[Getorius and Arcadia 01] - The Secundus Papyrus

by Albert Noyer

  The weak emperor’s court at Ravenna was also a scandal. Men were said to wear their hair long, in the manner of females. Women commissioned silk robes the cost of which would feed a dormitory of the poor for a year. And a woman, Emperor Valentinian’s mother, not the Emperor himself, truly ruled this corrupt Western empire. False teachings were everywhere, affecting forms of worship among Hibernian, Gallic, Roman and Eastern churches. The faithful milled about like confused sheep, unsure of their true shepherds.

  Brenos’ head ached with a dull pain, and he felt again the fullness that periodically pressured his loins. He would usually practice a penance after succumbing to the erotic urge, but thought that if he read the League charter the temptation might pass.

  “The Declaration of the Associates of the Gallican League,” he read softly, “the vigilant ones who were chosen to fulfill the things predicted by Jesus the Nazarene concerning the end of the world.”

  Brenos skimmed through the preamble. It pointed out that even as a child Jesus did not suffer fools. The infancy narratives of Thomas related how He struck dead a child who accidentally knocked Him over, then rendered blind the elders who reprimanded Him.

  The League brothers might not yet be many, but they were not blind. Was Matthew not speaking to them when he wrote with apostolic authority that those of a humble nature would have the earth as their possession? The Brothers had taken on Ciallanus’ sweet yoke of humility, obedience and poverty, as the clause stipulated:

  CLAUSE I. We have sold our belongings and given the proceeds to the poor in exchange for earthly perfection and treasure in the New Jerusalem.

  CLAUSE II. The Nazarene’s prophet, Sextus Africanus, confirms in his Chronographia that the Final Coming, and the end of the world, will occur five hundred years after His first Coming. Four hundred and thirty-nine years have passed. vigilamini! It is time to be vigilant!

  CLAUSE III. Blessed John, in an ecstasy similar to ones we have experienced, was privileged with a revelation. He saw, in the right hand of One seated on the throne of the New Jerusalem, a scroll. No one was worthy to open the scroll and break its seven seals except Jesus the Nazarene.

  You are worthy to take the scroll

  and open its seals,

  because you were slaughtered. With your blood

  you ransomed men for God

  from every tribe and nation.

  And you made them to be a kingdom

  and priests to our God.

  And they are to rule as kings over the earth.

  Brenos’ head throbbed now. He skipped past the list of seals that revealed in turn war, famine, death, martyrdom, and the day of Jehovah’s wrath. The Seventh Seal brought a short period of silence in Heaven, then the seven angels before the throne summoned hail, fire, mountains of flames, and seas of blood. Water was made bitter by the fall of the star Wermut, amid total darkness. A third of mankind was destroyed.

  The abbot came to the core of the revelation as the Gallican League interpreted it, and whispered it aloud. “Then another angel came holding only a little scroll in his hand, that the mystery of Jehovah might be revealed. The scroll was bitter to the stomach, but as sweet as honey in the mouth. And the angel vowed that there would no longer be a delay, that the days of the opening of the scroll of the mystery of Jehovah, as he announced to his servants, would be fulfilled.”

  The pain in Brenos’ head and the fullness in his loins were almost unbearable. He needed to begin the purge. His mouth was dry, but he forced himself to finish reading.

  CLAUSE IV. Wherefore, the contents of the angel’s scroll are to be revealed on the Feast of the Nativity. Each of the periods of the six sealed scrolls is of ten years’ duration, and six times ten equals the sixty years remaining of Africanus’ prediction of the final Tribulation.

  Let him who has eyes to see and ears to hear, see and hear!

  Brenos rasped the last line. His swollen member rubbed against the rough cloth of his tunic. Without rearranging its pages he shoved the manuscript back into the hidden compartment. He avoided looking at his erection as he took off his tunic and slipped into the short goat-hair vest that hung by the door. Had not the African bishop, Augustine, written that a man could not control his sexual appetite through the will, and that even in an honest celibate ‘the diabolical excitement of the genitals’ was uncontrollable?

