The Oblate's Confession (54 page)

to grab something, save herself, and then the small bundle that was his mother had entered the night, his mind madly plotting the arc of her descent, making desperate calculations, contriving improbable outcomes, unlikely interventions.

There was a sound, he said, I remember him telling me that, that there was a noise. Branches breaking somewhere on the side of the mountain, the first of the trees being struck, and then, in quick succession, an awful sound, and a second. Gwynedd’s mother had come to rest.

You know, even after all these years, even though I’ve had a lifetime to grow accustomed to the idea, it’s still hard for me to believe that, child that I was, I was able to discern the link that exists between myself, that dream, and the disreputable doings of those old ones. And how much more difficult it must be for you, my brothers. Even now I can hear you complaining, reminding me (as we always do) that some things are best left unsaid, that some histories should not be recorded, are unworthy of the vellum. After all, you ask, what’s the point? How could anyone, even in a dream, connect two such things, the pagan practices of our pagan past with a wagon ride up the abbey path? Yes. Yes indeed, how could one? Yet that is exactly what my mind did. And when, at last, my poor dim faculties recognized the connection, saw in it the genesis of my dream, the bolt slid quietly home. The door closed, the bolt slid home, and any other possibility was shut off from me. The fear the little boy Gwynedd felt when he realized the women who watched over him were not his guardians but his guards, this was my fear. The terror he felt, the terror that sprang from him at that moment, all the more ferocious for having been so long repressed, this was the terror I felt—had, I now realized, felt and repressed every day of my oblate life. For years now I had told myself I wanted nothing more than to grow up, could hardly wait to assume the responsibilities, the privileges, of a solemnly-professed monk. Yet now, now that the wagon had begun its

climb, now that the monastery was within view, solemn profession an inevitable fact, I realized I knew nothing of this, had not an inkling of what it meant, where I was being led to, what I was going to do.

The end, when it came, was, I suppose like most endings, anticli-mactic. Godwin was not subsumed, bodily, into perdition; my father did not return to call me home, declare me his true and rightful heir; Eanflæd did not cover her hair, join us upon the terrace— my wishes, my dreams, remained, as I suppose they always had been, phantoms, nothing more. But Victricius did die. Oh yes, as we all know, Victricius died.

Of course people will tell you he sent everyone away, monks will tell you that, but it’s not true. He didn’t send me away. And if it really was intentional, if sin was involved, doesn’t that strike you as odd? I mean, after all, he had no real affection for the helpers Godwin had given him, the ones he’d stolen from Brother Osric. Brothers Athelstan, Rufinianus, and Tilmon were good men, hard

workers, but they were like everyone else. They didn’t think much of Victricius, did little to hide their contempt for him. So why should he have gone to such lengths to save them, protect them from complicity in his supposed act? And what is more, why hold me close? Why risk the one person I honestly believe he still cared for? I know he should not have. It shames me now to remember how badly I treated him, but I believe Brother loved me still, cared for me, in his own peculiar way, as much as Gwynedd or even Dagan. Yet it was I he asked to remain behind that day, I he asked to take my place at the bellows, to pump as he fed, the two of us once again united in work if not in mind, our shoulders and backs in thrall to the furnace.

I can still see those bellows, can still feel the pole, solid, beneath my palms: the initial opposition as I bear down upon it, the anguished sigh when, reluctantly, it gives way, submits to the pressure of my weight, whistles—at my insistence and not its own—lewdly up the thighs of old brother furnace. All of which must seem strange to those of you whose only knowledge of such a thing is the pile of rotted hides and beams that now lies alongside what we still call the furnace path. Yes. Yes, that was the bellows. But when you imagine that moth-eaten collapse animated, breathing, you must not picture a simple bladder squeezed between two sticks such as Brother Kitchens might use at his oven or a smith at his forge. No, our bellows was a far grander affair than that. It took the lives of four full-grown deer to make the bag, their skins worked by a company of virgins that then lived upon the lower Meolch. When I was given in service to Brother Victricius that bag was already many years old, yet it remained soft, supple, like glove leather, its surface still bearing, here and there, the impress of tiny teeth. Ultimately the hides had been delivered (with much ceremony) to Redestone for sewing. Until just a few years ago there was a brother yet alive at our abbey who, when the weather changed, could point at a sliver of scar on the little finger of his right hand and, with a movement of that hand, remind you of the way in which he’d pulled those stitches tight. Once his (and how many others’?) work on the hides was done—the seams

tarred, the chamber airtight—the resulting sack, looking now like a giant’s stomach trussed and bound for market, was roped in place between linden poles and slung up at the base of the furnace. The whole thing—poles, bag, spout—nearly as big as an ox.

And this, I can hear you wondering, was driven by a boy? Well, yes and no. I did operate the bellows, but I would not have been able to do so long without the assistance of an ingenious device created by Brother Victricius. The way it worked was this: Pumping a blast of air into the furnace by forcing the top pole of the bellows down against the bottom had the simultaneous effect of raising a large stone into the air, the stone being connected to the upper pole by a length of cord strung over a beam. Once raised to the level of the beam—and left to its own devices—the stone naturally enough sank back to the earth whence it had come, its weight, in turn, pulling the cord after it over the top of the beam; which, in turn, pulled the bellows back open again. And here it was that I came in, for I weighed slightly more than the stone. Grabbing the upper pole and raising my feet, my weight alone was enough to pull the bar back down to earth, once more pumping air into the furnace and, at the same time, raising the stone back up to the wooden beam. Releasing the pole of course reversed the action, stone returning to earth and bellows reopening. A complete cycle took about as long as a Pater Noster said quickly, but over time I could, with the aid of Victricius’s machine, deliver quite a bit of air into the furnace.

