The Rule of Sebastian

by Shelter Somerset

  By SHELTER SOMERSET

  NOVELS

  Alaska Hunt

  On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch

  The Rule of Sebastian

  Between Two Worlds

  Between Two Promises

  Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Copyright

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  5032 Capital Circle SW

  Ste 2, PMB# 279

  Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

  USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Rule of Sebastian

  Copyright © 2012 by Shelter Somerset

  Cover Art by Paul Richmond

  http://www.paulrichmondstudio.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Ste 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA.

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  ISBN: 978-1-62380-128-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  November 2012

  eBook edition available

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62380-129-8

  Dedication

  To Joseph

  Weekday Trappist Schedule

  (Winter)

  3:00 a.m. Rise

  3:30 a.m. Vigils, first of seven prayer “offices”

  4:15 a.m. Lectio divina, “divine reading” of Scripture

  5:15 a.m. Breakfast; personal needs

  6:00 a.m. Lauds, sunrise prayer

  6:30 a.m. Lectio divina

  7:30 a.m. Eucharist

  8:30 a.m. Terce, “third hour” prayer (Grand Silence ends)

  8:45 a.m. Morning work assignments

  Noon Sext, “sixth hour” prayer

  12:15 p.m. Lunch

  12:45 p.m. None, “ninth hour” prayer

  1:00 p.m. Optional siesta and prayer

  2:00 p.m. Afternoon work assignments

  4:30 p.m. Dinner

  5:30 p.m. Vespers, sunset prayer

  6:00 p.m. Community activities; personal needs

  7:00 p.m. Compline, night prayer (Grand Silence begins)

  7:45 p.m. Retire

  Trappist Garments

  Tunic: White ankle-length habit worn during the day and at

  sleep, confined at waist with leather belt.

  Scapular: Black calf-length hooded garment worn over the tunic

  during daytime.

  Cowl: Full white, woolen cloak with wide sleeves and hood

  worn in chapel.

  Footwear: Inexpensive leather sandals; work boots.

  Chapter One

  “HURRY! Come help! Come help!”

  Sebastian sprinted from his cell, where he had been engaged in lectio divina, to see what the commotion was about. He found Brother Casey sitting on the wood floor in the entrance foyer, replacing his sandals with a pair of the common work boots stowed under the bench. Beneath his tunic, he wore snow pants. Casey stopped tying the bootlaces long enough to look up at him. His brown eyes grew wide, frozen ponds caught in a sudden spray of the overhead lights.

  “What is it, Casey?” Sebastian asked. “Are you all right? Did you hurt yourself?”

  “I’m fine,” Casey said, refocused on tying the boots, “but there’s someone—I think a man—lying outside in this blizzard. He appears unconscious. I don’t think it’s one of our brothers. My eyes didn’t deceive me. Can you pull on some snow gear and follow me outside?”

  Skeptical but alarmed, Sebastian wasted no time minding the latest of the monastery’s postulants. He sat on the bench next to him and pulled on socks, snow pants, and sturdy boots. Minutes later, clad in their parkas with their scapular hoods pulled over their heads to ward off the blowing snow, they dashed outside into the storm. Sebastian drew his hood back enough for a clearer view, jerking his head from one angle to the next to avoid the hard-driven snow stinging his cheeks, but he had no idea what he searched for.

  Casey pointed to one of the library’s arched windows, where light cast a dull yellow over a snowbank. “I was seated in the library for lectio divina when I noticed something in the snow,” he shouted above the wind. “At first I thought it was a mound of sheets that might have blown from an open window in Brother Giles’s cell. You know how forgetful he can be. But then I was certain it had a man’s shape.”

  Up to their knees in snow, they circled around where Casey claimed he had spotted the man. Rushing wind swept a patch of the fast-accumulating snow, and in a flash Sebastian discerned the same mound of color. He motioned with his head for Casey to follow. “I see him, come on!”

  They dropped to their haunches by the lifeless figure and cleared the snow around him with their bare hands, exhaling thick, vaporous breath. The more they dug, the more Sebastian was certain they would uncover a dead man. Two more brothers wrapped in parkas and secured in boots scurried outside.

  “May God have mercy on his soul. Is he dead?” Brother George hollered from the buried footpath, where the blowing snow iced his thick eyeglasses.

  Sebastian removed his fingertips from the man’s carotid artery. “He’s alive,” he shouted above his own pounding heart, “but barely.”

  “Who is he?” Brother Eusebius asked, standing beside them and looking on with deep lines marring his forehead.

  “I’ve never seen him before,” Sebastian said. “We’ll have to find out later. Let’s get him inside before he freezes to death.”

  “I’ll go fetch the abbot.” Brother Eusebius dashed along their boot tracks, already smoothed into a subtle groove from the relentless wind and snowfall.

  Sebastian gathered the unconscious man in his arms and carried him inside the warmth of the abbey while Casey and Brother George shielded him from the elements. Six of the abbey’s twelve brothers were already waiting by the front door, pelting them with questions. But Sebastian had no answers, and his main objective was to hurry the man to the infirmary and get him beneath several layers of bedcovers. He shouted for someone to get Brother Jerome and shouldered his way through the brothers.

