The Devils Novice (4 page)

“Fool
boy!” shouted Cadfael, furious at being subjected to such alarm and shock when
he already had one fool boy on his hands. “Pick up your apples and get them and
yourself out of here, and out of my light, if you can do nothing better to
help. Can you not see the lad’s done no more than knock his few wits out of his
head against the bole, and skinned his ribs on the sickle? If he does bleed
like a stuck pig, he’s well alive, and will be.”

And
indeed, the victim proved it by opening one dazed eye, staring round him as if
in search of the enemy who had done this to him, and becoming voluble in
complaint of his injuries. The relieved circle closed round him, offering aid,
and Meriet was left to gather what he had spilled, in stiff obedience, still
without word or sound. The frozen mask was very slow to melt, the green eyes
were veiled before ever the light revived behind them.

The
sufferer’s wound proved to be, as Cadfael had said, a messy but shallow graze,
soon staunched and bound close with a shirt sacrificed by one of the novices,
and the stout linen band from the repaired handle of one of the fruit-baskets.
His knock on the head had raised a bump and given him a headache, but no worse
than that. He was despatched back to the abbey as soon as he felt inclined to
rise and test his legs, in the company of two of his fellows big enough and
brawny enough to make a chair for him with their interlaced hands and wrists if
he foundered. Nothing was left of the incident but the trampling of many feet
about the patch of drying blood in the grass, and the sickle which a frightened
boy came timidly to reclaim. He hovered until he could approach Cadfael alone,
and was cheered and reassured at being told there was no great harm done, and
no blame being urged against his father for an unfortunate oversight. Accidents
will happen, even without the assistance of forgetful goat-keepers and clumsy
and overweight boys.

As
soon as everyone else was off his hands, Cadfael looked round for the one
remaining problem. And there he was, one black-habited figure among the rest,
working away steadily; just like the others, except that he kept his face averted,
and while all the rest were talking shrilly about what had happened, the
subsiding excitement setting them twittering like starlings, he said never a
word. A certain rigour in his movements, as if a child’s wooden doll had come
to life; and always the high shoulder turned if anyone came near. He did not
want to be observed; not, at least, until he had recovered the mastery of his
own face.

They
carried their harvest home, to be laid out in trays in the lofts of the great
barn in the grange court, for these later apples would keep until Christmas. On
the way back, in good time for Vespers, Cadfael drew alongside Meriet, and kept
pace with him in placid silence most of the way. He was adept at studying
people while seeming to have no interest in them beyond a serene acceptance
that they were in the same world with him.

“Much
ado, back there,” said Cadfael, essaying a kind of apology, which might have
the merit of being surprising, “over a few inches of skin. I spoke you rough,
brother, in haste. Bear with me! He might as easily have been what you thought
him. I had that vision before me as clear as you had. Now we can both breathe
the freer.”

The
head bent away from him turned ever so swiftly and warily to stare along a
straight shoulder. The flare of the green-gold eyes was like very brief
lightning, sharply snuffed out. A soft, startled voice said: “Yes, thank God!
And thank you, brother!” Cadfael thought the “brother” was a dutiful but
belated afterthought, but valued it none the less. “I was small use, you were
right. I… am not accustomed…” said Meriet lamely.

“No,
lad, why should you be? I’m well past double your age, and came late to the
cowl, not like you. I have seen death in many shapes, I’ve been soldier and
sailor in my time; in the east, in the Crusade, and for ten years after
Jerusalem fell. I’ve seen men killed in battle. Come to that, I’ve killed men
in battle. I never took joy in it, that I can remember, but I never drew back
from it, either, having made my vows.” Something was happening there beside
him, he felt the young body braced to sharp attention. The mention, perhaps, of
vows other than the monastic, vows which had also involved the matter of life
and death? Cadfael, like a fisherman with a shy and tricky bite on his line,
went on paying out small-talk, easing suspicion, engaging interest, exposing,
as he did not often do, the past years of his own experience. The silence
favoured by the Order ought not to be allowed to stand in the way of its
greater aims, where a soul was tormenting itself on the borders of conviction.
A garrulous old brother, harking back to an adventurous past, ranging half the
known world—what could be more harmless, or more disarming?

