The Harp and the Blade (10 page)

If the food at St. Lucien was nothing special it was sound and plentiful. I thrived, healing and taking on weight again, but I didn’t push on. My mind was still set on faring east, but the attendant difficulties were great. I had neither horse nor sufficient money to buy one and yet have anything left over for traveling expenses. As for going afoot, it was dangerous everywhere and too perilous even to consider there. To get anywhere I wanted to go I’d have to cross the Loire and use Charlemagne’s highway. That would take me directly through Chilbert’s territory, and I was a marked man, known personally or by description to the count and his followers.

Chilbert himself, I heard, was moving everywhere trying to procure strengthening alliances. His power already extended north a considerable ways and west along the river to the stream down which I’d drifted in the barge. That meant, I mused, that he had St. Charles Abbey in the crook of his elbow and reached along the southern border of Conan’s holdings. My friend was mentioned a few times, but they didn’t seem to know that he was or had been in mortal danger.

I didn’t dare to betray the knowledge implied in asking any direct questions, for as the monastery stood near the sphere of Chilbert’s influence he might have a man or so there in his pay.

I would have given much to see Conan again before leaving that section of the country, but the risk of seeking him out, granted he would be alive to make me welcome, was only one drawback. War was imminent, and if it broke out in the course of my visit I couldn’t gracefully avoid doing my part against our common enemy. But there was no gain for me in that, and it struck me that I had already lost enough blood in his behalf to satisfy all reasonable demands of friendship.

All in all the river appeared to be the best means of getting out of the corner I was in. I saw none but local boats, yet I learned that sea fishers came in the fall to sell salt stock, working their way upstream as far as Tours. As that exactly fitted into my plans I determined to wait and buy passage on one of their ships.

I enjoyed the first month I was there, alternately loafing with Father Gaimar and working with Father Michael. The latter was articulate as well as knowledgeable, and he inspired me to refurbish some of the worn patches in my education. In turn I was able to do a few things for him.

I early found that he blamed himself for not being able to fire his fellow monks with his zest for reading. In post of fact he could not get through to them, being by nature incapable of dealing with an uneducated mind. He could say nothing in a way they could understand, and to them he was half a wizard and half a joke.

Sitting in one of his classes I observed how he was openly flouted. They yawned, fidgeted, and talked to each other; and his pathetic eagerness to teach was met with a stolid determination not to learn.

It angered me to see him helpless and pitiable before such oafs. “Father,” I said when he had forlornly dismissed them, “why don’t you let me take the class tomorrow?”

His very desire to get out of it made him refuse. “No, thank you, my son. It’s one of my duties.”

I feigned great disappointment. “I suppose you don’t think I’m learned enough to instruct others in even the rudiments of knowledge.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that!” He was distressed, as I had known he would be, at the thought he had hurt my feelings.

“Then why don’t you let me take the class?” I wheedled. “There’s much more valuable work you could be doing in the library, and I really think I might be able to teach them something.”

“It would not be hard to do better than I,” he said humbly; and because of this alone he surrendered to his own wish.

The next day I marched before the students and laid my sheathed sword on the desk. “Father Michael has asked me to help you to read,” I announced, gazing from one to another with a challenge they instantly recognized and resented. “I expect your attention.”

That wasn’t true, and I didn’t get it at first. They started gabbing as usual, their eyes everywhere but on me or their wax copy plates. “Shut up, damn you!” I shouted.

For an instant they were startled into silence. “Fathers of the Church are supposed to have two things you midges lack,” I said belligerently. “They are grammar and courtesy, and I propose to teach you both.” I fixed my eyes on a young man who looked more intelligent as well as more insolent than the rest. “Can you decline
mensa?”

He smirked. “No, but I can decline to answer.”

I rose when his mates had finished laughing. “This,” I stated, picking up my sword for him to see, “is a thing. Its name is a noun, which can be declined but not conjugated.” He pursed his lips mockingly. “Oh? “

“The act of moving a thing,” I pursued, “is a verb, which can be conjugated but
not
declined.” I hit him over the head with the sheathed blade, and he sagged in his seat, almost out. “To confuse one with the other,” I concluded as I resumed my seat, “is a shocking fundamental mistake.”

