Free Raptor by Gary Jennings

were segregated any sinners under sentence of penance.
    Not until everyone else was in place did Dom Clement enter, wearing over his brown burlap robe the pure-white, priestly linen stola. The congregation saluted him with the “Alleluia!” He returned the salute by chanting the “Holy, holy, holy,” and the people—signing the cross on their foreheads—responded with the “Kyrie eleison.” Then Dom Clement took his place behind the ambo, laid his Bible on its top and announced that his Prophetica lection that Sunday would be the Eighty-third Psalm—“O God, who shall be like to you?”—the psalm that inveighs against the wicked Edomites, Ammonites and Amalekites.
    He read it loudly and slowly, in the Old Language, but not from the Bible. He read it from a parchment scroll that had been written out in the Gothic script, and written large, so that the scroll was considerable in length. Also, it had been illuminated by our scriptorium limners with pictures illustrating various things mentioned in the lection. Those pictures were set upside down in the text. That was done so that, as Dom Clement read, and let the free end of the scroll unroll down the front of the ambo, the pictures were right side up in the view of the congregation. Almost all of the local people except the penitents came close to the ambo—politely taking turns, not crowding—to examine the illustrations. Since no peasant owned a Bible, or could read one, and since many of them were too ox-witted even to comprehend a priest’s reading of it aloud, those pictures enabled the peasants to get at least a dim idea of what was being told to them. When Dom Clement had finished reading the psalm, and then began to preach his homily on it, I was more surprised than impressed by his solemnly telling us:
    “The tribal name of the Edomites comes from the Latin word ‘edere,’ ‘to devour,’ hence we perceive that they were guilty of the sin of gluttony. The name of the Ammonites comes from the pagan ram-demon Jupiter Ammon, hence they were a tribe of idolaters. The name of the Amalekites comes from the Latin word ‘amare,’ ‘to love passionately,’ hence they were guilty of the sin of lust…”
    After the homily, Dom Clement prayed, still in the Old Language, for the Holy Catholic Church, for our Bishop Patiens, for our Burgund Kingdom’s two co-ruling brothers, for their queens and their families, for the commonfolk of the kingdom, for the harvest here in the Balsan Hrinkhen, for widows, orphans, captives and penitents everywhere. He concluded in Latin: “Exaudi nos, Deus, in omni oratione atque deprecatione nostra…”
    The congregation responded, “Domine exaudi et miserere,” then went silent, while the monks acting as exorcist clerks herded all the sin-stained penitents out of the room and the doorkeeper clerks barred the portals against them. Next there came the Procession of the Oblation. The monks acting as deacon and acolytes brought into the chapel the three bronze vessels—each covered with a fine white veil of the cobweb cloth called goose-summer—the chalice of the wine-and-water; the paten bearing the Fraction, those being bits of the Host arranged on the tray in the shape of a human body; and the tower-shaped pyx in which was reserved the rest of the consecrated bread.
    After the Eucharistic Prayer, the body-shaped Fraction was dismembered and the fragments distributed to Dom Clement, his assistant celebrants, the other monks, myself and any properly baptized guests that the monastery may have been entertaining that Sunday. Then Dom Clement did the Commixtio, dipping his bit of bread into the chalice, and pronounced the Benediction. The rest of the Host, from the pyx, was distributed to the congregation, each man receiving it in a bare hand, each woman in a hand covered with the dominical linen cloth she had brought with her. As each communicant swallowed the Host and was given a sip from the chalice, the others of the