Aelfden finds a Fergus for his need

Food. A cup of wine. Perhaps merely a nap. Aelfden did not know what Brother Columba was about to press on him, but he already knew he did not want it. He had no appetite for anything, not even for the sickeningly-​​sweet indulgence of sleep.

He slid his folded arms back across the tabletop until he could speak down into the open air above his lap.

“Am I needed?” he asked hoarsely. He would go down for the sake of someone else.

It was not Columba’s anxious whine that replied, but a deep, unfamiliar voice, soft and smooth and simple as butter melting over a warm slice of crusty bread.

“Lord Father, I was hoping you would tell me I was.”

Half-​​dreaming, half-​​delirious, Aelfden let his head lie still for a moment upon his arms, merely savoring the sound. Then he recalled that no man but Columba himself was to have been allowed up to his office, and this presence that in more peaceful times might merely have annoyed him proved terrifying now.

He whipped himself around and wailed, “What are you?” where in more peaceful times he might have queried, “Who?”

“I’m a Fergus,” the stranger announced, so matter-​​of-​​factly that he seemed not to find it strange that his species would be in doubt. “I don’t suppose you see too many of those around these parts,” he added with a wink.

Aelfden reached back to grip the edge of the table and steady himself. The skin of his forearm strained taut around its crackling scabs, warning him not to lean.

The man – the Fergus – looked as lumbering as an ox, but he dropped smoothly to one knee like a cat settling on its haunches. His rough-​​hewn hands appeared clumsy, but they were gentle enough to lift Aelfden’s right hand from his knee without prying, though his bony fingers had been clamped around his own flesh like claws.

Fergus bent his head and said, “Greetings in Christ, Lord Father,” in his first voice: grave yet warm, sober yet soothing. He bowed his head still further and kissed the Abbot’s Ring. Then he looked up.

The man’s pale eyes were the color of clouds on a cloudy December day. Their gray chilled Aelfden like sleet and snow, like a shovel’s iron blade slicing through frost, like tears dried by a cold wind. Aelfden’s breath hissed through his chattering teeth and made a fog between their faces in the wintry air.

His hand was already lifted in the other man’s hand, high enough that he had yet the strength to raise it the rest of the way and make the sign of the Cross over the stranger’s head, blessing him. His duty done, he closed his eyes and waited for the man to go away.

“It’s cold up here,” Fergus observed. “Why don’t we put those pages away for the evening and go down to sit in the parlor a while, where it’s warm?”

His very voice was warm like soup and blankets. Aelfden imagined himself pitching forward into it.

“You do speak English, don’t you, Father?” Fergus murmured after a while. “Anglice loquerisne?”

“Yes yes,” Aelfden whispered hastily.

He opened his eyes. The man’s eyes were still as gray as he remembered from a moment before… from a week before… from a year before…

“Forgive me my…” Aelfden waved his gaunt hand in the air for lack of words to explain his present state. Finally he croaked, “You remind me of someone I knew…”

“Oh, I’ve heard that before!” Fergus laughed. He clapped his hands down on his thighs and leapt up. “Don’t tell me! Sir Egelric!”

Egelric… Aelfden had not noticed anything beyond his size and the color of his eyes, but he saw the resemblance now.

“I can’t vouch for that man’s morality as a general matter,” Fergus grinned, “but I can assure you he is not my father. I know who my father was, and it wasn’t him. Shall we go down?”

“Who allowed you up here?” Aelfden protested weakly.

“Brother Columba was his name! Charming fellow!”

Seeing that Aelfden was not about to rise, Fergus turned to close the door instead. The floorboards squeaked beneath his feet as he walked over them.

“Brother Columba did?” Aelfden muttered dubiously. “I suspect he was not the only charming fellow in the room.”

“You’ll have to ask Brother Columba about that. I didn’t see anyone else there but me.”

Fergus glanced quickly over his shoulder to wink, and meanwhile slid his hand gently down the doorframe as he closed it, almost caressing it. Aelfden thought dizzily that this man could even put doors at ease.

