The Priest of Blood (11 page)

But when my mother was accused and arrested, it was a shock to my system so deeply felt that I flew into a rage when I first heard.

2

“How do you know this is true?” I asked my companion, Ewen.

“Corentin told me,” he said. “He was at the abbey, bringing with him the pups from the baron’s litter as gifts for the monks. Your mother is held there, against her will.”

“They will release her,” I said.

“They say she murdered a child,” Ewen added, and he said it with such compassion that I nearly wept. “I am sorry to be the messenger of this news, Falconer. I could not keep it from you, for you have been my friend since I arrived here. But if I had known it would make you suffer like this, I would have held my tongue.”

“No, thank you, my friend, my only true friend,” I said, and embraced him in goodwill. “You are right to tell me that I might go change the course of this terrible mistake.”

I went first to seek out Corentin. He seemed to be at the center of any base untruth, of any evil doing, and I had become the protector of the other boys against his wickedness. He by then was held in too-high esteem, both by my master and by the baron himself. I would not believe a word he said, but I needed to face him and discover exactly what he knew before taking this up with my master.

I found him in the stables, not working as he should have been, but atop some hapless milkmaid. I drew him up by his elbow and pushed him against the wooden slats. “What do you know about this vile gossip?”

He seemed a little frightened, then began laughing. The girl ran off, out into the yard. He said, “What in the Devil?” Then he boomed, “How dare you, Mud-hen, come in and demand of me.” He had a blade sheathed in a short scabbard that had been a gift from some lady. He drew it out and held it in the air between us. “Do not come near me, or I shall ruin that pretty face.”

“My mother has been accused of witchcraft,” I said. “What do you know of this?” I used language then that I’d held inside myself. Curses and oaths that I had not yet uttered in life. They flew from my mouth like locusts in the air.

“I am sorry, Mud-hen,” Corentin said, but there was no sorrow in his voice. “I am sorry. This fate should not befall even you. Your mother and a midwife of the Forest have been taken into the abbey. They are accused of sorcery and murder.”

“Did you cause this to happen?” I asked.

His eyes widened. He slashed his dagger in the air before me, so close that I could smell its metal and the filth of his hand, yet it never touched my skin. “Go to your mother, Mud-hen. Do not waste your time with foolish chatter. If she is a servant of the Devil, they will find it out soon enough. If she is innocent and Godly, that, too, will reveal itself.”

He held the dagger up in front of my face until I turned and left the stable.

3

I could not simply rush to the abbey to see my mother. I had to wait until work was done. I went to the small chapel in the household to seek solace and find an answer through prayer. The chapel was dark, but flickering with candles.

Alienora knelt near the front of the chapel, deep in prayer. When she saw me light a candle and place it at the Virgin’s feet, she came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

“I feel the Holy Mother’s presence here,” she said softly. “What troubles you, Falconer?”

When I looked into her eyes, I felt the maternal warmth of her being. Her face was like an arc of light in my dark world.

I told her of my troubles, and she took my chin in her soft, warm hand. “Have faith. If your mother is as you say, then she will be found innocent in the Lord’s eyes. Our priest and abbé know what is of Heaven and what of Hell.”

“You do not understand,” I whispered. “And I dare not tell you more.”

“Please,” she said. “Please tell me.”

“If I tell you, will you promise not to be angry with me for this? For the telling?”

She nodded. “On the Blessed Mother’s womb,” she said. Then she went and kissed the statue of the Virgin, first at the feet, then at her womb, as was then the custom of maidens who sought the Virgin’s protection.

She brought me to kneel on the hard stone floor. We clasped our hands together in prayer.

“Tell me,” she said. “What strikes fear in your heart?”

“You have lived in comfort,” I said. “You have, since childhood, known no want. You have known no care. When you are sick, you are healed. When you are sad, you are made gay. When you desire meat, it is cooked for you. Drink, it is there. You adorn yourself with jewels and fur, at which price someone must go hungry, but you have not met whoever hunts the bear or barters for the gemstones or captures the wild boar and slaughters and dresses it for the feast. I am one of those who pay that price. I have known a different life.

