by Albert Noyer
Germanus brought to his new Christianity the same discipline he had displayed as governor: he traded his splendid uniform for a homespun wool tunic and wore it over a goat hair shirt. For a bed, he spread coarse sacking on the ground and sprinkled ashes over the covering. At meals he refused to eat meat and most vegetables, rarely drank wine unless it was heavily watered, and abstained from salt as a seasoning. Germanus was seen chewing ashes as he cut into his supper barley loaf. As he ate, he sipped water from a wooden cup.
Brenos had met Germanus in Britain, where the bishop had gone to battle the heretic Pelagius, who was teaching denial of Original Sin and claiming that Adam would have died regardless of Eve’s mischief in wanting to know the difference between good and evil. On the Feast of the Resurrection, three hundred and sixty-nine years after that holy event, Germanus used the military skills he had acquired previously as governor to defeat a Pict and Saxon horde. When his jubilant Briton army shouted “Alleluia!” the victory was so named.
Brenos, who had also come to dispute Pelagius, and to introduce Ciallanus’ Hibernian form of monasticism to the island, was present at the Alleluia Victory. He took a liking to Germanus’ asceticism but more importantly, saw the bishop as a conduit for preaching the rule of Ciallanus in Gaul. Brenos persuaded Germanus to build a monastery at Autessiodurum and to appoint him its abbot.
After word of a messenger from Ravenna was sent to Brenos’s secretary, Fiachra, the monk, was surprised, then concerned. Sending a courier from the Western capital in winter meant news of extraordinary importance.
Walking down the path from the Collegium, a stone building that housed offices, monks’ cells, a library, and a refectory, Fiachra saw an unarmed stranger inside the wooden palisade, warming himself around the guards’ fire.
He greeted the shivering man. “God preserve you, messenger. What is your name?”
“Warinar of Aballo.”
“Your journey in winter was either foolish, Warinar, or important,” Fiachra probed.
Warinar unslung a waxed leather case. “The answer is in this, Brother, and for your holy abbot to decide.”
“I am the abbot’s secretary.” Fiachra jingled a coin bag. “If news is hard, I soften it for him.”
“How would I know an abbot’s business?” Warinar countered, without taking his glance away from the small sack.
Fiachra eased out a shining coin. “Whisper it to ‘Brother Silver.’ I’ll turn away.”
Warinar snatched the money from the secretary’s fingers. “Your monk Behan of Clonard drowned during one of his penances.”
“Hard news indeed, messenger, but ‘Brother Silver’ thanks you. If you have no other place to sleep, you may stay in our hospice.”
“A day or two, then. I’ve friends upriver.”
“Ask for Brother Ailbe.”
Behan dead on foreign earth, Fiachra thought, as he climbed the cobbled path back up to the Collegium. Why did Brenos send him so far away in the first place?
Fiachra knew some of Brenos’ background since, like his abbot, he had been educated at the Hibernian Abbey of Clonard. Fiachra’s ease at learning to write neatly formed letters had prompted that abbot to advise against ordination. Instead, two years ago, Fiachra had been assigned as secretary at the new Gaulish monastery of Culdees.
Three-fourths up the stony way, Fiachra paused to look over the monastery compound, and beyond, toward the valley of the Icauna River. He knew the rise of ground near the town walls was lower than Brenos wanted, but Germanus had already situated a chapel there. The abbot had ordered a log barricade built to surround the area, like the ones protecting Hibernian hill villages, lengthened the chapel nave, replaced a cluster of mud-and-wattle huts with stone dwellings, and erected the Collegium building.
Fiachra glanced at the nearby hospice. Pilgrims had started coming to venerate a bloodstained rock in the compound’s Church of Saint Stephen. The stone was reportedly one of those that had killed the deacon, at Jerusalem, in the early days of the Church. Germanus believed the relic was genuine, and Fiachra had never heard Brenos voice a contrary opinion.
Ciallanus’s Rule called for self-sufficiency, so the flattest area of the compound was given over to forage crops, gardens and animal pens. The monks divided their day into periods announced by a tolling of the chapel bell—hours of prayer, study, work and sleep. Sleep had the lowest priority, being constantly interrupted by calls to prayer. On the Lord’s Day, the bronze clapper summoned citizens to Mass, where they heard about Christ and the monastery’s harsh rules. Once curiosity had prompted their first attendance, Fiachra noted that few came back.
