The Abbot's Tale Read online

  There was a cart piled high with grain sacks and four young monks stood on the cart bed. Above those working lads, two more gestured from a high window cut in what must have been a grain store. I didn’t know. What caught my eye and held it was a double pulley, with ropes that whirred in polished wooden grooves. I swear to you I felt hair rise on my neck.

  I have told this story a dozen times and there’s always someone to laugh or scoff and tell me it couldn’t have been the way I remember it, but I will tell you the truth here. I saw those pulleys and I understood them in the instant, that turning a rope over the spinning blocks would halve the weight. I saw a device, a machine so extraordinary it looked the work of angels. I knew nothing then of Euclid’s mathematics, nor the engineering of Archimedes. I was just an empty sheet, waiting to be bitten deep.

  I stood there, though my father was tugging my sleeve as I had done to him before, trying to break my perfect concentration and introduce me to Abbot Clement. Yet I saw it all: how four pulleys would be better still and give a ratio of four to one, while the rope would travel four times as far. My mind lit up, and if you have never experienced such a thing, well, I am sorry. There are many wonders in the world, if you look.

  I know them all now. Even today, these old hands could make the six great engines of the Greeks, that built the modern world and in combination will make wonders for a thousand years to come, if the Day of Judgement does not interrupt all our labours. The lever, the wheel and axle, the inclined plane, the screw, the wedge – and the wonder of the pulley, which sailors call the block and tackle. No great sail can be raised without the last. Those six, simple machines have given us dominance over all the natural world. I saw my first at Glastonbury Abbey and I stepped onto a new path.

  ‘Dunstan! His head is in the clouds, I swear it. Dunstan!’

  ‘Yes, Father, I’m sorry. I saw . . . the pulleys, how they raise the bags.’

  He didn’t understand my wonder, of course.

  ‘Well, pay attention now, boy! Bend your knee to Father Clement or I will redden your ear for you.’

  I knelt, though I felt my mind aflame. I bowed my head, but still tried to glance over to the pulleys and ropes even as I felt the abbot pat my shoulder.

  ‘Boys, Heorstan, eh? Always distracted at that age. Yet there are worse things to tempt a boy than pulleys, is that not so?’

  My father smiled, as if accepting the point. I saw he was flushed and I realised he was truly annoyed with me.

  ‘I am sorry, my lord Abbot,’ I said, looking up. I did not dare to rise without my father’s permission. ‘My name is Dunstan of Baltonsborough. I give you honour and I am pleased to meet you. I have never seen such a . . . contrivance before. Please forgive any hurt I may have caused.’

  The abbot raised his eyebrows at that, then grinned at me, revealing just three brown teeth of unusual length.

  ‘You must call me Father Clement, boy. Your father and I were friends so many years ago it seems another age. I am astonished to see him once more with young sons – and you are welcome here, of course – a local lad brought to follow Christ.’

  ‘Thank you, Father Clement,’ I said, dipping my head once again. He was in earnest, I learned later, one of the true old believers who lived with God on his shoulders and thought evil could be beaten out of a boy. He lived only another year and almost all my memories of him are bitter. Still, he smiled away, all nut-brown and healthy from a life working under the sun.

  ‘Perhaps you should go and see how Wulfric is faring, Dunstan,’ my father said. ‘And leave me to discuss our stay at the abbey with Father Clement.’

  ‘I would rather speak to those men by the cart, Father, if I may,’ I said. The reply was thoughtless and innocent enough, though I saw from the tightness of my father’s expression that it was the wrong thing. There was a hint of thunder in the abbot’s eyes as well, though I did not see the danger then, as I did with my father. Heorstan was too old and slow to catch me, but then I was too young to know I could dodge. So I stood still as he backhanded me across the face and sent me sprawling.

  ‘See to your brother,’ he snarled at me.

