by Tim Severin
The sad-looking treasurer looked at me where I stood against the far wall. I no longer wore a chain or manacles, but the scars on my wrists made my status obvious. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘we will accept the young man to come to work for us on loan, though it is not our custom to employ slaves in a monastery. However, the blessed Patrick himself was a slave once, so there is a precedent.’ And with that I passed from the ownership of Donnachad, ri tuathe of the Ua Dalaigh, into the possession of the monks of St Ciaran’s foundation.
SEVENTEEN
TO THIS DAY I look back on my time at St Ciaran’s monastery with immense gratitude as well as heartfelt dislike. I do not know whether to thank or curse those who were my teachers there. I spent more than two years among them and had no inkling that the knowledge made available to me was such a privilege. My existence seemed pointless and confined and there were many days when, in my misery, I feared that Odinn had abandoned me. With hindsight I am now aware that my suffering was only a shadow of what the All-Father endured in his constant search for wisdom. Where he sacrificed an eye to drink at Mimir’s well of wisdom, or hung in agony upon the world tree to learn the secret of the runes, I had only to bear loneliness, frustration, bouts of cold and hunger, and the repetition of dogma. And I was to emerge from St Ciaran’s monastery equipped with knowledge that was to serve me well every day of my life.
Of course, it was not meant to be like that. I came to St Ciaran’s monastery as a slave, a non-person, a nothing, a doer. My prospects were as bleak as the grey autumn day on which I arrived, with the air already holding the chill promise of winter. I was a down payment against a debt, and my only value was the manual work I was able to perform to reduce the arrears. So I was assigned to the stonemasons as a common labourer and I would have remained with them, hauling and cutting stone, sharpening chisels and heaving on pulley and tackle until I was too old and feeble to perform these simple manual tasks, if the Norns had not woven a different fate for me.
The monastery stands on the upper slope of a ridge facing west and overlooks a broad, slow-flowing river which is the chief river of Ireland. Just as Donnachad’s royal home was not a palace in the accepted sense, so too St Ciaran’s monastery is not the imposing edifice which might be imagined from its name. It is a cluster of small stone-built chapels on the hillside, interspersed with the humble buildings which house the monks and contain their books and workshops, and surrounded by an earth bank which the monks call their vallum. In physical size everything is on a modest scale, small rooms, low doors, simple dwellings. But in ambition and outlook the place is immense. At St Ciaran’s I met monks who had travelled to the great courts of Europe and preached before kings and princes. Others were deeply familiar with the wisdom of the ancients; several were artists and craft workers and poets of real excellence, and many were genuine Ceili De, servants of God, as they called themselves. But inevitably there were also dullards in community, as well as hypocrites and sadists who wore the same habits and sported the same tonsures.
The abb in my time was Aidan. A tall, balding and colourless man with pale blue eyes and a fringe of curly blond hair, he looked as though all the blood had drained out of him. He had spent his entire adult life in the monastery, entering when little more than a child. In fact, it was rumoured that he was the son of an earlier abb, though it was more than a century since monks were allowed to have wives. Strict celibacy was now the outward show, but there were still monks who maintained regular liaisons with women in the extensive settlement which had grown up around the holy site. Here lived the lay people who provided casual labour for the monks – as their carters, ploughmen, thatchers and so forth. Whatever his origins, Abb Aidan was a cold fish, conservative yet ambitious. He ran the monastery along the same unwavering guidelines that he had inherited from his predecessors and he shunned innovation. His great strength, as he would have seen it, was his devotion to the long-term interests and continuity of the brotherhood. He intended to leave the monastery stronger and more secure than when he was first made abb, and if such a stiff figure recognised the frailty and impermanence of human existence, it was in order to concentrate his energy on longer-lasting material foundations. So Abb Aidan strove to increase the reputation of the monastery by adding to its material marvels rather than its sanctity.
He was fixated on finances. Brother Mariannus, the treasurer, saw the abb more than any other member of the community, and he was expected to render an almost daily account of the money that was owed, the taxes due, the current value of the possessions, the costs of administration. Abb Aidan was not avaricious for himself. He was interested only in enhancing the prestige of St Ciaran’s, and he knew that this required a constant flow of income. Anyone who threatened that revenue was dealt with harshly. Most of the monastery’s income came from renting out livestock, and in the year before I arrived a thief was caught stealing the monastery’s sheep. He was hanged publicly on a gibbet just outside the holy ground. An even greater stir came in the second year of the abb’s rule. A young novitiate absconded, taking with him a few articles of minor value – a pair of metal altar cups and some pages from an unfinished manuscript in the scriptorium. The young man disappeared in the night and managed to travel as far as the lands of his tuath. Abb Aidan guessed his destination and sent a search party after him, with orders that the stolen items be recovered and the miscreant brought back under guard. When I arrived at St Ciaran’s, one of the first stories I was told in scandalised whispers was how the young monk had arrived on the end of a leading rope, his wrists bound, his back bloody from a beating. The other monks had expected that he would suffer a strict regime of mortification to atone for his sins, and they were puzzled when the young man was only held overnight at the monastery, then led away to an unknown destination across the river. A month later news filtered through that the young man had been placed in a deep pit and left to starve to death. Apparently it would have been profane to shed the blood of someone who had been about to promise himself to the Church, so the abb had revived a method of execution rarely used.
