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CHAPTER XXIV

He came to me in the darkness, a moving shadow, a whisper of stirring in the air, somewhere between waking and sleep.

"Yet another plant plucked up," the abbot said, in a voice uncommon soft for him.

"Two plants. The dearest of them all," said I.

There was silence for a space, and I spoke again to him, at once angered that he'd come and fearful he might have gone. "Are you to be a Job's comforter to me then, explaining how these innocents had to die for my deserving?"

His answer came slowly; so slowly that for a time I thought I was alone indeed.

"I'm sent to beg your forgiveness," he whispered at last.

It was my turn to be silent.

"It seems I've been overhard on you," he went on. I tried to imagine the expression on his unseen face, but couldn't fit one to the features. "The opinion at the . . . the Highest Level is . . . Och! You've got to understand."

"Understand what?"

"You've got to understand about Heaven. Heaven isn't what we thought. Or rather it isn't what I thought."

"So you're in Heaven now? Well out of Purgatory already?"

"I'm outside of Time. The question has no meaning."

"And what's Heaven like?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell. There's no words in Irish or Latin. 'Tis a shocking place, Heaven. There's things here—things encouraged, that'd never be allowed below. I can't say what; I can't even hint it, because it would put thoughts in your fleshly mind that would be like to get you damned. But here it's permitted—here all is permitted. `Love God and do what you will,' said Augustine, but you can't really do that below because your nature's diseased. It's like Adam and Eve. It was good for them to be naked, but it wasn't good after the Fall. We're not exactly naked here, but . . . it takes some getting used to.

"I spent my whole life mastering the rules. I thought it would please God, and it did. But early on I lost sight of the weightier matters of the Law.

"You though—with your recklessness and wanton ways—I find that God . . . God likes you better than He likes me. He loves me no less than you or anyone, but some . . . many . . . He likes better, and you're one of them.

"When He put on a body and walked among us, He wasn't like me. He was like you. I studied the gospels my whole life, yet I missed that plain fact, near enough to my face to singe my eyebrows. He went to weddings and parties, and played with children and spoke to loose women. Men like me He showed the back of His hand."

Can a blessed spirit sob? I could swear I heard him sob then, but the sound was so soft it might have been the roof settling.

"It's the risk He loves!" cried the abbot. "It's the mad, devil-take-the-hindmost rascality of the saints who throw away their gold or their shirts or their very lives and value it all at a feather for love of Him. God help me, in my whole life I never did one incautious act, and now I repent my respectability; I repent it in sackcloth and ashes."

Long silence then. The world had stopped; the night might linger forever if I gave it no push with a word. I outwaited him; humbled him by forcing him to ask the question once more.

"I've come to beg forgiveness," he said. "Will you give me it?"

"With all my heart," said I. "Just as soon as God gives me my woman and child back."

 

My memory of the weeks and months that followed is smoky. That we celebrated Easter I know, but whether it was done well or poorly I cannot tell. I baptized and buried, heard confessions and pronounced banns, and did the work of a priest generally. As before, the priest Aillil and the man Aillil were two separate souls, only the man Aillil had died.

Even anger can be pressed to death. I knew the cause of Steinbjorg's murder, and our child's—the judgment of God on my sacrilege in feigning His priesthood—but I was too weary to rail at Him for it. "You are mightier than all the world and slyer than a Scot," I said to Him in a rare moment of plain speaking. "There's no use arguing with someone who kills the innocent to make a point." Then I asked forgiveness and did quick penance, and thought no more such dangerous thoughts.

A man came with a ship to buy grain one summer day, and in the hall that night he declared himself to be, not a merchant, but an agent of Svein Forkbeard, King of Denmark.

"Svein will make you a jarl, Erling Skjalgsson," the man said. "He has heard your name and your deeds, and it's men such as you he seeks for retainers in his Norse domain. Denmark is a richer land than Norway, a civilized and Christian kingdom, and to steer your lands under Svein is far to be preferred over serving whatever sea king thinks he can hold a few woodlots in Norway for a month or two."

Bergthor said, "Does Svein think to send the Jomsvikings to conquer us again?"

Everyone laughed, and the agent reddened. Someone explained to me that Bergthor was harking back to an attack from Denmark years before, which had turned out badly.

Erling smiled, turning the gold ring the agent had brought from Svein in his hands, and said, "It's good to know the king of Denmark invites me if I need him, but all in all I prefer a Norwegian lord."

