He remembered the poor guivre held captive by Lady Sabella, tormented by starvation and disease, fed dying men and, in the end, used by her as ruthlessly as she used the rest of her allies. He could not regret saving one after having killed another.
Sighing, he turned away from the forest and walked back to the dormitories with Iso hobbling, gasping and whispering, at his side. It would be hard for Iso to keep silent about the guivre, but who would believe him?
Alain laughed softly. Maybe disbelief could be a form of freedom. For the first time since he stumbled out of the stone circle with the memory of Adica’s death crushing him, he felt a lightness in his heart, a breath of healing.
As they passed the stables, they almost ran into old Mangod, who had labored here for more years than Alain had been alive. Like Iso, lie was a cripple with a withered arm that, once broken, never set right. When he lost his farmstead to his sister’s son, he retired to the monastery.
He had an excitable voice and a way of hopping from leg to leg like a child needing to pee. “Have ye heard?” he asked in his western accent. “There come some holy monks this morning to the abbot, and a couple of king’s soldiers. They say they’ve seen sleepers under the hill with the look of old Villam’s son, the lad who got lost up among the stones a few years back. Terrible strong magic, they say. And a revelation, too, to share with us brothers.”
His words made Alain nervous; they pricked like pins and needles in a foot that’s fallen asleep. As he and Iso walked up past the stables, he saw most of the day laborers clustered on the porch although they would normally be in their cots by now. A dozen of the monks stood among their number, straining forward, and at one corner of the porch huddled six pale-robed novices who had escaped from the novices’ compound where they were supposed to live and sleep in isolation until the day they took their final vows.
“‘His heart was cut out of him! Where his heart’s blood fell and touched the soil, there bloomed roses.’”
“Th-that’s a woman!” stammered Iso as they pressed forward into the crowd gathered on the dormitory porch.
The guivre’s eye could not have struck such sluggish fear into Alain as did her voice. He knew that voice.
“‘But by his suffering, by his sacrifice, he redeemed us from our sins. Our salvation comes through that redemption. For though he died, he lived again. So did God in Her wisdom redeem him, for was he not Her only Son?’”
“Heresy,” murmured a monk standing at Alain’s elbow.
“This one comes from the east, from the Arethousans.”
“All liars, the Arethousans,” whispered his companion. “Still, I want to hear her.”
“Do not let others frighten you. Do not let them tell you that the words I speak are heresy. It is the church that has concealed the truth from us—”
“To what purpose?” An older monk stepped forward. “Were the ancient mothers dupes and fools, to be taken in by a lie? Do you mean to say they were schemers and deceivers who conspired to damn us all by hiding’ the truth of the blessed Daisan’s true nature and his final days on earth? You haven’t convinced me with this wild talk!”
Alain pressed through the crowd until he was able to see the speaker. It was Hathumod. Somehow she had escaped the battle in the east and reached Hersford. He hung back. He didn’t want her to see him.
A frown creased her rabbitlike face as she examined the scoffer. She appeared the most innocuous of interlocutors. No one could look more sincere than she did. “Brother Sigfrid will answer you,” she replied.
Four young men stood beside her: the handsome blond and the redhead whom Alain had seen at services, as well as a stout fellow who resembled Hathumod and a slight young man no larger than Iso though apparently sound in all his limbs. The two Lions, Dedi and Gerulf, stood behind them, arms crossed as they surveyed the crowd with practiced vigilance. As Dedi glanced his way, Alain ducked down behind the shoulder of one of his fellow laborers, and when he glanced up, the slight young man had climbed up on a bench to address the crowd. He was dressed in a tattered monk’s robe, but despite his disreputable appearance, he responded in a voice both rich and sweet.
“Truly, Brother, I dare not set myself higher than the Holy Mothers out of whose words flowered our most sovereign and holy church. Yet you and I both know how few of their writings have come down to us, and how many have been lost. What might the ancient mothers say to us now, were they here and able to speak freely? What fragments have we been left to read, despite the best efforts of our brethren, brothers and sisters who copied and recopied the most holy texts? Has it always been the most holy who have worked in the scriptoria? In whose interest has it been to conceal this truth?”