Blood and Majesty

Chapter Seven

- The Black Pulpit
 
 
The Pulpit Knights were not knightly at all and primarily roamed from town to town to serve as an executioner, a bounty hunter and in rare cases, carry out inquisitions.
 
The Order of the Pulpit began as a religious sect that split from the Temple Bastion when the Priory of Cornell called on them to raise their war banners and rid the heathen gypsies of their lands to the north that everyone refers to as: The Roam.
 
The Roamani gypsies were seen as thieves, deviants, scammers and harlots by some, but artists, entertainers and the promise of a good time by others.
 
They would move from town to town, dancing for coin, putting on skillful displays of knife throwing and archery.
 
They were sleight of hand and could find a silver coin tucked behind your child’s ear while at the same time removing three more from your own pocket. They were promiscuous, didn’t marry and didn’t own land or hold titles, instead choosing to travel in large, covered wagons that served as their home, storefront, stage and means of transportation.
 
When the Priory began to dot the Midlands with their chapels and temple fortresses, the Roamani found that the towns and cities who once opened their gates and paid good coin were becoming less and less welcoming, some even barring them from entering completely.
 
“Stable house caught fire?”
“Probably gypsies.”
 
“Something missing?”
“Probably gypsies.”
 
“Plague?”
“Gypsies.”
 
“Shit your pants?”
“Gypsies.”
 
It was odd that the more holy one considered themselves, the more intolerant and hateful they seemed to be.
 
Trade among their wandering community all but stopped.
 
The king of Orryn, Osric the Swift, took pity on their plight and gifted them the lands that he had already left exhausted of its timber and resources.
 
A sprawling swath of rolling green hills, rich soil, and natural springs that offered fresh, clean water.
 
The Kings Mercy, or (The Roam) spread some 200 miles east to west and just over 500 miles north to south. To the west they shared a border with Orryn and to the east, at their back, was the Great Bulwark Mountains. To the north was the independent Duchy of Benic, lorded over by a mountain top keep on the jagged peak of the Fang. A relatively poor Duchy with little interest or capability for expansion.
 
Unfortunately, the Roamanis new neighbors to the south were none other than the zealous Temple bastion and their Priory of Cornell, and they were not of the same mind as the Dukes of Benic.
 
When the order was given to take the land by force using means of religious holy war as casus belli, the Lord Marshall of the Temple Bastion refused the call.
 
The Priory was a chapel, a sanctuary, a school, an orphanage and a workhouse.
 
Anyone, of any age can hobble themselves to their doorstep and expect a meal and a warm bed. But you were expected to be in the chapel for prayer, in the field sowing crops, in the kitchens preparing food or any of the other daily tasks and chores that needed to be carried out.
 
The Priory were preachers and missionaries.
 
They carried no money, no jewelry, no weapons and depended on their faith to be their shield.
 
At first.
 
After decades of being the target of raiders and brigands it was decided that perhaps a real shield would serve them better. And so was born the religious military order: The Temple Bastion.
 
These warrior monks or ‘‘Bastion Knights” were led by a man chosen among their own ranks, the Lord Marshall.
 
For centuries, the Lord Marshalls have raised their banners and waged war faithfully in the name of the Priory, until they didn’t.
 
When he refused, making the case that it was greed, the desire of land and the dislike of the Roamani that was motivating this call to war, the Lord Marshall was excommunicated, stripped of his title, tortured and buried alive, face down in unhallowed ground.
 
It was the most severe sentence at the time that had ever been carried out.
 
His soul would never be accepted either in hell, or paradise. He would wander endlessly in a state of perdition called: The Under.
 
Those loyal to the Lord Marshall stole away with his body, abandoned the fortress of the Temple Bastion and made their way south to flee the religious persecution being carried out by men they once called their brothers.
 
The bloody schism had cleaved the Priories military strength in half, so any ambitions of expansion were deemed as unnecessary risks that would be too costly to pursue.
 
The Priory had gained nothing.
 
The Black Pulpit was once a large, white tower that was used by several heads of several religions to speak and preach to mass gatherings of peoples who would make the pilgrimage to hear them. It stood some three hundred miles north-east of the Scorpion Ridge and was now charred black, and little more than a ruin.
 