After a few more such incidents interest in literacy waxed. All were attentive, and the better minds began to take hold. Not that I could claim to be popular with my class. Some resented my methods, but more were displeased because I, a non-cleric, was presuming to instruct monks. The fact that instruction was needed only aggravated the sting of the point. Even though they might not want to take the trouble of knowing more, by rights I should have known less.

Father Michael would have been dismayed at some phases of my technique, but he was overjoyed at the results. “You are a real teacher, my son,” he said happily, and I could see that he already had visions of the abbey swarming with eager students. Perhaps in other days, like many another house, it had been; but the great age of learning had passed. A saint of scholarship himself, he could not believe this, and it would not have flattered, but instead pained him, had I pointed out how wonderfully alone he stood.

A teacher of bare fundamentals I might have been, but he, awkward as a swan on the ground, was as splendid when allowed to soar. He had a flair for making the magnificent real that could stun the intellect with dreams.

Piety of a true sort he had. But though he was unaware of it he was no more a theologian than myself. I’m sure that Virgil was a much more vivid and beautiful spiritual reality to him than the banded Twelve Apostles, and I know, if he did not, that he viewed the loss of the Garden of Eden as a trifling tragedy compared to the sack of Troy. Rome and Greece in truth formed his paradise, and even the most despicable rogues in it had a glory that made their villainy inconsequential. Naiveté of a kind it might have been, but such was his love for it that he could put you in that dead world and take you through it, breathless at its wonders.

At the end of five weeks, however, our association was interrupted when some species of fever to which he was apparently subject sent him to the infirmary. While waiting for him to recover, I spent more time with Gaimar than ever. By then I had all but regained my full strength and felt so good about it that I usually took the oars for the returning upstream pull. I was well sweated getting my back into it on a scorching day when Father Gaimar stopped telling me and a boon companion of his who had joined us about the Mother Superior who had found a fiend under her bed.

Reprieving the fiend from ravishment, he said in a startled voice: “What’s that?”

I gazed where he was pointing, then stood up the better to see. The head and shoulders of what appeared to be a man, the rest of him trailing in the water, lay on the north bank just down river from us. “It’s a basking nicor!” Father Gaimar said in an awed voice.

“Let’s get away quick!” the third member of our party whispered.

Ignoring them, I let the boat drift until we were directly parallel with the figure. It didn’t move. “It’s a nicor, all right,” Gaimar said authoritatively. “Make for the other bank!” Notwithstanding the heat, I felt gooseflesh, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. “Nicors hang out in the sea,” I objected. “I never heard of one in a river.”

“It’s come up to catch fish,” he opined. “Row like the devil!”

“It’ll put a spell on us!” the other monk cried.

“Let me take an oar!” Gaimar urged, but I pushed him away. Their panic had had a steadying effect upon me.

“Why don’t you two holy men exorcise it?” I asked, half ironically and half wishing they could.

“I never got the hang of it,” Gaimar said, “but I’m going to learn if we ever get back safely.”

I had been studying the thing carefully. The hair was fair, which is true of nicors, and what of the torso could be seen was naked. Still there was nothing in his appearance to disprove he was human, either. “I think it’s a man,” I announced.

“It’s not!” the odd brother said angrily. “If you don’t want to row, give us the oars.”

I sat down and put the sculls between the thole pins once more. “I can’t and won’t leave without finding out whether that’s a man or not. If it’s a man, why, we can’t just go off without seeing what’s the matter with him.”

They didn’t agree and jumped me, trying to wrest the oars away. I stopped Gaimar by putting my foot in his stomach. His fellow struck me, and my reciprocating shove landed him on his back. I caught up my sword and drew it. “This can put a spell on you as quickly as a nicor,” I warned them. After a moment I laid the weapon on the thwart beside me and so began pulling toward the creature.

