The Oblate's Confession

by William Peak

  Of course in those days everyone knew how Brother Ælfhelm had come by his songs because of the chestnut. Despite what the Rule says about possessions, Brother was allowed to—in a sense—own the thing (certainly it was considered his), wearing it openly on a thong around his neck. Father Dagan said this was permissible because the chestnut served as a reminder both to Ælfhelm and the community of God’s power, and that its value, therefore, was essentially spiritual and not material. Lest some future generation think such a judgment specious, I will give a brief account of the story here.

  Before he became a monk, Brother Ælfhelm had lived as a swineherd in a part of Bernicia that was then otherwise uninhabited. The moon came and went, years came and went, but Ælfhelm hardly ever saw another soul. Then, one day, a snowstorm drove a band of lonely men to his hut. Now Ælfhelm was not a little afraid when he saw these men for they carried great shields and battle-axes. But the swineherd was not so far removed from civilization that he had not heard of the new faith, and— mindful he should “show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares....”—he suffered them to enter, offering them what food and comfort he could.

  After a while, the men—warmed by drink and Ælfhelm’s fire— begged a favor of the swineherd. It was, they explained, a custom among their people to pass a brooch belonging to their host as they sang their drinking songs, whichsoever man held the brooch being the one whose turn it was to sing. Now at this news Ælfhelm was greatly affrighted, for he was a poor man, his cloak held in place by a simple knot: he did not own a brooch. Still, his guests insisted he give them something; so, fearful lest they hurt him, he picked a large unblemished chestnut from the stores he kept for his animals and let them use that.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, that chestnut made its way around the fire, each man taking his turn, singing his songs, then passing it on to the next with all the honor due a great jewel. Eventually the chestnut reached the man next to Ælfhelm, and it was then that the poor swineherd realized that he too would be expected to sing, that, indeed, this was likely the purpose of his guests’ strange custom, for it assured their host the honor of the last song. But Ælfhelm did not want to sing. He was terrified of singing. The swineherd, as the saying goes, “had a mouth full of teeth,” and his guests had been drinking. Who knew what offense they might take when they heard his ill-natured voice, his rough country songs?

  Still, there was little he could do. Even as he thought these thoughts, the man next to him brought his lay to an eloquent inventive close. Toasts were drunk, compliments paid, more wood placed upon the fire; and then, quite simply, like someone passing a piece of bread, the man next to Ælfhelm handed him the chestnut. As he stood to sing, the poor swineherd offered up a silent plea that the new God might save him, give him a song that would please these men, keep them from killing him. Then, having no idea what would come out of his mouth, Ælfhelm began to sing:

  Great is the Earth,

  And He Who made it.

  Great the Sky,

  Great the Sea.

  The Night rolls back,

  Day is revealed,

  And all is as it should be,

  All is as it should be,

  Should be, should be.

  All is as it should be—

  That is my song,

  The song of the Earth,

  The dream of the Sky.

  Of course the rest of the story is well known. The men, as it happened, belonged to Bishop Wilfrid. They were so impressed with Ælfhelm’s song, they presented him to their lord, who, in turn, had the swineherd placed at Redestone that his poetry might please the community and convince the ignorant. For there was no doubt that Ælfhelm’s songs were miraculous. The brother himself admitted as much. Father Prior asked him to sing for us once, and, afterward, he told us the story of the chestnut and the gift it symbolized. His songs, he said, always arrived without warning or effort. He would be washing or weeding or performing some other perfectly ordinary task when, suddenly, he would realize he had been repeating some phrase under his breath, something entirely new, something which, even as he repeated it, even as it assumed the rhythms of his work, would, apparently of its own accord, give birth to still more phrases, the phrases assembling themselves into lines and verses, until, before he knew it, before his very eyes, a song had appeared. It was always like that, he said, his songs arriving when he least expected them. It was as if God wanted to make it perfectly clear they were a gift.

  “Don’t you bother him.”

  A shiver ran down my spine. Was Tatwine speaking of Ælfhelm?

