Autessiodurum
Chapter four
Warinar, the courier who was sent from Ravenna to Autessiodurum to report the death of Behan, arrived at the Abbey of Culdees before mid-November. A native of the area, he had been given more gold coins to make the dangerous journey than he could have earned in Ravenna all winter.
Brenos of Slana was abbot at Culdees. Germanus, the bishop who had appointed him, was a man after the abbot’s ascetic heart, if not his humble background. Brenos had been born in Slana, a port hamlet on the island of Hibernia’s eastern shore. The two main concerns of those who lived in its stone, thatch-roofed huts were catching enough fish to feed themselves, and coming back alive with them from the stormy seas.
The aristocratic Germanus had studied law in Rome. After the Senate appointed him governor of a province, he had administered it with model efficiency. This had prompted the then bishop to view him as good material for the growing Gallican Church. He had tonsured Germanus into the presbyterate with a ruse, then mollified his anger by telling of a vision in which God ordered that the governor would follow as the next bishop.
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