  I scrambled back up, my cheek flaming as I stood and bowed carefully to them both. Only when my father dismissed me with a sharp gesture did I actually dare to leave. He’d shown another old man he still had authority over a lad, which was important to him. I accepted it out of love, if that makes any sense. I would certainly have borne a thousand blows from him rather than see him reduced in front of strangers. Looking back, I think so still. If he lived, I’d back him so today. Not the abbot, though. I’d strangle that old bastard and put him down the privy.

  2

  Wulfric was sitting on a little flat bed in the infirmary, chattering away to the matronly sort and calling her ‘Mother Aphra’ as she wrapped his foot. I noticed she was careful to add small blessed medals under each layer, so my brother would heal twice as fast as some poor churl without them. She sprinkled holy water on him as well. It had great powers of healing, she said, when I asked in suspicion what she was doing.

  The abbey was an oddly relaxed place then, with a few married and unmarried women tending the brothers, and half the men not ordained nor even formal Benedictines. The cellarer was paid a wage, if you can believe that. They had a small grant of land, but it was hardly enough to raise food to feed themselves. For the most part, they survived on gifts from wealthy families. I think they would have withered in a generation if I had not been taken by shaking sickness and brought amongst them to be cured.

  I edged closer to my brother, honestly just to see if Wulfric had managed to clean himself while he’d been away from me. I don’t like to talk about my own illness. It was a nuisance for a while, then. I fell down on occasion and I twitched and shook. I’m told I stuttered as well each time, before. Strange, but a vital part of me is one I do not experience and cannot recall. It does not happen often, thank God, though it unmans me and makes me a child when it does, so perhaps they are all one time too many. Yet of the two of us, I did not feel the weak brother. I sat there in a room of cool beech benches and piles of folded linen, watching a woman make an invalid of Wulfric while he simpered and pretended he could not see my glower.

  ‘Father says my brother Dunstan can be cured here, with the relicts you have. He says the abbey has bones from St David and St Patrick – and a blessed sapphire.’

  Aphra seemed pleased the boy knew so much. She patted his leg as she split the bandage and tied it in a neat knot.

  ‘Wiggle your toes for me, blossom. There, you’ll be right as rain in a few days, or sooner if you pray at the shrine. I’ll get a crutch for you.’

  ‘There’s no need, ma’am. I can walk well enough,’ he said, showing her his courage and yet somehow still making a little squeal as he put his weight on. I saw her slip him an apple as well and I watched where he put it, though he thought he hid it from me.

  ‘There are dozens of crutches and walking sticks down in the cloisters, from those who came here and were healed.’ She whistled up one of the urchins from the water-landing, all snot and elbows. ‘Fetch one of the crutches, James, one of the good ones for this dear lad.’

  He raced off and the great, bovine creature turned her head towards us once more.

  ‘We could make a bit of coin selling them, I dare say, but Abbot Clement says they’re to be left where they are – to carry word of what we do here, so more will come. They are evidence of our faith, he says. God knows, we do need the money the pilgrims bring, just to keep body and soul together. Canterbury gets them all, of course, from Rome even. If the faith had come first to Wessex instead of Kent, we wouldn’t be struggling to feed ourselves each winter, I tell you that!’

  She rattled on and I nodded and smiled, irritated by her. The boy James returned with a rough-carved crutch that was a little too large for my brother, so that Wulfric had to stand lopsided, with his bad foot tucked up behind. I saw a gleam of devilment in the urchin’s eyes as he
looked him over and I took it as an insult. I gestured for young James to go ahead, then helped him along with my boot. He rubbed the tail bone down there and glared, but he knew then to be wary of me – and that I wouldn’t take kindly to Wulfric being mocked. God knows, Wulfric was a trial, but he was also my brother.

  We were taken through some open cloisters with a chill wind nipping at us, then through a great refectory where a dozen monks sat with heads bowed over their plates. One of their number stood at a lectern to read Augustine’s sermons at them. I took it all in as best I could, but I think my decision was made even then. My father had been a thane to kings. My uncle was a bishop. We were not royal ourselves, but still so far above churls or slaves they might have been a different breed. Earls, churls and thralls make our Wessex England. Or thanes, common men and slaves – with kings above all, as God ordained. Yet Heorstan was long retired, too far from power, too old to place me with a court household, or even in a position to be noticed by one. He had no titles to grant the second batch of his sons, and my life would be one of hard labour and working someone else’s land. The abbey was a place where learning lay – from pulleys and Latin to secret alchemies. I could hear the sound of a smith beating iron somewhere not too far away. It was my bell, and it rang for me.

