Curious Affairs

by Mary Jane Myers

  He heard the clattering of horses’ hooves. Peering down over the meadow, he watched the butchery unfold. He could not move his limbs and his face turned ashen. Sibari whined but never barked.

  The soldiers remounted their steeds and urged them even further up the road, to within thirty meters of the lad and his dog. Arsenius could hear the snorting of the horses and the clinking of metal. He fainted and lay inert on the rock shelf of the crag. Sibari nudged the youth’s arm with his wet nose, and whimpered.

  The horsemen conferred together. They saw no further signs of life. A dense rosy fog blanketed the crest of the mountain. They turned their horses around and spurred them back down the road.

  The angelic hosts of the firmament, seeing the slaughter, dispatched two messengers to earth. One angel appeared to Arsenius as he lay unconscious on the rock. The angel sang:

  Arise! Make thy way to the blessed monk.

  Find the elixir from shellflow’rs distilled.

  Race to the field littered with heads and trunks.

  Our Lord will heal the carnage on the hill.

  Simultaneously a second angel appeared to Brother Elias as he lay sleeping in his cell. The angel sang:

  Go hotfoot and fetch the shell flow’r balm.

  Fly posthaste to the field of shepherds slain.

  Then chant in joyous tones King David’s Psalms.

  Sprinkle the brew. The dead will rise again.

  Arsenius opened his eyes to find Sibari hovering over him. He smelled the doggy breath, and felt the wet tongue licking his face. He patted the dog’s head. He dared not look directly at the meadow. What had he dreamt, something about Brother Elias, about the shellflowers, but what exactly? He could not recollect. But he knew he must go to the friar. He scanned the horizon. No horses, no armed men, as far as he could see. He leapt up, and sprinted up the steep road to the monk’s cell, the dog bounding alongside.

  Brother Elias startled awake. He had dreamt again, something about his elixir, ah, daily he had asked God to reveal its healing qualities, and he dreamt often about it. He removed his hair shirt and laid it on the pallet. He pulled on his brown woolen robe that hung on a peg on the wall. As was his daily habit, he knelt to pray, crossing himself and murmuring over and over, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me a sinner.” He fell into his usual meditative trance. But something different happened this morning. After a time, he wasn’t sure how long, a commotion interrupted his reverie. Disoriented at first, he finally located the source of the noise, the thuds of a fist pounding on the oak door, and a boy’s voice yelling just outside.

  “Holy friar, open up. They’re dead, they’re dead.”

  The monk pulled open the heavy, creaking door. Outside stood the youth, wet with perspiration and gasping for air, and beside him his panting dog.

  “Blessings to you, child, come in, welcome.”

  As the boy and his dog crossed the threshold, the monk embraced Arsenius, and squatted to shake Sibari’s paw.

  “What is it, my son?”

  “Good friar, listen to me. They came and killed my friends, they’re dead, they’re dead.”

  “Sit down. Close your eyes, breathe deeply, be quiet, and pray for a moment. Then talk, but say each word slowly. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  The two sat on the stone floor facing each other. The youth spilled out the story of the massacre, in fits and starts, in a torrent of staccato phrases, the monk interjecting “ah’s.”

  Brother Elias closed his eyes and thought back to his dream. An angel had spoken, in sacred rhyme. And now, the words hovered before him, as if engraved on a scroll, black fire on white fire. How could this be? Nowhere did God vouchsafe to mortals the power to raise the dead to life. Yet the angel commanded him to act, and promised this miracle.

  “Come with me, my child. We must not lose any more time.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the field where your comrades lie fallen.”

  “To say the blessings for the dead?”

  “No. To raise them up. For the Lord, Blessed Be He, has bestowed on us the favor of a potion that can resurrect the dead.”

  He took an iron key from a peg, and motioned for the youth to join him. They hurried to the laboratory. Sibari padded behind, sniffing the damp grass. The thick mist swirled around them. The youngest monk was just tolling the bell for matins, and the fog muffled its clanging. Woolen robes swished against stone steps as the friars filed into the church.

  Brother Elias put the key into the lock of the colossal bronze door of the laboratory, which opened easily on its oiled hinges. He went over to the chest and took down the bottles from the top shelf. He handed one of them to Arsenius.

  They trekked carefully down the road, as the incline was steep, suited to the hooves of sheep and goats rather than the feet of humans. Sibari trotted behind, circling in wide loops as he snuffled in the grasses and scratched at the holes dug by ground squirrels.

  After an hour they rounded a bend. Sunlight flooded the meadow. They saw the jumble of bodies and heads, and the red gore oozing and darkening on the ground. They gagged on the stench. Their line of vision bobbed and weaved, as if they stood in the prow of a ship on the Adriatic hurled about by a sirocco cyclone. An instant later, their legs buckled, and they swooned and passed out. The bottles rolled away and came to rest against a hummock. Sibari chased his tail and bayed.

  The angels observed the scene from on high, and released a strong scent of lavender, bergamot orange blossoms and musk directly over them. Sibari sniffed the air and then sneezed. The man and the boy coughed, then stretched, and sat up. A gauzy mauve haze shimmered over the meadow. Sibari sat down on his haunches and stayed still, his ears cocked.

