He taunted me with his tales of Alienora and how he intended to take her for himself now that my flesh had damaged her. He tormented me with stories of our mother’s wantonness, and then struck me several times as I crouched there, unable to fight back. He lay on the dirt before me, and wore a grin of idle wickedness as he said, “Your life is truly in my hands, little brother. I knew of our relation when you came here, and I could not stand to see our mother in your face. I still cannot stand her, though she is nothing but ashes in a field. But I see her in your face, and I see your father, as well.”
At this, I started, and tried to spit out the gag in my mouth. He saw this action and reached over, pushing the cold palm of his hand against my lips to keep them closed. “Your father was an infidel who had gained favor with the duke many years ago. He had his own kind of witchcraft. Few knew him, but all took pity on our mother, for he had raped her, and you were born from that heinous act.” He smiled, nearly pleasantly. “Didn’t you want to know? Your father was a monster. He abandoned your mother as soon as he had his way, and I’ve been told that it was then that she lost her mind with grief. Then that she began to spread her legs for food. She was not like that before. He changed her, and disappeared before you were born. Everyone knows, but few would tell you of him. My father tried to kill him, but could not. My father led a party to hunt him down, but he used his sorcery to elude them. All took pity on our mother, until her own witchcraft came out.”
I glared at him, wanting to shout that he was a monster, for she was his mother, as well.
As if reading my thoughts, he said, “I did not care for her. She was a bitch, giving birth to litters of children. I was merely in one of those litters.”
He spat more poison at me, speaking of the tragedies I had heaped upon him, upon the baron, and upon Alienora. “If you are found here in the morning, you will be arrested on charges of theft and of sorcery. I requested this night with you so that I could tell you how, after you’re gone—gone from this country—I will know carnal pleasures with Alienora. I will think of you as I enter her. I will imagine how your lips took each nipple, and I will bite them as I do so. I will force myself upon her, and she will acquiesce, because I will tell her that your life hangs in the balance, and should she not pleasure me in every way I can devise, then I shall see to it that you are murdered instantly. And she will not even know that I don’t have that power, nor would I ever hurt you, little brother. I will let others butcher or enslave you. I imagine you in some prison in Byzantium, living on rats, raped nightly by a filthy Turk. Or deep in the land of the Rus, a savage winter taking you in its frozen embrace. And all the while, think of the roaring fire in the hearth, and how I shall bend Alienora to my will because of the purity of her love for you. How I will enter her, thinking of your suffering.”
I wanted to pull free from my shackles and cut his throat as he lay there before me, spinning out his hellish heart.
“You and I are children of the same womb,” he said. “You see me as everything you are not, but I see how alike we are. Do you cringe at my ambition here, in the castle? It is the same as yours. Do you fear how I will take your beloved and make her suffer? It is the same suffering that you brought her. You are not as good as you believe. And I am no worse than you, my brother. We share the same sin.”
When he was done with his poisonous words, he called the guard back and a cloth sack was placed over my head.
I felt blows to my back and arms as men with cudgels pounded at me. Then a blow to my head, and another.
I was thrown into darkness in my mind and thought as I went that I must be dying.
PART 2: THE WORLD OF MEN
Chapter 7
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ABDUCTED
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Fate had not yet taken my life, though even I assumed she would at any moment. How little I understood of life and death in that mortal realm, for I wept in darkness for my mother. I prayed to see her face again. To see my sisters and brothers, and to feel the arms of my grandfather about me, with the wings of doves fluttering like those of angels. I wept at my memory of Alienora, and the fate I had brought upon her. I began to understand how I had brought about the destruction of others around me, how Corentin’s words had at least half of the truth to them. How, just by not having a care for my mother, I had allowed her death. And Alienora—if I had truly loved her, would I have so let my animal urges run free in the chapel of Our Lady? Would I risk her reputation? If I had truly loved her, not just wanted the baron’s daughter, but genuinely loved her soul, could I not have held back from the temptation to have her? All my pain had come, I felt then, from my not knowing my place in life. I had believed, as my grandfather had taught me, that I was meant for greater things than the mud. I believed that I was as worthy of the baron’s daughter as a prince might be. I believed that my mother was lower than a dog at times. I had been blind to her goodness until it was too late. I had only seen what was bad in her, and I felt the burden of loss and of my own vanity. Was there nothing of Heaven within me?
