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 tempt 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
