Wine of Violence

Chapter Five

Giles rode away. Thomas stood in the dark shadow of the priory walls; his hand raised to ring the gate bell; his back turned from the road. He knew there would be no backward glance from the rider, only a swirl of dust kicked up by the horses’ hooves.

Brother Thomas, as he now must call himself, pressed a hand against his chest. Pains of longing and grief stabbed equally and unmercifully at him. Both the lack and the loss of loved ones were all too familiar to him, yet he had never been able to inure himself to either.

Thomas was a by-blow. His servant mother had died of some fever soon after his birth. His father, an earl, had taken him up, tossed him into the arms of a wet nurse, fed and clothed him with some decency, and then mostly forgot about the boy as he habitually dismissed all his offspring, whatever their legitimacy. In both war and bed, the earl was a man of passionate action. Consequences merited a more limited interest.

The earl’s presence in Thomas’ life was just frequent enough, however, that the boy could neither forget nor ignore him, and he longed for his father’s rare attention and even more infrequent praise. Thus the lad searched out the men most favored in the earl’s circle and began to study how they spoke, stood, and gestured, so that he too might catch his father’s eye and approval. This may have started as a boy’s desperate attempt at attention, but Thomas soon developed a talent for shadowing older men, eavesdropping on their bragging tales, and watching them do the things men do when they do not know they are being watched. And with the precocious intelligence of a parentless child, he quickly figured out the significance of what he overheard when secrets were whispered.

One day, the boy begged an audience with his father and imparted something of such import into his ear that the earl developed a true, albeit belated fondness for him. As a reward for warning him of the malicious plot being brewed, the earl gave Thomas a thump of genuine affection and sent him off to cathedral school.

Thomas might have preferred more direct forms of affection and, from the beginning, made it clear he had little taste for the Church. At his father’s insistence, however, he did take minor orders. The earl told him with well-intentioned candor that Thomas’ birth precluded inheriting either title or lands and that taking such orders would give the boy a fine future with men in high places who would value his talents. Indeed, as he began his sometimes less than strictly clerical duties for some of the more ambitious men of the Church, Thomas learned to enjoy assisting in the earthly power games played by his priestly masters.

Sharing this love of intrigue had been his boyhood friend, Giles, who was also sent to cathedral school as the proper place for a younger, and in this case legitimate, son of one of the earl’s barons. Giles was more than just a childhood friend. They had been brothers in toddler mischief, adolescent buffoonery, and finally the more serious sports of wining and wenching.

Then one bright spring morning, after a night of sharing the lush favors of a serving maid from a pilgrims’ inn near Saint Edward the Confessor’s shrine at Westminster, Thomas was awakened from a sweet but unremembered dream by church bells ringing out with their particular joy. He looked at Giles’ naked body next to him and had begun to caress him with an inexplicably tender longing. Indeed, never before had Thomas felt so unreservedly happy nor had he ever been able to show love so freely.

Giles later claimed he knew nothing of what had happened before the maid began to scream and a horrified pilgrim ran to fetch the archdeacon’s chief clerk, but Thomas knew better. He remembered how ardently Giles had returned his kisses and fondling, how Giles had begged his friend to thrust his sex into him. And as he began to do so, Thomas felt an almost holy joy.

Yet the man who dragged him from Giles had screamed “Sodomite!” and the dungeon where Thomas had soon found himself was a cold, foul, and brutal hell.

One of his jailers raped him, all had taunted him, but two took especial joy in loudly recounting tales of how Giles had spent his days since, tearing at his garments and howling like a wolf. He had been locked away in his father’s castle tower until he begged his father to take him to the chapel. Arriving at the door, Giles had ripped away his remaining rags and plunged naked into a bed of stinging nettles. The priest had exorcised Satan from the young man’s writhing body, after which Giles had fallen into a deep sleep and, when he awoke, claimed ignorance of all that had transpired in bed with Thomas.

Now cleansed of evil, Giles had walked barefooted to a nearby shrine in penance and in gratitude. Shortly thereafter, he was married to an old and wealthy widow of his father’s choosing. Thomas’ jailers recounted this last news in especially ribald detail just outside his prison door. The onetime rape he might have endured, swearing to castrate the man in good time. The tauntings were only words even his dulled wits could match, but these jailers could not have chosen a better torture than this tale to bring him to his knees, whimpering like a beaten dog, in grief for his friend.

Why Thomas hadn’t been burned at the stake was still a mystery to him. Perhaps it was his father’s doing. Perhaps it was some bishop who had benefited from his murmured advice. Whatever, he had wanted to die by the time he was finally wrenched from his prison bed of rotten straw, rat feces, and his own filth. The brightness of forgotten sunlight had seared his eyes, and the encrusted chains had rubbed his bloody ankles to a point beyond pain. He would have begged for death, had he not lost his voice in a world where darkness made a mockery of human speech.

Although the tonsure would suggest the man was from the Church, Thomas had no idea of the somber one’s identity as he sat in the warden’s room and silently examined the disgusting wretch Thomas had become. Whoever the man was, he had quickly ordered a stool brought for Thomas to sit on and some watered wine for his rusted throat.

“I have a proposition for you,” the black-robed man had said, his voice undistinguished by any particular tone.

Thomas had stared at him.

“A slow death at the stake and your soul condemned to Hell…”

Thomas blinked.

“…or your sins forgiven in return for becoming a priest with unquestioning obedience to a master whom you will never meet.”

Thomas said nothing.

“Do you hear me?”

Thomas dipped his head.

“Do you understand the choice?”

Thomas nodded.

“And?”

“The Church,” Thomas whispered. “I know Hell and wish no more of it.”

And so they had cut the chains from his flesh, bathed his filth-dyed and rat-bitten body, put poultices on the worst of his festering wounds and shaved a monk’s tonsure on his head. When he was strong enough, they trained him further in priestly rites and draped chastity, poverty, and obedience over his head with a monk’s rough habit.

But Thomas didn’t mind what he had been forced to swear.

He only minded forswearing Giles.

And who, with such sadistic humor, had chosen the penitential Giles to lead the ravaged Thomas to Tyndal Priory and leave him like an abandoned child to be encloistered with monks under the rule of women?

Thomas hoped he never found out.

***

Thomas rang the bell, then turned and looked down the road. There was nothing to see, not even settling dust, but Thomas continued to stare into the distance as tears slipped down his cheeks. Shamed at his weakness, he wiped them away but bowed his head as the ache of grief burst into his hollowed-out heart. The pain would linger for a long, long time.

The sound of the heavy wooden door opening on its metal hinges caused him to turn around. In front of him was a small monk of indeterminate age with deep blue eyes and a head so bald a tonsure was unneeded.

“Thanks be to God! And welcome to Tyndal Priory, brother,” the man said with ritual greeting and a deep bow. “I am Brother Andrew.”