The Priest of Blood (7 page)

He told me that the Brethren had taught him much about the world and its workings, and how a boy might rise in station further than he could imagine if only he would put himself under the care of the correct guide. He placed his hand on my shoulder and whispered to me that I should not be afraid so long as he was nearby and would be my guide. At first, I thought this delightful and part of the goodness that life had to offer me. I soon learned that he exacted tribute from those of us he considered his vassals, and that he was nothing like my brother Frey at all, nor much like any who might be called country people. He was not particularly adept at companionship. He would crawl onto the straw-stuffed bed and tell me of the tortures that the baron put to boys who lied or disobeyed.

Corentin was older—perhaps sixteen—and he was the unofficial leader of some of the other ruffians with whom I shared quarters. Most of them had not come from families as poor as mine, but they bemoaned their lives as if they had been dealt the worst fate that had ever been conjured. Most were the second and third sons of noble blood, with no estates, no legacy, and many of them were destined for the monastery in a few years if they were lucky. Corentin himself claimed to have no living family, and perhaps I could feel for him in his lonely misery, but he insisted on tormenting me.

“Your mother is a whore. She is known throughout the village, and the priest takes pity on her when he allows her to Mass. I heard from a courier that she slept with his horse for a tankard of ale.”

The most frightening thing about his voice and his words were that I had thought of my mother in the same way. And yet it incensed me to hear this from him. My heart grew dark with hatred of him. I had to resist wrestling him to the ground, although I didn’t resist nine times out of ten, and we’d roll around on the floor of our chamber hitting and biting and tearing at each other. Corentin, the stronger, the larger, the older, had the better of me. I often ended up bruised and battered at dawn, but still arose to get out to my birds and my work.

I was determined not to allow anyone to stop me from proving myself and moving forward in life, though Corentin did his best to tell me that mud-hens (for that was his own nickname for me) never rose higher than I had, and that when I reached sixteen, I would be sent back to the filth from which I had been born. “Or else you will be sliced from nave to chops,” he said, making a motion with his hand from his sack to his chin. “And your head will be stuck on a pike.” This last part terrified me, for I had seen the heads of criminals on pikes during certain months when treason had been discovered.

I had gone to the executions of the depraved and the indigent and those who had cursed the Church or those who had committed adultery. I had seen three children—two brothers and their younger sister—all hanged at the gibbet just outside the baron’s castle, none of them more than six years old, for stealing food from a family of good lineage. Mud-hens, indeed, could be hanged, or their heads severed from their bodies and thrust onto pikes for all to see the faces of those who had broken the law.

Corentin’s words gave me nightmares when I had thoughts against those surrounding me. I had to keep my humours balanced and my emotions buried, or else I might one day wind up spinning slowly on a rope or sliced with a hand ax for having sinned in some great or small way. Although I had seen Death before with my family, it was among the boys of the hunt and the stables that I saw it pass by, and often. A chill would come, and suddenly three of my cohorts would catch fevers in the night, and no amount of fire in the hearth or soup in their bellies drove Death away.

I began to see Death as a great king, perhaps the greatest Fallen King of the Earth, for Death ruled all, was feared by all, and yet, had no worshippers in any chapel. Death was the unacknowledged visitor in every household. Corentin reminded me of how Death could arrive, and I hated him for it but could not get far away from his words. I was the most humble and most impotent of the boys in the baron’s household. If Corentin, who outranked me in position as well as age, had decided that I had committed a terrible crime, he could let it be known to the baron, and I might be dead before the next morning. While I didn’t live in fear of this, I knew that the possibility for deviltry existed with Corentin, and his word would be taken over mine.

