"Huard," Prosper said, "do you have any advice to give me concerning my lessons with Orel?"
The priest lowered his cup. He said, "I remember clearly the speech you once gave to all of us priest-pupils in my time. It was when we were discussing the law on marriage. You said that even a man entering into purified love with his wife must never forget the God. If he did, his lovemaking would become demonic."
Prosper said slowly, "I have a faint memory of that lecture, but I'm not sure how it's applicable here."
"You went on to say that it was even more important for those of us whose work required us to care for a number of people – priests and chieftains and commanders – never to become too absorbed in one person, for dire consequences could result."
"Too much time?" Prosper frowned. "Huard, I only spend two hours of the day with Orel—"
"—and spend much of the remainder of the day preparing for his lessons or wandering over to this yard to watch him at his duties."
Prosper found that he was having to turn aside a prickly desire to become angry. "Huard, you've taught catechism classes; you know how much work it takes to prepare for them. As for unfortunate consequences—"
"'Dire' is the word you used when you taught me. You cited the example of a priest who, spending all of his time taking the confessions of one woman under his care, found himself unable to resist the demon of impure love when it came in temptation. You said that such a man had to be burned. . . . You are shaking your head."
"Not at your advice," Prosper said quickly. "I am simply saddened that other priests have been burdened with temptations that I have been spared. In all my years as priest, I've never been troubled by lustful desires. I suppose I owe that fact to the good fortune of having taken my vows of service to the God at an early age, before desires normally arise. Still," he added thoughtfully, "I see what you are saying: you are concerned that I am spending time with Orel as a way to become intimate with his mother. Huard, I assure you, I've had no contact with either of Orel's parents since the teaching began. Indeed, I have been feeling guilt over that fact. I really ought to have visited them before now, to let them know how their son is progressing."
Huard sighed. He still had not looked Prosper's way. "Prosper, I truly do not know which demon will decide to take advantage of your new duties to attack you in a way that you do not expect. I do remember, though, that you once told me that the surest way to know of a change in a person's spiritual condition is to note any changes in his regular routine."
"Yes?" said Prosper and waited, but the priest did not speak further. After a moment, Prosper realized that, under the God's Law, Huard was not permitted to speak further.
Hearing the first faint fanfare of fear, Prosper put his mind to the task of discerning what warning Huard was giving him. It did not take him long. "I have broken my discipline of silence," he said slowly. "Huard, I am sorry. There were times when, as a priest, I cut back on my worship discipline in order to devote more time to my lessons with my priest-pupils. I should have realized that it would be dangerous to my spirit if I did so during my year of exile. The truth is, though," he added, his mouth taking on a rueful smile, "that it is easier to listen to someone who speaks to you."
Huard did not smile in return. "Do not forget that the God is speaking to you continuously, Prosper, even during your exile; you have simply closed yourself to his voice. You will be able to hear him if you listen carefully."
"Our fellow living spirits are voices for the God as well," Prosper reminded him.
"Certainly, and I have been pleased by how far your discipline has carried you in enabling you to listen carefully to Orel's needs. Do not forget the God's needs, though. Remember the husband and his demonic lovemaking."
Prosper shook his head. "I understand now what you're telling me, Huard. I should never have allowed my discipline of reaching out to Orel in his need to interfere with my worship discipline. I will return to my discipline of silence immediately. As for the time I spend with Orel—"
He stopped abruptly; out of the corner of his eye, he had seen a flash of light, accompanied by a cry. He turned in time to see the sword that Orel's father had been wielding spin to the ground, blown aside by Orel's successful completion of the maneuver that his father had just taught him. For a moment, father and son alike looked stunned. Then Orel gave a whoop of delight and dropped his sword, rushing into his father's awaiting arms.
Huard's voice said, "I am going now to Iolo's hut. He wounded his arm while hunting yesterday. Will you come with me and help me apply the healing herbs?"
"Yes, certainly," said Prosper. He was smiling, watching the boy joyfully embrace his father, and he was thinking that this would mean he must change his lesson plans again. When discipline was rewarded by the acquisition of new skills, that was the right time in which to undertake harder disciplines which might daunt the pupil if introduced at times of discouragement. Tonight, he thought, he would set Orel to the difficult task of beginning to learn the ancient pronunciation, a task that had caused more than one of Prosper's pupils to beg to be released from his training as a priest. Somehow, Prosper doubted that Orel would seek to be released from his temporal lessons. Prosper's smile deepened.
He did not hear the priest leave. Nor did he see Huard's frown.
CHAPTER FOUR
"Again," said Prosper.
He and Orel were seated in the corner of Huard's inner chamber, settled upon seat cushions with the scroll unrolled on a low table before them. It was a position that Prosper would once have thought far too indulgent for proper discipline in scribe-training, but with his newly heightened awareness of what his pupil needed, he had realized that the boy associated seat-cushions with the years he had spent sitting on the ground, watching his father demonstrate proper battle maneuvers. Thus Orel was far more alert while sitting upon cushions than he was when seated at the table.
