Storyteller Page 9

  “Seven of them,” said the abbot.

  “Seven tankards?”

  “Seven sails. Look.”

  Colgu looked. There were seven sails. “I see them, too!” For a moment he entertained the notion that the abbot’s holiness had spilled over into his own eyes, empowering them to see the vision. He counted them aloud. “Seven sails. What could it mean?” He expected a spiritual interpretation.

  “That seven ships are coming this way,” said the abbot.

  This was reasonable. “Who could it be?”

  The abbot didn’t conjecture. “We must prepare for visitors. Who is the brughaid* this month?”

  “Murchadh,” Colgu replied. “Shall I see that the cauldron is full?”

  “Brother Murchadh will tend to it,” said the abbot with confidence. “We have meat at the ready: three flesh of boiled, three red, and three living, as custom requires. But seven ships . . . there will be many mouths to feed. Fetch nine more from the pastures: oxen, wethers, and hogs. Three of each. We mustn’t be caught short.”

  Colgu, rubbing his hands together for warmth, hastened down the path on his errand. As he ran, his anticipation of visitors grew, for it meant a great feast; food in abundance, not the meager rations the monks customarily allotted themselves, and their helpers. And not meat only, but bread, and beer, and salt. Also the three cheers: of the strainers straining ale, of the servitors over the cauldron, and of the young men over the chessboards competing for glory when the meal was done!

  He ran faster. Who were these guests? Where did they come from? Best of all, what stories would they have to tell when everyone gathered by the fire?

  Yet, what ships came from the north?

  All questions would be answered in time. He entered the earthen enclosure and the pens and began assembling the little herd as commanded. By the time he had them in order and was driving them back up the path it was nearly dark. It was then he became aware of a glow over the hillocks of grass and scrub trees. At first he thought a bonfire must have been lit, probably to guide the ships to shore. A great bonfire indeed. But there was too much smoke. And it was not one fire, but two. Three! Four! Cresting the hill he saw that the whole compound was ablaze, and in the mad fury of wind-driven walls of flame, he could make out the familiar figures of the monks, fleeing to and fro in panic. And strangers—wild-maned men of ferocious stature—were chasing them, swords and spears upraised, cutting them down with great slaughter.

  Colgu’s brain was petrified to inaction. He stood and gaped and would have cried out, but nothing came. Horror had stolen the air from his lungs, so there was nothing upon which a cry could ride. And what would he cry? What incantation could freeze the earth in its path, arrest time itself and halt the massacre? If there was such a spell, surely the monks would know it, but if they had used it, it had been of no use, for the killing continued.

  The scriptorium was the farthest inland of the buildings and it had not yet been ravaged by fire, though the destroyers were rushing toward it with torches alight. As he watched, someone emerged from its low door. The abbot! And behind him the monk Breas. Their arms cradled the sacred books and precious manuscripts into which all the community had poured their life’s blood these long years.

  Suddenly everything seemed to be happening apart from time, as if the very ether had gelled and the blood-thirsty pursuers and their terrified prey were caught up in it, swimming through it with slow, arching, erratic strokes, their limbs distorted and extended to supernatural lengths by the frenzy of shadows. Colgu’s brain—never a quick witness—slowed to a standstill. So stupefied was he, so unable to comprehend the horrors he beheld, that his thoughts began to turn in upon themselves, and to run backward, to the time he had first entered service among the monks.

  “You see,” explained the abbot as he dipped his goose-feather quill into the ink and made a graceful mark upon the newly-dried vellum, “each mark makes a sound in the reader’s mind. And the sounds, when they are assembled, make words, and the words tell stories, just the same as when you and I speak.”

  The concept was unnatural to Colgu. None of his forebears, who had inhabited the island since long before the monks had arrived, had learned to read or write. In fact they held the art in grave suspicion; it was through these mystical arrangements of dots and lines that those long dead spoke to the living. Yet, applying the same science, the living couldn’t speak with the dead! What good could come of such sinister communication from the grave?

