by Michael Meyerhofer
in Issue 121, February 2022
It made a lot of people angry when my sister became my brother. That kind of thing was less common ten years back, before the truce in Jerusalem. Worse in Isabeau’s case because she’d already been Christ-kissed. That means in the eyes of the Holy See, her behavior reflected directly on them. And we all know how the Church feels about scandals. But I’m getting ahead of myself. No sense preaching at stone. So I’ll paint the head before the tail, and by the time I’m done, either you’ll understand or you won’t.
Our grandfather was the butcher in some little town they don’t bother naming on maps. Don’t think he liked his work but our father liked it even less. Many times, he told me how cows and pigs and even chickens struggle when you drag them to the killing yard, how they must smell the blood on the grass, know in their guts what’s coming. Seen it myself so I know he’s right.
Sure, the Bible says it’s fine what we’re doing but the same God who wrote it left our father mean as a wood tick when it came to his own children, yet so soft-hearted with animals that killing one cracked him inside. Funny. So after our grandfather died and passed on the tools of his butcher-trade, our father switched to killing people instead. Mind you, I don’t mean murder. I’m saying our father became the town executioner.
“They still cluck like chickens,” he said, “but at least they’ve earned the axe.” Bandits and child-rapers mostly, elsewise a cutthroat from further down the river. See, once word turned flood-like that our father didn’t mind cleaving head from neck, provided the Church pronounced sentence and assumed divine responsibility in case witnesses lied, towns up and down the Seine clamored to hire him. No surprise there. Seems like the ones who prosper most during crusades are killers and rats. Poisoners tend to the latter; our father took on the former.
I’ll spare you the grisly details, which he didn’t mind sharing each night by the hearth, like he figured the best way to avoid nightmares was to wave them right in. Our father had strong shoulders and he kept his blades sharp, so before long, he went from a widower with two scrawny brats to the kind of man who rode his own horse and enjoyed decent-fitting clothes with brass buckles. Perhaps to irk those who still looked down on him, he even paid the local friar to teach my sister and I to read. Alas, the only book the old codger had was the Bible, and no knowledge of foreign matters save those related to dead infidels and sinners. Even then, Isabeau was the better student.
Then, our father heard they found the Grail in a cistern outside Acre. Moreover, the Grail had already been tested and as impossible as it sounded, whoever drank from it obtained ferocious powers straight from Heaven. Right away, he started visiting every parish priest who owed him a favor. Somehow, he harangued an audience with the bishop. I still remember watching him leave for Paris in his best dark cloak, a couple brass rings on his fingers. He swore he’d get me permission to drink from the Grail so I could join those new Christ-kissed knights whose holy fury was poised to retake Jerusalem. Watching him ride away, my eyes stung. I forgave him for everything. Then he came back sullen, without his rings, holding a wax-sealed scroll that granted that drink not to me, but Isabeau.
Looking back, we should have expected this. Cheaper for women than men. I guess that makes sense. More often, Heaven teaches women how to heal wounds and calm fevers. But if Heaven touches a man, you best keep an eye on him. Still, everyone was disappointed—everyone but Isabeau, of course. The New Templars came to escort her to Acre for the world’s most expensive sip of wine. We expected her to return with an uncanny talent for stitching men’s guts back together just by touching them. Instead, she came back with the ability to stop time.
Isabeau never was like other girls. No face-paint made from blaunchet or flour, no lips smeared in beeswax. No, she listened first to our father’s stories of executions, then the friar’s talk of battles, like they were Sabbath gospel. Once her chores were done, she’d run around slaughtering Saracens with my wooden sword. Got to wear the handle fit her hand better than mine. Sometimes, she’d go around after and offer strawberries to her fallen enemies—imaginary strawberries for imaginary infidels.
Turns out Isabeau’s gift was one of the rarest in Christendom. Of course, if you know what it means to be Christ-kissed, it’s never as simple as it sounds. Isabeau explained she could only stop time the way she saw it. I mean to her, the river froze while to us, it went on rushing by. She couldn’t move any more than we could—at least, until she let time thaw—but that kind of ability still has its uses.
“Time to plan,” she said. “Gauge your enemy, see where he’s reaching. Take an hour, a week if you like. Look for however long it takes to see what’s right in front of you.”
I know what you’re thinking: you want to know if I ever tested her. Well, I did, right in the backyard near the chopping block. Father warned me not to, which might be half the reason I did it. Isabeau didn’t even look surprised. She just sighed. Then she walked over to a splash of tree-shade coming off a big old elm, which is where our mother had been resting for so long I couldn’t even remember her. Isabeau knelt in that place and started to take her armor off. “Is it too heavy?” I teased her. “No,” she said, “I just don’t want to hurt you with it.”