“I
was with Robert of Normandy’s company, and a mongrel lot we were, Britons, Normans,
Flemings, Scots, Bretons—name them, they were there! After the city was settled
and Baldwin crowned, the most of us went home, over a matter of two or three
years, but I had taken to the sea by then, and I stayed. There were pirates
ranged those coasts, we had always work to do.”

The
young thing beside him had not missed a word of what had been said, he quivered
like an untrained but thoroughbred hound hearing the horn, though he said
nothing.

“And
in the end I came home, because it was home and I felt the need of it,” said
Cadfael. “I served here and there as a free man-at-arms for a while and then I
was ripe, and it was time. But I had had my way through the world.”

“And
now, what do you do here?” wondered Meriet.

“I
grow herbs, and dry them, and make remedies for all the ills that visit us. I
physic a great many souls besides those of us within.”

“And
that satisfies you?” It was a muted cry of protest; it would not have satisfied
him.

“To
heal men, after years of injuring them? What could be more fitting? A man does
what he must do,” said Cadfael carefully, “whether the duty he has taken on
himself is to fight, or to salvage poor souls from the fighting, to kill, to
die or to heal. There are many will claim to tell you what is due from you, but
only one who can shear through the many, and reach the truth. And that is you,
by what light falls for you to show the way. Do you know what is hardest for me
here of all I have vowed? Obedience. And I am old.”

And
have had my fling, and a wild one, was implied. And what am I trying to do now,
he wondered, to warn him off pledging too soon what he cannot give, what he has
not got to give?

“It
is true!” said Meriet abruptly. “Every man must do what is laid on him to do
and not question. If that is obedience?” And suddenly he turned upon Brother
Cadfael a countenance altogether young, devout and exalted, as though he had
just kissed, as once Cadfael had, the crossed hilt of his own poniard, and
pledged his life’s blood to some cause as holy to him as the deliverance of the
city of God.

Cadfael
had Meriet on his mind the rest of that day, and after Vespers he confided to
Brother Paul the uneasiness he felt in recalling the day’s disaster; for Paul
had been left behind with the children, and the reports that had reached him
had been concerned solely with Brother Wolstan’s fall and injuries, not with
the unaccountable horror they had aroused in Meriet.

“Not
that there’s anything strange in shying at the sight of a man lying in his
blood, they were all shaken by it. But he—what he felt was surely extreme.”

Brother
Paul shook his head doubtfully over his difficult charge. “Everything he feels
is extreme. I don’t find in him the calm and the certainty that should go with
a true vocation. Oh, he is duty itself, whatever I ask of him he does, whatever
task I set him he performs, he’s greedy to go faster than I lead him. I never
had a more diligent student. But the others don’t like him, Cadfael. He shuns
them. Those who have tried to approach him say he turns from them, and is rough
and short in making his escape. He’d rather go solitary. I tell you, Cadfael, I
never knew a postulant pursue his novitiate with so much passion, and so little
joy. Have you once seen him smile since he entered here?”

Yes,
once, thought Cadfael; this afternoon before Wolstan fell, when he was picking
apples in the orchard, the first time he’s left the enclave since his father
brought him in.

“Do
you think it would be well to bring him to chapter?” he wondered dubiously.

“I
did better than that, or so I hoped. With such a nature, I would not seem to be
complaining where I have no just cause for complaint. I spoke to Father Abbot
about him. “Send him to me,” says Radulfus, “and reassure him,” he says, “that
I am here to be open to any who need me, the youngest boy as surely as any of
my obedientiaries, and he may approach me as his own father, without fear.” And
send him I did, and told him he could open his thoughts with every confidence.
And what came of it? “Yes, Father, no, Father, I will, Father!” and never a
word blurted out from the heart. The only thing that opens his lips freely is
the mention that he might be mistaken in coming here, and should consider
again. That brings him to his knees fast enough. He begs to have his probation
shortened, to be allowed to take his vows soon. Father Abbot read him a lecture
on humility and the right use of the year’s novitiate, and he took it to heart,
or seemed to, and promised patience. But still he presses. Books he swallows
faster than I can feed them to him, he’s bent on hurrying to his vows at all
costs. The slower ones resent him. Those who can keep pace with him, having the
start of him by two months or more, say he scorns them. That he avoids I’ve
seen for myself. I won’t deny I’m troubled for him.”

