Servant of Birds

by A. A. Attanasio

  "I have come from the abbey because reports continue to reach my ear that a pagan temple is being built here."

  "We are building a temple that Jesus himself would recognize," Rachel says.

  "Jesus commanded Peter to build him the Church," Maître Pornic states, "not synagogues."

  "We will worship God here, padre," Gianni offers, "as our Lord worshiped when He—"

  "Say no more," Maître Pornic speaks sharply. "I have heard all this before. I know there will be no saints' statues here, no crucifix to bear testimony to the inconsolable suffering of our Savior—and no altar! No altar upon which to commemorate the sacrifice that redeems our souls of Adam's sin." He shakes his head. "This is not a church. This is an empty building."

  "It will be empty," Rachel agrees. "It will contain only pews and a cabinet and lectern to store and display the Torah. It will be empty of everything but the Lord and the people He has made."

  "That is sacrilege."

  "Surely not, padre," Gianni counters. "This is God’s house."

  "This is a portal to hell for all who forsake the true Church!" Maître Pornic declares loud enough for all to hear. He points to the villeins with mallets and chisels in their hands. "This is the site of a pagan temple—and upon it you are erecting yet another pagan temple. All those who toil here are building for their souls a secure place in hellfire!"

  The villeins drop their implements and begin drifting toward the path.

  "Come with me, my children," Maître Pornic beckons. "Come away from this place of wickedness and spare yourselves eternal suffering."

  The villeins cross themselves and hurry past the baroness.

  "Ailena—if you truly are Ailena—remember your faith." Maître Pornic opens a leather vial and scatters holy water over the baroness and the men beside her. "Will you abandon this heathen endeavor?"

  "I will not!" Rachel's heart pounds with anger. "Nor can you condemn it—unless you condemn your own Savior, who worshiped as I worship."

  Maître Pornic casts a pitying frown over the disbelievers, turns his mount, and rides dolefully after his flock.

  -/

  Rain billows in sheets from the mountains, puddling the hoof-gouged earth to slurry, and drumming atop the pavilion tent where Guy Lanfranc and Roger Billancourt sit. They play at draughts, have been since the hard rain woke them at dawn, hours ago. Roger executes a clever slip shot and captures three pieces.

  Guy groans, pushes away from the board, and stands by the open flap. The land appears hammered and shiny as metal, and Castle Neufmarche in the distance appears a craggy boulder. "Branden gloats that he has us boxed like cattle in the rain while he sits on high."

  "This is but a temporary stay." Roger leans back, regards their saddles and rucksacks, all which is left of their worldly possessions. He considers getting wet to visit the two hackneys Branden has lent them. Tethered under an ash tree behind the tent, they should be moved to better provender.

  "Temporary, indeed," Guy grumbles. "If we don't convince him of Erec's threat, he won't move against the Pretender. He'll just sit on high while they raid his cattle. And come autumn, we're vagabonds."

  "Your father and I wandered the king's roads with no more than we have now," Roger states proudly. "Thinking back, those were Gilbert's and my best years."

  "You were lads. You want to grow old living in tents?"

  "Fret not. Your keep will be your home again soon enough."

  Guy turns his head with slow, reptilelike precision. "You think the poison will work?"

  "Bane-root is lethal. It will work."

  "Where did you get it?"

  "From a witch in the hills—pig-eyed Mavis. Rest assured, Guy, this time we will serve her in kind—deception for deception. And, the beauty is, no blame will affix to us. Thierry reports that when the Jew's temple is complete, a Mass is to be said for all the people. We will be there when she drinks of the cup. With William and Thierry, we will decry such treachery. We will blame religious fanatics seeking vengeance on the Christ-murderers."

  Guy is not listening. He is thinking, So it has come to this—poisoning her as though she were vermin. And is she not?

  Lightning fangs over the mountains, and he remembers how his mother infected him with rage in his boyhood. The very day his father died, and for years afterward, she assailed him with stories of Gilbert’s cruelties—how he had loved no one, not even his children, punching her in the belly during her pregnancies, like this—

  His stomach winces at the memory of her blows, and he presses a fist against his gut. In gruesome detail, she had described the slithery red jellies with lidless eyes and pegged fingers that dropped out of her after those beatings. "You would have been one of them," she had stabbed. "He never wanted you."

