The Priest of Blood (15 page)

She would not let me touch her, nor would she allow me to speak of plans or of ways of stealing her from her family. She simply cupped her hands in the water and sipped of it. Then I leaned over her cupped hands and drank the rest of the frigid water before it dribbled out from between her fingers.

“If we did not live in this world,” I said, “I would take you for my bride. We would ride out to the sea and travel to other Breton lands, and live freely. We would raise children, and I would build an earthen house and keep the fire burning so you would never know want or lack of desire.”

“If we did not live in this world,” said she, “I would go with you, taking jewels from my mother’s furs to pay our way on a boat to those lands of which you speak. And there, like the lovers of legend, we would spend our lives in bringing to each other happiness and freedom from the sorrow that is our mortal life. May it be so in the life hereafter, when our eyes shall be opened on the Day of Judgment.” I had already lost her, I knew. Lost her to a suitor I could not fight, could not even challenge. I had lost her to God. At least, that was my feeling then. I still retained hope that I might draw her back from a decision to leave the world for the confinement of this rocky nunnery. But I had to let her go for the time being, I knew.

We rode back to the castle, and my heart was heavy. I had sent Ewen Glyndon to my mother’s house, and with him, the charity passed to my brothers and sisters from the baron’s wife. He returned and told me that many of my siblings were gone. Still, the neighbor had taken two of the youngest and had promised to raise them as her own.

I had no family, and soon I would have no love.

Nor was hope rising within my heart, and my mother’s death weighed heavily on me.

I had just passed my eighteenth birthday, and I felt as if life held nothing but misery. I could not see beyond my present pain, despite my having drunk of the sacred water with its legend of lovers bound forever.

8

At the castle we were surprised by guards, who took me prisoner and swept Alienora away, off her horse even as she struggled. She cried out for me and I for her, but it was too late for us. I knew they would not hurt her, but simply return her to her father’s care, though I worried for her reputation and safety, even so.

I was taken to a room I had never before seen. It was beneath the ground and smelled strongly of dung and blood. In it were implements of torture and restraint. The dungeon. Three guards fastened shackles made of iron to my wrists, and more to my ankles. I was bound in such a way that I had to sit uncomfortably on the dirt floor, with knees bent, head and shoulders forward, almost to my knees. After I was secured thusly, a guard took a strip of cloth and thrust it into my mouth to keep me silent.

Into the room came Corentin himself. He wore a soldier’s garb, and I knew immediately that he had managed to raise himself in the baron’s estimation and might now be a guard or even sent off to fight in the duke’s army. It was an honor for him, although it often meant death to the men who were thus passed from the baron out to the foreign wars.

“I have brought you here, dear Mud-hen, because your time on this Earth will be short. You are accused of a crime,” he said, although he did not inform me what that crime might be. Neither could I ask. “And you have been poisoning a young maiden’s mind with obscenity and blasphemy. Because of your mother’s crime, the baron and the magistrates have some care for your being, despite the fact that your life is worth nothing. However, when I told them of how you had taught a bird to blaspheme the Holy Virgin by repeating the ‘Ave Maria’—surely this was of the Devil himself—they felt that you should be dispatched before another night goes by. You made things worse for yourself with kidnapping his daughter and stealing a horse, but your master has spoken out on your behalf. He has, for reasons unknown to me, taken up your cause, though I do not know why.”

As he spoke a small ray of hope lit up the dark of my mind. Kenan, my huntsman, had spoken for my goodness. He had, perhaps, saved my life. Yet, at that moment, I did not care for life at all. What had life to offer me? I was truly a Mud-hen; I had no family, I had no hope for the love of my heart, and this despicable Corentin, who had done everything within his power to ruin my life and destroy any chance of happiness or decency I might have, ruled the last of my existence.

