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Diarmuid knelt with the rest of the brothers, all with bowed heads and spread arms as though they shared one body. He breathed in during the call intoned by Abba at the altar, breathed out with the rest in response, the murmur of their breaths under the words like the ever-present whisper of the sea: We seek the Lord our God…
“Do you seek Him with all your heart?” Abba intoned, stern despite his ever-kind tone.
“Amen. Lord, have mercy,” Diarmuid breathed out, his words barely audible, knowing how many blows the Blessed Colmcille’s rule prescribed for laxity, distraction, and other sins of the mind whilst at prayer, knowing also how much Abba and Brother Ciarán misliked to administer such punishments. None of it helped settle Diarmuid’s mind, let the prayer carry him like a wave, as it had used to do.
Do you seek Him with all your heart? with all your soul? with all your mind? with all your strength? Do you seek HIM, seek Him, seek him? Lord, have mercy, have mercy, have mercy!
Hot tears spilled between Diarmuid’s tightly clenched eyelids as he mouthed along with the call and response, but he could not put the faith the words merited – demanded – into the breath of his lungs or the movement of his tongue. His body felt wracked by warmth, like he carried a summer’s day within him. Like the fires of hell, painted gold and vermillion in the Book of Hours he’d seen when the Bishop had visited the monastery three summers hence: Satan’s great, jagged maw gaping open to swallow the sinners falling, helpless, like the angels flung down from heaven, and the flames licking up to catch and singe them, flames as obscene as tongues, all around the Enemy’s reclining form.
The back of his neck burned hottest of all, where he imagined his friend’s eyes were trained, though he knew the Mute would do no such thing, would not be distracted from his penance. He knew without turning to check that the Mute knelt in his customary spot just inside the door, half in and half out of the church as the lowest of sinners should. The Mute’s head would be bowed in prayer, his eyes closed to the world and his lips unmoving, the better to converse with God. It was only Diarmuid’s flesh which was weak, only his soul which sought that which he knew would destroy it.
The first time had been less than a sennight before. Diarmuid still could not explain to himself why he had sought out a spot by the path through the dunes, when he could have concealed himself in the sheep byre, or one of the sheds, or even the stone cell he and the Mute shared at night. Any of the brothers might have caught him in any of those places. His friend might have caught him, but there, out in the open, by the path through the tall grass, he had been hidden from neither man nor beast, naked despite the habit he hadn’t shucked, naked in the sight of God. He’d been trembling and on the verge of madness for days, such that neither prayer nor fasting had helped, as before.
He had lifted and bunched his habit under one arm as he knelt in the sand, the dry grass under him as rough as such a sinner merited, and laid his hand on himself as every book of penance and every sermon he knew told him never to do. Oh, the relief he had discovered even as his heart had clenched at his error, his ungratefulness…
There had come the whisper of footsteps on the path.
He’d looked up, knowing who it would be even before he’d beheld the Mute looking down at him where he knelt, the wooden buckets for gathering seaweed and clams slung across his broad shoulders. Diarmuid had known he would be discovered in that place, and by whom, after for nights on end he’d barely slept between vespers and nocturns and again before matins, in terror that his sinful desire would be made manifest against his will if he slept too close to his friend and his flesh betrayed him, as it so often did in his dreams, so that he woke in a soiled loincloth which clung unpleasantly to his skin, still as fevered as before. He had stared up into that familiar face, on his knees in the sand and grass like a heathen, his black habit falling too late to conceal his cock in his hand, where it had popped into view like a clam from the wet sand. Diarmuid had laughed then, a mad sound, even as salt water slid into his mouth, his eyes leaking the sea.
