The Devils Novice Read Online Free PDF

to that, I’ve killed men
in battle. I never took joy in it, that I can remember, but I never drew back
from it, either, having made my vows.” Something was happening there beside
him, he felt the young body braced to sharp attention. The mention, perhaps, of
vows other than the monastic, vows which had also involved the matter of life
and death? Cadfael, like a fisherman with a shy and tricky bite on his line,
went on paying out small-talk, easing suspicion, engaging interest, exposing,
as he did not often do, the past years of his own experience. The silence
favoured by the Order ought not to be allowed to stand in the way of its
greater aims, where a soul was tormenting itself on the borders of conviction.
A garrulous old brother, harking back to an adventurous past, ranging half the
known world—what could be more harmless, or more disarming?
    “I
was with Robert of Normandy’s company, and a mongrel lot we were, Britons, Normans,
Flemings, Scots, Bretons—name them, they were there! After the city was settled
and Baldwin crowned, the most of us went home, over a matter of two or three
years, but I had taken to the sea by then, and I stayed. There were pirates
ranged those coasts, we had always work to do.”
    The
young thing beside him had not missed a word of what had been said, he quivered
like an untrained but thoroughbred hound hearing the horn, though he said
nothing.
    “And
in the end I came home, because it was home and I felt the need of it,” said
Cadfael. “I served here and there as a free man-at-arms for a while and then I
was ripe, and it was time. But I had had my way through the world.”
    “And
now, what do you do here?” wondered Meriet.
    “I
grow herbs, and dry them, and make remedies for all the ills that visit us. I
physic a great many souls besides those of us within.”
    “And
that satisfies you?” It was a muted cry of protest; it would not have satisfied
him.
    “To
heal men, after years of injuring them? What could be more fitting? A man does
what he must do,” said Cadfael carefully, “whether the duty he has taken on
himself is to fight, or to salvage poor souls from the fighting, to kill, to
die or to heal. There are many will claim to tell you what is due from you, but
only one who can shear through the many, and reach the truth. And that is you,
by what light falls for you to show the way. Do you know what is hardest for me
here of all I have vowed? Obedience. And I am old.”
    And
have had my fling, and a wild one, was implied. And what am I trying to do now,
he wondered, to warn him off pledging too soon what he cannot give, what he has
not got to give?
    “It
is true!” said Meriet abruptly. “Every man must do what is laid on him to do
and not question. If that is obedience?” And suddenly he turned upon Brother
Cadfael a countenance altogether young, devout and exalted, as though he had
just kissed, as once Cadfael had, the crossed hilt of his own poniard, and
pledged his life’s blood to some cause as holy to him as the deliverance of the
city of God.
    Cadfael
had Meriet on his mind the rest of that day, and after Vespers he confided to
Brother Paul the uneasiness he felt in recalling the day’s disaster; for Paul
had been left behind with the children, and the reports that had reached him
had been concerned solely with Brother Wolstan’s fall and injuries, not with
the unaccountable horror they had aroused in Meriet.
    “Not
that there’s anything strange in shying at the sight of a man lying in his
blood, they were all shaken by it. But he—what he felt was surely extreme.”
    Brother
Paul shook his head doubtfully over his difficult charge. “Everything he feels
is extreme. I don’t find in him the calm and the certainty that should go with
a true vocation. Oh, he is duty itself, whatever I ask of him he does, whatever
task I set him he performs, he’s greedy to go faster than I lead him. I never
had a