Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic Read online

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  Definitely louder this time. More demanding. Soon a latch will be raised if the summons is not answered and a stealthy figure will enter. For be certain, the one that is knocking will not go away unanswered.

  Jon Wilberfoss rolled away from his wife, turning his head from the musky tousle of her hair and releasing his arm from the warmth under her breasts. She, Medoc by name, an alien woman of the indigenous people called the Tallines, murmured like the sea, uttering words of her own language and turned on her back, moist lips open. For a brief moment her fingers touched and caressed his naked body touching his chest and then gliding down to his thighs. Reassured she relaxed and released him and slid from a dream of horses to a dream of houses and so back down into the bottomless deep of sleep.

  Not so Wilberfoss. Jon Wilberfoss was waking up. He drew the covers back slowly and blinked in the shadowy room. Already his dreams were fleeing into oblivion and he knew who he was and where he was. A man such as Wilberfoss, a trained combatant, did not wake with a lot of ballyhoo. His early training reached deep into his subconscious. He lay still for several moments, aware that his awaking had an external cause, and strained to catch the slightest irregular sound. Consciously he breathed silently and deeply to quieten his pulse.

  When he was confident that there was nothing unexpected in the chamber, he rose from the bed, a shadow among shadows, and moved across the room to find his gown. He dragged it over his shoulders with barely a rustle and then crossed to the door. The door squeaked when he opened it and the sound seemed loud in his ears: likewise the click when it closed. But his wife did not wake.

  Outside in the stone-flagged corridor, the passage lights, sensing his presence, began to glow softly. That they were not already glowing gave him confidence that there was no intruder and he smiled at himself, at his own apprehension.

  Indeed, what intruder could there be here in the heart of the Pacifico Monastery and in a house where the alien goddesses of Juniper held equal sway with St. Francis Dionysos of old Mother Earth? Still, defensive habits once learned, die hard and without realizing it, Wilberfoss moved on down the corridor, walking softly on the sides of his feet, alert for anything untoward.

  Let us pause and gain some physical impression of this man. Some men are like lions, some men are like horses. Jon Wilberfoss is huge like a bear. He has a loose-limbed gait, somewhat amplified as he now walks down the corridor by his need to remain quiet. It is the careful walk of a large man who is all the time aware that there are others in the world smaller than him and whom he might crush. There is no pride of strength in his walk, no arrogant stepping forth, and yet there is an impression of great strength. He pauses at a door, arms raised and touching the frame and again we are reminded of the bear, standing up in the forest, head cocked, listening. The man who would challenge Jon Wilberfoss would need to be very confident of his prowess.

  He turns and looks back up the corridor toward the room where his wife is sleeping. The face is mild, with deep-set blue-gray eyes which, surprisingly, look somewhat timid. The hair of his beard and on his head is short, coarse and blond. The face is tanned and healthy but deeply lined and looks older than one might expect. A seaman who has looked into flying salt spray or stood watch above the coldness of a midnight sea might have such a face. Weather-beaten is the phrase.

  The hands too are worthy of comment. Jon Wilberfoss’s hands are large and square and freckled on the back. The fingers are stubby. They are farmer’s hands, fisherman’s hands, hands for hard labor. For those who only know Jon Wilberfoss as a burly pilot, there is both surprise and delight when they discover the sensitivity with which he plays the guitar or the delicacy of his touch as he mends a fine and fragile beaker made by the potters of old Talline.

  There was no sound from the children’s rooms and Wilberfoss moved on.

  He did not know exactly what had wakened him. A knocking of some kind ... a sound at least... but he knew that he did not want to hear that sound again. His wife would surely wake and perhaps the three children. Besides, only trouble could come with such insistence in the night and he preferred to face trouble alone. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

  “All right,” growled Wilberfoss, “I’m coming. No need to wake everyone up.” Then he heard his own name whispered, like a voice from a well, and it made him shiver.

