The Priest of Blood (2 page)

I write this from my tomb, in the present century, having lived (in the way that I live, which is not living but not dead) for these hundreds of years. I have lost some of my provincial touch, the air of the peasant boy, the uncouth youth who spoke in crude, barely decipherable phrases, the child of a mud-and-thatch hut that I once thought of as a cottage, as home, without education, without a hope in Hell, as it were. Should I lapse from the tale, or forget a detail of history, you will forgive such ignorance, for too many years have passed from my birth to this date, and I remember it as if through my current sensibility.

I picked up my language from the past hundred years or so. I did not learn the art of writing my name until I was nearly three hundred years old. My education—at the great universities of mankind and among ancient profane documents hidden in caves from the eyes of man—did not begin until the last days of the nineteenth century. Laggard schoolboy that I am, it was not until the twentieth century that I comprehended the vastness of this world, of its literature, of the inventions of man, and the passing and rebirth of the Gods in this, the forest of those who hunt in the dark.

My understanding, also, is of this new age. The past is a territory of mirrors and tricks of light. Should I fail in my depiction of the battles in the Holy Land or the chateaux of my home country, then so be it. It has been too many years, and memory piles upon memory. And yet, of the truth of it, I remember all. And the smells, the tastes, the touches of those whose lives were intertwined with mine. I write of the history of the soul. There are history books you may consult, though most of them lie. But if you wish to know the date of battles, or the banner flown by a knight, or the ins and outs of the strategies that toppled the Holy Land then untoppled it later, I suggest you find a history of my first century of life. There are maps. There are treasures locked up in museums. There are tombs. There are accounts of the kings and dukes of the world, as they affected the politics and legends of their eras. Some of the history is true, some of it false, and most of it hidden.

There were greater wars than human wars, greater races than the mortal, and greater histories than those of the kings of men.

So I will write as well as I can of all that I remember, beginning with the road that led me to the Priest of Blood.

Blood is my sustenance, and my glory, but I am not its priest. I am but a servant of the Veil and its creation; a man who was then reborn of the Great Serpent in his nineteenth year.

Since you asked, I will tell of such things as my immortal life has experienced. I will show you the great Temple of Lemesharra and of the Netherworld called Alkemara, and the towering citadels of the Veil itself and, yes, its murky inhabitants, as well as the abominations known to many as the Myrrydanai, those plague-bearers born from the corrupt wombs of the Chymers. I will tell you of flights across the seas of the Earth, and of the rocks that speak, and the blood that sings. Furthermore, I will tell of that which I have seen through a Second Sight, of others who played their parts in the tale of my existence, of paths I have not taken, and those that have led me to the darkness and the truth. I will show you the secret of the life of the Blood itself, and of Pythia, and of her jealousy. And above all this, I will tell you the history of the Fallen Ones of Medhya, and of the tribe that was once vulture and jackal, which became falcon and wolf and dragon.

I will tell because I know.

Chapter 2

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B
ORN
IN
E
MBER
D
AYS

1

I was born from blood, and to blood I return.

My mother was taken by men in a moment of brutality that I might be born. Her inner body went to war with her desire. I learned later that she tried to rid herself of me using potions and flowers known only to the Wise Women of the forest, fragrant but deadly white petals stewed in water poisoned with insect’s venom. Tried to use instruments of the midwives to draw me out and crush my skull, as she had done with my less-fortunate siblings, buried, it was said, at the edge of the barley fields of my home country, where the sedge grew wild.

But I resisted within her and grew to term.

2

As such, many hundreds of years ago, I came into being in a spot on Earth that has captured my imagination and heart as no other ever could. It was a place you would not recognize, though histories have been written about my first century of its wars and kings and territorial disputes. I arrived in a land of the Bretons, known now as Brittany. My ancestors were varied, for, being of a lowly family, born of a bastard line, I was a mix of Gaul and Celt and Briton and Frank on my mother’s side. My father—my natural father—was, by legend, a Saxon merchant. Only the very wealthy could say for certain who their parentage included, and even that was suspect. Because of my ancestry, I was considered racially mixed, as were many of the peasant families in my world.

If England was not fighting for control of Brittany, France was, and if neither, there was some foreign invader at the shores, notably the Norsemen. By the time I was born, Armorica, Brittania, Bretagne, my Brittany, had become a wasteland in parts, overforested in others, abandoned by many in the Church or by the great chieftains. We lived at the edge of the Great Forest and heard many tongues spoken at the crossroads of town and wood. The French language had begun to take over the Breton tongue, and families such as mine had lost everything over the past few generations. We were the vanquished of a vanquished land. An abbey had been built perhaps two hundred years before my birth, then a village grew around it, and somewhere in its history, my mother’s family had fallen from some height and taken up residence squarely in the mud.

There was not yet the sense of a great Mother Church, but instead we had Christendom, and in her skirt hems the Old Ways still continued, and orders of nuns and monks who would later be called Heretics, who believed in a Christian God that was not quite the one believed in today. It was an embattled territory, but my memory of it coincides less with history than with the world of a little boy. Despite our Breton blood upon the land that would one day be France, we still had ways of our tribes and clans, and were closer in tongue to our kinsmen in Wales and Cornwall than to those who lived to the east, in Paris.
 

My world was the only world that existed, and it was not full of the high history of books, but of the lowly and simple and humble and mean. It was a daylight world with a beautiful sun, its jewels strewn upon the slanted, thatched roof, the sod and mud and sheep manure between my tiny toes even as I dropped from between my mother’s thick legs, out of that darkness into a cradle that was no better than her womb.

(Do not think ill of me for insulting my mother in this way, for you may guess that I might have had reason to feel this.)

