The Oblate's Confession (4 page)

For weeks after that I thought about Ælfhelm, pictured him as he made his way down the abbey path, passed beneath the refectory window. I could imagine what it would be like, the sounds that would come from that window, the voices—maybe Prior Dagan asking a question, Father Abbot clearing his throat, saying something you couldn’t quite hear. It was pleasant lying in bed and thinking about that, picturing Brother Ælfhelm, secure in the knowledge that he (and he alone) would suffer the consequences of his actions. Many’s the night I drifted off dreaming of trespass and the great North Wood.

I suppose the bad times really began with the furnace master’s speech. I mean, when people think about the bad times—if they allow themselves to think about them at all—that is probably what they think of first, the speech, the fact that it was the furnace master who told them what was going to happen. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if that was the beginning of Victricius’s own personal bad times as well. It makes sense. No one likes to hear such news, and especially not from a foreigner. But I write under obedience. I must record only what I can attest to, and I cannot attest to this. I was still too young for Chapter then; I never heard the famous speech. No, when I remember the bad times, I think not of the furnace master but of the little one, of poor little Oftfor. And not for the reasons you think. I remember Oftfor not for what he became
but for what he was, the boy I knew, the living breathing child.

That was a wet year. The rains came early that spring and continued well into the haying. When it rained hard we knelt in church and prayed for better weather, and when it rained less hard, we pulled our hoods up, gave thanks to God, and marched out into the peas, our woolens still weighted with the previous day’s mud. By the end of that summer there were brothers whose feet were so swollen and white from the damp it was said they looked more like fish than feet. Brother Tunbert lost some toes.

Still, when I think of that year, the end of that summer, I think first not of bad weather but of good, of a day that dawned so bright and clear it seems now to mock all that came after. I remember colors—turf, lichen, moss—I remember a high blue almost winter sky. I remember Oftfor. Oftfor stands in the angle created by sanctuary and apse, russet walls steaming at his back, sunlight everywhere, sparkling. The boy raises an arm. He must have been wearing woolens too big for him for, in my memory, as he raises his arm, the opposite shoulder (frail, bony, white) always
slips incongruously from the neck of his garment. He smiles. As if embarrassed, as if unsure of the importance of what he has to show me, Oftfor smiles. It’s a squirrel. A dead squirrel. Oftfor is standing in the angle created by sanctuary and apse and he is holding a dead squirrel up by its tail. The thing hangs in the air by Oftfor’s left ear, its eyes caked, useless, perfect little feet clutching at nothing.

And then, always, whether I like it or not, a second memory intrudes upon the first. This time we are in the reredorter and I am feeling disappointed. Despite myself, despite conscience, the horror of what Oftfor has shown me, I am thinking of myself, realizing that I’ve been tricked, betrayed, that this had nothing to do with food, that I shall not be gorging myself anytime soon on illicit food.

Not that it began in the reredorter. No. No, of course it didn’t. It began in the dortoir.

Which probably explains Waldhere and Ealhmund’s absence. I mean we must have left them in the dortoir. Doubtless I didn’t want to share, doubtless this too reflects an essential poverty of spirit. Still, if that is true, if they were there—convenient, handy— why choose me? Given Waldhere’s natural gifts, the obduracy that made Ealhmund as trustworthy a receptacle for secrets as a wooden box, why did Oftfor turn to me? Why burden me with this memory? I do not know. It makes no sense. Yet that is what happened. Even now I can see him standing there, back to the wall, hands behind him as if hiding something. I think I must have given him a look or signed something derisive because I remember his forehead crumpling—and that does make sense, does fit with my memory of the boy, Oftfor’s forehead having been, in its way, as supple an organ of expression as most people’s eyes or mouth. And on this occasion it crumpled uncertainly. He looked at me. Forehead crumpled, Oftfor looked at me, raised a hand, walked two fingers quickly through the air.

I shook my head,
No.
Dudda had already explained that. The dead animals were a sign, he’d told us, an omen. They’d said so in Chapter. All the little corpses meant Death was coming, that Death
was coming and it rode on the air like a horse. The part about the horse hadn’t made sense to me, but Dudda said he was just repeating what the furnace master had said. Dudda said the furnace master told them there were different kinds of airs, just as there are different kinds of horses, and that bad airs, like the one Death rode, were heavier than good airs. He said this was why Oftfor had found so many dead squirrels and mice, and why all the village dogs were dying. He said that, being smaller than people, living closer to the ground, these animals were more susceptible to heavy lowlying airs. But now that Death had killed all the little animals, it was going to rise. According to Dudda, the whole valley was filling up with Death like a bowl filling up with water. He said the bad air was at our knees now but soon would rise to our necks and then our heads. Waldhere had made a joke about this. He’d said that Oftfor would die first and then me and then Ealhmund. He said he would last the longest because he was the tallest. He laughed when he said it but you could tell he didn’t really think it was funny. Which was why I didn’t want to go to the reredorter.

No!
I shook my head,
No!