Had I not been myself somewhat nervous I would have derived more amusement from the sight of those bawdy monks kneeling and stumbling through the Latin of their prayers.

About ten yards from the thing I stopped. The river was too roiled from recent rains to let me see whether the lower extremities took the form of legs or not. The face was that of a man right enough, but it was so colorless that it might well have been something kept from the sun by deep water.

I almost weakened and consented to leave without pushing the investigation further, when to my excited fancy the face suddenly looked like that of the Saxon youth I had let Chilbert kill. “I’m going to find out exactly what’s what,” I told my wildly babbling companions. “You can come with me or you can jump ashore.”

They preferred the latter course, so I rowed them to the south shore and let them scramble up the bank and away. They had no intention of waiting to see what happened, either, but bee-lined home to the sanctuary of holy ground. Gaimar, it occurred to me as I pushed off, had at last found a spiritual use for the monastery.

Rowing backwards so that I could see better and be in a better position for flight, I approached the figure slowly. Reassured by closer inspection, I grounded the skiff near him and sprang ashore. His body was chill but not death-cold, so I rolled him over to get his face out of the mud. It was then that I saw his trouble, a deep gash in the shoulder. I examined it and whistled.

Unless I was much mistaken that wound had been made by an arrow, since pulled out. Bows aren’t used much for war purposes, although an occasional Dane is dangerous with the weapon. Leaving the man for a minute, I climbed the bank to look around. He had come from the west, the road, which ran quite near the Loire at that point, showed me, and had turned off to the river, no doubt desperate with thirst. Apparently the steep bank had been too much for him to negotiate, he had fallen in the water, and had fainted in the course of his struggle to get out.

His wound had stopped bleeding but recommenced a little when I put him in the boat, so I bound a press of leaves over it to keep the flies off. On the way back I devised gibes for Father Gaimar and planned to entertain my fellow diners with an epic account of his prayers and panicky retreat. But when I walked up to the monastery to get help in carrying my foundling the door was not opened at my word. Instead, as on the morning of my first arrival, Father Paul peered at me through the shot window. He closed it a second later but still did nothing about the door.

“Open up!” I said irritably.

“You can’t come in,” he retorted, and I could tell that he was enjoying himself.

“Quit playing jokes,” I told him sternly. “I’ve brought in a wounded man that needs looking after.”

“Father Gaimar told us how you picked up a nicor. You can’t come in.”

With the hilt of my sword I knocked the shot window loose from its grooves to glare at him through the small opening. “I tell you it’s a man. Hell! I’ve been with him an hour, and he’s done no harm to me.”

He swung the key on his finger and smiled. “Well, my distinguished scholar,” and by those words he as much as announced that he was avenging the snub I’d given him at our first meeting, “nobody knows anything about you except that you suddenly appeared. You may be a fiend yourself.”

He would not call any of the others when I asked him to, so I began shouting. When they appeared they did not come singly but in a group. They had been talking about me. “Father Raoul,” I addressed the sacristan, “I have a man in need .of attention here who should not be made to wait while this gnat-brained fool plays bad jokes.”

He was a well-intentioned old nincompoop, but he was of the kind to be thoroughly taken by Gaimar’s story. “You can’t defile a house of God by bringing in devil’s spawn,” he said uneasily. I could see that he did not relish even talking with someone who had associated with that spawn.

“Gaimar,” I said to my former friend, “tell them you lost your nerve and ran away before you could find out whether it was a man or not.”

“Father Gaimar saw he had a fish’s tail when you took him out of the water,” another monk volunteered.

“Tell them you lied, Gaimar,” I said ominously, but he just looked at me sullenly. In part he was a bearer of exciting news who balked at publicly confessing its falseness, but I believe he also now thought he had witnessed what he so vividly imagined.

I was losing my temper, but I was still making an effort to be reasonable. “Come out and see for yourselves that he’s just a harmless lad who’s had a bad time of it. Look. I’ve lived here over six weeks. You all know me and can see that being near this fellow has wrought no change in me.”