Huard put down the silver lamp with a smile. From the look in his eyes, Prosper knew that he understood the motive of Prosper's words.
Thirty-four years before, Prosper had experienced one of the greatest shocks of his life when he had entered the only private place in his training school – the altar area which no one but vowed priests were permitted to enter – to find huddled under the altar a small, plump boy eating a bag of sugar balls that a soft-hearted woman from the nearby tribe had given him.
Temporal men had burned for less. Prosper had considered himself exceedingly merciful for sentencing the boy only to a week's fast. Not until three months ago, though, had Prosper begun to remember – had allowed himself to remember – what place food held in the hunting tribe in which both he and Huard had been raised.
First came mid-morning meals, when the tribal folk travelled sociably from hut to hut, sampling each other's foods. These were followed by mid-afternoon meals, in which the various groups within the tribe – the mothers, the hunters, the soldiers, the children – gathered separately and discussed, at great length, their favorite meals from the past. Next were the early evening snacks, usually taking place immediately after the service, in which children, in particular, exchanged bags of sweets and engaged in long bargaining over whether two sugar balls equalled one honey cake. And finally, climaxing the day, a three-hour feast between mid-evening and midnight, in which the day's hunting was roasted upon spits, and the delicate dishes that the women had spent most of the day preparing were poured out onto platters for all to admire.
In the midst of the tribe of the Feasters, Huard – inclined by bodily temperament and upbringing to love rich foods and sweets – practiced an austerity that stunned his fellow tribal folk. Every day, he merrily attended the important social events of the day: the mid-morning guesting, the mid-afternoon bonding, the early evening trading, and the late evening feast. He walked amidst wine caskets and sizzling mountain cats and high peaks of sugar balls, admiring them all and contributing his own anecdotes about which foods tasted best.
He ate almost nothing.
Sweets had not passed into his mouth since the day when he reacted to Prosper's stern lecture about the demon of gluttony with tears of repentance. Meat and wine, the staple foods of the tribe, he almost never ate. Beans and vegetables and fruits, which formed the central portion of priests' diet, were not part of the tribe's traditional diet, and Huard had made no suggestion that such foods be added to the tribe. Instead, he existed almost entirely on a small amount of water, a small amount of cheese, and bread imported from the neighboring crop-growing tribe, which was almost always stale and hard by the time it reached the border.
The tribal women – clearly convinced that their portly priest was about to expire from starvation – would periodically leave offerings of meat and wine at Huard's doorstep. Whenever possible, Huard would quietly dispose of these gifts to needy families within the tribe. In cases where such imparting would create hurt feelings, Huard did not spurn the gift but instead invited temporal guests to his home. He would urge these guests to eat helping after helping of the meat and wine, while he himself ate the bare minimum required of a polite host.
After six weeks of watching Huard's dietary habits – which the priest never discussed – Prosper had awakened one morning to the realization that he had been placed under the care of a man who was as gifted in bodily and spiritual discipline as Prosper himself was gifted in tutoring. After that, Prosper had found that his discipline of humility toward the priest was considerably easier.
o—o—o
The smell of roasting deer caused Prosper's stomach to gurgle as he and Huard walked toward the open area where the communal meals were held. Torches stood on poles at the head and foot of each of the trestle tables holding the food, but the torches were barely needed on this moonlit night. Even before he entered the clearing, Prosper could see the piles of pies filled with badger meat, the sticks piercing various types of bird-meat, the trays offering a choice of golden or ruddy wines, and bowls filled with boiled pastries covered with white sugar, a delicacy that Prosper had discovered was the most pleasant aspect of his dietary discipline.
Huard, following his usual custom of ignoring the food until one of the tribal folk dragged him bodily to the serving tables, wandered off to greet some of the hunters and to allow them to describe, in mouth-watering detail, the succulent choices of the night. Prosper carefully wove his way through the tangle of tribal folk sitting on the ground or, in the case of older men and women, on tree stumps. He was trying to still the demon of panic arising within him.
