The Emerald Circus

by Jane Yolen

  She glared ahead at the darkened path. “Yer father kept yer room the way it was when ye were a child, though I tried to make him see the foolishness of it. He said that someday yer own child would be glad of it.”

  “My father—”

  “But then he went all queer in the head after Alec’s father died. I think he believed that by uncovering all he could about the old witches, he might help Alec in his research. To bring ye together. Though what he really fetched was too terrible to contemplate.”

  “Which do you think came first?” I asked slowly. “Father’s summoning the witches, or the shadows sensing an opportunity?”

  She gave a bob of her head to show she was thinking, then said at last, “Dinna mess with witches and weather, my man says . . .”

  “Your man?” She’d said it before, but I thought she’d meant her dead husband. “Weren’t you . . . I mean, I thought you were in love with my father.”

  She stopped dead in her tracks and turned to me. The half moon lit her face. “Yer father?” She stopped, considered, then began again. “Yer father had a heart only for two women in his life, yer mother and ye, Janet, though he had a hard time showing it.

  “And. . . ,” she laughed, “he was no a bonnie man.”

  I thought of him lying in his bed, his great prow of a nose dominating his face. No, he was not a bonnie man.

  “Och, lass, I had promised yer mother on her deathbed to take care of him, and how could I go back on such a promise? I didna feel free to marry as long as he remained alive. Now my Pittenweem man and I have set a date, and it will be soon. We’ve wasted enough time already.”

  I had been wrong, so wrong, and in so many ways I could hardly comprehend them all. And didn’t I understand about wasted time. But at least I could make one thing right again.

  “I’ll go after Alec, I’ll . . .”

  Mrs. Marr clapped her hands. “Then run, lass, run like the wind.”

  And untying the knot around my own pride, I ran.

  The Quiet Monk

  Glastonbury Abbey, in the year of Our Lord 1191

  He was a tall man, and his shoulders looked broad even under the shapeless disguise of the brown sacking. The hood hid the color of his hair and, when he pushed the hood back, the tonsure was so close cropped, he might have been a blonde or a redhead or gray. It was his eyes that held one’s interest most. They were the kind of blue that I had only seen on midsummer skies, with the whites the color of bleached muslin. He was a handsome man, with a strong, thin nose and a mouth that would make all the women in the parish sure to shake their heads with the waste of it. They were a lusty lot, the parish dames, so I had been warned.

  I was to be his guide as I was the spriest of the brothers, even with my twisted leg, for I was that much younger than the rest, being newly come to my vocation, one of the few infant oblates who actually joined that convocation of saints. Most left to go into trade, though a few, it must be admitted, joined the army, safe in their hearts for a peaceful death.

  Father Joseph said I was not to call the small community “saints,” for sainthood must be earned not conferred, but my birth father told me, before he gave me to the abbey, that by living in such close quarters with saintly men I could become one. And that he, by gifting me, would win a place on high. I am not sure if all this was truly accomplished, for my father died of a disease his third wife brought to their marriage bed, a strange wedding portion indeed. And mostly my time in the abbey was taken up not in prayer side by side with saints but on my knees cleaning the abbot’s room, the long dark halls, and the dortoir. Still, it was better than being back at home in Meade’s Hall where I was the butt of every joke, no matter I was the son of the lord. His eighth son, born twisted ankle to thigh, the murderer of his own mother at the hard birthing. At least in Glastonbury Abbey I was needed, if not exactly loved.

  So when the tall wanderer knocked on the door late that Sunday night, and I was the watcher at the gate, Brother Sanctus being abed with a shaking fever, I got to see the quiet monk first.

  It is wrong, I know, to love another man in that way. It is wrong to worship a fellow human even above God. It is the one great warning dunned into infant oblates from the start. For a boy’s heart is a natural altar and many strange deities ask for sacrifice there. But I loved him when first I saw him for the hope I saw imprinted on his face and the mask of sorrow over it.

