The Priest of Blood Read online

  He glanced over at his compatriots and roared for them to go off and drink or wench or devour roasts, but that he was going to go with me to the Forest to see how well I called the birds. He told me to call him by his name, not the haughty French name of his father, but by his Breton name, which was a fairly common one of the time: Kenan. His father had been from the south, by way of France, and his mother had lived her whole life in the castle, and died there while he was still a boy, sent off to fight Norsemen along the coast. When he had returned to his home, it had changed, and he no longer hungered for war and adventure. Although he seemed old to me then, Kenan could not have been more than his late twenties. Yet he had a kind of halo of age around him, as if life had been too hard on him.

  I took him down a well-worn path. Once we had gone into the murky part of the woods, where the bramble grew thick and high, I tied his horse to one of the old oaks. When he’d dismounted, I took him by the hand and led him in among the giant ferns and the roots rising up like low cottages among the part of the Forest. Running within the overgrowth, the remnants of an old Roman wall. My grandfather had told me that many years before, when his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had lived, this had been a military outpost when the Romans fought the true people of the land. I showed him the stones that were the markers of the dead.

  “Is this where your birds speak?”

  I nodded, and cupped my hands to my mouth and let out a whistle and a call that I had learned from too young an age even to know where I’d learned it. Within seconds, a giant raven swooped down from the dark green canopy above us and came to rest on one of the ancient stones.

  I held my arm out and chirruped for the bird, and it flew to my shoulder. It was always a jolt when it grasped me, and I had to steady myself, for the bird had grown large over the past year. I pursed my lips, and my wild pet cocked its head to one side, then the other, and leaned over and pressed its beak to my lips.

  “Sing to me,” I commanded.

  And then the raven began reciting the “Ave Maria,” but in the poor accent and mispronounced words as I might as well have done it myself.

  Kenan roared with laughter, which scared my dark friend away. The bird flew up again, and although I whistled for it, it had become skittish around this stranger.

  I looked up at him.

  “And what of the gryphon?” he asked.

  “I have never seen it,” I told him. “But I know where there is an ancient well, and at the bottom of the well a gryphon lies, immortal, but broken-winged.”

  “And who told you this?”

  “A crone,” I said. “Her name is Mere Morwenna. Although she raises a young child, she is ancient. She is bent and hobbled, a friend of my mother’s, and has some pox across her face so she lives deep in the woods so that she might not spread her plague. Her child is hideously deformed. Yet she has wisdom, my mother says.”

  “She has a plague but has lived long?”

  I nodded. “I have never seen her face, for she hides it with a veil. But once, she came to our home to offer the leaves and bark of the birch tree to help my mother bear the birth of my little sister. She told me then of the creature in the well. She has told me never to visit the well, but I have gone once or twice and heard the gryphon crying out, at midday. It is the saddest sound.” This last part was something of a lie, for though I had been near the spot, I had never actually heard anything from within the well itself. Still, the lie added a nice glow to his face, and a bit of a light grew in his eyes.

  “And if you were to capture this beast, how would you do that?”

  “I would first ask for a large fisherman’s net. Then a rope. I would tie one end of the rope to a hook lodged at the top of the well. Then I would climb down the well with the net. When I reached the bottom, I would cover the gryphon with the net and have someone—perhaps you, sir—draw me back up.”

  “That wouldn’t work,” Kenan said, a grin on his face. “The gryphon would be too heavy for you to bring up. And it might fight you. And it might hurt you. Kill you.”

  “Might,” I said. “At midday the gryphon is weak. It has not eaten for many years, perhaps centuries. It has no fight left in it. And I, sir, am very strong.”

  “You must show me this well one day, mud lark,” my huntsman said. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You may have been born under a lucky star. I believe you may have work with the hunt.” He told me that if I proved able with falcons, I might end up a huntsman just as he had become one from being a boy who worked with the horses once. He mentioned a brief memory of knowing my grandfather, yet Kenan would not tell me much of what he knew of him.

