The Lance Thrower

III

FATHER GERMANUS

IT HAS BEEN a matter of astonishment to me throughout my adult life that, having spent no more than half a day in the company of Chulderic, King Ban’s Master-at-Arms, I can recall everything he said to me, practically verbatim, and yet when it comes to speaking of my great tutor and mentor Germanus, the renowned Bishop of Auxerre, I often find myself ready to gnash my teeth with fury and frustration because I can remember so little with any clarity. Certainly I can remember incidents, and when I push myself toward recalling those in detail I can sometimes remember the surrounding circumstances quite accurately, but overall I have no sense of any flow of time in those recollections, as though my years with the bishop comprised no more than a series of unconnected incidents. I am aware of a series of lacunae in my memory—holes and spaces and missing parts that prevent me from having any solid conviction of wholeness in my relationship with the saintly bishop.

Saintly is not an inappropriate word to use in describing Germanus of Auxerre, for before he ever came into my life, men and women were already speaking in awe of his sanctity, his holiness and goodness. It was public knowledge that early in his first years as Bishop of Auxerre he had cast out demons from a man who had stolen large amounts of money, and in the process of the exorcism had forced the demon to divulge the place where the hoard was concealed—these events had taken place openly and were witnessed by many people, and the results had been indisputable. Ever since that time, the bishop had been besieged by people seeking cures for illnesses and possession, and he had performed many miracles on behalf of his flock. I was not surprised, then, that within months of his death people had already begun speaking of him as Saint Germanus. Whether or not the bishop truly was a saint, however, I find myself unqualified to judge, precisely because it was Germanus himself who taught me never to presume to make moral judgments, since those were the sole property of God to make or unmake.

I am content to remember him as my mentor, my teacher, and my guide, and latterly my friend. I have never known a time when I did not have cause to be grateful for the example he set me, the lessons he taught me, and the principles he instilled in me. The man I grew to become could never have existed or behaved as he did had it not been for the direct influence of Germanus of Auxerre. And that conviction, that certitude that he shaped and molded me to be what I was and what I am today, is the major reason why I find it so galling that I can remember so little of our time together.

Germanus grew to be a constant in my life, the dominating force behind my mental and physical growth for the seven years that followed Chulderic’s single day of tuition and enlightenment, and as in the lives of all growing boys, the majority of the mundane events and ordinary, undistinguished times in those seven years have long since been forgotten, leaving only the high points and grand events to be remembered.

As King Ban had told me he would, Germanus arrived at our gates within the month, accompanied by a small retinue, and on the night of his arrival, before dinner, King Ban summoned me to his private quarters to meet my new guardian. As I made my way to the King’s chambers, I visualized some kind of wizened cleric, stooped with piety and learning, long-bearded and wearing a high, pointed hat. It was only long months later that I realized I had been visualizing a sorcerer, the image dredged up from some half-forgotten memory of someone else’s story told over a fire on a winter’s night. The reality was radically different

“Aha, there you are. Over here, if you please.” The Lady Vivienne had just emerged from her own chamber as I entered the long suite of rooms she shared with the King, and I changed direction slightly in response to her summons, smiling and holding out my hands for the inspection I knew was coming. Smiling gently back at me, she took my hands in her own and held me out and away from her at arms’ length as she examined my appearance. Then she turned my hands over and inspected my palms before turning them back and peering closely at my fingernails, after which she released my hands and reached out to hook one finger into the front of my tunic and pull me toward her as she leaned forward to sniff at me, wrinkling her nose delicately as she did so. Then, when she had satisfied herself that I had bathed that day and was fit to present to an important guest, she nodded and ruffled my hair fondly. “You look remarkably fine, young man, clean and respectable. Are you ready to meet Bishop Germanus?”

I nodded, feeling my heart beating hard with excitement in anticipation of meeting the great man, but smiling back at her still, aware as I always was in those days of the change that had taken place in our attitudes, each to the other, since the acknowledgment that we were not mother and son, but aunt and nephew. Somehow, and quite inexplicably as far as I was concerned—and very surprisingly, too, looking back on it nowadays, since I was only ten years old at the time and demonstrating a very mature self-awareness for my age—our relationship had changed for the better within a matter of days of that admission. We had always been close and affectionate with each other in the past, but now that our true relationship had been revealed and accepted, each of us had altered our treatment and our awareness of the other very slightly and indefinably, offering and demonstrating a degree of friendliness—I could think of no other word to define it better—that had not been there in former days. The first few days after my unexpected epiphany had been painful for both of us, with neither one of us knowing what the other was thinking or expecting, and throughout those days, each time I met her, the Lady Vivienne’s eyes had been red and swollen from weeping, as, to tell the truth, had been my own. But that time had passed swiftly enough, and at the end of it she and I felt possibly more comfortable with each other than we ever had before. Once she saw that I had not grown to hate her for her necessary deceit, my aunt—although as forewarned I continued to call her Mother—had become more open and more demonstrative in her concerns for me, and in return I had taken pains to let her be aware of my unaltered love for her. Now, as these thoughts flitted through my mind, she caught a trace of them somehow and frowned at me, her face betraying slight perplexity.

“What’s wrong, Clothar? You’re not afraid, are you? Of meeting him?”

I shook my head immediately. “No, Mother, not at all. I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I heard about him.”

“Then what were you thinking a moment ago? You looked almost … distressed.”

“No,” I said and again shook my head in an emphatic negative. “Truly. I was merely thinking about all that has happened recently, but I’m not distressed at all. Can we go in now?”

She reached out and stroked my cheek gently with the back of her fingers, her eyes narrowing as she gazed intently into mine, and then she, too, nodded and tapped my cheek twice, very softly and tenderly, before crooking her finger in a sign for me to follow her as she turned away and walked ahead of me, leading me into the room where King Ban sat talking with Bishop Germanus. I followed her wordlessly, my nostrils still pleasantly aware of the perfume I had picked up from her when she leaned forward to sniff at me.

I knew the man with King Ban had to be Germanus the moment I set eyes on him because there was no one else in the room, and that was very unusual. Whenever King Ban entertained guests there were always other people around—advisers and military personnel and other dignitaries—to share the burden of amusing and engaging the visitor and to act as cushions between king and guests on those few occasions when the situation grew strained, difficult, or tiresome. No such situation, I knew, could possibly arise with Germanus, an old and much loved friend.

Ban heard us as soon as the doors swung open and he rose to his feet to greet us. His guest rose at the same time, and my first impressions of him were confusing. He was nowhere near as tall as Ban, nor was he quite as broad across the shoulders, and he was far, far older than the King, yet he struck me immediately as being by far the larger of the two men. It would be years before I encountered the concept of presence as it applied to some people, but even though I had no notion of what it was when I first saw Germanus of Auxerre, I was awestricken by my immediate awareness that here was someone larger than life. Rising to his feet beside the King, he seemed to loom over Ban, though he was neither as large as Ban was nor as magnificently dressed. He simply radiated appeal, filling the room with it and demanding the attention of anyone and everyone who entered.

He certainly claimed all my attention from the moment I set eyes on him, and I watched in open-mouthed admiration as he strode across the room to greet the Lady Vivienne, his face beaming in a wide-mouthed grin of sheer pleasure. He had no time for me at that moment; all his attention was focused tightly upon his hostess, whom he had not seen, I gathered, since his arrival. As I stared, amazed, he threw his arms about her and hugged her in a very unbishoply manner—that word, which sprang newborn into my mind as I watched him, has remained in my vocabulary ever since. Effortlessly, and despite his advanced age, he lifted her clear of the ground and spun her around, kissing her soundly on both cheeks as he told her how happy he was to see her again after so long a time. He then placed her firmly back on her feet and did much the same thing to her as she had done to me mere moments earlier: he held her out at arm’s length, her fingertips in his, in order to examine her from head to toe, and then proceeded to heap compliments and blandishments upon every aspect of her appearance, from her gown and veil to her complexion and hair. The Queen preened with pleasure and her husband the King stood smiling like a man besotted.

But then it was over, suddenly, before I was ready, and he had somehow guided Queen Vivienne into a deep chair and turned the full force of his gaze upon me. I can still recall the sensation of falling that filled me as those eyes met mine; it was akin to the sensation you experience when swinging widely on a hanging rope, far out over water that is deep and still beneath you. Germanus looked at me, and all the gaiety and humor faded from his face to be replaced by an expression I could not decipher. I could almost feel the weight of his scrutiny as his eyes moved up and down and across my body, and in a vain attempt to disguise the effect it was having on me I busied myself in looking back at him, absorbing the details of his appearance.

He was dressed completely in white, which did not surprise me, white being the color of purity and sanctity, according to my stepmother, the Queen. It seemed appropriate to me, in my ten-year-old wisdom, that God’s bishop should be dressed in white. The high, pointed hat I had expected was nowhere to be seen, however, and I was observant enough to be able to tell from the condition of the bishop’s hair that he had not been wearing a hat at all: it was thick and curly, on the white edge of silvery gray, and he wore it cropped short in the military fashion. He was clean shaven that particular day, although I was to see him bearded as often as not in the years that lay ahead, and his skin was darkened to the color of old bronze by the summer sun. He wore some kind of heavy woolen stole across his shoulders, its ends trailing in front of him and held loosely in place by the bend of his elbows, and beneath that his entire body was encased from neck to ankles in a long, plain robe of heavy white cloth, belted at the waist with a thick length of white silken rope and otherwise completely unadorned. Beneath the hem of that long white garment, however, revealed as he spun around holding the Queen, I had seen heavy, black, thick-soled military boots.

“So,” he said finally, his eyes fixed now on mine. “You are Clothar, son of Childebertus and Elaine.” I waited, not knowing how to respond and not quite daring to glance at my foster parents for guidance. Then slowly Germanus held out his right hand, palm up and fingers extended, and I stepped forward and stretched out my own, palm downward. His long fingers closed around mine, warm and supple, yet callused as though from long, hard work. Still looking deep into my eyes, he smiled and nodded. “I knew your grandfather Jacob, you know, in Constantinople. He was a friend of mine, a very good friend, although he was far more than twice my age. He came from Britain. Jacobus was his Roman name, but everyone called him Jacob. He was a lawyer, and so was I, although he was a famous arbitrator with a lifetime of triumphs behind him by then and I was just starting my career. This was long before I met your father—almost a full decade earlier, as a matter of fact. I was honored that he chose to befriend me, for his own reasons, and I still am.” He nodded again, still smiling. “I didn’t meet your father until we were both in the army. You father was a junior officer, and I was his commanding legate, so had I not known Jacob as well as I did, and then discovered almost by accident that your father was his son, the two of us might never have met, let alone become close friends.”

He stared at me steadily for a time, then rested an elbow on the back of his left fist and ran the tip of an index finger down the length of his cheek, a gesture with which I was to become familiar over the next decade, knowing it as an indicator that the bishop was thinking deeply, remembering or considering. “I never knew your father when he was your age, but I can see him in you, as you are. Your grandfather, Jacob would have been proud to see you standing there, the image of his own son.” He was silent then, looking at me still, pouting slightly so that his lower lip protruded against the tip of his finger. It was clear that he was thinking, but still I could not judge from his expression what kind of thoughts were going through his head.

“You are to come with me when I leave here,” he said then, “to be a student in my school in Auxerre. Does that cause you concern?” I managed to shake my head, but could not have spoken had my life depended on it. “You are sure about that, are you not?” I nodded. He turned back to my parents, cocking his head. “You didn’t tell me he is mute.”

Ban laughed aloud, and even Vivienne smiled. “Oh, he’s no mute, believe me,” Ban said. “He may be awed by you, for the time being, but that will wear off, and when he finds his tongue again you may end up wishing he were mute indeed.”

The bishop turned to me again, an expression in his eyes that might have contained a hint of humor. “Will I?” he asked me. “Are you really that loud? I find that hard to credit. Mind you, your father was known to raise his voice from time to time. Come, sit with us. We have things to talk about before we go down to dine, and once there, there will be too many others talking for us to hear ourselves. Sit, and let me tell you what lies in store for you at Auxerre.”

I took the chair he indicated, across from him and between the King and Queen, and for a short time everyone spoke in generalities, as people do when they meet after having been years apart, questing to find topics that will neither strain nor test the relationship they had once known together. Finally, Queen Vivienne asked the bishop the question that turned the conversation toward me.

“What will you teach Clothar, up there in Auxerre, that he will not have touched upon here in Benwick?”

Germanus grinned. “Probably little, if not nothing. The concerns and the materials of education are unchanging—reading and writing, logic, debate, philosophy, science, polemic, and geography … but the focus of everything will be different, if you can understand what that means.”

The Queen smiled. “I understand completely. You are referring to the scope of things.”

“Exactly so, my Lady, simply because of the size of the school and the number of pupils. We have wonderful teachers, most of whom I hired myself after lengthy observation.” He turned to me. “I wonder … I had better make it clear to you from the outset, Clothar, that although you will be in my charge, I will not be your personal teacher. Did you know that, or did you think you would be under my constant attention?”

