Interlude.

“Hayfoot! Strawfoot!” the brother cried. “And are you a fool, too?” he asked, his voice like thunder, deep and rumbling.

Just last night the lightning cracked upon us, the booming steps of the storm like a giant’s pace. “Gad, but it’s loud,” and me at the edge of the bed, ready to run for a mother's shelter. “Is it war?” I might have shouted. “Abed with thee, child” the prefect told me. “It’s just a storm, is it not? And you shoutin’ war. What overcomes you so? Hush. It’s abed, to be sure.”

To be sure, Brother, a fool I am. And, Brother, fool enough to know, I’m not made for marching, though I might grow in fondness for murder. I sent to him as much, but he could not read me. He just heard my wheezing and was disgusted. And me, I heard his complaints, his blasted tooth aching so and they’d tear it out. They will, God help me, he thought. Like something for shoein’ a horse, the clamp they wave about. God. And the crunch of it. That’s the worse. Poor lamentable me, I ache so. Worse than a kick to me sack. But what good is me stand anyway?

“Left and right, you whelp! Do you not know them by now?”

“Brother, if you would just ask? I know the Latin, too.”

“Vile cur, I say. Dogs have no Latin, I won’t hear it!”

“Pater.” Rian said, and he took the priest’s hand. “I heard you were poorly. Well ... I thought of you, and it was clear.”

The priest didn’t stir, but his breathing was easy. Rian felt the fever leave.

“I was out grubbin’ for asparagus.” And he thought, What might be its truename?

“Oh, stand to, you sorry pup. Left, right and bother. You’ll never march. Your head’s too big for it. You’re heart’s too big for it, too. So who will you fool next? Go back to your books and your candle wax.

“Brother, I’ll try harder...”

“Laddie, don’t go bother a brother,” the man told him. “Bugger a brother,” he muttered. “Oh, the whole lot of you." He cast eyes eyes over us. "I’d best go shovel coal.”

And the winter came hard. I remember the troughs gone froze over and the cows’ staring. Like licking for salt with less chance. Chaney-eyed, the beasts, the breath of them a vapor. Was it their prayers, like the incense we burned on the Lord’s day, our plea for the Christ, the Son of God? When would he come ... and would we know him? Pater asked just so, “Will you know him?” and the lot of us shook our heads. Would it be poetry he spoke? Like the psalms? Or will he just speak with his sword and have at us sinners?

We’d know then.

Seventeen.

Selden waited for Geoffrey at the front of the cottage, tempted to sit down and light a pipe, but he thought better of it. His enjoying a diverting smoke wouldn’t seem quite right, not with the bishop so ill. Instead, he looked down the darkened path toward the village and dished into his memories.

He remembered his naming day, him just turned sixteen and the vital force of him just beamed. He would see the world and conquer its four corners, clearly. And would there be love? Yes. And sorrow? Don’t you know it, he told himself. They came packaged together. One didn’t need the gift to know as much. Didn’t women cry so, and even the men would let loose in tears when they were deep in their cups.

I’ll have my name and then make my place in the world, he thought. His father would have him help keep the farm, but there was a brother just a year older and strong as an ox and another son of the soil just two years behind him. The family might do without him. It’d be one less mouth to feed at least and Selden admitted, I can’t stand the filth of it ... and all the slaughter. Even the piggy faces had a beauty to them. There was kinship among the living and the squealing before the bloodletting would tug hard at his heart. They know ... and he felt their desperate fear and he’d turn desperate, too, his father shouting his commands, his eldest brother with the bloody knife, and him nearly in the mud with the pigs, holding one fast and telling it, “Shush now, shush now. You’ll see it’s soon over.”

So he was named. The village priest stood down current from him, holding him by the belt and muttering prayers. The man had lost nearly all his teeth and the psalms and all he spoke came out in a slush of rhythms and long vowels. The bishop waited in the center of the fast-moving stream–it was spring and the snow melt came racing down to them–and he grabbed the boy’s hand and asked, more gently than Selden had expected, “Who are you?” And then he felt like the weather. Storm and thunder, gentle breeze, parching summer, the sweet nostalgia of the gold and falling leaves, the tender dew, and the odd singularity of a snow flake, the prism of it and the commonsense of all its angles.

He was named. The bishop whispered it to him, though he had to shout it to the village pater so that he’d hear too and remember. No matter, the stream rushed so hard, no one else might hear.

“Master,” Geoffrey called. The boy was within ten feet of him and he never knew, so deep the reverie.

Selden turned to him. “All right, then?”

“Yes, well enough, if a hayloft will do. They wanted you in a bed, but I told them you wouldn’t have it.”