  That night, I drew out the blue stone that my grandfather had shown me at the oak tree, which I had stolen to keep near me at all times. I rubbed it for luck, and for hope, that I might prove myself in my work and help my brothers and sisters in some way. I kissed the stone, remembering my grandfather’s face, feeling a twinge of guilt that I had not returned the gem to its rightful place, yet comforted that I drew the memory of the old man into it and held it there.

  3

  From that day forward, I went to live within the baron’s household. Although I knew my huntsman to be named Kenan Sensterre, I was instructed to call him “sir” or even “Master” for the sake of the castle.

  Now the castle was not the enormous fortress of history, but a fairly simple structure of wood and earth, grand in its own way, yet fairly primitive in others. Very little of it was made of stone, except the chapel and beneath it, the kitchen, and beneath that, underground, a dungeon of sorts to hold prisoners. The structure was pentagonal in its interior, but from the outside, the palisades seemed curved in a circle. It was built upon a low, smooth hillside overlooking the Forest and marshlands, close enough to the abbey and the village if there ever was an attack (for truthfully, the abbey was a better fortress if trouble neared). The village beyond it was protected by the duke, then the great king, whose name was never spoken to me but was simply known as the father of our universe, next to God.

  The baron was simply called “my lord” if any were to see him, but in the first weeks of my employment, I rarely spoke a word to the great man. The baron himself was perhaps the richest man within one hundred hectares of land, which today I suppose would be a thousand acres or so. Treveur de Whithors had been the name he’d been known by as a knight in one of the Crusades, and he had returned from years of battle to his storehouse of land and coin, married quickly, and had three sons. All had gone to war but the youngest, still a baby, who remained with nursemaids—and was treated like a pampered pet. He also had three daughters who, as they grew, were capable of running the castle by themselves. His wife took sick after her last child had been born, and this lingering ailment brought a kind of unspoken grief to the household that shadowed its halls and etched lines in its quarters.

  I felt the brunt of the baron’s anger at times, as passed to me by other servants; I also felt his generosity during the Christmas feasts. I felt as if I were a princeling, even so. I slept in a room with the other boys who worked under the baron’s household, and at Holy Days and in seasons of plenty, I was able to take bread and fowl to my mother and little brothers and sisters. The work took me from dawn until midnight some days, and it was thankfully constant. I always had a roof over my head and food in my belly. I raised doves, swans, and falcons from the egg, and trained them for the needs of the castle. My name “Aleric” was soon lost, and I became first mud-lark, then Bird Boy, and, finally, Falconer before my first working year had ended.

  The other boys were often envious of the attention that my master gave me, and one in particular named Corentin Falmouth, who some in the castle took to calling Foul-Mouth, seemed to enjoy tormenting me in the few hours of sleep I had.

  Corentin first came up to me when I had laid claim to the straw mat in the corner not far from the fire, and told me that a boy had burned from lying too close to the hearth. “You should sleep in the back, with me,”
he said, pointing to a pile of bedding in a dark corner. “I can be your protector.”

  I soon learned that he believed protection meant keeping me from being beaten—by him.

  Like me, he was a boy from the country, and reminded me somewhat of my brother Frey, and what I imagined he might look like then. Handsome, and not particularly charming, Corentin at first seemed as if he would be my guide and confidant. There was something of the familiar to him, and to his manner of speech—he was a youth who had come from the marshes and woods, as had I. We spoke some of the Old Tongue, as well as the New. He had been educated a bit, as far as working boys could be, when he went to work with the Brothers, cleaning their quarters and learning bites from their lessons.

  He told me that the Brethren had taught him much about the world and its workings, and how a boy might rise in station further than he could imagine if only he would put himself under the care of the correct guide. He placed his hand on my shoulder and whispered to me that I should not be afraid so long as he was nearby and would be my guide. At first, I thought this delightful and part of the goodness that life had to offer me. I soon learned that he exacted tribute from those of us he considered his vassals, and that he was nothing like my brother Frey at all, nor much like any who might be called country people. He was not particularly adept at companionship. He would crawl onto the straw-stuffed bed and tell me of the tortures that the baron put to boys who lied or disobeyed.