Still unwilling to trust my tongue, I merely shook my head again, and he grunted, deep in his throat. “Aye,” he said. “Well, that is the way of it. I’ll be your confessor, and I will keep a close eye on you and on all your activities, serving as your parents’ deputy in a double capacity—on behalf of your real parents, who were my friends, and of your foster parents here, who are no less parents and who remain my friends. You and I will meet privately at least once every week to discuss your progress and your life and anything else demanding our attention, but your actual teaching will be at the hands of others, all of them better tutors than I could ever be. I have my pastoral work, as Bishop of Auxerre, and that, I fear, often consumes more time than I have to spend.” He sniffed, thrusting out his lower lip again. “Do you know anything about our school?”

I knew a nod would not serve as a response this time and so I coughed to clear my throat. “No, sir.”

The bishop nodded and looked at King Ban and from him to the Lady Vivienne. “And what about you two?”

Ban slowly shook his head.

“There is no reason you should, I suppose. Auxerre is a long way from here … . But I confess I am disappointed that the fame of our school has failed to penetrate this far.”

“Enlighten us, then, dear Germanus—” The Queen stopped short. “Oh, forgive me. Should I be calling you by another name, now that you are a bishop?”

Germanus laughed. “Absolutely not! Call me Germanus as you always have. That’s who I am and nothing about me has changed simply because I am become a bishop. Titles are for others. Among friends as old as us, names never change.”

The Queen bowed her head, acknowledging the courtesy. “Thank you. Now tell us about this school of yours.”

The bishop’s face grew sober. “It is a school in the tradition of the ancients, where boys are taught the things they need to know in order to be good men, accepting duty and responsibility.”

“What kind of boys attend this school of yours? Are they all the sons of wealthy men?”

Germanus smiled at the Queen, but in answering her he spoke to both of them. “No, not at all, although many of them are. Ours is a school for boys, my Lady, not necessarily rich boys. The prime entrance requirement to our ranks is intellect. We are looking to train minds and encourage learning for learning’s sake. Our world is changing rapidly nowadays, my friends, and many of the old, time-honored ways of doing things are being forgotten and abandoned. And it pains me to say it, but high among those.things ranks the education of our children. Education has fallen out of favor, the need for it seemingly eclipsed by the catastrophes and cataclysms shaking the very foundations of the Empire. In a disintegrating world, people are thinking, there is little need for education.”

“Think you the world is coming to an end?” This question from King Ban made my eyes snap wide open. The notion of World’s End is a Christian one and Ban was no Christian, and yet here he was, asking the bishop for reassurance.

Germanus shook his head. “Are you referring to the return of the Christ in the Final Judgment? I think not. Not yet. The Scriptures tell us that the Second Coming lies ahead of us, but they also indicate that much requires to be done before it comes upon us. At least, that is what I believe. The Empire may be facing its end and that would not surprise me, but not the world, I think. Mind you, I may be wrong. No man may know the mind of God and it is blasphemous to presume to do so. But it is the possibility that the world might survive that causes me such great concern over the education of our children. And so we believe—we being the elders and bishops of the Church—that we court disaster if we allow our children to run wild. If we fail to teach them how to read and write and use their minds as God intended, then they and our entire world will fall back into Godless savagery. And so we maintain schools.”

“To train clerics for the Church.” The Queen’s voice was gentle, no hint of censure to be found in it, but Germanus caught the inference.

“Of course,” he agreed. “But not exclusively. The world needs more than clerics. It needs leaders—educated, Christian leaders.”

“And soldiers.” This was Ban.

“Aye, indeed, soldiers, too.” The bishop’s gaze returned to me. “The King tells me you have the makings of a cavalry soldier. We will build on that. Tiberias Cato, one of our brethren, served with me in the army and saved my life on numerous occasions simply because he is a magnificent horseman—the finest natural rider I have ever known. He, too, knew your father, although not, perhaps, your mother. Cato will supervise your training as a horseman and a cavalryman—I know you know the two are not necessarily the same.” His pause was barely perceptible. “You do know that, do you not?”

I swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“And do you know the difference?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. What is it?”

“You can be a horseman without being a cavalryman, but you cannot be a cavalryman without being a horseman.”

“Absolutely. Good lad. Anyway, Tiberias Cato was a doughty fighter in his time and now he is a marvelously gifted teacher and trainer, but he is more horse than human at times. He will be responsible for your overall development in military things. There will be others working with you, too, in the various disciplines, but Tiberias will be your primary trainer. He will take whatever talents you possess for horsemanship and polish them until they dazzle even you.

“Apart from that—and it is probably sinful of me to prioritize in such a manner, but the soldier in me frequently fights with the bishop—apart from that, you will study all the other subjects that a well-tutored young man should know. You will learn the rudiments of Greek, sufficient for some of your reading, but for the most part you will be taught in Latin. You will have training in logic, debate and polemics, philosophy, mathematics and geometry, geography, and the basic elements of imperial law. Also, you will be living among priests and clerics, and so you will behave for the most part as they do, adhering to the Order of Saint Benedict and observing the prayers and ceremonies he has decreed as being proper for a devout man of any age. You will eat well, three times a day, and in return for your food and lodgings, you will be expected to share the tasks of keeping the school clean and its students well fed. That means you will scrub floors, whitewash walls, wash clothes, grow and gather food, prepare it, and serve it to your fellows.”

He stopped, frowning at me as he watched my reactions to his words, and then his face broke once again into a wide, friendly grin. “But not all of those at once, I promise you. Each of those tasks will fall to you no more than once a month, for one day at a time. We have cooks and gardeners and carpenters and masons who work full time at their various crafts. You, as a student, will be seconded from time to time to assist them, and that means performing the dirty, heavy work most of the time. So you will be required to work and work hard, but the requirements are not brutal and you will have plenty of time to study and to rest between spells of duty.”

He sat gazing at me for long moments, and then he said, “Do you have any questions to ask of me?”

“Yes, sir. What … what should I call you?”

He barked a short, deep laugh. “Hah! Straight to the point, and a good question. You’ll call me what all your fellows call me: Father Germanus. That’s the simplest and most effective name we have been able to come up with, and it has taken us some time to arrive at it. I am no longer an active army officer, so General and Legate are invalid, and I have a personal dislike for the term Bishop used as a name. ‘Magister’ is another term I dislike, because it bears too many overtones of army life, which is notoriously impious and ungodly. Then there is a movement among some of the Church’s adherents nowadays, particularly in the east, toward equality in which all members of a clerical community address each other as Brother. We have a number of men in our community whose use of the title Brother is highly appropriate. These are laymen, devout and pious beyond question, who choose to live lives of service to God and to conduct that service in our community, but they have taken no vows and have not been consecrated to the priesthood. They are Brethren in the Christ and I honor them highly. For a time, I even considered adopting Brother as my title, too, but the truth is that to those who attend my school I am both teacher and superior, and I have no desire to be anything as egalitarian as a brother.” He paused and smiled again. “As a bishop, I am the pastor and father of my flock, and as mentor and governor to a school full of boys, I am, ipso facto, a fatherly figure. So, like everyone else, you will call me Father Germanus. Have I explained that clearly?”

“Yes, Father Germanus.”

For the following half hour, the three adults moved on to speak of other things and I spoke not another word, although I missed nothing of what was being said. Soon, however, we were summoned to dinner by the King’s Chancellor, formally dressed in honor of the bishop’s visit, and I was banished to sit among the lesser family members in the body of the hall. I made sure to seat myself on the side of the table that permitted me an uninterrupted view of the King and Queen and their guest, however, and I barely took my eyes off my new guardian until they rose again to leave.

I spent the next morning preparing to take my leave of my family and friends, and the time passed by in a blink, so that it was suddenly past noon and I was standing outside the main gates of Ban’s castle, holding my horse’s reins and awaiting the signal to mount. My belongings were all safely packed and stowed in one of the three wagons in our train, and I had made all my farewells to those I loved, including my old nurse Ludda, Allisan the head cook, who had doted on me since my infancy, and Queen Vivienne herself. All three partings had wrung tears from me and as I stood there waiting for the signal that would send us on our way, I was highly aware of the reddened rims around my eyes and agonizingly and increasingly conscious of the fact that I had no slightest desire to go with Bishop Germanus, or to live in his renowned school among strangers. Benwick Castle was the only home I had ever known and already, standing outside its main gates with all my belongings and gazing up the walls, I was missing it unendurably. From this day forth I would become an alien, an outsider living in a strange land far to the north and west. My friends here would soon forget me as they grew up without me and I knew, deep in my soul, that I would never be able to return, because I had once heard King Ban say to someone that there is no going back. Once you move beyond a thing or a place, you outgrow it and you can never return and find satisfaction there again. That thought terrified me with the vision of all I would be losing by this departure, and my aunt Vivienne’s face sprang into my mind, her lips quivering slightly in a tremulous, deeply regretful smile. And suddenly I felt my traitorous lower lip begin to tremble in exactly the way it had when I was little and preparing to burst into tears. I gritted my teeth fiercely and sucked a great, deep breath, swallowing hard and looking away from familiar faces up on the walls, forcing myself to think about the physical journey ahead of us and trying to visualize the unknown territories through which we would be passing. But of course that was impossible and so I finally turned my back altogether on the crowd and stood glaring off into the distance, hoping that no one would come to ask why I was doing that, because as soon as anyone did, he would see the tears streaming down my cheeks.

Finally there came a noise and a restless stirring at the gates and I swung around again, scrubbing at my tears with my sleeve and just in time to see the crowd of onlookers parting to permit the King and Queen to emerge with Germanus. And at once I forgot all that had been in my mind as my eyes fastened upon my new guardian. There was nothing bishoply about his appearance on this occasion, either. He wore a military style tunic of rich brown and white fabric, kilted above his knees, and sturdy, heavy riding boots with spurs. He wore a heavy cloak of plain brown cloth, too, fastened across his chest with a bronze chain and thrown back over his shoulders. He was bareheaded and he carried no weapons, but no one setting eyes on him would ever have mistaken him for anything other than a soldier, and seeing him, my heart leaped and felt suddenly lighter within me and I was able to smile and wave to where King Ban and Queen Vivienne were both watching me. The Queen blew a kiss to me and the King lifted his clenched fist to his left breast in salute, and I bowed my head in acknowledgment, to both of them. Then the king raised his arm in a signal and a trumpeter on the walls above us blew a salute in response, and we swung away, turning our backs on Benwick and riding—I, at least—into a new, unknown, and consequently frightening world.

I adapted to my new life with all the resilience of any ten-year-old boy, accepting everything that came my way, no matter how new or strange, and adjusting immediately to whatever demands or requirements it entailed. Everything that occurred after we left Benwick was new and alien to some extent, and so I quickly learned to catalogue and categorize each event almost as it occurred, assessing, absorbing, and accepting the results, for better or for worse, as part of the way things now were, and I threw myself wholeheartedly into every element of the wondrous adventure that my life had become.

All my life, until arriving in Germanus’s new school—the Bishop’s School, everyone called it—I had regarded King Ban’s castle in Benwick as the pinnacle of privileged living. Here in Auxerre, however, I found that the sumptuous luxury of Germanus’s family home beggared description. No matter that Germanus himself was now a pauper, having ceded his houses, wealth, and all other possessions to the Church; he yet lived in his own former home as bishop and custodian for the Church, and his beloved school, which he considered his life’s work and his greatest endeavor for the glory of God, was housed in another of his family’s former dwellings, close to his own house and scarcely less luxurious.

I had grown up accustomed to living in strong stone buildings, but now I found myself living in strong, beautiful, and graceful buildings, with multicolored walls of fine marble, polished to the luster of expensive glass. For days after my arrival, I walked in awe of the beauty of my new surroundings, but then, being ten, I grew used to them and forgot that they were any different from other houses anywhere, and I lost myself completely in the strange world of living in a school among other students.

Father Germanus had promised me that I would have fine teachers at his school, and I did. Some of them I loved, some I admired, several I endured, and a few I tolerated. I only really disliked one out of all of them, however, and the antipathy I felt for him was reciprocated in full measure. His name was Anthony—he insisted that we call him Brother Anthony—and he and I detested each other from our first encounter. He took exception to something in my face or my deportment the first time I went into his classroom and he went out of his way thereafter to make his dislike of me plain to me and to everyone else, and so in response I found it remarkably easy to find a host of elements to dislike and disparage in him. Since he was the teacher and I the newest, most insignificant student in the school, however, he had, and continued to have, the best of our encounters for a long, long time. Even today, looking back across the chasm of years, I find myself hard put to define what it was about that man that offended me, but I have absolutely no doubt that were he and I to meet again today, never having laid eyes upon each other before, we would react to each other exactly as we did then. Some people simply affect one another that way.

Brother Anthony was a tonsured monk, his head shaved bald to show that he was a slave of God, bound to the Church by vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. Such total commitment was a new custom and indicated an entirely new depth of devotion and dedication, Bishop Germanus himself informed me, but one that was gaining great numbers of adherents throughout the eastern portion of the remaining Empire. The people who took such stringent vows, Germanus said, referred to themselves as monastics, and they sought perfection here on Earth by shunning the earthly vices of avarice, pride, and lechery and shutting themselves away from the world and its temptations, living in communes known as monasteries. Germanus himself had taken identical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but he was at pains to point out that his reasons for so doing were purely personal and pragmatic, to enable him to concentrate solely upon his episcopal responsibilities. He had no interest in monasticism, he maintained; his ordained place of work was squarely in the world of ordinary men, with all its temptations. He was a bishop, with a flock of faithful dependents relying upon him for guidance and example.

