Father Germanus had promised me that I would have fine teachers at his school, and I did. Some of them I loved, some I admired, several I endured, and a few I tolerated. I only really disliked one out of all of them, however, and the antipathy I felt for him was reciprocated in full measure. His name was Anthony—he insisted that we call him Brother Anthony—and he and I detested each other from our first encounter. He took exception to something in my face or my deportment the first time I went into his classroom and he went out of his way thereafter to make his dislike of me plain to me and to everyone else, and so in response I found it remarkably easy to find a host of elements to dislike and disparage in him. Since he was the teacher and I the newest, most insignificant student in the school, however, he had, and continued to have, the best of our encounters for a long, long time. Even today, looking back across the chasm of years, I find myself hard put to define what it was about that man that offended me, but I have absolutely no doubt that were he and I to meet again today, never having laid eyes upon each other before, we would react to each other exactly as we did then. Some people simply affect one another that way.
Brother Anthony was a tonsured monk, his head shaved bald to show that he was a slave of God, bound to the Church by vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. Such total commitment was a new custom and indicated an entirely new depth of devotion and dedication, Bishop Germanus himself informed me, but one that was gaining great numbers of adherents throughout the eastern portion of the remaining Empire. The people who took such stringent vows, Germanus said, referred to themselves as monastics, and they sought perfection here on Earth by shunning the earthly vices of avarice, pride, and lechery and shutting themselves away from the world and its temptations, living in communes known as monasteries. Germanus himself had taken identical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but he was at pains to point out that his reasons for so doing were purely personal and pragmatic, to enable him to concentrate solely upon his episcopal responsibilities. He had no interest in monasticism, he maintained; his ordained place of work was squarely in the world of ordinary men, with all its temptations. He was a bishop, with a flock of faithful dependents relying upon him for guidance and example.
Brother Anthony was a monastic and had sworn his vows as such, fully intending to immure himself somewhere far from the world and its temptations, where he could concentrate on keeping his sacred commitments, but he was also a brilliant administrator, trained originally as an imperial legionary quartermaster, and so Bishop Germanus himself had prevailed upon Anthony to postpone his departure and remain for a time in Auxerre, tending to Germanus’s episcopal accounts and supervising inventories of everything required to keep the bishop’s domestic affairs functioning. Anthony had agreed, and in the brief periods of time left to him between his work and his prayers, he also taught divinity and theology to the students of the episcopal school. He was an able and gifted servant, very pious and devout, the bishop said on many occasions, and whenever I heard him say it, I nodded. Deep within myself, however, I knew that Brother Anthony had somehow managed to deceive Father Germanus and his staff and to keep his true malevolent nature concealed from everyone but me.
There was one unspoken and unwritten law among the fifty-odd students at the Bishop’s Schooclass="underline" you never complained and you never, ever carried tales. It was a matter of honor among the boys, but as such traditions always do, it carried within it a great potential for abuse. Discipline in the school was harsh, and the rules by which we boys lived were many, strict, and inviolable; you broke them at your peril, and when you were caught, as you were more often than not, you took your punishment—always corporal punishment—in silence. You could weep, and depending on the severity of the beating you had undergone people might or might not make allowances for that, but you could not, ever, whine or complain. That was one of the first learned facts of life in the Bishop’s School.
Brother Anthony enjoyed beating the younger boys and was despised for it by the entire student body, but he particularly enjoyed beating me, and I have many memories of being unable to walk without limping after one of his “punishments.” Of course I, being as stubborn as he was vicious, would never give him the satisfaction of seeing me wince, let alone cry, and so the beatings he delivered grew more savage as time went by and as I grew larger and more able to absorb them. I would often dream of the day when I would be big enough to face him and disarm him and I drew great pleasure from the images I dreamed up of what I would do to him on that occasion.
That day never arrived, however, because long before I grew big enough to challenge my tormentor, I was summoned to an unscheduled meeting with Father Germanus shortly after one of Anthony’s “punishments.” To this day I have no knowledge of who had reported what was going on, but from that moment my troubles with Brother Anthony were over. Germanus stopped me with an upraised hand as I entered his cubiculum—the spacious room from which he conducted all the affairs of his bishopric—and then stalked toward me, an unreadable expression on his face as he raked me from head to foot with his eyes. He took hold of my chin, then tilted my head sideways, right then left, examining my face closely. That done, he reached down quickly and grasped my belt buckle, tugging on it sharply.
“Off,” he said. “Undo it and take off your tunic.”
Not knowing what he was about, and never suspecting that someone else might have interceded. to save me from Anthony, I did as Father Germanus demanded. I loosened my belt and pulled my tunic up and over my shoulders, baring my torso. He frowned, his eyes moving across the bruises on my ribs, and then he grasped me by the upper arm, not ungently, and turned me around. I heard the hiss of his indrawn breath as his gaze encountered the fresh welts on my back, and his fingers tightened on my arm before he turned me back to face him. His face had paled but he said nothing to me. Instead he called to his clerical assistant, Potius, who came in quickly from his station outside the doors of the cubiculum. I was shrugging back into my tunic by then, but the bishop stopped me and waved to Potius to approach and see what had been done to me. Again, a shocked hiss, quickly stifled.
“Take him to the infirmary,” Germanus said, and I had never heard such iron control in his voice. “Brother Martin to look after him in person. Tell Martin to do what must be done and then come here to me. Quickly now.” He looked back to me, his face impassive. “Go with Potius. We will speak again later.”
I spent four days in the infirmary, lying on my side or on my stomach, anchored in such a way that I was completely unable to turn onto my back, and on two of those days Germanus himself came to visit me. He said nothing the first time, merely nodding to me and standing in my doorway for a while, contemplating me as I lay immobile, but when he returned the second time he did speak, if only briefly. “Recover quickly,” he said from the doorway. “Your time remaining here is none too long and you should enjoy it to the full. Brother Anthony has left us.”
Brother Anthony had, indeed. As soon as I was released from my confinement, my friends came rushing to tell me that Brother Anthony had been escorted to his monastic life by Bishop Germanus in person, and would spend the remainder of his life in pious servitude within a monastery selected by the bishop and noted for the severity of its commitment to penance. Therein, Brother Anthony would be cut off forever from the company of boys.