The Abbot's Tale

by Conn Iggulden

  I have never known such bright thoughts and hues as when I was fourteen years in the world. I think it would drive me mad to burn so bright now. Perhaps it did, for a time.

  I heard voices below, calling my name. I looked down and saw the smears of lanterns as they searched for me. I had been missed, my bed found empty. I cursed to myself then, knowing I would be beaten. I dared not think I might be sent home. My home was given to my brother Aldan. The foxes have their holes and the birds their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Dunstan too, on that day. I was alone and afraid, slumped against a wooden pole, my legs dangling over nothingness.

  6

  The abbey was a small world in those days. As news spread of the ‘missing’ pupil, I do not think anyone was allowed to rest in their bed. Abbot Clement was bustling all over, calling for lamps. Even Prior Simeon came out, blinking and dazed at having been summoned from his life of contemplation or regret. From the abbot to the lowliest urchin, they were all roused to search.

  I could see their movement by following the firefly trails of lanterns and torches in the mists below. Worse, I could hear my name being called, over and over, in the high double-tone of boys and women, or the gruff voices of monks, already annoyed. They began to sound positively vengeful as the cold bit deeper. I had no idea what time it was, but I knew Matins could not have been far off. Somewhere among the search parties, Brother Caspar would be scowling, or perhaps hiding his delighted anticipation that some terrible calamity had befallen me. No doubt someone was sent down to the little dock, but I knew they would find each boat in place. On a small island in the marsh, they expected to find me.

  I lay back on the wooden planks, despairing. My hand rested on a great pulley of oak, my fingers finding the grooves and pressing into them. It must have been as wide across as my chest, a great heavy thing with four channels, all polished to a shine by beeswax and use. It awoke a light in my imagination and my hand crept across that platform, trembling. I had a plan then. I had a way out.

  Knowing I must not be discovered, I rose slowly to my full height, wincing at every creak of the scaffold. The tower stones were lifted to the top with pairs of these pulleys. Each one was anchored to a scaffold beam with an iron ring, and I began to untie the closest. It was not too long before I had the beam free and swung it out above the grumbling searchers, perhaps a hundred feet over their heads. The mists hid me well, though I hardly breathed, so convinced was I that they would hear me.

  I lifted up the pulley and something clanked, so that I froze, wincing. No voice called from the ground, so I hooked it on and began to pull vast lengths of wet rope hand over hand.

  It was difficult and frustrating, with only touch as my guide. I breathed more easily when the rope grew taut at last. I felt the iron weight shift far below. My delight was in knowledge that would allow me to step onto the air itself without fear.

  That last was not strictly true. I do not think my heart had ever beaten quite as fast before that moment. The pulleys lay one above the other, with the ropes like iron rods. The huge counterweight grazed the grass below. I prayed for a silent descent and waited for the best moment, when no lights shone nearby. I knew I should delay long enough for Matins to sound, drawing them away. As I stood there, I breathed and asked for help from St Jude and St Christopher.

  To my dismay, I heard Abbot Clement announce he would take the brief Matins service himself in the open, so as not to interrupt the search. I leaned out to hear, peering through mist that would surely thin and burn away in the dawn. With no warning, my foot slipped and my life rested in those few, pounding heartbeats. Below me, the counterweight rose and the ropes hissed through the pulleys. I fell, at no great speed, but as I did, someone cried out in wonder at the sight of a boy descending through the whiteness. Other voices snapped questions and instructions, but more than one saw me falling, slow as thistledown.

  I landed on soft turf and tied off the rope. They found me panting and pale, as you might expect. Abbot Clement had been standing on a small mound to address the brothers. He was one of those who had caught a glimpse as I floated down and he looked at me in shock and disbelief. His gaze flickered up to the scaffold, a hundred feet above, and once more to me, unmarked, unbruised, unharmed.

  My first plan had been to get down unseen and then slip away from the area of the scaffold, so that Brother Caspar could not accuse me of disobeying him. I cared nothing for being found anywhere else on the abbey grounds, as long as it was not there. Now, though, I had been seen to descend. As they gathered around me, I could not run, not with the shadow of the scaffold at my back.

  Brother Caspar came through the whispering crowd like an avenging angel, grabbing me so hard by the arm that I cried out.

  ‘See what you have done! What did I say about this place? Not hours ago, I told you not to come here and yet here you are! I will thrash the brazen out of you, with your creature! Come . . .’

  ‘A moment, Brother Caspar,’ Clement said. ‘Unhand the boy, that I may speak to him.’

  Caspar had not seen me descending to earth, I thought. An idea came then.

  I might not have thought of it had they just clipped my ear and sent me back to bed, or marked my name for a thrashing later on, so that I would have had the morning to fear and sweat. Instead, Abbot Clement approached me with an awed expression. The brothers who glanced at him frowned in confusion at the light in his eye, but they took their manner from him and no one handled me as roughly as Caspar had done.

  ‘What has happened here, my son?’ Clement said. I saw raw need in his eyes, like hunger.

  ‘I had a vision, father,’ I said. Even then I might have faltered, if Caspar hadn’t snorted in disgust.

  ‘I told him not to come to the tower . . .’ he began in anger.

  Clement held up his pale hand and the monk rolled his eyes like a child, sulking.

  ‘I saw a great abbey risen from the land around Glastonbury, a collection of towers three times as high as the one here! I flew like a bird to see them all, as if I rode the wind itself.’

  I had closed my eyes, growing louder, as if overcome. I’d seen visionaries before and I’d read lives of the saints. The important thing was not to overdo it. Speaking in great passion with closed eyes is one thing; dribbling or chewing off your own lips is too far. I paused for just a beat, feeling my way.

  ‘I could draw it, even now, before the lines fade from my mind’s sight. Bring me paper and I will mark the outline for you.’

  ‘Clement, the boy is lying to escape a thrashing, that is all,’ Caspar said.

  I ignored him, raising my voice.

  ‘When I came to my senses once again, I was on the tower, high in the mists and afraid, terrified I would be plucked off and thrown down to break on the stones below. I hung there and I saw your torches, but it was as if a hand lay across my mouth and I could not cry out.’

  I looked around and saw that I was the centre of a circle, that everyone had gathered to hear me speak. They made no sound and only stared, though some crossed themselves. It made me bold, that silent audience.

  ‘I heard a whisper in my ear,’ I told them, ‘saying not to be afraid. “Do not be afraid, Dunstan!” I did not dare to look round, but I felt a calm come upon me – and I heard the beating of great, white wings . . .’

  I trailed off, overcome by the memory, carried away by my own telling of it. Now, yes, I admit I did not mention the pulleys, but then all that I am came from God and so my understanding was God’s creation. In a sense, I was carried down. In telling the tale this way, I gave hope and faith to fifty souls that morning. I may have sifted out some of the truth, but the good bread rose even so.

  ‘I was carried down and placed on the ground as softly as a falling feather. I heard the wings beat once again and the angel was gone.’

  I stared into nothingness, awed by my own imagination, until I could almost see the scene they pictured, a boy borne down, cradled in white wings, wrapped all abou
t by an angel’s protection.

  It occurred to me that I might faint, though I was not sure how to go about that. I considered it as a problem and, in my hesitation, Brother Caspar snorted, breaking the spell.

  ‘I told him not to go near this tower just a little earlier! This . . . fantasy is to save him from punishment.’

  I recalled then how the rope had scorched me in my descent. I held up my arm and the crowd took a sharp breath at the red marks on the flesh. It did look a little like the grip of a great hand, I think. Or two stripes of a rope scratching across my forearm.

  ‘This was where he stopped me from falling, his light so great it burned my skin, yet caused no pain.’

  ‘Let us pray!’ Abbot Clement cried in ecstasy.

  We fell to our knees and I saw that only Caspar and Abbot Clement remained standing, the senior man staring coldly at the younger. With ill grace, Caspar dipped down at last, side by side with Encarius. I noticed too that Aphra was there, with her daughter Alice. The girl was staring at me then, bending her swan neck for the abbot’s blessing. I could feel her gaze like a hand on my cheek, though I knew better than to acknowledge it. I saw Wulfric looking at me in awe and astonishment and I was pleased. Pride, you see. It is one of the nastiest little sins we own.

  Abbot Clement blessed my deliverance from peril and thanked God for the intervention of his most holy angel on the unworthy behalf of this most lowly of sinners. I thought that was a bit much, but kept my head down and prayed as earnestly as I could for them all to go back to bed and for it to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

  Well, I have been wrong about a few things in my life, but rarely quite as wrong as I was that day. What followed was like a city market, a great rattle of visits and speeches and quills scratching on vellum as the great and the good were summoned to Glastonbury. I was examined and questioned over and over so that I repeated my story hundreds of times during the next few weeks and months. My lessons resumed, with both Encarius and the other masters, but at any moment I could be summoned away to the abbot’s office to be seated before some dignitary and asked to go through it all again. I memorised the phrases after a time, so that I could repeat them without thought. It is what makes it so hard to write a slightly different account on these pages.

  I did not waver, or change my tale. I understood that if they caught me out, the beatings I’d known before would be as nothing. I feared they would kill me if they learned of the pulleys.

  On that first morning, I’d crept back from my bed after the monks and boys had finally settled once more and were sleeping. Though I was weary unto death, I could not rest for the image of the tied rope that held the counterweight high above the tower scaffold. The masons would hear my story as they began work. I had lost track of the hour, but as I lay there and sweated, I knew it could not be long before they came over from their little camp in the village. They would take one look at the pulleys and the weight and the tied rope and they would laugh and explain exactly what I had done.

  Panic grew in me as that dawn approached, convinced my life was measured in hours. I knew it was madness to creep out again, but the rooms were growing grey and I had no choice. The floor creaked as I moved and I froze each time until I had padded to a door and rested there, my heart beating hard. I waited, listening for the slightest sound.

  For the second time that night, I raced across the yard, ignoring pain from my feet. I found the scaffold by almost breaking my outstretched fingers on a beam, but could not curse aloud. It was a matter of moments to undo that rope and pass it through my aching hands until the iron block rested on the ground once again.

  I was back in my bed just moments later, all doors closed behind me, panting hard and chill with dew, but exultant. No voice had cried out in anger or suspicion. I knew I had dust and scrapes on my bare feet and bruises almost everywhere else, but I was safe and they would never break me. I smiled in the darkness. I did not know I had been seen for a long time.

  I cannot say I minded my new notoriety as the year unfolded after that. Though I was questioned by two bishops and an earl, I saw in them the same awe and hope as in Abbot Clement. Faith is hard work. In me, they saw a chance to lay down that burden of unknowing – and simply know. They trembled as they took my hand in theirs, wanting to believe it had known the touch of wings. By telling them it had, I gave them something of value in their lives. I cannot regret it.

  My days and my lessons continued. Encarius examined the marks on my arm for an age, but he could not say with certainty that they were not the mark of an angel’s palm. I think he had his doubts, but perhaps like me, he understood the world needs faith. Without it, believe me, it is a foul, cruel place.

  Brother Caspar certainly did his best to make it so. Over the next months, it was rare for me to be brought out to meet some benefactor or man of the Church without being forced to stand in their presence, unable to sit on the welts that marked me. That vicious monk dared not call me a liar again, not once I had the prior and the abbot on my side – not with all the grand men and women who came to Glastonbury to meet the child carried by an angel! Yet he wore his disbelief in his anger.

  He did not try to hide his punishments. I think if he had, I might have sought help from one of the gentler monks. No, I was beaten raw in full sight of Abbot Clement, of Encarius and Masters Florian and Gregory, Brother John in the gardens, Guido of the boats, my brother, the other boys of all ages, and, of course, the grinning Godwin. The prior’s son always sidled around to the best viewpoint while Caspar laid on with his switch, just so I would know he was there.