Then he tramped over to the chest and sat himself down so heavily that the old wood creaked in protest.

“Are you hungry?” he asked bluntly.

Aelfden gasped. “No!”

Fergus sighed through his equine nose and shook his mane. “I promised Brother Columba I would talk you into eating something. I guess it was too much to hope you would simply be hungry. A shame, too, because the Lord knows I am.”

Aelfden’s fright and shock was melting into mere annoyance. “What can I do for you, young man?” he demanded.

“Eat something!” Fergus laughed.

“You did not come all the way from – from whencever you came – ”

“Scotland!”

“Scotland,” Aelfden huffed, “to convince me to eat something.”

Fergus clapped his hands down on his thighs and leaned closer. “How do you know I didn’t?” he asked shrewdly.

Aelfden sat back and scowled.

“I came all the way from Scotland looking for a Fergus-​​sized need,” Fergus announced.

Aelfden waited for him to go on, but he only sat back and nodded sagely as though this were explanation enough.

Finally Aelfden spluttered, “I do not need a Fergus!”

“What you need is a big supper, and where supper is, there can Fergus be found. Some men may call that coincidence, but I call it Providence.”

“Thus you were sent by the Lord to lead me to supper,” Aelfden said sarcastically.

Fergus laughed. “Verily, unto the land of milk and honey!”

Aelfden turned his face aside and snorted, but the gesture only made his rheumy nose trickle into his mustache, and he was forced to sniffle and paw about in his robes for a handkerchief like a frail old man.

“Verily, Father,” Fergus said softly, “I am here to help however I may.” 

His voice had changed again to its first gentle gravity, like warm milk, like warm honey, like warm bread and butter, like warm blankets. Aelfden could not help but lean his head into it as if it were a pillow, even as he blotted his handkerchief against his nose.

“I was six years at St. Serf’s on Loch Leven,” Fergus murmured, “on again, off again. Something keeps calling me away from monastic life, Father. This time I followed it here. Maybe the Lord really did just want me to take you down to supper.”

“This is a monastery, you know,” Aelfden grumbled as he folded his handkerchief.

“I don’t mean to be a monk, but I’m certain I could be of use to you, if that’s God’s will. I’m an ordained lector, and I know how to write. I’m looking to serve.”

“You might talk to Father Matthew down at Nothelm, if you haven’t already,” Aelfden sighed. “He’s lacking a deacon.”

“You haven’t many yourself here,” Fergus observed.

“Haven’t we?”

“Dear Brother Columba told me you’re spread thin. But, Father, if I felt called to that sort of life, I would become a priest. The Lord knows I’ve almost made up my mind to do it a thousand times!” He sighed and rubbed his big hand over his big chin. “Then some pretty girl blinks her black lashes at me, or someone shoves a baby at me, or some youngster demands a ride on my shoulders, and I remember I want to have a few of those…”

Aelfden grunted and rubbed his thin hands over his thin knees. He wondered whether Brude had ever thought the same about Flann and Liadan, or whether he had even known about Liadan at all, or whether he had simply known and not cared.

“I’m just a man, Father,” Fergus said. He planted his fist on his hip and leaned close as if to share a secret. “Appetites,” he whispered.

Aelfden grimaced. “Appetites are the worst possible guide to life a man could find, Fergus. It is the very name of everything that is ungodly about our bodies.”

Fergus sat up. “Is that why you don’t eat?”

Aelfden snorted and sighed in frustration. “Controlling one’s appetites is absolutely essential to living a holy life. How could you live in a Culdee priory and not know that?”

Fergus frowned. “There’s controlling one’s appetites, and then there’s starvation, Lord Father.”

His voice had gone so grave that it was scarcely warm, but even subdued it remained intensely strong.

“The Culdees get that part wrong, I think, and from the looks of it, so do you. That’s not self-​​denial, that’s just indulgence in suffering.”

“There is grace to be gained from suffering, too,” Aelfden said softly.

