The Oblate's Confession (17 page)

Brother Swidbert came in next, then Brother Edric. When Brother Hewald gave up and crawled in under the wagon, he looked at me as if I’d done something wrong. I looked away.

The afternoon wore on, our tiny shelter growing close, the stink of damp woolens and someone’s fasting breath. At some point I must have drifted off because I seemed to be on another ridge, long ago, when someone jostled me and I opened my eyes. Brother Hewald had changed positions. He was looking at Brother Edric. Brother Edric nodded and then glanced out at the open ground. He shook his head.

I looked out that way too but could see nothing wrong. The snow had changed—the big feathery flakes gone now, replaced by a snow that was coming down so fast it made a sort of hissing sound as it fell. Around the grove, in the lee of rocks and trees, the snow was accumulating in little piles that looked like spills of salt. Otherwise though, everything remained as it had been: the ground dark, the air white and moving, the hermit gray. I looked back at
Brother Hewald and was a little frightened to find him looking at me. He shook his head to keep me from looking down, then— eyes insisting I pay attention—he lifted his chin toward the open area out in front of the wagon.

I looked out that way again but still could see nothing wrong.

Hewald’s jaw muscles knotted.

I cocked my head:
Sir?

Brother Hewald crossed himself, glanced once at the sleeping Dagan, then, in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear, said, “Your master! Have you no shame?”

“Sir?”

“Take something and cover him up!”

Hot tears filled my eyes. I pulled my hood down over my face and held it there. Someone shoved a blanket under my chin and for the briefest of moments I thought it was meant for me. Then I remembered myself. Holding the blanket against my chest, I crawled out from under the wagon and stood up. For a moment I let the snow sting my face, each icy missile welcome, a blessing.

Then I hurried across to the hermit.

Father was sitting with his back to the wagon as he had been since None. Earlier such a position might have afforded him some advantage, but since it had begun to snow the wind had changed direction. Fearful the dripping tonsure and beard might really bring on some life-threatening illness, I raised my blanket, intending to drape it over the old man’s head and shoulders. Then I remembered. The last time I had touched the hermit when he was praying, he had told me I must never do anything like that again. Admittedly I had touched him with a firebrand on that occasion but, still, he had been emphatic.

I glanced back at the figures resting under the wagon and held up my blanket:
I
hate to disturb him.
A pair of hands—white against the shadows—gestured impatiently.

I looked back down at Father Gwynedd. Water dripped from the tip of his nose; an icy froth was developing on the whiskers around his mouth. Then I noticed the dry place. Though elsewhere snow was pelting Father at will, the right side of his face—the side

I was blocking from the wind—looked dryer. I moved to my left and the effect increased: fewer flakes struck the hermit. If I raised my blanket....

I held it out behind me like a sail and, like a sail, it caught the wind and blew flat against my back, my body and the blanket blocking both wind and snow. If he was conscious of the real world at all, Father must have thought it had stopped snowing.

I spread my legs and assumed a more comfortable stance, rather pleased with myself. Now, instead of returning to the wagon, I would have to remain out here on the open ground. Like Father Hermit, I would brave wind and snow, do my part to help the grownups cleanse this place of evil. It was a nice thought. It made me happy. I hoped Father Prior would wake up soon so he could see what I was doing.

For a long time I stood as I had imagined I would stand. My arms grew tired, my heart beat in my fingertips, but I did not falter. The brothers under the wagon knew I was there even if Father Gwynedd didn’t. A part of me wondered what Father
did
know.

Usually, when one of the monks underwent a mortification, you could tell they were suffering. It showed in their faces and, sometimes, in the way they behaved. But the hermit was different. Despite the fact his woolens were encrusted with rime, his tonsure dripping, he looked, well, if not happy certainly content, a man sitting by his fire thinking about something, pondering. And maybe that was it. Maybe he was. Who knew where Father Hermit went when he prayed. Did it snow in the Holy Land? Did the wind blow in Heaven?

A crystal of snow landed on the upper part of Father’s ear, melted and, following the curve of the ear, ran down to the tip of the lobe from which it then hung, refusing to drop. I shivered and found that the motion relieved some of the pain in my right arm. When I turned my head to stretch in that direction, I saw that the snow had picked up again, the flakes coming down so fast they looked more like needles than snow. As I was noticing this, thinking this, the ground (like a piece of cloth rising toward the hand that stitches it) rose into the sky.

I looked down, forced myself to concentrate on the hermit, concentrate on holding my blanket just so. It helped. The ground grew firm beneath my feet, the earth ceased to levitate, and, slowly, my knees began to relax. I closed my eyes and thought about the hermit. In my mind I saw him flying, like St. Peter, around the tower of our ridge, a gray man flying wingless through a gray sky.

When I opened my eyes, it was to find the hermit looking at
me.

“Winwæd?” he said.

