Purgation (Septimus in Heaven 3)
Purgation (Septimus in Heaven 3)
Septimus was choking. His mouth was full with salty copper, not the mere taste of blood, but blood itself, filling his mouth. He spat it out, and he coughed and more took its place. He spat that out, and yet more came as the wrenching coughs shook him, convulsing his entire body.
How long had he been doing this? He felt so weak. The pain was appalling
Where was he? He must find out where he was. He levered his eyelids up and half closed them again as brightness struck them. He concentrated on looking gradually... a few inches at a time...
There was canvas. Brown canvas? No, that was dried blood. His blood? He lay in the blood, he could feel it, hot and damp around him, filling the canvas sling...
Then there were poles. At the top of the canvas were poles. Wooden? The canvas was stitched around them. It was a stretcher... the identification floated back to him from his life, from countless battlefields, battle camps...
Beyond that? Two men carrying the stretcher. They looked tired and grumpy and none too clean. Like someone had vomited blood all over them... Oh.
They were moving along a narrow walkway of cloud... he waited for a pause in the coughing and pulled himself up with agonising effort, peeping over the stretcher's edge. He looked down and his hands clenched around the pole, eyes widening.
Below them was a mighty pit in the clouds and in the earth below and flames burned in it, licking up the sides... On a cloud just below lay row upon row of stretchers, a pale, lifeless form lay on each one... A number of men were engaged in bearing each stretcher to the edge and tipping the body from it... the bodies fell like rain, down, down to the flames below, and as they reached them, they came alive again, twisting in pain, screaming... and some sort of beautiful pearlescent white mist came from their burning bodies like steam, rising to mingle with the clouds...
Septimus vomited blood down into the pit as another spasm shook him, and slipped back into the stretcher's bloody embrace, convulsing and gripped with mortal terror. Where were they taking him? Not to that field of the dead, surely, he still lived, after a fashion... The one certain piece of knowledge that he had was that he was dead in the mortal world... this was the afterlife.
He shuddered and coughed helplessly. I mustn't die here, he thought desperately, if I do they'll throw me down to the flames. And then he felt a flash of anger, that even here, even here he could not rest. Still he must battle to survive...
The two men had reached a cloud and were calling to its inhabitants. After a brief exchange they looked at one another,
"Hell!" said the one holding the front end of the stretcher. "It's the wrong place, they don't know him."
The other man groaned.
"Let's take him back then," he said wearily. "We're wasting our time, anyway. He's a gonner for sure."
Septimus looked at the man who had made this pronouncement with narrowed eyes as they turned and started back across the cloud bridge. He was not a gonner. He could not be a gonner. He would not let himself be. But he coughed and coughed and could not stop.
By the time they laid the stretcher down on another cloud top he had sunk deep into near unthinking misery. The agony was appalling and he felt utterly alone, the men did not care if he lived or died. He'd rarely sought comfort in his life but he'd never known terror or pain like this... it consumed him.
But the setting down of the stretcher drew him back into awareness and he tried to look around... he lay in a field of stretchers but the occupants still moved and no one seemed to be throwing them from the cloud. The two men were reporting to the angel who stood nearby,
"They didn't know him," one complained.
"All right, cotton-wool-in-the-ears," said the angel rather tiredly. And it turned to give orders to other pairs of men, and other stretchers were picked up and borne away.
Septimus still coughed. He looked at his arms in horror, they had not been that frail before... he was coughing his very flesh away, he realised, and his life with it. At this rate he would not live much longer. He fought the coughs, with furious determination, struggling to suppress them, to hold them back, to hold his precious blood inside him...
The angel noticed his efforts and gave him a gentle smile. Its white wings swished spotless, despite the blood and sickness that surrounded it.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you," it advised him sadly.
Septimus stared up at it, eyes narrowed in pain and anger and distress,
"How should I possibly know what I should do?" he gasped between the tightly suppressed shudders that shook him.
"It has to come out," the angel told him, then eyeing Septimus's set teeth and wild gaze, it added, "there's some fight in you, isn't there? Let's see then..." It stared into Septimus's eyes with twin orbs like molten silver. "Prince Septimus of Stormhold," it said, and Septimus had better things to worry about than how a supernatural being knew his name. The angel turned to the waiting men and spoke briefly to them, Septimus's concentration was slipping as the convulsions overcame him again and blood gushed forth once more.
