Jesse Bullington - The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

Ahem.

At one such village a particular lass seemed to shine on me, and so intent was I on talking with her that I scarce remembered to drink and spent the entire night with a blasting headache but a gay heart. We wandered over streams and across fields, and when I brought her to her door she kissed me on the cheek. Such bliss! Her father softened and set down his ax when he threw open the door to discover a young monk chatting with his daughter, and to my shame and inner torment I discovered that my destined abbey sat atop the hill of that very village, and from my cell window I could pick out the light of Elise’s farm, for that was the girl’s name.

I managed to clean myself up enough to be accepted at the abbey, and in very little time had gotten myself comfortably arranged with the cook. Rare was the day when water passed my lips instead of beer, wine, brandy, or mead, rare as a good Christian in the Holy Land these days. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I know as well as you that all men drink regardless of their link in the chain, but know you must that I drank more than is befitting of any save a drunkard. The faces of my brothers and superiors were as interchangeable as those at my last monastery, although I still shook in my dreams when I remembered the pretty farm girl Elise cavorting that previous spring when I hiked through vale and mountain. Whenever possible I volunteered to take our herbs to the village for market, where Elise would often notice and come running to warm me with her adorable smile, her chest heaving from the exertion. Temptation, lads, shun it, shun it! I prayed and drank and tended the garden and studied and prayed and debated and drank and helped illuminate manuscripts and prayed and translated and drank and prayed. There I would have grown old and shriveled like the fruit of the Lord which I was but instead, instead…

That’s better. Good stuff, this. They must be Benedictines, yes? Fine drink, fine, fine, fine. But as I said, was saying, am saying, er, where was I?

Oh, oh oh oh. Yes. Two years passed, was it two? Three? No matter, a little time passed, and then the pest came to our fair empire without warning, and then all flesh and souls were threatened by the Archfiend’s plan, for surely, surely he was to blame. At the time, naturally, I did not know this, and shared the base belief that it must be God’s Wrath, a cleansing of the Gomorrah we had become. To believe such evil was wrought by His Pure Hands!

What? God’s, who else’s?

No, no, I did not mean it like that, I meant only that the pest was not His Holy Work but the machinations of the old Serpent again among us. At the time, however, how else could we see it but as another test? The serfs and yeomen who had built their town around the abbey, however, had their own ideas…

That noxious swamp vapors are responsible for the pestilence is documented, and by your nodding heads I see that you are educated men. What is not so well accounted is that in certain rural, dismal places men are so desperate for succor from its ravages that they bow down before the miasma itself, offering devotion in exchange for their lives and those of their families. This diabolical heresy was perpetuated by the cult’s ringleader, a man calling himself the Bird Doctor.

He arrived shortly before the pest, and succeeded in gaining the confidence of the foolish members of the village. The abbot brought me personally along to condemn the man as he cavorted in the square, dressed in a suit of raven feathers and wearing a sinister wooden vulture mask. The abbot launched into a diatribe against the heretic and swore if he was not departed in three days’ time sterner measures would be taken. The man laughed under his mask and told the assembled mob that only he could ward off the miasma, and continued his strange, lascivious dance.

Contrary to his nonchalance, he left the following morning, wandering down the eastern road, and, they said, dancing and singing as he went. That evening the miller’s wife began coughing and by cockcrow had buboes swelling from groin and pits. A family of Jews were passing through, and they could not escape before the town had rallied and caught them. From my cell I heard their screams as they went onto the pyre, accused of sprinkling viper skin into the brook and conjuring forth the miasma.

This time the blasphemous peasants chased the abbot back to the abbey when he tried to intervene, and the miller rode out in pursuit of the Bird Doctor. They returned late that night, and as I drank in my cell I saw their shadows on the moonlit road. After his return, events, as you may suspect, did not improve.

The village was decimated within a week but the abbot refused to allow any of the peasants entrance, swearing they had brought the pest upon themselves by turning their backs on God. I was not then and am still not now convinced he made the right decision, but I was young then and old now, and young men often do very foolish things. When the first of our order developed those damn lumps and the distinct cough we all prayed, and I am sure I was not the only one to eschew water for stouter stuff. Each day several more caught it, and yet Providence spared me, and I drank and drank and drank but could not forget her face.

I packed my belongs, in a drunken fit of hubris convincing myself I could do His Work just as well outside the church as within. I packed my things, mostly bottles, and escaped down to the pest-riddled village in search of Elise. Why do we punish ourselves so?

I saw her pleasant face bloated and gray, staring out from the pile of rotting corpses as I hurried down the rocky path. I found her burnt bones beside the creek, where the heretical peasants had tried to purify her dead flesh. I even saw her embracing the Bird Doctor, licking his hideous mask and cooing to him as I ran through the square. But the worst, which I knew would be the truth as I raced along the outskirts to her house, was that she had contracted the pest but had not yet expired, and I would find her in horrible pain, powerless to help. I was a sobbing man-child as I banged on her door, praying she had eloped with a farm boy before the Bird Doctor arrived.

As I feared, none answered my summons, and in my despair I kicked in the door. The stench tormented me but I fought it with more mead and braved the interior. The wretched, foul bodies were too far decayed to tell man from woman, father from daughter, and I embraced the moldiest of them, wailing her name between fits of vomiting.

I heard my name spoken from the door, and my gagging throat and breaking heart both hesitated in their course. Oh, her voice, her charming, innocent voice!

She trembled like a foal taking its first steps, like a novice reciting his first letter, she lived, she lived! Oh, what further proof of His Love, what further proof!? She had meant to flee that very night, having hid in the hay bales for several days, incapacitated with grief and terror. She had seen my approach and raced away, fearing I was the Bird Doctor who had menaced her every day until her parents’ passing and her concealment behind the house. Later she told me something inside had made her turn back to be sure, and we agreed it must be the merciful whispering of Mary.

We traveled to a hunter’s cabin high in the hills behind the abbey, taking only what food she had in her satchel and I had in mine. Base as I had become, I had also stolen several rushlights, and lighting one of these, I nested us down in that dilapidated shack at the foot of an enormous peak. The heavy pines more than the thin roof kept out the rain, and with tears still glazing our cheeks we acknowledged that we must inspect one another for marks of the pest.

She removed her dress and I my cowl and habit, and our joy at finding each other unblemished soon increased. Do not cast such disapproving looks my way! I shall explain to you as I did to Elise that Martyn the monk is different from Martyn the man, and Martyn the monk’s last act as such was to wed Martyn, the man, to Elise. The woman.