Oftfor closed his eyes, opened them again. He turned his head, looked down the length of the wall at his back. I looked down that way but there was nothing to see, just beds, a few windows, the gray and rainy light. Oftfor looked back at me, his expression different now, changed, a decision of some sort apparently made. He brought his hands from behind his back. He was holding a piece of bread.

I glanced over at the door, made sure it was closed, then stood up, walked to the nearest window. The garth was reassuringly empty. I looked back at Oftfor, smiled. He entered the reredorter ahead of me.

We’d been using the necessarium ever since Hlothberht caught us digging graves behind the lavabo. I had no idea why Oftfor took such pleasure in searching out and finding the dead animals, but, whatever the reason, the resulting funerals had provided something of a diversion. Or at least they had until now. Now that we knew what each of these deaths signified, how much
closer they brought us to Dudda’s full bowl of water, I was—I think for understandable reasons—less interested in make-believe. A few brief words, maybe a priestly gesture or two, and then I was going to tip whatever bundle of fur and bones Oftfor had found this time down the nearest hole
and eat that bread!

Oftfor took up a position by the window, arms firmly at his sides, neither bread nor beast in evidence. Something about his posture made me think he was planning on being the priest, but— food or no food—I wasn’t going to let that happen. Heretofore Waldhere had filled that role; this time it was my turn.

Oftfor raised an arm.

Before I could stop him or object, Oftfor raised an arm and— his sleeve slipping down toward his shoulder—the little room filled suddenly with a bad smell.

“What’s that?!”

The skin on Oftfor’s forehead drew taut like the skin of a drum. He pointed at the inside of his elbow.

I took a hesitant step closer (the smell was really quite offensive) and was able to see a small dark spot where Oftfor pointed. The thing looked too black to be part of his skin.

“Did you burn yourself?”

Oftfor shook his head.

I came closer still, breathing through my mouth. “Did something bite you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well cover it up and we’ll show Father Prior.”

Oftfor pulled his sleeve down and I turned to go, the bread crowding once more into my thoughts, making me a little angry with Oftfor, this smell, the fact that now, hungry as I was, I was going to have to go without, help him with this.

“Wait.”

I turned around, ready to say something.

The skin on Oftfor’s forehead drew taut once more, then, abruptly, curdled. Looking at me, never taking his eyes off me, he reached down and jerked up his woolens.

I turned away in disgust.

A small hand grasped my sleeve.

More disgust, and, with it now, the first touch of horror. I jerked away. Was there something wrong with Oftfor? Did he think he needed me to stand guard while he made water? I jerked away, spun around, the look on my face daring him to try that again.

Oftfor appeared as shocked as I, eyebrows raised in a show of almost comic fright.

I stared at him.

Oftfor glanced down and, despite myself, despite the fact I knew I didn’t want to, that I would do almost anything to avoid looking down there, I followed his gaze. Along the crease created where Oftfor’s left leg joined his body, a small line of welts stood out like the sting of a whip, rebuke to my curiosity.

“A rash?” I asked, my voice sounding suddenly different, wrong, a voice belonging to someone else.

“I don’t know. They weren’t there yesterday.”

I shrugged, anxious now to leave, to get out of there, the room suddenly too small, its roof too close, the once pleasant sound of rain on thatch now become something else entirely, a mad irreligious chant.

Oftfor looked back down at his groin, woolens held up around his chin like a bib. “I don’t know Winwaed,” he said, shaking his head like an old man shaking his head over an apple gone bad, “but I think I’m going to die.”

In my memory of that night the moon makes a sound as it rises. I know that cannot be, that it’s impossible, but that is the way I remember it. The thing is big, too big, and it seems to make a sort of noise as it rises over the Far Wood. In a fever you can sometimes get a noise like the noise I am remembering. It is a steady sound, constant, irritating, as though someone were humming beneath his breath right behind you. But in a fever of course no one is really humming. You can stop your ears with your fingers but it will make no difference for the sound is not in your ears, it is in your head. This is the sort of sound I remember hearing that night as we came out of Vigil. I don’t think we really heard it. I don’t think it was possible we could have heard the sound that soon, that far away. But that is the way I remember it—the garth, the
moon, the mindless sound of someone humming.

And then of course we entered the dortoir and whether or not we’d really heard the humming out on the garth we certainly heard it then. Though Eadnoth sat at the far end of the hall, there is no doubt in my mind that we heard the humming from the moment we first stepped through the door. And that nothing happened. For that is another strange thing about that night, the fact that, so far as I can recall, no one did anything about it. No one said anything or went down to where Eadnoth sat to remonstrate with him. No one even seemed upset by the fact that Brother had so clearly missed the Vigil.

Which, looking back on it now, makes a sort of sense. I mean, when you think about it, you can see how this could have happened. The older monks, all the senior monks, certainly all the obedientiaries, would have been keeping the long watch: they would still have been in church, praying. The community that marched with me across the garth that night would have been young, novices and postulants for the most part—children really,
children unprepared for such a thing, children taught daily to do as they’d been told, to follow orders, not give them.