Adam - 1. Adam

Adam

The crackling fire is a surprise. He can feel its warmth and smell the woody fragrance of smoke. This is the afterlife? Curious, he opens his eyes, when pain erupts inside him, burns his innards, and brings back the agony and despair he thought he had escaped. Hell!

He had known he was dying, so when the dark figure stepped out of the shadows, he wasn’t surprised. Black robes rustled as the Reaper stopped beside his cot, looked down at him, and finally took Adam’s wrist to suck what was left of his wretched life out of him. As he passed, words that had haunted him for so long echoed in his mind: ‘In the end, you have to do penance for your mother’s mating with the devil by burning beside her in the eternal fire.’

Uncle John had been right, at least partially, when he whispered those words that terrible day, while his hands were digging into Adam’s shoulders, forcing him to face the entrance of the marketplace. Adam was frightened, tried to avert his face, close his eyes, instinctively knowing something bad was about to happen. But Uncle John wouldn’t have none of that. He took Adam’s chin between his spindly, cold fingers and forced him to watch as they brought his mother; forced him to listen to the celebrating crowd eating and drinking, laughing and joking, waiting for the spectacle to begin. Forced him to see the burning of the witch!

A log cracks with a sharp noise, and Adam shivers, despite the fire. He pulls the blanket closer around him. Blanket? Before he can focus on this oddity, its smell of thyme brings back another memory.

Their small house had always smelled of herbs, with thyme being the dominant scent. Mother washed her hands with its extract every time she delivered a baby or visited an ill person. Its oil was used for bandages. He still remembers where to find the most aromatic plants. She showed him the sunny glade up in the mountains the day she taught him how to finely grind their leaves with a pestle and mortar.

In the night, Mother had roused him with panic in her eyes. She told him to hide outside up in the old apple tree. From his perch, he heard them knocking down the front door. Bearing flails, and torches, they ransacked the house, burnt everything and even killed their cat. He wanted to fight them so badly, but Mother had made him swear to only come down after they were gone, and he couldn’t break his oath, because that would get him into hell.

Somewhere birds cry and a breeze of fresh air caresses his clammy skin. This can’t be real. The devil is torturing him, showing him glances of heaven, only to burn him with hell’s fire afterwards. It doesn’t matter, though. He gladly accepts the price for his sins. His sins, not his mother’s. He won’t find her here. She went directly to heaven. What they did to her...

He almost hadn’t recognized the broken figure clumsily climbing down from the cart. They had shaved her head bald, clad her in a white penitential robe which couldn’t hide the bruises and deep gashes littering her face, arms, and legs.

Even now he can hear his own shrill voice piercing through people’s chatter. ‘Mama!’

He had tried to escape his uncle’s grip, but at the last moment, John caught him by his collar and held him in place. At seven, Adam hadn’t understood why he couldn’t go to her when she so obviously needed him. She was hurt. He had to bandage her wounds. Why didn’t Uncle John understand?

People around them had become silent when they heard him. They even stopped throwing rotten food and horse apples so they could watch better.

‘That’s the witch’s child’, they whispered. ‘Who knows who the father is?’ ‘The devil himself.’

They wanted to see them suffer, wanted to see the pain on Mother’s face when she realized Adam would see her burn to death. Only Mother didn’t seem to have heard him, she kept staring at the ground while limping barefoot in front of the masked guard.

Then his uncle called her. “Brenna! Look! Today your son will witness as HIS flaming sword smites you, and throws you directly in hell!”

She finally looked up, her dull eyes becoming clear for a short moment, her lips moving, but all Adam could hear was a pained grunt, when the guard pushed her forward again.

“Mama!” She didn’t look back.

The executioner chained her to a metal pole protruding from the top of the stake. Then someone passed him a clay jug, and he poured oil on the wood, while circling slowly around it. The mob howled impatiently. The masked man lifted a burning torch for everyone to see. People started chanting. ‘Burn the witch! Burn the witch!’ The torch went down, and Adam felt blazing heat on his eyelids.