Father followed my glance over at the wagon. When I looked back at him, he was smiling. “Well,” he said, “at least you can sit under the blanket with me.”

“Sir?”

Gently, Father pulled me down onto the ground beside him. He took my blanket from me, shook it out, and then, with a flourish, draped it over our heads. From the wagon we must have looked a little like Modra nect, the back of my head representing the mountain’s lower, southern peak.

For a long time we sat like that. Perhaps it was the fast, perhaps the enchantment of falling snow, but, for once in my life, I felt no desire to speak or fidget; I lay quietly against Father’s side, smelling the smell of old fires in his woolens and enjoying the tinkling sound the snow made on the blanket he held over our heads. After a while I grew drowsy. When I spoke, it surprised me as much as it must have the hermit. “What do you see, Father? When you pray I mean, what do you see out there?”

Though my eyes were closed, I could hear the smile in the voice that answered me. “Well,” said Father Hermit, “if I’m lucky, I see nothing at all.”

We still have the wagon. It’s the one Father Cyneberht uses to haul manure. We had to play the part of oxen to get it down the mountain, but it would have been a shame to leave the thing behind. It was a perfectly good wagon.

The furnace path was different in those days—darker, wetter, more mysterious. A species of bird called back there then that called nowhere else, its song fey, haunted, ethereal. Nonsense of course, the birds that sing now are the same as those that sang then; the valley above the monastery remains just as dark and dank. Still, memory insists it was different. Waldhere and I used to lie on our bellies at the entrance to the path and make up stories about what went on up there, the mill and its creaking wheel, the foreigner, Victricius, and all his works. We knew the place was important. When the man from the bishop was expected, the hours themselves seem to slow in anticipation of his arrival: Chapter was lengthened, prayers said, the food got better. But it wasn’t the iron that interested us, it was the path itself, the fact that it was
forbidden, that it lay there open and inviting at the very edge of our realm; and we could not go there. No matter how much we might want it otherwise, the furnace path was one place that would, we knew, remain forever out-of-bounds.

And then one day late in Lent, a third of the way through what had been up until that time a perfectly ordinary year, Father Prior asked me to walk with him there.

It was morning I remember, Prime having just come to an end—Father pulling me from the back of what was in those days not a particularly long procession. He didn’t speak, just took me by the shoulder and, gently, pulled me from the line. When he pointed at the furnace path, indicated I should accompany him there, I tossed a quick glance at Waldhere and was pleased to find him looking back over his shoulder at us, clearly wishing he were me.

In truth we didn’t go far, just far enough to be out of earshot of the cloister, but where we stopped was interesting enough. As with the west walk, the furnace path marks both walkway and
watercourse, its flagstones roofing and concealing our abbey race (here too one feels the gentle thrumming through the soles of one’s feet). But the furnace path is different as well, for the monks who dug the race were forced by the steepness of the upper valley to cut their channel directly from the side of the mountain. On one side of the path where Father Prior and I stopped, a sort of manmade cliff rises dripping and lichen-covered to half again the height of a man, while, on the other, the ground falls away dramatically toward the Meolch. The air would have been full that day, as it was every day, of the scents of hemlock and pine; the river, at full spate, deafening.

Father said something.

I cupped my ear.

He spoke again, louder. “You know how much we care for you.”

I nodded. This was going to be bad.

“Good. It is our duty to love our brothers, but Christ has placed an especial obligation upon us to love children. For some
this may be easy, for others it is a great cross to bear. You understand?”

Of course, he was talking about Brother Baldwin. I nodded.

“Good. Well, I wanted to make sure you understood this, that we love you, that we will always take care of you.”

I smiled but I was beginning to worry. Once before, when we were all very little, Baldwin had tried to get rid of the oblates. I remembered it only as a time of loud words and unhappiness, but Dudda had told me, if it hadn’t been for Father Prior, we all would have been placed at the far end of the abbey path.

Father must not have liked what he saw on my face. “Really,” he said, “we do care about you.
I
care about you.”

Again I nodded.

Father looked at me for a moment, then shook his head as if changing his mind about something. “It’s your father,” he said, “your father Ceolwulf is here.”

I looked at my lord prior.

His voice softened. “The stranger?” he said. “The man with
the scar and all the rings? He’s your father, your natural father.”

The relief was so great I almost laughed. Father didn’t know I knew who the visitor was. He’d just been preparing me for the shock.

“This is good? You are pleased the man is your father?” Knowing that I wasn’t supposed to be, I shook my head and bit my lip, trying to appear serious. But I was overjoyed. They weren’t going to throw us out after all!

“Well,” Father went on doubtfully, “he is your father and, right or wrong, he has asked to see you.”

“Sir?” I said, forgetting myself.

“Your father has asked to see you. He’s waiting for you now in the abbot’s lodge.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s all right, you have my permission to speak.”