"I wasn't the one who left, father," Ozzy replied. "That was you."
The way Ozzy had said father, Carol thought, was not the way Carlton had said Father. She looked from Ozzy to the abbot, from face to face, studying their features. "Ozzy's your son?"
"Pfft," Daryl snorted. "Monks can't have kids."
"Well," Ozzy clarified, "they can if they become monks after they have kids and after they're widowed. And if they're fine with abandoning their children."
"I didn't abandon you!" The abbot sat back down solemnly in his chair. "You were of legal age. More than of legal age."
"I was twenty. And Dimitra was only eighteen. She's alive, by the way, safe at home in my camp, not that you care."
"Twenty is the age of a grown man."
"I didn't know anything about living in the world!"
"Oh, I think you knew plenty about living in the world. Girls. Drink. Cards. That was always your problem, Ozymandias. You were always too much of this world."
"That was my problem? No, my problem was that my mother died when I was fifteen and my father retreated into his religion for the next five years, until he retreated into this monastery, where I wasn't allowed to visit him, and where he wasn't allowed to write me more than twice a year!"
"If anyone comes to me," the abbot intoned, "and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yea, even his own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. It is the way of the monk, Ozymandias, to shed any emotional attachments. Emotional ties are fraught with temptation, guilt, and nostalgia that disrupt spiritual progress."
Ozzy shook his head. "So if the family of any of your monks had come here seeking refuge, you would have turned them away?"
"Of course not! You think I would leave the living out in the cold to be devoured by the soulless? Whoever has sought refuge behind these walls has been welcomed, including relatives of some of the monks. But, yes, those family ties unfortunately confuse their spiritual progress. One novice who had been with us three years before the Second Fall chose not to continue down the path soon after his sister and nephew arrived. That's his free choice, as a novice. But the real shame was the stavrophore who had to be defrocked. The temptation of women in the monastery proved too much for him. As the wise king Solomon said, better it is that you should not vow, than that you should take a vow and not keep it."
"So you banished him?" Ozzy asked.
"No, I didn't banish him! He lives here still, with his woman and infant. But he has been defrocked and excluded from the Eucharist." He looked at Daryl while extending a hand toward Ozzy. "What a monster he paints me to be."
"Well, you do sound like kind of an asshole," Daryl replied.
At this the abbot reared back. "This is a fine way to seek peace."
"Look, we brought you your shit," Daryl told him, "what we could of it. We told you the Redeemers ain't comin' back, and now we just want to go home without anyone trying to shoot us."
"Yes, Jeremy told me your version of events. One thing, however, doesn't comport." The abbot spoke only to Daryl, almost as though Carol and Dianne weren't there.
"What's that?" Daryl asked.
"If you were just driving that truck to return it to us, how did you plan to get home? Because the hunter who found it told Jeremey there was no other vehicles in those woods."
"We plan to hike to a rendezvous point," Carol explained, "someone will be picking us up tomorrow."
The abbot wouldn't look at Carol when she spoke. Instead, he kept his eyes on Daryl and asked him for confirmation. "Is that true?"
"She just told you it was," Daryl answered. "Why would we be bringing your shit here if not to return it? All the way up here from the Redeemers' camp, your shit and only your shit and exactly your shit?"
The abbot stood up, walked over to one of the bookcases, and pulled out a volume. He strolled back to his desk, lay a thesaurus down in front of Daryl, and then sat down again.
Daryl looked down in confusion at the thesaurus. "Hell is this?"
"It means he thinks you need to clean up your diction," Ozzy told him. "Develop a more nuanced vocabulary. He used to do it to me when I was thirteen and fourteen, any time I swore, before he stopped bothering to raise me at all."
"A'right. I take back the kind of part," Daryl said. "Your daddy's just a straight-up asshole." He slapped open the cover of the thesaurus and began flipping through the A section. Then he stabbed his finger down on the page and read, "Jackass. Clod. Schmuck. Prig. Jerk. Pri-"
The abbot held up a hand. "Enough. The lesson was clearly as lost on you as it was on Ozymandias."
"Who the fuck names their kid Ozymandias?" Daryl asked.
