Emperor of Thorns Read online

  In the end I decided to go with my strengths. I didn’t wait for the monk to quit his silent moaning and I didn’t ask for help.

  ‘I’ve come to be a monk,’ I said, with the silent proviso that hell would freeze and heaven burn before I let them give me the haircut.

  The man stood without haste and turned to face me, the window colours sliding across the grey of his habit. His tonsure left a garland of black curls around a polished scalp.

  ‘Do you love God, boy?’

  ‘I couldn’t love him any more.’

  ‘And do you repent of your sins?’

  ‘What man doesn’t?’

  He had warm eyes and a soft face this one. ‘And are you humble, boy?’

  ‘I could be no more humble,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve a clever way with words, boy.’ He smiled. The lines spreading from the corners of his eyes declared him given to smiles. ‘Perhaps too clever. Too much cleverness can be a torment to a man, setting his wits against his faith.’ He steepled his fingers. ‘In any event, you are too young to become a novice. Go home, boy, before your parents notice you’re gone.’

  ‘I have no mother,’ I said. ‘And no father.’

  His smile eased. ‘Well now, that’s a different matter. We have orphans here, saved from the corruptions of the road and educated in the ways of our Lord. But most come to us as infants, and it isn’t an easy life, our boys work hard, both in the field and at their studies, and there are rules. Lots of rules.’

  ‘I came to be a monk, not an orphan, a brother, not a son.’ I didn’t want to be a monk but just being told ‘no’ lit the corner of a fire in me. I knew myself broken, to burn over every refusal, to feel my blood rise at the slightest provocation, but knowing and fixing are different things.

  ‘A good number of our novices are drawn from boys maintained here.’ If he sensed my anger he showed no sign of it. ‘I myself was left on the church steps as a baby, many years ago.’

  ‘I could start that way.’ I shrugged as if letting myself be talked into it.

  He nodded and watched me with those kind eyes. I wondered if his prayers were still echoing behind them. Did God speak back to him or did the Old Gods whisper from the yew, or perhaps the gods of the Nuban called out to him across the straits from the crowed heavens above Afrique?

  ‘I’m Abbot Castel,’ he said.

  ‘Jorg.’

  ‘If you follow me we shall at least see that you get a meal.’ He smiled again, the sort of smile that said he liked me. ‘And if perhaps you choose to stay we might see whether you really could love God a little more and be somewhat more humble.’

  I spent that first day digging up potatoes with the twelve orphans currently under St Sebastian’s care. The boys ranged from five years to fourteen, as mixed a bunch as you could want, some serious, some wild, but all excited to have a new boy amongst them to break the monotony of mud and potatoes, potatoes and more mud.

  ‘Did your family leave you here?’ Orscar asked the questions and the rest of them listened. A short boy, lean, ragged black hair as if cut in haste, and mud on both cheeks. I guessed him to be eight.

  ‘I walked,’ I said.

  ‘My grandpa brought me here,’ Orscar said, resting on his digging fork. ‘Mam died and my father never came back from the war. I don’t remember them much.’

  Another taller boy snorted at the tale of Orscar’s father, but said nothing.

  ‘I came to be a monk,’ I said. I drove the fork deep and turned up half a dozen potatoes, the biggest of them skewered on the tines.

  ‘Idiot.’ The largest of the boys shouldered me aside and lifted the end my fork. ‘Scratch them and they won’t keep past a week. You gotta feel the way into the ground, dig around them.’ He pulled the wounded vegetable free.

  I imagined how it would be to lunge forward and impale him, the fork’s middle tine nailing his Adam’s apple and the other two bracketing his neck. I wondered that the danger didn’t even occur to him as he scowled at me over the weapon, pointed right at him. He wouldn’t keep past a week.

  ‘Who’d be a monk?’ A boy my age came across, dragging a full sack. He looked pale beneath the grime, his grin fixed, as if he knew exactly what I’d been thinking.

  ‘It has to be better than this?’ I lowered the fork.

  ‘I’d go mad,’ he said. ‘Praying, praying, more praying. And reading the bible every single day. And all the copying. All that quill work, copying other people’s words, never writing their own. You want to spend fifty years doing that?’ He hushed as one of the lay brothers stomped over from the hedgerow.