  “When he prays I mean,” said Brother, eyes studying the pool. “You leave the hermit alone. He has better things to do than worry about some boy.”

  I assumed custody of the eyes. It wasn’t fair for Tatwine to talk that way. I never bothered anyone.

  For a while we sat in silence. Then, quite unexpectedly, Tatwine said, “He could have stopped it you know. The pestilence I mean. He could have stopped it if, you know, if Ælfhelm had reached him in time.” Brother glanced at the far bank of the pool and I guessed this was where the body had been found. He looked back at me. “You’ll ask him to pray for me, won’t you? I mean, he should pray for everyone of course but, whenever you think of it, a little prayer for me?”

  I looked at Brother and nodded. No one had ever wanted anything from me before.

  Tatwine regarded me for a moment longer, then he looked back at the place Ælfhelm had made holy. “I first noticed it about a month ago,” he said.

  The spring?

  Tatwine nodded at a small sapling and held his hand out, palm-down. “It was only about this high then.” He looked at me. “It’s a chestnut,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to the thong.”

  We didn’t stop for Sext but climbed on, singing as we went.

  After a while the air grew cold and dark and—the overhanging wood notwithstanding—you could tell that the day had become cloudy. A fine mist began to fall and then, rather abruptly, Tatwine stopped. When I caught up with him, I saw that we had happened upon someone’s camp—one or two broken pots, the remains of a shelter, and, hanging from a pole by a small stream, a tattered piece of cloth, black markings on a white field. Despite the mist, the fire was still smoking. Someone had left this place in a hurry. Had they heard us?

  All the noise we’d made as we’d climbed came suddenly clanking and clattering back to me.

  How could they not have heard us?

  And if that were true, didn’t it mean they must still be nearby, that, perhaps even now, they watched, readied their leap?

  I leapt, and then realized it had just been Tatwine turning around to say something.

  Brother seemed distracted. He made a show of bringing a finger to his lips.

  What?!

  He indicated the stream with his chin and I froze. There was someone there, someone sitting by the stream!

  I looked back at Tatwine wanting reassurance, some reason for hope, but Brother continued to stare grimly at the figure by the stream.

  Carefully—fearful lest the turning of my head make a noise—I looked back that way. The man appeared to be asleep—eyes closed, head forward, hands resting in his lap—but I knew this could just be a trick. And I wondered if that was it, if the men who had made this camp—Cumbrogi, beggars, what-have-you—if they might not have left this ancient as bait, the perfect bait for religious sworn to help such creatures—the poor, the old, the halt and blind. And there was something about his head I didn’t like either, something wrong and, at the same time, vaguely—perhaps even disturbingly—familiar.

  And it was then that I noticed the stubble and a great sense of relief washed over me: The man wasn’t bald, just poorly shaved!

  This was our hermit—our hermit in need of a razor, but our hermit nonetheless!

  I looked over at Tatwine and—proud of myself now, secure, one adult speaking to another of a child—I raised my hands and placed them palm
-to-palm against my ear, Asleep?

  Tatwine’s hands rose in a similar gesture but stopped before his face,Praying. Then a single finger broke free to tap, once more, his lips.

  We unpacked the loaves and tabula and placed them in neat piles by the fire. Then we sat and waited for the hermit to finish his prayers.

  He prayed for a long time. Watching him, I found myself wondering about hermits, wondering what their prayer might be like, my speculations growing vague, indefinite, as the waiting extended and I grew drowsy, the hermit’s figure slowly merging with its surroundings, becoming first a pot, round and gray, then a stump, an old gray stump sitting by an old gray stream.

  When I woke up, the hermit and Brother Tatwine were standing by the fire, talking quietly. It had stopped raining and I was cold and tired. I wondered when we would eat.

  “It won’t take that long, really.”

  “Father, look at your fire. It’s going to take some time to get that going again. Maybe if the boy hadn’t dawdled so....”

  The hermit glanced over in my direction. He was taller than I had expected. And dirtier. His woolens looked as if he had slept on the ground.