"Do you think you're likely to make peace with Olaf Trygvesson, whose uncle you slew?" asked the agent, and after that things were unfriendly, and the man went on to the next district unsatisfied.

I was giving the host to Ragna one day at mass when I noticed, as one suddenly notices a cobweb that's been flourishing in a house corner for days, that the woman had grown thin, and the skin hung loose and pale on her jaw and neck. I went to her in the women's house later and asked her if she was unwell. She smiled at me from her seat and said, "No, I've only been fasting much lately."

"Is there some matter I should have in my prayers?" I asked.

"No. I mourn my old sins, and the days of heathendom. My husband was a heathen and so was I, Father, and I loved him much; but now I see that our lives were wicked, and he burns in Hell, and I am only saved, if saved I will be, by God's mercy. When I walk about this farm, I sometimes think how I miss Thorolf, and then I tell myself it's wicked to miss so evil a sinner, so I do penance. And sometimes I think how great have been my sins, and how short a time I have to atone for them, and I do penance that my stay in Purgatory may be the less. So with one thing and another, I've been eating little. And truth to tell, I find I want food less than I did. I suppose that lightens the value of my fasts, so I must fast even more."

"You shouldn't abuse your body so as to break your health," I told her. "The body must serve us as a horse serves his master, but only a fool would starve his horse."

She smiled a small smile. "I think what time I have left will not be shortened much by penances. I have thought that when I've seen my son married, and a new mistress in place at Sola, I will find a convent in England or Germany, and take the veil."

I said that would be an honorable undertaking.

"The great thing is to get Erling wed to Astrid Trygvesdatter," she said. "When I see that done I can bid the world farewell with a good heart. And in Heaven I can tell my ancestors I have left the family higher in the world than I found it. Only my ancestors won't be in Heaven, will they? Ah, me."

 

One morning in June I was awakened by somebody beating on my door. I stepped out into a blue and shining morning, and the bullyboy who'd roused me said there was a stranger in the steading, and that Erling wanted me. As my head cleared, I realized a voice was shouting, and shouting in Irish.

I hurried to the gate, where a crowd had gathered around a tonsured man in a tattered monk's robe, accompanied by a huge wolfhound which snarled at Erling's hounds. The man stood with his arms stretched out and his face turned to heaven, crying, "Now, Lord, let thy servant depart in peace; I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; let the arrows of the heathen pierce me through; let their spears transfix my bowels and their axes hack my corpse, still in my flesh I shall see God. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me; I shall not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day; from the end of the earth I cry to Thee, when my heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the rock that is higher than I; for Thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy. . . ."

He had to take a breath some time, and when he did I put in, "I'm sorry, brother, but if you're seeking martyrdom you'll have to look elsewhere. We have a few heathens left here, but we keep them on a leash."

He opened his eyes and stared me in the face, and had I not known better I'd have thought from his look of joy that we were long-lost kin. He was a long, ginger-haired fellow with a crooked nose, thin to the point of unhealth, and his chin and tonsure needed shaving. "Praise to the Beloved, a Christian priest!" he cried, and he leaped on me and grappled me to his breast, giving me ample proof that along with food and a shave he needed a bath (it didn't occur to me until later that I'd dwelt in heathen lands so long that I'd come to despise the honest stink of a holy man). His rangy hound leaped about our knees in brainless sympathy, and Erling's hounds put their ears back and growled at the sight.

Erling stepped nearer and said, "Now that we've eased your confusion, brother, may I offer you the hospitality of my house? I am Erling Skjalgsson, lord of Sola. The fellow whose back you're trying to break is Father Aillil, my priest. Breakfast is nearly ready, and I beg you to join us and tell us how you came so far by yourself."

"Fishermen found him wrecked on the reef this morning and brought him here," Erling told me when I'd gotten loose and we were all headed for the hall. "He was sitting on the rocks, singing, they said, with the dog howling at his side. When my men took charge of him he assumed they were going to kill him."

"A natural assumption, if you're from Ireland," said I. "He must be a White Martyr."

"A White Martyr?"

"White Martyrdom is when you go off by yourself, far from your homeland, to live or die by God's providence. It's not so common anymore, but in times past many a monk set sail in his curragh and was never heard from again. Somehow this one got carried here."

Once we were seated and I'd blessed the food, and our guest had refused the washing bowl, I began to question him, and there was whispering as the Irish speakers translated for their friends.

