by Jack Whyte
I had grown up accustomed to living in strong stone buildings, but now I found myself living in strong, beautiful, and graceful buildings, with multicolored walls of fine marble, polished to the luster of expensive glass. For days after my arrival, I walked in awe of the beauty of my new surroundings, but then, being ten, I grew used to them and forgot that they were any different from other houses anywhere, and I lost myself completely in the strange world of living in a school among other students.
Father Germanus had promised me that I would have fine teachers at his school, and I did. Some of them I loved, some I admired, several I endured, and a few I tolerated. I only really disliked one out of all of them, however, and the antipathy I felt for him was reciprocated in full measure. His name was Anthony—he insisted that we call him Brother Anthony—and he and I detested each other from our first encounter. He took exception to something in my face or my deportment the first time I went into his classroom and he went out of his way thereafter to make his dislike of me plain to me and to everyone else, and so in response I found it remarkably easy to find a host of elements to dislike and disparage in him. Since he was the teacher and I the newest, most insignificant student in the school, however, he had, and continued to have, the best of our encounters for a long, long time. Even today, looking back across the chasm of years, I find myself hard put to define what it was about that man that offended me, but I have absolutely no doubt that were he and I to meet again today, never having laid eyes upon each other before, we would react to each other exactly as we did then. Some people simply affect one another that way.
Brother Anthony was a tonsured monk, his head shaved bald to show that he was a slave of God, bound to the Church by vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. Such total commitment was a new custom and indicated an entirely new depth of devotion and dedication, Bishop Germanus himself informed me, but one that was gaining great numbers of adherents throughout the eastern portion of the remaining Empire. The people who took such stringent vows, Germanus said, referred to themselves as monastics, and they sought perfection here on Earth by shunning the earthly vices of avarice, pride, and lechery and shutting themselves away from the world and its temptations, living in communes known as monasteries. Germanus himself had taken identical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but he was at pains to point out that his reasons for so doing were purely personal and pragmatic, to enable him to concentrate solely upon his episcopal responsibilities. He had no interest in monasticism, he maintained; his ordained place of work was squarely in the world of ordinary men, with all its temptations. He was a bishop, with a flock of faithful dependents relying upon him for guidance and example.
Brother Anthony was a monastic and had sworn his vows as such, fully intending to immure himself somewhere far from the world and its temptations, where he could concentrate on keeping his sacred commitments, but he was also a brilliant administrator, trained originally as an imperial legionary quartermaster, and so Bishop Germanus himself had prevailed upon Anthony to postpone his departure and remain for a time in Auxerre, tending to Germanus’s episcopal accounts and supervising inventories of everything required to keep the bishop’s domestic affairs functioning. Anthony had agreed, and in the brief periods of time left to him between his work and his prayers, he also taught divinity and theology to the students of the episcopal school. He was an able and gifted servant, very pious and devout, the bishop said on many occasions, and whenever I heard him say it, I nodded. Deep within myself, however, I knew that Brother Anthony had somehow managed to deceive Father Germanus and his staff and to keep his true malevolent nature concealed from everyone but me.
There was one unspoken and unwritten law among the fifty-odd students at the Bishop’s School: you never complained and you never, ever carried tales. It was a matter of honor among the boys, but as such traditions always do, it carried within it a great potential for abuse. Discipline in the school was harsh, and the rules by which we boys lived were many, strict, and inviolable; you broke them at your peril, and when you were caught, as you were more often than not, you took your punishment—always corporal punishment—in silence. You could weep, and depending on the severity of the beating you had undergone people might or might not make allowances for that, but you could not, ever, whine or complain. That was one of the first learned facts of life in the Bishop’s School.
Brother Anthony enjoyed beating the younger boys and was despised for it by the entire student body, but he particularly enjoyed beating me, and I have many memories of being unable to walk without limping after one of his “punishments.” Of course I, being as stubborn as he was vicious, would never give him the satisfaction of seeing me wince, let alone cry, and so the beatings he delivered grew more savage as time went by and as I grew larger and more able to absorb them. I would often dream of the day when I would be big enough to face him and disarm him and I drew great pleasure from the images I dreamed up of what I would do to him on that occasion.
That day never arrived, however, because long before I grew big enough to challenge my tormentor, I was summoned to an unscheduled meeting with Father Germanus shortly after one of Anthony’s “punishments.” To this day I have no knowledge of who had reported what was going on, but from that moment my troubles with Brother Anthony were over. Germanus stopped me with an upraised hand as I entered his cubiculum—the spacious room from which he conducted all the affairs of his bishopric—and then stalked toward me, an unreadable expression on his face as he raked me from head to foot with his eyes. He took hold of my chin, then tilted my head sideways, right then left, examining my face closely. That done, he reached down quickly and grasped my belt buckle, tugging on it sharply.
“Off,” he said. “Undo it and take off your tunic.”