So
was Cadfael, though he did not say how deeply.

“I
couldn’t but wonder…” went on Paul thoughtfully. “Tell him he may come to me as
to his father, without fear, says the abbot. What sort of reassurance should
that be to a young fellow new from home? Did you see them, Cadfael, when they
came? The pair of them together?”

“I
did,” said Cadfael cautiously, “though only for moments as they lighted down
and shook off the rain, and went within.”

“When
did you need more than moments?” said Brother Paul. “As to his own father,
indeed! I was present throughout, I saw them part. Without a tear, with few
words and hard, his sire went hence and left him to me. Many, I know, have done
so before, fearing the parting as much as their young could fear it, perhaps
more.” Brother Paul had never engendered, christened, nursed, tended young of
his own, and yet there had been some quality in him that the old Abbot
Heribert, no subtle nor very wise man, had rightly detected, and confided to
him the boys and the novices in a trust he had never betrayed. “But I never saw
one go without the kiss,” said Paul. “Never before. As Aspley did.”

In
the darkness of the long dortoir, almost two hours past Compline, the only
light was the small lamp left burning at the head of the night stairs into the
church, and the only sound the occasional sigh of a sleeper turning, or the
uneasy shifting of a wakeful brother. At the head of the great room Prior
Robert had his cell, commanding the whole length of the open corridor between
the two rows of cells. There had been times when some of the younger brothers,
not yet purged of the old Adam, had been glad of the fact that the prior was a
heavy sleeper. Sometimes Cadfael himself had been known to slip out by way of
the night stairs, for reasons he considered good enough. His first encounters
with Hugh Beringar, before that young man won his Aline or achieved his office,
had been by night, and without leave. And never regretted! What Cadfael did not
regret, he found grave difficulty in remembering to confess. Hugh had been a
puzzle to him then, an ambiguous young man who might be either friend or enemy.
Proof upon proof since then sealed him friend, the closest and dearest.

In
the silence of this night after the apple-gathering, Cadfael lay awake and
thought seriously, not about Hugh Beringar, but about Brother Meriet, who had
recoiled with desperate revulsion from the image of a stabbed man lying dead in
the grass. An illusion! The injured novice lay sleeping in his bed now, no more
than three or four cells from Meriet, uneasily, perhaps, with his ribs swathed
and sore, but there was not a sound from where he lay, he must be fathoms deep.
Did Meriet sleep half as well? And where had he seen, or why had he so vividly
imagined, a dead man in his blood?

The
quiet, with more than an hour still to pass before midnight, was absolute. Even
the restless sleepers had subsided into peace. The boys, by the abbot’s orders
separated from their elders, slept in a small room at the end of the dortoir,
and Brother Paul occupied the cell that shielded their private place. Abbot
Radulfus knew and understood the unforseen dangers that lurked in ambush for
celibate souls, however innocent.

Brother
Cadfael slept without quite sleeping, much as he had done many a time in camp
and on the battlefield, or wrapped in his sea-cloak on deck, under the stars of
the Midland Sea. He had talked himself back into the east and the past, alerted
to danger, even where no danger could possibly be.

The
scream came rendingly, shredding the darkness and the silence, as if two
demoniac hands had torn apart by force the slumbers of all present here, and
the very fabric of the night. It rose into the roof, and fluttered ululating
against the beams of the ceiling, starting echoes wild as bats. There were
words in it, but no distinguishable word, it gabbled and stormed like a
malediction, broken by sobbing pauses to draw in breath.