  No amount of patient explanation on the abbot’s behalf could expunge the prevailing skepticism from Colgu’s mind. When the monk would recite the meaning of the marks, the menaig would stop his ears with the heels of his hands. He did not want the words of the dead, or the strange language in which they were spoken, echoing in his mind. Making sense of the living was chore enough.

  But the marks had a grace and wonder of their own, a rhythmic cadence, an orderliness as they flowed from the tip of the pen, establishing patterns that reflected the patterns of nature; seasons, tides, the cycles of the moon and stars. Patterns. These he could understand.

  Colgu, for whom so much that others seemed to take for granted was utterly unfathomable, had always taken comfort in patterns. In fact, he could see them where others only saw chaos: in the ripples of a steam, in the heaped-up clouds of autumn skies, in rocks on a beach or lichen on granite. And not only could he see them, but he retained them.

  Once his brother had tested this gift when Colgu had made it known, by blindfolding him, spinning him in circles, and taking him deep into the forest, to a place where he could see nothing but the trees surrounding them. There, removing the blindfold, he commanded Colgu to tell him where they were. Colgu studied the pattern of the branches on the leafless trees with every confidence that—as long as he had been there before, no matter how distant in time—he would recognize the place, which he did. Unconvinced, the brother tested him in another place. Again he proved his gift.

  For some little time the brother added a respectable supplement to his living by wagering that Colgu, whom everyone knew to be all but an idiot, could perform this magic. Very shortly, however, the supply of gullible takers from the island’s small population was exhausted, and Colgu ceased to be either a commodity or entertainment. That was about the time his father, a fisherman with too many mouths to feed, hired him out to the monks on the neighboring island.

  Colgu’s sole captivation, when his chores were done, was to watch over the shoulders of the monks as they copied text from some ragged, yellowed scroll onto fresh rectangles of vellum. This they did in sunlight, when weather allowed, for like all the Scots*, they preferred the outdoors.

  “Colgu, move! You’re in my light!” was a refrain heard more often than prayers.

  But the true shrine of the art, to Colgu’s thinking, were the multicolored majuscules and half unicals* the monks created to illustrate the text, and into which they would pour all the power of their skill and boundless imagination. These were symbols and signs, like the runes on the stones the ancient ones had set up all over the island and, though he could coax meaning from neither, Colgu did derive from their intricate patterns the same deep and lofty comfort that the monks seemed to take from the words that followed them.

  In a world where, it seemed, no deed went unpunished, he wondered if it was blasphemy or sacrilege that he copied them all onto the parchment of his mind, every stroke, every letter, every word, every page over which every monk labored, to say nothing of the arrangement of red, green, yellow and brown inks by which they were depicted. He thought not. But, just in case, he kept this Great Secret to himself. For if he discovered it was a sin he would be compelled to repent, what else would he think of at night? With what else could he decorate his dreams? What horrible penance would it require to exorcise so deep an impression from the sinews of his soul?

  A loud cry reached into the chasm of the past and startled him to the present. Brother Abbot was impaled on a spear. Conflicting fi
res fought with shadows to depict the suffering on his face. His eyes were still open. His hands were stretched out, it seemed toward Colgu, and in them was the Great Book, the one to which he had devoted over fifteen years and only recently completed. Its covers were inlaid with gold leaf and encrusted with precious jewels.

  The abbot’s mouth opened and his tongue moved. His eyes seemed to be peering into the shadows, embracing Colgu who couldn’t hear the words over the chilling ululations of the destroyers and the wailing prayers of their victims, but he could see them. “Save the book!” the old man said. “Save the . . .”

  The next second there was only empty air where the abbot’s head had been. Triumphant, blood-soaked hands seized the Great Book before it hit the ground, tore off the bejeweled cover, and threw the codex* into the fire.

