Between the Monk and the Dragon
A Parable
Jerry Camery-Hoggatt
Between the Monk and the Dragon
A Parable
Copyright © 2012 Jerry Camery-Hoggatt. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-410-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-63087-382-0
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.
For Kelly
and for Josephine
Sometimes one wonders
whether the dragons of primeval ages
really are extinct.
—Sigmund Freud
It does not do to leave a live dragon
out of your calculations,
if you live near him.
—JRR Tolkien
The Medieval Horarium
6:00—Vigils First communical prayer
6:35—Lauds Morning prayer
9:00—Terce Midmorning prayer
12:00—Sext Midday prayer
3:00—None Mid-afternoon prayer
6:00—Vespers Evening prayer
8:00—Compline Night prayer
The seven daily prayers are called the divine offices.
The regular meeting of the members of a monastery is called Chapter.
The Benedictine Grand Silence is observed between Compline and Vigils.
Caput Primum
Book One
I
Fletcher dug the wolf pup out of the burrow, withdrew his hunting knife from its sheath, and then paused, aware of the pup’s tiny head and its soft fur against the rough calluses of his palms and fingers. He thought for a moment of his own child, equally as helpless, but his own child had taken his wife from him, and this pup had done nothing except to be born. He braced himself to do what his sense of duty told him had to be done, then took the pup’s head firmly in one hand and slit its throat in a single firm stroke.
It was something he had done many times with larger animals, but this was somehow different. The knife entered the throat too easily. Fletcher felt something horrifying within himself, felt the gorge rise within his throat, had all he could do to keep his stomach down. A wave of anger surged over him. He dropped the knife, and grasping the pup’s head in his right hand and the body in his left, he wrenched its neck like a chicken. There was blood on his tunic, blood on his hands. Fletcher counted six or seven droplets of blood in the air, and beyond them a spattering of others too tiny to add to the count. A strange silence fell over the glen like snow falling on the marshes. He saw his own hands, covered now with blood, he saw the carcass of the mother wolf tied to the rump of his saddle, he saw the arrow, his arrow, that had killed her, he saw Alysse, her hair shimmering in the morning breeze, her smile an eternal beacon that called to him from somewhere deep in his dreams or maybe from the other side, he saw her dressed as the Virgin Mary, with lighted candles flickering at her feet, he saw her giving birth and then dying, her last breath the sigh of life fading from her body, he saw the girl an infant covered in mucus mixed with the blood of the wolf pup, he saw the girl older, maybe ten, poring over a book by the light of a candle in a corner of the hut, he saw the candles of the church where Alysse’s body lay waiting a funeral and a simple Christian burial within the monastery walls.
❧
Just the day prior, Fletcher had tracked the pup’s mother deep into the king’s forest, where he had caught sight of it silhouetted against the grey English sky, sniffing the wind as though it somehow sensed that there was danger nearby. It was odd for a wolf to do that. Usually wolves kept a low profile, preferring to blend into the grasses and heather of the forest. Fletcher had stopped his horse and dismounted a hundred paces off, down-wind.
It was unusual that there should be a hunter in an English forest on the day before the Feast of the Annunciation in this year of the Lord 1253, and it was unusual that in this forest the hunter should be a commoner, but John the Fletcher had been sent on precisely this errand by the sheriff of Warwickshire, within whose jurisdiction the forest lay. The wolf had been wreaking havoc on farms in nearly a ten mile radius. There was concern for the farm fowl but even greater concern for the smaller children, and the farmers had appealed to the sheriff and then beyond the sheriff, but it was only after Prior Robert, titular head of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad, had added the voice of Christendom to the voices of reason and pleading that the sheriff had obtained rights of warren to engage in the hunt. His reluctance had been understandable—the shire bordered royal lands, the forest in which the wolf had found refuge was the king’s own demesne, and it was forbidden to hunt there except at the king’s pleasure. The sheriff had been granted the warren only on the condition that he send his own sergeant, and that any other found hunting there should be brought bound to the stockade and made an example.
“And keep an eye out for hunters in the forest, John,” the sheriff had grunted, reinforcing this secondary responsibility. “Somebody’s poaching the king’s game. The forester says there’s a hunter’s bivouac in that mound near the north fork of the river.”
Fletcher had acknowledged this instruction with a grunt of his own. Poaching in the king’s demesne was serious business. A nobleman or knight caught hunting without permission might be released with a heavy fine or the loss of his title or liberty, but a peasant or villein—who had neither gold nor freedom to lose—might rightly and justly expect punishment by maiming, the lopping of a hand or the blinding of an eye.
The wolf had raised its head for a better sense of the breeze, but in doing so had exposed its position.
Without taking his eye off his quarry, Fletcher withdrew his bow and an arrow from the quiver he wore diagonally across his back. Had it not been