  Quickly he entered and crossed the dining-room where the remains of the evening meal were still on the table. This house was managed in accordance with Talline ways and the food of the evening was never cleared from the table until the morning as a mark of respect to the guardians of the house. A mouse, disturbed while enjoying Talline hospitality, scampered in a panic for its hole. The fire still glowed a dull red under its patina of gray ash.

  Then Wilberfoss was out in the hall. Facing him was the massive front door made from planks of ironwood. He felt a sudden anger at being disturbed in his privacy. “If this is—” he began to say.

  KNOCK . . .

  With one sweep of his arm, Wilberfoss drew back the heavy curtains which stopped the draft. He lifted the hasp with a bang and heaved the door open.

  Note this about the man’s character, he opened the door to his secure home without knowing what was waiting on the other side. He did not know what to expect.

  Facing him was one of the small blind servants who satisfy the many practical needs of the Pacifico Monastery. It was a woman, as was revealed by the bulky dark blue gown she was wearing. In her hands she held a pair of smoothed balls of granite. One of these she had used to tap at the door. Her eyes were closed and the dim light from the hall revealed that she was nodding dreamily to herself as though listening to some inner music. Her face was waxen and unhealthy and it was impossible to tell her age. Her size was little more than that of a nine-year-old human child.

  Wilberfoss felt his anger evaporate. “What do you want?” he asked, and then added foolishly, “Do you know what time it is?” As though in answer the monastery clock tolled twice.

  “Yom sorry to waken you, Senior Confrere Wilberfoss,” said the woman in her thick accent and never speaking to him directly but aiming her voice to the side of his face. “Yis asked to call you urgently. Yis told to use special pitch so only you would wake. There is a secret. You're to come to Magister Tancredi’s rooms immediately.”

  “Why? What is this secret?”

  “Yo no know.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Yo no know. Yis just asked ...”

  “Tancredi just told you to come and get me?”

  “Yes. Magister Tancredi sounded worried. . . mmm . . . yes, worried and excited too. Yo no think it is a bad worry. But you're to come immediately.”

  The big maxi peered down into the diminutive woman’s bland unquestioning face. She was one of the Children of the War as they were called: a tribe of several hundred humanoid beings who worked and lived at the Pacifico Monastery of St. Francis Dionysos. Congenitally blind, stunted in their growth and yet miraculously still able to breed, the Children of the War survived only in the benign, albeit unnatural, environment of the monastery. They were all that were left of an entire race and had been rescued from a dying world at the height of the War of Ignorance. That war ended over four hundred years ago.

  “What is your name?” asked Wilberfoss.

  “Miranda.” The voice which breathed the name was little more than a whisper.

  “Thank you for your message, Miranda. Please return to Magister Tancredi and tell him I’m on my way. Tell him I’m just getting some clothes on.”

  The small figure bowed. “Yom doing that now.” She whispered and turned and hurried away. Jon Wilberfoss watched her go. She joined the shadows under the dark fused arches. She moved with complete confidence in the permanent night of her blindness. She glided rather than walked with her arms outstretched and her fingers brushing the columns. Her gown billowed. She could almost have been flying.

  Before she disappeared from view into the stacked hone
ycomb of cells that made up this lower part of the monastery, Miranda paused and brought her hands together in three quick gestures. Wilberfoss heard the hard click of stone on stone.

  Wilberfoss shivered, but not with the cold. He experienced one of those strange moments of frisson and, as the ancients would have said, he felt as though someone had walked over his grave. He laughed at himself. “Reading the echoes,” he thought. “She’s just reading the echoes. I’ve seen them do this a thousand times. Everything seems strange at two o’clock in the morning.”

  And with that he closed his door and hurried inside to get dressed.

  2 Apropos the Gentle Order

  And so, while Jon Wilberfoss tiptoes about in the sleeping house, making himself a drink and gathering his clothes, I will tell you about the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos.