He leaned forward, letting his arms slide through his sleeves to rasp their scabs over the coarse cloth. This lingering torment was always dry and hot, not cold like the blade, but it made a sort of numbness for him by submerging all his other pain.

“How so grace?” Fergus asked gravely.

In its unquerying calm his question seemed to spring neither from argument nor from eagerness to learn. It was the sort of question that did not even seek an answer, but fed on itself, making answers moot – “How so grace?” – “I am that I am.”

Brude had sometimes spoken that way, making questions into answers. Sebastien had only known how to give answers that held their own questions between their teeth, like snakes their tails. And now a gray-​​eyed question-​​answer-​​smith had come again…

Aelfden sat up stiffly and reminded himself that he would not have thought so at all if the man had had eyes of any other color. Truly he resembled Egelric far more than Sebastien or Brude. Gray eyes, he told himself, were simply less rare than he had once believed.

“If you have been with the Culdees,” Aelfden explained evenly, “then I may spare you Paul’s instruction on the matter of bodily appetites, and denial of the flesh, and so on, and remind you of the ultimate aim of a holy life. ‘Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.’ Our Lord became flesh and through suffering expiated our sins. Through suffering we may join Him in the act of salvation.”

Fergus furrowed his brow and looked down at his hands. He rubbed them slowly together, not as if they were cold but as if they ached, dragging one broad thumb down the opposite palm and then switching to the other.

Aelfden startled himself with the realization that he was leaning close to scrutinize the man’s hand, searching for stigmata. Quickly he explained it away by remembering that some Culdees were said to nail their hands to boards. In any case, the man’s hands were unscarred.

“That depends on what you call a cross, Lord Father,” Fergus said at last. “Suffering itself isn’t, or oughtn’t to be. A man can gorge himself till his stomach aches and screw till his prick is rubbed raw, but just because it hurts, that doesn’t mean it’s holy. I know. I tried.”

Aelfden huffed and glared at him, but after a moment decided the man was speaking seriously – and worse, honestly.

“Engaging in that sort of behavior, Fergus, as you may well imagine, is not what I call taking up a cross.”

“Just because it feels good, it doesn’t mean it’s a sin, either,” Fergus mumbled.

He lifted his gray eyes and looked pleadingly at Aelfden.

“That’s what I meant, Father. The Lord became flesh and suffered to be more like us. The only way He could lift us up out of our state was to get knee-​​deep down in it Himself and heave.”

As he spoke he rubbed his own arms and broad shoulders, thinking perhaps of wagons he had helped out of deep ruts, or cows he had helped calve, or other feats of physical strength that Aelfden with his lifetime of shameful frailty could not imagine. Like all men, Fergus fashioned his God in his own image.

“And that’s why I can’t make up my mind to starve myself just because I’m hungry,” Fergus concluded. “If the Lord suffered to be more like us, it doesn’t make sense for us to suffer to be more like Him. That’s like lying down in a puddle to get closer to the clouds.”

He blinked his gray eyes solemnly. They were wet, reflecting the guttering candles, the evening light that was dying in the window, and if he leaned closer, Aelfden thought, his own haggard, dying face.

Aelfden was a man who walked head-​​down, who saw little lakes and long wagon-​​rut ribbons of sky at his feet more often than he looked up at the sky. He wondered whether one could ever be certain one was looking at clouds and not the reflection of clouds – whether one knew before the end whether one was rising or diving face-​​first into the ground.

“Our body is both our cross we must carry, and our self we must deny,” Fergus said.

He lifted his unscarred hands from his lap and wriggled his fingers in the air. With even this slight shifting of his weight, the oaken chest creaked beneath him.

“We must wear it lightly,” he murmured. “When we don’t even know it’s there, that’s when we can turn our minds to holy things.” He sat back and slapped his thigh. “And that’s a good reason to go down and have supper! Are you with me?”

Aelfden slumped and nearly fell over, forgetting for a moment that he had chosen a stool to deny himself the comfort and support of a chair.