Not knowing what he was about, and never suspecting that someone else might have interceded. to save me from Anthony, I did as Father Germanus demanded. I loosened my belt and pulled my tunic up and over my shoulders, baring my torso. He frowned, his eyes moving across the bruises on my ribs, and then he grasped me by the upper arm, not ungently, and turned me around. I heard the hiss of his indrawn breath as his gaze encountered the fresh welts on my back, and his fingers tightened on my arm before he turned me back to face him. His face had paled but he said nothing to me. Instead he called to his clerical assistant, Potius, who came in quickly from his station outside the doors of the cubiculum. I was shrugging back into my tunic by then, but the bishop stopped me and waved to Potius to approach and see what had been done to me. Again, a shocked hiss, quickly stifled.
“Take him to the infirmary,” Germanus said, and I had never heard such iron control in his voice. “Brother Martin to look after him in person. Tell Martin to do what must be done and then come here to me. Quickly now.” He looked back to me, his face impassive. “Go with Potius. We will speak again later.”
I spent four days in the infirmary, lying on my side or on my stomach, anchored in such a way that I was completely unable to turn onto my back, and on two of those days Germanus himself came to visit me. He said nothing the first time, merely nodding to me and standing in my doorway for a while, contemplating me as I lay immobile, but when he returned the second time he did speak, if only briefly. “Recover quickly,” he said from the doorway. “Your time remaining here is none too long and you should enjoy it to the full. Brother Anthony has left us.”
Brother Anthony had, indeed. As soon as I was released from my confinement, my friends came rushing to tell me that Brother Anthony had been escorted to his monastic life by Bishop Germanus in person, and would spend the remainder of his life in pious servitude within a monastery selected by the bishop and noted for the severity of its commitment to penance. Therein, Brother Anthony would be cut off forever from the company of boys.
We spent our lives training and studying, and only occasionally praying, and none of us would have had it any other way. That is why our time there in the Bishop’s School—for my experience was shared
by all my friends—passed by so quickly. We were boys, engrossed in doing what boys do, thoroughly captivated by our studies, both military and academic. A stringently observed aphorism at the school was mens sana in corpore sano: a healthy mind exists in a healthy body. The importance of that belief was reflected in the discipline of personal hygiene, both mental and physical, that permeated the lives of the students, driving them remorselessly from cold baths and shivering prayers in the darkness of the predawn, prebreakfast hours, through days crammed with varying activities, both scholastic and military, until the curfew hour, when we would fall into bed after the communal evening prayers known as vespers, too exhausted even to talk to each other and acutely aware that almost before we had time to close our eyes to sleep, we would be rousted out again for matins, the morning prayers that the entire community shared in the darkest hours before dawn. And yet, for all the hardships and strictures of our life as students there, few of us would ever be as happy in our adult lives as we were then in our innocence.
And yet great things were occurring in the world around us, events that ought to have claimed all our attention and surely would have, had we known they were happening. Entire races of people were on the move at that time, sweeping in mass migrations through vast territories that had once been owned by the Empire and policed by its ubiquitous armies but were now, for the most part, abandoned and unsupervised. And as each race of land-hungry people swept forward—Visigoths and Goths, Vandals and Huns, and a hundred other nameless hordes—wheeling from northeast to westward for the most part, they dispossessed other, former occupants, who moved on in their turn and increased the havoc and chaos.
Everything—every stretch of land that had been part of the Empire in the West for a thousand and more years—was in a condition of flux and turmoil in those turbulent days after the fall of Rome, when Alaric and his Visigoths first captured the Eternal City. The Empire, which everyone had thought to be eternal, had collapsed within the space of a few years, and no one, anywhere, was equipped or prepared to deal with the catastrophe. And yet, when the tally was complete and all the initial chaos began to subside, order, or a degree of order greater than anyone could have anticipated, reasserted itself at an astonishing rate.
The reasons for that were not hard to find, for anyone who cared to look for them, for in the decades and even centuries that the old Empire had been tottering, a victim of its own corruption, people had learned to subsist on their own terms, to be more self-sufficient and independent of imperial dictates. And so the crash of collapse, when it came, proved to be less surprising, less demoralizing than it might have been, and even the majority of the peoples who were on the move had benefited from the civilizing influence of Rome for a millennium.
Not surprisingly, since Auxerre was firmly in the center of Gaul, we experienced very little of the upheavals that were happening elsewhere. The Frankish presence in the north and west continued to increase, but that meant nothing to us, since we ourselves were Franks and our migration had been ongoing for more than a hundred years. It was similar with the Burgundians, whose settled borders almost abutted ours in the south. They had practically overrun the entire southwest of Gaul. But although neither of us was amicably disposed toward the other and there were sometimes clashes between our people and theirs, the situation between us never degenerated into outright war. Each of us knew the other and had his measure, and we both knew it was more important to guard ourselves against outside aggression than to fret over what our neighbors might be planning.
Bishop Germanus, of course, was aware of all of this, but he made it his business to ensure that none of us were bothered by such things. We had an education to absorb, he believed, and the form in which we absorbed it would dictate, to a very great extent, the fashion in which we later reacted to such external priorities and distractions. If our grounding in the classical elements of education was sufficiently substantial, he argued, then we would be perfectly well equipped to deal with whatever the world might throw at us, and so we studied logic and philosophy, geometry and polemics and geography—this while the world was changing daily—and we conversed in Greek and Latin and were conversant with the written works of the great Masters: the Greeks Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, Aeschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, and Homer, and the Roman works of Caesar, Cicero, Pliny, Ovid, and many others. And over and above all of these, we studied the Christ and his teachings.
