The Priest of Blood Read Free

Perhaps she held me close and wept over me with love and a sense of her unfortunate life. Perhaps a midwife had been there, too, helping to snip the cord and give me first milk from a more generous breast. Perhaps my mother had, for a few moments of her life, kissed my cheek and whispered a lullaby.
    Perhaps the Great Mater was there with her, Matter, Mother, Mutter, the Earth that cradled me, in some invisible way, guiding her hand as She had guided so many hands before.
    A kind merchant put Madonna and squalling brat into the flat of his wagon and drove her back over snowcapped slopes to the one-room home that I would come to think of as little better than the stable in which I’d been born.
    My name was at first Alaricald, and then changed to Aleric, and my full name Aleric Atheffelde, which is not the patronym it may seem, nor was it pronounced as written. In fact, neither my siblings nor mother had a name passed down, either from mothers or fathers. It is easy to forget the pains of bastardy, and the lengths to which good folk kept away from it, and kept all bastards from any number of endeavors, including attaining a name of any distinction. Atheffelde simply meant “at the field,” and that is, in fact, where we lived, although more appropriately “In-the-Marsh,” “Felding,” or “Attheforet,” as some families had it, or even my stepfather’s name, which was Simon Overthewater, for his work in the sea.
    You will detect the Saxon influence in our names—for while we were Breton by culture, we were the mutts of that world, between Saxon and Breton and Norseman and Gaul, as well as other influences. Some of my siblings had other names, depending on the mood of the priest and the neighbors and my mother. The village folk often had names passed down from antiquity or from work, but such as my family was, we simply were of the land itself. In homes such as mine, the children might go on to change their names as they discovered life. Whenever one from our region ventured to other countries, we were generally called as if by one family name: LeBret, the breton. Thus, my name, too, would one day change based on my talents and travels, but as a baby, I had no such influence.
    My mother told me when I was older that she nearly went to Heaven the night after my birth, and that my stepfather, a brute whom I was lucky enough rarely to lay eyes on after the age of four, called me a whelp bastard and thrashed my mother for bringing another mouth to feed into his home. I might hate him for this, but I barely knew him—he was often off to sea or to the rocky coast to gather shellfish and the ocean’s harvest for months at a time, returning with very little in his pocket but a dried fish or two. My mother, I soon discovered, was often abed with the local men of the village, lifting her heavy brown skirts, drawing back her scanty and torn underthings whenever she chanced to wear them, giving to get something in return.
    As a result of her wantonness, my brothers and sisters and I barely resembled each other except, perhaps, in our lack of fat on our bodies and in the generally sleepless look in our eyes. Even the twins might’ve been sired by separate whorehounds. As a child, I hated her unholy, if brief, alliances, and it was only when I spied her in the chapel of Our Lady, her dimpled sun-browned thighs wrapped around our local prelate, a look of absolute sacred radiance on his face, a reddish glow to his tonsure, that I realized that we all must do what needs to get done in order to put bread in our mouths. If the fish and mollusks were not a-plenty, we would go without, but not so long as our mother prayed on her back and brought home bread and sweets and mutton. Everyone who is mortal must work at some trade, and my mother’s was more arduous than most, but possibly pleasurable, if damnable.
    Certainly the local monks did not think it a damning offense.
    That week, we got a finer share of the Poor’s distribution, a