by Ron Miller
In order to eat, she and the professor had at first tried raiding the gaunt and stony gardens, but the strange and silent people frightened Bronwyn and she was afraid of being seen and caught. She had hoped that the professor, who is so knowledgeable about botany, might recognize edible wild flora. But she discovers that plants as plants mean nothing to Wittenoom; once they are catalogued he has exhausted both his interest and his knowledge. He might recognize a plant as being of the genus Fragaria, but that the fruit it bore is popularly known as the strawberry is unknown to him. likewise, he might point to a plant and say, “There’s an Allium,” but it would mean nothing to Bronwyn who has never before seen a wild onion.
Bronwyn finds that due to her earlier experiences she has more practical knowledge of dining al fresco, as it were, than the erudite scientist, and they are able to find a few varieties of familiar berries and nuts whose discovery provide the princess with much satisfaction but are disappointing in quantity.
They even try begging but with very little success. Working against them are the grinding poverty of the people and their intense distrust of strangers. It is difficult to ask something from people who have nothing themselves. From the black looks they almost invariably received, it is apparent that the natives themselves agreed that this is an inappropriate imposition.
The privation is much harder, the princess realizes, finally, on the elderly scientist than on her. Normally gaunt to the point of emaciation, Wittenoom now looks dangerously cadaverous. His skin has grown sallow and clings loosely to his bones, like damp tissue paper. His eyes no longer sparkle behind his glasses; they merely stare unfocussed at a point about fifteen feet ahead, with neither his characteristic interest nor humor. He drags his feet mechanically, mathematically pacing off the endless muddy ditch like a pair of steel dividers.
Bronwyn has just begun to grow worried about the man when they came to yet one more village.
It is really more a cluster of shabby hovels clinging to the vast, decaying bulk of a church and monastery like ticks attaching themselves to a buffalo. The monastery is only an ancient stone cube, erected without art or particular attention to rectilinearity though it is inspired compared to the attached church, which maintains the traditional, dull Musrumic style with fastidious if unimaginative perfection. Both buildings are being allowed to be reclaimed by Nature who, no doubt, has far better use for the materials. The splayed foundations are sinking into the murky, peaty soil, throwing the structures far out of plumb; the walls are zigzagged with cracks, and all of the windows are unglazed trapezoids.
The monastery and church are occupied and operated by a few dozen aging monks, who welcom the strangers with a kind of senile, distracted hospitality. It has been so long since they’d seen anyone from outside the village that protocol is something that has to be more or less created ad lib from cobwebby and long-unused memories, -like exploring attics full of dusty, unopened trunks, or picture albums so long unopened that they are now full of only vaguely familiar strangers. Still, the old men are kind and give generously of what little they have. The princess and the professor are fed a watery vegetable soup, a smoky-flavored tea, some stale bread that would have completed its petrifaction within the hour and a cup of slightly lumpy sour milk. There are a few small, hard, bitter apples and an antique chunk of cheese sharp enough to have whittled with. Bronwyn thinks that she has never eaten finer food, a certain example of how hungry she is.
The hall to which they have been taken is a dark and cool relief from the heat and humidity outside. The room smells earthy and ancient, like a cave.
The monks have said scarcely a word since their arrival, and not a syllable since the strangers began eating, and the princess begins to fear that they are members of some order that proscribed speech. She has not realized how much she misses real conversation, to say nothing of how badly she needs information.
Her fears are without foundation, she happily discovers, when a monk she has not seen before approaches her after the meal. He is dressed, as are the others, in a heavy, coarse, black-hooded cassock that leaves only his face visible: a kindly but almost impossibly wrinkled visage that looks insubstantially soft and translucent; she unkindly but accurately compares it to a rotting pear. Although his body is hidden from view by his robe, there is ample evidence of its presence, which, judging by the domed shape of the cassock, which resembles a tent pitched in the middle of the stone-flagged floor, is corpulent at best and most likely intensely and impeccably obese.
“Welcome,” he says to his guests, once he has allowed them to finish eating, “to the Abbey of Saint Woncible. “I am Father Flatnoy, the abbot, and . . .” He looks at his guests curiously, a raised eyebrow inviting them to introduce themselves.
“My name is, um, Bronwyn,” the princess replies, not even considering using her previously despised nom de crime, “and this is my Uncle Whemner.” (Which is, in fact, Professor Wittenoom’s real first name.)
“It’s not very often we get visitors here . . .” begins the abbot, who fortunately shows no sign of recognizing the princess from her name (and who can have reasonably expected him to?).
“Not in thirty-seven years!” corrects a croaking voice from somewhere in the room.
“Yes. As I said . . .”
“Not since the sulfur water market dried up,” continues the interruptor. “Hee! hee! I believe that is a joke!”
“I’m reminded of the parable,” says another voice (it is impossible to tell which of the hooded shapes is speaking), “recorded in Musrum, chapter one hundred and twelve, verse sixty-seven. ‘A blind did hide five hundred crowns in a corner of their garden; but a neighbor, which is perceive it, did dig up and took its. The blind not finding more her money, is suspect that might be the robed, but one work for take again it? He is going find the neighbor, and told him that he came to get him a council; than he is a thousand crown with the half is hided into a sure part and I don’t know if want, if to put the remains to the same part. The neighbor is council him so and is hasten to carry back that sum, in the hope soon to draw out a thousand. But the blind having finded the money, is seized it, having called her neighbor, he told him: Gossip, the blind saw clearer than this that may have two eyes. ‘ Amen.”
