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I didn’t let it bother me. I’d seen bishops before. Well two. Bishop Simon who ministered at Our Lady in Crath City, and Bishop Ferr who replaced Simon when the angels dragged him off one cold night. Even so I’d wait and have a look-see at this third one. He might have treasures in his carriage that would keep my road-brothers happy. If the other boys had found something better to occupy them, good luck.
‘He’s the grandson of the Duke of Belpan, you know?’ Arthur said.
‘The bishop?’
He nodded. I shrugged. Abbots in an order bound to simple living and hard labour might work their way up from an orphan’s box abandoned on the doorstep. Bishops in their velvets and palatial residences tended to have been placed there for safe-keeping by powerful relatives, having been plucked from the outer branches of some illustrious family.
It took a while. The torches had started to gutter and the compline bell threatened when at last we saw the procession, armed riders at the front, priests walking, the papal carriage creaking along behind two plough-horses, more clerics trudging behind and finally two more mailed riders with the holy cross in red atop white tabards.
The carriage jolted along the road, halting with its door between the double line of torches that formed a corridor to the chapterhouse’s grand entrance. The driver of the carriage, a goblin of a man with grey and bushy brows, sat motionless, his pair with their heads down, snorting occasionally like oxen. The grandest of the three priests preceding the carriage came to open the door and to lend Bishop Murillo his arm, although the man seemed unlikely to need it. He squeezed from the gloomy confines, his bulk strained against the purple of his cassock. Once out he reached back in and took the mitre offered from the shadows. I hadn’t thought there room for a second passenger. Murillo jammed the hat onto his head, the sweat on his tight black curls immediately soaking into the red band around its base. He stood straight, hands in the small of his back, thrusting that belly. I half expected an enormous belch from his fleshy mouth, but instead he growled and stamped toward the monastery. The head priest and two men-at-arms followed close behind. Although fat, the bishop had a restless energy about him. He reminded me of a boar hunting a scent. A little of Burlow too. His eyes found Orscar, then me, as he reached the door. He smiled at us, a convulsion of the lips, and muttered something to the closer guard before vanishing within.
The bishop’s mass kept us from our beds, a droning affair of Latin prayers in the crowded church hall. We orphans stood scattered amongst the monks and saw little but the backs of tonsured heads. Holy or not, monks are an unwashed lot. The old brother ahead of me made frequent releases of evil smells that the rope around his habit could not restrain. He had two fat ticks behind his ear – the image stays with me, two bloated purple pearls.
At last, communion, and the long queue to be dismissed. At the head of the line I saw Abbot Castel take offered cup and drink from its gilt bowl.
‘The blood of Christ,’ the serving priest intoned under the bishop’s watchful eye.
Wine. At least it wasn’t to be a dry wafer.
We shuffled forward slower than a candle burns its length. In the queue I noted again that most of the orphans were missing, only Orscar stood before me, and somewhere back along the line, Arthur.
I saw the abbot, waiting in the shadows of the wall, as we approached the altar. He had the look of an unwilling conscript gathering himself to draw steel and to fling himself into battle. The bishop in his finery shot Castel a vicious glance. Soft and fat he might be, but another life could have put the bishop amongst my road-brothers, red in tooth and claw. Another life would just have made Castel a different kind of victim to men such as Rike and Row and Liar.
Three more monks until our turn. Two more. One. Orscar stepped up, thirsty for communion wine. The orphans normally got the body not the blood. And, quicker than I had thought he could, the abbot strode forward, swept the boy up, and bore him from the church. Orscar, made mute by surprise and by the speed of his abduction, didn’t manage even a yelp before the door to the chapterhouse swung shut behind them. Every other person in the great hall of the church held still, watching the door until the echoes of its closing died away. Murillo, already red in the face, shaded to purple. Another heartbeat of silence and then the bishop looked my way, furious for reasons I couldn’t fathom. He stamped the heel of his crook to the floor. The priest, silver thread tracing the scarf that draped the black velvet of his gown, fixed cold eyes upon me and held out the communion cup, almost empty now. I drank, and the wine was bitter.
More monks, more filing past, more drinking, as we stood and waited. The wine still burned my tongue, as if they had fermented gall rather than grapes. A lethargy rose through me, from the cold stone of the floor, through leg and belly until my thoughts swam in it and the drone of liturgy lost its meaning. And finally, with the witching hour behind us, the bishop spoke those words all children long for in any mass.
‘Ite, missa est.’ You are dismissed.
I staggered on the way to the door, catching at a monk’s arm for support. He shook me off, a stony look on his face, as if I were diseased. The church stretched and squashed, the walls and pillars dancing like reflections on a pond.
‘What?’ I tasted the bitterness again and my tongue ran out of words. My hands sought the knife that should have been on my belt. My hands knew the danger.
‘Jorg?’ I heard Arthur’s voice, saw him bundled away by the monk with the ticks and foul stinks.
Somehow I came to the doors that led outside, and leaned on them. Cold night air would help. They gave, opening by degrees, and I slipped through. Strong arms wrapped me. One of Murillo’s men-at-arms. A black hood, taking away the world, throttling hands. I threw my head back and heard a nose break. And fell into a confusion without up or down, without sight, straining against bonds, and drowning, choking, retching in the dark.
Memory gives me only pieces of the time spent in the bishop’s chambers, but those pieces are clear and razor-edged. I had never fought Katherine when she pulled me into nightmare. Now I fought her as she tried to leave. I fought her as I drew each part of those broken memories through the channel she had opened – like Brother Hendrick and his Conaught spear, I didn’t care if they tore me, so long as she felt some fraction of it too.
The smell of Murillo, perfume and sweat. The corrupt softness of his bulk. The strength that twisted my limbs until they creaked, until the pain reached me through the fog of whatever drug the wine had hidden, and tore thin screams past the gag. I made Katherine watch and share, made her share the pollution, the crude stink of his lust, the delight he took in his power, the horror of being helpless. I let her hear his grunting. I made her understand how dirt can get inside you, too deep to be scrubbed out, too deep to be bled out, perhaps too deep even to be burned out. I showed her how that stain can spread, back across the years turning all a child’s memories to rot and filth, out across a future, taking all colour and direction.
I kept her with me, lying soaked in blood and filth and pain, bound, blindfold, sick with the drug and yet clinging to it for fear of the clarity a clear head would bring.
I won’t say rage kept me alive. Those poisoned hours offered no escape, nothing so tempting as dying, but perhaps if I could have slid away into death, if it had been an option, then my anger might have been the thing to keep me back. As the drug faded from me and focus returned, a need for revenge started to build, quickly eclipsing all minor desires such as escape, the easing of pain, or the need to breathe.