The yield from Abb Aidan’s meticulous husbandry of the monastic finances was spectacular. The monastery had long been known for its scriptorium – the exquisite illumination of its manuscripts was famed throughout the land – but there was now a whole range of other skills devoted to the glorification of the monastery and the service of its God. Abb Aidan encouraged work in precious metals as well as in enamel and glass. Many of the craftsmen were the monks themselves. They created objects of extraordinary beauty, using techniques they sifted from the ancient texts or had learnt in foreign lands during their travels. And often they exchanged ideas with the craftsmen who came to the monastery, attracted by its reputation as a generous patron of the arts. I was put to work for one of these craftsmen, Saer Credine the master stonemason, because our abb believed that nothing could express immutable devotion better than monuments of massive stone.
Saer Credine was surprisingly frail-looking for someone whose life was spent carving huge blocks of stone with mallet and chisel. He came from a distant region to the south-west where the rocks break naturally into cubes and plates, and his tuath was a place where stoneworkers have been reared and respected for time out of mind. Any fool, he would say, could attack a lump of stone with brutish strength, but it took skill and imagination to see the finished shape and form within the rock and know how to coax that shape from the stone. That was the God-given gift. When he first made this remark, I thought he meant that the White Christ had endowed him with his skills.
Abb Aidan had commissioned him to produce an imposing new stone cross for the monastery, a cross to be the equal of any of the splendid crosses which already stood in the monastic grounds. The base was to show scenes from the New Testament and the shaft would be incised with the most renowned of St Ciaran’s many miracles. The senior monks had provided the stonemason with rough sketches of the scenes – the resurrection of the White Christ from his tomb, of course, and the wil
d boar bringing branches in its jaws to make St Ciaran’s first hut – and they checked that the tableaux had transferred correctly to the face of the stone before Saer Credine gouged the first groove. But from that moment onward there was little that the monks could do, and everything depended on Saer Credine’s competence. Only the master stonemason knew how the stone would work, and by subtle distinction how to lead and instruct the eye of the beholder. And, of course, once the carver’s blow had been struck there was no going back, no rubbing out, starting again and altering the moment.
By the time I joined his labour force, Saer Credine had the massive rectangular base nearly complete. It had taken him five months of work. On the front panel a shrouded Christ was emerging from his coffin watched by two helmeted soldiers; on the rear panel Peter and Christ shared a net while fishing for the souls of men. The two smaller end panels were simple interlace carved by Saer Credine’s senior assistant because the master craftsman was already working on the great vertical shaft. It was of a hard granite, brought by raft down the great river and laboriously hauled up the hill to the shed where we worked. When I arrived, the stone lay on its side, sheltered by a roof. It was supported on huge blocks of wood so as to be at a convenient height for Saer Credine to strike the surface. My first task was no more than to pick up the stone chips that dropped into the muddy ground, and at dusk my duty was to cover the half-completed work with a layer of straw against the frost. I was also, by default, the nightwatchman because no one had assigned me a sleeping place and I slept curled up on the straw bales. At breakfast time I went to stand in line with the other servants and indigents who came to the monastery kitchens to seek charity of milk and porridge, then I carried the food back to eat as I squatted beside the great block of stone that rapidly became the fixed point of my slave’s existence. After a few days of gathering stone chips it was a short step to being given the task of brushing clean the worked face of the stone whenever the master craftsman stepped back to view his work or take a break from his labour. Saer Credine never made any comment on how he thought his work was progressing, and his face was expressionless.
Within a month I had graduated to the task of sharpening Saer Credine’s chisels as well as wielding the sweeper’s brush, and he even let me strike a few blows on the really rough work, where there was not the slightest chance that I could do any harm. Despite my stiffened left hand, I found that I was fairly deft and could cut a true facet. I also discovered that Saer Credine, like many craftsmen, was a kindly man beneath his taciturn exterior, and extremely observant. He noted that I took a more than usual interest in my surroundings, wandering round the monastery enclosure whenever possible to see what was going on, examining the other stone crosses that already stood with their instructional scenes. But, typically, he said nothing. After all, he was a master craftsman, and I was a doer, nothing.