  Roger peels away from his chair, stands beside Guy, watching him gaze into the rain-fog, and pats his shoulder. Too much musing, the warmaster thinks. No edge for cutting through moods. No edge at all. He strides out into the rain to check the horses, the downpour scattering off his head like a halo of gnats.

  -/

  Gianni Rieti blesses the last of the parishioners as they leave the chapel after vespers and throw on their cowls to ward off the pattering rain. Though Maître Pornic has supplanted him in the village by resuming services there himself, Gianni is glad that the guildsmen’s families and the knights continue to attend his chapel Mass each day before supper. Many have told him that the ceremony has become more meaningful performed in the very language Jesus spoke and with the very rituals by which he adored God. Even surly-eyed Thierry attends every evening, taking the host and drinking the sanctified wine.

  Returning to the chapel, Gianni notices that one attender remains kneeling among the pews. And where is Ummu, who always helps clear the altar? He approaches, then stops—for he recognizes the golden elf locks visible through the diaphanous veil of the blue-robed maiden.

  "Madelon—" he means to whisper, but the breath of his adoration and surprise fills the empty chapel. He has not been alone with her for many days, not since Hugues found them out in the night garden during the festival of the king's men.

  She rises and turns, revealing pouted lips and eyes glassy with tears. "I cannot stay. Mother will come for me in a moment. But I must tell you. I must tell someone." She gnaws at a knuckle, her pollen-bright face flushed with fever. "Gianni—I am with child."

  -/

  During the days of rain, little work is done on the temple. The knights continue to chisel stone, instructed by David and the mason, who works for the stone and the baroness who pays him, and not for Maître Pornic. Without the villeins little more can be done.

  Rachel makes several trips to the village. Her mantle soaked by the torrent, hair plastered and eyelashes and brows dew-baubled, she has gotten to know most of them by now. Blind Sian, Aber the Idiot, and Legless Owain need no convincing to defy the abbot, who promises to reward their compliance with blessings from God they have not known in this life.

  The others sincerely fear perdition. Only her own miraculous experience with the Grail affords her any validity against the stern authority of the holy man. "Jesus was a Jew," she insists. "He taught us the law of love. So, why should we not love His tribe, the tribe God blessed by giving them His son? Why are the rituals that served His worship of God, which sanctified His death for our sins, not good enough for us?"

  Maître Pornic sequesters himself in the wattle hut that serves as the village shrine and will not speak with the heretic. Thomas tries to mediate, even though the abbot will only repeat Saint Paul’s edict from Corinthians: '"You are not your own—you were bought with a price.'"

  From that, Rachel remembers Ailena's admonition: "Everything has its price—even the blessing of the pope." And she wraps two of her rubies in a letter of offering to the bishop of Talgarth and begs his blessing for her temple, quoting Exodus: "And they shall build for Me a Sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst."

  She sends the oblation with a pilgrim retu
rning from Saint David's, and the next day the weather clears, which she accepts as a blessing.

  -/

  Out of the wet light of the forest, Erec Rhiwlas and fifteen of his men ride up to Merlin's Knoll. "I've come to build my future," he grins at Rachel. "The sooner this is done, the sooner you will be mine." Boisterously, he sets to work with his comrades.

  Rachel turns away from the busy crew, faces the sodden land brilliant with new-washed colors, feels the urgency to pray to God in gratitude, but fears to try.

  At the end of the work day, before returning to the castle for vespers and supper, the knights sit on the cut stones, and the rabbi raises the Torah before them.

  The Welshmen loiter among the ancient ring rocks, both amused and startled to see Invaders with chin-beards and braided temple locks reciting as one: "Baruch ata adonai elohainu melech ha-olam asher natan lanu torat emet, v'hayai olam nata b'tohainu. Baruch ata adonai, notain hatorah."

