Terror of the Trdlo - Part III - Nun: The Wiser

Um, Abbess in Brewery Uniform - Bartolomeo Passeroti, Wikimedia Commons

“Feuerpause!”  

A tall, stately woman in the habit of the Sisters of St. Vlasta entered, deadpan-ordering a cease-fire in Schwabisch military jargon.  It was the abbess, Reverend Mother Vlasta, named after the patroness of the brewery, the abbey, the former Kingdom of Krajansko, and her order.  She bent down to wrench Zdenka’s first dagger from the floorboards, straightened, and walked toward Zdenka with the pommel carefully extended toward the leather-armored young woman.

“I thank you, your Reverence,” Zdenka said as she lowered her arm and tucked the unthrown dagger inside her armor.  She took the dagger Mother Vlasta handed her and tucked it near the other one.  Then she tied back her unruly midnight-dark hair.

“I have been watching both you and Beata from the murder holes in the floor above,” said Mother Vlasta.  This was no large surprise to Zdenka, who had come to know Mother Vlasta a little in the weeks she and Beata had been staying in the convent/brewery.  During the recent siege and invasion, Zdenka had also looked down into the beer hall through the murder holes in its ceiling.  

“I’ll wager you’re a bit anxious to get out of town, and I have a job opportunity for you and Beata involving a few days of travel and a few weeks of work,” Mother Vlasta continued.

The abbess was a superlative reader of people, Zdenka had discovered.  Zdenka could readily admit some of things she was sure Mother Vlasta had intuited. 

She was bored, now that the battle to repel the attack on the convent was many weeks in the past.  The brute-force demolition and reconstruction work on the brewery’s experimental production equipment was finished now, too, and she felt in the way when the brewer-nuns were setting up specialized vats and vessels and calibrating them according to their expert knowledge.  

What was harder to admit was that she still felt ill at ease in Vodnikov, which she had returned to more than a decade after fleeing it in order to save her life.  Zdenka sometimes still saw the hideous, hatetwisted face of her enemy, Bulvarka, loom up to glare at her in the crowds bustling across St. Vlasta’s Square, but she would shake her head or close her eyes for a moment, and the criminal boss’s haggish visage would disappear.  It would feel good to be away from the neighborhood again.

Hardest of all to admit to others or to herself was the jealousy she felt when the beautiful young nuns gazed with rapt attention at Beata. They reminded Zdenka of the novices Beata had seduced long ago – the reason Beata had been defrocked and forced out of the convent she had grown up in.

Undoubtedly, shrewd Mother Vlasta had subtly discerned a similar dynamic between Beata and Vlasta’s young Sisters.

This gave a certain force and urgency to her job offer.

+++++

Before this one:

Terror of the Trdlo - Part I

Terror of the Trdlo - Part II

and the one AFTER this one, Part IV: The Hermitess