  Once inside the infirmary, Sebastian and the others rushed to undress the stranger and dry him with soft cotton towels. The brothers’ palpable interest in the man did not surprise Sebastian. He caught the flush that blemished their faces when he slid off the stranger’s wet jeans and underwear. And he detected a puckering of their lips when the first trace of body odor reached their nostrils before they tucked him into bed and cocooned him in woolen blankets.

  Firm muscles now lay underneath those three sturdy blankets, which were tucked around him snugger than a baby in swaddling. His breath came in short gasps, lifting the blankets every fifteen to twenty seconds. Sebastian worried that the young man, perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two—about the same age as Casey and Brother Rodel—might not make it.

  Lying in bed, he appeared almost surreal, a dark Adonis poised for death after his mysterious ascent along southwest Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Color had returned to his cheeks. Ruddiness accentuated the subtle brown of his skin. But he was still out cold.

  The brothers pushed against the bed to the point that Sebastian h
ad little room to turn. He couldn’t help but notice a high energy emanating from them. Excitement had replaced their humdrum abbey lives.

  “What was he doing in the middle of the snowstorm?” Brother Lucien asked in his typical quirky English lilt, stealing the thoughts straight from Sebastian’s head.

  “It’s a perfectly good question,” Sebastian said. “I’m unsure how or why he’s come to us. Had anyone witnessed him hiking up?”

  “I was in my cell studying Scripture, and the few times I glanced outside I saw nothing,” Brother Hubert said, adjusting his black-framed glasses over his rosacea-coated nose. “But with all this blowing snow, how could I?”

  “Yes, I know. I was in my cell as well,” Sebastian said, almost disgusted with himself for having failed to see the man. “But I hadn’t noticed a thing.”

  The others said they’d spent their rest periods in other parts of the abbey and hadn’t noticed anything either.

  “Do you think he’ll survive?” Casey directed the question to Sebastian, flexing his fingers from the cold that probably still stung them.

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Sebastian said, providing the handsome young brother one of his stealthy signature winks to reassure him.

  “I hope he lives. I really hope he does,” Brother George said, rolling his chubby hands in front of his scapular. “I want to see him with opened eyes. They must be brown, I’m sure.”

  “Could he have gotten lost while skiing?” Brother Rodel asked in his typical whispery voice. He was as reserved as a turtle, yet with the stealth of a cat. So many times the five-foot-two brother had sidled close to Sebastian without his realizing until he’d spoken.

  “He wasn’t dressed for skiing,” Sebastian said. “He had no skis, no poles or ski boots, unless he’d left them elsewhere.”

  “This is a pickle,” said Brother Giles, who, at seventy-two, showed signs of reverting to a childlike emotional detachment from the abbey, a trait Sebastian had grown to envy. Even the gout that had confined him to a wheelchair failed to dispirit Brother Giles. He wheeled closer to the bed, the squeak of the chair punctuating the awed silence, and nudged aside Brothers Lucien and George. “Certainly is a pickle, I’ll say.” He rubbed his grizzled beard. “Maybe he’s one of those nature hikers.”

  “What person goes hiking in the mountains in the dead of winter without proper attire?” Brother Micah said, scratching at his expanding forehead and curling his thin upper lip. “Don’t you think so, Brother Sebastian?” He softened his sour tone and gazed at Sebastian with ardent blue eyes. “Don’t you think he couldn’t possibly be a nature hiker?”

  “Yes, I agree.” Brother Sebastian patronized Brother Micah, as he often did. “I don’t think he’s your typical rugged outdoorsman. He was wearing only those worthless hiking sneakers, and I didn’t see any snowshoes. Even if he was dressed properly, it’s unlikely he’d be joy hiking in this snowstorm. I think he’s come to the abbey on purpose.”

  “But what for?” Brother Lucien asked.

  “Maybe he’s come to us out of desperation, to find solace from a tragedy,” Brother Hubert said.

  “He reminds me of the Lord our Savior, napping in the stern of the boat as he and the disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee,” Brother Giles said with a grin. “Look how he lies so helpless and peaceful.”

  The brothers gazed at the sleeping figure in silence until Brother Eusebius rushed into the room with Father Paolo following close on the hem of his tunic. The abbot parted the band of brothers with a sweep of his flowing sleeve. Sebastian noted the hint of smoldering juniper wafting off his garments from the incense he liked to burn in his private office. Father Paolo leaned into the unconscious figure, his breath inches from the young man’s nose.

  A smile twisted one side of the venerable sixty-year-old’s pale face. According to Brother Hubert, who seemed to have the abbey secrets whispered to him by the finches that clustered in the cloister garden even in winter (did he know Sebastian’s dark secrets too, and the reason why he’d come to Mt. Ouray?), the abbot had retreated to the abbey more than twenty years ago to escape the pressures of parish life. Ten years later, resident brothers had elected him abbot.

  Accepting Father Paolo’s complete authority at Mt. Ouray was perhaps the most difficult transition for Sebastian. A stoic man used to leading (or as his father used to say, “Stubborn as an old dog, like a good Irishman should be, a Harkin through and through”), Sebastian had found himself biting his tongue more often than not whenever facing the abbot’s leadership.

