Old Habits

2 - Patience

Cockerels, thought Tam, were surely the most stupid of animals.

They were out in the yard, below his window, every day. Every morning the sun peered over the horizon, testing that the coast was clear. Every day it slowly levered itself over that ridge, and cautiously began its ascent. Every day the cockerels watched it do this. They watched it float warily through the heavens, and they watched it creep back below the verge. Every day they watched it rise again, and yet every day they were caught by surprise, and compelled to cry out in alarm.

Cock-a-doodle-doo.

Tam closed his eyes until the noise subsided, and rolled out of his bunk. Manoeuvring his blanket to ease the burn of the cold stone floor, he shuffled over to the open window and watched the birds, now coming to terms with their revelation. Tam savoured the frosted dawn breeze. His was one of the few rooms in the monastery without glassed windows, along with the rest of the outhouse, but that was his preference. The main building, with its crowds and candles and incense, had always seemed stuffy to him, and if he had hoped new leadership would change this he was mistaken.

It wasn't that the young Abbot was afraid to embrace modern technology and architecture (if anything, to Tam's mind he was rather too fond) but that he had to cater for a rather elderly assortment of monks, who were only happy to be at one with any nature that could be reached from a warm and comfortable armchair. The result had been a bizarre combination of revolution and tradition, of excitement and comfort, although both parties had certainly learnt a lot from the exchange.

Tam, for one, had never known that stained glass could be double glazed.

So he had retreated into the shell of his outhouse, and watched the damp revolution slowly come to envelop the main buildings. Nobody came here, so he had been left well alone. He liked it that way. Monks were private by nature: large periods alone in prayer forced a man to appreciate the beauty of solitude, and with only other loners for company there was little interactionto lose.

Of course, Tam knew that prolonged seclusion from the world had effects on the brain (some of the most interesting passages in The Book had the lonely life of a prophet to thank) but he saw no reason to doubt that his daily conversations with the animals could stave off this stagnation. He knew because asked them about it, and they'd agreed.

Ah, The Book. The Lydelian holy text. The monks worshipped an omnipotent deity, Gosh, and his son, The Almighty Prophet.  Technically, the rest of the ctiy worshipped them too, but the monks had worshipped them before it was cool.

Unfortunately, the followers of the Prophet had once been intensely persecuted, and so to protect their leader they had refrained from ever mentioning his name in writing. They'd done this job well. Whilst they had all been captured, tortured and crucified by the oppressors, they'd never given up their leader's name, and he'd gone on to live a long life in hiding. He eventually died, a martyr, to old age. When their combined writings had been combined to form The Book, however, a problem had emerged. Throughout their thirteen small accounts, nobody had recored the Prophet's name.

In a way, it was Tam's job to make sure this sort of thing never happened again. He was the monastery's historian. He documented new events, and faithfully copied down accounts of the past. It was an arduous job.

Tam had been told that history was written by the victors, but that seemed a pretty poor reward. The long nights scratching away by candle-light, the poor eyesight, and the back-ache: these did not seem like prizes for winners. If he ever won a war, Tam swore, he would make the losers write it all. He'd never work another day.

Of course, the saying wasn't literal. The moral was that the victorious could redefine history; but this power was nothing compared to that of future history-writers, who could redefine the victory. Just by changing a single digit, Tam could alter a long-forgotten war, and a thousand fewer soldiers would have been killed. Of course, nothing would really change: but then, what more were the lives of the dead than the memories of the living? If a tree fell down in a forest, and nobody remembered it happening, did it make a sound?