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‘What’re you a-goin’ta do? Ask them to take pity on you?’ Gemt snorted a laugh through his nose. Maical echoed him back down the line, with no idea what the joke was.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well … it does have an orphanage.’ Burlow rubbed his stubble, folding himself a few more chins.
We made camp a couple of miles back along the road in a copse of twisted elm and alder, thick with the stink of fox. Burlow had decided in his wisdom that I would approach the monastery a little after dawn when they should be finished with matins prayers.
The brothers lit campfires among the trees and Gains took his cauldron from the head-cart to set over the biggest blaze. The night turned mild with cloud unrolling as the gloom thickened. The aroma of rabbit stew started to spread. We were twenty strong or thereabouts. Burlow moved about convincing men to their duties, Sim and Gemt to watch the road, old Elban to sit where the horses were corralled and listen out for wolves.
Brother Grillo began to pick at that five-string harp of his – well his since he took it from a man who could really play it – and somewhere in the dark a high voice ran through the Queen’s Sorrow. Brother Jobe it was who sang that evening. He’d only sing when it got too dark to see much, as if in the blind night he could be another lad in another place and call out the songs they’d taught that boy.
‘You don’t think we should rob St Sebastian’s?’ I asked the darkness.
It spoke back with the depth of the Nuban’s voice. ‘They’re your holy men. Why do you want to steal from them?’
I opened my mouth, then shut it. I had thought I just wanted to build my reputation with my road-brothers and to share out a little of the anger gnawing inside me. More than that though … they were my holy men, these monks in the fortress of their monastery, echoing psalms in its stone halls, carrying golden crosses from chapel to church. They spoke to God and maybe he spoke back, but the wrongs done to me hadn’t even rippled the deep pool of their serenity. I wanted to knock on their door. My mouth might ask for sanctuary, I might play the orphaned child, but truly I would be asking ‘why’? Whatever lay broken inside me had started to wind too tight to be ignored. I would shake the world until its teeth rattled if that was required to have it spit out an answer. Why?
Brother Jobe ended his song.
‘It’s something to do, a place to go,’ I said.
‘I have a place to go,’ the Nuban said.
‘Where?’ If I hadn’t asked he wouldn’t have told. You couldn’t leave a gap long enough that it would force the Nuban to fill it.
‘Home,’ he said. ‘Where it’s warm. When I have enough coin I will go to the Horse Coast, to Kordoba, and take a ship across the narrows. From the port of Kutta I can walk home. It’s a long way, months, but across lands I know, peoples I know. Here though, in this empire of yours, a man like me can’t travel far, not alone, so I wait until fate leads us all south together.’
‘Why did you come here if you hate it so much?’ His rejection stung though it hadn’t been aimed my way.
‘I was brought here. In chains.’ He lay back unseen. I could almost hear the chains as he moved. He didn’t speak again.
Morning stole through the woods pushing a mist ahead of it. I had to leave my knives and short sword with the Nuban. And no breaking my fast. A rumbling stomach would speak on my behalf at the monks’ gate.
‘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.
