Heretic

  “Father!” Galat Lorret said warningly.

  “Quiet!” Thomas snarled at the consul. He raised his voice. ”’Cumque elevasset Moses manum,’” he was quoting from memory, but thought he had the words right, ”’percutiens virga bis silicem egressae sunt aquae largis-simae.’” There were not many advantages to being the bastard son of a priest or to having spent some weeks at Oxford, but he had picked up enough learning to confound most churchmen. “You have not interpreted my words, father,” he told the priest, “so tell the crowd how Moses struck the rock and brought forth a gush of water. And then tell me that if it pleases God to find water with a staff, how can it be wrong for this girl to do the same with a twig?”

  The crowd did not like it. Some shouted and it was only the sight of two archers appearing on the rampart above the two dangling corpses that quietened them. The priest hurried to translate their protests. “She cursed a woman,” he said, “and prophesied the future.”

  “What future did she see?” Thomas asked.

  “Death.” It was Lorret who answered. “She said the town would fill with corpses and we would lie in the streets unburied.”

  Thomas looked impressed. “Did she foretell that the town would return to its proper allegiance? Did she say that the Earl of Northampton would send us here?”

  There was a pause and then Medous shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “Then she does not see the future very clearly,” Thomas said, “so the devil cannot have inspired her.”

  “The bishop’s court decided otherwise,” Lorret insisted, “and it is not up to you to question the proper authorities.”

  The sword came from Thomas’s scabbard with surprising speed. The blade was oiled to keep it from rusting and it gleamed wetly as he prodded the fur-trimmed robe at Galat Lorret’s chest. “I am the proper authorities,” Thomas said, pushing the consul backwards, “and you had best remember it. And I have never met your bishop, and if he thinks a girl is a heretic because cattle die then he is a fool, and if he condemns her because she does what God commanded Moses to do then he is a blasphemer.” He thrust the sword a last time, making Lorret step hurriedly back. “What woman did she curse?”

  “My wife,” Lorret said indignantly.

  “She died?” Thomas asked.

  “No,” Lorret admitted.

  “Then the curse did not work,” Thomas said, returning the sword to its scabbard.

  “She is a beghard!” Father Medous insisted.

  “What is a beghard?” Thomas asked.

  “A heretic,” Father Medous said rather helplessly.

  “You don’t know, do you?” Thomas said. “It’s just a word for you, and for that one word you would burn her?” He took the knife from his belt, then seemed to remember something. “I assume,” he said, turning back to the consul, “that you are sending a message to the Count of Berat?”

  Lorret looked startled, then tried to appear ignorant of any such thing.

  “Don’t take me for a fool,” Thomas said. “You are doubtless concocting such a message now. So write to your Count and write to your bishop as well, and tell them that I have captured Castillon d’Arbizon and tell them more…” He paused. He had agonized in the night. He had prayed, for he tried hard to be a good Christian, but all his soul, all his instincts, told him the girl should not burn. And then an inner voice had told him he was being seduced by pity and by golden hair and bright eyes, and he had agonized even more, but at the end of his prayers he knew he could not put Genevieve to the fire. So now he cut the length of cord that tied her bonds and, when the crowd protested, he raised his voice. “Tell your bishop that I have freed the heretic.” He put the knife back in its sheath and put his right arm around Genevieve’s thin shoulders and faced the crowd again. “Tell your bishop that she is under the protection of the Earl of Northampton. And if your bishop wishes to know who has done this thing, then give him the same name that you provide to the Count of Berat. Thomas of Hookton.”

  “Hookton,” Lorret repeated, stumbling over the unfamiliar name.

  “Hookton,” Thomas corrected him, “and tell him that by the grace of God Thomas of Hookton is ruler of Castillon d’Arbizon.”

  “You? Ruler here?” Lorret asked indignantly.

  “And as you have seen,” Thomas said, “I have assumed the powers of life and death. And that, Lorret, includes your life.” He turned away and led Genevieve back into the courtyard. The gates banged shut.

  And Castillon d’Arbizon, for lack of any other excitement, went back to work.