“And the boy and his family?”

“Noon, just as you asked.”

Selden was quiet then, but spoke up before the boy grew uncomfortable being read. “You’re afire.”

“I was knocked clean down, by an oaf shouting about his bowlegs and followed by his niece banging a spoon on a pan. They made it all fun, and me in the mud!”

“Go on, Geoffrey. They were achase, after their bees.”

Geoffrey just looked on.

“It was a swarm they were after,” Selden said.

The boy looked dull still.

“You know nothing about the country, Geoffrey. Do you?”

Geoffrey smiled, shaking his head, the rhythm reminding him of the girl’s running off, the laughing as loud as the spoon against pot.

“A beekeeper maintains his claim on the swarm so long as he chases it," the master explained.

“And the pot? And banging spoon?”

“Sure she was tanging the bees. It drives them to cover, they say, like thunder.”

“Rubbish,” Geoffrey claimed.

Selden was silently amused. Sure the boy was stung.

Sixteen.

“No, thank you, Matron,” Geoffrey told her. “Pater will be waiting for me.”

“And have you made arrangements for the night, Geoff? We’ll happily find a place for you two. We haven’t much room, but it’s a roof, init?

“Pater’s taken care of all that, Matron. But thank you. Thank you all the same.”

Geoffrey nodded his head to take his leave. He asked, “With your license?”

“What’s that, Geoff?” Rian’s mother smiled, clearly perplexed by the expression but patient enough with the student’s high manners.

“With your leave, Matron?”

“Yes, yes. Don’t let grass grow through your toes.”

Geoffrey turned outdoors and soon enough he heard the banging of pots coming closer. What in the world? he wondered. He just reached the corner of the cottage and was mowed down by a beast of a man, not tall at all, but with a chest the breadth of a barrel. And squat legs that kept to their awkward running.

“Blast!” the man shouted. “And me so bowlegged!”

Could that have been an apology?

And now came a young women banging a metal spoon against a metal pot, laughing at the collision and the tumble of a boy.

Geoffrey looked up and saw her and thought, She's beautiful. Her light brown hair done up in braids and her figure so appealing to the boy’s imagination. Blue eyes that seemed to spark and white teeth that gleamed as the girl laughed.

“He is my uncle, young sir,” she expressed between her laughing and the banging of the pot. “He is quite bowlegged.” And off she raced. The sight of her joyful to Geoffrey’s eyes, and him not a bit mindful of his toppled pride.

Well, he thought, as he pulled himself up. I’ll be the bowlegged one.

Fifteen.

In the village–not far away, just over two gently rolling hills and down two or three field lengths, lying just beside a rushing stream–Geoffrey stood at the cottage doorway and puzzled over what he might say. The boy’s mother–Rian’s mother–insisted that the master and he join the family for a meal the next day.

“After Pater has spoken to the boy, when that’s all done and put aside, we’ll have a meal. Rian’s just now gone to collect the sperage and we’ll have a hen or two. We’ll make a small feast of it, won’t we?”

“Tomorrow’s an ember day, Matron...”

“No meat then. Is that it? That is a shame.” She thought of what might be in the larder and was puzzled, too. “We’ll make do, young man. Still a feast. A small one maybe, but bread at least, and greens. And we’ll find something frothy for our cups.” She took to sweeping again. The floor couldn’t have been more clean, a mud floor dried hard and shiny. “You’ll see, young man. Geoff, was it?”

“Yes, Matron.”

“A feast, a feast,” the woman said, though she shook her head at the puzzle of it. Why visit on an ember day when all within her said they must eat?

For Geoffrey’s part, he bit his tongue. No one ever called him Geoff, not unless they wanted to provoke a fight. Country manners, he thought. When he first introduced himself, the matron hugged him and insisted, “I’m Beatrice, but they all call me Bea.” He recoiled at the familiarity.

Ember days, of course, were days of complete fasting. Geoffrey hated them, but it was better to choose hunger than be forced by want. Nothing but water. Broth perhaps, if you were sick, or old. He didn’t have the heart to say as much to the woman in front of him, who nearly danced with her broom.

“Come sit down, Geoff. I can’t see how you won’t have a nibble at least now. No ember day today, is it? That wouldn’t be fair. Not at all. A growing boy like you?”

A bit more for Part Fourteen.

Again Selden whispered, “Matron, did Primus share his truename with you?”

“Heavens no,” she answered. And she thought, “You are a queer sort... No one gives their truename.”

