The Priest of Blood by Douglas Clegg Read Free Book Online Page B

Those who are peasants without means may become princes of the world. Only you and I know this to be true, for I have seen it come to pass, and remembered, while others have forgotten and believe that we are each born to our station and remain there until death. Remember this moment in future years. Remember when a man plucked you from the mud and brought you into a better life.”
    He glanced over at his compatriots and roared for them to go off and drink or wench or devour roasts, but that he was going to go with me to the Forest to see how well I called the birds. He told me to call him by his name, not the haughty French name of his father, but by his Breton name, which was a fairly common one of the time: Kenan. His father had been from the south, by way of France, and his mother had lived her whole life in the castle, and died there while he was still a boy, sent off to fight Norsemen along the coast. When he had returned to his home, it had changed, and he no longer hungered for war and adventure. Although he seemed old to me then, Kenan could not have been more than his late twenties. Yet he had a kind of halo of age around him, as if life had been too hard on him.
    I took him down a well-worn path. Once we had gone into the murky part of the woods, where the bramble grew thick and high, I tied his horse to one of the old oaks. When he’d dismounted, I took him by the hand and led him in among the giant ferns and the roots rising up like low cottages among the part of the Forest. Running within the overgrowth, the remnants of an old Roman wall. My grandfather had told me that many years before, when his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had lived, this had been a military outpost when the Romans fought the true people of the land. I showed him the stones that were the markers of the dead.
    “Is this where your birds speak?”
    I nodded, and cupped my hands to my mouth and let out a whistle and a call that I had learned from too young an age even to know where I’d learned it. Within seconds, a giant raven swooped down from the dark green canopy above us and came to rest on one of the ancient stones.
    I held my arm out and chirruped for the bird, and it flew to my shoulder. It was always a jolt when it grasped me, and I had to steady myself, for the bird had grown large over the past year. I pursed my lips, and my wild pet cocked its head to one side, then the other, and leaned over and pressed its beak to my lips.
    “Sing to me,” I commanded.
    And then the raven began reciting the “Ave Maria,” but in the poor accent and mispronounced words as I might as well have done it myself.
    Kenan roared with laughter, which scared my dark friend away. The bird flew up again, and although I whistled for it, it had become skittish around this stranger.
    I looked up at him.
    “And what of the gryphon?” he asked.
    “I have never seen it,” I told him. “But I know where there is an ancient well, and at the bottom of the well a gryphon lies, immortal, but broken-winged.”
    “And who told you this?”
    “A crone,” I said. “Her name is Mere Morwenna. Although she raises a young child, she is ancient. She is bent and hobbled, a friend of my mother’s, and has some pox across her face so she lives deep in the woods so that she might not spread her plague. Her child is hideously deformed. Yet she has wisdom, my mother says.”
    “She has a plague but has lived long?”
    I nodded. “I have never seen her face, for she hides it with a veil. But once, she came to our home to offer the leaves and bark of the birch tree to help my mother bear the birth of my little sister. She told me then of the creature in the well. She has told me never to visit the well, but I have gone once or twice and heard the gryphon crying out, at midday. It is the saddest sound.” This last part was something of a lie, for though I had been near the spot, I had never actually heard anything from within the well itself. Still, the