  ‘More work, less talk!’

  And we set to digging.

  It turns out there’s a certain satisfaction in digging. Levering your dinner from the ground, lifting the soil and pulling fine hard potatoes from it, thinking of them roasted, mashed, fried in oil, it’s all good. Especially if it wasn’t you who had to tend and weed the field for the previous six months. Labour like that empties the mind and lets new thoughts wander in from unsuspected corners. And in the moments of rest, when we orphans faced each other, mud-cheeked, leaning on our forks, there’s a camaraderie that builds without you knowing it. By the end of the day I think the big lad, David, could have called me an idiot a second time and survived.

  We trudged back to the monastery as evening shadows tracked across the rutted fields. They fed us in the fraterhouse with the ordained brothers at one long trestle, the lay brothers at another, and the orphans crowded around a low square table. We ate faggots of potato mash fried in pork fat with autumn greens. I hadn’t tasted anything better in for ever. And the boys talked. Arthur told how his grandpa used to make shoes before his sight got dim. Orscar showed us the iron cross his da gave him when he went away. A heavy thing with a circle of red enamel at the crossing point. For the blood of Christ, Orscar said. And David told how he might sign up to be a soldier for Lord Ajah, like Bilk and Peter who we saw patrolling along the Brent. They all spoke, often at once, laughing, cramming in food past their words, speaking of foolishness, games they played, dreams they had, ‘might-have-been’s and might-be’s’. The easy talk that children share, that Will and I had shared. Strange to think of these boys bound about by so many rules and seeming so free, and my road-brothers, unbound by law or conscience, yet so guarded and bitter in their conversation, each word edged and weighted, as if they were every one of them trapped and seeking escape each moment of their lives.

  The orphans slept in their own dormitory, a solid stone-built building, slate-roofed, clean within though bare as a monk’s cell. I lay among them, comfortable on my straw mattress. Sleep found us all quick enough. Honest labour will do that for you. But I woke in the darkest hour and listened to the night, to the skittering of mice amongst our straw, to the snores and the mumbling of sleep-tied tongues, to the hunting owls and the chuckle of water through the mill. I thought of my road-brothers, caught in dark dreams as their bodies lay scattered between the trees. They would wake soon, blood-hungry, and turn this way.

  A monk came for us before dawn so we would be washed and ready for matins prayer.

  ‘No work!’ Orscar whispered beside me as he dressed.

  ‘No?’

  ‘It’s Sunday, idiot.’ David used a long pole to heave the shutters open. It made little difference.

  ‘Sunday’s for praying.’ This from Alfred, the peacemaker in the potato field.

  ‘And studies,’ said Arthur, a tall and serious boy of around my age.

  It turned out Sunday held time for studies additional to those the monks arranged for us. First though, I sat through lessons on lettering, instruction on the lives of saints, and a session of choir practice – I croaked like a crow. An elderly monk arrived for the day’s last lesson, hunched around a black cane, eyes bright but pale beneath the grey fringe of his hair. He had a sour look to him but the boys seemed to like him.

  ‘Ah. New boy. What’s your name, young man?’ He spoke quick and high with ju
st a creak of age.

  ‘Jorg,’ I said.

  ‘Jorg, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sir.’

  ‘I’m Brother Winter. No sir about it. And I’m here to teach theology.’ He paused and frowned. ‘Jorg, eh?’

  ‘Yes, Brother.’

  ‘I never did hear of a St Jorg. Now ain’t that a curious thing? St Alfred, St Orscar, St David, St Arthur, St Winter … ain’t you got a saint’s day, boy?’

  ‘My mother had it that St George’s day would serve. Jorg being a flavour of George.’

  ‘The Brettan saint?’ He made to spit and caught himself. ‘He fell out of heaven when the sea swallowed those lands.’

  Brother Winter let my name and its ill omens lie after that and taught us theology as promised. He proved entertaining and praised my quick wits, so we parted friends.

  In the two hours between vespers and compline we ran free of prayers and lessons. The slightest hint had Orscar begging to show me the monastery – grounds and buildings all. He raced me around as fast as the evening dark allowed, eager to please, as if I were his big brother and my approval weighed more than all the gold in chapel. We crept up the woodpile by the old almonry where peasants came for alms in hard years, and from our vantage spied on Ajah’s soldiers who barracked there when not on duty.