"I don't understand why it matters whether I pronounce it correctly," complained the boy. "Nobody speaks the ancient tongue any more."
"It matters because, if you are to do a task, you should do it as well as you can, rather than willfully adopt errors. At sword-play, would you teach yourself to disarm an opponent, but neglect to teach yourself to kill him, just because killing him was more difficult?"
"But I can't say it!"
"You can. Try again."
Orel leaned forward over the scroll, his hair touching the soft fuzz beginning to appear on his cheek, which was otherwise as smooth as a maiden's. He bit his lip, which was the color of winter berries, and then said aloud, "'The ancient lands were destroyed by the demons, but the Mercy above all mercies will assist us to destroy our demons before they destroy us. In order to receive the God's assistance, we must kiet our minds—"
"No. Try again."
Orel sighed and leaned back against the wall, his shoulder brushing against his tutor's shoulder. "Sir, it's so late – I'm already missing the evening meal, and Father will wonder why I'm late tonight. He may come looking for me."
"Let him come. I will tell him that he had best give up training you in swordplay, because you do not have the strength to hold a sword when you are weary."
Orel groaned and leaned forward again. "'In order to receive the God's assistance, you must kiet—"
"No. You are not listening. 'Quiet,' not kiet."
"I'm trying!" The boy's voice was strained. "I hear what you say, and I try to say it, but my mouth won't speak the word properly."
"That is because you are trying to speak the word through your own effort. Listen to the meaning of the passage, not just the letters. 'You must quiet your mind and receive the God's training in silence.' Quiet your mind; do not attempt to think about what you are doing. Simply listen to the word I say, and repeat it. Quiet."
"Kiet."
"Quiet."
"Kiet."
"Listen. Quiet."
"K-kwiet."
"Very close. Now try it in the sentence. Do not think; merely st
ill your mind. 'To receive the God's assistance—'"
"'You must kiet your—' Oh, Prosper, I can't do it."
"Very well." Prosper's voice turned cold. "If you cannot do it, then there is no need for me to train you further. We have reached your limits. Leave now."
Orel had been sagging back against the wall, his eyes closed. Now he jerked upright and stared at Prosper with wide eyes. "You can't send me away," he whispered. "I'm making such progress. You said so yourself."
"You are not here to learn a language; you are here to learn discipline. If you have no discipline – if you are unwilling to strain beyond the limits you believe that you have, are unwilling to hold that sword for a minute longer than your body bids you to hold it – then you are of no use on the field of battle against demons. What sort of soldier, when battle-weary and torn with wounds, drops his sword and tells the comrades he was defending, 'I'm too tired. I've missed my supper. I can't do this, so I must leave you to die'?"
The boy's face was white. In the silence that followed, Prosper entered into his own silence, listening, as Huard had trained him to do, for the warning he would receive that he was being too harsh on the boy.
The warning came. Proper slid his arm over the boy's shoulders and said gently, "You are a very fine pupil indeed – I would not press you so hard if I did not believe that you are able to go beyond the limits that most boys would have reached by this time. There is a reason that I am pressing you now, when you are so tired. You must trust me in this matter."
Some of the color returned to Orel's face, and Prosper had a moment to reflect that Huard, quite unintentionally, had given training to his exiled guest which was enabling Prosper to be a better teacher than he had been for many years. Then the boy closed his eyes, let out his breath slowly, and said, with a voice clear and bright, like that of a sword moving in a beautiful arc, "'The ancient lands were destroyed by the demons, but the Mercy above all mercies will assist us to destroy our demons before they destroy us. In order to receive the God's assistance, we must quiet our minds—' Prosper, I did it!" His face alight, Orel flung his arms around his teacher.
Prosper smiled as he enfolded the boy's warm body into his embrace. "It happens that way sometimes, when the body and mind are weary. We have no strength then for any thoughts or fears, and so the God is able to enter into us at such moments and take us beyond what we can normally achieve."
"And that's why you wanted me to stay late. I'm sorry; I should have trusted you." The boy pulled back just enough to lean his head against Prosper's shoulder. Prosper kept his arm around the boy as he smiled in the dim light of the autumn evening. He had often thought that men not trained as priests, who received their chief pleasures from the body, must feel this way when they lay in love with their wives: the exultation at the end of an act of love, driving out all thoughts except for that of the beloved. Or so Prosper had been told by men who spoke to him in confession, seeking reassurance that it was normal at such times to lose thought even of the God. For truly, Prosper thought, training a pupil is an act of love, and as much a service to the God as a married man's act of purified love with his wife.
