Alms for the Dead 1300

Ignatius ambled between the gravestones of Lugdim, the city from which the kingdom took its name. Not many in this graveyard were Horned Ones, their gravestones including praise for the great river spirit Thymenes or the benevolent sea spirit Orka or the Oak-Lord Nemeton. Ignatius wondered idly whether their descendants paid for their ancestor’s baptism, or if they cared about those in the fiend’s fire. He guessed that, like many, they simply did not care.

But no matter. He was here to enjoy the Lugdim Outremer not worry about men’s eternal souls. Lugdim was a ringstaad, built in concentric circles around a center in the deepest widest part of the Thymenes. The inner rings of the city were cold, dead and gray, occupied with achingly empty cathedrals, abandoned manors and the twisting halls of government. There, Church Proctors controlled the city according to their useless Northern ideasl, all while the Phalange, street-thugs and foppish second-sons in King Eduardo’s employ, defied those very ideals.

The outer rings, while certainly cold and gray, were intensely alive. Ancient codes had restricted graveyards to these outer rings, while Church proctors forced ungodly activities to the Outremer. Whorehouses, taverns and even theatres! And without the Phalange or Proctors to roam the streets, vulgar men of vulgar trades took to hiring all the scum cities tend to draw in. Gaudily dressed yeomen, pining for some golden age with their rusted knives, stood on every street, glaring angrily at all passerby, daring not to touch. Interfering with business would be, well, bad business.

They gave Ignatius some room. He didn’t wear a Proctor’s garb, but wore his country parish’s ritual vestments. As most were country-boys brought in as city-men, they gave any country preacher some degree of respect.

As Ignatius came near a theatre, his desired ungodly vice, he sighted a large man in colorful garb, waving his hands as if plying a trade and yelling just the same. But when Ignatius gave some attention to his words, he noticed the unmistakable air of godliness in the words.

“…your coin hits the bowl, the soul leaves its damnation. Can you, yes you…” A sausage fattened finger pointed at some docksmen in the crowd. “… hear your kinsmen crying out ‘Save us from this with but a bobber!’ Can you not hear the fiend’s whips upon their flesh, the fire sizzling their fat with the pop! of a morning wassail? Give your alms for the Dead! Free them from everlasting damnation and….”

A man who smelled of an abattoir spoke above and with the murmur of the crowd. “Ol’ Tetzel, always th’ spectacle!” He smiled a toothless smile to Ignatius who stood horrified and dropped a bobber into Tetzel’s open bowl. The iron coin’s ringing supposedly signaled the salvation of one long passed.

What common and scandalous preaching, fumed Ignatius. What manner of man was this Tetzel, this plier of men’s souls! Would these coins go to some patron’s pocket or to the Father Church? Ignatius was disgusted and… then he let it pass. He wouldn’t need to care about this God-forsaken land much longer.

He continued into the theater; Tetzel’s crowd falling apart behind Ignatius, their near-pagan trickster having left them. This was the one thing he could appreciate about Lugdim. Nowhere in the world were there better playwrights, unfettered as they were by the illegality of their trade. Ignatius thought that in far-off Serica, where prostitutes were servants of the state, the trade must have fallen behind in craftsmanship to the West, for the same had happened with the Southern playwrights to the Northern. Who in the South could compare to Marlouis, the half-Lochaber bastard, or to Hastivibrax, the rising star of criminal playwrights who adopted even a false name for all of his performances? Perhaps the Don Juan Callisto and that was due to his criminality. In the South, plays were written for the state. Here, they were written in spite of the state.

The theater was showing one of Hastivibrax’s works, though it was not his theatre or company. One exchange in the inflammatory piece caught Ignatius’s ears and emboldened him:

“Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Vercetorix, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are under them.”

Ignatius left the performance satisfied with the word play, inspired by the hatred of Eduardo and the love for Mother Lugdim. And the next day, he would beg at that King’s feet to leave this damned land. Hastivibrax would have wept at such a man enjoying his play.