  Leaving his worldly goods back in Philadelphia had come easy—he’d had few worldly goods to sacrifice (two hundred seventy thousand in savings had gone straight into the abbey’s purse)—but renouncing his inclination to command had proved more painful.

  Once he’d committed to the idea of professing his vows after he’d arrived at Mt. Ouray four years ago, he’d learned to take the abbot’s orders silently and with deference. Although the abbot often relied on him as his second in command, for Sebastian stood tall and strong and the others naturally looked to him for guidance, a fresh, pestering resentment had begun to nag Sebastian.

  He gulped down his rising angst and waited for the abbot to comment, anticipating his characteristic Portuguese accent that always sounded as if he held a mouthful of marbles.

  The father stood erect and adjusted his wire-framed glasses, eyes still focused on the stranger. “Any idea how he came to us?”

  “No one saw him hiking up,” Brother Micah said.

  “It’s as if he fell out of the sky,” Brother Hubert said.

  “Like an angel,” Brother George breathed.

  “There’s no identification on him,” Sebastian added, his voice resonating in his ears, more forceful than he’d intended. “He was carrying only one small knapsack, that yellow pack over there on the table,” he said in a softer tone. “Inside we found two protein bars, a frozen bottle of water, nothing else. No wallet or anything. Not even a cell phone.”

  He explained how they’d discovered him wearing only hiking sneakers, a thin parka, and day clothes, absent of any other outdoor gear, and how they’d undressed him and packed his clothes in a bag for Brother Hubert to launder. “I turned the pockets of his jeans inside out,” he said. “Shook the knapsack upside down. No clues, not even a stub from an airline ticket or motel receipts.”

  “You can tell by his battered feet that he hiked a long ways,” Casey said. “We cleaned him as best we could.”

  “We’ve refrained from administering any first aid until Brother Jerome gets here,” Sebastian said.

  “Has he been notified?”

  “He was in lectio divina when I went to call for him.” Brother George twisted his head toward the door. “Praise be to God, here he comes now.”

  Old, weathered Brother Jerome, suffering from osteoarthritis, lumbered toward the brothers. He had once been a physician in lay life and, according to Brother Hubert, was widowed, with three sons. His medical skills had proved invaluable to the secluded abbey, nestled nine thousand feet in the Rockies, fifteen miles from the closest village, and cut off from civilization in winter. Unable to keep up with the seasonal snowfall, the forest service closed the road that passed Mt. Ouray from November to April. No one could come or go until snowmelt. Or so Sebastian thought.

  Brother Jerome fumbled in a drawer and removed a pocket flashlight, stethoscope, and blood pressure meter. He stepped up to the bed, pulled open each of the stranger’s eyelids, and peered at the pupils with the flashlight.

  Brother George stood on his toes. “See, I told you he had brown eyes. I told you.”

  Next, Brother Jerome exposed the stranger’s midsection to the subdued gasps of many of the brothers, and listened through the stethoscope while everyone held a collective breath. He moved slowly, careful not to raise his arms above his shoulders, since this caused him great pain.

  While he took the stranger’s blood pressure, Brother Jerome uncorked the instrument fr
om his cartilage-shattered ears and began to feel around the man’s ribcage and stomach. Then he removed the sphygmomanometer and secured the covers around him. He next examined his hands and feet. Some of the monks flinched when Brother Jerome uncovered the blisters and blue swelling at the toes and fingertips.

  Sighing, Brother Jerome tucked in the man’s hands and feet and stood straight with a pained expression. “Feet and hands have some frostbite. Nothing too horrible. Mild hypothermia, from the looks of his pupils. We’ll have to keep him good and warm.”

  “Will he survive?” Father Paolo asked.

  “I’m unsure. Breathing is labored, but his heart sounds strong. Blood pressure isn’t bad. Doesn’t seem to have any visible signs of internal injuries, which is a blessing.”

  “How long do you think he was out there?” Sebastian asked.

  “From the looks of him, maybe no more than a handful of hours. He must be a strong boy to have gotten this far without more serious injuries.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Sebastian said.

  “Ideally, he should be taken to a hospital for tests,” Brother Jerome stated with a wince. “But there’s little hope for a helicopter or even a snowmobile to make it through this storm. We’ll have to wait for it to clear. There’s not much to do but keep watch over him and pray he awakens. And even then, I’m afraid, it might get worse.”

  “Get worse?” Brother George’s dark eyes widened behind his thick glasses.

  “He could suffer cardiac arrest.”

  “We’ll pray for him,” Brother Hubert said. “He’ll need divine help.”

  “I think he’s already had much of that just by reaching us,” Brother Eusebius said. At more than six foot, the middle-aged monk towered over the others, save for Sebastian. The light fixtures hanging above reflected off his golden sphere of a shaved head.

  Many of the brothers followed the abbot’s lead and made the sign of the cross over their black scapulars. Sebastian peered at the dark figure. His chest rose and fell slowly and methodically. The interim between breaths seemed to have shortened. A good sign.