The Oblate's Confession

by William Peak

  For some reason Waldhere and I were being led around the village in a wagon. I knew we must have done something good because everyone was standing outside their houses clapping and cheering, but I had no idea what it was that we had done. And Eanflæd was there. Eanflæd and another girl were dancing in front of us, dancing in front of us as the great wagon (I now recognize it as the one we found upon the mountain) made its ponderous way around the village. The two girls had filled their aprons with cherry blossoms and, as they danced, they tossed great handfuls of these into the air. When Eanflæd threw to her right, a dark cloud burst suddenly into bright pink snow; but when she threw to her left, across her body, it was as if she were sowing seed.

  After we had made several circuits of the village, the wagon turned away from the houses and entered the abbey path. The crowd moved with the wagon, sidestepping to avoid the oxen (which, rather alarmingly, I now saw to be without a driver). The people lined the path ahead of us, clapping and shouting. Several held sheaves of wheat and these they raised above their heads as the wagon drew even with them, the sheaves golden against a pale blue sky. Eanflæd and the other girl continued to dance. Once, apparently as part of the rite, the two girls turned and bowed to us. When they straightened up again our eyes met. The girl I did not know blushed and looked away, but Eanflæd's gaze held mine for a moment, communicated something. Then she too looked away.

  It was now, as we began to approach the monastery, that I grew apprehensive. What was going on? What was everyone so excited about? Why were they hurrying us up toward the abbey? What were they going to do to us up there? I looked over at Waldhere, hoping he might have an answer to these questions, and was surprised to discover it wasn’t Waldhere who rode beside me but someone else, some oblate I had never seen before. Whoever this boy was, he now looked at me, smiled. He had no teeth.

  As if the world itself were shocked by this discovery, everything became immediately quiet, still, the villagers staring wide-eyed up at the monastery. I looked up that way and at first could find nothing to explain their wonder, the abbey sitting as it always had, silent and serene atop its terrace. Still, trying to think about it from their point of view, I could see how the place might seem a

  little intimidating, at least to a villager. And it was then, as if thoughts could call themselves into being, that before my eyes the abbey changed, grew overlarge, charged with menace, and in an instant the place I had known all my life stood revealed as something else, a place I did not want to go to, an assemblage of buildings that stared down at me from its perch like something alive, something awful, an animal biding its time, licking its chops.

  Our wagon continued its slow progress up the path. One by one, the villagers began to turn, fall away. They looked embarrassed as they did so, shamefaced, as if they only now realized what they were doing, sheaves hanging forgotten at their sides. Eanflæd and her friend had stopped dancing. They walked solemnly before us now, heads down, apparently afraid even to look at what sat upon the terrace. Somehow I knew that they too would soon step aside, and then nothing would stand between us and the abbey.

  The urge to say something, call a halt, demand an explanation, rose in my throat like something hot and cathartic. But when I tried to speak, nothing came out. It was as if a hand had been clamped over my mouth, stopping all my words. I looked over at the oblate who rode beside me, pointed at my mouth. He nodded, placed a similar finger to his lips: Yes, we must be silent.

  I shook my head, desperate to be understood, trying as hard as I could to force the words through whatever it was that blocked them. And something gave. Though there was no sound, something gave, and far off in the distance I thought I heard something, something vague and tremulous, an echo, a distant reminder of what it felt like to speak, emote, proclaim. Again I pushed, excited now, heaving the thought before me like a battering ram, forcing it up and outward. And this time something definitely gave, something came out. But where I had expected a roar, a great torrent of exclamation and outrage, I heard instead only a small creaking sound, a voice so muffled and weak as to be scarcely recognizable as my own.

  What?

  I blinked.

  Light.

  There was light. Ceiling beams lay their long familiar lengths down across my world.

