The Orphan King (Merlin's Immortals)

by Brouwer, Sigmund

  Over the past week, he’d used his mind and all his other resources to make the plans that, in the cool silence of the cave where he often hid from the monks, seemed to have no flaw. In the world of his dreams, he could picture himself as the hero, overcoming every obstacle set in his path. In those dreams, fear did not exist. In those dreams, matters of the mind triumphed over matters of the heart. In those dreams, intellect conquered emotion.

  Outside the cave, however, was the real world of cold and hunger, of sheriffs and soldiers armed with crossbows and swords, of dark forests and narrow roads where every corner might hide roaming bandits eager to prey upon the weak. Of a castle with impregnable defenses.

  Beneath the trees and the rustling leaves just outside the sanctuary of the cave, Thomas would feel the fear that did not exist inside the cave, knowing those all-too-real dangers should force him to reconsider the boldness of the plans. Even so, it was more than a lack of courage that gave him doubts.

  He was an orphan. When Sarah had died, he had lost the last of his family. He had only memories of her, and questions about the father and the older brother and sister who had been taken from him before there could be memories. Pitiful as the children were who clung to their mothers outside the gates, they had something Thomas did not. A true sense of belonging.

  Thomas had a shadow of this feeling, enough to identify the source of what made him ache during his loneliest moments. Inside the abbey, despite the abuse heaped upon him, Thomas was still part of a group, with rituals and the familiarity of what to expect each day. He had a bed, miserable as the straw ticking was, and a room of his own.

  This was a comfort of sorts, enough to hint at what it might feel like to be part of a real family, loved and secure. As it was, he did belong to this group, even if the men in this group were arrogant and unkind and treated him with more disdain than they did the livestock. It was one thing to be lonely—he could endure this because he had no choice. It was another thing to be alone.

  Could he find the courage to make the choice to become alone?

  To flee the abbey would not only force him to risk his life on a plan that seemed to contain too many obstacles to succeed, but it would also cast him into the unknown, out into the world where he would not have even the certainty of knowing where he would rest each night. Compared to that, the occasional beating from Prior Jack did not seem like such a poor bargain.

  The truth was simple. He was more afraid of being alone than of failing. The combination of the two fears was almost overwhelming.

  Thomas wasn’t certain he could find the courage to flee the abbey, even after he’d learned through that letter about the injustice of his imprisonment among the monks.

  If his courage failed him, he would regret it until he died. For at dawn the next day, a certain knight would be executed by hanging. And this was the man that destiny had promised him.

  Which led Thomas to another question.

  Did he have the courage to turn his back on destiny?

  It did not remain a typical evening.

  As Thomas reached to take the empty plate in front of Prior Jack, the fat man grabbed the collar of Thomas’s tunic and yanked Thomas downward with such unexpected violence that his face slammed into a pile of chicken bones beside Prior Jack’s plate.

  “I did not see you in the garden today,” Prior Jack said with a chilling calmness.

  At impact with the table, one of the discarded chicken bones had snapped on the point of his jaw, and Thomas felt a sharp pain where the jagged edge cut through his skin. He blinked against the pain, the rough wood of the table a blur beneath his eyes.

  “Jack, I doubt that kind of intimidation is needed,” came the voice of an older monk, Philip.

  “He’s a fully grown man,” Jack answered in the permanent wheeze that resulted from his gross fatness, a state that also forced him to waddle sideways through most of the abbey’s narrower doorways. “He needs to be taught again and again that his size doesn’t matter when it comes to disobeying us. I believe he should be flogged.”

  Thomas did not move. He could not move. Prior Jack was massive. Thomas was in an unbalanced position, something that a bully like Prior Jack undoubtedly knew. By the tone of the man’s voice, Thomas could picture Prior Jack’s eyes as pinpoints of black hatred almost hidden in rolls of flesh.

  Once, on a sweltering summer day, Thomas had heard splashing in the pond behind the abbey. He’d crept closer and seen Prior Jack waist-deep in the water. So wide and blubbery were the rolls of stark white fat that Thomas could barely recognize the shape of a man beneath the boulder-shaped head.

