The roads out of Ciudad radiate across the plain like the spokes of a wheel. Most of them are straight, or fairly straight, and bear the names of their destinations among the little towns. Only the road to Sant Jeronimo and beyond in the high mountains fails in directness, and that lies on the mighty slopes that it gradually and painfully ascends like twine that has fallen from a shuttle, turning and returning in the sharpest of bends, making many miles and a tolerable gradient up the face of the mountain. The roads are dusty, but not neglected – breaking stones and filling holes being given as a customary penance to able-bodied sinners. One road leads along the foot of the mountain some distance, and then turns abruptly between two mighty free-standing peaks, great volcanic plugs with sheer sides rising to flat-topped crests, and, passing below them in a narrow and spectacular gorge, enters an intramontane valley. The valley floor is occupied by an ancient fig orchard, with wheat spreading beneath the armies of trees. A torrent, violent in spring and dry in summer, cuts a serpentine gully full of stones alongside the road. There are no villages here, although there are barns and byres – the whole valley belongs to the monastery of Galilea, which stands on an eminence at the northern, remoter end.
Those who founded the Galilea sought solitude, and the monastery originally occupied a group of caves and ledges in a cliff-face. The fame of its austere and pious founder spread; pilgrims made the two-day journey from Ciudad; by and by the ledges were fronted with sheltering arches, the caves opened to balconies and porches with outlooks down the valley, and eventually at the foot of the cliff, beside the monastery church, a cloister and a library spread out below the vertiginous structures clinging to the cliff wall. After the first century and a half of the monastery’s existence, the abbots had been able to build alongside the original church a grander and larger one, but piety and love of the founder forbade abandoning his church, and the two naves shared an aisle and opened into one another.
Remote as it was, the Galilea was a centre of learning. Every priest on Grandinsula had sat for some months daily on the benches that occupied the older church and learned theology from one or other of the famous teachers of the order. There was also an oblate school, at which any clever boy, however poor, could get an education in exchange for a promise to enter the order if God called when the time was ripe, and at which the princes of the island could taste discipline, from fearless masters. There, long ago, Severo had been beaten for mistakes in Latin grammar and had learned humility. There the great scholar Beneditx, who had shared an oblate’s bench with Severo, now sat at the window of one of the highest painted caves, bent over the works of the fathers, day by day, indifferent to his fame for sanctity and learning, having long withdrawn from teaching and disputation, devoting himself single-mindedly to his great treatise on the knowledge of angels.
He had copied into his papers ‘Boethius says: through Himself alone God disposes all things’ when, looking up, he saw the rider, far below, on the road up the valley. It was early evening, and the amphitheatre of mountains which towered around was an overlapping sequence of outlines in greens and blues, the shadowy masses dissolved in light as though translucent. The little dust cloud raised by the rider caught the sun and showed like a trailing halo behind him. He was riding fast and coming late, where pilgrims, walking, came early, but Beneditx had no curiosity to spare for him. He returned to his book.
‘To the contrary, Gregory says, “In this visible world nothing can be disposed except through invisible creatures.”’ Beneditx laid down his pen and closed his eyes. He saw visions of angels at work in every moment of creation. Their hands flexed the tops and branches of the trees to raise the wind; their hands carried each single snowflake in the myriad storms and laid it softly down; their delicate fingers unfurled the scrolled leaves on the fig trees and silently opened each blossom on the almond boughs. They poured the springing torrent where it flowed, they stirred the sea and raised the breaking waves, they drew the curtain of nightfall across the sky and lit the lamps of heaven, day and night.
When reluctantly he opened his eyes again – did angelic fingers lift his lids for him? – the rider was just entering the gate. He wrote, ‘Moreover, Origen says, “The world needs the angels, who rule over beasts, preside over the birth of animals, and over the growth of bushes, plants, and other things . . .”’
His was among the highest of the ancient troglodyte cells, reached by a veritable Jacob’s ladder of stone steps and narrow passages criss-crossing the ancient cliff-face behind the perched curtain of walls and arches. Below him he heard the slap of running sandals on the stones. Someone ascending in haste. A lay brother on an errand . . .
‘But even in rational creatures an order can be found,’ he read. ‘Rational souls hold the lowest place among these, and their light is shadowy in comparison with that of the angels . . .’
A lay brother stood at his cell door, breathless from the climb. He held a paper in his hand. Sighing, pushing aside his interrupted volume, Beneditx took it and read:
‘A hard thing must be decided. Come to me. Severo.’
The news that Beneditx was preparing to depart ran like wildfire through the warren of the Galilea’s cells. A thousand whispers broke the vows of silence that were supposed to possess the night. Even the little boys in the oblate dormitory learned in the light of the flickering candles that kept night-frights at bay that the great scholar was leaving them. No more could they hope that the great man, passing them in the cloister and seeing tears, would take the smudged slate from their hands and write the lesson clearly, explaining in soft words. The news cast down the lowliest scholars in the place, their hopes blighted if Beneditx was gone. Not that he taught them, nowadays. Not that they knew anything about him except that their teachers held him in awe. But as any one of the churches of the island valued its holiest relic, so the Galilea valued Beneditx. As pilgrims came to venerate holy relics, so scholars came to the Galilea, seeking out the remote valley on the distant island to find Beneditx and talk to him. The wisdom of Paris and Padua, of Monte Olivetto and Oxford flowed in the discourse that ensued; the exquisite discernment of the Galilea’s great scholar travelled to the ends of the earth when the visiting learned men departed. Naturally, some of them wished to depart with Beneditx himself. But it was the work, not the glory and influence it could bring, that Beneditx desired. The abbot of the Galilea knew very well that only the books in those famed and far-off libraries could tempt his great man to leave; in a dozen scriptoria in as many countries, monks laboured to copy for him so that Beneditx would want for nothing.
It never ceased to astonish the abbot that Beneditx was humble. Not a trace of scorn disfigured his soul for any, even the stupidest student. He would sit on the bench beside any baffled novice and sweetly and eagerly expound, explain, resolve the most elementary difficulties, his face luminous with joy at his powers of clarity, as though the dullest bovine pupil had been one of the visiting mighty scholars. When once the abbot had commented on that, Beneditx had said that reason, even at the height of its powers, was like the mounting block at the monastery gate – it served to give a leg up to faith. ‘Many a rider who struggles to mount, once in the saddle rides like the wind,’ he had said.
And now at dawn a horse was led out for Beneditx, and the cloister was packed with grieving brothers come to take leave of him. The abbot offered his own joined hands to Beneditx as a mounting block, and Beneditx got easily into the saddle and rode away.
It was late when Beneditx reached Ciudad. A cell was prepared for him near Severo’s, and the cathedral clergy ran about, bringing hot water to fill a bath for him, since he came covered with the dust of the road, finding him a clean soutane, laying a breviary open at the evening office for the day. They were in awe of him, of his fame. He chastened them by making no demands, by remembering the names of those among them whom he had once taught. He asked for Severo, and they led him to a side chapel in the cathedral, screened from the nave by a heavy decorated grille, where the sacrament was reserved. There Severo, by the flickering light of devotional lamps and stands of candles, could be seen stretched out prone, arms extended, upon the floor, keeping vigil. ‘Do not disturb him,’ said Beneditx. ‘Whatever it is will keep until morning.’