Book of Souls

He felt too ill to kneel, so he lowered his throbbing head and softly prayed out loud, his Breton accent as coarse and pebbly as when he was a boy. The choice of prayer, from Psalm 42, came to him with spontaneity, almost taking him by surprise:

Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meatum.

I will go to the altar of God. To God, the joy of my youth.

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen

He pursed his lips at the irony of the prayer.

World without end.

Once, his beard had been as thick and black as a boar’s cheek. He had been muscular and robust, able to handle the rigors of monastic life tirelessly, the meager rations, the cold sea winds that frosted the bones, the manual labors that broke the body but sustained the community, the brief periods of sleep between the canonical hours that punctuated night and day with communal prayer. Now his beard was patchy, the dirty white of a seagull’s breast, and his cheeks were sunken. His fine muscles had withered and sagged, and his skin, drained of suppleness, was as dry as parchment and so itchy and scabbed it distracted him from prayer and meditation.

But the most alarming physical change affected his right eye, which had progressively begun to bulge and stare. It was a slow, creeping process. At first he only noticed a pink dryness, like a mote of grit that could not be lavaged. Then the mild throb behind the orbit became worse, and his vision became troublesome. Initially, there was some blurring, then blinding flashes of light, now a distressing doubling of images that made it difficult to read and write with both eyes open. In recent weeks, every man and woman within the abbey walls had anxiously noticed the bulging prominence of his eyeball. They whispered among themselves while they milked cows or tended crops, and at prayer they beseeched God to show their brother mercy.

Brother Girardus, the abbey infirmarer and a dear friend, visited with him every day and repeatedly offered to sleep on the floor of his great room should Felix need his assistance during the night. Girardus could only guess at the nature of the malady but supposed there was a growth within the fine man’s head, pushing against his eye and causing his pain. If this were a boil under the skin, he could open it with a lance, but none but God could cure a growth within the skull. He plied his friend with bark teas and herbal poultices to ease pain and swelling, but mostly he prayed.

Felix spent several minutes in meditation, then shuffled to the rosewood chest that sat between his bed and his table. Bending at the hips caused too much eye pain, so he lowered himself to his knees to open the large wardrobe box. It was filled with vestments, old habits and sandals, a spare bed cloth. Underneath the cloth and softness was something hard and solid. It took a good bit of his small strength to drag it out and carry it to his writing table.

It was a heavy book, ancient, the color of dark honey, a labor of distant centuries. It was the last of its kind, he supposed, the lone survivor of a conflagration that he himself had ignited. And the reason he had hid it so carefully over these many years was that it bore a date almost two hundred years in the future-1527.

Who alive today would understand? Who among his brethren would see it for what it was and adore its divinity? Or would they mistake it for a specter of blasphemy and malevolence? All who were with him that icy January day in 1297, when hell visited earth, were dead and buried. He was the last to bear witness, and it had been a weight on his soul.

Felix lit smaller candles illuminating his desk in an arc of straw-colored dancing light. He opened the book and removed a sheaf of loose vellum pages that had been cut for him in the abbey Scriptorium to fit neatly inside the covers. He had been feverishly working on his manuscript, rushing against time, fearful his malady would claim him before he was done.

It was painstakingly difficult work to overcome double vision and splitting headaches to pour out his recollections. He was forced to keep his right eye closed to fix a single image on the page and to keep the movements of his quill on a straight line. He wrote at night, when all was quiet and no one would intrude on his secret. When he exhausted himself, he would return the book to its hiding place and fall onto his pallet for a sliver of sleep before the abbey bells rang for the next call to cathedral prayer.