Free The Pop’s Rhinoceros by Lawrance Norflok

events relentless, and though after a few more pages the chronicle simply stopped in midsentence Jörg knew that its story continued, sunk invisibly within the parchment, the chest whence it came, the stones of the cell that surrounded him, and the fabric of the monastery that had soaked up their efforts as the parchment had the ink until they were only gray-robed ciphers, illegible in the church’s mere continuance. Its collapse had saved them.
    Jörg reached across the Abbot to his desk and quickly cut a quill. The Abbot had not touched his accounts since the night of their catastrophe. Jörg moistened the ink-cake with his spittle, scraped the quill in the well, and scrawled quickly,
When their church collapsed, the monks of Usedom were sent by their Prior to mingle with the people of the island. Much bafflement awaited them. …
And there the ink ran out, so he stopped. He had not come here to write his own
Gesta Monachorum Use-domi
. His thoughts swept wider than Usedom, further and higher. Father Jörg reached within the chest for the books that had lain undisturbed beneath the chronicle since the days of the very first Abbot. The library they were to have founded had never been built. One after another he lifted them out, wiped the mold from their covers, and placed them carefully on the floor. The Abbot ignored him as he staggered under the weight, never turned as the door swung shut, only watched the sea where black waves and white moonrays seemed to play together, waiting for daylight to blend them to gray.
    In the weeks that followed, the brothers were to find their island excursions inexplicably curtailed. Ulrich Meister’s pigs had been fattened on acorns, and Brother Walter had hoped to help with the slaughter. Brüggeman had told Brother Florian of wild greengage trees somewhere on the far side of the island, ideal for grafting, but the far side of the island was hours away and by order of Father Jörg every monk was to return to the monastery by midday. Brother Gundolf had taken up fishing, and Brother Volker was breeding bees with Stenschke. Brother Heinz-Joachim was charting the ponds of the island, Brother Joachim-Heinz the woods. All these activities would now have to wait. Brother Georg felt the lack of his circuitous morning walk around the peat-bog to Haase’s manse, while Brothers Wilf, Wolf, and Wulf came to miss their tricornered chin-wagswith Riesenkampf’s wife. Already, from within their hesitant footsteps and bewildered trampings new measures had emerged. Brother Bernd worried over Riesenkampf’s ox rather than the crumbling casements of the dorter. The cycles of service and labor had expanded to encompass the island and its denizens, and now their ambit was narrowing, drawing them back, returning them to their church. The brothers found themselves surprised at their own disappointment, resentful once more of their Prior, who spent his days closeted in his cell and his nights the same. Brother HansJürgen brought him his meals and was told to leave them at the door. Mucky yellow light seeped out as he burned tallow candles until dawn; alone in there, unguessable, under siege from their unframed questions.
    He read, breathing in damp and the chalky smell of mold as he slid his nails under the pages and bent his head to the fading script. The candles’ thin convections sent the musty years spiraling about his cell. He coughed, scratched, rubbed his eyes, reached the end of one book, and picked up the next. The days began to lengthen, and outside, on Usedom, the harvest began.
    Tar barrels burned for Saint John on the mainland, sending up thick black smoke columns in a lazy slant, high into the dispersing air. The islanders cut their corn with long-handled scythes, their women gathering and sheaving behind them. Old gods marched ahead of the harvesters, Roggenmühme scaring the children, who ran shouting into the cool of the beech woods. They picked berries and stripped bark from the oaks for