And the Mute…
The Mute had put down his burden of empty buckets, and knelt before Diarmuid in the sand, and slowly lifted and folded Diarmuid’s habit out of the way before he’d laid his broad, calloused hand over Diarmuid’s clenched fist. His face open as the sky as he’d taken Diarmuid’s burden on himself. Diarmuid had spilled almost at once, trying in vain to choke back his cry of release, and had felt a tongue on his salty cheek, lips under his ear, the scratch of beard on his neck. His head had fallen back helplessly, as in a swoon, and he’d moaned in a voice he barely recognized as his own while the Mute had kissed his throat, his whole body still trembling, settling after his release, as never before.
That had been the first time. It had not been the last. This was how men tumbled into sin, into the mouth of hell burning gold and vermillion, Diarmuid knew. But he could not will himself to stop. It had not even been a sennight, yet once having cracked it open, he seemed determined to fill the black book of his sins to the last blank sheepskin page.
“Amen. Christ have mercy,” Abba chanted, and they rose as one, bowed to the altar one more time, and filed out of the church to their daily tasks.
Diarmuid no longer slunk away from where he knew he should have been, to go pretend-hide himself among the dunes. He had received half a dozen blows for that first time and taken them with neither tear nor complaint, for they had been far less than he was due. Years. Years of penance on bread and water were his just due after less than a sennight, and he defiled the holy grounds of the monastery with every step he took, every bite of bread he put in his mouth, every psalm he chanted while his heart and his mind dwelled elsewhere. He could feel Brother Ciarán watching him as they weeded, as Ciarán pointed at various herbs and Diarmuid named them and their uses, as he scraped and stretched the fresh sheep hides, and chopped wood, and carried water, and swept out the church, and fulfilled all of the day’s other tasks. He thought he could feel Ciarán’s eyes on him even when he and the Mute were alone, gone as usual to gather the sea’s bounties, to look for tern eggs, to fetch salt from the pans the brothers kept in a cove east of the monastery, and snatched the time for other things too, on the way there or back again.
Ciarán’s eyes were on him at night in the shared cell also, and Abba’s, and all the brothers’, but what of it? God was in that small, close clochán with them. The devil was there too, no doubt. They all spied Diarmuid’s nakedness, his shame, his need. Christ had spoken of sinning in one’s heart long before one sinned in the flesh. In this, Diarmuid’s flesh and his heart were one.
It was after vespers, and instead of sleeping, Diarmuid sat astride his friend like a man astride a horse, only they were face to face in the close dark, Diarmuid’s eyes accustomed to it and able to pick out the shape of a hand, the curve of muscle, the gleam of an eye or a bared tooth.
Diarmuid was as hard as he could ever remember being, ever being the not-quite sennight since his world was created anew. He sat astride the Mute’s haunches, the Mute’s thickness snug in the cleft of Diarmuid’s arse, as Diarmuid rocked himself back and forth, and back and forth like a heathen at prayer, rubbing the sensitive skin of his opening and the warm, slick skin of the Mute’s cock together. His breath entered his body in short, almost silent gasps, for he had learned to be silent in sin as in the daily round of work and prayer, after that first day in the dunes. His hands gripped the Mute’s chest tightly. The world was that curve of straining muscle under his hands, and his own arms trembling with the mounting sensation as his back arched into the movement of his hips. His unruly mind slid to Colmcille’s prayer, for were they not rutting in a clochán in a daughter-house of the saint’s great monastery in Inishkea?
May the guiding hands of God be on my shoulders,
may the presence of the Holy Spirit be on my head…
Diarmuid gripped the Mute’s chest, the muscle swelling with the man’s gusty breaths, and knew that he must have been hurting his friend. He shifted his hands to the Mute’s broad shoulders and clung to them as his hips hitched down the length of the Mute’s cock. His nipples were so tight. He did not speak, yet the Mute’s thumbs found him, rubbed those tight little nubs till they ached, till Diarmuid quivered with the need to cry out, worrying his lip between his teeth till he was certain he bled.
