The Priest of Blood (6 page)

So, with the huntsman and his party surrounding me, I began to sputter on about gryphons and great beasts that had remained unseen by men, but we of the country knew them, of wolves the size of dragons, and dragons the size of mountains, and the poisons of the witches that grew in the shadows of the great oaks. I felt as if I were drowning as I spoke, as if my tongue would soon unfurl and grab his blade from beneath his belt and cut itself off rather than listen to the wild stories I let loose.

The huntsman drew his hand back and slapped me across the face as hard as he could. Knocked me down. In the dirt, I looked up at him, coughing. He bent over, grabbing me as if I were an ash sack, lifting me up from beneath my armpits, and hefting me above his head, all the while keeping watch on my eyes as if to catch the imp of perversity scuttering about inside my soul.

“When you lie,” he whispered, “the angels weep. The Devil himself has not lied so much as you have in these precious minutes. Will you tell the truth, Bird Boy? Will you?” As he spoke, he shook and rattled me in the air, and I was fairly certain he would toss me into the crowd before too long.

I felt it was in my best interest to change course.

“I will tell the truth, sir,” I said solemnly. As I spoke, the fair around us disappeared to me, the men beside him vanished, and I felt as if there were just the huntsman and I in all the world. “I am a poor boy, and I have not a trade. Nor is my father a good fisherman, nor does he hunt pearls. My sister took sick and died last winter, and my little brother went soon after. My mother is a wanton, and sleeps with even the clergy for scraps of mutton and pork, but I do not blame her, for she has many mouths to feed. I have but one small talent. And that is for falcons and doves, sir. The birds of the air. I speak to them, in my own way, and they understand me. And they hunt with me.”

“So please God if you lie now, I will do more than cut out your tongue,” he said.

“I do speak to the birds.”

“They listen to you?”

I nodded. “The rock and mourning doves. The falcons, too. I trained a raven to speak by splitting its tongue, and I once raised a hawk to bring fish from the river.” This was all true, and had been taught me by my grandfather when I was barely able to speak. The only lie within it was that the birds usually escaped to the Forest once they were of an age, although I could call them to me through whistles and caws now and then.

“Tell me, what did your raven say with his language?”

“He repeated the ‘Ave Maria,’” I said, which was true, and made the huntsman laugh like a crash of thunder. “Not every word of it,” I said. “Just the first part. His Latin is not as good as our priest’s. He flew beside old women as they knelt to pray at Mass, and it was the only thing he would learn. The farmers nearby think he is the spirit of a damned soul, for he now haunts the old burial grounds, repeating the words again and again.”

When he had stopped laughing he lowered me to the ground and scruffed my hair with his rough fingers.

“I would love to meet this praying bird,” he said. “You hunt in the Forest?”

2

It was against the law to enter the baron’s forest, despite the fact that I—and all in my family—had been doing so since my memory had begun. A family of bastards might all be slaughtered by a servant of the baron or the duke if caught with a boar’s head in the home. Poachers, if discovered, were hanged or drowned, depending on the availability of a gibbet or a pond and a sack. Now and then, a poacher was allowed to live as an example to others, and I’d seen one once, his hands cut off at the wrist, his nose also cut off. There was a man named Yannick, who wandered door to door, begging for morsels, because he’d stolen a rabbit from the Great Forest. His hands had been chopped off, as well as the toes on his feet and his left ear. I did not want any such fate to befall me or my family. One did not break the law lightly. So I lied a bit.

“No, sir. I hunt in the fields by the cottage. I hunt rat and rabbit and other small creatures of the marsh and field that are not owned by the king or baron.”

“You speak well for a meadowlark.”

“My grandfather taught me to speak well.”

“Your grandfather is alive?”

“No, sir.”

“What was his name?”

When I mentioned my grandfather’s name, the huntsman nodded. “Tell me, how did the old man die?”

I told him of the day in the field, and of the ravens and doves, as well as the flocks of birds that seemed to be everywhere at his death, though I, perhaps, exaggerated the tale as it went.

“Did your grandfather mention his time in the wars?”

I shook my head.

