Panacea

by F. Paul Wilson

  “How’s the fishing?”

  “The smallmouth bass are excellent.”

  Laura gave Rick a nudge and a look. “Can we talk about the monastery?”

  “Yes, you were right,” Leander said. “It is a monastery of sorts.”

  Rick gestured to the climbing vines, the crumbling masonry. “Looks more like ‘was’ a monastery.”

  He shrugged. “When is a monastery no longer a monastery?”

  “When it has no monks.”

  Leander glanced over his shoulder at the building. “It has no monks … at least not for as long as I have been alive. It is more properly an abbey. Men come and visit, but no one stays.” He turned to Laura. “I heard you mention ‘panaceans.’ Where did you learn that term?”

  “We were told it applies to a certain group of pagans we’ve been tracking. Also called the Children.”

  “Pagans … Oh, these parts have been home to many pagans, and heretics too—followers of Arius back in the day. But the Romans and the Franks and the monks converted all they could and killed the ones they couldn’t.”

  “We have a poem from the panaceans,” she said, pulling the paper from a back pocket. “Would you mind taking a look at it?”

  She’s not wasting any time at all, Rick thought.

  “I do not mind.”

  “Don’t you need glasses?” she said, handing it to him.

  “Not if the light is good.” He angled it into the sunlight and read aloud.

  “’Twixt the house of the fallen godmen

  And the tomb of the fallen star

  That slew summer,

  Auburon lies drowning.

  He sleeps,

  Martyred and imprisoned

  Yet mocking his oppressors.

  He sleeps in the Wound,

  Midmoon from the godmen gate

  Where five men stand above his door.

  His guardian leg shall bear you to new life.”

  “Have you ever heard that before?” Laura said.

  He handed it back to her. “Of course. Everyone around here knows ‘The Song of Auburon.’ It originated in these parts many, many centuries ago, although this is the first time I have seen it in English. The original was in Catalan, I believe.”

  “A monastery with no monks,” Rick said, thinking aloud. Leander’s reading had caused pieces to start clicking into place. “Holy crap! Is this ‘the house of the fallen godmen’?”

  Leander nodded. “Yes … if the old tales are true.”

  “But…” Laura was looking around. “Where did they fall from?”

  “Grace,” Leander said simply. “Come.”

  He stepped back under the arch and motioned them to follow. Of its own volition, Rick’s hand found the handle of his knife. Leander stopped before the dark rectangle of an open doorway. Rick looked for signs of life or movement down the shadowy hallway beyond. All quiet.

  Leander pointed to a number carved into the stone above the door.

  DXXXVI

  Rick tensed. “Well, I guess that settles that.”

  “But why did they build it here?” Laura said.

  “You do not know the story?”

  “No. But you’re going to tell us, right?”

  “Of course. It is no secret. We have passed the story from generation to generation.” Leander pointed to a block of stone outside to the right of the arch. “There. Let me sit and warm myself in the sun while I tell you.”

  They followed him and stood by as he settled himself.

  He squinted up at them. “Tell me what you already know.”

  “We know of the comet that caused the sky to burn in 536 AD, and the piece of it that landed here.”

  Leander nodded. “The ‘Wound’ of the poem. That was what Auburon’s people called it. They had come from the north and mixed with the Visigoths, but they worshipped the All-Mother. Being a pagan was dangerous back then, so they pretended to follow the teachings of Arius, who preached that Jesus was not an aspect of God in the Trinity, but a separate being created directly beneath God. But even though Arians were themselves considered heretics by the pope and the rulers of the Church in Rome at that time, they fared better than pagans. The Church had absolutely no use for pagans. Thus the pretense. When they saw the fire in the sky they thought the Christian God was attacking the All-Mother.”

  Laura was shaking her head. “And we assume life was so simple back then.”

