Read The Snow on the Cross Online
Authors: Brian Fitts
The Snow on the Cross
The Snow on the Cross
By Brian Fitts
The Snow on the Cross
All Rights Reserved ©
2002 by Brian Fitts
No part of this book
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic,
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publisher
Author’s Note
Although historical in nature, this
is primarily a work of fiction based around historical people and events. It
is not necessarily to be taken as a firm historical account. Some liberties
have been taken with timelines and names to fit the narrative.
B.F.
Woe unto you, ye
souls depraved
Hope nevermore to
look upon the heavens;
I come to lead you to
the other shore,
To the eternal shades
in heat and frost…”
-Dante Aligheri
The Divine Comedy
Two sounds are evident as I write
these words. One is the scratch of my quill on the scrap of parchment, the
other is laughter: sometimes high pitched, sometimes guttural. The latter
sound I have heard every day for the last twelve years as it filters through
the window in my door and bounces off the stone walls into my ears. I scratch
these words into this scrap of parchment I found lying outside in the corridor
because if I do not, my only other choice will be to carve these words into the
very stone of my prison walls with my fingers.
There is water creeping down the rock
in tiny streams. Its source is unknown. Perhaps it filters down from the
wells outside from which we draw our water. Maybe it is from the kitchen vats
that bubble day and night with the thick gruel they feed us. Perhaps it is the
urine trickling down through the cracks in the ceiling from the mindless who
live above me. I hear their thumping on the floor above. Sometimes flecks of
stone shower down upon me. The powder from the stone taints my inkwell, and I
sit and dip my quill and write with black and white ink. Sometimes I sit and
stare at the streams pouring down the walls. They remind me of blood: the
blood of the walls seeping and eroding the foundation of this prison. In a
thousand years I will be free when the walls have all crumbled away. I have not
seen sunlight in twelve years. They think I will die here, but I will not. I
have no reason to die. Locked in this stone coffin that measures ten feet by
six feet, they seek to silence me about where I have been and what I have seen.
A disgrace to the church, they called me.
Once I left my parchment too close to
the walls, and it was splashed with the water. I sat for two days and let it
dry out. There is nothing to do but gaze at the endless streams and listen
to the laughter drifting through my window and the walls. Sometimes I imagine
the sound is carried by the water directly to me, like a messenger. My quill
is blunted, and my ink is partially frozen. There must be no mistakes. I must
be careful. My parchment shrinks with every word I scratch and when it is
gone, there will be no more.
My name is Arnald. It was the same
name as my father. Sadly, the name will end with me and our bloodline will
cease. My father was a bishop of
Le Mans
. A great man, if you believe the chronicles I imagine the scholars will
create for him. I am not such a great man, and my father’s name, as it passed
on to me, leaves no mark of distinction. I, too, became a bishop, and was
expected to inherit my father’s work and his legacy along with his name.
It is not sunlight I miss, but the
trees. I remember trees. I even sketched a little one here in the margin next
to my words so I would not forget. Not too big, just enough to jab my
memory. If the sketch is too large, then it takes away valuable space for my
words.
I have a story. Although the
scholars will not remember me like my father, I think the work I did bears
telling before I die. I am old, but as I said before I have no reason to die,
at least not yet. I will even write the date here in the margin beside my
tree: the Year of our Lord 1015 A.D. That will be enough.
There are many more words to write,
so I begin with only God’s truth to guide my hand. I will tell the story of
the man they called Eirik, and the
Green
Land
he so passionately believed in. My
name will be forgotten by time, but I am sure his will not. I was there. I
saw his land and his people. I was Bishop Arnald of
Le Mans
, and now I begin the tale so those
who follow may read and learn.
In the
Land
of
Smoke
and Scrub
There are no trees in
Greenland
. The entire landscape is hills and
valleys dotted by scrub bushes. There is good pasture on the southern end of
the island, but to the north, I don’t even know of any North Men who would dare
settle there. It is all frozen tundra threaded with lichen and moss. No beasts
survive there, so I know no humans could either. Everything is one of two
colors: blue or brown. Even the grasslands are mud colored.