“I knew him,” the huntsman said. He half smiled. “Ronan was a fine soldier of his day.” Then his mood darkened. “And your mother is his daughter?”

Again, I nodded.

“Armaela.” When he said her name, it sent a slight chill through me. I had never heard a man say her name without trying to bed her. “I knew her, many years ago,” he said. “You must not speak ill of her. Your family truly was once a great one. Perhaps you have greatness in you, though your kind has fallen from favor in these present times. Let this be an understanding between us, boy, should you think ill of any for whom life’s fortunes have turned. Misfortune is the world. Those who are kings today may be knaves by sunrise tomorrow. Those who are peasants without means may become princes of the world. Only you and I know this to be true, for I have seen it come to pass, and remembered, while others have forgotten and believe that we are each born to our station and remain there until death. Remember this moment in future years. Remember when a man plucked you from the mud and brought you into a better life.”

He glanced over at his compatriots and roared for them to go off and drink or wench or devour roasts, but that he was going to go with me to the Forest to see how well I called the birds. He told me to call him by his name, not the haughty French name of his father, but by his Breton name, which was a fairly common one of the time: Kenan. His father had been from the south, by way of France, and his mother had lived her whole life in the castle, and died there while he was still a boy, sent off to fight Norsemen along the coast. When he had returned to his home, it had changed, and he no longer hungered for war and adventure. Although he seemed old to me then, Kenan could not have been more than his late twenties. Yet he had a kind of halo of age around him, as if life had been too hard on him.

I took him down a well-worn path. Once we had gone into the murky part of the woods, where the bramble grew thick and high, I tied his horse to one of the old oaks. When he’d dismounted, I took him by the hand and led him in among the giant ferns and the roots rising up like low cottages among the part of the Forest. Running within the overgrowth, the remnants of an old Roman wall. My grandfather had told me that many years before, when his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had lived, this had been a military outpost when the Romans fought the true people of the land. I showed him the stones that were the markers of the dead.

“Is this where your birds speak?”

I nodded, and cupped my hands to my mouth and let out a whistle and a call that I had learned from too young an age even to know where I’d learned it. Within seconds, a giant raven swooped down from the dark green canopy above us and came to rest on one of the ancient stones.

I held my arm out and chirruped for the bird, and it flew to my shoulder. It was always a jolt when it grasped me, and I had to steady myself, for the bird had grown large over the past year. I pursed my lips, and my wild pet cocked its head to one side, then the other, and leaned over and pressed its beak to my lips.

“Sing to me,” I commanded.

And then the raven began reciting the “Ave Maria,” but in the poor accent and mispronounced words as I might as well have done it myself.

Kenan roared with laughter, which scared my dark friend away. The bird flew up again, and although I whistled for it, it had become skittish around this stranger.

I looked up at him.

“And what of the gryphon?” he asked.

“I have never seen it,” I told him. “But I know where there is an ancient well, and at the bottom of the well a gryphon lies, immortal, but broken-winged.”

“And who told you this?”

“A crone,” I said. “Her name is Mere Morwenna. Although she raises a young child, she is ancient. She is bent and hobbled, a friend of my mother’s, and has some pox across her face so she lives deep in the woods so that she might not spread her plague. Her child is hideously deformed. Yet she has wisdom, my mother says.”

“She has a plague but has lived long?”

I nodded. “I have never seen her face, for she hides it with a veil. But once, she came to our home to offer the leaves and bark of the birch tree to help my mother bear the birth of my little sister. She told me then of the creature in the well. She has told me never to visit the well, but I have gone once or twice and heard the gryphon crying out, at midday. It is the saddest sound.” This last part was something of a lie, for though I had been near the spot, I had never actually heard anything from within the well itself. Still, the lie added a nice glow to his face, and a bit of a light grew in his eyes.

“And if you were to capture this beast, how would you do that?”

“I would first ask for a large fisherman’s net. Then a rope. I would tie one end of the rope to a hook lodged at the top of the well. Then I would climb down the well with the net. When I reached the bottom, I would cover the gryphon with the net and have someone—perhaps you, sir—draw me back up.”

