The Abbot's Tale

by Conn Iggulden

  ‘Go back to your room, Wulfric. I am sick of the sight of you.’

  ‘Dunstan, please! We must stand together in this place. The rest of them are Godwin’s creatures. I have no friends amongst them. Come on, Dun. We’re brothers! Please!’

  I took the door in my hand and slammed it in his face, a crack of sound that echoed a long way. When I thought of another stinging insult, I opened it again, but he had retreated and I could hear my classmates returning from their meal. I remembered then that I was meant to be in the gardens. Being late might earn a few welts from a cane, but not turning up at all would bring much worse punishment.

  I began to run, then cursed and came back, putting my head into Wulfric’s room as the corridor grew noisy behind me.

  ‘Come on. We have work to do in the gardens before the None service.’

  He scrubbed his hand across a tear-stained face and I rolled my eyes as I understood he had been weeping into his pallet, the noise smothered.

  He scrambled up and I spat on my hands and wiped at his eyes.

  ‘Don’t let the others see you’ve been crying, toad-eater,’ I murmured. I was always too soft on him, I suppose. My heart overbrimmed with kindness then.

  I don’t think Godwin liked the way I watched him after that. He sat ahead of me in class and he reacted to my gaze on the back of his neck like a draught. When Florian asked him to decline a noun in Latin or Brother Encarius asked him the name of some plant – when he could not reply or spoke his answer poorly, I would snort to myself, always the same noise and just loud enough for him to hear as the master turned away. It does not sound like much, but I would watch the flush spread on his neck then. I played with fire, with very little understanding of what I was doing. I thought it was just a game.

  It did not help that I was sometimes so ill I could barely stand and had to spend a half-day groaning and sweating over the privy. That long shed was a marvel of design, with a stream diverted through a lead-lined trough that ran the length of it, washing away whatever fell from above. There were a dozen seats on the bench and it was common for us to find a few doleful monks wedged into the wooden seat-holes, waiting for nature to complete the work and staring off into the distance. Conversation was considered ill-mannered there. It was a peaceful place, though I saw too much of it in the first months.

  On Wednesday and Sunday evenings, Brother Encarius would summon me to his little apothecary and grind ingredients while I watched, explaining the nature of each one and what effect they had on the humours of the body. He wrote everything down in his black book, next to my initial. I saw names to conjure with, from the innocent-sounding lily of the valley to garlic for the lungs and vervain for the bones. I have never met anyone else so well informed, nor one so casual with his herbs as to the effect on my bowels.

  A herbalist was vital then. Despite our Roman drain in fired clay and lead of which we were so proud, the smell of forty men, eight women and a dozen boys all crammed together was never pleasant. Beyond my face and hands, I did not wash from one spring to the next, and only then because my neck went grey or one of the monks found my rank sweat particularly oppressive. Encarius would grow herbs to strew on the ground, or to hang in bunches. If I press my face to lavender or mugwort even now, it takes me back to that silent young man, working his mortar and pestle.

  When he was done with his grinding and mixing, he would dose me with some horrible concoction. His aim was always to either bring on a fit, through heating my blood, or reduce their frequency and power over me. He was an earnest seeker after truth, but the reality was that I missed a number of morning classes, spending those hours in stunned disbelief on the wooden privy seats. There is a particular horror to seeing the door swing open on some merry soul, only to observe the change in their expression as they wave a hand and back away. I cannot say those doses did me much lasting harm, but I do not think they did me any good.

  I did, however, learn herbs from Encarius. He sent me out at intervals to collect what plants clung on in the sulphurous marshes around our abbey. I gathered wild garlic there, crushing it in my hands as he taught me, to be sure it was the right kind. Unfortunately, the smell lingered, which was how I ended up preparing a salad with lily of the valley – and lost a day vomiting. Still, such knowledge is useful and the form of the lessons made me keen to learn. When he gave me a pinch of powdered foxglove, for example, I thought my heart would surely burst in my chest.

