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In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti.
Amen.
Someone horks deep in their throat in the ensuing silence. The priest resumes the mass. A figure in red shakes its head, droplets of water landing on the man next to it. Janosh groans.
“No fucking dog in church, you forget?”
“No cursing either.”
Adder grins and smooths down his damp hair backwards. It does nothing to flatten the stray hairs. The rain caught them on their way back to a tavern. They were stuck in some middle of fucking nowhere town near Hradec Kralove, or something similar sounding. It seemed like the sky opened up just as they were passing the local church. The mass had just been starting.
It was unclear who pushed whom towards the entrance of the church. “Thunder don’t go into nettles, hey?” Janosh had offered lamely at the time.
They were really hoping said thunder wouldn’t follow them. They had separated from the bulk of the Devil’s pack — fuck off and go sniff this cunt out — Hynek had said. Adder took it as a much too literal opportunity to go sniff out cunt and Janosh hardly protested after grueling three days of cooking with nothing but scraps.
They were tasked with finding a cunt that owed Hynek a fat sack of groschen for previous banditry related endeavors. Easy job — find the man and scare him until he shits out the silver. However, nobody accounted for the man taking that money to pay for his new retinue of knights. Four solid kits of armour, not too expensive nor gilded, but the numbers weighed against their odds. Adder had barely managed to hiss out a kurwa and hadn’t had a chance to pluck even a single hair from that cunt’s head before the iron entourage caved in on them.
It was a long and tiring run, but not as tiring as it must’ve been for the men running in full armour. Adder had flipped them off doubly once both of them made it to the top of a hill, then vanished to the other side of it.
And on the other side stood a town, with a ringing church.
Both of them are still mildly out of breath as they stop in the far back of the crowd. And very wet. Droplets of water drip from the hem of Janosh’s kaftan. Adder grips the scabbard of his sabre indecently and drags it all the way to its bottom to rid it of any stray water. Janosh averts his eyes towards the altar.
Spera in Deo, quóniam adhuc confitébor illi: salutáre vultus mei, et Deus meus.
Glória Patri, et Fílio, et Spirítui Sancto.
The priest resumes his chanting, oblivious to Janosh’s predicament.
— qui fecit cælum et terram. Who had made heaven and earth.
Adder murmurs quietly, mumbling tits and cunts where heaven and earth are invoked in prayer. Janosh hides a snort behind a fake cough. It only spurs Adder on.
— mea culpa, mea culpa, —
Adder cups an imaginary set of tits over his own chest at every uttered mea culpa, mouthing at the words.
— mea maxima culpa.
On maxima he cups his chest again in an even grander gesture of a massive rack. Janosh tries to hide another snicker under a well timed cough again and spirals into a wheezing coughing fit instead. He retaliates with a well placed elbow to the Pole’s ribs.
The noise Adder makes, a deflating wheeze, makes a sour faced old woman in front of them turn to give them both a scathing look. She notices the way Adder bends inward at what is most definitely going to be a bruise and turns her gaze towards the Hungarian.
“What is the problem with you two?”
Janosh wipes all signs of humour from his face in favour of a grave look. “So sorry madam. My friend dying and he wanted to visit church one last time.
Something akin to sympathy begins to bloom on her face just as she turns away, when Adder chooses to retaliate by stomping firmly on Janosh’s toes. Janosh yowls through his teeth, a growl in his throat, ready to berate the blond cunt when the woman turns around to find the source of commotion once again.
Janosh, grimacing, offers her a half-hearted explanation.
“I…very hurt by my friend illness.”
She huffs indignantly, shoulders her way through the crowd to put distance between them. Several people turn their heads to stare at them.
“Cunts like owls,” Janosh observes under his breath, his ache forgotten in favour of leaning into Adder’s space to mumble. The Pole only snickers.
They lapse back into silence, as much as the room echoing with the priest’s voice allows it. Janosh looks around; walls flaking with old frescoes, altar glinting with chalices and trinkets. His sight falls onto Adder then. They left both their weapons tucked behind a damp wall before entering the space of the nave. Without them, they both look a little softer. Easier on the eyes, easier to imagine this as just a thing they’d do together if they were two yokels from the same village.
The choir is halfway decent; the male voices sing softly against the noise of rain on the roof and walls. Janosh thinks Adder is too busy staring at some wench few paces away from them. Despite the dampness, he doesn’t seem as worried or disgruntled with the predicament that waits for them just outside the church walls.
But the weapons aren’t there and it’s easy to pretend there’s no bandits waiting for them in the dark either. It’s easy to pretend that even the paltry distance between them is coincidental, too. They’re huddling for warmth, after all, in the pitiful cold of the house of God.
Kýrie, eléison.
Adder’s circling gaze settles back on Janosh. He imagines he’s done counting how many naked cherubs there are floating on each fresco. The blond leans in close enough to whisper something in his ear — what could be so blasphemous that could warrant a bigger need for privacy than freely uttered curses and mentions of all perverse parts of a body right under the priest’s nose?
Kýrie, eléison.
“I think I want to make a confession, since we’re already here,” Adder murmurs. The reverb of his low voice strikes a chord in Janosh’s chest lower than the cherubic croon of the choir.
Kýrie, eléison.