  Taking one of the fresh yew branches that a novice brought every morning, Brenos lay down on the blanket that covered a broad ledge under his high window. He struck at his shoulders and chest with the yew, then decreased the intensity of the whipping as he moved downward, with satanic urgency, to his stomach and swollen penis.

  Ciallanus’ rule utilized penance to punish sexual lapses. Married men not in the Order who confessed to fornication, or even to fantasizing about the act, were forbidden to lie with their wives for a designated period of time. Guilty monks were assigned strokes with a leather scourge and ordered to fast. The hunger, paradoxically, sometimes brought on the hallucinatory sexual monsters that had tormented Blessed Antony in the desert.

  Brenos moaned at the exquisite pain and thought of the girls in Slana, daughters of Eve whose pale flesh and wheat-colored hair would have seduced the serpent in Paradise, not the opposite. As a child he had heard the muffled laughter of couples during their awkward trysts in boat storage sheds. He was barely fifteen when he had succumbed to his first—and last—temptation with a girl.

  She was the daughter of a boat caulker, with skin as smooth and creamy as ewe’s milk. When she had bent over to untie his trouser lacing, he had seen her breasts, small and pointed. Even her under-arm sweat was as sweet as the presbyter’s incense at Mass. After she hiked up her tunic to receive him, white thighs spread wide, golden delta glistening, he had climaxed the instant he touched her warm wetness—just as he did in the erotic dreams that came a few times a month. He had grabbed himself to stifle the outflow, but his seed had spilled onto the sailcloth beneath her.

  She had laughed at him in a combination of anger and scorn, then smoothed down her tunic and flounced out of the shack. Shamed, he had hidden there until nightfall. In that dim space, the nest he had made for her on a coil of rope, so filled with anticipation, reverted to what it was—a dirty, tar-soaked hawser under a musty linen sail that was spotted with his wasted seed, and lit by a soiled window laced with cobwebs.

  At the next Lord’s Day service, Brenos felt that the presbyter somehow knew. He did not speak of the Nazarene’s miracles, but of Paul’s condemnation of fornication among the Corinthians. The fornicator had been handed over to Satan, for his flesh to be destroyed that his spirit might be saved. That afternoon, Brenos had left for the Abbey of Clonard, to save both his flesh and his spirit.

  Brenos’ rapid strokes of the yew branch slowed to gentle caresses, until pain and pleasure suddenly melded together. When the unstoppable pulsing spent itself, the smell of his seed, mingled with that of evergreen sap, renewed his feeling of guilt. But the headache was gone and he fell asleep.

  After Brenos awoke, he bathed in water as cold as he could stand. At supper he took only bread and water, then left the refectory before the reading of Patricus’ letter.

  Monks going to evening Compline service found their abbot lying on the ground alongside the chapel, stretched out on the snowy stones of a penitential cross. He was chanting psalms.

  “Judge me, O God. Why have you cast me off? Send out your light and truth. May these lead me. May they bring me to your holy mountain and to your great tabernacle.

  “Why are you in despair, O my soul?”

  None of the brothers wondered about the nature of Brenos’ transgression. Every man has his own personal demon to exorcise.

  In the morning, the abbot told Fiachra to order the courier to meet with him and plan the route by which he would guide them back to Ravenna.

  Warinar protested. He had wanted to stay in the Autessiodurum area and spend his gold. He warned of winter storms and said he had no inclination to t
empt Fortune again.

  Brenos insisted, demanding he be shown Warinar’s crude map. He said that if they only took one packhorse to carry supplies, and relied on his status as an abbot to claim hospitality from local officials, they would make good time. Going downriver on the Icauna River by barge, they would be in Lugdunum in seven days. There, Brenos would visit the shrine of the martyred Blandina. Perhaps prayers to the virgin slave girl, who had been torn apart by wild beasts in the amphitheater, would help him overcome the beast of lust in his own body.