Brother Anthony was a monastic and had sworn his vows as such, fully intending to immure himself somewhere far from the world and its temptations, where he could concentrate on keeping his sacred commitments, but he was also a brilliant administrator, trained originally as an imperial legionary quartermaster, and so Bishop Germanus himself had prevailed upon Anthony to postpone his departure and remain for a time in Auxerre, tending to Germanus’s episcopal accounts and supervising inventories of everything required to keep the bishop’s domestic affairs functioning. Anthony had agreed, and in the brief periods of time left to him between his work and his prayers, he also taught divinity and theology to the students of the episcopal school. He was an able and gifted servant, very pious and devout, the bishop said on many occasions, and whenever I heard him say it, I nodded. Deep within myself, however, I knew that Brother Anthony had somehow managed to deceive Father Germanus and his staff and to keep his true malevolent nature concealed from everyone but me.

There was one unspoken and unwritten law among the fifty-odd students at the Bishop’s School: you never complained and you never, ever carried tales. It was a matter of honor among the boys, but as such traditions always do, it carried within it a great potential for abuse. Discipline in the school was harsh, and the rules by which we boys lived were many, strict, and inviolable; you broke them at your peril, and when you were caught, as you were more often than not, you took your punishment—always corporal punishment—in silence. You could weep, and depending on the severity of the beating you had undergone people might or might not make allowances for that, but you could not, ever, whine or complain. That was one of the first learned facts of life in the Bishop’s School.

Brother Anthony enjoyed beating the younger boys and was despised for it by the entire student body, but he particularly enjoyed beating me, and I have many memories of being unable to walk without limping after one of his “punishments.” Of course I, being as stubborn as he was vicious, would never give him the satisfaction of seeing me wince, let alone cry, and so the beatings he delivered grew more savage as time went by and as I grew larger and more able to absorb them. I would often dream of the day when I would be big enough to face him and disarm him and I drew great pleasure from the images I dreamed up of what I would do to him on that occasion.

That day never arrived, however, because long before I grew big enough to challenge my tormentor, I was summoned to an unscheduled meeting with Father Germanus shortly after one of Anthony’s “punishments.” To this day I have no knowledge of who had reported what was going on, but from that moment my troubles with Brother Anthony were over. Germanus stopped me with an upraised hand as I entered his cubiculum—the spacious room from which he conducted all the affairs of his bishopric—and then stalked toward me, an unreadable expression on his face as he raked me from head to foot with his eyes. He took hold of my chin, then tilted my head sideways, right then left, examining my face closely. That done, he reached down quickly and grasped my belt buckle, tugging on it sharply.

“Off,” he said. “Undo it and take off your tunic.”

Not knowing what he was about, and never suspecting that someone else might have interceded. to save me from Anthony, I did as Father Germanus demanded. I loosened my belt and pulled my tunic up and over my shoulders, baring my torso. He frowned, his eyes moving across the bruises on my ribs, and then he grasped me by the upper arm, not ungently, and turned me around. I heard the hiss of his indrawn breath as his gaze encountered the fresh welts on my back, and his fingers tightened on my arm before he turned me back to face him. His face had paled but he said nothing to me. Instead he called to his clerical assistant, Potius, who came in quickly from his station outside the doors of the cubiculum. I was shrugging back into my tunic by then, but the bishop stopped me and waved to Potius to approach and see what had been done to me. Again, a shocked hiss, quickly stifled.

“Take him to the infirmary,” Germanus said, and I had never heard such iron control in his voice. “Brother Martin to look after him in person. Tell Martin to do what must be done and then come here to me. Quickly now.” He looked back to me, his face impassive. “Go with Potius. We will speak again later.”

I spent four days in the infirmary, lying on my side or on my stomach, anchored in such a way that I was completely unable to turn onto my back, and on two of those days Germanus himself came to visit me. He said nothing the first time, merely nodding to me and standing in my doorway for a while, contemplating me as I lay immobile, but when he returned the second time he did speak, if only briefly. “Recover quickly,” he said from the doorway. “Your time remaining here is none too long and you should enjoy it to the full. Brother Anthony has left us.”

Brother Anthony had, indeed. As soon as I was released from my confinement, my friends came rushing to tell me that Brother Anthony had been escorted to his monastic life by Bishop Germanus in person, and would spend the remainder of his life in pious servitude within a monastery selected by the bishop and noted for the severity of its commitment to penance. Therein, Brother Anthony would be cut off forever from the company of boys.

We spent our lives training and studying, and only occasionally praying, and none of us would have had it any other way. That is why our time there in the Bishop’s School—for my experience was shared by all my friends—passed by so quickly. We were boys, engrossed in doing what boys do, thoroughly captivated by our studies, both military and academic. A stringently observed aphorism at the school was mens sana in corpore sano: a healthy mind exists in a healthy body. The importance of that belief was reflected in the discipline of personal hygiene, both mental and physical, that permeated the lives of the students, driving them remorselessly from cold baths and shivering prayers in the darkness of the predawn, prebreakfast hours, through days crammed with varying activities, both scholastic and military, until the curfew hour, when we would fall into bed after the communal evening prayers known as vespers, too exhausted even to talk to each other and acutely aware that almost before we had time to close our eyes to sleep, we would be rousted out again for matins, the morning prayers that the entire community shared in the darkest hours before dawn. And yet, for all the hardships and strictures of our life as students there, few of us would ever be as happy in our adult lives as we were then in our innocence.

And yet great things were occurring in the world around us, events that ought to have claimed all our attention and surely would have, had we known they were happening. Entire races of people were on the move at that time, sweeping in mass migrations through vast territories that had once been owned by the Empire and policed by its ubiquitous armies but were now, for the most part, abandoned and unsupervised. And as each race of land-hungry people swept forward—Visigoths and Goths, Vandals and Huns, and a hundred other nameless hordes—wheeling from northeast to westward for the most part, they dispossessed other, former occupants, who moved on in their turn and increased the havoc and chaos.

Everything—every stretch of land that had been part of the Empire in the West for a thousand and more years—was in a condition of flux and turmoil in those turbulent days after the fall of Rome, when Alaric and his Visigoths first captured the Eternal City. The Empire, which everyone had thought to be eternal, had collapsed within the space of a few years, and no one, anywhere, was equipped or prepared to deal with the catastrophe. And yet, when the tally was complete and all the initial chaos began to subside, order, or a degree of order greater than anyone could have anticipated, reasserted itself at an astonishing rate.

The reasons for that were not hard to find, for anyone who cared to look for them, for in the decades and even centuries that the old Empire had been tottering, a victim of its own corruption, people had learned to subsist on their own terms, to be more self-sufficient and independent of imperial dictates. And so the crash of collapse, when it came, proved to be less surprising, less demoralizing than it might have been, and even the majority of the peoples who were on the move had benefited from the civilizing influence of Rome for a millennium.

Not surprisingly, since Auxerre was firmly in the center of Gaul, we experienced very little of the upheavals that were happening elsewhere. The Frankish presence in the north and west continued to increase, but that meant nothing to us, since we ourselves were Franks and our migration had been ongoing for more than a hundred years. It was similar with the Burgundians, whose settled borders almost abutted ours in the south. They had practically overrun the entire southwest of Gaul. But although neither of us was amicably disposed toward the other and there were sometimes clashes between our people and theirs, the situation between us never degenerated into outright war. Each of us knew the other and had his measure, and we both knew it was more important to guard ourselves against outside aggression than to fret over what our neighbors might be planning.

Bishop Germanus, of course, was aware of all of this, but he made it his business to ensure that none of us were bothered by such things. We had an education to absorb, he believed, and the form in which we absorbed it would dictate, to a very great extent, the fashion in which we later reacted to such external priorities and distractions. If our grounding in the classical elements of education was sufficiently substantial, he argued, then we would be perfectly well equipped to deal with whatever the world might throw at us, and so we studied logic and philosophy, geometry and polemics and geography—this while the world was changing daily—and we conversed in Greek and Latin and were conversant with the written works of the great Masters: the Greeks Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, Aeschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, and Homer, and the Roman works of Caesar, Cicero, Pliny, Ovid, and many others. And over and above all of these, we studied the Christ and his teachings.

When I consider that we studied all of these things between predawn morning prayers and noon, and that the second half of each day was given over completely to our military training and discipline, then add the additional consideration that we somehow had to accommodate all of our daily chores and duties within the fabric of those activities, finding and making time between classes to tend to our community responsibilities, I am never surprised that we had no time for talk, or even thoughts, of girls or women.

And then, of course, there was the fighting: the training … the horses. I have to admit that that aspect of our education, the physical, militaristic part, was supposed to be a relatively minor element of our growth, recognized and provided for but of significantly less importance than our scholastic and clerical training. That was never the case with me, however, despite the concerted efforts of my other tutors, and to his credit Father Germanus never sought to influence me to conform to their wishes. He had promised Ban and the Lady Vivienne that my training in the military skills would continue and he never deviated from his word.

I had been born and bred among King Ban’s horse soldiers and had learned to ride as soon as my legs could spread widely enough to span a pony’s back, so I had no inhibitions about thrusting myself, the morning after my arrival in Auxerre, into the world of the school’s stables and its small but carefully selected and extremely valuable collection of horses. I walked in through the gates with all the arrogance and innocence of trusting youth only to be stopped short with a barked command before I was three paces over the threshold. I froze, taken aback by the ferocity of the shout and the wild appearance of the man who had uttered it, and my challenger bade me stand right where I was, the tone of his voice defying me to move another step at. my peril. He strode toward where I stood gaping at him, glowering at me from beneath bushy white eyebrows that formed a solid bar across his forehead.

He was a small man, tiny perhaps being an even more accurate word, because he was not much taller than me and I was only ten. He was carrying a smallish coil of limber, well-used rope—seven, perhaps eight loops in all. I remember that clearly, because when he reached me he slipped his arm through the loops and shrugged the coil upward to hang from his shoulder. Seeing him glare at me, I tried to smile back, but I was intimidated, and my face would not relax, so I simply stared back at him, wide-eyed. Finally he hawked loudly and spat off to one side.

“Benwick, right?” His voice was loud and harsh, rough edged as though seldom used. “You’re the brat came back with the Gen’ral?”

The General. I realized he was talking about Father Germanus and remembered Germanus saying that a man called Tiberias Cato would be my teacher and that he had served in the army with him. This must evidently be Cato. I nodded, and looked at him more closely.

Although he was small in stature, I saw now that he was built perfectly in proportion and his limbs were clean lined and clearly defined, dense with corded muscle. He was hairy, too, his entire body—or all that I could see of it—apart from his clean-shaven face, coated with a thick pelt of soft blond hair, its color ranging from faded yellow in places to grayish white in others, with one swirling whorl of a cowlick thatch at his crown that showed signs of once having been a bright yellowy gold. His forearms and the legs below his knee-length tunic were deeply sun-bronzed, and the hair that coated them was bleached almost white. I was fascinated to see that the hair on the back of his hands grew right down to his knuckles and that the phalanges of his fingers had coarse black hair growing on them, utterly unlike the hair on the rest of his body.

It may have been the thickness and profusion of his body hair that made the bareness of his face so obvious, but irrespective of what caused it to seem so, the man’s face, smooth cheeked and deeply tanned and dominated by brilliant, flower blue eyes, glowed with health and a special kind of self-sufficient beauty. His eyebrows, the first thing I had noticed about him, were a thick, unbroken bar of white, and the tangle of hair surmounting his forehead was unkempt and long untrimmed.

“Hmm,” he grunted, oblivious to or uncaring of my scrutiny. He lowered his shoulder and allowed the coil of rope to slide off and drop into his waiting hand, and then he threw the coil to me. I caught it with both hands. It was a running noose of the exact kind used by Ban’s stablemen.

“You know how to use that?”

“Yes,” I managed to say.

“Hmm. We’ll see. Come.”

He led me to a wide, barred wooden gate at the far end of the stable yard and held it open as I went through, after which he closed it carefully behind us and secured it in place with a loop of rope. We were in a long passageway now, with two paddocks on each side, each of them measuring approximately fifty paces in length by the same in width. The first enclosure on my right held eight mares, all of them in foal, and in the one beyond that, I could see others, these accompanied by newborn colts. The paddock on my immediate left held five healthy young geldings, and the fourth space lay empty. I followed the stable master as he led me the length of the passageway to the gate at the far end and beyond that into a wide, fenced pasture with clumps of trees scattered here and there and a lazy brook meandering among them. I had no idea how big the pasture was, because the trees obscured the boundary fences, but I knew it was enormous and I guessed from the position of the sun that we had to be close to the northern outskirts of the town. There were horses everywhere, and I immediately began to count them, but I lost track as I passed thirty and realized that just enough of them were moving to make my task impossible. The wiry little man looked around him and then glanced at me.

“Bring me one,” he said, then walked away. Unsure of myself and even of what he meant, I watched him as he went, and when the trees blocked my view I followed him again, keeping him in sight until he disappeared inside a small, low-roofed building with thick stone walls. He had not glanced back once in my direction, and so I moved closer, stopping only when I drew close enough to identify the building as a small smithy with a forge and a heavy, sturdy-looking bellows. Cato was already bent over the bellows, blasting gales of air into the coals of the forge and filling the smithy with clouds of smoke and ashes. As the scent of the hot ashes reached my nostrils I grasped my coils of rope more firmly and turned back toward the horses.