  “But a welcome, a proper welcome. Even the Rule requires as much.”

  Brother Tatwine shook his head. “Forgive me, Father, we can’t. If we’re to make it back before dark, we must leave now.”

  I stood up, liking the idea of making it back before dark.

  The hermit noticed me move and a row of teeth appeared in his ratty, unkempt beard. He looked back at Tatwine.

  Tatwine held his hands out. “Besides,” he said, “there’ll be plenty of time next time. He’s so slow, he’ll have to spend the night.”

  Spend the night!

  But an elder had spoken, a pronouncement been made: to question it now would only provoke a charge of pride, possibly even a mention at Faults. I said nothing. Tatwine handed me my now-empty scrip, we knelt before the hermit, received his blessing, and then we left. I remember, as we hurried off, he called after us. “Pray for me,” he yelled. Pray for me, as though we were the holy men and he some farmer we’d passed in a field.

  Climbing down Modra nect was easier than climbing up. Brother Tatwine called out to me regularly, apprising me of certain landmarks, ordering me to pay attention to the turns, to beware of false paths, but my mind was on the hermit. He hadn’t been what I had expected. Far from it. Despite Father Prior’s warning, perhaps even because of it, I had been expecting someone special. I had (it seemed silly now) pictured a man dressed all in white, a figure out of Scripture who would welcome us with milk and honey, speak differently from other men, more brightly, more gaily, perhaps even laugh aloud. Why there had even been a part of me that had hoped—being special himself—the hermit might recognize something special in me, a kindred spirit perhaps, one with whom his own might correspond.

  But of course he hadn’t. And so I decided Father must have been right, that this man was no different from any other. Indeed, now that I thought about it, I wondered if Prior Dagan might have been trying to tell me something more, if, possibly, he had wished to warn me that this Gwynedd, this reputed holy man, was not only not special, he was also not particularly nice, that, in point of fact, he might be mean, someone like Baldwin, a mean man who did not like children. Which, in turn, got me to thinking about the other thing, the thing I’d been trying so hard to forget, that soon— not too soon, but soon enough: seven days—I was going to have to go back up there, I was going to have to go back up there and stay with him, stay with this man Father might have been trying to warn me about, stay through the night (in the wood!) with this man who did not look special, did not even look like a monk, this man who, truth be told, looked like nothing so much as a beggar, one of the evil thieving beggars.

  By the time we recrossed Wilfrid’s bridge, the sun was down and Redestone sat quiet and dark beneath her stars. Prior Dagan met us at the kitchen gate, signing to us to keep our voices down while whispering rather loudly himself. We had missed collation but Father had set aside cold soup and bread for us. I remember he hugged me, though he wasn’t supposed to, and listened while I told him and Tatwine about our day. After a while I grew sleepy. It was nice to be home.

  X

  The dream is always the same, I climb and I climb but, no matter how high I go, how desperate I become, I never can find the hermit. Later, when I awaken, the reason for this will become clear: the mountain I’ve been climbing isn’t Modra nect; it’s some other mountain, like Modra nect but not like it too. On at least one occasion it wasn't even a true mountain, just an unending series of hills. Nevertheless, and despite the obvious incongruities, I always resolutely climb on, certain only of my uncertainty, that things are not right, that these landmarks, while familiar, are, in some fundamental way, wrong: a spring at the top of a cliff instead of the bottom, a valley where the path was meant to rise. Once I even sought the wrong hermit. I remember how strange I felt upon waking to realize that, instead of Father Gwynedd, I had been sent after a Father Spoor. An interesting name when you think about it, as if I had searched after searching itself—the art of searching, its methods and tools.