  Not that fatness was unfashionable. On the contrary; it was a status symbol. Only the rich could afford it. Most peasants suffered from continuous hunger and considered themselves fortunate each day to eat more than a bowl of thin cabbage soup and some slices of black wholemeal bread, never with butter. Yet Prior Jack took advantage of the distance of Harland Moor Abbey from the mother abbey, becoming a tyrant in relentless pursuit of his gluttony.

  “Our soil is poor enough as it is,” Prior Jack explained to the others, keeping Thomas’s head firmly pinned against the chicken bones. Thomas felt warmth on his chin. His own blood. “If he continues to neglect the garden, fall harvest might only last until January.”

  Yes, Thomas thought, because the monks eat five meals a day.

  “More to the point,” Prior Jack said, “is the question of where Thomas goes. I demand an answer.”

  It is not the mind that drives a man, but emotion. For all his worry about whether he’d find the courage to flee, in the end it was anger that tipped Thomas toward his own destiny.

  He’d been humiliated by these men daily, but this time, the snapping of the chicken bones snapped something inside him. Nobody deserved to be stooped over a table, face pressed into the discards of another man’s meal.

  “Prior Jack,” Thomas said through gritted teeth as he reached into his shirt with his right hand. “You are a fat, obscene pig.” Thomas pulled his hand free. “If you don’t let go, this knife will slice lard off you in strips.”

  He jabbed the blade into the fat man’s side, knowing it pierced skin and the first layer of fat.

  Prior Jack yelped and let go.

  Thomas straightened and pulled his knife free from Prior Jack. The tip ran red with blood. Thomas wiped the blade against his sleeve and pointed the knife at Prior Jack’s face.

  “Any move at all from any of you,” Thomas said, “and I stab out his eyes.”

  He felt exultant. Perhaps that had been his reluctance to flee—not a lack of courage but the need to be openly defiant. Slipping out in the night while the monks were drunk would have shown his fear of them. But to threaten these bullies at knifepoint was an act of rebellion that would not allow turning back. Effectively, he’d just become an outlaw. Escape was not an option; it was a necessity.

  He was ready; he was strong.

  Prior Jack rattled a gasp from his overworked lungs. “How dare you threaten me! I am a man of God!”

  Thomas took a deep breath and spoke words that erupted from years of supplication to these loathsome men.

  “You? A man of God? First convince me that God exists. Then convince me you’re a man, not a spineless pig of jelly. And finally, if God does exist, prove to me that you actually follow Him instead of preaching one thing and doing another.”

  The fat monk’s cheeks bulged in horror. How astounding it must have seemed; for years Thomas had formed his defiance through simple silence.

  This horror added to Thomas’s sense of freedom. Like steel revealed behind a falling cloth, it was if he’d suddenly discovered he was no longer a scrawny boy but that his corded muscles had taken him into manhood. If there was irony in this rebellion, it was that all the unending work forced upon him had built those muscles.

  The knife in his right hand did not waver.

  Prior Jack dropped his voice to an unusual strained wheeze. “Put the knife away. Im
mediate penitence may spare your soul after such blasphemy. Or these men will stop you immediately.”

  Dust danced between them, red and blue in the light beams from a stained-glass window on the west side of the corridor. It reminded Thomas that the sun was at a sharp angle. Eventide would be upon him soon.

  His plan must work. But first he must get past this detestable bully and the three other monks. Would he actually murder to obtain his freedom?

  The others stared at him, their shaved heads faintly pink.

  “The boy has lost his mind,” Prior Jack whined to them. “He is threatening to kill me. Do something!”

  Monk Walter, gaunt and gray, frowned. “Put the knife down, boy. Now. And you will only be whipped as punishment. If not, you will lose your hand.”

  Thomas knew that was no idle threat. Peasants had had their hands cut off for simple crimes like theft. To threaten members of the clergy was unimaginable.

  “Tonight,” Thomas said calmly instead of dropping the knife, “is the night you set me free from this hole that is hell on earth. Furthermore, you will send me on my way with provisions for a week and also three years’ wages.”