On that day, as I remember it, all was working as it should have been, the stone rising and falling monotonously, the furnace hissing and popping, so that, as was my habit, I had fallen into a sort of reverie, not really attending to the motions of the day but, instead, abstracted, the regular wheeze and sigh of the bellows providing a sort of rhythm for my thoughts.

And then it stopped. Suddenly and without warning, the bellows stopped, and for a moment I dangled beneath its upper pole, daydreams dissolving around me, thoughts in tatters, the bellows yawning wide-open before me, triumphant, leering, refusing to close. Then, thankfully, I noticed the hand, and was at once both

furious and chagrined. It was Victricius. Victricius had crept up on me and, as was a habit of his, a trick he sometimes played, had stayed my stroke with the strength of one of his short but sturdy arms.

I lowered my feet to the ground. Feeling useless and small, impatient and annoyed, I lowered my feet to the ground, touched earth, stood up.

Victricius glanced at me, then back up at the sky, nodded in that direction. I looked where he indicated but could see nothing, the sun still below the tops of the trees, the light as yet liquid, fragile, cold. I shook my head,
No, no I don’t think it’s Terce yet.

The furnace master’s expression did not change. He lifted a hand, pointed, not at the sky but at the stack, the stack which.... But here my mind stuttered, stopped, went, for a moment, deaf and dumb. The stack was empty. The stack which sat atop the furnace, which sat atop the furnace I’d been stoking since before sunrise, the stack which sat atop the popping, hissing, broiling furnace was empty, not a whiff of smoke issuing from its throat,

only a slow and sinuous wavering of the air around it to show it was even attached to, part of, the vent for, the hot and bulging shape beneath it.

“There’s an obstruction,” said Victricius. It was the first thing he’d said all day and—like so many things Victricius said— seemed unnecessarily brutal. “A pestilence is coming,” he’d told the community, and so it had, and half the community had died. And now he said there was an obstruction and, by saying it, seemed to make it so, gave the situation all the gravity and alarm he had taught me to associate with the word
obstruction.
Yet even as I thought this, even as I felt myself annoyed with the furnace master, irritated, another part of me was secretly pleased with Victricius, glad to have him with me. For if anyone could deal with a problem like this, if anyone knew how to face down such a danger, defeat it, it was the furnace master. I looked at him. As a child looks to its mother when in danger, I looked at Victricius and, in my heart, I drew near.

I wondered what he would do. This had never happened

before. He had talked about it of course, warned of such things, had even told me what must be done in the event of an obstruction, that the blast must be stopped, the furnace dismantled, the blockage, whatever it was, cleared; but I wondered if he would do that. Now that the crops were in the ground, Father Abbot was anxious again about his iron, had ordered Victricius to work unceasingly till he had made up all that had been lost to the Mercians in their raid. If Brother stopped now, all our charcoal would have been burned for naught, all the limestone ruined, to say nothing of the time required to rebuild the furnace, reestablish a proper charge. Who knew what Godwin would say—Godwin who knew nothing of iron-making yet spoke as though he knew all?

Victricius didn’t say anything. With one arm he forced me away from the bellows. Never taking his eyes off the stack, stepping between me and the furnace, he forced me firmly but not unkindly away from the bellows, shepherded me across the yard, moved me back down toward the path. When we reached the first of the trees, felt the crunch of pine needles underfoot, he stopped, began to speak, his back still toward me, arms spread wide, eyes upon the furnace. “I want you to go to the abbot,” he said. “Go to Father Abbot, Brother Maban, tell them what’s happened.”

I was instantly disappointed. In the way of boys, I went from being terrified at the prospect of something happening to the furnace to being disappointed by the idea that, should something happen, I would miss it. “He isn’t going to like this,” I said, stalling for time, pointing out the obvious. “He isn’t going to like it if you stop.”

The back of Victricius’s head moved. “It won’t go out for a while. Hurry and we’ll let him decide.”

“But...”

“Go! Now! Run!”

And I was off and running, the smell of the river in my nostrils, trees flying by, the first broken beams of sunlight splintering the forest before me. Victricius had never yelled at me like that before. Truth be told, Victricius had never even raised his voice to me before. But, surprisingly, I wasn’t angry with him. Indeed, as I

ran along, I realized that for the first time in my life I was rather proud of my master, proud of the forcefulness with which he had spoken to me, sent me on this errand, proud of the importance it gave what I did, the speed with which I ran, the breathlessness with which I would deliver my message, wait upon Father’s answer. I could see it all quite clearly, Chapter, the brothers sitting along the walls, heads turned, gaping, Prior Maban demanding an explanation, Father Abbot snorting, looking confused, standing on ceremony. And it would all be because of me. I would spill headlong through the door, throw myself on the ground before them, shout out my business, disrupt everything!