  "That is the language of Jesus?" Erec asks Rachel.

  "Yes. They are thanking God for the first books of the Bible, for 'planting among us life eternal.' It is a prayer that Jesus learned as a child."

  "And the beards—" He points to the tufts of hair on the chins of Denis, Harold, and Gerald.

  "In Leviticus, men are told: 'You shall not destroy the corners of your beard."'

  Erec tugs at his brindled beard. "When we are wed, that will be one article of faith where the Welsh have not deviated from the Patriarchs." He smiles, elated, glittering with sweat from his day's labor and proud of the envy in the stares of his men as they play over his elegant lady with her bruised hands and smudged nose.

  Under the broad hat she wears to protect her fair skin from the sun, she is long-throated, hollow-cheeked, a waterbird, a doe.

  -/

  Dawn purples the thick night. The dreadful tailed star is gone at last. Rachel, who has slept in the temple with her grandfather, Gianni, and Denis, returns from relieving herself in the privy shack the workers built in the soggy willow grove at the base of the knoll, and finds David pacing. He is walking the perimeter of the temple, staring up at it admiringly. All but the glass is in place now.

  "Rachel," he says softly to her when she steps into stride beside him, "you have remade yourself in a lonely place—and now I know, where before I only believed, that God dwells everywhere."

  -/

  Seventeen days into August, the knights with the help of Erec and his men finish shingling the roof of the synagogue. Even Maître Pornic climbs Merlin's Knoll for the first assembly in the temple, Beth Yeshua.

  Thomas stays close beside him, silently praying that the abbot will not disrupt the proceedings with his displeasure at the Hebrew ceremony. Blessedly, just yesterday a pilgrim passing through conveyed a letter from the bishop of Talgarth, consoling the holy man in his indignation yet obliging more tolerance of small variations in the faith so long as the worshippers do not dispute the basic tenets of Christ.

  To see for himself that the Savior receives proper honor, Maître Pornic reluctantly concedes to the bishop and leads the villagers to the synagogue. The large gathering impress both he and Thomas. The entire village and castle have convened on the knoll, and the small temple is so jammed that many worshipers must stand on rock rubble to peer in through the windows.

  Rachel and David greet each of the worshipers as they come up the knoll trail. Last to arrive, Guy and Roger trot to the temple. From horseback, Guy calls down, "Will you be truly Christian and welcome your enemies?"

  "Are we enemies?" Rachel calls back. "We are only kith who have misplaced our love."

  Guy and Roger share a grave look, dismount, and unbuckle their swords.

  Gianni, surveying the assembly from the small door at the back of the synagogue, flusters to see not only Maître Pornic in the front pew but a small commotion as Denis and Harold make room for Guy Lanfranc and his sinister shadow Roger Billancourt. The Welshmen across the room glare hostilely, and Rachel moves among them, speaking soothing words.

  Unlike the chapel, no altar resides here, only the niche in the wall where the scroll of the Torah lodges, hidden by a veil. A lamp of the Eternal Light hangs above it, and before the pews squats the bimah, a small dais with a narrow table standing atop it.

  Consequently, Gianni must prepare for the ceremony in a narrow courtyard flanked by aboriginal worship stones. He relies on Ummu to arrange his vestments and help him with the sacraments while he reviews the Hebrew passages he will recite. William and Thierry attend, too, keeping the crowd back and brushing flies away from the unleavened bread, the karpas vegetables, and the wine.

  As Gianni carries in the chalice on the silver tray with the other ritual items, Rachel takes her seat between Clare and Denis. David, with his prayer shawl over his head, mounts the bimah. The assembly falls to a hush.

  "I am a stranger among you," he begins in his resonant voice. "As a boy, I learned that every stranger is a mystery from God. Yeshua ben Miriam—the Jew we are here to honor today—preached, as the Torah preaches, that we should love others as we love ourselves. In that way, we love the mystery that is God, we love what can be known of God, God's human face, that is Welsh and Norman, Christian and Jewish. Let this house of prayer be the threshold where cruelty ends and love begins."