Bad training, on the other hand – he followed further this path of thought – was like impure lusts, when a man slept with a woman without seeking to purify his act through a priest's blessing. Selfish training, where the teacher cared more for his own self-importance than for the progress of the pupil, was far worse: it was like twisted lust, a terrible parody of purified love. Such twistedness in teaching, Prosper was coming to recognize, had begun to destroy even that which was at the center of his vocation as a priest: his ability to train priest-pupils. It would have destroyed his abilities as a teacher in the end if he had not been fortunate enough to be placed under the curse.
Smiling at this paradoxical thought, Prosper said, "You have done very well indeed during the past three months. It is time that your father saw how you have progressed. I'll go home with you tonight, both to apologize for your lateness and also to show your father—"
"No!"
The boy's cry was so deep that Prosper felt the reverberation of it through Orel's body, which was pressed against his. Prosper tried to turn his head to look at Orel's face, but the boy had his face pressed against Prosper's shoulder.
Orel said, "No, you shouldn't bother him; he's very busy at the moment. I think it would be best to wait until you've finished training me. That way he can see the complete results—"
"Orel," Prosper said, and at that single word, the boy fell silent. Faintly through the window where dusk was drawing its shade upon the world came the sound of feasting, but Prosper scarcely noticed it. His mind was on the boy snuggled against him.
He said slowly, "You came to me the evening that you were to ask your father's permission to train with me. You told me that evening that you could train with me. But you did not tell me: Did your father grant you permission to do this?"
Orel was silent a moment. Prosper could feel the warmth of his breath making its way through Prosper's shirt. Then the boy burst out, "He wouldn't understand! If I'd told him, he would never have let me come, and he'd have been watching me to ensure I didn't come near you. It didn't do any harm to tell him Huard was giving me extra catechism lessons—"
"Orel." Prosper's voice was hard this time. There was an aching arising in him that he could not fully understand, but he dared not give thought to it – his thoughts must be on the boy at this moment. "You are speaking as a child. Where is the discipline that you have received in these lessons? Remain silent a moment, then reply to me as you would if explaining why you had not completed a lesson I had given you."
The pause lasted a long while. When he finally spoke again, the boy did so in a low voice. "Sir, I apologize. It was wrong of me to lie to my father, and it was wrong of me to have let you think that my father had given me permission for training. I not only endangered my own spirit through such an act; I also brought danger upon you and Huard, for my father might have thought that both of you had conspired to help me in this deception."
"Good. That is well spoken." Prosper was having a difficult time keeping his voice level, and he was beginning to think that it might be important to understand why. If only he were granted a moment for silence . . . "You know what you must do now?"
"I must tell my father and ask his pardon. I must follow his command, whatever it may be. Oh, but Prosper, I can't! He'll tell me that I must never see you again!"
Orel's face, as he raised it from Prosper's shoulder, was as white as a demon's. He was biting his berry-red lip in an attempt to keep his chin from trembling. Prosper felt the words the boy had spoken resound through his own body as though he himself had spoken them. It was becoming more urgent to understand why the boy's anguish was communicating itself so deeply to him, the teacher.
He knew, of course, what he was witnessing. No teacher of five years, much less thirty-five years, could have missed the signs. It happened sometimes with the more sensitive pupils: an early awakening of love, too early to take the form of desire, whether pure or impure. It was simply the knowledge that another person in the world was of such high importance that the person deserved to receive the sort of worship that would normally be offered up only to the God.
The priests were divided on how such childish loving should be regarded. Some priests, such as Martin, saw it as a godly sign that the boy was developing impulses toward love that would, in the normal course of time, eventually develop into the love a young man holds for the woman he is to marry. During his years of priesthood, Prosper had always taken the opposing view: he believed that children's love could easily lead to impure love, or even – since it was often directed by a boy toward his male teacher – to the horrors of twisted lust. Thus Prosper had always taken pains, whenever he noticed such love developing in a pupil toward him, to discourage it with severity.
And yet he felt no such impulse now – indeed, he felt quite the opposite desire. Was this a godly sign
, or was some demon working within him that he had not yet known? Bewildered, Prosper tried to pull himself back from Orel as he said, "Your coming-of-age rite is in the spring; you would have had to have ended your lessons with me then in any case. Perhaps your father will allow you to study the ancient tongue under Huard until that time—"
"But I want you!" Orel flung his arms around Prosper, almost strangling him in his embrace. Muffled by Prosper's shirt, he said, "I love you. I love you."
Orel's head was brushing against Prosper's face. He thought to himself that he should at least give the boy a light kiss on the head to indicate that affection between a teacher and his pupil was a natural and indeed a godly thing. And if the boy lifted his face then, perhaps it would do no ill to kiss him on the forehead as well, for surely the boy seemed to require such comfort, trembling as he now was in Prosper's arms. And if kissed on the forehead, the boy would come to no harm if he were kissed on the lips—
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