“When I was a child, there were days of hunger. Long nights of fever while I watched a sister die slowly, and without any help, except from the Forest crones. Here, in your home, it is warm in the wintertime. Where I lived, we simply froze. We slept with dogs and each other for warmth, upon straw thrown on the frozen ground. My mother is old before her time. My life, to her, seems like the life of a prince, and yet I sleep in a place where even your hounds would not venture.

“If you were accused of this crime of sorcery, your father would pay tribute to the abbey, and you would soon be released. But my mother does not have a father to protect her. She does not have powerful friends. She has no influence in the village, and she has been kept from Mass on too many occasions. I dread saying this at the foot of the Virgin herself. But she is a whore, and has many children to still care for. She is not someone who, like you, would have others to speak for her or to pay the jailer’s bribe. I am afraid that she will die.”

Alienora leaned forward and kissed me gently on the cheek, right where a tear had fallen. Her lips must have tasted that tear, for when she drew back from me her lips shone with it, and her cheeks were flushed with red where they had been snow-white a moment before. “Your love for your mother is strong,” she said. “I will help you. I will help her.”

She reached up to her neck and drew a pendant over her head. She asked me to open my hands, cupped. I did so, and she placed the pendant in them. “This was brought to me by the man I was to wed. He died in the Holy Crusades, but it was a gift he sent before his death. They call it an encolpion.”

I looked at the image on the medallion. It was the face of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Above her, to her right, a small white dove. It had a Byzantine cast to it, and gold filaments within the metal. On the other side was a picture of Our Lord, surrounded by gold, holding the Bible in his left hand, his right hand raised up. There were strange figures written below this, and Alienora told me that it was a prayer for safety and glory.

“You must wear this for me,” she said. “Wear it and Our Lady will speak to her son for you and for your mother, as she watches out for all mothers and their children.”

I put the pendant around my neck, slipping it beneath the cloth, and felt Alienora’s warmth in its metal as it struck my chest.
 

“Alienora,” I said, then faltered, remembering my station in life. “My lady.”

“I must go,” she said. “I’ll aid you in this. Your mother needs you more than me at this moment. But take one thing with you tonight that will be not for you, but for the one who brought you into this world.”
 

Then she leaned forward and bestowed the slightest of kisses on my forehead.

4

Alienora first went to her sisters, all of them pious maidens, and when she had rallied their support, they went to their sickly mother. Then to their father, and begged that he might show his mercy to help the Falconer’s mother in this time of terrible trial. Generously, the baron consulted with my master, Kenan Sensterre, with whom I had chilly relations at best, and the huntsman came to me within the hour and told me gruffly, “You have worked your own kind of sorcery on the baron, Falconer. I am to give you a horse and a bag of coins. You are to ride to the abbey this evening and speak with the abbé himself.”
 

My heart gladdened at this, and I felt hope rise up in my soul. But as I rose to take the small cloth sack of coins, I saw an undisguised disdain on my master’s face. “Sir, if I have offended you in any way, I ask your forgiveness,” I said. “You have been good to me all my life, and if I have repaid you with sorrow, I would like to know of it and atone for this sin against you.”

His eyes grew cold and distant. He whispered something that sounded like an oath. Then he said, loudly, so that I would not mistake his words, “Honest Corentin has told me of your kind of mischief. I had known your mother in my youth, and I had assumed that she was a victim of the world. But you, the spawn of her womb, are the worst sort of man. And your grandfather had been a great man. How your name has fallen in the world and in my estimation. If the baron had not commanded me to give you these coins, I would have thrashed you and thrown you out of the castle.

“You return any favor I have offered you with lies and with trouble. And now your mother has murdered a baby as it was born, and you expect to save her using the baron’s good faith and the piety of his daughters. Do not ask for forgiveness where you shall get none. I have only the memory of a young woman named Armaela, your mother, as a girl who was full of love and innocence once, to stay my hand from throwing you into the marshes. Pitiably, she has returned to the perversions and deviltry of her bloodline. Your grandfather may have been godly in his old age, but your kind always comes through.”

