When he said that, it did cross my mind that perhaps he had me confused with someone else. As I said, I never liked him from the beginning. I was forever trying to stop him from following me around. Certainly I didn’t recall having ever shared jokes with him.
‘Those were the days,’ he said wistfully. ‘I suppose I never realised how lucky I was to have such schooling until it was taken away from me. Not that I enjoyed it much at the time. I was glad to get away from the deacons and the masters. All those passages we had to memorise, all those saints and their feast days. I hated that. Grammar, rhetoric, poetry. I hated it all. I could barely put together a Latin sentence, let alone remember how to say the words for Mass. Can you imagine what a terrible priest I would have made?’
No worse than myself, I thought. For I had completely squandered the chances that had been given me. All those hours spent in the classroom learning my letters, copying out passages of the Bible. All that work, all that effort, and what for? What had I made of myself? What use had all that learning been? I was no good as a priest, no good as a teacher, no good to anyone.
‘Patience always was one of your virtues,’ he went on. ‘I wanted everything straight away. I would never have been content to do what you do. I would have been too eager for riches and rewards. The lure of gold and silver has always been too strong for me to resist. One way or another, I would have ended up where I am now.’
That was the moment, I think, when I realised what I had to do.
Ever since I was young I’d known that I was a sinner, a slave to temptation. I’d tried to be honest and pure in deeds and in spirit, had tried my best to resist errant urges, but it was no use. I’d tried to make up for everything I’d done. Again and again I’d admitted the error of my ways and sworn to be a better person in future, only to break those pledges.
For years I’d been fooling myself, drawing a veil over my eyes so that I didn’t have to face the truth. All I had to do was recognise who I really was, and I would be free.
Maybe, I thought, I was more like Wulfnoth than I’d ever wanted to admit.
Softly, so that my students wouldn’t hear, I said, ‘Let me join you.’
He almost choked on his ale. ‘What?’
‘Why not? We’re old friends, aren’t we?’
‘You’d join us? You, a priest?’
To his ears it must have sounded ridiculous. A man of God saying that he wanted to give up everything he knew and become an outlaw.
What I saw, though, was a way out. A way to escape the life I’d grown to despise. A way to save me from myself.
*
‘So you gave up the life you’d led for forty years, just like that?’ Oslac asks. ‘On a whim?’
‘No, not on a whim. I knew what I was doing. It was what I wanted, or thought I did, anyway. I always was good at telling myself the very things I wanted to hear. At the time it seemed like a chance had been offered to me, and that if I didn’t take it, I would regret it.’
Tova just stares at him. She hears what he’s saying, but she still can’t believe he would turn his back so easily on God. He is nothing like kindly Thorvald, their priest at Heldeby. He’s nothing like she thought he would be.
‘And Wulfnoth agreed?’ Oslac asks.
*
Not at first. No, to begin with he just laughed at me, as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard. When he realised I was serious, though, he changed his tone.
He said to me, ‘If you knew some of the things we’ve done, you wouldn’t be asking to join us.’
I’d done things too in my time, I replied. Things at which my confessors blushed when I told them. I wasn’t the saint he thought I was. And then I told him everything: the years of drinking, the stealing, the lies, the fornication, the swindling, my forswearing of God. And the strange thing was, I didn’t feel ashamed to be saying those things. I felt proud, as if each one were a mark of honour.
‘I don’t belong in the Church,’ I whispered and gestured towards my students. ‘I’m not like them. I never have been. For years I tried to deny it; for years I tried to be the person they wanted me to be, and I’m tired of it. Let me come with you.’
He shook his head, disbelieving. ‘You must know that what we do is more than the kind of petty theft you’re used to. You’re a good man, Guthred. Not like me. Believe me, you don’t want to become involved with us.’
That was when I grew angry. I knew what I was, I said, and what I wanted. This was what I wanted.
He shook his head. ‘We move around a lot; we have to. I have no room in my band for those who can’t keep up, who can’t do their fair share.’
What he was saying was that he didn’t need someone like me slowing them down. I replied that I was used to spending long days in the saddle, and that Whitefoot and I had travelled countless leagues together.
‘There’s danger,’ he said.
These were uncertain times we lived in, I said.
He sat for a long time, chewing his lip, contemplating. ‘It’s been a long time since we had anyone new,’ he said eventually. ‘Let me speak to the others.’