Stephen Lawhead - Byzantium

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 2.3MB 1887 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

PART ONE

God be with thee on every' hill, Jesu be with thee in every pass,

Spirit be with thee on every stream, Headland, ridge, and field; Each

sea an) land, each moor and meadow Each lying down, each rising up, In

wave trough, on billow crest, Each step of the journey thou goest.

I sawByzantiumin a dream, and knew that I would die there. That vast

City seemed to me a living thing: a great golden lion, or a crested

serpent coiled upon a rock, beautiful and deadly. With trembling steps

I walked alone to embrace the beast, fear turning my bones to water. I

heard no sound save the beating of my own heart and the slow, hissing

breath of the creature. As I drew near, the half-lidded eye opened,

and the beast awoke. The fearful head rose; the mouth gaped open. A

sound like the howl of wind across a winter sky tore the heavens and

shook the earth, and a blast of foul breath struck me, withering the

very flesh.

I stumbled on, gagging, gasping, unable to resist; for I was compelled

by a force beyond my power. I watched in horror as the terrible beast

roared.

The head swung up and swiftly, swiftly down--like lightning, like the

plunge of an eagle upon its prey. I felt the dread jaws close on me as

I stood screaming.

Then I awoke; but my waking brought neither joy nor relief. For I rose

not to life; but to the terrible certainty of death. I was to die, and

the golden towers ofByzantiumwould be my tomb.

And yet, before the dream--some time before it--I had gazed upon a

very different prospect. Such rich opportunity does not come to every

man, and I considered myself blessed beyond measure by my good

fortune.

How not?

It was an honour rare to one so young, and well I knew it. Not that I

could easily forget, for I was reminded at every turn by my brother

monks, many of whom regarded me with ill-disguised envy. Of the

younger priests, I was considered the most able and learned, and

therefore most likely to attain the honour we all sought.

The dream, however, poisoned my happiness; I knew my life would end in

agony and fear. This the dream had shown me, and I was not fool enough

to doubt it. I knew--with the confidence of fire-tested

conviction--that what I dreamed would be. Sure, I am one of those

wretched souls who see the future in dreams, and my dreams are never

wrong.

Word of the bishop's plan had reached us just after the Christ Mass.

"Eleven monks will be selected," Abbot Fraoch informed us that night at

table. "Five monks from Hy, and three each fromLindisfarneand

Cenannus."

The selection, he said, must be made before Eastertide.

Then our good abbot spread his arms to include all gathered in the

refectory. "Brothers, it is God's pleasure to honour us in this way.

Above all else, let us put aside jealousy and prideful contention, and

let each one seek the Holy King's direction in the days to come."

This we did, each in his own way. In truth, I was no less ardent than

the most zealous among us. Three were to be chosen, and I wanted to be

one of them. So, through the dark months of winter, I strove to make

myself worthy before God and my brothers. First to rise and last to

sleep, I worked with unstinting diligence, giving myself to those

tasks which naturally came my way, and then going out of my way to

take on the chores of others.

IF any were in prayer, I prayed with them. IF any were at labour, I

laboured with them. Whether in the fields, or the cookhouse, the

oratory, or the scriptorium, I was there, earnest and eager, doing all

in my power to lighten others' burdens and prove myself worthy. My

zeal would not be quenched. My devotion was second to none.

When I could not think of any chore to do, I took a penance upon

myself--as severe as I could devise--to chastise myself and drive out

the demons of idleness and sloth, pride, envy, spite, and any others

that might stand in my way. With a true and contrite heart, I did

humble my willful spirit.

Then, one night'...

I stood in the swift-running stream of the Blackwater, clutching a

wooden bowl tight between shivering hands. Mist curled in slow eddies

over the surface of the river, softly spectral in the pale light of a

new moon.

When my flesh began to grow numb, I dipped the bowl into the icy water

and poured it over my shoulders and back. My inward organs shuddered

with the shock of the cold water on naked skin. It was all I could do

to keep my teeth from clashing, and my jaws ached with the effort. I

could no longer feel my legs or feet.

Ice formed in the still places among the rocks at the river's edge and

in my wet hair. My breath hung in clouds about my head. High above,

the stars shone as flame-points of silvery light, solid as the

iron-hard winter ground and silent as the night around me.

Again, and yet again, I poured the freezing water over my body,

enforcing the virtue of the penance I had chosen. "Kyrie eleison..."

I gasped.

"Lord, have mercy?

In this way, I held my vigil, and would have maintained it thus if I

had not been distracted by the appearance of two brother monks bearing

torches. I heard someone approaching and turned my stiff neck to see

them clambering down the steep riverbank, holding their torches high.

"Aidan! Aidan!" one of them called. It was Tuam, the bursar, with

young Dda, the cook's helper. The two slid to a halt on the bank and

stood for a moment, peering out over the moving water. "We have been

looking for you."

"You have found me," I replied through clenched teeth.

"You are to come out of there," Tuam said.

"When I have finished."

"Abbot has summoned everyone." The bursar stooped, picked up my cloak,

and held it out to me.

"How did you know I was here?" I asked, wading towards the bank.

"Ruadh knew," Dda answered, offering his hand to help me climb the

slippery bank. "He told us where to find you."

I held up frozen hands to them and each took one and pulled me from the

water. I reached to pick up my mantle, but my fingers were numb and

shaking so badly I could not grasp it. Tuam quickly spread my cloak

over my shoulders. "I thank you, brother," I murmured, pulling the

cloak around me.

"Can you walk?" Tuam asked.

"Where are we going?" I wondered, shivering violently.

"To the cave," Dda replied, a glint of mystery in his eye. I gathered

the rest of my clothes, clutching them to my chest, and they started

away.

I followed, but my feet were numb and my legs shook so badly that I

stumbled and fell three times before Tuam and Dda came to my aid;

supporting me between them, we made our way along the river path.

The monks of Cenannus na Rig did not always meet in the cave. Indeed,

only on the most important occasions was it so--and then rarely were we

all together. Though my companions would say nothing more, I discerned

from their secretive manner that something extraordinary was to

happen.

In this, I was not wrong.

As Tuam had said, everyone had been called and all were assembled by

the time we reached the sanctorum speluncae. We entered quickly and

took our places with the others. Still shaking, I drew on my mantle

and cloak, dressing as quickly as my fumbling hands allowed.

Observing our arrival, the abbot stepped forward and raised his hand in

blessing. "We watch, we fast, we study," Abbot Fraoch said, his voice

a rasping croak in the domed chamber of the cave. "And this night we

pray."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

PARTONE Godbewiththeeonevery'hill,Jesubewiththeeineverypass,Spiritbewiththeeoneverystream,Headland,ridge,andfield;Eachseaan)land,eachmoorandmeadowEachlyingdown,eachrisingup,Inwavetrough,onbillowcrest,Eachstepofthejourneythougoest. 1 IsawByzantiuminadream,andknewthatIwoulddiethere. ThatvastCityseemed...

展开>> 收起<<

Stephen Lawhead - Byzantium.pdf

共1887页,预览378页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Stephen Lawhead - Byzantium

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: