11
Him
Bisclavret has not been alone with a priest since his mother died.
Now, fatigued from another journey delayed by rain and poor roads, is not the time he would have chosen to change that. They gave him a chance to bathe and eat, but sleep, it seems, must wait until this is done, for he had no rest at all before they bundled him into the chapel for this testing of his faithfulness.
There was no time even to greet the king; he hasn’t seen him since before he left for his journey. Though perhaps that’s for the best. The way the king looks at him – it flays him, lays him bare. He feels known, in a way he’s not sure he’s comfortable being known. There is something unsafe about those looks. He doesn’t believe for a minute that the king would act in any way that might harm him, but the power of that knowing threatens to violate his sense of self, of boundaries, of what will bring him peace and what will unmake him.
Every time he meets the king’s gaze, he’s half certain the other man can see the wolf there, lurking behind his eyes. One day, the king will know him for what he is, and the threat of it is terrifying – and exhilarating. He can do nothing but hide from it.
In that respect, being confiscated by the castle chaplain is awelcome reprieve from a reunion he wasn’t ready for. In other respects, it is . . . harder.
The chaplain asks, ‘Do you speak your prayers, son?’ and for the span of a heartbeat, Bisclavret almost tells the truth:yes, every time my body warps in on itself I beg to be allowed to die. Instead, he hesitates, and the chaplain’s brow creases into a frown. ‘I am not expecting you to keep the hours, but this should not be a difficult question to answer.’
‘I pray,’ Bisclavret interrupts. He doubts the chaplain will send word to his mother’s estate to confirm his attendance at Mass, but in any case he has missed few services, though often his mind wanders and his prayers echo more the desperate pleas of his heart than the words of the priest:Lord, I will endure this if you give me the good days, the human days, the memory of having hands.The wolf has kept him from the church on occasion, he cannot deny that, but if the Almighty forgives a shepherd who shuns the Eucharist to mind his flock then perhaps He might extend the same grace to a broken man tending the animal that lives in his skin.
‘You will keep your vigil, nonetheless,’ says the chaplain, ‘whether or not the king thinks it necessary.’
This has the air of an old disagreement, and one to which he was not privy. ‘I have no objections to that,’ he says, which is not entirely true, for he can feel the wolf ache in his bones even now, and a night alone in the chapel carries little appeal. He hopes only that it remains an ache and nothing more until all of this is over, but it would be a lie to say he has not imagined them dressing him in armour only for the wolf to burst out of it, splintering the mail into tiny useless fragments. It seems strange, after all, that he might be allowed another skin when he already has two of his own. ‘It will not be the first night I have spent alone with God.’
The chaplain gives him a small smile. ‘Then this will be no hardship. I will hear your Confession first, and we will take the Eucharist together.’
Confession. It will not bring him peace nor cleanse him of his demons, and in recent years he has all but abandoned the practice, letting months elapse without absolution. How, after all, can he name his sins, the acts he commits when not in his own skin? Is it even truly a sin for an animal to give in to rage and hunger? He doesn’t see the birds and beasts trooping to the confessional.
But he cannot make excuses now, so Bisclavret bows his head obediently and speaks the familiar words, faltering only when he comes to articulating his transgressions.
‘I have told lies, Father,’ he says finally. ‘Not because I wanted to, but because I believed it was safest that way. That the truth would hurt others, as well as myself.’
The chaplain eyes him keenly. ‘Have you lied to the king?’ he asks.
Bisclavret would not think it a confessor’s place to ask such questions, but he supposes it is a little different, when you are confessor to a king and your penitent is about to be knighted. He has to stop and consider the question for a moment:hashe lied to the king? Not in as many words. The king has not said to him,Come, Bisclavret, tell me, are you wolf-sick? And he has offered no false explanations for his nature. If he has told a lie, it has only been a lie of omission.
‘No,’ he says at last, content that this is an honest enough answer. ‘I have never lied to the king.’
The chaplain nods. ‘Have you anything else to confess?’
There are few enough opportunities for sin, living alone in exile. There are few neighbours whose possessions he might covet, few married women with whom he might wish to commitadultery. He knows that in his wolf’s shape he has taken animals from fields in the dead of night, but he has tried where he can to compensate those losses, if they are not his own beasts that he takes.
He says, ‘Sometimes I am guilty of the sin of despair.’
The chaplain looks at him. ‘Tell me what is in your heart, my son.’
My son. The word carries no weight, spoken by a priest who is father to all, but it brings a lump to his throat regardless. Has anyone ever addressed him that way? His mother would call him by name, when she acknowledged him at all; his father never had the chance to call him anything –and the better for him that way,his mother used to say,that he never had the shame of seeing you.
He swallows. ‘Sometimes I think it would be better if I were not alive.’ He sees the look on the chaplain’s face and adds, ‘I have not . . . I would not attempt self-murder. I know well enough the teachings on the matter and I’ve no interest in damnation, and besides which, I maintain a stubborn hope that better days may yet come.’ He has been human for days now. Weeks, in fact; the wolf may have tinged the edges of his long journey home, but he has not slipped from his skin since that first night at the castle. Maybe he is recovering from this bout of weekly transformations, and will know peace for a few months. ‘But still it is hard to avoid the darkness when it creeps in, and it brings with it doubt.’
‘You struggle with faith,’ says the chaplain, not exactly a question.
‘I struggle to see the Lord at work when everywhere I turn I see the shadow of the Adversary.’ He doesn’tthinkthis is heresy, but he avoids meeting the chaplain’s eyes anyway, in case he has never known what it is to wrestle with God. ‘I havea condition, Father. It is . . . it is akin to madness, though it seldom lasts more than a single night when it comes. I am like a sleepwalker, wandering the woods, lost to myself. It frightens me to realise how little control I have over my own body and mind, and sometimes I lack hope that I will ever recover that power. At other times I’m not sure I have ever had it at all.’
‘And that brings you to doubt the Lord’s goodness?’
‘It brings me to despair.’ Bisclavret looks down at his hands. ‘It feels like I will live my life always as though sleepwalking, never one thing nor another – not sane nor a lunatic, not a child nor a man, never fully grasping anything. I have remained in exile because it is easier there to be unmade and not have it witnessed.’
He is confessing everything and nothing at the same time. He waits for the chaplain to give him that sharp-eyed look and ask if there is more to his condition than he is saying.
He does not. He says, ‘It is difficult, when our health is not our own, to hold fast to trust in the Lord.’ There is new sympathy in his expression. ‘I have struggled myself with pain, of a kind which neither physicians nor prayer can fully banish. We are told that the Almighty has plans for us, to prosper us and not to harm us, but it is hard to fathom how any plan can involve such suffering. I have felt this same despair, this loss of self that comes from the absence of control.’
