Free The Long Sword by Christian Cameron

strength.
    I had been a brigand.
    I hadn’t dealt well with Anne, I had betrayed Emile, I had failed to kill the Bourc and I’d slaughtered a couple of down-on-their-luck routiers when I should have knocked them out or even handed them some silver.
    I went to confession with Father Pierre again, in the same ruined chapel where we’d cooked dinner a year before. It is no pleasure to confess to a man who knows you, and whose good opinion you crave. Indeed, it is even less a pleasure to confess in the damp corner of a wet stone ruin with a flickering fire twenty feet away and a circle of professional ears cocked for your every failing.
    That’s just my fear speaking. God knows I never listen when some poor fellow is confessing, and I doubt they listened to me, but it made it all worse, and the rain fell on us. Father Pierre seemed immune; indeed, his patience was untouched by weather.
    I confessed killing the two thieves and letting the third live. And I confessed my desire to kill the Bourc. And then I confessed to having lain with Anne, which he’d heard before – do priests tire of hearing men’s sins? Does God tire? What can be duller than repeated sin, eh? And with the farm girl in Italy.
    Emile I kept to myself.
    Father Pierre heard me out, all my rambling, my disputations on my own sin; all the hollow arguments of the guilty.
    He smiled in the flickering firelight. ‘Killing thieves,’ he said softly. ‘Two thieves died by Jesus.’
    I shrugged.
    ‘Listen, William, what you’d like is for me to set you some strong penance, and then you’d push yourself to accomplish it, and be cleansed.’ He shrugged and looked away.
    ‘Yes!’ I agreed.
    ‘Let me ask you a thing,’ he said, and his gentle eyes met mine. ‘If you kill a Saracen on crusade, how is that different from killing a thief in the dark streets of Avignon?’
    I rubbed water from my forehead. ‘I don’t know, Father,’ I said. ‘Since they are all unshriven, they go to Hell – is that what you mean?’
    ‘No,’ he said, and shook his head. He took a breath and then shook his head again. ‘I don’t know either, but as I am about to lead men to die and kill, I have prayed on this subject every night. And now you set me this.’ He put his chin in his hand. ‘Let me ask you another thing. The Bourc Camus. Do you think him to be … a servant of Satan?’
    Just thinking of Camus made my breath catch a little. But I paused, and saw him in my mind’s eye. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I think he believes it himself. But if he were Satan’s knight, surely he’d be …’ I found that I was grinning. ‘Better? Or rather, worse? More … preux ? More dangerous?’
    ‘He may yet serve the enemy in this world and the next,’ Father Pierre agreed. ‘But yes, he seems all too human to me. And yet … he made me afraid. And for me to be afraid, I must, for a moment, have doubted God, because you know that a Christian who hopes for heaven has nothing to fear.’
    ‘I have never met a mortal man who did not know fear,’ I said.
    ‘Perhaps battle teaches a wisdom and humility that the University of Paris lacks.’ Father Pierre smiled. ‘Perhaps fear and sin come from the same wellspring, then,’ he said. ‘At any rate, I can shrive you like any village priest. But you knights … you kill. You strive hard to excel at it. You have fine words – beautiful, noble words like preux and courage to describe yourselves and your way.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Sometimes, I wonder if your way is not altogether wrong.’ He raised a hand. ‘Ah, your pardon, my son; tonight it is I who needs a confessor, not you. I do not like this mantle of authority thrust upon me. Listen, cut all the firewood from here until Turin, and while you cut dead wood, think of the living men you have killed, and say prayers for them.’ He blessed me then. ‘And stop your lechery. I am not amused by it – you are not a schoolboy. Wake up, or you will be awakened roughly.’
    I