  There are many official histories of the Order of St. Francis Dionysos and all of them are equally bad. They either offer mechanical history which gives a date and a fact and no analysis or they disappear up the dark tunnel of mysticism at just the point at which they should be clear and skeptical. While this is sad, it is not surprising. Ours is, in the main, a practical order devoted to the saving of life and there remains within it, I suspect, more than a tinge of the anti-intellectualism which characterized its founders. Theory follows practice with us, and only those with time on their hands can afford the luxury of an historical perspective. Besides, historians, rightly considered, are both the greatest radicals and the greatest revolutionaries since they show the causes and consequences of ideas. Such types can be an encumbrance to men of action.

  What I want to do is explain the origin of the Gentle Order. I want to give you the true flavor of Francis Dionysos. In the official histories you will search in vain for an explanation of how the Dionysian entered the mainstream of the Franciscan Order. One can suspect ancient censorship here.

  Since I conceived this massive project, the documenting of a man’s recovery, I have spent many hours in the library “digging and sifting,” trying to gather the kinds of facts and events which will give us a vivid understanding of the past. I have found some wonderful things and I can affirm that our order is very old. Our roots belong with the dawn of human consciousness itself.

  I want you to read the following fragment. I came upon it by accident while looking for information on the early spread of our movement. The page was pressed inside the cover of a translation of the Odyssey which once belonged to a certain Consceur Waimarie. This woman was the senior navigation officer aboard the Cornucopia which, as you know, was the very first ship to carry a human settlement group to live among aliens. All the books which Consoeur Waimarie took with her on that journey are preserved in our library at Pacifico. The planet upon which they settled was called Lore and the aliens, humanoid as their pictures testify, were given the dubious name of the Lorelei. The fragment is almost six hundred years old and dates from the early years of optimism and expansion, long before the Wars of Knowledge and Ignorance. The manuscript is written in the lady’s own bold hand but whether Consoeur Waimarie composed the piece herself or simply copied it from an original I do not know. Whatever its origin, it reflects early wisdom. The following is the complete text, unabridged, and this is the first time that it has been published.

  First there came Achilles.

  Achilles the hero. Achilles of the staring eye. Achilles of the hungry sword. Achilles the drinker of blood, the slaughterer, the red man. Achilles who tied the still warm body of Hector behind his chariot and dragged him around the walls of Troy, before the faces of his pale wife and children, before the staring eyes of mother, father and friends, until the flesh came away in tatters.

  Achilles who sees land and calls it territory, who stokes the ovens of war and whose spittle-flecked lips chant slogans of death.

  Learn to know his face.

  And wherever the rat-faced, cunning killer man stepped out, there was Achilles before him, whether on land or in the sea or the cold vastness of space.

  And if all we had was Achilles to sustain us, then I would not be writing this song, and you would not be reading it. For Achilles plants no grain and Achilles founds no temples. Where Achilles has walked there is the acrid smell of smoke and the crying of the maimed and dying.

  Second came Christ the light-bearer, the turner of cheek, the washer of feet, beloved of harlots, who was the hero for those who had no hero and who promised a life hereafter as a reward for the now.

  He taught that goodness is harder than cruelty, that the man of peace is always the man of courage. He tamed the wild horses, brought peace to the valleys and corn sprang up in his footsteps.

  Even Death paused in his labors when Christ walked past. Before Christ’s cold, pure gaze Death slunk off into the hollows.

  And as he climbed aboard his cross for the hundredth or perhaps the thousandth time, he blessed Achilles and Achilles winced with pain. That was a different kind of victory, a new kind of victory.

  Where Christ founded temples, Achilles sacked them.

  Where Christ gained followers, Achilles killed them.

  Christ was of the spirit, Achilles of the no-spirit, and at the poles of their difference they licked their wounds.

  Mankind needed more. Mankind needed the Earth, soft and sure, ever renewing as she always had been, even before the first song was composed.