When I consider that we studied all of these things between predawn morning prayers and noon, and that the second half of each day was given over completely to our military training and discipline, then add the additional consideration that we somehow had to accommodate all of our daily chores and duties within the fabric of those activities, finding and making time between classes to tend to our community responsibilities, I am never surprised that we had no time for talk, or even thoughts, of girls or women.
And then, of course, there was the fighting: the training … the horses. I have to admit that that aspect of our education, the physical, militaristic part, was supposed to be a relatively minor element of our growth, recognized and provided for but of significantly less importance than our scholastic and clerical training. That was never the case with me, however, despite the concerted efforts of my other tutors, and to his credit Father Germanus never sought to influence me to conform to their wishes. He had promised Ban and the Lady Vivienne that my training in the military skills would continue and he never deviated from his word.
I had been born and bred among King Ban’s horse soldiers and had learned to ride as soon as my legs could spread widely enough to span a pony’s back, so I had no inhibitions about thrusting myself, the morning after my arrival in Auxerre, into the world of the school’s stables and its small but carefully selected and extremely valuable collection of horses. I walked in through the gates with all the arrogance and innocence of trusting youth only to be stopped short with a barked command before I was three paces over the threshold. I froze, taken aback by the ferocity of the shout and the wild appearance of the man who had uttered it, and my challenger bade me stand right where I was, the tone of his voice defying me to move another step at. my peril. He strode toward where I stood gaping at him, glowering at me from beneath bushy white eyebrows that formed a solid bar across his forehead.
He was a small man, tiny perhaps being an even more accurate word, because he was not much taller than me and I was only ten. He was carrying a smallish coil of limber, well-used rope—seven, perhaps eight loops in all. I remember that clearly, because when he reached me he slipped his arm through the loops and shrugged the coil upward to hang from his shoulder. Seeing him glare at me, I tried to smile back, but I was intimidated, and my face would not relax, so I simply stared back at him, wide-eyed. Finally he hawked loudly and spat off to one side.
“Benwick, right?” His voice was loud and harsh, rough edged as though seldom used. “You’re the brat came back with the Gen’ral?”
The General. I realized he was talking about Father Germanus and remembered Germanus saying that a man called Tiberias Cato would be my teacher and that he had served in the army with him. This must evidently be Cato. I nodded, and looked at him more closely.
Although he was small in stature, I saw now that he was built perfectly in proportion and his limbs were clean lined and clearly defined, dense with corded muscle. He was hairy, too, his entire body—or all that I could see of it—apart from his clean-shaven face, coated with a thick pelt of soft blond hair, its color ranging from faded yellow in places to grayish white in others, with one swirling whorl of a cowlick thatch at his crown that showed signs of once having been a bright yellowy gold. His forearms and the legs below his knee-length tunic were deeply sun-bronzed, and the hair that coated them was bleached almost white. I was fascinated to see that the hair on the back of his hands grew right down to his knuckles and that the phalanges of his fingers had coarse black hair growing on them, utterly unlike the hair on the rest of his body.
/> It may have been the thickness and profusion of his body hair that made the bareness of his face so obvious, but irrespective of what caused it to seem so, the man’s face, smooth cheeked and deeply tanned and dominated by brilliant, flower blue eyes, glowed with health and a special kind of self-sufficient beauty. His eyebrows, the first thing I had noticed about him, were a thick, unbroken bar of white, and the tangle of hair surmounting his forehead was unkempt and long untrimmed.
“Hmm,” he grunted, oblivious to or uncaring of my scrutiny. He lowered his shoulder and allowed the coil of rope to slide off and drop into his waiting hand, and then he threw the coil to me. I caught it with both hands. It was a running noose of the exact kind used by Ban’s stablemen.
“You know how to use that?”
“Yes,” I managed to say.
“Hmm. We’ll see. Come.”
He led me to a wide, barred wooden gate at the far end of the stable yard and held it open as I went through, after which he closed it carefully behind us and secured it in place with a loop of rope. We were in a long passageway now, with two paddocks on each side, each of them measuring approximately fifty paces in length by the same in width. The first enclosure on my right held eight mares, all of them in foal, and in the one beyond that, I could see others, these accompanied by newborn colts. The paddock on my immediate left held five healthy young geldings, and the fourth space lay empty. I followed the stable master as he led me the length of the passageway to the gate at the far end and beyond that into a wide, fenced pasture with clumps of trees scattered here and there and a lazy brook meandering among them. I had no idea how big the pasture was, because the trees obscured the boundary fences, but I knew it was enormous and I guessed from the position of the sun that we had to be close to the northern outskirts of the town. There were horses everywhere, and I immediately began to count them, but I lost track as I passed thirty and realized that just enough of them were moving to make my task impossible. The wiry little man looked around him and then glanced at me.