“There is a fine line between love sacred and love profane,” she is reputed to have said. “The flesh is weak, yet we may worship God while we are still confined to earthly bodies just as readily as the angels do, whose substance is pure spirit. If we use well and wisely the vessels God Himself has given us and praise His name for many, many years from these poor shells of clay, He is pleased. But if we flee the body too eagerly, does that not indicate a certain scorn for what is our Creator’s very image?”
It is further related that her lengthy arguments convinced Willibald of the tenuous border between willing martyrdom and plain suicide. He promised her that he would retire into the more rustic areas surrounding the great city, there to ponder her words, “which were marvelously wise and reasoned for one of her previous calling,” as my dear mother used to recite.
My mother was a sensible woman, with a pleasant’s concise way of putting things. While she was proud enough to number a saint among our antecedents, and also had a horror of tampering with the family’s prized oral tradition, her marginal comments at this point in the relation of Saint Willibald’s history are perhaps too earthy to be included in my text. Let it suffice that she—and I—reserved some doubt as to Julia’s choice of words and method of convincing Willibald to depart from Rome.
Julia herself remained in the Eternal City, where she founded both a successful business establishment and the left-hand shoot of Willibald’s line.
Whatever the lady’s arguments, they were effective. Willibald left Rome and did not stop running until he was well beyond the city precincts, in the farmlands. It was a journey of many days, Rome being as great a metropolis as it was.
My revered ancestor’s supplies were meager. A saint requires little to keep body and soul together, but Willi was a big lad and not yet a saint. He relied on the charity of others to sustain him. When they seemed reluctant to part with any of their worldly goods, he performed that office for them, unwilling to see his fellow man condemned to eternal torment over the matter of a crust of bread, a scrap of meat, or a few coins.
Somewhere along the road, he acquired a sword. Being German, he knew how to use it. Being Christian, he never used it on his enemies. Being a saint in the making, he regarded no man as his foe.
By the time Willi reached the outlying districts, somewhat of his holy fame had preceded him. Thanks for this lay as much with the many farmers’ wives and daughters he converted in passing as with those men to whom he taught the precepts of charity. It became more and more difficult for the lad to encounter generosity, either spontaneous or otherwise. He could scarcely find any people on his route at all. Therefore, it was with great joy and satisfaction that Saint Willibald came at last to the accursed villa of Lucrecia Posthuma Sabinus.
It was deep night. The lights of the villa beckoned the weary traveler to approach and take his ease, or whatever fate might present. The porter at the villa gates was old and singularly decrepit. He sized up the late caller and snickered, but did nothing else to deter Willi from going in. Between the gate and the villa proper was a garden. Though it was high summer, the air was full of the rustle of dead leaves. Pitted statues of the lesser gods showed in snowy slivers through the overhanging tangle of branches and creepers. The empty skins of locusts crackled underfoot along the weed-grown paths, but there was no other sound, not even the whir of insect wings or the cricket’s scraping song.
Here would be a good place to interpolate a comparison between the villa’s sinister garden and the state of an unsaved soul, but I think my ancestor will forgive me for declining the opportunity in favor of the unadorned tale.
Equally unadorned was the lady Lucrecia. When Willibald at last stepped out of the clinging garden shadows, she was waiting for him on the villa porch. At first he thought her just another statue until he realized that statues do not have long red hair that ripples in the breeze, or short red hair that is so difficult to represent effectively in most sculpture. Willibald’s reaction on first beholding this handsome woman—naked, unashamed, and abutting a garden—has not survived, but we may assume that his thoughts were full of Genesis.
He was bid welcome to the Villa Sabinus and asked to join its mistress at a feast already spread in the cenaculum.
The lady introduced herself and did not seem at all surprised or put out by the arrival of an impromptu dinner guest. She led him through the richly appointed interior of the villa.
Within, Willi saw no servants. He had seen none besides the lone porter since his arrival, and yet the sumptuous meal of which he partook that night must have required the work of many hands. Moreover, he remarked that no sooner had he and his fair host emptied one dish than it mysteriously vanished from the table and was replaced by another. The wine too was as bizarrely replenished, gurgling up in the glasses.