  Encarius did not trust me with books or paper, not then. Yet I watched and I listened, as he dissolved and boiled and cut and burned, holding crystals in iron tongs and showing me how they gave off strange colours and scents. From him, I learned of nitre and aqua fortis, of a dozen wonderful vitriols and the extraordinary sal volatile.

  Even to say those names brings me pleasure. We took the world in our hands and ground it fine. Like an innocent, Encarius described poisons so potent they could dispatch an army. I wrote nothing down, but my memory was a vault.

  4

  That first summer seemed to last for an age, and then suddenly it was gone and it rained as if our little abbey had been chosen to serve as an ark. I do not usually note the seasons, especially now that I have seen so many. Yet I recall my pain, and making a cocoon around myself where I could not be hurt. Alone, neither Brother Caspar nor Godwin would have been able to touch me. Together, it seemed I had enemies on all sides. At least Godwin remained wary as his nose healed. It had to be rebroken by Aphra and Encarius to let him breathe, and for a couple of months, it gave him a weak spot he feared I might grab. I certainly mimed twisting it once or twice, in case it hadn’t occurred to him. He left me alone and I thought we’d somehow agreed a truce between us. I was wrong.

  While storm gales battered the abbey walls, Godwin and a few of his acolytes sought out Wulfric and slapped and punched him until he was in tears, snivelling like a ruined girl. I found him later, crammed into a cupboard and blowing his nose on a fine altar cloth, though that too would have earned him a beating if he’d been found.

  ‘Did Godwin put you in here?’ I asked him, already growing full of wrath.

  ‘No, it’s my hiding place, for when I am afraid or I miss home.’

  I reached out and turned his face, seeing a fat swelling on his lip and a bruise along his cheek. He was protecting his ribs, I saw. I imagined there were marks there as well, from hard feet.

  ‘Was that Godwin?’ I asked, pointing to his wounds. I felt a terrible coldness come upon me and I welcomed it.

  ‘No! Why do you have to keep asking? Leave me alone, Dun. You’ll only make it worse.’

  He was a terrible liar, but I had the truth of it later from another boy. Godwin could not come at me in the night for fear of my knife. I was not in that place for friends and so he could not turn others against me. My only weakness was Wulfric – and I detested him almost as much as Godwin did.

  ‘Stop your snivelling!’ I told my brother, gripping his tunic. ‘He doesn’t care about you. This is all because you told him I would protect you, in front of the other boys! By God, Wulfric, you’ve made an enemy for me.’

  ‘You would have been enemies anyway,’ he said, in perfect truth. He knew me well. I do not like to lead, but I will not be led. That is the heart of me.

  Do not think I was immune to sneers and pinches and scornful laughter. Godwin mimed the way I’d expelled air on my first day, in the infirmary. He did it well and had our classmates hooting. They wore me down. Such things weigh on a soul when there is no escape. The abbey was a very little world and at times it seemed as if there was nothing else beyond the foetid waters lapping at our fields, with the great hill of the Tor stretching above us all in the mists.

  Godwin was a true leader, I suppose. Though he used us ill, the boys of that class adored and followed him. If some of them met me in private and apologised, they were only one or two. The rest were as bright-eyed and cruel as a family of rats. In some ways, Godwin taught me more on the nature of boys and power than King Æthe
lstan ever managed.

  Just before Christmas, Abbot Clement called Wulfric and me to his little office and asked us to sit down, a suggestion that made me wary from the start. When Clement handed me a thick white fold, clasped with a coin of blue wax, I knew it was not going to be good news.

  My father had always worn a ring with a wyvern carved intaglio, so that its image stood proud when pressed into warm wax. He loved words, did Heorstan. Most men would have seen nothing strange in the wyvern crest of old Wessex, the two-footed dragon. Yet it was said to have a poisonous bite – and the name came to us from vipera in Latin, a viper. In my family, we used that ring as a warning.

