The Priest of Blood (5 page)

Taking deep breaths, my grandfather said, “I told you once of your bloodline. This is a sign of it.”

“You must not speak,” I said. “You are tired. We can rest. I can bring water.”

“No,” he said. “Just sit beside me.”

He patted the fern-covered ground to his left, and I plopped down, eager to hear a new tale. He cradled me with his arm. He took the stone from me.

“It is worth little now,” he said. “But it once was a sign of our family. Before the invaders, our blood ran in the veins of these woods. My grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather planted this tree. In those days, there was no abbey. No church. We are now the vanquished. But you must never forget who we were, for it is in your blood to be more than what this world has forced upon you. And what your true father has done.”

“My father?” I asked, but when his breathing became labored again, I begged him to rest a bit before speaking.

But he would not. “My birds are the last of my own childhood. They will fly away. But you will remember this day, won’t you, Aleric? You will remember me?”

“Always,” I said, and I took his hand in mine and leaned over to kiss it. “But you won’t ever leave.” How young I was to say such things! How ignorant of the pulse of life itself! For, surely, the old man was past the years of hope for life and had managed to survive merely from luck and his love for his family. I could not know then of the disease that had begun to ravage him a few years earlier. That his breathing and his complaints of soreness of old wounds had all been part of the beginning of his demise.

“All who breathe upon this Earth,” he said, “must depart the flesh. This does not mean that we are not here. The soul flies, and nothing should stop it from spreading its wings, just like a dove. Its journey is known to it alone, not to the one who possesses the dove. Here”—he brought my hand over his heart—“feel the way it pounds, lightly, feebly? Like a drummer marching into the distance?” Then he brought my hand to my own heart. “Yours is strong and just beginning its journey. But one day it, too, will slow. It is a gift to die, Aleric. You must always remember that. We return to the arms of this.” He glanced up at the ceiling of leaves, the deep emerald of the forest. “And the soul flies like a bird to a new nest.”

I resisted the sorrow his words brought to me. I pressed my face to his heart, trying to hear it. But it was faint. He stroked the top of my head. “Your falcon has flown,” he whispered. “He will be free in the Forest now, for he seeks a mate. He is the age of mating and of the hunt. You will be of that age soon. It is an important time. You will forget the Forest. You will even forget the birds. But you must fight the world, Aleric. It is important to remember. This stone, from the tree. It is of little value in the world. But it is an ancient stone of our people. It was once possessed only by great men and women. We were once of a line of the priests of the Forest. No one speaks of our kind anymore. Many were hunted. Many killed. Many left to become priests in the church of the new god. You are of a priestly caste, my boy. Your talent for the birds shows me that you are closest to the forest ways. You have been taught the woods are full of devils. But you know they are not.” As he spoke, his strength seemed to return. I felt the beating of his heart increase, and was glad of it for all the talk of the past and of death and of stones and priests made me think he had but moments left. “I want you to remember this. Your father was a man I despised. Yet he had greatness in him. He was not of our kind, nor of any country I know. He chose your mother because he understood that she was the daughter of the Forest, though she lived in the mud and gave herself too freely to men. He changed her forever. You must forgive her all, for he had power and terror in his gaze. And yet, for all that, he had goodness, as well. That goodness is within you.”

“Who was he? Where may I find him?”

“He will find you,” my grandfather said. Then, when he had regained some of his strength, he lifted me up to put the stone into the oak’s knot. Yet, I did not do as he wished. I was afraid that I might never find the tree or the stone again. I slipped it into the leather pouch about my shoulders and did not tell my grandfather I had taken it. The badness of this act did not haunt me until the next morning, when my mother cried out that her father stood too still in the field.

5

By the time my older sister and I had run out to him, he had already fallen.

“Grandfather!” I shouted, feeling for his heartbeat while my sister cried out for others to come. I wept over his body, not wanting to believe he had died, not wanting to look at his lifeless face again. I wrapped my arms around his neck, tears flowing too easily.