"What's the point?" one of the men was demanding. "He's never going to make it!"
"Make it or not, all souls have the right to be with their loved ones," the angel said, steel in its voice. "Take him."
The men ducked their heads and hastened to obey. They set off along an even narrower cloud path that twisted and turned and rose and fell. The stretcher tipped dangerously as they went and Septimus slid in his pool of blood perilously close to falling from it altogether. The fiery pit was still below them and he wrapped his feeble fingers around the poles and hung on as tightly as he could... which was barely tightly enough, so wasted were his gaunt fingers now, but fear dragged every last modicum of strength from him...
And still he coughed.
Eventually the path flattened and his clutching became unnecessary and fortunately so, for his strength was exhausted. He lay helpless in the stretcher's depths... he would drown soon, he realised, appalled, for the blood was not draining away, but filling the sling, creeping higher and higher; already it covered his neck, lapping against his chin... He was too weak to sit up out of it... he snarled defiance at the crimson menace, but even that came out a feeble hiss.
After the angel's advice, he did not dare to try and hold the coughs back even though he could feel his life leaving him in the flow of blood. His limbs were becoming mere bones covered with skin... and there was nothing he could do... The stretcher tilted and he got a good look down into the pit... His nostrils flared as he fought back a stab of pure heart-stopping panic, ruthlessly smothering the sob that tried to rise in his throat and letting more blood pour out instead.
I must not die, he thought. I must not die. I must not die. He clung to that as half-conscious misery tried to claim him again. It was all he could cling to and all he could do and it was nothing. I must not die. I must not die. I must not die.
That was what he had always clung to...
Dimly, dimly, he was aware that the stretcher was being lain down again and a voice was speaking, a high, clear voice that was like balm to his ears,
"Where has he been? What has taken so long?" The men's mumbled reply was cut off by the rather haughty order, "no matter, lay him here..."
Hands lifted him from his bloody tomb and none too soon, for the blood was poised to spill into his mouth. He was laid down on something soft and wetness touched him. Not the hot sticky clinging of the blood, but the cool freshness of water... someone was washing him... It was only then that he realised that he was as naked as the day he was born. His hands flew weakly to his waist in a convulsive movement but his sword was not there, nor his daggers. He felt stripped and vulnerable.
Then something was being laid over his legs, drawn up over him. Something velvety and comforting. He dragged his eyes open again; even that was an effort now. It was a blue quilt, delicately stitched and beautiful. A figure crouched beside him, entering his field of vision. Una...
She fussed with the quilt, tucking it around his waist, though no higher, probably because he was still spewing blood everywhere.
"There," she said gently. "That's better."
It was she who had the wet cloth, and she wielded it once more, washing the fresh blood from his chin and chest. He frowned. It was wonderful to see her, to have her there but... there was something about it that worried him badly, if he could only think clearly enough to grasp what it was...
"I've been waiting and waiting," she was saying. "I thought they were never going to bring you, I've had time to make you a set of clothes and anything. All you've got to do is... get well so you need them..." she finished, her voice shaking slightly. He frowned up at her in between spasms. He had it now...
"Una," he gasped through his congested throat, "what... happened... I thought you... all right..."
She stroked his blood-matted hair back soothingly,
"Shss," she crooned. "It's alright, Septimus. Time moves differently here. I lived to be eighty-six and died in bed with my husband. My, ah, my purgation was on the short side, so here I am waiting for you. Don't worry about it."
Septimus's mind tried to tease at her words, tried to worry them, but could not. He was forced to take her word for it.
"Purgation?" he whispered eventually.
She looked faintly exasperated but seemed to conclude that he would not lie still and rest until he had at least some idea what was going on.
"All souls must undergo purgation when they die," she told him quietly. "It takes various semblances of physical distress, various ways in which the soul's wrongdoing leaves them. If there is enough good in them, they will... survive... it. If they do not... they are cast down into the pit where what goodness there is in them is burnt out of them by the flames and rises to mingle with the clouds of heaven which are made of that substance. But the true bare naked spark of the soul remains down in the pit for all time..."
Her voice had died away to almost nothing and she dabbed yet more energetically with the damp cloth. "So you must get well, brother," she told him softly, leaning to place a kiss on his damp and burning brow. "You must get well..."
Septimus agreed vaguely with that statement. He must. He must not die.