Fergus leaned closer and opened out his hands, but he did not leap up. Nevertheless his monumental solidity seemed in itself an assurance that he would have leapt if Aelfden had needed to be caught.

“I’m truly not hungry,” Aelfden said hoarsely.

Fergus nodded. “You’re probably so hungry you can’t feel it anymore. I know!” he sighed. “I tried that too. What you need is a nice, warm bowl of soup to remind your stomach what it’s for. Shall we go?”

He scooted forward to the edge of the creaking chest and smiled expectantly.

Aelfden sighed and swayed in weariness. Perhaps it would be simpler to go down with the man after all. A bowl of soup greatly thinned with hot water… just food-​​like enough to satisfy Columba and this stubborn man…

“And we can figure out just which of your needs has the size and shape of a Fergus,” the man added. “Sir Malcolm says you might be looking for a tutor…”

“You spoke to Sir Malcolm?” Aelfden gasped, suddenly awake.

“Charming fellow!” Fergus beamed. “He and his Irish friend Cearball. And Malcolm guessed I was a Culdee when I wiped my knife… by the weave of the cloth! Can you believe that?”

“Yes, I can,” Aelfden said dryly.

“He said you have the boys up here for lessons on Fridays, but you’re so busy, you might use a man to take over for you. I swear my Latin’s better than my English grammar, and I’m big enough to wallop a boy across the room if he doesn’t behave, as I hear Father Timothy cannot,” he winked.

“The lessons…” Aelfden sighed. The boys had not had their lessons in weeks now, to his shame. “I shall continue the lessons myself, Fergus. However, I believe the Duke may be looking for a tutor for his ten-​​year-​​old son,” he offered. “You might ask him. One of his secretaries lives here at the abbey – you might go down with him tomorrow.”

Fergus slapped the opposite thigh with the opposite hand. “A secretary! That’s what you need, Lord Father.”

He waved at the sheets of parchment the table: dutifully cut and ruled by Brother Brendan, dutifully stacked by Brother Columba, and which – in spite of uncounted hours of uninterrupted solitude – Aelfden had not yet summoned the strength to touch.

“An Abbot oughtn’t to be writing his own letters,” Fergus scolded.

“I prefer to,” Aelfden whispered.

“You could at least let me write the boring parts at the beginning and the end. I’ll be the dog under your table, Father,” he winked. “You slip me the turnips and the peas, and save the meat and the dessert for yourself. And speaking of dessert…”

Aelfden clapped his hands over his face and sighed through the narrow space between them.

“Will you be satisfied if I go down and eat a bowl of soup with you?” he groaned.

“Yes. Until we get hungry again, that is. I like a snack before Matins.”

Fergus slid off the chest and landed on the floor with a clomp like a pair of plowhorse hooves. The old oaken chest creaked out of sheer relief.

“We do not have snacks in this abbey,” Aelfden grumbled, but he grudgingly leaned on Fergus’s arm and heaved himself to his feet.

“Then I’ll have to make a pantry of my pockets!” Fergus declared. “You wouldn’t need a house steward around here, would you?” he wheedled.

“No, but young Sir Sigefrith does, to my understanding. You might ask – ”

“You might ask him,” Fergus lisped, jovially mocking. “I know, I know. Do you always send people off to help somebody else whenever they try to help you?”

“I am only trying to help you, Fergus,” Aelfden sighed. “You said you were a man looking for something to do.”

“I said I was a man looking for someone who needed me,” he corrected. “Do you always turn around and try to help the people who are trying to help you?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Well, that’s going to be a problem, Lord Father,” he chortled, “since I always do the same thing.”

“Now how shall we ever decide who helps whom?” Aelfden asked wearily.

“Good question, Father,” Fergus laughed.

He flung open the door and threw his arm companionably over Aelfden’s shoulders. In its strength, it did not merely lie lightly, but even seemed to bear Aelfden’s body up.

“We can always do as I did with Brother Columba to get admitted up here,” Fergus said slyly.

“And what was that?”

“Arm wrestle me?”