Raptor (4 page)

Every brother did obey the first two precepts of monasticism, the foremost being Obedience, which is founded on the second, Humility—but the third precept, which is Love of Silence, was not very rigidly observed at our abbey. Since the monks’ various labors required considerable communication among them, they were not bidden to be mute, although any talking not absolutely necessary was discouraged after Vespers.

There are some monastic orders that take also a vow of poverty, but at St. Damian’s that condition was simply taken for granted, and was considered not so much a virtue as the absence of a vice. Every brother, on admission, disposed of all his worldly belongings, right down to his garments, and thereafter possessed little that he could call his own, except his two hooded burlap robes—one for daytime wear, one for after working hours—plus a light summer surcoat and a heavy woolen one for winter, his indoor sandals, his work shoes or boots, two pairs of waist-high hose and the rope girdle that he doffed only on going to his pallet at night.

There are also communities of monks that take a vow of celibacy, in the manner of convent sisters. But at St. Damian’s that condition, like poverty, was rather taken for granted. It was only comparatively recently, just some seventy years before the time of which I write, that the Church had demanded celibacy, and then only of its bishops, priests and deacons. Thus a man in holy orders might marry while he was still a young minor clerk—a lector, an exorcist or a doorkeeper—and then could father children while he rose through the ranks of acolyte and subdeacon, and not have to part from his wife and family until he became a full deacon. Needless to remark, many clerics of all degrees have flouted both the tradition of celibacy and St. Augustine’s pronouncement that “God hates copulation.” They have had wives or concubines, or swarms of them, all their lives long, and have sired innumerable “nephews” and “nieces.”

Most of the monks of St. Damian’s were natives of the surrounding Burgund lands, but we also had numerous Franks and Vandals, several Suevians and a few representatives of other Germanic nations and tribes. All of them, on entering the abbey, dropped their Old Language names and took the Latin or Greek names of saints, prophets, martyrs or venerable bishops of the past—a man named Kniva-the-Squint-Eyed becoming Brother Commodian, and Avilf-the-Arm-Strong becoming brother Addian, and so on.

As I have said, every monk had a job to fill or a daily labor to perform, and Dom Clement did his best to assign each brother to a duty that was as near as possible to what the man had worked at in the outside world. Our infirmarian, Brother Hormisdas, had formerly been the medicus to a noble household in Vesontio. Brother Stephanos, who had been steward to some great estate, was now our cellarius, in charge of all our stores and provisions.

Monks who were literate in Latin became preceptores, copying scrolls and codices in the abbey’s scriptorium, while any who had some artistic ability illuminated those works. Brothers who could read and write the Old Language were made responsible for the chartularium, where were filed all the records of St. Damian’s, plus the marriage, birth and death rosters, the land deeds and contracts transacted among the lay residents of the valley. Brother Paulus, who was amazingly adept and swift at writing in both languages, was Dom Clement’s personal exceptor, scratching onto wax tablets the abbot’s dictated correspondence, as fast as it was spoken, and then writing the missives on vellum in a fine hand. Within our abbey grounds were herb and truck gardens, barns and yards containing poultry, pigs and milk cows, and those were tended by monks who had formerly been farmers. But the abbey also owned, both inside and outside the valley, extensive tracts of farmland, vineyards, orchards and pastures of sheep and cattle. Unlike many monasteries, St. Damian’s did not possess slaves, but employed the local rustics to till those lands and manage those herds.

Even the dullest-witted of all our brothers at St. Damian’s—he was a poor lout whose tonsure topped a head that was very nearly conical—was given some simple tasks to do, and he did them with great pride and self-satisfaction. That fellow had previously been called Nethla Iohannes—presumably on account of the shape of his head, for that name meant Needle, John’s Son—but he had assumed the even more ridiculous name of Brother Joseph. I say “ridiculous” because no monk, cleric, monastery or church has ever been known to name itself after St. Joseph—that personage being considered, if anything, the patron saint of cuckolds. On Sundays and other holy days, our Brother Joseph had the job of shaking the sacra ligna, the loud wooden rattles that summoned the valley and village folk to services in our abbey’s chapel. On other days, Brother Joseph stood as a scarecrow in this or that field of crops and rattled the sacra ligna to drive the scavenger birds away.

