16. Then Tibolt
THEN: TIBOLT
The town of Sheridan was like many in the settlements and territories of the known world, a lord’s keep and sharecropping lands abutting a bustling township.
Thousands of winters prior, it was somehow decided that the family Sheridan was the most noble, and the then patriarch became the lord of this portion of what many folk called “the low country.” Our township was on the Tintarian border, more southern than northern, a short ride from the magic of the Nyossa forest.
My twin sister and I were born on a humid day in late spring, both small and screaming. Our father, the miller, was disappointed at us both being girls. Our mother, a pretty, pleasant woman, was half alive after the birth. The midwife advised she not try again for a babe.
In our early days, I do not think there was much suffering.
Rowena was an hour younger, cheerful, and delighted by everything.
Even as a little girl, I knew the house was dictated by my father’s moods, and I pretended to be as delighted as Rowena even if I was not.
This proved helpful to me as my father was caught up in the clutches of a faith that justified all of his rages.
Many winters before our birth, Perpatane, the great, icy country to the west and north of us, propped up on its gold mines and its stark religion, had paid in gold, a rare coinage outside of that country, to have a church of their faith built in the town.
The lord at the time, having no faith of his own and not having a care what his people believed in, happily accepted the gold.
Perpatane installed in the church a nasty old priest by the name of Father Kenneth, the third or fourth son of a Perpatanian peerage family.
Perhaps he was bitter about his lot in life, for he was a mean man.
He preached the teachings of Saint Rodwin, which could easily be summarized as women being the origin of all sin and men being the cure to their disease.
Father Kenneth died before Rowena or I could remember very much about him and was replaced by a fat, generous man named Tibolt, who insisted on being called Brother and not Father.
“Please,” he would say. “Father makes me feel old. And I have been a brother for winters! Brother Tibolt works just as well if not better, child!”
He was a drastic change from his predecessor. Perpatane had monasteries, where only the most devoted Rodwin men lived, celibate and dedicated to study. Tibolt had been sent to us as a kind of missionary late in his life, his first priesthood assignment.
“I am sixty winters! And I have not left the library since I was ten! The High Conclave said every monk must take up one mission in his life. Here I be.”
The austerity of Father Kenneth receded somewhat. The crueler practices of Rodwin were set aside.
“I subscribe to the teachings of my namesake,” he would preach. “The Lesser Saint Tibolt believed the best way to follow Rodwin and avoid our eternal souls being cast into the demon realm was through doing good and being good to others.”
Sheridan folk did not know what to think of this, most of them having been raised in the light of Kenneth’s hellfire.
But how could one complain about a priest who smiled at everyone and admonished parents not to beat or publicly condemn their children too much?
How could they find fault with a man who said that though women were born evil, the eradication of that evil was best done gently?
For twelve winters, the faith of Rodwin was preached in a more livable, inclusive way. This did not sit well with my father, a devotee of the stringent saint.
“That fat man is too soft,” he would gripe.
My father and a few other men did not allow Tibolt’s watered-down sermons to influence them and only held stronger to their belief in what Kenneth had told them as boys, that they were the divine gender, the heads of their households, and that women were corrupt.
My mother was a foundling child, dropped off at the lord’s keep as a babe with no known parentage. Our father had married her, rescuing her from a life of scullery and keep servitude; he expected her to be grateful for it. And she was.
His rages were mostly kept at bay by her. Everyone loved my mother. She was gregarious and could preempt a foul mood in both her husband and her superiors. She knew when to soothe and when to retreat, and she tried to teach us the same.
“You girls have to go along with him when he is mad,” she would whisper. “Agree with his anger. Even if you are the cause of it. Repent and repent immediately.”
Rowena would bob her head, eyes wide. I would nod too, my own rage a knot in my stomach. But around our seventh winter, I began to open my mouth. “But why are women evil?” I would ask.
He did not like this. He would shout at me, quoting scriptures that said a woman was not permitted questions. I would again ask why. I was not being tiresome. I truly wanted to know. By my tenth winter, I was boxed.
My father went to the priest and demanded the old practice be put in place. Brother Tibolt tried his best to dissuade my father from this, claiming it was a punishment for adulterers, thieves, and the like.
“She is beset by demons of hell,” claimed my father. “They have visited us in this land, in this life, taking up home in her mind. She is sick with it.”
Tibolt would suggest my being made to recite scripture. The man was desperate, unaccustomed to anything but sermons about being kind to one’s neighbor. He had never been a priest. He had never had to exact or condone punishment.
Lord Sheridan, who was my father’s age and who had also grown up under the instruction of Father Kenneth, was called upon.
He agreed with my father and with other men who found Tibolt too lenient.
He told the priest he would write to King Pollux himself if the scriptures were not upheld in Sheridan.