Historical Setting: The Great Skellig in an unknown time
Inside a stacked stone cell, its eye’s pupil opens at the top to the morning sky’s brightness. Here is also the doorway opened allowing in some light and sound from the outside while the little monk is just outside chipping on a stone. I ache with the ringing of each hammer blow on the iron chisel. A church bell rings a dirge. The voices of people talking just outside frightens the canine who now thinks I’m her refuge.
I am lying here, tattered, hurting, hardly able to imagine I will ever move an arm or a leg again — in fact — I’m hardly sure if I have an arm or a leg, and the canine has chosen me as her bed, her safe place with people talking near-by.
They are speaking in an ancient language — it could be old Galatian — ancient — but discernable. The familiarity takes me to that by-gone place of early Christians, but then, I recognize this is also the native language of Father Columbanus and the brothers he came with to Gaul; though I rarely heard it spoken because he learned our tribal tongue so easily. People in their tribes are always on journeys pretending themselves strangers to one another, but there is a shared belonging among humankinds — a oneness among people in all human language sometimes familiar, sometimes buried deep in time.
Outside I hear a woman’s voice answering for the silent little monk. And now he comes back in here with a skin of fresh goat’s milk. He pours milk into two bowls and sets one for the canine and another he brings to me, and tips it so that I can also have a taste. It is delicious and still warm. He fills the bowl again and drinks from it himself.
The people outside are wondering why he has only prepared one grave marker. He returns to the visitors now, with the empty flask. After a pause the woman answers, “He says there is only one burial.”
The man says, “Ask him, what of the dead man found at the edge of the sea?”
“He said Brother Lugh was mistaken. There was no dead man; it only looked like a drowned man. What looked like a black beard was just a clump of tidal debris.”
Now I realize I am this little fellow’s secret. I wonder if the shag and the canine are unknown as well. And does he feed us all with his own portion?
(Continues tomorrow)
,
Lazarus Ink 