The day was cold but almost windless, with a winter sun in a cornflower-blue sky moving toward its seasonal nadir. Fiachra squinted at fallow fields sparkling in their clean tunics of white snow. Some were crossed by neat rows of gray vineyard canes. He momentarily imagined them as phalanxes of legionaries ready for the battle trumpet to sound, then corrected his vision to that of dormant Christians awaiting the greening life of Ciallanus’ discipline. Brenos preached that Gaul was a vineyard which the Nazarene wanted harvested. Unruly people, like vines run amuck, needed frequent pruning, and Hibernians were the ones chosen, albeit relatively recently, to be His laborers.
Fiachra continued up the slope and into the Collegium. He stood listening at the door of Brenos’ office for a moment, and then gave the three quick raps that identified his presence.
“Enter Fiachra,” the abbot called out.
When the secretary crossed to the desk, Brenos was reading a letter. Fiachra observed his gaunt face while he waited. The brown eyes under thick, dark brows were extraordinarily intelligent, and the man might have been considered handsome were it not for the unflattering ear-to-ear tonsure shaved across his skull, that left a fringe of long hair growing at the back.
Brenos finally looked up. “This is Patricus’s report from Hibernia. Have a lector read it at the evening meal.”
Fiachra said nothing. He knew about the missionary who had studied at Germanus’ school, then immediately been ordained a bishop and sent off to preach on the island of Hibernia—all because of a dream he claimed to have had. The monk listened in sullen silence as his abbot read aloud.
I, Patricus, am one born out of time like the Blessed Paul, yet by the will of God ordained shepherd to convert a pagan flock, and sent to reveal to them the good news of their salvation.
“What arrogance!” Fiachra blurted out, his face flushed with resentment. “The man dares compare himself to the Apostle? And he calls himself Patricus now? His Celtic name of Padraic isn’t good enough for him?”
“Caritas, Brother Fiachra, be charitable,” Brenos gently admonished, realizing his secretary was venting a measure of envy that would have to be disciplined. “The name was given him by our patron Germanus, when he elevated him to the episcopacy. Let me continue. ‘It is my joy to report the success of my earlier efforts in converting the followers of the chieftain Eirinn, although not without great humiliation to me. The pagans ridicule my tonsure, which I accept as a sign of the Nazarene’s humiliation on being mocked with a thorn coronet. Tailcenn they call me, in our language ‘Baldhead,’ amid much laughter. Yet they are in awe of my bishop’s vestments and crozier. The staff was left me, you will recall, on the island of…I have forgotten the name…in the Tyrrhenian Sea, by the Nazarene himself.’”
“By the Nazarene?” Fiachra burst out again. “Th…the insolence of the man! Even Paul never claimed—”
“Fiachra, Fiachra,” Brenos admonished with a shushing motion of his finger. “Are you harboring envy in your soul?”
“Pardon, my Abbot,” he mumbled, bending his head low. “I will do an extended penance on the stone cross, to atone for my pride.”
“We’ll talk of it later.” Brenos gave him a thin smile. “Listening to the rest of this letter may be penance enough. ‘I am opposed in my work by the druid priests who keep their countrymen in the darkness of error. Two of them attempted, b
y magic, to conceal my preaching in a mantle of darkness. I had gone to a wood called Focluit in answer to a dream about King Amalgaid and his seven sons. As I was teaching about the Blessed Trinity, the druids caused a sudden darkness to appear.’”
“A lowland fog,” Fiachra muttered. “I’ve seen it creep along the Sinnenus valley like a gray cat mousing in a barn.”
Brenos ignored him and continued reading, “‘To dispel it, I struck a stone with the tip of my crozier and the ground began to burn.’”
“A spark into a dry peat bog,” Fiachra scoffed.
“It divided itself into twelve fires, one for each of the Holy Apostles. Lo! The darkness fled and with it the perfidious druids. The priests could not even evoke their god, Crom Cruach, because I had thrown down the idol on the Plain of Magh Slecht five years earlier—”
Fiachra suddenly gave a sharp, guttural cry, then pulled his coarse robe over his head and lay face down on the stone floor, naked except for a swaddled loincloth. “I cannot tolerate the man’s boasting,” he croaked, stretching his arms out as if on a cross. “Punish me, Abbot.”