May the voice of the Holy Spirit be in my ears,
may the smell of the Holy Spirit be in my nose…
He could smell them both, the sweat from the day’s work, the sweat from the night’s secret exertions (God was watching, as was Satan). Sweat rolled down Diarmuid’s sides, slicked the skin of his thighs where they hitched and hitched against his friend’s body. His sweaty palms slid on the Mute’s shoulders, so Diarmuid almost fell forward. Colmcille’s rule prescribed twelve blows for any who received the sacrament with unclean hands. Diarmuid held tightly to the Mute and counted in silent fever: one, two, three, ten, twelve rolls of his body. He sucked in the breath he’d been holding while he counted as the Mute’s hands tightened on his hips and jerked him even closer to the man’s straining flesh, the Mute rising up to press against him more insistently. Colmcille wrote further that the body must be gratified with food but poorly and sparingly, greed must be avoided, and a monk must accustom himself to rising from an unfinished sleep. Yet he spoke also of the small possessions of utter need, and what could Diarmuid need more than this? Not food. Not sleep. Not even salvation.
May the sight of the company of heaven be in my eyes,
may the speech of the company of heaven be in my mouth…
Even without a hand on his cock – full and bobbing with the movement of his hips – Diarmuid’s release rushed toward him like a high tide. That first day, the Mute had grasped him around the waist as he’d trembled from head to toe in the imminence, and turned him like he weighed nothing, and held and stroked him so that he’d spilled on the sand and the dry grass – the white clinging to the dry stalks like ripe pearls – rather than his black habit, where the white writ of his faithlessness and the weakness of his vows would have been plain for all to see. And in the days since, Diarmuid had learned the feel of his friend’s tongue, his lips, the tickle of his beard, the warm tight hold of his mouth, in the dark under the roof of their cell and in the daytime when they should have been occupied solely with their work. And never was it enough.
May the work of the church of God be in my hands,
may the serving of God and my neighbor be in my feet…
The Mute’s hands, which he now knew as well as his own, held him firmly by the waist and urged him to move, back and forth on the Mute’s cock, from the wiry hairs at the root to the wet spilling steadily at the tip. There Diarmuid lingered, fighting the man’s strong grip, working his hips and sighing deeply at the sudden bigger need he discovered within himself.
May God make my heart His home…
The Mute jerked against him, almost violently, the wet tip of him pressed to Diarmuid’s opening and quivering there. Diarmuid had seen and touched his friend’s cock, thick and red under the sky in the daylight, frighteningly large and beckoning in the warm, close dark. Yet this novel sense of the Mute’s great need sparked with the one kindling within himself in a way which set him alight anew. The thought of being breached, of the Mute fully sheathed within him, rolled over him and submerged him. He half-collapsed on top of the Mute as he grabbed hold of himself when he was already spurting, moaning through his nose and biting his lip to the quick as terror twisted his insides at the thought of the sin of Sodom, but also… A longing as fierce as what he felt at prayer, imagining his earthly death and the life everlasting. Or what he had used to feel at prayer. Since that day among the dunes, his thoughts at prayer strayed in one direction only, and it was not the reward after death, the unimaginable splendor of heaven, but only this, in this cell, under the sky which covered the earth, under these hands.
And may I belong to Him completely.
Diarmuid gulped the sweet night air, salt and heather, as strong hands lifted and turned him. He flew through the air on the wings of angels or devils, the ecstasy before the sinner’s plunge into Satan’s scorching mouth, and landed on his back, on rushes warmed by the Mute’s body.
The Mute parted his legs with a rough hand and settled between them, on his knees. Diarmuid began to speak, but the Mute hoisted his lower body up, one hand cupping Diarmuid’s arse, fingers rubbing his opening, brushing his sensitive, just-emptied sack, while with his other hand the Mute grasped his full, heavy cock and set to thrusting into his fist, over Diarmuid’s supine body, the slap of his sack against the side of his hand filling the night’s stillness. His hips rode his fist almost violently, as he’d never done in front of Diarmuid before, for usually he turned away after he’d taken care of Diarmuid or hid his face in Diarmuid’s shoulder when he let the boy handle him.
