The Sermon (Patreon)

He did not come in a procession. Nor did he come hooded, as was usual, but barefoot and bare-headed, his dark hair cropped to dusty stubble. He was beautiful, thought Giulia de Codico, the merchant’s daughter, who watched him cross the plaza from where she stood waiting for her father outside of the dyer’s shop. Her courses had come that morning and she felt faint after so long spent standing, her belly twisted into burning coils. 

The man carried a six-tongued discipline over one shoulder, its knotted cords swaying with each limping step he took. He wore ragged hose, a simple tunic belted at the waist, and over it an open cloak of brown roughspun with slits for his arms. The plaza was subdued, many of its shopfronts shuttered and painted with black crosses to show where the plague had come, but a few curious townsfolk trailed after him. Two of them, a pair of women, passed by not far from where Giula stood.

“...said he preached a scorcher at the fish market in Bacoli. Waste of good horseflesh, if you ask me,” sniffed the taller of the two, who Giulia took for a merchant’s wife by her comfortable plumpness and good clothes. “No vows, no debts, and this is how a ride like that spends his life?”

“I’ve a florin says he’s stiff under that tunic,” said the other, older and slightly bent-backed. She leaned on a cane and dragged her left foot as she walked. “You know what they say about the devotees of the discipline.” She smiled wickedly, displaying a handful of crooked teeth. “Their backs aren’t the only thing they’re beating.”

Giulia hid her smile behind her hand. She glanced back at the dyer’s shop where her father’s men Liso and Tomma were unloading the cart, Tomma standing in its bed and handing down the heavy oaken barrels of murexes for wall-eyed Liso to haul through a side door propped open with a bench set on its end. A few of the long, spiny snails lay smashed on the cobbles, purplish innards oozing out onto the stones. She looked away, disgusted. 

At the center of the square the stranger had come to a halt. The small crowd following him fell quiet, murmuring to each other as market-goers left their business to look over at the newcomer. Slowly, he removed his cloak and shrugged out of his tunic, letting it fall without a thought. Giulia’s breath caught in her throat. His back was a maze of scourged and lacerated flesh. Half-healed gashes squirmed like serpents over the knots of his muscles, scabs stretching and cracking. Fresh wounds glistened, red and weeping. He held his discipline in his right hand, the tails nearly touching the flagstones. In profile his face was like a mountain crag, furrowed brow leading into a long, hooked nose and angular jaw. His eyes were pale, his eyebrows thick and dark.

“The dead choke the streets of Rome and Venice.” His voice was harsh and rich and broken, a basso rumble rolled in tar and shards of flint. “I have seen them. God’s punishment is meted out in the boils that mar their bodies, that swell at the groin, the armpits, the throat. Where is our repentance in the face of it? Where is our shame? Our disgrace?” His arm came up. The discipline’s tongues made a sound like an open-handed blow against his back. He struck himself twice more, faster, lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes growing deeper as he grimaced. Blood trickled over the jut of one prominent shoulder blade. 

Giulia struggled to think. Her face felt hot. A fresh cramp writhed in the cradle of her hips and she wondered if she’d stained her stockings; they’d been out longer than she’d guessed, and the cloth between her legs was soaking. The stranger turned, his discipline’s tongues swaying, blood dripping from the cords. More people had gathered. A few interfered with her line of sight, but she could still see his writhing scars and knotted limbs through the gaps between their arms and bodies and over the tops of their shoulders. The sea air was cool, but it was hard to breathe. 

“We have broken our covenant with God!” Spittle gleamed on his yellow teeth. “We have blasphemed! We have coveted wealth and titles! We have profited by simony, and by the lending of money!” Blood flew where the discipline struck him. Giulia watched the droplets glitter in the sunlight. She imagined them falling hot like summer rain on her upturned face. The shadows of gulls streamed over the cobbles and the growing crowd. The pigeons milling around the dry fountain near where the wine vendors did their business took flight in a shower of molted feathers and white, watery shit.