Thus, I was born in the ember days, a new year, after the solstice, into the frozen world of life. They say that my mother was in the village, a half-day’s foot travel from our home at the edge of the Great Forest. Heavy with child, she had taken rest by the village well, along its smooth gray stone edge. When the hour of my birth had come ‘round at last, the frost of the day drove her to a stable. Like Our Blessed Lady, as she has been called, the Maria, Mary, Notre Dame, mother squatted among goats and sheep and asses and perhaps even a sunk-backed horse and no doubt several spotted dogs, and out I came into the encircling snake of life, into the hoop of time. My mother grew sick in that place. I have no doubt she thought, for a moment, that she might kill me and bury me in the dung to hide her shame and her sin. No barleyfield for me; my early grave was meant to be the home of flies and vermin.

But something stayed her hand, whether the law or her own conscience, I can’t be certain. Perhaps it was Fate herself who kept my mother from braining me against the wall. I can even hope that she felt the maternal warmth of a cow for its calf and she let me suck at her teat. Perhaps she held me close and wept over me with love and a sense of her unfortunate life. Perhaps a midwife had been there, too, helping to snip the cord and give me first milk from a more generous breast. Perhaps my mother had, for a few moments of her life, kissed my cheek and whispered a lullaby.

Perhaps the Great Mater was there with her, Matter, Mother, Mutter, the Earth that cradled me, in some invisible way, guiding her hand as She had guided so many hands before.

A kind merchant put Madonna and squalling brat into the flat of his wagon and drove her back over snowcapped slopes to the one-room home that I would come to think of as little better than the stable in which I’d been born.

My name was at first Alaricald, and then changed to Aleric, and my full name Aleric Atheffelde, which is not the patronym it may seem, nor was it pronounced as written. In fact, neither my siblings nor mother had a name passed down, either from mothers or fathers. It is easy to forget the pains of bastardy, and the lengths to which good folk kept away from it, and kept all bastards from any number of endeavors, including attaining a name of any distinction. Atheffelde simply meant “at the field,” and that is, in fact, where we lived, although more appropriately “In-the-Marsh,” “Felding,” or “Attheforet,” as some families had it, or even my stepfather’s name, which was Simon Overthewater, for his work in the sea.

You will detect the Saxon influence in our names—for while we were Breton by culture, we were the mutts of that world, between Saxon and Breton and Norseman and Gaul, as well as other influences. Some of my siblings had other names, depending on the mood of the priest and the neighbors and my mother. The village folk often had names passed down from antiquity or from work, but such as my family was, we simply were of the land itself. In homes such as mine, the children might go on to change their names as they discovered life. Whenever one from our region ventured to other countries, we were generally called as if by one family name: LeBret, the breton. Thus, my name, too, would one day change based on my talents and travels, but as a baby, I had no such influence.

My mother told me when I was older that she nearly went to Heaven the night after my birth, and that my stepfather, a brute whom I was lucky enough rarely to lay eyes on after the age of four, called me a whelp bastard and thrashed my mother for bringing another mouth to feed into his home. I might hate him for this, but I barely knew him—he was often off to sea or to the rocky coast to gather shellfish and the ocean’s harvest for months at a time, returning with very little in his pocket but a dried fish or two. My mother, I soon discovered, was often abed with the local men of the village, lifting her heavy brown skirts, drawing back her scanty and torn underthings whenever she chanced to wear them, giving to get something in return.

As a result of her wantonness, my brothers and sisters and I barely resembled each other except, perhaps, in our lack of fat on our bodies and in the generally sleepless look in our eyes. Even the twins might’ve been sired by separate whorehounds. As a child, I hated her unholy, if brief, alliances, and it was only when I spied her in the chapel of Our Lady, her dimpled sun-browned thighs wrapped around our local prelate, a look of absolute sacred radiance on his face, a reddish glow to his tonsure, that I realized that we all must do what needs to get done in order to put bread in our mouths. If the fish and mollusks were not a-plenty, we would go without, but not so long as our mother prayed on her back and brought home bread and sweets and mutton. Everyone who is mortal must work at some trade, and my mother’s was more arduous than most, but possibly pleasurable, if damnable.

Certainly the local monks did not think it a damning offense.

That week, we got a finer share of the Poor’s distribution, a charity taken in by the Brethren of the monastery for the families in need.

My brother, Aofreyd, whom I called Frey, would place bets with me about where we would find our mother a-lying on a summer afternoon. She was, nine times out of ten, pressed into some haystack with a local farm boy half her age. Those nights, we often drank fine milk and had fresh eggs. When the plague came through each year, bringing with it terrible nights of praying and endless Masses that lasted past midnight, and my father stayed away for the season at sea, my mother often brought her men home, believing that we were too ignorant to understand why the planks in the cupboard creaked. At night, Frey and I would lie together on our mat, listening for the sound, and giggle together at how the men always seemed like dogs, growling, barking, whimpering, and how what they did sounded as if it could not be pleasurable at all, but was, indeed, what the cats in heat must feel when Old Tom mounts them.

Once, when Frey threw this in her face, furious that he had to defend her at Market from being called the Whore of Babylon by the local boys his own age, she gave him a whipping and told both of us that she worked for God, and those men were Saints come down to Earth to bring a message from Heaven.

At the time—I was seven, perhaps—I believed her. Frey did not. My brother spat in her face and told her that she was the kind of woman who should be dragged through the streets and beaten on a gibbet until every bone in her body was like honey in a goatskin. He pointed to little Franseza, with her tangled black hair and the raised bumps on her face. “She is dying in front of you, and you lie with strange men. Look at Aler”—as he called me—“he is bones and hair and not much else. You let those men use you as a sewer for their cods, then you bring another bastard into the world and watch as they suffer.” I knew this was bad talk at the time, although I didn’t understand it.