THE ALEXANDRIAN DEALER returns in the spring and gives her a heavy purse for the copies and translation of the work that has saved her soul and restored her vocation. He asks for more of the same, plus copies of this and that vita, but she is uninterested despite the riches offered. As her body has stopped craving meat and wine and sex, so too has her mind stopped craving the words of others. With the lack of desire comes a stillness, and within the stillness her own thoughts take deep root and grow.
She calls for novices to run to the city and buy her parchment and ink and then to take her finished texts to this or that scholar. She refuses visitors still, but welcomes written messages. She reads them—such genius, clear brilliance, wasted in this hermitage, all the gold in the empire—then scrapes the parchment clean. She writes as long as the light allows, sleeps long and dreamless through the dark.
A scroll wafting sea salt and soil comes addressed to Brother John. The seal is that of Abbot Hatto of Fulda Abbey.
My dear Brother John,
After long years of prayerful seeking we lately received word of your place among an Hellenic brotherhood. Be assured we do not write to demand restitution for your theft of church property, that property being yourself. It is true our hearts were greatly saddened by your absconding as we lay on our sick beds. Brother Randulf, on his return to us, told of his attempt to find and restore you to your rightful place. His despair at failing in his mission was grave and for some time his brothers feared for his body and soul. With God’s grace he recovered and resumed his vital work for us and was at this godly work when he was taken from this world by vile banditry. This black news reached us in near time to that of your place in Athens as a scholar and scribe of some fame, and so it is that we grieve the loss of one wandering sheep and rejoice in knowing another is alive and flourishing.
Having consulted with the obedientiaries and prayed at great length God has led us to Matthew 5:14–15, and so it is that we excuse your debt to our house and give blessing for you to follow your calling to serve God in the world. I ask that you continue to remember and pray for your forever brothers in Fulda and for the soul of our lost Brother Randulf who tried so valiantly to bring you home.
For the first time in months, she leaves the hut, walks across the valley and makes her way to the top of the mountain. The sky is perfectly blue, perfectly clear. Why should it not be? Randulf had not died this moment, or even this day. And if he had, so what? God cannot turn the world dark every time a man dies. We would never see light at all. Still. The brightness of the day seems a terrible insult. If she had God’s ear the way the men of Athens said she did, the whole of Christendom would be breathing ashes and weeping blood.
The bathhouse servants appear alarmed to see the filth-encrusted Brother John lurching towards them. One tells the other to fetch Abba and she tells them to stay where they are. The stone has rolled from the mouth of the tomb. There is a gold coin for each if she remains undisturbed. Two gold coins if they can find for her clean robes and new sandals, a knife to cut her hair.
The water is warm and fragrant, it holds her like a mother. Her bones jut the way they did when she arrived in Athens, but beneath the months of dirt her skin is soft as a newborn babe—except for her feet, which have grown their own sole leather, and her knees, which are hard as a camel’s.
Eight years she has lived without Randulf and she cannot know how much of that time he was already gone from the earth. It should not matter, then, this news. It changes nothing.
And yet. And yet.
There is no one left on this earth who knows who she once was. Who she is.
When she saw the last person who would ever call her Agnes she was twenty-five years old and now she is thirty-three. She has lived twice as long as her mother and half as long as her father. She is the age of Hild when she found God and her life truly began. The age of Christ at his death, which was also his becoming.
She is thirty-three years old and no one in this world knows her, and God, who does, has sent her a message by way of his servant in Fulda.
You are the light of the world, he has said. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it gives light unto all that are in the house.
She is alone and undivided, clean and hunger-less and strong. She is God’s brightest candle and He is calling her out of this sheltered valley so she may give light to all in His lately darkening house.