  Warinar continued his objections, pointing out that even if they made it that far safely, the road would become more difficult as it climbed the Alpine foothills to the Genevris Pass. Snowstorms might leave them stranded there, or on their descent into the valley of the Padus River.

  Brenos dismissed the warnings, and convinced Warinar to cooperate through an offer of gold coins coupled with the threat of spiritual damnation if he did not.

  They would be in Ravenna, the abbot told Fiachra, no later than December sixth, the beginning of the second week of Advent. Brenos did not tell his secretary that at that time there would be just eighteen days in which to reaffirm the prophecy, contact Smyrna, the Gallican League associate, and coordinate the discovery of the Nazarene’s Last Testament at the Nativity Vigil.

  Nor that, in just six weeks, the period of the Final Tribulation would begin.

  Ravenna

  Chapter five

  Although Theokritos had shown no interest in the dead monk’s prophecy—a fact Getorius thought strange for a scholar— Feletheus continued to be intrigued by the cryptic verses. He sent word to Getorius, asking him to bring the manuscripts the next time he was in the library, so he could study the text at leisure.

  A few days later Getorius brought the case to Feletheus, then stayed to read Galen’s treatise on the body’s parts, particularly the section on the anatomy of hands, because of his recent treatment of the fisherman’s injured thumb.

  It was almost dusk when Getorius came out of the palace and walked briskly toward his villa. Arcadia heard him enter through the atrium and waited by the drapes. She was annoyed at his recent irritability around patients, and his complaints that he did not have enough time to research medical texts, but had guessed he was preoccupied with Behan’s parchments. He had gone to the library that afternoon, taking them with him, and had been away most of the day.

  “Well, what did you and that Feletheus discover?” she asked coolly. “A prediction about the end of the world, or the date of the General Resurrection? Should we even bother opening the clinic tomorrow?”

  “Sorry I took so long, cara,” he apologized, pecking her cheek. “I was reading Galen.”

  “You didn’t go there to read Galen.”

  “Did any more patients come in?” he questioned to dodge her rebuke.

  “Not unless you count the boy with the broken arm.”

  “Broken arm? You should have sent for me. How did you—”

  “I took care of him. Come and eat now. Agrica has supper ready.”

  The cook’s first course was a thick barley soup flavored with smoked pig hocks, onion and dill, to which she added a slight sweet-sour taste with a sauce of honey, vinegar, and boiled grape juice spooned separately into the bowls.

  Getorius ate in silence. Arcadia did not speak either, upset over her husband’s neglect of patients and the fact that he was not sharing information with her. She finally decided to play on his sense of guilt.

  “You cut me off before, but you took those manuscripts to Feletheus, didn’t you?”

  Getorius nodded and reached for a chunk of bread.

  “Well? I presumed you discussed them?”

  “Briefly,” he replied, between mouthfuls.

  “Oh, swallow that, Getorius,” she snapped, “and talk to me! Theokritos dismissed the text as a word game. What makes you think his assistant will find any other meaning?”

  “Feletheus isn’t stupid and he’s around Theokritos all day. He’s probably read most of the books in the library.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. You used to complain that he was always spying on you.”

  “That has nothing to do with this matter.”

  “No, but your obsession with those manuscripts has made you unpleasant around patients.”

  Getorius pushed his bowl away and stood up. “Are you going to start again?”

  “Where are you going? Ursina still has a leek and sausage dish to serve.”

  “I’ll forego that and bathing, and go to bed early.”

  “As you wish, Surgeon.”

  After he disappeared in the direction of the bedroom, Arcadia told Ursina not to bother with the second course, and decided to read in her husband’s study. She had become excited about the gynecology book Theokritos had lent her and read it every evening, having reached the section on preparing a woman for the birth of her child. Midwives knew this information, but she did not. Soranus gave detailed signs of imminent labor and the preparations that should be made for the infant’s delivery.

  After reading for an hour, Arcadia had Silvia arrange her hair in braids for the night, then slid into bed alongside her husband.

  Getorius was asleep. It was painful to feel estranged from him over some manuscripts, and she resolved not to pester him about them any longer.