  I considered my future as we ate that evening, honoured at a long table where the abbot sat and engaged my father in talk. Every other seat was filled, of course. The monks desired to know anything they might hear of the world, informed of it by visits like ours. I had thought the marshes cut the abbey off, but Abbot Clement talked with energy and interest of King Æthelstan and all he was doing to secure the realm and keep the Danes out of it. Across from me, Wulfric chewed with his jaw so widely open I could both hear and see each mouthful being made to paste. I tried to kick him under the table, but it was too far.

  I would have found a way on my own to broach the subject of joining the classes at the abbey, but there was no need. I had no inkling the talk was in part for my benefit, innocent that I was. I suspect my father had sold me before I even broke bread that night.

  Clement described the dozen boys who attended the school there, keeping the hours of the abbey day and learning their prayers, as well as plants and all manner of crafts. The words were like gushing water to me, and I turned to my father and found he was already smiling at my expression, his eyes lost in wrinkles. It is how I remember him best, that affection.

  ‘Would you then have room for another, Father Clement?’ Heorstan said.

  I stopped breathing. The abbot inclined his head as if in thought, the old fraud.

  ‘For both lads, my lord, if you would have it so?’

  This had not occurred to me, that I might have to share the wonders of this place with Wulfric. I began to shake my head, but my opinion was not sought and the two men continued to discuss the arrangement as if they sat alone.

  Abbot Clement went a little pink around the gills after a time. He cleared his throat, drawing one finger through a puddle of ale on the tabletop.

  ‘My lord Heorstan, if it is your will, I will undertake to add your boys to our classes here, to instruct and discipline them, to return them to you as young men. Yet . . . I recall St Augustinus taught Latin in Rome for a time. His classes were always packed, but the custom then was to take payment on the last day of the term. On that day, his benches were always mysteriously empty. It has been good habit ever since to collect the fee on the first day rather than the last, though no insult is intended, on my very honour.’

  I turned to see a frown darken my father’s expression. I knew Clement was on shaky ground, though it was the poverty of the abbey driving him to it. To risk even a suggestion that we might not pay was a perilous path. I turned a look of scorn on the abbot, just as I imagined my father doing. At my side, I flinched from a sharp movement from him, but it was just a pouch being tossed the length of the table.

  Abbot Clement did not open it, barely fondling the coins as he made it disappear. I am sure he made a fair guess by weight alone. My father’s pride would have doubled whatever he might have been asked. Perhaps that had always been Clement’s intention, for he was a cunning man – and sharp enough to cut himself. He and my father exchanged a nod and the matter was not raised again.

  Wulfric was gaping, his eyes wide enough to show the whites as he turned from Father to me to Abbot Clement, with no sense of decorum at all. I did not care. Joy filled me and I pushed my wooden plate away with food still on it.

  My father left the following morning. Wulfric and I awoke at dawn, though the monks had been up and working long before. We rubbed water on our faces and peed in a halfbarrel the monks used for bleaching wool. Wulfric splashed the floor, of course. I cleaned it up with a rag, so that he was first into the sun.

  Abbot Clement stood with my father, still a big man in his furs despite his age. Both of them were smiling at something as Wulfric and I came into the yard.

  ‘I will see you again at Christmas,’ Heorstan said sternly to us. ‘Work hard in the meantime. Behave. Pray every day and do not neglect your souls, though your flesh withers. Tell the truth, boys. Do as you are told.’

  Wulfric and I stood side by side and stared at our sandals in the dust, just waiting to be dismissed. I didn’t know I would never see the old man again.

