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tossing pebbles from one pile to another—small pebbles for the Aves, larger ones for the Paternosters and Glorias—to count his imposed allotment of prayers, and at the end of each prayer making the sign of the cross upon his forehead.
    Besides the offices of each day, we were required each week to chant all the hundred and fifty of the psalms, plus the canticles appointed for each week. Those monks who were literate were required to read for two hours each day, and three hours a day during Lent. During each year, of course, we all attended Sunday and holy-day and feast-day masses, the Easter baptismal services and frequently wedding or funeral masses. On sixty days of each year, we fasted. In addition to making those numerous observances, I, as an oblate and postulant, had to include time for religious instruction and secular education as well.
    Very well. From my earliest years, I was made to work hard and to study hard, and only seldom was I let to go briefly beyond the cliff walls that enclose the Ring of Balsam. But, not ever having known any other kind of life, I might have remained satisfied with that one, and never have known any other. Sometimes, in after years, in moments of mellow mood—when I have been flushed with wine, say, or languorous after lovemaking—I have reflected that perhaps I should not have dealt so harshly with that Brother Peter as I eventually did. Had it not been for that wretch, I might this minute be still immured in the Abbey of St. Damian’s or some other cloister or a church, and the secret of my nature would be a secret still, even to me, concealed beneath the robe of a monk—or of an acolyte, a deacon, a priest, an abbot, perchance even the robe of a bishop.
    For I had a thorough grounding in the Catholic Christian Scriptures and doctrines and canonics and liturgy—a much more thorough grounding than most postulants ever receive. That was because Dom Clement, from his first arrival as abbot of St. Damian’s, took a personal interest in my instruction, and often personally applied himself to it. Like everyone else, he assumed me to be of Gothic parentage, and evidently he also assumed that I had been born with inbred Gothic beliefs—or disbeliefs, or nonbeliefs—and so devoted some of his own time to expunging those and replacing them with firm Catholic orthodoxy.
    On the Catholic Church: “It is our mother, prolific of offspring. Of her we are born, by her milk we are nourished, by her spirit we are made alive. It would not be decent of us to speak of any other woman.”
    On other women: “Should a monk have to carry even his own mother or sister across a brook, he will first carefully swathe her in a cloak, for the very touch of any female’s flesh is fire.”
    On me: “Like a wounded man, young Thorn, you have had your life saved by the sacrament of baptism. But for the rest of your life you must endure a protracted and precarious convalescence. Not until you die in the arms of Mother Church can you ever be fully recovered.”
    And every time the abbot sat with me, he made sure to say, with repugnance in his voice, something like this: “The Goths, my son, are outlanders—men with wolfish names and wolfish souls—to be shunned and execrated by all decent folk.”
    “But, Nonnus Clement,” I said, on one of those occasions, “it was to outlanders that our Lord Jesus first revealed himself after his glorious Nativity. For he was of the land of Galilee, and the Wise Men came from the outland of Persia.”
    “Ah, well,” said the abbot, “there are outlanders and there are outlanders. The Goths are barbaric outlanders. Savages. Beasts. As is clearly evident from their tribal name, the Goths are the terrible Gog and Magog, the hostile powers whose coming was ominously foretold in the Books of Ezekiel and Revelation.”
    “Then,” I mused, “the Goths are beings as detestable as pagans. Or even Jews.”
    “Ne, ne, Thorn. The Goths are far more reprehensible, for they