Diarmuid held his breath as the Mute leaned over him and worked himself, his night-accustomed eyes on Diarmuid as heavy as the boy knew his body would have been, if only they’d… Diarmuid started to raise himself on one elbow, to reach for the Mute, not knowing his own intention, but the Mute dropped his arse on the rushes and pushed him back down, his broad hand unmovable on Diarmuid’s narrow chest, the Mute’s thumb brushing the bite of the apple of knowledge bobbing in his throat, pressing almost too hard. Diarmuid’s heart beat like a captive bird under that strong hand, and he reached up again as best he could and more bravely than he truly felt, and ran his hand over the clench of hard muscle in the Mute’s chest, the ridged scars brushing his palm.
The Mute bent closer and loosed the hot spill of his seed over Diarmuid’s straining body, grunting as harshly as when he’d moved a cart loaded with sacks of grain at Candlemas, stuck in the winter mud with two mules unable to shift it. The Mute’s head tilted back as though to avert his eyes from that which offended them, but his throat was bared to Diarmuid, so Diarmuid swept his fingers upward to caress it, from the spreading, blade-clipped wings of his friend’s chest to the full, feathery thickness of his beard, black as ravens.
The Mute looked down at him and, moving his fist more slowly now, letting Diarmuid see it and hear the slickness of his skin as he did so, aimed the last, weakening spills of his seed onto Diarmuid’s stomach, his chest, even up to the notched hollow below his throat. The moon had come out, and by its light through the clochán’s door, Diarmuid looked down at the wash of red blood under his skin, all the way down his chest, the white trail of the Mute’s body inscribed like rivers on the map of his body. His fingertips tingling from the Mute’s wiry beard, he dipped his fingers in that river and tasted something much bigger than any river. He tasted the body’s ocean. His eyes drifted shut at the taste.
The Mute let out a noise like a laugh denied, lifted his hand from Diarmuid’s chest – the boy’s lungs expanded in desperate need for a full breath – and laid his whole body, as heavy as it looked, over Diarmuid’s, cradling him between strong limbs and holding him close, pinned. The Mute’s mouth sought out the skin under Diarmuid’s ear, which he had first tasted among the dunes, traveled the length of his throat, opened at last on his collarbone. The brush of teeth, then drool slipping down the long, thin bone. Diarmuid gasped, as in a prolongation of his ecstasy, though he lay wrung out under the weight.
“Were you in need of it?” Diarmuid blurted out. “Like I was? So much?”
No answer came, of course. None save the repeated motion of the lips tracing his collarbone, the tongue on the fluttering bird of the pulse in his throat, the squeeze of the hands along his sides. Diarmuid threaded his fingers through the Mute’s shaggy hair, held the Mute’s head in the crook of his throat, gripped his back – the muscle moving with deep breaths, the scarred skin sweat-slick – as though he could control the Mute’s body when Diarmuid couldn’t even control his own. Diarmuid’s hand lingered on the cross inked into his friend’s skin, the symbol of suffering and the promise of redemption, marked into the body of a man who had labored over Diarmuid’s supine body with fierce need yet refrained from taking that which Diarmuid still quaked to consider giving.
Soon they would be summoned to nocturns – midnight, when God made the world – and then it would be domnach, Dominicus, the Lord’s day. Brother Ciarán had told Diarmuid he would expect his confession after matins and before Mass, his eyes holding Diarmuid pinned. Lying was inconceivable, yet truth-telling would cost Diarmuid something he knew he could not do without, not now that he had begun to know it. Thus did Man fall, with the bite of knowledge stuck in his throat. Thus did the devil’s maw gape open to swallow him whole.
Diarmuid held the Mute in his arms and breathed deeply under his friend’s weight, unmoored from every certainty except that this knowledge, once gained, could never be lost to him, for good or ill.