"My name is Moling," he told me, "and I am a man of Armagh, a wicked transgressor before God, guilty of sins of the flesh and sins of the spirit." He spoke cheerfully though, as if the memory of his sins troubled him not at all. He ate a bite of the food set before him and passed the rest bit by bit to the dog who sat with his muzzle on his knee.

"It's not horsemeat," I said, recalling my own sins.

"What? Oh, of course not." Moling's eyes had gone dreamy, and he snapped back with a smile. "I had no such unworthy thought. I've no wish to insult the hospitality of Christian brothers in an alien land. It only seems I've less need of food than I did, since I've been spending much time with God, and my friend Conn here, God bless him—" he patted the hound "—he's a purely carnal being, as God intended him to be, and better able to appreciate these things. So I enjoy spiritual food, and Conn enjoys fleshly food, and we praise God according to our kinds."

"What led you to take up the White Martyrdom?"

Moling smiled. "I killed my father and mother," he said. "I killed my wife and children, and I raped my neighbor's daughter, and I robbed the church and I betrayed my king, and I took the homes of the poor and drove them weeping into the road. I broke fasts and labored on Sundays and lied to my confessor and slandered the Blessed Virgin and spit on the crucifix, and stole the sacramental wine and got drunk on it. I moved my neighbors' boundary stones, and accused them falsely and perjured myself at their trials. I lent money at interest. I burned down houses, and stole cattle, and took slaves, and—"

"You kept busy," said I.

"I? Oh yes, it's rather a lot for one life, isn't it? And I'm not as old as I look. But then perhaps it wasn't me at all. Perhaps it was some other fellow. Or perhaps I only dreamed of doing them, and so sinned in my heart. What does it matter?"

"It must matter somehow, else why are you wandering the earth to earn forgiveness?"

He stared at me. "To earn forgiveness?" he asked. "You can't earn forgiveness. Surely you know that."

"Then why this penance?"

"For the Beloved, of course. When a man as wicked as I has all his sins forgiven and debts paid, he must love the One who forgave. And love wishes to be with the Beloved. If I could suffer a thousand thousand White Martyrdoms, and a thousand thousand Red Martyrdoms, they wouldn't begin to repay what He spent on me. But as I let go everything that separated us, I am drawn closer and closer to Him, and my joy is sometimes such that I think that this world, where I seem to range as a starving stranger, is Paradise itself, and I wander in blessed groves and eat the apples of Heaven and hear the music of angels. Did you hear them this morning? They sang the strangest song to me as I sat on the reef. `Maeve lives,' they sang. It was beautiful, but I don't know what it means. I know a couple lasses named Maeve, but why shouldn't they be alive?"

I reached out and took him by both shoulders. "What else did they sing?"

"Nothing. Only `Maeve lives.' Is this Maeve someone to you?"

I let him go. "My sister," I said. "Taken by Vikings. But what use is it to tell me she lives without saying how it is with her?"

Moling laid a hand on my arm. "In the end, we none of us ever know how it is with another, even our dearest. We must leave each of them in God's hands soon or late."

"I don't mind leaving her in God's hands. It's the hands of some greasy Viking master I can't bear to think of."

"There are many kinds of White Martyrdom, my brother. Embrace it as a bride, and find your true love."

"Let's speak no more of this," I said.

Moling spent the day playing with children and watching Lemming in the rebuilt forge until supper, which he fed again to his hound. Then he passed the night in a byre, refusing absolutely to sleep in a house, and after I had said mass the next morning he made ready to set off north overland. We told him it was a long, dangerous journey, sometimes roadless, pitted with mires and unfriendly men, and the Boknafjord only the first of many waters he'd have to cross. These things only made him more eager. "I've heard tales of heathen Lapps in the far north," he said. "I must go and preach to them."

"Wait a bit," I said to him, and I ran to Erling, who was in the horse pen, gentling a colt.

"Let me go north to Tungeness with Moling," I said.

"I don't see what help that would be," said Erling. "You don't know the way any better than he."

"I want to speak with him. There are things I can talk over only with him."

"What sort of things?"

"Irish things. Churchmen's things."

"I could send one of the men with you, I suppose. I'd hate to have you end up sunk in a bog."

"Send no one. I must be alone with Moling."

Erling searched my face, then called a thrall. "Get some food together for Father Aillil—sausages and cheese, dried fish—traveling fare."

 

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Framed


Title: The Year of the Warrior
Author: Lars Walker
ISBN: 0-671-57861-8
Copyright: © 2000 by Lars Walker
Publisher: Baen Books