indeed those of Arthur and Guinevere, killed in a legendary battle in such an ancient past that its shrieks and blows had ameliorated into nothing more than the puff of a story-laden breeze.
But those shrieks, those blows, had been less than a generation ago. She had a duty to the dead; she was who she was.
She felt the little pier vibrate as somebody joined her on it. Beside her were the long, white, sandaled feet of Abbot Sigward.
“We have been searching for you, my child. Will you come and take some food before we go?”
She squinted up at him, shading her eyes. “How did your son die?” she asked.
For a moment he was as still as death. She continued to look at him.
“So you are Nemesis,” he said.
She nodded.
Then the abbot’s face changed, quite beautifully, as if the sun shining on it was reflected back by an inner light. “I have been awaiting that question for twenty years.” He stretched his arms sideways to embrace the view, like a cormorant holding out its wings to dry in the warmth. “See what a perfect day the Lord has chosen for it. He has even supplied a bishop for my confession.” He smiled down at her. “Stay there, my child, while I fetch the others.”
He strode off toward the kitchen, then stopped to turn around.
“I killed him,” he said.
LATER, WHEN ADELIA looked back on the journey to Lazarus, it was the incongruity of it that never failed to jolt her. It should have been made in darkness, or at least cast a shadow that withered everything they passed. Instead, as Godwyn smoothly poled the punt containing Sigward, Adelia, Rowley, and Hilda along, the sun shone on them as if on a jolly outing.
At one point, the abbot even paused in his confession and uncovered a basket that had been put up for him by Brother Titus before they left, exposing a jug of mead and cakes of oatmeal and honey, and passing them around. “Eat, drink,” he urged them.
He was exalted. Sitting on the punt’s middle thwart, facing the bishop of Saint Albans, he unburdened himself of his sin almost joyously, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in English, as if fearing that Adelia, his nemesis, sitting in the stern behind Rowley, would not understand him.
Hilda-he’d insisted she should accompany them-crouched in the bottom of the punt, quiet now, her head on his knee like an exhausted dog’s.
His story-and it was as much story as confession-was of a cleaving. Of a young man hacked in two. Of an earthquake that had not only opened rifts in the ground but had separated the Sigward, lord of great estates, from the Sigward who’d become a lowly monk of Glastonbury Abbey and then its abbot.
He spoke of them as two different people. “Lord Sigward was a man assured of his righteousness,” he said. “He gave to the poor, he built churches and oratories so that God should be reminded of his virtue. He ruled his little kingdom justly with a Bible in his hands, knowing he obeyed its precepts. He bathed in the admiration of his neighbors. His servants had cause to love him…” Absentmindedly, Abbot Sigward patted Hilda’s shoulder. “At least those he kept by him, for he was quick to punish and rid himself of the ones who did not.”
Wishing she didn’t have to listen, Adelia kept her eyes on the river, trailing her fingers and watching their wake in the water. A moorhen hurried her chicks away from the ripple.
“Lord Sigward chose his wife carefully, but she was a disappointment; he did not understand why she was afraid of him. She bore him a son, and she died doing it. No matter, Lord Sigward had his heir and held a great feast so that he could boast of him to Somerset’s nobility. But the boy, too, was a disappointment; he was weak, like his mother. He cowered when his father spoke to him; he failed in the tiltyard, he was an inept huntsman. Like some clerk, he preferred books to pursuing the manly arts.”
Adelia glanced at Rowley’s rigid back; he’d averted his face from the man opposite him, as he would have done in the privacy of a confessional. There had been no moment to warn him before they set off. When the abbot, crossing himself, had spoken the formula-“Hear and bless me, Father, for I have greatly sinned”-she’d seen her lover draw away as if in protest.
He always hated hearing confessions. “Who am I to pronounce on sin?” Like Thomas a Becket before him, he’d been appointed by his king, not the Church, and had been made a priest literally overnight-ordained one day, installed into the bishop’s chair the next.