Flames surrounded her quickly. He couldn’t tear his eyes away and their gazes connected one last time while she breathed in deeply again and again. Just as thick smoke began to obscure his view, she slumped down, and he screamed and screamed until his voice gave out.

The stench of burning flesh, the cheering of the crowd—their neighbors and friends, people his mother had healed over the years—and the triumph and elation he saw in his uncle’s eyes will be forever engraved in his memory.

Afterwards, Uncle John told him his mother had been a priestess of the devil. She and other so-called healers and midwives had been spreading the plague that ravaged the country and killed many people in their small village. Under the pretention of treating the sick, they went to huts and houses, infecting more and more families. God himself had ordered him to stay in his church and barricade it, so he would be saved and could hunt down those who were defying HIS name.

Adam hadn’t believed him, had screamed it wasn’t true, but Uncle John had proof. How could he explain that she visited the sick, but didn’t become ill? It was unnatural. She must have had a pact with the devil, which protected her. In his name, she also poisoned the grain, and bad harvests followed. He knew, because people had seen her walking in the rye fields.

Mother sometimes collected ergot to make a medicine for hasting childbirth. She didn’t poison the grain. They killed her for something she never did. Not like him. He deserved everything he got. He deserved hell.

Oliver. The very thought of his name summons the hellfire singeing his insides, and Adam writhes in the sudden onslaught of pain. He had been so stupid, secretly believing that God was just. Hadn’t he learned from his mother’s fate? Oliver and he hid their love because people eliminated the other, the different they didn’t understand. They feared the unknown. But shouldn’t God be greater than this? How could HE punish him for how HE himself made him? So, he had clung to a thin thread of hope until the last minute of his life was over. He knows better now. No heaven for God’s mistakes. HE burns those in hell.

The only reason Uncle John and Aunt Mary had taken him in was that John was the village’s priest. He had to show mercifulness. Adam was to help around the house, but mostly stay out of sight. Encounters with Uncle John usually resulted in blows to the face and sometime the cane on his back.

At ten, they sent him to work at the duke’s horse stables and the happiest years of his life began. Even though at the beginning he mostly cleaned out stables, and fed and watered the animals, he also learned how to ride. What he loved above all was grooming the duke’s foreign horses. He sensed their untamed spirit, their longing to feel the heat and the sand of the desert under their hooves again, to roam its vastness. While he ran a brush over their coat, they murmured to him in a language only he could understand. They were kindred souls. With him they were always calm, even Henry, who was the most difficult of the three horses. His Arabic name was Riah, and he belonged to the duke’s second son.

A strangled grunt pulls Adam out of his memories. His eyes fly open, ready to face hell’s wrath again—but nothing happens; no pain assaults him. He tries to sit up. It is surprisingly easy. Running his hands over his arms and legs, his jaw, his nose, the corner of his eye, he can’t believe it. His bones are mended! There are no longer open wounds, or bruises. Still, the flickering fire can’t keep away the coldness he feels, or the darkness that creeps up on him when he thinks of what he lost.

Lord Oliver had come to the stables any time he could. He brought treats for his horse Henry, groomed him, fed him, and did not think it beneath himself to clean out his box. The stable master told Adam once the young lord preferred the animals to his family.

Then one day, Henry had kicked the farrier and even Lord Oliver couldn’t calm him down. It was not until Adam grabbed the reins and talked to Henry with soothing words, the horse could be shod. The lord was amazed and immediately wanted to know Adam’s secret, but Adam was reluctant. He feared Oliver would laugh at him, or worse accuse him of witchcraft. When he finally gave in and admitted the horses trusted him because he could hear their words, Oliver didn’t mock him. Instead he told him his father had been gifted the horses as a reward by a foreign king, so Adam must understand Arabic. He even joked Adam might be the reincarnation of an Arabic prince, which were famous for talking to their horses.

From that day on, an unlikely friendship began. Adam always accompanied Oliver on his long rides. Together they explored the forests and the surrounding lands. Oliver taught Adam hunting and fishing and sometimes they made a fire and cooked fish or game.

