The Martyr’s Curse. Scott Mariani

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       Chapter Four

      It had been after that discussion that Ben had been taken to see the prior. The head of the monastery lived in just the same kind of humble quarters as the other members of the order. His name was Père Antoine. He was over eighty, with a face deeply etched by wrinkles and what would have been a leonine mane of pure white hair if it hadn’t been for the monk’s tonsure shorn into it, symbolising the crown of thorns worn by Christ.

      The first thing Ben noticed about Père Antoine was his eyes. They didn’t belong in an old man’s face. They seemed to glow like those of a happy child, as if filled with some kind of inner light that poured out of him. Ben found them mesmerising.

      The two men spoke in French, after Ben explained that his was fluent and he had lived in France for a while. The old man smiled at the discovery that ‘Ben’ was short for Benedict, and addressed him by the French version of the name, Benoît. He gently invited him to talk about himself, which was something Ben found difficult. Secrecy was second nature to him, instilled by years of covert military operations and the work he’d done since leaving the army. But that wasn’t the only reason it was difficult for him to speak openly. Here, now, in the presence of the old monk, Ben felt a sense of shame.

      ‘I’ve done a lot of pretty bad things,’ he confessed.

      ‘Père Jacques tells me you were once a soldier. For how many years was that your occupation?’

      ‘Too many.’

      ‘During those years, Benoît, did you kill many people?’

      Ben said nothing.

      ‘The memory of your past pains you, I see. But you atoned for your sins by leaving that path.’

      ‘I’m not sure if that counts as atonement, Father.’

      ‘It depends on the reason why you left.’

      ‘I didn’t like people telling me what to do.’

      ‘You have a problem with authority?’

      ‘It depends on who’s giving the orders. If it’s someone I respect, that’s one thing. If it’s some government stooge with a secret power agenda who expects me to do his dirty work for him on the pretext of protecting the realm, that’s another.’

      ‘You did not find your realm worth protecting?’

      ‘Not if it meant taking the lives of innocent people whose countries we invaded simply for reasons of territory and economics. That troubled me then. And it troubles me even more now, when I think about the things I did.’

      ‘And if your order came from God?’

      ‘I’m still waiting for that one,’ Ben said. ‘That’s the truth.’

      ‘Perhaps it has come already, but you do not see it.’

      Ben didn’t reply.

      The old monk nodded thoughtfully and reflected for a few moments. ‘By choice, I know little about the modern world. But history, I do know. These things you tell me – it was always so. This monastery was built during the time of the First Crusade. It is convenient for us to forget that the Christian forces who established the Holy Kingdom of Jerusalem, in so doing, carried out the wholesale massacre of thousands of innocent Muslim lives. It was not an act of faith, but of pure murder.’

      Ben looked at him.

      ‘The Church’s past is tainted by many sins, and to force good men to do evil in the name of God is but one of them.’ Père Antoine smiled sadly. ‘It surprises you, to hear me speak this way.’

      It did.

      ‘You speak of your shame for the things you did then,’ the monk went on. ‘But the goodness in you prevailed, Benoît. You left that life behind.’

      ‘I tried to,’ Ben said. ‘I wanted to use what I’d learned to do some good.’ He paused as he tried to find the right words. ‘Things happen in this world. Things you couldn’t even begin to imagine from up here. K and R is just one of them.’

      ‘You are right. I have no idea what that means.’

      ‘Kidnap and ransom,’ Ben explained. ‘It’s a business, and a big one. The trade in human misery for money. The men who do it are pure bad, and too often, there’s nobody there to stop them. That was something I wanted to change.’

      ‘And did you?’

      Ben thought of the kidnap victims he’d removed from the clutches of their captors. A long list of names and faces that he’d never forget. Many of them had been children, snatched from their homes, from schools, from cars, so as to extort ransom from their families. He wondered where they all were now. Getting on with their lives, he supposed. He wondered if they too were haunted by old memories.

      ‘Saving the lives of the innocent is not something of which you should be ashamed,’ Père Antoine said.

      ‘Yes, I saved people. But to save them, sometimes unpleasant things had to be done.’

      ‘Violence?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Killing?’

      Ben shrugged. He nodded. He glanced down as he did it. It was the first time СКАЧАТЬ