A dark, jagged dagger stabbing into the sky.
 
There was a day, when the people here stood side by side, shielding their eyes as they looked up to its balcony to hear the words of their gods, that some man, woman or child heard the sound of thunder rolling over the dunes somewhere in the distance, only to turn and see heavily armored, white cloaked men on horseback charging down upon them.
 
The people, the heathens, were heretics. They were scattered, their towering Pulpit set ablaze.
 
The exiled knights took refuge beneath its charred husk.
 
Later, though still an abandoned ruin, women, girls and young mothers carrying around all sorts of excuses for why they were doing what they did, began leaving their unwanted children and newborns at the Pulpits remains.
 
They would come in the dead of night, often hurried, frantic, and crying. The Knights would watch them. Never moving or appearing to be anything more than another shadow, one of the many that already enveloped and unnerved you when you were alone at such an hour.
 
They would take these abandoned children, as they did before the schism, and train them.
 
You knew what you were looking at when you saw a Pulpit knight leading his horse through a gate house or riding through the streets.
 
They were tall, like the northerners, but lean and bronze skinned.
 
They wore all black, and more specifically black chain mail which was uncommon to see when the grass turned to sand and the sun was more of an enemy than an ally.
 
They all make this black paint from ash and roots and mark their faces.
 
 Some black out their chin and jaw, some dip their fingertips and make lines on their forehead or cheeks. Some took it further and would darken their eyes, nose and mouth. At a distance, when their hoods were up, it looked like a skeletal incarnation of death himself had decided to retrieve you personally.
 
It was unsettling.
 
Death is very taboo in some cultures, particularly in the southern reaches, which is why almost every culture and society has some designated person who is ceremoniously given charge of tending to their neighbors’ dead.
 
People, for the most part, have no desire to be near death. They don’t like to see it; they don’t want to touch it. It is sad, it hurts, and it smells bad.
 
If a murderer is caught but his victim had no family to declare a blood debt, he was housed in the keeps dungeon to either die on his own of sickness and infection or to await the arrival of a Pulpit knight who would, no matter the hour, take him directly to the block.
 
He rode alone, though not entirely. He was never given a name. The Lord Marhsall called all his bastard knights: Son. But he had been given a horse, a black one that he proudly named:  Go.
 
Go was not a purebred, rather he was caught in the wild and broken by a Ursari horsemen outside of fort Morrow in the Red Steppes. There were no finer horsemen in all the south than the Ursari. Go was the bastard offspring of a wild steppish mare that mated with some northern breed that had probably fled from a harsh master or was left untethered at night by a drunkard and wandered off.
 
Go hadn’t been graced with his sires larger, heartier northern attributes but the man assured him that steppish mares, though relatively smaller and more refined, have a greater bone density, short cannons, sure feet, and a strong back.
 
The black rider and his horse had been tracking a nomad who killed a farmer and his son outside of a small hamlet west of Saczis a few months ago. He had heard stories that a man with long greasy hair and wearing a brown or yellow sash had slaughtered a family and ransacked their belongings. It was later said that the stranger had even defiled the mans’ girl child. But he and Go had visited this hut.
 
He had seen what was inside. He saw the man hanging from the rafters, his stomach open and clumps of shit and entrails on the floor beneath him.
 
He saw the younger man’s body curled into a blood-soaked ball in the corner, but there was no girl child or signs of any woman’s presence at all.
  
A few days ago, he had heard that the same man was seen at the port in Saczis but that he had left in a hurry and was heading west.
 
Go and his rider also headed west. For the umpteenth time. Go and his rider had been everywhere the maps can mark.
 
But near the river of the serpent peoples walled city, that the locals spoke of a young woman being abducted by a man who rode north with four others wearing a dirty yellow sash.
 
She had been washing clothes when they took her.
 
Some children playing in the fields heard the poor girl screaming and tried to get a look at the men as they rode past, but children are children. By the time they found someone to listen to their story, the only helpful detail they could remember was a yellow sash.
 
He had no doubt that the man wearing that sash also had long, greasy hair.