The Priest of Blood (14 page)

Ewen went with me to take food to my little brothers and sisters, whom I had never come to know. A neighbor who had lost a child from fever took in the youngest baby and nursed her. I arranged to send eggs and some grain to this kind woman, and she told me that she would care for the baby until such a time as my mother would be free to return home. I felt heartened by the hope she offered.

I slept in the stables rather than my quarters with the others of the field, so as to avoid Corentin. I spoke nothing to my master and spoke little to others during those days of shadows. I could not visit my mother in her cell, nor could I speak again to the abbé and priest while my mother and her companion underwent the inspections and interrogations by a man sent from Toulouse who had experience with what was called the Great Heresy, the Old Religion that had not died completely in the Great Forest.

4

We were a poor country backwater, and it surprised many that a scholar-monk had come all the way out to deal with this question of witchcraft and murder. I had heard stories of what happened to those who were thus accused, and I worried myself into a strange ailment with all that had happened.

Within a few weeks, I took to bed and was fed only clear broth.
 

And then, soon enough, my mother’s fate was determined. I awoke from my fever, having lost weight, weakened, and it was Alienora herself, who had not yet gone off to the sisterhood, who was the messenger of it.

“She is to be burned in the marshes, along with Brewalen of the Forest, for the crimes of murder and sorcery,” she said as she wiped a warm, wet cloth against my forehead.

“I must go to her,” I said. “I must stop this. She is not a witch.”

Alienora folded her hands as if in prayer. “You love your mother greatly, and for this the angels weep, Falconer. I love you now with a charity I had never before known. I wish for you only the light of Our Lady to guide your steps. But your mother has confessed. She has described her meetings with the Devil and with his emissaries. I do not know beyond that.”

“But will she be burned for this confession?” I knew well enough that if a witch confessed, she might be pardoned, although imprisoned for the crime. While in prison, a confessed witch might still be tortured and die within a dank miserable cell. But alive, she might have hope, and I might be able to rescue her from that awful fate.

I felt a surge of strength in my bones. Soon, I rose and went to the baron himself, pushing my way past his guards, who raised their swords against me. I did not care if I were cut down. I needed the baron’s protection and authority if I were to help my mother.

While the baron listened with compassion to my entreaties and held his tongue until I had finished, he showed me with his words that he had washed his hands of this as surely Rome had washed its hands of Christ’s crucifixion.

“It is the murder that is the charge that commends your mother’s body to the flames and her soul to God’s judgment,” he said. “The sorcery charge is a lesser one, and her confession would have rescued her from the fire, truly. But a child has been murdered in this instance. And two women, midwives, no less, drowned the child in the same barrel of water that was meant to be its bath. Pray for your mother’s soul, boy. That is all that can be done.”

“If I have to, I will go to the king himself,” I said.

“You will waste the last hours of your mother’s life riding on horseback to his court, then,” the baron said. “For she has been sentenced, and she will burn this night.”

5

In those days, witch-burnings were not as common as they would be years later. Although ecclesiastical law was such that a woman or man could be executed for what was often called Devil worship, it was rarely enforced, and had not yet become the firestorm that took over all of Western Europe soon enough. In fact, if my remembrances are not too clouded with later centuries, few believed that witchcraft was a threat to any. Yet there were those among the villages and abbeys accused of crimes, with worship of the Devil and the sorcery attached to it, who would be burned for their own redemption, sometimes by a mob if famine or plague had swept through. I had never seen it before, but I had heard of distant, ignorant villages and towns where this might occur.

I didn’t think it would happen in my own home. The heresies of country people had not yet been seen as a threat within Christendom, although the winds would change within a hundred years, then, later, the burning times for the witches would begin. But my mother’s case was one of the many isolated ones where locals and others felt that sorcery and murder had occurred, and any form of execution other than public burning would not cleanse the community of such deviltry.

