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.