  “Impertinent dog,” squeaked Monk Philip. Tiny and shrunken, he quickly looked to the others for approval. “You owe us the best years of your life. Few abbeys in this country would have taken in scum like you and raised you as we did.”

  “As a slave?” Thomas countered. He lifted his knife higher, and they kept their distance. “Since I was old enough to lift a hoe, you sent me to the garden. When I cried because of raw blisters, you cuffed me on the head and withheld my food. Your filth—dirty, stinking clothing and the slop of your meals—I’ve cleaned every day for seven years. In the winter, I chopped wood in the mornings while you slept indoors, too cheap to give me even a shawl for my blue shoulders.”

  Monk Frederick rose on his toes and pointed at Thomas. His greasy face turned red with indignation. “We could have thrown you to the wolves!”

  Thomas spat at their feet. “Listen to me, you old, feeble men.” He felt a surge of hot joy. The moment was right; he knew without doubt. The hesitation that had filled him with agony had disappeared.

  “Listen,” Thomas repeated, ready to reveal he’d found the letter in the archives, the one that Sarah promised was there. “You did not take me in as charity. You took me in because the prior at Rievaulx ordered that you care for me and the nurse.”

  Even now, Thomas had to pretend Sarah had been nothing more than that, a nursemaid. He continued the fiction, fully aware of the price Sarah paid to keep them hidden. “The prior did so because my parents were not peasants as you have tried to lead me to believe. My father was a mason, a builder of churches, and left behind enough money to pay for my education.”

  No, he’d been a man sacrificed beneath a full moon. By men that Thomas would hunt and destroy.

  Thomas continued. “Yet you took advantage of the distance from the abbey at Rievaulx, and instead of providing an education, you used me as a slave.”

  Monk Philip glanced wildly at the other three. “He cannot know that,” he sputtered.

  “No?” Thomas’s voice grew ominous. As he spoke, he saw by the reactions of the monks how much strength he had carefully hidden from them, and to his surprise, from himself. Thomas let his tone grow cold, and he spoke quietly enough to make them strain for every savage word. “The letters you leave carelessly about speak plainly to me. I’ve read every report—every false report—that you have sent to the prior at Rievaulx, including the first one, which affirms that you are doing the Christian duty to me that you were charged to do. Bah!” Thomas made his contempt plain. “I wish I was half as content as you have made him believe.”

  Monk Walter shook his head. “You cannot read. That is a magic, a gift the clergy give to very few.”

  Thomas ignored him. “Furthermore, I have written in clear Latin a long letter that details the history of this abbey over the last years. I have also transcribed the letter into French, with that copy reserved for the Earl of York.”

  “Thomas writes too?” gasped Monk Philip. “Latin and French?”

  “These letters are in the hands of a friend in the village. Unless I appear tonight to ask for them back, he will deliver them to the mother abbey. All of you will be defrocked and sent penniless among the same peasants you have robbed for years.”

  “It’s a bluff,” Prior Jack declared. “If we all move at once, we can lay hold of him and deliver him to the sheriff—for hanging.”

  Time ebbed heartbeat by heartbeat in the stillness of the abbey.

  Thomas held up his hand, and the sudden motion checked any rash action. “Monk Frederick. Your accounting of the wool taken from the sheep that I guarded night after night. Will it bear close scrutiny when the prior at Rievaulx sends men to examine the records? Or will they discover you have been keeping one bag of wool for every ten sold and turning the profit into gold for yourself?”

  Frederick’s face grew white.

  “Don’t worry,” Thomas said. “The strongbox you have hidden in the hollow of a tree behind the pond is safe. But empty of your gold. That has been given to my friend in the village as payment to hold my letters, a payment that will be distributed among the poor whom you have failed so badly to comfort.”

  The other monks swiveled their heads to stare at Frederick.

  “I see,” Thomas said. “The gold was a secret.”

  A growl from Prior Jack proved the statement true.

  “Prior Jack,” Thomas snorted. “Tending to your dishes after each meal made my task very easy. The letter also details the food you consume in a single month. I’m sure the prior at Rievaulx will be disappointed to discover that you slobber down nearly four hundred eggs from full moon to full moon. Over fifty pounds of flour. Three lambs. And a side of beef. It will explain, of course, why this abbey has not made a harvest contribution to the mother abbey in five years.”

