The Oblate's Confession (52 page)

After we had made several circuits of the village, the wagon turned away from the houses and entered the abbey path. The crowd moved with the wagon, sidestepping to avoid the oxen (which, rather alarmingly, I now saw to be without a driver). The people lined the path ahead of us, clapping and shouting. Several held sheaves of wheat and these they raised above their heads as the wagon drew even with them, the sheaves golden against a pale blue sky. Eanflæd and the other girl continued to dance. Once, apparently as part of the rite, the two girls turned and bowed to us. When they straightened up again our eyes met. The girl I did not know blushed and looked away, but Eanflæd's gaze held mine for a moment, communicated something. Then she too looked away.

It was now, as we began to approach the monastery, that I grew apprehensive. What was going on? What was everyone so excited about? Why were they hurrying us up toward the abbey? What were they going to do to us up there? I looked over at Waldhere, hoping he might have an answer to these questions, and was surprised to discover it wasn’t Waldhere who rode beside me but someone else, some oblate I had never seen before. Whoever this boy was, he now looked at me, smiled. He had no teeth.

As if the world itself were shocked by this discovery, everything became immediately quiet, still, the villagers staring wide-eyed up at the monastery. I looked up that way and at first could find nothing to explain their wonder, the abbey sitting as it always had, silent and serene atop its terrace. Still, trying to think about it from their point of view, I could see how the place might seem a

little intimidating, at least to a villager. And it was then, as if thoughts could call themselves into being, that before my eyes the abbey changed, grew overlarge, charged with menace, and in an instant the place I had known all my life stood revealed as something else, a place I did not want to go to, an assemblage of buildings that stared down at me from its perch like something alive, something awful, an animal biding its time, licking its chops.

Our wagon continued its slow progress up the path. One by one, the villagers began to turn, fall away. They looked embarrassed as they did so, shamefaced, as if they only now realized what they were doing, sheaves hanging forgotten at their sides. Eanflæd and her friend had stopped dancing. They walked solemnly before us now, heads down, apparently afraid even to look at what sat upon the terrace. Somehow I knew that they too would soon step aside, and then nothing would stand between us and the abbey.

The urge to say something, call a halt, demand an explanation, rose in my throat like something hot and cathartic. But when I tried to speak, nothing came out. It was as if a hand had been clamped over my mouth, stopping all my words. I looked over at the oblate who rode beside me, pointed at my mouth. He nodded, placed a similar finger to his lips:
Yes, we must be silent.

I shook my head, desperate to be understood, trying as hard as I could to force the words through whatever it was that blocked them. And something gave. Though there was no sound, something gave, and far off in the distance I thought I heard something, something vague and tremulous, an echo, a distant reminder of what it felt like to speak, emote, proclaim. Again I pushed, excited now, heaving the thought before me like a battering ram, forcing it up and outward. And this time something definitely gave, something came out. But where I had expected a roar, a great torrent of exclamation and outrage, I heard instead only a small creaking sound, a voice so muffled and weak as to be scarcely recognizable as my own.

What?

I blinked.

Light.

There was light. Ceiling beams lay their long familiar lengths down across my world.

I closed my eyes, turned, opened my eyes, and there in the bed next to mine lay the stupid drooling face of old Brother Willibald. How many times had his countenance—foolish, senescent, benign—welcomed me back to the land of the living, signalled an end to some terrible dream, relief from the nameless horrors of night? But this morning I found it not so comforting. This morning, even old Brother Willibald looked unreliable. Of course I tried to reassure myself, remind myself that such things were to be expected, that it was in the nature of dreams that the world should be turned upside-down, the familiar seem alien, the alien familiar, right, commonplace. But the dream would not be so easily vanquished. The visions it had given birth to kept rising before me, clouding my mind, disturbing the natural peace of morning—that strange procession up the abbey path, my growing sense of apprehension, the feeling that I was being delivered into the clutches of something from which there would be no escape, and then the image of the monastery itself, my home, the place I had always run to when frightened, turned suddenly strange and forbidding, sentient, grotesque. Again I looked at Brother Willibald, again I tried to see him as I had seen him so many times before, old, friendly, harmless. But the vision would not hold. For the first time in my life I saw something unnatural in the life that lay on the bed before me, something cruel and inflexible, mindless and unrelenting. I swallowed. I swallowed and the muscles of my throat (against which I had struggled in my sleep) constricted painfully like the hinges of a door long since rusted into place.

As it happened, the sore throat lasted for the better part of a week. Brother Theodore was infirmarian in those days and a good one, but he could do nothing for me. When I swallowed it hurt, and when it hurt I saw again the monastery as I had seen it in my dream—smug and abiding, ravenous and self-assured. Because of my illness, I was excused from work which was probably not a good idea as it gave me time to dwell on my thoughts. Out of a vague sense of duty to my community and the expectations it held for me, I remained faithful to my devotions, though my silence was filled now not with prayer but visions. Again and again I rode that wagon up the abbey path, again and again I heard the crowd’s roar, felt my pulse grow rapid, saw Eanflæd’s look, the abbey waiting. It is in the nature of dreams that important aspects of their

character should be revealed only upon reflection; over time we realize that the woman we spoke with was not a stranger but our mother, the ditch we tried to step across not a ditch but the Meolch. And so it was with this dream. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that there had been something vaguely (and uncomfortably) familiar about the whole thing, a sense, almost a foreboding, that I had experienced it all before, been carried up the abbey path like that once before. Still, try as I might, I could not dredge up any memory of such an incident. Indeed, even as I became more and more convinced that a memory like this must exist, the very strength of that conviction seemed to drive any recollection of it from my mind. And then, just when I had given up all hope, had in fact turned in disgust from the problem, told myself I didn’t care, didn’t even want to know, the answer itself rose before me like an artifact of my capitulation. It wasn’t me, it was Father. It wasn’t my memory I’d dreamt that night but Father Hermit’s.

