Warlock and Son (18 page)

Corin's shoulders squared, and he went on bustling about, then turned away and went out to the kitchen. Roble sagged and lowered his eyes.

Magnus glanced at Rod, then stood and stepped over to the bar. He leaned across and hooked a tankard off its peg. He beckoned to Roble, who looked up in surprise, then followed him back to the table, where Rod and Magnus were each pouring half their tankards into the empty one.

"Drink." Magnus set the stoup in front of him. "We are not of the village." Roble looked them slowly up and down, with suspicion but also with relief, then growled, "I will-and bless thee, strangers." His lips quirked with a mirthless smile. "If the blessing of a sinner and an outcast will do aught for thee."

"I certainly can't cite anyone else for being a sinner," Rod rejoined, "and the blessing of a father should certainly . . ." But Roble was sinking again. "I am parent no longer. Call me not `father,' goodman." The innkeeper came bustling back out and jarred to a halt, staring at them, shocked. Then he remembered that he wasn't supposed to even see Roble, and turned away. Magnus decided to press his luck. He stepped over to the counter, calling, "Ho, goodman! Fill the bowl again, if thou wilt!"

Corin turned to stare at him, then let a slow smile show. "Aye, stranger." He refilled Magnus's tankard, took down a new one and filled it, too. "For thy father." Then he turned away quickly, back to the kitchen.

"So," Magnus murmured, sitting, "he hath some fellowfeeling after all."

"Corin was ever a good-heart," Roble allowed. "Dost say thou art this man's son?"
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"I have that honor."

Rod looked up in pleased surprise.

"'Tis a holy bond," Roble growled. He turned to Rod. "Rejoice in him."

"Good advice," Rod said slowly. "I do."

"I'll give thee better: leave this village, and quickly. The bishop will be angered with thee for thy mercy to me, as will his curate, his acolytes, and his nuns-and what they hate, all the folk will hate. An thou dost gain the enmity of the clergy, thou dost gain the hatred of all the town-which thou wilt, by naught but thy converse with me, for such hath been declared to be a sin."

"Whatever the priests tell them is Gospel, huh? Well, I think we'll take our chances. Being from out of town can be a big help."

"Such conduct is odd," Magnus pointed out, "for they who preach Charity." Roble shrugged. "There are virtues, and other virtues. For all their preaching, they will tell thee quickly that obedience is of greater import than charity."

"Obedience?" Rod frowned up at Magnus. "I don't remember that as being one of the cardinal virtues."

" 'Tis an aspect of Faith, goodman-for if one hath Faith, one doth obey God's Word."

"And God's Word is whatever the priest tells you it is?"

"Aye, and he doth say Faith is the greatest virtue of all." Magnus shook his head and quoted softly, "

`For there abide these three: Faith, Hope, and Charity-but the greatest of these is Charity.' " Roble looked up, startled. "Whose words are these?"

"Saint Paul's, from the first of his Epistles to the Corinthians."

"The priest hath not read us that from the pulpit."

"And you're not taught to read for yourself?"

"Nay. Only they who are learned can correctly interpret God's Word. None others should read." Rod jerked his head toward the outside. "I take it those boys we saw this morning are being taught their letters?"

"The acolytes? Aye. They have been chosen for their intelligence and faith." Which probably translated as their fanaticism and willingness to do whatever the priest said, Rod imagined. "They're giving up a lot. Your neigh ... fellow villagers tell me the priests and nuns really live very chaste lives."

"Aye," Roble admitted, "that they do. I ha' ne'er seen so much as a gleam in a priest's eye; they are
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consumed with devotion. Each hath a small house by the church, though the bishop's is larger than the others, and none ever enter those houses save the one who doth dwell there. Nay, they are pure in their zeal."

"If zeal is enough to make a man good. Yes. Of course, sparing someone else's feelings might be a factor in spiritual quality, too."

"Charity, aye-but it doth take second place, or third, when there is the matter of protecting all other souls from heresy--or thine own, from thine own error."

