The Priest of Blood (10 page)

“That is easy enough,” I said. “For the lark has a sweet song, and I have raised many.” It was true—many ladies of breeding enjoyed having a caged bird to bring them music during the harsh winter months, and I had captured many songbirds from the field.

“I have heard that you can teach a bird to pray,” he said.

“It is not so much in the teaching,” said I, “but in the bird’s talent to mimic. The birds suited for this are the raven and the daw. I do not know of any other that will speak.”

“She has been ill a long time,” he said, a shadow crossing his face. It was a secret grief of his, and although it was known within the household, none of us spoke of the baroness’s illness lest we bring her and us bad luck. “I want to lift her spirits. Might you not train a daw to speak soft words to her that she might laugh? I would love to hear her laugh again, or even smile.”

I worked industriously, setting traps in the marsh, until finally I captured a young blackbird that had only just left the nest. I had learned in my years that my grandfather had been mistaken about the splitting of the tongue—it was not necessary, even for the raven. I learned instead that the bird must trust the teacher, then words had to be repeated again and again. I spent two months with the little dark bird, feeding it from my own lips, and the only words I could think to say were, “I love you, dear lady, with all my heart,” and although it resisted its lessons, finally, in the days when I had begun to give up hope that this little bird would learn, it began to repeat the words back to me, with a croaked version of my own voice: “Dear lady.”

I built a tall, wide cage for the bird, which I named Luner, a name that always made me laugh when I heard it. Then I presented it to my master, who took it to the baron and his wife. I lay awake at night imagining her in her room, covered with a winter fur, by the fire, feeding bread to her pet, Luner, as the bird said, with my voice, “Dear lady.” One afternoon, a servant came to me, commanding me to go visit the baroness in her chambers. When I arrived, in awe of the enormous hearth opposite the large, wide bed, covered with the furs of every animal imaginable, the beautiful Alienora stood there at her mother’s bedside, beckoning me with her hand. Her eyes shone with tears that she held within, and when I reached her, she grasped my hands in hers. I felt warmth and fear in her touch.

I gasped as I saw her mother, who lay shrunken against the bedclothes as if she were slowly vanishing. She seemed much older than a woman who was mother to children no older than nineteen should be, but she wore a slight smile on her face. Sitting in its cage, next to her, Luner, the bird I had trained.

The baroness crooked a finger toward me, and I leaned down to hear her. She whispered, “Thank you for bringing me this sunlight, into a room so dark.”

I felt better than I had in a long time as I stood there, listening to the bird speak, and seeing the wan smile upon the old lady’s face. Alienora looked at me as if I had just given the most wonderful gift she had ever received. A single tear, what must have been a diamond of grief and joy mingled together, rolled down her cheek. I stood there by the bedside into the night, speaking with the baroness about the Great Forest, and of the birds and the marshes.

8

By the time I reached the age of seventeen, in the estimation of many I had risen too high. A mud lark was not meant to be a falcon. The others grew jealous of this peasant boy who had come to wear finer things, who trained the falcons most beloved by the baron, who had even trained a falcon that was sent as a gift for a foreign prince, and was now called Falconer. I had lost much of my childhood as I consciously tried to become what I felt was a better person. Although I still sent food to my mother and her children, I did not spend time in the field seeking them out. I had grown cold and a little empty, and my hatred of Corentin ruled my heart at times more than my burning but unrequited love for Alienora.

I could feel the jealousy of some of the others my age, when I was called to care for the baroness’s bird, or when, on the hunt, I rode on a horse beside the lead huntsman, two falcons on my arms at the ready. Kenan Sensterre had remained aloof from me during those years, but none could deny my abilities on horseback and with the falcons, and so he remained a distant but approving presence in the hunt.

In those years, superstitions about country people were on the rise, and as the village grew, a wall of stone was built between it and the field, further separating families like the one I’d come from and those who were of a better class, despite the general poverty of the area.