  Corentin was older—perhaps sixteen—and he was the unofficial leader of some of the other ruffians with whom I shared quarters. Most of them had not come from families as poor as mine, but they bemoaned their lives as if they had been dealt the worst fate that had ever been conjured. Most were the second and third sons of noble blood, with no estates, no legacy, and many of them were destined for the monastery in a few years if they were lucky. Corentin himself claimed to have no living family, and perhaps I could feel for him in his lonely misery, but he insisted on tormenting me.

  “Your mother is a whore. She is known throughout the village, and the priest takes pity on her when he allows her to Mass. I heard from a courier that she slept with his horse for a tankard of ale.”

  The most frightening thing about his voice and his words were that I had thought of my mother in the same way. And yet it incensed me to hear this from him. My heart grew dark with hatred of him. I had to resist wrestling him to the ground, although I didn’t resist nine times out of ten, and we’d roll around on the floor of our chamber hitting and biting and tearing at each other. Corentin, the stronger, the larger, the older, had the better of me. I often ended up bruised and battered at dawn, but still arose to get out to my birds and my work.

  I was determined not to allow anyone to stop me from proving myself and moving forward in life, though Corentin did his best to tell me that mud-hens (for that was his own nickname for me) never rose higher than I had, and that when I reached sixteen, I would be sent back to the filth from which I had been born. “Or else you will be sliced from nave to chops,” he said, making a motion with his hand from his sack to his chin. “And your head will be stuck on a pike.” This last part terrified me, for I had seen the heads of criminals on pikes during certain months when treason had been discovered.

  I had gone to the executions of the depraved and the indigent and those who had cursed the Church or those who had committed adultery. I had seen three children—two brothers and their younger sister—all hanged at the gibbet just outside the baron’s castle, none of them more than six years old, for stealing food from a family of good lineage. Mud-hens, indeed, could be hanged, or their heads severed from their bodies and thrust onto pikes for all to see the faces of those who had broken the law.

  Corentin’s words gave me nightmares when I had thoughts against those surrounding me. I had to keep my humours balanced and my emotions buried, or else I might one day wind up spinning slowly on a rope or sliced with a hand ax for having sinned in some great or small way. Although I had seen Death before with my family, it was among the boys of the hunt and the stables that I saw it pass by, and often. A chill would come, and suddenly three of my cohorts would catch fevers in the night, and no amount of fire in the hearth or soup in their bellies drove Death away.

  I began to see Death as a great king, perhaps the greatest Fallen King of the Earth, for Death ruled all, was feared by all, and yet, had no worshippers in any chapel. Death was the unacknowledged visitor in every household. Corentin reminded me of how Death could arrive, and I hated him for it but could not get far away from his words. I was the most humble and most impotent of the boys in the baron’s household. If Corentin, who outranked me in position as well as age, had decided that I had committed a terrible crime, he could let it be known to the baron, and I might be dead before the next morning. While I didn’t live in fear of this, I knew that the possibility for deviltry existed with Corentin, and his word would be taken over mine.

  Thus it was that when Corentin one night came to my bed and pressed himself into me, turning me onto my stomach, holding my arms such that I had no movement in them, that I cried out into the straw and not for others for help. A boy who was thus used would certainly be thrown out of his occupation, and perhaps worse would befall him. He might even be found as guilty as the perpetrator of the deed itself. King Death might visit him next, for whether the sodomer or sodomee, the crime reflected both as evildoers. There were no innocent parties. Sodomy was considered the Devil’s worst offense, and although I would later find out of its acceptance among certain warriors, in that world I occupied at twelve, to be named a catamite was to be as good as burned alive. Although I tried to fight him, he overpowered me and had his way. It was not a sexual impulse on his part; even then I was aware of this. He was pissing on me, the way a dog might piss on something to mark its territory. To keep the pissed-upon from rising up. To somehow damage me. His laughter afterward told me that. He was interested only in destroying me. In pushing me aside. In ensuring that a Mud-hen would not rise above his lowly station, and that if one would rise, it would be Corentin Falmouth himself, whose father was the third son of a Breton family that had risen in their fortunes since God had decreed it many centuries before, then fallen all too swiftly—or so he claimed.