I would die like a dog as I had lived. I would suffer for these many sins, for the foolishness of my childhood dreams, for the way I had not cared enough for my family, not honored my mother in any way until it was far too late to matter. I remembered my grandfather’s kindness, then how I had stolen the small stone from the oak tree, thinking that it would somehow bring me fortune, when it was meant to remain within the tree, a memory of past generations of our bloodline. I could not blame everything of my life upon Corentin, who had begun to seem like a foul shadow of my own being. He was more than half-brother; he was half-soul in some unspeakable way. I loathed him the way I loathed part of myself, and wished I could take a dagger and slice myself away from this shadow.
I lay in a smelly, dark, small prison and remained battered and barely conscious, wishing for death, wishing for vengeance, wishing to be clean of the sins of my past. Although I was later told that I regained consciousness soon enough, my memories of that time blur. I remember being in a small, dark, enclosed space, still shackled, dryness about my lips. I remember light, but briefly, and water. I remember that my bodily functions proceeded, whether or not I could stand and find a place to relieve myself of them.
I did not wonder if this were Heaven or Hell, but knew that it was the beginning of my voyage from home, away from that terrible hearth near where I slept, away from my beloved. I felt as if I had been packed in ice, not merely from the dank atmosphere in which I found myself, but also from the winter in my heart. Mere Morwenna had told me as a boy that the only hell that existed was separation from the one most loved, and she had been proved right by me: I thought of nothing but Alienora, the Lady de Whithors, the maiden who might at that moment be suffering for the sin I had thrust upon her in my lust for her body.
I tried to conjure her face, thinking of that sacred water we shared on our last night before the sorrow of parting forever, hoping to see her in my mind’s eye, but instead, I conjured darkness. Another face came to me: my mother in her last moments. My sweet mother, who had been trampled by the world, and had to suffer the fate of the ignoble and the damned before the entire community that I had once thought of as home and hearth.
The memory of my mother’s burning body at the stake still left its yellow-and-red echoes within my soul, and I doubt I could ever wash that in the river of forgetfulness. Her eyes, so full of Our Lady’s own grief as we kissed briefly, before I was torn from her. Before the executioner’s torch came to the brambles around her feet. There was no justice in the world. There was no honor. Perhaps for the baron and his family, perhaps even for treacherous snakes like Corentin Falmouth there might be victory and conquest; but justice was something sold to the poor, which, like the mud and thatch of a roof, had no value and might melt during even a mild storm. These images and thoughts plagued me from my cramped barrel, and I wondered at what cruel fate awaited me once I was set free from it, or if I would lie there until dead.
I arose from a deep but troubled sleep to see what at first I thought was torchlight but soon discovered was the light of a fresh, fair morning.
The lid of my prison removed, someone yanked me into a fresh sea air. The thick arms of a man of swarthy complexion, and long, ragged beard. His dark beard was braided as the looters from the north often did, and he had a bushy brow and a scowl upon him that made me think of a badger. Let me now think of him as the Emperor, for that is the nearest I could come to pronouncing his name, a foreign one. He unlocked my shackles and threw me into an ice-cold sea at the edge of the land.
What land was this? It must surely be my country, only the water was clearer than the Atlantic, and the rocks along the shore towered above me. My arms had been set too long in my dark prison, such that I could not swim, and felt myself drown. The Emperor splashed into the water after me, a burly bear of a man, dragging me to shore. I lay back and looked up at the sun. It seemed brighter than it should have been. The Emperor laughed at my pains, and spoke to me as if I understood him. Then he brought water and a bit of rabbit, which he roasted over a fire while I longed to grab it off the spit and gobble it down, my hunger being so intense.
