“He says I’ll always be Lance to him?”
“MyLance, to be accurate. My Lance, who becameplus quam frater...” Tomas looked up, storm clouds beginning to gather on his brow. “Who became my more-than-brother on the shore of the lake?!”
Lance smiled helplessly. “Well, you know Art. He’s very affectionate.”
“And again, upon that...lectum...Well-remembered bed?!” Tomas sprang to his feet. With the energy of a much younger man, he strode to the corner where he kept his rod of punishment. He hadn’t dared lift it to Elena’s one surviving child, not after the prince of Cerniw had come and gone and left the boy cloaked in his new adulthood, but enough was enough. “Heinous brat!” he rasped. “Spawn of corruption! There’s better use for birch than the scrawling of such monstrous tales. Thou shalt not lie with man as with woman! Thou shalt not...”
Lance jumped out of his reach. He grabbed the birch strip Tomas had dropped, gathered up the others and clutched them to his wicked heart. Unpredictably, he was laughing, not with mockery but a kind of pure joy. He leapt beyond the sweep of Tomas’s rod and bolted for the chapel door.
Tomas gave chase. It was beneath his dignity, but this was a special occasion.More than brother, on the lake shores and in the bed! He didn’t much care if he saved the wretched boy’s sacred soul or whaled it out of him. Corruption! The lusts of the flesh, shamelessly written in ink for all eyes to see! Lance, whose leg had healed nicely, was running at full pelt across the stable yard, causing Balana to stretch her head out of her stall and whinny a greeting. He seized a low-hanging gutter, made an improbable leap and vaulted up onto the terracotta tiles of the roof.
He was laughing still. “Father, forgive me,” he managed, as Tomas approached. He was just out of reach of the long, whipping rod. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have asked you to read it. I swear.”
“What difference does...” Tomas leapt as high in the air as he could, cassock flapping wildly. His swipe with the rod brushed Lance’s knees. “What difference doesknowingit make?”
“I just didn’t know he’d write something like that down. I wasn’t even sure he’d remember. He’s had lots of lovers, you see.”
Another impotent swipe. “Close your wicked mouth!”
“He has to. He’s going to be king, and he might not live long, so he has to get heirs.”
“He won’t get them with you!”
Lance slid down to the edge of the roof. He caught the end of the whip and held it fast. He’d stopped laughing, and his face was oddly gentle. “There’s more to love than that.”
“That’s just where you’re wrong,” Tomas gasped, trying to twitch the rod away. “Procreation is the sole reason for the lusts of the body. All else is wickedness.”
“How strange it is. I struggle with Arthur’s writing, but I have read most of your holy book by now. I’ve never found such a thing written there.”
“Nevertheless, it’s... it’s what I was taught.”
“Who would teach you such a thing?”
“My preceptors from Rome. Holy men!”
“They must have faced a quandary, I suppose.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
Lance tugged the rod out of Tomas’s hand. He put it across his knee, and without any sign of effort or anger, snapped it in two. Then he jumped down off the roof. He was taller than Tomas by now, beginning at last to fill out into the length of his bones. He turned to face him, and any authority the old man had held over him vanished at that moment, like dew on the sunlit gorse. “If all joys of the flesh are wicked as you say, where are the children to come from who will carry on your church? I suppose that was the compromise. I even understand it in a way. But already you make no distinction between the words in your book and lessons taught you by men, with no better idea of what’s right and wrong than you have yourself. And that makes me afraid.”
“How dare you?” Tomas rasped. But the time for remonstrance was past and gone for him. The wicked child—a fine young man now, straight as a reed, a far-seeing clarity in his brown eyes—was gently and kindly dusting him down. “Terrible things come out of your mouth,” Tomas said wearily at last. “But your actions contradict them. Why did you stay with us, when your prince has offered you so much?”
“You read past his sinful words of love, then? You didn’t go blind?”
“They’re all words of love, it seems to me. The court is established in the south, in a place he calls Cam. He says he’s keeping a place at his side for you, a seat at his right hand. You’ll leave us now, won’t you? You’ll go.”
Lance looked away. He reached for the strips of birch that had slithered into the dry stable gutter, carefully piled them up and bound them once more in their leather ribbon. He fastened the hoop of the ribbon around his wrist. “No,” he said hollowly. “I will not.”
“Why not? The teachings of my book mean nothing to you—not even the words of my new and gentle god.”
“Did my mother need a book to take you in and shelter you, and not... feed you to her dragons, as must have been a sore temptation? Even my father, whose life should be judged for what it was, not just its miserable ending—he built you your church and fed you at his table. It seems to me that men shouldn’t need a book or a god to make them good.”
He opened the stable door, and Balana came nickering out to him, snorting and lowering her impeccably trained Roman head for her bridle. Lance unhooked it from the back of the door and put it on her. Ector had left him the beautiful horned saddle too, but that was locked up in the armoury. Balana widened her eyes at his unaided leap onto her back, but stood foursquare and still for him, just as she would have done with battlefield spears raining down around her.
“Don’t misunderstand me, Tomas,” he said. “I know what I’ve given up. I don’t mean the honours and the place at his side in Cam. I’d just give my immortal, wicked soul to be with him once again by the lough.” He touched the mare’s sides with his heels. “See to it that Bryn the drover’s fed, and have the farmhands settle the new tup. I’ll be back by sundown.”
Chapter Eighteen