Brenos did not order him up. It might be better to let him lie in that pose until he begins to shiver. He looked at the thin body, whose pale skin was speckled with brownish moles and traces of old insect bites, and was pleased that Fiachra did not cultivate lice colonies, as did several other monks. Brenos had cautioned against penances that sapped strength, even while practicing them himself during the week that commemorated the Passion of the Nazarene.
The abbot noticed his secretary’s body convulse slightly, and found it hard to understand how some monks could be sexually attracted to each other. Hibernian bishops were wise in permitting marriage among their presbyters, to forestall homoerotic liaisons. At the same time he realized that, in the past, Celtic warriors had considered it honorable to be loved by men of the same social class. Women had given themselves freely to the bravest fighter, and children born of such unions were raised by the clan without stigma. The Roman Church had changed all that.
Patricus the Briton might be doing good work by planting the vineyard of faith in Hibernia, Brenos mused, but he was putting in fragile canes that were in danger of being uprooted by the druids he mentioned. Ciallanus, on the other hand, was a native of the island and knew its fickle people. With more sense than Patricus, he had come to Gaul to cultivate vines that had been planted centuries earlier.
The Gallic vineyard had borne fruit sevenfold in the early days, but was now in need of pruning. Wild shoots grew everywhere. Dead wood rotted on the vines. And the Nazarene had given the mandate: “Every branch in me not bearing fruit he takes away, and every one bearing fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” Ciallanus was sending abbots and monks to Gaul, even as far as the eastern empire, to wield the pruning knife.
Brenos noticed Fiachra’s skin pucker into minuscule bumps and another shiver convulse his body. He rose from his chair and bent down to touch the monk’s shoulder.
“My brother, put off the cloak of envy and dress yourself in humility,” he urged quietly. “Envy shoots others and injures itself. Rejoice in the success of Patricus.” As Fiachra stood and adjusted his robes, Brenos went back to his desk. “But you came to see me about something in that dispatch case?”
Fiachra nodded, but knelt again. “Forgive me, Abbot. Hibernians are known for boasting, yet Padraic also accepted the yoke of humility.”
“His boasting, like Paul’s, is for the Nazarene.”
“Assign me a penance then, as Paul gladly bore with fools for His sake.”
“Enough, Fiachra,” Brenos ordered, sternly this time. “We will speak of it in private confession. Now. What did the messenger bring?”
“Sad news from Ravenna. Our brother Behan of Clonard is dead.”
“You opened the case?” Brenos frowned and reached for it to inspect the bishop’s seal.
“Couriers gossip in the manner of old women.”
“Indeed, Fiachra. Did he speak of the cause of our brother’s death?”
“Drowned in a state of penitential grace. He died in the arms of the Nazarene.”
“There will be a report from Bishop Chrysologos inside.” Brenos snapped the seal and opened the cover. When he pulled out two parchments, he saw that one bore the bishop’s signet, but opened a smaller sheet first, which was sealed with red wax showing the imprint of a rooster. “The cockerel is ready to crow,” he read aloud.
“Cockerel? Crow?” Fiachra looked puzzled. “What does that mean, Abbot?”
Brenos ignored his question, thumbed off the bishop’s seal, and read a moment. “Chrysologos is asking for permission to bury our brother. A surgeon has preserved the body for now, but fears warmer weather. What is the rule, Fiachra? May Behan be interred in Ravenna?”
“There is a precedent, Abbot. Fithal of Limercu lies in Constantine’s basilica at Rome.”
“Indeed?” A sly smile creased Brenos’ gaunt features. “Then, Fiachra, I have thought of your penance. You will accompany me to Ravenna.”
“Ravenna? But…but by spring the body will be—”
“Not in spring,” Brenos said, cutting off the monk’s objection. “We will go there now.”
“In winter? Abbot, consider the dangers. Surely—”
“Surely, the courier just did so. Are we monks lesser men?”
Fiachra desperately looked for an excuse to avoid the hazardous journey. “But…but the holy season marking the Nazarene’s birth will begin soon.”