These prandial miracles were all it took to convince Willi that he was in the presence of an incipient saint, and he asked the lady Lucrecia how long she had been a Christian.
The lady is reputed to have come near strangling on her wine before she was able to answer her guest’s honest question. When she recovered, she rose from her couch and wordlessly bid Willi follow her into the depths of the villa. I say the depths because that is precisely where she took him, down into a webwork of cellars beneath the marble floors. There were torches to see by, though oddly enough these seemed to require no more kindling than a single word spoken by the lady as they entered each new corridor. It was a word of no language Willibald could identify, but the lady Lucrecia’s oral skills simply confirmed his notion that she must be one of the Faith’s most holy souls.
This was further enforced when they entered the catacombs.
Willibald counted many score of skulls and unreckonable heaps of miscellaneous human bones, all sorted out in their several niches according to kind and displayed with true pride. In this, Lucrecia Posthuma’s saintliness was manifest, for obviously these must be the remains of martyrs, rescued by her single-minded efforts from the charnel houses of Rome and here on her family estate given Christian burial. Why else would a gently bred lady have so many ossa about the house? He gazed at the rippling rows of skulls and smiled beatifically. They smiled back.
Lucrecia was smiling too as she sank down upon a couch built entirely of the more substantial sort of bones and topped by a skillfully executed canopy of curving ribs. She beckoned for Willibald to join her on the scented cushions spread lavishly over such a grotesque and probably uncomfortable bed.
Here our family tradition states verbatim: “Thus was Saint Willibald convinced at length of the lady Lucrecia’s scorn for the pleasures of this world. For she had surrounded herself with mementos of man’s evanescence and the triumph of the grave. Beside these grim reminders, what fleshly delights however exotic will not pall? And she did repeatedly there prove to Saint Willibald that the ecstasy of the senses is fleeting, no matter how frequently renewed, but that Death waits for all.”
Having looked after Saint Willibald’s welfare, body and soul, the lady at last burst into tears. Willi questioned her grief. Had he somehow offended? Had he failed to learn the lesson of mortality she had striven so valiantly to teach? If so, he was yet willing to learn more.
The lady waved aside his scholarly zeal. Between sobs she confessed a fearsome thing: she was a woman doomed. Even farther down below, lower than the catacombs underlying her home, was a cave of great antiquity. In the dark and fetid depths of this cavern there lurked a most horrendous creature, a monstrous worm, a fiery serpent, an unnatural child of Sin and Satan, offspring of that Snake which first brought evil to Mankind.…
In brief, the lady was embarrassed of a dragon.
“He prowls beneath this villa,” she is reported to have told the saint. “I hear him dragging his great, scaly belly across the rock. No one knows how old he is. My family line goes back to before the coming of Aeneas. We have always made our home here, and we have always been the warders of this fiend.”
Here Willibal
d suggested that the lady move elsewhere, to a more salubrious neighborhood.
“Gladly!” the lady cried. “But it is impossible. Our family records tell that in ancient times we worshiped the worm and all the dark powers he represented. We were his chosen servants, who once in every seven years were charged with providing the dragon with a human sacrifice. Failing that, we had to offer up one of our own family to the beast, preferably a tender young virgin. By this means my ancestors renewed a hideous partnership with the dragon, and in exchange for human flesh they obtained dark sorcerous powers beyond imagination.”
Saint Willibald remarked as gently as possible that he did not think much of the ethics or morals of Lucrecia Posthuma’s ancestors.
Lucrecia covered her fair face with her hands. Her body shook with excessive sorrow. “Do you think I like having such relatives?” she wailed. “But their old wickedness had forged a chain which binds all of my family. Once in seven years the dragon hungers for human flesh. If we do not provide, he comes forth and takes! Always it is a member of my household. It does no good to run away. The beast can follow. He has eyes that pierce the darkness of Avernus itself, claws that can slash through rock, teeth that crush steel, and wings that span the heavens!” Her voice grew very small. “Tonight is the last of the seven years just past, and I am the last of my line left alive.”