"My late wife, that's who." The abbot's Adam's apple bobbed. "It's the Greek name for Pharaoh Ramesses II. Ozzy's mother was an accomplished Egyptologist. We spent a year in Cairo, just before Ozzy was born. She was a guest lecturer at the university there." The abbot looked into a corner of the library. He gritted his teeth and stared at where the walls met until he had re-gathered himself. Then he turned his face to Ozzy. "See. Nostalgia. It confounds. It confuses. It's a faint, perverted echo of the true spiritual longing, the longing that leads to ecstasy."
"Well, you look positively ecstatic, father," Ozzy replied dryly. "Can we go on our way now?"
The door opened and Carlton stepped back in, shotgun still in hand.
"The sun has almost set." The abbot turned up the oil lamp as if to prove the point, and the light of the flame filled the whole glass. "For safety, stay the night. We have enough cells for you all. In the morning, you may breakfast with the laity. That meal is served at nine a.m. The monks breakfast when the night vigil ends, at four in the morning, and we begin work at eight. So I'm afraid I won't likely see you again before you leave."
"Yeah," Ozzy said. "I'm sure that will be a great loss for you."
"No need for the shotgun anymore," the abbot told Carlton. "Please show our guests to their rooms and shut the library door on the way out."
Ozzy resituated the hat his father had flicked up high on his forehead as he walked toward the door. The others rose and followed him. As Ozzy was about to exit, the abbot called after him, "Ozymandias, your sister Dimitra, she is well?"
"As well as a woman can be in this world, after losing her only child." Ozzy turned back and beheld his father's shocked expression. "Oh, she never wrote to tell you, did she? Your granddaughter was eleven months old when the sickness took her."
The abbot swallowed. "What was her name?"
"The same as our mother's."
"Vasiliki," the abbot practically whispered.
"But Dimitra called her Vicky." Ozzy walked out.
The others followed, and Carlton pulled the door shut behind them before leading them halfway down the hallway, where he threw open the doors to four cells, one after another, side by side. "These are yours for the night. We'll give you all your weapons back in the morning. If you want, after you get settled, join us at the pavilion. We hang out there during quiet hours so as not to disturb the monks."
"We're sharing," Daryl told him as he tossed his pack onto a bed in a cell. "Me and m'wife."
"Tight fit," Carlton said, nodding to the very narrow wooden bed, which was topped by a thin mattress. A knitted blanket was folded up at the end. On the floor by the bed was a woven rug. A small writing desk, with an oil lamp atop it, sat in the corner. A single wooden chair leaned against the wall, above which was an empty prayer cabinet. The cell did have a window, at least. "I don't know any couple who shares a cell. You know, they sneak some quiet lovin' and then one goes back to his or her cell. Even the kids have their own cells. Well, except the baby."
Carlton left them to themselves.
"It does look like a tight fit, Pookie," Carol said.
"Fine. You take that one. I'll take the one next to it."
When they had tucked their packs under the beds of their cells, the four of them met back in the hallway again.
"You knew your father was in charge of this place," Dianne said to Ozzy, "and you didn't tell us?"
"I didn't know. The last time he wrote me, he had just been tonsured as a schemamonk. But that was four years ago. I moved and never sent him my new address. I didn't even know if he was alive. If he was still here. And if he wasn't…I didn't want to have to explain all that."
"Don't get it," Daryl muttered, "bein' willin' to leave your kids like that, never see 'em again."
Ozzy sighed. "Well, I suppose there are kids who have had it worse. Some fathers beat their children."
Daryl shifted his eyes down to the rough floor of the monastery hall.
Carol put a hand gently on the small of his back. "Should we join the laity in the pavilion?"
"I think it would be a good idea to make allies," Dianne said. "You've seen their gardens, their fruit and walnut trees. They might prove a good trade partner. And they're only about thirty-five miles from the Kingdom. I don't know how we never found this place when we were out scavenging. Except that it's in the middle of nowhere. They're lucky the Saviors never found them."
"The Saviors never found us, either," Ozzy said.
A cell door opened on the opposite side of the hall, several feet down the hallway, closer to the library. A monk stuck his head out. "Quiet hours have begun."
"Our apologies," Dianne told him. "We'll quite down."
The monk vanished.
"Well, I for one don't want to go to sleep at eight in the evening," Ozzy said. He waved his hand down the hallway toward the exit, "so let's go to this pavilion and make friends and make merry."