I knew I was facing some kind of test here, but I had no idea what was being tested, and yet I knew somehow that time was of no great importance in whatever it was. And so I made myself think about what I knew. Cato had told me to bring him one, and the only thing there in numbers greater than one was horses, so he evidently expected me to bring him a horse. Clearly he meant me to select one from the herd, and I was to be judged, in some manner, on the one I chose. I began to walk among the animals, looking at them, and quickly made a number of discoveries. Scattered among the herd, but numerous enough to be clearly evident, were horses of a breed I had never seen. They were all completely black and larger than any of the other animals in the herd; big, strongly muscled animals with dense, extraordinarily heavy coats of deepest black, long, thick manes and tails, and beautiful feathered fetlocks that almost covered their hooves. The other herd animals were of several breeds and sizes, all familiar to me, and their colors ranged from gray to red to chestnut brown. There were mares and fillies, immature colts and a preponderance of geldings, but there were no stallions. And then, mere moments after realizing that, I found the first of the stallions and smiled in admiration. There were six of them, I soon discovered, each one magnificent and each securely confined in its own strong enclosure. The six enclosures were strung along the paddock’s perimeter fence like beads, each separated from the others by a distance of at least twenty paces. Two of these six animals were of the beautiful long-haired black breed, and I found myself admiring them even more than I had earlier.

It was evident, however, that I was not expected to select a stallion, so that left me facing a choice between a mare or a gelding—all of the colts were too immature to qualify as horses in this instance, I suspected. I examined all of them again, and all of them were beautiful, but my eyes kept returning to the big black animals.

A short time after that, I reached the door of the small smithy, leading the horse I had chosen. Tiberias Cato, hunched over his forge and peering into the blue-white coals, paid me no heed until I stepped across the threshold and called out to him. He started slightly and straightened up, swinging to face me, his eyes taking in the horse I was holding. He tossed the tongs he had been holding onto a heavy workbench and came toward me, wiping his hands on a rag he had pulled from somewhere.

“Why’d you pick him?” he asked when he reached me.

“He’s beautiful,” I replied. “I’ve never seen his like before. What kind is he?”

“Forest horse. Wild stock. But why him in particular? He’s not two years old yet.”

“He’s magnificent, and when he’s two, and older, he’ll be the best here.”

“Will he, by God? D’you say so?” Listening to him say that, I actually believed he had not realized that and was surprised, but I had not yet come to an appreciation of sarcasm or irony. His eyes were already moving beyond me to another mount, and he pointed. “That one. Let’s see you mount him.”

Not catch him or bring him, but mount him. I turned to look at the bay gelding Cato had indicated and then swung back, tightening my grip on the reins in my hand. “Why can’t I mount this one?”

“Because he’s not broke yet. Trying to ride him now could get you killed, or it could end up with his being ruined as a good horse. Besides, I showed you the one I want you to mount, and I’m waiting.”

Disappointed, but no longer feeling rebellious, I quietly took the rope bridle off the black gelding, then loosened and removed the noose around his neck. I coiled my rope again and went after the bay, which stood placidly watching me and allowed me to come close enough to slip both the noose and the bridle over his head. He was not a tall horse, and his head was too big and heavy to be beautiful or even handsome, but he was stocky and deep chested, strongly muscled. When the bridle was secured, I led him to an old tree stump that was obviously much used as a mounting block and heaved myself up onto his broad back. The bay stood there with his head down, his ears twitching back toward me as though he was listening to my breathing. Apart from that, however, he remained motionless as I made myself comfortable.

Then he exploded into motion, leaping high into the air and spinning in a head-snapping half circle to land stiff-legged, head down, hooves together with his back bowed upward so that he almost jarred me off, which was his intent. By sheer good fortune, this was a trick with which I was thoroughly familiar, having had to deal for more than a year with a cantankerous horse in King Ban’s stables that had mastered the same turning leap and must have been one of this animal’s relatives, and so I recognized the preliminary movements under me and adjusted to them practically without thought, relaxing my posture and leaning into his spinning jump, allowing the slackness of my body to absorb the shock of his stiff-legged landing.

He must have been greatly surprised to find himself still burdened after this exertion, because he stood stock-still long enough to permit me to lock my fingers in the hair of his mane and hammer him in the ribs with my heels, and then he went into action again, bucking, rearing, and spinning, determined to rid himself of me. I, for my part, was just as determined that he would not do so, because I had caught a glimpse of Tiberias Cato’s face just before this second rampage erupted and it was plain to see that he was even more surprised than the horse was by its failure to reject me. And so the gelding cavorted and reared like a mad creature and I clung on, adapting to his every feint and trick until he stopped again, quivering with fury. I did not relax for a moment, however. I knew he was not yet finished and I stayed poised, ready to adjust to whatever he might do next. Even so, what he did caught me unprepared.

With a mighty surge of powerful muscles he launched himself into a run, his stride lengthening rapidly into a full gallop, and I rode him easily, enjoying the sensation of speed until I saw where he was taking me. We were headed directly toward a huge old solitary elm tree in the center of the paddock, and it was clear that he was either going to run straight into it or brush very closely past it, using it as a tool to scrape me off his back. Incredulous, I watched until there was no doubt of what he was doing: the rough bark of the tree would scrape along the horse’s right side, and my right leg would not survive the impact. Then, a bare two leaps before disaster struck, I anchored my fists more solidly in his mane and swung my right leg backward across his back, twisting my pelvis and bringing my knees together on his left side, my right hip against his surging side. I allowed my body to swing down, straight-legged, until my feet hit the ground and rebounded, and then I used his speed to swing myself back up to straddle him again. I felt his speed start to flag immediately and he had no more tricks after that, so that I found it easy to turn him around and head him back toward Cato, his speed slackening until we drew to a halt in front of the stable master, whose face remained blank even after I had dismounted.

“They teach you to ride like that in Benwick?” was all he said.

“I’ve never been anywhere else.”

“Hmm. King Ban, does he ride like that?”

I merely nodded, not knowing what else to tell him. I knew, from my riding instructor in Benwick, that even although I was a mere boy, a child, I was one of the best riders in Ban’s kingdom and would one day be the best of all, but I did not want to say that to Tiberias Cato, lest he think me a braggart.

“I didn’t think you’d last through his first jump.”

I was on the point of telling him about the horse with the same trick in Benwick, but then decided to hold my tongue and asked him instead, “Does he do that often?”

The small man nodded. “Every time, even with me. Not many people can stay up there when he does that.”

“Did you know he would try to scrape me off?”

He shook his head, frowning. “No. I’ve never seen him do that before. That’s something new. He’s a clever whoreson, for a gelding.”

I shrugged. “It didn’t work, though, so he might not try it again. I mean, it’s not as if he’s human, is it?”

“No, but there’s times when he seems to come damn close. Anyway, take the bridle off him and turn him loose, then get out of here. You’re not supposed to be here at this time of day. No student is. Come back the day after tomorrow when your lessons start. What’s your name?”

I told him, and he nodded and pursed his lips, and such was my self-conceit that I saw nothing strange in being accepted instantly by Tiberias Cato, Master of the Stables, a unique and formidable being respected and feared by every student in the school. I was, after all, Clothar of Benwick, adopted son of King Ban of Benwick, since birth used to being treated with deference and respect.

It may have taken me as long as a week to realize that Tiberias Cato was no respecter of names or rank and that he cared not a whit what people in the world beyond his paddocks thought of anyone else. In Cato’s eyes, there was but one natural ranking in the order of men, and it lay visible in the ease and skill—or in the lack of ease and skill—that they demonstrated in their relationship with horses. Cato himself was more centaur than human being and he rode as though the animal beneath him was an extension of his body. I cannot remember ever seeing him use his hands to control a horse while mounted. All his control—and it was prodigious—was exerted from his hips downward, leaving his hands free at all times to do whatever he required them to do. It was very impressive, even awe-inspiring to watch, and yet in order to watch and appreciate his mastery of what he did, you had to be aware of it, and the astonishing truth was that most people looked at Cato, then through him or past him, without ever seeing how gifted he was. They dismissed him idly as some form of stable groom with the seniority of age and were too blinded by their own inadequacies to be able to discern anything of the magic he worked with horses.

I had no such blinkers hampering my view of the stable master. He fascinated me from the day I first saw him ride a horse, and he quickly became my hero. I made it my concern to find out everything I could about him, but of course there was only one man, apart from Tiberias Cato himself, who could tell me everything that was known about the Master of the Bishop’s Stables, and that was the bishop, who knew Cato perhaps better than Cato knew himself, and it would be more than a year before I could be sufficiently comfortable in his august company to come right out and ask him openly about his friend and servant Cato. And so until that time I merely watched and admired this favorite of all my teachers, nursing what little knowledge of his history I had been able to acquire from the stories the older boys told about him, and feeling my admiration for him increase with every new example of his knowledge and understanding of the ways and the lore of horses.

The six years that followed my departure from Benwick flew by, as time always does when we enjoy what we are doing, until the day when I found myself, slack mouthed and stunned, contemplating my sixteenth birthday, which was looming in the too-near future. I tend to remember the occasion nowadays as having dropped upon me as a complete surprise, as though I had not even been aware of my increasing age until Father Germanus pointed it out to me in the course of one of our regular weekly meetings. It is a comforting thought, that image of being caught off balance, ill prepared and unready, but that is not really the way it occurred. I may have been mentally and emotionally unprepared to be sixteen years old, indulging in wishful thinking and foolishly believing that if I paid no attention to the passage of time then it would flow on without changing anything, but the truth is that I had been very much aware of time passing, and of the changes I was undergoing, in common with my friends, as a result of its passing. Bodies that had been slim and soft, hairless and childish, had gradually become hardened and muscular, thicker and heavier, and the downy growth that had been barely visible upon our faces no more than a year earlier had coarsened upon some of us, the darker skinned among us, and hardened into stubble on our chins.

The most noteworthy change of all, however, had been in the stuff of our conversations, the things we talked about. Where once we had discussed and debated little else but physical training and our individual performances in drills and contests, most of us now talked of little else but girls; women and the dark and mystical secrets surrounding them and their physical nature. And as a result of our waking preoccupation with such things, our nocturnal lives, once a matter of mere oblivion disturbed very occasionally by nightmares, had changed to encompass exciting and erotically disturbing dreams, barely remembered upon awakening yet no less powerful because of that. Manhood was closing in upon us, we all knew, and although the prospect excited and intimidated us, we continued nonetheless to gull ourselves into believing that we could have and enjoy the satisfactions of physical manhood—the fighting and the womanizing—without ever having to abandon the innocence and comradeship of boyhood.

But now all at once, and beyond equivocation, I was to be sixteen, which meant that I would have to leave the Bishop’s School and make my way alone in the real world, among real men! The realization of that truth was devastating, because it forced me to accept that this stage in my life, boyhood as I had known it in Auxerre, was close to being over. A boy’s sixteenth birthday is his life’s greatest watershed, marking the crossing point into manhood and taking him from childhood to adult status, from carefree idyll to the acceptance of a man’s responsibilities.

On the day when Germanus reminded me of my age, I had been the acknowledged leader of the senior class, the Spartans, for more than a month, but even that exalted estate had failed to make any significant dent in my lack of awareness. I had been so happy and confident in my own popularity and power among the other students that it seemed natural that things must continue as they were. But my entire world changed in the space of one short, supposedly normal interview, when I found myself having to accept that, with the start of the following year, another boy, a younger boy, would be leader of the Spartans and I would be gone, never to be remembered by the boys that followed in my footsteps from year to year. Where I would be by then, I knew not; but I would be a man—if in name only—and probably a serving soldier, my boyhood locked irretrievably behind me.

On a hot spring day in the first half of my sixteenth year, completely without warning, Tiberias Cato announced that the next day. would be a day of festivities and freedom from classes for the entire school, in honor of the return of Bishop Germanus from a particularly long episcopal journey. Furthermore, he announced, the occasion would be highlighted by an all-out competition among the senior students, designed to test their prowess and skills and the progress they had managed to achieve so far in this, their final year. The student who emerged victorious from the final stages of the competition would be rewarded with a special prize, something unique and valuable, although Tiberias Cato refused to say what it was.

That part of the announcement caused more excitement among the students than anything else anyone could remember, for although competition in everything was taken for granted at the school, prizes were seldom awarded, and those few that were usually took the form of time off from classes, for one morning or afternoon, in recognition of some stellar achievement. Such rewards were a welcome respite from the normal grind of daily school life, but no one would ever have described them as exciting.

Here, however, was a competition with a valuable prize to be won, and the entire student body was agog with speculation as to what the prize might be.

Everyone competed against everyone else for everything at the Bishop’s School as a matter of course, striving to achieve one’s best possible performance in everything for the greater glory of God. That Latin phrase, ad majorem Dei gloriam, was probably the most commonly heard expression at the Bishop’s School. It was Bishop Germanus’s own personal watchword, conveying his deeply rooted conviction that if everything a person does on Earth is dedicated to glorifying God, then it becomes impossible for that person to sin and incur damnation. By direct association, the sentiment had become the school’s maxim as well, constantly quoted by the teachers and never lost sight of by the student body.