Willibald fell to his knees among a pile of knucklebones. He gave thanks to God for directing his steps to the Villa Sabinus, then rose and told Lucrecia to dry her eyes.
“I will deal with the dragon,” he said.
“Slay him,” the lady Lucrecia specified. “It is written that the hero who slays a dragon and eats the monster’s heart will be given the wisdom to understand and speak the language of all beasts. Let that be your reward.”
This honorarium left Willi puzzled. “Why would I want to know the language of all beasts?” he asked.
“What harm is there in knowledge?” Lucrecia replied, and set him on the route out of the catacombs, down into the realm of the dragon.
As Willi followed his way, he continued to mull over the strange position into which the Divine Hand had shoved him. He was not a fool, and he did not fancy himself a slayer of monsters. The thought of facing a dragon was formidable. Once he stopped and was on the point of going back, but he heard the faint sound of Lucrecia’s voice wafting down. The lady was laughing. There was a note of nigh hysterical joy in her merriment. No doubt she was rejoicing in the Lord and giving thanks for her deliverance. Willi took a deep breath, recalled that faith makes all things possible, and went on.
He soon left the region of paved floors and man-made corridors. He walked over undressed rock, surrounded by the unseen drips and damps of the lower world. There were still a few torches made fast to the walls, and he marveled at the fact that they were all lighted, as if in miraculous anticipation of his coming. Soon, however, he passed the last of them and had to make his way by touch in the dark.
It was very cool down there. Thus my ancestor was all the more able to perceive the point at which the temperature began to rise. There was likewise a faint though sensible glow in the offing, a natural stone archway some two spearcasts ahead whose enframed blackness seemed a shade lighter than the surrounding murk. A deep grumbling sound emanated from this most unpromising gateway, and a smell which can only be described as heartsickening, being as it was a combination of smoldering fire, moldering flesh, ancient droppings, and the prickly, insinuating odor peculiar to large reptiles.
Willi’s palms grew slick with sweat. He drew his sword, though he had to shift his grip on the leather-wrapped handle several times. Never had he felt so uncomfortable with a blade, not even in the days before his salvation, when he had slain a very expensive Latin tutor back home, enraged by the slave’s uncalled-for emphasis on the ablative absolute and an irritating habit of snickering knowingly over Willi’s fumbled gerunds.
Thoughts of that unfortunate pedagogical episode made Willi recall the lady Lucrecia’s instructions: slay the dragon and eat its heart. He shuddered. If this was how the worm smelled alive, he had little desire to smell it dead. But eat its heart or not, he was still obliged to slay the beast, and the closer he came to that fateful encounter, the less Willi liked the prospect. He was no coward, he told himself at frequent intervals (while pausing to catch his breath, readjust his grip on the sword, shake pebbles from his sandals, and make sure he was going in the right direction), but he was no killer either. Not anymore.
“The Commandment teaches Thou shalt not kill” he said to the darkness. “If it goes on to say except dragons, no one ever taught it to me that way. The worms do suffer from a poor reputation, but there must be some good in them. I have heard more people complain about the ravages of mosquitoes, weevils, slugs, and fleas than about the depredations of dragons. Noah must have taken a pair along, or there would be none left alive this day. They didn’t eat anyone aboard the Ark…I think…so they are reasonable creatures. Yes, and God created them just as He formed every living thing, with a divine purpose in mind. If they have fallen away from that purpose, has not Man fallen even farther? Yet Man is to be saved! Why not dragons too?”
As Paul on the road to Damascus, so Saint Willibald beneath the Villa Sabinus: light struck, divine inspiration came, and a great miracle happened there. He smiled, sheathed his sword, commended his soul to God, and sauntered on down the tunnel, whistling a hymn.
