Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (26 page)

'To train clerics for the Church." The Queen's voice was gentle, no hint of censure to be found in it, but Germanus caught the inference.

"Of course," he agreed. "But not exclusively. The world needs more than clerics. It needs leaders—educated, Christian leaders."

"And soldiers." This was Ban.

"Aye, indeed, soldiers, too." The bishop's gaze returned to me. "The King tells me you have the makings of a cavalry soldier. We will build on that. Tiberias Cato, one of our brethren, served with me in the army and saved my life on numerous occasions simply because he is a magnificent horseman—the finest natural rider I have ever known. He, too, knew your father, although not, perhaps, your mother. Cato will supervise your training as a horseman and a cavalryman—I know you know the two are not necessarily the same." His pause was barely perceptible. "You do know that, do you not?"

I swallowed. "Yes, sir."

"And do you know the difference?"

"Yes, sir."

"Excellent. What is it?"

"You can be a horseman without being a cavalryman, but you cannot be a cavalryman without being a horseman."

"Absolutely. Good lad. Anyway, Tiberias Cato was a doughty fighter in his time and now he is a marvelously gifted teacher and trainer, but he is more horse than human at times. He will be responsible for your overall development in military things. There will be others working with you, too, in the various disciplines, but Tiberias will be your primary trainer. He will take whatever talents you possess for horsemanship and polish them until they dazzle even you.

"Apart from that—and it is probably sinful of me to prioritize in such a manner, but the soldier in me frequently fights with the bishop—apart from that, you will study all the other subjects that a well-tutored young man should know. You will learn the rudiments of Greek, sufficient for some of your reading, but for the most part you will be taught in Latin. You will have training in logic, debate and polemics, philosophy, mathematics and geometry, geography and the basic elements of imperial law. Also, you will be living among priests and clerics, and so you will behave for the most part as they do, adhering to the Order of Saint Benedict and observing the prayers and ceremonies he has decreed as being proper for a devout man of any age. You will eat well, three times a day, and in return for your food and lodgings, you will be expected to share the tasks of keeping the school clean and its students well fed. That means you will scrub floors, whitewash walls, wash clothes, grow and gather food, prepare it and serve it to your fellows."

He stopped, frowning at me as he watched my reactions to his words, and then his face broke once again into a wide, friendly grin. "But not all of those at once, I promise you. Each of those tasks will fall to you no more than once a month, for one day at a time. We have cooks and gardeners and carpenters and masons who work full time at their various crafts. You, as a student, will be seconded from time to time to assist them, and that means performing the dirty, heavy work most of the time. So you will be required to work and work hard, but the requirements are not brutal and you will have plenty of time to study and to rest between spells of duty."

He sat gazing at me for long moments, and then he said, "Do you have any questions to ask of me?"

"Yes, sir. What . . . what should I call you?"

He barked a short, deep laugh. "Hah! Straight to the point, and a good question. You'll call me what all your fellows call me: Father Germanus. That's the simplest and most effective name we have been able to come up with, and it has taken us some time to arrive at it. I am no longer an active army officer, so General and Legate are invalid, and I have a personal dislike for the term Bishop used as a name. Magister is another term I dislike, because it bears too many overtones of army life, which is notoriously impious and ungodly. Then there is a movement among some of the Church's adherents nowadays, particularly in the east, towards equality in which all members of a clerical community address each other as Brother. We have a number of men in our community whose use of the title Brother is highly appropriate. These are laymen, devout and pious beyond question, who choose to live lives of service to God and to conduct that service in our community, but they have taken no vows and have not been consecrated to the priesthood. They are Brethren in the Christ and I honour them highly. For a time, I even considered adopting Brother as my title, too, but the truth is that to those who attend my school I am both teacher and superior, and I have no desire to be anything as egalitarian as a brother." He paused and smiled again. "As a bishop, I am the pastor and father of my flock, and as mentor and governor to a school full of boys, I am,
ipso facto,
a fatherly figure. So, like everyone else, you will call me Father Germanus. Have I explained that clearly?"

"Yes, Father Germanus."

For the following half hour, the three adults moved on to speak of other things and I spoke not another word, although I missed nothing of what was being said. Soon, however, we were summoned to dinner by the King's Chancellor, formally dressed in honour of the bishop's visit, and I was banished to sit among the lesser family members in the body of the hall. I made sure to seat myself on the side of the table that permitted me an uninterrupted view of the King and Queen and their guest, however, and I barely took my eyes off my new guardian until they rose again to leave.

I spent the next morning preparing to take my leave of my family and friends, and the time passed by in a blink, so that it was suddenly past noon and I was standing outside the main gates of Ban's castle, holding my horse's reins and awaiting the signal to mount. My belongings were all safely packed and stowed in one of the three wagons in our train, and I had made all my farewells to those I loved, including my old nurse Ludda, Allisan the head cook, who had doted on me since my infancy, and Queen Vivienne herself. All three partings had wrung tears from me, and as I stood there waiting for the signal, I was highly aware of the reddened rims around my eyes.

Finally there came a stirring at the gates and the crowd of onlookers parted to permit the King and Queen to emerge with Germanus. There was nothing
bishoply
about his appearance on this occasion, either. He wore a military-style tunic of rich brown-and- white fabric, kilted above his knees, and sturdy, heavy riding boots with spurs. He wore a heavy cloak of plain brown cloth, too, fastened across his chest with a bronze chain and thrown back over his shoulders. He was bare headed and he carried no weapons, but no one setting eyes on him would ever have mistaken him for anything other than a soldier. A trumpeter on the walls above us blew a salute in response to a signal from King Ban, and we swung away, turning our backs on Benwick and riding—I, at least—into a new and unknown world.