  ‘The abbot says we don’t need soldiers everywhere.’ Orscar clambered back down, wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘But David says he heard St Goodwin’s – down by Farfield – was raided six months back and burned flat. He heard it from novice Jonas at the smithy.’

  ‘If a raid comes, don’t trust in soldiers,’ I told him. ‘Run for the river and follow it upstream. Don’t stop for anything.’

  I slipped away from Orscar in the dark and made my way to the road, where the monastery lane joined the wider way. Even ditching the boy with a turn of speed in the shadows felt like a betrayal. He’d started to dote on me like Maical with that idiot grin of his following Gemt. Like Justice used to pace after William and me, hour after hour, just happy to be pack with us, overjoyed if we petted him, ecstatic if Will wrapped him in his little arms and buried his face in that fur. The hound would stand there as if he were tolerating the hug, as if it wasn’t what he’d followed us half a day for, but his tail couldn’t lie.

  Elban stood waiting a little way down the road, a ghost in the moonlight. ‘What’s the word, Jorth?’

  They’d sent Elban because he didn’t look like trouble, but I’d back him against two of Ajah’s troopers any day. Well, not in a fair fight, but you don’t see many of those.

  ‘The word is precious little gold and more guardsmen than Brother Burlow is going to want to take on, well armed, with strong points to defend. The place is built to hold.’

  ‘They ain’t gonna like that news, Jorth.’ ‘Newth’ he said, struggling on the ‘s’. He sounded worried, though he scowled to hide it.

  ‘Tell Burlow you’re just the messenger,’ I suggested. ‘And keep out of Rike’s reach.’

  ‘Ain’t you coming with me then?’ Elban frowned. His tongue slid across the pale flesh of his gums.

  ‘There’s a piece or two worth stealing. If I can swipe them, I’ll come running. Otherwise I’ll join you here tomorrow, same time, and we’ll all go.’

  I left him muttering ‘they won’t like it, they won’t like it’.

  I’d counted twelve guards, none of them much younger than Elban, and the crucifix the abbot wore to vespers on its own was worth the effort to take them down. In truth, despite the cruel lessons taught me by my own father and by the thorns, I had found the whisper of a different way in the fields and halls and sanctums of St Sebastian, and whilst I listened with a sceptical ear, still I wanted to hear that whisper a little longer.

  My father taught me not to love or to compromise, the thorns taught me that even family bonds are fatal weaknesses, a man must walk alone, bide his time and strike when the strength is in his hands. Sometimes, though, it seemed all that bound me to those lessons were the scars they had left on me.

  As I trudged back I reasoned that what I wanted from the road, from my road-brothers, wasn’t gold and the slaughter of monks. I had come from wealth – I knew how the innocent died. What I sought was the power that lies in hands untied by social strings, not restrained by moral code, chivalric charter, the rules of war. I wanted to earn the edge that the Nuban showed in my father’s dungeons, to be forged in battle. And I would find those things in the hard times. I would steer my brothers into the crucible where the Hundred wet their swords, and see what would unfold.

  I told myself all that, but unsaid, beneath those words, I knew that perhaps I just wanted a door back to gentler days when my mother had loved me. I was after all a child of ten, weak, stupid, and unformed. I had been taught the right lessons but all teachers know a pupil will backslide if hard lessons are not reinforced by repetition.

  The scent of white musk reached me, reached into wherever it is the dreamer stands to watch their nightmare unfold. She stood with me, unseen and untouchable, but close, almost skin to skin as I pulled these old memories through her. And I knew she felt the threat, counted its approach in heartbeats, whilst knowing neither its nature nor the direction of its attack.

  I had returned to find the monastery guards setting torches in iron brackets before the chapterhouse. More monks than I had suspected to be housed at St Sebastian’s were already gathered in the shadows by the wall. Evidently not all showed up for meals.

  ‘Where’d you go?’ Orscar rushed me from the dark. If I’d had a knife he’d have got himself stuck on it.

  ‘The bishop’s coming!’ His news proved too important to wait on my answer.