The punt surged and slowed as Godwyn dug its pole effortlessly into the riverbed and lifted it again, his face without expression. The words issuing from the mouth of the man who’d been his master might have been no more than the chirp of the buntings hidden in the reeds.
“When the boy was sixteen, it seemed necessary to Lord Sigward that he should regain the admiration of the county and get credit with Almighty God by sending his son on crusade. He fitted him out lavishly with weapons, equipment, gave him a fine destrier to ride… which was too big for him.” For the first time the abbot’s voice had faltered, then, with an indrawn breath, it regained its rhythm. “A farewell feast for the county to wish the son well and praise the father who, though wallowing in his pride, also resented the boy’s obvious happiness in leaving him.”
A dragonfly skimmed the water and landed on the punt’s gunwale like an iridescent jewel before taking off again.
“Four years went by without a word. Other fathers received news of their offspring from those returning from the Holy Land, sometimes that they were alive and well, sometimes that they were dead. The Lord Sigward, however, heard nothing and began to think that his boy, too, had died, perhaps in the battle for the fortress of Ascalon, where so many Christian knights were slaughtered during its recapture from the Saracen. If so, it would be an excuse for him to hold another feast, this time a valedictory one-what honor to Lord Sigward that his child had given his life in the attempt to return the Holy Land to God.”
Adelia watched a kingfisher that had been perching on an alder twig suddenly turn into a rainbowed arrow as it dived into the water, coming up with a frog in its beak.
It was getting hot. Abbot Sigward threw back his cowl to let the air play on his tonsured head. The exaltation was still with him, but his fingers were showing white where he clasped them in his lap-he was coming to the crux.
Adelia tried to distance the clear voice ringing over the marshes into that of just another storyteller in a market. Twenty years ago, she told herself. They have been dead these twenty years. This man is not the same man who kitted them.
But he was.
It had been the evening before the Feast of Saint Stephen 1154, the abbot said, a blustery night.
Christmas festivities were over. Lord Sigward, being the kindly master he was, had already allowed his servants to set off on their annual visit to the villages they came from.
“Apart from Hilda”-the abbot patted the head of the woman crouching beside him-“who refused to leave him, and Godwyn”-he smiled up at the man poling the punt-“who refused to leave her, there was no one in the house.”
So Lord Sigward was dining alone in his hall when Godwyn, acting as a doorkeeper, heard a loud knocking and went to answer it. Two young men were ushered in, and Lord Sigward found himself being embraced by his son, whose dripping rain cloak put wet marks on the silk of his father’s robe. Laughing and exclaiming, the boy introduced his magnificently tall friend. “We have been on the road from Outremer for three months, Father, and we are very, very hungry.”
Immediately, Lord Sigward felt anger; if his son had sent word ahead, he could have invited his neighbors to welcome the boy as a hero. He kept his patience, however, and called for Hilda to bring food and drink.
As he watched the young men eat, he became angrier.
“He should have been pleased,” the abbot said. “His son had become the man he’d wished him to be. The years in the Holy Land had given the boy belief in himself. He looked Lord Sigward in the eye. He was no longer afraid; he was Lord Sigward’s equal-and Lord Sigward resented it.”
Also, there was a sweetness in the son’s smile when it was directed at the friend that was missing when he addressed the father.
Both youths had pale, cruciform patches on their tunics where the crusader’s cross had been stripped off. When Lord Sigward inquired why this was so, he was able to find justification for his anger with the two of them. “They denigrated the sanctity of crusade, they poured scorn on the holy purpose of driving the Saracen from the land Jesus had walked on. They had seen too much death, they said; Islam was merely being inflamed. What purpose in killing Muslim men, women, and children if each corpse added a hundred living people to the number hating Christianity? Was that following the teaching of Our Lord?”