Thus it was that when Corentin one night came to my bed and pressed himself into me, turning me onto my stomach, holding my arms such that I had no movement in them, that I cried out into the straw and not for others for help. A boy who was thus used would certainly be thrown out of his occupation, and perhaps worse would befall him. He might even be found as guilty as the perpetrator of the deed itself. King Death might visit him next, for whether the sodomer or sodomee, the crime reflected both as evildoers. There were no innocent parties. Sodomy was considered the Devil’s worst offense, and although I would later find out of its acceptance among certain warriors, in that world I occupied at twelve, to be named a catamite was to be as good as burned alive. Although I tried to fight him, he overpowered me and had his way. It was not a sexual impulse on his part; even then I was aware of this. He was pissing on me, the way a dog might piss on something to mark its territory. To keep the pissed-upon from rising up. To somehow damage me. His laughter afterward told me that. He was interested only in destroying me. In pushing me aside. In ensuring that a Mud-hen would not rise above his lowly station, and that if one would rise, it would be Corentin Falmouth himself, whose father was the third son of a Breton family that had risen in their fortunes since God had decreed it many centuries before, then fallen all too swiftly—or so he claimed.

I bore the shame for weeks on end, and slept little but kept watch for my nemesis. But it was the last he ever came near me or spoke to me for a long while. I began to hope that he might be afraid of me. That something in his vile act upon my body had terrified him. I can only guess that he felt he had done his work on me.

But he had not.

And no matter what ill he wished me, I prospered despite his taking of the last remnant of my childhood from me, which was not my innocence but my love for all mankind. I would weep for the child I was, but I truly had fury in my heart, as well as innocence. My grandfather had warned me to take the good with the bad, and never to forget that all within life had both. I, too, had both good and bad. But Corentin seemed completely evil to me, and I saw no good in him.

Truly, I wanted to kill him and keep him from hurting others as he had hurt me. I wanted to cut out his tongue so that he could not say the words of loathing of my mother, though there were times when I felt them in my heart, as well. He was like a shadow that I could not rid myself of—for when I thought of evil, when I held the idea in those years of all that was terrible about the world, Corentin’s face came into view, whether in my mind or before me in one of the chambers.

And yet, I dare admit to myself that even then, part of Corentin was too much like me, as if he were me, a few years ahead, having taken a slight turn in the path of life from where I would stand one day. Had I been sharper, perhaps I would have seen in his demeanor a caution to me, a mirror of what I might become: a predator in the world, and, more than that, a predator who made all around him into prey.

From that moment, I went to the boys and the esquires who worked with the knights and watched as they lifted their swords. I intended to learn to fight like a man, and, if necessary, kill a man well in order to protect myself from any who wished to harm me.

I would kill Corentin if given the opportunity.

I would risk the gallows to stop him from ever harming me, or anyone I knew, again.

4

And yet there were sunny days as well as the murky ones.

The huntsman, my master, Kenan Sensterre, had a masculine grace about him, and despite his boisterous appearance and occasional moodiness, he and I grew close as I ran alongside his horse, twin falcons on my leather-strapped arms. He taught me much about the bow, and about hefting the sword in such a way as to increase the strength of the shoulders and arms. He took me to the machine that the knights used to train, and we spent an idle hour simply running at each other so that he could show me proper technique. Our hunts together seemed unforgettable to me—he had the prowess of an archer in top form, while I knew the paths through the Forest where the wild boars rooted. We hunted boar and rabbit and stag, and I showed him many byways and paths across the treacherous marshes that were rarely crossed by any but poachers. He asked me if I had ever seen those sacred nymphs of the Old Way known as the Briary Maids. I laughed when he said this, for I knew them as imaginary tales told to the young.

“They are girls of the wood who seduce and destroy youths,” I said. “By calling them to the edge of cliffs and down into deep bogs covered with briars.” I told him that they couldn’t possibly exist because if they did, many more young men would go a-missing. But there was, of course, truth to the legend, for whenever a young man was found, by himself, drowned, or having thrown himself from a rock ledge to his death, it was said he was called by the Maids of the Briar, rather than that he had killed himself. The Briary legend was at least as old as the Forest itself, and sometimes I wondered if Mere Morwenna and her hags were not, in fact, of the Briary themselves. In the village and the baron’s household, Morwenna was often called Morwenna Bramblebog for just this reason. For it was thought she was no longer a woman at all, but a damned spirit that roamed the woods and marshes, calling out to those who were weak in faith to come join her and her sisters in their deviltry among the oaks and birches.