  He did not ask to come in; he demanded it. But he never raised his voice nor spoke other than quietly. That is why we dubbed him the Quiet Monk and rarely used his name. Yet he owned a voice with more authority than even Abbot Giraldus could command, for he is a shouter. Until I met the Quiet Monk, I had quaked at the abbot’s bluster. Now I know it for what it truly is: fear masquerading as power.

  “I seek a quiet corner of your abbey and a word with your abbot after his morning prayers and ablutions,” the Quiet Monk said.

  I opened the gate, conscious of the squawking lock and the cries of the wood as it moved. Unlike many abbeys, we had no rooms ready for visitors. Indeed we never entertained guests anymore. We could scarce feed ourselves these days. But I did not tell him that. I led him to my own room, identical to all the others save the abbot’s, which was even meaner, as Abbot Giraldus reminded us daily. The Quiet Monk did not seem to notice, but nodded silently and eased himself onto my thin pallet, falling asleep at once. Only soldiers and monks have such a facility. My father, who once led a cavalry, had it. And I, since coming to the abbey, had it, too. I covered him gently with my one thin blanket and crept from the room.

  In the morning, the Quiet Monk talked for a long time with Abbot Giraldus and then with Fathers Joseph and Paul. He joined us in our prayers, and when we sang, his voice leaped over the rest, even over the sopranos of the infant oblates and the lovely tenor of Brother John. He stayed far longer on his knees than any, at the last prostrating himself on the cold stone floor for over an hour. That caused the abbot much distress, which manifested itself in a tantrum aimed at my skills at cleaning. I had to rewash the floor in the abbot’s room where the stones were already smooth from his years of penances.

  Brother Denneys—for so was the Quiet Monk’s name, called he said after the least of boys who shook him out of a dream of apathy—was given leave to stay until a certain task was accomplished. But before the task could be done, permission would have to be gotten from the Pope.

  What that task was to be, neither the abbot nor Fathers Joseph or Paul would tell. And if I wanted to know, the only one I might turn to was Brother Denneys himself. Or I could wait until word came from the Holy Father, which word—as we all knew full well—might take days, weeks, even months over the slow roads between Glastonbury and Rome. If word came at all.

  Meanwhile, Brother Denneys was a strong back and a stronger hand. And wonder of wonders (a miracle, said Father Joseph, who did not parcel out miracles with any regularity), he also had a deep pocket of gold which he shared with Brother Aermand, who cooked our meagre meals. As long as Brother Denneys remained at the abbey, we all knew we would eat rather better than we had in many a year. Perhaps that is why it took so long for word to come from the Pope. So it was our small convocation of saints became miners, digging gold out of a particular seam. Not all miracles, Father Joseph had once said, proceed from a loving heart. Some, he had mused, come from too little food or too much wine or not enough sleep. And, I added to myself, from too great a longing for gold.

  Ours was not a monastery where silence was the rule. We had so little else, talk was our one great privilege, except of course on holy days, which there were rather too many of. As was our custom, we foregathered at meals to share the day’s small events: the plants beginning to send through their green hosannahs, the epiphanies of birds’ nests, and the prayerful bits of gossip any small community collects. It was rare we talked of our pasts. The past is what had driven most of us to Glastonbury. Even Saint Patrick, that most revered of holy men, it was said came to Glastonbury posting ahead of
his long past. Our little wattled church had heard the confessions of good men and bad, saints of passing fairness and sinners of surprising depravity, before it had been destroyed seven years earlier by fire. But the stories that Brother Denneys told us that strange spring were surely the most surprising confessions of all, and I read in the expressions of the abbot and Fathers Joseph and Paul a sudden overwhelming greed that surpassed all understanding.

  What Brother Denneys rehearsed for us were the matters that had set him wandering: a king’s wife betrayed, a friendship destroyed, a repentance sought, and over the many years a driving need to discover the queen’s grave, that he might plead for forgiveness at her crypt. But all this was not new to the father confessors who had listened to lords and ploughmen alike. It was the length of time he had been wandering that surprised us.

