Petrus stared at the silent figure in surprise. Though the hood covered his head, he could see enough of the man’s face to judge that the stranger was only a few years older than himself.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“He sails with us tomorrow,” the mariner explained, “to Ireland. He’s going to join this fellow they call Patricius and his friends. And they’ll all be killed.”
Petrus had never heard of Patricius and asked the mariner who these people were. The man grunted impatiently. “Missionaries,” he said with scorn. “They’re going to convert the heathen Irish, who are mostly cut-throats and pirates, as anyone on this coastline can tell you.” It was true that in recent times, the raids of the Irish pirates on the west coast had been a constant source of trouble. “They’ll be butchered.” He paused before glancing at the traveller and adding: “Pity. He’s a nice young fellow.”
After the meal, the sailors gathered round the fire at one end of the room while the stranger quietly moved to the other fire where, drawing out a small roll of parchment, he began to read. Petrus sat with the sailors.
The evening passed pleasantly, with the sailors getting steadily but peaceably drunk while they chatted or sang an occasional chorus. As darkness fell, four of them retired to the sleeping quarters while two more dozed where they were by the fire. The stranger, who took no notice of them at all, was still reading quietly.
Petrus had drunk only a little and was still wide awake. Having nothing else to do, he found himself watching the stranger curiously. There was something in his manner that seemed modest, even retiring, yet self-possessed. After some time the other became aware of his gaze and turned towards him.
His face was indeed young, Petrus now saw: hardly older than himself; it was broad and square, with widely spaced brown eyes. His hands too, were large and strong. He might have been a pleasant young country farmer. The eyes flickered with amusement and then, to Petrus’s surprise, he gave him a boyish grin.
“Not asleep yet? Seems you didn’t drink enough.”
As he spoke the young man pulled back his hood and Petrus saw that the whole of the top of his head was shaved, leaving a circular fringe of hair around the edge; and although at this time monasteries were still almost unknown in Britain, Petrus was aware that this tonsure meant that his companion was a monk.
It seemed that he had finished his reading, for he motioned Petrus to join him.
“My name is Martinus,” he explained.
He had come, he said, from Gaul, to visit his family in Britain before making the voyage to Ireland. He asked Petrus about his own journey, and listened with interest as Petrus told him about his trip to Lydney and the visit he was planning to Flavia’s family the following day.
To his surprise the young monk showed no shock that he had been to the shrine of Nodens, and when he heard about Flavia he grinned and said:
“Let’s hope she’s pretty, then you can marry her with a good conscience!”
When Petrus had told his own story, he felt less embarrassment at asking Martinus about himself. Was the mariner’s report true? Was he going to Ireland to convert the heathen? Martinus nodded.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
The young man nodded again.
“Sometimes. But it soon passes. If you’re serving God, there’s nothing to be afraid of really.”
“But they may kill you.”
Martinus gave him a gentle but unaffected smile.
“Perhaps.”
Petrus was familiar with the blustering Christianity of his own father, but the young monk’s quiet confidence seemed very different.
“What made you choose to serve the Christian God?” he asked.
To him it seemed a natural question, but a look of genuine puzzlement crossed Martinus’s broad face.
“Oh, I didn’t,” he corrected. “It’s God who chooses.”
Petrus shrugged.
“Well, you want to go to Ireland anyway,” he remarked.
Now Martinus grimaced, a little ruefully.
“Actually, I don’t want to go at all.”
Petrus stared at him. Was the monk playing some kind of verbal game with him, like his old professor? He did not think so.
“You don’t
want
to go?”
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. He asked him why.
At once Martinus became serious.
“You attach too much importance to the man, too little to God,” he said. “Man is sinful and imperfect. He’s noble, if you like, only in so far as he turns his mind over to God directly. It’s not that I or Patrick,” he used the non-Roman form of the missionary’s name, “can do anything in Ireland: but God will work through us. That’s exactly Augustine’s point, he wants us to know that as a man, he was a pagan, a sinner, a fornicator. Whatever he’s done – and believe me, in Africa he’s done more than ten others could have – has only been done through God’s providence and will, not his own. His own spirit, which knew only confusion before, is now at rest in the service of God.”
As he spoke, the boyishness of his former manner had left him and Petrus suddenly felt himself to be in the company of a man who, although about the same age in years, was far ahead of him in maturity.
“And you – are you at peace?” he asked.
“Yes,” the monk answered simply. And Petrus could see that it was true.
But to Petrus the answers the missionary gave still seemed incomplete. He might be going to heathen Ireland, but what about Britannia – and what of Rome? He thought of the deserted baths at Aquae Sulis, the cities of Venta and Corinium, fortifying themselves against the Saxons, and of the villa at Sarum under threat at this very moment.
“You may be at peace,” he accused, “but our towns and villas are not. I want to restore them. I want to see Rome great again – the theatres, the temples, the baths all restored.”
Martinus smiled.
“Like the shining city on its seven hills – Rome in all its glory. Civilisation, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Martinus nodded understandingly.
“Even the great Jerome, a saintly Christian scholar, even he could not speak when he heard that Rome had fallen,” the monk agreed. “And Augustine, too – his great work of theology is not called
De Civitate Dei
– the City of God – by chance. Many Christians love Rome and all it stands for. But there is a greater city still,” he went on eagerly, “a city that no man can corrupt, no army destroy. And that is the city of the spirit – God’s citadel that shines like the eternal sun. Think, my friend,” he urged, with sudden passion, “if you are prepared to defend a city made by man, how much more you should be anxious to defend the faith, which is the city of the Creator of the heavens Himself.”
It was a fine speech, and Petrus could not help being moved by his companion’s passion. But he still shook his head doubtfully.
To his surprise, Martinus stretched out his big hand and took him gently by the arm.
“I see, my friend, that though you are a pagan you are a seeker after truth. One day you will find it when God commands you, and then you will know peace.” He gave his arm a friendly pat. “Time we slept. We both have journeys tomorrow.”
Petrus considered. Had he found peace? He thought of his parents, of the girl Sulicena, of the
taurobolium
, of the tangled events and violent urges of his young life. No, whether the missionary’s religion or his own were the true one, he had not found peace. As they rose, a thought occurred to him.
“When you first left your farm, you said, God commanded you. What command did God give you, Martinus?” he asked.
“The same that he gave to the apostle who bore your own name Petrus – Peter the rock,” the monk replied. “He said: ‘Feed my sheep’.”
Petrus nodded. He knew the text.
“God does not speak to me,” he admitted frankly.
Martinus gazed at him carefully.
“You have to listen, Petrus,” he replied. “Sometimes He speaks very quietly.”
For the rest of his life Petrus always explained that his conversion took place that night, shortly before dawn. It happened in a dream.
He was on a huge, empty downland – similar to the ridges around Sarum. “But I was not at Sarum,” he would say, “I was in some other country which I took to be Ireland.” The landscape was full of white sheep. But as he rode through them, he came upon a single lamb. “It was a lamb, yet bigger than the sheep; and it came towards me and stopped, dead in front of me, so that I couldn’t go on. Then it spoke: ‘Petrus,’ it said, ‘Feed my sheep’. Then it vanished.”
He had not known what to make of this, but soon afterwards, though the lamb had gone, he heard its voice. And again it said: ‘Feed my sheep’. And he had woken.
“Then later, that same night, I had a second dream. This time I was looking at Venta. It was definitely Venta: I saw the walls, the column to Marcus Aurelius and the gates. The sun was shining on the roofs, and it seemed to me that my old professor was still there, in the city, and that I had only just come from seeing him. As I looked back at the town, a great light from the heavens seemed to descend on the place, so that all the tops of the buildings gleamed and sparkled, as though they were made not of tiles and stone, but of silver and gold. And then I heard a voice. I could not tell where it came from, whether it came from inside my own head or from the clouds: but the voice spoke so that there could be no mistaking it, and it said: ‘My city is a heavenly city, not made of bricks, but of the spirit. And my city is eternal. Turn back from worldly cares, Petrus, and walk boldly to the city of God’. Then, for the second time I awoke. The dawn was breaking. And I knew what I must do.”