The three-hour feasts had become a time of daily torture for Prosper. Here, as nowhere else, he was forced to accept the truth of what his place was in the tribe. For the moment, he tried to pretend to himself that the other people there were too absorbed in conversation to notice him.
He paused before one of the torches, considering the spectacle before him. It had not taken him many meals here to realize that the demon of gluttony did not trouble him, and that his austere eating habits over the decades had been of no spiritual benefit to him – indeed, had been of benefit to the demons, since his vainglory over his eating habits had increased every time he encountered priests whose bodily temperaments required them to struggle to achieve the discipline that Prosper achieved with ease.
With his indifference to food, Prosper was learning that his real struggle was to concentrate his mind on each day's offerings so that he looked like an ordinary temporal man.
He considered the problem with a focussed spirit, as he would if asked to translate a particularly difficult passage. Only the ill took less than five dishes at his tribe's evening feast; the question was how to fill himself slowly with food so that he had enough room left at the end for the sugar balls and other sweets. He decided finally to begin with the soup: that was usually more broth than meat, and he could dip into it the hard flat-bread that his priestly discipline no longer demanded, but for which he had acquired a peculiar nostalgia.
He picked up one of the glazed bowls and walked over to the simmering cooking pot. The ladle was too hot to touch directly. Pulling a rag from his belt that he kept there for such purposes, he wound the cloth round his hand and began to raise the soup into his bowl.
A jarring blow at his elbow caused him to drop the ladle. He gave an involuntary cry as the burning liquid splashed onto his skin. Turning his head, he saw, without surprise, one of the tribal youths who enjoyed playing this sort of game with him. The youth had his arm wrapped over a friend's shoulder, and both the young men were laughing heartily.
With effort, Prosper turned his thoughts toward fishing the ladle out of the soup into which it had fallen. For several weeks now, he had suspected the youth and his friend of being twisted, for they spent far too much time with each other and far too little time with the other young men. On one terrible night, Prosper had been tortured by temptations to tell Huard of this serious spiritual matter. By morning, though, he was able to chase away the demon of judgment and see the matter clearly. Huard was far too skilled a priest not to know the signs of twistedness. If the youth and his friend had not been formally cursed, it was either because Huard had placed the youths under discipline or because he believed that the demons would leave of their own accord in due time. Or because, quite possibly, Prosper had read the evidence incorrectly. In any case, the matter was a spiritual one, and Prosper would be placing his own spirit in peril if he allowed himself to dwell on it.
The youths were gone and Prosper's hand was scalded by the time he managed to pull out the ladle. Wiping the ladle carefully clean with his rag, he completed the task of filling his bowl. And then, alas, he was faced with his usual daily nightmare: of figuring out which group to join.
The hunters, Prosper had found, simply ignored his presence. Prosper could comfort himself with the knowledge that hunters behaved like that toward everyone; they considered their work to be inferior only to the work of priests, and perhaps not even that. Prosper remembered this well, for his father had been a hunter. His father's pride had demanded that, if his son were determined to be a priest, he should become one in as honorable a fashion as possible, taking his instruction from the High Priest himself. Still, that had been the end of any communication between Prosper and his hunting family.
With bits of hunting lore still trickling through his memory, Prosper had recently attempted to join the hunters on one of their trails, carrying their extra spears as a boy does. The hunters had made no move to stop him, but neither had they acknowledged his presence, and one flung spear – thrown where Prosper would have been if he had not ducked in time – had made clear to the exiled man that his services were not wanted.
The soldiers had been much the same. Normally the most affable of men, always eager to discuss their trade with outsiders, they had taken to unsheathing and polishing their blades on the occasions when Prosper stopped by to ask whether he could be of any assistance in fetching water and doing other small tasks while they practiced their wrestling and swordplay. Prosper, whose training school had been located next to a military yard and who knew what soldiers could do when their tempers were roused, was finding it increasingly difficult to call up the courage to approach that group of men.