As I remember it, Father told the story as a sort of cautionary

tale, the sort of history one recounts to warn a child of the dangers of indiscriminate contact with other races; and thus I have always associated it with the time I caught him conversing with a shepherd in the tongue (harsh and vulgar) of the Cumbrogi. But now that I come to write the whole thing down, record it for the community, I realize such a conclusion doesn’t bear scrutiny. The Cumbrogi are, after all—after a fashion—Christian, yet Father’s story was a tale of pagan depravity, of the depths to which a life without Christ will lead a man. So I wonder now if it wasn’t Stuf, if, perhaps, my introduction to Stuf might not have been the occasion for Father’s revelation. The timing’s right, and, though it seems hard to believe now, I suppose I might once have been drawn to the charcoal-maker, might once have found something to admire in a man who dressed so differently, spoke so wildly, held such a dim view of those his betters were required to respect. And, if that is the case, if such an infatuation did occur and was disclosed, then what better reason could Father have had for telling me about the old ones?

As is typical of dreams, the story that gave birth to mine would seem, at first glance, to bear little resemblance to its offspring. But it was, I believe, not so much the story Father told but the feeling that story evoked in me, the fear I must have felt as it developed, as I realized what I was hearing, what was about to happen, that inspired my nightmare, placed me in that wagon, sent it riding up the abbey path. But I get ahead of myself. First, if you are to understand any of this—Father’s tale, my dream’s connection to it—you must understand a little of the history of our valley. As unlikely as it seems now, it has not always been ours. There was a time when the Cumbrogi held this place, worked these fields, were baptized (after a fashion) in our stream. Then (thanks be to God) our people began their march from east to west across Northumbria, always driving the Cumbrogi before them, winning battle after glorious battle, until, finally, we pushed what remained of that people beyond the last of the mountains, pushed them until they held but a tiny remnant of their original land, testimony to the error of their faith and our Lord’s contempt for such error. But here, as it so

often does, history throws up a stumbling block for those foolish enough to trip over it. For it must be admitted that at this time our people were as yet unsaved. Paulinus had not then begun his ministry, and the beliefs we now ascribe to the hill people were, in those days, held by one and all. And so the fool, thinking himself the wiser for it, points out that a people who called themselves Christians had been defeated by one that openly practiced idolatry, leaping from this to the conclusion that the pagan gods must be the more powerful. Thus the unwary are caught in their own snares. For the fool cannot see (as God does) that, eventually, it would be our people who would show themselves open to the teachings of the missionary saint from Rome, while the Cumbrogi (to their unending shame) would turn their backs upon him, cling stubbornly to the Northern way long since proven unorthodox and wrong.

But no wave washes all before it; inevitably there will be a shell here, a stone there, left turned perhaps, up-ended, but otherwise in more or less the same position it held before. And so it is with

people. We may have swept the Cumbrogi before us like a great tide but, here and there, individuals would have washed up in more or less the same place they occupied before. Which explains, we may assume, how Gwynedd and his mother—Cumbrogi both—came to rest in their native village (the one we now properly call Wilfrid’s) even after the greater part of its inhabitants had been driven across Modra nect. Perhaps Gwynedd’s father was killed in the fighting, perhaps he turned and ran—I do not know. All I know for sure is that, whatever became of the man, he left a wife and child behind him, left them to the mercy of those he must surely have thought incapable of mercy. But in this, of course, he was wrong. Our people (unlike his) do not slay the innocent; and so Gwynedd and his mother were permitted to live, kept as servants by a family that, even to this day, claims descendants among those that dwell in our village.

Now we of course cannot know what it is like to live as slaves—our people never having been reduced to such a state— but surely it cannot be pleasant. One thing I remember well from

Father’s story is the complaint he made of the changes effected in his mother by servitude. Apparently the woman (whose name, alas, I no longer recall) had been quite a beauty. Indeed, in the way of children, Gwynedd had believed her the most beautiful woman in the world. But in the course of her captivity the light went out of her beauty, her once supple skin become coarse and gray, her hair thin and tending, like a man’s, toward baldness. I remember this because it was part of Father’s story to remark upon the change that came over her when they began to feed her again, how she blossomed, seemed to regain her youth, became again the mother he had known, the beauty he had adored. Up until that time, Gwynedd and his mother had subsisted almost entirely upon what food they could pilfer from that set aside for their master’s beasts. But suddenly, and without explanation, their status had changed. They were fed now upon sweetmeats and pie, butter and bread. Where before they had dwelt among the family’s ducks in a lean-to affixed to the house, now they were permitted to move inside, take their meals with their master, sleep on the floor by his bed. Father told me he grew half a head taller during this period and that his mother’s hair came back in, though he believed it a different shade after that, darker and less fine.