Brenos squinted from pain and held his head. The brilliant light inside his skull hurt his eyes like flashes of miniature lightning bolts. With a hoarse laugh, he steadied himself against a marble table. The Gallican League had been formed just in time, for the sickle was ready to gather in the earth’s grape harvest. This very room would soon become the winepress of God’s wrath that John had foreseen. Blood would flow from the press to the height of a horse’s bridle. Let the Harlot come clothed in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold and jewels…pearls…holding a golden cup….
The abbot’s eyes lost focus. Objects in the room blurred, as if seen reflected in a pool of water. After a month spent in cold outdoor air, the heat and smell of incense was overpowering. An acrid bile rose to Brenos’ throat. He was about to turn toward the door and run out, when he heard a female voice speaking to him.
“Our greetings to you, Abbot.”
Brenos squinted, trying to make out the nature of the woman who approached him. She seemed to be dressed in a purple tunic with red trim, and wore a golden tiara and necklace of glittering jewels. Was it a golden cup that the Harlot held out to him in her outstretched hand? He shivered in horror and staggered back, away from the unclean apparition.
“Are you well, Abbot?” Galla Placidia asked. “You seem ill, but We imagine your journey was incredibly tiring.”
“No…no…” He continued moving away, confused, frightened, unable to think of a rational response.
The abbot’s appearance startled Placidia. She had caught glimpses of Behan when he came to the palace library, an unkempt man in a soiled gray robe, yet that might be expected in a holy one unconcerned with the world. This abbot, however, resembled a wild Hyperborean rather than a churchman living in civilized Gaul. His cheeks bristled with several weeks’ growth of dark beard, and his strange tonsure was half-grown in. The homespun robe he wore was flecked with mud and smelled rancid as a result of his journey, she realized, yet she had expected the abbot to groom himself more carefully for the interview.
“I am Galla Placidia, mother of the Augustus,” she continued, dropping the formal pronoun, “and in my own right, Queen of the Goths.”
After Brenos realized who the woman was, he recovered from his momentary hallucination, and yet was still unsure of how to address her. Hibernia had kings and queens. “Queen” might be proper, and she had called herself by that title.
“Queen, I…I am Brenos, Abbot of Culdees,” he told her, regaining a measure of firmness in his voice.
“Yes, the bishop told me.” Placidia smiled and handed him the golden cup. “My steward prepared this hot wine to warm you after the alpine snows. I find it commendable that you came from Gaul just to bury one of your brothers.”
“Queen, the Nazarene commanded us to bury the dead. I am his servant.”
“Nazarene?” Placidia repeated in surprise. “Christ has not been referred to by that name in decades. Indeed, you do come from the furthest limits of the world.” She indicated a cushioned chair, “Please, Abbot, sit there. I noticed that your right side seems painful.”
“A bruise from the journey.” Brenos sat and brushed a hand over the silk material. It felt smooth and sensuous compared to his rough woolen robe, but he would not let it, or the room, or especially this Harlot-Queen, distract him.
“A pity about your monk Behan’s death,” Placidia sympathized when Brenos said nothing further. “Tell me of your Order. I know something of Egyptian holy men, yet little of those who come from Hibernia.”
“We follow the rule of Ciallanus,” Brenos replied, more at ease now that the queen’s questions had turned to a familiar subject. “I see my task as one charged with the pruning of the Nazarene’s vineyard, casting unfruitful and dead wood into eternal fires.”
“Indeed, abbot,” Placidia retorted, “but would you not agree that in pruning a vine an inept vintner may destroy it?”
“Queen, the Nazarene has commanded that I do this.”
“Commanded you, abbot?”
“A humble instrument of Ciallanus.”
“Why do your Hibernian liturgies differ from those of our Roman Church, which are founded on the Rock of Peter?”
The Harlot is clever. Brenos flushed and shifted in his chair to ease the pain in his side. She seeks to trap me with silken questions, like a spider’s web ensnares an unwary fly.
“Abbot?”
“Queen, your liturgies have been corrupted,” Brenos lashed out in rising anger. “We, ‘The Friends of God,’ call for self-denial, penances. Discipline—”
“All are virtues that even our pagan ancestors practiced,” Placidia replied. “Yet already the asceticism of some Egyptian monks has become fanaticism. Cruel penances replace rational judgment about the offenses and discipline becomes tyranny. Our Roman civilization is based on laws passed to moderate those extremes.”
“The Nazarene said he would vomit out those who were lukewarm.”
“Abbot, do you not confuse conscientiousness with blind certitude?”
“Behan died in the arms of the Nazarene,” Brenos said, returning to the subject of the dead monk. He had to find out how well his prophecy had been received in Ravenna, and the sense of expectation it had aroused in the citizenry. Why hadn’t the bishop mentioned it? Brenos gulped a swallow of the Wine of Fornication, but the unfamiliar spicy taste made him gag. He wiped his mouth on a soiled sleeve. “Fortunately, Queen, before his death Behan had completed his mission