My own duties, when I was very young, were almost as menial as those of Brother Joseph, but at least they were numerous and various enough so that no job ever got too tedious. One day I might assist in the scriptorium, giving sheets of new-made vellum their final polish—this was always done with a mole pelt, because mole fur has the peculiar property of lying smooth in whatever direction it is rubbed—and then abrading the sheets with pumice dust to make their surface suitably gripping for the preceptores’ swan-quill pens. Oftener than not, it was I who had earlier noose-trapped the moles to get those pelts, and I who had collected the oak galls from which the pens’ ink was made, and I who had suffered painful nips and buffetings while plucking the quills from the swans.

Another day I might be in the fields collecting sweet gale, from which our infirmarian brother brewed a medicinal tea, or collecting thistle cotton, with which our sempster brother would stuff pillows (our geese and swans provided ample down, but such a soft luxury in a monastery dorter was unthinkable). Another day I might spend in dropping a frantically shrieking and flapping hen down one after another of the abbey’s flues to clean them out, and then taking the dislodged soot to our dyer brother, who would boil it with beer to make a good brown tincture for coloring the monks’ robes.

As I grew older, the brothers entrusted me with slightly more responsible tasks. The dairy-house brother, Sebastian, pouring cream into two pannier tubs slung across the back of our old draft mare, solemnly informed me, “Cream is the daughter of milk and the mother of butter.” Then he set me atop the mare and had me jog her at a shambling fast walk around and around the barnyard, until the cream did indeed magically turn into butter.

On the day Brother Lucas, a carpenter, fell off a roof and broke his arm, the infirmarian, Brother Hormisdas, told me, “The comfrey plant is named for the comfort and curing it provides,” and he sent me out to the fields to find and uproot enough of those plants to fill several bustellus baskets. By the time I brought them back, the infirmarian had laid Lucas’s arm in a sort of wooden trough. Hormisdas let me help him mash the comfrey roots to a mucilaginous pulp, then he packed that around the broken arm. By the end of the day, the pulp had dried hard, like gypsum. The trough was removed and Brother Lucas was able to get up and get about, wearing the comfrey cast until his arm knitted, and he was as good a carpenter as before.

I always hoped mightily that I might be asked by our vintner brother, Commodian, to tramp around in the grape-pressing vat with his assistant monks, all of them barefooted but heavily clothed so their sweat would not drip into the juice. To me, that work looked more merry than wearisome. But I never got to try it; I was not heavy enough to have been worth the room I would have taken up in the vat. But I
was
able to work the leather bellows for Brother Adrian, while he forged sickle and scythe blades, billhooks, bits for the local people’s horses and rimshoes for any of those horses that had to work on stony ground. I was especially happy whenever I was sent afield to take the place of some peasant shepherd who was ill or drunk or otherwise incapacitated, for I enjoyed being by myself in the green pastures, and the herding of sheep is no backbreaking job. Each time, I carried with me a wallet containing (for myself) a cantlet of bread, a wedge of cheese, an onion and (for the sheep) a box of broom-jelly with which to daub cuts, scratches and fly-bites. I also carried a crook for grabbing any sheep that needed treatment.

Except when I was afield, my work—like that of every monk—had to be planned and arranged to accommodate all our religious obligations, for our every day, week and year was most rigidly regulated. We rose in the dark each morning for the cockcrow office of Vigil. Then we (or most of us) took a wash before the sunrise service of Matins. After breaking our fast with a bit of bread and water came the first-hour office of Prime. In midmorning came the third-hour office of Terce. In late morning, at the fifth hour, we had the prandium, our one hot and hearty meal of the day, then performed the sixth-hour office of Sext. After that, unless work called, we were allowed the sexta nap or rest. In midafternoon came the ninth-hour office of Nones, and at sundown came Vespers, after which almost all the workers, except the brothers who had to tend animals, were free to take care of private business: reading, mending, bathing or whatever. At almost any hour of the day, though, if a monk had an unoccupied moment, he could be found kneeling and doing private, silent, lip-moving devotions, tossing pebbles from one pile to another—small pebbles for the Aves, larger ones for the Paternosters and Glorias—to count his imposed allotment of prayers, and at the end of each prayer making the sign of the cross upon his forehead.