“All the better,” Brenos replied. “We shall celebrate His nativity in the bishop’s church at Ravenna. You may go about your duties now.” The abbot watched Fiachra stride to the door in poorly concealed fury. “Courage, Brother. Perhaps at Ravenna we shall hear this cockerel crow.”
After Fiachra was gone, Brenos went to the door and slid the locking bolt into its socket. “Indeed we shall hear it,” he muttered, returning to his heavy desk. He felt along the edge of two thick planks that formed the top until he located a groove underneath. Sliding the edge molding aside revealed a compartment containing a square parchment envelope.
Brenos untied the leather thong securing it and took out several sheets of soft white vellum. The top sheet bore a drawing of a cockerel in red ink, with a title underneath.
THE GALLICAN LEAGUE
He touched the symbol, pleased again at his cleverness in thinking of it. At Clonard he had learned that the word gallus was Latin for both a rooster and the land of the Gauls. The Church used the bird as a symbol of vigilance. What more appropriate sign to identify his league of associates on the Continent?
“Little cockerel,” Brenos murmured fondly, “your crowing will soon be heard throughout two empires. Even Ciallanus will be forced to listen.”
Whoever had paid the courier to put the cryptic note in the dispatch case had done his work well, Brenos mused, but the report about Behan was disturbing. Who was this meddling surgeon who had taken it upon himself to preserve the body? Still, it was useless to blame him. Chrysologos was uninformed about monastic jurisdiction, and was merely extending the courtesy of an abbot’s decision, yet why hadn’t the bishop mentioned the prophecy? Surely, Behan had had time to preach it, reveal it.
Brenos’ self-satisfaction overcame his doubt; the first phase of the League’s two-year plan was a success. By now the final legacy of the Nazarene was well hidden by the person Behan had recruited in Ravenna. What code name had the monk given his accomplice? The abbot turned to the last page of the vellum.
“Smyrna,” he read aloud. “Yes, Smyrna will have arranged to conceal the gold case, and for me to read the Gospel of John at the dawn Nativity Mass. There, to fulfill Behan’s prophecy, the Last Will and Testament of the Nazarene will be revealed.”
Brenos recalled the text of John from memory. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we have seen his glory: the glory of an only Son coming from the Father, filled with enduring love.” After he finished reading, Br
enos would hold up the Nazarene’s Last Will and announce that, by God’s grace, it had been in the safekeeping of Hibernians since the time of the Apostle Peter. Simultaneously, at concurrent Nativity services in Rome, Constantinople, Mediolanum, Antioch, Alexandria and Autessiodurum, League associates would have visions of the revelation. And he, Brenos of Slana, would be in Ravenna to verify the discovery for his Order. Confusion would result until Sixtus, the Bishop of Rome, called a council of theologians to determine the authenticity of the document, yet by the Feast of the Resurrection, in the spring, the Gallican League would be ratified as the Will’s executors, by virtue of their centuries of guardianship.
Brenos fingered the second sheet. For a moment its purity and sensuous feel reminded him of the white flesh of a village girl who had tempted him in his youth, but then he forced himself to concentrate on the Celtic script, writing that flowed with the regularity and beauty of waves rolling onto Hibernia’s shores. It was appropriate for a document that heralded the most important message since the Nazarene’s ministry was written down and completed God’s plan for mankind.
After His Resurrection, the Apostles had asked about the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel. The Nazarene had replied that it was not yet time for them to know the season the Father had fixed—an unmistakable indication that the Judean kingdom would be restored. After Peter the Apostle was released from prison by the angel, he told his friends he was leaving them. “With that he went out and journeyed to another place.” What was not recorded was that the angel told Peter, in a dream, to take the Nazarene’s Last Testament and embark for Hibernia, where it would be safe until the Father’s time came for its revelation.
Brenos winced and rubbed his forehead. One of his recurring headaches had returned, but he continued his mental summary of the League’s origin.
Peter too had realized things were going wrong, writing about the passions of the flesh warring with the soul, of slaves and servants who did not respect their masters, of women who were not submissive to their husbands, and flaunted expensive robes decorated with gold. Today, one need look no further than Faustina, the provincial governor’s harlot, for proof of Peter’s accusation.