Over the next days, I avoided talking about the pilgrimage. When anyone asked a question, I replied with vague, dismissive answers, and eventually the brothers stopped asking. Life in the monastery went on, after all, and what was done was done. I resumed my work, and the daily round. The work I had once viewed with such pride and delight was dry tedium to me now, the very scratch of the pen set my teeth on edge and the words I wrote held no meaning. Prayer became merely a way to escape the scriptorium; and though I knelt in the chapel with all the rest, I never opened my heart to God.
How could I pray? I knew God for what he was: a monstrous betrayer of souls-demanding honour and worship and obedience, demanding life and love, promising protection and healing and sanctuary. And then, when need was greatest and the longed-for sanctuary required…nothing. In return for years of slavish devotion, he gave nothing, less than nothing, in return.
Each day as I knelt in the chapel, listening to the simple brothers speak their prayers, I thought, Lies! All lies! How can anyone believe a single word?
Thus, the wounded animal that was my heart sickened and began devouring itself in its misery. I sank further and further beneath the weight of malignant grief. When Brynach and Ddewi departed to return to their abbey in Britain, I did not see them away or say farewell. Dugal chastised me about it later, but I did not care. I was a world of woe unto myself, and the days passed unnoticed and unheeded.
One day I rose to see that winter had come again to Kells, and realized I had not been aware of the season's change. The greyness of the land and sky was the greyness of my own benighted soul. Standing before my cell, I looked out across the muddy yard to our little church and recoiled in disgust. After the glittering splendour of Hagia Sophia and the towers of the Great Mosq, our rude stone structure appeared a mean, ill-made thing. I looked around at all the places I had once thought sublime in their humble simplicity, and found them coarse, ugly, vulgar, and repugnant against the glowing reality of all I had seen and done in Byzantium.
I realized then, to my horror, that the shining verity of my memory was swiftly receding, replaced by emptiness, by a gathering gloom of shadows moving in an ever-increasing void. Soon there would be nothing left-soon not even the shadows would remain, and the darkness would be complete.
Oh, but once my memories had pulsed with the blood-heat of life. In desperation, I forced myself to recall that once I had walked with kings and conversed in languages never heard in this land. Once I had stood at the prow of a Sea Wolf ship and sailed oceans unknown to seamen here. I had ridden horses through desert lands, and dined on exotic foods in Arab tents. I had roamed Constantinople's fabled streets, and bowed before the Holy Roman Emperor's throne. I had been a slave, a spy, a sailor. Advisor and confidant of lords, I had served Arabs, Byzantines, and barbarians. I had worn a captive's rags, and the silken robes of a Sarazen prince. Once I had held a jewelled knife and taken a life with my own hand. Yes, and once I had held a loving woman in my arms and kissed her warm and willing lips.
Would that I had died in Byzantium!
Death would have been far, far better than the gnawing, aching emptiness that was now my life. I bent my head and moaned for the hopelessness of it. That night, I went for the last time to my confessor's hut.
I can stay here no longer," I told him, hopelessness making me blunt.
"Sure, you surprise me, Aidan. I thought you had left us long ago," Ruadh replied, then motioned me into his cell and bade me sit. Lowering himself into his chair, he pressed his hands together and asked, "What did you expect to find?"
His question, like his placid demeanour, took me unawares; I had to ask him to repeat himself, for I was not certain I had heard properly.
"Your pilgrimage, Aidan-what did you expect to find in Byzantium?"
"Truly?" I asked, provoked by his subtle insinuation that I was somehow to blame for my misery. "I expected to meet my death," I answered, and told him of the vision I had dreamed the night before I left.
"A curious dream, certainly," Ruadh conceded mildly. He thought for a moment, gazing at the wooden cross on its stone shelf. "Pilgrimage is called the White Martyrdom," he mused. "Yet, we say the pilgrim seeks not the place of his death, but the place of his resurrection. A curious thing to say," he observed, "unless the pilgrim was in some way already dead."
