The Priest of Blood Read Free Page A

charity taken in by the Brethren of the monastery for the families in need.
    My brother, Aofreyd, whom I called Frey, would place bets with me about where we would find our mother a-lying on a summer afternoon. She was, nine times out of ten, pressed into some haystack with a local farm boy half her age. Those nights, we often drank fine milk and had fresh eggs. When the plague came through each year, bringing with it terrible nights of praying and endless Masses that lasted past midnight, and my father stayed away for the season at sea, my mother often brought her men home, believing that we were too ignorant to understand why the planks in the cupboard creaked. At night, Frey and I would lie together on our mat, listening for the sound, and giggle together at how the men always seemed like dogs, growling, barking, whimpering, and how what they did sounded as if it could not be pleasurable at all, but was, indeed, what the cats in heat must feel when Old Tom mounts them.
    Once, when Frey threw this in her face, furious that he had to defend her at Market from being called the Whore of Babylon by the local boys his own age, she gave him a whipping and told both of us that she worked for God, and those men were Saints come down to Earth to bring a message from Heaven.
    At the time—I was seven, perhaps—I believed her. Frey did not. My brother spat in her face and told her that she was the kind of woman who should be dragged through the streets and beaten on a gibbet until every bone in her body was like honey in a goatskin. He pointed to little Franseza, with her tangled black hair and the raised bumps on her face. “She is dying in front of you, and you lie with strange men. Look at Aler”—as he called me—“he is bones and hair and not much else. You let those men use you as a sewer for their cods, then you bring another bastard into the world and watch as they suffer.” I knew this was bad talk at the time, although I didn’t understand it.
    My mother took a hot pan from the fire and threw it at him. It hit Frey on the left-hand side of his face. I screamed as if I had been hit. But Frey made no sound. He put his hand to his forehead. He kept his eyes on her.
    That was the night she locked him in the root cellar, and I lay atop the locked wooden platform and whispered to him that it would be all right, that he would be out in the morning. We touched fingers to each other that night through a crack in the wood. Frey told me that he would never forget my loyalty and our kindred (even if we shared the same mother, but perhaps not the same father), nor would he remain at home another day. “She is not a bad woman,” he said of our mother. “But I cannot live here.”
    “I hate her,” I said. “Sometimes.”
    “It’s better to pity her. She has some cause for her anger in life.” Then he told me a story about our mother, and my grandfather, and how our family had become outcasts of the village. It made little sense to me, for I was too young to understand how prejudice might arise even among neighbors. “I need to leave,” he said. “She is angry because she knows I must go.”
    “She’s mad,” I said.
    “She has her reasons.” His words made me curious about our mother. When I asked him more about her, he told me to keep quiet. “She is as she is. I am as I am.”
    Frey was twelve years of age when he left home for good. At dawn’s first light, he dug his way out of the cellar trap, taking with him some roots and apples, wrapped up in his ragged shirt. The left side of his face was scarred and full of raised bubbles of skin where the oil had struck him. He kissed me on the forehead and swore that should we ever meet again, in this life or the next, that he would greet me as brother and friend and allow no one to harm me.
    I thought that I would never see him again. We all knew that if any of us left, abandoned our home, Death would surely follow. Frey knew this. We had heard of what happened to boys