  Prior Jack’s cheeks wobbled with rage.

  “Tut, tut,” Thomas cautioned. “Anger, like work, may strain your heart.”

  “Enough,” Monk Walter said.

  “Enough? Is it because you dread to hear what that letter reports of you?”

  The lines of Monk Walter’s face drew tight. “You shall get the provisions you demand.”

  “This means, I take it, that your fellow monks don’t know your secret vice?”

  “You will also receive three years’ wages,” Monk Walter said.

  “He’s a male witch,” Thomas announced to the other three. “A practicing warlock. Potions, magic chanting, and the sacrifice of animals at midnight.”

  The other three monks recoiled from Monk Walter.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Thomas said. “He’s quite harmless. I’ve heard him sobbing into his pillow from failure more times than I care to recall.”

  In the renewed silence, they could only stare at one another. Four monks in shabby brown. A full-grown boy with enough calm hatred to give him strength.

  Thomas was the first to break the silence. “I will take my wages in silver or gold. Have it here before the sun is down, along with the provisions. Or I shall demand four years’ wages instead.”

  They hesitated.

  “Go on,” Thomas said. “I’ll keep my word and have the letters returned when I have escaped safely.”

  They rose from the table and scurried as he’d commanded; even before rounding the corner of the hall, they’d already begun heated arguing and accusations.

  Shortly after, the last rays of sun warmed the stained glass as Monk Walter and Monk Philip strode back to Thomas in the dining hall.

  Monk Walter held out an oily leather bag. “Cheese, bread, and meat,” he said. “Enough to last you ten days.”

  Monk Philip tossed Thomas a much smaller sack. “Count it,” he said. “Two years in silver. Another year in gold.”

  Thomas regarded them steadily. Where was the fear with which they had departed barely a half-hour
earlier? Why the gleam of triumph behind Monk Walter’s eyes?

  “Thank you,” Thomas said as the comforting weight of both sacks dragged on his arms. Yet he did not leave. An unease he could not explain filled him.

  “Go on, boy,” Monk Walter sneered in the gathering darkness of the hall.

  Still Thomas waited. Unsure.

  Monk Philip gazed at the rough stones beneath his feet. “In the letter,” he mumbled, “what have you to tell the prior at Rievaulx about me?”

  Thomas suddenly felt pity. The tiny man’s shoulders were bowed with weariness and guilt.

  “Nothing to damn you,” he said gently. “Nothing to praise you. As if you merely stood aside all these years.”

  “You show uncanny wisdom for a boy,” Monk Philip choked out, his head still low. When he straightened, he made no effort to hide tears. “Perhaps that is the worst of all, not to make a choice between good or evil. I’m old now. I can barely hear, yet the slightest noise wakens me from troubled sleep. My bones are brittle and I’m afraid of falling, even from the steps to the chapel. The terrifying blackness of death is too soon ahead of me, and all I am to the God who waits is an empty man who has only pretended to be in His service.”

  “Quit your blathering,” Monk Walter said between clenched teeth. “Send the boy on his way. Now!”

  Monk Philip clamped his jaw as if coming to a decision. “Not to his death. Nor shall I go meet God without attempting some good.” He drew a lungful of air. “Thomas, leave alone the—”

  Monk Walter crashed a fist into the tiny man’s mouth. The blow drove Monk Philip’s head into a square stone that jutted from the wall. He collapsed to his knees without a moan. He smiled once at Thomas, struggled to speak, then toppled to the floor and did not move.

  Thomas felt a chill. What had Philip been trying to say?

  “Spawn of the devil,” Monk Walter hissed at Thomas. “Your soul will roast in hell.”

  Thomas said nothing and rested the bag of food on his shoulder. He took half a step away, then turned to deliver a promise.

  “Monk Walter,” he began with quiet deadliness, guessing suddenly the reason for Philip’s death, “if indeed there is such a place as hell, your soul will be there much sooner than mine.”