“That wouldn’t work,” Kenan said, a grin on his face. “The gryphon would be too heavy for you to bring up. And it might fight you. And it might hurt you. Kill you.”

“Might,” I said. “At midday the gryphon is weak. It has not eaten for many years, perhaps centuries. It has no fight left in it. And I, sir, am very strong.”

“You must show me this well one day, mud lark,” my huntsman said. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You may have been born under a lucky star. I believe you may have work with the hunt.” He told me that if I proved able with falcons, I might end up a huntsman just as he had become one from being a boy who worked with the horses once. He mentioned a brief memory of knowing my grandfather, yet Kenan would not tell me much of what he knew of him.

That night, I drew out the blue stone that my grandfather had shown me at the oak tree, which I had stolen to keep near me at all times. I rubbed it for luck, and for hope, that I might prove myself in my work and help my brothers and sisters in some way. I kissed the stone, remembering my grandfather’s face, feeling a twinge of guilt that I had not returned the gem to its rightful place, yet comforted that I drew the memory of the old man into it and held it there.

3

From that day forward, I went to live within the baron’s household. Although I knew my huntsman to be named Kenan Sensterre, I was instructed to call him “sir” or even “Master” for the sake of the castle.

Now the castle was not the enormous fortress of history, but a fairly simple structure of wood and earth, grand in its own way, yet fairly primitive in others. Very little of it was made of stone, except the chapel and beneath it, the kitchen, and beneath that, underground, a dungeon of sorts to hold prisoners. The structure was pentagonal in its interior, but from the outside, the palisades seemed curved in a circle. It was built upon a low, smooth hillside overlooking the Forest and marshlands, close enough to the abbey and the village if there ever was an attack (for truthfully, the abbey was a better fortress if trouble neared). The village beyond it was protected by the duke, then the great king, whose name was never spoken to me but was simply known as the father of our universe, next to God.

The baron was simply called “my lord” if any were to see him, but in the first weeks of my employment, I rarely spoke a word to the great man. The baron himself was perhaps the richest man within one hundred hectares of land, which today I suppose would be a thousand acres or so. Treveur de Whithors had been the name he’d been known by as a knight in one of the Crusades, and he had returned from years of battle to his storehouse of land and coin, married quickly, and had three sons. All had gone to war but the youngest, still a baby, who remained with nursemaids—and was treated like a pampered pet. He also had three daughters who, as they grew, were capable of running the castle by themselves. His wife took sick after her last child had been born, and this lingering ailment brought a kind of unspoken grief to the household that shadowed its halls and etched lines in its quarters.

I felt the brunt of the baron’s anger at times, as passed to me by other servants; I also felt his generosity during the Christmas feasts. I felt as if I were a princeling, even so. I slept in a room with the other boys who worked under the baron’s household, and at Holy Days and in seasons of plenty, I was able to take bread and fowl to my mother and little brothers and sisters. The work took me from dawn until midnight some days, and it was thankfully constant. I always had a roof over my head and food in my belly. I raised doves, swans, and falcons from the egg, and trained them for the needs of the castle. My name “Aleric” was soon lost, and I became first mud-lark, then Bird Boy, and, finally, Falconer before my first working year had ended.

The other boys were often envious of the attention that my master gave me, and one in particular named Corentin Falmouth, who some in the castle took to calling Foul-Mouth, seemed to enjoy tormenting me in the few hours of sleep I had.

Corentin first came up to me when I had laid claim to the straw mat in the corner not far from the fire, and told me that a boy had burned from lying too close to the hearth. “You should sleep in the back, with me,” he said, pointing to a pile of bedding in a dark corner. “I can be your protector.”

I soon learned that he believed protection meant keeping me from being beaten—by him.

Like me, he was a boy from the country, and reminded me somewhat of my brother Frey, and what I imagined he might look like then. Handsome, and not particularly charming, Corentin at first seemed as if he would be my guide and confidant. There was something of the familiar to him, and to his manner of speech—he was a youth who had come from the marshes and woods, as had I. We spoke some of the Old Tongue, as well as the New. He had been educated a bit, as far as working boys could be, when he went to work with the Brothers, cleaning their quarters and learning bites from their lessons.