Traditions of Dead Generations

Round Two - The Bones, Pt. 1

(Judges: this story takes place during the Third Crusade (June 1190, to be exact). I have used quotes #1, 5 & 7 (in bold) and pictures #7, 9, 10 & 11 (some of which are in the media widget). Enjoy!)

"I'm sorry - a-who did what?"

"Turks, m'lord! Two of them, bold as badgers, come for the Emperor's bones!"

Petrus struggled to understand what the boy was telling him. "Two Turks came here and took the Emperor's bones."

"Yes, m'lord, but it was not as simple as that. I sought to defend his holy remains, but they were two, and big men also. I stuck one of them with the scalpel but they pushed me to the ground and knocked my head so that I became confused..."

"You attacked two Turks?" Petrus looked around the large, empty hall they had converted for surgery. It had been a stone chapel, but for Petrus's use the pews and altars had been removed to make way for a massive wooden table, a trough, and a great iron cauldron on stilts over a roaring, smokey fire. Sure enough, the tools of Petrus's trade had been spilt on the ground, and the vile juices accumulated in the trough had splashed and soaked into the hay. Bad enough the air here was thick with the smell of vinegar, mint, frankincense, smoke and rotting flesh. "Are you completely stupid, boy? I've told you how many times you're not to fight, haven't I! You're Jesus-six years old. You are to run away when armed men come at you!"

"I'm twelve!" the boy answered stubbornly, his soft calf's eyes wide with indignance. "They've boys in the camp what's younger than me-"

"If you're twelve years old, I'm a flying bloody donkey." Petrus cut off his apprentice. The dark-haired lad was too much like he was when he was that age. And how'd that end up for him? Petrus could count his years by his scars. "Turks." he muttered. "Turks won't touch a dead body. Boy, they wore kaftan? Turbans? Tied like, this, or up like - I see." Petrus mimed several options of spirals about his head while the boy shrugged with varying degrees of commitment. "That doesn't sound like any Turk I know."

Petrus paced the empty chapel with the nervous energy of a soldier on leave, which he was not. Petrus was a surgeon and a chaplain, an herbalist and an alchemist. Occasionally, an executioner, once or twice a smuggler; debatably a thief, depending on how you looked at it, and most certainly a scoundrel - but he was not a soldier and he was not on leave. Far from it: Frederick of Swabia was bound and determined to meet the bulk of the Christian army at Acre as soon as possible despite the calamity that had become of the Imperial army. This stop to boil the body of Swabia's father, the great Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, was meant to pass as quickly and uneventfully as possible.

 "Where did you stab the man?" he demanded of the boy, gesturing vaguely at his own corpus for directions. The boy took his meaning.

"Between the left anterior deltoid and the lower clavicle," he answered promptly, "I was going for the cephalic vein, but-" Petrus winced and waved his arms to make the boy shut up.

"You're a surgeon, Maik, not a murderer. But very well done, anyway - that sounds very painful and not at all fatal." He gave the boy one last considering look. "Now, you have a job to finish. I secured quicksilver while you were engaged in mortal combat - put out the fires, fish out those meaty bits and get to work on the embalming unction-"

"But sir!"

"Shut up, boy. You're lucky I'm not holding you responsible for losing the bones of the Holy Roman Emperor. Clean up and finish your job, or I don't know what!"

"Where will you go? What will you do?" the boy was desperate to come along, Petrus could see that clearly enough. But Petrus was determined not to be any more of a bad influence than he needed to be.

"I will go get the bones back." he grumbled. "And I think I know just where to start."