I’ll See You on All Hallows
by Katie-Rose Svich
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
50 B.C. — Averni (Celtic Gaul)
The Gaelic festival of Samhain, in the far distant future to become All Hallows Eve, was well underway that autumn night. On the cusp of the dark half of the year, the harvest was complete, and Druid priests chanted magic into a wheel of fire. Meanwhile, the orange flickering of scattered bonfire flames illuminated a sprawl of newly cleared fields.
Faeries might slip through the temporary break between spirit and physical worlds, snatching the souls of those unfortunate enough to be caught in the collision. That was what the priest confirmed when Elisedd found his betrothed, Feidlimid, lying motionless on the ground at the edge of the forest.
An inevitable tragedy of the Samhain transition, they’d said, but Elisedd struggled to reconcile Feidlimid’s pure white skin now marbled with deathly grey. Dark green dress draped elegantly over her motionless body, she looked more like a beautiful statue than a corpse. It was the dress she’d worn at their handfasting ceremony.
Soul kidnapped by the Faerie Host, cold and damned, her frozen fingertips scraped the handle of her sword lying beside her, as if she might still somehow drag herself back into life.
“Hasn’t anyone told him she’s not breathing?”
Two years ago, they’d met during a war defending the city against Roman invaders. Those Romans had never seen a female warrior before. She met them eye-to-eye on horseback and with her sword drawn out in front of her; she never struck from behind. Elisedd had witnessed her charging into a fray, more reckless than any man, and he could tell she possessed a spirit far greater than the small confines of her physical body. There was so much more to her than what immediately met the eye.
But now, Elisedd was helpless in front of Feidlimid’s motionless body. He considered there must be something more to this scene, no matter how tragic and hopeless it looked. The gathering crowd all thought she was deader than dead, but he knew better. She’d wake up and have fooled them all.
“It’s a curse. She should never have brought that sword out tonight. The faeries and shape-shifters always aim for the soul of someone holding a weapon during the Samhain transition.”
No, she can’t be dead, Elisedd thought. He couldn’t see any blood, and Feidlimid had vowed that if she died young there’d be a lot of blood. Kneeling beside her, he searched all over her still body half-drowned in darkness, the other half illuminated in the dim flickering orange of far-off flames. No gushing crimson, yet it looked as if she’d been drained completely without making a single cut.
His heart broke. She’d died young, but not in battle with her sword. She’d died young, but not gouged by childbirth, a child that had yet to be conceived.
A hand emerged from the shadows behind him, resting on his shoulder, and he recognised the voice of a middle-aged woman, healer and midwife. The sound was cracked and thin like the dubious light coming from the fire across the field. “There’s a chance one day she might find her way out and be reborn into this world again. Though I can’t tell you when. We’ll all likely be long gone.”
Elisedd couldn’t bring himself to turn away from Feidlimid to look this woman in the eye, but he answered: “Then let me go with her. I’ll wander in the dark for a millennium if I have to, but some day we’ll find our way out together.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” the older woman’s tone was grave, “especially on a night like tonight.”
The ceremonial fire wheel flared up again with renewed heat, and distant chanting, growing in fervour, echoed through the night. The field glowed brighter, and it was then that Elisedd noticed a trickle of dark blood tracing down Feidlimid’s chin from the corner of her mouth. He leaned in closer, took her hand, and saw the palm was smeared with it, too, as if she’d tried to wipe it away. It wasn’t the blood of valour, but sickly and unwholesome...
Still, Elisedd didn’t retract his wish. He would go on to live a long life, but never forgetting. Even when he died at age one-hundred-and-three, leaving behind many descendants to carry on after him, he never repented what he’d vowed that night, all those eighty-three years ago.
As weary half-blind eyes closed for the last time, he wondered if Feidlimid had vowed the same when her soul was dragged away. Perhaps, but all he could be certain of was that the faeries were waiting for him, too, now; ready to take him in then spit him back out in a continuous maze of immortality. Whether or not his wish had been ill-advised, as the healer-midwife had warned, would become a difficult question to answer as lifetime piled on top of lifetime, his mind wiped brutally clean of the last before being reborn into another.
“I promise, I’ll find you...”
Vague scraps of memory and an ingrained feeling were all that would cling to the edges of his brain each time, connecting him to what he was chasing.
“In this age or the next.. someday, I promise, I’ll find you.”
* * *
1412 — Republic of Florence
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Father Antonio listened to the breathy female voice, disembodied by the wooden lattice partition segregating priest and sinner in the confessional box. At thirty years of age he’d already been the privileged custodian of hundreds of sins — varying degrees of egregiousness.
“I accuse myself of the sins of pride and disobedience.”
Father Antonio pretended not to recognise nineteen-year old novice Sister Veronica as he furrowed his brow in the dark.
“You do not sound sincere.”
“No, I am not.”
He could almost feel her smirk from the other side of the partition, shrouded in darkness and her novice’s veil.
“But what can you do about it? The confidentiality of Confession is sacred.”