5

I rode out of the castle with confusion and pain in my mind. What had Corentin told him to make Kenan believe that he was Honest Corentin and I was worse than a thief?

But even these questions had to wait as I rode down the hillside toward the abbey. I felt bolstered by the faith of Alienora, and of her gift; the encolpion pendant that swung against my skin beneath my shirt. The coins from the baron would no doubt buy my mother’s safety, if this were at all possible. And Alienora’s words about Our Lady watching over my mother in her innocence of this horrible charge, these thoughts also gave me comfort.

I arrived at the abbey at nightfall and asked immediately to see the abbot.
 

“I am sent not merely as a dutiful son,” I told the brother who came to me at the gate, “but as a servant of His Lordship, as well as of Our Lady of Sorrows.”

The monk, who was young and seemed frightened by my approach and demeanor, scurried off to find the abbot. Soon enough, I was ushered into the abbot’s quarters, and sat with him at table. He offered me wine and game bird as we spoke, but I could not touch any of his food, for thoughts of my mother and her pain swelled within me.

He told me of the charges. They had come from an official in the village who had come to the abbot because of a curious story he’d heard from one of the prominent, if humble, families within the abbey’s protective reach. It seems that a woman named Katarin Luhan, a good woman of virtue, had been giving birth when she had erroneously called out for her sister to go find a midwife. Had she called for one of the Sisters, the Brides of Christ, perhaps none of this would have come to pass. Katarin experienced great pains, but could not deliver her child. An old woman of unknown origin who claimed to be Brewalen du Tertre had come soon after, along with my mother. They had spent many hours trying to help Katarin deliver her child, but realized that either the child would die, or the mother must. Katarin’s sister heard clearly words said between the two women that the mother must live and the child must be sacrificed. Other words were also spoken in the ancient tongue, and her sister believed they invoked demons, for the baby itself, born dead, had another child attached to its scalp.

Thus, Katarin and her sister brought the charge in the village, and the two women were brought to the abbey to be examined and determined if a trial was necessary.

As he spoke, I felt my heart pound with fear. A fever was beginning to sweep the country—a new plague had been reported to the east—and when these plagues and miasmas came through, the Devil was often to blame, and the women of what I have come to think of as the Old Religion were considered to be the emissaries of Satan on Earth, though I knew them not as such.

I must add that I did then believe in a Devil, but my belief must not have been strong, and this news of my mother now had me doubting anything I had ever believed about Hell and its minions. I knew the Forest women as good folk, knowledgeable of herbal lore, difficult only in that they did not mix with the village or town, and no one could ever remember them in the abbey or at church or chapel.

I gave the abbé the bag of coins, and he took them with some delight. “Of course,” he said, while counting them, “if your mother is a friend of the baron’s, then we must be very careful with this case. Our Lady will show her as innocent, I have no doubt about that.”

I asked if I might see her. First, he asked if would be willing to disrobe so that he might make sure I took no weapon or poison to her. I balked at this, but quickly enough decided that this was a small price to pay for seeing her. I had no masculine modesty as some young men seemed to exhibit, and was perfectly content pulling off my breeches and boots and tunic and standing before him naked except for the pendant my lady had given me. He asked me what it was. I drew it from my neck and showed it. He came over to me, far too near, and took it from my hand. He turned it back and forth between his fingers. “This is the Eastern Heresy,” he said.

“It was a gift from her betrothed, now in Heaven,” I told him. “Although it may be from Constantinople, surely you can see that it is Our Lord and Our Lady.”

“Yes,” he said, and the “s” of his “yes” drew out too long. “I must keep this while you visit her. It is a precaution. It will be returned after.”
 

He then reached over and touched the edge of my scalp. “You are unusual,” he said. “A fair youth when most of your brethren are dark.”