Benighted Read Online Free Page B

it’s a wonder you remember anything.”
    He stays scowling, which is a relief of sorts. Anyone else would probably tell me to keep my bareback insults to myself: Jerry’s still half a minute behind. “Don’t remember pissing on anyone. Would I do that?”
    “Yes. You would. Jerry, I’ve got good news for you.”
    He looks up at me, hopeful despite his hangover.
    “You are going back through the system. AA, your social worker, the works. As of now, you’re on the dry.”
    His face falls, but I harden my heart. I don’t want him in jail. He’s one of my less ungrateful clients, but right now he’s the least of my worries.
    “Hard woman,” he mutters, quiet enough so I can pretend not to hear.
    I almost like him, but I don’t care to be blamed for speaking the truth. “Jerry, a few short centuries ago you would have gone to the stake. I’m an angel of mercy.”
     
    I had two years to learn it all, how to be a legal adviser for the Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity. That’s our name nowadays, in this country; it changes from time to time, according to the era. Two years to learn the laws. It didn’t seem long at the time.
    They’re old, our laws, they’ve bent and twisted under the weight of history, and nobody but us studies them much. Everyone’s used to the curfew, most citizens are willing to lock themselves up. It’s less trouble than thinking up an alternative. Every now and again someone mutters that if we hate lunes so much, maybe we should just lock ourselves up and let normal people get on with it. I can’t disagree with that; it would be better for us, if not for them. Mostly.
    We used to be the Order of St. Giles; that was where we started. Giles, Aegidius, patron saint of cripples, protector of rams, saint of woods and forests and fear of the night. Patron saint of barebacks, though Judas Thaddeus, St. Jude, Saint of Hopeless Cases, probably gets most of our prayers. St. Giles is our saint, Giles and the Dominicans.
    This is what I learned in two years, in the gaps between classes in administration, animal handling, and marksmanship. Before the fourteenth century, the laws and curfews relating to moon nights were what I’ve been taught to call ad hoc: you made them up as you went along. If people lived in a village with livestock, they locked themselves up and got any nons that happened to live in the area to keep watch so they didn’t attack their own flocks. If they lived in a city, there was probably a nightly curfew anyway, so not much changed when the moon was full. If they lived somewhere remote, they did whatever seemed sensible. If they were beggars, they roamed and slaughtered and were hanged for it later.
    Then the plague came. It was a bad time to be alive, back then, a hard time to stay alive. There were wars, mercenaries roaming; there were famines, starvation, ergot in the crops and people living on poisoned bread, and the Black Death swept across Europe like an Angel of the Apocalypse. The Book of Revelations was coming true: Plague, War, Famine, and Death were riding out. It was the end of the world.
    A bad time for roamers. Lunes don’t understand words like “quarantine.” Surrounded by death every day, watching their neighbors rotting alive and never knowing if they’d be next, there can’t have been a man or woman who wasn’t fearful. People were killed for wiping their dirty hands on walls by fellow townsmen who thought they might be putting on curses; Jews were killed for supposedly poisoning wells. And people who got out of their houses at night were declared plague-spreaders, and wracked citizens who’d seen half the population die built pyres in the middle of towns and burned them alive.
    That was early, before the Inquisition really got under way. Some of my teaching at school I had from nuns, who weren’t eager to share these details with us: it was DORLA-appointed teachers who were prepared to tell us about history. The Church