Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [190]
Martinus shook his head.
“No, to tell you the truth, if I followed my own will, I’d stay on my family’s farm. It’s only two days’ ride north of here you know. But God gave me a commandment and I joined a monastery, and now God’s will is that I go to Ireland, so . . .” He made a gentle, self-deprecating movement with his big hands; and then, seeing that Petrus still looked surprised, he asked: “Do you know the story of Patricius, the man I’m going to join?”
Petrus did not, and so Martinus explained.
Patricius, or Patrick, was only a few years older, he told Petrus. His family were like the Porteus family – modest landowners of the decurion class, whose estate was in the west of Britannia. When Patricius was sixteen, Irish pirates had raided the coast where he lived; they had caught him and carried him across the western sea to Ireland, where he had been sold as a slave.
“He was used as a shepherd,” Martinus said. “Cut off from everyone he loved. But he never lost his faith in God.”
“Were his family Christian?” Petrus asked.
To his surprise, Martinus chuckled.
“Both his father and grandfather took Christian orders, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was to escape taxes – don’t you think?”
For under the late empire it had been possible for decurions to obtain exemption from the financial burdens of holding local offices by taking priestly orders, and many local landowners had entered the priesthood for this reason. Petrus smiled: his companion’s frankness was engaging.
But the story of Patricius’s religious calling was another matter, and Martinus told him the story of how he used to go alone into the woods every day to pray; and how one day, after six years, he had a vision which told him where he would find a ship, several days’ journey away and in a strange port he did not know, and how he found the ship which then took him home to his family.
“But that was only the start of his real life,” Martinus explained. “From then on, you see, he knew that he had been chosen by God. He left his family home, went to study in Gaul, and became a monk. And then he had another vision which told him that the heathen Irish who had made him a slave should be converted to Christianity. At first the Church authorities said he couldn’t go – even that he was unworthy,” here Martinus’s face puckered into momentary anger and disgust. “But he persisted and now he has been sent there. I’m going to join him tomorrow.”
This was a new, and altogether more daring version of Christianity than Petrus had encountered before. He questioned Martinus further, and the monk told him about the vigorous monasteries of Italy and Gaul, of their great men like Martin of Tours, Germanus of Auxerre and the monk Ninian who recently founded the first monastery in the land of the wild Picts in the north of the island. He told Petrus about their bravery, the sanctity of their lives, the hair shirts and other discomforts they willingly endured to mortify the flesh. “These are true servants of God,” he said. “In Ireland we shall continue their work.”
Since Petrus was still curious, he gave him some account of the Church’s thinkers, men like Augustine, the present Bishop of Hippo in Northern Africa. “He used to be a pagan you know, just like you,” Martinus said. “He’s a great scholar, and before he converted, he taught rhetoric at the finest pagan schools of Italy. It was his confessions about his early life that I was reading this evening. I copied them out when I was in the monastery in Gaul.”
“Another saintly life I suppose?” Petrus asked.
Martinus roared with laughter.
“He is now. But as a young man – you should read his Confessions. He seems to have done nothing but fornicate, according to his account!” He grinned again. “Actually, I think Augustine boasts about it a bit.” He paused, then added conspiratorially: “Even after his conversion, they say he kept his concubine for years.”
Petrus was puzzled. It was obvious that Martinus was ready to lay down his life for a religion whose great men, saintly though they might be, didn’t seem to him like heroes.