  Of course we applauded his despair and sanctified his search with a series of oratories sung by our choir. Before the church had burned down, we at Glastonbury had been noted for our voices, one of the three famed perpetual choirs, the others being at Caer Garadawg and at Bangor. I sang the low ground bass, which surprised everyone who saw me, for I am thin and small with a chest many a martyr might envy. But we were rather fewer voices than we might have been seven years previously, the money for the church repair having gone instead to fund the Crusades. Fewer voices—and quite a few skeptics, though the abbot, and Fathers Paul and Joseph, all of whom were in charge of our worldly affairs, were quick to quiet the doubters because of that inexhaustible pocket of gold.

  How long had he wandered? Well, he certainly did not look his age. Surely six centuries should have carved deeper runes on his brow and shown the long bones. But in the end, there was not a monk at Glastonbury, including even Brother Thomas, named after that doubting forebear, who remained unconvinced.

  Brother Denneys revealed to us that he had once been a knight, the fairest of that fair company of Christendom who had accompanied the mighty King Arthur in his search for the grail.

  “I who was Lancelot du Lac,” he said, his voice filled with that quiet authority, “am now but a wandering mendicant. I seek the grave of that sweetest lady whom I taught to sin, skin upon skin, tongue into mouth, like fork into meat.”

  If we shivered deliciously at the moment of the telling, who can blame us, especially those infant oblates just entering their manhood. Even Abbot Giraldus forgot to cross himself, so moved was he by the confession.

  But all unaware of the stir he was causing, Brother Denneys continued.

  “She loved the king, you know, but not the throne. She loved the man of him, but not the monarch. He did not know how to love a woman. He husbanded a kingdom, you see. It was enough for him. He should have been a saint.”

  He was silent then, as if in contemplation. We were all silent, as if he had set us a parable that we would take long years unraveling, as scholars do a tale.

  A sigh from his mouth, like the wind over an old unused well, recalled us. He did not smile. It was as if there were no smiles left in him, but he nodded and continued.

  “What does a kingdom need but to continue? What does a queen need but to bear an heir?” His pause was not to hear the questions answered but to draw deep breath. He went on. “I swear that was all that drove her into my arms, not any great adulterous love for me. Oh, for a century or two I still fancied ours was the world’s great love, a love borne on the wings of magic first and then the necromancy of passion alone. I cursed and blamed that witch Morgaine even as I thanked her. I cursed and blamed the stars. But in the end I knew myself a fool, for no man is more foolish than when he is misled by his own base maunderings.” He gestured downward with his hand, dismissing the lower half of his body, bit his lip as if in memory, then spoke again.

  “When she took herself to Amesbury Convent, I knew the truth but would not admit it. Lacking the hope of a virgin birth, she had chosen me—not God—to fill her womb. In that I failed her even as God had. She could not hold my seed; I could not plant a healthy crop. There was one child that came too soon, a tailed infant with bulging eyes, more mer than human. After that there were no more.” He shivered.

  I shivered.

  We all shivered, thinking on that monstrous child.

  “When she knew herself a sinner, who had sinned without result, she committed herself to sanctity alone, like the man she worshipped, the husband she adored. I was forgot.”

  One of the infant oblates chose that moment to sigh out loud, and the abbot threw him a dark look, but Brother Denneys never heard.

  “Could I do any less than she?” His voice was so quiet then, we all strained forward in the pews to listen. “Could I strive to forget my sinning self? I had to match her passion for passion, and so I gave my sin to God.” He stood and with one swift, practiced movement pulled off his robe and threw himself naked onto the stone floor.

  I do not know what others saw, but I was so placed that I could not help but notice. From the back, where he lay full length upon the floor, he was a well-muscled man. But from the front he was as smoothly wrought as a girl. In some frenzy of misplaced penitence in the years past, he had cut his manhood from him, dedicating it—God alone knew where—on an altar of despair.

  I covered my face with my hands and wept; wept for his pain and for his hopelessness and wept that I, crooked as I was, could not follow him on his long, lonely road.