Our ship approached the rocky
shoreline early one morning. Even before I saw the land, I could smell the
smoke drifting up from a dozen stone chimneys. As we came closer, I saw the
flat gray of the stone huts lined along the beach. Behind the little row of
houses a sheer grass hill, impossibly steep, concealed what was beyond. I
eventually climbed that hill and got my first look at
Greenland
, and it was as if I had stepped out
of my world and into some dream.
No trees, just little bushes that
seemed to reach out and snag one as one passed. Miles and miles of nothing.
So our little ship rocked and
splashed toward those rocks on the beach where there was a gathering of men:
huge bundles of fur with faces peeking out from behind long thick beards.
There was the occasional glint of metal from a pin that held their furs
together. One pin pulled, and the bundles would fall away to reveal ordinary
men, some quite small after the layers peeled off. Some were waving. Others
looked angry, and even from the distance I was, I could see the creases on their
brows and the hatred in their eyes.One of the men with whom I was sailing
tapped my shoulder and pointed. “Look, Bishop,” he said. “See that man
standing away from the others? That’s Eirik. The leader of these men. He’s
the one that sent for you.”
I looked in the direction indicated.
Yes, the largest of the bundles. I called them bundles because I could not see
them as men. From a distance, they appeared as beasts lined against the gray
water. Some carried axes that flashed, others had no hands, as they were
concealed in their furs. Others were shouting, and their voices were foreign
to me.
The wind coursed over the bow of the
ship and caused me to pull the cloak around myself tightly. One of the men on
the shore produced a torch that smoked and sputtered in his hand. He threw it
onto a pile of driftwood stacked on the beach. In a matter of moments, thick
black smoke smoldered in little clouds along the shoreline.
“It’s a welcome,” said my companion.
“They light their fire to welcome you.”
The driftwood was crackling fiercely
in a matter of seconds. Its smoke mingled with the smoke from the huts and
flew into the dismal, cold sky. My gaze returned to the largest of the
bundles. Eirik. He made no acknowledgment of our approach, nor did he join in
the shouting of his men. He stood as if entranced, looking remarkably older
than the others. His thick red beard stood out in contrast to his black fur.
He stared at me, and I could see his
eyes, dark and grim, like two holes in the center of his pale skin. His mouth
was a tight line as he glared at me. I should have taken it as a sign of
things to come.
I don’t know why he had decided to go
there and try to settle that lonely place. As far as I could tell, there was
no good farmland, and nothing to recommend others to go there. Certainly not
for the weather, for I hadn’t even set foot on the shore, and already I was
longing for the warmer days I had left far behind me in
Le Mans
. It was a land of smoke and scrub,
and whatever reasons Eirik had for going there were his own. Others followed
him because they had faith in his leadership, but as I saw him for the first
time, I was not overly impressed. He seemed ill tempered, and the bright red
of his hair and beard made him appear almost comical.
I could hear the distant low of the
cattle somewhere over the hills, probably roaming the endless pastures with
only a small stone fence to separate them from the frozen nothingness that I
knew lay to the north. This was
Greenland
, but it was certainly not what I had imagined. The entire land seemed
laced with gray.
Springtime at the turn of the
millennium. Since God had decided not to end the world, much to the
disappointment of the zealots, I assumed it was going to be my fate to live out
my days huddling beside a fire in a frozen wasteland. I could see the spring
thaw’s effect on the land, and it even seemed as if tiny flowers were springing
up on the hillside behind the huts.
Greenland
, after much straining and searching on my part, had some slight tinges
of green along the shoreline and so, I suppose, it earned the named Eirik had
given it.
I would find out later that the wood
burning so fiercely on the beach before us was the accumulated effort of
several weeks of work on the part of the men who lived there. Most of it was
driftwood that had been painstakingly collected one slivered fragment at a time
as it washed up on the rocks. Now they were burning it all at once as a sign
of my welcome. I didn’t know what to think. Our patron
St. Augustine
teaches of the sins of the wasteful
and the indulgent. Later that winter as the winds howled, I found myself
thinking back to that blazing fire that burned on my arrival and cursed the
North Men for their squander