Magnus frowned. "Dost thou believe this of thyself?" Roble's mouth hardened. "Nay. 'Twas that which drove my boy Ranulf mad with grief-for he had a mind that sought sense, mind you, and would protest to the nuns, even when he was a child, that the Holy Ghost would not be separately named if He did not truly exist, or that Christ could not be any more a son of God than any others of us if He was not in some sense God Himself."

Rod whistled. "That must have gone over like a whirling skillet."

"A most bright lad," Magnus murmured.

"Aye, much good did it to him. They took offense," Roble confirmed, "and screamed at the boy that he was a heretic and a damned and impious one, then beat him. His schoolmates beat him worse, on the way home, and he wept bitterly when he was come to his mother. She sought with gentle words to explain to him that he must never question the nuns' teachings-and the bishop came to accuse me of poisoning the lad's mind with my incessant questioning of Holy Doctrine, and to read me the passage in which Christ says of the one who leads younglings astray, that it were better for him to have a millstone bound around his neck and be cast into the depths of the sea. Yet I had been careful not to speak of my own questions in the lad's presence-aye, or even in his mother's, when first I found that she was frighted by my wonderings." He lapsed into a brooding silence.

"So thou, too, didst note the contradictions in the bishop's teachings?"

"Aye, when I was young myself. The old bishop, who came before this one, told me I had a twisted and rebellious mind, and was over-fond of listening to the Devil. I will own that I chafed at the authority of the priests, for I could not see that they were that much better in soul than any other men, save in the matter of mastering their fleshly lusts. I wished to leave the village, and even crept away one dark night-but the old bishop sent men after me, with dogs to trace my scent, and they beat me and brought me back." Magnus's eyes widened; he exchanged a quick glance with his father. "So, then. Thou art not allowed to leave."

"Aye, for, saith the bishop, I fled toward the Devil, entranced by his wiles and snares. The whole forest is the domain of the Adversary, seest thou, and the great wider world beyond it is there only to corrupt the innocent." His mouth twisted in bitterness. "I think they may have truly believed such. Surely they did lock me in a darkened cottage, to meditate upon my sins, and mine only company was a curate who came to preach to me an hour at a time, three times daily. At last I was so desperate for release that I came to believe I had been misled by the Tempter, and confessed my sins. They loosed me then, but watched me closely. They need not have, for I was cowed, and truly believed myself to be evil. I lived in penitence, and at last the bishop judged that I should marry. I balked at this, but he lectured me sternly, to show me that 'twas my obligation either to serve God as a priest-and I lacked the strength of Faith for that--or to wed and rear up babes to witness the glory of God-for there were, after all, only those two
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vocations."

"Nay," Magnus said sharply. "There are three-the chaste and single life is another, even without the call to the priesthood."

Rod nodded. "Of course, it has its own burdens and responsibilities-and it's a very lonely life." Roble gave him a brittle smile. "The bishops have told us, throughout the ages, that no soul should endure such loneliness and the temptations with it, if he cannot-and therefore all should marry, if they are not priests or nuns. So they matched me to a lass whom no one else wanted, and wed us-and she never forgave me for marrying her out of force, not love. She shrilled at me, she scolded me, she nagged, and I thought again about fleeing to the forest-but she bore a son, and proved as gentle and sweet a mother as she was a hard and bitter wife. Yet she would not tolerate the slightest sign of impiety in Ranulf, and as he grew older, began to beat him sorely for daring to speak of it. As he grew, and questioned more, she grew harsher and harder, even as the nuns, and then the priests lectured and upbraided him, and told him he was corrupt in his very nature, and bound for Hell, because he was my son. My wife would have turned me out from the house then, were divorce not sinful-and 'twas not long thereafter that she died. The bishop proclaimed her saintly, for having striven so hard to raise Ranulf in the fear of God, and for enduring the presence of the rebellious soul who was her husband." He said this all without expression, his tone level.

Rod felt his heart wrench within him, and felt a huge upwelling of gratitude that he had found Gwen-and his old abiding sense of guilt in that he had been so poor a husband. Magnus murmured, "And thy son questioned God's wisdom, in taking his mother when she was not yet aged?"

