Some of the monks sang the words:
. . . each new child’s birth, we die in our hearts, truth black, we are shown, death always returns . . .
The other monks chanted over and over the single word “with.” Inserting the “with” after the word “returns,” they carried the dark song full-cycle.
Hugh had accompanied the monks since he was six cycles old, but this time he’d been ordered to stay and complete his morning’s work. He did as he was told, without question; to do otherwise would be to invite a beating, delivered impersonally and without malice, for the good of his soul. Often he had silently prayed to be left behind when the others went on one of these grim missions, but now he had prayed to be allowed to go.
The gates boomed shut with an ominous dull thunder; the emptiness lay like a pall on his heart. Hugh had been planning his escape for a week. He had spoken of it to no one; the one friend he had made during his stay here was dead, and Hugh had been careful never to make another. He had the uneasy impression, however, that his secret plot must be engraved on his forehead, for it seemed that everyone who glanced at him kept looking at him with far more interest than they had ever before evinced.
Now he had been left behind when the others were gone. Now he was being summoned into the presence of the lord abbot-a man he had seen only during services, a man to whom he had never spoken and who had never before spoken to him.
Standing in the chamber of stone that shunned sunlight as something frivolous and fleeting, Hugh waited, with the patience that had been thrashed into him since childhood, for the man seated at the desk to acknowledge not only his presence but also his very existence. While Hugh waited, the fear and nervousness in which he’d lived for a week froze, dried up, and blew away. It was as if the cold atmosphere had numbed him to any human emotion or feeling. He knew suddenly, standing in that room, that he would never love, never pity, never feel compassion. From now on, he would never even know fear.
The abbot raised his head. Dark eyes looked into Hugh’s soul.
“You were taken in by us when you were six cycles. I see in the records that ten cycles more have passed.” The abbot did not speak to him by name. Doubtless he didn’t even know it. “You are sixteen. It is time for you to make preparation for taking your vows and joining our brotherhood.”
Caught by surprise, too proud to lie, Hugh said nothing. His silence spoke the truth.
“You have always been rebellious. Yet you are a hard worker, who never complains. You accept punishment without crying out. And you have adopted our precepts-I see that in you clearly. Why, then, will you leave us?”
Hugh, having asked himself that question often in the dark and sleepless nights, was prepared with the answer.
“I will not serve any man.”
The abbot’s face, stern and forbidding as the stone walls around him, registered neither anger nor surprise. “You are one of us. Like it or not, wherever you go, you will serve, if not us, then our calling. Death will always be your master.”
Hugh was dismissed from the abbot’s presence. The pain of the beating that followed slid away on the ice coating of the boy’s soul. That night, Hugh made good his plans. Sneaking into the chamber where the monks kept their records, he found, in a book, information on the orphan boys the monks adopted. By the light of the stub of a stolen candle, Hugh searched for and discovered his own name.
“Hugh Blackthorn. Mother: Lucy, last name unknown. Father: According to words spoken by the mother before she died, the child’s father is Sir Perceval Blackthorn of Blackthorn Hall, Djern Hereva.” A later entry, dated a week after, stated: “Sir Perceval refuses to acknowledge the child and bids us ‘do with the bastard as we will.’ ”
Hugh cut the page from the leather-bound book, tied it up in his ragged scrip, snuffed the candle, and slipped out into the night. Looking back at the walls whose grim shadows had long ago shut out any of the warmth or happiness he had known in childhood, Hugh silently refuted the abbot’s words.