  I wish I could make my young self look up that last time, to hold every moment of that morning as a jewel – but I cannot. That lout, that thick-headed clod of thirteen, was thinking of all the things he might learn at the abbey. Our family home was not a dozen miles from Glastonbury and it did not seem too far. I think boys are never truly away from home when they can walk back.

  My father did not embrace either of us. I do not think he ever did, which is only right when a man is preparing sons for the world. My mother embraced me all the time and it is true I miss her with more tenderness, but we are given our roles in this grief-ridden vale and there is no changing them. A father gives strength and makes a man. A mother tempers that iron with tears and her love. Too much of either makes weakness.

  Heorstan was too old to survive another winter, that was just the truth of it. He did not live to see the next Christmas. He gave me a good start. A man cannot ask for more.

  Abbot Clement gave me over to the care of a Brother Caspar, who loomed thin, but even taller than me. He took me to a little empty schoolroom, where he settled himself as I stood there, with much clearing of throat and fussing with quills and papers.

  It broke my heart to look through the window and see Wulfric tripping nervously off to the Prime service. I had to stand there and listen to a cadaver in his thirties scratching a blunt quill, sharpening it poorly, all the while breathing through a softly whispering nostril.

  I was asked to describe my illness in more detail than I ever had before. I made the mistake of saying it came on sometimes when I was weary and hungry. I should have said it was worst when I slept well and ate like a lord.

  Brother Caspar wanted to see one of my trembling agues, and of course I could not produce one for him. My hands were steady, my mind relaxed and unclouded, as he stared and waited, tutting to himself and smoothing a quill through his hand, over and over.

  ‘Your father fears a curse,’ he said, ‘or perhaps that a demon has you in its grip. If the last is true, the creature would hide from us, just as it seems to be doing now. Oh, I see your insolence, boy – and I wonder at its source. I wonder if he hears me, your friend.’

  ‘I have no friend, Brother Caspar,’ I said, looking to see if I might get past him if he leaped at me. There was always that sense in Caspar, that madness might lurk in him, that he might go for a man’s throat with no warning at all. He was too bright in the eye to breathe easily in his presence.

  ‘I can’t waste days and weeks on you!’ he snapped. ‘We must bring him out. Up, boy, from your slothful waste of a morning. Run around the yard for me, while I read.’

  I have never been slow to hate a man I thought a fool.
In my innocence then, I took his words as a challenge. My body had not once let me down and I could not imagine it doing so. I believe I smiled as I began to run, which was the last such expression for quite some time.

  I set off while the monks were still in the Prime service. I was sweating freely by the time the brothers trooped out of the chapel to breakfast, passing me with curious glances as I ran, though saying nothing. It seemed not long before they were streaming out once more, heading to the workshops and gardens. St Benedict’s Rule is for work and prayer. It makes for healthy, long-lived men, though admittedly liable to ill temper.

  I ran on, consumed by pride, while the morning passed, with no sign of Brother Caspar noticing as I began to stagger. Again and again I rallied my will. I counted in dozens and hundreds and reached four hundred circuits around that yard, eventually six hundred or thereabouts. I lost count. The sweat fell like coins from me, while my eyes stung so with salt that I could hardly see.

  I ran until the Terce prayers were called around nine, three hours after Prime. I had been waiting for that bell to toll, telling myself I would hold on for it, even if I had to run on bloody bones. When it sounded, I felt such a wave of relief it was almost an ecstasy. I drew to a halt and, without a warning or a sound, there was Brother Caspar standing before me in his black robe. He said not a word at first, but raised my eyelid with a cold thumb and peered at me like a man examining a horse for sale. He shook his head in disgust and, as I heaved for breath, he kicked my legs away.

  ‘Show yourself, creature,’ he said softly, looking down on me.

  I tried to scramble to my feet when I saw a stick in his hand, but he laid about me with as much force and energy as a madman. After a time, I recall the stick splintering and breaking into sharp pieces, though he still flailed and whipped in a frenzy, almost shrieking with his own exertion. Spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth. It looked like the white froth you see sometimes in spring grass, where creeping green things protect themselves from the sun.