A few in the crowd jeered at the man. Someone threw a coin, which bounced off the cobbles at his feet. There were people watching from windows overlooking the square, now. Giulia saw one woman, perched on the sill of a room above a shoemaker’s shop across the square, feeding a babe with dark hair like her own at her breast as she watched the commotion build. One bare foot dangled by the wall, swinging back and forth.

“Keep your gold!” the stranger thundered, voice hoarse. “The plague cares nothing for your vanities. Even now, here, it moves among us, marking whom it will for death. If this is the punishment God has allotted us, let us paint our bodies in the scarlet of contrition! Let us welcome each new boil and swelling and rejoice that it is us and not a neighbor blessed to carry the sign of His wrath!”

Another coin flew. This one struck the flagellant’s forehead. He spun, searching for the thrower, and again Giulia saw the ruin of his back in full, if only for a moment as the crowd shifted around him. Ragged red fissures. Raw skin weeping jewels of blood. He looks like the sweet Christ must have, when they scourged his holy body. A few rough-looking men were forcing their way toward the center of the square and across it, near the millery and the public kitchens with the hills beyond the river and the towers and baptistery of the cathedral atop them looming behind, laborers from one of the restorations in the old city were streaming into the square. The kitchens had emptied as well. The closeness of so many bodies made Giulia feel nauseated, drowned in the massed stench of sweat and foul breath.

“What’s this?” her father asked. He had come up on her left, though for all his great size she hadn’t heard his approach.  Giulia felt a terrible surge of shame at the sight of him, as though he’d caught her pissing on a carpet like one of her mother’s little dogs. Under the weight of his dark stare a fresh cramp clawed at her belly. He took her arm in one great hand. “You’re white as milk, girl.” His grip tightened and for a moment she thought he might shake her. 

She swallowed, fighting the urge to clutch at her stomach. “There’s a stranger preaching. A layman. He whipped himself.”

“Never mind,” her father said, looking over her head at the surging crowd. “The prince’s guard will come through soon, or the bishop’s men; we should be on our way.”

He pulled her toward the cart, Tomma and Liso falling in to either side of them. Tomma gripped the ironwood club he wore at his belt with an air of hungry self-importance, as though he were itching for a chance to use it. The woman in the windowsill had disappeared. Someone was screaming. A mob of barefoot children hurtled past, desperate not to miss the uproar. Giulia searched for the stranger as her father helped her up onto the seat behind the cart’s worn bench, but where he’d been there was only the surging body of the crowd.

They’re beating him. 

Tomma heaved the cart’s gate up and latched it in place as Liso and Giulia’s father climbed onto the bench, Liso gathering up the team’s reins. A crack of worn leather against the mares’ hindquarters and the cart lurched into motion, Tomma pacing it for a few swift steps before swinging himself up onto the rear runner. The cart still smelled of shellfish, a thick, gluey stink Giulia knew would cling to her for days. It turned her stomach. 

They rumbled past four of the prince’s guards, pikes on their shoulders, mail jangling, peaked helms glinting in the afternoon sunlight. The crowd melted away like flies in a high wind before the new arrivals, wave after wave of laborers, merchants, fishwives, and the rest of the plaza’s chaff drifting back to whatever they’d been doing before the stranger’s sermon. The guards spread out, gesturing with their pikes and mailed hands, shouting over one another. One leveled a blow at a beggar slow to vacate his place in the shade of a vacant stall, knocking the man flat on his face with the haft of his pike. 

The last of the assembly faded into the town’s scrawl of brick and stone. The flagellant lay sprawled on the cobbles, his clothes torn, his face a mask of blood. Two of the prince’s men stood over him. One said something that made the others laugh. Neither bent to help the injured man. For an instant, as the stranger levered himself up from his elbows to his hands and knees, threads of crimson drool hanging from his chin, their eyes met. Giulia bit her lip to stifle a groan as a fresh wave of cramping wracked her, She clutched fistfuls of her skirt until her knuckles ached. 

He was smiling.