Late one evening, when the butt of the shaft was finished, neatly flattened across the base and precisely squared on each of its corners ready to be dropped into its socket on the base, Saer Credine cut some marks which puzzled me – they looked like scratches, twenty or thirty of them. He made them after the other workmen had left, and he must have thought himself unobserved when he took his chisel and lightly chipped the lines across one of the corners. He made the marks so delicately that they could hardly be seen. Indeed, once the shaft was set into its socket hole the lines would be buried. Had I not observed him doing the work, I would not have known where to look, but I glimpsed him stooping over the stone, fine chisel in hand. When he had gone home I went to where he had been working and tried to puzzle out what he had been doing. The lines were certainly nothing that the abb and his monks had ordered. At first I thought they might be rune writing, but they were not. The lines were much simpler than the runes with which I was familiar. They were straight scratches, some long, some short, some in small clusters and several at a slant. They had been cut so that some were on one face of the squared-off stone, others on the adjacent face, and a few actually straddled both faces. I was completely baffled. After gazing at them for some time, I wondered if I was missing any hidden details. I tried running my fingertips over the scratches and could feel the marks, but they still made no sense. From the ashes of the midday cooking fire, I took a lump of charcoal and, laying a strip of cloth over the corner of the shaft, I rubbed the charcoal on the cloth to reproduce the pattern on the material. I had peeled the cloth away from the stone and laid it out flat on the ground so that I could kneel down and study it, when I became aware of someone watching me. Standing in the shelter of one of the monks’ huts was Saer Credine. He had not gone back to his house, which was his usual custom, but must have returned to check on the final details for the stone shaft which was to be erected next day.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded as he walked towards me. I had never heard him so gruff before. It was too late to hide the marked strip of cloth as I scrambled to my feet.
‘I was trying to understand the marks on the cross shaft,’ I stammered. I could feel my face going bright red.
‘What do you mean “understand”?’ the stonemason growled.
‘I thought it was some sort of rune writing,’ I confessed.
Saer Credine seemed surprised as well as doubtful. ‘You know rune writing?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Come with me,’ he stated bluntly and set off at a brisk walk, crossing the slope of the hill to the site where many of the monks had been buried, as well as visitors who had died on pilgrimage to the holy place. The hillside was dotted with their memorial stones. But it was not a monk’s last resting place that interested Saer Credine. He stopped in front of a low, flat, marker stone, set deep in the ground. Its upper surface had been carved with symbols.
‘What does that say?’ he demanded. I did not hesitate with my reply. The inscription was uncomplicated and whoever had cut it used a simple, plain form of the futhark. ‘In the memory of Ingjald,’ I replied and then ventured an opinion, ‘he was probably a Norseman or a Gael who died while he was visiting the monastery.’
‘Most of the Norse who came to visit this place didn’t get a memorial stone,’ the stonemason grunted. ‘They came upriver in their longships to plunder the place and usually burned it to the ground, except for the stone buildings, that is.’
I said nothing, but stood waiting to see what my master would do next. It was in Saer Credine’s power to have me severely punished for touching the cross shaft. A mere slave, and a heathen at that, who touched the abb’s precious monument could merit a whipping.
‘So where did you learn the runes?’ Saer Credine asked.
‘In Iceland and before that in Greenland and in a place called Vinland,’ I replied. ‘I had good teachers, so I learned several forms, old and new, and some of the variant letters.’
‘So I have an assistant who can read and write, at least in his own way,’ said the stonemason wonderingly. He seemed satisfied with my explanation, and walked back with me to where his great cross shaft lay on its trestles. Picking up the nub of charcoal I had left behind, he searched for a flat piece of wood, then shaved a straight edge with his chisel.
‘I know a few of the rune signs, and I’ve often wondered whether the runes and my own writing are related. But I’ve never had a chance to compare them.’ He made a series of charcoal marks along its edge. ‘Now you,’ he said, handing me the wooden stick and the charcoal. ‘Those are the letters I and my forebears have used through the generations. You write your letters, your futhark or whatever you call it.’
Directly above my master’s marks I scratched out the futhark that Tyrkir had taught me so long ago. As the letters formed I could see that they bore no resemblance to the stonemason’s writing. The shapes of my runes were much more complicated, cut at angles and sometimes turning back on themselves. Also there were several more of them than the number of Saer Credine’s letters. When I had finished copying, I handed the stick back to Saer Credine and he shook his head.
‘Ogmius himself co
uld not read that,’ he said.
‘Ogmius?’ It was a name I had not heard before.
‘He’s also called Honey Mouth or Sun Face. Depends who you are talking to. He’s got several names, but he’s always the God of writing,’ he said, ‘He taught mankind how to write. Which is why we call our script the ogham.’
‘It was Odinn who acquired the secret of writing, according to my instructors, so perhaps that is why the two systems are different,’ I ventured. ‘Two different Gods, two different scripts.’ Our conversation made me feel bolder. ‘What is it that you wrote on the cross shaft?’ I asked.
‘My name and the name of my father and my grandfather,’ he replied. ‘It has always been the custom of my family. We carve the scenes that men like Abb Aidan decide for us, and we take pride in such work and we do it as well as our gifts allow. But in the end our loyalty goes back much farther, to those who gave the skill to our hands and who would take away that skill if we did not pay proper respect. So that is why we leave our mark as Ogmius taught. The day that this cross is set in the foundation stone I will leave him a small offering beneath the shaft in thanks.’
Saer Credine gave me no hint of what he must have decided that evening when he learned that I could read and write the runes.
Three days later I received word that Brother Senesach wanted to speak with me. I knew Brother Senesach by sight and reputation. He was a genial and vigorous man, perhaps in his fifties. I had seen him frequently, striding around the monastery grounds, ruddyfaced and always with an air of unhurried purpose. I knew that he was in charge of the education of the younger monks, and that he was popular with them on account of his good nature and his obvious concern for their well-being.