I could not estimate the days I had been in my dark prison, but it seemed an eternity. I can also guess that I had been somewhat cared for, even in the barrel, for I no longer wore my breeches and tunic, but was dressed as if for a pauper’s grave in a cloth that barely covered my loins. Clothes were brought—these were not as fine as the ones I’d had, but once I washed up more, another servant threw a proper tunic and shoes to me.
The Emperor didn’t treat his servants badly, nor did he dress me as someone who would go to work for him. Instead, he pointed to a great ship in the harbor. I gathered from his motions and a word here or there that I would be taking a long voyage.
When I had regained some strength, he secured the shackles at my ankles; all the while I was too weak to struggle against this. I accepted my fate. I would never see Alienora again. I would never see the baron’s castle upon the hillside. Or the marshes that guarded my beloved Forest. Nor would I be able to help my younger brothers or sisters. All was lost.
My mother’s ashes floated above me as gray clouds moving eastward.
I looked to the ship, which was being loaded with cargo and on which I saw others like me, hapless youths being sent off to some unknown fate.
On shipboard, with the Emperor working beneath the commanding officer, I was soon in yet another darkness: the hold of the ship, crowded by more youths and men, many of whom spoke my language. I learned of tales of sorrows of the younger boys, sent or kidnapped, as was I, or enlisted if they sought fortune in the wide world. We were headed toward Byzantium, or the Holy Land, or faraway end-of-the-Earth countries with names that could not be uttered in our own languages. We would fight for the Pope and for the king and for the glory of Sir Ranulf, a rich knight who desired to fulfill a Crusade to stamp out a heresy in a southern city that was not yet occupied. We were not to be Crusaders, or gain wealth ourselves, although this was the mythology that many of my companions had on that long and arduous journey east. The Emperor had been, I learned, a pirate of sorts, but had discovered the Savior on an island in Greece and had determined to serve him in this way: by enslaving and kidnapping and bringing into the Lord’s Service those youths who would bring him the most coin.
2
While I had many adventures aboard that ship, and I saw a boy of fourteen cut the throat of a man of twenty, most of the journey was tedious and without horizon. We ate hard, salty bread, and drank what tasted like bilge water. I grew sick some days from the sea’s motion, as did many of my companions. One man threw himself from the ship, taking his shackled companion with him, willing to drown rather than continue the journey. But I remained hopeful—not of the foreign land upon which I would set foot, but that my love for Alienora, and her love for me, would sustain the both of us through any trial that we would encounter, separately or together.
When we finally came into port, and our shackles were taken off, I had already accepted this new fate and this new world. I had begun believing that I was a servant of the Holy Cross, and that I must gain my fortune, however meager, from this endless war with the East in order to prove myself worthy of one so far above me as Alienora. I was not to be a mercenary soldier of the lowest caste, but one of the infantry, which was called a Badge of Honor by those above us in rank who took treasure and honor at will; but to us, being the infantry meant we were the unpaid slaves of a Holy War.
We would have no weapons but those we took on the battlefield from the dead infidel, and we would only find food and water after the knights and soldiers had their fills. Men talked incessantly of remission of sins and of the death of honor as a pilgrim-warrior, and there were monks who were handsome and bright who told those of us—some as young as eleven or twelve, in truth—that we were doing this for the honor of Jerusalem, which was the center of all Christendom, which the heathens of Satan had defiled and blasphemed for too long.
There were so-called papers of transmission and manumission from the baron, as well as a passage of armor. That was not to say I would be well armed, but the papers would be sent on to the Knights Hospitaller, to whom my baron sent me. I would never hope to be part of that Holy Brotherhood of Knights, but no doubt I would be doing some fighting on their behalf as a servant-soldier. As a bastard, my life would be fodder for the Glory of the Most High. My lot in life had been thrown in with other serf and peasant youth—our lives were part payment to some king from the baron. Other boys and youths like me had been sent off, as well, and I was overjoyed to see my companion Ewen Glyndon, the shepherd boy, among those in our group.