2

I adapted to my new life with all the resilience of any ten-year-old boy, accepting everything that came my way, no matter how new or strange, and adjusting immediately to whatever demands or requirements it entailed. Everything that occurred after we left Benwick was new and alien to some extent, and so I quickly learned to catalogue and categorize each event almost as it occurred, assessing, absorbing and accepting the results, for better or for worse, as part of the way things now were, and I threw myself wholeheartedly into every element of the wondrous adventure that my life had become.

All my life, until arriving in Germanus's new school—the Bishop's School, everyone called it—I had regarded King Ban's castle in Benwick as the pinnacle of privileged living. Here in Auxerre, however, I found that the sumptuous luxury of Germanus's family home beggared description. No matter that Germanus himself was now a pauper, having ceded his houses, wealth and all other possessions to the Church; he yet lived in his own former home as bishop and custodian for the Church, and his beloved school, which he considered his life's work and his greatest endeavor for the glory of God, was housed in another of his family's former dwellings, close to his own house and scarcely less luxurious.

I had grown up accustomed to living in strong stone buildings, but now I found myself living in strong, beautiful and graceful buildings, with multicolored walls of fine marble, polished to the luster of expensive glass. For days after my arrival, I walked in awe of the beauty of my new surroundings, but then, being ten, I grew used to them and forgot that they were any different from other houses anywhere, and I lost myself completely in the strange world of living in a school among other students.

Father Germanus had promised me that I would have fine teachers at his school, and I did. Some of them I loved, some I admired, several I endured and a few I tolerated. I only really disliked one out of all of them, however, and the antipathy I felt for him was reciprocated in full measure. His name was Anthony—he insisted that we call him Brother Anthony—and he and I detested each other from our first encounter. He took exception to something in my face or my deportment the first time I went into his classroom and he went out of his way thereafter to make his dislike of me plain to me and to everyone else, and so in response I found it remarkably easy to find a host of elements to dislike and disparage in him. Since he was the teacher and I the newest, most insignificant student in the school, however, he had, and continued to have, the best of our encounters for a long, long time. Even today, looking back across a chasm of years, I find myself hard put to define what it was about that man that offended me, but I have absolutely no doubt that were he and I to meet again today, never having laid eyes upon each other before, we would react to each other exactly as we did then. Some people simply affect one another that way.

Brother Anthony was a tonsured monk, his head shaved bald to show that he was a slave of God, bound to the Church by vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. Such total commitment was a new custom and indicated an entirely new depth of devotion and dedication, Bishop Germanus himself informed me, but one that was gaining great numbers of adherents throughout the eastern portion of the remaining Empire. The people who took such stringent vows, Germanus said, referred to themselves as monastics, and they sought perfection here on Earth by shunning the earthly vices of avarice, pride and lechery and shutting themselves away from the world and its temptations, living in communes known as monasteries. Germanus himself had taken identical vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but he was at pains to point out that his reasons for so doing were purely personal and pragmatic, to enable him to concentrate solely upon his episcopal responsibilities. He had no interest in monasticism, he maintained; his ordained place of work was squarely in the world of ordinary men, with all its temptations. He was a bishop, with a flock of faithful dependants relying upon him for guidance and example.

Brother Anthony
was
a monastic and had sworn his vows as such, fully intending to immure himself somewhere far from the world and its temptations, where he could concentrate on keeping his sacred commitments, but he was also a brilliant administrator, trained originally as an imperial legionary quartermaster, and so Bishop Germanus himself had prevailed upon Anthony to postpone his departure and remain for a time in Auxerre, tending to Germanus's episcopal accounts and supervising inventories of everything required to keep the bishop's domestic affairs functioning.

Anthony had agreed, and in the brief periods of time left to him between his work and his prayers, he also taught divinity and theology to the students of the episcopal school. He was an able and gifted servant, very pious and devout, the bishop said on many occasions, and whenever I heard him say it, I nodded. Deep within myself, however, I knew that Brother Anthony had somehow managed to deceive Father Germanus and his staff and to keep his true malevolent nature concealed from everyone but me.

There was one unspoken and unwritten law among the fifty-odd students at the Bishop's School: you never complained and you never, ever carried tales. It was a matter of honour among the boys, but as such traditions always do, it carried within it a great potential for abuse. Discipline in the school was harsh, and the rules by which we boys lived were many, strict and inviolable; you broke them at your peril, and when you were caught, as you were more often than not, you took your punishment—always corporal punishment—in silence. You could weep, and depending on the severity of the beating you had undergone people might or might not make allowances for that, but you could not, ever, whine or complain. That was one of the first learned facts of life in the Bishop's School.

Brother Anthony enjoyed beating the younger boys and was despised for it by the entire student body, but he particularly enjoyed beating me, and I have many memories of being unable to walk without limping after one of his "punishments." Of course I, being as stubborn as he was vicious, would never give him the satisfaction of seeing me wince, let alone cry, and so the beatings he delivered grew more savage as time went by and as I grew larger and more able to absorb them. I would often dream of the day when I would be big enough to face him and disarm him and I drew great pleasure from the images I dreamed up of what I would do to him on that occasion.

That day never arrived, however, because long before I grew big enough to challenge my tormentor, I was summoned to an unscheduled meeting with Father Germanus shortly after one of Anthony's "punishments." To this day I have no knowledge of who had reported what was going on, but from that moment my troubles with Brother Anthony were over. Germanus stopped me with an upraised hand as I entered his
cubiculum
—the spacious room from which he conducted all the affairs of his bishopric—and then stalked towards me, an unreadable expression on his face as he raked me from head to foot with his eyes. He took hold of my chin, then tilted my head sideways, right then left, examining my face closely. That done, he reached down quickly and grasped my belt buckle, tugging on it sharply.