I heard the birdsong at that moment—just a lark in the field.

As I let go of him, I saw a flock of wild birds flying out from the Forest, across the marshes. Although it may be a trick of memory, I was sure I heard the geese in their chattering sound as if they were praying, and the two ravens he kept circled the sky above us. These did not leave the heavens until my mother had removed his body.

The birds had known. My grandfather had breathed his last, and the birds had taken his soul with them as he had taken them up in his hands at their hatching.

The soul flies, and nothing should stop it from spreading its wings, he had said.

After his death, I grew ill and feverish. I kept the stone a secret, and rubbed it with my fingers in the night as if wishing for my grandfather to return.

One dawn, I awoke feeling better, but in my soul, anger had grown. I began to see things darkly, I began to view the world as a devourer of all that was good. I no longer could find forgiveness for my mother, nor did I find comfort in my siblings. I felt as if all love was lost when that old man dropped in the field, and only my love for the birds remained.

I wanted nothing more than to leave that home and get far away. It became like a thirst that could not be slaked, or a hunger with no fullness after a feast. I could not escape the feeling that I had to get away, the way my older brother Frey had done.

By midsummer’s eve, I found a way to leave and still remain close enough to my family to help them when I could.

Chapter 3

________________

T
HE
H
UNTSMAN

1

When the baron’s men went looking for a new boy to serve the hunt and train the falcons and goshawks, I begged my mother to take me to the midsummer’s fair. It was a league or so up the road, where peddlers sold wares and music played and the huntsmen of the baron tested the skills of local boys of talent. After the fuss I made over going, my mother relented and took me.

I stood in line behind many other boys, most of whom were of better lives than I had known, but I had prayed to Our Lady and had left a birch twig at the edge of the marsh with a wish to the forest crones themselves. I had rubbed the blue stone from the oak tree and walked backward at the crossroads in the marshes, which was considered good luck. I had cleaned myself well before the trip, and stood tall and proud as the other boys my age did.

When it came my turn, a broadax of a man with a booming voice and brusque manner checked my teeth and the way my legs moved, in case there was disfigurement, and then my scalp for lice. He commented greatly on my fair hair and red face to his compatriots.

“The baron likes boys who are rough-and-tumble,” he said. “You seem soft. You have hair like a girl’s, full of bird’s nests, and you smell like a barnacle.”

With this comment just out from his lips, I kicked him hard in the shins.

He looked at me, eyes wide with shock, and the next thing I knew, his hand came down for my face. I flew through the air in the next moment, backward onto the grass.

Then he began to laugh, and gave me a hand up again. “You’re a tough little mud lark,” he said.

So this huntsman liked me, and enjoyed my scrappy demeanor. He had me demonstrate my use of the bow and quiver. He asked me how I was at running with the dogs. I told him that I often slept with dogs, and felt they were my cousins. He laughed at this, but I could tell he meant to dismiss me. “And what of your mother? Would she not miss you?”

“I am not a girl who would stay by dung-fire tending the rat-stew,” I said boldly. “I intend to be the greatest of hunters one day. And my mother is a whore.” I said this last part without any sense of judgment, for I was used to thinking of her this way. When I said this, the men around us roared with laughter, some of them clapping their hands and a few asking after my mother and whether or not her hair was like mine.

“The baron would not want the son of a whore in his Forest,” said one of the men, who looked like a great bear. He laughed loudly, as if it were the finest joke he’d ever told.

“My father is a great fisherman,” I said, allowing the lie to slip off my tongue far too easily. “He has a fleet in the sea right now, and dives for pearls in the southern sea in the winter. He has made a necklace for the queen. He finds rare jewels in an ancient city, beneath the waves, and brings them up for the Seven Princesses of Spain.”

I can, even hundreds of years later, recall the burning of shame on my cheek that day, as I spun a tale that I hoped would save my reputation as a wellborn boy. I heard myself, as if from a distance, recite the very lies of noble birth and ancestry that my grandfather had taught me, as well as his stories of the Lost City beneath the sea. Even as I said it, I could see it in their faces: not just bemusement or even annoyance at my boasting falsehoods.

