The Shattered Lamp

There are strange things happening at St. Cuthbert’s, in these last days before the trumpet of Judgment sounds, when the dead outnumber the living. Brother Lucca displays brown feathers laid against his bare back — his strong young body is unfamiliar in its nudity, freckled and proud with muscle. There’s not a trace on him of how the long winter has wasted every one of them, or a sign of sickness, only the aberration of his wings.

In the nave of the monastery at Vézelay there is a carved stone capital depicting the boy Ganymede carried off by Jove’s eagle — the child squalling in fear and his father tearing his cheeks, baying dogs and the Evil One grinning with pride as the bird’s beak gouged naked flesh. The image is a warning against lechery between monks and novices, and he remembers it now, the sight of those powerful wings — but Lucca is not a boy any longer but a perspicacious young man, one who perhaps sees more than he ought to see.

“I’ve come to bring you good news.”

“What is this?” Matteo on his knees, praying for deliverance, for death.

“A miracle.”

Wicked, wicked, wicked — something strange and unholy now passes among them, more seductive than an adulterous woman and more pernicious than plague. Something that shatters the minds of the wise and turns men into beasts, the very thing Matteo has dreaded and never named, and now it is Lucca in all his innocence who has happened upon it unprotected. There are certain texts that should not be read without an experienced teacher to explicate them, to unravel the holy meaning beneath the pagan surface or to banish any possibility of covert lust. For all Matteo’s restraint, his friend has found this wicked truth regardless.

“There are no miracles in these days,” Matteo says. He does not hope for marvelous things, now that the plague has come; the men with whom he once labored and prayed are broken mockeries of their former selves, though whether they are deranged by the horror of their bleak tasks or the fear for their own corruptible bodies is beyond his knowledge.

The younger monk had pressed him for what he knew, once, and now he knows too much — his eyes are brilliant with a kind of holy fervor, and his shivering feathers are lustrous.

“Our Lady has come, and she is so beautiful — come and see her.” A rosary swings from his naked hand, but the familiar cross with which it terminates has been torn loose, leaving only a tassel of broken thread, in scarlet. He wraps his beads around Matteo’s hand, and they burn.

Lucca continues, loud enough to be heard from the farthest corners of the chapel, loud and certain as the officiant of a Mass. “She told me things that you would not, Our Blessed Lady of the Morning Star. The other Lady.”

“You have to pray, pray that this affliction leaves you.” Matteo grabs at his hands, and the horror grips him that Lucca’s skin is blazing hot — or perhaps his own body has gone terribly cold. “May the Lord have mercy on us.”

How long, Lord? wilt thou be angry for ever? shall thy jealousy burn like fire? The people have clamored after the idols of meat and bread and fleshly satisfaction, and the plague has come to scourge and scatter them. The Lord’s anger is clear, but His mercy has ceased to be. There is a woman in the cloister, a woman and a great beauty, a woman of whom Matteo has good cause to be terrified. No one is left unblemished in time of plague. No body is unmarred. No face is beautiful. Something is wrong.

“Pray to her,” Brother Lucca says, and kisses him.

His long strong body bears Matteo down against the stones, toppling him from his knees.How many times he’s longed to kiss those lips in the spirit of pure and Christian friendship, and yet he has turned away — this is Lucca, his Lucca, but an evil will now animates the both of them and the proper distance between their bodies means nothing now, with Matteo hitching up his robes to free himself or else enthrall himself further.

Beneath the eyes of St. Cuthbert they are sinning. The Ganymede of Rovato is half-eagle and half-youth, raking him with his fingernails and gripping him by the hair to keep him from breaking their clinch. There is pain, of course, but here beneath the shadow of the cross it seems a fitting penance for their sin. Brother Lucca’s golden complexion shows up all the ruddy color of his desire: the blushing skin of his back where Matteo’s wondering hands fumble for understanding, the blush of unshed tears burning in his cheeks, the flush of arousal creeping down his naked breast like an invitation to Matteo’s sinful eyes.

He makes love to him frantically, bending him down to take him from behind like a boy but with those powerful wings spread wide — they quiver with strange urgency and the feathers slip like silk beneath his fingers, borders of embroidered silk beside the coarse brown cloth of his clerical frock. He presses a kiss between Lucca’s sharply thrusting shoulder blades and it elicits a cry that is almost a sob…

When Brother Matteo wakes in his bed, his lust has degraded him; he lies sticky and breathless in the cold, with the one threadbare blanket kicked to the floor. His body still aches with the blameful remnants of pleasure, but the empty cell reassures him that none of this has come to pass, that these horrors of the flesh are only hellish visions and not realities. No doubt Brother Lucca is locked safely in his own cell, barred from him by stone walls and the decency of Benedict’s Rule. Thus Matteo can catch his breath, and let his shuddering limbs go still. Only a dream.

But his right hand still clutches a broken string of beads.