  Leander smiled. “Anything but. Imagine what a terrible time that must have been: A veil has covered the sky, obscuring the sun after the firestorm that caused the Wound. On the day of the summer solstice, a heavy snow falls. Summer does not come and the crops mostly fail. Auburon keeps his family from starving by hunting the diminishing small game and eating the stunted, deformed plants growing around the rim of the Wound which is slowly filling with water. He pulls up the cold-resistant plants and takes them home to eat. Half delirious with fever from an infected wound on his leg after a hunting accident, he dumps his plants into a boiling pot.”

  “How do you know all this?” Laura said.

  “My father told me the story when I was a child, just as his father told him, and now I am telling you. Auburon should not be forgotten. The next morning he has no fever and the wound has healed. A miracle! Or could it be the tea he made? He is a farmboy who learned healing ways from his mother. After experimenting, he discovers that a tea made from the whole plant has great healing properties. He becomes revered among the locals and his reputation grows.”

  “The first panacean,” Laura said.

  “Yes. And everything is fine until the Church arrives.”

  “Here we go,” Rick said. “The 536 Brotherhood rears its ugly head.”

  “They were merely Benedictine monks then. It is a few years after the impact when Friar Hugh arrives from the Montecassino monastery in Italy to establish a new abbey in Gaul. Via the good word of the pope—named Vigilius by then—Hugh’s party has the blessing of King Chlothar, who provides troops to guarantee safe passage from Toulouse to Aquitaine. Each Benedictine monastery at that time was autonomous and Hugh and his followers want to establish a more ascetic lifestyle than Montecassino’s.”

  “I smell fanaticism,” Laura said. “Or fundamentalism at the very least.”

  Rick nodded. Just what he was thinking. He’d been keeping watch on their surroundings as Leander spoke. He couldn’t shake the sense of something off about the old dude.

  “You shall see. This was the frontier of the Church and Friar Hugh and his fellow Benedictines saw themselves as pioneers blazing new paths for the Glory of God. They chose southern Gaul because they figured the recent years of empire-wide cold summers and famine would make it easy to convince the local Visigoths, mostly followers of Arianism, to convert to the Trinitarian beliefs of the Byzantine Empire. It was also safer than heading east, because shipments of grain from Egypt had brought plague to Constantinople and it had spread across the Mediterranean from there. Even Emperor Justinian was not spared, although he survived his illness.”

  Laura glanced at Rick. “Duval called it the Justinian Plague. The start of the Dark Ages.”

  “Yes,” Leander said, nodding. “The Dark Ages … and men like Friar Hugh helped bring the darkness. A short time after his arrival he hears of a local known as Auburon who performs miraculous healings. In fact, the local Arians call him ‘Saint Auburon.’ This does not sit well at all with Friar Hugh. He tells the accompanying soldiers to bring this Auburon to him.”

  “I’m guessing the rest isn’t pretty,” Laura said. “Not with ‘martyred and imprisoned’ in the poem.”

  Leander smiled. “Did you never question the order of those two states of being? I mean the fact that ‘martyred’ precedes ‘imprisoned’ in the poem?”

  “I assumed it was for purposes of rhyming or meter in the original.”

  “We shall see. In his innocence, Auburon explains to Friar Hugh that he performs neither miracles nor witchcraft. It’s just a tea
he brews from the plants along the rim of the hole God made when the sky rained fire. He leads them to the crater—filled with water by now—where Hugh sees the twisted plants. The friar tells him this isn’t God’s work. The night of fire was the work of Satan—the Serpent—to undo God’s Holy Church. After the night of fire, the Serpent stifled the light of God’s sun, causing years of darkened skies without summers, famine throughout the empire, and now plague. These deformed plants are the legacy of the Serpent’s attempt. Were Auburon not a heretic, he’d know that. Hugh orders him imprisoned. But there is no prison, so he is tied to a tree.”

  “Okay,” Laura said. “It’s reversed in the poem. Imprisoned first.”

  “We shall see. During the night, a Frankish soldier named Paschal, tasked with guarding the bound healer, shows his prisoner the leprosy on his lower leg. He’s been hiding it from his fellow soldiers. Auburon instructs him how to make the tea. Paschal follows the directions and drinks. The leprosy is gone by the next day, but Paschal has to watch in horror as Auburon is burned alive, and then drawn and quartered for heresy and witchcraft and pretending to be a holy man.”

  “Paschal,” Rick said. “We now know the name of the second panacean.”

  Leander turned to him. “You are quite correct. But now we come to the abbey. Friar Hugh becomes the abbot of his new order. The construction is slow work because it’s being built on the high uplift in the center of the crater. Some of the block can be quarried from the uplift itself, but so much else has to be brought over by boat. He chose to consecrate the uplift in order to purify and sanctify this mark of Satan’s work.”

  “Ah-ha!” Rick said, nudging Laura. He couldn’t help it. “Told you.”

  She gave him a look. “You love being right, don’t you.”

  “I do, I do, I do.”

  “Because it’s such a unique experience?”

  He laughed. “That was harsh.”

  Yeah, he really liked her.

  “May I go on?” Leander said.

  Rick raised his hands. “Yeah. Please. Sorry.”

  “But Hugh cannot seem to stamp out the local pagans and their healings. He has started calling them panaceans. But whenever he finds and executes one, another pops up.

  “It is during the abbey’s construction that Friar Hugh—far removed from the orthodoxy of Rome—develops the peculiar theological underpinnings of his new order. He instructs his fellow monks—once Benedictine but now a long way, both physically and spiritually, from their order—in his new interpretation. He agrees with the Church teaching that, even though man was born to suffer, we are doing the Lord’s work when we ease human suffering. But we are to help alleviate only some suffering. The pagan potion, though it cures disease, is really Satan’s work, created to subvert God’s punishment for the transgressions in Eden. Man was banished from the Garden to know death and disease and hunger and despair. The panacea undoes God’s will. Because of their growing fixation on the Banishment, they start to refer to Satan as ‘the Serpent.’”

  “That’s a majorly twisted view of Genesis,” Laura said.

  “I don’t know,” Rick said. “It’s logically consistent with the Garden of Eden myth.”

  “Oh, you would think that,” she said. “Because it’s also consistent with your myth that it’s evil because it comes from outside—wherever that is.”

  “We don’t need to go into that now,” Rick said, but her words pierced like a knife.

  Was he another side of the 536 coin?

  “Please?” Leander said. “May I finish? Hugh and his fellow monks dedicate themselves to stopping the evil the Serpent began in the year 536. They brand themselves with the date so they can never forget.”

  “This explains so much,” Laura said. “They don’t want the panacea for themselves—they want to keep anyone from getting it.”

  “Yes, and to that end, Friar Hugh decides to destroy all the plants around the crater. He calls on a postulant, a former Frank soldier who left the army to join the 536 order. He instructs him to rip up all the plants that the panaceans use for their potion and burn them. He cannot seem to stop the pagans, but if he destroys the raw materials for their sacrilegious potion, he’ll have rendered them powerless. The postulant says he’ll start immediately. But the postulant’s name is Paschal who, you might remember, was cured by Auburon. He and others like him have become a fifth column among the friars. In fact, he has been overseeing the quarrying of stone from within the upwelling for the abbey’s foundation. He tells his fellow panaceans to dig up whatever plants they can under cover of night and move them and their soil to a remote place in the mountains where they can grow in safety.”

  “And so it began,” Rick said. “A secret war lasting a millennium and a half. And we’re in the middle of it.”

  “How are you in the middle?” Leander said.

  Laura shook her head. “Another long story.”

  Leander slowly rose to standing. “I would love to hear it but this old man’s bladder is full. I will relieve it on the far side of the abbey. Do not go away.”

  “Not on your life,” Laura said. She turned to Rick as the old man tottered away toward the abbey’s left flank. “Well, what do you think?”

  “I think we just struck the mother lode of panacean lore. That old dude has answered a lot of questions. But can we trust him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something off kilter about him. I wish I could say just what. And I don’t like him going off by himself.”

  Laura smiled. “Why don’t you peek around the corner and see if he’s really relieving himself.”

  “Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me.”