Too furious to speak, Lord Sigward had left the hall and retired to his chamber. He couldn’t sleep for thinking of the shame his son’s impiety would cast on his name. In the middle of the night, he got up and went to the boy’s room to argue with him.
“He found his son and the friend in bed together,” the abbot said. “They were naked and performing a homosexual act.”
Hubris had descended on Lord Sigward then. Quietly, he closed the door on the two lovers and went to fetch an ax.
The abbot said, “He… No, I must not think of myself in the third person… Me. I was that butcher. With the ax in my hand, I burst in on those two boys and hacked them to death where they lay in each other’s arms. I struck and struck and went on striking long after both were dead.”
The river was beginning to straggle through reeds now, and the punt nudged aside yellow water lilies as it went. Sandpipers called from the banks, a descant to the implacable human voice.
“I considered myself justified. Had I not followed the Lord’s action against Sodom and Gomorrah? Did not Leviticus say that a man who lies with a man as with a woman has committed a detestable act and should surely be put to death?”
Covered in blood, Lord Sigward went downstairs to sit at the table and stare at nothing.
Hilda had heard the shrieks and gone running to view the slaughterhouse. The dead boys were less important to her than her lord; nobody should know what the dear master had done.
She took over. Godwyn was sent to prepare a coffin while she swabbed and cleaned. The bodies were laid on a sheet; the bedding was burned.
“Not the least of my sins that night was that I involved my two good servants in it.” Abbot Sigward glanced up, but Godwyn kept his eyes on the river.
The corpses were put in their coffin, ready to be buried secretly somewhere on the estate…
And then the earthquake struck.
“The world tilted. The ground opened. Worst was the noise, as if God’s voice had come close and was blasting destruction through the clouds.” Abbot Sigward nodded to himself. “Which it was, which indeed it was. I heard Him. Is it for you to condemn, you murderer? Was it for this that I sent My Son to preach love and forgiveness? Who are you to set yourself up against Him? Two mothers’ sons you have killed, Sigward. In your arrogance and wickedness you have committed filicide twice over and the Son of Man has been crucified yet again.”
It was the voice that Saul heard on the Road to Damascus.
As it had to Saul, it showed Lord Sigward to himself. He cowered at what he saw, a creature of hatred, a vainglorious, pitiless upholder of all law except the one that mattered most, a murderer, not least of a gentle wife who had died loveless. He saw the Pit waiting for him, and it held no flames but was barren and empty, like his soul; he would be condemned to shiver in it alone through all eternity.
“I crawled, pleading for a mercy that would not be given me because I had shown none,” the abbot said. “The floor tossed beneath me in the cataclysm that was God’s condemnation.”
When at last the earth stopped quaking, it was another Sigward who rose to his feet, though he could barely stand upright for the horror of what he had done. He knew now that the boys he’d killed must not be buried in unsanctified ground; to placate a vengeful God, he would take their bodies to the nearest and holiest place he knew, Glastonbury Abbey.
“I was, of course, bargaining with my Lord, wicked creature that I was, leaving it to Him to say whether or not my crime should be discovered. If it were, I would take my punishment. If not, I promised Him that all my lands and possessions should go to Mother Church and I would spend the rest of my days in service of His loving Son.” Sigward turned to Adelia. “I told you, my lady, that I was a gambler. It was gambling.”
She nodded.
One thing he had not been able to do. “I could not let my son’s body go to its rest complete. In my fury, I had hacked it into three, throwing the sexual part onto the floor. Even now… Sweet Mary, what twisted madness… I would not bury it with him, as if I might still conceal what he was. Hilda saw to its disposal separately, another sin that she bore for me.”
Not Hilda, Adelia thought. It was Godwyn; tears were trickling down the man’s face. It was him-Lord, the wonderful strangeness of human nature. She wondered what he had done with that dreadful collop of flesh until it was skeletonized and he could give the bones a more decent interment because he’d loved and pitied the boy they’d belonged to.
