But the Lord in His wisdom had taken the child in spite of our prayers, and the monks, neither knowing how to comfort his mother nor having the courage to try, gave themselves to mournful song instead.
‘My child. My child is lost,’ the woman wailed. ‘See?’ Her eyes bored into mine and for a terrifying moment I thought she would hand the little body to me. ‘He is too small,’ she told me. ‘How will he find his way to Annwn?’
I could not answer that but made the sign of the Thorn at her mention of the otherworld, the abode of the pagan dead, and, to my shame, looked away, shuffling closer to Father Phelan and the others, taking up the solemn chant in praise of God.
The men’s voices were reed-thin at first but grew in strength, their breath blending in veils of fog in the chill dawn as they poured a balm of song into that small room which should instead have filled with a baby’s cry and a mother’s cooing.
I was in full spate when Father Brice pulled me aside. ‘Fetch Brother Yvain,’ he said. ‘I need him to go across the water.’
I nodded and turned to leave, grateful to be given a task, but Father Judoc grabbed my sleeve and hauled me back. ‘A moment, Galahad.’ He held up a finger and lifted his chin at Father Brice. ‘What do you intend, Brother?’ he asked. He stood a head taller than Brice and revelled in it, not that I’d ever seen Father Brice intimidated.
‘There is a man in the village who is sick,’ Brice said. ‘Eudaf the cobbler. His son came to me two days ago, begging me to send someone to sing the Litany for his father.’ He lifted an eyebrow and turned an upward palm towards the grieving mother. ‘I did not find the opportunity.’ He frowned. ‘Now I fear that I have failed the child, the mother and the cobbler.’
‘God willing, the man has recovered.’ Father Judoc placed his hands together, the straight fingers threaded to represent the Holy Thorn.
Father Brice tilted his head towards another possibility. ‘But if he has died, and is not yet buried, it may be that this Eudaf can help the poor child,’ he said. ‘Help this young woman, too.’
‘It is sacrilege,’ Father Judoc blurted out, glaring at Father Brice.
‘It is a kindness,’ Father Brice countered with a thoughtful nod. I saw that his tonsure was in need of a blade, for there was new white growth, as fine as cankerwort down, sprouting on the front of his liver-spotted scalp. ‘A simple kindness, nothing more,’ he said, glancing at the woman.
The look on my face must have told them both that I did not know what they were talking about, and it was Father Judoc who took it upon himself to enlighten me, presumably hoping to win an ally against Father Brice.
‘Brother Brice would have the dead child placed in the earth with this villager so that the man’s soul may escort the little one to heaven.’ Father Judoc curled his lip in distaste. ‘It is a pagan ritual. I have seen it done.’
‘Her grandmother served King Deroch back in Uther’s day,’ Father Brice said. ‘Her father fought in Lord Arthur’s shieldwall. I would assuage her pain if I can.’ For we did not save her child, was what he left unsaid.
Judoc shook his head. ‘It is not Christian.’
‘Not Christ-like to seek to comfort those in pain?’ Father Brice asked us both. ‘And is it not wise,’ he went on, inclining his head to give this next point more weight than the first, ‘to keep the peace with those who may yet turn back our enemies? Their gods were powerful here, once.’
‘The Saxons cannot be turned back,’ Father Judoc said. ‘They will not relent until they have slaughtered every last Briton or else driven us into the Western Sea. Britain is lost, Brother. You are a fool if you cannot see that. And helping non-believers will only anger the Lord further. It will only hasten the end.’
Father Brice gave him a sad smile. ‘If we are already lost, Brother, then what harm can this small kindness do?’ With that he turned his face, guiding our eyes back to the dismal scene of the young mother holding the dead infant to her bosom. Her mewling was pitiful to hear, all the more for being muffled by the little thatch of fair hair against her lips. It glistened with her tears, that hair, as though she offered the child a second baptism, just a candle’s length after we had watched Father Brice wash the child with water from the White Spring. The mother had not seemed to know what Father Brice was doing. Or if she knew, she did not care.
‘Do it if you must, Brother, but it will not be on my conscience,’ Father Judoc said, making the sign of the Thorn again.
‘Of course not,’ Father Brice said, one eyebrow arching. Then he turned to me and lifted his white-stubbled chin and I went to find Father Yvain.
‘The poor wretch has left us already, then.’ Father Yvain nodded at Father Dristan to keep working the lathe, which the younger man did, pulling backwards and forwards on the leather strap that was wrapped around the piece, turning the wood one way and then the other. Over and over.
Yvain did not look up, his iron hook tool casting chips and curls of creamy wood onto the floor rushes. ‘Boy or girl?’
The smell of that place changed as often as the weather, depending on which wood he was working and whether it was seasoned or freshly cut and still wet. Today, I caught the sweet smell of cherry mixed with the cat-urine tang of elm.
‘A boy,’ I said.
He made a gruff sound in his throat, whether at that revelation or because of how the green wood was turning, I could not say. ‘Knew something wasn’t right when I heard no squawking,’ he said. ‘Not since the girl stopped labouring.’
Sweating in spite of the chill day, Father Dristan pulled the leather strap with the fluid consistency of long practice, and Father Yvain pressed the little hook into the wood, gouging some decoration into it. Creating by taking away. ‘Poor little soul,’ the older man said, blowing away from the sharp iron a sliver of wood, bright as a curl of fair hair. He sighed. ‘May the Lord be merciful.’
‘Amen,’ Father Dristan breathed.
Father Yvain seemed to fill the low-beamed workshop, seemed as much a part of that place as did the bowls stacked to dry on shelves, and the old, scarred work benches and the piles of ash-shafted hook tools and spooning knives forged by Yvain himself, each for a specific task. He could be found there most of the day, even at those times when the rest of us were gathered at prayer. Not that the others begrudged Father Yvain’s absence from Sext and None, or from Vespers, where we almost never saw him. Aside from his wood-turning, Yvain shouldered certain responsibilities, undertook tasks which none of the others would. There was an unwritten covenant among the brothers that in return he be allowed to spend more time at his lathe than at prayer, which was why I now stood in the workshop, fighting the temptation to lift my foot and search for the splinter which was tormenting me.
‘So?’ Father Yvain said.
Broad-shouldered and black-bearded was Yvain. His hands were thick-fingered and gnarled as an old yew tree, and yet so many times I had marvelled at the graceful shapes which he teased from apple and ash, beech and blackthorn. Gaming pieces, bodkins and spoons, lidded boxes for salves and herbs, stool legs, shepherd’s crooks and walking sticks for the older monks. All came from his lathe and his rough hands.
‘Everything I make, I make as if the High King of Britain himself will hold it in his own hands,’ Yvain had told me once, when as a child I had watched some spinning piece being kissed into shape by bright iron. Not that there had been a High King of Britain these past thirty years or more.