Well, I might not be brave, but I’m good at being angry. Besides, Isabeau was still the size of a whisper back then. I was half-afraid I’d hurt her. Funny. In the whole history of Christendom, I don’t think a chicken-farmer ever got the best of a Christ-kissed, and Isabeau wasn’t about to be the first. Every swing, every kick I tried, she was faster. It was like she knew what I was going to do before I did it. I thought of how we used to roughhouse in a barn so old that light shone through holes in the roof, and sometimes the patterns of sun looked like birds gliding over the straw. I remembered how easily I’d beat her then, which made me madder. But that only seemed to make Isabeau twice as quick.
And all the while, her little fists jabbed me like mace-heads. Her knees became cudgels. Her feet were quarterstaffs. Eventually, I ended up on my back, parts of me hurting in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible. And somehow, there was little Isabeau standing over me, quietly offering her hand. Our father watched from the doorway, arms crossed, laughing.
Anyway, as you might imagine, the New Templars weren’t anxious to see another peasant-girl strap on armor (wasn’t long after they were raking up Joan’s ashes at Rouen) but what Isabeau could do was undeniable. She might be slight as a feather, but she had iron in her blood, and even a child can thwack a giant if they know just when to lean, how to move, where to step. If they have a lifetime to plan it out. Isabeau proved that to Renald de Payens, the last grand master—supposedly, she bested his champion, despite his flaming sword—so by year’s end she was sailing off to Acre in clothes and armor that cost more than I earned in a year, with my turnips and dead chickens.
Meanwhile, our father was getting tired—hard work, chopping necks—and he knew better than to pass on his man-cleaver to someone like me. So there I was, barely brave enough to kill something that couldn’t talk, dreaming most nights of riding an armored charger ahead of a sea of silk and steel, a burning sword in one hand, hot with God’s love and approval. I thought maybe Isabeau could get me in, get me a drink, help me become better than everyone—even her.
Then a year later, Isabeau came back changed. Oh, I don’t mean changed—not like that, not yet. Just that she didn’t seem to like swimming in the guts of infidels anymore. When our father said he wished he could go kill a few infidels to atone for the animals he’d killed, then asked Isabeau would promise to do it for him, she turned and stared into the fire. Later when we were alone, in our secret place in that barn beside a cemetery, sunbirds gliding over our toes, she started saying things about the Holy See that I couldn’t believe.
She even shared a theory about the Muslims’ version of Christ-kissed. She said that instead of receiving boons from the Devil, like the Church and the grand master claimed, the past the Muslims must have found the Grail themselves. Yet rather than simply using it to forge an unstoppable army, they’d decided instead to bury it in that cistern outside Acre. I asked her why they’d do such a thing. I could tell by the flash in her eyes that she had an answer but she didn’t want to tell me. That made me mad. Isabeau and her damn secrets.
Years passed and Isabeau did not return, though she sent many strange letters. They described sunrise in the desert, the weight of a dead fish, the smoothness of a sword once the edge has gone dull. In time, she began sending us Arabic poetry, painstakingly copied and translated. Our father burned those letters and forbade me from answering. I answered anyway, though I could think of nothing to say and just told her about the price of chickens and the bitterness of turnips. Eventually, I told her about some wild strawberries I’d found growing outside the barn where we used to play as children.
Isabeau was still in Acre when our father died. I wrote to her about that, too. I didn’t expect her to come back but she did. It took weeks, though, so by then I’d already trimmed the grass that had grown from our father’s body. I didn’t think she’d stay long but it seems she’d secured an entire month’s leave from the front. So she was still there, praying by herself along the Seine, when the New Templars finally took Jerusalem.
She wept when I told her the news, which I’d just heard myself from the friar at the tavern. I figured her tears were still a bit for our father, plus all the Christ-kissed who died slaughtering Muslims, not to mention shame over Jerusalem being taken in her absence. But she just shook her head and said, “Folly. The whole damn thing. Folly.” Then she said something else in Arabic. I could have asked what she meant, I suppose, but for some reason her words knotted my guts into fists and I thought I’d better walk away.
Even though Isabeau wasn’t at Jerusalem when it fell, she’d still done enough for the Church that they wanted her back in the Holy Land, helping mop up whatever was left of the infidels. The message they sent used words like reward and honor, let her know it was a privilege to be sent back to the front. Standing there in front of the house we’d grown up in, our father’s body moldering in the dirt beside the garden out back, watching my smartly armored sister hoist herself into the saddle, I saw the look on her face and just knew she was about to do something that would make me hate her.