There were twenty-two of us in the senior class that year, a larger number than normal, and according to school tradition we were called the Spartans. The suggestions of discipline, preeminence, and status implied by that name were not accidental. The soldiers of the ancient Greek kingdom of Sparta were renowned and revered in our male, militaristic society, and the story of their heroic fight at the Pass of Thermopylae was one of our legends. In defending and holding that narrow pass against the enormous invading armies of the Persian Empire for longer than anyone could possibly have expected, three hundred of Sparta’s finest soldiers, under the command of their king, Leonidas, had won eternal glory, sacrificing their lives to purchase much-needed time for their countrymen to prepare to defend themselves against the invaders. Therefore we, the Spartans of the Bishop’s School, were charged with the responsibility of being exemplars to the entire school, setting the standard of high achievement, scholastic pride, and sterling behavior for all the younger students following behind us. Tomorrow, we all knew, one of us would win a memorable prize, and each of us was determined to be that winner.

The truth was, of course, that of the twenty-two Spartans in our current year, only eleven possessed the skills and the prowess that would be required to emerge as victor. The remaining eleven possessed skills and abilities directed more toward generating higher standards of clerical and scholastic excellence. It had become the tradition among the Spartans that each Warrior, as the more physically inclined students were called—they were selected by Tiberias Cato and his staff for their athletic and equestrian prowess—would be assigned one or more Scholars as partners for the year. The unit thus formed would become a team, competing together against the other teams in the class, but also performing together when it came to the supervisory duties and responsibilities incumbent upon the Spartans as senior students. There had been eighteen Spartans in the previous year’s class, and of those only six had been real Warriors, and so that class had been split into six teams each of three students. This year, by contrast, we were evenly split into pairs, eleven Warriors and Scholars respectively. My Scholar was Dominic Tara, the smallest and the youngest, but also the most brilliantly gifted student in the class in both mathematics and geography, the areas wherein I was weakest.

Dominic came looking for me soon after Cato’s announcement and found me talking with two of my closest friends, Stephan Lorco and Quintus Milo, who, as his name suggested, was the youngest of five brothers, all of whom had attended the Bishop’s School. Dominic’s face was set in a very peculiar expression and he was moving strangely. I stopped whatever I was saying.

“Dom, what’s wrong?” I asked him. “You look as though you’ve discovered something terrifying.”

He said nothing, but looked at me with that peculiar wide-eyed expression and shook his head.

Dom was the only member of the Spartans who was called by his given name. Everyone else in the school, and certainly among the Spartans, was either known simply by his family name—Lorco and Milo were two of those—or by a descriptive nickname. I cannot remember now why Dom should have been different from everyone else in that respect, but I suspect it had to do with his age and his tiny size—he reminded most of us of smaller brothers we had left at home, and we tended to treat him more tolerantly and gently as a result of that.

“Dom?” I repeated, raising my voice to capture his attention, but he shook his head again, disregarding both me and Milo, and spoke to Lorco.

“I’m to summon you to the Chancellor,” he said.

The smile vanished instantly from Lorco’s face. A summons to the Chancellor was never issued lightly, nor was it treated as anything less than disastrous. Brother Ansel, the Chancellor, was first deputy to Bishop Germanus and was charged with the daily running and discipline of the school whenever the bishop had to go away, which occurred with some regularity. There was little doubt that he was an able administrator, but he was also a man utterly devoid of both humor and mercy. Ansel had become famed for the intolerance and inflexibility of his views and for the ferocity of his punishments. None of us were sure if Germanus was aware of Ansel’s other side, and of course, no one rushed to inform him that his deputy was preternaturally cruel and remorseless, and every student in the school behaved with extreme caution whenever the bishop went away.

Lorco’s face had drained of all color as he tried to think of what crime he must stand charged.

“No, it’s not that,” Dom continued, looking quickly from Lorco to Milo and then to me, seeing the effect his words had had on all of us and trying to reassure us with flapping hands. He turned hurriedly back to Lorco. “It’s nothing bad … at least, I don’t think it is … . He’s not after you … I believe it’s your father.”

Death. The word, unspoken, clanged loudly in all our minds. The only time anyone ever seemed to speak of parents here was when word arrived that one or another of them had died unexpectedly.

“Wha—” Lorco had to cough to clear his throat. “What about my father?”

“He’s here, I think. In the school.”

That was even more startling than the summons to the Chancellor. “My father?” The disbelief in Lorco’s voice would have been laughable at any other time. “You’re mad. My father’s more than five hundred miles from here, probably in Hispania, pacifying the Iberians.”

Dom merely threw up his hands, palms outward. “I don’t know, then. Perhaps I’m wrong. But there’s a strange man in with the Chancellor, someone I’ve never seen before, and he looks like a soldier, and I know your father is a soldier. I went in to do some transcription for Brother Marcus in the vestibule beside the bishop’s day room and I heard old Ansel talking to someone, so I peeked through an open door and saw this man. I couldn’t hear much of what they were saying, but what I could hear sounded boring. I didn’t pay any attention to them at all after that, to tell the truth, until I heard your name being mentioned. And I’m pretty sure I. heard the man say something about his son. A little while after that the door opened and old Ansel stuck his head out and sent me to fetch you.”

Lorco looked at me, his eyes wide, and I shrugged. “Better get going,” I told him. “It’s not wise to keep old Ansel waiting, and besides, Dom might be right. If he is, and your father’s here, that’s good, is it not?”

In truth, I was not sure whether it was good or not. We boys, as the stoic Spartans we were supposed to be, seldom spoke among ourselves about our homes or our parents, and the reason for that was more self-defense than reticence. When you were as completely immersed as we were in a life that offered ample hardship and few comforts, it became foolish to endanger what little equanimity you possessed by dwelling on memories of home and family and the softnesses and luxuries you could find there.

Fortunately, Lorco’s face broke into a wide, toothy grin as soon as I asked the question. “Better than good,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. If my Tata’s really here, we’ll all have some fun. You’ll like him, I promise you.”

It turned out to be true. The man with Brother Ansel was Lorco’s father, Phillipus Lorco, another former legate who had soldiered under Germanus’s command and now held the military title and rank of dux, or duke. As Duke Lorco, he was now the imperial governor of a huge territory in the southwest of Gaul that included the entire mountainous region separating Gaul from Hispania, but in his time with the legions, even before the advent of Germanus, he had won great acclaim and successes coordinating and conducting hard-fought, relentless campaigns against the Burgundian tribes who had been invading south-central Gaul and spreading havoc there for nigh on a hundred years.

He was now here in Auxerre, it transpired, because he had been urgently summoned by Germanus’s military successors to attend a gathering of imperial strategists in the fortress at Treves, Germanus’s own former base and still the military headquarters at that time for all of Gaul. The purpose of this extraordinary assembly was to coordinate a campaign against the ever-bellicose Burgundians, who were once again threatening to break out of the territories they had now occupied for decades, this time to engulf the entire southwest, of Gaul. Duke Lorco’s contribution to the planning and prosecution of the campaign had been deemed both invaluable and a sine qua non of success.

Faced with a journey of several hundreds of miles north to Treves from his home base in the ancient fortified town of Carcasso in the south, and aware that the most direct route to his destination would take him within a hundred miles of Auxerre, where his eldest son, Stephan, was in school and prospering, the Duke had allowed himself sufficient time in advance of the gathering to visit his old friend and commander Germanus, his primary purpose to arrange to take his son back home with him to Carcasso when the boy’s schooling was completed and the Duke’s own duties in Treves were concluded.

It turned out that the bishop was not in Auxerre for his arrival but was expected to arrive back in Auxerre the following day. In the meantime, the senior Lorco had three days to spend in Auxerre before striking out for Treves, and Brother Ansel had magnanimously permitted him to renew his acquaintance with his son.

I had the privilege of meeting Duke Lorco that same afternoon, when he came with his son to be introduced to me and Milo as Lorco’s closest friends. He was a friendly, affable man with an easy manner and a charming disposition that stirred a fleeting spasm of resentment in me at the thought of how fortunate Lorco was to have a living father. The sensations caused me to flush with guilt and shame at what I judged to be disloyalty to my adoptive parents in Genava, and with those feelings came an abrupt awareness of how much I missed them and how greatly I wanted to see them again. I would give anything to see my stepfather’s face again I thought then, and with the notion, Ban of Benwick stood before me in my mind, gazing at me with that raised eyebrow of his and smiling his slightly crooked grin.

Those feelings passed and left me feeling content as I stood beside Milo, watching Lorco leave the school with his father. They would dine together privately that evening in the Duke’s quarters in the nearby mansio, the local hostelry maintained by the imperial civil service for the accommodation of couriers and others traveling on official affairs. Whether Lorco would return to the school that night at all was something that remained to be seen, although I hoped that he might not. He was so obviously happy and proud to see his father and to have had the opportunity to introduce him to us, his friends, that I felt he deserved to be allowed to spend every moment that he could in his father’s company. The mere occurrence of such a thing—a student remaining out of the school overnight—was unusual enough to cause all kinds of talk among the other students, and for once the boys talked as they never had before about the places they came from and about their loved ones. More than a few tears were shed without much effort being made to hide them, so that there was a subdued atmosphere in the dormitories at curfew that night that was almost palpable, despite the countering excitement over the coming day’s activities and the promised competition.

It was midafternoon and the celebrations at the school were already well under way when Bishop Germanus arrived, without fanfare, at the exercise grounds attached to the school’s extensive stables. All activities ceased, and a respectful silence hung over the assembled students. I watched my mentor as he dismounted from the pony he rode that day and walked, alone as always, slowly toward the raised reviewing stand at the far end of the open-air arena where most of the afternoon’s contests and events were talking place, then mounted the dais to join the assembled tutors, staff, and visitors.

As I watched the bishop on this occasion, however, something in the way he moved brought the realization home to me, for the first time ever, that Germanus of Auxerre was an old man. I saw something different and bothersome in him that day, something intangible and yet unnervingly suggestive of a lack of healthiness, although it appeared and disappeared so fleetingly that I was able to convince myself that I had imagined it. It may have been the way he walked the few steps from dismounting from the pony to the start of the stairs rising to the stand. The day had been fine, on the whole, but a heavy shower of rain had fallen half an hour earlier and muddied the ground underfoot, making it treacherous, and just before the bishop reached the first of the steps to the dais he paused, a very brief hesitation, and reached, unsteadily it seemed to me, for the support of the handrail. It happened, I saw it, and the unwelcome burden of a new anx-iety descended upon my head and shoulders.

I was completely unprepared for the revelation and I rejected it even as it occurred to me. I can distinctly remember the anger I felt at myself at that moment for even thinking such a thought—entertaining the very notion of his mortality. But unsought and unexpected as it was, it disconcerted me to the point of causing a strong spasm of anxiety in my breast.

No one else noticed, I am quite sure of that, because Germanus reached the top of the stairs to the dais and strode directly along the front row of seats, his bearing utterly regal and resolute, to where Duke Lorco had risen to greet him. The two men embraced as old friends do and exchanged a few pleasantries before Germanus excused himself and turned to bless the gathering before sending Tiberias Cato the signal to continue with the proceedings his arrival had interrupted. That done, he sat down in the vacant seat by Duke Lorco’s side and both men talked animatedly for a while before settling back to watch the competition, which was now approaching the final stages.

I had been doing well in the competition until then and was quietly confident that I was ahead of the field on points. I had been in excellent form in the preliminary events, all of which involved athletic activities on foot: running, jumping, and wrestling, and the fighting drills, which included mock combat with clubs, swords, and heavy spears, as well as archery and lance throwing.

I had won the running events easily, to no one’s surprise. I had grown a handsbreadth during the summer of my third year at the school, which had inspired much jesting and also my nickname, Legs. But Lorco had challenged me seriously on the broad jump, and I had been on the point of giving up, convinced that I could not possibly match his final, inspired leap, when I saw Tiberias Cato watching me, a troubled, meditative look on his face. I knew Cato had no time for anyone who ever quit ahead of being beaten in anything, and I did not want him ever to think such a thing of me, so I rallied and gritted my teeth for one last, all-out attempt. Somehow I managed to fly out and land precisely where Lorco had landed, destroying his mark in the process and making it impossible to discern whether one of us had outdistanced the other. The judges shook their heads and consulted the notations they had made earlier and muttered among themselves for a long time before they called the event a draw.

I had then fought my way more than adequately through the range of fighting drills, too, emerging unbeaten from all but the last category, the lance-throwing event, where my closest rivals were Milo and Gaius Balbus, the boy I liked least of all the Spartans. Balbus was taller than I was, and slightly heavier, the largest student in our class, and although I could beat him easily in most events, including swords and heavy spears, he was the only student who could throw a javelin consistently farther than I could. Fortunately for me, however, he could not throw with anything approaching my accuracy, and that displeased him greatly, since accuracy gained more points than distance. I seldom had difficulty in upsetting him sufficiently to make him lose his temper, and with it his judgment, whenever we competed. He was quick to anger and viciously savage with his tongue when he was angry, which was the reason I found it easy to dislike him, for he had stung me and all of my friends too often with his waspish, sarcastic ill-humor.