  I broke the seal like a wafer of unleavened bread, with a crack that sounded loud in the silence. I knew it had to be news of treachery or death, but there was no way of knowing who had been taken. Age was no guide then, nor is it now. The old and the young defy their endings, while others go too soon. Neither is it good or evil in the veins that seems to protect them. This is a brief and bitter life, the mere proving crucible for what lies beyond. That is all that makes sense of it, or I would rage at the heavens themselves.

  It was my father, of course. I knew as soon as I saw the few scratched lines in childish lettering. My mother’s hand.

  Wulfric and I were dismissed in silence, allowed to take the paper with us. We read it over a score of times, but could tease no further meaning from the words. What goods we owned or had made in the abbey were easily gathered into a single sack of hessian.

  I hardly remember the boat across the marsh, or walking the dozen miles or so with Wulfric snivelling beside me, as if his grief was so sharp it could not be held in. I told him to be quiet and he only wailed the more.

  We arrived at our home, stepping onto Heorstan’s twelve hides of land as we crossed a gate of whitened beech, made into bones by a hundred summers. A rowan tree loomed over that gatepost, its berries red, though the air was chill and winter had come.

  I heard howling down the track, and in the distance I saw my father’s dogs, yelping and staring in their excitement. They raced at us then and I believe any wolf or thief would have turned tail and run from that pack. As it was, Wulfric and I were near bowled over. Hounds leaped four-footed into the air around us, bouncing like hares, shivering with excitement, hardly able to believe we had returned.

  The house was long and high, of oak and thatch and plaster. My father’s home was no stone keep, though it was solid enough and comfortable. A dozen thralls and servants had beds under his roof, or in small cottages on the land. We had other farms around us and there had always been food on that table. We had never gone hungry, my father used to say. I remember his pride.

  I thought it looked just the same as it always had, with Threefingers and John of Ower coming out of the barn at the noise of the dogs. Both men carried huge bundles of dried meadowsweet, that queen of herbs. Those were put down and they walked together to intercept me. My father’s men were not young. They had served him for thirty years or more, as I’d heard it, coming with him in retirement for their food and a little pay – and for the companionship. They were free men and they both had families living there. In some ways, my father’s house was a village.

  Threefingers put one knee to the dust with a grunt. John of Ower glanced aside at him and did the same, both men bowing their heads. I blinked at them, wondering if they were making mock of me, before I understood. Though I was barely fourteen years of age, they assumed I was the head of my house. That was natural enough, except that my father had four older sons as well. When they heard, there was every chance I would see those men striding around that very yard, kicking over the buckets, judging the worth of every beam and iron nail.

  Young as I was, I did not know how to respond to two old servants kneeling to me in my father’s yard. I cleared my throat and Wulfric just gaped.

  ‘Is . . . is my mother inside?’ I said, blushing and pointing at the door as if I had not seen it before. Both men nodded. The dogs continued to fuss around us, whining for just the touch of a hand or a glance.

  ‘Welcome home, boys,’ Threefingers said. ‘I’m sorry it had to be for this. Your father was a fine man, a great thane.’

  ‘We all depended on him,’ John of Ower added, though I saw Threefingers wince. Of course they were worried about their homes and futures. They’d been happy and secure, and now all that had been thrown into the air.

  I reached the kitchen door and paused, feeling the intensity and grief of that moment—the change that my father’s absence had made. Wulfric could not help himself and ran in, calling for his mama. He was very young then, though I remember being annoyed at him even so, for spoiling my entrance.

  My mother had heard all the howling and barking. Those dogs were hunters for the most part, able to run a wild boar to collapse so that a hunter could stroll up and dispatch it with just a knife. Yet they were howlers as well. I do not know the breed, but they were noisy hounds and they walked through their own muck, tracking it all over our home. I have never owned a dog since.

  Mother had Wulfric pressed into her skirts as I entered, so deep into the folds the little sniveller almost vanished from sight. A white veil covered her hair, but the red dress was bright, the colour of new madder, fixed with seethed moss mordant. It seemed an odd colour for mourning.

  She gathered me in and I went to her like one of the dogs outside, pleased to be held. After a time, I stood back, watching her remove Wulfric’s grip on the cloth with more gentleness than I would have used.

