3.

When the pollen of July’s fields blew on warm breezes through the monastery he would recall his childhood and even long for the capricious dirty world of the village, the naked muddy dances and open copulation in summer grass, his family of fourteen vying for sleeping space on the squalid generational bed, bustling with vermin in the night, his grandmother’s tales of dwarfs with magical powers and angels with great shining wings whacking devils with their swords, but he knew that he was happier with his brothers at the monastery. Unfortunately, they had grown tired of him. After exasperating his fellow monks at Iona for eight years with prolonged accounts of his visions, he was sent by his superiors to the fortress island of Wesxhall, off the eastern coast of Britain in 997 to preach his unique ecstasies to other English and so help to civilize them. He accepted the task with zeal. There were, of course, other strategies at work. Whatever the inspirational merits of his visions, they were fully pleased to be rid of him. The silence in the stone halls after his departure was precious.
The surf crashed against the jagged black stones of Wesxhall, and John gazed up at the immense stone fortress that St. Joseph the Twice Martyred had founded upon the natural defense point in the North Sea. It was here that the monks had seized every text they could find and hid them from the violent Norsemen who would have burned them as worthless if they had found them. The library contained gilt missals from as far away as Rome, purchased from itinerant continental merchants who had come upon them through various means. Most survived because they were bound in gold and encrusted with jewels and so became valuable artifacts. As he ascended the steep switchbacks to the battlements, John dreamed that he would one day lay the foundation of his own monastery, but one less imposing, with a great library such as the world had never seen, perhaps with even hundreds of volumes. Once at Wesxhall, John found that as an outsider he was an important ally to whatever faction could recruit him in their internecine squabbles, and the elocutionary misfit rose quickly through the hierarchy of the outpost. After four years, word of his enthusiasm and great erudition spread to the mainland. He had become something of a legend, a man made unsightly by God but gifted with such vociferous talents that he could wend his way through any dispute by simply overwhelming opponents with pungent and sometimes coarse piety.

He would stand looking out at the barren sea in the golden mornings, watching birds circle over the cliffs. In the early Spring, icebergs from the north, where the kingdoms of the dragon ships were hidden, would crash and break apart on the grey shores, grinding themselves apart on the marl. Norse longships sometimes jutted from the green crystal sides of the bergs, their keels bent, whole armadas trapped like insects in cold amber. The monks of Wesxhall sent salvage crews to pry the metal clasps and rivets from the crushed vessels. In the year that John came to Wesxhall, stranger items began to appear in the ice from the northern sea, and, in conjunction with flaming stars that crossed the sky with imperceptibly slow trails of snowy effluvium, these were taken as a sign that the final age of Christ’s kingdom might be coming to an end. Appeals to John’s incredible scriptural knowledge were made in hopes of determining the exact time of Christ’s return, of the terrors and persecutions that would precede it, of the identity of the AntiChrist who would seize the papal tiara and tear the Church apart from within. He refused to answer these questions, and this only made firm the conviction of the other monks that he did indeed know the time of the return.

One berg, lucent and dawn-tinted in the thin April sunlight, proved to be filled with vast tracts of Mediterranean coral. The monks had seen small pieces of coral before, embedded in trinkets brought overland from Italy and Spain to the channel, but never in this proportion. These were acres across, with great fish protruding from the porous steaming mass, black dead eyes of sharks and the limp defrosted tentacles of octopuses, cavernous dripping chambers that refracted the sun pink and blue, where echoes of the sea resounded through the hollow ice. Over the following week, the berg gradually smashed itself apart against the rocks of the island, leaving hunks of coral as big as Roman villas that slipped away and sank into the grey tumult of the sea. John saw all of this as a sign not only of God’s beneficence but his utter unpredictability, heaving the corpses of blind Leviathans against the English coast just to remind them of the great variety with which He had established His Creation. The enterprising cloister sold great loads of the coral quarried from the mysterious berg, traded inland and as far south as Mercia and even across the channel to the continent.