  We waited for months for word to come from Rome, but either the Holy Father was too busy with the three quarrelsome kings and their Crusades, or the roads between Glastonbury and Rome were closed, as usual, by brigands. At any rate, no message came, and still the Quiet Monk worked at the abbey, paying for the privilege out of his inexhaustible pocket. I spent as much time as I could working by his side, which meant I often did double and triple duty. But just to hear his soft voice rehearsing the tales of his past was enough for me. Dare I say it? I preferred his stories to the ones in the Gospels. They had all the beauty, the magic, the mystery, and one thing more. They had a human passion, a life such as I could never attain.

  One night, long after the winter months were safely past and the sun had warmed the abbey gardens enough for our spades to snug down easily between the rows of last year’s plantings, Brother Denneys came into my cell. Matins was past for the night and such visits were strictly forbidden.

  “My child,” he said quietly, “I would talk with you.”

  “Me?” My voice cracked as it had not this whole year past. “Why me?” I could feel my heart beating out its own canonical hours, but I was not so far from my days as an infant oblate that I could not at the same time keep one ear tuned for footsteps in the hall.

  “You, Martin,” he said, “because you listen to my stories and follow my every move with the eyes of a hound to his master or a squire his knight.”

  I looked down at the stone floor unable to protest, for he was right. It was just that I had not known he had noticed my faithfulness.

  “Will you do something for me if I ask it?”

  “Even if it were to go against God and his saints,” I whispered. “Even then.”

  “Even if it were to go against Abbot Giraldus and his rule?”

  “Especially then,” I said under my breath, but he heard.

  Then he told me what had brought him specifically to Glastonbury, the secret which he had shared with the abbot and Fathers Paul and Joseph, the reason he waited for word from Rome that never came.

  “There was a bard, a Welshman, with a voice like a demented dove, who sang of this abbey and its graves. But there are many abbeys and many acres of stones throughout this land. I have seen them all. Or so I thought. But in his rhymes—and in his cups—he spoke of Glastonbury’s two pyramids with the grave between. His song had a ring of Merlin’s truth in it, which that mage had spoke long before the end of our tale: ‘a little green, a private peace, between the standing stones.’”

  I must have shaken my head, for he began to recite a poem with the easy familiarity of the mout
h which sometimes remembers what the mind has forgot.

  A time will come when what is three makes one:

  A little green, a private peace, between the standing stones.

  A gift of gold shall betray the place at a touch.

  Absolution rests upon its mortal couch.

  He spoke with absolute conviction, but the whole spell made less sense to me than the part. I did not answer him.

  He sighed. “You do not understand. The grave between those stone pyramids is the one I seek. I am sure of it now. But your abbot is adamant. I cannot have permission to unearth the tomb without a nod from Rome. Yet I must open it, Martin, I must. She is buried within and I must throw myself at her dear dead feet and be absolved.” He had me by the shoulders.

  “Pyramids?” I was not puzzled by his passion or by his utter conviction that he had to untomb his queen. But as far as I knew there were no pyramids in the abbey’s yard.

  “There are two tapered plinths,” Brother Denneys said. “With carvings on them. A whole roster of saints.” He shook my shoulders as if to make me understand.

  Then I knew what he meant. Or at least I knew the plinths to which he referred. They looked little like pyramids. They were large standing tablets on which the names of the abbots of the past and other godly men of this place ran down the side like rainfall. It took a great imagining—or a greater need—to read a pair of pyramids there. And something more. I had to name it.

  “There is no grave there, Brother Denneys. Just a sward, green in the spring and summer, no greener place in all the boneyard. We picnic there once a year to remember God’s gifts.”

  “That is what I hoped. That is how Merlin spoke the spell. A little green. A private peace. My lady’s place would be that green.”

  “But there is nothing there!” On this one point I would be adamant.

  “You do not know that, my son. And my hopes are greater than your knowledge.” There was a strange cast to his eyes that I could just see, for a sliver of moonlight was lighting my cell. “Will you go with me when the moon is full, just two days hence? I cannot dig it alone. Someone must needs stand guardian.”