My mother and her friend would be set ablaze with a large crowd watching, for it would be considered sinful not to attend such an event. The murder itself had grown in rumor from the death of a child with two bodies to the Devil and his infernal angels gathered around, conjured from the blood of the infant as the sorceresses drank from its throat the last of its life. Katarin, the mother of the dead child, went from being an ordinary woman of some means to being sacred to the Virgin Mother in her aspect of Our Lady of Sorrows, who cried nightly for children who had been sent to either Limbo or Hell itself. But none of these wild rumors mattered to me.

I saw my mother when they drew her along, tied to the back of a horse. She had to run in the mud, and she went too slowly. I could clearly see the marks upon her of the interrogator, the scars from her tortures, though I did not dwell on this much, for my goal was to pray to the Almighty to intercede on her behalf. When she finally slipped to the ground, it was my own angel, Alienora, who went to her with a cloth and a cup of water, lifting her up and whispering some prayer to her. My mother clung to her briefly until a soldier drew her away again.
 

Within the pavilion grounds itself, in front of what would be my mother’s funeral pyre, the baron and his entire household stood, alongside my friends, the few I had, including Ewen.

I fought back tears as I stood among my neighbors, watching as guards bound my mother to the stake.

And then I could take no more. I ran through the crowd, fighting against anyone who got in my way. Hands grasped at me. I felt the slam of a cudgel against my shoulder. Yet, I felt a strength that had never before existed within me and pressed through them to the stake itself.

I reached the kindling that had not yet been set ablaze. The abbé held back the man who held the torch that would begin this execution. I wrapped my arms about my mother as she wept against my shoulder. I begged her to help me loosen her bindings so that we might somehow fight our way through this terrible gathering.

She whispered to me, as close as she could press her lips to my ear, “Get away from me. You must. Don’t show them you care for me. I’m a whore and a witch, Aleric. Let me be, don’t put yourself in the fire’s path. Before Brewalen died, she offered me a small dried and twisted root. I have it beneath my tongue. She told me if I press it between my teeth at the moment before death, its powerful juice, will throw my soul from my body and I’ll have no pain.”

I kissed her cheek, weeping, “Please tell me what can be done. I don’t want you to die.”

“A secret has been kept from you,” she whispered. “A secret of your father and who he is. He...” I felt an iron grip on my hand. I turned and saw the same monk who had me disrobe before him. He pulled me away as I struggled against him. Two guards rushed up, each taking an arm and lifting me while I fought to return to my mother’s side, shouting for justice and for her innocence. It took more men to subdue me, and still I fought them, regardless of what might happen to me as a result. I lashed out, tugging my arms free, but still other men grabbed me and drew me back into the sea of faces turned toward my mother.

My mother cried out to me to protect my brothers and sisters.

A soldier lit the kindling that surrounded her, a crown of thorns at her feet.

Her lips moved, and I knew she had bitten down on that root of which she spoke. Her eyes went up into her head, with only the whites showing. Smoke came up, from the kindling, and it drew up around her body. The rags in which they’d allowed her to be burned caught fire fast, and though I could not watch, I heard screams from the crowd. I opened my eyes to see her belly rip open from the fire, and her entrails pour out.

And yet, upon her face, a smile or grimace, and her eyes looked toward Heaven. I can only believe—and hope—that the root’s juice had sent her on her journey to eternity without the pain that was her body’s fate.

For my part, my eyes were dry of tears. The spectacle of the column of smoke and fire lit the night, and I watched as others, people I had worked among, those I had called friend and enemy alike, seemed to become entranced with the white and black ashes as they rose up into the sky, a human bonfire, reminding me of the tales of the ancient burnings of sacrifices to the pagan gods of old.

This night of burning terror changed me forever. What love I felt for the world went with the black smoke of my mother’s flesh and bones, up into the heavens, blown by a bitter wind.

It burned away anything good within me, though I fought to cling to my sense of love and curse my foolishness at spending my childhood and youth pretending to be of the castle when I was of the Forest itself.

