The most noteworthy change of all, however, had been in the stuff of our conversations, the things we talked about. Where once we had discussed and debated little else but physical training and our individual performances in drills and contests, most of us now talked of little else but girls; women and the dark and mystical secrets surrounding them and their physical nature. And as a result of our waking preoccupation with such things, our nocturnal lives, once a matter of mere oblivion disturbed very occasionally by nightmares, had changed to encompass exciting and erotically disturbing dreams, barely remembered upon awakening yet no less powerful because of that. Manhood was closing in upon us, we all knew, and although the prospect excited and intimidated us, we continued nonetheless to gull ourselves into believing that we could have and enjoy the satisfactions of physical manhood—the fighting and the womanizing—without ever having to abandon the innocence and comradeship of boyhood.
But now all at once, and beyond equivocation, I was to be sixteen, which meant that I would have to leave the Bishop’s School and make my way alone in the real world, among real men! The realization of that truth was devastating, because it forced me to accept that this stage in my life, boyhood as I had known it in Auxerre, was close to being over. A boy’s sixteenth birthday is his life’s greatest watershed, marking the crossing point into manhood and taking him from childhood to adult status, from carefree idyll to the acceptance of a man’s responsibilities.
On the day when Germanus reminded me of my age, I had been the acknowledged leader of the senior class, the Spartans, for more than a month, but even that exalted estate had failed to make any significant dent in my lack of awareness. I had been so happy and confident in my own popularity and power among the other students that it seemed natural that things must continue as they were. But my entire world changed in the space of one short, supposedly normal interview, when I found myself having to accept that, with the start of the following year, another boy, a younger boy, would be leader of the Spartans and I would be gone, never to be remembered by the boys that followed in my footsteps from year to year. Where I would be by then, I knew not; but I would be a man—if in name only—and probably a serving soldier, my boyhood locked irretrievably behind me.
On a hot spring day in the first half of my sixteenth year, completely without warning, Tiberias Cato announced that the next day. would be a day of festivities and freedom from classes for the entire school, in honor of the return of Bishop Germanus from a particularly long episcopal journey. Furthermore, he announced, the occasion would be highlighted by an all-out competition among the senior students, designed to test their prowess and skills and the progress they had managed to achieve so far in this, their final year. The student who emerged victorious from the final stages of the competition would be rewarded with a special prize, something unique and valuable, although Tiberias Cato refused to say what it was.
That part of the announcement caused more excitement among the students than anything else anyone could remember, for although competition in everything was taken for granted at the school, prizes were seldom awarded, and those few that were usually took the form of time off from classes, for one morning or afternoon, in recognition of some stellar achievement. Such rewards were a welcome respite from the normal grind of daily school life, but no one would ever have described them as exciting.
Here, however, was a competition with a valuable prize to be won, and the entire student body was agog with speculation as to what the prize might be.
Everyone competed against everyone else for everything at the Bishop’s School as a matter of course, striving to achieve one’s best possible performance in everything for the greater glory of God. That Latin phrase, ad majorem Dei gloriam, was probably the most commonly heard expression at the Bishop’s School. It was Bishop Germanus’s own personal watchword, conveying his deeply rooted conviction that if everything a person does on Earth is dedicated to glorifying God, then it becomes impossible for that person to sin and incur damnation. By direct association, the sentiment had become the school’s maxim as well, constantly quoted by the teachers and never lost sight of by the student body.
There were twenty-two of us in the senior class that year, a larger number than normal, and according to school tradition we were called the Spartans. The suggestions of discipline, preeminence, and status implied by that name were not accidental. The soldiers of the ancient Greek kingdom of Sparta were renowned and revered in our male, militaristic society, and the story of their heroic fight at the Pass of Thermopylae was one of our legends. In defending and holding that narrow pass against the enormous invading armies of the Persian Empire for longer than anyone could possibly have expected, three hundred of Sparta’s finest soldiers, under the command of their king, Leonidas, had won eternal glory, sacrificing their lives to purchase much-needed time for their countrymen to prepare to defend themselves against the invaders. Therefore we, the Spartans of the Bishop’s School, were charged with the responsibility of being exemplars to the entire school, setting the standard of high achievement, scholastic pride, and sterling behavior for all the younger students following behind us. Tomorrow, we all knew, one of us would win a memorable prize, and each of us was determined to be that winner.
The truth was, of course, that of the twenty-two Spartans in our current year, only eleven possessed the skills and the prowess that would be required to emerge as victor. The remaining eleven possessed skills and abilities directed more toward generating higher standards of clerical and scholastic excellence. It had become the tradition among the Spartans that each Warrior, as the more physically inclined students were called—they were selected by Tiberias Cato and his staff for their athletic and equestrian prowess—would be assigned one or more Scholars as partners for the year. The unit thus formed would become a team, competing together against the other teams in the class, but also performing together when it came to the supervisory duties and responsibilities incumbent upon the Spartans as senior students. There had been eighteen Spartans in the previous year’s class, and of those only six had been real Warriors, and so that class had been split into six teams each of three students. This year, by contrast, we were evenly split into pairs, eleven Warriors and Scholars respectively. My Scholar was Dominic Tara, the smallest and the youngest, but also the most brilliantly gifted student in the class in both mathematics and geography, the areas wherein I was weakest.
Dominic came looking for me soon after Cato’s announcement and found me talking with two of my closest friends, Stephan Lorco and Quintus Milo, who, as his name suggested, was the youngest of five brothers, all of whom had attended the Bishop’s School. Dominic’s face was set in a very peculiar expression and he was moving strangely. I stopped whatever I was saying.
“Dom, what’s wrong?” I asked him. “You look as though you’ve discovered something terrifying.”
He said nothing, but looked at me with that peculiar wide-eyed expression and shook his head.
Dom was the only member of the Spartans who was called by his given name. Everyone else in the school, and certainly among the Spartans, was either known simply by his family name—Lorco and Milo were two of those—or by a descriptive nickname. I cannot remember now why Dom should have been different from everyone else in that respect, but I suspect it had to do with his age and his tiny size—he reminded most of us of smaller brothers we had left at home, and we tended to treat him more tolerantly and gently as a result of that.