“Amen,” choruses the room.
“What,” asks the first voice testily, “has that to do with anything?”
“What?”
“I have more than once,” grumbles the abbot, “wished that our order have taken a vow of silence. Will you follow me to the gardens? We can talk peacefully there.”
Bronwyn and the professor allow themselves to be led from the hall, the abbot’s enormous bulk swinging ponderously from side to side like a tugboat in a heavy swell. Bronwyn decides that the garden they find themselves in exists almost exclusively in the abbot’s imagination. A rectangle enclosed on two sides by the colonnaded monastery and church and on the remaining two sides by a high stone wall, it contains little more than gravel and a few bravely struggling weeds. With a wheeze, the huge man settles himself onto a specially reinforced rustic bench. He wipes his brow with a handkerchief. “I’m not half the man I used to be,” he says, which conjures an image in Bronwyn’s imagination of an almost cosmically vast younger abbot. “This summer weather is a terrible burden.”
“I for one,” commiserates the princess, “would hate to have to wear a heavy woolen robe on a day like this.”
“I remember all too well the halcyon days of my youth; an afternoon like this would invariably find me and my companions splashing in some refreshing pool in a nearby stream or river. ‘The pains come at horse and turn one’s self at foot,’ as Musrum wisely put it. Ah, well. It’s not often, as I mentioned a moment ago that we get strangers passing through here . . .” He glances at the princess curiously, waiting for her to respond to his unexpressed question.
Bronwyn had not thought that she would need to explain to anyone the reasons for her presence on the road, and has not prepared a plausible stor
y. She is not a talented liar.
“We are, ah, on our way to the north coast, to, ah, meet my father.”
“Your father is a sailor, I gather?”
“Why, ah, yes . . . how did you know?”
“Merely hazarding a guess, but your own costume suggested the connection. Never mind me, I’m becoming too inquisitive . . .”
Yes, you are, agrees Bronwyn.
“ . . . We turn away no one here. As Musrum Himself says, ‘So many go to the jar to spring, than at last rest there.’ Where you’re from or where you’re going is of no concern to us. Forgive my curiosity: it’s so seldom that we have visitors here, and even more seldom that they are of any education or breeding.”
“Please don’t concern yourself, there is no offense. Ask us anything you wish, I’ll be glad to answer any questions you may have.” Though the answers may be entirely fictitious.
“You are most kind, and very understanding. ‘All trees have very deal bear,’ Musrum, twelve: one hundred and eleven. I thank you. Tell me, is there any chance that you’ve been outside recently?”
“Outside?”
“Forgive me. I mean, have you been outside this region? Have you been in any towns or villages lately where there’s been any news of the outside world? I’ve gotten no direct news from the Mother Church for months, and what little that’s trickled down to us has been most distressingly disturbing. ‘The necessity don’t know the low,’ as Musrum so clearly put it.”
“I’m afraid the news is indeed bad, Father,” the princess replies. She goes on to tell him what she knows of the events recently taking place in Blavek and elsewhere in Tamlaght, how Payne Roelt is systematically looting the Church and stripping it of its influence and power. The abbot turns deathly pale as he learns of the hundreds of priests who have been put to death, and he is especially horrified at learning of the terrible fate of Bishop Harspranget.
“I can only suppose,” Bronwyn concludes, with more accuracy than tact, “that you’ve been ignored up until now because you have so little.”
“But this is distressing! What shall I do?”
Though the abbot is obviously directing his question to himself, Bronwyn takes it upon herself to offer an answer: “I think that the best thing would be to do nothing. There’s nought to be gained from drawing attention to yourself.”
“I suppose you’re right . . . still, it’s very difficult to sit here and do nothing. After all, ‘A bad arrangement is better than a process’.”
“What can you do?”
“Nothing useful, of course, but that doesn’t make it any easier.”
Bronwyn grows thoughtful. There is, of course, little the abbot can do to alleviate the situation in Blavek . . . or anywhere in Tamlaght, for that matter. The power of the Church has been effectively quashed by Payne Roelt and there is scant hope that it would ever regain its former position . . . certainly not in the princess’s lifetime. However, if the abbot is powerless to help his church and fellow clergy, it is not impossible that he can aid his princess to a small but not insignificant degree.
“Father, there is something I must entrust to you . . .” And she tells him her full name and a carefully abbreviated synopsis of her adventures and present goal. The good man is understandably incredulous until Bronwyn displays her signet ring, which is unmistakable. Too, once his attention has been drawn to her appearance, he cannot deny that her distinctive features are not only generally characteristic of the least inbred of the Tedeschiiys, but strongly recall the few representations of the princess he has previously seen in newspapers and magazines.
“But,” he protests, “if everything you say is true, then what can I possibly do?”