  My first trip up Modra nect by myself must have been very much like my dream. I must have been exceedingly afraid, exceedingly unsure of myself. No doubt I thought I was lost again and again. But I cannot swear to this, for I have no memory of that first climb. Indeed, nowadays, I cannot even imagine what it would be like to not know my way up that path—its bends and turns, its slopes and level places, having long since been laid down as surely in my mind as they are upon the mountain itself. Nevertheless, as the scar left by a wound otherwise long forgotten may still, on occasion, pucker and ache, so the mark left by that first trip still sometimes troubles my sleep and I awaken in panic, bedding wrapped round me like winding sheets, heart pounding in my ears, arms flailing about like those of a man trying to swim to safety. After a moment or two, sheepishly, I remember where I am, who I am, that I have no reason to fear losing my way on the mountain anymore, that, indeed, I have no reason to go there anymore. I lie back on my bed as relieved as I was when, on that first trip, I finally did reach the hermit’s camp. For that I do recall, the giddy sense of accomplishment, the pride, the silly joy. “Father!” I remember shouting, “Father, I am here!”

  The hermit looked up, all color drained from his face.

  I stood where I was, hand still hanging stupidly in the air. I had done just what I had been told not to do, I had disturbed the holy man at his prayers.

  For a moment or two the hermit just looked at me. Then, slowly, like a man getting up from a long sleep, he unwrapped himself from his sitting position and, awkwardly, climbed to his feet.

  I smiled a little, but thought better of waving again. Should I prostrate myself? Did people do that sort of thing on a mountain?

  The hermit took a few hesitant steps toward me, then stopped at a distance too respectful for the kiss of peace.

  Again I smiled. Should I bow? No one had told me anything.

  The hermit did not smile. He stood very still and very straight, looking at me as if he had forgotten something.

  I was about to whisper, Winwæd, I am your servant Winwæd, when, cautiously, like a man lowering a fragile weight to the ground, the hermit lowered himself to his knees, looked at me one last time as if reconsidering, then lay all the way down, face-down on the ground before me, that great unshaven head of his coming to rest about a hand's width from my foot.

  XI

  That was a hard spring for Redestone. With the abbey’s stores depleted after the bad harvest and our ranks reduced by pestilence, only one growing season stood between the community and famine. Nighttime offices were curtailed and Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers sung in the field. When we worked, we worked like men asleep, planting and pruning by memory. When we sang, we sang like old men crying. Hunger made us short-tempered. I remember on one occasion we even heard the village women quarreling down by the river.
We were all surprised by this for we did not hear women often. Sometimes they sang at their wash, but if the sound of the singing reached us, one of their men was always sent to quiet them. But not this time. No one shook their heads this time, no one looked embarrassed, no one did anything.

  We just worked. Come rain or shine, cold weather or hot, we worked, we planted. We had no choice, this growing season must succeed.

  Strangely enough, despite all the hardship, I have fond memories of that spring. After only two or three trips to the hermit's camp, I grew confident of my ability to get up and down the mountain safely. Not that I didn’t still sometimes think myself lost. If a tree had fallen across the path or a portion of it been washed away in the rains, I could easily become confused. But, generally, the landmarks remained in their proper places. There was even a sort of logic to them: as Vespers followed None, so the mossy place in the trail always came after the high ridge, the cool place after the stream. You could depend on it. Indeed, I became so sure of my proficiency I began to enjoy the climb, looking forward to it, drawing it out, delighting in my ability to predict what lay around the next bend, over the following rise. The further away from Redestone I got, the better I always felt. It was as if I grew happier and healthier the higher I climbed.

  But in reality of course I did not grow healthier the higher I climbed. By the time I reached the hermit’s camp I was inevitably exhausted, the week’s work having taken its toll. After receiving my master’s blessing, I would go directly to bed, not waking again until after dark, my body stiff and sore, Father warming something by the fire. Sometimes the stiffness was so bad I couldn’t grip a spoon and the hermit would have to feed me by hand. It shames me now to remember the pride I took in this. I would look at my hands, trying to bend the fingers, and I would think about the sacrifice I was making, how I was working as hard as any adult. And of course I was working hard, we all were, but that gave me no right to look at the hermit, as I sometimes did, as if I were better than he. He too did his work, he too made his sacrifice. To be quite honest about it, I think he sometimes missed the fieldwork. I’ll never forget how sad he was when he learned old Dextra had died. He told me he had broken her to the plow.