In return, Adam showed Oliver which herbs they could use for seasoning and told him about the medicine he could make from some of the plants they found. When Oliver asked how he learned all this, Adam eventually told him about his mother. He still remembers how he had cried for hours in Oliver’s arms afterwards.

In time, innocent gazes became meaningful, coincidental touches deliberate. After that, it didn’t take long and they shared their first kiss. It made them feel elated, free in a way, though they always knew they lived on borrowed time. Someone someday was bound to notice, and they wouldn’t see love and happiness; they would see abominations, sin, and devilry. In all likelihood, their punishment would be a painful death.

Adam shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the memories. He feels weak and hungry. It’s more than a simple hunger, though. It’s…a yearning, an urge, a craving….

Oliver had been restless. He feared his father suspected something, and he might even have had them followed secretly. He told Adam about a faraway country, the home of the horses, where a love like theirs was allowed. They dreamed of leaving. Oliver even begun to stash away valuables for their journey.

No! He doesn’t want to think of it anymore! His head snaps up. For the first time he takes in his surroundings with a clear mind. A cave? He looks around. There, black against the light coming through the entrance, stands the tall figure of the Reaper. What is he still doing here? Is this a waiting room of sorts? Before he can linger on those thoughts, debilitating pain once again consumes him, swallows his consciousness, meant to forever bring back the moments his bones broke and his flesh tore. Hell’s punishment for being a mistake.

The duke’s personal guards entered the stable just after Adam and Oliver had put the horses into their boxes for the night. Two of them immediately crowded Oliver, took his arms and pinned him against the wall, before the leader pressed his forearm against Oliver’s throat, making it difficult for him to move without strangling himself.

They forced Oliver to watch as the first punch hit Adam in the jaw, his head snapping back and colliding with a metal hook coming out from the wall behind him. Dazed, he couldn’t ward off the knee landing in his groin, and when he instinctively bent over to protect himself, they kicked his face and broke his nose.

Even restrained as he was, Oliver yelled at them, ordered them to stop and threatened them, but they laughed in his face, telling him they were only following the duke’s orders. Next, they stripped Adam naked, touched him, slapped him, taunted him, and eventually burnt him repeatedly with the branding iron. All that was left for him to do was curl himself together as tight as he could, while endless blows and kicks rained down on him. He heard his bones break when one of them stomped on his arm. He felt tendons snap when they bent his leg in the wrong direction. Breathing became difficult; he felt as if he was under water. And the whole time Oliver roared in the background, by now begging them to stop. They never did. By order of the duke, they were killing Adam and with that destroying Oliver.

Finally, when they thought he was dead they threw his body on the dunghill behind the stables.

Adam was still alive when George, Oliver’s personal guardsman, finally found him. Even though he was sent by Oliver, George undertook a great personal risk. He brought him to Aunt Mary and Uncle John and even gave them gold to pay a healer.

He woke up on his old cot in the shed by the stable. The pain was unbearable by then. Within hours, the cot was soaked through with blood and later puss. He became more and more delirious, but in every lucid moment, he thought of Oliver, hoping he was well.

Adam rubs his face and when he looks at his hands, they are stained red from his tears. Red. Blood.Fire.Hunger.Endless.

Suddenly the Reaper kneels in front of him.

“You must be hungry.”

Suddenly unnaturally long canines flash in the firelight, when the Reaper slashes his own wrist open. Blood immediately wells up and to his horror, Adam feels saliva pooling in his mouth. It smells heavenly. The Reaper dips his finger into the blood and then smears it over Adam’s lips. Adam eagerly licks it away. Then he grabs the Reaper’s arm, presses it against his mouth, and sucks greedily. Slowly the hollowness inside him vanishes. After a while, Adam feels warm and sated. He looks at the Reaper.

“Is this hell?”

“That depends.”

“Are you the Reaper?”

“In a way. I am Zaidu.”