Which was true enough, though a daughter might tell her mother–a man might tell his bride–but it was the village priest who would remember and would give a dead man a proper burial and stone, a stone with one’s truename etched for all to see and remember. It was no secret then. The dead were past caution, past any fear they might have that their truename be used against them. One’s true name bound one irrevocably to those who knew it, perhaps more completely even than marriage.

One never asked for another’s truename. That was understood. When given, it was nearly always an unexpected gift ... and always a burden. Sometimes the vagrant, the lonely traveler, the exile ... they might give their truename to a priest when they thought they had no more days to live. More often, they died nameless and unclaimed. If there were a stone, it might read “Berwin, as he was known,” or “Aline, as we called her,” but such a monument seems to break the heart.

“He might share it,” Selden supposed, “but I don’t think we should count on it.”

“You can’t divine it?” Matron asked, which brought a smile to Selden.

“Fairy tales, Matron. Not even the Black Arts can force a man’s truename.”

Matron shivered and mouthed, “Avert,” the spoken charm that even toddlers learned. “Avert” meant to turn evil. Many gestured, too, passing a flattened hand, palm down, across the air in front of them, as though they were at table and meant to say “No more.”

Fourteen.

“Thank you, Pater,” the old woman said.

“It’s a gift from the Archmage himself.”

Bread of life, bread of heaven.

Selden remembered the story the Archmage told when he handed the bread over to him: The Archmage began his religious life as a monk, one who traveled his city’s streets begging for food. One day a housewife was so irritated with him she threw a very hard loaf and struck him in the head. “It hurt very much,” the Archmage recounted. “I think that perhaps she did not give it with a glad heart.”

Part Thirteen.

Selden signed himself and then turned to where the bishop lay. He spoke quietly a spell that would bring back the bishop’s appetite, making the small gestures called for, questioning himself still if this was what the dying man would want. He took away the fever, too, knowing that he was just masking the symptoms of the man’s dying.

He called for Matron then, not out loud, but by placing the gentlest of suggestions into her mind. Matron would sense it as curiosity or concern. And, sure enough, she appeared in just a moment, her eyes searching those of the middle-aged priest for some sign of hope.

She came close and Selden whispered, “How well do you know this man?”

Matron’s mind scurried between anger and suspicion and fear. What a question to ask, she thought. This is no man lying here; he’s a priest. And do you mean, am I intimate with him? No, I love my husband still–God rest his soul–and I wouldn’t sin with a priest. How dare you, her mind demanded. And of course I know him well, Pater; he’s my parish priest. I confess to him. Less likely would I turn to you for penance and forgiveness. So, what do you mean: Do I know him? Is he not what he seems?

Matron finally spoke, “I am as close to him as if he were my brother.”

“Then you’ll care for him until the end? For you should know, Matron, he is not long with us. He’s been shriven. He calls for the end, so that he might begin his new life.”

Matron’s eyes filled with tears. She struggled to speak, “Is there nothing you can do? I would ask– ”

“Nothing more can be done... Or, at least, ought to be done.” He looked at her closely, calling her attention to his eyes, and perhaps his heart. Might she hear him as he felt? “One reaches a place of quiet–even when everyone else is wailing and in tears, even when one’s self makes a terrible groaning... A vast place of quiet and towering clouds, that race toward the setting sun. And then comes certainty. Death comes as naturally as a heartbeat, as unplanned as our breathing. We make the steps as though we are young again. The best of us go skipping, making songs like those children might sing.”

The old woman smiled, a bit. Perhaps she understood.

Selden told her, “I’ve done some small things. For comfort. I’ve taken the fever away and given back an appetite. Don’t be fooled by it, Matron. Your priest hasn’t long to live.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Let me tell you something. Not a secret, but tell no one until he’s passed. Will you be bound?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Your priest is a bishop.”

Matron showed her surprise, but looked at the dying man as if she had known all along. Selden heard her thoughts: We’ve known that he is a holy man.

“He gave up his crosier when his health began to fail. And was called here to Cald Mere. Tiny Cald Mere.” To himself, Selden reasoned, He came to Cald Mere to teach this boy. One would receive no better catechism.

“So he is Primus to us, Matron. When he wakes, Primus will be hungry. Give him broth and ... I have a loaf of bread with me, from the Archmage. It is the eulogia, but some days old. Perhaps it will be a sop for you two, for you should eat of it also. It is blessed bread and you share in its blessing as you tend to Primus.” Selden placed a hand on the woman’s head. “God reward you, Matron.”

He knew her well enough from what he had seen in her. She was a kind woman, devoted more to her priest than to her God, perhaps, but that was her path.

And Selden knew, “All paths lead to God.”