God, why can’t I learn? But I’d heard too many stories at the tavern, filling up my head with fairytales and ale once my work was done. Everyone knew that sipping off the Grail does strange things to a body. Sure, most have to do with fighting or healing, though a very few like Isabeau can take hold of time and stop the wheel a while, take a breath before they let it go. But even rarer, found mostly among the infidels for some reason, was the ability to… change things. Change them deeper than flesh, right down to the length of your bones and the width of your hips.
*
So just for the sake of waving in my last worst nightmare, I’ll skip whatever happened to Isabeau when she went back to Jerusalem (she never told me anyway) and just tell you that when she rode back up to the house a trinity of years later, she was a he. Short hair, fresh height, new muscles—even a thin beard like a strap of blond leather. But the eyes were familiar: soft and fierce at the same time. And I knew her right away, like you always know your own shadow, no matter how many fools are standing around you.
“They’ll come after me, so I won’t stay here,” promised this stranger with my sister’s eyes. “But I wanted to see you. And explain, when you’re ready.”
Well, I won’t repeat what I said back to her, once I’d found my voice. You have to understand, I’d never seen anything like that before. Sure, I’d heard stories, plus what the friar sprinkled into his sermons about sinners and judgment, but I wasn’t ready. So I said what I said, and Isabeau left, and I figured that was it.
Then one Sunday morning a few weeks later, men came to hunt her—Christ-kissed all the way from Acre, dashing as statues, led by a handsome young officer with a crucifix of gold and rubies welded right to his breastplate. The officer didn’t bother telling me his name. He just smiled, polite as an awning in a thunderstorm, and started asking questions. Soon he was yelling, demanding I tell them where Isabeau was hiding. He’d heard from the friar, you see, so there was no sense pretending she hadn’t been here.
I knew, of course. There was really only one place and I knew she was there, even though I’d never gone to see her. So I told them about a cave a few miles west of here, along the coast, that could only be reached by a narrow pathway at low tide. Another one of the Christ-kissed cleared his throat to get the officer’s attention and shook his head. His talent was recognizing lies, I suppose.
The officer glared at me, then he dismounted and started forward. I backed up, wondering if this is how condemned men felt when they saw my father. But all of a sudden, the officer’s voice got soft as an underwing. He promised he’d take my sister alive, change her back, save her soul. Calm as he sounded, his eyes looked wild and his sword started flaming so fierce it burnt up its scabbard and clattered onto the road.
I don’t know what I said, didn’t even hear myself say it, but the next thing I knew, the officer smiled, picked up his sword, and walked away. He mounted his horse and led the bright column of knights toward the barn barely visible in the distance. Behind the Christ-kissed came a dozen crossbowmen moving on foot in a ragged, dirty column, followed by more men with empty carts.
Once the men were gone, all I heard was the clucking of chickens. I went back inside. I knew I’d done the right thing. This was the Church, after all. Wasn’t it their job to save sinners, just as my father had? I started thinking about all the times the weight of my father’s work made him buckle. How sometimes, even as he hit us, he’d sob. How sometimes I’d try to get between him and Isabeau but once, she got between him and me. How that ended: both of us sent to bed with bloody mouths, sure, but later on even though I couldn’t see her, I could feel her grinning, like we were one body in the dark.
Next thing I knew, I was running after them. It took a while for the blood to stop pounding in my ears—even longer before I looked down and realized I was holding our father’s big sharp neck-cleaver in my right hand. By the time I made it through the cemetery and neared that barn, their horses milled outside, pulling on the yellow grass with their yellow teeth. The barn doors hung open, like a dark mouth. A strong breeze swept through the fallow field in the distance, like the shifting of dead grass was the world’s answer to the steel clashing inside the barn. I don’t know if Isabeau and the New Templars traded words but if so, I never heard them. I took a second to catch my breath, then I forced my feet toward that dark mouth, into the barn.
First thing I saw was a flock of sunbirds on the straw—just light shining through the cracked roof. I remember wondering why Isabeau and I had ever thought as children that those birds were <i>gliding. More like they were frozen, just kind of floating there. Then, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I realized there were Christ-kissed and crossbowmen lying all around me. Some whimpered. Some didn’t move at all.
Then, I saw Isabeau lying there, too, at the center of it all. No sunbirds touched him. He was on his back, arms spread straight out, not exactly smiling but calm, if that’s the word for it. A crossbow bolt stuck right out of his forehead like a fence post, impossibly straight. Strange enough, there was almost no blood. My first thought, mad as this sounds, was that he didn’t look like an Isabeau anymore. I wondered if he’d traded his old name for a new one. I realized he probably had. I wish I’d asked what it was.