  I closed my eyes, turned, opened my eyes, and there in the bed next to mine lay the stupid drooling face of old Brother Willibald. How many times had his countenance—foolish, senescent, benign—welcomed me back to the land of the living, signalled an end to some terrible dream, relief from the nameless horrors of night? But this morning I found it not so comforting. This morning, even old Brother Willibald looked unreliable. Of course I tried to reassure myself, remind myself that such things were to be expected, that it was in the nature of dreams that the world should be turned upside-down, the familiar seem alien, the alien familiar, right, commonplace. But the dream would not be so easily vanquished. The visions it had given birth to kept rising before me, clouding my mind, disturbing the natural peace of morning—that strange procession up the abbey path, my growing sense of apprehension, the feeling that I was being delivered into the clutches of something from which there would be no escape, and then the image of the monastery itself, my home, the place I had always run to when frightened, turned suddenly strange and forbidding, sentient, grotesque. Again I looked at Brother Willibald, again I tried to see him as I had seen him so many times before, old, friendly, harmless. But the vision would not hold. For the first time in my life I saw something unnatural in the life that lay on the bed before me, something cruel and inflexible, mindless and unrelenting. I swallowed. I swallowed and the muscles of my throat (against which I had struggled in my sleep) constricted painfully like the hinges of a door long since rusted into place.

  XXXIV

  As it happened, the sore throat lasted for the better part of a week. Brother Theodore was infirmarian in those days and a good one, but he could do nothing for me. When I swallowed it hurt, and when it hurt I saw again the monastery as I had seen it in my dream—smug and abiding, ravenous and self-assured. Because of my illness, I was excused from work which was probably not a good idea as it gave me time to dwell on my thoughts. Out of a vague sense of duty to my community and the expectations it held for me, I remained faithful to my devotions, though my silence was filled now not with prayer but visions. Again and again I rode that wagon up the abbey path, again and again I heard the crowd’s roar, felt my pulse grow rapid, saw Eanflæd’s look, the abbey waiting. It is in the nature of dreams that important aspects of their

  character should be revealed only upon reflection; over time we realize that the woman we spoke with was not a stranger but our mother, the ditch we tried to step across not a ditch but the Meolch. And so it was with this dream. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that there had been something vaguely (and uncomfortably) familiar about the whole thing, a sense, almost a foreboding, that I had experienced it all before, been carried up the abbey path like that once before. Still, try as I might, I could not dredge up any memory of such an incident. Indeed, even as I became more and more convinced that a memory like this must exist, the very strength of that conviction seemed to drive any recollection of it from my mind. And then, just when I had given up all hope, had in fact turned in disgust from the problem, told myself I didn’t care, didn’t even want to know, the answer itself rose before me like an artifact of my capitulation. It wasn’t me, it was Father. It wasn’t my memory I’d dreamt that night but Father Hermit’s.

  As I remember it, Father told the story as a sort of cautionary

  tale, the sort of history one recounts to warn a child of the dangers of indiscriminate contact with other races; and thus I have always associated it with the time I caught him conversing with a shepherd in the tongue (harsh and vulgar) of the Cumbrogi. But now that I come to write the whole thing down, record it for the community, I realize such a conclusion doesn’t bear scrutiny. The Cumbrogi are, after all�
��after a fashion—Christian, yet Father’s story was a tale of pagan depravity, of the depths to which a life without Christ will lead a man. So I wonder now if it wasn’t Stuf, if, perhaps, my introduction to Stuf might not have been the occasion for Father’s revelation. The timing’s right, and, though it seems hard to believe now, I suppose I might once have been drawn to the charcoal-maker, might once have found something to admire in a man who dressed so differently, spoke so wildly, held such a dim view of those his betters were required to respect. And, if that is the case, if such an infatuation did occur and was disclosed, then what better reason could Father have had for telling me about the old ones?