Now that he had some grasp of the situation he felt a little calmer. Still afraid but less achingly confused. And he was no longer alone. His sister was beside him, soothing him, washing him, speaking gently to him, an inconsequential stream of comfort-babble that flowed over him, occasionally entering his consciousness...
"Primus had the worst case of wind," Una was telling him. "It was actually really serious, who'd have believed it; wind! For Secundus it was diarrhea, very nasty. He very nearly didn't make it. But his mother nursed him, and he did. Tertius was nauseous, that wasn't too pretty either. Quartus had a severe cold, the way his nose ran! But he pulled through all right. Quintus had such a headache, a true migraine, I felt quite sorry for him. And Sextus a terrible fever. He was quite burning with it. But they all pulled through, even Secundus, so you can too... you're coughing a little less, I wonder if some spring water would do you good?"
She bent over him, examining him carefully. She looks just as when I last saw her, he thought vaguely, but that was another thing that was too much for his mind in its current condition.
"I'm going to the brook, Septimus," she told him, speaking very clearly this time to be sure he heard her. "You're doing well. I won't be long."
He didn't feel like he was doing well... but she adjusted the quilt a little and the little pillow that cushioned his head, and hastened away across the... glade, that was what it was, he thought. The soft stuff he lay in was not cloud top, it was moss... charming, really. But all thought of that left him as another spasm of coughing shook him.
He heard whispers...
"We'll get in trouble... we're not supposed to interfere!"
"It's all right for you! He didn't do anything to you!"
"Not for want of trying! I tell you, there'll be trouble..."
"Sissy..."
"Bowel boy..."
"Are you really going to do this now?"
That last was Quintus's voice, Septimus suddenly realised. And the other two...
A line of furtive figures approached across the clearing. Secundus was in the lead, a very mean look on his face. Primus hung back, trailing along behind the others, still making faint sounds of protest. Quintus was right behind Secundus, and Sextus just behind him, Tertius peeping around him. Quartus strolled along after them, and when they had stopped and gathered around Septimus, he eased back until he was behind even Primus. The others paid him no heed, their attention fixed on their youngest brother.
"Well, well," said Secundus loftily and most unpleasantly, "I'm surprised they even bothered to bring you here. You'll be stiff and cold soon enough."
"And then you'll never be cold again!" sniggered Tertius, clearly convulsed with his own wit.
"I'm going to watch you burn," whispered Sextus hoarsely, his gaze scorchingly intent.
A variety of responses suggested themselves to Septimus's mind, even in his befuddled state, varying from witty put downs, to self-justifications to actual apologies, but his heart was not wholly behind any of them, so he decided to save his strength and said nothing at all.
"I hope you're afraid," Quintus hissed at him. "Because you aren't just going to go to sleep and never wake up, oh no...!" And he shot Secundus a look, "well, get a move on," he snapped, "if you insist on doing the honours..."
Secundus stuck his nose in the air in his most arrogant fashion and knelt beside Septimus, fastidiously trying to keep his knees out of the blood. I don't think I ever told him quite how good a target his throat makes when he does that, Septimus thought, wishing for just one little dagger. Then another fit of coughing seized him and the thought flew from his mind.
Secundus snatched the pillow from under Septimus's head, smiled down at him in the most appallingly smug way, and reached out to press it over his face. Hard. Septimus fought for breath, fought to get free, his wasted fingers scrabbling feebly against his brother's muscular arms... it was utterly hopeless, he could never hope to overpower him... and the coughs still shook him, indeed, it almost seemed that the harder he struggled the worse they became... He flailed desperately, but his strength failed him and his arms fell back on the ground. Desperate instinct made his body try and raise them again, but his mind caught himself... He was utterly exhausted and he couldn't afford to lose much more blood at all; now for a gamble, whether it was that of a wise man or a fool he did not yet know...
He forced himself to lie still, to not struggle, though he couldn't breathe and his head swam and his chest ached fiercely... if he had not been so desperately weak he probably couldn't have overpowered his instincts, but as it was he managed it. He lay still and quiet and the coughs died away. The pressure eased slightly and a little air reached him.
"Is he gone?" Tertius was asking in a tone of schoolboyish nervous excitement.
"Well, he's stopped struggling," observed Sextus in the tone of one pointing out the obvious.
"Oh, 'spose he must be dead then," said Tertius, and the others groaned at the slowness of his uptake.