  FOR TWO DAYS Genevieve did not speak or eat. She stayed close to Thomas, watching him, and when he spoke to her she just shook her head. Sometimes she cried silently. She made no noise when she wept, not even a sob, she just looked despairing as the tears ran down her face.

  Robbie tried to talk with her, but she shrank from him. Indeed she shuddered if he came too close and Robbie became offended. “A bloody goddamned heretic bitch,” he cursed her in his Scottish accent and Genevieve, though she did not speak English, knew what he was saying and she just stared at Thomas with her big eyes.

  “She’s frightened,” Thomas said.

  “Of me?” Robbie asked indignantly, and the indignation seemed justified for Robbie Douglas was a frank-faced, snub-nosed young man with a friendly disposition.

  “She was tortured,” Thomas explained. “Can’t you imagine what that does to a person?” He involuntarily looked at the knuckles of his hands, still malformed from the screw-press that had cracked the bones. He had thought once he would never draw a bow again, but Robbie, his friend, had persevered with him. “She’ll recover,” he added to Robbie.

  “I’m just trying to be friendly,” Robbie protested. Thomas gazed at his friend and Robbie had the grace to blush. “But the bishop will send another warrant,” Robbie went on. Thomas had burned the first, which had been discovered in the castellan’s iron-bound chest along with the rest of the castle’s papers. Most of those parchments were tax rolls, pay records, lists of stores, lists of men, the small change of everyday life. There had been some coins too, the tax yield, the first plunder of Thomas’s command. “What will you do?” Robbie persisted. “When the bishop sends another warrant?”

  “What would you like me to do?” Thomas asked.

  “You’ll have no choice,” Robbie said vehemently, “you’ll have to burn her. The bishop will demand it.”

  “Probably,” Thomas agreed. “The Church can be very persistent when it comes to burning people.”

  “So she can’t stay here!” Robbie protested.

  “I freed her,” Thomas said, “so she can do whatever she likes.”

  “I’ll take her back to Pau,” Robbie offered. Pau, a long way to the west, was the nearest English garrison. “That way she’ll be safe. Give me a week, that’s all, and I’ll take her away.”

  “I need you here, Robbie,” Thomas said. “We’re few and the enemy, when they come, will be many.”

  “Let me take her back—”

  “She stays,” Thomas said firmly, “unless she wants to go.”

  Robbie looked as if he would argue, then abruptly left the room. Sir Guillaume, who had been listening in silence and who had understood most of the English conversation, looked grim. “In a day or two,” he said, speaking English so that Genevieve would not understand, “Robbie will want to burn her.”

  “Burn her?” Thomas said, astonished. “No, not Robbie. He wants to save her.”

  “He wants her,” Sir Guillaume said, “and if he can’t have her then he’ll decide no one should have her.” He shrugged, then changed to French. “If she was ugly,” he looked at Genevieve as he asked the question, “would she be alive?”

  “If she were ugly,” Thomas said, “I doubt she would have been condemned.”

  Sir Guillaume shrugged. His illegitimate daughter, Eleanor, had been Thomas’s woman until she had been killed by Thomas’s cousin, Guy Vexille. Now Sir Guillaume looked at Genevieve and re
cognized that she was a beauty. “You’re as bad as the Scotsman,” he said.

  That night, the second night since they had captured the castle, when the men who had been raiding for food were all safe home and the horses were fed and the gate was locked and the sentries had been set and the supper eaten, and when most of the men were sleeping, Genevieve edged from behind the tapestry where Thomas had given her the castellan’s bed and came to the fire where he was sitting reading the copy of his father’s strange book about the Grail. No one else was in the room. Robbie and Sir Guillaume both slept in the hall, along with Thomas, but Sir Guillaume had charge of the sentries and Robbie was drinking and gambling with the men-at-arms in the chamber below.

  Genevieve, dressed in her long white gown, stepped delicately off the dais, came close to his chair and knelt by the fire. She stared into the flames for a while, then looked up at Thomas and he marvelled at the way the flames lit and shadowed her face. Such a simple thing, a face, he thought, yet hers enthralled him.

