We spent our lives training and studying, and only occasionally praying, and none of us would have had it any other way. That is why our time there in the Bishop’s School—for my experience was shared by all my friends—passed by so quickly. We were boys, engrossed in doing what boys do, thoroughly captivated by our studies, both military and academic. A stringently observed aphorism at the school was mens sana in corpore sano: a healthy mind exists in a healthy body. The importance of that belief was reflected in the discipline of personal hygiene, both mental and physical, that permeated the lives of the students, driving them remorselessly from cold baths and shivering prayers in the darkness of the predawn, prebreakfast hours, through days crammed with varying activities, both scholastic and military, until the curfew hour, when we would fall into bed after the communal evening prayers known as vespers, too exhausted even to talk to each other and acutely aware that almost before we had time to close our eyes to sleep, we would be rousted out again for matins, the morning prayers that the entire community shared in the darkest hours before dawn. And yet, for all the hardships and strictures of our life as students there, few of us would ever be as happy in our adult lives as we were then in our innocence.
And yet great things were occurring in the world around us, events that ought to have claimed all our attention and surely would have, had we known they were happening. Entire races of people were on the move at that time, sweeping in mass migrations through vast territories that had once been owned by the Empire and policed by its ubiquitous armies but were now, for the most part, abandoned and unsupervised. And as each race of land-hungry people swept forward—Visigoths and Goths, Vandals and Huns, and a hundred other nameless hordes—wheeling from northeast to westward for the most part, they dispossessed other, former occupants, who moved on in their turn and increased the havoc and chaos.
Everything—every stretch of land that had been part of the Empire in the West for a thousand and more years—was in a condition of flux and turmoil in those turbulent days after the fall of Rome, when Alaric and his Visigoths first captured the Eternal City. The Empire, which everyone had thought to be eternal, had collapsed within the space of a few years, and no one, anywhere, was equipped or prepared to deal with the catastrophe. And yet, when the tally was complete and all the initial chaos began to subside, order, or a degree of order greater than anyone could have anticipated, reasserted itself at an astonishing rate.
The reasons for that were not hard to find, for anyone who cared to look for them, for in the decades and even centuries that the old Empire had been tottering, a victim of its own corruption, people had learned to subsist on their own terms, to be more self-sufficient and independent of imperial dictates. And so the crash of collapse, when it came, proved to be less surprising, less demoralizing than it might have been, and even the majority of the peoples who were on the move had benefited from the civilizing influence of Rome for a millennium.
Not surprisingly, since Auxerre was firmly in the center of Gaul, we experienced very little of the upheavals that were happening elsewhere. The Frankish presence in the north and west continued to increase, but that meant nothing to us, since we ourselves were Franks and our migration had been ongoing for more than a hundred years. It was similar with the Burgundians, whose settled borders almost abutted ours in the south. They had practically overrun the entire southwest of Gaul. But although neither of us was amicably disposed toward the other and there were sometimes clashes between our people and theirs, the situation between us never degenerated into outright war. Each of us knew the other and had his measure, and we both knew it was more important to guard ourselves against outside aggression than to fret over what our neighbors might be planning.
Bishop Germanus, of course, was aware of all of this, but he made it his business to ensure that none of us were bothered by such things. We had an education to absorb, he believed, and the form in which we absorbed it would dictate, to a very great extent, the fashion in which we later reacted to such external priorities and distractions. If our grounding in the classical elements of education was sufficiently substantial, he argued, then we would be perfectly well equipped to deal with whatever the world might throw at us, and so we studied logic and philosophy, geometry and polemics and geography—this while the world was changing daily—and we conversed in Greek and Latin and were conversant with the written works of the great Masters: the Greeks Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, Aeschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, and Homer, and the Roman works of Caesar, Cicero, Pliny, Ovid, and many others. And over and above all of these, we studied the Christ and his teachings.
When I consider that we studied all of these things between predawn morning prayers and noon, and that the second half of each day was given over completely to our military training and discipline, then add the additional consideration that we somehow had to accommodate all of our daily chores and duties within the fabric of those activities, finding and making time between classes to tend to our community responsibilities, I am never surprised that we had no time for talk, or even thoughts, of girls or women.
And then, of course, there was the fighting: the training … the horses. I have to admit that that aspect of our education, the physical, militaristic part, was supposed to be a relatively minor element of our growth, recognized and provided for but of significantly less importance than our scholastic and clerical training. That was never the case with me, however, despite the concerted efforts of my other tutors, and to his credit Father Germanus never sought to influence me to conform to their wishes. He had promised Ban and the Lady Vivienne that my training in the military skills would continue and he never deviated from his word.
I had been born and bred among King Ban’s horse soldiers and had learned to ride as soon as my legs could spread widely enough to span a pony’s back, so I had no inhibitions about thrusting myself, the morning after my arrival in Auxerre, into the world of the school’s stables and its small but carefully selected and extremely valuable collection of horses. I walked in through the gates with all the arrogance and innocence of trusting youth only to be stopped short with a barked command before I was three paces over the threshold. I froze, taken aback by the ferocity of the shout and the wild appearance of the man who had uttered it, and my challenger bade me stand right where I was, the tone of his voice defying me to move another step at. my peril. He strode toward where I stood gaping at him, glowering at me from beneath bushy white eyebrows that formed a solid bar across his forehead.
He was a small man, tiny perhaps being an even more accurate word, because he was not much taller than me and I was only ten. He was carrying a smallish coil of limber, well-used rope—seven, perhaps eight loops in all. I remember that clearly, because when he reached me he slipped his arm through the loops and shrugged the coil upward to hang from his shoulder. Seeing him glare at me, I tried to smile back, but I was intimidated, and my face would not relax, so I simply stared back at him, wide-eyed. Finally he hawked loudly and spat off to one side.
“Benwick, right?” His voice was loud and harsh, rough edged as though seldom used. “You’re the brat came back with the Gen’ral?”
The General. I realized he was talking about Father Germanus and remembered Germanus saying that a man called Tiberias Cato would be my teacher and that he had served in the army with him. This must evidently be Cato. I nodded, and looked at him more closely.