An exasperated chuckle bubbles out of Janosh. Never a good thing for Adder to stay long in a church. “You think you can play nice with priest, hey?”
Adder smiles knowingly, like Janosh is missing some kind of a bad, obvious joke. “Ach, don’t need the priest,” the Pole shrugs, unconcerned. Janosh briefly recalls that one time they shoved Kubyenka into a far too small Dominican habit; a frankly disturbing sight for anyone who had been involved.
“I not getting my fat arse in dress like Kubyenka,” he retaliates. Adder snorts at that horrific memory; Janosh can’t help but snicker along. The Pole had been calling him nothing but Ojciec Kubyenka for weeks.
“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” Adder begins. Janosh’s eyes widen at the low croon of his voice almost pressing against the shell of his ear. “My last confession was before I met you.”
Kýrie, eléison.
And Janosh, Janosh doesn’t know whether to laugh it off or not, not because the space of the church compels him into silence but because it’s Adder, speaking into his ear without any sign of a smile — deadly serious, as deadly as he is with his sabre. It might also be because he already knows all Adder’s sins; he was there for them. The absurdity at the thought of condemning him for penance he himself had been running away from is ridiculous.
What are two penitents to do with holy words between them?
“I stole,” Adder continues. Janosh exhales through his nose, smiling.
“I lied,” Janosh can’t even think of lies as sin anymore; not when he’s living one every day.
“I murdered,” and Janosh knows he did, because it was him who ducked under the sword of the last bandit who had attacked him, Adder swinging a sabre over his back and into the man’s guts. He had finished him off with his fokos.
“I slept with my neighbour's wife,” And Adder leers at that one, sly smile on his face. Janosh thinks Adder must hold some kind of a record in this category.
“I’ve disrespected God,” he says, and Janosh smiles. “You disrespect him right now.”
Adder chuckles. There’s no privacy of a confessional or a screen between them to let him fall behind it. Maybe if they were still outside he could’ve pretended the sheets of rain separating them could make it less personal.
“You want to keep up this and go on your knees?” Janosh teases. He doesn’t want to be asked for forgiveness in that voice.
Adder makes a thoughtful face, as if properly considering it, then cackles again when Janosh elbows him after a few seconds too long.
Another handful of heads turn around to regard them with haughty disdain. This time even the priest turns his head towards them, a stormy expression on his face.
Janosh elbows him again, successively, until they’re both slowly retracing their steps back to the church’s entrance. The Pole scuttles over to the niche in the wall to retrieve their weapons, to the shock of some of the residents. The priest urges the choir subtly to raise their voices to drown out the commotion of voices in the crowd.
The massive gate stands open, as it did throughout the entire service, and they escape back into the rain. What was the opposite of out of the frying pan and into the fire? It’s still raining, though at least it feels less as if someone was emptying buckets on their heads now.
Adder is still buckling his sabre back to his belt, fingers cold and slipping. “Kurwa,”
Janosh looks around briefly, making sure no not-knights in not-shiny armour are prowling around the edges. “Your confession always make you kicked outside of church?”
He can’t decide whether he feels relieved Adder is no longer being odd right against his ear or pissed because they’re back in the fucking rain again.
“Kurwa, I wasn’t done yet,” he whines.
“Not even God forgive you, why bother,” Janosh insists. He thinks Adder has used up all the mercy Lord could give in this world already, and then some. The Pole is silent for a moment, then rests his hand on the hilt of his weapon. He slumps into that slanted stance of his and Janosh thinks maybe the rain will slide off of him quicker under that angle.
“And you? Does Janosh forgive?”
Janosh can’t help but huff. “Janosh not God.”
And maybe Adder is right to ask forgiveness from him because he knows no God would forgive him for the shit he’s done. And maybe He shouldn’t, either. Because he’s done it too, and the notion of it all being absolved makes him laugh like no other joke.
Maybe he could forgive him for every mangled deer carcass he’s brought for Janosh to make supper with. Or maybe, he could forgive him for disgracing the memory of his mother with every perverted joke he’s ever made about her. He can’t decide if she would have loved or hated Adder.
But, to forgive Adder is to forgive himself, and he gave up on redemption a long time ago.
He wipes his wet brow with the back of his damp sleeve. “I steal. I lie. I murder. Same as you. Sometimes with you. So who forgive who, hey?”
“Then we’re even,”Adder’s laugh cracks out of him, sharp and cutting through the rain. “Except I’m worse. My sins are bigger.”
“Your cock maybe bigger. Not your sins,” Janosh fires back, lips curling.
The Pole doubles over a little at that, hand pressed to his side as if the laugh hurts. “And I didn’t even have to pay you to wash my back while you say that.”
Janosh smirks, but doesn’t look at him. His eyes scan the edges of the square, the stones gleaming black under rain. The silence stretches between them, long enough to feel wrong. Adder doesn’t fill it with more curses, more jokes. He just watches him — like he’s waiting for something Janosh isn’t about to give.
Finally, Janosh spits into the mud, adjusts the fokos at his belt, and mutters, “Come. We find shelter before I confess how stupid I feel standing here in rain.”
Adder chuckles low in his throat, but when he falls into step beside him, he’s still grinning that grin — the one that says he heard something else in Janosh’s words, even if Janosh won’t admit it out loud. Janosh can forgive that one, at the very least.