The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (5 page)

He was too young by far to be a stevedore on the docks. But he knew that boy slaves were used in the mines, where they worked in tunnels too narrow to admit the bodies of men. He also knew that slaves were wretchedly clothed and fed and often were brutally whipped for small infractions. And that once enslaved, they were owned for life.

He lay and wept. Eventually he was able to gather his courage and tell himself that Dick Bukerel would never sell him for a slave, but he worried that Mistress Bukerel would send others to do it without informing her husband. She was fully capable of such an act, he told himself. Waiting in the silent and abandoned house, he came to start and tremble at every sound.

Five frozen days after his father’s funeral, a stranger came to the door.

“You are young Cole?”

He nodded warily, heart pounding.

“My name is Croft. I am directed to you by a man named Richard Bukerel, whom I’ve met while drinking at the Bardwell Tavern.”

Rob saw a man neither young nor old with a huge fat body and a weather-beaten face set between a freeman’s long hair and a rounded, frizzled beard of the same gingery color.

“What’s your full name?”

“Robert Jeremy Cole, sir.”

“Age?”

“Nine years.”

“I’m a barber-surgeon and I seek a prentice. Do you know what a barber-surgeon does, young Cole?”

“Are you some kind of physician?”

The fat man smiled. “For the time being, that’s close enough. Bukerel informed me of your circumstances. Does my trade appeal to you?”

It didn’t; he had no wish to become like the leech who’d bled his father to death. But even less did he wish to be sold as a slave, and he answered affirmatively without hesitation.

“Not afraid of work?”

“Oh, no, sir!”

“That’s good, for I would work your arse off. Bukerel said you read and write and have Latin?”

He hesitated. “Very little Latin, in truth.”

The man smiled. “I shall try you for a time, chappy. You have things?”

His little bundle had been ready for days.
Am I saved?
he wondered. Outside, they clambered into the strangest wagon he had ever seen. On either side of the front seat was a white pole with a thick stripe wrapped around it like a crimson snake. It was a covered cart daubed bright red and decorated with sun-yellow pictures of a ram, a lion, scales, a goat, fishes, an archer, a crab …

The dappled gray horse pulled them away and they rolled down Carpenter’s Street and past the guild house. He sat frozen as they threaded through the tumult of Thames Street, managing to cast quick glances at the man and now noting a handsome face despite the fat, a prominent and reddened nose, a wen on the left eyelid, and a network of fine lines radiating from the corners of piercing blue eyes.

The cart crossed the little bridge over the Walbrook and passed Egglestan’s stables and the place where Mam had fallen. Then they turned right and rattled over London Bridge to the southern side of the Thames. Moored beside the bridge was the London ferry and, just beyond, the great Southwark Market where imports entered England. They passed warehouses burned and wasted by the Danes and recently rebuilt. On the embankment was a single line of wattle-and-daub cottages, the mean homes of fishermen, lightermen, and wharf workers. There were two shabby inns for merchants attending market. And then, bordering the wide causeway, a double line of grand houses, the manors of the rich merchants of London, all of them with impressive gardens and a few built on piles driven into the marsh. He recognized the home of the embroidery importer with whom Mam had dealt. He had never traveled beyond this point.

“Master Croft?”

The man scowled. “No, no. I’m never to be called Croft. I’m always called Barber, because of my profession.”

“Yes, Barber,” he said. In moments all of Southwark was behind them,
and with rising panic Rob J. recognized that he had entered the strange and unfamiliar outside world.

“Barber, where are we going?” he couldn’t refrain from crying.

The man smiled and flicked the reins, causing the dappled horse to trot.

“Everywhere,” he said.

