The Oblate's Confession by William Peak Page B

life—the hermit held me. One moment I was standing there, alone and afraid, and the next I was against him, the smell of wood-smoke and old man in my nostrils, scratchy wool against the skin of my face. I was so shocked I stopped crying instantly. I looked up. The hermit looked down at me, smiled at me from out of his beard. Beneath my chin, his stomach rumbled.
    Afterwards—after he had patted me and given me some tea and assured me a hundred times that all was forgiven, forgotten, not to be worried about—the hermit asked me, gently, why I had burned him. “Were you angry with me?” he asked, and he looked at me as if it really mattered, as if he were really concerned he might have offended me. He was always like that. The man’s capacity for prayer was equalled only by his capacity for charity. It shamed a person. At the very moment when you most deserved rebuke, the hermit assaulted you with love. Later, when I was older, this could make me angry, but on this first occasion it merely made me shy. I equivocated, not mentioning Waldhere at all but repeating how sorry I was and explaining I hadn’t meant to harm him, that I had honestly believed he wouldn’t feel anything, that, somehow, when he prayed, he would be impervious to pain. Of course the hermit had laughed at this, but that didn’t surprise me. Whatever the secrets of his prayer, I couldn’t expect him to share them with an oblate.
    After that, as I remember it, I sat and sipped my tea, the enormity of what I had done—and what the hermit had done in response—silencing me entirely. Father busied himself about the camp, selecting the tabula he wanted taken back down the mountain, packing my scrip. When he was finished, he suggested a walk. He said he had something he wanted to show me.
    Oddly enough I can still remember that walk. Of course I know now we didn’t go far, couldn’t have, yet I remember certain aspects of that journey as you might those of a longer trip, a pilgrimage that, for whatever reason, impresses itself upon you—the white bloom of the fog, the sense of a morning cast adrift, time unimportant, forgotten, trees looming suddenly into view, monstrous boulders, everything silent, mysterious, the world afloat; and then the unexpected halt, Father grinning as if he’d found something wonderful, asking if I knew where I was.
    I shook my head. “We left the trail back there, didn’t we? By the stream?”
    “Yes, very good.” Father frowned, thought about it. “Now the fog’s breaking up, you should be able to see it even better on our way back. But what do you see up there?”
    I had already been looking up the path but could make no sense of what I saw, dark trees before a lowering sky. Had we come upon a meadow?
    The hermit nodded. “You go ahead, but be careful. It’s Dacca’s crag.”
    Dacca’s crag! I could see....
    “You can see Redestone from out there.”
    Thankfully something stopped me. Maybe the hermit yelled, maybe a peripheral awareness of the height intruded upon my
    mind, maybe God took my hand, but something, something firm and not to be denied, reached out at the last moment and stopped me before I could run out onto the rock. I clung to a tree at its edge and waited for the hermit to catch up, afraid to move, afraid even to look down.
    “It is quite safe.”
    “Sir?”
    “The crag. You can walk on it.”
    “Oh. Well. I don’t know.”
    “Don’t you want to see Redestone?”
    With one arm wrapped securely around the tree, I glanced once more at the rock, its rounded surface stretching out before me like the back of a great fish. Above and beyond the crag, clouds raced from right to left so that, in turn, the crag itself seemed to be moving ever so slightly from left to right.
    “I don’t think so. It’s nice though.”
    The hermit smiled. “Really Winwæd, it’s quite safe.”
    I didn’t want to look at the clouds again, so I looked down at
    my feet.
    “I’ll be right here in case anything