Father Antonio paused for a few moments, stunned out of speech, though he tried to pass it off as contemplative meditation. That sincere lack of sincerity, it should have been grotesque, blasphemous; and it was. But he knew he himself wasn’t any different. He smiled an invisible smile in the dark.
“Say two-hundred Hail Marys and pray for piety and purity.” He recited the standard remedy, keeping his tone of voice as flat as he could.
“Maybe, if I pray hard enough, the skin on my back might purify again too, and be clean of the lash marks.” Sister Veronica remained quietly defiant in spite of the thin cracks emerging in her voice; a faint underpinning of pain.
“I’m surprised you don’t see them as a badge of honour,” Father Antonio replied.
“Maybe I do...” Sister Veronica’s voice sounded stifled, yet somehow it still managed to cut straight to the core. Then, as if prompted by some mutual telepathy, they began praying together while still sitting in the confessional booth: together yet segregated, free from prying eyes yet suffocated by the dark.
“Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women...”
“Blessed amongst the downtrodden.” Sister Veronica brought the fluid strain of prayer to a jarring halt.
Father Antonio paused momentarily before replying: “We’re all downtrodden, ever since Eve ate the Forbidden Fruit.”
They continued, in unison, this time without break and with smooth precision: fast track to redemption.
“And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners,
now, until the hour of our death.
Amen.”
Exiting together, the two of them returned to the light of day — and accountability. A grainy mid-morning brightness filled the interior of the grey stone chapel, where rows of identical dark wooden pews lay before the altar, stained glass images of saints lining the walls on either side. All of those colours: pink, blue, yellow, green...
The faint smell of incense and holy oil drifted beneath Sister Veronica’s nostrils as she turned to leave, eyes fixed modestly to the floor. That was when she felt a hand on her shoulder, and her gasp echoed through the empty chapel.
“I think you’re forgetting something.”
She turned to find Father Antonio with a book in his hand, bound in rich, green leather: Christine de Pisan’s City of Ladies. Sister Veronica had sewn it secretly into her pillowcase, unpicking each of the threads carefully one at a time whenever she wanted to read it.
It was the book that changed her life, if only in her own head. The only book she’d ever read that openly defended the female sex against universal accusations of being an aberration, the root of misery and sin. The only book that made her consider that her mind might be just as good as a man’s. She’d continued until she was discovered — one lash across bare skin for each stitch in that pillowcase.
“I’m impressed you can read this,” Father Antonio spoke as he held the book out to her. “It’s all written in French.”
“Anything other than Latin is vulgar for literature. You should be offended.” Sister Veronica glanced at his face only briefly before letting her eyes fall back down, face semi-concealed by her veil. After an extended moment of silence she continued. “You know, why don’t you keep it for me? They’ll only find it again.”
“Alright. It can be our secret.” Father Antonio smiled faintly as he tucked the book back into his robe, out of sight.
From that day forward, the novice would go to the priest’s study to read, and sometimes, they would talk. It turned out that Father Antonio was more than just a maverick; he was completely beyond redemption. He showed her books that weren’t in the open library, ones he kept hidden away, just like Sister Veronica’s own treasured book.
It was from him she would learn about the ancient magic, of gods that died, and the ruins upon which this brave new world was built.
“Have you ever considered there may be more to your existence than just this brief span, more than just what you can remember, in this moment?” Father Antonio’s voice by candlelight, resonating faintly against stone walls, coaxed Sister Veronica to smile. More than anything she liked the possibility that, buried somewhere, there might exist some sort of power other than those that be.
Yet still, perhaps inevitably, their quiet revolution of the heart and mind would be doomed to fail.
At the chilly end of October that year, Father Antonio was arrested. For the charges of heresy and blasphemy, he was plunged down beneath the streets to languish in a dungeon until his trial.
“The jury finds him guilty.” Flat, toneless words fell like a blunted axe.
Executed before a crowd, the blood gushed down through the canals, a strain of red beneath gondolas that carried on as if nothing had changed. When oars broke the water’s surface, the blood blurred and diluted until eventually it became invisible.
That same time on the following year, novice Sister Veronica would be found kneeling at the chapel altar, knees pressed into the cold stone steps. Father Antonio never betrayed her, even under pain of torture, and for that reason she was there, ready to complete her solemn, irrevocable vows.
Father Antonio was dead — a stabbing pain gouged at the pit of her stomach. He was dead and she knew what she felt was more than the appropriate level of grief. Could this perhaps be love?
Love, as she knelt before the altar of her wedding to Christ. Love, in the most twisted and painful way.
Never would she be remembered as a great warrior, or diplomat, or adventurer — but perhaps there was something she could do right now, in this moment, that might make her remembered nonetheless. With the jagged edge of a piece of broken glass concealed in her sleeve, she cut open the tip of her index finger, biting back an exclamation of pain as she did. Then she stood up, walked over to the table in the middle of the altar, and brought her bleeding finger to the contract waiting on top.
All the silent anger, sadness, frustration and determination she could muster, she poured out through her finger — a bright red, blurred signature on parchment as the final veil descended over her head.
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by Katie Rose Svich