  As is typical of dreams, the story that gave birth to mine would seem, at first glance, to bear little resemblance to its offspring. But it was, I believe, not so much the story Father told but the feeling that story evoked in me, the fear I must have felt as it developed, as I realized what I was hearing, what was about to happen, that inspired my nightmare, placed me in that wagon, sent it riding up the abbey path. But I get ahead of myself. First, if you are to understand any of this—Father’s tale, my dream’s connection to it—you must understand a little of the history of our valley. As unlikely as it seems now, it has not always been ours. There was a time when the Cumbrogi held this place, worked these fields, were baptized (after a fashion) in our stream. Then (thanks be to God) our people began their march from east to west across Northumbria, always driving the Cumbrogi before them, winning battle after glorious battle, until, finally, we pushed what remained of that people beyond the last of the mountains, pushed them until they held but a tiny remnant of their original land, testimony to the error of their faith and our Lord’s contempt for such error. But here, as it so

  often does, history throws up a stumbling block for those foolish enough to trip over it. For it must be admitted that at this time our people were as yet unsaved. Paulinus had not then begun his ministry, and the beliefs we now ascribe to the hill people were, in those days, held by one and all. And so the fool, thinking himself the wiser for it, points out that a people who called themselves Christians had been defeated by one that openly practiced idolatry, leaping from this to the conclusion that the pagan gods must be the more powerful. Thus the unwary are caught in their own snares. For the fool cannot see (as God does) that, eventually, it would be our people who would show themselves open to the teachings of the missionary saint from Rome, while the Cumbrogi (to their unending shame) would turn their backs upon him, cling stubbornly to the Northern way long since proven unorthodox and wrong.

  But no wave washes all before it; inevitably there will be a shell here, a stone there, left turned perhaps, up-ended, but otherwise in more or less the same position it held before. And so it is with

  people. We may have swept the Cumbrogi before us like a great tide but, here and there, individuals would have washed up in more or less the same place they occupied before. Which explains, we may assume, how Gwynedd and his mother—Cumbrogi both—came to rest in their native village (the one we now properly call Wilfrid’s) even after the greater part of its inhabitants had been driven across Modra nect. Perhaps Gwynedd’s father was killed in the fighting, perhaps he turned and ran—I do not know. All I know for sure is that, whatever became of the man, he left a wife and child behind him, left them to the mercy of those he must surely have thought incapable of mercy. But in this, of course, he was wrong. Our people (unlike his) do not slay the innocent; and so Gwynedd and his mother were permitted to live, kept as servants by a family that, even to this day, claims descendants among those that dwell in our village.

  Now we of course cannot know what it is like to live as slaves—our people never having been reduced to such a state— but surely it cannot be pleasant. One thing I remember well from

  Father’s story is the complaint he made of the changes effected in his mother by servitude. Apparently the woman (whose name, alas, I no longer recall) had been quite a beauty. Indeed, in the way of children, Gwynedd had believed her the most beautiful woman in the world. But in the course of her captivity the light went out of her beauty, her once supple skin become coarse and gray, her hair thin and tending, like a man’s, toward baldness. I remember this because it was part of Father’s story to remark upon the change that came over her when they began to feed her again, how she blossomed, seemed to regain her youth, became again the mother he had known, the beauty he had adored. Up until that time, Gwynedd and his mother had subsisted almost entirely upon what food they could pilfer from that set aside for their master’s beasts. But suddenly, and without explanation, their status had changed. They were fed now upon sweetmeats and pie, butter and bread. Where before they had dwelt among the family’s ducks in a lean-to affixed to the house, now they were permitted to move inside, take their meals with their master, sleep on the floor by his bed. Father told me he grew half a head taller during this period and that his mother’s hair came back in, though he believed it a different shade after that, darker and less fine.

  I have often wondered what it would be like to have something like that returned to you, to think your mother’s beauty lost, that you would never see it again, and then to have her restored to you, to have her smile at you as she had before, laugh and share food with you as if nothing had happened, as if the two of you would live like this forever: healthy, happy, content and secure. Such a transformation must have seemed a miracle to Father, perhaps seemed so still, for I remember his eyes grew damp as he told me of it, his cheeks shiny with tears, glistening. I don’t remember saying anything. I don’t remember reaching out, touching his arm. I don’t think I did anything at all. Doubtless I envied him. Doubtless I sat there and, fool that I was, thought him a fool for crying, thought him a fool for not appreciating what he had, the memories of his mother he as yet possessed, the time he had spent with her.