On this particular morning, however, Balbus had aligned himself alongside Milo, who was throwing very well, consistently, and with impressive accuracy. Balbus had paced himself deliberately and precisely, concentrating fiercely and modeling his performance and his rhythm and tempo on Milo’s and ignoring me and my performance completely. It worked well for him, and by the start of the last round of throws—five casts each at the torso of a man-size target thirty paces distant—he and I had both scored sixteen hits out of a possible twenty-five.

The rules of the competition were simple, but the degree of difficulty escalated hugely with each round of five casts. The initial targets, wooden cut-out figures of men, were set up twenty paces from the throwing line, and the whitewashed scoring area extended from the line of the hips up to the head and included the arms—a relatively easy mark. After each round of five casts, however, new targets were placed two paces farther away from the throwing line and the scoring area was reduced in size, the arms and head being among the first to go, until by the last round the casts were thirty paces long and the scoring area was a wrist-to-elbow-length square on the target’s chest.

Going into that last round, Milo was one point ahead of both of us. He had scored eighteen hits, his best score ever and a school record for twenty-five casts. It may have been the lengthy duration of the event—thirty casts of an infantryman’s lancea, the ancient, thonged javelin used so effectively by the Roman armies for hundreds of years, exacts a terrible toll on the throwing muscles—but Milo missed the scoring area of the target with all five of his final casts, although all five hit the wooden target somewhere, and he ended up with eighteen points out of a possible thirty. I hit three out of five to beat Milo’s score by one, but Balbus, in a display of unsuspected virtuosity that shook and humbled me, hit solidly with all five casts and emerged with yet another record: twenty-one hits out of thirty casts.

It was purely coincidental that the bishop arrived just shortly before we were to progress to the riding events, most of which were designed to test advanced riding skills and the formal, correct, and precise handling of animals in restrictive and difficult situations. Several of the equestrian contests, however—and the most difficult, according to some people—involved grueling tests of both horse and rider in events that measured stamina and endurance, as opposed to precision and obedience. The most brutally demanding of those were point-to-point races over planned routes, and fiendishly difficult obstacle courses that had to be negotiated within stringent, close-to-impossible time constraints.

This was the area in which I felt most confident—far more so even than in the foot-racing events. I did not feel even slightly presumptuous when I told myself that no one among my classmates could come close to me in anything having to do with horses and horsemanship.

At the start of the first race—a point-to-point affair in which each contestant had to ride three miles, collecting three flags along the way and bringing them back to the starting point within the time it took for a sand glass to drain twice—all of us were drenched in a brief but spectacular cloudburst. This was quickly forgotten by everyone but me, because it would cost me the race. I was riding a big bay gelding that I had ridden often before that afternoon, and we were first through the gate leading from the stable yards and along the short, wide lane that led into the open country beyond the town. I gave the bay his head and let him stretch his muscles while I enjoyed the rush of the wind through my hair and the feeling of his enormous body flexing and uncoiling beneath me.

I leaped down from his back at the first pickup point and snatched up one of the red flags that lay there, and I had remounted and was kicking him forward again when the closest of my rivals, Balbus once again, came thundering down toward us.

The run to the second pickup point, with the yellow flags, was uneventful despite a couple of obligatory jumps, one of them a downhill leap over a log at the edge of a deep pool of water. I was confident I was outstripping the field easily until I discovered—unpleasantly and most surprisingly—that Balbus was hard on my heels, far closer than he had been at the red flag pickup. I looked closely at his mount this time as we passed each other—Balbus leaping down to snatch up his flag as I kicked my heels into my mount’s ribs. He was riding a huge gray, and it was sweating visibly, but not inordinately so. I crouched lower on the bay’s back and drummed my heels against his sides, coaxing him to higher speed on our way to pick up the last, green flag, but I was distracted now, wondering how Balbus could have gained so much ground on me so quickly.

It did not occur to me, then or later, that he might have cheated, for that was simply not a possibility. There were no rules to contravene in this race, other than the rule stating that each rider must pick up all three flags before heading for home and the finish line. There were degrees of difficulty in routing, and each rider had the option of deciding whether or not to deviate from the standard course, which wound through valleys between hills, for it was possible, theoretically, to shorten distances dramatically by riding up and over any hill crest, rather than going around it. But we were all familiar with the dangers that lay in wait there; the slopes were steep and treacherous with loose stones and boulders, and in some places they were simply unscalable. Besides, the normal risks of attempting to go up and over were increased and emphasized by the fact of the race and the consequent need, if the attempt were made, to get up one side and down the other quickly with no failed attempts, no hesitation, and no loss of time.

On the last dash for home I decided to leave the flat valley bottom and cut off some distance by riding higher, taking a straighter route along the gently sloping shoulder of the hillside that stretched above me on the right. But just as my mount breasted the last angled line of hillside that lay between me and the finishing line, I suddenly saw Balbus coming down at me from above, on my right. He, too, had chosen to climb, but had gone even higher than I had, gambling that he would be able to cut my lead and beat me on the downhill dash into the last turn. I saw him just in time and kneed my mount to the left, sending him downhill, not steeply but sufficiently to stay ahead of Balbus. My horse, a surefooted animal that I had ridden many times, lost his footing somehow on the slick, rain-wet shale of the hillside and went sprawling, hurling me over his head like a living boulder. Neither my horse nor I was seriously injured, but we were nonetheless effectively out of the race. By the time I had collected myself and clambered back up onto the bay’s back after checking him for injuries, five riders had galloped past us and we were unable to catch any of them thereafter.

I arrived back in the stable yards glowering blackly and biting down on my self-disgust, but I could not even have the satisfaction of being angry at Balbus. He had done nothing wrong, apart from inducing me to make an error of judgment and then going on to win the race.

Less than an hour later, my earlier disappointment forgotten, I was in the middle of what we called the battle, the most chaotic but also the most enjoyable part of the competition. It was a remnant of the truly ancient gladiatorial contests in which, as the climax of a set of games, there would be a general fight in which it was every man for himself and the last man left standing could win his freedom. Our version of the event was nowhere near so bloodthirsty, but it was our tradition that the last man standing would be declared the day’s victor, which meant that even an underdog who had fared badly in the individual contests of strength and skill had a theoretical chance to emerge victorious over all others. There were almost as many umpires on our battlefield as there were combatants, too, their object being to identify and remove participants who were clearly beaten before they could suffer any real physical damage. The combatants all wore heavily padded protective leather helmets and fought in armor built of boiled and hammered layered leather; solid metal was too cumbersome and heavy for most boys. The weapons were standard shields and wooden practice swords of heavy ash or oaken dowel.

The combat began with every contestant mounted on horseback, and the theory was that the man who remained mounted for the longest time ought to emerge as the easy victor. Theory, however, seldom survives for any length of time against reality and human ingenuity. It had quickly become standard activity in our school battles for those who were first unhorsed to join forces on the ground and unseat everyone who remained on horseback. Then, when the last man had been unhorsed, the battle began on foot and in earnest.

The ground-level battlefield was not a pleasant spot for those who took no joy in passages of arms, because the danger of serious injury was very real. There were always students—usually the younger, smaller boys—who would take part gleefully in the early portion of the battle, milling around in the crush until they were unhorsed and then joining forces to bring down their elders and betters. They would then defect soon thereafter, citing self-declared and self-determined wounds during the confusion of the first few moments of the main fighting. The majority of the larger boys, particularly at the outset of each battle, had high hopes of winning the contest by themselves, and laid about them enthusiastically, slashing at everyone who came within reach. Reality asserted itself quickly, however, as arms and wind began to tire after but a few moments of savage, energy-sapping swings that missed their targets but nonetheless took their toll on the swingers.

In the end, the contest invariably boiled down to a struggle between the same eight or ten boys who had been predicted as final-stage fighters long before the event began, and this occasion proved no exception. By the time the initial frenzy began to dissipate and I had an opportunity to take a wary step back and look quickly about me while I snatched a breath of air, I found I was now sharing the arena with five opponents. Even as I counted them, however, one of them, a classmate called Serdec, took a thrust in the gut that dropped him to his knees. His shield fell away, leaving him open to a crushing blow that might have cracked his skull had it not been struck aside by a vigilant umpire.

Serdec was out, leaving five of us, and even then, as I counted, the number shrank to four as another fighter, Balbus this time, was hit savagely between the shoulders and then again on the back of the helmet as he went to his knees, head down. I didn’t wait to see him fall forward but swung away, my own shield up in anticipation of being attacked simply because I had stopped moving to look, but there was no one near me and I was in no danger. I was alone in that part of the field and I took immediate advantage of the respite, dropping the tip of my wooden sword to earth to rest my arm muscles as I looked about me for the best spot from which to defend myself against whoever would eventually come against me.

For hundreds of years the legions of Rome had trained with practice swords that were double the weight of the real swords they would use in battle, and the reasons for that were simple, admirable, and perfectly understandable: after having trained for years with heavy practice weapons of oak or ash doweling, a real sword, wielded in battle, felt practically weightless to the soldier using it. For our battle we were similarly encumbered with the brutally heavy practice swords. These often became too heavy even to hold after a period of prolonged use, and so I stood there gratefully, my arms dangling, feeling the deadweight of the weapons I was holding but enjoying the sensation of exhilaration as new strength came flooding back into my tired muscles.

The fighter who had finished off Balbus was a large boy from Germania whose real name had been unpronounceable to anyone when he first came to the school. Because of that, he had quickly been nicknamed Lupus, because someone had said he looked just like a big German wolf, and nowadays no one in the school knew what his real name was. This fellow was now moving quickly toward Lorco, his gait a combination of trotting and sidling as he maneuvered to come in behind Lorco’s opponent, another Spartan called Borus. Borus saw him coming, however, and shifted his stance warily, circling away from Lupus and trying to assess whether the newcomer would tackle him or join him in attacking Lorco. Apparently none of them had noticed me, still on my feet and armed, less than thirty paces from them. Borus had done his own calculations, however, and with a wave of the hand he invited Lorco to join him in a combined assault on Ursus, the largest of the three. They closed on him together, from right and left, and he did not last long at all against their combined assault. He lost his wooden sword to a smashing blow from Lorco so that he had only his shield for defense and no offensive weapon at all. The umpires declared him dead immediately, and he slumped and lowered his shield, hanging his head dejectedly as his two erstwhile opponents turned their heads to look at me.

I had taken advantage of the time accorded me to choose my own fighting ground and prepare myself to meet them, and I stood crouched on the only spot in the entire arena that might be described as high ground, a tiny knoll that afforded me a very slight advantage over them in height. I was half convinced that Lorco would take sides with me against Borus if I invited him to join me, but the other half of me argued that even if he did join me, I would then be forced to abandon my position on the little knoll, and then I would have to fight Lorco on equal terms, once we had beaten Borus. I held my ground, facing them both blank-faced and keeping my wrist cocked threateningly, my sword’s point up and ready to swing in any direction. They shuffled their feet, hesitating, doubtless reviewing their own plans should the next few moments bring them both against me. The next move, and the decision that would precipitate it, would be momentous, and at the instant when the die was cast, all three of us knew, the one of us left to fight alone against the other two would be out of the contest, which would then be settled between the pair who remained.

It was one of those moments when everything seems to slow down and stop, as though the entire world were being arrested in its progress. The sun was at my back, a choice I had deliberately made, and I could see both Borus and Lorco squinting against its brightness as they tried to read my expression. But then, unexpectedly, I found myself looking beyond them, to where Duke Phillipus Lorco sat tensely on the high reviewing stand beside Bishop Germanus, gazing intently down at the tableau in the arena almost at his feet and at the picture his son made, crouched and determined, his attention totally focused on the task at hand here in the final stages of the afternoon’s competition. And as I saw the Duke, I also became aware for the first time of the cacophony of screams and shouts that surrounded the three of us who were left standing in the arena, only because it faded quickly into silence, in one of those strange and inexplicable occurrences that sometimes happen among the largest crowds. Now there was utter stillness, and into it came the thought, as clearly heard in my mind as though it had been spoken aloud, of how proud my friend Lorco would be to win this contest in the presence of his father, and how equally proud the Duke would be to witness his son’s triumph in front of the entire assembly of the Bishop’s School.

The thought was unexpected and unwelcome, and I thrust it away almost as soon as it occurred to me. But it would not go away, and then I found myself stepping down from my little knoll and nodding to Lorco. He nodded back and we both turned on Borus, whose face had already begun to sag with disappointment. He knew he could not possibly win against me and Lorco; he could not have won against any pair, by that stage, but Lorco and I were the primary favorites, and to fight us both would be folly.

“Yield.” Lorco spoke the word, and for the space of half a heartbeat I thought Borus might do as he was bidden, but then he showed us his true mettle and roared some kind of challenge in his own tongue, swinging his sword high and throwing away his shield at the same time to grip the weapon’s hilt with both hands as he sprang hard and to his left, directly at me. He almost caught me unprepared, too, for I had really expected him to yield and had already been planning my opening moves against Lorco.

The tip of his hard-swung weapon whistled by the tip of my chin so closely that I felt the wind of its passing, but I was leaping backward at the time. I landed awkwardly, unbalanced and unsteady, and most of my attention went perforce to leveling myself, but Borus was still pursuing me, almost on top of me, and a second heavy blow was already on its way toward my head. There was no time to think, but I knew I could not remain on my feet and avoid the descending sword, and so I simply gave way at the knees and rolled away as soon as I hit the ground.

