Page 15 of Warrior Queen
“I’ll send for the boy,” Jerome said, and rang the bell.
The same monk who’d brought the wine for us went scuttling off to fetch Gildas. It didn’t take long. A few minutes later, a knock came at the door into the courtyard.
“Enter,” Jerome called.
The door swung open, and Gildas stepped into the room.
He’d grown, as boys that age are inclined to do, and probably would have matched me in height had I been standing. Still an ugly, rawboned boy, he now had a look about him of the man he’d one day be, with more than a hint of his dead older brother. His shaggy, sandy hair had been chopped off short, by a blind man with garden loppers by the looks of him, and the dark robe he wore left his bony ankles and wrists poking out. Time for a bigger size. But his face held an inner light I’d not seen before, radiating from his pale eyes, despite the purple bruise on his left cheekbone.
He halted on the threshold, eyes widening as he saw me. “Gwen!” An inner battle raged, easy to see, as he shifted his weight from foot to foot, clearly trying to decide whether he was allowed to run up to me and take my hand, or maybe hug me. He’d never done that before, but I sensed that seeing a face he knew after so long in the abbey had brought that inclination to the fore.
“Come here,” Jerome said, forestalling any action the boy might have decided to take. “And close the door behind you. The day is chill.”
Gildas shut the door and approached the table, halting to one side of it, his ink-stained hands clasped in front of him. Had his sleeves been long enough he could have concealed his dirty hands in them, but they weren’t.
Jerome fixed him with a gimlet stare. “This is the Queen– your Queen now. You do not greet her by her proper name. That is for her husband alone. Now, greet her correctly.”
“Milady,” Gildas muttered, keeping his eyes lowered, his bottom lip beginning to jut. He had the full and fleshy lips of his father and dead older brother, good for looking sulky.
Jerome tapped the table with his long fingers. “And you can take that look off your face, young man. The Queen is here in her capacity as your guardian, to find out about your progress.”
Gildas looked up sharply, his eyes darting from Jerome to me to Merlin, then back to me. The jutting lip vanished, and a small smile twitched at the corners of his over-large mouth.
I returned the smile. “I have it on good authority that your progress is more than could have been expected. I’m very pleased.” I paused. “But that’s not all I came to check.” I shot a glance at Jerome, but he remained impassive. “I came to find out if you are happy.”
Gildas’s pale eyes flew open wide. Perhaps no one had ever cared to ask about his happiness before. “I–” he began, then stopped, his eyes flicking back to Jerome, who gave him a slight nod.
Gildas swallowed. “I’m happy with the learning. I love it. It’s what I always dreamed of.” A snort from Merlin distracted him for a moment. “I work as hard as I can, and my teachers seem pleased with me…”
I nodded. “So I hear. But that’s not what I asked. Are you happy? Do you have friends? You’re a child. No, whatever you think, youarestill a child. And children need friends.”
“Idon’t,” he blurted. “I’mhappy just being me. If they’d let me.”
“Who? The other boys? How many are there?”
Again, a glance toward Jerome, asking for permission to continue. He’d been well-trained in obedience by someone. Jerome nodded.
Gildas looked back at me. “Five– and I make six. They’re idiots, all of them. They try to find any excuse to get out of working. They don’t want to learn. They play tricks on our teachers and get angry when I tell on them. They play tricks on me too…” His voice trailed away as he took the full force of Jerome’s stare.
The abbot cleared his throat. “That’s no way to describe your fellow scholars. They may not be as quick as you at their work, but they arenotidiots.”
“Yes, Father Abbot.” Gildas hung his head.
“Oh dear.” Poor boy, he had no idea of how to get on with anyone. A thought crossed my mind– might he, in my time, have been diagnosed as high-functioning autistic? He had many of the attributes– the obsession with what he wanted to do to the detriment of all else, the lack of empathy, the yearning to be alone. I’d known a few people diagnosed with that back in my youth, and the challenges they’d faced had been similar to this. But how to help him lay beyond my knowledge.
Jerome tapped the table again, beating a tattoo with his fingers. “The only thing I can see to do is to move him from the boys’ quarters to a cell of his own,” he said. “But that will single him out even more as being different, and these are boys who will one day be monks with him. He may well become an abbot if he continues to work this well, if not here, then elsewhere. But he needs to learn how to get on with people if that is to be his destiny.”
I nodded. “I think separating him from the boys who dislike and tease him would be a good idea, at least for some of the time.” I glanced at Gildas again, standing bolt upright beside the table, his pale eyes flicking between our faces. “My husband and I would be prepared to pay for him to take his lessons apart from the other boys. Maybe if they don’t see how far ahead he is, they’ll treat him better.” Optimistic words. Boys are unforgiving creatures.
Beside me, Merlin snorted again, but made no comment. Maybe he was thinking Arthur wouldn’t see this investment in the son of one of his enemies as suitable expenditure. Most likely he was right. I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
Jerome nodded. “As you wish. I’ll have Gildas’s belongings removed to a spare monk’s cell. And I’ll undertake his education myself.”
Gildas’s broad, ugly face split into the biggest smile I’d ever seen, his usually somber eyes dancing with excitement. “Thank you, Gw…Milady.”
Hopefully I’d done the right thing here. This was the boy who would one day be known as Gildas the Wise, and who, as a man grown, would write about the kings of Britain in a work calledDe Exidio et Conquestu Britanniae.This would end up being the only work available in my time that was anywhere near contemporary to Arthur. And Gildas wouldn’t mention Arthur in it even once, an argument often used to suggest Arthur had never existed.
Perhaps, if I became this boy’s mentor, I could change that, and the world would know there really had once been a King Arthur.