"Aye, and in his grief, he spoke of it aloud-nay, he ranted and demanded that the priests should explain how a good God could take a woman who was in the summer of life. The bishop thundered at him that he was a blasphemer and a lost soul, and that I had driven his mother to her death. God bless the lad, he would not believe it-and God pity him, for he said it aloud, and the bishop commanded his priests to beat the Devil out of him. He was pilloried and whipped, and I with him, then cut down to limp home as best we might, and do what we could to bind each other's wounds. 'Twas then he spoke of fleeing, and I, in fear of their dogs and whips, cautioned him against it; nay, pled with him. And at my asking, he bided, and tried to be good by the bishop's rules-but he had lost all faith in the priests by then, and saw them as villains."

"And therefore saw himself as evil," Rod murmured. Magnus looked up at him, startled, but Roble nodded. "Aye, for he had lost all faith in aught but God Himself, or so he told me. And so it befell that he sought to flee one night, without telling me. I knew naught of it till the small hours of the morning, when the hunters brought him back with a huge clamor, and waked the whole village to witness the shame of the apostate. They scourged him as they had me, and locked him in the hut, and preached at him mightily-but he was made of sterner stuff than I; he never wavered, and would not give in. At last, two nights agone, he hanged himself by the thongs of his shoon." His whole face squeezed shut; his shoulders trembled. Magnus put out a hand toward him, but Rod waved him back, and the younger man slowly withdrew his hand.

Finally, Roble opened his eyes with a gasp. "Thy pardon, strangers. I should not burden thee with a father's guilt."

"I wouldn't say the guilt was yours," Rod said, keeping his voice low. "This variety of religion you're taught here, goodman Roble, is not the Church as it exists in the outside world."
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Roble turned to him, staring. "In truth? Is the Church outside this forest, then, possessed by demons, as our legends say?"

"Not a bit, though it has its share of weak and fallible mortals in it. It preaches Charity as the most important virtue, and its punishments are much gentler-so much so that if a really vile crime is committed, it hands the victim over to the King's men for punishment."

"We are of that Church," Magnus murmured. "We believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each separate persons, but at the same time, each completely and fully God." Roble stared. "But how can that be?"

"How can a single triangle have three sides? Naetheless, that is too simple an example; true understanding is beyond our mortal minds." Magnus wondered if that was because human beings could only perceive three dimensions, but suspected it was only one among humanity's many limitations. He didn't cloud the issue, though.

"There are other differences," Rod said, "but the sum and substance is that, no matter what your priests and bishop tell you, the Church that rules you here is not the same as the real Roman Catholic Church. In fact, my son and I have been wondering how this cult could ever gotten started." Roble lifted his head, gazing off into the distance. "There is a history, that we are each of us taught." Rod glanced at Magnus. "I think we'd like to hear it." Magnus nodded; if nothing else, it would take the older man's mind off his grief.

"An thou dost wish it, then," Roble said slowly. Magnus reached over and refilled his tankard.

"I thank thee." Roble smiled, then began the tale that, in their village, passed for history.

"This village, strangers, was begun by a group who found summat in the Bible that made them believe the Church of the outer world was sinful."

Rod nodded. "I take it there was some kind of leader who pointed that out to everyone else?"

"Aye; he was the Eleazar whom these folk name a saint. He called upon all who believed in the pure Faith to follow him to the wildwood, and went off to the forest." Probably with the sheriff one step behindhim, Rod thought to Magnus. The young man's lips quirked, then smoothed; he kept his look of close attention to Roble's words.

"The folk struck off by themselves into the forest," the peasant told them. "Our legends say they had to slip away by twos and threes, for fear of the soldiers. They met Eleazar at his hermitage, a great rock in the forest, and all went together in search of a place where they might worship as they pleased."

"Or as Eleazar did," Rod murmured.

Roble gave him a bitter smile. "Aye. After some weeks' wandering, they did find this clearing in the forest-where the church and school now stand. They cleared the trees to make them fields, and proceeded to dwell in harmony."