You may wonder how the Old Ways and the New could live side by side, yet if you look around the world, even in the most intolerant land, there is some tolerance, particularly when those being tolerated have no land and no coin to steal. Charges of witchcraft were rare in those days, and when they were brought, underlying the charge was theft, or a poisoning, or adultery, where bewitchment may have been the action of the accused; but it was not the crime that committed the woman to death. But things were beginning to change, and as the abbey and its monks grew richer, and the baron sold more of his knights off to the Crusades for a mercenary’s share, I began to notice that the whisper of sorcery and witchcraft was growing stronger among those in Christendom, as if an enemy were growing in the ranks.

Kenan told me about his fears of the witches in the Forest, and how even hunting the stag, he had once seen something that utterly terrified him and made him rush to the church for a blessing and a Mass from our Pater. “We chased the stag for three days, deeper and deeper into the woods. This was so many years ago, before you were even born, and I was still a boy, training with my own master. We did not understand how one stag could have the energy to keep running, without stopping for eat or drink. Exhausted, I ran with my master into a clearing, and there we saw our stag—which was snow-white and with a great crown of antlers that were of so many twists and turns that it seemed impossible. And there the beast went into a bog that was as black as night.

“My master and I cut through the brambles, and waded into the bog. I had a spear, and he had his bow, but when I entered that water, I felt as if I might burn—it was so hot that bubbles came up from beneath its surface. Still, my master entered the water, though I stayed near the muddy land. I called to him to leave the stag to its fate, for the beast waited at the center of that terrible bog, as if watching the both of us, taunting us to follow it in. Then my master took one step farther as he aimed his arrow for the stag’s neck, and in that one step, his fate was sealed. He slipped, and went beneath the surface of the water. The stag went to the other side of the bog, slipping back into the woods. And I waded into the bog, calling to my master, wondering where he had gone. Finally, he came up, and he nearly thrashed me, thinking I was some demon.

“He told me that when he went beneath the water, he saw such things as he thought never to have dreamed. He saw a war on Earth of demons and sorcery, and a woman whose cloak was the night as she swept down upon the world of men and made them tremble. He forbade me to tell this to anyone, then we returned to the hunting party to tell them that the stag had gone too deep into the Forest to be tracked.

“The worst of it was that I, too, had seen something in that water. I never even told my master. Before the stag departed the bog, it spoke in some language I could not understand, but I knew it was a corruption of the Old Tongue. It spoke to me directly, although I could not understand it; still, I knew its message: we must never come to this place again, and were I to do so, I would die. I remember how unnatural that beast was, Falconer, with its white coat and its antlers that seemed like brambles themselves. The priest told me that the demons of old lurk where the Church has not yet consecrated. The deep of the woods is a deadly place, and the servants of Satan are everywhere there, waiting.”

Despite the chill I felt at his story, I admit that it intrigued me, for I was not afraid of bogs or stags, and I wished to have great adventures. Perhaps my head had swelled in the years I had eaten the baron’s food, but my childhood in the mud-and-straw hut seemed another life, a dream I, a huntsman’s apprentice, the Falconer, had once had—a nightmare, perhaps. I had even, in my mind, created a family from the baron’s house, with Kenan Sensterre as my father, and my mother as the rarely seen matron of the castle, the baroness.

In many ways, my master seemed to be the kind of father that children only dream about, although he did not suffer idleness or stupidity or falsehood without drawing a whip out and tying one of the working boys to the post. I had even suffered under this punishment, but it was meted out with such efficiency that I could not take offense, for I often stole an apple from the kitchen wench, or fell asleep at the edge of the pond when I should have been herding the swans to the butcher’s block. I took kindly to my benefactor. As I grew older, I showed him the secrets of teaching certain birds—mainly blackbirds—to speak. He told me that in his travels, he had seen birds with long tails singing songs in pitch, and promised that if he ever traveled to the southern mountains again, he would capture one and bring it back to me. Later, he decided that he couldn’t encourage this, because of the fears of sorcery that abounded, since many believed that talking birds were the Devil’s emissaries.