Heaven's Fire Read Online Free

was a woman—her age indeterminate, for she faced away from him—dressed in a homespun kirtle, her black hair plaited in two long braids tied together in back. Next to her on the ground, shaded from the midafternoon sun by a yew tree, lay a corpse beneath a blanket.
    Dismounting, Rainulf hobbled his bay stallion by the stream and approached the woman, who still seemed unaware of his presence. As he got closer, he saw not one but two empty graves dug into the earth. One appeared to be finished, given the sizable mound of dirt next to it. The other was still but a shallow trench. It was this second, just begun grave on which the woman labored so industriously, yet hampered by fatigue, if the slowness of her movements was any indication.
    Rainulf looked around for a second corpse, but could see none. He did notice, scattered among the weathered headstones in the churchyard, several fresh graves—victims of the pox, no doubt.
    He paused about ten feet from the woman and cleared his throat. She gasped and spun around, holding the shovel as if to swing it. Her face bore a bright red flush, and her hands shook. Rainulf saw fear in her wide brown eyes, then confusion. “You’re not...” she began in the old Anglo-Saxon tongue. “I thought perhaps you were Sir...” She took a deep breath, as if relieved, and lowered the shovel. “Who are you?”
    Rainulf took a step toward her, but she raised the shovel again, and he stopped in his tracks.
    “Don’t come any closer,” she said. She had an odd, husky voice, unexpected in a woman of such slight build.
    Rainulf held both hands up, palms out. “Easy,” he said in English. “I’m Rainulf Fairfax. Father Rainulf Fairfax, from Oxford.”
    Her gaze took in his short, tousled hair, over which he wore no skullcap, and his rough traveling costume. “You don’t look like much of a priest.”
    “I’m not,” he dryly agreed.
    A spark of amusement flashed in her eyes. Taking this for encouragement, Rainulf stepped forward again, but she thrust the shovel at him. “Get back!”
    “I won’t hurt you,” he said reassuringly.
    She smiled somewhat wryly. “I didn’t think you would. It’s just that I’ve got the yellow plague, and I wouldn’t want you to catch it.”
    Rainulf’s gaze narrowed on her reddened face. What he’d thought at first to be a flush of fear had not subsided, nor had the trembling of her hands. He suspected that, were she to let him touch her, her skin would be burning hot. This was how this awful disease began, he knew—with fever and chills and that strange scarlet tinge to the face and body. The pox themselves would appear later.
    “Rest your mind, then,” he said. “I’ve had this affliction already. I can’t catch it again.”
    Her eyes searched his face. “You’ve had this?”
    “I had several interesting diseases while a guest of the Turks some years back. Smallpox—what you call the yellow plague—was one of them.” He tilted his head, pointing at the two minuscule indentations on the side of his jaw.
    Lowering the shovel, the woman approached him slowly, her gaze riveted on the scars. “That’s all the pockmarks you’ve got?” she asked incredulously. “Just those?”
    “I was lucky,”
    “ I’ll say.” She inclined her head toward the corpse under the yew. “Father Osred didn’t get off so easily.”
    Rainulf walked over to the body and squatted down. He reached for the edge of the blanket to uncover the face but hesitated, smelling, in addition to the stench of death, the distinctive, sickening odor of the final stages of smallpox. It was an odor that conjured up vivid memories. Closing his eyes, he found himself transported back to the Levant, to that foul underground cell in which he and two dozen other young soldiers for Christ endured a year of hellish suffering. Their torment found new depths when the pox swept through their stinking hole, claiming one out of every four men and leaving most of the rest wishing