I do not like what I remember of myself then: I had turned to stone in order to gain favors, to build what career a youth might in that cutthroat terrain where one might be executed for a stolen loaf of bread. I had once been a boy full of love and life, the boy who loved his storytelling grandfather, who spoke to birds and loved them and the Forest as well. I had become a product of the household, of walls, of chambers. I had grown dishonest in the way that those do who follow rules too closely—I was ready to blame others for minor sins, quick to bend before a better in order to rise up beyond my station. I worried at times that my soul had begun to erode as I sought to escape my origins. I had begun to forget that I had ever come from the woods and the marshes at all. I cannot judge that youth too harshly, for he lived in a world of rats and lice disguised as noblemen and ladies, of servants who would slice him open if it meant a crust of bread and a mat near the fire. The boy named Aleric—the one I had been and the one I had become as I approached manhood—had lost the Forest and its verdant life for the gray and the brown, the dead wood of the castle, the place of infestation.

And yet I saw it as beautiful and wonderful then, for I had a nearly full belly at times, and the company of those who had fine garments and spoke a language that had been unheard in the outer world.

It was only when I met a boy two years younger than I, named Ewen Glyndon, that I remembered where I’d come from. Like me, he was of the field, but he had become a shepherd to the household, as a debt from his father who owed much to the baron. He was handsome and strong, but seemed in desperate need of protection. A night came when I saw Corentin begin to treat him as he had once treated me years before, and Ewen had no defense in him.

I crossed Corentin then and there, and whispered in his ear, “Should you hurt that youth, I will find you one night, in your sleep, and tear you open with my bare hands. And when they execute me for your murder, I will be happy that I watched your face as pain poured from you.”

It was enough, that threat, for Ewen to remain free of Corentin’s darkness. After that, Corentin did not bother Ewen, and the young man followed me whenever he could as if he owed me his life, though I reassured him that he owed me nothing. But from this we became fast friends, and when I opened my heart to him about my secret longing for Alienora, he grinned broadly, slapping my shoulder, and whispered, “She does not deserve one so fine as you.”

9

Since the incident of the speaking bird, Alienora had stopped me in my duties now and then to ask a question about birds, or about fish, or about the Great Forest, or about why the marshes stank during the spring. I detected that, beneath the question, she offered a spark of interest in me.

Still, she kept some distance, and I did not approach her to speak but merely waited for her to come to me. She had become as pious as her older sisters, each of whom had married but whose husbands were off in wars. Rarely seen without her Bible, Alienora read it aloud in Latin in the morning, in the courtyard, with her older sisters. We began to talk of her faith and her blessed purity, those of us who saw and admired her. I suspect that seeing her transformation from beauty to saintliness changed even Corentin, who watched her nearly as close as did I. I learned from Corentin himself that her piety stemmed from the death of the man to whom she’d been betrothed. He had died in the north, on his way to meet his future bride for the first time. Alienora was to have married him in her fourteenth year, but this had been delayed because of wars and troubles beyond our little country. Now, at eighteen years of age, Alienora had decided to go to the convent to live. Soon enough, she would have to bid farewell to the castle forever, in exchange for the nunnery that existed to the west of the Great Forest, its chapels and rooms carved into the belly of the Earth itself by an anchoress who had seen a vision of the Holy Mother in the rock.

It seemed a tragedy to me that such an angel should lock herself away. I wanted to be near her constantly when I wasn’t working. I began to go more frequently to the chapel to stand in the doorway and watch her pray beneath the altar and statue to Mary as well as that of Saint Blaise. Alienora’s purity had seduced me, finally. God’s Heaven showed through her face, and in her eyes, I saw the light of eternity.

I had no lust. I had no desire.

I simply did not want ever to live in a world where I could not watch Alienora pray or recite Latin or stand at the parapet watching the horizon, as if waiting to see God Himself in the setting sun.

