Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) (11 page)

‘Get the lie of the land, Jorg,’ Burlow told me as if it had been his idea from the start.

Brother Rike and Brother Hendrick watched me with no comment other than the scrape of their whetstones along iron blades.

‘Find out where the men-at-arms bed,’ Red Kent said. We knew the monks had mercenary guards, Conaught men, maybe soldiers from Reams sent by Lord Ajah, but maintained and kept in coin by the abbot.

‘Watch yourself up there, Jorth,’ Elban lisped. The old man worried too much. You’d have thought as a man’s years ran out he’d worry less – but no.

And so I started along the road and let the fog swallow the brothers behind me.

An hour brought me mist-damp and muddy-footed to the bend in the road where we first studied the monastery. I walked another few hundred yards before the fog admitted a dark hint of the building, and in ten strides more it slipped from suggestion to fact, a sprawl of buildings to either side of the River Brent. The waters’ complaints reached me as they tumbled through the millwheel before escaping to the farmlands further down the valley to the east. Wood smoke tickled my nostrils, the faintest scent of frying, and my stomach rumbled obligingly.

I passed the bakehouse, brewhouse, and buttery, grim stone blockhouses identified by the aromas of bread, malt, and ale. All seemed deserted, the matins prayers requiring even the lay brothers from their labours in the fields, at the fishponds, or at the piggery. The path to the church threaded the cemetery, headstones all askew as if at sea. Two great trees stood amidst the graves, shouldering the most weathered stones aside. Two corpse-fed yews, echoes of an older faith, standing proud where men played out their lives in service to the white Christ. I stopped to pick a pale red berry from the closer tree. Firm and dusty-skinned. I rolled it between finger and thumb, an echo perhaps of the lost flesh those roots drank, sunk in the ichors of the rotting faithful.

Strains of plainsong reached across the cemetery, the monks coming to the close of matins. I decided to wait.

Burlow had plans to head north with St Sebastian’s treasures. To make the coast, where on a clear day a man could look out across the Quiet Sea and spot the sails of a half dozen nations. The port of Nemla might pay tax to Reams but it paid no attention to Lord Ajah’s laws. Pirate lords held power there and a man might sell anything in such a place, from holy relics to human flesh. More often than not the buyer would be a man of the Isles, a Brettan from the drowned lands, sailors all. They said that if all the men of Brettan left ship at once the Isles would not have space for them to stand.

The Nuban once rumbled me a song from the Brettan Isles. Hearts of oak it said they had, but the Nuban told it that if their hearts were of the oak then it was from the yew that their blood had been brewed, a darker and more ancient tree. And from the yew come their longbows, with which the men of Brettan have slain more men in the long years than were felled with bullet or bomb in the short years of the Builders.

I waited by the church doors when the songs ran out, but despite the scraping of pews and the mutter of voices, no one emerged. All fell silent and at last I set hand to the doors and pushed inside into the quiet hall beyond.

One monk remained at prayer, kneeling before the pews, facing the altar. The others must have left through another exit leading into the monastery complex. The light from windows of stained glass fell around the man in many colours, a patch of green across his head making something strange of his baldness. It occurred to me as I waited for him to finish bothering the almighty that I didn’t know
how
to ask for sanctuary. Acting had never featured in my skill set, and even as the words I would need sprung to mind I could hear how false they would ring, falling bitter from a cynical tongue. Some tell it that ‘sorry’ is the hardest word, but for me it has always been ‘help’.

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 just 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?’