  ‘What bishop? Where?’ It didn’t seem a very likely story.

  ‘Bishop Murillo! His servant just arrived ahead of the procession to warn us. He’s on the north road. We’ll see their lights coming up over Jedmire Hill soon enough.’ Orscar kept hopping from one foot to the other, as if he needed to piss. Probably did.

  ‘Brother Miles said the Vatican sent the Pope’s own carriage to collect him.’ Arthur stood behind us now. ‘Murillo’s on his way to Roma.’

  ‘They’ll make him a cardinal! For sure!’ Orscar sounded far more excited about church politics than any eight-year-old should be.

  ‘Where are all the others?’ I asked. Apart from Orscar and Arthur none of the orphans had come for the show.

  Orscar blinked. ‘They must’ve seen him before. He ministers at St Chelle. He’s visited before. Brother Winter said so.’

  I didn’t let it bother me. I’d seen bishops before. Well two. Bishop Simon who ministered at Our Lady in Crath City, and Bishop Ferr who replaced Simon when the angels dragged him off one cold night. Even so I’d wait and have a look-see at this third one. He might have treasures in his carriage that would keep my road-brothers happy. If the other boys had found something better to occupy them, good luck.

  ‘He’s the grandson of the Duke of Belpan, you know?’ Arthur said.

  ‘The bishop?’

  He nodded. I shrugged. Abbots in an order bound to simple living and hard labour might work their way up from an orphan’s box abandoned on the doorstep. Bishops in their velvets and palatial residences tended to have been placed there for safe-keeping by powerful relatives, having been plucked from the outer branches of some illustrious family.

  It took a while. The torches had started to gutter and the compline bell threatened when at last we saw the procession, armed riders at the front, priests walking, the papal carriage creaking along behind two plough-horses, more clerics trudging behind and finally two more mailed riders with the holy cross in red atop white tabards.

  The carriage jolted along the road, halting with its door between the double line of torches that formed a corridor to the chapterhouse’s grand entrance. The driver of the carriage, a goblin of a man with grey and bushy brows, sat motionless, his pair with their heads down, snorting occasionally like oxen. The grandest of the
three priests preceding the carriage came to open the door and to lend Bishop Murillo his arm, although the man seemed unlikely to need it. He squeezed from the gloomy confines, his bulk strained against the purple of his cassock. Once out he reached back in and took the mitre offered from the shadows. I hadn’t thought there room for a second passenger. Murillo jammed the hat onto his head, the sweat on his tight black curls immediately soaking into the red band around its base. He stood straight, hands in the small of his back, thrusting that belly. I half expected an enormous belch from his fleshy mouth, but instead he growled and stamped toward the monastery. The head priest and two men-at-arms followed close behind. Although fat, the bishop had a restless energy about him. He reminded me of a boar hunting a scent. A little of Burlow too. His eyes found Orscar, then me, as he reached the door. He smiled at us, a convulsion of the lips, and muttered something to the closer guard before vanishing within.

  The bishop’s mass kept us from our beds, a droning affair of Latin prayers in the crowded church hall. We orphans stood scattered amongst the monks and saw little but the backs of tonsured heads. Holy or not, monks are an unwashed lot. The old brother ahead of me made frequent releases of evil smells that the rope around his habit could not restrain. He had two fat ticks behind his ear – the image stays with me, two bloated purple pearls.

  At last, communion, and the long queue to be dismissed. At the head of the line I saw Abbot Castel take offered cup and drink from its gilt bowl.

  ‘The blood of Christ,’ the serving priest intoned under the bishop’s watchful eye.

  Wine. At least it wasn’t to be a dry wafer.

  We shuffled forward slower than a candle burns its length. In the queue I noted again that most of the orphans were missing, only Orscar stood before me, and somewhere back along the line, Arthur.

  I saw the abbot, waiting in the shadows of the wall, as we approached the altar. He had the look of an unwilling conscript gathering himself to draw steel and to fling himself into battle. The bishop in his finery shot Castel a vicious glance. Soft and fat he might be, but another life could have put the bishop amongst my road-brothers, red in tooth and claw. Another life would just have made Castel a different kind of victim to men such as Rike and Row and Liar.