The Priest of Blood Read online

  Thus, I was born in the ember days, a new year, after the solstice, into the frozen world of life. They say that my mother was in the village, a half-day’s foot travel from our home at the edge of the Great Forest. Heavy with child, she had taken rest by the village well, along its smooth gray stone edge. When the hour of my birth had come ‘round at last, the frost of the day drove her to a stable. Like Our Blessed Lady, as she has been called, the Maria, Mary, Notre Dame, mother squatted among goats and sheep and asses and perhaps even a sunk-backed horse and no doubt several spotted dogs, and out I came into the encircling snake of life, into the hoop of time. My mother grew sick in that place. I have no doubt she thought, for a moment, that she might kill me and bury me in the dung to hide her shame and her sin. No barleyfield for me; my early grave was meant to be the home of flies and vermin.

  But something stayed her hand, whether the law or her own conscience, I can’t be certain. Perhaps it was Fate herself who kept my mother from braining me against the wall. I can even hope that she felt the maternal warmth of a cow for its calf and she let me suck at her teat. Perhaps she held me close and wept over me with love and a sense of her unfortunate life. Perhaps a midwife had been there, too, helping to snip the cord and give me first milk from a more generous breast. Perhaps my mother had, for a few moments of her life, kissed my cheek and whispered a lullaby.

  Perhaps the Great Mater was there with her, Matter, Mother, Mutter, the Earth that cradled me, in some invisible way, guiding her hand as She had guided so many hands before.

  A kind merchant put Madonna and squalling brat into the flat of his wagon and drove her back over snowcapped slopes to the one-room home that I would come to think of as little better than the stable in which I’d been born.

  My name was at first Alaricald, and then changed to Aleric, and my full name Aleric Atheffelde, which is not the patronym it may seem, nor was it pronounced as written. In fact, neither my siblings nor mother had a name passed down, either from mothers or fathers. It is easy to forget the pains of bastardy, and the lengths to which good folk kept away from it, and kept all bastards from any number of endeavors, including attaining a name of any distinction. Atheffelde simply meant “at the field,” and that is, in fact, where we lived, although more appropriately “In-the-Marsh,” “Felding,” or “Attheforet,” as some families had it, or even my stepfather’s name, which was Simon Overthewater, for his work in the sea.

  You will detect the Saxon influence in our names—for while we were Breton by culture, we were the mutts of that world, between Saxon and Breton and Norseman and Gaul, as well as other influences. Some of my siblings had other names, depending on the mood of the priest and the neighbors and my mother. The village folk often had names passed down from antiquity or from work, but such as my family was, we simply were of the land itself. In homes such as mine, the children might go on to change their names as they discovered life. Whenever one from our region ventured to other countries, we were generally called as if by one family name: LeBret, the breton. Thus, my name, too, would one day change based on my talents and travels, but as a baby, I had no such influence.

  My mother told me when I was older that she nearly went to Heaven the night after my birth, and that my stepfather, a brute whom I was lucky enough rarely to lay eyes on after the age of four, called me a whelp bastard and thrashed my mother for bringing another mouth to feed into his home. I might hate him for this, but I barely knew him—he was often off to sea or to the rocky coast to gather shellfish and the ocean’s harvest for months at a time, returning with very little in his pocket but a dried fish or two. My mother, I soon discovered, was often abed with the local men of the village, lifting her heavy brown skirts, drawing back her scanty and torn underthings whenever she chanced to wear them, giving to get something in return.

  As a result of her wantonness, my brothers and sisters and I barely resembled each other except, perhaps, in our lack of fat on our bodies and in the generally sleepless look in our eyes. Even the twins might’ve been sired by separate whorehounds. As a child, I hated her unholy, if brief, alliances, and it was only when I spied her in the chapel of Our Lady, her dimpled sun-browned thighs wrapped around our local prelate, a look of absolute sacred radiance on his face, a reddish glow to his tonsure, that I realized that we all must do what needs to get done in order to put bread in our mouths. If the fish and mollusks were not a-plenty, we would go without, but not so long as our mother prayed on her back and brought home bread and sweets and mutton. Everyone who is mortal must work at some trade, and my mother’s was more arduous than most, but possibly pleasurable, if damnable.

