“Hold on that, brother,” Manfried said, “til we hear what our holy vested friend has to say on how he came to be waitin for us behind that boulder with murder on his mind.”

“What?” Hegel blinked.

“See, I never heard a no priest nor monk intendin a deed like that, and what with his nonchalance bout gettin quarreled by your bolt, accident or no, and the familiar way he’s sippin that rot, well, I figure twixt tyin up his wound, fillin his belly, and showin off our pits on the coldest cunt night yet, he owes us a tale fore he hears ours. That seem fair or foul?”

“Manfried.” Hegel blanched. “That’s no way a talkin to a priest we shot up.”

“No, no, your brother is correct,” Martyn sighed. “I do owe you gentlemen an explanation. I confess, as much as yours intrigues me, my own has burdened me greatly, and I would be indebted to share the load with such worthy fellows.”

“What?” Hegel squinted at him.

“He’ll tell us what he been doin led to him bein behind that rock,” Manfried explained.

And so the priest did.

When I first read the chronicles of the Crusades that my order kept I finally appreciated the necessity of my learning Latin. Doctrine, even the writings of Saint Augustine, had failed to convince me the long years I spent were not in vain, for what boy wishes to spend his best youthful years squinting over a desk, memorizing a language a millennium fallen out of vernacularism? But those accounts of adventure and tragedy in the Holy Land left an indelible mark upon me, as my ability to flawlessly recite them all these years later demonstrates.

I realized my mundane existence held the potential, however scant, of becoming remarkably interesting, of being the stuff my brethren would study centuries after I went to my reward. I confess it was a vainglorious dream, to travel and adventure instead of showing my devotion in the traditional manner, but I was young and naïve and did not yet appreciate that a lifetime of quiet contemplation is as close to physical peace and perfection as we may achieve here. I have made myself obedient, however, and no longer lament my lot, for I indeed achieved my proud ambitions, and I have suffered for them. Our prayers must always be pure, lest they be directly answered!

To understand my condition when I came to the abbey at… at, by Her Mercy, even now I cannot vocalize its name, so does it haunt me. You must understand that I am disposed to the appreciation of certain libations, but I was never discovered or even suspected, for rather than floundering in a drunken stupor drink gave me passion at that point in my life. Due to my, shall we say, exceedingly vocal qualities regarding the nature of man’s duty to his Father, I was sent out in the world to proselytize my way into the Holy Roman Empire and to establish myself at a certain abbey.

Again I stress my unwavering faith for even when I drank too much to stand and lay praying in my own sick I knew I remained in His Service, though to an outsider I suppose it appeared that perhaps I lost my way somewhat, for several times I was denied sanctuary at local parishes and had to stay at taverns or farms, where those my age reveled despite the calamitous nature of those times. I would watch the girls dance and only then did my piety tremble like their smooth, plump thighs swaying under their dresses, dresses damp with sweat and youth and-

Ahem.

At one such village a particular lass seemed to shine on me, and so intent was I on talking with her that I scarce remembered to drink and spent the entire night with a blasting headache but a gay heart. We wandered over streams and across fields, and when I brought her to her door she kissed me on the cheek. Such bliss! Her father softened and set down his ax when he threw open the door to discover a young monk chatting with his daughter, and to my shame and inner torment I discovered that my destined abbey sat atop the hill of that very village, and from my cell window I could pick out the light of Elise’s farm, for that was the girl’s name.

I managed to clean myself up enough to be accepted at the abbey, and in very little time had gotten myself comfortably arranged with the cook. Rare was the day when water passed my lips instead of beer, wine, brandy, or mead, rare as a good Christian in the Holy Land these days. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I know as well as you that all men drink regardless of their link in the chain, but know you must that I drank more than is befitting of any save a drunkard. The faces of my brothers and superiors were as interchangeable as those at my last monastery, although I still shook in my dreams when I remembered the pretty farm girl Elise cavorting that previous spring when I hiked through vale and mountain. Whenever possible I volunteered to take our herbs to the village for market, where Elise would often notice and come running to warm me with her adorable smile, her chest heaving from the exertion. Temptation, lads, shun it, shun it! I prayed and drank and tended the garden and studied and prayed and debated and drank and helped illuminate manuscripts and prayed and translated and drank and prayed. There I would have grown old and shriveled like the fruit of the Lord which I was but instead, instead…

That’s better. Good stuff, this. They must be Benedictines, yes? Fine drink, fine, fine, fine. But as I said, was saying, am saying, er, where was I?

Oh, oh oh oh. Yes. Two years passed, was it two? Three? No matter, a little time passed, and then the pest came to our fair empire without warning, and then all flesh and souls were threatened by the Archfiend’s plan, for surely, surely he was to blame. At the time, naturally, I did not know this, and shared the base belief that it must be God’s Wrath, a cleansing of the Gomorrah we had become. To believe such evil was wrought by His Pure Hands!

What? God’s, who else’s?

No, no, I did not mean it like that, I meant only that the pest was not His Holy Work but the machinations of the old Serpent again among us. At the time, however, how else could we see it but as another test? The serfs and yeomen who had built their town around the abbey, however, had their own ideas…

That noxious swamp vapors are responsible for the pestilence is documented, and by your nodding heads I see that you are educated men. What is not so well accounted is that in certain rural, dismal places men are so desperate for succor from its ravages that they bow down before the miasma itself, offering devotion in exchange for their lives and those of their families. This diabolical heresy was perpetuated by the cult’s ringleader, a man calling himself the Bird Doctor.

He arrived shortly before the pest, and succeeded in gaining the confidence of the foolish members of the village. The abbot brought me personally along to condemn the man as he cavorted in the square, dressed in a suit of raven feathers and wearing a sinister wooden vulture mask. The abbot launched into a diatribe against the heretic and swore if he was not departed in three days’ time sterner measures would be taken. The man laughed under his mask and told the assembled mob that only he could ward off the miasma, and continued his strange, lascivious dance.

Contrary to his nonchalance, he left the following morning, wandering down the eastern road, and, they said, dancing and singing as he went. That evening the miller’s wife began coughing and by cockcrow had buboes swelling from groin and pits. A family of Jews were passing through, and they could not escape before the town had rallied and caught them. From my cell I heard their screams as they went onto the pyre, accused of sprinkling viper skin into the brook and conjuring forth the miasma.

This time the blasphemous peasants chased the abbot back to the abbey when he tried to intervene, and the miller rode out in pursuit of the Bird Doctor. They returned late that night, and as I drank in my cell I saw their shadows on the moonlit road. After his return, events, as you may suspect, did not improve.