The Priest of Blood Read online

  “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

  ________________

  THE HUNTSMAN

  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 s
omething 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.

  So, with the huntsman and his party surrounding me, I began to sputter on about gryphons and great beasts that had remained unseen by men, but we of the country knew them, of wolves the size of dragons, and dragons the size of mountains, and the poisons of the witches that grew in the shadows of the great oaks. I felt as if I were drowning as I spoke, as if my tongue would soon unfurl and grab his blade from beneath his belt and cut itself off rather than listen to the wild stories I let loose.

  The huntsman drew his hand back and slapped me across the face as hard as he could. Knocked me down. In the dirt, I looked up at him, coughing. He bent over, grabbing me as if I were an ash sack, lifting me up from beneath my armpits, and hefting me above his head, all the while keeping watch on my eyes as if to catch the imp of perversity scuttering about inside my soul.

  “When you lie,” he whispered, “the angels weep. The Devil himself has not lied so much as you have in these precious minutes. Will you tell the truth, Bird Boy? Will you?” As he spoke, he shook and rattled me in the air, and I was fairly certain he would toss me into the crowd before too long.

  I felt it was in my best interest to change course.

  “I will tell the truth, sir,” I said solemnly. As I spoke, the fair around us disappeared to me, the men beside him vanished, and I felt as if there were just the huntsman and I in all the world. “I am a poor boy, and I have not a trade. Nor is my father a good fisherman, nor does he hunt pearls. My sister took sick and died last winter, and my little brother went soon after. My mother is a wanton, and sleeps with even the clergy for scraps of mutton and pork, but I do not blame her, for she has many mouths to feed. I have but one small talent. And that is for falcons and doves, sir. The birds of the air. I speak to them, in my own way, and they understand me. And they hunt with me.”

  “So please God if you lie now, I will do more than cut out your tongue,” he said.

  “I do speak to the birds.”

  “They listen to you?”

  I nodded. “The rock and mourning doves. The falcons, too. I trained a raven to speak by splitting its tongue, and I once raised a hawk to bring fish from the river.” This was all true, and had been taught me by my grandfather when I was barely able to speak. The only lie within it was that the birds usually escaped to the Forest once they were of an age, although I could call them to me through whistles and caws now and then.

  “Tell me, what did your raven say with his language?”

  “He repeated the ‘Ave Maria,’” I said, which was true, and made the huntsman laugh like a crash of thunder. “Not every word of it,” I said. “Just the first part. His Latin is not as good as our priest’s. He flew beside old women as they knelt to pray at Mass, and it was the only thing he would learn. The farmers nearby think he is the spirit of a damned soul, for he now haunts the old burial grounds, repeating the words again and again.”

  When he had stopped laughing he lowered me to the ground and scruffed my hair with his rough fingers.

  “I would love to meet this praying bird,” he said. “You hunt in the Forest?”

  2

  It was against the law to enter the baron’s forest, despite the fact that I—and all in my family—had been doing so since my memory had begun. A family of bastards might all be slaughtered by a servant of the baron or the duke if caught with a boar’s head in the home. Poachers, if discovered, were hanged or drowned, depending on the availability of a gibbet or a pond and a sack. Now and then, a poacher was allowed to live as an example to others, and I’d seen one once, his hands cut off at the wrist, his nose also cut off. There was a man named Yannick, who wandered door to door, begging for morsels, because he’d stolen a rabbit from the Great Forest. His hands had been chopped
off, as well as the toes on his feet and his left ear. I did not want any such fate to befall me or my family. One did not break the law lightly. So I lied a bit.

  “No, sir. I hunt in the fields by the cottage. I hunt rat and rabbit and other small creatures of the marsh and field that are not owned by the king or baron.”

  “You speak well for a meadowlark.”

  “My grandfather taught me to speak well.”

  “Your grandfather is alive?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What was his name?”

  When I mentioned my grandfather’s name, the huntsman nodded. “Tell me, how did the old man die?”

  I told him of the day in the field, and of the ravens and doves, as well as the flocks of birds that seemed to be everywhere at his death, though I, perhaps, exaggerated the tale as it went.

  “Did your grandfather mention his time in the wars?”

  I shook my head.

  “I knew him,” the huntsman said. He half smiled. “Ronan was a fine soldier of his day.” Then his mood darkened. “And your mother is his daughter?”

  Again, I nodded.

  “Armaela.” When he said her name, it sent a slight chill through me. I had never heard a man say her name without trying to bed her. “I knew her, many years ago,” he said. “You must not speak ill of her. Your family truly was once a great one. Perhaps you have greatness in you, though your kind has fallen from favor in these present times. Let this be an understanding between us, boy, should you think ill of any for whom life’s fortunes have turned. Misfortune is the world. Those who are kings today may be knaves by sunrise tomorrow. Those who are peasants without means may become princes of the world. Only you and I know this to be true, for I have seen it come to pass, and remembered, while others have forgotten and believe that we are each born to our station and remain there until death. Remember this moment in future years. Remember when a man plucked you from the mud and brought you into a better life.”