The blow missed. I heard the sound of its passing and the grunt of effort with which Borus stopped the missed swing and tried to reverse it, but then I heard, too, the solid whack of what I knew could only be Lorco’s sword against Borus’s armor.

Came another grunt and a muttered curse and Borus sprawled on top of me, thrown down by the weight of Lorco’s attack so that his cheek came to rest against mine. For the briefest moment I felt the softness of his face and the warmth of his expelled breath in my ear, and I wanted to giggle like a girl. But I was already scrambling away from him, frantically grappling and sliding to where I could regain my feet and defend myself against Lorco, who was now as much my enemy as was Borus.

I was almost successful, too, but as I braced myself solidly on my sword, using it as a staff to push myself up to my feet, Lorco smashed it sideways with his own, knocking it out of my grasp and dropping me straight down again to bang my chin against the ground and drive my teeth into the edge of my tongue. I managed to lurch into an ungainly forward roll and spun around, regaining my feet in time to see Borus’s last stand. He had evidently hit Lorco as Lorco smashed my sword away, and now he had his sword above his head, still in a two-handed grip, ready to deliver the final blow. Lorco spun around and swung his sword, backhandedly, up into Borus’s groin.

Borus fell like a stone and curled himself into a ball, clutching at his injured parts. Lorco raised his head and slowly pushed himself up onto all fours, looking around for me. I was standing, but barely, spitting blood from my swollen mouth and gasping for air like a winded ox, telling myself disbelievingly that I had never, ever felt so tired. The sword in my hand felt like the heaviest burden I had ever carried, but I knew that I had one more thing to do. I had to finish Lorco before he could stand up again, and he was already rising unsteadily.

I hoisted my weapon and moved forward to claim my victory, and as I did so I saw Duke Lorco again, gazing down wide-eyed at his son, and my knees gave way and I found myself kneeling in the dirt, blinking up at my friend Stephan Lorco as he stood above me. I knew I did not have the strength to stand quickly enough and so I swung again, low and wide and as hard as I could, a hacking, horizontal slash at Lorco’s knees. His blade sliced down in an opposing blow and stopped my swing almost effortlessly, and I did not see the following stroke that hit my thickly padded leather helm and sent me flying sideways into darkness.

“Is he that good a friend?”

The question caught me unprepared, but Tiberias Cato was not the only one who would ask it of me in the time that followed. I had just picked myself up off the ground and begun to limp toward the medical pavilion and I had not even had time yet to realize that I needed to ask myself the same thing: was Lorco that good a friend that I would willingly sacrifice my chances of capturing all the triumph of the moment and winning a valuable prize simply to ensure that he might look as good as possible for his visiting father? Or was I deluding myself? Had I, in fact, sacrificed anything? Had I hung back and allowed Lorco to beat me, or would he have beaten me anyway? Apparently I had done something, and done it overtly, for Cato growled his question at me out of the corner of his mouth as he swept by me on his way to present the victor’s prize to my friend Lorco, and for a short space of time I was too taken aback to realize the import of his words.

I blinked blearily and swung around to peer after Cato as he strode to where the victor of the day stood spread-legged with exhaustion now that the battle was over. I could hear Lorco panting heavily from where I stood, twenty paces away, and I watched his chest heaving beneath his leather cuirass as he fought to regain his breath, his head dangling and his arms hanging straight from his shoulders. He was swaying on his feet, and he looked as though he might topple forward at any moment to measure his own length on the dirt of the arena, but Tiberias Cato marched right up to him and grasped him by the upper arm, then turned him firmly toward the spot where his father and Bishop Germanus sat watching from the reviewing stand.

I had seen that Cato was carrying a sheathed sword tucked beneath his arm, a long-bladed cavalry spatha, and as I watched him present it to Lorco, I began to appreciate what I had lost and felt the first tug of regret. The spatha was Tiberias Cato’s own sword, a superb weapon, probably one of the finest of its kind ever made. It had been bought for him many years earlier by Germanus himself, in Constantinople, shortly after Cato had signed up with the legatus as an Assistant Master of Horse, charged with teaching the garrison’s troopers some of the hew techniques and skills that he had brought back with him from the lands of the Smoke People, where he was raised. This was a distant eastern land, far beyond the boundaries of the Empire, a place where all people had straight black hair, skin of yellowish brown and strangely slanted eyes. Tiberias Cato’s father had traveled there as a merchant, taking his wife and young son with him in his unending search for new and exotic goods to trade, and when he and his wife died there of a fever, their orphaned son was brought up by the local tribesmen and lived among them until he achieved manhood and was able to go in search of his own birthplace and his surviving kinsmen.

That sword had gone everywhere with Tiberias Cato since the day it came into his possession. It had hung either from his waist or from his saddle on every campaign in which he fought for two decades and more. I was astonished to think that he would ever consider giving it away, even though he had no real use for it nowadays. My astonishment, however, quickly gave way to chagrin that it had not been won by me.

I heard applause from behind me and looked up to where Phillipus Lorco stood by his chair on the reviewing stand, flanked by Bishop Germanus and Brother Ansel and backed by everyone who had assembled to watch the day’s events. All of them were applauding noisily, their eyes fixed on Lorco. I sniffed and shrugged off my disappointment, then made my way to the medical stand, where I knew I could at least find some cold water to drink. I had no injuries to speak of, apart from a few bumps and bruises that would soon fade and disappear.

Less than an hour later, having bathed and changed into fresh clothing, I was standing stiffly at attention in front of the worktable in Tiberias Cato’s quarters, hearing him repeat the question he had growled at me earlier.

“Don’t feed me that swill,” he barked when I responded as though I didn’t know what he meant. “You know damned well what I mean. I asked you if he is that good a friend that you’d willingly give up a prize like that one today simply to make him look good—and don’t try to deny what you did, either. I was watching you. You looked up so many times to where his father was sitting that you almost lost count of who was still in the arena. You were swiveling your head from side to side like a thief caught between two angry dogs.”

There did not seem to be much I could say in response without lying or blustering, and so I said nothing, fighting against the urge to grow angry and staring directly at the wall behind him, my eyes leveled just above his head. He was partially correct, I told myself. I remembered looking from father to son and perhaps back again, that much was true; but I had not done it as often as he had suggested, and not in the way he seemed to mean. And besides, I was far from sure that I had willingly done anything to give up the fight. The more I thought about that, in fact, the more convinced I became that I had done no such thing. Cato, however, was not interested in any self-justification I might develop.

“Look at me, boy. Damnation, look me in the eye!” I did. “Humph! That’s better. Don’t ever be afraid to look a man right in the eye while he’s tearing a piece off you with his tongue. As a matter of fact, you should teach yourself to be afraid not to look him in the eye. Everyone deserves a reprimand once in a while, because God knows everyone makes mistakes. But you show respect for the man who’s dressing you down while he’s doing it. It’s his responsibility to do whatever he has to do to straighten you out and get you to mend your ways. Staring over his head as though he isn’t there will just make him angry.

“Now, one more time, from a different viewpoint. Would your friend Lorco have done the same for you? Think hard. If your stepfather, Ban of Benwick, had been up there on the stand, would Lorco have done for you what you did for him today?”

“I don’t—”

“Think, I said, before you answer.”

“But—” He cut me off with a sidewise slash of his hand. I subsided, gritting my teeth, and began to think honestly about his question, since it was plain he would permit me to do nothing else. Would Lorco, in fact, have done the same thing for me, to his own cost?

“And before you answer that one, here’s another. D’you think he knows what you did?”

Another question I had failed to consider. But that one was easier. I shook my head, emphatically. “No, Magister. He could not possibly know; because I don’t even know if I did what you say I did. I thought about it, perhaps—no, I know I did—but only in the back of my mind. So, no … Lorco doesn’t know.”

“Well, let me ask you this: if we could restart the battle, would you be tempted to do it again—to give up the fight to make your friend look good? Would you?”

I was able to smile for the first time. “Not if I knew, going into the arena, what the prize was to be.”

“Ignore the prize; prizes can change. Would you do it again?”

I thought about the last time I had seen Lorco, as I emerged from the bathhouse a short time earlier. He had been on his way in, walking toward the main entrance with its multicolored windows of tiny red- and gold-stained glass diamonds mounted between thin strips of lead. He had been talking to his father, his head tilted up toward the Duke’s face and his left hand curled around the hilt of his new spatha, which now hung from a belt at his waist. Neither of them had seen me pass, so completely were they focused one upon the other. Now I remembered Lorco’s smile as he gazed up at his father and I found myself smiling.

“Yes, Magister,” I said. “I would do it again.”

“Good!” The Master of Horse almost leaped to his feet. “That was decisive enough, even should it turn out to be a wrong decision.” He paused then, one hand suspended in the air, as though about to bless me—something that he would never dream of doing, being both a layman and a warrior. “But you still have not answered the first question: would Lorco do the same for you?”

I shook my head but spoke with conviction. “I can’t say, Magister, one way or the other. I don’t know whether he would or not, but I have just realized that, either way, the answer to your question is not important. Whatever I might have done out there, it felt like the right thing to do at the time. I certainly don’t feel bad about having done it now. If, as I said, I did it.”

Cato shrugged. “Very well, then. You’re probably right. He was bound to beat you eventually and today was his time. Lucky thing you’re not going to be here for much longer. I doubt you’d enjoy being second best more than once.”

“Second best!” That stung me, but Cato had already begun to grin by the time I was able to think of a response, and I immediately swallowed what I had been about to say.

He nodded his head. “Aye, right. Let’s forget about it from now on, shall we? The bishop wants to meet with you before dinner. He’s tied up now with Brother Ansel and some of the other senior brethren, but he told me to send you in to wait for him when I was done with you. Now get out of here and don’t keep him waiting. And let’s both hope you’ll never have to depend seriously on a friend’s willingness to make a sacrifice for you. Out!”

I walked very slowly on my way to the bishop’s chambers, dawdling unconscionably as I sought to grapple with new and strange ideas. I was beginning to realize, but only slowly and imperfectly because it ran counter to what I saw then as logic, that Tiberias Cato was not angry at me at all, even while he clearly believed I had lost that day’s battle deliberately. But then, even as that thought was occurring to me and challenging my beliefs about the man I thought I knew, I found myself amending it as a new understanding began to build upon itself: Cato would never condone such a thing as a deliberate loss. That is what was so confusing about what I had been thinking. The idea of someone setting out deliberately to lose a fight smacked of cheating; there was a definite connotation of dishonesty within that premise at some level; and that, from all I had come to know and admire about Tiberias Cato, would have been anathema to him, violating every principle of conduct that he possessed.

But then a new thought occurred to me, possibly the first purely philosophical thought I had ever had. The idea of someone deliberately choosing not to win was not at all the same thing as that person’s making a deliberate choice to lose. As soon as I glimpsed that notion, seemingly solid in its logic, I snatched at it to examine it and devour it whole, but it eluded my grasp like smoke and left me feeling vaguely anxious, somehow mildly threatened, and aware that I had almost mastered a profound and tantalizing abstraction. I wanted to sit down there in a doorway by the edge of the thoroughfare to think the whole sequence of ideas through from front to back and from end to end, but then I noticed that the doorway in which I had paused was the one leading into the bishop’s quarters and I was already too late to do anything but make my way inside.

I heard voices from the bishop’s day room as I passed along the passageway that ran between Germanus’s private quarters and his working, public rooms, and was quietly relieved to know that the meeting of the senior clerics, whatever it concerned, was still in progress and I had not, therefore, kept the bishop waiting. I knocked nonetheless before entering his private rooms and was unsurprised when one of the lay brethren opened the door and, waving me forward with the broom he was clutching, ushered me into the familiar anteroom, where a wood fire burned briskly in an iron basket set in an ornate fireplace in the wall near the entrance. I thanked the man courteously and took the chair he indicated, beside the fireplace, and settled in to wait for the bishop. The lay brother, who had not spoken a word and whose name I did not know, nodded to me and then quietly withdrew into what I knew was the bishop’s bedchamber, where he was obviously doing some kind of cleaning chore. A pocket of resin in one of the logs on the fire ignited and spat loudly, making me jump, and I gazed into the burning mass, trying to detect where the explosion had occurred.

I had seen stone fireplaces indoors before—life in King Ban’s great stone castle, with its thick walls, tiny windows, and perpetually darkened rooms would have been intolerable without huge fireplaces, and logs that were large enough to be considered tree trunks were kept burning in them night and day, to banish the shadows and generate much-needed heat. Until I came to Auxerre, however, I had never seen a smaller version, in a smaller, brighter, better-lit household—and having said that, I must add that until then I had never even imagined the existence of smaller, brighter, better-lit households. I knew of only two kinds of dwellings: the stone huts that ordinary people lived in where I came from, which varied in size but never in design, being either round or square and consisting only of one common room, usually windowless; and the massive fortresses in which the rulers lived. The presence of light indoors, in an unfortified dwelling place, and the feelings of spacious airiness created by that light, had been the single most telling difference I found between life in Auxerre and the Bishop’s School and life in the land in which I had grown up with King Ban and Queen Vivienne. Here, in the civilized fastnesses of north-central Gaul, where peace had reigned virtually uninterrupted for hundreds of years, people had learned how to live elegantly, in wondrous houses built with pleasure and entertainment in mind.

