The Priest of Blood Read Free Page B

who ventured into the world without any means. I said many prayers for my brother the morning I watched him running along the path at the edge of the forest.
    It was the saddest day of my young life, and though you may judge my mortal days as misspent and full of vain pursuits, you must always remember that, for a child, the world is meant to be wondrous. When it is not, it becomes the realm of shadows and of nightmare. In the mud of that world, I did not know one day to the next if I would eat, or if I might die, or if one of my sisters might fall dead.
    It was quite natural for a boy such as myself to dream of great things, to believe in the lies told me by other dreamers, and to want more than simply the filth and disease of the hovel called home—I wished for Heaven in that lifetime, a sweet place where dreams and hopes were fulfilled.
    The forest was my place of dreams, and the birds, my messengers to Heaven.

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    I must tell you of the forest, a place of dreams and wishes in my young mortal life—as well as nightmares. Old men said that in the center of it there was a tree more ancient than all the others. It was called the Oak of the Priests, or the Devil’s Tree, depending on whether a peasant or a monk told the tale. It was said that its roots went down into the Earth and from them grew all the trees of the world. This was just one of the legends of the wood; I grew up with the magick of these stories.
    Within the forest were large caves in which the group of sisters, Brides of Christ, had built their chapel and chambers into the rock itself. They were known then as the Magdalens, and shunned material life and, more importantly, sunlight itself, as part of the world of matter that corrupted the spirit. In those days, Christendom encompassed a variety of what were later called heresies, and a century later the Magdalens of the Languedoc were hunted down and slaughtered in their chapels, but during my young life, they were simply part of Christendom’s variety.
    These good women lived mainly on the food brought them by pilgrims, for the grotto and its springs were said to restore the sinful to a state of innocence by virtue of Mary Magdalen’s blood, which had, by legend, been spilled to create the spring. They had a relic of the Magdalen, supposedly a bit of her heart, dried and kept in a wooden box at the foot of the statue of the only female apostle. The Magdalens, although friendly with the local abbey and its abbé, kept their distance from all, for they were meant for a solitary life of contemplation and prayer, as well as bestowing a blessing upon the rock ledge within which they dwelled. But the good Sisters were the farthest point in our land that I then knew of, and the Forest and its marshes were of much more interest to me than a nunnery and pilgrims.
    In the spring and fall, one had to find entry points through narrow, muddy paths. The marsh and bog led to streams into the woods, and an area we later came to know as “The Devil’s Teeth,” which was a series of large stones standing upended in a circle—as tall as many men—that were said to have been there since the beginning of time. It was a mysterious and wonderful place, although the priests and monks often warned us to never go into the Forest except from necessity, for the Devil lurked everywhere among its branches and roots.
    Our storytellers spun many tales around firesides of the ancient heroes and damsels who had met their fates within it, of the creatures and monsters that had once walked among its great trees, and the nymphs and faerie queens that had lived along its bogs and among the caves. There was a legend of a sacred poisonous tree—its fruit would kill whoever tasted of it, save for those purest in spirit. I heard a story once of a man who went foraging for his family and drew a root out from the earth, and the root was shaped as a man, and screamed so loud when the good man pulled it that he went deaf from the sound.
    At the