  I bore the shame for weeks on end, and slept little but kept watch for my nemesis. But it was the last he ever came near me or spoke to me for a long while. I began to hope that he might be afraid of me. That something in his vile act upon my body had terrified him. I can only guess that he felt he had done his work on me.

  But he had not.

  And no matter what ill he wished me, I prospered despite his taking of the last remnant of my childhood from me, which was not my innocence but my love for all mankind. I would weep for the child I was, but I truly had fury in my heart, as well as innocence. My grandfather had warned me to take the good with the bad, and never to forget that all within life had both. I, too, had both good and bad. But Corentin seemed completely evil to me, and I saw no good in him.

  Truly, I wanted to kill him and keep him from hurting others as he had hurt me. I wanted to cut out his tongue so that he could not say the words of loathing of my mother, though there were times when I felt them in my heart, as well. He was like a shadow that I could not rid myself of—for when I thought of evil, when I held the idea in those years of all that was terrible about the world, Corentin’s face came into view, whether in my mind or before me in one of the chambers.

  And yet, I dare admit to myself that even then, part of Corentin was too much like me, as if he were me, a few years ahead, having taken a slight turn in the path of life from where I would stand one day. Had I been sharper, perhaps I would have seen in his demeanor a caution to me, a mirror of what I might become: a predator in the world, and, more than that, a predator who made all around him into prey.

  From that moment, I went to the boys and the esquires who worked with the knights and watched as they lifted their swords. I intended to learn to figh
t like a man, and, if necessary, kill a man well in order to protect myself from any who wished to harm me.

  I would kill Corentin if given the opportunity.

  I would risk the gallows to stop him from ever harming me, or anyone I knew, again.

  4

  And yet there were sunny days as well as the murky ones.

  The huntsman, my master, Kenan Sensterre, had a masculine grace about him, and despite his boisterous appearance and occasional moodiness, he and I grew close as I ran alongside his horse, twin falcons on my leather-strapped arms. He taught me much about the bow, and about hefting the sword in such a way as to increase the strength of the shoulders and arms. He took me to the machine that the knights used to train, and we spent an idle hour simply running at each other so that he could show me proper technique. Our hunts together seemed unforgettable to me—he had the prowess of an archer in top form, while I knew the paths through the Forest where the wild boars rooted. We hunted boar and rabbit and stag, and I showed him many byways and paths across the treacherous marshes that were rarely crossed by any but poachers. He asked me if I had ever seen those sacred nymphs of the Old Way known as the Briary Maids. I laughed when he said this, for I knew them as imaginary tales told to the young.

  “They are girls of the wood who seduce and destroy youths,” I said. “By calling them to the edge of cliffs and down into deep bogs covered with briars.” I told him that they couldn’t possibly exist because if they did, many more young men would go a-missing. But there was, of course, truth to the legend, for whenever a young man was found, by himself, drowned, or having thrown himself from a rock ledge to his death, it was said he was called by the Maids of the Briar, rather than that he had killed himself. The Briary legend was at least as old as the Forest itself, and sometimes I wondered if Mere Morwenna and her hags were not, in fact, of the Briary themselves. In the village and the baron’s household, Morwenna was often called Morwenna Bramblebog for just this reason. For it was thought she was no longer a woman at all, but a damned spirit that roamed the woods and marshes, calling out to those who were weak in faith to come join her and her sisters in their deviltry among the oaks and birches.