  The two retrieved the bottles. They walked into the middle of the field among the bodies. They chanted together the poem of the psalmist: “The Lord is my shepherd, nothing shall I want.” Brother Elias then took his bottle, uncorked it, and poured a little of the potion into his hand. With a flick of his wrist he sprinkled the liquid over the bodies nearest to him. He repeated this movement, walking around the perimeter of the heap of corpses. Arsenius followed two paces behind him. Over and over they recited: “Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forever.”

  When the monk had emptied his bottle, he gave it to Arsenius. The youth then handed the friar the second bottle and the monk sprinkled the elixir over the carcasses until all the liquid was gone. The monk and the boy walked to the edge of the meadow and sat down. After a few moments, lo, the heads were joined back to the trunks, each head to its proper trunk. The blood dried to a fine pink dust that drifted into the air and sparkled in the sunlight.

  Brother Elias sat still, a calm smile on his face. How wondrous was the Lord, and how miraculous were His ways. Arsenius sat, his mouth gaping open. He could not believe what he was seeing. He glanced at the monk. Ah, if only he could learn from this man, if he could walk in the way that this friar walked. Sibari came up to him and lay down, nuzzling his wet nose into the folds of his master’s goatskin tunic.

  Soon the fingers of the bodies twitched and the eyes opened. Indeed, they were living men. They sat up, stretching their arms over their heads. Then they stood, unsteady at first, shifting their feet from side to side and blinking in the sunlight. Their eyes adjusted. Now they were rubbing their necks and looking around, examining each other. They walked over and formed a ragged line in front of the monk and the youth.

  Elias and Arsenius stood up. Sibari sat up, occasionally yawning. Brother Elias spoke first.

  “Good morrow, my good men.”

  Now the men jabbered all at once, like chickens that cluck when handfuls of seed are strewn in the dirt of their coop.

  “Ho, good morrow, holy friar.”

  “Those cursed Mohammedans murdered me.”

  “Yea, they lopped off all our heads.”

  “My neck itches. Does yours?”

  “I do not see a scar on your neck. Is there one
on mine?”

  “But why are you here, Arsenius? You were not with us when we died.”

  Brother Elias raised hands, palms facing out, the gesture of blessing.

  “Be calm, good souls. Do not clamor, do not worry. You have imagined a horror.”

  The graybeard spoke. “But we did not imagine it.”

  A tall muscular fellow chimed in. “Revenge will be ours.”

  The shepherds shook their fists toward the sky and shouted out, a babel of voices.

  “Yea, revenge!”

  “Stay out of this. Monks are of no use in times of war.”

  “Anathema on the Mohammedans.”

  “May God strike them dead.”

  “Let their bodies be hacked to pieces!”

  “May Satan cast them into the fires of hell!”

  Brother Elias spread his arms further apart in the air, palms out in blessing.

  “No, my brothers, listen to me. Hearken to the words of the Lord.”

  He spoke barely above a whisper. They watched him. They dropped their hands and lowered their voices, although they continued to scowl and clench their fists and mutter curses. He looked straight into their eyes, one after the other, holding each man’s gaze for a quarter minute. They ceased talking and their arms dangled loose at their sides.

  Then the friar spoke slowly, enunciating each consonant and elongating each vowel.

  “My beloveds, it was only an illusion, a work of the Evil One, who envies our peaceful mountain. The Evil One casts his Evil Eye out of a jealous rage. He begets fear and hatred among men.”

  The graybeard swayed slightly, as if spellbound. He mumbled “Yea, the holy monk speaks words of truth.”

  The friar now raised his arms higher and looked up to the sky. The shepherds with one movement also shifted their eyes heavenward. They wished to see what the monk saw.

  “Our gracious Lord, Blessed Be He, has today banished the Evil One. He has restored His peace. Hallelujah. Praise God. Amen.”

  “Amen,” answered the shepherds, in unison, as if they were reciting the Mass. They looked at one another and began to smile.

  “Peace be with you,” they murmured, and they embraced, and each kissed one another upon the cheeks. Then they strode off, whistling for the dogs to fetch the sheep and goats. All as it should be, a normal autumn day.

  Arsenius entered the monastery as a disciple to Brother Elias. Both men grew in wisdom and loving-kindness. The fame of their elixirs spread far and wide, even south to Constantinople and north to the forests of the Franks.

  In the fourteenth century an anonymous master painted a fresco cycle that recounted the legend of the two blessed friars. The artist created a backdrop of cobalt blue sky punctuated with yellow stars. In the early scenes, a monk and a boy gathered mauve flowers. Carmine red blood spurted from the stumps of shepherds’ necks. In the foreground, a white dog frolicked with many white and a single black sheep. Angels with the rose cheeked faces of young boys hovered in the heavens above. In later episodes, two monks in brown robes walked in a landscape dotted with cypresses and Roman arches. The painter applied shimmering gold leaf to the haloes that surrounded the heads of the monks and the angels.

  These frescoes cover the walls and ceiling of a chapel near the apse of a Romanesque church in a monastery on the summit of a mountain in Calabria. The abbey is difficult of access and therefore not included in a typical tourist itinerary. Some stalwart travelers find their way to this remote place, and it is not unusual for a visitor to sit alone in the hush of that chapel, studying the frescoes, and meditating on their meaning.