After the murder of Our Lord, the Romans built a temple to Venus on Golgotha, so that any Christian praying there would be seen to be worshipping Venus. When Saint Helena, wife of the first Constantine, mother of the second, came to Jerusalem to find the True Cross, she commanded the temple to be razed, the earth to be ploughed up, and three crosses were disinterred, because Christ had been crucified beside two thieves. To distinguish between the crosses, she had them placed in the centre of Jerusalem and Saint Helena waited for the Lord to manifest his glory. At about the ninth hour, a funeral procession was going past. The dead man’s body was placed beneath each of the crosses, and beneath the third cross, the dead man came back to life.
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The way cuts into us. Pebbles and twigs assail our feet, branches lash our faces and eyes. Our stops for rest are more frequent than I should have liked. The sun moves fast in the heavens; our feet go slowly on the ground. After the exhilaration of setting off on our journey when we took too fast a pace, stung by the novelty of strange trees and different faces, our bodies protested the labour. To Viterbo? To Paris? Canterbury, even Rochester would seem impossible. By the end of the day the next-but-one step would seem impossible.
Brother Bernard hardly speaks. He grunts when he walks, our beast of burden, our donkey. It is forbidden to members of our Order to ride. It is also forbidden to carry. We carry and yet refuse to ride, when a passing merchant or farmer offers us room in his cart, as if resisting a second sin obviates the first already committed. We are not pilgrims, or penitents, we are on a mission to the Pope, but my companions, who are ignorant of the true reason for our journey, refuse to break the saint’s commandment. They are both perplexed by their supposed crime and banishment. Neither, I think, is unhappy to have left the friary. Brother Andrew’s good nature emerges in whistling and song and an excited regard of everything he sees.
We walk. We accept alms from strangers who have sins to expiate. We walk in the same rhythm. The road we walked on was wide. And there were others on it too, I had never seen such diversity of kinds. Farmers driving their pigs, merchants in carts, cattle for market grazing by the side. And sometime a fine horseman would gallop past down the middle of the road. And we would gaze upon the finery and the speed and the hoof prints left in the mud and the steam disturbing the air.
Towards the end of the day, we had been singing to forget the pain in our legs and feet, until we had fallen silent, a little chiding, and then silent again, as we listened to the sound of our tread on the way.
People are kind to us. At night we were invited to sleep in a barn, our new dormitory with its friary of donkeys and convent of hens. I was asked by Brother Andrew if I understood their language.
Yes, I told him, they are saying, Please do not eat me. If you spare my life, I will lay you a very fine egg in the morning.
And he looked in wonder at the hens and thanked God for the wisdom that can penetrate mysteries, and Brother Bernard grunted, and I might easily suppose that he is the one who can speak the languages of the animals.
We slept on rough straw and as I fell asleep I felt, for the first time, the desire to be back in the friary where life is understood and I am under the shelter of my Master.
We were woken by a child who had been sent to bring us bread and milk, which was still warm from the sheep. The first taste of the milk was the strongest and the fullest, as if our appetites had shrunk to the shape of their first satisfaction. Rain and sunshine dripped through holes in the roof. Brother Andrew was smiling as he led us through the prayers. You O Lord will open my mouth. And my mouth shall declare your praise.
Our feet were aching to return to the journey. Bernard gathers his load, Andrew laid some stones into the sign of the cross. We stopped for breakfast and then Brother Bernard and I became impatient with Brother Andrew because he took so long to finish his food.
When we stopped again, in the shade of a tree, by the side of a river, stretching our legs, resting our tired, beaten feet, after we had performed our prayers, Brother Bernard and I ate the food we had kept back from breakfast. The bread was stale, the milk was sour, but after the labour of our day’s walking, each bite and sip contained whole worlds. My body strengthened with every mouthful. I felt I had discovered something here today, to do with size and magnitude. If I had filled myself as quickly as Brother Bernard was doing, then I would not taste or feel or perceive so much.
Brother Andrew was looking miserable. He confessed that he had consumed all his food at breakfast. I gave him half of the rest of what I had. Brother Bernard threw him a scrap of bread.
A rainbow is ahead of us, which is either an auspicious omen or a signal sent to direct us by Master Roger. I explained to Brothers Andrew and Bernard that there are five principal colours, black, blue, green, red, and white. Aristotle said that there are seven but you can arrive at that by subdividing blue and green into two halves of dark and light. I could hear my voice above the music of a songbird and how preferable that music was at this moment so I became silent.
We could hear the bird as we walked. Brother Andrew and I looked above our heads for the songbird but we could not see it in the trees, just heard its song. I looked around and saw Brother Bernard’s lips shaped forward, the whistling coming from them. I had not thought he was capable of such game or skill.
We wear the brown robes of our Order and the insignia of two keys on our chests, to signify our pilgrimage to Rome. The orders of angels watch our process towards Canterbury.
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I have committed two sins, close to blasphemy, on the short way we have come. I have found myself wishing we were not carrying my Master’s Book and his device for the Pope and his packet that we are to open when we have abandoned hope or hope has abandoned us. I have even neglected to pick up treasure I saw in the woods. I made my companions stop. We must go back, I told them. Or at least we have to stop and you must wait for me. It was not hard to persuade them to drop themselves down in a glade in the forest.
I went back to where the treasure was, cut it away from the earth, put it in my bag, and made my laborious way back to where my companions were, or at least should have been. I halted, went farther on, then back the way I had come. The trees looked like giants who were mocking me before taking me prisoner, casting their nets of leaves. I searched for different paths through the trees in the event I had taken a wrong turn in my tiredness. I stopped, I renewed my search; I went this way, and that, and returned again to the place where I first thought to find my companions – who, revivified by their rest, leaped out laughing at me from behind the trees.
My companions question me about my Master. They ask what it is we do up in the tower. I may of course not tell them about the Book.
We study, he teaches, I learn. Sometime we sing.
Sing what?
Different songs. The shape of music reveals the hidden structures of many things. Music is the power of connection coupled with beauty.
You sing?
In line with Aristotle’s teaching. Music also teaches the virtues, courage and modesty and the other dispositions.
Who is Aristotle?
A great teacher. Perhaps the greatest.
A Franciscan?
No. Not a Franciscan.
A Dominican then?
Not a Cistercian?!
Bernard shows a particular antipathy to Cistercians.
He is not attached to any order, I tell