  In the gatehouse, Brisios was awakened by a determined pounding on the courtyard gate and the frantic barking of his dog, Nigello. He opened the portal a handspan and saw two men standing outside, vagrants, to judge by their clothes. One man supported the other. Brisios quieted the hound.

  “What is it?” the gateman asked. “This household is asleep.”

  “My friend is sick,” the man told him. “He’s got t’see th’surgeon.”

  “Bring him back in the morning,” Brisios replied curtly. “I’ll not awaken the master now.”

  “He may not live that long. He’s…”

  “No! In the morning.” Nigello began to bark again as Brisios struggled to shut the gate against the man’s resistant shoulder.

  Childibert came out through the courtyard entrance to the villa. “I heard your dog barking,” he said to Brisios in Frankish.

  “What is it?”

  “Some beggar says his friend is sick. I told him to come back when it’s light outside.”

  “Let them in,” Childibert ordered. “It’s not for you to decide what the master would do.” Brisios did not conceal his disgust when he pulled open the gate and winced at the smell of stale wine and vomit on the men’s clothing. “Take them to the clinic. I’ll tell the master.”

  After he was awakened, Getorius was not pleased at the prospect of treating someone at that hour. He thought of telling Childibert to send them to the new hospital at the palace, but changed his mind.

  “I’ll come, but get Primus up. Have him light the brazier in the clinic.”

  By the light of a single lamp, Getorius tried to pull on a pair of trousers and tunic as quietly as possible, but Arcadia heard him as he splashed water on his face.

  “What is it, Getorius?” she asked in a voice thick with sleep.

  “Someone’s ill. I’m going to take a look at him.”

  “Shall I come?”

  “No, stay in bed. According to Childibert, it’s just some vagrant. Probably needs stitching up after a brawl.” When Getorius came into the clinic, he saw the sick man sitting on the examining table, coughing with a deep hacking that left him gagging and gasping for breath. Blobs of bloody sputum stained the floor tiles. He felt the man’s face. Feverish. His hot-cold balance is critically upset.

  “What’s his name?” Getorius asked the man’s companion.

  “Marios. Can y’help him?”

  “Where do you two live?”

  “We got a space in th’boat sheds by th’harbor.”

  Marios began shuddering despite the beads of sweat standing out on his face. Getorius brought a blanket from a cabinet and put it around the man�
�s shoulders, wincing at the stench permeating his tunic. “How long has he been like this? What’s your name?

  “Me? They call me ‘Brevius’ on th’docks. Y’ see, I’m not very tall, and—”

  “Your friend. Sick how long? Eight, nine days?”

  “About. We been livin’ under an overturned boat.”

  “Well, Brevius,” Getorius warned, “your friend is very ill. A phlegm imbalance has tipped his fever to the critical stage. I’m afraid he may not last the night.”

  As if to confirm the diagnosis Marios began to cough uncontrollably, then fell sideways onto the table. Getorius barely caught the man before he hit the wood. The vagrant wheezed again in shallow gasps that brought a bloody froth to his lips, then lay still. Getorius felt his throat for a pulse and found none.

  “I’m sorry, Brevius. Your friend is gone.”

  “Marios dead? I…I can’t afford no funeral for him.”

  Getorius pulled the blanket out from under Marios and laid it over his body. “If you want, I’ll see to it that he’s put in the beggars’ field—” Getorius was interrupted by Primus shuffling into the room with a sack of charcoal and lighted taper to service the grate. “Get out, boy, you’re too late,” he scolded, and turned back to Brevius. “Wait here a moment.”

  When Getorius returned, Brevius was at the opposite end of the room, as far away as he could get from his deceased friend.

  “The dead can’t harm you,” Getorius said, rattling several coins in his hand. “As I said, I’ll take care of the burial. Here are a few bronzes to reward your loyalty to Marios. If you wish, you can sleep in our bathhouse until morning.”

  Brevius mumbled awkward thanks as he counted the money, then licked his lips. “I…I’d best be gettin’ back.”