  And then came St. Francis, later called the Dionysos, strolling by.

  Third came Francis Dionysos. He ate the earth and shat the earth.

  When the sad Achilles howled in the wilderness for blood, Francis Dionysos dipped his ladle in the wine vat.

  When Christ yelped in agony as the nails bit deep, Francis Dionysos sank his teeth into a juicy hock and the grease ran down his chin.

  While Christ and Achilles warred, Francis Dionysos whored. The noise of his lovemaking was like a beating of wings in the night and his laughter shook the stars. The moon bled.

  When he tore the flesh the women swooned.

  When he tore the flesh the men cried out in ecstasy for more.

  Primroses bloomed in their thousands in the place where he had lain. Snakes graced the land once more. Spiders came out of comers. The bristling wolf rolled on its back begging to be scratched.

  And in the great silence which followed his love-making, both Christ and Achilles came on their knees and sat at his feet and sucked on his fingers like calves.

  There is much in this fragment that cannot be explained. Many references can only be guessed at, but I would draw your attention to the line, “And then came St. Francis, later called the Dionysos, strolling by.” This confirms that St. Francis and Dionysos were originally separate entities.

  Who was this Dionysos? I incline to the view that he is more a principle than a man. In antiquity he was one of the Gods of ecstasy, much honored in the vine groves and at festivals celebrating the arrival of Spring. He was known by many names such as Bacchus, Sabazius, Adonis and Pan and was widely regarded as a prototype for that same Christ who is the central figure in verse two. There is a wildness about Dionysos, a lust for living, a trust and an anarchy. He is neither cruel nor kind, but both. LIFE: primitive as fire, urgent as running water, raw and pagan, golden and gorgeous, in sunshine and shadow. That is Dionysos. I see this with all the clarity of the non-living. In my terms Dionysos is co-equal with electricity.

  Now, worship of this principle, which was widespread in the antiquity of the world, was driven underground by the spread of religions which offered life in an afterworld in an exchange for penance in this world. Paradoxically, it was political Christianity which was the main culprit here and led to the suppression of ancient nature cults. If a machine could cry, I would cry, at the waste and misery caused by men and women attempting to be other than in their natures they are.

  But underground is not dead. And just as Christ himself was a descendant of Dionysos of the Grain Cradle so many of the most devout followers of Christ were themselves followers of Di
onysos without their being aware. Indeed it would have shocked them had they known and been a cause for strict penitence. One such was St. Francis whose spirit was Dionysian but whose practice was severe and penitentially Christian.

  It was in the year 1209 AD, on the parent world called Earth, that a young man of the Bernadone family founded a religious order in a small town in Italy called Assisi. His given name was Francis (his father, we are told, having just returned from a successful business venture in France), and hence the members of the order he founded became known as the Franciscans. We who serve in the Gentle Order are their descendants.

  From its beginning the order was characterized by austerity for the brothers and compassion for sinners and a radiant love of all life.

  Many delightful stories are told about this young zealot Francis and, regrettably, most of these stories are probably apocryphal. I have noticed that there is an inherent tendency in scribes and historians to dress the bare bones of feet with flesh of their own invention. Myth, history and imagination wear the same bold face. For instance, we can read in story books how Francis bled from the hands and feet after a vision and yet seemingly did not die from hemorrhage. I have asked Lily about this and she confirms that such an event is extremely unlikely. Perhaps this bleeding is meant to be understood symbolically in which case blood may equal life: a traditional exegesis.

  We can also read that Francis declared himself married to a country girl called Dame Poverty. Again without doubt, a symbolic declaration for I can find no record of such a marriage having actually taken place. We can also read that the young Francis talked and preached to birds and animals, and even to the stones and the water. This I, Wulf, the skeptical wordsmith, believe, for it is the central tenet of our Order that all life is to be cherished, and Francis celebrated the spirit that is found in all things.