His face was dark with grime, and his hair a tangle of bird’s nest, but I recognized him through his eyes, which had not dimmed in their warmth. I could not believe that we might’ve been on the same long voyage and had been within arm’s reach of each other the whole time without recognizing each other at once. I embraced him as if he were a younger brother. I held him, wishing not to have to lose even the smell of him for a moment to this strange land and these strange people around us.
He laughed, and told me that he had been sent along on my passage by his own request. “Kenan Sensterre wished me gone, and I begged the baron’s daughter for help in this plight. She thought you had been murdered, but when she learned that you were to be sent to the Holy Land, she bade me kiss your cheek so that you would feel her love. I am here as her message to you. She will never forget you, Falconer. She will always seek your salvation and safe return.” Then Ewen pressed his lips near my ear by a wisp of hair that hung down from my scalp.
“Do not fear for her. She is safe,” he whispered. “She told me to let you know that there is a token of love she holds for you so that she might always remember you.”
I thought of Alienora and felt gladdened by all of this. I felt as if the Fates watched over me, and over my beloved, and Ewen was a messenger from them to let me know that the love between Alienora and me could not be ended by war or exile.
I did not appreciate, at the time, the great sacrifice Ewen had made for me, nor did I understand the full extent of his friendship; but if you have ever been sent to a foreign land, to face certain death if not hardship, and you had seen a familiar face, you, too, would keep that person at your side at every moment.
As I looked at other youths, similarly sent to soldiers, I realized that all of us who were from among the poor and subservient had the look of the vanquished upon us, no matter the land of our origin. We were payment for the debts of war. I have since learned that much of mankind’s security and comfort is built from such payments, and the wealth of many human nations has been built on the backs of such as I, sent off to fight without weapon in hand, for the glory of others. I counted myself, and Ewen, as lucky for having survived the trip with only a sense of the heaviness of the burden of life and the charge put to us to help with the bringing of the land of the
Cross back under the holiness of Christendom.
I did not lose heart. Alienora’s face remained within my mind, and I felt as if I could speak to her in my dreams and she would hear me.
Nor did I lose hope when we docked and went overland some hundreds of miles or more, many of my fellow soldiers dying along a sunburned roadside, keeling over from fever or thirst or hunger. There was little in the way of supplies until we reached an encampment of Holy Knights at the outskirts of a stone castle called Kur-Nu. Many in my company were calling it the City of the Miracle, for it held a cloth that had touched the Lord’s face before the crucifixion. If you had told me that we were far away from Jerusalem, the center to our world then, I would not have known. Our commanders had told us that we were about the work of the Lord and of the Pope and of the kings of Christendom. We traveled to the south and east. On some days, over a mountain pass, I could see the blue of the distant sea.
I was young, still, and I believed more in goodness than I did in evil, despite what had happened with my mother, despite Corentin and his dark heart, and despite the betrayals I felt from my master, Kenan. I had lost a sense of justice, but I still believed that benevolence could come from the darkest shadow. After a skirmish along a trade road, in which we took camels and supplies from the infidel, and during which our commanders slaughtered every living enemy, I found myself with a weapon. I took up the sword offered to me—a double-edged broadsword that had belonged to one of the recently killed infidels we fought.
Ewen and I quickly learned how to wield it, as well as the mace, which was a weapon of the Saracens, though the knights would not then touch it, nor would the sergeant-brethren. Most of us in the infantry had daggers, another instrument of battle that the superior knights sneered at. Knights had the great swords with legendary names, blessed by saints and the Pope in Rome, passed down from king to knight with magical Christian properties. Those of us who would fight on foot simply had ordinary weapons, and I was honored to be given the broadsword, despite the fact that it was no use in spearing. Still, I learned to wield it, to cut and hack at the enemy, and my muscles built fast as if they’d been waiting for years to grow from my scrawny shoulders.
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