He taunted me with his tales of Alienora and how he intended to take her for himself now that my flesh had damaged her. He tormented me with stories of our mother’s wantonness, and then struck me several times as I crouched there, unable to fight back. He lay on the dirt before me, and wore a grin of idle wickedness as he said, “Your life is truly in my hands, little brother. I knew of our relation when you came here, and I could not stand to see our mother in your face. I still cannot stand her, though she is nothing but ashes in a field. But I see her in your face, and I see your father, as well.”

At this, I started, and tried to spit out the gag in my mouth. He saw this action and reached over, pushing the cold palm of his hand against my lips to keep them closed. “Your father was an infidel who had gained favor with the duke many years ago. He had his own kind of witchcraft. Few knew him, but all took pity on our mother, for he had raped her, and you were born from that heinous act.” He smiled, nearly pleasantly. “Didn’t you want to know? Your father was a monster. He abandoned your mother as soon as he had his way, and I’ve been told that it was then that she lost her mind with grief. Then that she began to spread her legs for food. She was not like that before. He changed her, and disappeared before you were born. Everyone knows, but few would tell you of him. My father tried to kill him, but could not. My father led a party to hunt him down, but he used his sorcery to elude them. All took pity on our mother, until her own witchcraft came out.”

I glared at him, wanting to shout that he was a monster, for she was his mother, as well.

As if reading my thoughts, he said, “I did not care for her. She was a bitch, giving birth to litters of children. I was merely in one of those litters.”

He spat more poison at me, speaking of the tragedies I had heaped upon him, upon the baron, and upon Alienora. “If you are found here in the morning, you will be arrested on charges of theft and of sorcery. I requested this night with you so that I could tell you how, after you’re gone—gone from this country—I will know carnal pleasures with Alienora. I will think of you as I enter her. I will imagine how your lips took each nipple, and I will bite them as I do so. I will force myself upon her, and she will acquiesce, because I will tell her that your life hangs in the balance, and should she not pleasure me in every way I can devise, then I shall see to it that you are murdered instantly. And she will not even know that I don’t have that power, nor would I ever hurt you, little brother. I will let others butcher or enslave you. I imagine you in some prison in Byzantium, living on rats, raped nightly by a filthy Turk. Or deep in the land of the Rus, a savage winter taking you in its frozen embrace. And all the while, think of the roaring fire in the hearth, and how I shall bend Alienora to my will because of the purity of her love for you. How I will enter her, thinking of your suffering.”

I wanted to pull free from my shackles and cut his throat as he lay there before me, spinning out his hellish heart.

“You and I are children of the same womb,” he said. “You see me as everything you are not, but I see how alike we are. Do you cringe at my ambition here, in the castle? It is the same as yours. Do you fear how I will take your beloved and make her suffer? It is the same suffering that you brought her. You are not as good as you believe. And I am no worse than you, my brother. We share the same sin.”

When he was done with his poisonous words, he called the guard back and a cloth sack was placed over my head.

I felt blows to my back and arms as men with cudgels pounded at me. Then a blow to my head, and another.

I was thrown into darkness in my mind and thought as I went that I must be dying.

PART 2: THE WORLD OF MEN

Chapter 7

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A
BDUCTED

1

Fate had not yet taken my life, though even I assumed she would at any moment. How little I understood of life and death in that mortal realm, for I wept in darkness for my mother. I prayed to see her face again. To see my sisters and brothers, and to feel the arms of my grandfather about me, with the wings of doves fluttering like those of angels. I wept at my memory of Alienora, and the fate I had brought upon her. I began to understand how I had brought about the destruction of others around me, how Corentin’s words had at least half of the truth to them. How, just by not having a care for my mother, I had allowed her death. And Alienora—if I had truly loved her, would I have so let my animal urges run free in the chapel of Our Lady? Would I risk her reputation? If I had truly loved her, not just wanted the baron’s daughter, but genuinely loved her soul, could I not have held back from the temptation to have her? All my pain had come, I felt then, from my not knowing my place in life. I had believed, as my grandfather had taught me, that I was meant for greater things than the mud. I believed that I was as worthy of the baron’s daughter as a prince might be. I believed that my mother was lower than a dog at times. I had been blind to her goodness until it was too late. I had only seen what was bad in her, and I felt the burden of loss and of my own vanity. Was there nothing of Heaven within me?