  The day began, as Father remembered it, with a sudden and unexpected noise, an explosion of sound so loud and abrupt it brought him immediately awake, drew him so completely from sleep that, for the remainder of the day, Father said he experienced a sort of displacement, as if, in a sense, he slept still, lay as yet curled upon his bed, all that happened around him taking place as in a dream, a dream so vast and incomprehensible as to be someone else’s, a dream dreamt not by him, the little boy Gwynedd, but by someone else, someone large and not altogether sane. When I asked about it, Father said he wasn’t sure what had caused the noise—drums and cymbals certainly, a tambourine he thought, maybe a pipe or two, but what he was sure of, could still in a sense hear, was that, whatever the instruments employed, they had all been played at once, without regard for harmony or tone, as if every savage within two-days’ walk of that place had been given a drum and told to beat on it as loudly as he could. And he had. And that, accompanying this cacophony, as if any noise so loud and fierce must generate its own heat, there had been a smell, the smell of something hot and disagreeable, as though the heathen had taken to burning not incense but hair, great long hanks of human hair.

  And where was Gwynedd’s mother during all of this? What did she do to allay her son’s fears, soothe what must have been a growing sense of alarm? We do not know. Interestingly, Gwynedd remembered almost nothing of his mother from that day. Perhaps she had already been taken from him. Or, more likely, perhaps she kept him occupied with some childish game, pretended all was as it should be, the little boy becoming involved in her conceit, absorbed, lost, until, finally, he attends to her not at all. By such crafts mothers have always prevented the formation of unpleasant memories, in the process denying their children—it must be said—the consolation of a true good-bye.

  What Gwynedd did remember was that night, what happened that evening after the sun went down. They had given him something to play with, a toy of some sort, something that belonged to the children of his master, and it was this, he told me, that first

  alerted him to the change in atmosphere, the feeling that somehow things were different, that maybe t
here was something about this day (the smell, the heat, the sound) that made people nice, friendly, for he had never been allowed to play with the toy before, had indeed been struck for so much as looking at it, and now, here, the selfsame woman who had dealt that blow gave it to him, leaned down and offered him the toy as if she were his mother herself, her hand not striking but stroking his head, her voice not raised in anger but soft, caressing, like a mother’s, like his own dear mother’s.

  And then, just as the child Gwynedd lowers his defenses, begins to play with his toy, grow comfortable with the woman who has given it to him, perhaps even a little enamored of her, a familiar character enters our story to sound an alarm. For it is Folian, the same Folian who will someday found our monastery, become its first abbot, that now changes the tenor of the day, gives the first indication of the horrors it must contain, returns the boy, in an instant, from a growing sense of confidence to one of utter bewilderment. For why should the holy man cry out like that? Why should the stranger, the one everyone laughs at but his mother, the one his mother loves, respects, reveres, why should he cry out like that, why should his voice rise suddenly like that above the din, reach into this room as the smell does to distract him from his pleasure, draw his eyes from the toy to the women at the door, the women who, he now realizes, stand not like mothers but guards, their glances, however maternal, however caring, thrown at him over their shoulders, back at him over their shoulders, their real concern clearly elsewhere, outside, beyond this room, where whatever is happening is happening (the noise and confusion), outside where the holy man has just yelled? And why should he cry out like that? Why should the holy man yell No! like that?

  And in an instant it is gone, the sense of security so carefully developed, so assiduously maintained, it is gone, vanished, the toy gone limp and unimportant in his hands, the women at the door no longer women but harpies, harridans, a troupe of witches set to guard him, keep him, who knew, fatten him for the fire, the