  ‘I am glad you came home, Dunstan. Your half-brother Aldan has sent word that he will be arriving tomorrow or the day after. I fear it will not go well.’

  ‘Where do you stand, with the law?’ I asked, in all my innocence. I know a little better now that the rules of men are whatever we claim them to be. I thought then that they resembled a tool handle: hard and unbending. I was very young.

  My mother sighed. Cyneryth must have been around thirty then. Her skin was unlined and her eyes were bright, though there was no sign of tears in them.

  ‘I have sent a maid to the king’s Witan to ask for a judgement, but Threefingers says I might be turned out and should prepare for it. If you or Wulfric were younger than ten years of age, I would have a stronger case.’

  I began to grow angry on her behalf. My father had adored my mother, I knew that much. It would never have been his will to see her made homeless.

  ‘You must have talked about it with . . . Dad,’ I said. It was like picking at a wound to speak of him, seeing a drop of bright blood or pus swell at the edge. I still expected to see him in his chair by the fire. I dared not look over at it.

  ‘Yes, of course. I will not starve, Dunstan. Your father’s will leaves me wealth enough to live quietly and at peace, though perhaps not here. Do not fear for me, or for your place at the abbey. If you wish to continue your studies, there is coin for that.’

  ‘I want to come home!’ Wulfric wailed suddenly.

  I rounded on him in a temper, though it vanished when my mother touched my face, smoothing it with a thumb as if she could rub away the rush of angry colour.

  ‘Be gentle, Dunstan. Wulfric is your kin and he’ll need you now, more than before. I only wish I could have brought forth sisters to temper you a little. You were always iron in the cast, not iron wrought. Yet I would not see you break.’

  I don’t think Cyneryth had ever set foot in a forge, but I understood her and nodded. I did not accept her judgement of me, however. Cast iron will break before it ever bends, that is true, but what of it? That is the whole point of being iron!

  That night, I slept in my old place under the attic eaves, wrapped tight against the frosty air. When I woke, the house was very still. I broke ice on the surface of the water jug and poured some into a bowl, waking myself with a doublehanded splash, so that I shook and cursed and even laughed, before I remembered my father had gone.

  When I opened the shutters, I saw a cart coming slowly along the
track, raising dust behind, turning in through the gate and setting all the dogs off once more in a great cacophony.

  I felt a touch of fear at the thought of my older brother. Aldan had grown to manhood when my father had been much younger. I’d hardly known him, and when he’d described Heorstan from those days, it seemed I hardly knew him either. The father I’d loved, the man of wry amusement and patience, who lay beneath the earth in the graveyard of St John’s Chapel not a mile from his home, had gone.

  The house felt strangely small to me then, after the vast spaces of the abbey. Yet that too is reduced in my memory. Perhaps the greatest of wonders can become ordinary in time. Or perhaps we just grow out of old places, like hermit crabs finding new shells, one after the other.

  Aldan looked around as I came out to greet him, still smoothing damp hair with my fingers. Wulfric was behind me, more solemn than usual. I felt a prickle of dog-like resentment, as if another hound stood on the verge of my land. Yet as I came close, I saw Aldan’s eyes were as red as mine. He held out his hand and I took it, feeling a hard, dry grip.

  ‘I cannot believe the old man has gone,’ he said. ‘My goodness, Dunstan, you have grown so – and you, Wulfric, both of you. Dad loved to be tall, I remember. He must have been delighted for you both. I know he spoke of you with great pride in your accomplishments.’

  I remember his words because, even then, I understood for the first time that my older brother was truly a man – and that I was yet a boy. I would not have thought to put two grieving children at their ease, to speak with fondness of a man we’d all revered.

  ‘Will you come in?’ I asked him. ‘You are welcome, Aldan. Threefingers and John of Ower are here, with . . . Mother.’

  I hesitated over that last, not quite sure how to refer to the woman who had been my father’s second wife. My mother, yes, but not his. Aldan nodded and I thought I saw tears shine in his eyes before he knuckled them away, surprising me.