Boy, Boy! cried the dogs. Boy, Boy, you are back, you are back! They sniffed my hands and my hose. You smell different, Boy, Boy! You smell of . . .
I smell like an angel. I smiled. I smell of Saint Peter and birds and two months’ walking. I smell of a girl I returned to her mother, and the lost chicken I found, and the hay I helped cut—
Hrmm, said the dogs, too much words! Come on!
And so I entered the courtyard—the courtyard of the manor of Sir Jacques.
Pots of thyme framed the kitchen door; trays of grapes lay drying to raisins. I could not resist a glance at the cowshed. All the folk I met on my homeward journey had liked me. They’d shared their stories and homes and directions, and all of them had called me a boy. . . .
Stand up, my mind scolded. If you slump like a monster, then so you’ll be treated.
A voice from the threshing room: “I said to sweep, you louse brain! Did you turn the cheeses? I thought not.” Cook strode outside. “Tell the cooper I’ll pay him once I know his barrels hold wine.” She scanned the courtyard. . . .
Her eyes returned, taking me in. My straight back. My calm face. “You!” she snapped. “I thought you’d run off.”
“Hello, milady. I took your cup to Saint-Peter’s-Step as I promised. I prayed for you—”
“I’ve no time for chitchat. Tell your pilgrim he ruined my herdsman.”
Ox? I turned to the dogs: What happened to Ox?
They danced round: Did you not hear, Boy, Boy? He stomped away shouting!
“Ox is gone?” The words fell out of my mouth.
“Went off to preach, the dimwit. Right before planting, too.”
Ox a preacher? I could not imagine. Although preachers are loud and fierce, and Ox was both of those twice over.
I pictured Ox standing before a church, giving listeners the fear he’d once given me . . . Secundus must have filled him right full of hell’s terrors! The strong didn’t stand a chance, not with Ox protecting the weak.
Cook sniffed. “The goats have gone wild without you. You’ll have a fine time tracking them down.” She strode away. “Someone get the kittens out of the milk house. And check on the harvest! They’ll ruin those grapes, I just know it. Where is that salt? I’ll weigh it myself—I’m sure we’ve been robbed. . . .”
The dogs nuzzled my hands. She scares us, Boy, Boy.
I patted them. She should. But she sees that you’re fed. I smiled. I was still the goatherd! What a relief that was.
I looked around. I had another soul to greet. . . .
There he sat. The sun caught the dent in his head, and the line of drool on his jaw.
Softly I approached. The dogs nuzzled his curled hands, hoping yet for a pat.
I knelt before him. “Hello, Sir Jacques.”
He stared past me, his mouth agape.
Hello, milord. I spoke with my mind, as I speak to all creatures.
From somewhere within his broken skull, he answered. Hello, Boy. My, you have grown.
I smiled. Yes, milord. I’m an angel, it seems.
An angel? How grand. Do you . . . know where my wife is? I can’t seem to find her.
I blinked back tears. I am sorry, milord. She awaits you in heaven.
Sir Jacques trembled, reaching—
I clasped his hands. How I used to marvel at his hands, the palms as calloused as tree bark. Now his skin was so soft . . . “Shh.”
You were always so good. Help me, Boy.
I must! I was an angel! But how?
A notion came to me. I am thinking of a place. See if you can see it with me. In my head, I thought of a broad marble staircase. The steps to paradise . . .
Step by step, I climbed. Beside me—in my head—Sir Jacques crept. Weakly, for he had not walked in years. With both my arms I held him up. Come, milord. I have someone to show you.
We approached the bronze gates.
Saint Peter, I called. Please help us.
The gates cracked open. A figure stepped out—a pretty woman in a cream-colored gown, a baby in her arms. A shy little boy clung to her skirts, and a girl old enough to toddle.
“Greetings, Boy,” milady smiled. “How fine to see you again.” She reached to the bent man beside me. “Hello, my love.”
Sir Jacques gripped my hand. Can it be? Tears ran down his face.
With great effort he stepped . . .
His hands uncurled. The dent in his skull disappeared. He lifted his children in his great strong arms, and he hugged milady, beaming. . . . “Thank you, Boy,” he whispered.
“They are here, milord. They await you.”
The vision ended. I was kneeling in the courtyard, Sir Jacques’s hands in mine. His blank eyes stared . . . but a faint smile lifted his lips. Thank you, Boy.
And thank you, for your kindness to me, all of my life. I stood. Stay with him, I said to the dogs. He needs you.
Of course, Boy, Boy. They rested their heads in his lap, and curled at his feet.
I left the courtyard. How lovely paradise had been! How pretty milady. Someday I would meet her again, and the children. Someday I would join Secundus, and thank him for saving me.
But not yet. There was work to be done. Work . . . and something else, too.
I descended the hillside swarming with folk cutting grapes. I crossed the road—the road Secundus had walked six months before, his palm scarred from the rib of Saint Peter—
A thunder of hoofbeats. The goats! Bah! they cried. Where have you been? They bleated with joy, and leaped about almost like dogs. You were gone an awfully long time! The kids butted one another in glee.
Hello, goats! I’ve missed you—you’ve no idea.
Together we strolled to the orchard. Why did you leave? the goats demanded.
Well. I pondered. I was on a quest. I had to find home.