  Certainly the local monks did not think it a damning offense.

  That week, we got a finer share of the Poor’s distribution, a charity taken in by the Brethren of the monastery for the families in need.

  My brother, Aofreyd, whom I called Frey, would place bets with me about where we would find our mother a-lying on a summer afternoon. She was, nine times out of ten, pressed into some haystack with a local farm boy half her age. Those nights, we often drank fine milk and had fresh eggs. When the plague came through each year, bringing with it terrible nights of praying and endless Masses that lasted past midnight, and my father stayed away for the season at sea, my mother often brought her men home, believing that we were too ignorant to understand why the planks in the cupboard creaked. At night, Frey and I would lie together on our mat, listening for the sound, and giggle together at how the men always seemed like dogs, growling, barking, whimpering, and how what they did sounded as if it could not be pleasurable at all, but was, indeed, what the cats in heat must feel when Old Tom mounts them.

  Once, when Frey threw this in her face, furious that he had to defend her at Market from being called the Whore of Babylon by the local boys his own age, she gave him a whipping and told both of us that she worked for God, and those men were Saints come down to Earth to bring a message from Heaven.

  At the time—I was seven, perhaps—I believed her. Frey did not. My brother spat in her face and told her that she was the kind of woman who should be dragged through the streets and beaten on a gibbet until every bone in her body was like honey in a goatskin. He pointed to little Franseza, with her tangled black hair and the raised bumps on her face. “She is dying in front of you, and you lie with strange men. Look at Aler”—as he called me—“he is bones and hair and not much else. You let those men use you as a sewer for their cods, then you bring another bastard into the world and watch as they suffer.” I knew this was bad talk at the time, although I didn’t understand it.

  My mother took a hot pan from the fire and threw it at him. It hit Frey on the left-hand side of his face. I screamed as if I had been hit. But Frey made no sound. He put his hand to his forehead. He kept his eyes on her.

  That was the night she locked him in the root cellar, and I lay atop the locked wooden platform and whispered to him that it would be all right, that he would be out in the morning. We touched fingers to each other that night through a crack in the wood. Frey told me that he would never forget my loyalty and our kindred (even if we shared the same mother, but perhaps not the same father), nor would he remain at home another day. “She is not a bad woman,” he said of our mother. “But I cannot live here.”

  “I hate her,” I said. “Sometimes.”

  “It’s better to pity her. She has some cause for her anger in life.” Then he told me a story about our mother, and my grandfather, and how our family had become outcasts of the village. It made little sense to me, for I was too young to understand how prejudice might arise even among neighbors. “I need to leave,” he said. “She is angry because she knows I must go.”

  “She’s mad,” I said.

  “She has her reasons.” His words made me curious about our mother. When I asked him more about her, he told me to keep quiet. “She is as she is. I am as I am.”

  Frey was twelve years of age when he left home for good. At dawn’s first light, he dug h
is way out of the cellar trap, taking with him some roots and apples, wrapped up in his ragged shirt. The left side of his face was scarred and full of raised bubbles of skin where the oil had struck him. He kissed me on the forehead and swore that should we ever meet again, in this life or the next, that he would greet me as brother and friend and allow no one to harm me.

  I thought that I would never see him again. We all knew that if any of us left, abandoned our home, Death would surely follow. Frey knew this. We had heard of what happened to boys who ventured into the world without any means. I said many prayers for my brother the morning I watched him running along the path at the edge of the forest.

  It was the saddest day of my young life, and though you may judge my mortal days as misspent and full of vain pursuits, you must always remember that, for a child, the world is meant to be wondrous. When it is not, it becomes the realm of shadows and of nightmare. In the mud of that world, I did not know one day to the next if I would eat, or if I might die, or if one of my sisters might fall dead.