Indoor fireplaces were yet uncommon here. I knew of only six others in addition to the one here in the anteroom to Germanus’s sleeping chamber. He had worked and soldiered too long under a hot sun, the bishop said, to permit him to be warm away from the sun’s direct rays, and so he kept a fire near him at all times, even going to the extreme lengths of building one into his house. I found it amusing but thought-provoking that every one of the other five similar fireplaces I had seen were in the homes of retired soldiers, men who, like Germanus, had spent years and even decades on campaign beneath desert suns.

“Ah, Clothar, you are here. I hope you have not been waiting long?”

I leaped to my feet, not having heard Germanus enter the room, but he was already waving me back into my seat.

“Stay, stay where you are.” He crossed the room to the long table beneath the glazed window opposite the fireplace and carefully placed the parchment scrolls he had been carrying so that they would not roll off and tumble to the floor, moving a heavy inkwell against one side of the pile to ensure that they would stay. That done, he turned back to gaze at me in silence for some time. I gazed back, but although he was looking at me, I knew he was not really seeing me, for it was clear that his mind was elsewhere. His lower lip was thrust forward, covering the line of his upper one completely, and I knew that this indicated deep thought prior to some momentous announcement, for that expression, known throughout the school as the Bishop’s Pout, appeared only in times of extreme deliberation and deep concern, and everyone who knew Germanus recognized it immediately.

“Is something wrong, Father Germanus?” I asked, daring to interrupt his thoughts. He blinked, then seemed to shake himself although he made no visible move.

“No.” I could tell from his voice that that was true. “No, there is nothing wrong, nothing at all. It’s simply that—” He broke off and frowned slightly. “It seems like an unconscionable time since last we spoke. When was it?”

“Eight weeks ago, Father. The day before you left to go to Britain.”

“Aye, right, eight weeks ago … Dear Lord, the time is flying nowadays. Eight weeks, gone in a blink, and it seems but yesterday since I was talking to Ludovic about our plans for traveling, and that in itself must have been nigh on half a year ago.” He paused, and then asked, “Did you really believe it necessary for your friend Lorco to win this afternoon?”

I gaped at him, caught off balance yet again by the sudden emergence of this question when I had not expected it, but this time, having been through the exercise of discussing the matter with Tiberias Cato, I responded more quickly and more easily.

“Yes, Father. I did.”

“Hmm. Why? Do you object to my asking?”

“No, Father, of course not, but Tiberias Cato and you both noticed what happened. Do you think anyone else saw?”

Father Germanus shook his head tersely. “No, I doubt it. Cato and I noticed it because we both know you as well as we do, and we saw … shall we say, a certain lack of fire and energy in your attack? Duke Lorco took great pleasure in his son’s prowess. You intended that to be the case, did you not?” I nodded. “I thought so. Why?”

I shrugged. “Lorco is my friend, sir, and his father’s esteem is important to him. I saw that today, and I first noticed it yesterday, when word came of his father’s visit. It was good that he should win and make his father proud.”

The bishop smiled a tiny smile and raised his right hand to bless me. “Peace be upon you, then. I shall beseech God in my prayers to furnish you with friends worthy of such loyalty and trust.”

I smiled and nodded. “Thank you, Father.”

“Do not thank me, boy. Friendship is God’s gift for fortunate men to share. It is a wonderful phenomenon and it exists according to its own rules and regulations. Its criteria are unique unto itself and it is restrained by none of the usual demands that people place upon other people’s behavior.”

Once launched upon a favorite topic—and I knew by this time that the bishop loved to talk about the criteria governing friendship—Germanus could be virtually unstoppable. I sat back and listened for a long time as he held forth on all that he believed about friendship, and much of what he told me that afternoon is still as alive in me today, and as fresh and credible, as it was when I first heard it that day.

He talked about the nature of friendship and about its durability; about how it could, and often did, spring out of nowhere, fully formed to take both members of the relationship by surprise, and then he went on to describe how, at other times and in other circumstances, it might grow slowly and almost unnoticeably, unsuspected by either participant. He pointed out to me, too, that friendship is untrammeled and unconstrained in its acceptance in a friend of appearances and personality quirks that would be unacceptable in anyone else; and from there he progressed to a discussion—albeit one-sided—of the nature of friendship and its relationship to love.

I listened, fascinated, to everything he had to say, hanging on his every word and feeling no urge to speak or to intrude upon what he was unfolding to me.

Love, he maintained, is an essential part of friendship, although it might be seldom mentioned by the friends themselves, but friendship may not necessarily be a part of love. Physical love—sexual love—and the state of being in love he explained as being conditions that completely enfold two individual people, fusing them emotionally and inexorably into a single unit of awareness and rendering them generally oblivious to everything else that is taking place in the world about them. They are a pair, but in the fiery singularity of their love for each other they exist as a single entity that shuts out the rest of the world.

Friendship, on the other hand, while also confined to two people, involved each of the two less exclusively and far less selfishly. Lovers demanded closeness—propinquity was the word he used—but friends could remain friends at opposite ends of the world and their friendship was undeterred by years of separation. Each friend in a pair might have many other friends, and those friends might like or dislike any of their friend’s other friends, but the initial pair’s friendship was a thing unique to the two of them, and though they might choose to extend the privilege of their friendship to others, their own friendship remained strictly and at all times a private matter between the two of them. I blinked, I recall, when he said that, but I managed to follow it without difficulty.

True friendship, he asserted in summing up, was a unique and divinely privileged phenomenon, and in consequence it was a condition that occurred only rarely in the life of any single person. If a man could name five close, lifetime friends before he died, Germanus said, then that man’s life had truly been blessed.

I clearly remember that as I listened to him say that I felt uncomfortable, skeptical, and even slightly embarrassed by what I perceived as his naivety, for I was fifteen years old and had a wealth of friends—scores of them, I thought. I was prepared to accept everything else that Germanus had had to say on the subject of friends and friendship, and in fact I had been delighted to hear him endorse some of the ideas that had occurred to me in thinking about my friends, but I really did believe that he was being ingenuous in insisting upon this scarcity of true friendship. Alas, two decades were to pass before I came to appreciate what he had meant.

“Now, I have a task for you, should you be willing to accept it.”

I straightened with a jerk, aware that I had been woolgathering.

“Anything, Father,” I said. “Anything, and gladly.”

“Hmm. Enthusiasm, without knowing what is involved? Thank you.” Smiling at his own observation, he crossed to the armchair on the other side of the fire and sat down, tugging at the voluminous folds of his outer garment and shifting in his seat until he had adjusted everything and could sit in comfort. “I want you to go home,” he said, and then, before I could react, he held up his palm to forestall me. “I have just returned from Britain, as you know, and much has happened while I was over there—happened here, I mean, in Gaul, not merely in Britain.”

I nodded, silently, and waited.

“I was supposed to spend last night in Lutetia, for no other reason originally than the fact that it lies on the direct route here from the coast. But it is also a central point for irregular gatherings of bishops, and one of those was convened while I was in Britain, in response to several urgent matters that arose unexpectedly and could not safely be postponed. It was known that I would be returning shortly from Britain, but couriers were dispatched to find me sooner and to summon me to the gathering in Lutetia as quickly as I could travel. They missed me on their first pass because I had made a detour for reasons of my own, and by the time they found me I was preparing to leave for home, so they only gained a single day on my planned schedule. Thus I arrived in Lutetia one day earlier than I had intended, and spent not one but two nights there, conferring there with my pastoral brethren.”

His face clouded, and he sat staring for a space of moments into the flames in the fire basket, but then he collected himself again and straightened slightly, looking me in the eye. “You may or may not have heard mutterings of what is going on in the world outside our school, but there is widespread unrest, and troublesome events are shaping up here in Gaul … very real threats of another war, which is the last thing any of us needs. These threats are arising from several sources. Most particularly, however, they are emanating from the lands of the Burgundian tribes, to the south and west of where we sit today. The imperial military intelligence people have been warning us for years now that the Burgundians are poised to spill out of their present holdings in an attempt to conquer all of central and southern Gaul, and first and foremost, from my perspective, those are not good tidings for the Church. The Burgundians, as you know, are not Christian and are, in fact, violently opposed to us and to our faith. They seem to delight in killing priests and bishops and in persecuting the faithful wherever they find them, and so we—my brother bishops and our clergy—will be using all the influence at our disposal, marshaling and channeling our combined resources to deflect and disarm the rebels’ initiatives however and wherever we can—working in conjunction, of course, with the legions.” Again he paused, considering his next words.

“It was forewarnings of a Burgundian revolt that caused the Imperial Administration in Treves to summon Duke Lorco here from his base in Carcasso, but I have received forewarnings, too, from my own sources, concerning another aspect of the same revolt, and that is why I require your assistance—not because you are a doughty fighter and a champion of God’s work, although you show all the signs of growing into such strengths, but because you are Ban’s nephew and adopted son and Ban is my friend. And so I would have you leave here in four days’ time, bearing messages from me to your kinsman Ban and traveling with your friend Stephan Lorco and his father the Duke when they leave to return to their own lands in the south. Their journey home to Carcasso will take them within sixty miles of where you live, and I have asked the Duke to provide you with an escort from his group for that short portion of the journey that will remain to bring you to Genava. He assures me that he will see you safely delivered home. Will you do this for me?”

“Of course, Father,” I said, attempting to mask my disappointment at being sent home from school before my just time had elapsed. Even as I voiced my consent, however, I saw that he had told me nothing other than that he was sending me away. Because King Ban, my uncle, was his friend, he had said, Germanus wanted me to leave his school and go home. For what purpose? And if it were only to bear messages, why would he send me and not a fast-riding courier? Beginning to grow increasingly confused, I bit down upon my rising panic and forced myself to try to speak what was on my mind. “You want me to carry a message to King Ban … from you and in person … but what do you wish me to tell him, Father?”

He seemed completely unaware of my discomfiture and merely smiled, shaking his head very slightly in dismissal of any concerns I might have. “Nothing that you need lose sleep about. I will put everything into words on paper in the next few days, because it is of extreme importance that I say what must be said properly, with no possibility of being misunderstood. I shall therefore write, and rewrite, and write yet again. It will be sufficient for you to carry the missives that I write to your uncle the King, thereby assuring him that they come directly from me to him, as a friend. That done, and having spent some pleasant and restful times with your aunt, the Lady Vivienne, you will hie yourself back here as soon as may be, for this is merely the first such task I have assigned to you and by the time you return I will have great need of you … .” He broke off, arching one eyebrow. “You wish to say something.”

“I … I am to return, then, Magister? I thought you were sending me away for good.”

“I am sending you away for good, boy—for good reason and to even better purpose. I am sending you upon a mission for the well-being of God’s Church and her faithful servants, which means, in effect, that I am sending you upon God’s own work. But I am far from being finished with your education, if that is what you really meant to suggest. I have much in mind for you, and hone of it entails sending you back to Genava permanently as a punishment for having reached the age of sixteen.” He smiled. “In truth, I see little of Genava in your future, my young friend, at least for several years. That is, at least in part, why I am sending you home on this mission. It will give you an opportunity to take your leave of your family again before moving on to the next level of your endeavors.”

As his words washed over me I felt relieved, elated, and exalted. I would be called upon to do a man’s work here in central Gaul, it seemed. I felt the merest twitching of guilt in acknowledging then that I had been dreading my eventual return to Genava, fearing that the life I had known there previously would suffer gravely now by comparison to all that I had known here in Auxerre. Now, however, with the blessing bestowed by these new duties, I could return gratefully to the lakeside to revisit and embrace all my old friends and loved ones before taking off yet again on expanded adventures.

I had yet another cause for relief and exultation in my breast on that occasion, although I would have been loath to mention it to my august mentor. When it first occurred to me that I was being sent away, never to return to the school, my chest had filled up with the unanticipated and panic-stricken fear of being unable to fulfill my vengeance—that long-standing promise to myself that I would one day pursue, confront, and cut down the usurper Clodas of Ganis as just punishment for the murder of my parents and my grandfather, his own true king, Garth of Ganis. Were I to be sent home now, I had realized, dismissed from the school before officially achieving manhood, I might never have the opportunity to fulfill my dreams in that regard. Still a mere boy, I would have no voice in Benwick when I went back and that, allied with my reluctance to go back and live in what I now perceived to be a backward and inferior region, might easily combine to make it impossible for me to escape from the humdrum of daily life by the lakeside.

It was an unjust thought and one that was already causing me to feel guilty and ungrateful by the time I realized that I was wrong and Germanus was not banishing me permanently. As soon as that awareness dawned, however, I lost all feelings of fear and guilt in the burst of elation that flooded over me. I would return to Auxerre, and I would finish my schooling and my training, and I would leave the Bishop’s School as a warrior with all the skills, all the abilities, and all the weight of years that would enable me to claim King Ban’s promised assistance in my quest to regain my own rightful kingdom.

When I left the bishop’s quarters that afternoon, I was bubbling inside with excitement, and every philosophical thought that had simmered in my mind earlier had been obliterated by the import of what I could now look forward to doing and being. I had four days left as a schoolboy; four days to wrap up the raiment of my time as a student; after that, like a chrysalis shedding its outer skin, I would be reborn as an entirely new being: a man and a warrior dedicated to the greater glory of God.