Free Flying to Nowhere: A Tale by John Fuller Page B

her nature and age, or any age she had ever been. And so she felt less and less sure of having any identity at all. Was it Gweno she had sent away, with her chaperones, to play her part in the novice’s night of examination, or had she gone herself and was Gweno left dying here? She could easily think (indeed, some days since had hoped) that she might be carried in her bed to the abbey, borne on the shoulders of the brothers in the folds of her soft cortège, to observe the dedication, the humiliation, the drenching, the sermon, the processsion with the witnesses to the chamber.
    The sermon in particular she would have dearly loved to hear, not for its theme (which by tradition concerned some aspect of the efficacy of the Saint) nor for its truth alone, but for the truth as understood by her friend the Abbot, so solemn and shy in his dealings with the world as she had lived it, but possessing a wisdom which she craved, and a nature which she half knew she loved.
    The whisperings from the dairy below, the muffled din of crockery, the slight scrape and jar of benches as the harvest girls finished their supper—these and other more distant sounds of the farm were converted in her mind to the sounds of the congregated brothers in the abbey. She imagined the Abbot ascending the pulpit, his lips slightly compressed in concentration, the beard mingled with the dark folds of his habit, his hands reaching to grip the rim of the stone pulpit, and her heart suddenly fluttered and lurched in a full knowledge of what she was leaving and what in her full life she had most lacked.
    To the dark and silent room she voiced her last words, a rebuke to the emptiness about her, a challenge to the ceremonies that at the same moment were elsewhere taking place:
    ‘We have failed to make the little bird fly!’
    Her mouth stayed open, a thread of moisture between the lips. In its absolute stillness her face seemed smaller, harder, more beautiful, like a sudden relic of itself, almost lifesize. It was as though the curtain of motion and colour had been momentarily lifted so that the reality behind it could be appraised, and the mechanism, though found to be irreversible, was a wonder for ever to the hushed audience of surrounding objects. And so the Abbot began his sermon.

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    Brothers, I show you here a mushroom by which you shall learn about flying. And in my other hand is my text from Ezekiel xiii.20: ‘Wherefore thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against your pillows! Be mindful of our brother who is brought before us in the image of the blessed Lleuddad, bearing the pains and scourging of the Lord. Hold him in your eyes and hear my words.
    The mushroom is falsely named, you will say, for in it there is not much room, but little room. Yet I say there is multum in parvo, much room in little. In the narrow beams of this soft room there is a savour; as in the leaves of this holy book there is a Saviour, whom we may also breathe in at our nostrils and make much room for in our souls. And our souls are like the mushrooms of the fields, multum in parvo, an infinity of God’s insufflation in a small rotundity of skull, where little savour is not less than all the savour there is; for the Saviour once sniffed is the true savour by which we distinguish life from the corruption about it.
    Which of us can distinguish the savour of life from the savour of corruption? Brothers, the stink of the deathbed is sweet with the memories of a life that folds its wings; the savour of the fungus survives the rot of the stump or dunghill. Wherefore we gather in the fields these buds of the earth which like miracles appear, white with folded wings. However, these wings are not folded up, but to be unfolded as we are to be unfolded. From the soil the life thrusts upwards to the heavens; the soil itself thrusts, as souls thrust. The mushroom, bred of no seed, is soil only; the soul is only soil, and man is corruptible dust, though full of seed.
    If a man is broken