Rise Above

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  Robert went, but the effect of his visit lingered like an itch in an amputated limb. Tobias kept thinking of his brother's strictures (not to have too many books, not to hunt, not to drink too much, or eat rich food); they chafed. Unnatural that the younger brother disciplined the elder, but then Robert had never had any self-doubt, had never set limits on his brilliance. (And yet his brilliance was dimmed, the radiance as a young man now darkened by his sense of having been passed over, having in some way been slighted, so that seeing him now, Tobias saw not the golden youth, but a bitter man, ageing faster than Tobias himself was.)

  It was not suitable for an archbishop to hunt. According to Robert. And why not?

  He'd always let Jamie check the snares if they rode past the coverts. That was only fair; the huntsman had his work to do. Then one day Jamie had brought a greyhound along with him, a little brown bitch who'd run after a hare. Tobias watched it doubling and curling around its own tracks, till at last it seemed to run through a loop of the track like a rope through itself, tied in a knot, tumbling over its own paws; and then there was snarling and screaming and an end of it. He felt its pain, flinched from it inwardly.

  They ate jugged hare for supper the next day.

  After that their rides had lost their innocence. Death became a constant companion; every death, of pheasant, partridge, rabbit, hare, he felt as deeply as the first, with tender pity, and yet however any times he tried to speak to Jamie, to forbid him the practice, he could not. The words would not come. He felt pity and yet could not exercise mercy.

  Robert had no idea of this. Robert, with his rules and decorum and spite. He thought of his brother's face, sharp with ambition and dislike, and instantly knew that he would ask Jamie to take him hunting.

  It wasn't that easy, of course. He spent days in the orchard learning to handle the crossbow, shooting at the rotten trunk of a dead tree. He had to learn to keep his fingers and thumbs down, out of the way of the string; once he dry-fired, when Jamie wasn't keeping his usual close watch, and the bowstring broke and snapped a gash across his knuckles.

  "You're lucky it wasn't worse," Jamie said; but his fingers were gentle when he tied a cloth across Tobias' hand and pressed down on the wound to keep the sides together before tightening the tie.

  "You won't be moving that hand now?" And he didn't, till they got back to the house and he could douse the wound in turpentine, and have it properly dressed.

  But eventually he was allowed to hunt with the bow; first rabbits, then the deer. No red deer here, the sport of kings, but the fallow deer with their dappled sides, shy, untrusting creatures. He shot his first a few days before his fiftieth birthday, and thought if anyone had told him he would become a huntsman, or an archbishop, he would not have believed either.

  Not that he spent every day hunting; the translation occupied a great deal of his time. Every word had to be analysed; whether to use 'church' or 'congregation' for ekklesia, for instance, though he would have preferred, perhaps, 'assembly', a word that had (so far) not been annexed by any faction. He could not stray too far from the translations that had been made before; and yet they were so often faulty, or clumsily expressed. His work was painstaking, comparing the different versions, the Greek, the Latin, the English translations, yet at the end of the day he would always read one chapter of a Gospel in the original Greek, letting the silver words flow into him and calm him as they always did.

  Winter passed, slowly, and spring advanced, and his physician told him he was nearly ready to take up his cares again – for so he thought of his office; but his heart was weakened, he said, and he should take care not to strain it. More warnings, he thought, more limitations set on a life already limited; but the physician encouraged his riding out, said it would help keep his blood from thinning further.

  He forgot his brother's other warning; felt himself coming to life again with the new year, his breathing easier, his body more sinewy and compact with the exercise he'd taken. Spring mornings, his breath hot in the cold air – he imagined himself a dragon in the mist, exhaling smoke, breathing in ice. The crunch of the frosted grass stems underfoot. The whistling thump of swans' wings as they flew over, just after dawn. Life was full of these small sensual pleasures.

  He was up to a chapter a day, the translation flying. He worried that once his task was over he'd miss it; there would be nothing left for him to do.

  Late in February, he fell. There was a smear of ice he hadn't seen on the path, his feet slid from under him and he landed awkwardly, one foot twisted out. He was winded, at first, sat there stupefied, wondering at the fact that his lungs had stopped breathing, that his ribs seemed numb; then breath came, burning cold in great sobs, but still he couldn't stand.