  “If I were ugly,” she asked, speaking for the first time since he had released her, “would I be alive?”

  “Yes,” Thomas said.

  “So why did you let me live?” she asked.

  Thomas pulled up a sleeve and showed her the scars on his arm. “It was a Dominican who tortured me too,” he said.

  “Burning?”

  “Burning,” Thomas said.

  She rose from her knees and put her arms about his neck and her head on his shoulder and held him. She said nothing, nor did he, neither did they move. Thomas was remembering the pain, humiliation, terror, and suddenly felt as if he wanted to cry.

  And then the hall door squealed open and someone came in. Thomas had his back to the door so could not see who it was, but Genevieve raised her head to look at whoever had interrupted them and there was a moment’s silence, then the sound of the door closing and footsteps going back down the stairs. Thomas knew it had been Robbie. He did not even need to ask.

  Genevieve put her head back on his shoulder. She said nothing. He could feel her heart beating.

  “The nights are the worst,” she said.

  “I know,” Thomas said.

  “In daylight,” she said, “there are things to look at. But in the dark there are only memories.”

  “I know.”

  She pulled her face back, leaving her hands linked behind his neck, and she looked at him with an expression of intense seriousness. “I hate him,” she said, and Thomas knew she was talking of her torturer. “He was called Father Roubert,” she went on, “and I want to see his soul in hell.”

  Thomas, who had killed his own torturer, did not know what to say, so retreated into an evasion. “God will look after his soul.”

  “God seems very far away sometimes,” Genevieve said, “especially in the dark.”

  “You must eat,” he said, “and you must sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep,” she said.

  “Yes,” Thomas said, “you can,” and he took her hands from his neck and led her back to the dais and behind the tapestry. He stayed there.

  And next morning Robbie was not talking to Thomas, but their estrangement was diffused because there was so much work to be done. Food had to be levied from the town and stored in the castle. The blacksmith had to be taught how to make English arrow heads, and poplars and ash were cut to make the shafts. Geese lost their wing feathers to fledge the arrows, and the work kept Thomas’s men busy, but they were still sullen. The jubilation that had followed their easy capture of the castle had been replaced by unrest and Thomas, whose first command this was, knew he had reached a crisis.

  Sir Guillaume d’Evecque, much older than Thomas, made it explicit. “It’s about the girl,” he said. “She must die.”

  They were again in the great hall and Genevieve, sitting by the fire, understood this conversation. Robbie had come with Sir Guillaume, but now, instead of looking at Genevieve with longing, he watched her with hatred.

  “Tell me why,” Thomas said. He had been rereading the copy of his father’s book with its strange hints about the Grail. It had been copied in a hurry and some of the handwriting was barely decipherable, and none of it made much sense, but he believed that if he studied it long enough then some meaning would emerge.

  “She’s a heretic!” Sir Guillaume said.

  “She’s a goddamned witch,” Robbie put in vehemently. He spoke some French now, enough to understand the conversation, but preferred to make his protest in English.

  “She wasn’t accused of witchcraft,” Thomas said.

  “Hell, man! She used magic!”

  Thomas put the parchment aside. “I’ve noticed,” he said to Robbie, “that when you are worried you touch wood. Why?”

  Robbie stared at him. “We all do!”

  “Did a priest ever tell you to do it?”

  “We do it! That’s all.”

  “Why?”

  Robbie looked angry, but managed to find an answer. “To avert evil. Why else?”

  “Yet nowhere in the scriptures,” Thomas said, “and nowhere in the Church Fathers’ writings will you find such a command. It is not a Christian thing, yet you do it. So must I send you to the bishop to stand trial? Or should I save the bishop’s time and just burn you?”

  “You’re blathering!” Robbie shouted.

  Sir Guillaume hushed Robbie. “She is a heretic,” the Norman said to Thomas, “and the Church has condemned her and if she stays here she will bring us nothing but ill luck. That’s what’s worrying the men. Jesus Christ, Thomas, but what good can come from harboring a heretic? The men all know it will bring evil.”