4

THE BARBER-SURGEON

Before dusk they made camp on a hill by a stream. The man said the gray plodder of a horse was Tatus. “Short for Incitatus, after the steed the emperor Caligula loved so much he made the beast a priest and a consul. Our Incitatus is a passing fair animal for a poor beggar with his balls cut off,” Barber said, and showed him how to care for the gelding, rubbing the horse with handfuls of soft dry grass and then allowing him to drink and go to grazing before they tended to their own needs. They were in the open, a distance from the forest, but Barber sent him to gather dry wood for the fire and he had to make repeated trips to accumulate a pile. Soon the fire was snapping, and cooking had begun to produce odors that weakened his legs. Into an iron pot Barber had placed a generous amount of thick-sliced smoked pork. Now he poured out most of the rendered fat and into the sputtering grease cut a large turnip and several leeks, adding a handful of dried mulberries and a sprinkling of herbs. By the time the pungent mixture had cooked, Rob had never smelled anything better. Barber ate stolidly, watching him wolf down a large portion and in silence giving him another. They mopped their wooden bowls with chunks of barley bread. Without being told, Rob took the pot and bowls to the stream and scrubbed them with sand.

When he had returned the utensils he went to a nearby bush and passed water.

“My blessed Lord and Lady, but that is a remarkable-looking peter,” Barber said, coming up on him suddenly.

He finished before his need and hid the member. “When I was an infant,” he said stiffly, “I had a mortification … there. I’m told a surgeon removed the little hood of flesh at the end.”

Barber gazed at him in astonishment. “Took off the prepuce. You were circumcised, like a bleeding heathen.”

The boy moved away, very disturbed. He was watchful and expectant. A dankness rolled toward them from the forest and he opened his small bundle and took out his other shirt, putting it on over the one he wore.

Barber removed two furred pelts from the wagon and flung them toward him. “We bed outside, for the cart is full of all manner of things.”

In the open bundle Barber saw the glint of the coin and picked it up. He didn’t ask where it had been gotten, nor did Rob tell him. “There’s an inscription,” Rob said. “My father and I … We believed it identifies the first cohort of Romans to come to London.”

Barber examined it. “Yes.”

Obviously he knew a lot about the Romans and valued them, judging from the name he’d given his horse. Rob was seized with a sick certainty that the man would keep his possession. “On the other side are letters,” he said hoarsely.

Barber took the coin to the fire to read in the growing dark. “IOX. Io means ‘shout.’
X
is ten. It’s a Roman cheer for victory: ‘Shout ten times!’”

Rob accepted the coin’s return with relief and made his bed near the fire. The pelts were a sheepskin, which he placed on the ground fleece up, and a bearskin, which he used as a topping. They were old and smelled strong but would keep him warm.

Barber made his own bed on the other side of the fire, placing his sword and knife where they could be used to repel attackers or, Rob thought fearfully, to slay a fleeing boy. Barber had removed a Saxon horn which he wore on a thong around his neck. Closing the bottom with a bone plug, he filled it with a dark liquid from a flask and held it toward Rob. “My own spirits. Drink deep.”

He didn’t want it but feared to refuse. A child of working-class London was threatened with no soft and easy version of the boogerman but instead was taught early that there were sailors and stevedores anxious to lure a boy behind deserted warehouses. He knew of children who had accepted sweetmeats and coins from men like these, and he knew what they had to do in return. He was aware that drunkenness was a common prelude.

He tried to refuse more of the liquor but Barber frowned. “Drink,” he commanded. “It will set you at ease.”

Not until he had taken two more full swallows and was set to violent coughing was Barber satisfied. He took the horn back to his own side of the fire and finished the flask and another, finally loosing a prodigious fart and settling into his bed. He looked over at Rob only once more. “Rest easy, chappy,” he said. “Sleep well. You have nothing to fear from me.”

Rob was certain it was a trick. He lay under the rank bearskin and
waited with tightened haunches. In his right hand he clutched his coin. In his left hand, although he knew that even if he had Barber’s weapons he would be no match for the man and was at his mercy, he gripped a heavy rock.

But eventually there was ample evidence that Barber slept. The man was an ugly snorer.