By my eighteenth year, I would take unholy advantage of that fair maiden, I would face a terrible truth, and the worst that might happen to any I loved would come to pass. That one year would set the course of my life and start me along the path that led to my soul’s damnation.

But the most terrible moment of my mortal youth happened early in my seventeenth year, when an official of the village had my mother arrested on charges of sorcery and consorting with the Devil.

Chapter 5

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T
HE
A
CCUSED

1

The village had grown by leaps and bounds in the years since I had first burrowed beneath the baron’s largesse. Shambles of houses topped the earthen-and-wood palisades of its gate. Beyond it, and yet somehow surrounding it, the abbey itself loomed like a very different castle. It was full of monks and the priests and who tended to the sick and the poor as well as the rich and mighty. The road broadened within a few years, and we had pilgrims from foreign climes, and even the bishop from Toulouse came once to bless the Barony of Whithors, as we were now called.

The stories of war were always on the tongue, for battles to the north and south and east and west raged, yet our Forest home was untouched by much of this in those days. Knights rode out, or rested in the Great Hall of the baron, and young men like me went to be the foot soldiers of the Heroes, as we called the men of wealth who went to fight the Saxons or Norsemen or Spanish or those of the Southern Heresy. But I was not called to fight, for my value with the hunt was great. Although I had learned a bit of swordsmanship, poor boys such as I would not wield a sword but a spear or a bow. I had no real skill for warfare, and my only weapons of excellence were the sling and the dagger.

On my trips outside the baron’s household, to take grains to my mother, or what were then called mint-sweets to my little brothers and sisters, most of whom I barely knew, I began to notice how merchants from Normandy and the south had come and brought to us the promise of foreign goods. My mother’s home, however, was the same as it had always been—an earth hut, with thatch for roof and only a little wood to create structure to it. When I entered it, I saw a dark, smelly rat hole, and felt that if I could, I’d try and bring my remaining siblings into the service of the baron. It made me happy to think I might do so, and I made plans for ways of shepherding them into work in the castle or grounds. The older children from my family had all left, and either had begun their own families nearby, farming as tenants and subsisting on a small portion of what they were able to produce from such efforts, or, like my brother Frey, they had just disappeared into the night, no doubt to seek their fortunes in war. My mother had a total of eleven children, and I barely saw a reflection of her face or mine in any of them.

My stepfather stopped returning from his trips to the sea, and my mother had become exactly what I was afraid she would. She slept with too many men, and her payment for these beddings had gone from food to drink. She was often sick, and I could look in her eyes and see that she was not a woman who would live much longer. She told me that she often went to Mere Morwenna for cures, for she had bouts of fever and a foot that would swell up often after she’d been bitten by a venomous spider. I am ashamed to say that I felt no real love for her but an obligation and a duty to console her when I could. I spoke to the local abbot and priest about possibly allowing my mother into that order of nuns that lives to the west, in caverns, anchoresses. There she might find peace and the arms of the Lord before her death. But these men of the Church were not sympathetic and believed my mother’s soul had already been lost in the battle of righteousness. I saw men in the Church who had taken their liberties with my mother, and yet they still retained their piety, while she had been cast from God’s saving grace.

I had told my mother that she should not see the Forest women so much, that the world had changed since her girlhood, when the midwives and the herbal teachers were part of the village. I could tell that the tide was changing as I saw the priest speak out against the Devil in the midst of what he called the “ungodly wood,” and although there were not yet accusations, I had heard of men and women of the country claiming that witchcraft had begun to curse the crops, and that the Devil had killed a child sleeping in its cradle.

When news reached me that one of the Forest crones had been arrested on the charge of fortune-telling, I was not at all surprised. Relief passed through me when I learned that it was not Mere Morwenna, but some hag whom I did not know. But I was startled at the way the abbot dealt with this old woman, for she was bound and thrown in the marshes. Being an old woman, she died there, for it was winter, and they had not clothed her.