I lifted my eyes and studied the Christ-kissed standing around my brother’s body—fewer than before, all of them breathing hard. A handful of crossbowmen stood there, too, frantically trying to reload, like they were still too rattled to realize the matter had already been decided in their favor. No one noticed me at first.
Then the Christ-kissed officer gave me a sour look. His armor was dented and he was missing some rubies from his golden crucifix. He gestured with the tip of his burning sword, wheezing faintly. I dropped my axe on the straw. Four more Christ-kissed gave me a sidelong glance, then stepped forward and quietly gathered up Isabeau. One seized each arm, each leg. They carried him out and set him in a wagon without a word. While the officer leaned against the wall of the barn and rubbed his chest through his dented armor, the rest of the men gathered up their dead and wounded and loaded them into the rest of the wagons. Next, they sifted through the bloody straw and recovered the rubies knocked out of the officer’s breastplate. These they deposited into a small leather pouch, which the officer accepted without comment, his face still ashen.
Finally, straightening, the officer stumbled out. The rest of the men followed—all save the Christ-kissed who had caught me lying earlier. He knelt without comment, picked up my brother’s sword, and wiped it on the straw. For a moment, steel and blood flashed in the belly of a sunbird. Then the Christ-kissed stood, wrapped the sword in his own cloak, and carried it off in the crook of his arm like a holy relic.
I stooped, retrieved my own crude weapon, and ordered my arm to swing the blade right through the back of the man’s neck. I wanted to stop him from taking my brother’s sword. Only my arm didn’t obey. Instead, I followed the men out, where all the surviving Christ-kissed were mounting their horses. I saw that someone had stripped a scabbard off a dead man—possibly my brother—and given it to the officer, to replace his own. As the men rode away, that young, wheezing officer took a pouch from his saddle and tossed it over his shoulder. It landed on the ground and burst open. Silver.
I left the coins where they were and went back into the barn. Familiar smells clawed my nostrils. I did what I always do after slaughtering an animal. I breathed deep, which was a trick my father taught me when I was a boy, which he himself learned from cutting condemned men’s heads off.
“Can’t ignore hell’s own stench,” he used to say. “Best just clog your nostrils and get it over with.” I looked around. Clouds must have thickened over the barn because all the sunbirds had disappeared. But I could still see well enough to note the crossbow bolts: a whole armory’s worth, stuck in the walls and rafters at every imaginable angle, like they’d been shot in desperation at a tornado.
Then I looked down. Blood glazed the straw, though I could not tell whose it was. Here and there, a few little fires guttered in the half-light. I realized they must have dripped unnoticed off the blades of burning swords during the fight. I wondered how many fires these Christ-kissed had started without even realizing it. As I watched, the flames turned from holy-white to common-yellow. They began to spread. I started to stamp them out. My feet left blackened footprints in the straw. I was nearly done when I turned and found in the far corner, arranged neatly on a spread-out cloak, a little pile of strawberries.
I stared for a long time. Then I walked out. The flames did the rest.
*
I know you want to hear more about Isabeau—who she really was, who she became—but I can’t tell you. That’s my point, God forgive me. Of course, I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. But if you really want to know what changed me, what’s haunted my thoughts damn near every night these past ten years, I’ll tell you.
Not the stories of slaughter, then protest, then popes and kings dying like fleas as half the continent seems intent on burning up the other half. Not the news that the Grail disappeared again, and no one knows where it is or who’s responsible. Not the speculation over what’ll happen once the last Christ-kissed dies out, if everything will just go back to the way it was. Not the truce either—nor the cruel, familiar words of those who still won’t accept it, all those frightened bastards who want things to stay the same.
No, what changed me was imagining how Isabeau must have turned just in time to see that crossbow bolt flying right at his face—how he stopped time, sure, but it was already so close he had to know he couldn’t dodge it. That it would stay frozen only so long as he did. God, how long did he stare at that crude bit of iron-capped wood in a barn where all he wanted to do was eat strawberries and not kill men too stupid to live? Did it feel like hours to him, or years? Did he wish he’d told me his new name, even though I hadn’t dared to ask? Did he imagine how it might have sounded on my lips—that name of his choosing, once my heart finally found the strength to speak it?
©February 2022, Michael Meyerhofer
Michael Meyerhofer is an active member of the SFWA whose work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Analog, Dread Machine, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Strange Horizons, and other journals, including previously in Swords & Sorcery. He is also the author of the Dragonkin Trilogy, the Godsfall Trilogy, and several books of poetry. For more info and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.