They had lost interest.

I had to somehow get the attention of the huntsman again. He seemed kinder than the rest, although his face had something of the aspect of an ogre, and his nose, a serrated blade. But his eyes had a keenness to them as I spoke. I had not just yet lost his attentions. I understood in that moment why my mother, with no means at all, might do anything to entice men to give her what she needed to feed herself and her children.

I needed him to want me working for the baron. It was my only escape from the life I hated as a child.

I took a deep breath. I prayed to the Lord for guidance. Then to the Devil for a magick trick.

“If you give me one night in the Forest, I will bring the baron the most magnificent hunting bird he will ever find.” I am certain that I didn’t use words quite so well placed at eleven. But I said something as formally and awkwardly as I could to put my point across.

“What kind of bird?” he asked.

The lie came easy, and I convinced myself even as I spoke. “The most magnificent bird, a gryphon, with talons as big as goat’s horns, with a wingspan as wide as the castle walls,” I said quite seriously, and nearly believing every word.

His men laughed, but the huntsman nodded. “A wager from the mud lark.” He winked and patted my hair, calling me “yellow bird,” and told me that if I could bring him back the finest hunting bird in Christendom, this gryphon of monstrous glory, the following day, I would be the bird-boy in the baron’s hunting party.

“But,” he said, “if you do not, if you have lied to me about this business, I shall cut out your tongue. Do you see this?” He drew a small, curved blade from his belt. He held it in front of my eyes until I saw the sunlight glinting from its edge. “I have cut off a man’s hands with this blade. I have cut a baby from its mother’s belly with it. I have even gutted a stag with it and held its beating heart in my hand. Open your mouth, boy. Open it.”

I did as I was told, but had never in my life felt quite so terrified. He reached forward, and grasped the back of my neck with his left hand. With his right, he brought the blade to the edge of my lips. “Your father is a great fisherman who dives for pearls in the southern sea, say you. Do you know how he takes his blade and cracks the oyster shell and digs in to the squirming meat of it? How he presses the sharp edge at the back of the thick slimy creature, and saws, to and fro, slowly, carefully, to dislodge it from its home?” As he said these words he made slight motions with the knife, its curved end inside my open mouth, not touching anything, but nearly. And then I felt the razor cut of its edge—slight, but painful.

I tasted blood. Metallic as the knife.

Then he tucked the blade back into his belt and let go of my neck. “Shut your mouth, mud lark. Look at me.”

I gazed first at his boot, then at his middle, and, finally, up at his face again. His eyes were pinched and small and like shiny stones.

“Tell me again about this gryphon, for I have heard of these creatures, although I have never seen them. I would like to have one in the baron’s menagerie, both as a hunting bird and pet.”

I then had no reason to doubt that this was a sincere interest on his part. The legends of gryphons were everywhere in those days. I knew of one, although I had never seen it. I had been warned away from an ancient sacred well that was far off the path in the Great Forest, entangled with vines and encrusted with the roots of trees to the point that the well—which some called St. Vivienne’s Fountain—was barely visible for the green growth around it. My mother, when she heard me mention it, forbade me to speak of it. She told me that it was of another race of people. That it was of an old time, before even the churches had been built, and that it was no saint that had been martyred there. But she would not tell me the rest. But Mere Morwenna had told me about it when she found me in the woods at the old ruins, training my birds. “There is a great bird at the well’s bottom,” she had said. “As large as a dragon. It has claws that will rip a man to pieces, and a wingspan that can take over the night sky. A thousand years ago, it fell and broke its wings, and so it lies at the bottom of the well.” She showed me the well, and told me that the pagan Romans had martyred St. Vivienne there, as well. Her story had a profound effect on me, and when I asked my grandfather about it, he told me that if it had such a wingspan and such powerful claws and was an immortal bird, that it must be a gryphon, for that was the only beast with such qualities.