  Thomas slapped the table, startling Genevieve. “You,” he pointed at Sir Guillaume, “burned my village, killed my mother and murdered my father who was a priest, and you tell me of evil?”

  Sir Guillaume could not deny the charges any more than he could explain how he had become a friend of the man he had orphaned, but nor would he back down in the face of Thomas’s anger. “I know evil,” he said, “because I have done evil. But God forgives us.”

  “God forgives you,” Thomas asked, “but not her?”

  “The Church has decided otherwise.”

  “And I decided otherwise,” Thomas insisted.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Sir Guillaume said, “do you think you’re the bloody Pope?” He had become fond of English curse words and used them interspersed with his native French.

  “She’s bewitched you,” Robbie growled. Genevieve looked as if she would speak, then turned away. Wind gusted at the window and brought a spatter of rain onto the wide floorboards.

  Sir Guillaume looked at the girl, then back to Thomas. “The men won’t stand her,” he said.

  “Because you worry them,” Thomas snarled, although he knew that it was Robbie, not Sir Guillaume, who had caused the unrest. Ever since Thomas had cut Genevieve’s bonds he had worried about this, knowing his duty was to burn Genevieve and knowing he could not. His father, mad and angry and brilliant, had once laughed at the Church’s idea of heresy. What was heretical one day, Father Ralph had said, was the Church’s doctrine the next, and God, he had said, did not need men to burn people: God could do that very well for himself. Thomas had lain awake, agonizing, thinking, and knowing all the while that he wanted Genevieve too badly. It was not theological doubt that had saved her life, but lust, and the sympathy he felt for another soul who had suffered the Church’s torture.

  Robbie, usually so honest and decent, managed to control his anger. “Thomas,” he said quietly, “think why we are here, and consider whether God will give us success if we have a heretic among us.”

  “I have thought of little else,” Thomas said.

  “Some of the men are talking of leaving,” Sir Guillaume warned him. “Of finding a new commander.”

  Genevieve spoke for the first time. “I will leave,” she said. “I will go back north. I won’t be in your way.”

  “How long do you think you’ll live?”
Thomas asked her. “If my men don’t murder you in the yard then the townsfolk will kill you in the street.”

  “Then what do I do?” she asked.

  “You come with me,” Thomas said and he crossed to an alcove beside the door where a crucifix hung. He pulled it from its nail and beckoned to her and to Sir Guillaume and Robbie. “Come,” he said.

  He led them to the castle yard where most of his men were gathering to discover the result of Sir Guillaume and Robbie’s deputation to Thomas. They murmured unhappily when Genevieve appeared and Thomas knew he risked losing their allegiance. He was young, very young to be the leader of so many men, but they had wanted to follow him and the Earl of Northampton had trusted him. This was his first test. He had expected to meet that test in battle, but it had come now and he had to solve it, and so he stood on the top of the steps that overlooked the yard and waited until every man was staring at him. “Sir Guillaume!” Thomas called. “Go to one of the priests in the town and ask for a wafer. One that has already been consecrated. One kept for the last rites.”

  Sir Guillaume hesitated. “What if they say no?”

  “You’re a soldier, they’re not,” Thomas said and some of the men grinned.

  Sir Guillaume nodded, glanced warily at Genevieve, then gestured two of his men-at-arms to accompany him. They went unwillingly, not wanting to miss whatever Thomas was about to say, but Sir Guillaume growled at them and they followed him through the gate.

  Thomas held the crucifix high. “If this girl is the devil’s creature,” he said, “then she cannot look at this and she cannot bear its touch. If I hold it in front of her eyes she will go blind! If I touch her skin it will bleed. You know that! Your mothers told you that! Your priests told you that!”

  Some of the men nodded and all stared open-mouthed as Thomas held the crucifix in front of Genevieve’s open eyes, and then touched it to her forehead. Some men held their breath and most looked puzzled when her eyes remained whole and her clear, pale skin unblemished.

  “She has the devil’s help,” a man growled.