set the course of my life and start me along the path that led to my soul’s damnation.
But the most terrible moment of my mortal youth happened early in my seventeenth year, when an official of the village had my mother arrested on charges of sorcery and consorting with the Devil.
Chapter 5
________________
T HE A CCUSED
1
The village had grown by leaps and bounds in the years since I had first burrowed beneath the baron’s largesse. Shambles of houses topped the earthen-and-wood palisades of its gate. Beyond it, and yet somehow surrounding it, the abbey itself loomed like a very different castle. It was full of monks and the priests and who tended to the sick and the poor as well as the rich and mighty. The road broadened within a few years, and we had pilgrims from foreign climes, and even the bishop from Toulouse came once to bless the Barony of Whithors, as we were now called.
The stories of war were always on the tongue, for battles to the north and south and east and west raged, yet our Forest home was untouched by much of this in those days. Knights rode out, or rested in the Great Hall of the baron, and young men like me went to be the foot soldiers of the Heroes, as we called the men of wealth who went to fight the Saxons or Norsemen or Spanish or those of the Southern Heresy. But I was not called to fight, for my value with the hunt was great. Although I had learned a bit of swordsmanship, poor boys such as I would not wield a sword but a spear or a bow. I had no real skill for warfare, and my only weapons of excellence were the sling and the dagger.
On my trips outside the baron’s household, to take grains to my mother, or what were then called mint-sweets to my little brothers and sisters, most of whom I barely knew, I began to notice how merchants from Normandy and the south had come and brought to us the promise of foreign goods. My mother’s home, however, was the same as it had always been—an earth hut, with thatch for roof and only a little wood to create structure to it. When I entered it, I saw a dark, smelly rat hole, and felt that if I could, I’d try and bring my remaining siblings into the service of the baron. It made me happy to think I might do so, and I made plans for ways of shepherding them into work in the castle or grounds. The older children from my family had all left, and either had begun their own families nearby, farming as tenants and subsisting on a small portion of what they were able to produce from such efforts, or, like my brother Frey, they had just disappeared into the night, no doubt to seek their fortunes in war. My mother had a total of eleven children, and I barely saw a reflection of her face or mine in any of them.
My stepfather stopped returning from his trips to the sea, and my mother had become exactly what I was afraid she would. She slept with too many men, and her payment for these beddings had gone from food to drink. She was often sick, and I could look in her eyes and see that she was not a woman who would live much longer. She told me that she often went to Mere Morwenna for cures, for she had bouts of fever and a foot that would swell up often after she’d been bitten by a venomous spider. I am ashamed to say that I felt no real love for her but an obligation and a duty to console her when I could. I spoke to the local abbot and priest about possibly allowing my mother into that order of nuns that lives to the west, in caverns, anchoresses. There she might find peace and the arms of the Lord before her death. But these men of the Church were not sympathetic and believed my mother’s soul had already been lost in the battle of righteousness. I saw men in the Church who had taken their liberties with my mother, and yet they still retained their piety, while she had been cast from God’s saving grace.
I had told my mother that she should not see the Forest women so much, that the world had changed since her girlhood, when the
But the most terrible moment of my mortal youth happened early in my seventeenth year, when an official of the village had my mother arrested on charges of sorcery and consorting with the Devil.
Chapter 5
________________
T HE A CCUSED
1
The village had grown by leaps and bounds in the years since I had first burrowed beneath the baron’s largesse. Shambles of houses topped the earthen-and-wood palisades of its gate. Beyond it, and yet somehow surrounding it, the abbey itself loomed like a very different castle. It was full of monks and the priests and who tended to the sick and the poor as well as the rich and mighty. The road broadened within a few years, and we had pilgrims from foreign climes, and even the bishop from Toulouse came once to bless the Barony of Whithors, as we were now called.
The stories of war were always on the tongue, for battles to the north and south and east and west raged, yet our Forest home was untouched by much of this in those days. Knights rode out, or rested in the Great Hall of the baron, and young men like me went to be the foot soldiers of the Heroes, as we called the men of wealth who went to fight the Saxons or Norsemen or Spanish or those of the Southern Heresy. But I was not called to fight, for my value with the hunt was great. Although I had learned a bit of swordsmanship, poor boys such as I would not wield a sword but a spear or a bow. I had no real skill for warfare, and my only weapons of excellence were the sling and the dagger.
On my trips outside the baron’s household, to take grains to my mother, or what were then called mint-sweets to my little brothers and sisters, most of whom I barely knew, I began to notice how merchants from Normandy and the south had come and brought to us the promise of foreign goods. My mother’s home, however, was the same as it had always been—an earth hut, with thatch for roof and only a little wood to create structure to it. When I entered it, I saw a dark, smelly rat hole, and felt that if I could, I’d try and bring my remaining siblings into the service of the baron. It made me happy to think I might do so, and I made plans for ways of shepherding them into work in the castle or grounds. The older children from my family had all left, and either had begun their own families nearby, farming as tenants and subsisting on a small portion of what they were able to produce from such efforts, or, like my brother Frey, they had just disappeared into the night, no doubt to seek their fortunes in war. My mother had a total of eleven children, and I barely saw a reflection of her face or mine in any of them.
My stepfather stopped returning from his trips to the sea, and my mother had become exactly what I was afraid she would. She slept with too many men, and her payment for these beddings had gone from food to drink. She was often sick, and I could look in her eyes and see that she was not a woman who would live much longer. She told me that she often went to Mere Morwenna for cures, for she had bouts of fever and a foot that would swell up often after she’d been bitten by a venomous spider. I am ashamed to say that I felt no real love for her but an obligation and a duty to console her when I could. I spoke to the local abbot and priest about possibly allowing my mother into that order of nuns that lives to the west, in caverns, anchoresses. There she might find peace and the arms of the Lord before her death. But these men of the Church were not sympathetic and believed my mother’s soul had already been lost in the battle of righteousness. I saw men in the Church who had taken their liberties with my mother, and yet they still retained their piety, while she had been cast from God’s saving grace.
I had told my mother that she should not see the Forest women so much, that the world had changed since her girlhood, when the
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