In the year 1008 as reckoned in Rome on the Julian Calendar, Brother Cyryl Procopius was given a writ of Accession to take over the Parish of St. Adelbert in the Polish town of Virlun at the edge of the God-forsaken Wood of Mldawa. It was well known that the world ended at the Bug river, and that the Woods of Mldawa were the beginning of the Great Wilderness that surrounded the realm of Blessed Christendom, a place where Satan and his minions held sway out of the reach of God and his all his angels; that no saint's eye saw what happened on the far shore of the Bug where Virlun stood, and the people who lived there were little better than beasts, living as they did surrounded by the powers of darkness, and that they all of them lived and died in peril of losing their immortal souls.
The other monks in the seminary in Warsaw agreed that Cyryl must have done something very bad to have been given this Accession, and most thought it was from asking too many questions of the learned brothers who taught them. Questions weren't the way to come into a knowledge of God's grace and here was proof. What you got for asking questions was an Accession to a town under the protection of the powerful but barely civilized Baron of Swodzj near Satan's forest where there were creatures who shat fire and pissed lightning and who had pricks for heads and cunts for mouths—cunts with great, sharp teeth in them.
But Brother Cyryl took his order and his allotment of wine of communion wafers and rode from Warsawa to Lvov to Brest, and from Brest he got a ride on a grain barge that was going upriver to Tzyrniecki and at Tzyrniecki he was met by Ojcunie Wojcik with a cast in his eye and Borslaw Holowycz who was missing his front teeth. Both rode asses and Borslaw's idiot cousin Niedan was there with boils on his neck, and he led a broken down and dusty mare from the Baron of Swodjz's stable for Cyryl to ride, and in this way they proceeded to Virlun, avoiding the rapids that made the Bug unnavigable this far upstream while skirting the edge of the dark and forlorn Mldawa forest with its wild animals, its devils, and its demons. It was autumn and in the drizzle and mist the forest looked dark and forbidding yet still seemed to beckon like a woman lying indolently in the warmth of a deep and soft featherbed in a dream in which you were afraid to pull back the comforter because you knew the dream was nightmare, and there was no telling what you would reveal when you pulled back the the blanket, a pile of worms or a putrid corpse.
They entered the village through a side path that took them past a stream running through a little vale filled with ferns and then past the church the original priest Father Jerek had built with his own hands and the help of the villagers, finished thirteen years ago and empty these last seven, already given over to the elements. Cyryl had expected to find it abandoned but was surprised to see that part of it had been razed, a portion of the roof removed and some of the stone blocks from the north end of the transept scattered in the tall weeds.
He got down off his horse and bent over to inspect one of the blocks. It was a sizeable piece of stone and could not have been easy to move. Someone was either very strong or very dedicated to the church's destruction. Ojcunie and Borslaw just sat and watched him as he stood for a while beneath the dripping trees and stared at the stone with the autumn grasses still growing so lushly around it. It must have been there for some time, for green moss had a purchase on one side and made it soft and feminine when he ran his fingers over it so it was like touching a woman's body. The thought shocked him and he quickly took his hand back. He had joined the priesthood largely to put all that behind him. He'd intended to purify himself.
He left the horse to graze and he walked through the quiet weeds and leaned in through the hole that had been made in the transept of the church. The two men watched him suspiciously while Niedan swung a stick at flowers. Rain and wind had entered the church but the sacred aura was still unaffected; Brother Cyryl could feel it. He looked inside at the sturdy walls and the smooth, flagstone floor, the confessional, the sacristy, the altar, the baptismal font, all untouched these many years. The stained glass windows had miraculously survived intact. Brother Jerek had been a stubborn man, a builder, and hadn't been shy about using the limestone quarries that gave the town of Virlun its reason for being, or about using the villagers who owed fealty to the Baron of Swodzj. Nor had he been shy about petitioning the Baron for money and men, which is how he'd obtained the stained glass windows and brass candlesticks and the bell in the belfry, all of which had been shipped upriver and overland from Brest years ago.
Attached to the church was a fine stone house for his rectory with a kitchen with its own well and fireplaces with chimneys and four glass windows that swiveled cunningly on rods to admit fresh air, luxuries not even the Baron could boast of, and when Cyryl saw these he was deeply embarrassed by the wealth he was forced to live with.
He was shown the village and introduced to the few nervous villagers that could be found, and when he saw the hovels they lived in, huts of wattle and daub with fences of crooked sticks and floors of packed earth, he felt even more ashamed at the richness Brother Jerek had left for him. He noticed witch-signs and marks of the old gods all over the village and the people seemed frightened and resentful. There were idol-posts and offering trees tied with ribbons and streamers, no doubt for the goat god Borewit and the dark god of the forest Berstuk, and these commanded the choice spots in the peoples' yards and the village squares, an offense to God and his martyred saints.
