Chapter Two
My Christian and born name was Thomas Gebson. This was what I was known by and how I knew myself. I was the son of Geb, a poor pig farmer, and for most of those years I bore a churlish life of filth and rags, sunrise to sunset. My story begins in a time of real trouble, thereabouts some thousand years after the death of Our Lord, the Son of God, the crucified Jesus Christ. A new era had begun. We were in England, eleven years after the Normans and their hated king, William, our conqueror (beast and Bastard!) had come across over the black waters, and brought their strange and superior ways to us.
War. Darkness. Burning. Chaining us to that weary stony land through the constant fee—they called it the feud—and the villainy of serfdom. We were very poor. We lived in the North Mi
