In fact, the memories of his years at the monastery in Gascony, where he was sent for his early education, between Pau and Mont-de-Marsan, a stone’s throw from the foothills of the Pyrenees, are quite limpid. During those years he learned much that was unknown to most of the medieval world. He still recalls with some amusement that day when Felicity had prepared for what she was sure would be an arduous effort. She had assumed, quite reasonably, that Abelard’s pre-Columbian memories saw only a flat world. He was to be broken the momentous but difficult news that the world was in fact spherical. She stood at her chalk board, rolled charts and maps at the ready to display the full glorious triumph of the globe over the tyranny of Cosmas of Alexandria's rectangular rhomboid. She tightly interlaced her hands, pensively touching her lips with the tips of her fingers, as though praying, looking soberly down at the floor, evidently preparing to tell the student something so awe inspiring, so monumental as to surely be unbelievable. He looked, waited, listened to her lengthy introduction about ancient and medieval mysteries, all the while a deepening frown furrowing his brow. Why, he asked her, was she telling him something so obvious? For the longest time Felicity could only stare incredulously. Ever so slowly, she reduced her telescopic pointer to the size of a pen, put it on the lip of the chalk board and moved close enough to hover over her precocious student. She very deliberately put her hands on top of his small desk and asked, as nonchalantly as she could manage, how he knew what was unknowable in the Middle Ages. He of course only grinned and kept to himself the remembered source of his knowledge, letting on only that this was a bit of trivia inexplicably lodged in his brain.
His father, the Captal de Buch, Gascon bigwig, loyal to the English and serving the Black Prince, was also a very thoughtful man. Strength, courage and brute force were all essential qualities that a noble preparing for the hard business of war must have, but by themselves insufficient. Learning would make the difference between a merely successful warrior and one who would go on to greater things. He was sent for his education to the monastery. There was, of course, always the possibility that he would have to become a man of the cloth if too many of his siblings survived the dangerous lives they would be leading. Father wanted to avoid two things: breaking his properties into many small pieces, each ending up poor and indefensible and; having too many siblings killing each other in attempts to acquire larger, more economically viable and easier to defend estates. Father did want a certain number of stalwarts with sufficient means so that they could build allegiances on blood ties and assist each other in a mutual defense, or aggression pact, whichever circumstances demanded. Alas for Abelard, father had more than enough surviving sons, well beyond what the probabilities of the time would have predicted. Thus, it might be to a life of celibacy and learning for which he was destined.
If any good at all could be found in such a fate, he was fortunate to fall under the tutelage of Lucidus, also the parish priest. True, he was a lecherous abuser of boys, very fond of the monastery’s distilled and fermented products and hugely obese. None of these moral blemishes troubled young Abelard. He had, soon upon arriving, set the priest’s compass to always point away from him whenever his loins demanded young flesh. Abelard was ten when he arrived and he came armed with a small dagger, which he had been given at six, when his father was yet too unsure as to how long his other boys might survive. Noble families groomed their sons to be warriors and the Captal de Buch was no less diligent than another. Daily instruction from the castle constable left Abelard, after four years, easily able to defend himself against any untrained rabble, including larded priests obsessed with forbidden fruit.
Alone with him in the scriptorium, two dark embers peering from the fleshy face, the mountain of rough cloth and cowl stalked its prey. He sat his huge mass upon a small stool and bade young Abelard to come closer. The large red face, giant lips parted, fetid breath hanging in the still air, closed slowly with that of the child. He lifted his heavy hand to caress the beauty he so lusted after when the child suddenly withdrew the object he had kept hidden under his shirt and with a swift thrust ran his knife through the priest’s hand. The jab had been so unexpected and deft that the pain had hardly had the time to register before the dagger point was pressing lightly against the priest’s jugular. Under the circumstances, the two came to an understanding which greatly favoured Abelard.
But Lucidus was also a renaissance man well before the Italians brought it to the rest of Transalpine Europe. He cared as much about the content of the manuscripts that the monks spent all their time transcribing, as he did about his irresistible moral lapses. He had looked at carefully and closely studied the Arabic texts on Algebra, Astronomy, History and Medicine. He did not teach these subjects to all his students, still viewed as suspicious and often dangerous by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Only a select few, those he deemed worthy and not just to those he desired, although the two sometimes coincided. Abelard was among that small group.
He spent four years at the monastery being groomed for a life of piety, mental exertion and a place in the church in the event all his male siblings managed, against the odds, to survive. Then, at fourteen, disaster struck his family. The Hundred Years war was in full swing, pitting the English under the Plantagenet gang against the French under the Valois mob. In 1345 the English struck a humiliating blow in Upper Gascony, making important gains. The French counterattacked the following spring and made little gain but did inflict considerable casualties upon the English and their Gascon allies. As hazard would have it, two of the Buch brothers were among the fatalities. Very soon thereafter a rider, chest emblazoned with the Captal’s coat, arrived at the monastery and left with a two-minded teenager. While he yearned to live the dreams of violence which he had imbibed with his nursemaid’s milk, he had also been very powerfully drawn into the world of the mind. He knew he had little choice in these matters but did resolve to never abandon the precious knowledge he had joyfully acquired from the chastised priest.
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