Home? Bah. They tossed their heads. Home is here.
I chuckled. It took time to learn that. I looked back at the manor, every soul busy at harvest, Cook bawling instructions. Whatever would we do without her? It took time to find me.
We arrived at the orchard so well pruned. Cook’s doing, no doubt. We came to the tree—the tree I climbed the day I met Secundus. How often I had dreamed of this moment. Each night as I stretched my wings, I’d think of the place I must start from. The tree that had once seemed so high, and the view from its top so vast. How vast my horizons were now.
Apples! cried the goats. Feed us! Yum!
You’ve food enough, you greedy creatures. I laughed. I slipped off my tunic, and tied it around my waist.
I looked around once more: no one could see me.
With a sigh of delight, I stretched out my wings. The September sun caught the white, the blue. Rich red. Flecks of gold. Oh, my wings had been patient.
I peered through the apple-filled branches to the blue autumn sky. I had climbed this tree in March, I had. With great effort I’d reached the top branch and I’d jumped, just to relish the feeling of flying.
But that was six months past.
Bah! The goats pranced. Will you climb, Boy? Will you climb?
I patted them, enjoying the breeze on my feathers. I don’t need to.
I spread my wings, and I flew.
Map
Author’s Note
The Book of Boy is set during the Holy Year of 1350, when hundreds of thousands of Christians pilgrimed to the city of Rome. It was not an easy time. Bubonic plague had recently killed a third of the population of Europe. War touched England, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Spain; bands of unpaid soldiers held entire cities hostage. Starvation threatened, always, for food was hard to grow and even harder to transport.
Rome suffered especially. The pope had left the city early in the 1300s for the French city of Avignon; with his departure, the city lost its government and most of its wealth. In the 1340s, a bloody civil war destroyed many of Rome’s buildings and families. Then came the earthquake of September 1349. The poet Petrarch, visiting for the Holy Year, wr
ote:
The houses are overthrown, the walls come to the ground, the temples fall, the sanctuaries perish, the laws are trodden underfoot. . . . The mother of all the churches stands without a roof and exposed to wind and rain. The holy dwellings of Saint Peter and Saint Paul totter. . . .
A later visitor reported wolves howling outside his door at night. Pilgrims in that Holy Year traveled in bands as protection from brigands, and slept four to a bed when they could find beds at all—or find food. They journeyed to both the tomb of Saint Peter and the grave of Saint Paul because, they believed, the saints’ bodies were split between the two churches. They journeyed as well to the Mother of All the Churches, marveling at the saints’ lifelike wax heads.
As The Book of Boy makes clear, relics in the Middle Ages were important to health, trade, and fame. Kings traveled with their relic collections, displaying them to prove their own power. Cities and monasteries stole one another’s relics, and boasted publicly that they’d done so. Readers today might be disturbed or amused by all this attention paid to bits of bone and cloth. But modern halls of fame are filled with used guitar picks, sweaty jerseys, and cracked leather balls—not so different from the relics that pilgrims sought a thousand years ago.
Visitors to the church of Saint Paul in Rome can still see a hole in the coffin lid—the hole through which pilgrims once lowered cloth strips; the church also has an extraordinary collection of coins left by pilgrims over the centuries. In the 1940s, archeologists working in the church of Saint Peter discovered an ancient tomb beneath the floor, and within this tomb the actual bones of Peter.1 The head of Saint Peter still resides at the Mother of All the Churches—a church better known today as Saint John Lateran. The skull sits in a gold vessel beside the head of Saint Paul, high above the altar, safe behind thick gilded bars.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the medievalist Daniel Lord Smail for reading my manuscript and for pointing out my mistakes. I fixed most of them.
—C. G. M.
About the Author
CATHERINE GILBERT MURDOCK has always been fascinated with the Middle Ages, adventures, and Rome. She traveled extensively researching The Book of Boy, and she had close encounters with a pack of hounds in France and a tomb or two in Italy. She is the author of several acclaimed novels for children and teens and lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
www.catherinemurdock.com
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Copyright
THE BOOK OF BOY. Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Gilbert Murdock. Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Ian Schoenherr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Cover art © 2018 by Ian Schoenherr
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-268622-0
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268620-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Murdock, Catherine Gilbert, author. | Schoenherr, Ian, illustrator.
Title: The book of Boy / by Catherine Gilbert Murdock ; illustrations by Ian Schoenherr.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2018] | Summary: In 1350, a boy with a large hump on his back becomes the servant of a shadowy pilgrim on his way to Rome, who pulls the boy into a dangerous expedition across Europe to gather the seven precious relics of Saint Peter.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017043536 | ISBN 9780062686206 (hardback)
Subjects: | CYAC: Relics—Fiction. | Pilgrims and pilgrimages—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Voyages and travels—Fiction. | People with disabilities— Fiction. | Middle Ages—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Historical / Medieval. | JUVENILE FICTION / Action & Adventure / General. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Self-Esteem & Self-Reliance.
Classification: LCC PZ7.M9416 Bo 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043536
18 19 20 21 22 CG/LSCH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
Greenwillow Books
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1 Which is to say, the bones of a man Saint Peter’s age and build who died around the time of Saint Peter, and who had the name Peter (or Petrus in Latin).
Catherine Gilbert Murdock, The Book of Boy
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