If I may be granted one last desire before I am privileged to view my entrails littering the scriptorium floor, it would be to attend that fateful meeting of Saint Willibald and the dragon of the Villa Sabinus. Oh yes, there most certainly is an account of what transpired, but…it is entirely based upon Saint Willibald’s own testimony, there being no other witness save the worm himself.
I hesitate to call a saint’s own words suspect, although I may be forgiven this. Willi was, as I said, a German tribesman, and if there was anything those wild folk liked better than doing great deeds, it was telling them afterward. And retelling them. And telling them yet again, in case their hearers had missed any part of their exploits the first time.
Howbeit, at this point the tale goes into the mouth of Willi himself, and how it emerges is a matter of record:
“And I did enter into a vast chamber which reeked of death. My fallen nature bade me flee, but I placed my faith in the Lord and went on. Now all was light, a golden glow which radiated from the massive flanks of the dragon. This monster was couched upon a hoard of treasure whose sparkling brilliance was redoubled by reflection from the creature’s shining scales, each as big as a good-sized wooden dinner plate. The beast was sleeping. I reflected upon the Sin that slumbers in us all, and thus fortified, I raised my voice in holy song.
“My singing roused the dragon, as I intended it should. Its eyes were red as blood, and when it opened its black-lined jaws, I saw a flicker of fire. So shall our Sin awake to open a gateway to the everlasting fires of Hell, if given the opportunity. The dragon uttered a grating roar, no doubt desiring to drown out my song of Truth, but I sang on. In my youth, I had often been commended for my strong wind control and my endurance. Now at last I might bring back God’s gift to me multiplied. I sang louder, and the echoes within that abominated cavern took up the sacred words and battered the dragon’s ears therewith.
“My faith told me I would triumph. In momentary pride, I forgot to allow for a shift in key and lost the proper harmony in my hymn. At this moment, I saw the dragon cringe. Certainly it must have been that my musical presentation of Scripture was beginning to affect the worm. I sang on, louder yet, abetted by the natural resonances of the cavern, pressing the advantage. I freely admit that the tune’s true melody escaped me once or twice again, at most.
“By now, the dragon was writhing on his bed of luxury. His taloned paws pressed themselves close to the sides of his huge head, and in a pathetic voice he did beg me to cease my song, no price being too great for him to pay for the Peace of God. ‘Mercy!’
the dragon cried. And yet again, ‘Mercy!’
“I was momentarily surprised to hear the beast speak intelligibly, but what miracle lies beyond the powers of Almighty God? I took the dragon’s bloodless surrender as a good sign, and used his requests for peace and mercy as the perfect point from which to address him on the nature of Eternal Peace and Divine Mercy. He showed himself to be a willing audience. There was a moment or so when a glint of the old Devil came back into his tiny eyes, but I had only to interrupt my preaching and suggest that a song might more appropriately illustrate the lesson and the dragon was all submissive eagerness. He implored me not to sing, but to speak on.
“In the end, my words moved the monster to repentance. He freely confessed his past wickednesses. These included an unreasoning hatred of all other dragons—for the worms are notoriously solitary and grow malicious therefore—and an unquenchable enmity against the whole race of unicorns. He was not too fond of Humankind either.
“When he learned that the lady Lucrecia was the one responsible for sending me into his domain, he said, ‘I used to believe her family to be the only humans wise enough to be worth sparing. I see now that I was wrong.’ I said that I rejoiced to hear that he now considered all of us deserving of mercy. The beast gazed at me askance, then muttered, ‘Who would have thought that a booby’s shell could hatch a falcon? It must be as you say: this god of yours reserves a special protection for fools and children. A sword would have been useless against me, yet…Faugh! What is done, is done. For sending you to me, I must thank the lady Lucrecia properly before we go.’
“I did not follow all he said, although my duty to God constrained me to commit it to memory, but I did ask where we were going. He replied, ‘Why, to have you preach to all my brethren, of course. We can’t have them going about unsaved, can we? Is it not blessed to share salvation? I shall take you to them. Be not afraid. Begin with a song as you did with me—exactly as you began with me!—and I guarantee they shall be yours for the saving.’
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