The pillow was removed entirely, and Secundus peered down at him. Septimus, theorising that if struggling was bad, deceit was also, opened his eyes and smiled sweetly up at his brothers. The shocked appalled expressions on their faces would have made him laugh, had he had the strength.
"Die, you bastard!" yelled Secundus, and clamped the pillow over his face again. Septimus continued to lie still. It got easier with practise.
"Secundus! What are you doing?" That was Una's voice, horrified.
"What does it look like I'm doing?" retorted Secundus sarcastically.
There was the sound of rushing skirts and the pillow was torn from his face again. He drew in deep, grateful breaths and tried to pay attention to what was going on.
"How dare you!" Una was exclaiming. "You all got a fair chance, why shouldn't he?"
"He's a murderer," replied Secundus decidedly sanctimoniously. Una stared at him,
"You can't talk!" she cried.
"No, you really can't,"' said Quartus dryly, from the back.
Secundus ignored him and made a very threatening movement towards Una.
"Out of the way, you silly wench," he commanded. "Let me finish the worthless worm."
"I shall not let you touch him!" declared Una defiantly.
Sextus scowled.
"Oh, we'll see about that," he said darkly, stepping forward.
Alone at the back, Quartus gave a little shrug of his shoulders and a tiny secret smile, as though to say, why not, and backed away, slipping off into the woods.
"Now, now," Primus was protesting, "Less threats to our dear sister, if you please..."
"If she chooses to defend him," responded Secundus is a very grandiose manner.
"She must reap the consequences," snarled Sextus, who was looking more than a little manic. They both stepped towards Una, who raised her fists determinedly.
Septimus did not like the way this was going.
"Una," he rasped, "It's not worth... you... hurt... let them... have... me..."
"Hell I will!" retorted Una, squaring her shoulders as the four brothers spread out around her and started to close in. Primus still dithered uselessly, calling for restraint. They sprang, and though Una fought like a wildcat, scratching and biting, in very short order she was pressed down on top of Septimus, with the four of them struggling to restrain her and drag her away...
"Just what is going on here?" said a calm, aloof voice that rang with authority. The brothers froze guiltily and Una surged up, pushing them away with some vigour.
"Mother!" she gasped furiously, "they were trying to interfere with Septimus's purgation!
A queen of Stormhold stood there, graceful and fair. Quartus stood just behind her, smirking slightly. The queen eyed the four brothers, who now stood looking guilty, frustrated and decidedly uncomfortable.
"This is a very serious offence you have committed," she said coolly. "You know all men, good or bad, undergo the same purgation. One has to wonder if your own purgations are truly complete, that you can behave in such a way."
The four brother exchanged wary glances. There was a long silence. Then Tertius suddenly clapped a hand to his mouth and bolted from the glade. Secundus stood with awkwardly crossed legs for a few moments, trying to pretend that nothing was wrong, then he blanched and fled with the look and gait of a man frantically seeking a bathroom. Sextus groaned and wiped his forehead, which was suddenly clammy with sweat, and Quintus clutched his own head, moaning. They staggered away together, leaning on one another. Primus remained, looking apprehensive, but when nothing happened, he finally snuck off. Quartus sauntered after him.
The queen joined Una at Septimus's side. He was dead white and his eyelids seemed to weigh several tons, but merciful ease gripped him...
"The coughing's stopped!" exclaimed Una triumphantly. "How did that happen, I wonder?
"No matter," said the queen, taking up the wet cloth and gently washing the last of the blood from her son. "It has stopped. He can rest safely now."
Septimus peered up at the woman who leant over him. She seemed vaguely familiar; he felt as though he should know her...
"Mother?" he whispered.
She stroked his tangled hair back from his face.
"Yes," she murmured soothingly. "I am your mother. But sleep now."
Septimus blinked up at Una. He wanted to sleep, wanted it more than anything, but he was afraid...
"Sleep, Septimus," Una said softly. "You're safe now. You can sleep. It will heal you."
So Septimus obediently let his eyelids fall and slipped into a deep healing slumber.
"He was lost in life," Una said quietly as they sat beside him. "I could not save him there."
"That was there," said the queen. "Here everyone has a fair chance. He will live, and recover, and be what he might have been, had life been kinder to him."
"He made it," said Una contentedly, tucking the quilt around his neck and replacing the pillow under his dark head.
Then the two women sat together, watching over the seventh prince of Stormhold as he slept.