix without any further help from me.

“Why don't you tell me about what happened?” I asked him after a while when I could see a tear start to crawl down his face. “Let's start with your name.”

The poor kid took a moment to shed a few tears for which I had every sympathy. I have, in the relatively recent past, been confronted with the truth that everything that I had believed about the settled order of the world was incorrect. But to me it happened over the course of several years. It started when I went to the university and has continued throughout my association with Kerrass and, I had no doubt, would continue until long after I marry a vampire. Nowadays I look forward to the challenges of this entire process of self-education as to how the world really works but I do remember the first time I realised that the world didn't really work the way I thought it did.

For this kid, it had all just come crashing down. Probably over the course of the last week or so.

I could relate.

The following account from the lad is severely edited as if I told you every question that I asked or that Kerrass or the healer asked then you would still be reading the account next week. The lad was not that well educated and didn't know how to talk like I do in any kind of narrative structure. He would often leap ahead into his own story while at the same time forgetting things that were of importance and so we regularly needed to ask questions to bring him back to the point. He was also in a lot of pain, both physically and emotionally. But don't make the mistake, as we sometimes did, that just because he was uneducated, doesn't meant that he was stupid.

I should also say that I have changed the lad's name and the name of his family for fear of reprisals against them.

“My name is Maxwell of Tarth.” He told us after wiping his nose on a piece of cloth that the healer provided.

“I'm the youngest son of Sir Eustace of the same. I have, or rather had, three brothers. The first is to inherit the lands that my father won on the field of battle and, as far as I know, he defends it against my fathers enemies and our nations enemies still. The black ones claim our family lands as theirs but we took it from them in the first Nilfgaardian war so it's ours.

“My father is not a wealthy man. Like any peasant or commoner, our house is made from timber and the roof is thatched rather than tiled. The only thing that keeps us distinct from the common folk is that my father had a wall built around the manor with logs and our house is slightly bigger than those of the surrounding village. What I'm saying is that we're not rich and if my other brother and I were going to make a name for ourselves we had to do it with the only thing that our family was good at which was that we knew how to swing a sword.

“We couldn't afford tutors or anything to come and teach us about anything else so our education was entirely overseen by our father. Mother had died between the second and third war when I was little and I can barely remember her now. Father didn't like to talk about her. I never found out why.

“But I've been learning how to ride, hunt, tilt and fight since I was five.

“But the war is over, we lost and my father's often predicted “rising of the north against the tyranny of Nilfgaard” has not happened. My family is poor and as a result my brother and I, having no prospects of our own, have struggled to attract potential brides and are therefore unable to bring in any large dowry's so we were forced to leave to make our names in some way, using the only skills that our father had given us. I am, or rather was, a few years younger than my immediate elder brother and I haven't yet attained my full growth so our plan was that I would act as squire to him while I was still growing and we would be able to make our own way accordingly.

“We were young and all we wanted to do was to help make the world a bit better, the same as our father did.”

The narrative stopped here for a while as the poor kid had a sobbing fit. Kerrass came in at this point as it was starting to get dark and he felt confident that the pursuing knights were long gone. We took the opportunity to have something to eat which was a rabbit stew that Kerrass had managed to catch while leading the knights around in the darkness.

The lad continued his story as we were mopping up the last of the juices with half a loaf of hard black bread between us.

“We were heading north and looking for a nobleman or something that might take a couple of us on. One of those people that might be getting the courage together to fight of the Nilfgaardian oppression. We wanted nothing more than to sign up with them and help in that regard but no-one was taking anyone on.”

(Freddie's note: This is an increasingly common thing. People are honestly surprised by the way things are going in the world at the moment. They keep expecting the iron heel of oppression to come crashing down on the neck of the north. But it hasn't. So there are a whole lot of lords that are milling around in confusion.

They've been fighting,or preparing to fight, Nilfgaard for nearly the entirety of everyone's living memory and now that they're no longer fighting, they don't know what to do with their spare time. The thought that no-one is going to raise some kind of rebellion is ludicrous to them.

I suspect that, at some point, someone, or a series of someones, are going to raise their banners in rebellion.

This will probably result in the greater Nilfgaardian empire laughing for a short while before one of the greater Nilfgaardian armies turns up to thrash the upstart. Most lords that I know are beginning to settle into the idea of paying fealty to client kings and on towards the Empress of Nilfgaard. This has been made easier by the Empress' former association with the North.)

“Then one day we came to a field where he was giving a sermon. It was just outside a village that I never learned the name of but oh, it was like a light shone down from the heavens. There was a line of them stood on their horses on the edge of the field. Armour shining in the sun as he preached. They were like the statues that you see in the greater cathedrals of the lands. Tall, almost godlike, warriors of the Holy fire. Red Tabbards resplendent in the sun. The fire, that was sewn into their tunics, was so realistic that I could almost feel the heat coming from it.