  It was Jamie who ran to him, Jamie who put his arms tight around him, who helped him up, who helped him to the house. It was Jamie, the physician being not expected for another three days, who made a poultice for his ankle – "It's what I make for the horses, but it will do" – and put him to bed, and sat with him. Jamie who ran the household for him, who brought his books up from his study to his chamber, who kept the fire going all day, who served his food. Tobias hardly saw any of the other servants; Jamie chased them away, wanted his master all for himself. Nor did Tobias object.

  Tobias had always been fastidious, like a woman; he'd loved solitude, loved distance, hated it when in the library at Cambridge he'd sat on a bench and found it warm with the heat of someone else's body. But there was something comforting in Jamie's presence; his strong arms, his caring hands. Tobias's whole foot was swollen; he was beginning to think he must have fractured the bone; he couldn't stand unaided, and pain shot through him if his injured foot dragged against the floor, or he knocked it with the other.

  He learned to trust. He lay back, and let his huntsman tend him. He dozed, supported in those strong arms, feeling Jamie's soft warm and regular breath, as reassuring as a mother's heartbeat to the child at her breast.

  Three days and nights of pain. He let Jamie give him too much brandy, and spent the days fuddled, but the pain seemed to go a little further away, though it was still there, hiding deep in his clouded brain, biding its time. At night, he could not sleep, though he dozed through the short days; owl cries kept him awake, and the scuttling of mice in the rafters. Once, he began to cry, thinking of the things he had left undone, words he had not said, the life he could have lived, but had always been too shy and unassuming and diligent to dare. He had never cried in front of another man before; he was too weary and drunk to care. He let Jamie hold him, felt the soft tickle of beard against his neck, the stroking of those strong hands on his back, as he cried his loneliness out.

  And on the third day, he woke refreshed, having somehow managed to sleep for fully eight hours. That day he got up, and walked with a stick as far as his study. His foot was not broken, after all, but the bruise was dark purple surrounded by livid yellow, the skin stretched tight and painful over his swollen ankle.

  Three whole days! He couldn't believe how badly ill he'd been; just a fall, after all. He felt ashamed of himself, to be so weak still that the slightest accident could fell him; was he a child, to be so feeble? For a moment he hated Jamie, hated his dependence on his servant, and then was ashamed of his anger. Robert was right; he had never mastered his feelings, and he knew his face was flushed, and that Jamie would have seen it.

  "You're still fevered?"

  Tobias shook his head, but he was glad Jamie had mistaken the flush for fever.

  "I am well; just..."

  "Your heart is weakened. I know."

  ***

  God forgive me.

  His lips moved silently. He could taste the wine on them, dark and sweet, Christ's blood. He wished he could believe it had been shed for his sins.

  He remembered, then, the king's carefully incomplete judgment; how he had never cleared him of murder or manslaughter, but had only said there was no reason he should not continue. His li
fe from then on had been lived in the shadow of the king's disfavour; tongues had never stopped wagging. He wished, almost, he had been tried for murder; he might have expiated his sins on the block, or been fully cleared of the guilt.

  Feeble as he had been since the illness that took him to Felstead, Tobias had outlived them all; the king, the king's favourite, his brother Robert (carried off by an apoplexy, they said, when he learned that York had gone to Prey, and his promotion had been blocked), even Lady Venetia. And Jamie. And now, Tobias in his turn faced the door into the dark.

  They'd let Turbridge in. Not Prey, as they'd suggested; he'd rather the local minister, a leaden preacher but an honest man. He should confess his sins; the things done, the things left undone. But his tongue betrayed him with his silence.

  He remembered Jamie. That late spring day, not long before he went back to Lambeth, when he watched the younger man swimming in the stream, and realised what Robert had meant about sin. (Sunlight gleaming on his chest, touching each droplet of water with gold.) The way he had caught the huntsman's eye, and looked down, suddenly embarrassed, his face hot. The way Jamie, helping him as always from his horse at the end of their ride, had kept his arms around him, bent, and kissed him.

  He remembered Jamie, whom he could have loved. He wondered now, with the dispassionate inquiry of old age, whether that would really have been a sin.

  And he remembered the crossbow held pointed at a good man's heart, the trembling of a finger on the trigger, the thrum of the string.

  About the Author

  A M Kirkby writes fantasy, SF, and historical fiction, as well as children's books.