  It was quite natural for a boy such as myself to dream of great things, to believe in the lies told me by other dreamers, and to want more than simply the filth and disease of the hovel called home—I wished for Heaven in that lifetime, a sweet place where dreams and hopes were fulfilled.

  The forest was my place of dreams, and the birds, my messengers to Heaven.

  3

  I must tell you of the forest, a place of dreams and wishes in my young mortal life—as well as nightmares. Old men said that in the center of it there was a tree more ancient than all the others. It was called the Oak of the Priests, or the Devil’s Tree, depending on whether a peasant or a monk told the tale. It was said that its roots went down into the Earth and from them grew all the trees of the world. This was just one of the legends of the wood; I grew up with the magick of these stories.

  Within the forest were large caves in which the group of sisters, Brides of Christ, had built their chapel and chambers into the rock itself. They were known then as the Magdalens, and shunned material life and, more importantly, sunlight itself, as part of the world of matter that corrupted the spirit. In those days, Christendom encompassed a variety of what were later called heresies, and a century later the Magdalens of the Languedoc were hunted down and slaughtered in their chapels, but during my young life, they were simply part of Christendom’s variety.

  These good women lived mainly on the food brought them by pilgrims, for the grotto and its springs were said to restore the sinful to a state of innocence by virtue of Mary Magdalen’s blood, which had, by legend, been spilled to create the spring. They had a relic of the Magdalen, supposedly a bit of her heart, dried and kept in a wooden box at the foot of the statue of the only female apostle. The Magdalens, although friendly with the local abbey and its abbé, kept their distance from all, for they were meant for a solitary life of contemplation and prayer, as well as bestowing a blessing upon the rock ledge within which they dwelled. But the good Sisters were the farthest point in our land that I then knew of, and the Forest and its marshes were of much more interest to me than a nunnery and pilgrims.

  In the spring and fall, one had to find entry points through narrow, muddy paths. The marsh and bog led to streams into the woods, and an area we later came to know as “The Devil’s Teeth,” which was a series of large stones standing upended in a circle—as tall as many men—that were said to have been there since the beginning of time. It was a mysterious and wonderful place, although the priests and monks often warned us to never go into the Forest except from necessity, for the Devil lurked everywhere among its branches and roots.

  Our storytellers spun many tales around firesides of the ancient heroes and damsels who had met their fates within it, of the creatures and monsters that had once walked among its great trees, and the nymphs and faerie queens that had lived along its bogs and among the caves. There was a legend of a sacred poisonous tree—its fruit would kill whoever tasted of it, save for those purest in spirit. I heard a story once of a man who went foraging for his family and drew a root out from the earth, and the root was shaped as a man, and screamed so loud when the good man pulled it that he went deaf from the sound.

  At the center of the wood (as all legends went) an ancient ruin of a castle rose up from fern and thicket, home to a Celtic queen who once ruled all the forests of the world. An old Roman wall, half-torn, half-lost, ran among the overgrowth. There were legendary fountains and lost treasures buried centuries before; other great tales of magick and history mingled in its green darkness. Although the duke claimed the woods, and, of course, the baron, partially, in the name of the duke, there was not a family I knew of that did not occasionally risk the punishment for poaching in order to feed themselves. And although there was a great cry from the abbots and priests and nuns, there were still known those who practiced fortune-telling and healing within the Great Forest.

  When my mother had taken sick, I often accompanied her with my grandfather on a journey into the woods, where he knew how to call the crones of the wood. They would come with a poultice or a tea for my mother to drink to help with her fever. When I cut my foot on the edge of an adz, which was a kind of ax that we used then for woodcutting, my grandfather carried me deep into the Great Forest to the crone that I knew as Mere Morwenna.

  She gave me something that tasted like licorice and mint, then had me eat a disgusting chunk of rye bread covered with gray-green mold. The candy-flavored treat helped me swallow the pieces of bread, and within two days the infection and its accompanying fever had vanished. Like all the Wise Women, she wore a thin veil that seemed to me to be made of spider web, for once, when I touched it, it seemed sticky to my hand.

