Old Habits

6 - Community

Night fell on the monastery, with the rest of the city presumably joining in.

Tam’s sleep was broken by the sound of the newly Brother Ger being called to prayer. Given budget cuts, this consisted of somebody leaning out of a window and shouting;

“Hey, new guy! It’s time for your prayer!”

To accommodate its new guests, the monastery’s daily rhythm had needed change. Alongside the nocturnal interruptions, Brother Ger’s religion required strict fasting, which for some reason was limited to the hours after sundown. Tam enjoyed a midnight snack as much as anyone, but he still felt that only not eating at night was somehow cheating. 

He’d read that the Aldenian religion also required its adherents to never get wet, or be exposed to bright lights. However, as is the case with many old religious laws, nobody observed those rules nowadays.

On the surface, Kaida seemed an easier guest. She made no special demands, other than that she be treated exactly like any other monk. Her difficulty, though, came from elsewhere. She complained about everything.

From the early starts to the cold floors, she made it clear that the monastery did not please her; and yet she refused to be listened to. If the Abbott made an exception for her, he would be called a patronising misogynist. Sister Kaida moaned incessently that the physical chores were too hard for her, but the monk who offered reprive would be stereotyping all women as too weak for ‘man’s work’, and forced to beg forgiveness. Kaida’s complaints had become background music to monastic life.

Mind you, there was a lot of it going around. With Brother Hisaab cutting traditional practices right left and center, even on the reasonable grounds that they had no practical purpose whatsoever, almost every monk found time to complain. With all this hostility towards the accountant, they almost forgot to be annoyed about Kaida and Ger, though old-schoolers like Berith still made time.

Tam found he was spending more and more time alone with his books, or with the animals. In many ways, they were much more civilised company. When it came to managing them, he certainly had a much easier job than the Abbot did. It was a big responsibility, in a way, but one which he enjoyed. To other monks, the livestock were an occasional source of food. To Tam, they were pleasant company.

Not many people knew it, but pigs were highly intelligent creatures, with strong individual personalities. The Aldenians refused to eat pork. This made Tam sympathetic towards the ethical side of their religion, until he learnt that they replaced it with dog meat.

The latter point had led to a lot of mockery and, on the behalf of Brother Berith, outrage. 

“How can they bring themselves to eat such intelligent, loyal creatures? It’s barbaric!” he would splutter. Brother Ger had never defended himself, beyond carefully watching his tormentors in an unsettling way, but the pigs showed Berith’s point to be nonsense. Lydelians didn’t spare dogs for their brains. They were spared because they were cute and furry, or vicious and useful; not because of any ethical claim to rights.

Aldenians were no better. They spared pigs because they were unclean, not because they were intelligent (although Tam had noticed a correlation between the two, in the case of religious elders). One party argued that dogs were clean household pets, and so shouldn’t be eaten, whilst the other allowed them for precisely that reason. As the Aldenian holy book said: “If you wouldn’t let something in your house, why would you put it in your mouth?”

People were so complicated. The pigs had personalities, but at least they didn’t argue metaphysics with each other. They knew better than that.

Another reason Tam enjoyed four-legged company was that he’d never really fitted in with his two legged peers. In a way, he had four legs himself; disabled from birth, he had always walked with the use of sticks. Perhaps that was why his parents had left him at the monastery.

It couldn’t be a fun place for anyone to grow up. The orphanage was barely distinguishable from the rest of the monastery; cold rooms, and colder people. For an orphan, it was horrible. The orphans were raised knowing they had nothing beyond these walls. Nobody loved them on this Earth, and so it was easy for many to have faith in the next. Being disabled, Tam found it slightly harder to be so trusting. If there was somebody up there looking out for him, surely they would give him a leg up in life, or at least his own legs to stand on.

It made him question his own identity, too. Tam had no idea where he had come from, who he was, or why he was here. He had been given his first name by the monks, and two middle names, but no surname. He had no way of tracing his ancestry, or his origins. In some cultures, your father’s name was a large part of who you were. He would only have been able to introduce himself weakly; “I am Tam, son of either Arathorn or Pontiron, we’re not sure” or call himself “Tam JacksonorJohnsonorDavidson”. Without parents, without ancestors, who was he? What was he?

He was a monk. That’s all they’d taught him, and that’s all they’d thought he needed to know. The monastery had a virtual monopoly on adoption in the city, whilst adoption by same-sex couples was strictly forbidden. Tam didn’t care what The Book said. Two dads were better than none.

At the start of his education, he’d protested this sort of inequality. Perhaps this was instinctive behaviour for Lydelian infants, but the monastery had soon stamped it out of him. Now he didn’t question a thing. He was teased for being quiet, but that was better than the alternative. Ridicule is bearable. Intense rage, burning with righteous zeal, is not.

The pigs, though, didn’t judge him for what he said, or didn’t; who he was, or wasn’t; how he walked, or didn’t. They minded their own business, and he minded his. He minded them, of course, as his job demanded, but he did so in a non-invasive way. He respected them.

That was probably why he alone noticed, when woken up that night, that one of them was missing.