“By yourself, nothing, I suppose. In fact, I suspect that the best thing you can do for the Church would be to remain as inconspicuous as possible. However, you now know how important it is that I discover what happened to my army. Anything that you can do to help us get to the coast north of the Strait, anywhere between the Strait and Stuckney Bay, would be enormously helpful. I know virtually nothing of this territory.”
“There are only a few very small villages, scarcely deserving of the name!, between here and the coast. One of them is my own hometown, I admit, so perhaps I oughtn’t speak of them too harshly. Slintner-up-the-Orn. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it? I thinks not. In any case, I can offer you directions for the easiest route as well as a letter of introduction that ought to encourage the aid of anyone you may meet . . . even the villagers, who cannot read, ought to at least recognize the Great Seal.”
“That’d be a huge help, thank you. Do you have any idea of how far we may be from the coast? I’ve gotten completely disoriented.”
“Not terribly far, I suppose; perhaps two hundred and fifty miles or so.”
Not far! The princess feels not a little sense of desperation, hoping that the abbot did not notice an involuntarily blasphemous but honestly expressed curse.
“Is there something wrong?” asks the abbot.
“No, no, there’s not,” she lies.
“You’re of course welcome to stay with us tonight,” continues the corpulent cleric, “and we’ll provide you with as many provisions as we can, food and whatnot, perhaps even some fresh clothing, if you wish. ‘To craunch the marmoset,’ as we say. Ha ha!”
“You’re very kind.”
That evening Bronwyn and the professor are given separate cells whose only furnishings are a plaster effigy of St. Woncible attached to the bare stone wall and a straw pallet. The princess strips off her clothing with more than a little disgust, looking forward to whatever replacements Father Flatnoy has promised to provide. She had been wearing the same sailor’s outfit for weeks, the same underthings ever since leaving Londeac, and, other than the occasions she had been able to rinse herself in a stream, and when she had fallen into the sea, has not have an opportunity to properly bathe or wash her clothes in all that time. She is surprised that skin does not come off with them.
A muggily sluggish breeze flows lethargically through the window like a heavy syrup. Both moons are scant crescents still not far above the horizon, following the sun which had set an hour before, and are still only fleeting glimmers visible through the trees that surround the abbey. They do not provide enough light to illuminate the chamber. The princess had tanned in the many months since she had first left home, and her body, she discovers, no longer has its old faint luminescence. There are so many more things she has lost in that time as well.
Her contact with the abbot is the first she had had with any officer of the Church in a great many years. She had long ago stopped attending services as soon as she realized that no one was bothering to monitor her attendance. It was at the time, she felt, one of the few beneficial side effects of her enforced invisibility.
Bronwyn had begun to doubt both the precepts and the motivations of the Church by the time she was twelve years old. At sixteen or seventeen, her doubts had become firm convictions. So much so, in fact, that she feels not a little guilt and confusion at accepting the good abbot’s honest generosity. She decides that even if he does hold the title of abbot, he is probably no better educated and no more willing to think for himself than any of the local peasants. He is just as perfectly happy to accept the bland and self-serving fairy tales concocted by the Church as the most illiterate peat-cutter or mushroom-gatherer.
She stretches out on the bed, watching the grinning moons drift through the trees.
I can easily believe in Musrum, she decides, if for no other reason than that my life can scarcely have been this consistently rotten without some sort of outside influence. It’s just the Church that I can’t believe in. I may not even believe in Religion, generally, regardless of it’s particular gods. In fact, I think I’ve about decided that Religion is a wholly human invention that we came up with because we cann’t figure out anything else to set us apart from the animals. I mean, there’s absolutely nothing that humans do that animals don’t do, to
o, although it’s usually to a lesser or greater degree. I mean, animals can communicate, just as we can, even if what they are communicating is simple, it’s communication for all of that. We usually ascribe all sorts of complex motives and meanings and whatnot to our actions, but that’s just window dressing. So, anyway, we have to invent something that can’t be seen or measured that animals don’t have: the soul. All so that adenoidal cowherd I saw this morning can feel superior to everything else on the planet.
Then the priests convince us that we’re all sinners bound directly for the furnaces of the Weedking, with our invisible, impalpable souls at risk, of course, and then tell us that only they can sell us the cure! It’s something like a quack doctor first convincing someone that they have a disease they didn’t know existed and then selling them a cure they didn’t know they needed. The priests’ advantage over the quack is that their cure does us no good until after we are dead, when, surprise, surprise, there’s not much chance of anyone ever complaining that it didn’t work. There’s no way you can absolve yourself of our built-in sins, either (the priests have covered every possible out: you don’t just become a sinner . . . that would limit the field of prospective clients . . . no, everyone on the planet is automatically born a sinner), only a priest can do that . . . and always for a price of course. It’s a great racket: there’s literally a sucker born every minute.
While she feels sorry for the priests hurt or killed in Payne’s pogrom, the looting of the Church is the one activity for which she holds the least against him.
She feels terribly wicked thinking these thoughts while practically in a church, and it gives her a very pleasant sensation.
She lay atop the blanket that covers her bed, luxuriating in its relative comfort, and without further mental ado, falls into a deep sleep.