The medicinal taste of the liquor filled Rob’s mouth. The alcohol coursed through his body as he snuggled deep in the furs and allowed the rock to roll from his hand. He clutched the coin and imagined the Romans, rank upon rank, shouting ten times for heroes who wouldn’t allow themselves to be beaten by the world. Overhead, the stars were large and white and wheeled all over the sky, so low he wanted to reach up and pluck them to make a necklace for Mam. He thought of each member of his family, one by one. Of the living he missed Samuel the most, which was peculiar because Samuel had resented him as eldest and had defied him with foul words and a loud mouth. He worried whether Jonathan was wetting his napkins and prayed Mistress Aylwyn would show the little boy patience. He hoped Barber would return to London very soon, for he longed to see the other children again.

Barber knew what his new boy was feeling. He had been exactly this one’s age when he found himself alone after berserkers had struck Clacton, the fishing village where he was born. It was burned into his memory.

Aethelred was the king of his childhood. As early as he could remember, his father had cursed Aethelred, saying the people had never been so poor under any other king. Aethelred squeezed and taxed, providing a lavish life for Emma, the strong-willed and beautiful woman he had imported from Normandy to be his queen. He also built an army with the taxes but used it more to protect himself than his people, and he was so cruel and bloodthirsty that some men spat when they heard his name.

In the spring of Anno Domini 991, Aethelred shamed his subjects by bribing Danish attackers with gold to turn them away. The following spring the Danish fleet returned to London as it had done for a hundred years. This time Aethelred had no choice; he gathered his fighters and warships, and the Danes were defeated on the Thames with great slaughter. But two years later there was a more serious invasion, when Olaf, King of the Norwegians, and Swegen, King of the Danes, sailed up the Thames with ninety-four ships. Again Aethelred gathered his army around London and managed to hold the Norsemen off, but this time the invaders saw that the cowardly king had left his country vulnerable in order to protect
himself. Splitting up their fleet, the Norsemen beached their ships along the English coast and laid waste to the small seaside towns.

That week, Henry Croft’s father had taken him on his first long trip after herring. The morning they returned with a good catch he had run ahead, eager to be first in his mother’s arms and hear her words of praise. Hidden out of sight in a cove nearby were half a dozen Norwegian longboats. When he reached his cottage he saw a strange man dressed in animal skins staring out at him through the open shutters of the window hole.

He had no idea who the man was, but instinct caused him to turn and run for his life, straight to his father.

His mother lay on the floor already used and dead, but his father didn’t know that. Luke Croft pulled his knife as he made for the house, but the three men who met him outside the front door were carrying swords. From afar, Henry Croft saw his father overpowered and taken. One of the men held his father’s hands behind his back. Another pulled his hair with both hands, forcing him to kneel and extend his neck. The third man cut off his head with a sword. In Barber’s nineteenth year he had witnessed a murderer executed in Wolverhampton; the sheriff’s axman had cleaved off the criminal’s head as if killing a rooster. In contrast, his father’s beheading had been clumsily done, for the Viking had required a flurry of strokes, as if he were hacking a piece of firewood.

Hysterical with grief and fear, Henry Croft had run into the woods and hidden himself like a hunted animal. When he wandered out, dazed and starving, the Norwegians were gone but they had left death and ashes. Henry had been collected with other orphan boys and sent to Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire.

Decades of similar raids by heathen Norsemen had left the monasteries with too few monks and too many orphans, so the Benedictines solved two problems by ordaining many of the parentless boys. At nine years of age Henry was administered vows and instructed to promise God that he would live in poverty and chastity forever, obeying the precepts established by the blessed St. Benedict of Nursia.

It gained him an education. Four hours a day he studied, six hours a day he performed damp, dirty labor. Crowland owned vast tracts, mostly fens, and each day Henry and the other monks turned the muddy earth, pulling plows like staggering beasts in order to convert bogs into fields. It was expected that the rest of his time would be spent in contemplation or prayer. There were morning services, afternoon services, evening services, perpetual services. Every prayer was considered a single step up an interminable stairway that would take his soul to heaven. There was no recreation
or athletics, but he was allowed to pace the cloister, a covered walk in the shape of a rectangle. To the north side of the cloister was the sacristy, the buildings in which the sacred utensils were kept. To the east was the church; to the west, the chapter house; to the south, a cheerless refectory consisting of a dining room, kitchen, and pantry on the ground floor and a dormitory above.