  Huge tears welled involuntarily in Colgu’s eyes. With the thrust of a spear and the stroke of the sword, the existence of the great man, his friend, provider, and protector, was ended. This was hard to bear. But it was his entire life and passion that was now consumed by flames. In an instant it was as if he had never been.

  And so the slaughter continued, as Colgu watched unmoving. The animals, without a hand to guide them, dispersed. The pigs wandered into the night, away from the chaos. The cows ambled toward it, for the fires held promise of warmth. Before the blood of the monks had congealed, the kine were roasting over the flames on makeshift spits hastily constructed by the Northmen for the unexpected banquet.

  Still Colgu stood, transfixed, and watched, patterns of death and destruction etching themselves on the eyes of his mind. He did not move. As the feast and the fury subsided, several of the boatmen—those not overcome by drink or conquered by the lethargy of full bellies—began probing the shadows at the periphery of the compound. Colgu was reminded of a verse the abbot had often recited: “The devil roams the earth like a lion, seeking whom he may devour.” Surely these were devils.

  Not until this moment had it occurred to Colgu’s benumbed brain that he was in peril. His mind cleared completely and, at long last, he lifted his feet to flee. The motion caught the eye of one of the boatmen, who promptly raised the alarm. Instantly spears and shields and swords leapt to the hands of the destroyers as if of their own volition and an army of demons, resuscitated by the scent of unspilled blood, descended upon the shadows. Several seized torches from the fires and waved them high, throwing tale-bearing swatches of light into the darkness.

  Colgu was gripped with fear. His feet, acting independent of any resolution, spun him in frantic circles. Where could he go? The nearest forest was a mile away and between him and it only wide, wind-scoured expanses of undulating granite, dry copse, and the earthen embankments of the cattle pen. He fell to his knees and prayed that the earth would open up and swallow him.

  But it could! Lugaid’s grave!

  At once he was on his feet again, running with all his might toward the hallowed ground. There, even in the absolute darkness, he had no trouble finding the grave, for he was led to it by the powerful, musty smell of freshly-turned earth. He threw himself into the hole and began pulling as much of the dirt as possible in after him. The shouts of the destroyers were growing closer, but they were spreading in all directions. One, though, was very near.

  Colgu burrowed as deep into the loam as he could and lay still, sure that the pounding of his heart would betray him. The soft, moist earth filled his nose and his ears and he wanted to sneeze. It dribbled down his neck, like the feet of a thousand ants, and he could almost feel each grain shake the earth as it fell.

  The footsteps of the nearest boatman shuffled at the periphery of the grave, knocking clumps of dirt from what remained of the pile into the pit. Colgu heard his guttural breathing, heard the tip of his spear as it prodded the earth, felt the razor-sharp iron as it sliced the fat of his thigh. He contained his impulse to cry out.

  The Northman, very drunk and easily fatigued, gave up the exploration and, hurling a curse at the wind, abandoned the search in favor of the fire and sleep.

  Colgu lay in the grave all that night, all the next day and the following night, nursing from a tiny pocket of stale air. On the morning of the third day, unable to contain his screaming muscles any longer, he began to dig himself out.

  The smell of smoke was thick and acrid. Overhead, framed by the gravesides, seagulls circled. Their cries filled the air. More, he could tell, flocked nearby, no doubt fattening themselves on the abundance of flesh—both human and animal—the destroyers had left in their wake.

  He poked his head out of the grave. Cool clumps of earth trickled from his matted hair and down his spine. He swiped the residue of dirt from his eyes and absorbed the destruction.

  All of the buildings in the compound had been reduced to smoldering rubble. The scriptorium and the chapel were heaps of stones upon which the pagans had defecated and urinated, adding a further, foul dimension to the assault on his senses. Gulls, as he had anticipated, had congregated in wild array and were fighting one another for choice morsels. There was more than enough to feed the entire species, Colgu thought, still they fought and wrangled and complained and stole from one another.

  Of the fires only ash and hearts of glowing coals remained. The sky was gray and a soft, inquisitive breeze poked and prodded at the garments of the fallen monks, giving them a peculiar animation, as if the dead brothers might at any moment mount the wind and fly away to heaven.