  But he’d take a pass on that. Instead he pointed to the abbey. “‘The house of the fallen godmen.’” Then to the lake. “‘The tomb of the fallen star.’”

  “Right. But Auburon sleeps ‘twixt’ … somewhere between … where would that be?”

  Rick knew the poem by heart by now. “… mocking his oppressors … He sleeps in the Wound … Midmoon from the godmen gate … Where five men stand above his door.” He looked around. “The ‘godmen gate’ could be the front door to the abbey. But what’s ‘midmoon’ from that?”

  “A half moon? “Laura said.

  “Yes! A hundred-eighty degrees.”

  He hurried along the abbey’s right flank to its rear wall—a blank stone expanse with a cross carved into the block. Not even an arch. He was hoping to find some sort of statue or monument—any sort of structure. But all he found was brush.

  “Check the ground for a trapdoor or something,” he said, parting the brush.

  “You don’t think they’d make it easy to find, do you?”

  “Or look for remnants of statues—namely the ‘five men’ who ‘stand above his door.’ Auburon should be beneath.”

  “Nothing but dirt and rock here,” Laura said.

  Yeah, she was right. Damn it.

  He stepped to the water’s edge where they’d seen Leander fishing.

  “Wait. ‘Auburon lies drowning.’” He pointed toward the water. “He’s down there.”

  “But no statues of five men. How about carved into the bank?”

  Rick leaned over for a look. “Nothing but blank rock.”

  “‘Five men stand above his door,’” Laura said. “What if that means five man-lengths? People didn’t grow much above five feet back then. Could he be in some sort of crypt down there … twenty-five feet down?”

  “Damn right, he could. ‘Martyred and imprisoned … Yet mocking his oppressors.’ It all fits. His first disciple, Paschal, was in charge of the quarrying. They placed him right under the abbey where he could thumb his nose at them for eternity.”

  “It fits, but is it true?”

  He began shucking his jacket. “Only one way to find out.”

  “You’re not thinking…”

  “Unless you can come up with a better way, this is the best I’ve got.”

  “We shou
ld have brought some scuba gear.”

  “No one wishes that more than yours truly.” He wasn’t concerned about free diving two dozen feet. The SEALs had put him through a lot worse. The temperature could be trouble because Rick knew, just knew that water was going to be cold. Too cold and his muscles would seize up. “My kingdom for a drysuit.”

  “Maybe I should get Leander…”

  “Let him empty his bladder in peace. It takes old guys a while.”

  As he stripped down to his cotton boxer briefs, he heard Laura groan behind him. Her voice had a husky sound.

  “There are some things one cannot unsee.”

  He laughed. “Don’t tell me I have skid marks!”

  “Just get this over with.”

  He grabbed the Maglite Mini from his jacket pocket. The water looked clear and the high sun would add a lot of light near the surface, but he might need it twenty-five feet down. Not waterproof, just water resistant, but he figured it would last longer down there than his breath.

  He picked up his hunting knife.

  “Are you expecting to run into a shark?” Laura said.

  “Never know. Maybe a kraken.”

  Nah … he dropped it.

  “Be careful,” Laura said.

  He looked back and saw her concerned expression. She cared? Nice to know.

  “See you in a couple of minutes.”

  He looked down at the still surface of the water, maybe five feet below. If Laura’s calculation was right, he’d find something twenty feet or so below the surface. He filled his lungs to capacity then slowly released the breath four times. Taking a final deep breath, he turned on his Mag and dove in headfirst.

  He’d been mentally prepared for the cold but the shock nearly drove the breath from him. This couldn’t be just mountain runoff. Had to be a cold spring at work here.

  He kicked straight down, stroking with one arm and aiming the flashlight with the other. He saw the opening almost immediately: a black square, three feet on a side, cut into the rocky wall of the upwelling. Definitely not natural.

  He hesitated only a second before gliding into it, Mag thrust before him. He expected to find a coffin or some skeletal remains, but the passage made a sharp upward turn. He followed it. He doubted he could turn in the confines of the passage, so getting out would take longer than going in. He decided to allow himself a dozen or so more feet before he started backing out.