  Caspar laid stripes upon half-healed stripes until I was a patchwork. He flogged as if he wanted to murder me but had been given only a stick to accomplish his desire. Twice he drew my fits out, and the second time I bit my tongue, so that blood ran freely down my chin.

  Encarius made a soothing balm for my wounds that helped to ease them as they healed. He applied it, tutting and whistling to himself. He muttered to me then that he had complained to Prior Simeon, as one who had responsibility for the discipline of the monks and staff. Nothing changed, however. Getting a beating was common enough, though not as often or as savagely as I endured. The other monks just assumed I’d cheeked Brother Caspar, or had committed some boyish foulness that brought his wrath down upon me.

  We were constantly accused of ‘dark desires’ then, I remember. I confess I suffered with one or two. A linen bag of goose fat hung on the infirmary door, to help ease ordinary cuts and scrapes. I heard a rumour that Aphra would dip her whole arm into it if you were tormented, then work it back and forth between your thighs until you’d found release. She was a big, pale woman and had enormous breasts and forearms like white hams. My dreams grew quite fevered for a time after I heard that.

  The strangest part of that year was that I grew used to being flogged – and more and more determined not to let Caspar see he had hurt or humiliated me. If he told me to place my flat palms on a wall, I made no complaint or sound as he laid on with his switch for whatever error I had made that day. At the end, I would smile and thank him, then carry on. I saw his frustration and it was my only reward for that stubbornness – but almost worth it. My polite thanks seemed worse than hot coals on his skin, at least for the colour it made him. As I say, I learned a great deal in my years at the abbey. Those who follow Christ have always seen value in resistance to pain, the triumph of the will over weak flesh. Some monks flog themselves, they are so delighted with the idea. It is quite difficult to punish those men, I’ve found.

  My weakness was my brother, as it had always been. When I found my buttocks and back had grown leathery with scars, when I had developed just the right gentle and amused manner to infuriate Brother Caspar, he turned his attentions to Wulfric as well.

  In class, he sneered and mocked us both. The boys who wished to earn his favour were not slow to understand. They began with pranks: breaking my slate, or stealing Wulfric’s clothes so that he had to appear at lessons
in his sleeping shift. Every day brought some new insult to keep me simmering. They drove me further than I would otherwise have gone.

  When a master’s ring went missing from his cell and was found in Wulfric’s bed, it should have been clear to the meanest of them that his shock was real. Yet Caspar stepped forward anyway and bore him off, wailing. Wulfric spent the next two days in the infirmary, lying face down. I do not know if Mother Aphra used goose fat on his marks.

  It was a campaign against me. I sensed early on that they would not give up unless I made them, so I began to play the game. Brother Caspar raged and ranted when he found his satchel filled with turds, all across his precious papers. I looked as shocked as the others and took pride in hiding my delight from his immediate suspicion.

  I particularly enjoyed stealing the abbot’s silver inkwell and leaving it in Caspar’s office in plain view. I had hoped to have him dismissed, but it vanished before the abbot even missed it, returned to his desk by some unseen hand. My enemies were alert by then and the whole abbey and school seemed in a state of war, at least as I saw it. It could not go on. Under the movement of such great forces, oak blocks will break; hemp ropes will snap.

  7

  Over that spring and summer, I learned the ways of a forge. There were only two then in the whole abbey, one large and one small bloomery that was almost a workshop size, though it was the one I came to think of as ‘mine’. Encarius showed me the basics, taking me out to the forests to cut wood, showing me how to stack and dry it in our barns there, how to bake it to the charcoal we needed to reach high temperatures. Alexander the Great never knew the heat we reached with our little brick kiln. We could make iron run, yellow as a pale rose, with air forced in from bellows. Beat by beat, burned and scratched, watching my own sweat sizzle on golden metal, I learned to make simple square carpentry nails by the hundred, mastering the first skills, the anvil and the hammer. The abbey cat made its home in the warmth of that forge, spending days purring there while I worked. He was not mine, nor anyone’s, but I would smile at him and saved some scraps of food until he came to my hand to be stroked.