Besides the offices of each day, we were required each week to chant all the hundred and fifty of the psalms, plus the canticles appointed for each week. Those monks who were literate were required to read for two hours each day, and three hours a day during Lent. During each year, of course, we all attended Sunday and holy-day and feast-day masses, the Easter baptismal services and frequently wedding or funeral masses. On sixty days of each year, we fasted. In addition to making those numerous observances, I, as an oblate and postulant, had to include time for religious instruction and secular education as well.

Very well. From my earliest years, I was made to work hard and to study hard, and only seldom was I let to go briefly beyond the cliff walls that enclose the Ring of Balsam. But, not ever having known any other kind of life, I might have remained satisfied with that one, and never have known any other. Sometimes, in after years, in moments of mellow mood—when I have been flushed with wine, say, or languorous after lovemaking—I have reflected that perhaps I should not have dealt so harshly with that Brother Peter as I eventually did. Had it not been for that wretch, I might this minute be still immured in the Abbey of St. Damian’s or some other cloister or a church, and the secret of my nature would be a secret still, even to me, concealed beneath the robe of a monk—or of an acolyte, a deacon, a priest, an abbot, perchance even the robe of a bishop.

For I had a thorough grounding in the Catholic Christian Scriptures and doctrines and canonics and liturgy—a much more thorough grounding than most postulants ever receive. That was because Dom Clement, from his first arrival as abbot of St. Damian’s, took a personal interest in my instruction, and often personally applied himself to it. Like everyone else, he assumed me to be of Gothic parentage, and evidently he also assumed that I had been born with inbred Gothic beliefs—or disbeliefs, or nonbeliefs—and so devoted some of his own time to expunging those and replacing them with firm Catholic orthodoxy.

On the Catholic Church: “It is our mother, prolific of offspring. Of her we are born, by her milk we are nourished, by her spirit we are made alive. It would not be decent of us to speak of any other woman.”

On other women: “Should a monk have to carry even his own mother or sister across a brook, he will first carefully swathe her in a cloak, for the very touch of any female’s flesh is fire.”

On me: “Like a wounded man, young Thorn, you have had your life saved by the sacrament of baptism. But for the rest of your life you must endure a protracted and precarious convalescence. Not until you die in the arms of Mother Church can you ever be fully recovered.”

And every time the abbot sat with me, he made sure to say, with repugnance in his voice, something like this: “The Goths, my son, are outlanders—men with wolfish names and wolfish souls—to be shunned and execrated by all decent folk.”

“But, Nonnus Clement,” I said, on one of those occasions, “it was to outlanders that our Lord Jesus first revealed himself after his glorious Nativity. For he was of the land of Galilee, and the Wise Men came from the outland of Persia.”

“Ah, well,” said the abbot, “there are outlanders and there are outlanders. The Goths are
barbaric
outlanders. Savages. Beasts. As is clearly evident from their tribal name, the Goths are the terrible Gog and Magog, the hostile powers whose coming was ominously foretold in the Books of Ezekiel and Revelation.”

“Then,” I mused, “the Goths are beings as detestable as pagans. Or even Jews.”

“Ne, ne, Thorn. The Goths are far more reprehensible, for they are heretics—
Arians.
An Arian is one who has been shown the light of truth, and has chosen a foul heresy instead of the Catholic faith. The sainted Ambrose has declared that heretics are more blasphemous than the Antichrist, more than even the devil himself. Akh, son Thorn, if the Ostrogoths and Visigoths were only outlanders, and only savages, they might be tolerated. As Arians, they must be
loathed.”

Not Dom Clement or anyone else could then have foretold that, within my own lifetime, all the world about us would be ruled by those Arian Goths—and that one man among them would be the first ruler since Constantine to be universally acclaimed “the Great”—and that he would be the first man since Alexander to deserve to be called “the Great”—and that I, Thorn, would be beside him when he was.

What worldly education I received at St. Damian’s began when I was very young, taking instruction from a Gepid monk, Brother Methodius, who spoke in the Old Language. As children will do, I kept asking foolish questions, and the monk had to exert all his patience to answer those queries as best he could.