I had betrayed my mother by not moving Heaven and Earth to free her, even if it meant murdering the monks who held her, taking a hostage of the baron himself.

I saw myself then as a monster, bad as those who had accused my mother. Armaela, the witch. And her son, the Devil himself.

I thought of my grandfather’s words, about the good and the bad in all things, all people.

But as I stood there, a young man, I knew only the bad. I saw only the bad among those folk as they watched the spectacle of my mother’s burning.

6

That same night, the baroness grew sicker and also died, although it was not discovered until dawn, for the baron’s family had not returned to their quarters until the sun’s light had risen. Although I did not see this, the story swept through the baron’s household that she held in her hands the cage to the little bird named Luner. It was open, and she had, before she died, let the bird go. Her servant told others that the bird flew up first into the rafters, then, finally, out the window, into the purple light of morning just as the baroness breathed her last words, which were, “I am free.”

7

Other particulars I would later learn had some effect on me, soon after my mother burned in front of the baron, his household, and the village and the Sisters of the Magdalen caverns, and the abbey and its monks.

It would seem that a conspiracy was afoot regarding my own being, although at that moment I would not know whose hand made the first gesture toward my demise. Certainly my outburst at my mother’s execution played a role, for I was seen as untrustworthy and possibly in league with her, though there were those who were touched by my devotion to her in her last moments. I heard whispers of words about my grandfather, too. He had been a great soldier in some long-ago war, but had also been of the Forest folk and not of the Church. Still, other forces were at work. Corentin was involved, as was my master, his father, my mother’s early lover, Kenan, and perhaps even the baron himself. For that small pendant that Alienora had passed to me, which had been owned by her betrothed, had been reported stolen within the household.

I knew Alienora herself would not have done this, but I suspected that she had confessed her love for me to the local priest. Despite the sanctity of the confessional, when word got out that a nobleman’s daughter might have been taken beneath the consecrated image of Our Lady the Virgin Mother, in full view of the saints and perhaps the Savior himself, it would probably get back to the baron and his wife, or at the very least someone in the household who might have a particular friendship with the priest or one of the Brethren at the abbey. The ridiculousness of it all seems laughable now, but in that day, it was a matter of the utmost gravity.

Additionally, having nearly flung myself upon my mother before her death, I was no doubt viewed as a suspicious and derelict personage to know, for little understanding existed of how a pious son would love a mother who consorted with demons, unless he, himself, might be among the throng at the Witches’ Sabbat on a Lammas Eve.

All I know is that my dear beloved, who had given her body to me and her soul to the Almighty, came to me one dawn with the news that I must leave the castle with as much haste as possible. Although I begged her to go with me, she told me that the Almighty planned her life. She would enter the convent and take Holy Orders before Christmas with the Magdalens.

“My love for you is strong,” she said. “I will seek your safety in my prayers. They say if two hearts who have bound as one drink of the water of the Fountain of St. Gwynned, then they will never truly be parted.”

We went together, under cover of darkness. She had bribed her servants and guards, and, as I had seen her on that first night, she climbed astride a stallion as if she had been doing so since a child. It was hard for me to believe that this young woman would ever remain a Sister of the cloth, for she seemed wild and gay as she rode her horse across the marshy land, following the road until we reached St. Gwynned’s Grotto and its Font.

We approached the entrance to the carved and settled cavern where the anchoresses dwelled, living in an ascetic darkness within a cave that had been carved into a series of quarters and chapels for worship, lit occasionally by the sun and moon when the rock ceiling opened up. St. Gwynned’s Grotto was covered in a fine mist that caught the full moonlight that had emerged from behind clouds. It was like a metallic blue light, and it made the mouth of the Magdalen’s cavern—which looked less like a cave than a rock chapel—glow with a midnight rainbow of purple and white. The grasses had grown tall around the Font, and we spread ourselves out like children on a picnic there, at the edge of the water. I leaned to kiss her cheek, but she drew away from my love.