He was given a housekeeper, an old widow with no teeth named Toja, and Niedan as a helper, and he promised the villagers he'd say a mass the very next day, but when he returned to the church that night to clean up and get it ready, he was saddened and aggrieved. The church seemed huge and oppressive, almost as big as a cathedral, much too big for this village and this spot at the very edge of the world where there was so little God. He and Toja and Niedan set about with twig brooms and shovels cleaning out the altar, sweeping out the leaves and weeds and reconsecrating the church, but in his heart, he was troubled.
All night long he heard devils and leszys upon his roof loosening slate tiles and pitching them down into the grass, and there was even the sound of huge wings going by his glass windows. Father Cyryl knew he was a sinner and that he could not rely on God's aid and so he hardly slept at all. In the morning, only eight people out of the village's two hundred and forty showed up to attend mass. He had no altar boys and no one to help with the Eucharist, but Ojcunie and Borslaw did what they could, and of course Toja and Niedan were there, and the simple mass went smoothly. He felt an emptiness though, no joy or peace from the grandeur of the ceremony.
Cyryl couldn't help but notice the most striking woman in the meager crowd. Her hair was as blonde as sunflowers and her eyes were like the eyes of a cat, wise and knowing, and as green as deep water, and even in her black village rags her body betrayed the wonders of God's hand as she was a work of marvelous intent, as ripe as a piece of fruit hanging from the tree at harvest tide. When she looked at Cyryl as he elevated the host he felt like sunlight was pouring through the stained glass windows upon him, and like his gown had fallen away and he stood there naked before her, and he had to banish the lustful thoughts from his mind as he conducted the transubstantiation and converted the host and the wine into the holy body and blood of Jesus Christ there in his unworthy human hands.
"Who was that woman with the blonde hair?" he asked Toja after the mass as he kissed his surplice and stole and put them away.
"That? Father, that was Malodar Turek, the young widow of Drogram Turek. He was killed by a leszy in the woods not three years ago—torn to pieces we think and eaten. Never found. She's never been the same. There are terrible things in the forest, Father."
"I know. I heard them last night. We will have to bless these woods and drive them out. So she's a window? Are there any children?"
"None, poor thing. She's a midwife now and healer and does what she can to survive. She has the gift and second sight, though, and people pay for her services. She manages a living."
Father Cyryl nodded and remembered again the feeling of standing naked before those remarkable eyes. He could believe she had second sight and the gift of healing. She was a remarkable woman and perhaps her mother had been touched by a spirit or a hidden saint before she'd been born as well.
"Have Niedan saddle the mare. I have to pay my respects to the Baron. I'll leave after lunch."
He lunched on bread, cheese, and pickled onions, washed down with fresh brown beer from a keg that Borslaw had brought over and set up in the kitchen, so that when he got on the mare he was already sleepy. He dozed in the saddle as the horse skirted the Mldawa forest and then fell entirely asleep in the drowsy afternoon.
He awoke suddenly to find himself well into the woods, the road having passed into the forest while he slept. He was passing through a little dell where the sun shone down through the sparse trees on a floor littered with ferns, viper's bugloss, and the pale, nodding orange flowers of foxglove. He looked around wildly, suddenly certain he was being watched. He could feel eyes on him from the darkness of the woods, and even the ferns seemed menacing, their fronds curled like the hoods of snakes about to strike. He spurred the horse and galloped on, imagining the hot exhalations of a leszy on the back of his neck, the sharp points of the teeth grazing his skin, not daring to turn around. He didn't stop until he was out of the woods and saw the Baron's wooden castle at the head of a ravine not half a mile away.
He hailed the gate and was admitted, but he couldn't shake off the chill and the feeling of fear and anguish. The inside of the Baron's castle was dark and filled with smoke, a warren of close passages and tiny, messy rooms with even tinier windows, all hung with thick tapestries that made the air thick and close. The Baron was ill and had been since spring, sweating and nearly naked and lying on bear skins in his chamber, attended not by a priest but by a shaman in reindeer antlers and skins who was feeding him a broth made of mushrooms and cannabis. The air was thick with the smoke from poppy resin. His eyes were dull and shiny and he spoke as if from another world.
"You're the new priest?" the Baron said. "You don't belong here. There's no God here, no Jesus Christ. The woods are filled with devils and evil spirits. They'll eat your bones. That's what they did with the last priest. They drove him mad. Got rid of him."
"Lord have mercy, my liege. You don't know what you're saying."
"You'd better beg your God for mercy, priest. There are witches in your village. They cursed me and now I suffer. Your village is filled with witches and monsters, damn them all!"
"You have a witch right here, my liege. You should have a priest here, not a curer."