  Before the wine is consecrated to the gentiles' Messiah, David lifts the goblet from the tray on the table, raises the symbol of joy and gladness to the congregation, to the many mysteries of God—and drinks a toast.

  The congregation applauds, and with the chalice in his hands, David bows. The clapping abruptly pulls away and comes from far off. When he looks up, the people grow dimmer, spiraling down a constricting tunnel. He falls from them. He falls into silence and darkness.

  Rachel leaps from the front pew and reaches David as he collapses to the platform and rolls to his back. He lies in sunlight pouring in from a window, his stare bulging wide, the gaping blindness of his eyes reflecting the sky and a radiant star—a whole blue world suspended in the shadow of the sun.

  Bread of Hawks

  The Grail is our symbol of individual destiny –

  our personal intimacy with the Transcendent.

  Aber the Idiot squats among the shards of broken stone beside the creek, picking up small, flat pieces and skipping them across the water. A nearly round wafer of rock the size of his palm catches his attention. The grainy shadow of a face imprints it. When he lifts the small disk to the sunlight, he perceives that the chiseled scars in the stone reveal with terrifying clarity the dolorous face of Christ.

  Shouting the Ave Maria as he runs, Aber carries the visage in both hands, like a priest with the Host. He falls three times to his knees on his way up Merlin’s Knoll and takes the punishing pain without dropping the icon. At the synagogue, he bursts in, blithering, "Mary Virgin bless us—Mary Virgin bless us—"

  The knights, on their knees before the draped bier, where the rabbi’s body has been laid atop the bimah, stand. Gianni crosses himself when Aber presents him with the image in the stone.

  Denis, Harold, and Gerald crowd closer, awed to silence by the gruesome details of the thorny crown and the woeful eyes. Gerald touches the striated exactitude of the rabbinical beard. With careful deference, they pass the stone wafer among themselves before placing it in the wall niche with the Torah.

  The knights dispatch Aber to bring Maître Pornic, and the knights return to their prayers with renewed fervor.

  -/+

  Afternoon sunlight, mangled by branches and leaves, fills the alcove of the castle garden with bobbing sparks and fiery shadows like the insides of a turning jewel. Madelon sits on a stone bench at the glittering center, hands folded over her stomach. Tears glint at the corners of her eyes, sharp as diamonds.

  Thierry, too, smells the distant rain. He watches sun-shadowed clouds drifting east and guesses showers will arrive by nightfall. The intrigues of his father and uncle bore him. The king fights the French on the Continent, and he wants t
o go and earn honors on the field before winter sends everyone huddling back to their hearths.

  "You're not listening to me," William scolds.

  They sit atop their steeds at the forest’s edge. Having escorted Guy and Roger back to Neufmarche's realm, they have stopped before a swale of willow at the far end of a wide meadow. William has begun instructing Thierry on how to handle the inevitable questions that will arise from the poisoned wine.

  Thierry rocks his head back, annoyed. Denis and Gianni have already interrogated him sternly, but after the death of the rabbi, most of the crowd at the back of the synagogue fled the knoll. The sergeants rounded up many suspects.

  "They will question you again," William insists. "Remember what you told them."

  "I told them nothing, Father."

  "You told them you were too busy keeping gawkers from crowding the canon that you did not see who got close enough to poison the wine."

  "Yes, yes."

  "You do not seem fully aware of our danger, Thierry."

  A perplexed shadow creases the young knight’s brow. "It was only a Jew. We would have been in greater danger had we succeeded and killed the Pretender. The villeins and guildsmen would have suspected Uncle at once."

  "But that would have been Uncle’s danger," William corrects, with a knowing flick of his eyebrows. "If Guy fell to an angry mob, you would become baron, yea, even earl, need I remind you?"

  "You'd have abandoned Uncle?"

  The sincerity of Thierry's surprise angers William. "Loyalty is for dogs, not men. The poison was his idea. We took our risk with it—let him take his. Though now"—he chews the corner of his mustache—"the risk is all ours. The Jew is dead and Uncle and Roger have fled, leaving us to hazard all inquiries on our own."