  Apart from the three pigs, which had returned to scavenge, and the gulls, there was no sign of life.

  Colgu climbed out of the grave, got very slowly to his knees, and cast a wary eye in all directions, lastly toward the beach. The boatmen were gone. He alone remained.

  His wound healed but he had bled a lot and was weak. It took four days to bury all the monks, though the gulls and crows had made it lighter work than it might have been. Colgu ate one of the pigs, sharing the meat with its brothers, fattening them for the same eventual purpose. All the other cattle had been slaughtered; their meat, the evidence suggested, had been salted on the beach and taken aboard the ships.

  Colgu was not equipped to plan, only to act. For months, subsisting on gull’s eggs, pig meat, and shellfish, he piled stone upon stone, for there was nothing else to do.

  In less than two years he had rebuilt the crude dry-stone scriptorium and chapel. Two years more passed before he finished the last of the huts. He swept, and raked, and shoveled until the compound was much as it had been before the attack; every stone exactly as he remembered it. He replanted the garden and began to enjoy its harvest. But no amount of activity could fill the vast, aching canyon of loneliness. An entire ocean separated him from the world of living, breathing mankind. He wrung what little solace and companionship he could from the company of the dead in the hallowed ground. For the first time he wished he could read, that their voices would speak to him from the grave. But there were no pages. Of all the years of effort, the boatmen had left not a fragment. Not a word. Not a picture. All these existed only in Colgu’s mind.

  But they were there. For the first time in his life, Colgu had an original thought.

  He knew the art of the monks. He had made their vellum. He had made their ink, found their quills, fashioned their color pallets of wood and flat stones. What if he were to take his memory of all the monks’ great work, and put it down himself? The thought—the revelation—was put immediately into action. He made a raft and sailed to a nearby island where there were numbers of wild sheep. Hides for vellum. He collected the grasses, the flowers, the shells, saps, and pollen for the inks and varnishes.

  Day after day, month after month, year in and year out, Colgu the Simple poured his memory out on the pages, replicating every stroke with perfect accuracy, reproducing the illustrations so closely that even those who created the originals would not have been able to distinguish their work from his.

  Knowing no better, he even copied the idiosyncratic notes the brothers had made themselves in the margins when th
e work of copying and translating became tedious:

  “I and Pangur Ban my cat

  ’Tis a like task we are at

  Hunting mice is his delight

  Hunting words I sit all night

  ’Tis a merry thing to see

  At our tasks how glad are we

  When at home we sit and find

  Entertainment to our mind

  ’Gainst the wall he sets his eye

  Full and fierce and sharp and sly

  ’Gainst the wall of knowledge I

  All my little wisdom try

  So in peace our task we ply

  Pangur Ban my cat and I

  In our arts we find our bliss

  I have mine, and he has his.”

  Colgu, in complete ignorance of the written word, made no distinction between the sublime and the ridiculous. He copied all until the prodigious stores of his memory were exhausted. When the work was done, he sat cross-legged on the dirt floor of the scriptorium, surrounded by the carefully stacked, pressed, and weighted fruits of his labor. He was a very old man. The little marks had never spoken to him but, in their re-creation he found a fellowship of sorts with the monks. Most of all with the abbot. He had not been able to revive their bones—what man could?—but he had captured their souls, the essence of all that meant most to them.

  That is how the monks of Innis Murray found Colgu the Simple, his dried and desiccated body sitting cross-legged on the floor, awaiting eternity. They, in their ignorance, made him a saint, for he was surrounded by the works of several lifetimes, many works hitherto unknown. Was this not a miracle? Was he not the greatest scholar in Christendom?

  So it was that the works of Homer and Virgil, Herodotus and Tacitus, Demosthenese, Cicero, Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Porphyry were preserved for all time by Colgu the Simple, scholar-saint of Iona, who never knew a word of what he’d written.