I would die like a dog as I had lived. I would suffer for these many sins, for the foolishness of my childhood dreams, for the way I had not cared enough for my family, not honored my mother in any way until it was far too late to matter. I remembered my grandfather’s kindness, then how I had stolen the small stone from the oak tree, thinking that it would somehow bring me fortune, when it was meant to remain within the tree, a memory of past generations of our bloodline. I could not blame everything of my life upon Corentin, who had begun to seem like a foul shadow of my own being. He was more than half-brother; he was half-soul in some unspeakable way. I loathed him the way I loathed part of myself, and wished I could take a dagger and slice myself away from this shadow.

I lay in a smelly, dark, small prison and remained battered and barely conscious, wishing for death, wishing for vengeance, wishing to be clean of the sins of my past. Although I was later told that I regained consciousness soon enough, my memories of that time blur. I remember being in a small, dark, enclosed space, still shackled, dryness about my lips. I remember light, but briefly, and water. I remember that my bodily functions proceeded, whether or not I could stand and find a place to relieve myself of them.

I did not wonder if this were Heaven or Hell, but knew that it was the beginning of my voyage from home, away from that terrible hearth near where I slept, away from my beloved. I felt as if I had been packed in ice, not merely from the dank atmosphere in which I found myself, but also from the winter in my heart. Mere Morwenna had told me as a boy that the only hell that existed was separation from the one most loved, and she had been proved right by me: I thought of nothing but Alienora, the Lady de Whithors, the maiden who might at that moment be suffering for the sin I had thrust upon her in my lust for her body.

I tried to conjure her face, thinking of that sacred water we shared on our last night before the sorrow of parting forever, hoping to see her in my mind’s eye, but instead, I conjured darkness. Another face came to me: my mother in her last moments. My sweet mother, who had been trampled by the world, and had to suffer the fate of the ignoble and the damned before the entire community that I had once thought of as home and hearth.

The memory of my mother’s burning body at the stake still left its yellow-and-red echoes within my soul, and I doubt I could ever wash that in the river of forgetfulness. Her eyes, so full of Our Lady’s own grief as we kissed briefly, before I was torn from her. Before the executioner’s torch came to the brambles around her feet. There was no justice in the world. There was no honor. Perhaps for the baron and his family, perhaps even for treacherous snakes like Corentin Falmouth there might be victory and conquest; but justice was something sold to the poor, which, like the mud and thatch of a roof, had no value and might melt during even a mild storm. These images and thoughts plagued me from my cramped barrel, and I wondered at what cruel fate awaited me once I was set free from it, or if I would lie there until dead.

I arose from a deep but troubled sleep to see what at first I thought was torchlight but soon discovered was the light of a fresh, fair morning.

The lid of my prison removed, someone yanked me into a fresh sea air. The thick arms of a man of swarthy complexion, and long, ragged beard. His dark beard was braided as the looters from the north often did, and he had a bushy brow and a scowl upon him that made me think of a badger. Let me now think of him as the Emperor, for that is the nearest I could come to pronouncing his name, a foreign one. He unlocked my shackles and threw me into an ice-cold sea at the edge of the land.

What land was this? It must surely be my country, only the water was clearer than the Atlantic, and the rocks along the shore towered above me. My arms had been set too long in my dark prison, such that I could not swim, and felt myself drown. The Emperor splashed into the water after me, a burly bear of a man, dragging me to shore. I lay back and looked up at the sun. It seemed brighter than it should have been. The Emperor laughed at my pains, and spoke to me as if I understood him. Then he brought water and a bit of rabbit, which he roasted over a fire while I longed to grab it off the spit and gobble it down, my hunger being so intense.