  We of the fields knew them as the Forest Women or the Wise, but they called themselves the Women of the Veil, and so they wore this to cover their faces from the nose to the chin. Mere Morwenna had a young child whose entire body was veiled, for it was said that too much light would kill it. It was little more than a baby when I was a boy. My mother told me that it had a great deformity of some sort and that Mere Morwenna had to bathe it hourly in a bog at the center of the Forest, a bog in which grew berries that cured the ill or poisoned the healthy, and which was only known to the Wise Women. “Her baby needs these hourly baptisms to cure it, or else it will surely die,” my mother said. “She is a very good woman, despite what villagers say.”

  Once, out of curiosity, I drew back the veil slightly and looked at the baby’s face. It had a level of ugliness I’d never before seen, although its eyes were like pools of clear blue water. I heard the word “changeling” now and then, and that the child was not truly Mere Morwenna’s but had been discovered tucked into the opening of an oak that had been split by lightning. The Forest women’s stories were all like this—there was nothing of the ordinary about their world, and I loved every visit to them.

  We knew then that sorcery and witchcraft were outlawed, but those who lived outside the castle, out in the mud, did not turn against the Wise Women of the Great Forest. Brittany was not so rigid in its thoughts, nor were its people far removed from the Celtic ways of old. While the world of Christendom was our life, and the Christian gospel our salvation, although none could read it save the monks, the fever to destroy that Old Religion had not yet arisen in as violent a way as it would, soon enough.

  Mere Morwenna was our midwife, and with her assistant sisters, Brewalen and Gwenvred, would come to a home when the cries of labor had become too great. They were of value to us country folk, and they did not curse the priest or the Holy Mother when they were spoken to about matters of the spirit. Mere Morwenna had a hand that felt like fire when it was cold, and her eyes were small black rocks at the center of a wrinkled but kind face. Her hair was white from age, and when I was very young, she’d rock me on her lap after my mother had fallen asleep with my new little brother or sister. She told me of my birth, and how she had not been there to deliver me, but that once I was brought to her in the F
orest that she had foretold great things for me. What were these great things? I asked her often enough.

  “A prophecy told to the one who must fulfill it is a destiny interrupted,” she said more than once.

  “But you must tell me,” I insisted.

  She took my hand then, when I threw a fit over not knowing of my destiny. She kissed the center of my palm and peered over the whorls of my fingers and the lightly creased pathways between fingers and down to the heel of the palm. “All I can see that can be told is this: from the smallest, greatness may come.”

  “Will I be great? One day?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, peering into my eyes. “We live in a world where those who seem weak are the strongest. And those who seem strong are without true power. Someday, when you seem to have great power, you must remember this, for it is at your greatest moment of strength that you will also be at your weakest.”

  I laughed at her, for I was too young to understand this, and she laughed, too, and went back to cradling her little veiled baby in her arms.

  Mere Morwenna told me more tales of the Forest of an ancient well and a great, fearsome beast with wings that had been trapped by some hero of old of a fountain that was hidden from all men, but from which waters flowed that could heal the sick and make those who drank of it either die a sudden painful death or remain eternally young; there were streams within the Forest that went underground, into the caverns beneath it, and ancient drawings adorned the rock walls in those dark, dank places, telling of other worlds that had yet to be remembered; the trees themselves were thousands of years old, far older than mankind, planted by the giants that once walked the Earth, the same giants who brought the giant stones that existed along the plain at the center of the Forest. She also told me of the Faerie Queen whose castle still stood by the golden lake at the center of the Forest, although I had never ventured far enough to see it. I could well imagine a lake of gold, and she told me that if the wrong person put his boat upon the lake, it became a lake of fire. “Seven princesses sleep in the castle, waiting for seven youths to come and break the spell,” she would tell my brothers and sisters and me as she tended my mother’s birthing fever. “Each night, the princesses turn into ravens and fly up from the Forest, out to find the brave youths who will risk the lake to rescue them.”