The craftsmen were more forthright in their response to his offers of help: Prosper still had a cut on the cheek where a shard of pottery had grazed him. Even the frail and ill of the camp were accustomed to shouting invectives at him when he tried to assist them through his priestly knowledge of healing.
Prosper's greatest hope had then dwelt with the children, for he did not think it was vainglory to acknowledge that the God had given him a gift for being able to communicate with the young, especially with the catechism-aged boys whom he had taught for so many years. Children were also less likely to have acquired the deep fear that their elders felt toward the God-cursed. Having run these thoughts through his mind, Prosper had decided that he would be doing the children's parents a service if he helped to keep the children occupied with tales or other light amusements.
A mother screaming in hysteria at the sight of Prosper talking to her young daughter had put an end to this idea. From that moment forward, all of the mothers had kept a careful lookout for him, and children scattered in fear at the sight of him. When Huard began to receive requests from the tribal folk that Prosper be expelled from the territory, Prosper abandoned further attempts to contact the tribal children. It surprised him how much this forced sacrifice cut into him.
Looking over the crowd, he caught sight of Huard, who was cheerfully talking with the chieftain Iolo while dipping his bread into his water to soften it sufficiently to chew. The two men were just a hand's breath away from a badger sizzling over a spit. Prosper felt no desire to join them; Iolo's spear had been the one that had nearly impaled him.
A roar of laughter turned his attention toward a group of young men near the wine caskets. From their gestures, Prosper gathered that his tormenters were spreading the story of the ladle. Prosper sighed, then straightened his spine. Looking at the group, he found it hard to believe that the youths felt shock or fear or dismay as a result of his presence. Nevertheless, it was all too likely that he had harmed at least some of the young men by returning to the tribe. Clearly, his duty lay in visiting the group and seeing whether he could mend matters in any way.
He wove his way round the tribal folk who were seated on the ground. As he approached the young men, the group grew suddenly silent. Several of the youths clutched their spears tighter, and one reached for his dagger. Prosper, feeling the smile beginning to stiffen on his face, asked, "Might I join you?"
There was a pause. The original youth and his friend exchanged some sort of silent message involving raised eyebrows and nods; then the youth silently gestured toward the empty space beside him.
Prosper's smile grew more genuine. He stepped forward – and immediately fell over the spear shaft that the youth's friend had thrust between his feet.
He managed to fall on his hands and knees rather than his face, but his bowl crashed to the ground underneath him, spattering the stew onto his chest and thighs. A few drops landed on the young man with the dagger, who began to curse Prosper roundly with a lengthy description – pulled from the catechism, which he had apparently memorized well – of what happens to the God-cursed after death. Shouts of laughter all but engulfed his words.
Prosper closed his eyes, feeling the demon of anger rushing through his blood. He deserved this, he reminded himself. He deserved much more than this.
During his years as a priest, Prosper had always been reluctant to sentence anyone to exile. He considered such a sentence to be no mercy; everyone knew that more God-cursed men died in exile than survived. Most were slain during the first few days after their expulsion, when their fresh curse-mark made it clear to all who met them that they had recently entered exile. Even after the curse-mark healed, the exiled man or woman would generally wander from territory to territory, living off of the countryside and never staying in any place long, lest the scar left by the curse-mark be noticed and someone should question too closely when the mark had been incised.
Winter was the worst test for the exile. Every spring, during the thaw, hunters and field-hands happened across the frozen bodies of curse-marked men and women who had not survived the snows. Their unpurified corpses, even more than the burnings, helped to keep the Northern Peninsula's people from straying from the God's path.
Prosper did not have the skills to live off of the countryside; if it had not been for the mercy of Martin and Huard, he would have died very quickly during his exile. Even the taunting youths, Prosper reminded himself as he rose to his feet amidst the laughter, granted him mercy by permitting him, however grudgingly, to live amidst them during this year.