The following Spring, as John again stood musing on the cliff’s edge in dawn sea winds, watching as heavy ox-drawn cartloads of coral lumbered away into the still dark west of the mainland, he saw something glinting on the horizon, another iceberg, but one unlike the others. Eager monks gathered around him on the precipice above roaring surf and anticipated another gift from He Whose Light is Beyond Knowing, but as it drifted closer it seemed that something was different about it. There were objects lodged into it, as white as the ice, some reflecting the light against silver. The berg was caught in the shallows a mile south of the natural rock tower that supported Wesxhall, beyond the reach of the eager monks. The berg was protected by rough waves that crashed a hundred yards up the gleaming icy bluffs. They could make out writing, glyphs, immense black unadorned letters, one spelling NASA, another USA, and numbers, 1723. There were corrugated cylinders and concave discs, but the berg foundered out of reach on the rocks, lost most days in mist, sinking gradually into the sea over the days, sheets of silver metal slipping from its sides. Vague outlines could be seen deeper in the ice, like immense insects with protuberances and arms, blurred shadow forms in the crystalline depths. One morning the monks arose to find that the berg, which had been obscured by mist the previous four days, was gone, leaving no trace of its odd relics. Considering at length what they had seen, John decided that Norse ships of previously unimagined size had spilled their cargo of precious metals when caught in an iceflow. Believing the end of history had arrived as predicted in Daniel and Revelation, the monks prayed day and night, and fastidiously observed all rituals in preparation for the moment when the skies would be rent apart to expose the blinding light of Eternity, when all time would draw to a halt and all that had grown since antiquity would be snipped off at the root. Gradually their enthusiasm settled into disappointment, and they began to believe that John was correct in his very practical view that the broad white metals were evidence of dragon ships of incredible girth and length, that these warships would arrive again with the Spring. Confident expectation gave way to dejection. Following this evident and understandable explanation, the monks forgot about the puzzling bergs altogether as the late Spring winds brought the scents of clover and lilac from the mainland. Turning from the vast mysterious distances of the sea, thereafter they looked only to the familiar coast.

In 999, John’s peers, like those at Iona, grew tired of his prolixity and suggested that he take to the grimy side-roads of the mainland in order to spread the gospel to the outlying villages, many of which had retained pagan superstitions despite the illuminating influence of Christian rulers and law. Leaving his beloved cloister, he set to wandering the foreign ways and turned up two days later in Etheria, the site of an old Roman fortress that had been converted into a church surrounded by two dozen homes of poor construction, teetering on their mud foundations and leaking pale smoke. Once there, he introduced himself and was instantly recognized as the grim-visaged and gifted visionary John. He sat down to a meager meal with the priests and became immediately embroiled in a controversy over the correct date of the feast of St. Paulinus of Rhodes, a common dispute at the time and one that often concealed greater conflicts among ecclesiastical authorities. The priests were amazed at his fiery interest in the issue, which they had hitherto considered of peripheral importance, particularly when compared with the financial and political problems this dispute cloaked, and they began to rally around him, convinced of his superior judgment in such matters. He spiritualized the issue in a matter of minutes and proceeded to inform priests of the details of an angel’s gastronomy, which had been revealed to him in a moment of ecstasy while eating a bowl of particularly strong raw leeks the month before. The Heavenly Orders too ate leeks, but leeks with no physical substance, divine vegetables that contained the Triumph and Gratification of God’s Eternal Presence. The priests were dumbfounded and immediately proposed that they switch their diet to one made up entirely of leeks, unaware that this quasi-Manichean belief would eventually spark accusations of heresy that would lead to their excommunication five years later. All of Etheria would be sacked and burned by an army sent from the corrupt and militaristic Holy See of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Oblivious to the terrible fate that John’s vision would bring on their heads, the priests at Etheria hailed him as a prophet. Over bowls of leeks at supper, they urged him to travel to Brixwell, fifty miles to the west, where a synod had been called to settle the issue of the feast day of St. Paulinus of Rhodes. This would bring notoriety to their small church, help to establish them as a center of ecclesiastical power in the region, and provide them with a respite from his incessant speaking.

Watch for the next installment soon!